Hosts of Rebecca

by Alexander Cordell

  The men crept out of the quarry and over the mountain to their homes.

  I took the path home through Waldo’s preserves again. A wet bitch of a night now for spring with the wind owl-screeching like a lost soul, right old music when searching for informers. Black and spooky was the wood now with the branches rattling for skeletons as I skidded down to the limekiln humps. I walked much slower as I came in sight of the kilns, for if Joey had blabbed about Rhayader his mood would now be murderous with conscience and fear. So I came on tiptoe the last few yards, going on all fours in the peat at the first tang of the kiln fires, wiped rain from my eyes and peered.

  Joey was lying face down on the slaking-rim with a shroud of canvas pulled up to his ears, his body black against the glow of the fires.

  “Joey!” Behind the bole of a tree, kneeling, I called.

  This brought him upright.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Mortymer,” I shouted back.

  “What you want with me, Mortymer?”

  “Didn’t see you at the meeting tonight,” I shouted.

  “To hell with the meeting and to hell with Rebecca.”

  “And Tom Rhayader in particular, Joey? You heard about Tom?”

  This brought him to his feet, standing on the rim, white as a ghost in his dusting of lime. Hair plastered, rags fluttering, he peered for me, but I had already seen the gleam of his powder-gun and kept under cover.

  “You alone?” he called.

  “Aye.”

  “Then why don’t you come out, man?”

  “Not likely,” I shouted. “Not considering what you did to Tom Rhayader.”

  Stiff he stood, then his hands went to his face.

  “O, God,” he said.

  “You sold a Christian man, Joey Scarlet, God help you. You know what will happen if Justin lays hands on you?”

  Kneeling now, he wept, crying as a child cries. “Mortymer! Drunk, I was, I swear it!” he shouted. “I’d never have done it sober. O, help me, Mortymer – pretty tidy you was to me in the old days, remember?” He was wringing his hands now, giving peeps for listeners, standing above the slaking-pit as something in the steam of hell, his face wet with tears and rain.

  “Joey!” I shouted. “Are you listening? Up and away with you – hoof it out of the county. Put as much room as you can between you and Rebecca – and never mention the name of Rhayader again, for if Justin Slaughterer don’t land you another slaughterer will. Where’s your mam?”

  “Shropshire county, sin-eating,” he whimpered.

  “Right then, move. Away with you quick, for if I get a sight of you round here again I’ll do what Justin’s aching to do – rid the world of another Judas. Away!”

  Gibbering now, biting at his hands, God-blessing me, scampering around the wall of the pit, gathering up his possessions and bundling them into the canvas.

  And I saw quite clearly the hand that rose from behind and pushed him.

  Joey teetered on the edge of the slaking-pit, and screamed. Slowly he turned, snatching at air, his bundles flying, and he wheeled towards me as he fell face down, arms and legs spreadeagled, screaming once more as he hit the boiling lime, and the end of his scream was scalded into silence. In horror I leaped from my hiding place, racing up the mound to the rim of the pit, turning away from the stew that was Joey. The undergrowth was crashing to the passage of the murderer. Sickened, I turned.

  “Joey,” I said.

  The slaking lime bubbled his answer, speaking for his soul for the next million years.

  CHAPTER 20

  MAY WAS flooding into us now and the lanes were glorious with primroses and celandine. Golden my country now, the fields shimmering with buttercups and dandelions and the old burn was stoking up for a furnace of a summer. O, sweet is wet-a-bed days, with the taste of the gold in the milk and the chops of the cows all plastered with yellow petals as they peep through the hedges at strangers, grinning their joy of fat udders and milkmaids, dripping their beads of silver spit. And the whole rolling county was alive and shimmering breathless with the promise of a belly-full harvest by day and weeping in dew for the rusted ploughs at night. Few fields were ploughed near us for the levy on corn and the tolls were killing us. But up and down the country the gates were going up in flames, with scores of Rebeccas and hundreds of men riding every night, winning the race of building and burning. Magistrates were shivering in their beds, horses of the dragoons dropping dead in the fruitless gallops after Rebecca; lost in the maze of a country we knew backwards, redirected, misdirected, laughed to scorn, publicly insulted. The military heads were being recalled and replaced, the military stations were strengthened, all to no avail. Rebecca grew as an army in numbers. The Trusts were being defeated, and knew it.

  I had been out burning most nights since Joey’s death at the kilns. Down had come the special constables, of course; notebooks, pencils, all very official, but it was not worth risking to tell what had happened and a week or two after the inquiries ceased. We had hooked Joey out, what was left of him, and buried him decent in a pauper’s grave, with Dai Alltwen embalming him with the biblical and talk of the All-Seeing Eye that watches the fall of the sparrow, and a day later Joey Scarlet had never existed. Reckon I know who got Joey but I never had the proof of it, for nobody was steadier than Justin Slaughterer on the day Joey went down in his wooden suit. Tom Rhayader was still at St Clears awaiting justice and his woman and kids long gone to the workhouse, Carmarthen. Talk of a Rebecca attack on this workhouse was in the wind at the night meetings now, for our people were starving in it, said Flannigan. Something’s got to be done, the Rebeccas said. How can we sleep while our kinfolk starve. Floggings were being talked about, too, though we had no proof of this. A pig of a Master at Carmarthen house especially, it was said. Starve to death or be beaten to death, were the rumours. Gather the evidence and we will raze the place, said Rebecca – we will burn it as we burned Narberth house, and bring out our people. Then for some floggings, we will show who is master.

  The strain of the night meetings were taking toll of me – in just before dawn sometimes, going on shift with Morfydd at the pit after an hour of sleep. Coming pretty gaunt were most of the daughters of Rebecca, very severe this night courting on little growing maids, the men joked. I looked in the mirror one day and saw my face, lined, shadowed, and the haggard swellings beneath my eyes. Nigh eighteen, is it? said Morfydd, you look like forty, then some, there’s a damned sight. Mam and Mari must have noticed this but they made no mention; just quick glances over the table with the buttoned-up air of women disapproving, Mam believing it was a misspent life. I often wonder if my mother knew the truth, for most women did. Even the parish was complaining about the drop in the birth rate, so the joke went, with the men out burning every night when they should have been back home loving. But things were coming a mite better, people said. Now the gates were coming less we were having whey and rye bread twice a day instead of once, thank God for mercy. But we were all right at Cae White with double money coming in from coaling though the farm had gone to pot. Do not mind me, said Morfydd – why should farming pay while I can crawl round Ponty like a bloody donkey, one eye cocked for Job Gower Foreman.

  “It will not be for ever, Morfydd,” I said.

  “Damned right you are,” said she. “Remember it. But do not hurry, man, I am loving every minute.”

  “Easy,” I said. “It is not my fault.”

  “Perhaps not, but I am sick of it!”

  I had been watching Morfydd lately. Touchy, to say the least of it; silent in our walks to Ponty, ready for the quarrel, eyebrows up, flushing over nothing. Change of life, said Mam. Treat her kindly, Jethro, or account for it to me.

  “Be damned for a tale,” I said. “She’s only turned thirty.”

  “You are discussing something you do not understand,” replied Mam. “Kindly cease this conversation directly.”

  “Change of life, indeed – she is good for years yet. There is Mrs Evan ap R
ees over at Llansaint carrying for her sixth and she is over fifty.”

  “Mrs Evan ap Rees has not worked in the heat of iron,” replied Mam “Neither has she towed trams, neither has she starved half her life by the size of her. Now cease, it is most embarrassing.”

  “She will have no more babies, is it?”

  “If she does I will want to know why,” said Mam. “Leave it now, I am coming to a flush again myself. Just treat her gentle.”

  “Just gently, Jethro,” said Mari, smiling up from her corner. “It will pass.”

  Expect no kisses from the mouth of a vixen.

  “How are you today now?” I asked, very pleasant.

  “Go to the devil,” said Morfydd.

  “Asking after your health, I am. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Ask about Towey’s,” she replied, staring. “Towey can’t be bothered now.”

  We were alone in the kitchen that night – Mam out delivering somewhere, Mari with flowers down at church, the boys up in bed.

  This set me quiet. I did not see Towey catch it, being down with Muldooney in Number Two gallery at the time, but I had heard of it from him. Tripped on the top ladder rungs, had Towey, and fallen the whole hundred feet, clothes round her ears, head-diving, with her basket of coal coming down after her, collecting the other carriers. And they followed Towey down, all five of them, with their coal pouring on top of them, giving them a decent burial. Two Welsh women, a couple of Irish, and a Spanish boy aged ten. A long way for a soul to travel to Spain. “These bloody old ladders,” said Liam, the first time I had heard him swear in anger. “I will rig one on St Paul’s for the aristocracy of England, though long before that it will be worn out by Welsh squireens.”

  “I am sorry about Towey,” I said to Morfydd now.

  “Missus, to you,” said she, touchy.

  “We will have you up from the pit directly.”

  “And scrape on your eleven shillings a week? You see to your own business and leave me to mine, Jethro. I was born to coal and I will die in coal – you just go on burning gates, the farm can go to hell, isn’t it?”

  “Morfydd, the farm will not pay. I tried it.” She did not pull away when I took her from the sink and held her. “O, fach,” I said. “What is wrong these days?”

  And she bent her head, and wept.

  “Old Mrs Towey, is it?”

  “No, the boy. So little, he was. Got to love him. I saw his face when I lifted his chin, and thought of my Richard – could have been Richard, mind – only a few years older. O, God!” And she swung in my arms and gripped me. “Now, listen, Jethro, listen. I will kill someone if this farm goes flat and my boy goes into coal – I will hold you responsible.” She lowered her hands. “Nothing left for me, I am finished – I am coal outside and in now; corns on my knees that do credit to a horse. Dyed in coal, I am, in my mouth, my chest, my heart,” and she gripped her wrist making the veins stand out proud. “Look now, coal rivers I am, not normal flesh and blood, going to a prune with the towing, stinking of coal, coughing coal; dried of my womanhood and just over thirty. D’you hear me?” Her eyes were wide and strangely bright and I saw the lashes and brows still rimmed black after the washing.

  “As a pillar of salt, I am,” she said, “useless to a bed, and I have longed for more children – ten if I’d had my way. Now too late.”

  I turned to the window.

  “Saw little Towey yesterday,” she said. “I helped pull them off her and cart her out of it. God, there’s a mess, and I am used to messes. It didn’t worry me much, seeing Towey. But, O, God, that boy!” She covered her face.

  Just useless standing there. I went to the window. The fields were ablaze beyond, all over golden with buttercups. Quietly, behind me, she began to cry again, and I went to her and touched her.

  “Keep away from me,” she said.

  I longed for Mari to come in just then, for there are places in a woman not even a brother can invade.

  “You are leaving the pit,” I said. “Today.”

  “You starting farming again, then?” she asked. “Is Randy getting sick of it? Aye, I’ll take on. One pair of shafts is as good as another and at least I’d be towing in daylight.”

  “That was cruel,” I said.

  I turned to her. Strange it did not seem like Morfydd standing there, and strange, too, that she was smiling. Terrible is coal, reaching out its fingers for those who carve it; drawing their souls into its seams, making them one with it though hating it; taking over the brain.

  “Jethro.”

  I did not reply.

  “I am sorry,” she said, and went to the table and gripped the edge of it and bent, her eyes clenched. “Do not go, Jethro,” she said as I reached the door, and she turned to me.

  “Come here, boy.”

  I went to her and she straightened. “There now,” said she. “It has passed. There is a swine of a sister for you, cursing and swearing, and not your fault. Don’t tell Mam, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “No living soul?”

  “Nobody, but you are leaving the pit.”

  She did not hear me. “Jethro …” she whispered, smiling. “Hold me. Do not let me go.”

  I held her, and she was trembling.

  “You listening, boy?” she whispered, and I nodded against her face.

  “Jethro, I am going into coal – as Liam Muldooney, and Towey, and Gwallter – and Dada. …”

  “O, for God’s sake!” I said, and tried to throw her off but she clung as if sewn to me.

  “I have seen the leaf,” she said. “I saw it yesterday – down in Number Six, before old Towey came down with the others. O, clear as day was that leaf in every vein, with a million years engraved on the shine! You heard what the old ones say about Number Six? As the leaf is pressed in coal, so will I become part of coal. Terrible is that Number Six. Day after day the props go down, it will have us for sure. First leaf seen for ages, this one.”

  I held her off. “You will never see it again,” I said. “Forget the leaf.”

  She smiled then, changed. Brilliant was that smile.

  “Not bloody having me, is it?”

  I looked at her.

  “Not sharp enough by halves, eh?” And she whistled a note or two and snatched at her bonnet, tying the ribbons under her chin, turning her head at me, dimpling, changed. “You like this old hat, Jethro Mortymer?”

  “Seen worse,” I said. “You are leaving Gower today, understand?”

  “Gracious, no. I am seeing out the year now I’ve started, I am having my wages. But never mind about Gower. What you say about this new bonnet?”

  “Wonderful,” I said to please her.

  She put her hand to her waist and postured, swinging her hips. “Not bad for thirty-two, is it? Come on, boy, be honest. I still get the eye, mind, when I walk down the village. Very cosy, still drive the chaps demented. Reckon I might meet Willie O’Hara tonight; give the boy a treat, begging like a dog, poor soul.”

  “That is better,” I said, relieved.

  “Down on the Burrows. You ever gone courting on the Burrows down by the sea?”

  “My business,” I said.

  “O, beautiful is summer! And the moon comes up over the sea very tidy, very romantic, and the air is warm and sweet. Gentleman is Willie O’Hara, remember. Don’t let them tell you otherwise, Jethro. Might even marry little Willie, all two yards of him, you astonished?”

  “No, Morfydd.”

  “Cowman over at Kidwelly, good job, and ambitious. Might do worse, come to think of it.”

  “Bring him home, then.”

  “Eh, steady,” said she. “Mam would have him in bits. And I am trying him first, anyway, to see what stitches him together. Let you know later. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  “Give my love to Mam and Mari. Back before midnight, God willing.”

  As a young girl she went, bonnet tilted back, ribbons fluttering, and I stood by the door watchi
ng her as she went towards the Reach.

  I covered my face.

  As long as I live I will remember that May night, but not because of Morfydd. Strange it is how Fate strikes twice, sometimes within the hour; as if it brings its clenched fist to the face, crouched for the felling blow. With the house empty save for the boys asleep upstairs I was wandering about the kitchen lost, dying for Mam or Mari to come home, when a tap came on the door, and I opened it.

  Effie Downpillow stood there.

  Fresh from Monmouthshire was Effie; come back home to her county when the Top Town furnaces blew out, and scrubbing for Osian Hughes and his mam this past week, no more. Last Sunday at Chapel we all saw Effie, a little rag of a woman no older than Morfydd but belted by iron into skin and bone. She made spare money, she said, by selling her hair for wigs to gentry; sitting at home for weeks bald as a badger, rubbing in oils until the next harvest, but I never had the proof of it for she was pretty well shod when Osian took her in. Strange little woman this, and with dignity, though her legs and feet were bare. And at her first chapel Sunday I saw her eyeing me from the back pews, treating me important.

  “You Jethro Mortymer?” she whispered now, hugging herself.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The man of the Mortymer family, is it?”

  I nodded, wondering.

  “You asking me in, man?”

  “Aye, come on,” I said.

  Wandering in, hugging herself for winter, looking around with a vacant stare, and bags under her eyes like the fleshpots of Jerusalem.

  “Over at Osian Hughes, I am,” she said.

  I nodded, watching.

  “Sit down, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sit down.” And she sat, perched as a bird, with her white hair hanging down either side of her face.

  “You called to see my mam, Effie Downpillow?” I asked.

  “Called to see you,” she said, so I sat down opposite, wishing her to the devil. Her eyes drifted around the room.

  “Used to scrub here once,” she said. “For old Grandfer, before I took my two-room tumbledown up by Osian Hughes. Been away years, see – following the iron up to Monmouthshire, where you come from.” And she smiled of a sudden, leaning towards me. “You heard about my man, Sam Miller – his dad being in flour?”