Killing's Reward

by Andrew Wareham

  “What if I offered gold, and more than the land was worth?”

  “They’d tell thee to stuff thy guineas, sir, begging thy pardon. They don’t sell their land.”

  “A lease?”

  “A few might what has a need for coins in their hands just now. Men with a doctor’s bill that must be paid, they might offer a rental. Most won’t.”

  “If I offered to buy the whole of their acres, at a steep price, and set them on a ship to the Americas where they could take up a square mile at a time?”

  Bragg allowed that was possible. Some of the younger men might be tempted by the prospect.

  “The land here ain’t very strong, sir, and the coal mining is forever putting dirt and smuts into the wind and down to spoil their crops. Dirty business, coal, sir.”

  “I will try to encourage them to sell, Bragg, If they will not be persuaded, well, we must see what may be done, for we must progress, Bragg – there is no choice in the matter!”

  “Many of them have more sons than they know how to deal with, Mr Heythorne. Could be that the offer of a job, a promised place at a wage, would help persuade them.”

  It was worth a try. There was no shortage of workers in the area and jobs were not so easily come by still. A guaranteed income would be attractive to many.

  “What of housing the men we bring in, Bragg?”

  “Over on the north side, sir, downhill a bit so as to be sheltered from the worst of the weather. I have marked out a few acres as can go down to terraces for the men. Close to the pit and none so far from the iron foundry, if we decide that to make good sense, what it might well do, sir. But, sir, we can’t move iron into town except be way of a trackway, so it will be a necessity first.”

  Samuel agreed. Everything hinged upon the trackway.

  “I shall devote my best endeavours to the rights of way, Bragg. For your part, hire on the hands to dig the pit shaft and then to open up seams as they display themselves. Build the pithead and the houses. Set everything in hand, Bragg, and we shall depend on the trackway coming right in short order.”

  Bragg shook his head as he said he would do so.

  “Hundreds of pounds I will be spending, sir, and none of it to come back if the trackway doesn’t eventuate.”

  “It will come, Bragg. Never fear that. Whatever needs to be done, shall be done, I promise you.”

  The rest of the day was spent walking the site with Bragg, listening with interest and incomplete understanding to his explanations of what should go where, and why.

  “You do not mention a pump for water, Bragg. We can see a beck close to hand so we know there is water hereabouts.”

  “True, sir, but I have it in mind to run a leet and a gallery out from the bottom of the shaft. I calculate that the hillside slopes through some three hundred feet to the river, and the shaft is to be two hundred. The pit will drain itself, I trust, sir.”

  Samuel was satisfied with the response, but he would have liked to possess a steam engine – so modern and rare as they were.

  He returned to Thornehills pleased with his progress and determined to discover a way to obtain the rights of way that he required.

  Long thought and discussion with his mother over the dinner table brought him to the certainty that the sole answer was to persuade the yeomen farmers to emigrate. The trackway was no more than a first step; there would be a canal as well, itself requiring even more land. Better to get rid of the small farmers and turn their land to more modern use – he was sure he would be able to think of something.

  “Liverpool must be the answer, Mother. I must go there and I speak to good Mr Hayes, our colleague in the shipping of glass bottles. I must tell him in any case that I am moving out of gin, and he will have to make a new contract for his supply of spirits.”

  “What will he do that is so useful to us, Samuel?”

  “Emigrant ships, Mother. He is into shipping, will be able to discover bottoms to carry our yeomanry across the broad Atlantic.”

  “True. Your father was involved in that very activity in the years before he died. He assisted indentured labourers and tradesmen to cross to the Virginias and Carolinas to start a new life there.”

  “Profitably?”

  “Most!”

  It was worth considering, Samuel thought.

  “I shall order a carriage tomorrow and go the day after, Mother. I must first have a word with Nick.”

  “Small farmers, Nick, who most likely will not allow rights of way across their lands for the trackway that is necessary to our project on the Churnet.”

  “Foolish, stick-in-the-muds! They must learn not to obtrude themselves into the paths of progress!”

  “Indeed so, Nick. Elegantly expressed. You have a way with words, Nick!”

  Nick preened – he did so admire his own command of the English language.

  “I will examine the route, Mr Heythorne. No more, yet. I will be seen and shall talk kindly with the proprietors. I do not doubt that many will become cooperative at the simple sight of me asking their names.”

  “I hoped it to be the case, Nick.”

  Nick admitted that he did have a reputation in the locality which could sometimes be misunderstood but more often brought the willing cooperation of all sorts and conditions of men.

  “In the end, sir, most accept that to fall in with my wishes is only to their own advantage. My aim is always to ameliorate the evils which beset mankind, often in the simplest of ways.”

  Samuel nodded and smiled and agreed and went away convinced that the old chap was growing madder every day.

  Mr Hayes was happy to discuss business with Mr Heythorne.

  “For the empty case bottles, Mr Heythorne, I can move all that you put my way. The purchase of gin to fill them is a matter of ease. I can find distillers in and around Liverpool with no difficulty. There are so many, in fact, that I can probably better the price I have been paying you, though not with the same assured quality. You might be wise to have sold off your own stills, Mr Heythorne. There is a feeling of unease in the spirits industry, I believe. The abuse of gin is a great shame upon the nation, and I suspect the government may be inclined to take steps. Certainly, the churches, especially these new evangelical ranters and Methodies and such, are much opposed to the Demon. They do tend to call it rum, mark you, but no doubt the principle extends to gin.”

  Samuel was very pleased to discover that he had been wise in his instinctive dislike of a reliance on gin. He was delighted with Mr Hayes’ next words.

  “Gin is no longer respectable, Mr Heythorne, and it is increasingly important that the man of business should show a proper front to the world. You are but a young man, Mr Heythorne, and thus have a reputation yet to be established. That makes it the more important you should be perceived as a man of uniform virtues. If I might make so bold as to give you advice, sir, you should take a wife to your bosom at an early age.”

  Samuel shook his head; that was not possible, he regretted.

  “There is a family compact, sir. The young daughter of a close friend who will not reach marriageable age for three more years. When she is of such age, then I shall enter into matrimony with great delight.”

  Mr Hayes showed only joy at such news.

  “I will not hear a word against a properly arranged contract, Mr Heythorne. Such shows a degree of prudence which I can only respect, and which does not surprise me in the least. I could wish I had such an arrangement in hand for my own girl, sir.”

  No doubt, Samuel thought, there was time.

  “Now, Mr Hayes, I have a problem which I suspect you may be able to solve for me. I am to open another coal mine, and perhaps an iron foundry, and would need to build a trackway from the side of the moors near Cheadle into Leek and then Stoke. In time, a canal will make good sense, but not yet. Both demand rights of way across the land of stubborn – or so we suspect – small yeoman farmers. I may well have to purchase the whole acreage of many of these yokels, on condition that I se
nd them across the seas to the new and broad lands of the Americas. For it to succeed, I must have access to ships and to some means of locating the land they are to settle upon.”

  Mr Hayes raised a hand.

  “Say no more, Mr Heythorne! I can supply all that you lack, sir. I can set them aboard my own ships and put them into the hands of my very own land agents in both the southern and the northern parts of the Thirteen Colonies. Depending on their desire, I can set them into a square mile of wheat lands in the arable areas, or onto a mile of rolling pastures in the low hills, or onto cotton lands of the South, or tobacco fields of Virginia or the Carolinas. The last two, of course, demand that they shall have the cash to purchase the indentured servants they need. You must but specify how many and where, sir, and I will put them on the high seas – for a very reasonable fee.”

  “You may well be a Godsend to me, Mr Hayes. Tell me, sir, just how much advance notice do you require?”

  They talked and adjourned to a chop house where they ate and discussed business the further, touching on the proliferation of canal projects, so desirable for the country as a whole.

  “Navigators, Mr Heythorne, they are a problem, being so few to be discovered. Men who can perform the hard daily labour required are few and far between.”

  Samuel remembered his absolute amaze at watching a gang puddling clay and agreed with absolute sincerity. Such men must be uncommon.

  “Can they not be discovered in Ireland, Mr Hayes? We are told the land is impoverished, that the people are many and the work is little to be found.”

  “Young men there all too often grow up with the poorest of diets, Mr Heythorne. You see them come to the docks here, pigeon-chested and with spindly, rickety legs from a childhood of deprivation. These are men who may wish to work but who lack the means of doing so – they are not robust. No, sir, the best men to become navigators on the canals come from the small farms, poor but not underfed and used to hard labour from earliest boyhood. Men who started as stone-pickers at the age of five or six years and who progressed then to clearing brush and chopping firewood and then to threshing with the flail every winter. These are the men who have the burden of muscle that the navigator must build upon.”

  Samuel listened in growing delight.

  “The navigator is well-paid, is he not, Mr Hayes?”

  “Few will see less than three pounds a week, and more is a commonplace. They are paid typically by piecework, as they call it, a sum for each furlong of canal completed. The harder they work, the more they earn and when one canal is complete, well, they can choose which of the several others they will go to next.”

  “Can you point to the navigator gangs, Mr Hayes? Were I to send you young men in need of employment, could you place them for me?”

  Mr Hayes could and would, and for no fee. If the men were of the right sort, the gangers of the navigators would pay him for each he could put their way.

  Samuel started his round of the yeomen of the Churnet valley sure in his own mind that he had the means to entice them into doing his bidding. He could provide work for their sons; the prospect of wealth in the Colonies was real; he had gold coins to hand. What more could they want?

  Almost all wanted to stay on the freehold lands they had inherited; to plant them as their fathers had; to live a life unchanged from the way they had grown up. Their ideal was an existence in which each year was identical to the previous, and to the next, they expected.

  “Too much of this change going about, Mr Heythorne. Don’t need it here. I do have heard of men wantonly planting they po-ta-toes on their acres, but you ain’t going to find that here, I’ll tell thee for free, sir! Nay, Mr Heythorne, what was good enough for my old dad, and his before him, be all that I require. I ain’t selling none of my acres nor renting none. As for work for my boys – they can stay at home as labourers to my eldest and he will provide they with a bed and their bread, what is all the younger boys have entitlement to. Nay, Mr Heythorne, ain’t nothing new happening here. Nothing at all!”

  The same litany, with slight variations in the phraseology from nine men out of ten. The sole exception was willing for his younger boys to go away to find work, but that was the limit of innovation for him.

  Samuel tried his best to change their minds.

  “Sell your acres to me and I would pay your passage across the seas and each grown man of yours could settle on a square mile of land for free. You have four sons, Farmer Perry, and yourself. Between you, that would make three thousand two hundred acres of prime land in your family – for every acre you possess now, there would be forty!”

  “Ah, Mr Heythorne, so they would be – but they wouldn’t be acres on the Churnet, would they now!”

  After three days, Samuel had spoken to all of the yeomen, possessors of acres he needed to cross. None would sell or contemplate a lease of any part of their lands. Three had ordered him off, threatened him with fowling pieces for daring to suggest that they might do so.

  After two days of thought, Samuel returned to Farmer Perry, the first he had spoken to.

  “If, Farmer Perry, I was to purchase ten of your acres down by the river as I wished, and instead of paying you cash, offered you thirty good acres next door to you, would you be interested? Twenty more acres of good land, you would end up with. You would possess one hundred acres rather than eighty.”

  That was an attractive prospect, Farmer Perry admitted.

  “It ain’t nohow possible, Mr Heythorne, because of I don’t want the moorland what is to my western boundary and north of me, that being thin-soiled and acid and no use to man nor beast. South is the river what you wants and due east is Farmer Young’s land, what is his and can’t nohow be mine.”

  “If I can persuade him to sell up, then it will be my land, to do with as I wish, Farmer Perry.”

  “Ah, but you won’t persuade ‘im, cross-grained old bugger that he be! Only got fifty acres, ain’t he, and can’t be losing none of that at all.”

  Farmer Young had been one of those with a fowling piece to hand.

  “He is widowed, is he not, Farmer Perry?”

  “So ‘e is, poor bugger! The goodwife caught one of them growths in her belly and died on him, like women do sometimes, and left him with two sons not of age and no girls in the house to look after them. Bloody awkward for him, farming without a woman. Dunno what she were thinking of, dying so young as she did. She were a good worker, as well, and left them all to pieces, so she did!”

  Samuel gathered that she had really been very selfish to die so inconsiderately.

  “Was he to die, the land must fall to his eldest son, I must imagine.”

  “Young Josh be no more than sixteen years, Mr Heythorne. Don’t know what he could do with the land.”

  Samuel thought he perhaps had the basis for a chat with Nick but then it occurred to him that he was a man grown now – he should not be leaning upon Nick, relying on the goodness of an older man to solve his problems. One of these days, Nick would die, or retire to sit by the fire, and then he would be on his own, needing to solve his own problems.

  It was time to become self-reliant, to shoulder his own burdens.

  Dinner that evening was a quiet meal as Samuel tried to formulate a course of action for the immediate future. The yeomen of the Churnet needed an example, a shock to jolt them out of their comfortable, stick-in-the-mud ways. It seemed increasingly clear that Farmer Young must provide that sad exemplar.

  ‘Besides, the bugger threatened to turn a gun on me. On me! On Samuel Heythorne. No man does that with impunity!’

  That reminded him of the motto of the Stewarts, which he was now inclined to adopt as his own.

  “‘Nemo me impune lacessit’, a fine watchword. Do you not think so, Mother? None shall provoke me with impunity – and so they will discover before too many days have passed.”

  “Possibly so, Samuel, but do not be rash, my son.”

  “I shall not, Mother, but those who will not listen to words
of reason will be given cause to think again.”

  “Quite right, too. Josephine tells me she has mastered one of Herr Bach’s violin pieces and would wish to play it to us soon.”

  Samuel was instantly diverted from his exasperation, was happy to agree to sit down with them next afternoon.

  “Which Mr Bach is this by, Josephine?”

  “The son who lives in London, Samuel. There are four sons, I discover. Three in the Germanies and one who has settled in London, playing at the Gardens for entertainment as well as at the Opera House. He is a composer of some degree of fame now.”

  They listened for twenty minutes, Samuel with greater pleasure in the player than in her music, but both taking enjoyment from the relaxation.

  “Thank you, Josephine. I doubt I have ever enjoyed playing so much.”

  She blushed brightest scarlet at his praise. Josie smiled her satisfaction.

  It occurred to Samuel once again that Josephine would make any man a fine young wife and he must take some pains to ensure that the fortunate man was himself. He wondered how he might achieve the aim. He had learned many things at Miss Smithers’ knee, but the art of courtship was not one of them. Perhaps his mother could give some advice – she seemed to know most things.

  “I do not think you need worry, my son. Continue to be kind, to praise her, to make gifts whenever you go to town – as you have been doing. She knows your affection for her and certainly returns it. You do not need to follow the example of the farmers - you need not wait until you are forty years of age before taking a wife. When she is of a reasonable age, ask her for her hand and then wed her when it is convenient to the business. I know that Nick could ask for nothing more than she should wed the son of Sam Heythorne and he has a pretty little sum to leave in his Will as well as the pottery in town. An excellent wife in so many ways!”

  Much heartened by this, Samuel returned to the consideration of Farmer Young and his obstinate ways.