Cold Cruel Winter
( Richard Nottingham - 2 )
Chris Nickson
Chris Nickson
Cold Cruel Winter
Prologue
Jesus, he thought, he’d believed them when they called this a road. It was no more than a track winding up the side of the valley to the rock edge above, barely wide enough for a cart, the ruts frozen and slippery as man’s sin. His boots, thin enough already after the walk from Liverpool, could feel every hard, awkward step, and his breath plumed abruptly around his mouth. With a short sigh he drew the coat around himself, even though it wouldn’t keep him any warmer in this raw winter cold, and hitched the pack high on his back.
In every manner it was a long way from the Indies. There the heat had prickled his skin every day and his sleeves had been sodden from wiping the sweat out of his eyes. For a moment he almost longed for that again. But then the ache from the scars on his back stopped his mind from playing him false. That was the true memory of those years, along with the screams of men in the wild delirium of yellow fever before they died. Freeborn, convict, soldier or slave, few came back from the Indies.
He paused, looking back down at Hathersage, watching the smoke from a few chimneys rising dark and skimming across the air. A mile or two further, he’d been told, and he’d find the marker for the Sheffield road. Less than a week and he’d be back in Leeds, if he didn’t freeze his bollocks off on this God-forsaken moor first.
But he knew that wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen, he wouldn’t allow it. He had business in the city, and he’d come too far and staked too much not to manage the last few miles. His feet trudged on, calves burning as he kept climbing the hill, sliding sometimes on the ice. Frigid slurries of wind, a few carrying flecks of snow that were as cold as a whore’s heart, battered against his face. Six months before, his skin had been burned dark by the sun. Now some of that colour was gone, washed away first by the long sea journey, then another two weeks of Shanks’s mare that had brought him here as winter still held the land tight into February, and drifts rose high against the dry stone walls. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a puddle as he left the village, hair grey and lank under a cap, face pinched thin, his body hunched and spindle legs in patched breeches and torn hose. An ugly sight, he conceded wryly, but none would recognize him and his situation would improve.
At least he had a small purse in his pocket now, courtesy of a traveller over Winnats Pass who’d not be found until spring, and by then the animals would have picked him clean. No one would know who he was or that a slash across the throat had killed him. But it served the bugger right for befriending a stranger on the road.
So he’d afforded an inn in Hathersage last night, dozing on a bench at the George and letting the warm embers of the fire dry his boots and ease through to his bones. For the first time since setting out he’d felt some peace in his rest. At daybreak, with a heel of bread and a mug of small beer in his belly, he’d set out. The journey would take him close to the village where he’d been a boy, but he was damned if he’d ever go back there.
Another few days and his life could begin again. After eight years, life would begin again.
One
The road felt hard as iron, and Richard Nottingham guided the horse carefully, avoiding patches of ice that glittered softly in a weak afternoon sun. He hated riding at the best of times, but in the bleak days of winter every mile seemed gruelling. At least he was almost home; the welcoming smoke from the chimneys of Leeds rose tantalisingly just beyond the horizon. He’d be back in his house at the dying of the day, aching and exhausted.
He’d ridden to York yesterday and given his evidence at the Assizes this morning, before staying to joylessly hear the verdict of murder on a man who’d killed his wife and children rather than watch them starve. As Constable of the City of Leeds he’d made the journey many times over the years, and sat and spoken in the grand courtroom at the castle, dressed in his good periwig and best coat. Often he’d enjoyed the trips; he stayed at the Olde Starre off Stonegate, where they said the cries of men treated there for injuries during the Civil War could still be heard at night. Not that he’d ever heard them in the evenings of conversation and drinking with other travellers.
This time, though, he simply wanted to be by his own hearth, to try to shore up the world that had collapsed around him four weeks before.
It had begun early in December, when gales swept viciously from the north to batter the city, followed by the endless snow and brutal cold that stayed, day after day, week after week, until they seemed like facts of life.
At first it had been the old and the weak who died, many frozen in their unheated cellars, others, always teetering on the edge of life, fading quickly from hunger. Throughout Advent, then Christmas, the lists of the dead rose. By the middle of January 1732, with ice still thick on the streets, death was everywhere, a plague made of winter. The ground was too hard for burials, and corpses were lodged in every cool place, a village of bodies lurking in the darkness as the toll rose higher.
No one was immune. Every family, it seemed, fell prey to the unrelenting weather, although the rich, insulated by thick walls, warmth, and money, suffered less than most as they always had. And always would, he thought grimly.
Then in early February, just as the days grew longer and people began to raise their hearts and hope towards spring, Nottingham’s older daughter, Rose, barely twenty and married just the autumn before, began to cough and run a fever.
Her husband spent every possible hour at her bedside. Her mother nursed her with the old medicines, and the Constable rousted the apothecary away from the homes of the wealthy to tend to her, but try as they might, there was no heat or medicine that could touch the girl’s body or soul. All they could do was watch helplessly, hopelessly, and pray as the flesh slipped quickly from her bones. She vomited up the broth they fed her, and her pains grew stronger and her breathing shallower until the end almost seemed like a release. All it took was a single, shocking week to turn her from a healthy young wife into a wraith.
Nottingham used his position to have her buried when the earth thawed briefly at the end of month, the service conducted by a curate while the vicar stayed close to his roaring hearth. Just a day after he’d thrown a sod on the coffin and stayed to see the earth mounded on the girl whose childish glee still rattled in his head, the freeze returned. Since the funeral the Constable had barely slept. Even in the bare, brief hours he managed, the dreams that came pulled at his heart like a chain of beggars.
At home, he and Mary, his wife, moved as if there was a fog between them that neither could penetrate. They still talked about the everyday things, but the topic of Rose lay off to the side, pushed away behind a fence, never mentioned but always on the edge of view. They lay in bed side by side, and he knew full well that hours would pass before her breathing subsided into the uneven rhythms of a grieving sleep. Sometimes his fingers would start to reach across the sheet for her hand, but he always stopped short of touching her skin. What could either of them say that would help? In this world, simply living past childhood was an achievement. If God had robbed them of their joy, it was nothing more than He’d done to thousands of others. Every toll of the corpses he’d filled out since December bore testament to that.
Emily, their younger daughter — their only daughter now — had lost her wilful ways with her sister’s death. She’d become eerily quiet and obedient, and even more withdrawn, as if Rose’s passing had also killed a spark in her. Her eyes, once so bold and lively, had become dull and lost. Where she’d loved to read, losing herself for hours in a book, now she’d close a volume after a few minutes and gaze emptily. At what he could only guess.
/> He crested the hill. Leeds lay spread before him, the buildings worming their way up from the river. In the past he’d always loved this sight, his home, his love. Now it simply made him feel that his life had been too long.
As dusk started to fall, John Sedgwick was close to finishing his afternoon rounds, checking on the men the Constable employed. The last two days had been quiet, with little more than the usual pitiful cases of drunkenness and injury. For the first time in months, no one had died. Tall and ungainly, he loped down Briggate towards Leeds Bridge with his long stride.
He loved being the Constable’s deputy, and even after three years he could barely believe a post with such responsibility was his. The hours were long, the pay poor and the job was rough and dangerous, but what in this life was any better? At least the work was steady; crime would never go away.
There’d been precious little warmth to the sun that had appeared during the day, but it had still felt good on his face after the murderous grip of winter. The worst since 1684, they called it, back when the Aire had frozen over and they’d held a winter fair on the ice. Men might have recalled the good fun of that time, but how many remembered the suffering that must have gone along with it?
Soon he’d be finished and back in his room. Lizzie would have stoked the fire, James would be playing at the table with the horse and figures Sedgwick had painstakingly carved for him. Sedgwick’s wife Annie had vanished with a soldier, no word behind her, and no desire for their son. He’d have been lost without Lizzie, a prostitute he’d tumbled a few times in the past. They’d enjoyed each other’s company, and the flirtation that contained something more. With Annie gone, James needed a mother, and Lizzie needed. . truth to tell, he still didn’t understand exactly what she needed, but she seemed content and loving enough, away from the trade of her past, better to him than his wife had ever been. They might have been a family sewn together from discarded scraps and shreds, but they were a family nonetheless.
He thought about the Constable, who’d looked so lost since his daughter’s death, like a man walking aimlessly in a landscape he no longer recognised. His eyes were sunken, the skin under them as dark as if someone had smudged coal on his skin. Before, he’d seemed young, possessed of more energy than Sedgwick himself. Now it was as if he’d crumpled into himself, a man suddenly far older than his years.
The deputy shook his head and walked on, gazing around and taking in scenes almost without thinking. What was Bob Wright doing talking to Andrew Wakefield? They noticed his glance and turned away self-consciously. He smiled slyly to himself, and stopped at the bridge, with its worn cobbles and wide parapets. They’d held the cloth market here once, he’d been told, although it was long before his time. It must have been hell for the carters and travellers trying to enter the city from the south.
These days white cloth was sold in the White Cloth Hall and only the coloured cloth market was held outside, trestles set up on the lower part of Briggate twice a week, with business lasting just over an hour and conducted in the sedate whispers that passed for silence. It was all the lifeblood of Leeds. The city was wool, purchasing cloth from the weavers and exporting it all over Europe and to the Americas, places that existed to Sedgwick as nothing more than obscure names. Wool made the merchants and the Corporation rich. Not that men like him would ever see anything of the money; they kept that close to their purses. But he was happy enough. And his lad would do better than he had, he’d make certain of that.
There was one final area to walk: the path beside the river by the tenting fields, where cloth was pegged out to stretch, then along by New Mill to Mill Garth and through to Boar Lane, past Holy Trinity Church and back to the jail. And finally home.
He loved this short stretch of his rounds, no more than a few hundred yards from the city but as peaceful as the country. Even the occasional floating corpse in the river couldn’t spoil it for him.
He’d almost reached the track at New Mill when he noticed something from the corner of his eye: a low, pale shape that didn’t look quite right among the trees. Stopping, he cocked his head and squinted for a better look. It was probably nothing, but he’d better check. It was what he was paid to do.
The hard, frozen grass sawed against his threadbare stockings as he moved through the undergrowth. But it wasn’t until he was three yards away that he was able to make everything out fully.
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No.’
It was a man, lying on his back, eyes blank and wide, staring endlessly into the face of death. One arm was thrown carelessly across his breast, the other outstretched as if reaching for something. The strangest thing was that he was bare-chested. The deep red cut across his neck showed how he’d died.
‘No,’ Sedgwick said again. He sighed. He wasn’t going to be home any time soon.
By the time the coroner arrived, fetched by a boy clutching a coin hot in his hands, full darkness was close. A prissy, fussy man, Edward Brogden was muffled warm against the weather in a heavy new coat of good wool and a tricorn hat, a scarf gathered at his throat.
The deputy already had two men waiting to take the corpse to the jail, crouched with their backs against a tree, trying to stay warm as the temperature started to fall. The coroner gave the body a cursory look, bending to examine the sliced neck.
‘He wasn’t killed here,’ Sedgwick said.
Brogden raised an eyebrow quizzically. He didn’t really care; his only job was to pronounce death.
‘No blood around the body,’ the deputy explained. ‘With his throat slashed he’d have lost a lot of it. And he’s cold as the tomb.’
‘Turn him over,’ the coroner said without comment.
Sedgwick heaved the corpse on to its stomach, then stood quickly, horrified, taking an involuntary step backwards as the bile rose swiftly in his throat. He’d seen a lot in his life, much of it bad, but never anything like this. Someone had carefully, lovingly, taken all the skin off the man’s back, leaving a raw, ugly pinkness that barely looked human. Unable to break his stare, he heard the coroner turn and vomit on the grass.
‘Take him away,’ Brogden ordered huskily, his voice shaking.
Sedgwick followed the men as they carried the body on an old door, the flesh covered by a ragged, foul-smelling blanket. In the jail near the corner of Briggate and Kirkgate, nestled next to the White Swan Inn, they laid the corpse in the cold, far cell the city used as a mortuary. Sedgwick closed the door softly and shook his head. What kind of man could think to do something like that?
When Nottingham walked into the jail an hour later, Sedgwick was sitting at the desk, gazing into the flickering fire that burned low in the grate.
The Constable was cold, he ached, he was tired, and his soul was weary. After giving the horse back to the ostler on Swinegate he’d stopped at the jail out of habit and a sense of duty.
‘What are you doing still here, John?’ he asked.
Sedgwick’s head jerked up as if someone had pulled it by the hair. ‘Sorry, boss.’
‘Everything quiet?’
‘No,’ Sedgwick answered gravely. ‘Not at all.’
‘Why? What happened?’ Nottingham’s voice was urgent and inquiring.
The deputy rose slowly and walked back towards the cells.
‘You’d better take a look at this.’
Their breath frosted the air. Sedgwick struck a flint and lit a candle, pushing the gloom far back into the corners. He lifted the edge of the blanket to show the face and neck.
‘Found him in some trees down near the river late this afternoon. If it hadn’t been so bad out, someone would probably have seen him earlier.’
Nottingham leaned in for a closer look as the deputy continued.
‘There was hardly any blood where I found him. He was completely cold, he’d been dead a while.’
‘You know who that is, John?’ the Constable asked after a moment.
Sedgwick shook his head. Whenever the boss asked a question like that, it meant the p
erson was important.
‘Samuel Graves,’ Nottingham told him stonily. The deputy didn’t know the name. ‘A merchant, or he used to be, at any rate. Retired now.’ He looked knowingly at Sedgwick. ‘A lot of powerful friends on the Corporation.’
‘Look at his back, boss,’ the deputy said in a dark tone. ‘I’ll warn you, it’s bad.’
The Constable raised the shoulder and rolled the corpse on to its side.
‘Jesus.’ He spat the word out, wondering at the skinning for a moment, leaving the corpse on its side.
‘Whoever did it knew exactly what he was doing,’ Sedgwick pointed out. ‘It’s the whole of his back.’
Nottingham’s mind was racing. ‘Have you started searching?’ he asked.
As soon as the news reached him, the Mayor would demand action on this. This was more than murder; it was a desecration of one of the city’s respected citizens. He glanced at the man’s back again, the skin neatly and precisely cut away. Something like this made no sense at all.
‘It was too dark, boss. I’ll get them organized in the morning. His pockets were empty.’
The Constable nodded. He felt exhausted, drained.
‘You go on home, John. I’ll look after things for now. I’ll go and tell Mrs Graves.’
‘What are you going to say?’
Nottingham rubbed his eyes. What could anyone say? God knew he’d seen enough murders in his time, but nothing that came close to this. Why, he wondered. Why would one man do this to another? What kind of hatred could be in him?
‘I won’t say too much,’ he replied with a grim smile. ‘I think we’d better keep very quiet about the details here, don’t you?’
Two
He wrote a note to the Mayor, a brief description, knowing full well it would bring a peremptory summons in the morning. Then he gathered his greatcoat around his exhausted body, ready for the cold.
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