“And forty years ago, no doubt,” said Adam.
“Wot of it? I’d still back myself against Irishers. They can sit a horse well enough but they’re no great shakes at standin’ and facin’ fire from the glimpse I got of ’em. Besides, if we ambush ’em, we’ll have the edge on ’em, won’t we?”
“I certainly hope so,” said Adam, “for you’ve talked me into it, Blubb, and if there is blood money to be earned you’re welcome to it. I’ll settle for the free advertisement.”
It occurred to him, as they went about their preparations, that Blubb would have made an excellent troop sergeant. He was bold but deliberate, foreseeing all manner of contingencies and taking it upon himself to order the entire ambush, down to the last detail. They took the Arscott twins into their confidence and it was arranged that one should travel down to Ashford as driver while the other lay concealed in the back with a pistol and a cudgel. When, soon after noon, the waggon came into the inn yard, Adam and Blubb were awaiting it concealed in the stable loft. Twelve boxes of ball cartridges and two stand of arms were offloaded and left in charge of the ostler, Blossom, bewildered by all this secrecy but bribed into silence by a handful of silver. Adam and Blubb then joined Reuben Arscott in the back and his brother Job laced them in, leaving one corner loose to serve as a spyhole. Adam had a pair of single-shot pistols and Blubb an old-fashioned blunderbuss, of the kind he had carried as a guard. It was not his own for he had no time to fetch that, but one he borrowed from a local crony and although Adam watched him load it with nails and scrap metal, and prime and charge it with the greatest care, it did not look a very serviceable weapon to use against a gang of wild Irishmen. Whilst they were going about their preparations Adam speculated aloud on the reason for a raid of this kind, so far from the centre of Fenian activities, but Blubb had already made up his mind about that.
“They need a regular supply of arms for the mischief they’m planning over there,” he said, “but there's a deal more’n that. The more shindig they stir up over here the more they’ll get gabbed about. Being Irishers they’m divided among ’emselves, you see, and this lot is the livelier section, bent on showing the others up. Me, I never driven in Ireland, tho’ I talked to men as did. This kind of business is still commonplace over there, I’m told, for some of ’em are savages, and all of ’em spoilin’ fer a fight.”
As the waggon rolled out of the yard and turned south on the coastal road Adam had a moment's misgiving. It seemed to him quite absurd that he should have allowed a man of Blubb's disposition to embroil him in something that was clearly a task for the Crown forces, but as they jolted south the old instincts of the seasoned campaigner returned to him, and he thought how Roberts and “Circus” Howard would have relished the occasion. By the time they reached Mersham Hatch he would not have been anywhere else but here, with Blubb nursing his absurd weapon and Arscott, tense and silent nearer the box, where he could communicate in whispers with his brother.
The road seemed almost deserted, a fly or two speeding towards London and one knife-grinder's trap, with the owner fast asleep in the June sunshine. Then, as they approached the crossroads, Adam noticed a closed cab of a kind not often seen on the roads nowadays and it looked unattended, with the horse cropping the grass verge twenty yards down the sideroad that Blubb told him led, by a roundabout route, to Dymchurch on the coast. He would not have been surprised to see a knot of men lounging close by, but the sight of the driverless vehicle directed his attention to that side of the road, where the hedgerows were high, and he did not see the Irish woman standing by a milestone on their side of the road. Blubb saw her, however, pinching his arm as she stepped forward, and then everything happened with a rush that might have overwhelmed them had not the driver on the box pulled hard over to the centre of the road so that the waggon swung round at a wide angle blocking both routes.
Adam's attention, notwithstanding his glance at the woman through the chink in the curtains, had never really left the supposedly empty cab in the side road and this was just as well. Suddenly its offside door was flung open and two men bundled out brandishing pistols. At the same time, out of the comer of his eye, he saw three others leap over the nearside hedge of the turnpike, one making for the horses’ heads, the others running round to the back of the waggon.
Blubb's blunderbuss went off with a fearful roar that stunned the eardrums, and the interior of the waggon was full of smoke. The driver fired at the man holding the horses’ heads but the ball missed its mark and must have clipped one of the animals for the team began to plunge, and after that it was difficult to see what was happening for around them, in and out the smoke, figures were running and crying out, and the woman screamed as one of the attackers reeled against her, clutching at her dress and slithering to his knees on the road.
Adam fired one pistol, aiming at the two running figures who had jumped from the cab but then, not caring to be penned in such a confined space, he burst through the back flaps and jumped down, Arscott following on his heels. A ball whistled past his ear and he heard it smack into the wooden frame of the wagon as, running round to the front, he saw Blubb standing on the box, flailing down at a tall, wiry-looking assailant with the stock of his blunderbuss.
It was an utterly improbable posture for a man so gross and blubberly as the ex-coachman. He looked like a grotesque clockwork toy going through its routine, arms rising and falling with a kind of jerky precision. Then, as the man fell against the shafts, the scene changed utterly, with nothing happening around the waggon but a combined rush in the direction of the sideroad, where a sixth man suddenly appeared, mounted on a bay horse and leading others. Within seconds the woman and four of the men were galloping away towards a copse in the first fold of the hill, and suddenly there was silence, the dust and smoke settling to reveal the scene of the encounter. Adam saw Blubb scramble down, his little piggy eyes shining with excitement as he rolled his man on his back and looked down at his shattered skull. Another man, greyhaired and much older than the lean fellow, lay spreadeagled near the tailboard, a pistol clutched in his hand. He, too, was dead, with a ball through his heart and a smear of blood already showing through his topcoat.
Blubb shouted, triumphantly, “Two of ’em, Governor! And one o’ they others was winged, for they had to help him mount,” and he sucked his bleeding thumb where the blunderbuss had backfired and a piece of metal had laid open the joint.
It was like clearing up after a skirmish on the road to Jhansi. They heaved the two dead men into the waggon and turned the horses back towards Ashford. One of the Arscotts mounted the box of the abandoned cab and followed them, Blubb recognising the equipage as a vehicle hired from a livery stable at Deal. Blubb said, dolefully, “I smashed the stock o’ this blunderbuss. Smashed clean to bits it is. He had a thickish skull I reckon, but that's common enough among Irishers.” His tone of voice, and the fact that he made no attempt to boast of the success of the ambush or the part he had played in it afforded Adam a brief glimpse of the man Blubb had been in his prime. He thought “He doesn’t belong in this century at all. He's a Hogarth character and in another decade or so, if he survives, he’ll turn into Falstaff.” Then, without warning, the driver Arscott was sick, so that they pulled up and waited. He said, humbly, “I never seen a man killed before, sir.” Adam took the reins and sent him back to join his brother in the cab. At a slow walk the little cavalcade drove back along the road to Ashford.
3
There was no blood money. The authorities were embarrassed at the prospect of holding a double inquest on two unknown Irishmen who had tried, unsuccessfully, to rob Her Majesty of the consignment of arms and ammunition. But after the inquest, when the coroner pronounced “killed in the execution of a felony on the high-road” there was a dispute as to who should foot the bill for the funerals. Nobody came forward to claim the bodies, and the woman and her four companions were never seen again. It was said they had got away by sea from Dymchurch, where a brig sailed within an hour or s
o of the battle at Mersham Cross.
There was, however, a great deal of publicity, and Blubb, like Ratcliffe before him, achieved a passing notoriety and was drunk for almost a week. This time the impact on the firm was national rather than local. Catesby heard about it away up in the north and Edith Wadsworth wrote saucily from the east, saying she was interested to learn that Adam had exchanged the role of haulier for that of thief-taker. City men discussed it, some of them sarcastically, and Henrietta, finding in it proof that the soldier in Adam was not dormant introduced it into her sedate conversation at her monthly “At Home,” an event that Adam declined to attend.
But all this, the publicity resulting from Ratcliffe's feat in the west, and Blubb's in the south-east, was no more than an overture. The real breakthrough into national recognition was made in a remote Welsh valley, six months later, where Bryn Lovell, manager of the Mountain Square, suddenly found himself invested with the halo of Glendower.
4
The blight of the second iron age was upon this country too but its taint, although glaringly obvious, was not as overriding as in the cotton belt and the potteries. In the north the volcanoes of wealth had erupted and afterwards been levelled off and built upon, so that the factories and the dormitories of those who served them were now so thick upon the ground that the pastoral heritage of the areas had been all but obliterated. Something at once more subtle and more sinister had occurred down here, along the southern face of the Mountain Square. The desolation was not absolute because the outward manifestations of the sickness were scabrous. Instead of falling on the land like a bludgeon its ravages were wayward, sometimes almost casual, as though the valleys had been probed with sooty fingers that left triangular islets of greenery isolated on some of the spurs. Away in the distance the grape blue line of the mountains still stood like the deserted ramparts of a Promised Land, near enough to be seen but, in all other respects, as remote as the mountains of the moon. For up there beyond the skyline was beauty, emptiness, and worklessness, and only a small minority of rebels, self-outlawed from a land of tips and fouled streams, fought an ancestral battle with tools that were not unlike those used by the tamed but were employed against more elemental forces, wind and granite and an eternity of soft, seeping rain.
Most of the older pits were sited along the ancient river beds, their skeletal apparatus pitched in the narrow valleys seamed by row upon row of tiny, terraced houses, some of which seemed to have begun life at the top of the hillsides, slithered halfway down, and were now crowding upon the remains of earlier settlements, as though they wanted nothing more than to push them down the shafts and fall on top of them. The conical tips about here were high and crowned with a crust of brittle slurry that, in dry weather, could be broken by the touch of an iron-shod boot but was more often soft and moulded, particularly after winter rains converted the tips into gigantic black sponges. Sometimes, when shifts were coming or going, it looked as though nothing but a multitude of plodding, greyish beetles lived down there, insects trained to the toot of the whistle so that they surged up or down the hills in obedience to some blind, primeval impulse. The railway had reached this far a long time ago, running out spurs from the Newport-Abergavenny-Hereford line as it dropped down to link up with the South Wales railroad. Trucks, full and empty, moved ceaselessly along these spurs, and more branch lines were building as coal was clawed from newer, smaller pits higher up the slopes, and in valleys where, even yet, green predominated over black and slate grey.
Llangatwg was such a pit, north of the Abergavenny-Merthyr Tydfil road, still only two years old, and as yet without a rail to call its own, discounting the narrow gauge laid dawn by the owners when the pit first opened. For to link Llangatwg to a main siding was proving an expensive business, not only on account of the gradient but because of a freakish rock-seam that ran diagonally across the projected course and converted the approach into a series of ridges that were the despair of the engineers. They had persisted, however, in the way of railway builders, and were now only a mile or so short of the pithead. They might, with luck, have made the connection by the end of the year had not heavy snow fallen, causing a suspension of work. On the second day they called in their teams and paid them off to kick their heels for a week or two. It was hopeless to excavate under conditions of hard frost, and no coal had come down in the last forty-eight hours for the narrow-gauge line was soon obliterated by drifts that built up between the ridges and the levelled tipping ground at the top was already full of freshly mined coal.
Work ceased for the engineers but not for the miners. Fifteen hundred feet below the mountain the weather was the same all the year round, and men and ponies continued to use the main roads and galleries heedless of the snow, just as they were indifferent, in high summer, to the airlessness of the narrow valley, or the rain bucketing from the rock ledges in spring and autumn. There was even a certain eagerness among the men coming on shift from the town below to seek the shelter of the pit after the long, stumbling slither up the slope to work, whereas men coming off shift, spilling from the cage like schoolboys, still found the energy to toboggan down the ridges to their homes.
The day shift had been below an hour or more when it happened. Men trundling tubs across the level stretch from grading screens to where a line of trucks stood frozen to the rails, heard a muffled boom and then a long, hissing sigh, as though the mountain had belched and turned in its sleep, and soon the pithead was like a squat magnet attracting everything on two legs for half-a-mile around, and the sustained wail of the siren brought awareness of disaster to night-shift men and womenfolk in the town below, so that the long slope was streaked with running, stumbling figures churning the clean snow into yellow slush as they clawed their way upwards.
Men looking like frenzied gnomes darted in and out of the sheds, shouting to one another that the lower level main road was flooded roof-high, and when the few who had escaped the avalanche of solid water were lifted out and counted it was found that eighty-seven men and boys were missing, perhaps half of them already drowned and the rest, in the more distant galleries, as good as dead, unless, by some miracle, the water could be pumped from the road and shaft, and the rescue teams could make a thorough search against the checkers’ lists.
News of this kind, news of men and boys whose lives hang upon a thread attached to some imponderable shift of circumstances outside the range of men above ground, is not circulated by means of the printed word, or doled out in verbal driblets by some desperately worried official, juggling with words at the window of a besieged oflìce. It circulates freely, accurately, and almost instantaneously within a closed community, where almost every living soul is involved in the tragedy, and even those who are not find themselves sucked into the vortex by the currents weaving about them.
It is as though each new scrap of information is scribbled on a scrap of paper and tossed above the crowd where it is caught and broadcast over a square mile. A lampman at the foot of the shaft tells of a half-drowned miner gasping out that the water roofed above the first dip in the main road, sealing in the shift a hundred yards or so deeper in the mountain. A checker, who was one of the last up, says that the cage cannot descend below the second level because there must, by now, be twenty foot of water in the shaft. A third man brings news that the supplementary shaft further down the slope is also flooded, and so the news circulates, passed from mouth to mouth in a matter of seconds, and officials, checking names of the missing against known casualties, recruiting rescue teams, and gauging the sucking power of the pump, have no need to keep watchers informed of progress.
It was by some such means that Bryn Lovell heard about it and was able, even at a distance, to estimate the chances of eighty-seven entombed men, and it was a conviction that he could make a unique contribution that sent him scurrying over from Abergavenny and ploughing up the slope to the pit yard where, by now, some three thousand men and women were standing about the pithead.
He was a strange, sombre man
, a misfit in the community in that he was aloof and very solitary, seemingly without the need for the solace of wife, children, or even a friend, and lacking the sense of humour that saves the isolated Celt from self-destruction before he attains middle-age. He was considered, by the few who knew him to be an educated man, with any amount of book learning under his thatch, but this was only half true. Although he had taught himself to read with a primer when he was in his early twenties, he had read but two kinds of books, those dealing with social history and those concerned with moral philosophy, and perhaps it was what he dredged from these humourless tomes that made him walk alone, conjuring with the theories advanced by their erudite authors. He was tall and spare, with thinning grey hair, and a slight stoop. He was also near-sighted, and wore a pair of steel-framed spectacles that had served his father through two decades of the eighteenth century, and were now pressed into service by his son who was a frugal man and saw no reason to buy a new pair. He subscribed to no religious cult, his evenings with his books having taught him to distrust all creeds, but he was a man of great integrity and none of those with whom he did business held out for a piece of paper pledging Lovell to abide by his quotations or schedules.
Here in the Mountain Square Lovell had got off to a slow start but he was now firmly established in the north and centre of the Square and was, to Adam's gratification, making steady progress in short-haul work within an area well-served by rail. He had established a string of reliable agents along the South Wales main line, and Swann-on-Wheels pinnaces and frigates were beginning to be seen in all the upper valleys, where they carried a great variety of goods, everything from pit-props to cabbages. Taken all round Adam Swann had reason to consider Bryn Lovell the most reliable of his provincial managers, equating him, in terms of enterprise, with Catesby in the north, and in terms of reliability with a man like Wadsworth in the Crescents.
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