by Jan Needle
"Afternoon, Luke," said Matthew affably as he came up on the group. The district was generally known as a peaceful one but it was also a remote one and a man walked gently when strangers came onto his land carrying muskets.
Wrathall nodded his head taciturnly but made no reply.
"What's going on here, Ben?" asked Matthew of his own men. "I told you to bring the horses back for the rest of the wood."
Old Ben was eyeing Boss Wrathall with a smouldering glint of rage in one bloodshot eye, which was not improving Wrathall's hold on his own temper.
"Boss says I cannot 'ave me own 'osses back. He's tried to tek 'em away once a'ready," said Ben wrathfully. "So I'm not leaving this 'ere place until I get them."
"What's all this about, Luke?" said Matthew. He held the muskets in mind but he was a powerful young man standing on his father's own land and his hold on his own temper was not of the best. Lady Sarah Sharpe might be an aristocrat but she was not best-loved in the valleys. There was no need to be over-respectful of her.
"Tha'll 'ave to wait until 'er Leddyship's ready to deal wi’ thee," Wrathall told him sharply. "Until then, keep thy place, young Matthew."
Matthew took a pace forwards, lifted the musket out of Wrathall's hands and stacked it gently against the wall. The other three men jumped back and he heard the click-click of their flint-locks coming to full-cock and froze. Surely they'd not shoot him down! Not on his own land in broad daylight and in front of witnesses!
He let his eyes run around the group. Apart from Wrathall, the men were strangers to him, which was a surprise. In the tightly-knit mountain world most men within a surprisingly large radius were well known to one another. But the eyes staring at him over the levelled barrels were cold and determined. Yes, these men would shoot him down.
He stood stock-still. Slowly the reality of the situation dawned on him. These men would actually kill him. The two Bens would not be witnesses, because they, too, would die. Who would contradict Lady Sarah Sharpe if she gave her version of the incident? Certainly not Kendal magistrates.
The door of the mill opened and a group of people emerged, talking in low voices between themselves. At the sight of Matthew standing within the ring of musket-barrels, they all halted.
"What is going on, Wrathall?" asked an icy female voice. Matthew dared not turn his head to look.
"Young Matthew Milburn, come to make trouble," rumbled Wrathall, deep in his chest. "When I told him to wait for your ladyship, he went for me, and the lads 'ad to take guard for their lives. 'Ot-tempered and intemperate, is young Milburn."
"Put up your muskets. I'll have no shooting here. Wrathall, you should know better," said the voice. "Milburn, come over here."
Matthew turned as the musket barrels lowered to look straight into the cool green eyes of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
Lady Sarah Sharpe was a renowned beauty, even in her teens. It had been said that the Prince Regent himself had called her to court to see her. It had even been rumoured that, having seen her, he was not satisfied until he had enjoyed other favours, too. In all honesty, Matthew couldn't blame him if the rumours were true.
The secret of Sarah Sharpe's beauty lay in her colouring. It was as though some master craftsman had taken shining silver and the purest of porcelain and brought the two together in a work of such symmetry and purity of line that the eye quartered it constantly, unconsciously seeking some blemish, some falter in its perfection.
In her riding-habit-cut a little old-fashioned, since most young women, particularly in London polite society, would never for one second admit to being able to ride a horse - it was possible to see that this perfection of line extended to her body as well. High, full breasts swelled the severe line of the jacket. An impossibly tiny waist set them off to perfection. Rounded hips suggested other delights beneath the voluminous skirt.
Matthew let his eyes wander gently down her body and, wondering, back up to her own eyes, filled, now, with a kind of mocking, frosty amusement.
From under the dark skirt, one polished riding-boot tapped imperiously on the gravel. One gloved hand slapped the loaded haft of her riding-crop into the palm of the other hand.
One ash-blonde eyebrow rose a trifle. A corner of that rosebud-pink mouth twisted just a hair.
"He has an insolent and a knowing eye, this farmer's lad," she observed to the man standing beside her and Matthew turned from earthly perfection to Satanic cruelty.
Sir Jonathan Bright might have been cut from alabaster and finished in Indian ink.
His face, unseamed and unlined in repose - which it generally was - was of a death-mask whiteness and smoothness. He had once flogged a valet nigh to death for cutting him while shaving him.
Below, that stern and cleft chin rested on a cravat so snowy and so glossy that it might that moment have been brought from the laundry. Above and around, the face was framed with black curls so thick and so profuse that they did not look real.
His breeches of sparkling white buckskin clung to his legs like a second skin. His boots, high and tasselled, shone as though the whole of Sir Jonathan had recently been unwrapped from tissue paper and placed upon the road.
From one ringed hand dangled a laced and perfumed handkerchief. Yet the shoulders spreading the broadcloth of his coat would not have looked amiss on a guardsman.
But it was his eyes which took Matthew's attention. They were more like holes in his perfect face than eyes. Black, apparently without iris and pupil. And if, as has been observed, the eyes are windows to the soul then the soul of Sir Jonathan Bright was of purest black. Or perhaps it was never there at all.
Looking into those dark and compelling pools, Matthew felt as though he had been given a peep into Hell. His anger and outrage died slowly away inside him. This man would kill him merely to watch him twitch.
Sir Jonathan touched his perfumed handkerchief to his lips and permitted himself a tiny smile.
"Big feller," he observed carelessly. "Deuced big feller, I'd have said. Done any wrestlin', have you, lad?"
"I've wrestled enough," said Matthew, nettled by their easy dissection of him before his face. "As Boss Wrathall will tell you. But it does not make me find it any more palatable to find strangers pointing muskets at me on my own land."
There was a moment of stillness as though everybody around him was holding his breath and waiting for something to happen. Then Sir Jonathan flicked his handkerchief and put it away.
"I told yer it was a mistake to try to treat with the yeoman classes, me dear," he said. "Perhaps yer'd better leave this business to me."
Lady Sarah took a long look at him in which, had he cared to read it, there was much written which should have warned him not to issue orders to her.
"Bring him along," she said tersely to Wrathall. "And if he makes trouble rap him on the head. But do it gently."
Before Matthew could move, strong hands were taking him by the arms and a rough push in the back started him along the road. Without a thought, he planted his feet, reared back and pulled his arms sharply together in front of him.
The two men holding his arms flew round like a pair of stones on pieces of string and cannoned together in front of him. One let go of his hold. The other clung desperately on, winded.
Matthew was just reaching out for him when a brassbound musket-butt descended on the back of his head, and he fell forward across the bodies of his captors.
Lady Sarah looked down at the group from the saddle of her horse as Sir Jonathan mounted.
"Two of you carry him down to the farm, and we'll finish our business there," she said. "Wrathall, turn those labourers loose and tell them if they want to work they can come back tomorrow morning, when they will be working for me, and taking their orders from you."
Wrathall knuckled his forelock and turned to the Bens. "You heard," he growled, "now be off."
"What about the 'osses?" Old Ben had no intention of leaving the sawmill without his precious animals.
They had been his charge for as many years as he could remember, they and their forebears, and he had never left a sweaty horse without its rub-down.
"Take them with you, but bring 'em back in the morning," warned Wrathall. "You'll need them, I promise you."
Old Ben and young Ben exchanged a long look, then the old man reached for the reins of the two gigantic Shires.
"What'll we do about young Master Matthew?" hissed his son as the two of them prepared to mount up on the heavy horses.
"Nowt." His father's tone was sharp and final. "When quality gets involved it's time folk like thee and me mind our own business. Do yer work and keep yer gab shut, until we find out what's afoot."
Two
The bucket of water had been hauled from the very bottom of the well where the warmth of summer never penetrated, and as it hit Matthew's head and shoulders it felt like a scoop from a winter-frozen lake.
He shook his head and spluttered and groaned simultaneously. It rang with the clanging pain of a headache and at the same time felt big enough to accommodate two of him.
He was lying in the middle of his own farmyard, surrounded, so far as he could make out, by total chaos. Women wept and wailed. Men swore. Chickens cackled and ducks quacked.
With pain, Matthew raised himself onto his elbows and peered around him.
Sitting on a kitchen chair only a few yards away was his mother, face buried in her hands and shoulders shaking uncontrollably. All around them was the furniture from the house itself. As he looked, men appeared from the doorways carrying more.
The kitchen staff of two - Winnie and Maria - were wailing and clinging together a few yards further on. The hands, both indoor and out, were lined up against a wall.
"Father? Where's father?" he croaked. Surely the grizzled old warrior who was Matthew Milburn senior would not stand for this open desecration of his property.
His mother threw herself on her knees beside him. Her normally serene face - for Mary Milburn had been a beautiful woman and remained a striking one in late middle age - was twisted and her eyes reddened by her weeping.
"Oh, Matthew," she said. "They took him away to Kendal on a warrant. They said he owed money to Lady Sarah - that he had lost it gambling. But you know as well as I that your father never gambled in his life."
Matthew pulled himself to his feet and tried desperately not to be sick. He felt as though his brains had been scrambled, boiled lightly and then poured back into his skull.
'"My father, gamble? Never in this world!" He gasped as a riding quirt cut across his face.
"Never call your betters liars, lad." The mincing tones of Sir Jonathan Bright held an overtone which made Matthew squint up at him against the sun.
"If Lady Sarah has his notes of hand, there is no more to it. Your father put up the farm and land as security against his debts, and the notes are now due. We are taking the farm in place of the money."
"Taking the farm?" Matthew felt numb. There had been a Milburn at Shap Side since before the Civil War. Since the time of Queen Elizabeth, indeed. It was unthinkable that it could be taken from them.
"Taking the farm?"
"I told you it was no good trying to reason with the yokels," snorted Sir Jonathan, pulling his horse's head round to head for the gate. Lady Sarah stopped her own beast to look down at the mother and son.
"I can afford to lose no more money over this business," she told them in a voice which could have cut glass. "Be off this land with your sticks of furniture by tomorrow morning. I'll burn anything I find lying about after that."
With a rattle of hooves over the cobbles of the yard, she too was gone. From the house there was the sound of more thumping and banging, and furniture came crashing from the first-floor windows to splinter in the yard.
Matthew pulled himself together and looked about him.
He had a fatalistic feeling of events moving far too fast for him. Only this morning he had been the heir to a prosperous farm. Now he was an evicted son of a convicted debtor, homeless and hopeless. He would be hard put to get work anywhere in the neighbourhood, with Lady Sarah's face against him - even if the only other possible employer was Tom Stavely, Emma's father.
Rattling boots on the cobbles made him look up again. Boss Wrathall stood in front of him, musket in hand and bully-boys ranged on either side.
"You 'eard what her leddyship said," he leered. "Get your traps and get out."
Matthew looked long and he looked deep on Wrathall.
That the man was enjoying this moment of misery was quite plain. Just why he should be so personally involved, Matthew could not guess.
"She gave us until tomorrow," he said, dully. ''I'll put the stuff on a cart and move it over to Browhead until we find out what to do."
Wrathall smiled like the cat with his foot on the mouse's tail.
"Not on one of her ladyship's carts, you won't," he said, licking thick lips enjoyably. "I've had no orders to let you bring carts onto her land, either. What you take, Milburn, you carry. The rest we burn."
The thick, slow curdling wave of anger started to move, then, in the pit of Matthew's stomach. Wrathall, directly in front of him, saw it first and stepped back sharply, bringing the musket up. To either side of him, the armed men cocked their own muskets.
There was a moment when several lives hung in the balance. Matthew had only to reach out for Wrathall to turn the farmyard into a bloodbath. If he were shot down, he knew, the farm-hands would pitch in to avenge him. They were good, brawny fighters and properly equipped would have given trained soldiers a run for their money. But in shirt-sleeves, with not even a sword between them, they would be cut down where they stood.
His mother reached out and touched him and brought him back to reality. How could he expose her to such a risk? He turned stiffly away from Wrathall, fists slowly unclenching, to examine the household effects.
"Mother, you'd best pick what's essential and I'll see what I can get on Lucifer," he said, and made for the stables to get his own horse.
Once again, Wrathall, musket in hand, was before him. "Wheer does tha think tha's going?"
"To get my horse."
"Any livestock on this farm belongs to Lady Sarah..."
Matthew had had enough. "Tha knows as little about the law as tha does about people, Boss. What Lady Sarah's foreclosed on is my father's note of hand. That means anything that belongs to the farm belongs to her. But my horse and my personal property don't belong to the farm. They belong to me.
"Try and stop me taking away my own property, Boss, and you're stealing it. Lady Sarah'll not back you if you're caught stealing horses. Round here, you'll recall, horsethieves hang!"
Wrathall looked thoughtful. Round Kendal, it was true, they had a brusque way with horse-thieves. Matthew Milburn's word might not be much good against Lady Sarah Sharpe and her friends. But it would certainly stand good against his, Wrathall's, word.
He lowered his musket and stepped aside.
'Just make sure you take your own horse's tack and no other," he rasped. Matthew ignored him and reached for the harness hanging over the stall.
In truth it was not the horse he was worried about so much as the most valuable of the belongings. His guns.
Wrathall was unlikely just to let him walk off with his guns, which included a couple of fine fowling-pieces and a boxed pair of pistols which would have paid Wrathall's wages for a full year.
By tomorrow, he had not a doubt, the whole mess would have been sorted out through Kendal magistrates, who knew his father as well as Matthew did. The old man had never gambled in his life and it would be contrary to his very nature for him to risk his farm on such grounds.
Therefore a swindle was going on and, by God, Matthew would have the right of it out before the justices.
In the meantime it was necessary to preserve as much as possible of the furniture.
Still seething, Matthew turned the huge kitchen table into a stoneboat, harnessed it to the disgusted Lucifer
and filled it with such items as he could fit on.
Followed by his weeping mother, he ran the load as fast he dared to the edge of the farm land and unloaded it on the Stavelys' side. On the next trip he brought more and, by the time he had made a third trip, two of Stavely's farm-hands were there with a wagon to load the goods and take them further.
Emma's father was waiting for him when he got back from his final trip, flushed with his last exchange with Wrathall but triumphantly bearing, in his mother's clothespress, his fowling-pieces and his pistols.
"Now then, Matthew," said Stavely, his face grave in the falling summer evening.
"Now then, Mr Stavely," returned Matthew politely.
The older man shook his head glumly and looked at him seriously.
"This is a strange how-d'ye-do, Matthew," offered Stavely.
"It's more than strange, Mr Stavely. It's right down curious," said Matthew with some heat. "Lady Sarah says my father had bad gambling debts and she's collected up on them and foreclosed. But you know as well as I know that my father never wagered in his life. It would be more than he could do to mortgage the farm on such a debt."
Stavely was nodding vigorously at every word.
"So what's to be done?"
''I'm riding to Kendal in the morning," said Matthew, "to see the justices and find out what the evidence against my father might be.
"Once they examine the papers, I'm confident they'll find him honest and return the farm. Until then, by the way, I'll need a safe place to put the deeds."
Stavely looked startled. "They've not the deeds then, lad? Then the farm cannot be mortgaged, and all's well. Tha can put them in my strongbox wi' pleasure. But come on up to the house. Thy mother and thee'll stay with us until this is over. Emma'll be glad, for one!"
Matthew moved his shoulders uncomfortably. Romping with Emma this afternoon had been fun. True enough, he wanted very much to make her his wife. But as a dispossessed man how could he ask her father now? It would have to wait until he had sorted out his family troubles. Then, perhaps, would be the time to speak out.
