Late Harvest

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Fiona Buckley From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  People Like Us

  Recognition

  Dancing in the Spring

  Paying the Devil

  Kingfisher

  Inquest

  Escape

  Leaving It to Nature

  Wearing Away

  Weregild

  Return of the Past

  Storm

  Rockfall

  Perilous Knowledge

  Evading the Law

  No Awaking

  The Exile

  The Only Hope

  A Pale Horse in the Shafts

  Bitter Reunion

  The Sailor Comes Home

  Old Memories

  Midsummer

  The Summons

  The Overdue Reckoning

  Completion

  A Selection of titles by Fiona Buckley from Severn House

  LATE HARVEST

  The Ursula Blanchard Mysteries

  QUEEN WITHOUT A CROWN

  QUEEN’S BOUNTY

  A RESCUE FOR A QUEEN

  A TRAITOR’S TEARS

  A PERILOUS ALLIANCE

  LATE HARVEST

  Fiona Buckley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Fiona Buckley.

  The right of Fiona Buckley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Buckley, Fiona author.

  Late harvest.

  1. Smuggling–England–Exmoor–Fiction. 2. Great

  Britain–History–George III, 1760-1820–Fiction.

  3. Historical fiction.

  I. Title

  823.9’14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8594-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-697-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-758-5 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  PETER ANDERSON

  A much respected colleague

  whose work saved lives.

  He loved Exmoor too.

  Prologue

  Once more, it is June. In this year of Our Lord 1860, I am approaching eighty years of age. I can no longer walk far. I can’t now make my way down the winding sunken lane that leads from Standing Stone farm, my home now for a good thirty years, to see the combe below. I see the lane in my mind’s eye, deep and rutted between its steep banks. Dog roses are in bloom, tangled with the hedges atop the banks, and the banks themselves are thickly grown with long grass and tall foxgloves and sorrel, with golden buttercups and the red and white and pink of clover and valerian, overhanging the lane, all heavy with the warm scents of summer.

  The lane is a path of reddish earth that leads down into the combe and climbs the ridge of moorland on the far side. It isn’t yet time for the heather to be out, so the moors are still mostly dark velvety brown, though splashed here and there by patches of long tawny grass, and the bright green of marsh or young bracken or the bright gold of the gorse, which is always out somewhere.

  The track leads over the ridge, to descend towards Foxwell, the farm where I was born and where my son William still lives with his wife Susie. The window by which I sit for most of my time looks that way, and in clear weather I can see the sea, the Bristol Channel, framed in the dip.

  That view of the sea holds memories. Oh, such memories! There are two nights that I recall especially. On both of them, the moonlight was so bright that the Bristol Channel could have been made of molten silver. On one of those nights, a child was conceived. On the other, a man died.

  I am well looked after here, by my daughter Charlotte and her sensible husband, Rob Weston, and I am mostly happy – except for my arthritic hips and, of course, my sorrow for Ralph, a sorrow which will not leave me while I live. We should have had a lifetime together. I am glad of the years we did have but … if only, when we were young, our elders had let us alone.

  I live very quietly and many of the things I did, in past years, are not known to the world outside. Which is just as well, because if they were I would be known in virtuous circles as that wicked old woman at Standing Stone and there would be some truth in that. I did, when younger, do a number of things which many people would consider to be horribly wrong. I flouted the laws of God and man, and I don’t deny it. Nor do I repent. I feel regret for those I hurt but if I had not acted as I did, others would have been hurt instead. It was never a matter of whether to cause harm; only a choice of who should suffer. Not that I thought of it that way in those days, but it’s true, all the same.

  It is a pity that my other daughter, Rose – who knows much of my past and to this day remains scandalized by it – still refuses to have anything to do with me, but to her chagrin, her children and Charlotte’s have made friends. There will be no continuing feud.

  I grieve for what Ralph and I were denied, but yes, I rejoice in what we did have, and I will not apologize because I fought for it. Rest in peace, my dear love, and I shall not forget you. Nor will I forget how and where and when it all began, on that misty January morning in the year 1800, at my father’s funeral. When Colonel Danworth’s staghounds were running on a hot scent.

  It occurs to me that if I have a strain of lawlessness in me, well, I may have inherited it from my father. He didn’t exactly set me a good example. Thank heaven.

  People Like Us

  I was christened Margaret, but I was usually called Peggy, Peggy Shawe, of Foxwell farm on Exmoor. I was a disappointment to my father, who had wanted a son and never got one. I gave considerable trouble, I gather, when I entered the world and afterwards, my mother was never again able to conceive.

  Foxwell was – and is – a prosperous place and it was unusual in that we had the freehold. We were not part of the crown lands as most of the Forest of Exmoor was, nor did we belong to any of the other great estates, such as the Luttrell or the Acland lands, but owned our property outright. It went back to some service or other rendered by one of my ancestors to Charles the First during the Civil War
between the King and Cromwell. We had been granted the freehold as a reward.

  Now, for the first time, there was no son to inherit, only me, a daughter and the only child. Not that my father showed it in any unkind way; indeed, he was careful to see that I had an education. I attended a small school in Exford, our nearest village, about three miles away. It was run by the Reverend Arthur Silcox, an ordained vicar although he had decided to turn to teaching for a living, and his wife Amelia. They were good teachers and did much to widen the horizons of the dozen or so local children, sons and daughters of tradesmen and farmers from round about, who were their pupils. They not only taught us to read, write and add up; they also instructed us in a certain amount of geography and history. They had a globe, showing us where the continents and the various countries were; and we learned something about the products of those distant countries, and the strange beliefs held by the people there. We learned too that we lived on a planet spinning round a sun, and that the stars that studded the sky on clear nights were also suns, far away in space.

  And we were told stories about the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, about the Roman emperors and Antony and Cleopatra, and how the barbarians burst in to destroy that ancient world, and how civilization flowered again after the Dark Ages. We learned about William the Conqueror and Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and even read parts of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.

  It was a wide education for our district, though not detailed, since most of the pupils would spend their lives tilling the land, serving behind shop counters or simply cleaning the home and raising children, and would have no need of so much knowledge.

  Some parents doubted that there was any sense in us learning so many things that would be of no use to us and it was rare for any pupil to stay beyond the age of fourteen, while most were taken out of school at twelve. I enjoyed school and persuaded my father to let me stay until I was fourteen, but after that, he insisted that I left. I was to inherit Foxwell one day, and he had hopes that I would marry a local lad, perhaps a younger son, who would be happy to join me there, and that in due course I would have a son to follow me. He even had a prospective husband in mind for me, though I knew that he would not press me against my will. What he did insist on was that I should now concentrate on learning how to be a farmer’s wife – or, if necessary, a farmer in my own right.

  He died in January 1800, when I was in my twenty-first year, the result of an accident when his pony slipped on an icy track and threw him, causing him to crash headfirst into a rocky outcrop beside the path. And that is where my tale truly begins.

  The day of the funeral wasn’t icy though it was cold, with a sharp wind and an iron-grey sky. A sad little procession set out from the farmhouse, bound for the church of St Salwyn, half a mile or so beyond Exford. We used a handcart to transport the coffin. Wheels are often a trial on Exmoor, what with the steep gradients and the frequency of mud, but we had some small carts and wagons at Foxwell, as well as a light trap. However, none of these seemed quite right for a coffin, or for those who accompanied it. Somehow, the handcart for the coffin while the mourners went on foot seemed more respectful. Bearers would take over at the Lychgate and carry the coffin inside ‘in a seemly fashion’ my mother said.

  At least, that was the original idea. In the event, things didn’t work out quite that way.

  In the lanes through which the bier had to be taken, there were none of the summer’s dog roses or foxgloves, only tired grasses and straggling weeds. A considerable crowd set out from Foxwell, for Mr Samuel Shawe was well known locally. People from several farms round about came to us that morning to accompany us to the church. Among them were a gnarled widower, Ned Bright from Marsh Farm, a couple of miles north of us, together with his two grown sons, John and James.

  John Bright, one day, would take over the tenancy of Marsh and it was the younger son, James, that my father hoped would in good time marry me. No formal words had ever been spoken, but the understanding was there. James and I were friends, though there was no great passion involved. He was a four-square, tow-headed, blue-eyed lad a couple of years older than I was; I was a brown-haired, brown-eyed wench with a good complexion; both of us types seen often in our district. I had known him all my life. I had shared a bench with him at the Silcox school and because our backgrounds were so alike, I thought of him much as though he were my brother.

  It would be a very suitable alliance, however, and the prospect clearly appealed to my father. As I said, he never pressed me, but he did sometimes refer to it in a casual way. I had overheard him once say to my mother, One day, I fancy our Peggy and Jim Bright’ll make a match of it; another time, he said to me, Seen aught lately of young Jim from Marsh? Nice lad, that. Make some wench a good husband one day, I shouldn’t wonder. A week or two after that, he remarked to me: Saw Mr Bright at the market yesterday; says young Jim’s been axin after ’ee. I had never objected. One day, James would no doubt make me a formal proposal and we would be married at St Salwyn’s and he would come to live at Foxwell. Everyone would approve. It was a thing that was going to happen, but I had few feelings, let alone emotions, about it.

  Our two maids, young Betty Dyer and stout Mrs Page, who was married to our placid middle-aged cowman, Bert Page, did not come to St Salwyn’s with us, but stayed behind to put the finishing touches to the hospitality that must be offered when the ritual was all over. Mother and I had made the cold dishes beforehand but the hot dishes required on-the-day attention. Bert Page came with us, however, and helped with the handcart. Bert had a rim of grey beard round his jaw which made him resemble a sailor, but if anyone said so, he replied that he preferred the company of cattle to the hazards of the sea. He had a deep, soothing voice that the cows seemed to like.

  Father’s closest friend, Mr Josiah Duggan, would be among those meeting us at the church, my mother told me. Mr Duggan was a shipbuilder at Minehead, which was and is a port on the coast about twelve miles away from Foxwell as the crow flew, but a good bit further on horseback.

  ‘He’ll have his two boys with him,’ Mother said. ‘He’s got a daughter as well, but she’s married on the other side of Somerset.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, not very interested. I had only met Mr Duggan senior a few times and then very briefly. In fact, I had only recently come to understand the link between him and Father, although I had long known that Mr Duggan, or sometimes a messenger from him, arrived at Foxwell now and then bringing supplies of brandy and tobacco. I had gradually come to realize that these goods were contraband, and had been smuggled into Minehead by Mr Duggan without paying duty. I also understood that one never talked about these things – just in case a Revenue man should be within earshot.

  Other mourners met us as we came into Exford, including Mr Silcox, tall and thin and sympathetic. His wife Amelia had died not long before and his grave face told my mother and me how well he understood our feelings. It was a really big crowd that approached the old bridge that Mr Silcox had once told his pupils was built in the Middle Ages. We should have continued over the bridge and past the big village green and up the hill on the far side, but just as the handcart was about to be trundled on to the bridge, we heard the cry of a hound pack. Everyone stopped, turning their heads.

  The hunt was running over the upward sloping fields behind us. An antlered stag was racing ahead, with the hound pack pouring in pursuit. The horsemen came after, pink coats bright, the man in the lead riding a big piebald, striking even at a distance. The rest of the field streamed in the rear, strung out.

  ‘That’s be Colonel Danworth’s pack from Devon!’ James exclaimed. ‘I know that patchwork animal in front! That be Colonel Danworth atop ’un!’

  Other exclamations followed.

  ‘They’m closin’ in …!’

  ‘They’ll get ’un soon …’

  ‘Poor old Samuel: he’d have loved to be following; he followed the Danworth hounds, he did; not fair, him lying on that there
bier …’

  ‘Let’s see the end of it, we can make it on foot, up to where we can see, even if we can’t be right there. Let’s do it for Samuel …’

  ‘Vicar won’t mind … follows hounds hisself when he gets the chance …’

  ‘You won’t mind, either, Jenny Shawe – your old man loved the chase …’ That was the gnarled Ned Bright. My mother, looking bemused, said faintly: ‘Yes, yes, I know. I don’t mind.’

  It didn’t look as though it mattered much whether anyone minded, the vicar or my mother and certainly not me. The mourners had made their minds up already.

  ‘Samuel, he’d have said yes, go after ’un; I can hear ’un cheerin’ us on …’

  ‘We can leave ’un on ’un’s cart, under the shelter of the bank yur; he’ll come to no harm … you’ll stop with ’un, maybe, Mr Silcox, seein’ as you don’t hunt … you can stop along with Jenny and Peggy here, you can go on to the church and wait; we won’t be that long …’

  ‘Quick, or they’ll be out of sight …’

  And it was done. The handcart, complete with the coffin, was pushed close to the bank at the side of the track, and the mourners were gone, running and scrambling up towards the fields, finding their way through hedges and up rabbit tracks, tearing uphill in pursuit of the hunt, aiming to find a vantage point from which they could see the kill. I saw Ned Bright forcefully widen a gap in a hedge and with waving arms beckon John and James to follow him, which they did without a backward glance.

  In a few moments, my mother and I were alone with only Mr Silcox and an elderly man, Mr Eastley, who had once been a grocer in Exford but now took his leisure while his son and daughter ran the business.