Terroir (6 page)

When they took her father away to Richmond assizes they searched the house from top to bottom, but they hadn't found his gun. He'd made a special hiding place for it under the roof beams in the bedroom so that it was pushed between the plastered lath and the slates. They kept him in the stables at the Hall, word spreading that he'd been caught red
-
handed. She'd fetched him some food and spare clothing. He winked at her, putting a finger to the side of his nose as they took him away chained to a farm cart, expecting a few days in jail. He'd heard of the new game laws but taken little notice.
Nay
, he'd said,
they'll never thank us for tekkin' what's there's. Though what's theirs is ours by rights.
They'd expected him back within the month but he never came. It was Billy Crapper the carter who brought the news.
Transported
. Van Diemen's land, he reckoned, though he wasn't sure where that was.

Her father had taught her how to catch pheasants with raisins stuck through with a bristle to choke them, how to peg a wire snare, get rabbits with a purse net and ferret, and how to shoot his little rifle. They'd caught him snaring hares on the squire's land this time and they'd fought viciously in the dark. It was winner take all. He laid out two of the under keepers with his fists, but the head keeper produced a lantern and a pistol and put it to him plainly.
You come quietly now, Seddon. Think of your children. You'll take no more game if I send you to hell, and that's where you belong, you thieving gypsy bastard.
Her father cursed him as a craven arse
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licker, but had gone quietly in the end. Billy heard all this from a weaver who'd shared a cell with her father for a few days before being released. He spent his first day of freedom playing his fiddle for the soldiers and whores who plagued Richmond town and getting shit
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faced drunk. Billy got the whole story for the price of a pint. Her father was no gypsy, but he'd learned their ways. Night skills, a gentle stealth.

A woman stooped into a plaid shawl went past the window. Susan Darrent, toothless, sick with age and consumption. She'd not last the winter. After days of rain the village was sodden and dark
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stoned. Hillsides across the valley were streaked with white water where streams had boiled to the surface. Ellen went to the window nudging the fire with her clog as she went. There was hardly any coal left. She stood looking out, hands across her belly, feeling the warmth of the child inside her, remembering Michael's body heat, the little sigh as he came into her and then released himself. She hadn't known what was happening at first. But after that she enjoyed the power she had over him, the way a grown man would set his pleading eyes on her, bring her food and drink. He never forced her. He was never rough like the other men, not Michael. He had his eye on her ever since she took up as a maid at the King's Head and began stopping by after work. As soon as the landlord found out she was pregnant he felt her belly, gave her a sovereign, grinned wisely and sent her home. Sour breath, white bristles, black teeth. She'd never seen so much money. He couldn't have her moping around the place with a full belly when there were guests to tend to.

Earlier that summer they got away from the village, racing each other down the lanes together to make love in the hayfields amongst the meadowsweet and clover where the river made a loop of silver against the land. That's how she got pregnant. Lying down to take him instead of being had against a wall. Or maybe because she told Michael she loved him. He'd not known what to say. Not being good with words. That last time she lay down for him a moth had blundered against her breast. When she brushed it away it left a faint powder on her skin. She ran her hands over his arms, marked with scars, where the hairs grew thick and blond and he watched her with a kind of wonder. As if he'd never been touched like that. When they made love it was tender and slow. He let his lips graze against her neck and ear lobes as he came deeper in. The lids sagged over his green eyes and the lock of straw
-
coloured hair flopped over his face. Three days later he was dead. It'd crushed her as sure as if she'd been felled by that same landslide of stone and darkness. Then her monthlies had stopped and the sickness began as if sin had curdled in her. Except she never believed that. How could love be sin when they lived under the love of God?

Her father had shown her how to take the gun apart and clean it. It was a small
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bore rifle, specially made so that the barrel unscrewed and could be easily hidden. Seddon got it from a gun
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maker in Knaresborough. He showed her how to clean the barrel with the pull
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through, how to oil the hammer and trigger, then how to load it, tamping down the powder and ball with wadding and priming the pan. A time or two he took her up in the moor for target practice. She was a good shot, he said. She loved the feeling of the rifle in her hands, the way it was warm from her father's hands, the way it cracked and jumped against her shoulder and a bottle flew into pieces. They lay next to each other in the heather in his smell of sweat and gunpowder and oil. Her father had been a soldier –
the King's bloody fool
– then mended shoes for a living, a trade he'd learned in the army, then travelled the country from north to south. He'd been a sailor for one God
-
forgotten voyage. Then he learned his real trade –
the taking of hares that is
– and here he'd wink and put a finger to his nose – from gypsies in Kent when the hop
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picking season was on. They taught him to walk on stilts to get the highest flowers. They showed him the art of mole trapping, and that earned him extra cash when the farmers were plagued. And it gave him a chance to spot where game was being raised. What he brought home from the woods and estates around the village had kept them from hunger – though not from harm.

A few times he took her out with him. Usually when the moon was full and there was a high wind that tore the hems of clouds and drew them over its glare. The more noise weather made, the better. One night they climbed up to Reys plantation and went a few yards in to wait. The trees were mainly oak and beech with some elm and hazel. Her father taught her their names by showing her the shapes of their leaves. A ride was cut through the trees, strewn with straw. There were some feeders made from half
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sawn barrels. It was here that the keepers put down grain for the pheasants to feed. They came out in the late afternoon as the light was fading, then roosted in the trees. The cock pheasants gave out a brazen clucking cry if disturbed, leaving their perches to crash through the branches. She loved their princely colours, like the pictures of Mughal emperors she'd once spied in a book at the Manse when she'd been helping to keep house for the vicar. It was hard to imagine they could belong here in the grey Yorkshire dales when their colours were so rich.
Brought from beyond
, her father reckoned, and regarded more than starving women or children. They were living brooches for the land – and as stupid as the lords were rich.

He took them with a loop of snare wire attached to a stick, guiding the noose over the bird's head as they rooted for the grain he'd dropped. Then a sharp yank and the bird was choking, all feathers and commotion. You had to snap their necks quickly then. He taught her to kill quickly and mercifully; never to be greedy, to take only what you could carry, to carry only what you could eat or sell or give away. How to wear a cap and beard or blacking to take the glare off your face, to wear boots not clogs, to work alone. Long netting in gangs was a fool's game for you could trust no one. The other man will always let you down in the end. He never poached for profit. Hares he killed on the ploughed land, or after hay time, catching them silhouetted against the sky and bringing them down with a single shot. He said the moon mesmerised them, that the man in the moon was really a hare if you looked properly. That's why they got drunk on moonlight, standing up on their hind legs to give him a clear shot through the heart.

Her father told her stories about his one time at sea. How he got drunk in a quayside pub in Bristol and got tricked onto a slave ship that was trading beyond the law. Not that he knew. They'd taken a hold full of brass pots and pans to the Gold Coast in Africa, then on to El Mina fort where pirogues rode the breakers all around them, and the natives cast out nets, their boats rising and falling, appearing and disappearing in the high seas. There, they took on a cargo of slaves. Her father described how a line of negroes covered in sores from their chains stumbled down the ramp, dazzled by the sun after days in a dungeon. They'd never seen the ocean or a great ship before. Next minute they were being roughly doused in the sea, then taken up and chained in the hold. He told her how he'd lived a life of shame to see them suffer in their own filth and blood, men and woman alike. Every day started with dropping the dead overboard. They lost seven sailors and twenty
-
two negroes on that trip.

Her father said things that she'd heard no one else say. How all men were born equal until they were made unequal, black and white alike. How ‘nigger' was no name for a black man and how he'd not bear it said. He'd fought men over that, because God was everywhere and nowhere, in everything and in nothing.

One day they brought the negroes up on deck for air, chained at the ankles in groups of five. One group started to sing, doing a kind of war dance, stamping in their shackles. When the mate brought the lash to tame them, they jumped over an ill
-
rigged rail into the sea, dragging each other down. He watched them sink through the clear upper waters into the gloom below, their arms and legs still moving in their chains, air bubbles bursting to the surface.
Aye,
that's how much freedom means, Ellen. Freedom is everything to a man.
He told her how he'd wanted to join them, to jump for liberty, even if it meant certain death by drowning or sharks. He told her how huge and restless and bright the green Atlantic was, how he'd seen coconuts and pineapple trees in the Indies and women walking around naked to the waist. How the island been set in the sea like a jewel in a crown. As soon as they'd docked in England he'd taken his pay guiltily and stayed sober, slinking past the press gangs, heading north to Yorkshire by country lanes and hedgerows. How he met her mother was never told. She wondered if he'd lain with black women before that. She didn't care.

After marriage, he became a lead miner, walking three miles to work and back. Starting at five
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thirty and getting home at seven. When she lay in bed between her mother and brother she liked the peaceful feeling of him moving about the house in stockinged feet. She'd hear him taking the bowl of oatmeal from the hearth where it had soaked overnight, then putting on his clogs at the back door, trying not to make a noise. Easing the privy door because it creaked on its hinges, then lighting the lantern he had to carry in winter and greeting the other men of his gang in whispers as they tried not to wake their women. If times were good, they came down to a fire he'd got going from last night's embers. A cold hearth meant things were bad, even though they were never spoken of. When the hearth was dead you learned not to ask for more than there was.

It was mid
-
March now. Fells and fields were still pale brown. Winter had been hard, freezing the pump in the yard. The sheep were almost starving for lack of new grass, though she'd seen ransomes and dog's mercury spearing through in the woods. The weather was so cold that rabbits had gnawed the bark from the young trees, leaving bare white trunks as high as they could reach. The farmers had come out in gangs to shoot them. Sometimes they put turnips out for the cattle and sheep and she'd sneak down and bring a couple home under her shawl. She roasted them over the fire until they softened enough to eat. Then she'd get the wild shites and spend hours freezing in the privy, emptying her guts.

There was a crack in the thin window glass where droplets of rain were coming through. Mist blew over the fields below the church and the river had disappeared. The dray horses passed again, dragging the cart away with its load of empty barrels and firkins, the driver hunched into his cape, dangling the whip over the team as if he hadn't the heart to use it. She wondered where her father was. Van Demons land. The curate told her that was near Australia in the world's southern half. All she knew was that it would be hot. When her father had pleaded to the court that he'd served his country as a soldier and a sailor, the magistrate joked that the voyage wouldn't make him seasick then. He was a known poacher and would be made an example of. He ought to be grateful that he wasn't to be hanged. That was what Billy Crapper had said. Not that you could trust much that came from his mouth.

When her mother and Ben died, she wrote him a letter, telling him everything, saying that surely they would send him home now? She'd sent it care of the magistrate's court, but she heard nothing. He had three more years to serve. He'd come home to a grandchild and two graves, if he came at all. That thought of the child eased her grief sometimes, allowed her to go on.

Ellen was hungry now that the pangs of early sickness had passed. She took a knife and cut the crust and a thick slice from the loaf. The fire had just enough heat in it. She took a long fork from a nail on the wall and held bread over the glowing coals. She had a scraping of beef dripping from the butcher to spread on it. It was delicious – bread and dripping and coal smoke all mixed together. The bread would last her two days. After that, she didn't know what she'd do. The Poor House was always a risk for pregnant girls, but they'd never take her there. She was determined of that. She had her father's gun and knew how to load and fire it. There was enough powder and shot to see to things. She'd rather end it now than live as a slave, just as he'd said. Then one sin would be taken over by another.