Gamekeeper's Gallows

by John Buxton Hilton

  Blizzard or no blizzard, the Turks did a vigorous night’s work. Amongst other activities, they built a cairn on the spot where their compatriot had last looked on the waning moon. It was a lasting monument, to become a landmark on the line between Harpur Hill and Ladmanlow. Moreover, despite the inclemency of the night, three other people made the uninviting journey up to Pedlar’s Stump: the landlord, the ostler and the kitchen-maid, all of whom were found with their backs against the cairn, their heads almost severed frontally from their throats. A cordon had been drawn round them: a circle of whip-cord stretched round stakes driven into the snow, from which hung an odd assembly of small creatures: rats, stoats, weasels and an unnaturally frozen crow; a signal such as lyrically minded gamekeepers display as a warning to other vermin.

  All of which had been assiduously recorded by Sergeant Thomas Brunt in his note-book, as nearly as he could get them down in the words of the Chief Constable himself. Brunt’s lumpy features had betrayed no reaction whatsoever during the telling of the tale.

  See Rescue from the Rose, Macmillan 1976.

  Back to Text

  Readers wishing for further details of the extraordinary working of this line are referred to A. Rimmer: The Cromford and High Peak Railway. Locomotion Papers No. 10. The Oakwood Press.

  Back to Text

  Chapter Two

  Brunt was taken off balance before he had gone many more yards along the track. Wishing to change his bag from his right hand to his left, he hopped across the rails so that it was now his left foot that took the sleeper ends and his right foot the grassy bank. And it was at that moment that he heard the clank of metal behind him, the squealing of brake-shoes on iron wheels and the sudden escape of built-up steam from protesting cylinder-cocks. A light engine had come up on him and screamed metallically to a halt with its front buffers less than six feet behind him. Every creaking, oil-dripping joint, every sweating tube and hissing pipe seemed to unite in indignation. And from the driver’s cab there leaned a man in blue overalls whose ferocious eye-brows wandered, jutted forth, threatened, spread this way and that at alarming angles, asked furious questions and rejected in advance any answer that they might receive. Brunt carried his bag round to the flank of the engine and looked meekly up at this character, the eye-brows now splayed in incredulousness at the effrontery of a direct approach. He was a burly man, in his early fifties, with close-cropped hair and a streak of oil across his forehead.

  ‘Can you give me a lift into Piper’s Fold?’

  ‘Not into Piper’s Fold, I can’t, because the line doesn’t bloody go there. But I can put you down at the bloody Halt.’

  He pushed open his little metal door and Brunt swung himself up the steps on to the foot-plate, struggling awkwardly with his suitcase. The driver stretched down a hand under his shoulder-blade and lifted him into the cab. Brunt found himself in an atmosphere of heavy oil, of acrid coal-dust and metal polish on gleaming brass handles, of intolerable heat attacking him through the cracks in the badly fitting fire-box doors. The driver pushed up the regulator handle and they jerked into motion with an ear-splitting roar from the smoke-stack. The fireman threw open the fire-doors and evened out the roaring coals with a flat rake: an even bigger man than the driver, though rotund rather than brawny, with an enormous head that seemed too massive for his shoulders.

  There was not really enough room on the footplate for three men. Brunt found it hard to place himself so as not to be in the way of elbows, legs, flailing boots and shovel-handles. It was impossible to move because of the miscellany with which the cab was packed. Behind him, leaving only a narrow gap through which coal could be got from the tender, was a stack of wooden crates, one of which contained a pair of ferrets. Jammed tightly between two of the boxes were a twelve-bore sporting gun and the sections of a greenheart pike rod. Perhaps this was why the Fly sometimes reached the summit of one of its notorious Inclines to find its expected engine temporarily engaged elsewhere. Even entertainment of the passengers seemed possible, for on a hook on one of the crates, between a mole-trap and a brass telescope, hung a concertina.

  The driver lessened steam, put gentle pressure on his brakes, and shouted something to his fireman, who seemed well aware what was expected of him. With one foot against an iron step he hoisted his huge bulk nimbly on to the tender, picked up a vast boulder of coal as easily – and almost as lovingly – as if it had been a baby, cradled it tentatively in his arms for a second or two, then launched it through the air, over the wall into the yard of a cottage they were passing. A man came out of a shed and waved an arm in acknowledgement. Then the steam was off again, the brakes grinding down. They came to a standstill miles from anywhere. Brunt looked out at a broken gate leading into a field – a weathered shoal of exposed stone – an acre from which no man could hope to wrest a living.

  The driver began to turn down brass handles all over the bewildering console of the boiler, looked up at the pressure gauge; a wisp of steam was escaping from an inefficient joint lagged in old sacking. The driver reached for his shot-gun. The fireman opened the door at his own-side of the cab and jumped down.

  ‘Look after her for us, then, mister. Know what to do if she blows off steam?’

  ‘No.’

  The driver looked at him incredulously.

  ‘Know how the injector works?’

  ‘No.’

  The driver patiently stood his gun against the tender.

  ‘If the safety valve blows, inject water into the boiler. Cool her down. Take the pressure off: see here—’

  He dived for a tap, somewhere amongst the battery.

  ‘Open your water. Open the injector here a shade. Wait till you’ve got a cone of steam and you hear it take the water up. Then crack her out wide.’

  He fiddled confusingly with one tap after another.

  ‘You’ll be all right. Don’t worry if she does blow. She may not explode this trip. If she does, we’ll be in earshot.’

  He dropped himself out of the cab. The two men went off on separate errands. Brunt was left alone on the footplate, the monster hissing, throbbing, humming, trickling – seething with pressure and life. He tried to remember the handles that the driver had indicated, touched one or two of them, then began to look with professional habit at some of the other articles in the cab: a wicker bait-basket, an enamel tea-can, a hessian holdall for bits and pieces, marked with the owner’s name in home-spun print: Thos Beresford, C. and H. P.

  George Beresford, ostler, Piper’s Fold, a hundred and fifty years ago: arraigned, acquitted and his throat cut; Thos Beresford, 1875, machine-minder of the new age: it made sense. And how long between them? How many generations? Five, six? Thos Beresford, born when? 1820? His father, say, 1790? So George Beresford, ostler, murderer and murdered, might have been this man’s great-great-grandfather? Might even also have been remarkable for his eye-brows?

  Behind the fire-box door, the coals were raging furiously. Brunt identified the water-gauge, a tube behind brass-lined glass panels. He was not sure how it worked, but the level looked pretty low to his layman’s eyes. He cocked his eye up at the pressure-dial. The needle was rock still, not even trembling, a degree or two below a red line painted on the dial.

  Brunt continued his tour of the cab. There was a little metal door to a sort of cupboard in the front part of the tender, and he had no reservations about opening it: an oil-can, a spanner, a ball of cotton waste – and tucked away in the back a red-bound book, carefully wrapped round with several layers of white linen. It seemed an unusual possession for a man of the apparent outlook of Thos Beresford: Under the Eaves or The Stolen Golden Hour by the Author of The Meek in Spirit. Brunt lifted the cover and was for a moment bemused by the bookplate: Awarded to Amy Harrington, 12th September, 1869, for a composition on the Evils of Strong Drink. Signed Jno. Wildebloode, Superintendent, Wesleyan Sunday Schools, Melbourne Street, Tapton, Derbys.

  Brunt dismissed the temptation to slip the book into his own case. It was patien
ce that had earned him his promotion – the ability to sit innocently on acquired knowledge. He carefully wrapped the volume back in its linen and had just pushed it behind the oil-can when the steam-valve blew.

  The pressure was prodigious, the noise of it almost beyond toleration. Brunt struggled to remember what Beresford had told him to do. The main water-cock turned easily for him. He heard water pouring down under the cab, hissing against the hot plates. He opened the injector valve a fraction, heard steam escaping along the boiler casing; get a cone, Beresford had said. Brunt pushed the valve full open. And nothing happened; water continued to escape somewhere under the locomotive – he had visions of emptying the vital tank. He shut down all the taps and tried starting the process afresh. But there was some knack that he lacked. The steam flow would not take up the water supply.

  Then he heard two shots, an interval, and two more. Beresford could not possibly have failed to hear what was happening to his engine; therefore he was not worried by it; therefore he was positively enjoying Brunt’s discomfiture: a man with a sense of humour that needed to be watched.

  Then suddenly Thos Beresford was hauling himself back into the cab, cursing convincingly. He flung a bundle of lifeless rabbits over the crates on to the coals.

  ‘That’s the last bloody time I’ll leave you in charge of this engine.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  Beresford operated the same brass handles that Brunt had, but to proper effect. The safety-valve shut itself off, a heaven of comparative silence. Then the fireman was clambering up into his own corner of the cab, dumping a sack on to the tender. Beresford opened the stiff pilot-valve of the regulator and they lurched forward. The foot-plate swayed as they gathered speed. It was impossible to remain on one’s feet without bracing oneself against something in the cab – which meant being blistered against this piece of metal or bruised against that. A wholly hostile machine: yet Beresford seemed to have an affection for the creature that amounted to idolatry. He never touched the spoke of a wheel or the handle of a lever without immediately running a piece of soft, clean rag over it.

  Just as Brunt was beginning to find his foot-plate legs, Beresford closed down the main valve and they came smoothly to a stop beside a wooden platform, some twenty feet long, with no station furniture other than a rudimentary shelter. Behind the Halt, on a hill shaped like a sugar-loaf, stood a pile of stones like a truncated cone: Pedlar’s Stump. Beresford grasped Brunt’s wrists in hands of primeval strength and helped him out of the cab.

  ‘You’re staying in Piper’s Fold, then?’

  ‘I’m hoping I’ll get a room at the inn.’

  ‘They’ll find you one if you say Thos Beresford sent you.’

  But Beresford was making no motion to hand him down his case. Brunt took a step forward and reached up for it.

  ‘We’ll be seeing you tonight in the Rake,’ Beresford said. ‘And we come on horse-back. You’d best let us carry it for you.’

  It was impossible to know whether the offer was genuinely thoughtful. More likely Beresford was curious to know what this odd-looking character was carrying. It was more than conceivable that he was downright dishonest. And it was unthinkable that Brunt should allow himself to become parted from his burden. It contained confidential police papers – as well as one or two additional small specimens from Isaac Mosley’s Ottoman collection. He put a foot on the lowest step of the cab and one hand on the iron hand-rail.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Beresford said. ‘And we haven’t all night to be arguing with you. We’ve got to get this bloody engine back. Shed foreman doesn’t know we’ve got the bugger out.’

  Brunt continued to advance up the iron steps and as he did so he saw that in the momentary shock of the steam valve’s blowing he had not properly fastened the door of the locker in the tender. In the same instant Thos Beresford, following Brunt’s eyes, put two and two together – though whether it was his conclusions that made him lose his temper, Brunt never really knew. He picked up Brunt’s bag and flung it far out of the cab, over Brunt’s head, over the post and rail fence beyond the platform. It landed heavily on the bank beyond. And the Beresford eyebrows conveyed the impression that Brunt need not look forward to their next meeting.

  ‘You won’t be the first traveller to turn up in Piper’s Fold with a load too big for him,’ Beresford said.

  The engine steamed away, and Brunt fumbled with the fastening of the gate that would let him on to the track up Piper’s Clough.

  Chapter Three

  The path up the Clough had been made by and for sheep rather than man. At times it disappeared altogether, apparently following the bed of a stream, at present dried up after the hot summer. The valley reminded Brunt of the parable of the Good Samaritan. It was in just such boulder-strewn desolation that a robber’s victim might be left dry-throated and bleeding whilst passers-by attended to their own business. And the appearance of barrenness and neglect was increased by the many trial adits that had been driven into the rock by generations of lead-miners: dark holes surrounded by the great heaps of stone waste that had been torn out of the workings.

  Brunt had no doubt that every yard of his progress up the sterile cleft was being watched from behind some rock or other. No stranger came up Piper’s Clough without every yard accounted for – and, he reflected, if Amy Harrington had left the village voluntarily, her progress would equally have been public knowledge. Every few minutes he looked back over his shoulder, scanned the waving nettles, the stunted trees, the rain-hollowed rock-shelters. But he saw no man. He met no man in his path. It took him three-quarters of an hour to cover a distance of a mile and a half, up the gradient that was often one in five.

  And then he came upon his first view of the village – Piper’s Fold: 502 inhabitants, of whom only two were in view as he emerged into the village street: a child in a dirty pinafore, who took flight with no shoes to her feet; and an old woman in a cottage doorway who seemed deaf to his greeting.

  He quickly found The Crooked Rake, pushed his shoulder against a warped door that jammed after the first few degrees, and eventually forced his way into the bar and out of the nineteenth century. Conversation was suspended, clay pipes and tankards forgotten at the sight of him.

  He knew that he had walked in on a scene which differed little from the one which must first have met the eyes of the Turk. The room had pots, tables, benches, uncushioned, high-backed settles, and very little else. And of the group of men who were sitting round the walls, Brunt was prepared to expect anything – except initiative on the side of the law. Centuries of inbreeding had accentuated oddities of feature. Eyes were weak-minded and lacked lustre. The Pennine blizzards had weathered cheekbones to a broken-veined gauntness. Long years of stooping in rough-hewn galleries had bent backs and bowed legs.

  Brunt went to the landlord, a shirt-sleeved man called Nadin with a fringe of curls flattened against his forehead, who looked as if he were casting about in his mind for any excuse to refuse him a room. Eventually he accepted him, with the merest of nods.

  ‘And I’ll have a slice of whatever joint you have standing on your sideboard,’ Brunt said. He bought himself a pint of ale, and after he had been seen to take a mouthful of it in the same way as any other man might, some brave spirit actually spoke to him.

  ‘You’ll have had a long walk, then?’

  ‘Might have been longer. I got a lift on a railway engine.’

  ‘So you met Thos Beresford?’

  ‘I did that.’

  A murmur of approval. Presumably they felt that if Thos had disapproved of him, he would not be here. Somebody laughed.

  ‘Did he tell you any tales about his rappit?’

  ‘His rappit?’

  ‘Never comes in here of an evening but he tells us a tale about his rappit.’

  ‘Only rappit in the kingdom that’s ever been known to fight a dog. He’s had to put steel struts into its hutch. Their old tom-cat keeps out of the way when he lets it
out.’

  ‘He’s taught it to count, you know. Leastways, it can tap with its foot, up to three. Tells him which trap to bet on, when they’re racing whippets, over on Moggeridge Top. If he wins, he always takes it a bottle of oatmeal stout home. We’ve had a fair notion for some time that one of his wives is supping that.’

  ‘Aye, but which one?’ somebody asked, and a belt of coarse laughter went round the room.

  ‘Happen Thos’ll have too much on his mind for a rappit story today when he hears what the Rector’s up to.’

  ‘Well, you can hardly blame the Rector, can you?’

  ‘You’d better try telling that to Thos. Sooner you than me.’

  Some local cause célèbre, no doubt. Brunt began to differentiate between the various speakers. Some were clearly fonder of Thos than others. One little man with lips falling in to toothless gums had fighting confidence in him.

  ‘Thos will settle him this time, you’ll see. Thos has got time for all sorts of things since he lost his little playmate.’

  Then followed a silence of ghastly embarrassment, the company as a whole realising that, whatever this referred to, it was going too far in the presence of a stranger. The man who had made the remark tried to cover it up with pathetic self-justification.