Hosts of Rebecca

by Alexander Cordell

  I got Liam Muldooney with an elbow. “Since when has Gower been using the switch road through Six?” I asked.

  “Every fourth tram – Foreman’s orders.”

  “To hell with Foreman,” I said. “It isn’t even propped.” I sat up, hitting my head on the roof and cursing.

  “Sit down, sit down, man,” said Liam. “There’s enough props by there to hold up government – they got them all in on last night’s shift. Would I let a little woman go where I wouldn’t go myself. Firm as Moses’ rock that roof.”

  “That roof was dropping plugs not a week back,” I said.

  “And they fetched the plugs down, you satisfied? You start looking to your own business, little man, and leave me to mine. Shall I tell you of my grandpa now, and put your mind at ease?”

  “To hell with your grandpa.”

  “Then would you rather have a chapter from Galatians?”

  “O, for God’s sake!” I said, for I was watching the end of Morfydd’s tram, watching the glint of the backboard steel as it curved down the line to the switch road on Six, smaller and smaller in the lights of the tallow lamps.

  “Sharp enough to cut yourself this morning,” said Liam. “Rest you in God, little man, He will care for your Morfydd. No satan shall snatch at her in the presence of the Lord. Now give proof of your faith in Him, bach – tell Him what you know of the Book of the King, just to please Liam and take your mind from fear. How many books in the Old Testament, for instance?”

  “Thirty-nine,” I said. “Liam, I am afraid. …”

  “And the New Testament, little man?”

  “Twenty-seven. Liam. …”

  “Hush you,” said he. “It is not fear but the Devil wreaking his vengeance for the burning of the gates. And eight hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and eighty letters in the New Testament all told, and do not argue, man, for I have taken the trouble to count them. Man, be calm.”

  “I am away to see Gower,” I said, crawling, but he caught my wrist and twisted me back.

  “Peace! The shortest sentence in His Book, if you please. …?”

  “Jesus wept,” I murmured.

  “Aye, aye, for the likes of you and me, Jethro. Would you take a fist to me and sweep me aside when I tell you your girl will be safe?”

  Just looked at him. This the saint of faith; such men as this have prayed to their God with their bodies alight.

  Liam was smiling.

  “Trust you in Him,” he whispered. “Do not put your trust in props, for I have prayed and the golden Lord has answered. On, now. What is the middle verse of the Book of our God, boy? Think now, shiver up the herring-roes. Shall I tell, is it? The eighth verse of the hundred and eighteenth Psalm. And how many times does the word Lord occur? Forty-six thousand two hundred and twenty-seven, and there is no word therein more than six syllables, and the word Reverend occurs only once, as if the Lord just remembered to slip the thing in. How now do I stand in the knowledge of my God?” He gripped my hand. “Forsake all wickedness. Stand you firm in the countenance of the Father, and He will protect you and those whom you love.”

  “As Towey.” I raised my face.

  “Is she not with happiness now, man? And the boy from Spain?”

  “I want Morfydd living, not dead.”

  “So you put your faith in a four-inch prop when He can shift a mountain with His finger? O, Jethro, bach, do you listen to old Liam. Battered and addled I am, my body despoiled, but my soul is with glory and yours with dust. Conflict with the kings of the earth is conflict with God, for did He not teach humility to men? And the servants of the earthly queen is asking questions, you heard?”

  This raised me again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In search of Rebeccas, looking for daughters to break the march on Carmarthen – and searching for a man with broken hands – yours are not so tidy.”

  I heard his words but I did not care. Looking for the one who had flattened their dragoon, no doubt. I would do it again with half a chance, but quicker.

  “God help him if they find him, mind,” said Liam.

  I heard his words as an echo, for I was trundling with Morfydd down Number Six gallery, the new shaft opened in a forest of props; couldn’t rest till she got back to the seam, couldn’t work, couldn’t think.

  “The Lord says turn the other cheek, Jethro.”

  “Aye? Well I am not turning mine.”

  “God forgive you,” said Liam.

  “Nothing to forgive.”

  “God help you, then,” said he, and as he said it Number Six went down.

  A dull thump first, then thunder, rocking us as with an earthquake, turning us, felling those standing, burying those lying. One moment light, next moment blackness. Props were going like twigs, bending, snapping, driving into the ground. Lying as I was, the drop took me square across the thighs, pinning me, and I fought to breathe as the pressure came greater; pinned as if nailed there, coal against my face, my chest, stretching as a mantle down to my ankles. Couldn’t even gasp; lying solid in a tomb of coal, twisting, thighs bucking, screaming for breath, and the hand that clawed at my face was Liam’s, groping for my mouth, knuckles arched for my first inward breath. Heard him scratching, someone screaming; trickles in my mouth as the dust filled it solid. This, the press, the shudder of a county. Liam was tearing the dust from my face now; somebody on my ankles heaving tons, and they drew me out as a thumb from a thumbscrew before the roof arch bellied and dropped flat. The place was in torment as I staggered up, half naked men and women rushing, screaming, tripping, falling, and children shrieking for lost parents. Gower was at the entrance to the gallery, his voice booming for order, but the mob that rushed the ladders rolled him down, passing over him. Leaning against the wall, spitting out coal, digging out my eyes, I looked at Liam Muldooney. He was sitting as a man dazed, gaping to the shock, mouthing some incantation, his face grimed against the white roll of his eyes, and then I remembered Morfydd.

  The gallery was coming empty now, few tallow lamps were burning, but the colliers were still yelling down at the ladders, and I heard from there the cries of children, the bawling shouts of overmen trying to get order. Only fire was needed to turn it into Hell. Took one look at Liam and staggered to the entrance to Number Six, snatching at a tallow lamp and holding it before me as I went down the incline. Terror was in me, sweat flooding over me. Reckoning by time she was half way through the switch road when the roof came down. A forest of pitprops here and I stumbled and hit myself against them in my swaying run down the line. Queer how you pray when you fear such loss – strange how God is neglected till the testing time, and there is no other with ears. The shouts and bedlam was dying behind me now as I plunged on, following the shimmer of the rails in the faltering light of the candle. The air was fetid here, heavy with dust. The roof was lower now, the walls with jutting biceps of rocks; ankle deep in water now. Stopping, I listened. No sound but the thumping of my heart and the trickling of water from above. I looked at the roof. Wide fissures were crazing it from wall to wall, dust cascading in sudden spurts from the pressure building up. Gaunt the shadows of the candle, only an inch or so of it left, the flame spluttering to the heavy air. Dank the smell that wafted then from some devil’s hole, and I knew that I was holding in my hand the flame of detonation. Fear struck, thumping as a fist, putting me against the wall, and I dropped to my knees, staring at the blackness ahead.

  “Morfydd!”

  Flung back in my face in countless echoes, reverberating down the gallery, bouncing off the drop. The roof cracked like a shot behind me, the pressure begging for the least vibration to bring it roaring down. Couldn’t even shout without reprisal. Spitting out dust, I lurched on.

  Narrow here. The gallery was tapering. This is the hardest rock, its walls as filed from the body of the mountain, the roof still lower. Had to bend here, now go on all fours, with the candle held out, one hand gripping a line, and this was the beginning of the fall. Bould
ers of rock and coal were strewn over the narrow floor, coming thicker as I crept onward, stumbling, cursing as my knees pressed the flints. Had to rest, for my head was thumping with the hammer of my heart and each breath was drawn against the iron band of my chest. As a dog, I rested, tongue lolling, panting, hearing as if in dreams a dull roll of thunder far behind me, and the floor beneath me trembled to the new drop. As alive the rail sprang under my hand, transmitting its message of entombment for someone. Perhaps me. I did not really give it a thought. Past caring now: had to find Morfydd. The candle was spilling its tallow now, the wick hooked and black for the last minutes of flame, guttering, sparking. On again, the boulders coming thicker till the line disappeared. Crying aloud, I wept as a child weeps in all its tuneless sounds as I set the lamp down and clawed a path up the drop. It seemed a mountain but it was only three feet, for my head struck the roof, knocking me back. This was the end of it, this was the fall.

  Turning on my back I lay against the heap with the floor at my heels and the roof against my forehead, eyes closed to the scald of the tears, hands clenched to the loss. This is the end of it then, as she had said, engrained as the leaf; becoming part of the living earth, buried alive in the filth of coal for the profits of industry and the greed of men. The candle was chittering, opening my eyes to its incandescent fire in the blackness of the pit. Didn’t care now if I lived or died. Hope sprang then, shivering me awake in brief excitement, weighing the chances that she was beyond the fall, but I knew she was not. A gallery fall this, running as the drop of a stick; no isolated plug that she might have missed. I knew she was lost. And I saw in the seconds before the candle spat out a silver strand of shining braid, hanging from the splintered tip of a wooden prop, and stretched towards it and caught it in my fingers, pulling it down.

  Blackness.

  I put it against my face.

  Gower came in for me, led by Muldooney, they said after, but I do not remember; with a twenty foot burrow through the drop I had heard, up by the start of the switch; hewing like madman, stark naked, some of them, sweating, bleeding, dropping with exhaustion to rise and hew again. God, these colliers!

  Came in for me, ten men risking their lives for one, the most important man in their earth. A day and a night it took them, but they came crawling, with a tram rolling behind them – in like ants, out like things scalded. And ten hours later the whole of Number Six went down with a rumble they heard in Kidwelly, but I do not remember. Just a day and a night of dreaming for me; lying against the fall where Morfydd slept; hearing her voice raised in rebellion, hearing the whisper of her in a Willie O’Hara love-making; seeing her frown, the brilliance of her smile. A day and a night I lay with her, walking in summer with her over the green of the Coity mountain back home; standing beside her black starchness in chapel, hearing her sing. Sitting at home now, feeding her Richard, drawing up her bodice to the shift of my eyes: scolding now, going round the bedroom, swinging her fists like a man at me: innocent as a child under my mother’s stare. Sister and lover.

  I opened my eyes and saw Mari then; stars were about the curve of her shawl as she knelt by the hurdle and put her arms around me.

  “O, Jethro,” she said, and kissed me. “Jethro!”

  Men turning away to bury the dead.

  CHAPTER 26

  THEY GOT Abel Flannigan in bed, said Mari, on the night after the march on Carmarthen city: clanking horses and sabres drawn in his shippon, she said, heaving down the door and bursting up the stairs with Biddy screaming murder and heaving pans at them, yelling like a mad thing at Abel to hoof it through the window, but she yelled too late. Back to the wall in his nightshirt went Abel Flannigan, with a dragoon on his back and a constable on his legs, hitting off helmets with one hand and smacking them out with the other; five on the floor at one time, said Biddy, bleeding, ragged, tormented as a Spanish bull, was Abel, roaring to Biddy to saddle his mare while he settled all fifteen. They could have shot him, cut him down, but they didn’t, to their credit. But they thumped him to his knees and tied his wrists behind him and booted him out on the end of a rope, haltered as a wife being sold at market. Biddy’s screams could be heard from here, said Mari.

  “And then?” I asked, flat.

  “Then they went for Toby Maudlin.”

  Toby went easy, Mari said, thumped black and blue by his misery missus at the first clank of the sabres; kicked out through the door into the arms of the constables, his face still blackened, still wearing her nightdress, for he had taken a gate in his stride on the way back from Carmarthen.

  “Justin Slaughterer was taken in Carmarthen workhouse,” she said now. “He forced his way in there a yard behind John Harries Rebecca and two hundred following them, overturned the tables, smashed down the doors to free the inmates so they could put the place to flames. But the dragoons came galloping in and slammed the gates behind them.”

  “Got the lot,” I said.

  “Rebecca John Harries made back home,” she answered, “but not poor Justin.”

  “A damned fine way to end a page of history,” I said.

  “Then they came here,” said Mari, kneeling by the bed.

  This raised me on the pillow.

  “Six dragoons and a captain, Jethro. Looking for a man with broken hands, a man who had murdered one of their soldiers.”

  I stared at her.

  “Found drowned in a brook in the woods near St Clears – beaten, and left to die, left to roll about, and drown.”

  “O, God,” I said, sweating.

  So small and unequal she looked standing there in profile, one hand gripping the sill. Hard on women, this business. She had lost one man to rebellion. She looked like losing another. Murder now. Sick, I felt.

  “What … what did you tell them?” I whispered.

  “What Gower told me – that you and Morfydd were dead. O, God,” she said.

  I thought of the ship, tranquil on the calm sea, waiting, waiting.

  She said, “Then they went to the pit to get the truth of it and Liam Muldooney told them the same.”

  I covered my face with my hands.

  “Jethro, you must get away,” she said. “Every man under sixty in the village has been taken. Special magistrates are being sworn in to try them – hundreds and hundreds have been taken – even men who have never seen a Rebecca just in case. They will come back for you, you cannot stay here.”

  “Yes.”

  This was the Chartists all over again. With victory coming closer they had bungled it by moving too soon – men like my brother who had listened to John Frost; men like Flannigan who had followed the hothead John Harries. And now murder.

  “Thank God Mam isn’t here,” she said.

  “And if I go … what of you?”

  “I will manage,” she said.

  “Cae White, on your own?”

  “I have Richard and Jonathon for help. I will manage.”

  “You will starve, the three of you. You first,” I replied.

  “Perhaps for the good,” she said, empty. “Not much of a life as things stand, is it?”

  “Mari,” I said, and put out my hand to her and she came obediently and stood above me, looking down, before she went on her knees beside the bed and into my arms. Just held her for a bit. I knew she was sobbing for Morfydd; that the grief was cutting as a knife. Then the door came open silently and the faces of Jonathon and Richard peeped round. Jonathon as Mari, dark as Richard was fair. And I saw in Richard’s eyes the unspoken question as Mari rose like lightning and went to Jonathon. I glanced at Mari, my eyebrows raised and she shook her head and hurried Jonathon through the door.

  “The soldiers came, Uncle Jethro,” Richard said by the bed. “You heard one of them’s been killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Aunt Mari did say that you didn’t do it and that you and my mam be dead, anyway, then they went away.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Seven years old now, ten by the bite of his teeth on his lip
and he looked at me, his eyes large and blue, misted with tears.

  “Where’s my mam, Uncle Jethro?”

  “Richard, come to me,” I said.

  Quite still he stood, hands clenched by his sides, his hair alight in a shaft of the window sun, then he lowered his face, weeping without sound.

  “Richard,” I said, and reached out and drew him against me.

  Just held him, pressing him hard against me, feeling useless, cursing coal, the county, the country; cursing the world. No need to tell this one, no explanations begged. Just held him while he wept, thinking of the soldier.

  “Aunt Mari now,” I said. “Richard …” and I held him away, smiling. “With Jonathon for your brother, and Aunt Mari and me for your mam and dad.”

  “Took by the coal, is it?” Lips trembling, he faced me.

  “Yes.”

  “Eh, the bloody old coal,” he said, eyes slanting away from me. “Mam did say the coal would be the end of it, one night in prayers.”

  I nodded.

  He said, hands screwing, “Staying with you, is it? Not going to the workhouse or the Hirings like Ianto Vaughan when his mam passed on?”

  “No, Richard. We would not allow it.”

  “Tea now, is it?”

  The simplicity of the grief of childhood.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then I will help Aunt Mari bring it up.”

  “I am coming down,” I said, getting out. “Would you have me lying for days like a lazy old lump?”

  “Head bumps, is it?” he asked, feeling.

  “Aye, but most of them going down. Away like a good boy while I dress, Dick.”

  He got to the door, turned and flashed me a smile, but I heard the stuttering breath of his sobbing as he went down the stairs.

  “Jethro,” said Mari when the boys were in bed, “you have got to get away. The soldiers will come back.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Agitated, walking the kitchen for the last two hours, she was pulling at her fingers, encircling the finger that had once held her wedding ring, out of habit, for the ring was there no more. Face strained and pale she walked and turned, head switching to the slightest sound of the night.