Bloodie Bones Read online

  “Ai-ai-ai!” the woman wailed.

  “Dya, dya – Mother!” the child screamed.

  The metal cooking pot lay several feet away and the hearth stones were scattered in all directions. One side of the girl’s face was scalded and peppered with bits of kindling, and clumps of her hair had been burned off. Mrs Taylor’s hands were scorched red from beating out the flames. Dan could staunch bleeding, bandage wounds, even make a temporary splint for a broken limb if he had to, but he knew nothing about treating burns.

  “We must take her to Mother,” Walter said.

  “I don’t think we should move her. Can you fetch your mother? Take the cart.”

  “Quicker if I run. It’s just there, on the edge of the forest.” He sprang away.

  Most of the fire had been doused by the contents of the pot. Dan stamped out the last flames as Tom came tearing into the encampment, his big coat flapping. He dropped to his knees beside his wife, gathered his daughter into his arms, half-sang, half-chanted her name: “Kiomi, Kiomi”. The girl’s screams faded to sobs and whimpers. Over her head, the woman told her husband her tale, speaking in what Dan supposed was Egyptian, her rapid speech punctuated by Tom’s curses.

  The Hallings arrived, the boy carrying his mother’s bag of remedies. Dan had an idea of a village healing woman as a dirty old crone. Anna Halling was a neat young woman in white cap, striped neckerchief and checked cotton gown with a clean blue apron over it. She had a trim figure, and the concern that shone from her blue eyes made a naturally pleasant face more pleasant still.

  Tom’s boys stood nearby, shocked and singed but otherwise unhurt. Mrs Halling sent them off to fetch water. They were glad to have something to do and raced down the hill with the pail. Tom stood up and Mrs Halling took his place. She gave the girl a drink from a bottle, which after a short delay sent her into a muttering sleep.

  “It’s valerian,” Walter said in answer to Dan’s enquiring glance.

  “What did your wife say?” Dan asked Tom.

  “She set Kiomi to stirring the pot while she threw some more wood on the fire. It just went up.”

  “But why? This was more than damp kindling.”

  Tom did not answer. His attention was fixed on Mrs Halling’s deft fingers as she washed his daughter’s wound and picked out charred splinters.

  Dan turned away and raked through the gravy-soaked ashes. The fire had been carefully laid from branches and twigs, but among the natural kindling were some wooden stakes. He picked up the remains of one of these. A tube a few inches long had been hollowed into one end, the opening distorted and cracked by some internal pressure. He poked his finger inside. It came out covered with black dust. He sniffed. Gunpowder.

  “Taylor, do you know what this is?”

  Tom took the stake, examined it, and beckoned to the boys.

  “Where did you get this?”

  The younger lad started to cry. The elder turned pale and mumbled something in his own language. Taylor’s hand shot out and the stake cracked across his son’s face, leaving a red and black streak.

  “I’ve told you a hundred times to take only snap wood, furze and bracken.”

  The boy sobbed out excuses. Taylor struck him again. When he raised the stick a third time, Dan caught his arm. He had seen enough children beaten in his lifetime.

  “Thrashing them won’t do any good. They know they’ve done wrong. But what did they do?”

  Taylor jerked his head. The boys scuttled to the other side of the barrow, from where their sad, white faces peeped out at their father.

  “They took this from a pile of rails left ready to repair a gap in the fence around the wood. It’s an old keepers’ trick. They fill one or two stakes with powder, plug the hole, and leave them for someone to gather for firewood. I’ve heard of it. Never known it done around here.”

  “A nasty trick,” Dan said, and meant it. If Lord Adam Oldfield had been standing in front of him at that moment, no consideration of rank would have stopped him from punching his noble face.

  “Will the child lose her sight?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs Halling answered. “We should ask Dr Russell to look at her.”

  “No gadso doctors,” Taylor said.

  “But Dr Russell has more skill in such matters than I,” she said.

  Taylor stuck stubbornly to his refusal, so in the end she promised to look in on Kiomi herself in the morning. She put away her salves and stood up. Walter picked up her bag. Dan walked down to the road with them.

  Walter’s face was grim, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Those bloody bastards!”

  “That’s enough, Walter,” Mrs Halling snapped.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. But it’s true.”

  “That’s no reason for you to start swearing.”

  Dan wondered what she would say if she knew that swearing was the least of the mischief her boy got up to. They said their goodbyes, and he watched them until they disappeared around a spur of woodland. He had indeed said his piece to Walter and had not meant to say any more, but that was before he met Anna Halling. A kind woman, ever ready to help others, she had brought her son up well – the way she rebuked him for cursing was evidence of that. It must have been a hard struggle without a husband, and a unique effort among the mothers of Barcombe – Abe’s mother had not taken much care over her son’s morals. Not that Dan thought the Barcombe women particularly vicious; it was just that poaching was a way of life around here.

  He had seen enough to know that there were vicious mothers; mothers who pimped their own daughters; mothers who hired out their babies to beggars; mothers who kept their children hungry and in rags while they spent what little money they had on gin. His only memory of his own mother was of himself standing in a filthy cot, gripping the bars with his thin fingers, peering out through the holes in the tattered sack hung over the alcove where he slept, looking at her shadowy form straddling a man. He did not know where the room had been, nor how he knew the woman was his mother, nor when he had learned that if he did not keep quiet when she brought a man back, pain and terror would follow. So he watched and waited for the man to finish and pay, for her to pull down her skirt, stumble out to the shop, return with a bottle, and drink herself to death.

  It was one of the things he had not told Caroline, even when he asked her to marry him eight years ago and made a confession of his background. He had been honest about never knowing his father and losing his mother, and having to live on the streets, but the details he did not share. He’d had to tell her something, though he had been afraid she would refuse him, but she had called him her ‘wild boy’, seen it all as a great, glorious game, violent and glamorous at the same time. Like his boxing.

  Perhaps she had expected life with him to be more exciting. She had never taken him seriously when he said he did not want to be a pugilist. His boxing would make them rich and famous; she would have servants and a carriage, and a husband other women envied. Instead, as she never tired of complaining, he left her alone for hours on end while he went about his work, and he kept that a big secret, and while he was out having fun – for she didn’t suppose he spent all his time tracking thieves – what was she supposed to do?

  He would not talk about his work. He wanted to protect her from the depths to which people can sink, but somehow she had managed to sink there all the same. She did what his mother had done. She drank.

  *

  “Look who I’ve brought!” Abe cried, dragging Walter into the Fox and Badger that evening.

  “Can’t stop,” Walter muttered. “Said I wouldn’t be long.”

  “Go on with you,” Abe said. “You’re here now. Two of your best ales, Mistress Buller!”

  The landlord’s plain, fat daughter raised her eyebrows at this unusual extravagance, turned away from the barrel of ordinary, and drew two of Buller’s specia
l brew. Abe thrust a tankard into Walter’s hands. He sipped cautiously. Abe nudged his elbow. “Get it down you…That’s a bad business up at the barrow, ain’t it?”

  “It’s tyranny, that’s what it is,” Travell said. “It’s the yoke of the Hanoverian kings. I tell you it wasn’t always like this. We were a free nation once. Men were at liberty to roam the forests, hunt what and where they liked, even to vote for the Parliament men. All men, not just the rich.”

  “In Paradise before Adam and Eve, was that?” Drake asked.

  “Not so long ago as that,” Travell answered earnestly. “Under a great ruler called Alfred, Englishmen elected their king, voted, and had yearly Parliaments. Then King William of France invaded and made the forests his own, stole our land to give it to his nobles, and bled us dry with his taxes.”

  Dan could see how Travell got his reputation as a wise and learned man. His audience had never heard so much history. It came straight from the radicals in the London Corresponding Society. From their centre in London, they sent pamphlets and speakers to their friends in the regions, spreading the word of the coming revolution.

  “We have rights over Barcombe Wood,” Travell continued, “as inviolable as our rights over Barcombe Heath.”

  “In-what?” asked Abe.

  “No one can take them off us.”

  “Oh. I thought that was in-ailey something. Hey, Walt, it’s your turn to buy.”

  “It’s a bit strong – ” Walter began, but Abe cut him off by calling out to Mistress Buller, “Two more of the same when you’ve got a moment.”

  Travell went on, “We have deeds and field awards written down which prove our right to the heath. There must be something proving the same for the wood.”

  “How do you work that out?” asked Drake.

  “Because that’s what they did, the lords of the manor. They wrote things down. All we have to do is find the parchment.”

  Abe turned out his pockets. “Not here.”

  The others took up the joke, looking under the table, picking up their glasses, groping under their chairs.

  “You can laugh, my friends,” the shopkeeper said, “but if we found that deed we’d be able to make Lord Oldfield give us back the wood.”

  “And where do you think it is?” Drake asked.

  “In the parish chest in the church.”

  Drake rolled his eyes. “What makes you think Mr Poole will let any of us go rooting through the parish papers? Or that we could make head nor tail of ’em if we did?”

  Walter cried, “We must make him!”

  Abe laughingly patted his protégé on the back. “That’s right, Walt! We’ll make him.”

  “And how will you do that?” Drake demanded.

  “Never you mind,” Walter said. “We’ll do it, that’s all.”

  Drake shook his head and drained his mug, unimpressed by beer-bravado. Dan did not pay much attention to the lads’ wild talk either.

  “It’s a constitutional matter and needs handling by someone who understands such things,” Travell said. “I shall give the matter more thought.”

  He leaned back and furrowed his brow as if he was there and then solving the complex legal problem. Dan had a vision of Garvey: wigged, robed, pitiless. He put Travell’s chances of standing up to the sharp London lawyer at nil.

  “How is Kiomi?” asked Buller, who had just come up from the cellar where he had been clattering about among the barrels.

  “Mother says she thinks she will recover, though whether she’ll lose her sight she can’t yet tell,” Walter said.

  “We should get up a collection.”

  “Taylor wouldn’t thank you for money,” Singleton said. “He’s no use for it.”

  “Then we could send food and blankets,” Buller’s daughter suggested. “I’ve got a bit of ham left over from dinner. I’ll send that.”

  This went down well and the men began to pledge their womenfolk to making up food parcels. Girtin looked hopeful at all this talk of charity, so Dan asked Buller to fill his glass. Shortly after, it being closing time, Singleton and Dan left. Abe was buying another round for himself and Walter.

  *

  Dan turned over in his straw for the hundredth time. The country was a noisy place at night. There was a never-ending chorus of hooting, barking, snuffling and whining. Things rustled, skittered, bumped in the darkness. A man could not sleep for the racket. The streets around Covent Garden with its brawlers and prostitutes were more peaceful. At least there he knew what animals were outside.

  After a while he fell asleep, only to be woken a short time later by the sound of breaking glass. He sat up in the dark. It came from the direction of the rectory. He listened for the sound of running footsteps, but heard none.

  He pulled on his clothes, cautiously opened the forge door, and crept out into the yard. No light appeared in Singleton’s window. Either he was a heavy sleeper or, as seemed more likely, he took no interest in protecting the rector and his church from night-time marauders. If Mrs Singleton was trying to persuade him to turn out, she was not going to succeed.

  Dan climbed over the gate and slipped across the road. He jumped onto the wall in front of the churchyard and hauled himself onto the high garden wall to look over into the rectory grounds. A moving light appeared through a jagged hole in one of the downstairs windows. Dan scrambled up to the parapet and lowered himself into a flowerbed on the other side.

  He crept up to the window and peeped over the sill. The rector and his wife were inside in their nightgowns, her long, dark hair twisted in a plait falling to her waist. Poole put his lamp on the desk and fussed over the scattered books and papers.

  “Villains! Robbers! Where is that wretched constable when you need him? What do we pay our rates for?”

  “The mess can easily be cleared up,” Mrs Poole soothed, “and there is not much damage.”

  “Not much damage? Look at the scratch!”

  She stooped and examined the desktop. “We can repair it.”

  He snatched up the lamp and shone it about the room, pounced, and scooped something from the floor. He thrust a large stone under his wife’s nose.

  “If I had been in here, this could have killed me!”

  “You were not likely to be here in the middle of the night,” she said mildly.

  “That’s not the point, Laura. What’s this? There’s a note.”

  He put the lamp back on the desk and unfurled the paper wrapped around the stone.

  “This is an outrage! They dare to speak of oppressions – which they can’t spell – under the fairest government, the mildest king, a constitution the envy of every nation, a system of justice – ”

  “What does it say?”

  He flung the note at her.

  “Oppressions! Oppressions! Does our Government spy on its own subjects? Do we have a Bastille? Do we – ” He broke off. “You’ve decided to show your face, have you?”

  This was addressed to the shawled and curl-papered maidservant who stood wringing her hands in the doorway.

  “Oh, oh, oh, it’s the French!” she wailed. “We are to be murdered in our beds!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Martha,” snapped the rector.

  “Oh, sir, they’ll cut our throats! They’ll burn the house down with us in our beds. They’ll – ”

  “Now, Martha,” Mrs Poole said, laying the note on the desk, “they will do no such thing. It is nothing more than an annoying prank.”

  “It’s a great deal more than that,” Poole corrected her. “It is an act of subversion and must be reported at once. Martha, run for the constable.”

  This gave rise to more trembling and weeping. The girl could not be persuaded that the streets of Barcombe were not lined with Frenchmen.

  “Pah! I’ll go myself,” Poole said at last. He ushered the women out of
the room and hurried off to dress. After a few moments, the bolts on the front door shot back and he emerged from the house carrying a stout stick. He strode down the path, unlocked the garden door, and set off to Ayres’s house, which was at the other end of the village.

  Dan had about ten minutes before Poole came back with the constable. He took off his jacket, wrapped it around his hand, and reached through the hole in the window. The sash lock was easily undone. He slid the window up and clambered inside.

  Poole had left the lamp burning on the hall table. Dan tiptoed across the room and paused at the doorway. The women had gone upstairs and all was quiet. He darted out, grabbed the lamp, and carried it back into the study.

  The paper lay on the desk where Mrs Poole had left it. It was a page torn from a ballad, The Merry Broomfield: Or, the West Country Wager, blank on one side. Dan glanced at the print. ‘I will lay you an hundred Pounds / A hundred Pounds, aye, and ten, / That a maid if you go to the merry Broomfield / That a maid you return not again.’ Lucky Poole had not noticed that, or he might have been driven to apoplexy.

  Dan turned the page over to read the writing on the back: ‘Parsons and tyrants friends take note. We have born your oppreshuns long enough. We will have our parish rights or else Bloodie Bones will drink your blood. BB His Mark.’

  The paper matched neither the note left near Castle’s body, nor the earlier note sent to Lord Oldfield. The writing too was different. It was childish and clumsy. Lines ran diagonally across the sheet, and the last few words were squeezed into the corner because the first were too big.

  The ballad had probably been bought from a peddler or at a fair, impossible to trace. The sheet was creased and dirty as if it had lain in a pocket for a long time. Abe’s pocket at a guess: it was the sort of bawdy a young man like him would enjoy. As an apprentice, Walter would be able to read and write, though not necessarily all that well. This was their way of making the parson help the parishioners restore their rights to Barcombe Wood.