Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  At mid-morning he came out for a breather, went over to the house and found himself more bread and cheese, was disgusted at the disorder in which he had left things. He escaped by turning his back on it and returning to the Drift. Having started in one particular spot, he would work that out to its logical conclusions and then make one of his test borings.

  He worked for the rest of the day, ignoring hunger, not needing rest, hurling physical energy against stone, impelled always by the thought that one more blow might uncover a small fortune. I have already implied that he was almost a pathological optimist: in no way did this show itself more typically than in his onslaught against a daunting, to other men clearly futile, task. He worked with fury, no less, his hopes undulled by the vistas of valueless rock that he exposed. Sometimes he stopped to clear aside rubble that might have been hiding a find. Once his wedge loosened a whole block of stone that split away along the line of a natural fault. He thrust in his finger-ends and broke away a massive boulder in an outburst of sheer physical ecstasy: Lomas versus bed-rock.

  After that, he decided that his present scene of operation was going to yield no results, transferred his attention to the opposite wall and began to make inroads there.

  But never anything. It was not for weeks, indeed months, that Lomas ultimately abandoned his efforts in Dead-Nettle; but I think that it was on this day that the possibility first realistically occurred to him that the mine might be as sterile as most men said, that he might have to think again about his whole future, might even have to limp back to the coal-field of his boyhood, begging for any employment that they could find him.

  In the middle of the afternoon he broke the shank of what was by now his favourite wedge and came out to fetch a replacement. He stood for a moment by the door of the Drift and took stock of the grey, pulverised waste. A horse-fly hovered over a sorry clump of ragwort.

  Something was out of place in the scene before him, and although it should have been obvious, he did not at first see what it was: smoke rising from the cottage chimney. The front door was closed, but as he walked across the gangue, he saw someone moving about behind the window. He quickened his steps, recognised Isobel Fuller in the act of setting his broom back in its corner. The fire had been lit, the derangement from last evening’s supper-party had been tidied up, a length of old but respectable wool-clipping rug had been laid across the hearth.

  ‘I came to say thank you for last night. And on the spur of the moment, I thought I’d give you a little surprise. Better than just leaving a card, don’t you think?’

  She was wearing clothes in which he had not seen her before: jodhpurs and a three-quarter coat. He had previously only seen her ride in long skirts.

  ‘You got home all right last night, then?’

  A stupid question: but it was so near to the surface of his mind that he had to ask it.

  ‘Do you know of any reason why I shouldn’t have?’

  It was no more than a pleasantry, but there was a playful mockery in her tone that abashed him a good deal more than it need have done. She hastened to follow it up.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject, or something akin to it, may I say something?’

  ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘I don’t like your friends.’

  That was a relief, but after the way in which he had received them, there was no logic in trying to disclaim their friendship.

  ‘Especially not Colour-Sergeant Slack.’

  ‘He was not a Colour-Sergeant. He was a private soldier.’

  ‘I’ll believe you. He told me he was a Colour-Sergeant.’

  ‘He didn’t try –?’

  She smiled at his coyness.

  ‘No. As you so neatly put it, he didn’t try. If he had, he would have been up against a prancing steed, as well as a riding-crop. Did you expect that he would – try?’

  ‘I’m sure it would never have occurred to him.’

  ‘Frank, you are pricelessly sweet. That, at least, might have been expressed with more gallantry. But I must talk to you about him. I’m afraid he’s going to prove something of a nuisance. Shall I make a pot of tea?’

  ‘Yes, please do. How: a nuisance? I don’t think he’ll stay here long.’

  ‘He will. He has ingratiated himself with my father.’

  She busied herself with the kettle.

  ‘I came over to have supper with you last night, Frank, because I wanted to, because I usually do the things that I want to, and because there was no harm in it. I hope you’ll invite me again. But you’ll understand that amongst the people whom I have to spend most of my time with, it would raise a few eye-brows. I didn’t tell my father I was coming, not because it gave me any pleasure to deceive him. In fact, I didn’t deceive him. I simply didn’t undeceive him. There’d been some talk of a missionary lantern lecture in the parish hall, and he thought I’d gone there. It saved him unnecessary worry. But Master Slack and his Sancho Panza insisted on coming right up to the Hall with me. They aren’t exactly fairy horsemen with elfin feet, and Father came to the door before they could ride away. The story was that they had provided a gallant escort for me through the inspissated darkness, for which they were asked in and offered a toddy. I made a bad mistake. I took Private Slack to one side in the corridor and breathed quickly in his ear what story he had to tell.’

  Probably superfluous, Lomas thought. Slack would not have been slow to spot that he had happened on some sort of deception. He would have trodden warily until he had seen where his own advantage lay.

  ‘He is quick on the uptake, is your friend. He now thinks, of course, that he has some sort of hold over me. And so, up to a point, he has. But only up to a point. Five minutes’confessional with my father, and I can put everything right – but I’d rather not. I’d rather not have the fag of it, and I’d rather save him from days of fretting. So I sat by and listened while they talked him into giving them a job for the winter. Father was impressed by Private Slack – especially the Colour-Sergeant part – and by some of the battlefield tales that he told. So now Messrs Slack and Burgess have been engaged for estate work, finishing off all the jobs that my father has started all over the place.’

  Frank Lomas was a fair man to a fault. He felt he simply must avoid possible injustice to Gilbert.

  ‘Of course, I was invalided out, you know, and Gilbert still had his time to serve. He can’t have been out very long as it is. I don’t know all that’s gone on in the regiment since I was discharged. He might have been promoted.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Frank. You know he never would have been. He was Private Slack. And you were a corporal.’

  ‘Queen’s Corporal. Promoted in the field. By General Sir Redvers Buller in person.’

  ‘I know. Private Slack told us all about that.’

  And Lomas could suddenly find nothing at all to say. He knew beyond any shadow of doubt what version of that tale Slack would have told: the true one.

  ‘And that’s not the only thing,’ Isobel said. ‘He takes too much interest in Dead-Nettle Drift for my liking. He brings it back into the conversation every few minutes. Just as he did while he was here. He wants to know just how you’re working and where you’re going to bore next. And it isn’t the lead that concerns him. He knows nothing about mining, or processing, or market value. And it was he who put you on to this mine.’

  ‘It was. But –’

  ‘I’m sure you had every reason to believe him at the time. I’m sure you believe him still. I can only hope for your sake that you’re right and I’m wrong. The last thing I would ever want to do would be to come between you and a friend. But there is one thing that you must see. I have to break that man away from my father. I have to get him off our estate. I know he’s a villain, and he hasn’t come back to this village by accident. Just what he’s up to, I have no idea. The fact remains, I’m not going to have him impose on my father. Nor am I prepared to have him leering at me from every corner of every terrace round the place. That’s
what I’ve come here now to tell you – because I know you have always counted him a friend.’

  Frank Lomas said it then, at last. ‘He’s no friend of mine.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. And I’m sorry to say that I think that Dead-Nettle Drift is the least friendly gift he could ever have laid in your way.’

  ‘That’s still to be determined.’

  ‘As you please. I would give anything to be wrong about it. But you’ll not hold it against me if I see that Slack is sent packing?’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help –’

  But Lomas knew what havoc Slack could work before he went. Slack had only to choose his moment to destroy him. He had been a fool to think there would ever be any lasting escape from Hetty Wilson. But for Slack he would never have met her in the first place.

  Chapter Seven

  Winter staked its claim in the advancing autumn. In the second part of November there was a sudden week of ruthless frost. Lomas drove himself hard. He was at work in the Drift before sunrise. But a changed rhythm settled into his working habits. As trial after trial brought him no new sight of ore, his first wild flurry devolved into a steady, methodical progress along the channels that he had mapped out for himself. He began to pay almost superstitious attention to the tidiness with which he cleared up his debris behind him, building little stacks and walls of gangue. It must have cost him hours that could have driven him yards deeper into the hill-side. It was not that he had yet given up all hope; but I think he was beginning consciously to put off the day when he would finally have to do so. In the meanwhile he was deriving some deep personal reward from the labour itself.

  At first Isobel Fuller came at odd times of day, two or three times a week, according to the variations of her daily ride. On two days in succession she came in the late afternoon, and after that every day at the same time. Frank Lomas would come out of the mine, strip down to the waist whatever the weather and wash himself in a bucket in the open air before entering the cottage. By that time she had his kettle on the boil, a meal set for two on a linen cloth discarded from home that she had brought for his whitewood table. Often she brought dishes of food, and it would be a fiction to pretend that they were left-overs: sherry trifle, a cold apple-pie, a generous end of cold rib of beef. She did this, that and the other about the cottage, though Lomas could hardly be said to be in need of such service. His own housekeeping, if bleak, was never skimped of hygiene or symmetry: he might have been living in hourly expectation of a commanding officer’s inspection. Isobel brought here and there a woman’s touch – to which he never referred. She might have thought that he did not notice – but I believe that he did: it would simply have embarrassed him to have acknowledged his own inability to think of the things that would have pleased a lady. She once brought a couple of old gilt-painted picture-frames and asked him whether he had not any photographs from his past that he would like to put up. He then brought out an old oil-skin wallet, clearly something that had been through the war with him; but then he started extemporising with enforced gaiety about unrelated subjects. He was careful to avoid opening it in her presence. The next day the frames were on the wall; showing off a pair of studio groups, solemn massive family gatherings, apparently taken on the occasion of a mid-Victorian funeral. She never pried amongst his belongings for that wallet.

  Once, in the middle of a morning, he heard her arrive – or thought he did: irregular movements on the loose stones outside, as he was lying on one shoulder, hacking away at an overhang. He laid down his tool – she made a tacit point of never interrupting him during working hours; but he was secretly glad of the break. He blew out his lamp and came to the surface, to find not Isobel Fuller waiting for him on the slag, but a little old woman in widow’s weeds of a pattern that had gone out of vogue fifty years ago, though there was a certain newness about her costume, as if it had been long stored and little worn.

  Lomas knew at once who she was: Florence Belfield, a character well known in Margreave and the Adventurers’Arms. Not to delve too subtly into diagnosis, she was mad: mad with a fixity that amused no one and was the frequent source of trouble for her neighbours. Accounts of her eccentricities were told factually, neither as something comic, nor as anything that deserved sympathy. Florence Belfield was a feature of the Margreave hills, as gaunt and hard-lined as the slag-heaps and the abandoned crushing-wheels. Lomas prepared himself for trouble at the sight of her. Florence Belfield took her delusions seriously and treated her enemies, which she imagined most men to be, extremely uncouthly. Isaac Grundy, Bar Master, knew her well. She had a formidable knowledge of mining case-law, and two or three times a year could be depended on to emerge from her seclusion to demand action against villains who were now mostly dead.

  But there seemed nothing potentially aggressive about the withered creature who stood watching Lomas from his plateau of Dead-Nettle toad-stone. If she had been to her clothing-chest to dress to impress him, then he knew intuitively that for the moment he had the upper hand, even over her hallucinations.

  ‘So you’re the young man who’s working to free the Drift?’

  ‘I am. Frank Lomas, ma’am.’

  ‘Mrs John William Belfield – in need of your help.’

  He knew from the stories that these could be fatal words. He tried to be non-committal.

  It was nearly sixty years ago, as a young matron in her twenties, that Florence Belfield had been widowed by a roof-fall. In Badger’s Swallet it had happened, one of the last mines in the neighbourhood ever to be profitably worked. Old Edward Fothergill, Bar Master of the day, had transferred the holding to her name in the big register. She had half a dozen miners on her pay-roll and had gone on for a year or so, working out a tapering seam. Then there had been strife underground. She had found that she was being pettily and systematically robbed, put in a spy among her workmen, which led to a fight at the working face. A man was crippled for life and his brother filled a dish in an adjacent working with the barely concealed intention of driving in a heading to poach on her diminishing reserves. She watched, spied, questioned, reported her suspicions to the Moot; much was known but nothing proven and the conflict remained unresolved, the parties embittered. Florence Belfield began to bribe the ganger who had previously cheated her, and within a few months was obsessed in the tactical direction of an underground war. There were rumours and counter-rumours, a race from the two mines towards a reputed pocket that did not in fact exist. One side or the other, no one knew which, broke through into a subterranean water-course and two men were drowned. Florence Belfield was deserted by her own men. She made an effort to carry on in Badger’s single-handed, was brought out half dead when a thunder-storm over the hill brought the water in her gallery above shoulder level.

  Since then she had plunged into every kind of litigation that the usages of the liberty had ever envisaged. To old Isaac Grundy she became a sort of private curse. Frank Lomas was lucky to have been here as long as he had without being called on to declare his partisanship.

  ‘Young man, I need your help.’

  There was no star-light of insanity in her eyes as she said those words: no hysteria. She was matter-of-fact, aged but shrewd, in control of herself, husbanding her diminishing strength, but still in command of it.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  She had a reputation for convincing strangers in the opening round.

  ‘Anything that a good neighbour can be called upon to do, ma’am–’

  ‘Yes. You look the kind of man that Margreave can do with.’

  ‘I’m not quite clear, ma’am, what it is you want me to do.’

  ‘I’ve just told you. You’re not going to try to sidle out of it like the rest of them?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘There was someone in Badger’s again last night.’

  As every night for more than half a century, according to her tormented spirit.

  ‘I’ll come over some time and look at the place,’ he said, incap
able of rejecting a pleading woman, even a mad one.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Not now, ma’am. I have my own work to do.’

  She picked up a cobble from the gangue and scratched at a shining facet with her finger-nail.

  ‘It strikes me you are a wasteful young man.’

  ‘All in good time, ma’am. I propose to waste nothing.’

  ‘So when will you come to Badger’s? Before tonight?’

  ‘One day soon. Next week, perhaps.’

  ‘That will be too late.’

  But he got rid of her: for a while.

  And she was not the only one to disappoint him with the sound of her footsteps on the deads. Another time he was lying full length in a confined corner when he heard someone dismount from horse-back and walk towards the mine, unlike Isobel, who did not interrupt him at the face. He wriggled backwards out of his hole and saw that it was Gilbert Slack who was looking at him down the Drift, silhouetted in the daylight of the entrance arch.

  ‘I thought I’d come over and give you a hand, for old time’s sake. Got a day off. At least, old Fuller thinks I’m working on the far side of the estate.’

  He looked at Lomas’s tidy stacks of excavated waste. ‘Not much future in building that kind of little wall, is there?’

  Then he walked down to the end of the original mine, where the Drift petered out at the end of the founder-miner’s hope.

  ‘An extra pair of hands might just do the trick, eh?’

  Lomas did not want his assistance, but he was too easy-going and good-natured to say so in that first moment. Slack picked up a shovel and began digging in the gravel at the gallery-end.

  ‘I wasn’t going to bother down there,’ Lomas said. ‘Not until everything else has failed, at any rate. I always reckon the Old Man knew when he was beaten.’

  ‘He couldn’t have known more than you and I do,’ Slack said. ‘He hadn’t got eyes that could see through the stone, had he?’