by Graham Mort
– Be careful on that thing.
Gaspard was pumping his hand.
– Yes, be careful.
She said it wistfully, as Gaspard turned into the house, her voice clotted.
André started the bike as they watched from the doorway. Man and wife. He thought of the wine in the fermenting vats, its smell of fruit and carbon dioxide, its subtle chemical changes. André made the sign of a telephone with his gauntlet.
– I’ll call.
– Relax. Don’t worry. You’ve earned a rest.
Gaspard had his arm around Ghislaine’s shoulder as he pulled away. She gave an apologetic little wave and he gunned the bike.
He rode for twenty minutes in a daze of tiredness, sunlight strobing through poplars. It felt good to have the bike under him, to be alive, to have the future. Sun struck against his visor burnishing its tiny scratches. The road ran down steeply to the river, coiling into a series of bends. In half an hour he’d be on the motorway. In three hours he’d be having a beer with his father and uncles, discussing the harvest, talking about football, the new wine. André changed down, feeling the heat from the cylinders against his shins. A lorry laden with grapes was coming up the hill, two young women seated up behind the cab, the breeze fluttering their tee shirts against their breasts. He changed down again, pressing the brake lever. The handbrake felt soft, then it was pulling against nothing. The bike kept going. Too fast. He tested the brake again and looked down. A spray of fluid shone across his right boot. He pressed the footbrake hard and the back wheel slewed on the slick, throwing him into the path of the lorry. A girl’s hand went up to her mouth as the bike bucked and he hit the road.
André fell into the taste of berries breaking against his tongue. There was the scent of Ghislaine on his jacket, the heat of her body, her knees against his thighs, the swart stubble under her arms. Then the woods at dusk: blue shadows cooling like molten iron poured between the trees, a silence that howled and tore at them. He remembered long notes drawn from a cello, an echoing subway, footsteps, a man’s black hair swooping over his face.
When he rolled into the road, gravel scarred his visor, blinding him. The bike slid away, a spray of sparks into the long screech of the lorry’s brakes. He knew the meaning of terroir. It was the land and everything that had happened to it. Present, past and future. Everything that had and could happen. Everything that might come of the land, its fruits, the labour of human beings on it, their generations. Then there was no more to remember or to do or say. His mouth was numbed. No pain, but something beyond. The bike shimmered in petrol vapour, evaporating. There were footsteps and voices fading towards him. A blur of wild flowers on the verge. Convolvulus, pale as the smocks of choirboys. And there was life bursting in his mouth, its brief aftertaste. Terroir.
LEVERETS
Ellen ducked into the church porch, out of the rain. There was a dead starling on the bench, its wings folded, its plumage dulled. It looked like a knight with folded arms carved in stone, a sepulchre. She remembered starlings in autumn, how they gathered over the shorn meadows in their thousands, darkening the sky and thrumming like war. Then landing to pick over stalks of barley so the fields looked as if soot had fallen over them from the sullen chimneys of the village.
The headstones in the churchyard glistened with rain. Her mother and brother were buried under green humps at the east wall. Paupers’ graves. Her mother had died of consumption and her brother, Ben – a beautiful boy with brown curls and freckled skin – of next to nothing. A rash that had started under one ear, spread to his throat and become a fever. He’d burned under her hands as she bathed his face and as her mother coughed her own life away in front of a damp fire in the room below. The doctor had stood in the doorway shaking his head, refusing the shillings she’d raised from the miner’s fund her father had paid into. Try to keep them warm. That was all he’d said, as if he knew it was hopeless.
That’s how they were taken, their kind. Killed by next to nothing. Flux, consumption, syphilis, scarlet fever, measles, influenza, typhus, mad dogs and hunger. And tetanus. Their uncle, Tom, had scratched his wrist baling hay for Terry Hoad and it had gone bad ways. A week later he was dead. He’d gone rigid from the arms downward, staring at the bare boards of the bedroom ceiling in the infirmary where they’d taken him in case it was catching. There were so many ways to die and so little ground to house the dead. She turned the stiff bird with her finger, feeling the child in her belly, its pressure against her skirt band.
The cottage stood at an angle to the churchyard where she waited, separated by a line of flagstones and an iron fence. A few crocus shoots were pushing through. A billy goat was tethered to a stake, its rank stink mingling with sulphurous rain and the wet wool of her shawl. The goat’s eyes were pale yellow, like brimming chamber pots. Its horns curled outwards, its balls dangled from matted wool. Ellen made a run to her front door, squeezing through the stone stile to shoulder the swollen timber inwards. A grey spiral of smoke twisted up from the fire. She took the loaf from under her shawl and put it on the table, throwing some sticks from a broken skip onto the coals.
The cottage was one-up, one-down, just like any other in the village. It was in a row of eight and backed onto a yard with a line of earth privies, a midden, and an iron pump. In fine weather you could hang your washing there. In wet weather whole families took to their beds to keep warm. If the rain persisted, which it usually did, the drains backed up and the yard flooded. In summer, heat brought the same persistent stench. She’d seen the vicar’s teenage daughters cover their faces as they went by, ducking their heads in a kind of furtive distaste whilst trying not to. No doubt that was their penance for the day, how they learned humility.
Ellen went to the coalhole out back, cracked a cob of coal with the hammer and tumbled it into the bucket. The coal broke open easily, showing a glossy face with the faint imprint of a fern. Someone explained that to her once, her father probably, but she’d forgotten how the fern got there. She clumped into the house, pushed the door to and set about re-making the fire. Beyond the window the village was crouched in mist, smoke coiling from chimneys, rooftops steaming as their heat escaped. A brewery dray came up the hill to the King’s Head, its two shire horses stepping high, the driver hunched under his oilskin cape.
Ellen re-built the fire, pushing the sticks into the glow of the inner coals. She waited, watching the wood smoulder. She leaned in to blow, feeling her belly tighten. A few sparks crackled from the wood, then smoke, then flames licking, caressing, consuming. She let it catch then stirred the heap of flame until the coal sputtered, sending out plumes of smoke that caught fire like tiny volcanoes. They’d learned that at Sunday school, how the earth was hot at the core and how molten rock could burst out through a crack as if hell had broken free. She could read and write and do her sums. Not much more. And not that it had helped. But the Bethel lot were good for something. They stuck together and they liked to get ahead.
When her father was transported – seven years under the Night Poaching Act – the Seddons became disreputable. Though even some chapel folk were glad of the rabbits and pheasants her father brought by when the mine owners had laid them off. They made them shareowners in the mines so that each man was entitled to a part of the profits. But when the lode ran out and they were drilling bare rock, there was nothing for them. Bloody simpletons, her father called them. A share of nowt is nowt. He couldn’t read and write, but he knew that much. He’d been gone four years.
She’d worked since she was twelve years old. Scullery maid, cheese presser, drudge on a local farm. The poorer your employer the harder they rode you. She was nineteen now and on the Parish. She’d given away the only thing she had that was worth anything. Call it virtue. Call it love. Some did. Michael had liked her though. She knew that. He’d have wanted the child. She knew that too, or thought she did. She wasn’t stupid. Men were men in the end. They were made a certain way and it couldn’t be helped.
Ellen sat in
her father’s chair, kicking off her clogs, watching water pool on the flagstones and darken them. In winter they gave you wicked chilblains. She placed her hands flat on her stomach, watching the fire wax into flame, feeling the child. She was four months pregnant. For the first three she’d been sick as a pup every morning, emptying her guts into the midden under the hard eyes of her neighbours. They’d know why, where, when and with whom. She was a dirty little slut to the chapel-going Methodists and teetotallers. She didn’t care. She’d been kissed and fondled by Michael Simpson out back in the pub yard with drunken miners stumbling past and pissing up the wall. And after three gins and a plate of hot peas, she loved it. Loved his beery kisses, the tickle of his beard, the warm feeling of him inside her. Fingers at first, their tips rough from work, working their way towards her. Then they found more private places to meet and he’d grown bolder. He liked her as well as wanted her, she knew that. He died under a ton of rock in Swinton Level. Never uttered a word, just sputtered blood and broken teeth and gave up the ghost. The brass band turned out for his funeral and the mine bosses paid for a barrel of beer. Another life bought cheaply. Tha’ll do me, Ellen, was all he’d said, after that first time, kissing her nipples and closing up her blouse. Tha’ll do me.
When they took her father away to Richmond assizes they searched the house from top to bottom, but they hadn’t found his gun. He’d made a special hiding place for it under the roof beams in the bedroom so that it was pushed between the plastered lath and the slates. They kept him in the stables at the Hall, word spreading that he’d been caught red-handed. She’d fetched him some food and spare clothing. He winked at her, putting a finger to the side of his nose as they took him away chained to a farm cart, expecting a few days in jail. He’d heard of the new game laws but taken little notice. Nay, he’d said, they’ll never thank us for tekkin’ what’s there’s. Though what’s theirs is ours by rights. They’d expected him back within the month but he never came. It was Billy Crapper the carter who brought the news. Transported. Van Diemen’s land, he reckoned, though he wasn’t sure where that was.
Her father had taught her how to catch pheasants with raisins stuck through with a bristle to choke them, how to peg a wire snare, get rabbits with a purse net and ferret, and how to shoot his little rifle. They’d caught him snaring hares on the squire’s land this time and they’d fought viciously in the dark. It was winner take all. He laid out two of the under keepers with his fists, but the head keeper produced a lantern and a pistol and put it to him plainly. You come quietly now, Seddon. Think of your children. You’ll take no more game if I send you to hell, and that’s where you belong, you thieving gypsy bastard. Her father cursed him as a craven arse-licker, but had gone quietly in the end. Billy heard all this from a weaver who’d shared a cell with her father for a few days before being released. He spent his first day of freedom playing his fiddle for the soldiers and whores who plagued Richmond town and getting shit-faced drunk. Billy got the whole story for the price of a pint. Her father was no gypsy, but he’d learned their ways. Night skills, a gentle stealth.
A woman stooped into a plaid shawl went past the window. Susan Darrent, toothless, sick with age and consumption. She’d not last the winter. After days of rain the village was sodden and dark-stoned. Hillsides across the valley were streaked with white water where streams had boiled to the surface. Ellen went to the window nudging the fire with her clog as she went. There was hardly any coal left. She stood looking out, hands across her belly, feeling the warmth of the child inside her, remembering Michael’s body heat, the little sigh as he came into her and then released himself. She hadn’t known what was happening at first. But after that she enjoyed the power she had over him, the way a grown man would set his pleading eyes on her, bring her food and drink. He never forced her. He was never rough like the other men, not Michael. He had his eye on her ever since she took up as a maid at the King’s Head and began stopping by after work. As soon as the landlord found out she was pregnant he felt her belly, gave her a sovereign, grinned wisely and sent her home. Sour breath, white bristles, black teeth. She’d never seen so much money. He couldn’t have her moping around the place with a full belly when there were guests to tend to.
Earlier that summer they got away from the village, racing each other down the lanes together to make love in the hayfields amongst the meadowsweet and clover where the river made a loop of silver against the land. That’s how she got pregnant. Lying down to take him instead of being had against a wall. Or maybe because she told Michael she loved him. He’d not known what to say. Not being good with words. That last time she lay down for him a moth had blundered against her breast. When she brushed it away it left a faint powder on her skin. She ran her hands over his arms, marked with scars, where the hairs grew thick and blond and he watched her with a kind of wonder. As if he’d never been touched like that. When they made love it was tender and slow. He let his lips graze against her neck and ear lobes as he came deeper in. The lids sagged over his green eyes and the lock of straw-coloured hair flopped over his face. Three days later he was dead. It’d crushed her as sure as if she’d been felled by that same landslide of stone and darkness. Then her monthlies had stopped and the sickness began as if sin had curdled in her. Except she never believed that. How could love be sin when they lived under the love of God?
Her father had shown her how to take the gun apart and clean it. It was a small-bore rifle, specially made so that the barrel unscrewed and could be easily hidden. Seddon got it from a gun-maker in Knaresborough. He showed her how to clean the barrel with the pull-through, how to oil the hammer and trigger, then how to load it, tamping down the powder and ball with wadding and priming the pan. A time or two he took her up in the moor for target practice. She was a good shot, he said. She loved the feeling of the rifle in her hands, the way it was warm from her father’s hands, the way it cracked and jumped against her shoulder and a bottle flew into pieces. They lay next to each other in the heather in his smell of sweat and gunpowder and oil. Her father had been a soldier – the King’s bloody fool – then mended shoes for a living, a trade he’d learned in the army, then travelled the country from north to south. He’d been a sailor for one God-forgotten voyage. Then he learned his real trade – the taking of hares that is – and here he’d wink and put a finger to his nose – from gypsies in Kent when the hop-picking season was on. They taught him to walk on stilts to get the highest flowers. They showed him the art of mole trapping, and that earned him extra cash when the farmers were plagued. And it gave him a chance to spot where game was being raised. What he brought home from the woods and estates around the village had kept them from hunger – though not from harm.
A few times he took her out with him. Usually when the moon was full and there was a high wind that tore the hems of clouds and drew them over its glare. The more noise weather made, the better. One night they climbed up to Reys plantation and went a few yards in to wait. The trees were mainly oak and beech with some elm and hazel. Her father taught her their names by showing her the shapes of their leaves. A ride was cut through the trees, strewn with straw. There were some feeders made from half-sawn barrels. It was here that the keepers put down grain for the pheasants to feed. They came out in the late afternoon as the light was fading, then roosted in the trees. The cock pheasants gave out a brazen clucking cry if disturbed, leaving their perches to crash through the branches. She loved their princely colours, like the pictures of Mughal emperors she’d once spied in a book at the Manse when she’d been helping to keep house for the vicar. It was hard to imagine they could belong here in the grey Yorkshire dales when their colours were so rich. Brought from beyond, her father reckoned, and regarded more than starving women or children. They were living brooches for the land – and as stupid as the lords were rich.
He took them with a loop of snare wire attached to a stick, guiding the noose over the bird’s head as they rooted for the grain he’d dropped. Then a sharp yank and the bi
rd was choking, all feathers and commotion. You had to snap their necks quickly then. He taught her to kill quickly and mercifully; never to be greedy, to take only what you could carry, to carry only what you could eat or sell or give away. How to wear a cap and beard or blacking to take the glare off your face, to wear boots not clogs, to work alone. Long netting in gangs was a fool’s game for you could trust no one. The other man will always let you down in the end. He never poached for profit. Hares he killed on the ploughed land, or after hay time, catching them silhouetted against the sky and bringing them down with a single shot. He said the moon mesmerised them, that the man in the moon was really a hare if you looked properly. That’s why they got drunk on moonlight, standing up on their hind legs to give him a clear shot through the heart.
Her father told her stories about his one time at sea. How he got drunk in a quayside pub in Bristol and got tricked onto a slave ship that was trading beyond the law. Not that he knew. They’d taken a hold full of brass pots and pans to the Gold Coast in Africa, then on to El Mina fort where pirogues rode the breakers all around them, and the natives cast out nets, their boats rising and falling, appearing and disappearing in the high seas. There, they took on a cargo of slaves. Her father described how a line of negroes covered in sores from their chains stumbled down the ramp, dazzled by the sun after days in a dungeon. They’d never seen the ocean or a great ship before. Next minute they were being roughly doused in the sea, then taken up and chained in the hold. He told her how he’d lived a life of shame to see them suffer in their own filth and blood, men and woman alike. Every day started with dropping the dead overboard. They lost seven sailors and twenty-two negroes on that trip.
