* * *
The inn at Woolmer Green opened for business smelling of new wood and the brick that had mended the outside walls, of the fresh lath and plaster that had constructed the inner, and very faintly of the cow dung which made tensile the new firebacks in the grates.
The chestnut tree that had shaded the inn’s frontage was now a stump, allowing light into its windows and making it more visible from the road. Part of the tree had been made into a gibbet, which stood on the edge of the newly gravelled forecourt, carrying a large, chestnut board only a blind man could miss. The sign depicted a woman warrior, spear aloft. Underneath ran the legend: The Belle Sauvage.
Most had resisted the inn’s title. The Packers said it was too foreign, Colonel Grandison, too frightening, Dolly and the local parson, too heathenish, but Cecily felt a superstitious obligation which she translated as: ‘It’s bad luck to change a name.’
Archibald Cameron, who’d raised the loan for the renovation – and hadn’t been forgiven for being nice about it – grinned and said that if the name didn’t fit the inn, it fitted the landlady.
The Packers had found thirty feet of oak linenfold, the hall screen of an old manor that was being rebuilt in Palladian style at Bramfield, ‘going begging’. With it, Cecily divided off part of the taproom into a snug for her regulars, leaving a main area for passing trade.
From the rest of the panelling and an old door she made an office for herself in a corner that had a window on the Great North Road, and had another cut so that she could keep an eye on the yard.
On a fine July day in 1723, she sat at the escritoire Colonel Grandison had given her, doing the accounts. Flies, the smell of horses and hay came through the open window to the yard. Archibald Cameron looked over her shoulder, an irritating stance but one to which she could hardly object: as well as investing in the Belle, he’d become its lawyer.
‘Are those Ned’s accounts?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Ned was now the inn’s ostler.
‘Does he write Greek?’
‘He hardly writes English.’
‘He has the Greek flavour.’ Cameron picked up Ned’s slate that Cecily was copying into her ledger and read: ‘“To anos. 2s. To agitinonimom 6d.”’
‘For goodness’ sake.’ She snatched the slate back. ‘It’s clear enough. Squire Leggatt was too drunk to ride home last week and went back to the colonel’s to sleep it off. We stabled his horse for the night and Ned had to return it to Knebworth for him next morning. “To a horse. 2s. To a getting on him home. 6d.” See?’
She turned back to the accounts and he continued to watch until the last entry had been sprinkled with sand and drops of sweat from her forehead. It was hot in the office. ‘There. Thank God that’s done.’
‘Ye’re no bad at it.’ He took the ledger. ‘It balances. But finely. Ye’re making no profit after all’s paid.’
Did he think she didn’t know? ‘I need the coach trade. We’re popular with the locals, Colonel Grandison brings all his Tory friends to the snug. But the coach trade’s where the profit is.’
‘It’ll no’ be easy attracting it away from St Albans.’
He was a marvellous soul for pointing out the obvious. But she and Tyler had a plan to remedy the lack of coach trade which it would be impolitic to tell a legal man.
‘Now,’ she said, briskly, ‘you’re sure you can get Cole off?’
‘Aye. I went to Hertford and looked at the charge. They’ve—’
The door opened. ‘Cecily, my dear…’ Colonel Grandison was petitely pretty in brocade but worried. ‘How de do, Cameron, how de do? Just the man. Can you save our poor Cole Packer?’
‘A good afternoon to ye, Colonel. I was about to tell Mrs Henry here. He’s been indicted in the name of Walter Packer…’
‘Lord in His mercy be praised.’ The colonel turned to Cecily. ‘My dear, we can produce the parish register where, plain as a pikestaff, the man’s given name is writ Waller.’
For all her relief she couldn’t resist a hit at the Scotsman. ‘How interesting that justice depends on technicalities.’
‘It’s no’ ideal,’ he said, shortly, ‘but yon technicality will save the laddie’s neck from the noose.’
‘Indeed,’ Cecily said. ‘It’s interesting, too, that smashing a fishpond, which had no right to be there in the first place, is become a capital offence. Don’t you think so, Mr Cameron?’
Shutting her ledger with a slap, she led the way into the taproom to give the two men ale.
Unfair perhaps, but she was unsettled, almost fearful; cross with Cole Packer, cross with the new owner of the forest and crossest of all with this, the only representative of the even newer law on whom she could vent her spleen.
These last two years had shown that Lady Cecily Potts possessed a capacity for hard work and attendance to detail that made her into a more than competent landlady. She was disgusted to find herself such – when she had time to consider it. It suggested a plebeian streak. She consoled her shame by telling herself it was her wifely duty – from which the bluest feminine blood was not exempt – to provide for Lemuel while he made his recovery, as indeed he was doing.
Yet, with Cole Packer’s arrest had come the revelation that, busy as the two years were, they’d been as fulfilling as any she could remember. Insidiously, the people with whom she worked, Tyler, Ned, the Packers, Colonel Grandison, even Dolly, had become necessities she could not spare and, therefore, hostages to Providence.
Now the shadow that had chased her out of London had reassembled itself into something more general, more poisonous to the harmony of her landscape, everybody’s landscape.
Walpole, of course. Always Walpole.
His increased taxation of Catholics had forced the ancestral owner of Bramfield forest, a forest of which Datchworth was a part and which crossed the Great North Road to encompass her inn and purlieus, to sell it to the newly created Whig peer and friend of Walpole, Lord Letty.
With the appointment of Letty’s verderer had come the introduction of a forest law that the people who lived in it neither understood nor recognized.
Suddenly, the trout stream that had run alongside Cole Packer’s cottage for as long as anyone could remember ceased to run. Following the drying bed, Cole found it diverted into a large, stone-bound fish pond belonging to the new verderer. Not caring who saw him, he took a mallet to the pond-head and set the stream flowing back into its old course.
He was arrested immediately and taken to the Hertford bridewell. Cecily, expecting him to come up before the Hertford magistrates, went to the gaol armed with a lecture and money for his fine.
She was refused permission to see him. ‘Sorry, mistress,’ she was told, ‘he’s charged under the Black Act.’
‘What’s the Black Act?’
The gaoler scratched his head. ‘Don’t rightly know, mistress. Some new law they’ve come up with in Lunnon that’s like to hang un.’
‘Hang him?’
Colonel Grandison, when applied to, was as mystified as the gaoler. Act 9 George l.c.22 had been passed so quickly – there’d been less than a month between its first reading in the House and the royal assent – that it had only now arrived on his desk. He read it while she waited. ‘Fifty,’ she heard him mutter. ‘Fifty, do you think?’
‘Fifty what, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Fifty capital offences.’ He looked up at her. ‘Oh, my dear. Fifty new hanging matters put on to the statute books at the stroke of a pen. A rabbit – you can now be hanged for poaching a deer, a sheep, a rabbit, or a hare or even a fish if you go armed or disguised while doing so. In the king’s forests you can be hanged for it, disguised and armed or not. Cutting down a tree in any garden, orchard or plantation…’
Cecily supposed mildly that, retrospectively, she could be taken to the gallows as accessory. Neither she nor the Packers regarded the occasional haunch of venison served up at the Belle as poached; she bought, and the Packers sold, in good faith.
<
br /> Poaching. A poacher was Johnny Marsh who’d taken too many of her deer in the old days. Her keeper had caught Marsh, whipped him, shot his hunting dogs – as was the gamekeeper’s summary right – and that had been an end of it. It hadn’t occurred to Cecily or the keeper to go back two hundred years and hang the man.
For that matter, the Stevenage Hunt – the same hunt that boasted three JPs other than the colonel among its members – frequently chased a deer into Bramfield forest without bothering its owner for licence. It was the give and take of country living, understood by all. Even the deer expected it.
She returned to the matter in hand. ‘But Cole smashed a fish pond, that’s all. Letty’s man stole his stream.’
‘Fifty,’ Colonel Grandison was saying, rubbing his wig. ‘I doubt if any other country possesses a criminal code with anything like so many capital provisions as in this single statute.’
He seemed to be absorbing some enormity which she hadn’t grasped and wasn’t interested in grasping. ‘But what about Cole?’
‘And passed nem con,’ he went on. ‘Not a word raised against it. Damn the Whigs – your pardon, my dear. They set more store by the life of a beast than a man.’
‘Cole, Colonel,’ Cecily said sharply.
‘The death penalty for him, my dear,’ the colonel told her, tapping the Act copy. ‘Breaking a pond-head carries the death penalty.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘I agree. Damn the Whigs – pardon again, my dear. What will they do next?’ Now he was all activity, clapping on his feathered hat and calling out of the window for his horse, a miniature knight errant. ‘I’m for Hertford.’
Entering the Belle later that night, he was tipsy. Fellow magistrates had been as confused by the Act as he was, though the Whigs among them not quite so appalled. ‘’S only an emergency measure, my dear. ’S against Jacobite ruffians, Blacks in Windsor, naughty, naughty men. ’S the Black Act. Jury… jury’ll never convict our Cole.’
‘What do you mean a jury? Won’t he be tried by magistrates?’
Grandison shook his head. ‘He’ll… to go to King’s Bench.’
‘That he won’t.’ Cole’s wife, Marjorie, was as small as the colonel, twenty times more ferocious and the only living thing her husband was afraid of. ‘You get me that bugger back now, Colonel. He an’t fixed my dairy roof. What for’s that have-his-corp?’
‘Habeas Corpus… ss-suspended, Marjorie, my dear, because of Japcop… Jacobite plots. Emergency.’
‘Then you un-suspend it. I don’t care what Blacks and Jacobites do down south, they ain’t hanging my Cole.’
Even she wasn’t too disturbed. Cole had been a frequent guest of the Hertford bridewell in his early days: he’d always come out. And whatever the national emergency necessitating such ferocious legislation, news of it hadn’t reached Hertfordshire and, therefore, it was considered neither national nor an emergency.
It was when an Enfield Chase labourer, twenty miles off in Middlesex, was hanged for stealing a sheep – unlike horse-theft, sheep-stealing had not previously been a capital offence – that Hertfordshire woke up to the fact that the Black Act meant business.
* * *
The emergency that occasioned the Black Act had arisen in Windsor Great Park, once Queen Anne’s favourite hunting ground – even in her arthritic years she’d been sped through it behind her hounds in a little horse-drawn chariot. In those days her benignity had kept an equilibrium in the age-old running battle between keeper and poacher.
But the accession of King George and the Whigs had brought a new officialdom to the forest which damned such laxity and came down hard, not only on poaching but on the taking of fish, rabbits, turves and wood – perquisites that had kept many a forest cottager off the Poor Rate.
Windsor magistrates were slow to convict for crimes that had formerly been misdemeanours, and received letters of condemnation from the prime minister for being so.
An ancient battle escalated into war, with viciousness on both sides. A keeper was killed. The poachers, now a gang smearing soot on their faces to avoid recognition, thus earned the sobriquet ‘Blacks’, and were heard to shout: ‘God damn King George.’
That – and as far as Colonel Grandison could discover, that alone – gave Prime Minister Walpole the opportunity to denounce a Jacobite plot that was overrunning the country’s forests and leaving no property-owning Englishman safe in his bed.
‘Hence the Black Act of a black bastard – begging your pardon, my dear.’
If Sir Robert had managed to bend the House of Commons to his will, he wasn’t managing to subdue all protest from a country already restive at the number of Walpole relatives now appearing in high office. Even his third son, still at school, was receiving an official salary.
A certain amount of nepotism and corruption in ministers was to be expected but Walpole, it was felt, was overdoing it. As Colonel Grandison said, ‘The French called Cardinal Richelieu the best relative there ever was. They hadn’t met our Sir Robert.’
The Tory True Briton asked why a highway robber ‘committed perhaps for a trifle or the mere relief of his necessities’ should be executed ‘whilst another, who has enriched himself at the expense of his country, shall not only escape with impunity, but, by a servile herd of flatterers and sycophants, have all his actions crowned with applause’.
The Belle Sauvage’s taproom sang the song that was sweeping the nation: ‘When all great offices, by dozens/Are filled by brothers, sons and cousins…’
Cecily’s erstwhile friend Alexander Pope pitched into the fray when his brother-in-law, Charles Rackett, another Catholic, was accused of being a Berkshire ‘Black’:
Tell me, which knave is lawful game, which not?
Must great offenders, once escap’ed the crime,
Like royal harts, be never more run down?
Have you less pity for the needy cheat,
The poor and friendless villain than the great?
Cecily gleefully repeated it to Archibald Cameron, who winced.
However, it was thanks to the foxy-wigged Scottish lawyer that Cole Packer came out of Hertford bridewell. His wife gave him a clout on the ear for having got into it in the first place. Cecily lectured him, but served a round of free ale to a celebrating taproom that night.
She thought that Cameron, hero of the hour, could have accepted the company’s cheers with more modesty. As she passed his tankard she hissed Shakespeare: ‘“First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It was the Law put Cole in jeopardy in the first place.’
‘And it was the Law got him out.’ He was in high fettle. ‘Confess I did fine and ye’re pleased to see the man back.’
‘I am pleased at the return of a useful servant.’ The Packers were the bedrock of the Belle: plumbers, builders, chuckers-out. At night they brought their friends, other foresters, to drink. Their wives, aunts and cousins served in taproom and kitchen.
But she was aware that her relief was more than that: at first she had commanded the brothers as she’d commanded her former servants, through an aloof courtesy with a whip in its boot. Without effect. If the Packers thought a job wasn’t worth doing, they didn’t do it; if they thought it was, they did it to their own satisfaction, not hers. They responded more amiably to Dolly, who amused them, until, as ever, she fell out with them one by one.
A conversation one day between Warty and Stabber, which Cecily was meant to overhear, used the word ‘pad’ six times.
‘She do want that pump padded against frost, Wart.’
‘Ain’t worth it, Stab. That’s like my Mary’s dumplings, don’t need padding.’
‘Us’ll pad on over to it, shall us? See if that needs a pad?’
And so on. They knew.
It wasn’t that they disapproved of Cecily’s highway activity, they were merely informing her that loftiness was unacceptable from a coach-robber. After thinking it over, she had to agree with them.
It was difficult for her to unbe
nd to them as she did with Tyler: with their smocks, their hugeness and the slow oy-oy of their accent, each looked the archetypal bumpkin. She’d heard London crowds sharpen their wit on a hundred like them.
But the Packers had their own wit. When Cecily, remonstrating with Cole, who’d been working outside in a thunderstorm, for walking into her newly cleaned taproom, said: ‘You’re wet, man,’ Cole stared at his smock in simulated amazement. ‘Gor dear, if that in’t rain all over. Does it every time.’ And Cecily laughed.
To see Packer faces, like round, lugubriously humorous clocks, about the place became a reassurance that all was well. Tinker was the most troublesome, only because he couldn’t resist women – nor they him – but fondness for all of them crept up on her. Packer chaff, she learned, was not lèse majesté, but liking. Somewhat uneasily, she learned to chaff back, wondering at lowering herself, more often marvelling at their subsequent willingness to please. When Cole looked likely to hang, she’d experienced not the remote concern of an employer but the panic of a soldier for a fallen comrade.
None of this would she admit to Archibald Cameron. He’d become as indispensable to her as the Packers and the two of them had been forced into a somewhat uncomfortable modus vivendi that they eased by exchanging insults, teasing on his part, sincere on hers.
Knowing how much she owed him, Cecily, who loathed owing anybody anything, kept a distance between them. His frequent visits to the Belle – he now had his own room – she suspected as emphasizing her debt, as well as a cheap method by which he could enjoy his favourite recreation of fishing the local rivers.
‘I’ve a letter for ye,’ he said, and produced a folded paper so rubbed that, in the flickering light of the crowded taproom, she could only just read the superscription: ‘To Lady Cecily Potts, last heard of in London. Haste. Haste.’
I’ll be back for you, Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily. The seven years of his transportation were up: she’d counted every day of them. He’d found her. Somehow, through the mercy of God, he’d found her.
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