Hosts of Rebecca

by Alexander Cordell

  “You should have thought of that before,” said Flannigan, pushing her off. “You damned keepers are the scum of the Welsh!”

  “But my daughter – sixteen years old? O, God!” Her wild eyes looked round our blackened faces.

  “She is safe with us, woman – go fetch her out. Mortymer, where the hell’s Mortymer?” he turned in the saddle.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Bring out the girl, Mortymer, you’ve got a good handsome eye, and treat her as a sister or I bring you to account.” Damned fool, I thought, for mentioning my name, but I flung a man aside and entered the tollhouse.

  “There’s a farm down the road!” roared Flannigan then. “Two of you fetch a cart.”

  Bedlam inside the tollhouse; children wailing, the baby screaming and the girl in a corner screeching with fear. Ducking the furniture I slipped along the wall beside her. Tables were going up, bedding being dragged out, china from the dresser smashing on the floor as I reached her.

  “Hush,” I said, “nobody will harm you, hush!”

  You can see a man’s fist coming but women strike like cats. Caught me square, the bitch; uncovering her eyes and striking with talons, ripping me from forehead to chin. I gripped her wrists.

  “For God’s sake, girl, you only have to walk. Would you rather stay to fry?”

  The blood of my face seemed to quieten her. Hands lowered, she stared, then rolled her eyes and slipped down at my feet. Sickened, I stooped and gathered her up. I had not bargained on war against children. Her head lolling, hair streaming down, I kicked my way through the room, giving a special boot to Joey Scarlet who was already into it, swinging an axe like a man seeking freedom, roaring with triumph.

  “First blood to the tollgates,” said Rhayader as I got to the door. “Next time you search them for bread knives, Jethro.”

  “Fainted,” I said.

  “Right, find a blanket and cover her. Get her on the cart when the boys come back.” He wheeled. “Where the devil’s that cart, are they building it?”

  “Are you going to burn us, sir?” A blue-eyed youngster of six eyed Flannigan.

  “Not you, son, but your house. To the ground, and the gate with it – you can warm yourself to the blaze.” Flannigan cupped his hands. “Out everybody, out!”

  “I’m the last one,” cried Tramping Boy Joey at the door, and he swung his axe at the window, shattering it. “Where’s the tinder?”

  “The gate first,” said Rebecca. He raised his hand. “Silence, silence!”

  And the roars and cheering died. This, our first gate, was due for the opening ceremony. Tom Rhayader dismounted and walked towards it, hands groping blindly, eyes closed, touching it, feeling it; wandering along it seeking to pass.

  Dead silence now save for the weeping of the keeper’s wife and the chattering of the children. Strange how a mob is silenced by ceremony.

  “My daughters,” said Rhayader, turning. “I can go no further. There is something here that impedes me and I cannot pass. What is it, my daughters?”

  “Why, there’s a strange thing, Mother,” boomed Flannigan, touching it. “’Tis an old wooden gate across the road. Well!”

  “But what is it doing here, my daughters?” asked Rhayader, groping. “My old eyes are not too good, see – the thing wasn’t here last time I went to Carmarthen.”

  “O, aye, Mother,” said Flannigan. “Just remembered. It is one of them old tollgate things built by the Trusts. Hundreds and hundreds are going up in the county.” He turned to us. “That right, sisters?”

  “Hundreds and hundreds,” we cried.

  “But the gate must come down, my daughters,” said Rhayader. “We cannot have gates on the roads of Wales – for how will we get to the city of Carmarthen? How will I take my goods to market?” And he turned then and faced us. “This is the first, my daughters. Smash it to matchwood, burn it to ashes – the tollhouse, too. By God, we will give them tollgates – down with it, down with it! Hatchets! Tinder! Down, down!”

  A roar of cheering now. The powder-guns were going, pinning the moonlight with shafts of fire. Tarred brushwood was lit for flares and flung through the windows, tossed on the thatch. Flames billowed and swept along the eaves. The thatch caught, spluttering, flashing. Flannigan and Justin, Joey and a dozen others were chopping at the gate, their axes rising and falling and glinting red in the flames. Guns were exploding, men cheering as demons, dancing against the fire, drunk with success. Kneeling beside the unconscious girl, I watched. Pretty little thing she looked with the redness on her face and her black hair down. Opened her eyes then and the fear sprang back.

  “Easy,” I said. “It is only the old tollgate, easy,” and turned. “Mam Keeper,” I cried. “Your girl’s come round. Mam Keeper!”

  “Here comes the cart,” someone bellowed. It came galloping, skidding, scattering the men. Bending, I raised the girl.

  “Can you walk now?”

  And she spat in my face.

  “Get the family into it,” said Rhayader. “Eh, there’s a sight, boy,” and he grinned at me. “A cat you’ve got there, spitting and scratching – give her one on the backside if she doesn’t behave. Come on, come on! Pile them in – the children first, then the furniture – blankets, bedding, throw it all in, and watch this vixen of a girl by here if you fancy your eyes. Hurry, hurry!”

  The bile was rising to my throat. I spat, turning away, wiping blood from my face. She had done me pretty well for her age; nails like cut-throat razors by the feel of my face. Felt sick as they flung the belongings into the cart and hustled the people in after them: thought of my mother and what she would say. The gate was flat now. Joey was flinging the smashed timbers on to the tollhouse blaze which was going like Hades and setting the night alight, with flames roaring up and ammunition exploding inside. I looked towards the cart again. It was ready for off, with the keeper’s family hunched among the furniture. The girl was sitting motionless in her blanket, watching me, I noticed, with her great brown eyes.

  “Rhayader,” I said. “What happens to these people?”

  And Justin Slaughterer shouldered his axe and turned from the fire.

  “Aw, shut it, man! Rebecca, is it? Your petticoats suit you,” and he spat. “Dancing and dabbing at women and kids – get back to your gentry!”

  Suddenly enraged, I leaped and hooked him but he ducked and brought up the axe and Rhayader was instantly between us, one fist for Justin and the other for me, like lightning, and I staggered against the cart, tripped and rolled between its wheels.

  “Abel Flannigan, my hearty!” laughed Rhayader. “Come and settle these two slaughterers,” and he caught Abel by the shoulder as he lumbered over. “No, leave it, man – no time now. Private fights after. Come on, lads, do not look pitiful. Just the same as Efail-wen, we are bound to get tempers. It’s a dirty old business, mind, the boy is right.”

  “But what about these people?” I was up now, gripping him.

  He smacked my hands away. “All arranged,” and he turned, shouting:

  “Down to Kidwelly, lads – down to the squire. He has a snug little barn he is going to hand over or risk a visit from Mother Rebecca – she will see people housed. Away now, the gate is down!”

  The flames were dying as we mounted the horses. Randy took a belt at me as I caught his bridle but I did not fight back – too weary, too sickened by the violence and savagery of men.

  “You give me a lift again?” Matthew Luke John, standing below me and I leaned and hooked him up. Jogging on the horses now, eyes drooping for sleep, we marched on Kidwelly itself and the house of the squire; smashing the bar at the village entrance, going right up his drive. He dared not come out but I saw him at a window, face parched in moonlight. Very tidy was his barn by the time we had finished with it, and we put the tollkeeper and his family in warm and snug with a notice on the door daring anyone to evict them. Off again under the eyes of the peak-faced servants to the farm of the Reverend John Jenkins two miles east. A ti
nder to his ricks and we left them blazing, worth at least a thousand Bibles, and a Bible was left on the doorstep of the labourer, not even waking him.

  Home now came the wraiths, soot-stained, weary; little bands leaving us as we passed the villages, and we dispersed a mile or so short of Tom Rhayader’s place.

  Strange that Matthew Luke John should kiss me goodbye, disappearing into the frozen woods without a wave.

  The house was dead silent when I got in. I stabled Randy silently, stripped to the waist and washed myself clean. To bed now, watched every board for a creak, and I slipped into the blankets and laid there staring at the flush of dawn. Nearly daylight. With the nails of the vixen throbbing on my face, I dreamed. And the last thing I saw was the door coming open inches and Morfydd’s face peeping to see if I was in. Heard her sigh.

  I slept.

  CHAPTER 17

  WENT BACK to Ponty a week after this, for the bottom had come out of farming and we were only keeping alive by the skin of our fingers. No trouble with Job Gower, though he grinned a knowing grin: labour would be easy the way things were going, skilled men especially. And I went back to Liam Muldooney in his two foot seam. Good to be with Morfydd again. We were closer than ever now on the morning walks to the pit. Good to be relieved of the strain of pinching, too, for our combined wages were now nineteen shillings. Good to be away from Mari, hell to be away from Mari.

  Came Christmas with its white dresses and glaciers, its red log fires and goodwill to neighbours though we were still burning ricks and gates. I was out most weeks with Rhayader now, save when on night shift and somehow or other Mam did not get wind of it though she had played the devil about the state of my face, with a pinch round her mouth and her suspicions of Sixpenny Jane who had marked more than one in the village.

  Sweet were the nights when the neighbours called to sit in a circle for Readings of Him. Most religious, our friends, chiefly Nonconformists, though we sported a few Church of England, making allowances for the misguided, being Christmas. Matrons I do love to call at the house best, for they are of the world and with kindness, women like Biddy Flannigan with breasts for weeping on, Abel’s mam, though she’d have given him Abel if she’d known he was burning gates.

  “Well, well! Biddy Flannigan!” Mam would cry. “Come you in, fach, get warm by the fire!” And in she would come, black as a tomb with her bulges and wheezings as a mother should be. She sits in fat comfort, then, the sweat lying bright in the folds of her chins, black bun, black brooch with its picture of Victoria, God bless her. Living to satisfy the appetite of Abel, this one; going to grease in the heat of her oven. But she had another at home besides Abel – the idiot offspring of a churchyard digger, second husband, now deceased. Head lolling, spit dribbling, her idiot floundered and grunted, wallowing at table, screaming in bed. My cross, said Biddy, every woman’s got one, if it isn’t the womb it’s the offspring, and Cain is mine, God help him. Strange is the body of Woman, delivering a man one year and spewing a devil the next, though with Abel and Cain in the house it was hard to find the devil.

  Christmas dinner eaten now and Black Boar tavern was going like something out of Hades, for the men of the northern industries were sweeping in proper, coming like an army, ragged, starving, desperate; running from the closed pits and blown-out furnaces of the industry. Men who had not seen Carmarthen for years came home, dragging themselves along the highways, sleeping in snow with their little scrags of women and children dragging behind them. But a few had money that Christmas, single ones mostly, and they crowded the taverns from morning till night, quarrelling and drinking to drown their desperation. In his element was Grandfer now, of course; beer-swilled, tub-thumping, laying down the law, and night after night I heard him stumble to his room with Mari’s gentle voice to guide him. Amazing to me that he’d lasted so long – still more amazing where he got his money from for the drinking – must have salted a tidy bit away before the gates sprang up. And the second day after Christmas it lasted no longer.

  The county blew up as Grandfer blew up.

  The wooden horse was marching day and night now and the hatreds were rising in bitterness and threats. Burning hayricks dotted the countryside, the tollgates were blazing from Llandeilo to Pembroke, and as fast as we burned them they were rebuilt by Bullin, the price of the damage put on the tolls, and burned again. Windows were smashed nightly, gentry salmon weirs blown up, magistrates burned in effigy, people ridiculed in public. The whole teeming countryside from coast to coast brawled and rioted into open revolution. Special constables were sworn in to protect the gates, special constables were dragged out and horsewhipped by the Rebeccas. The dragoons and marines were dashing around arresting people, the magistrates had special sittings, with public warnings and transportations; the prisons were crammed to their doors, workhouses bulging. From Whitland to Laugharne, Saundersfoot to Carmarthen, the yeoman farmers armed for the fight. The poor became poorer, the poorest starved under the new Poor Law. Spindle-legged children were wandering the villages and dying of fever on beds of straw. Mass meetings were held on Mynydd Sylen and the torchlight processions around Picton’s Column, Carmarthen, became bolder and bolder. From the first Rebecca – Tom Rees of Efail-wen – there sprang up a host of new Rebeccas, men of education and most with deep religious beliefs, and the gates went down in scores. But the gates, as Rhayader had told us, were only the outward symbol of oppression. The reasons of discontent reached out to the very throne of England. One bitter complaint was the workhouse test, and people were starving rather than accept it. An evil exchange, Rebecca said; better auction the poor to the highest bidder as in the old days than drive them to the workhouse to be torn apart from their families and starved. Unmarried mothers were another indignity. The new Poor Law sent them straight to the workhouse, for the task of proving paternity was now placed on the woman, and the man usually got off scotfree. Good women, many of these unmarried mothers, said Rebecca – violated by deceit and the promise of marriage, and the Poor Law violated them again. To starve was a crime and thousands were starving rather than enter the workhouses. The industrial depression of the east had hooked our county flat, and the iron-workers poured in with their tales of poverty and dying – thirteen hundred deaths from cholera in a year in Merthyr and Dowlais alone. People were banding together and emigrating – single fare to America the land of justice – four pounds a head steerage. Better to die in steerage than starve in this winter of hell, they said. And in the turmoil of a land where there was plenty for all Rebecca stacked her barrels of gunpowder high, cupping her hands to the tinder, watchful, waiting for the chance of a bloody revolution. And in the new year the tinder struck. The flash of the explosion detonated into thunder.

  And in the blaze of Rebecca, Grandfer died.

  In the kitchen now, two days after Christmas, all the guests gone.

  “What you say his name is?” asked Mam, spinning.

  “Hugh Williams,” I said.

  “There’s a lovely Welsh name,” said Mari, smiling at her sewing.

  “Aye,” said Mam. “I know a good English one that led us to hell in Monmouthshire. John Frost, is it?”

  “Frost had no chance,” I said. “We shifted him before he was ready,” and I gave Morfydd a glance.

  “Should have had Vincent for the march on Newport. No Queen on the throne now if we’d had Vincent,” said she.

  “O, aye?” said Mam. “A finger on her and I would have a hand in it.”

  Spectacles on the end of her nose, she was, spinning away. Revolts came and went but Mam just went on spinning. “And what does he do for a living?” she asked.

  “Hugh Williams?”

  “That’s who I’m after.”

  “Solicitor,” I said.

  “History repeating itself,” said Mam. “Another with a tongue, it seems.”

  “Frost was a draper,” said Morfydd.

  “A cloth-cutter,” I said. “Hugh Williams is a leader.”

  And Morfydd tur
ned her eyes from the fire. “Like a damned parrot,” said she. “Repeating the rumours. Where did you learn such nonsense?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Aye, never mind!” Disdainful now, she rose. “Half chit revolutionaries, the lot of them – they wouldn’t have lived with Frost. But no discredit to Mr Hugh Williams, mind. Mam is right. He is a solicitor, nothing more. There is no single Rebecca, nor could there be one for he would dare not show his face in defiance of the law. Williams might defend Rebecca at the Assizes, but it ends at that – too much has happened to men like Frost – a life sentence in Van Diemen’s Land, so don’t talk nonsense.”

  I did not reply. Expert, Morfydd.

  “Now that we’ve had a revolution do you think I might have a cup of tea,” said Mam. “I’ve been promised one six times an hour back.”

  “I will get it, Mam,” said Mari.

  Mam sniffed. “Pray God the world could be governed by women,” she said. “Women like that.”

  “Damned fine state we’d be in then,” I said.

  “And a damned fine job you’ve made of it to date,” replied Morfydd.

  “But not so much greed, mind,” said Mari, fetching the kettle.

  “Tongue-pie in Parliament,” I said. “Morning till night.”

  With the kettle on the hook Mari went back to her needling and Richard, Morfydd’s boy, climbed up on her knee, knowing it was bedtime. She kissed him and bent again to her darning. Socks most nights for Mari, very calm, serene, smiling over the potato holes, mine chiefly, fingers spread, examining her art.

  “Prancing round Parliament with the latest in hats,” I said.

  “The country could only starve, though,” replied Mam. “And the country is doing that now, God bless the Members. Hey, you,” she stirred Richard with her foot. “Time for bed, nippy,” and he clung to Mari.

  “Up,” said Morfydd, jerking her thumb at him.

  “Before you start shooting Members of Parliament – we shouldn’t be talking like this in front of the children,” said Mam. “Bed.”