The Wanderers of the Water-Realm

First Published by M P Publishing Limited 2011.
e-book ISBN 978-1-84982-144-5
The Wanderers of the Water Realm

Alan Lawton asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Book Design by Maria Smith
Cover Design by Thomas Egan & Maria Smith

A CPI Catalogue for this title is available from the British Library

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I dedicate ‘The Wanderers of the Water-Realm’ to my life partner Hilary Bargent and gratefully acknowledge the help and encouragement given to me by numerous friends, including Mrs. Barbara O’Hanlon OBE and Doctor Richard Hamm … I give you all my heartfelt thanks.

Chapter  1
Chapter  2
Chapter  3
Chapter  4
Chapter  5
Chapter  6
Chapter  7
Chapter  8
Chapter  9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14

D
arryl Littlewood stifled a groan and jerked almost upright as Wise Hetty applied a steaming hot poultice to his badly bruised chest. “Easy there, Mother,” he gasped, “are you intent on boiling me like one of your garden turnips?”

Hetty laughed, thrusting her son down with the palm of her hand until the young man lay prone upon the well-used couch that occupied a corner of her kitchen.

“Lad, what can you expect when you come here beaten black and blue, after fighting like a demon in them boxing halls and those so-called ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs!’ I tell you plainly, son, I long for the day when you make the final payment upon that canal boat of yours then you can give up the bloody craft of prizefighting and make the whole of your living by plying an honest trade upon the navigations.”

“Then tomorrow will be a memorable day for both of us, Mother,” the young man answered with more than a hint of pride in his voice. “For yesterday’s bout in Sheffield, the one that left me with this damnable bruising, has also given me enough cash to pay off the last instalment of Uncle Robert’s loan. By tomorrow evening, the deeds to the Bonny Barbara will be in my possession and the craft will be mine and mine alone.”

“I’m fair glad to hear it lad!” Hetty said with a deep sigh of relief. “For I feared that someday you would be made a cripple in the ring or driven daft through repeated blows to that poor head of yours.”

She gently stroked his hair. “Now sleep, lad, and give the healing poultice a chance to do its work.”

Hetty covered her son with a warm blanket and returned to the tedious yet important task of sorting out the heaps of freshly gathered medicinal herbs that lay upon her kitchen table. As she worked, she pondered the unavoidable circumstances of birth that had ordained she must inevitably become a healer of the sick, aye, and ultimately forced her son to become a pugilist, although it was the very last career she would have wished for him.

Even from her earliest childhood days, Hetty had known that she was destined to become the hereditary ‘wisewoman,’ or healer, to the little Pennine village of Elfencot, an isolated rural community nestled within the shadow of The Devil’s Tor.

The Tor was a steep and sinister crag of naked granite overlooking the little hamlet, dominating its hinterland of small farmsteads and sheep pastures.

A woman bearing the Littlewood name had always treated sick humans and ailing farm animals in the district of Elfencot; daughter had followed mother, generation upon generation, with each wisewoman taking care to hand down the ancient secrets of her craft that were far older than recorded history. Each Littlewood female had inherited the very same plot of land upon which the present wisewoman grew her medicinal herbs and each healer had lived out her life in the same stone-built cottage that was situated on the outskirts of the village, a small four-roomed structure that lay hard by the towpath of the Marquis of Buckley’s Canal Navigation.

Generations of grateful country folk had viewed their loved ones being skilfully tended and brought back to health by the wise woman and her forbears, yet the influence of the church had always been strong in the district and the Littlewood women were often suspected of practicing witchcraft and the dark arts. Indeed, it was common knowledge that two of their number had once been burned as servants of the devil. Even in this far more enlightened year of Eighteen seventy-one, folks were known to pay furtive visits to Hetty’s cottage in search of some powerful charm to entrap a loved one, or simply to have their fortune told. Small wonder that many of the elders of the local church were known to suggest that the wisewoman’s rumoured knowledge of sorcery was a threat to her everlasting soul, aye, and to the spiritual well-being of the community at large.

Not surprisingly, few local men could be induced to take a Littlewood woman to wife and for generations their children had been sired by passing travellers who begged for a night’s lodging at their cottage, or by stalwart crewmen from the narrowboats that plied the nearby canal.

Hetty smiled with pleasure as she remembered the evening of her seventeenth birthday, when she had lain in the arms of a handsome boatman and conceived her son Darryl and his twin sister Myra. These were the only children she had ever been fated to bear.

Hetty’s children were her pride and joy. But she had always realized that her offspring would suffer many social disadvantages due to her own unconventional lifestyle and occupation. For the knowledge that the twins were sprung from a witch’s bloodline had effectively barred them from all church-run activates, including attendance at the local parish school, and no respectable tradesperson would ever consider teaching them a craft. Even so, a superstitious fear that Hetty probably possessed dark powers had ensured that they would always be treated with a kind of shallow civility, but they would never be ‘citizens of the community’ in the fullest sense of the word.

Hetty was proud of her daughter Myra, for she had provento be a quick and intelligent girl who promised to become an even more competent healer than her mother. She had also been fortunate in acquiring a reasonable degree of education from a man of letters, whom she had nursed through a long and ultimately fatal illness.

Had the girl lived in an earlier age, she would undoubtedly have succeeded her mother as the village healer. But Hetty shook her head sadly; young Doctor Smithson was building up a good practice in the district and the day of the old-fashioned wisewoman was obviously drawing to a close. It was quite probable that Myra would eventually have to find a new way of earning her living, perhaps as a nurse or possibly a lady’s maid. However, her son Darryl had far better prospects than his twin sister.

The wisewoman had only one close blood relative, a brother named Robert who was almost twenty years her senior. The elder Littlewood was master and sole owner of the narrowboat Bonny Barbara, a craft, which for years had carried general cargo on the small group of narrow canals that linked Yorkshire and the Pennine hill communities to the rapidly growing industrial city of Manchester. The veteran boatmaster, upon the wisewoman’s impassioned urging, had agreed to take Darryl aboard, at the early age of ten, and teach him the arduous trade of canal boatman and never did her brother have cause to regret his decision, for the lad proved to be a willing pupil and had quickly grown to love the gypsy life of the waterways.

Two years ago, the elderly boatmaster had chosen to retire from trade, and the veteran had such confidence in his twenty year old nephew’s ability, that he had offered to sell him the deeds to the ‘Bonny Barbara,’ with repayments to be made by ten half yearly instalments. Darryl had instantly accepted his uncle’s offer, but Hetty shook her head disapprovingly, for the young man had subsequently decided to liquidate the debt as quickly as possible by engaging in the brutal and dangerous occupation of part-time pugilist. Small wonder that the preceding two years had been exceedingly worrying ones for the wisewoman, for she had been in constant fear for her son’s safety. Even so, she was forced to admit that the young boatmaster had enjoyed a fair degree of success as a prize-fighter in the city of Manchester and the lad had even taken part in the occasional contest on the far side of the Pennines. Aye, and had successfully battered senseless every single one of the brutal ‘Yorkie’s’ matched against him.

Indeed, it was small wonder that Darryl had also succeeded in winning the vast majority of his bouts in Manchester and upon the Lancashire plain, for the lad had grown up as hard as teak, due to the heavy physical toil that was an everyday part of a boatman’s life and had also become thoroughly inured to physical violence through taking part in the bitter brawls that often occurred between rival boat crews. In addition, the lad had been well schooled in the art of boxing, by a burned out old prize-fighter who lived in a broken-down hovel near the Piccadilly wharves in Manchester. The old bruiser had taught him the intricacies of his violent craft for the price of a bottle or two of cheap gin and the odd plug of navy-cut tobacco.

Hetty paused and glanced over to the couch where her son was now lying, fast asleep.

“Great Earth Mother,” she muttered to herself. “I would never have believed that a child of mine would ever go by the ring name of ‘Black Darryl.”

The wisewoman shook her head. She had never liked her son’s ring name, for it was borrowed from a famous Lancastrian murderer. But she also knew that ‘Swift Darryl’ would have been a more apt title, for he normally disposed of his opponents quickly and without receiving the flattened nose and the scarred features that were the normal hallmarks of his profession.

Wise-Hetty felt happy and contented, as she hung the bundles of fragrant herbs from the rows of metal hooks that lined the ceiling beams, for she now knew that the debt upon her son’s boat would be paid in full by the following evening and her son would be done with the prize-ring. Her joyful mood was also accentuated by the knowledge that Myra had promised to arrive at the cottage by noon, and would keep her company until four-o’clock sharp. The girl would then have to return to a nearby farmhouse with all speed and continue her ministry of an old horse dealer, who was far too ill to care if his nurse was a witch’s daughter, or even Queen Victoria herself. Even so, an extremely faint, yet disturbing thought began emerging from the ‘Farsighted’ portion of the wisewoman’s brain.

“Beware!” It seemed to say. “The pleasure that you are experiencing today - will perhaps be paid for by a deluge of pain…Tomorrow!”

The hour hand of Hetty’s old grandfather clock was approaching twelve-o’clock, when the outer door of the kitchen suddenly swung open and a young woman entered the room with the weight of a well-filled wickerwork basket almost dragging her to the ground.

She dumped her burden upon the top of the kitchen table and turned to embrace the wisewoman.

“I’m fair glad to see you mother,” she said quietly, in order to avoid waking her twin brother. “Old Mr Ramsbottom is sinking fast and won’t live out the night. His son from High Fell farm is sitting with him in my absence. He sends you a dressed fowl, two loaves of fresh bread and some potatoes, in payment for the potions and salves that you prepared for his father.”

“Coin would have been better,” Hetty replied. “But never mind lass, young Master Ramsbottom’s provisions will furnish us with a fine dinner, for we have much to celebrate this day.”

The wisewoman then told her daughter of the good tiding her brother had earlier brought to the cottage. Myra was delighted with the news, for she was extremely fond of her sibling and the two women immediately set about preparing a sumptuous meal with which to mark the occasion. Myra busied herself with stuffing the fowl with breadcrumbs and herbs before setting it to roast in front of the kitchen fire, whilst her mother scrubbed the potatoes and then beat up the batter for the pancakes that would complete their unusually fine repast.

Soon, the savoury smell of roasting fowl filled the kitchen and the delicious odour began tantalizing the young boatmaster’s nostrils as he slowly drifted back into wakefulness. He opened his eyes, but his vision was temporarily clouded by the effects of the strong painkilling potion his mother had administered when he first arrived at the cottage. Indeed, he was barely able to differentiate between the two women as they completed the preparations for the forthcoming meal, for they possessed many physical similarities. Myra had inherited her mother’s long flowing red hair, her deep green eyes and her tall statuesque figure. But the younger woman’s high cheekbones and slightly Asiatic features contrasted sharply with her mother’s softly rounded Pennine face and was clear proof of the considerable measure of gypsy blood that the girl had inherited from her bargee father. The older woman’s complexion, despite the onset of early middle age, was as smooth and unblemished as that of her offspring, and a complete stranger to that rural household would undoubtedly have taken them for blood sisters, rather than mother and daughter.