Whoever had lugged the rock up Fiendsdale Clough to build it had been long forgotten, but there’d been a boundary line on the moors of some kind or another for centuries to separate the ewes and the game, the commoners and the rich, tenants and masters, and maybe, at one time, the shepherds and the Devil.
Much of it now was just grassed-over rubble, apart from the small section at the foot of Poacher’s Seat that Jim had rebuilt before he’d died. He’d made a proper job of it, as I remember, taking his time to strip everything back to the foundations with his mattock and crowbar, and lay out the copings, face-stones, fillings, through-stones and footings in neat rows so that reassembly would require a minimum amount of confusion and movement.
When Dadda and I came up to check on the sheep, I liked to try and catch the knack Jim had of selecting the right stone each time. I tried to understand how his hands could remember the contours of the one he’d laid down and find its partner with just a few brief touches. Sometimes he made his decision by sight only and worked mechanically, though never quickly, bending and rising and fitting and bending again, already knowing which stone to pick.
I got the impression that he didn’t mind someone else being there as long as he wasn’t required to engage in conversation, which was fine with me too. Dadda made small talk with him, but it was generally statement of fact or a compliment about the job he was doing, nothing that necessarily invited him to reply. Which he didn’t. He let the knock of the stone’s consonants speak for him. When we said goodbye and went back down to the farm with the dogs, he wouldn’t watch us for long before he was back bending and rising and fitting again.
It was hard to imagine he’d always been as silent as that. Angela wasn’t the type to marry a mouse, nor would someone like that have been much use in the Endlands. I’d always assumed that he must have been different once but no one talked about him enough for me to know if that were true. Perhaps they’d forgotten how he used to be. It was a waste of time to look backwards anyway when there was work that needed to be done now and I think, to be honest, they just let him do whatever seemed to make him happy. Caring for his animals, piecing together his walls.
Mind you, it was only as I got older that I realised they were indulging him. There was no need for the Wall to be rebuilt at all. Apart from the waste of physical effort—each yard repaired required the lifting and shifting of a ton of stone—there was no benefit for the animals either. If the deer came, they’d shoot them, and in any case the presence of the boundary line was so deeply entrenched in the consciousness of the Pentecost sheep, and had been passed down from ewe to lamb for so long, that to refrain from crossing it had become as instinctive as the urge to feed or breathe. There were, of course, always some lambs that seemed to be born clueless, and the dogs would find them lying in the old grouse moor at Gathering picked to bones or as a scum of dirty fleece on top of a bog. But these were few and far between and not worth worrying about.
‘There’s nowt worse than a lamb that won’t heft, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said. ‘You might as well take it to the slaughterhouse and have done with it.’
The sheep that were lying down by the stones watched us closely as if we were the first human beings they’d ever seen, and then, nervous and wide-eyed, they unbent their forelegs and lumbered off, braying for their lambs. They were all fat from the summer, stuffed full of mosscrop and waiting to be brought down for the cleaver or the ram. For them, one year was coming to an end and another was about to begin. It was a busy time for Dadda and I always hated having to leave him when he needed me to stay, even if he pretended otherwise.
He coughed into his fist and brought out a leather hip flask from his pocket.
‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it, Dadda?’ I said.
He was still rank with the smell of beer and scotch from the wake, still not remotely clear-headed.
‘You can’t afford to let yourself get cold, John,’ he said, taking a nip and then another. ‘You can’t shoot owt with stiff fingers. And if you can’t shoot straight then you might as well go home.’
He hacked again and spat into the grass. It was hard to see how he was going to shoot straight by curing his hangover with brandy either.
‘Perhaps we should go back,’ I said. ‘You’re not well. You must have caught whatever the ram’s got.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, ‘I’m fine,’ and scanned the moorland with his binoculars, taking in Poacher’s Seat, the acres of brown heather on the old grouse moor, and coming to Top Pond.
In the map book, the Pond, where the headwaters gathered, was marked as the source of the River Briar. It was easy to see why. There was always water here. Even in summer, when the rest of the moor was as dry as a broom, the springtime rain was still seeping down through the peat around the edges of the Pond, keeping the ground wet. It was in the dark, clotted mud that Dadda had found the petal tracks of the deer. And then a day later, he’d seen them feeding on the reeds and grass, quick to huddle behind the bushes when they noticed he was watching them.
‘How many stags were there?’ I said.
‘It were going dark,’ said Dadda. ‘It were hard to tell.’
‘One? Two?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe more. I don’t know. Here, you’ve got younger eyes than I have.’
He handed me the binoculars and I turned the focus wheel to sharpen the holly thickets that rattled and hushed in the wind, and at the turning of the year were coming into their berry bloom.
‘Well, they’re not there now,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they’ve headed back over to Wyresdale.’
‘We need to make sure,’ said Dadda.
‘But we’ll be Gathering in a few days,’ I said. ‘Then it won’t matter if the stags are here or not.’
‘Aye, and when we come back in the spring we’ll find that they’ve settled themselves in very nicely,’ said Dadda. ‘No, we need to kill them now.’
‘If we can find them,’ I said and gave the binoculars back to him.
‘We’ll find them,’ he said. ‘We just need to be patient. We’ll wait in one of the grouse butts until they come out.’
‘Standing around in the cold isn’t going to do your chest much good, Dadda,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come back another day when you’re feeling better?’
‘I won’t have another day, will I?’ he said. ‘Not once we’ve gathered the sheep. There’s too much to do.’
‘Dadda, the deer can wait if you’re not well,’ I said.
‘They can’t wait,’ he said. ‘Listen, you won’t remember, but the year after your mam passed away there were a farm over in Wyresdale where foot and mouth went through the whole flock in a day. That poor bastard had to shoot every one of his animals and burn them. I’m not going to let that happen here, John.’
‘I’m only thinking of you, Dadda,’ I said.
‘Then think, don’t nag,’ he said. ‘I’m not dead yet.’
Another cough and he picked his way over the Wall and into the deep heather.
∾
The grouse butts had succumbed to time and most of them had collapsed in on themselves, though there was one still usable and Dadda climbed down into the arc of stone. The butt was small for two men to stand comfortably together and the smell of our coats was suddenly noxious. Dadda wore the camouflage jacket that hung uncleaned in the scullery all year round and had lent me the Gaffer’s oilskin, the one with poacher’s pockets sewn inside by Grandma Alice. It was stiff and waxy and impregnated with a rankness that only burning would remedy. But if we were going to find the deer then it would pay to smell like the moorland.
For almost an hour Dadda stood on watch, nipping at the brandy in his hip flask while I shivered and willed him to give up and head for home.
‘There,’ he said, and handed me the binoculars.
The deer were moving across the moors. A stag and his harem, almost indistinguishable from the autumn colour of the heather.
‘Keep your eyes
on them,’ said Dadda, while he took the rifle out of its leather bag. The bolt-action Remington had belonged to the Gaffer and the story went that he won it in a card game. It was probably true. He’d certainly cherished it like something he’d acquired through sheer luck, something that shouldn’t really have been his. I’d often find him polishing the stock with lemon oil or cold-blueing the barrel to prevent it from rusting and to take any glare off the metal that might have given him away to the deer. That summer I’d left primary school, he’d been up on to the moors all the time and killed enough of the stags to stop them using our pastures for their autumn rut. But I knew that he hadn’t managed to shoot them all. One, at least, had been able to steal down into the valley and hide in the Wood. With the Devil inside, spurring it on, I supposed that it must have run faster than the others and escaped the Gaffer’s gunshots. If I hadn’t come blundering into the Greenhollow, then perhaps the Devil would have jumped into one of the animals there instead, or slipped into the heartwood of a willow. But they were toys that quickly bored him. He could make a tree blister with disease or turn a vixen on her cubs and then there was no more fun to be had out of them. A child, however, was a different thing entirely.
I couldn’t ever switch off his voice. Even when he wasn’t addressing me, he mumbled in the background. And if he sensed that I was ignoring him, he’d remind me that I’d said yes to watching Lennie die and that I couldn’t go back on it now. I’d promised. Then, like a boy in the playground taking the sting out of his coercion by pressing all the benefits of it into my hand, he told me it would be worth seeing, it would happen soon too, before the end of the summer, it would be something I’d remember. I needed to see how quickly life went out. One moment everything, the next nothing. And there was nothing, afterwards. But I knew that already. I’d look at the porcelain dolls and the glass swans on the mantelpiece that Mam left behind and wait for them to tell me something. But they never did. Not even if I held them in my hand and closed my eyes. The dead were dead. That was why, the Devil said, I shouldn’t waste the time I had while I was alive.
Not yet, he said, in answer to the question that I’d only begun to ask. Not for a while. He couldn’t tell me how long I would live, otherwise that would spoil the lesson I was about to be given. No one should know when their own death would come, otherwise the world would be wrecked by those with weeks to live and nothing to lose. No, a bit of uncertainty did us the power of good. It was better that we sat in the crosshairs, like the deer on the moors.
Dadda crouched and loaded the rifle with one of the hollow-point rounds, sliding the bolt into place. Two other stags emerged now, the sultan’s rivals, waiting on the peripheries for the right moment to make their challenge. The sound of them bellowing repeated on the sharp air.
Dadda took off his cap and laid it down upturned on the ground like a bowl and then, adjusting his position, he brought the rifle to his shoulder and passed the muzzle slowly through the tufts of grass on top of the wall. Now that he had competition, the sultan was alert and lifted his head from the pack of hinds, who had gathered together long-necked and twitchy as the geese on the Moss.
‘Come on, you owd bastard,’ said Dadda, squinting down the scope. ‘Show me your face. Look this way.’
He became completely still. The leather strap hung under the rifle.
‘Fingers, John,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Put your fingers in your ears.’
The sultan’s head twitched and a chunk of something red spun off into the air before he buckled into the heather. The gunshot rolled across the moorland, following the rest of the deer as they charged away, rumps and legs, in the direction of Blackmire Edge. On and on they went, the hinds now following the younger of the other two stags, springing over the tumps and bog-moss.
Dadda watched them for a few moments and then pulled on the bolt to eject the case.
‘We’ll have to follow them,’ he said.
Putting the rifle over his shoulder, he climbed out and we set off into a part of the moorland that I didn’t know.
∾
The sultan stag was a hoary thing, full of nicks and scars, his antlers chipped and bevelled from fighting off rivals. Dadda had hit him just above the eye and the wound had opened up like a little fleshy chrysanthemum. At least he’d died without pain. Hollowpoints are mercifully quick.
His tongue hung limply from his open mouth and the flies that were crawling over the sheep dung had come over to investigate his nose. They murmured and scattered when Dadda lifted the stag’s head with his toe.
‘Poor owd sod,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just stay put over in Wyresdale.’
‘Something must drive them this way,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ said Dadda, glancing across the moors. ‘There’s nowt here, is there?’
He looked at the stag once more and then set off, trying to pick out the driest route across the bog that had been churned up by the deer as they ran.
The wind got up and bristled through the dry roots. Watery sunlight spread and receded again. A corner of the sky darkened to slate and promised rain or even hail.
Go up on to the moors late in the year and it’s easy to see why it was necessary for the villagers to leave the coffin there if the weather turned and the cloud stooped. Lugging a wooden casket and its contents either back to the valley or over to Wyresdale would have most likely produced a few more corpses. And they were superstitious people, too. They would have thought of those angry spirits whose bodies had been abandoned here by clumsy relatives. They would have remembered the Blizzard and the way the Devil moved on the air. How easy it was to wake him up.
‘Aye, but it weren’t us, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said. ‘Don’t listen to what other folk tell you. They weren’t there. They didn’t see what Gideon Denning did.’
In 1912—by which time Richard Arncliffe’s son, Jacob, was running the mill—the estate had passed to Gideon Denning, but unlike his predecessors—Edgar, Enoch, his father, Saul, he’d actually made the journey north to see the valley and the moors.
An ambitious man, older than his years, he’d risen through the ranks of Asquith’s government and come to occupy an important position in the Foreign Office at not quite forty years old. There’d been a photograph of him at Brownlee Hall that made him look the spit of a young W.B. Yeats: pince-nez, a hawkish nose and disorderly hair. By all accounts, he’d been something of a polymath: a gifted writer, orator, historian and antiquarian. He spoke most European languages, had better than adequate Cantonese and could hold his own in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. And there were half a dozen other things that he might have easily excelled at if he’d chosen to pursue them: sailing, bridge, photography, cycling, the cello. On his desk in Whitehall, they said, was a chessboard where he’d set out the Budapest Gambit or the Scandinavian Defense as he talked—a reminder to whoever sat across from him that he was already thinking several moves ahead. He liked to unsettle expectations, put others on the back foot.
Which was why instead of taking visiting dignitaries shooting in the comfort of some sleepy estate in Hampshire, he’d bring them up to the Briardale Valley and show them the real England, its heart of peat and stone.
On the wall between the Ladies and the Gents of the Croppers’ Arms there were photographs Jacob Arncliffe had taken of serious-looking Indian diplomats in tweeds and turbans, a prince of Swaziland standing uncertainly beside an apron of dead birds, an Arab in his keffiyeh and thawb lined up with the cast of walrus-moustached MPs, consuls, businessmen, High Commissioners, Right Honourables and Lords. A time when deals were done on the grouse moors and the empire was governed to the sound of shotguns.
In those years before the Great War, from the start of the season until the uplands became impassable, the Endlands were loud every weekend with men and dogs and horses whenever a shooting party arrived from Brownlee Hall.
The autumn was a lucrative time for the people in the valley. Jacob Arncl
iffe’s mill-workers made good money acting as beaters and the village boys could pocket more in a month than they’d had in their hand all year if they were nimble in the grouse butts and could load a double-barrel quickly. But it was always the farm lads who led them further afield for the deer. And the Gaffer took at least a shilling a day for guiding the more serious sportsmen over to Far Lodge.
I assume it’s still there. No one goes looking for it any more.
Adam asks about it now and again, but I’m glad it’s too far away for me to take him. I’ve only ever been once. I won’t go again. It can’t rot away quickly enough as far as I’m concerned.
It had been built by Gideon Denning’s father on the strength of a passing fancy that he might like to come up to his northern acres and shoot at some point. But he’d never appeared and the Lodge had become a folly and—in time—a place of rumour.
On Sunday afternoons, young folk from the village went up on to the moors to try and locate it out of curiosity, but they found nothing and invariably got themselves lost. Even the Gaffer, who was free to go as far as a child with a healthy disregard for danger might wish to wander, had only stumbled upon it by chance.
‘If I’d been walking twenty yards further away I’d have missed it,’ he said.
‘What did it look like?’ I said.
‘Like it had been built that morning,’ said the Gaffer. ‘Strange bloody place, Johnny lad.’
In the old photographs from Gideon Denning’s time, it looked a functional rather than pretty place: a long, low building thickly rendered with lime mortar to keep the weather at bay, the doors braced with iron hinges and studded with black nailheads the size of eggs. Inside, there were two rooms: one a dormitory for half a dozen men, the other for eating and drinking.
After he’d found it the first time, the Gaffer went back the following week and then again and again until he could walk straight there every time, whatever the weather. It was a knowledge of the moorland that Denning’s guests appreciated when the mist came down and every direction looked the same. They were glad that they had their Little Virgil to guide them.
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