Part IV: Autumn 1769: Clett-Clett

Autumn arrived like a burning ghost ship on the landscape’s tide to set the land alight. The fire of the trees’ turning spread far across the flanks and the ravens took flight to the highest climes as leaves fell like flung bodies. September had long slipped away. It was a charred thing now. Gone.

The hills were ablaze with the colour of brilliant decay as the cycle of winter began with a fresh palette. Crows blown like black handkerchiefs from a funeral feast into the tangled tree tops exchanged shrill chatter there, a running commentary on all that was happening around them. Because everything was in vibrant flux. All was facing death.

William Deighton came in on over Hathershelf and aback of Scout Rock. He followed the field line where it fell away dramatically to a series of deadly cliffs and precipices above the thick woodland below that some believed was cursed or haunted; a place where things happened that could not be explained. In that small wood they said there were treasures buried – and bodies too. During his life-time more than one person had hurled themselves from the rocks to their death below. And William Deighton suspected that in the base of these sheer drops, where the scree met the soft soil of the woodland floor, and moss-covered boulders the size of small houses sat half buried, each cleaved away from the cliff face by the steady battering of the elements and underground springs that ran through the rock like woodworms through the trusses of a timber roof frame, lay hidden the tools of the Coiners’ trade too.

Perhaps it was they, the local criminals, who had spread the stories about Scout Rock wood: tales of the white witch that stalked its tangled undergrowth, the hidden medieval mineshafts that sucked children down and the mulchy terraces that were known to shift underfoot. And the small caves there too, where human remains were said to have been found. Where better to hide and plot and conspire – and stash a cache of contraband – than in the place no local dared set foot?

From up here beneath the darkening sky William Deighton could see right along the valley where the new turnpike was to follow the River Calder to Hebden Bridge, and beyond it the steep rake they called The Buttress up to Heptonstall high on the hill, where the locals barely left and lived in sordid domestic conditions, investing all their time and what spare money that they had in the new octagonal chapel built by this preacher, one John Wesley, whose words it seemed had captured the imaginations of so many in the valley. They said he shaped it eight-sided so that there were no corners in which the devil could hide. They said his name was known across the land, that he had the ear of God himself and that he saw sin in people just by looking at them, between blinks.

Only five or six miles from his Halifax home lay these other worlds.

William Deighton paused in the furrow of a field recently tilled and turned and shorn of the valued winter grass, and he looked back the other way from where he came, where the safety of town now sat unseen.

His destination was over the brow to the solitary farmstead of Stannery End, a straight crow’s mile across from Bell House.

It was evening and Thomas Clayton’s place appeared as a mirror image of the Hartley home. It may not have been quite as high up nor as remote but it was still a good half hour’s walk down to the cluster of houses and stores of Mytholmroyd and, sitting in nothing but fields, equally difficult to approach. As with the Hartley home its occupation was tactical. It was an asset to those who harboured secrets. A strategic bolt-hole.

William Deigthon cleared the last field that bordered the precipitous drop of Scout Rock cliffs and crouched behind a wall. Stannery End was in sight. There was light in the upstairs window. There was a shadow. There were shadows. There were several shadows stretching and receding.

He squinted and then keeping low he frog-crawled his way closer. He saw a figure cross the flame of the candle, a definite elongation of darkness bent crooked across the wall of that upstairs room. William Deighton crouched and waited.

Then the light went out. Snuffed.

The light went out and it was as if it had never been there at all.

The house was cast in darkness and suddenly William Deighton felt exposed, even here behind the wall with nothing but cliffs and woods behind him and the autumn sky closing in above him; night here, he noticed, had a habit of collapsing across the land quickly.

He climbed over the wall and ran across the field towards the house of the Coiner Clayton. He ran across the field, stumbling in holes. Holes that dotted the field. The field that would lay fallow and frozen over the coming months. The months of a winter already coming in on the autumn breeze. A breeze that rustled the stubby clusters of grass. Grass that fed the cows that made the milk. The milk that weaned the children of the valley. The valley that they said ran rich with gold.

William Deighton ran straight for Stannery End. He abandoned any attempt to remain unseen, for if his suspicions were right it was his sighting that had snuffed that candle. Killed that light. Emptied that room.

Then he was there. Then he was banging on the front door. Banging on the door and turning the handle at the same time. And the door was opening and he was entering to nothing but darkness. Darkness and the smell of a fire doused in water. Damp ash and imposter smoke. And cutting through it, the scent of a pipe and something cooked, hot, of salt and flesh.

He saw hanging from the ceiling onions strung in garlands. He saw on the window sill a row of corn dollies. Below them a basket of washed sheep wool. A roe deer’s skull mounted.

William Deighton bolted up crooked stairs. Here was one room containing three looms and baskets and trimmings and combs. Half-spun wool was strung everywhere. It stretched from ceiling beams to hooks in the wall. There were reels and bobbins. Yarn cleats and knotted tangles.

And tucked into recesses in the walls where bricks had been removed for this very purpose, there sat dripping stubs of candles. He went to one and touched it. The wax was soft. He pinched the wick. Still warm.

He quickly walked downstairs to the back door. It was ajar. It was opened to the anthracite night into which Thomas Clayton and possibly other Coiners had fled.

William Deighton went back into the house. He looked in the dresser and under the bed. He checked the stores. Checked the drawers. He looked up the chimney and felt the radiating warmth of the dampened fire in its stone, then he put his fingers into every nook and cranny. Between every cold stone. He tested loose floorboards. Lifted sheepskins still stinking of flesh. Scoured a raggy mat stitched from dyed scraps. Rifled through tangles of wool. Upended furniture then carefully replaced it.

Nothing.

He found nothing.

Not a sliver of metal nor a set of shears.

Not a single coin. Not a stamp or a crucible or tongs or buffing rags.

There was nothing but the presence of people recently departed to the hill behind. To the hill to hide and bury. To bury their counterfeit coins. Coins to clothe and feed. Here they surely watched and waited as William Deighton left Stannery End and began the long walk home back across the fields to the low lights of Halifax in the far distance, that flickered as if the sky had fallen in defeat, and draped itself across the rise and fall of the bloodless, smothering land.

With this stump of lead and wat papyre it is I have wangled from the turnkey I have writ a poem that I corl the Song of the Crag Vayle Coiners and it goes like this it goes Hot yorkshyre blood an tough yorkshyre bones Stiff yorkshyre prick and stout yorkshyre stones Theres no man can map where it is a afeersum Cragg vale clipper goes

An thats real mans poetree is that.

Many more nights he stepped into darkness and darkness was all around him. He wore it like a comforting shawl. It felt a part of him; an extension of his physical form.

William Deighton made darkness an asset and an ally and his feet began to find their way through the deepest blue so that in time he did not need even a stump of a candle. Soon he began to know the camber of the track over the hump-back hills from Halifax. He gained a feel for the undulations of the moorland’s edge and saw the moon turned silver in the puddles and sump holes that never seemed to dry up. His muscles gained memories and the memories guided him.

Occasionally he went on horseback but mainly William Deighton walked.

He felt his thighs fatten and took pleasure from the way his feet gained traction and his entire body responded. The hills registered in his bones and joints. He felt the pull of them in each tendon and sinew. Nature’s gymnasium.

He was not a young man but the ten Roman miles or more he covered on his night wanderings made him feel as if his blood was bubbling anew, just as a fresh spring stream bubbles after a flash of rain. The repetition of one foot after another, the corset of cold sweat sticking him to his undershirt, the gratifying burning in his lungs and the matting together of hair and hat all created a coursing sense of energy, the likes of which could not be mustered, summoned or experienced when wandering the town streets. He was surprised to learn of his own heightened levels of stamina.

Half a dozen times or more Robert Parker had insisted he took with him a young bailiff for his own protection but the excise man William Deighton dismissed the idea outright. The hunter, he said, works best alone. Many times his wife, too, tried to persuade him to stay by the fire in the house, where his younger children filled the floor and letters home from their eldest three sons sat stacked on the mantelpiece, but after Stannery End he was more determined than ever.

Stannery End was an affront. He said as much to Robert Parker. Stannery End was a snub to all lawmen and a puzzle too, for he had yet to work out how it was that the house’s tenant, Thomas Clayton, knew Deighton was coming for him; how it was he was able to flee with only seconds to spare.

Only when he had flattened out across his kitchen table a crude pen and ink map of the Upper Calder valley that marked the hamlets and larger hilltop farmsteads and messuages did the thought enter his head that it was possible that the Coiners were operating some sort of advance signalling system. From its elevated position Bell House sat a crow’s mile across the Cragg valley from Stannery End, and forming a third corner equidistant from the two across Calderdale, was the house at Wadsworth Banks, where it was known that one Thomas Greenwood – who the turncoat James Broadbent had informed him was also known, in typical gang-style, as Great Tom or Conjurer Tom – kept a home. Wadsworth Banks looked back directly across to the blackened cliffs and tree-lined basin of Scout Rock along which he himself had stalked. Together these three houses formed a triumvirate of eyes able to watch all the main roads and routes in and out the valley.

Could, he wondered, the men be signalling one another, with mirrors or flags perhaps? Or something even more sophisticated. It was a trick not beyond their capability, but one he did not raise with Robert Parker for fear of being ridiculed.

Robert Parker was a reasonable and learned man and to be outsmarted by these illiterate hill-dwellers was not something William Deighton wanted known.

He made a note to visit Wadsworth Banks. Thomas Greenwood would be receiving a visit. His was another name for the list.

For many nights he walked alone and soon these journeys gave him a deeper understanding of darkness. They gave him a greater understanding of place. Plunged into the night, William Deighton refined his senses and let sound and touch – the whistle of the wind and the scratching and snittering of animals; the creak of leather sole on grainy cart stone – guide him as the laminated layers of night peeled back to reveal a state of mind.

Through the valley he tigered as if in a dream and often he wondered if this was all indeed a dream for when he returned home in the early hours it was not sleep that greeted him but a strange limbo where day and night, dream, nightmare and reality overlapped. Coming home he brought the soft darkness with him. They were inside him now, these hinterlands. He carried the moor everywhere – or perhaps the moor carried him.

Each time he returned to town, to home, to lie in bed perfectly still beside his sleeping wife, his senses enlivened, William Deighton felt utterly exhausted, yet he was nevertheless imbued and infused with a sort of joyful drunkenness too, and increasingly a part of him was still out there, stalking the moor, a half-feral man whose very dreams were now scented by heather and lit by moonlight, crackling with the mute power of all things connected.

Wans in the forges wesst of Burmincham I did have to fite a man A rite big lump of a bastid he were A man they did say hayled from Scotlan from Glasger on the Clide I believe it was Now this lump had tayken a dislyken to King Daevid for wot reason I no not ecksept perhaps for me good lucks that sum have lycund to the Gods of olde or maybe it was my natril witt and gile but this big carrot topped bran faysed bastid did corner me wan day down in the forjes and I swear he was the size of an ocks up on its back legs As big as fucken beest of the feeld he was Bigger mebby.

And I sed I dunt want no trubble with you Jocky but he says oh you will get it for that bigg head and cruel tung of yours Hartlee and the daft bugger ript off his shirt and underneath he was hard as teek and his brisket boddee had mussels on mussels and I thort oh fuckerduck Hartlee you are in trubble now sunshyne An the lads were all gathrin rownd then becors they loved a good roar up as it was a nice brake from the werk and the manigers leffed us to it and most of them were just glad it wassunt them that were havven to duke it owt with the big boy And tho sum were happy to see King Dayvid who of cors at this pointe was not yet kynge get a rite rummelling this ginjer jock was known to be a bullkybuck too and tho this was no even handed scware straytunner somewan hayted was goan to be given a goan over wich ever syde you were so inclyned to take so it were summat to see It were sport.

An thats when this cunt comes chargen attes but I was one step on him becors as he did I reached into my arse pocked and I pullt out my snuff bocks an with a flick of the thum it was open and before he could grabbus I did flinge the hole fucken lot in the mans fayse and puff the browne powder was in his eyes and his eatin hole and up his bigg brokain snozz the daft cunt Well after that it was easy becores I booted him ones in the nutmegs and ones more for luck An at that he toppuld like a felled tree falls at the last chop of the acks blayde in a woodland cleerin Fell wimpering he did Fell like a lass he did and wan more punch to the hed did nigh on finish him sparko cold Dun up like a split kipper reddy for thur smokehaus.

Well aftur that he had no spit in him to get back up neythur I meen that man was leffed pissen blud for dayse and not a werd he sed to me when we were back at the smeltin and the pourin and the hammerin Not a werd And no man did trubble me after that in the Black Countree becors I tell you what a seed was planted that day A seed that sed I was to become a leeder of men A seed that I new would grow into sumthin big and strong and speshul and hoos roots would reech deep into the soil of my land and wud stay there and my name wud be planted too and it wud grow to graytness and so it did.

And so it did.

Evening eyes followed William Deighton all the way down the sunken hollow of Stake Lane and across the valley floor towards the permanent eventide of Bell Hole.

Eyes. The eyes of Stannery End. The eyes of Thomas Clayton.

When William Deighton left the lane and headed out across the open fields it was still light so Thomas Clayton sent his best boy out to get a closer look for all the Coiners and their children knew the face of William Deighton. They knew his brown coat and cord breeches, the red waistcoat and the shovel hat pulled low over the brow.

This man does not give up remarked Thomas Clayton from this window. But this time he has not given us a second glance. This time he has foregone us for the King’s sky palace instead.

The boy ran back up the hill, past the rabbit warren that spanned a hundred or more burrowed feet, through the pasture where foxes wrestled and tumbled at dawn in the dew-soaked grass, and up toward the post where a buzzard had often been seen tearing apart its morning feed, the fur and feather and tiny bones of its prey littering the grass around it as if ritually placed to demarcate a sacred feeding circle, a testament to its routine.

He ran into the house and said it’s him – it’s the wretched William Deighton. Thomas Clayton stood and opened up the wooden box and scooped a spoon of the powder mix made from the leached ash of wood and leaves and sodium mineral salt and the special unnamed, unknown compound that King David Hartley himself had supplied him with and he said step back, step back, and he flung the mixture onto the fire where it crackled and spat and the flame burned a fierce blue for a few fleeting seconds before the smoke turned into a heavy green colour that slowly spiralled from the Stannery End chimney, twisting upwards in an astringent column.

He repeated the process one more time and the spiral grew taller and stronger and the gusting back-draught of green smoke filled the front room and had Thomas Clayton coughing and his wife coughing and his children coughing. All of them hacking as the dense and acrid smoke burned their chests and sent them running to the windows to gulp in the clean sharp air of a settling Yorkshire autumn evening. Up at Bell House and Wadsworth Banks the signal was read.

Night. He circled Bell House as the hawk circles a freshly-cut field, awaiting the opportunity to swoop down upon its prey. He viewed Bell House from all angles until it became first a portentous looming presence and then an abstract thing, a crude shape, and then a ghostly light like the famed will-o’-the-wisps of the fenlands, something unanchored from its heather bed moorings, a Jack-o’-lantern sneering into a darkness so infinite and eternal it seemed as if daylight was a figment of his imagination, an impossibility forever out of reach. He felt first an excitement, and then an emptiness.

William Deighton saw Bell House as a vessel. A mask. A beacon. A torch.

Bell House was a lure, a pit, a cursed place.

A quarry, a foe, an insult. It was his.

Because viewed from afar night after night the solitary orange flame that burned tiny on the horizon had become for William Deighton a symbol for society’s undoing. It represented lawlessness. England’s downfall. The home of Hartley was a fertile bed for criminality and barbarism. Theft and forgery. Violence and mendacity. It was against progress. It was anti-empire, anti-monarchy, anti-government. No county or country could ever hope to flourish so long as people like Bell House’s inhabitants and their many pin-eyed, low-browed, dirty-fingered acolytes continued to ply their illicit trade without redress.

He walked to the house and he rapped on the door and when the door opened onto the night it was David Hartley himself standing there, and he raised one arm up against the door frame and said William Deighton is it and William Deighton said yes it is and David Hartley said thought so and then there was an awkward lingering moment of silence as the two men examined each other at close quarters for the first time.

I suppose you’ll be wanting to come in and take a look around then said David Hartley.

His words – his invitation – threw William Deighton. It unsettled him further. The casualness of his demeanour did not quite match everything he had imagined and expected David Hartley to be. No surprise had registered with the man.

Because David Hartley had known that he was coming. Of that he was certain.

This man they called King was, William Deighton noted, smaller in height too, as if perhaps the distance from which he had only ever previously been viewed had given him stature. It was a strange reversal of perspective. And his own fertile mind had perhaps played its part too, for in the endless hours of plotting and planning and rumination, William Deighton had surely elevated his prey. Inflated him. He was guilty of flattering him with imaginary abnormal attributes and making a myth from a man, just as the valley folk mythologised this gang leader whose behaviour they saw no harm in, so long as there was food on their tables and logs in their log stores.

Yes said William Deighton. I have a warrant.

You need no warrant here, tax-man. Come.

David Hartley turned and William Deighton followed him into Bell House.

As he crossed the threshold he felt as if the house were taking him. Consuming him.

And as he entered, William Deighton felt himself enfolded within its walls and beams, its secrets and its history, as if he were entering a realm whose architecture was comprised entirely of smoke and shadows.

William Hartley and Isaac Hartley were fastening an iron shutter to the fireplace when David Hartley said brothers this is the taxman that’s been out wandering the moors night after night like a lost sheep, and he gestured for William Deighton to step forward. William Hartley and Isaac Hartley looked over their shoulders and then turned back to the fireplace where the younger of the two brothers was turning some screws while the other held the new grate in place.

Will you have ale with us taxman? said David Hartley and William Deighton shook his head and said no you know it’s not an ale I’m after but a look round your abode, and David Hartley said you’ve been invited so now you’re a guest, but I’ll take it as an affront if you won’t share a pot with me and my brothers here after you’ve been watching us for all these weeks and even just this night have walked all the way over from Bull Close in Halifax.

To this William Deighton said how is it you know where I live? and David Hartley said you have two eyes but the king has many and they do see everything, and William Deighton said is that a threat? and David Hartley laughed and said you must be the first person to receive the offer of the best ale in Calderdale as a threat.

Just as he had seen in Tom Clayton’s vacated place at Stannery End, William Deighton found nothing incriminating in Bell House except the smirking soot-lined faces of the brothers Hartley, and the derisive whistle of the wind around the sharp stone corners of a dwelling that cowered beneath the ceiling of cloud.

Later, when their business was done, William Deighton stepped into the rectangle of dull lamplight that meekly lit across the back flags of Bell House and into the night. He had only taken a few paces when he heard the three splintering crashes of David Hartley breaking a chair down into a heap of kindling.

There are rats amongst us he heard David Hartley say to his brothers. One of them is known as the taxman and that rat must fall but there is another who has not yet shown his face. Fetch them all. Fetch them all. Bring them here, the rats. Tell them their king is calling.

Todaye a boy cum to me in the yard just a sprat of a thin and he says he says to me Are thoo David Hartley the king and I says wor of it and he says who do thoo feer and I says I feer no man never have feered a man and never will And with wyde eyes he says to me they say if thoo cuts King Daevid they say thoo bledes golde and thet thoo drinke moulten lead an eat ginees and sleepe on a duck fetha bed an be fucken all the wimmen and wherein a crown of silver an sittin on a thrown above they kindom An still with wide eyes he says is what they say all troo an I says Nay lad its fucken goose fucken fethas I sleep on an nowt fucken elsel do.

He walked down into the trees in the palest of diminishing light.

It was those earliest hours when the day has claws and still belongs to the creatures of tooth and feather and snout.

Soon he knew the steel soil underfoot would soften, and soon too the sky would wheel away its stars of winter.

Once wolves had inhabited these woods. David Hartley was sure of that. The old tales told of these noble animals sighted padding across clodded fields or circling shrinking copses. Stalking the choking carrs. Skulking in the vales. Bear and lynx too; their bones had been found. Deep in cold dark caves their remnants had lain untouched for centuries. Fireside stories told of the night calls of the wolf ensuring the moor was a place to be avoided; their ghosted howls were still said to be heard now by the fearful and lost.

And still now they spoke of wolves in corner snugs and kept them alive in song and paintings, though it had been three centuries since the last great wild dogs had been hunted off this island. Their skulls had been found. Their corpses flayed and pelts rack-stretched. Claws kept as mementos. Teeth scattered in rituals. Alive only in myth and superstition.

What it must have been to have shared this space with them, thought David Hartley. To see a wolf at day-break with hot breath droplets hanging from its matted maw like ruby jewels.

Alerted to his presence, a squirrel leapt from branch to branch. Another behind it.

David Hartley followed the stream to a hidden hollow where there was a fallen log by a clear pool. He knelt and scooped water into his mouth and then he washed his face, neck and hands. He patted his cheeks and brow. Slicked back his hair. Sat.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Bell Hole awakening. He bathed in the shrill birdsong. He listened to the falling leaves. The crackle of insects unseen. The rustling of life.

He thought on William Deighton. He thought on him in this still place as he had always thought on those topics that troubled him. He listened to the sound of the water and the way it sang over the smoothed rocks of flint and grit. The way it danced down through the woods like a child.

In time the day arrived in a crescendo of chatter and warming sun and the problem of William Deighton faded from view until all that remained was a soft orange sensation behind David Hartley’s eyes.

But then he was aware that he was not alone. He felt himself watched. Felt a gaze falling upon him.

David Hartley turned and looked to the trees. To the wall of green. He felt another heartbeat nearby. A heartbeat and blood. Hot blood. Close. The pulse of something living.

There was no movement but that of the silent inner workings of whatever it was that lurked there deep in the green cathedral of limbs and timber and branches and leaves that tilted and turned to the lifting breeze. Bell Hole was his domain.

David Hartley looked through the green wall and as he did something stepped out from the unknown within. It was a stag.

It arrived as if an apparition. No sound or movement heralded it – it was simply there, proud and curious. Alert. Its ears cocked. Nostrils searching for the scent of him – and finding it: strong and sour. The musk of a man dressed in the dirt of the land.

The stag’s eyes were wet dark pools of brackish black water settled in moor hollows. Its young antlers were still in bloom, the bony fuzz set in a base of matted fur and brilliant velvet bone.

Never before had he seen antlers at such close range in day-light – not unless they were attached to a stag skull – scalp-stripped, sun-bleached and mounted on an inn wall for men to hang their hats and crooks from.

He knew that once the whole of old Erringden moor was a deer park whose boundaries took in all of the old farmsteads.

Cragg Vale. Turvin.

Hollin Hey. Stoodley Clough.

Once it was a wooded, managed manorial place to be hunted all the way down to Mytholmroyd hamlet, where a fosse and a border fence met to create the old palisade. Once there were keepers and lodges and venison aplenty for whoever owned the manor some four or five centuries ago, and nothing but grief and punishment for any peasant that might dare to enter the hunting grounds.

The eyes of man and creature met and David Hartley did not move. He stored his breath in his chest and rationed it. He did not blink. The stag read the language of scent written in the air. It noted the message. It too knew that something was close. It searched the woods with its nose a moment longer and then it dipped, snorted and shook its head. It stepped forward.

David Hartley allowed himself the luxury of movement as his eyes glanced down at the creature’s hooves. This tiniest flicker of movement caused the deer to pause again. Sniff at the air again. David Hartley saw that the stag’s hooves were strangely small and elegant, two delicately cloven pivot points perfect in both form and function. They allowed traction and gave the stag poise.

He noticed the dewclaws too, small and useless, and so insignificant as to rarely register even in footprints.

Then he blinked and the deer was gone. Like that. Gone. As if lost in a lightning flash.

He walked to the spot where the deer had stood and he crouched. He studied the soil for footprints but he could not see any footprints, so then he got on his hands and his knees and he carefully scoured the dirt and the wet fallen leaves and the wet moss that held the weight of the fallen sky in them, and he looked more closely but still he could not see the mark of the deer. It left no print.

Sike an seede and sod is my song for theese are what the moore is bilton Sike and seede and sod I say Sike to worter the seede the seede that does growe in the sod and a biddy blasd of the suns rayes to bring up the grass whose tussocks russel thur in a shimrinn bundance These are the things of my song And synge them long and lowd and prowd I shooly will.

Aye sike and seede and sod and the sownd of the breese as it blows throo and the sun risin and the sun setten over it orl And some dayes it feels like sike an seede and sod is just eneuyf.

Butt wayte there is sum thayne ells Sum thayne ellls that does tred along the moors edyge Yes the Stagmen The Stagman dose feel the sike an seede and sod under foot that is to saye under hoofe and on boggy wet days you can follow his run and you can get downe low and put yore ayes to the grownd and see his markings there See his sunken prins there Freshen wet And they are nyethur foot print or hoof hole but sumthynge in between And thur they sit in sod a messayge from this grayte creachur wich has followed mine for all mines lyfe Wached over me Proteckted me Gyded me Warked with me And still he waches now and so too he will be there when im drug up to that gallis pole that awaytes us Heel be thur I no it Waytin o me.

Heel be thir.

Yet still sumtymes I do feer for mine mind here in the prisum sells of yorke cassel.

Too longe it has bean sinse I warkt or werkt the mooer.

It not be rite to cayge a man so.

A man laike me no.

Not rite is that.

No.

It was raining as David Hartley returned to Bell House. It was falling in mist-like swirls; a light, playful rain deceptive in its ability to nevertheless soak to the skin. Soon his trousers stuck to his legs and his leather boots first creaked with damp and then became clodded with clumps of heavy red mud.

As he cut across to the house and avoided the back bogs David Hartley saw the arrival of the men. Men from across the moor. Coiners from all directions. Men up from Mytholmroyd and Cragg Vale old village; men who had taken the back way up Swine Market Lane and past the farm at Stony Royd. Men from over Stannery End and Sowerby Bridge. From Brearley and Boulder Clough.

Men blowing snot from their nostrils, their wet hair pulled back with thick fingers or hanging down in dripping ringlets. Above them a mosaic of crows fell to pieces.

Only those who could receive the message and be up at Bell House in half a day came; those who had got out of the mill or were free from the loom – or those who made enough from the clipped coins to afford the luxury of no longer having to weave a blanket a week or dig drainage runnels or burn charcoal for a living. True Coiners, they came.

The smell of the men filled Bell House. Turned it tight with the funk of the moorland. Sweet and sharp. A tang of leather and mud and smoke and wood.

Dusted in ash and grime, unused old looms dominated the room and the men crowded in there between them, some standing, their heads dipped and shoulders hunched to mind the crooked beams, others squatting with their damp backs against rough stone walls.

You know why I’ve gathered my best and meanest, said David Hartley when the men had settled down. Because it is clear now that the black devil Deighton is out to ruin us.

Words of recognition ran through the room.

Just last night this man dared to show his face at my door.

He continued:

From this I know two things. Firstly that this exciseman who is content to do the other king’s dirty work for little pay does not fear the Cragg Vale Coiners enough. And secondly this interference cannot be allowed to continue.

He’s a milksop, said Brian Dempsey.

No, said David Hartley. You are wrong. A milksop he is not. This man shows courage in taking us on. Don’t you see that?

But he’s not alone, said William Hartley.

No, said David Hartley. Deighton does not work alone.

I heard tell there is a lawman behind him said Nathan Horsfall. A man of power who has a big house in the new square. A man with friends in that London.

His large frame squeezed into the corner of the room, James Broadbent said nothing. He just watched, nervous by the request for his presence.

And you would be right Nathan Horsfall, said David Hartley. They call him Robert Parker and it seems half the money in Halifax is not enough for him. No bribes can buy this man, for it is not money that drives him or William Deighton to pursue us, but moral superiority. Do you know what that means, James Broadbent?

James Broadbent looked up.

What?

Moral superiority. Do you know what it means?

The eyes of the room turned to James Broadbent.

No I do not.

It means thinks he’s better than us, said David Hartley. This lawman thinks there is only one king worth recognising. But what does this man do for us and our families? What has he done for this valley but help carve it up and sell it off? What have any of them done? Because it is lawmen and money men like this Robert Parker and flunkies like this William Deighton who serve the wealthy bastards who for years now have staked a claim on these moorlands, these woods, these waterfalls. The same rich pheasant-fattened bastards who’ll have us out on our ears when the cotton men come. And they are coming – mark my words. The machines and the mills are coming, but it’ll not be enough for them to have us living in hedgerows and ditches like the cursed Diddakoi of the road. No. They won’t even let us make a penny to put scran in our cupboards. They care nothing for the people of the valley like we do. Every brogger, every butcher, every milliner, every drayman and landlord that has given up their coin has made it back two-fold. We share our gains with our people because they are our people. We do not take our money and build castles to keep them out. We welcome them in for victuals. The young widow forced to scratch a life for herself and her children on two flooded acres of a marshy carr after her husband has fallen face to dirt in the king’s name on some distant battlefield does not scratch alone. She has friendly faces at her back door, food to fill her pantry. Her children will never walk barefoot because they are children of the valley just as the purblind toll keeper should not be affrighted that he is going to be diddled by some passing vagabond because this is our valley and those who come and go do so by our rules. This I have proven through my actions, just as was promised this spring or two since.

David Hartley paused to let his words settle.

The men nodded and muttered in agreement.

Robert Parker and William Deighton won’t be stopped until they see our wives and children starved and naked, and our bodies swinging on Beacon Hill.

Fuck the lawman and fuck them that try to kill our King, said John Tatham. His vocal declaration roused the men further.

It is true, said Jonas Eastwood. Down in town last week Samuel Duckett refused to give his monthly tithe. And Duckett is as hog-like greedy as they come. He’s been got at. Warned. Must have. He is afraid.

I too had a clipped coin refused for ale in town, said James Stansfield. This landlord would not take my guinea – and in front of people too. So this landlord will be fixed. I’ll take his teeth out with my toe cap one of these nights.

And then all the men were talking at once. Their voices overlapped, their words worn and chipped down into vowels uneasy in the mouths of the men like stones. Stones that fell clattering to the stone cottage floor. A cottage on the crest built in a nest of shadows. Shadows that never ceased to stretch. They spoke at once.

I have seen him out there, the bastard William Deighton.

More than once he has watched me go about my business. That man has the eyesight of a hawk.

Clip a coin and fuck the crown.

No chains so strong, no cell so small, no noose so tight to kill us all.

Cross the Coiners and dig your plot.

Valley boys fight and valley boys sing, valley boys fight for none but their king.

Aye. No law but our law.

Above the melee of voices rose one louder than the others. It was that of Absalom Butts, a man usually known for his silence, his expressionless face and cold indifference to the many victims who had felt the force of his fists and feet. Absalom Butts was the man who most in the valley feared above all other Coiners. Very few had resisted his silent persuasions. None had seen him smile.

The moors are ours and the woods are ours he said. And the marshes are ours and the sky is ours and the fire is ours and the forge is ours. The might is ours and the means are ours and the moulds are ours and the metal is ours and the coins are ours and the crags are ours and this grand life in the dark wet world is ours.

It was more words than most of them had heard him speak at any one time. Encouraged and cheered on by the men, Absalom Butts stood and addressed David Hartley.

King David, he said. You have shown me another way. In this short time you have made me rich in mind and heart.

Go on our Absalom, shouted a voice. You tell him.

You have saved this valley from starvation in lean seasons. You have given my life purpose where there was none. Any man that wants to bring you down will have to go through me first.

The men cheered.

I would rather die fighting than live long and prosperous on my knees, he solemnly added.

No law but our law, shouted one of the men.

Cross the Coiners and dig your plot, shouted another.

And these mill men with their new machines, continued Absalom Butts, gaining confidence now. I will smash every one of them. And after that I will break every waterwheel, every spindle. I’ll fill their foundations with rocks. I’ll poison their ponds and burn their horses from fetlock to mane. I’ll fuck their womenfolk and fuck them again. This valley is your valley, King David. And I will protect it from the bastard scheming offcumdens.

Again the men cheered and Absolom Butts was slapped on the back as he returned to squatting on the floor.

You are a loyal man, said David Hartley. I know of none better at splitting and breaking bones.

There was laughter at this.

And your loyalty will be tested because as well as this Deighton and Parker there is a greater threat. And it is closer than you know.

My brother is right, said Isaac Hartley, beside him. Too many times the bastard taxman has known our whereabouts. Too many times we have evaded him as closely as the cut-throat avoids the neck vein. But one day soon we will slip up.

Deighton has extra senses, chimed John Wilcox. He has extra eyes and ears, does that one. There is something of the stalking animal about him.

That he does, said David Hartley. And those eyes and ears surely belong to one of us.

One of us? said John Wilcox.

There is a turncoat, said Isaac Hartley. William Deighton has a valley man in his pocket – of that much we are certain.

Then the turncoat will die firstest and slowest said Absolom Butts. And by my own hand.

The men nodded.

A rat walks amongst us, said David Hartley. One who would rather take the taxman’s coin than give it back to his own. One who would sell a soul to the hangman’s collection than live as a glorious Turvin Clipper.

Then this bastard will die by midnight, said Brian Dempsey.

Aye said Absolom Butts. Death will be merciful when we are through with him.

I’ll snap his neck like winter kindling, said James Broadbent from the corner.

David Hartley fixed him with a stare and spoke as if to him and him only.

A turncoat will be nothing without a lawman to turn to, he said. It is Deighton who has the power – and Robert Parker more power still. The turncoat is nothing but shit on my shoe. When the power is gone the turncoat will be left alone. We shall smoke him out, even if he sits in this room today. Know this though: William Deighton will be the first to fall.

A man came out of the woods and onto the moor with a pack on his back. Below it a blanket roll contained his tools: a selection of chisels, a bowl gouge, a spindle gouge, a round nose scraper, a skew chisel, a sharpening stone, a drawknife. The handles of an axe, an adze and a coarse saw protruded from one end. A leather strap sat across his chest and his hat was worn askance. He was a bodger.

It was nothing but ill timing that he chose this hour of this day to wander onto Erringden Moor above Cragg Vale. Ill timing and ill fortune. Iller still that as he straightened after catching the breath stolen from his lungs by the arduous incline up to Bell House, his feet slipping once again on the dank carpet of leaves that shifted underfoot like a widow’s rug on a polished floor, he should be met by three black forms blocking the sun before him. The shapes of men. Moor men descending.

Absolom Butts. Brian Dempsey. Paul Taylor.

He shielded the heatless sun from his eye and squinted towards them.

Gentleman of the hills, he said breezily. He touched his hat and then took a side-step so as to let the men pass and get a better view of them.

And a fine day it is to view God’s country, he added.

When the men said nothing he made to carry on upwards to the moor but Paul Taylor blocked his path.

What’s the rush now stranger?

No rush, gentlemen. No rush at all.

And where is it you are coming from?

Well now – that’s a good question.

So flourish it with a answer then.

I’m not so sure there’s an easy answer.

Try, said Paul Taylor

I come from here and there and go where the work is, said the bodger.

What work? What business do you have in these hills?

The man pushed his hat back on his head and wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. Wiped his top lip. Wiped his neck.

Well now, in the summer I wander and offer my skills and services and in the winter I do much the same, only I make sure I’m never more than a half day’s walk from a hearth and my good lady wife’s warm white body. It’s all a man needs on a cold night.

And what about this dead season when the leaves fall and the animals gather their stores and the birds line their nests, said Paul Taylor. What then?

The bodger shrugged.

That depends.

There’s nothing up here on these moors for you – or anyone else.

He’s a thieving no good tinker is what he is, said Brian Dempsey. He’s a cursed gypsy, this one. He’ll bring trouble.

The man shook his head. He vehemently protested.

No, he said. No sir. I’m no tinker sir. No, no. A man of the road, yes. But a tinker I am not.

Well you look like one and you talk like one, said Paul Taylor.

And you smell like one, added Absolom Butts.

Curses in the Romany tongue and the shearing of the heather is not my business, replied the stranger. I’m something far superior than your common tinsmith and rag trader.

What are you then?

The stranger stood proud.

I am a bodger, sir. A bodger and boardwright. Tables and chairs are my main trade. Bowls and baskets too. Building and fixing. Rectifying and remedying.

The men stared back in silence. He cleared his throat.

I’m good with wood, he added.

Where did you apprentice?

Where? Right here in the woodlands of England, lads. Right here amongst the beech and the birch. The hawthorn and the hazel. The whitebeam and the willow. With these hands I can craft just about anything. The trees taught me every lesson I need to know.

And now we’re going to teach you one more, said Brian Dempsey. These is the king’s woods.

The king? said the bodger.

Aye. King David of the Craggs.

I know nothing of a King David.

Brian Dempsey laughed then Brian Dempsey spat. He spat at the feet of the bodger. Something green, flecked with red.

He says he knows nowt of the king and if he knows nowt of the king then he’s not paid his dues to the king.

Everyone has heard of King David Hartley, said Paul Taylor. The man who says he hasn’t is a liar. Tell us bodger – why are you really here skulking in these woods?

The stranger looked from one of imposing men to the other. Each in turn.

As I said, I’m just passing through, lads. From one place to the next.

And where might that next place be?

Wherever these feet take me. An honest coin for honest work. That’s all I’m after.

He mentions coins lads – and honest ones at that said Paul Taylor.

Is there any other type? said Brian Dempsey.

Now, said Paul Taylor. Who really sent you? Was it the devil Deighton?

He stepped closer to the bodger as he said this. The bodger looked straight at Paul Taylor’s Adam’s apple, small and hard in his throat now.

He raised his hands in protest.

Lads, he said. I really don’t know anything that you speak of.

The bodger turned back to the trees. The bodger turned back to Bell Hole. He made to go back the way he had come.

I think I best be upon my way.

I do believe this one is here to do the dog bastard Deighton’s dirty work, said Brian Dempsey, clamping a hand on his shoulder. He’s here to bring down the king.

The bodger fell as the fists and clogs came. A hail of them. He was stamped and kicked down into the trees. Down out of sight into the crisp dead leaves. Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor said nothing as they thumped and pounded and worked and grunted and clumped and punched and slugged and sweated. With feet and knuckles. With fists and elbows. Then logs and rocks. The bodger said nothing either for his body soon went limp and his eyelids twitched and his fingers slowly curled in on themselves as if grasping some unseen implement but Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor did not stop. Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor carried on punching the man, an honest man who was good with wood, whose hands were flecked with nicks and splinters, and who had a wife and children relying on him at home.

Down into the trees. In the dirt.

The crisp dead leaves beneath him.

They kicked until the branches closed in overhead, the trees’ lissom limbs intertwining to form a latticed ceiling as the men opened the bodger up and broke him down and he blossomed with rising blood that turned to bruising clots, and then his bones became crooked useless things and his face a hot swollen mask, his hair wrenched out in clumps that drifted away in the gentle breeze like the empty husks of insects that had hatched and shed their former selves.

The bodger was put in soil scraped out with fingers and nails. Left there in this ripe bed. Inhumed. The shallowest of lazy graves.

His tools were taken. Coins kept.

The dirt kicked back over.

He was not yet quite dead when he was buried in the Bell Hole soil but the spores and stems of tomorrow’s dawn-rising mushrooms welcomed him all the same.

Now see this man I know nowt about Swear down nowt for I am not my brothars keeper nor can I ackownt for the things it is that other lads did or do Killen a man stone dayde is just wrong is that Playne wrong when he is not meddlin or stealin your coin or rustlin your lyfestock or fixen to get you eckseycuted or fucken your wifey behind your back or fucken your wifey and your wifeys sister behind your back and your wifeys back or none of that No if its just a worken man of the countrayside a good Jórvíkshire man just goan about his bisness a man with skills and sweat on his underputs and a wife of his own back home sweepen the harth for him and who knows mebbay there is chillum there too and all he has is the misfortune to come across the worst ones in the coinin gang thems we do call the knucklemen The very worst ones The ones that would slap the teeth out of there own mothers mouth or lock their auld fathers in the cow byre for the night And mebbes they are ecksiteable that perticler day but even if that be so still they only did what they did because they are loyale to ther kinge you see Loyal to the first thing in their godfursaykun lives The first thin they can beleef in and be a part of and the first thin that has put clothes on their back and money in the pockets of ther new fustian wool suits and who knows maybe brought wimmin folk to there door too So you see vishus murderus barberus no good dirty bastids they might be but they only do what they do out of respect and loyalty to the Cragg vale Coiners them fellas what run together in the toughest meanest smartest bestist valley mob the whole wirl ever did see.

But as I say I know nowt about no poor bodger so you best not be askin us any more about it.

An almighty sound split the night, an elemental crack and crash of rock and rubble.

To James Broadbent asleep in his bed it sounded like the gunpowder claps of a worked quarry but he knew no quarryman would be mining in the deep dark witching hours.

Up the hill from his lodgings in Scout Rock wood a great hunk of rock the size of a small outbuilding had peeled away from the jagged cliffs that jutted out above the trees and come tumbling down the slopes. As it fell it smashed and uprooted trees, dragging them in its wake part way down, the splintering echo of their momentum ringing the bell of the three-quarter moon. And then another smaller piece followed, a hundred hands round and as heavy as many dead horses.

Young William Wilcox could not avoid it as he fled stumbling and slipping in the soil of the plateau deep in the centre of the wood where he had hidden the purse of creamed coins that he had been slowly stashing in secret over the past several months. He had been reaching deep into the roots of a tree when the first rock had fallen, and it was as if God himself was smiting him for his transgression with the tumbling of the second one. He had reached deeper still for the purse then, for he was only after two coins to give to his mother to pay for her pease pudding and peat hags. He had pulled it out from the moss and soil and turned and ran, the sound of fear rising up through his throat as God’s fearful echo reported back on itself from one valley side to another.

He died in an instant, though not before the fearful shadow of the tumbling rock had grown over and round him, eclipsing everything he had known in his short life as the blackness swallowed him and the cold rock that was as old as anything on earth turned him into a pulped mess of bones and flesh, flattened him between stone and mud, the mashed remains of what was once a hand matted around the bag of stolen golden guineas, whose disappearance, like that of the boy himself, would remain a mystery never to be solved by any man or woman of the valley.

Down the hill James Broadbent sat up in his bed. Several Mytholmroyd residents did. Each waited and listened but there was nothing but the strange silence that comes in the aftermath of movement. It was a silence that was tangible, but when no other noise followed he put it down to his disturbed sleep, and the ale, and the many things that haunted his mind, and then he lay back and closed his eyes.

There was knocking. Bone flesh on stout seasoned bone-dry door.

Fetch that will you, William Deighton said to his wife but then said: wait, no, let me.

He opened it onto a bleary-looking James Broadbent; onto the night.

William Deighton leaned out into Bull Close Lane and when he saw no-one else was out there he said to James Broadbent come in then. He led him into the back kitchen where mugs and plates and knives and forks sat freshly washed and stacked, and the range kicked out some vicious heat that to James Broadbent was welcome.

William Deighton poured him some tea from a pot on the range top and then poured one for himself. He gestured for James Broadbent to sit.

Well?

James Broadbent sipped the tea and then sniffed at it and sipped again. It was not a taste he was familiar with. Hot drinks he rarely took.

You’re still after the king?

Of course I am, said William Deighton. You know I am.

You and the other fellow. This Parker one.

Yes. And we have supporters too. We have spoken with magistrates. Men of influence in Bradford. They have vowed their support. The full force of the law is behind us. Now I just need to catch Hartley at it.

So you’ll still be needing my help, said James Broadbent through a puzzled scowl.

Your help would surely end this sooner, yes. And you’ll have surely heard that three more men sit in chains in York. John Pickles of Wadsworth Law is one. Stephen Marton of Stainland another. James Oldfield of Warley the third.

For what?

You know for what. Being caught with the implements of the trade.

James Broadbent did not look up from his tea.

Does the offer still stand though? he asked.

The offer?

The reward of money, said James Broadbent.

Yes. But you have to fully commit to the right side. The truthful side. Your Martons and Oldfields are all good and well but it is Hartley that will end this. It is he who I want.

The two men fell silent for a moment before James Broadbent spoke.

I have something.

What? What do you have?

Information.

Go on, said William Deighton

There’s talk of having you done for, said James Broadbent.

Done for?

Aye.

What do you mean?

There’s talk amongst some of the lads of seeing you dead.

What lads?

All the lads.

And how do you know this?

Because I was there to hear it with my own ears.

Where?

At Hartleys. At Bell House.

When was this?

Only a few days back.

William Deighton put down his cup.

And how do they propose to do this. What method?

Method?

Yes. How did they discuss they would kill me?

No way particular, shrugged James Broadbent. They just talked general, like.

Was it Hartley that proposed my killing?

Aye. I think perhaps it was.

Well either it was or it wasn’t.

Then it was.

Don’t say it was him if it wasn’t.

It was, nodded James Broadbent. He called a meeting. Dragged us up there.

How many men were present?

Hard to say.

Try.

Fifteen. Only the best of us.

And he thinks you’re one of his best men does he – Hartley I mean?

James Broadbent shrugged.

Must do.

Because I thought that David Hartley said you were as useless as a lame donkey.

He said that?

No, said William Deighton. It’s just an assumption.

Because I’d pull the stuffing out of any man with my bare teeth who said that.

Including a passing stranger?

What passing stranger?

They say a man went missing thereabouts, said William Deighton.

What man? asked James Broadbent. Where?

A worker.

A valley man?

No. A travelling man. A man of the woods.

Where?

Between Mytholmroyd and the moor.

That could be a lot of places. The moor is everywhere you go.

He was seen entering Bell Hole.

Travelling men travel, said James Broadbent. It’s their nature to be missing.

I think something befell him.

Like what?

William Deighton sipped his tea.

I think he met some men.

What men?

Your men.

I have no men.

You know who I’m driving at, said William Deighton. Fellow clippers. They say he was a bodger out looking for work. A decent fellow. Family minded. Might be that it was round about the time of this meeting that Hartley called.

I know nothing of no bodger, said James Broadbent. And that’s the truth of it.

But say there was one.

What of it?

And say he went a-wandering up onto the moor.

It’s a free country.

Is it though? wondered William Deighton. Say he crossed some Coiners coming down from Hartleys. And say these man were drunk on the threats of a king suspicious of all-comers. A king talking about killing off me, a man of the crown.

James Broadbent nodded slowly.

It is a possibility.

Then what would you do?

James Broadbent considered this for a moment.

Me? I would question this man. I would ask his family name and what business it was he had being up there where the land meets the sky and strangers do no pass through. I would warn this man.

Just warn him?

Yes. I would warn him with great persuasion. To him I would say this is still the kingdom of the shitneck King David dog-breath Hartley—

I think you would hardly use those words.

I would say what I wanted for I no longer hold my tongue for any man, fake king or real pauper alike.

Go on then, said William Deighton.

Yes, said James Broadbent warming to the subject. I would say this is the kingdom of the bastard King David bastard Hartley and this is no place for a lowly bodger. You’d be minded to watch the bogs that suck you under and the Hartley brothers who will pull the piss from your pecker. I would say watch out for that David Hartley especially, for this man is prone to mad visions and strange reckonings—

William Deighton raised a palm.

Wait. What mad visions?

James Broadbent grinned wolfishly.

Oh yes. They say he sees creatures dancing in his room. They say he does believe that men become animals and animals become men and together they dance like man and wifey in the moonlight. All his life he has talked of these things he sees that no other man does. He is not right in the head, is David Hartley. That’s why I’m telling you this: how could I follow the law of a man who sees animals dancing in his bedroom? Such talk will bring trouble to his own door – mark my words. When David Hartley swings the valley will have one less man gone mad with the moorland fever. But for now you must watch your neck Mr Deighton.

One hundred guineas, said William Deighton. A further one hundred guineas I will give you out of my own pocket if you serve me Hartley.

They’ll come after me.

With one hundred guineas you can live well a long way from here said William Deighton.

James Broadbent stared at his mug. He stared deep into it and at the dregs of leaves clotted in the bottom too, and he nodded. He said: for a further one hundred guineas on top of what is already coming to me I believe I would do most anything.

Wielding a dead hen like a lantern that had been snuffed out, William Hartley strode into the front room of Bell House. He threw it down on the table where his eldest brother was carefully applying a thin film of polish to a pocket watch from a piece of rag wrapped around one finger.

Bad things are afoot brother.

David Hartley looked at the chicken and then back to his watch.

Look at this time-piece, he said. Who would have imagined owning such a thing? Me, the son of a smelter from the hill tops.

Never mind that and look at this hen.

He glanced at it.

It’s dead is that.

I know it’s dead, said William Hartley.

They say there is a physician down in that London who advertises he can bring the drowned back to life.

What? said William Hartley.

They say that this physician down that London reckons on bringing the drowned back from the dead by blowing in their mouth. Perhaps you might consider putting your lips to the beak of that cackler and giving it a kiss, my brother.

This is no joking matter, our David.

David Hartley smiled and returned to his watch.

His brother was insistent.

Look at it.

The fox has had it, said David Hartley, his impatience rising. What of it? We need to get the boy to mind the hen hut for a night or two. He’s tip-top with that slingshot. I’ve seen him take moving squirrels from their branches at fifty paces. He’ll soon fettle it.

This is the work of no fox.

Well.

There’s not a mark on it brother. And they’re all like that.

All?

Dead. The chickens. The whole lot of them. Snabbled. That’s what I’m saying. And that’s not the half of it.

David Hartley set his watch and his waxing rag aside.

He took the bird and held it in his palm. Its neck hung loose. He stroked its feathers and then he parted them. He looked at its feet and eyes. He turned it this way and that. Then he put it down again.

Then we’ve been struck with ill luck he said. These chickens have been poxed.

You’re not listening, brother. It’s not just the chickens. It’s all of them.

All of who?

All the animals, said William Hartley. The grunters are dead and the cow is dead. Up top George Wharton’s sheep too. They are dead also. They are laid on the moor with their legs pointed to the clouds. Dead they are.

David Hartley pushed his chair back.

Where is that hound of mine? Where is Moidore? This must be his work. Fetch that mutt and I’ll give him what for. I’ll make a jump rope from his gizzard.

I have not seen the dog. But there are birds too. Birds on the ground. Birds of different varieties. Crows and gulls and spugs. They are dead, as if taken from the sky by your boy’s slingshot. Dead birds everywhere. No hound could do that.

How can this be?

William Hartley raised his open palms and shrugged.

It’s murrain he said. We have been stricken brother. That is the only explanation. Bell House and all around us have been stricken by the murrain. It is as if the moor is poisoned and the soil is poisoned and the sky is poisoned. Cursed. All the creatures have fallen over stone dead like this here cackler.

He picked up the chicken.

Burn it, said David Hartley. Burn it now.

William Hartley took the bird and he threw it onto the fire where it turned the flame blue and bristled with the sound of a charred blaze. The fire stripped it of its feathers. It singed them in an instant, then its skin shrank and tightened. Its eyes disappeared. Deep inside it, a fully formed egg cooked and then popped. The hen’s burning claws flexed inwards and then soon they too were gone.

David Hartley walked to the window.

What of the stag?

What stag?

Has there been any full-antlered deer found dead up here on these moors?

No brother. None seen.

What about down in the woods?

The lads have not reported seeing any dead deer as yet said William Hartley. Why do you ask this?

David Hartley touched his jaw. Felt that he needed a shave there. He said nothing.

Also the boy, said William Hartley. He has not been seen either.

What boy? said David Hartley.

Young Wilcox of the woods

What do you mean not seen?

His mother reports he has been gone for a night or two.

That is not uncommon for a lad of his age. Did we not wander off to spend nights with the owls and fox howls?

That we did, said William Hartley. That we did.

And the fresh air and soil pillows made us strong.

That they did.

Because it’s good for your bones to know the cold young.

Yes it is.

So are you saying he is to be blamed for all this?

No, said William Hartley. No I am not. I just mean with dead animals and a missing boy perhaps bad luck has befallen us.

Still looking out of the window across Bell Hole woods, David Hartley spoke.

It was The Alchemist, he said quietly.

The Alchemist? said William Hartley. The Alchemist did this? Then I’ll murder him for you. I’ll bring you his scalp and his teeth and his fingernails for this.

No. There’s no call for that. The Alchemist did not bring this murrain about the place – he prophesised it. He saw it in the flames. This plague is a portent.

A portent. Like witchery?

Like a sign of things to come.

David Hartley turned and picked up his watch and held it to his ear then looked at it.

That’s what he said to me: You’ll wish you read the signs. This then must be a sign.

Now you’re troubling me, said William Hartley.

And you’re right to be troubled. Dead hens is nothing. Birds falling from the sky is nothing. What comes next is what we should be concerned with. It’s the two sevens coming is what it is. It’s the fall of an empire.

I don’t understand.

Neither do I, young blood. But it has been seen in the flames. It has been spoken of. It is beyond even our control.

They sat in the back room of The Sun Inn, a mile or more outside of Bradford, on mismatched chairs and upturned barrels beneath smoked oak beams. The exciseman William Deighton and a man widely known only as Magistrate Leedes. In the corner was a spittoon slick with the sputum of passing men and on the table in front of them sat an ashtray and the abandoned remains of an undercooked spatchcock that they had split and picked at.

This Broadbent, enquired Leedes, not for the first time. Is he trustworthy?

The Magistrate looked uncomfortable in his surroundings. He was not a man at ease drinking in a public house where he might encounter those he had sent down. His first ale he had drained in seconds and his second he had made light work of too.

No of course not, said William Deighton. He’s as crooked as they come.

So am I expected to sit here all night waiting on a man whose word is worthless?

His word may be worthless and his morals crooked but James Broadbent is driven by something great: greed, Mr. Leedes. Greed is what fuels this man – greed and revenge. The best motivations for a man to do just about anything, I find.

Well that’s certainly true in my experience, sniffed Magistrate Leedes. But why isn’t your Halifax colleague Robert Parker joining us?

Mr Parker prefers to stay in the shadows.

As do I. As do I. And Broadbent is late.

As I have already explained he has a long way to travel on foot, said William Deighton. Eight miles it is from Halifax and five more before that from his lodgings in Mytholmroyd.

Could he not come by horse or have a companion bring him over by trap?

He has no such friends that I know of.

I thought these forgers were meant to have full pockets yet you say this man comes on foot?

James Broadbent is not a significant man, said William Deighton. His work for the Cragg Vale Coiners is of the dirtiest kind.

Then why do you bring him here?

William Deighton sipped his drink to hide his frustration at the magistrate’s impatience and lack of understanding. But before he could reply the Magistrate Leedes spoke again.

This man has lost his nerve.

I do believe he will come.

He is close to two hours late.

Though he did not show it, William Deighton was concerned. He stood and went to the door of the inn again. He looked out into the fading day and his spirits rose as he saw two figures ambling up the incline towards him. He recognised the slouched form and ambling gate of James Broadbent and a few paces behind him his father the charcoal burner, Joseph ‘Belch’ Broadbent. A sorry sight they may have been, but William Deighton felt like rejoicing.

He went out to meet them.

You are late, he said.

That is no way to greet a man, said James Broadbent. You are lucky we are here at all. My father is not a well man and the valley is long and arduous.

Yes, yes, said William Deighton. I have inside with me, as promised, the magistrate. Do you still intend to testify?

Do you still intend to give my boy one hundred guineas?

Joseph Broadbent said this. His voice was a thin, dry rasp.

Yes, said William Deighton. Of course. Now come inside.

After introductions were made and drinks ordered the quartet of the lawman, the exciseman and the two Broadbents retired to a quiet corner of the inn.

Now then, said William Deighton. You just tell the magistrate what it is you told me.

About what? said James Broadbent through a mouthful of broth.

You know what. About David Hartley.

He is a louse.

As he said this broth dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his shirt sleeve as the Magistrate Leedes, unaccustomed to observing such low company at close quarters, looked on aghast. Beside him his father was wearily hunched over his bowl, his red-rimmed eyes barely open, a hunk of bread dangling into his bowl, food glistening in his wet whiskers.

Tell Mr Leedes what you have seen him do, said William Deighton.

I have seen him do many things – and none of them good.

Have you seen him forging coins? asked the Magistrate Leedes.

Of course, said James Broadbent. And he’s not very good at that neither. Ham-fisted he is, for a man they call the king.

You’ve seen this on more than one occasion?

Aye. Many times I’ve seen him.

Tell Mr. Leedes what you saw exactly.

James Broadbent folded a piece of bread into his cheek and chewed a moment, then swallowed. He forked a hot buttered potato and lifted it aloft.

I have seen him take guineas and clip them.

Did he say why he was doing that? asked the Magistrate Leedes.

Broadbent shrugged.

How do you mean?

Did he express his intentions?

Eh?

He popped the potato into his mouth

Did he say what he was doing?

It might be he said he would take those guineas and he would strike them, James Broadbent said through his mouthful of food.

Strike them?

Aye. Mill them.

Was anyone else present? asked the magistrate.

Different people at different times. His bastard brothers were usually about.

He means William and Isaac Hartley interjected William Deighton. Who else?

Oftentimes Thomas Spencer. Tom Clayton too. They’re thick that lot. The moor-top boys. They came up together.

Was there anyone else there when Hartley clipped the coins? said William Deighton. We need specific incidents.

James Broadbent spooned more broth.

I do believe James Jagger was there as well.

Jagger? said the Magistrate Leedes.

He’s one of Hartley’s confidents, said William Deighton as an aside. An odious individual by all accounts.

And you are quite prepared to put this down in writing?

James Broadbent put down his fork. His father looked up from his bowl.

He’s not a book learner is James, he croaked.

It was only the second sentence that he had spoken since meeting the magistrate.

I don’t understand, said the Magistrate Leedes.

And you a man of the education, said James Broadbent as a crooked smile played about his mouth.

I think he means he does not write well William Deighton said.

He don’t write at all, said Joseph Broadbent. Neither do I – and it’s never done us no harm either.

Evidently, said William Deighton. Clearly you’re thriving.

He and the Magistrate Leedes studied the men across the table from them for a moment and then the latter sighed.

Then I shall write it for him, he said.

He reached down beneath the table and brought up a brown leather valise. He opened it up and began removing a congeries of items. A roll of papers. Ink jars. Pens. Nibs. Blotter. A candle stump. A monogrammed sealing stamp.

He took his pipe and carefully tapped it onto the table before packing it with a fresh plug of tobacco, then lit it.

James Broadbent sat back and quietly belched.

My throat is still tight, he said.

William Deighton sighed and then stood.

Two of the same? he asked.

Better make it four Mr Deighton, said James Broadbent. They say that ale loosens the throat and I do believe that this writing lark does take a man some time and effort.

Oh but I miss my Crag Vayle and the lanes and the woods and the folk what live up there Salt of the earthe folk and sum rite caracturs like Turvin Jim though James Lee was his berth name but we orl called him Gratye Jim The Grass Eater because this man had the belly and appytite of a hog I mean old Turvin Jim could eat throo owt Aside from thirty tankards of ale I’ve seenum sink over the corse of a day without even seeming drunk Jim The Grass Eater would sumtymes eat a dead sheep or a stillborn calf that had layde in the field from sunup to sundown and even if there were flyes or maggots on it Old Jim wuddent care No Old Turvin Jim would tuck into it raw even with no fyre to cook it on Hens and lambs gone greene as well or a fish thats floaten belly up in the silted ponde he’d think nothing of norrin on it and no sickness was ever cummin Worran appetite that man did have about him A hog he was A real greedy goate.

And what of Henry Wadsworth orlso nowen as Harry O Yems Well Old Harry made his wage by reeleeving weevers and packmen of ther stock as they made ther way over the moor tops from Colne and Marsden and Burnlee for a time Yemmsy was the most feered vagabond since Dicky Turpin and The Long Corsway was his preferred root Yass out past Heptstonstall he’d wayte lingerin in the shadow of a marker stone where thurs nowt but endless nite and boggards and malkins and stagmen for companee and then heed leep out and heed cut their cargo strait off the packhorse backs with a blayde Of corse this was when King David was a sprat for I would never allow such beehayvyor in my valley No that brings much attentshun Forteen year of penal servytude Harry O Yems got Forteen year in a dunjen like this wun in which I sit now the silly bastid A silly bastid for getten himself cort that is.

Wat lads.

Aye good lads of Calderdale and menny more besides orl just tryen to scratch a living from this dank shallow red soil that gives up nowt but trubble and stinken gasses like eggy guffs.

Blisters marked the palm of his hand as the old man clutched at the stirrup and walked as fast as he could without stumbling or breaking into a run that he was certain would kill him.

Beside him the horse’s flanks rippled in the snatches of moonlight that found its way through trees that closed in on them on either side, the walls of this dark, knotted corridor appearing to oscillate as they passed through it. But mainly the clouds conspired to keep the moon at bay, and there was only the sound of the reins in William Deighton’s hands, the sleek movement of the horse and Joseph Broadbent’s breath thin and tight on one side, the steady breathing of his son on the other.

The old man’s breath burned and he kept having to hawk up dry clots of phlegm and spit them out, the lung curds appearing silver as they landed on the rough ash, dirt and grit of the packhorse track.

They came back from Bradford over by the farmstead of Shelf and dropped down through wooded vales in the direction of Northowram. Here the trees ended and to their left the land opened out, sweeping away to the south where open pastures were dotted with copses and spiny thicket. They followed a sike through marshlands for a way and the horses struggled, and the old man wheezed. His lungs were on fire; his dry throat spiked with a piercing pain.

Mr Deighton, he said, but the exciseman did not hear him. He went to speak again but his voice did not come. There was only a rattle in his chest as he gasped and his blistered hand loosened its grip from the leather. He slumped to the ground. The hooves of the departing horse flashed silver. Seeing his father fall James Broadbent tugged on William Deighton’s stirrup and said Mr Deighton, Mr Deighton, hold up, and only then did the exciseman look down and then back behind him to where the old man lay at the side of the trail like errant cargo. His pale face was drawn, like a skull wrapped in waxed preserving paper. He brought the horse to a standstill and climbed down.

The two men walked to the prone third.

James Broadbent crouched beside his father. William Deighton joined him and offered his flask of water. Joseph Broadbent took it and drank long.

Well what is it man? said William Deighton.

He’s unwell, snapped James Broadbent. Anyone can see that. He’s got the fever on him.

We’ll soon be back.

Aye – to Halifax. Then it is on to Mytholmroyd that we go. Fifteen or more miles we must have done this evening yet with barely anything in our stomachs.

You should have eaten.

Eaten what? said James Broadbent. Our boots? We’ve got nothing.

There is ale at my house and food if you want it. You can stop there a while.

It is full rest that my father needs.

Joseph Broadbent nodded in agreement.

Or a ride, he croaked.

A ride?

Aye, said James Broadbent. On your horse.

William Deighton shook his head and clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

This horse belongs to the county of the West Riding, which in turn is funded by the crown itself. This is a king’s horse, man. It’s not for the likes of you two.

What do you mean by that, said James Broadbent. The likes of us two?

Are you not a member of the Cragg Vale Coiners?

I were, said James Broadbent. You know that and you also know that I’m not anymore, neither. And my father here never was. He burns the charcoal.

But until you have done what it is I have paid you to do you are Coiners, the both of you.

I’ve given you names.

How do I know you’re not still working for Hartley?

Because I said so, snapped James Broadbent. How do I know you’re not just some pettifogger who is going to turn me out into the ditch like a tick-bitten dog with the mange? How do I know you’re not going to serve me up hog-tied and fire-roasted to David shithouse Hartley and his bleeding brothers?

Because I am a man of my word, said William Deighton. One of the very last by all account.

I am a man of my word too – and mark my word when I say I’ll slit the throat of any man that dares to double cross me.

This James Broadbent said with a snarl, his bared teeth bestial in the moonlight.

William Deighton looked at the man crouched across from him, and his father. They were but sorry shapes; two dark blue silhouettes.

Be very careful with those words, forger.

James Broadbent spoke quietly.

These woods are dense and dark, Mr Deighton.

And the gibbet is strong, Mr Broadbent.

They are endless.

And you have signed a statement that is already long locked away in a magistrate’s chambers have you not?

Between them the old man coughed again.

Listen to him, said James Broadbent. My father is crying cockles. He is not a Coiner.

Saying that twice doesn’t make it so. Besides, he spawned one.

He is here for my concern, that is all.

Well then, said William Deighton. We must make haste and get this man to his bed where he needs to be.

By horseback?

By foot, of course.

You would have this man walk the long dark miles rather than let him onto your nag?

To put him on my horse would be against the crown’s law that decrees that all horses are only for those in the employ of royal business. I’ve already told you.

His insides are shot from the charcoaling Mr Deighton. He is on his last legs. No-one would know.

I would know, said William Deighton. He’ll be right. A jug of ale and a good sleep is all this man needs. It’s not far now.

The old man looked from his son to William Deighton.

How far mister?

Not far. Only an hour. Two at the most.

Joseph Broadbent coughed and then groaned.

William Deighton turned and walked back to his horse.

I need a pipe, said the old man. Just a couple of toots on a hockle-cutter would see me right. Let me rest a while and have a pipe.

Smoke is not what you need, said William Deighton as he mounted. Think on this instead: imagine what Hartley and his cohorts would say if they saw you two sorry sacks walking through the valley with the dreaded exciseman Deighton on a bright autumn morning. The darkness is your friend. You’d be wise to keep that in mind. The darkness is all that’s keeping them from you. The darkness and my knowledge of the best way through it. So let us get moving while the night still favours us.

Raindrops danced around them like diminishing sparks. It spotted across the distant hills in forms that shifted shape – vague apparitions stripping the mottled sky of its stars until rain and night and the scratching of trees around them, and the flexing haunch of the horse upon whom they rested their heads, was all that they knew.

When they finally reached the outskirts of Halifax the old man had to be lifted to the chair by the fire in William Deighton’s kitchen by his son. Awoken, Deighton’s wife placed the old man’s hat back on his head.

They rested and ate and drank and the old man slept and they warmed themselves, and then when the time came James Broadbent helped his father to the door and the cold air that blew in from Bull Close Lane seemed to rouse him for Joseph Broadbent was just about able to stand unaided. He leaned against the doorframe.

At the doorstep his son paused.

It’s an ill draft that blows in, said William Deighton.

Aye it is.

The walk and that belly of food will warm you though.

With his back to him, James Broadbent nodded.

Well then, said William Deighton. Be in or out but don’t just stand there letting Jack Frost pay us a visit.

The money, said James Broadbent.

What?

I’ll be needing them hundred guineas then.

William Deighton shook his head.

I don’t keep that sort of money around the house.

James Broadbent turned to him then.

You swore on it.

Indeed I did. Though I believe I swore to deliver one hundred guineas to you from my own pocket for information that leads to the arrest of King David Hartley of the Cragg Vale Coiners.

Well then.

Well then. When he is arrested you will be paid.

This not a fair game that you play Deighton.

And is forgery, corruption, intimidation and violence fair? No it is not. You must wait.

James Broadbent turned to his father.

Do you hear what this so-called man of honour says to me father – that I must wait for my money?

Joseph Broadbent nodded meekly. He was beyond conversation.

I thank you for your help tonight gentleman but I would advise you to keep your counsel, said William Deighton, ushering both men out into the street. You’d be wise to remember I have enough on you for capital charges and wiser still to note that if Hartley is not arrested you do not get paid. If he were to hear that you have been collaborating with me, well…

He left the sentence dangling there for a moment.

He is not known for his mercy, now is he? I bid you well.

He shut the door.

For a time the wind was up and it rattled at the stable’s shutters but then it dropped and all the night was still. Inside the air was thick with the sweet funk of the horses.

They were never entirely at rest. As one slept another rearranged itself. A third shook its mane for even in October the flies were still gathering around the warm wet fleshy pockets of their eyes, noses and mouths. Horse flies and black flies and stable flies. Some laid their eggs in open sores and others feasted on equine blood. The cold of winter would kill them off but for now they circulated, then settled, then circulated again, locked in a perpetual cycle of irritation for their hosts.

There was the sound of a metal shoe on stone and the slow rustle of the chewing of tufts of hay pulled in greedy clumps from broad summer bales, then the fleshy snort of a sleeping horse deep in a dream of galloping across open meadows, its memory reaching back to somewhere deep as it ran with the herd, thundering through woodlands as around it other horses fell into its stride, their hooves tearing up the soil, the boles of coppiced trees flashing by as if moving around them, and then suddenly bursting as one into a stubbin to rest and breathe and drink water as the sun played upon their steaming necks. It was a dream of experience and sinew intertwined, memories held in muscle. The solid core of something that stretched through thousands of centuries.

In the bluest part of night a slit of light grew broad for a moment and then narrowed again. Expanded and contracted. There were footsteps on the byre stone. There were hushed voices too, then the sound of a candle being lit and the faces of two men caught at the very limit of the flame’s reach. They moved the candle around and saw the creatures in their stalls – some were sitting with legs tucked under, others still standing. The light framed the large eye of one horse and its black pupil grew larger still and fearful in the glare of the dancing flame. The men moved onto the next stall. One nodded to the other. He gestured with his chin to the standing horse, whose hide appeared russet coloured in the gloomy elastic night.

That one, he whispered.

The other looked. Blinked. His hot breath hanging in the cold night.

Are you sure?

I know those markings. That horse is yon devil Deighton’s.

He raised the candle and ran it around the outline of the horse, tracing its form. He spoke with eyes. His eyes said: go on then.

From his coat his companion pulled out a large pair of cloth shears, their handles worn smooth with years of use, the forged blades blackened by dirt and time. He stepped forward and took the horse’s tail but his friend hissed no – not there, higher up you bloody doylem.

The man raised the scissors; he moved them right up to where the tail met the horse’s haunch and holding it there with one hand he hacked through the bunched hair. It was tougher than he thought so he hacked some more. When it did not give and the horse went to rear he paused a moment and then he moved the scissors further down and cut again and this time the thick hairs came away in strands. The horse stirred again and looked back over its shoulder, but it did not buck. Instead it repositioned its feet and looked on with mute indifference.

These shears—

Just get on with it.

He finally stepped away with the tail in hand and held it there before him as if it were a trophy: a legendary pike perhaps, or a leveret freed from a snare or a trapped fox ready to be tossed to a pack of baying terriers. He held it up to the candle and the light showed that the tail hairs were earthy brown in colour, running down to black where they fanned out at the tip. A ragged oversized hedgehog of hair remained on the horse’s rump.

Tie it, said the one holding the candle and his friend said what?

Tie it at the top end, he said again.

The man looped the tail. He encircled his fist with it.

He tied it round. Knotted the end.

Held it there again. Aloft. A trophy.

Deighton, he said.

That bastard, said the other.

I’ll nail it to his front door.

Aye. Just as was ordered. His scalp will be next.

In the dead of night the wind spun down the tight corridor of the hidden valley-within-a-valley that was Cragg Vale. It sprinted in across the open moors of Blackstone Edge and it screamed and shrieked when it found itself trapped between the steep sides of the shadowed vale that drew it deeper into the cleft of land.

Down through Turvin Clough it blew, and it whipped the waters of Elphin Brook into a fuming white foam then rose to the place where several houses huddled close together by a bridge and a marsh to form a hamlet. It pelted the black face of Cragg Hall with leaves and grit and shale. Rained down upon it. It shifted stones across the packhorse route and even flattened some headstones that marked the beds of the dead in the tiny cemetery. It blew metal buckets in noisy half circles. It tore rushes from the marshy grove and sent scarecrows on the seeded plots skywards, their matted straw stuffing spiralling from the collars and cuffs of old wool coats. It opened gates and then snapped them shut and took anything that was not tethered off into the darkness of the surrounding woods, where branches collected clothes and sacking and string and ribbons, and boots that had been left drying upturned on metal scrapers in stone porches.

Then just when the wind seemed as if it couldn’t get any louder the valley shaped the gust into a whistling twister; turned it into a spinning top that ate up the trees that grew densely packed in the narrow coppiced part of this fecund gulch above the village. It took trunks that had grown seventy and eighty years thick and pulled them up like carrots. It yanked tangled roots that had dug seventy or eighty feet deep into soil and tore them out in screaming wrenches. Roots that held amongst them boulders and warrens and setts and dens dug over generations by rabbits and badgers and foxes were now suddenly exposed to a whirlwind that sounded to them as if their very world was ending. Riven like rusted nails from warped wood, four dozen trees were snapped and felled in seconds. Others were split as if stricken by unseen axes that fell from the sky, and then they were upended so that they became distorted images of themselves, their roots now reaching skywards like arthritic fingers.

The storm howled once more and then it was over.

The spinning streak of violent wind had spun itself out, exhausted its dark centre into a nothingness, after which there followed only the creaking of timber and the shifting sound of small runs of mud sliding down the reshaped inclines before they slipped plopping into the stream that was now dammed in several places with the snarled entanglements of branches pressed down into the shallow waters by the weight of the thick trunks rent asunder above them.

The water swelled and by morning it was lapping over the banks and pooling in the lower clefts and channels of the newly-cleared leys that had opened up in woods that were once dense, but which now had greatly diminished overnight.

The roosting birds had already left a land they no longer recognised. Great gaps had opened up and what was once a maze of looming wooden columns that obscured any view from one side of the gully to the other was now a place of new spaces and chaotic uneven ground pitted with fresh holes that gaped like open mouths. A wrecked place. A ruined cathedral.

Then finally there was silence. A solemn, still silence.

At the Red Lion. In the barn out the back. The flat black back patch beyond the single street lamp’s reach – beyond the watching eyes of anyone who might chance to pass by.

Here the sharp sting of several types of smoke scented the air: the burned leaves of a bonfire, the greasy oil smoke of the hanging lanterns and the narrow plumes from clay pipes that clicked against black and broken teeth.

There was the stiff wet smoke too, ingrained in the wool and leather that the men appeared to wear as a second skin. And cutting through it all the pungent stench of chicken dung from the Red Lion’s own prizefighting bantams that were stuffed into their cells in a giant coop out the back, where they were kept mean and hungry.

In the centre sat a makeshift pit. Nothing more than a dug hole, circular, with three steps leading down into it and a sagging rope cordon to keep the men at bay. Only the landlord Piggy Ratchard and his boys – his setter-ons – were allowed down there to fix the spurs and remove the hoods and pick up the lifeless pecked carcasses of the weaker birds.

The pit edge was lined three-deep with men jostling to get a view as the hens were lifted aloft and odds were called.

There were sixteen cocks in the Welch Main contest, and the last one standing was to be declared the winner. It cost two guineas just to be there and much more to wager on a fight. Coins were being buffed and passed and checked and tossed. Pressed into palms in the half-darkness. Clipped coins and true coins, and the faces of the men that took them were halved and quartered by the falling shadow angles of the inn’s sharp corners.

There were familiar faces. Tom Clayton and John Tatham. The boy Jack Bentley. William Hailey and Joe Shay. Eli Hoyle. Eli Hill. William Hartley and William Hartley, the elder and younger. Isaac Hartley and David Hartley. James Jagger. Others. Their arms draped around one another, their pint pots slopping. Coins being flipped. A song on their tongues.

It was a time of plenty and together they faced an incoming winter without the usual ache of wanting; this winter there would be logs and ale and meat and oats and coins left over for those rarest of things: luxuries.

One of Piggy Ratchard’s setters lifted a bantam aloft and turned in a circle. It was a meagre looking bird, and already scrap-scarred. More than once it had been bathed in Ratchard’s own piss, a practice he believed speeded the healing of the injured. Another was to suck the blood from a cock’s head wounds. This would not be this bird’s first fight but the odds being called suggested it would more than likely be its last. Another of Ratchard’s setters climbed down into the pit and paraded the opponent, making sure to keep its spiked spurs folded away beneath it. The two were then presented at close quarters, eye to eye.

At the back of the crowd Isaac Hartley rested one elbow on his brother’s shoulder and said to him: the river runs thick with gold still, my brother. It seems good fortune continues to shine down upon us.

In the pit, in a flurry of feathers, the frantic cocks were released and immediately tore into a clinch, spurred feet first, their heads drawn back.

Fortune or luck has little to do with it, said David Hartley.

Well then. It is good to enjoy the fruits of our endeavours nonetheless.

Isaac Hartley raised his drink and took a long swig. David Hartley said nothing. Around the pit the men jeered as the game birds reared and pecked then reared again. Beer swilled from their tankards onto the dirt floor. The two cocks became one rolling ball of tangled wings and falling feathers and the men cheered them on.

The brothers watched a while before the younger spoke.

They say they fixed the exciseman, the black devil Deighton, said Isaac Hartley.

David Hartley turned to him.

Who did?

A couple of the boys.

Fixed him how?

Just a little frightening.

A little frightening?

I don’t know. I believe they did tamper with his prize horse.

David Hartley shook his head and looked away in disgust.

To tamper with a horse is the act of cowards.

They didn’t kill it, brother.

Then what?

They sent the bastard a message. That’s all.

And this message said—?

Isaac Hartley looked at David Hartley in confusion.

I don’t understand.

I’ll tell you what this message said. It said: we are cowardly men who would rather harm the horse that carries a man across the moors in innocence than meet the man himself. It said: come and get us, for we are nothing but yahoos full of wind and piss. It said the coining lads of Cragg Vale are nothing but hackums and hectors. Bouncers and merry-begotten bastards ourselves. Dung-dwellers and needy-mizzlers. Laming or branding or mutilating his horse will not deter that black devil William Deighton. It will only fuel his ire. Think on, man.

Brother, you need more ale in you, said Isaac Hartley. You have the look and words of one who has the gallows in his eyes.

I have seen signs.

What signs?

Omens and portents, Isaac.

Isaac Hartley grinned a crooked smile. In the pit one of the bantams had pinned the other to the ground and was pecking furiously at its neck. Around them the men were shouting it on. Tiny flecks of blood dotted the dirt.

Omen and portents brother?

Yes, said David Hartley. Omen and portents – like birds flying backwards and swans born with two necks. Signs of bad things afoot.

This is the talk of old crones and hedgerow-hoppers, David.

Are you denying all those dead animals, brother?

Isaac Hartley considered his answer.

No, he said. No, I do not. That was something I cannot yet explain.

And the storm that split the trees but two nights ago?

That is just nature’s way.

David Hartley shook his head.

That evil wind only blew upon the village of Cragg Vale; the vale whose name we Coiners carry. It didn’t even reach us up top on the moor. It passed right on by below, not but three hundred paces away. That was no mere hand of nature. That was a message from darker forces; a warning sent to us Hartleys. Yet still you talk of good luck and fortune and rivers running gold.

Are we not lucky not to have had Bell House blown away?

It was a sign I tell you, said David Hartley. They say a tinker went missing too.

He was no tinker.

Then you know about him?

It’s just rumour, David. You need not worry about that. Are our pockets not full?

At what cost though?

Isaac Hartley shrugged.

The people of the valley are fed and clothed and understanding happiness for the first time, he said. We all are. The land is ours.

The land is not ours, said David Hartley. Changes are afoot.

What changes?

Great changes. It starts with traitors amongst us.

I’ve had one beady eye on the Alchemist for some time now, said Isaac Hartley. Perhaps it is he who is responsible for the animals. Shall I fix him brother?

And then what?

Isaac Hartley pointed to another barn whose sides were quietly thudding with the movement of the three dozen creatures from whom Piggy Ratchard earned his name.

And then feed him to Ratchard’s guffies over there.

David Hartley shook his head.

Killing him will bring more trouble. And anyway who will clip then? This magic man is a master of metallurgy.

Isaac Hartley shrugged.

We were clipping before that man was brought on.

And look at the coins we made, said David Hartley. Crooked crowns and dirty guineas refused by half the traders in Jórvíkshire. Shit bits.

But we have those people on our side now. Our might is known. Fear has worked its wonder.

No, said David Hartley. The Alchemist is a man of magic with the metal and fire. So long as the coins keep coming in he is needed. After that – well. But it is not he who brings trouble to our door. I believe there are other forces at work. I’m thinking now perhaps it is time to cease.

Isaac Hartley looked at his brother, aghast.

Stop our clipping?

David Hartley nodded.

The two brothers looked around at the other men swaying and jostling, some of them smiling and singing, others sullen, but all with money in their pockets and meat in their stomachs. They saw their other brother William and their father too, smiling with the warm glaze of liquor in their eyes.

Look at the old man, said Isaac Hartley. At death’s door from starvation but two winters back but now given a stay from Old Nick himself. You did that, our David. You’ve made the Hartley name great. But now you talk about giving that up just as we’re getting started?

David Hartley nodded.

Kings don’t give up, said Isaac Hartley. Kings get dragged off their throne. They get beheaded or overthrown but they never walk away from their duty.

David Hartley turned to his brother.

What fucking duty? he said in a low tone.

Your duty to this rabble, said Isaac Hartley. And the rest of them. They fucking love you. Without you—

Without me what?

Without you I’m certain this valley will fall fallow. The coining will die off and the men will lose their will to fight because no man will go back to the loom after having the taste of gold on his tongue. And these others you speak of with their plans and their mills and their giant spinning machines, and their weaving machines and their fucking water wheels and their canal boats, they will be the death of all of us. They say they can spin a hundred unbroken yards of yarn in them factories, David. I heard tell of it. I heard that in the Black Country there are already mills the size of cathedrals. Is that right?

I saw one with my own eyes, said David Hartley. Water does the work of a hundred men and it’s a mile of unbroken yarn they can spin if they desire it.

Isaac Hartley shook his head.

No good can come of it. These buildings will not last, brother. We’ll make sure of that. We’ll burn them to cinders.

David Hartley stopped him.

It is too late, he said. Know this: we will not recognise this valley ten years hence. We will not recognise it and there will be no place for the likes of our lot.

But this valley is our valley, said Isaac Hartley. You’ve said the words enough yourself to the boys. They’ve sung it in song. A song to ring down the ages. The land is ours and the sky is ours and the moor is ours—

But David Hartley had already turned and walked away. He pushed through the men around the cockpit where one of Piggy Ratchard’s setters on was holding a broken ruffled flaccid thing aloft, its eyes gone, beak shattered, its dimpled skin as white as the moon that lit the path that he walked upon, and behind him the men cheered and then cheered again.

It began to rain.

Yes yes I remember the night at Piggee Ratchids well as that nite the moone appeert as if it were a hole in the sky throo witch feerless moths did fly Cold it was too and the cocks kept coming and that pit it did begin to fill with the blood of them what looked black in the moonlite Black as pitch beneath the lanterns old Pigghe had strung from strings out the back of that fine hostillry he keeps that they do call the Red Lione And what it is I wud give now to have just wan or a cupple of jugs of that ayle he serves there Aye Piggy’s foamin ayle would set me just rite in the cole darkness of this stone toom they’ve gorrus in.

Becors here in Yorke assises they do give us naut but pewtreyde water that maykes you weeke as a citten if you tayke it and they saye the fud they give you in the shotbox was allso yoosed to bild the jale itsel They says this stickee shyte is what holds the briccs together and thats eesy to beleeve becors when I squat to scwees one out mornentimes often it is like passen a brick A big thic brick And other times it is like the Rivver Calder itsel is flowern out me erse anin that momunt I says to mysel I says sweet jeesus what a life yoov made for yersel King Daevid What a bleeden life sitting here in your stink with naut but wet straw forra bed and these big fuken nite rats chewing the dead skin off the soles of your sweet stinken feet when yer sleep and nothing to do but rite this memwar for my chillen to reed with pride if they learnit to.

But that nite at the cockpit I had a bad feelun Corl it premmynishun call it omens and potents call it a sense of superstisheen but I do beleev the stagmen was sent to guide us and to warn us and the stagmen that nite they was sayan to us gerrowt Kinge Divaid get out wiile you can They was saying do the peeple not love you for all that you have done for them and will they not sing your praysus up to the heavens for feeden them and clothen them and making the valley a place of plenty even for just a few short seesuns and fertharmore have you not showern them a new way and just becors the big men with the big plans is comern over the horisum with all this talk of takern down the looms and bildin mills and diggin canals and increasing the cloth trade a hunnered fold doesunt mean the valley folk have to go back to sucken stones and mashen oats and eaten docks Heck no They say this is Gods cuntree so why not live like a God then.

No becors what you did King Dayvid says these voyses that I did heer was you showed that no man need live to the lors of another man just becors that other man has welth and whiskers and land and an educayshun No you have shown that valley folk belong in the valley becors the valley is thers and the moors is theres and orl of it is thers and yours too It is in you And Grayce has your hart and Bell House has your hart an the sky has your hart an the mooers have your hart and the crags have your hart and the hetha an the mud and the rain an the milstoene grit an the spelter stamp an the spyder web an the incummin clowd an the cawing crow an the mooing cow an the fox an the hawke an the sow and the priyze winnen bantam an all of it The hole big Yorkshyre lot of it has your hart becors when you come from a place you want to stay in a place And you are a place You make it and it makes you.

But did I lissen to them werds of the Stagmen did I buggeree Cors if I had I wudna be sat here riten these thorts these peoms these lassed werds offa grayte man aye but a desprut man to.

He left Bull Close Lane. He strode down Cheapside into Halifax. William Deighton walked briskly towards the centre of it. To George Street. To George Square.

To the guts of the town.

He passed clusters of people. Some singing, others vomiting. He saw a woman squatting in an alley, her skirts hitched, dark piss trickling and steaming in the October night and when he stopped and looked she laughed and pointed as if it were he, a family man in employment and of good standing, who was without shame or dignity.

He turned into Southgate. Here the street narrowed and the sky was blocked out by the shapes of buildings on either side. No stars. Around the back way he went. Into Old Cock Yard. Narrower still. He walked towards the inn on the corner after which the dead-ended street was named. Two hundred years it had stood and two entrances it had, one on the corner with a painted gallows sign swinging on chains above it, and a side entrance. William Deighton knew its history – how the Cock had belonged to the wealthy Saville family and had once housed them, but now was a hostelry that played host to crooks and forgers.

William Deighton walked on. Once more round he went. Round the block. Once more for luck; for security. Once more to check the doorways and alleys for eyeballs, for the shadow forms of the watching.

Then he walked back into Old Cock Yard and he pushed open the street door and he entered the inn.

In the hallway Robert Parker was waiting. He nodded to William Deighton then he tipped his head towards the tap room. William Deighton looked through the glass of the door and saw that it was deep with the bodies of men in coats and shirt sleeves, crowded into the space with their drinks in hand. Fine blue ribbons peeled away from their pipes to join a canopy of smoke that hung above them.

The light from the oil lamps was low, but nevertheless through the room he could see seated sideways at a table in the corner one David Hartley. He was surrounded by men. His men. Seven or eight of them, all clippers, raucous in the drink, their hats discarded and some with their shirts unbuttoned. In their centre David Hartley held court.

William Deighton stepped back into the hallway as two men entered the inn from the same street door. When they saw him they discreetly touched their fingers to their forelocks. Arkle and Baker. They were both burly men. They filled their clothes and their eyes were black beneath furrowed brows. Both bailiffs had been brought over from Huddersfield, hired for no reason but their bulk and availability. To meet muscle with muscle.

William Deighton introduced them to Robert Parker. The men appeared wary and then one of them spoke. Baker.

Two hours or more Hartley has been here he said in a voice that was surprisingly high for such a squarely-built man. We saw him come in ourselves.

He is well on his way, said Arkle. I would not like to interrupt his flow.

That is the last ale King David Hartley of Cragg Vale will drink, said William Deighton.

Beside him Robert Parker solemnly nodded. The bailiffs said nothing but both the exciseman and the solicitor noticed that neither of them could stand still. They fidgeted. They shifted. They appeared as if they were coming undone.

Are you men frit? asked William Deighton.

The bailiffs looked at one another but said nothing.

Come on – speak upon me. Are you scared?

Hartley is with many friends, said Baker.

We’ll get him out of here before they know what is happening, just as we discussed, said William Deighton. Him and James Jagger.

James Jagger is not here, said Arkle.

Not here?

He is in the Cross Pipes.

What is he doing there?

The same as he would be doing here. Drinking until his skin can hold no more I would say.

William Deighton shook his head.

Then we will have to move twice as quick lest Jagger hears about Hartley’s arrest and makes a run for it. Silver Street is but a minute’s sprint from here. We can hit both.

Perhaps we should reconsider, said Robert Parker. Try another night.

No, said William Deighton. It has to be now. It must be this day. Even just being here we will have been seen. Broadbent’s testimony will send Jagger to the gibbet. We cannot let him abscond. If he takes to the hills we may never see him again. We must take Hartley tonight. First him, then Jagger.

The four men looked at each other and nodded in agreement.

You will accompany me, said William Deighton to Baker, and then to Arkle he said: and you watch the street entrance as planned. No-one is to enter or leave. Mr Parker, perhaps you might now want to retire for the evening? For your safety of course.

We’ll all be safer when Hartley is in shackles. Not likely Mr Deighton.

The Cock is a rough house Mr Parker. The Coiners will know your face.

As well they should. I’ll stay until this business is done.

William Deighton capitulated.

Very well, he said. With God as our witness let us bring the king of the Coiners in.

The hand fell on the shoulder of David Hartley and fingers curled around cloth once woven by his own wife and cut to shape by the best tailor that the town had to offer. The hand clasped and pulled and dragged David Hartley to his feet, his tankard of ale sloshing across his hand and wrist, soaking his unbuttoned cuff. He turned to swing a fist but the bailiff Baker came around the side to clasp his arm and twist it, drawing it up his spine. David Hartley’s chair fell backwards and drinks wobbled and slopped on the table as he flailed in the grip of Deighton and Baker. The other men – his men – did not move; they were frozen in the moment.

Only then did David Hartley see it was the exciseman William Deighton that had him. He struggled in what space there was but the bailiff was pressed up too close – so close that he didn’t see the irons as they were snapped onto his wrists.

David Hartley looked to his men to see who would strike either his captor or the burly bailiff whose hot breath he felt on his neck.

But still his men were unmoving, torn between fate and consequence. They stood suddenly sober, caught between the passing seconds and a future that they saw suddenly unravelling before them like unspooling yarn. A future of patina-patterned coins turning green in the hidden troughs of fallow fields; of long winter weeks living on nothing but kale broth and chicken bones; of rope and chain; of forgotten pouches tucked into tree roots and tools turned blunt by the seasons; of crumbling cottages and rotting fruit; of sobbing wives and starving children; of farmsteads waterlogged and moss-covered and tumbling; of twisting creaking rope and desperate legs thrashing.

This is what David Hartley saw in the eyes of these men he had grown up with – the closest of whom he knew as well as any man might. Hunched men, scowling men. Mean-eyed men, muscular men, lean men. Men who appeared as if risen from the soil. Tommy Spencer and Wild Willy Clayton. Big John Wilcox and Absolom Butts. Jonas Eastwood.

None moved as they saw before them the ending of something, the collapse of an empire of dirt and clipped metal. They saw the falling of the good times, the death of the era of plenty and the dearth of abundance and freedom.

None moved and David Hartley’s struggles ended with a final shirk of one shoulder. The unflinching hands that held him there were the ultimate humiliation.

Deep from his throat he summoned phlegm and spat it to the floor, to the feet of the men whose pockets he had lined. Then John Wilcox turned and pushed his way through the crowd of the other drinkers beyond their immediate circle, who had slowly fallen into silence as one by one they realised who it was that was being arrested. Thomas Spencer put down his drink, picked up his coat and followed him. William Clayton was next. Other men – men on upturned barrels, men warming themselves by the popping fire or leaning on the bar – stood and left too.

William Deighton nodded to the bailiff and then with fingers curled around his biceps they led David Hartley through a corridor of bodies that had appeared in the packed tap room and out along the hallway, where Robert Parker watched as the king of the Coiners was taken out into the square where people were already gathering in a throng of whispers.

Not a single word had been spoken except that which now came from David Hartley himself, hissed with venom through crooked teeth clenched shut as a cloud crossed the autumn moon and a despondent mizzling rain fell, and the night decided that rain was not enough for such an occasion, and it turned the raindrops into a hail shower, the first of the season.

Bastards.

He did not sleep. Instead he sat shivering in wet clothes on the cold stone floor of the small square lock-up by the side of the Duke Of Leeds Inn. Outside was a pick-up point for the stagecoaches, and periodically through the night there was the scrape and clatter of wheels and hooves on the cobbles, followed by low murmured voices tired from long rides, and the sweet stench of horse scat and wet hides hanging heavy, tumaceous and steaming close by.

In the early hours the door was unlocked by the landlord of the Duke and the bailiffs Arkle and Baker brought another man in. The door was closed behind him. He was just a shape in the dark. The shape had a voice, dry and cracked. The damp walls held it and flattened it. Muted it.

Now then, King David.

Is that you James Jagger?

It is me.

A pause. The two men looked for each other in the near darkness.

They strong-armed you then? said David Hartley.

Aye, said James Jagger. Dipping my bill alone in the Cross Pipes, I was. They had a written warrant. It was that bastard William Deighton. Clipping and defacing the king’s coin he is claiming, to which I said there is only one king I follow and that is King David Hartley of Bell House, Cragg Vale, Eringden Moor, Upper Calder fucking Valley, Yorkshire cunting England. That’s what I told him. Thems the very words I used.

And then what happened?

I gave these two big bastards who were with him a clump each and they gave me a dozen more in reply. Bailiffs I reckoned them to be. Blow-ins from Huddersfield. And now a tooth is loose and I think some ribs are cracked. Listen to me wheeze, brother.

David Hartley spoke quietly.

Not one man stepped in when they arrested me.

Not one?

Not one. Between the best of us we could have buried the devil Deighton in the soil by sun-up, and his burly bastard blow-in bailiffs by his side too, and the silence of the inn would have been ours, there’s no doubt about that, the town and the valley is on our side, but instead they froze like ice shoggles. They just stood and stared. Gloared at the lawman. They shit it.

David Hartley felt James Jagger move closer and then sit beside him on the cell floor.

Maybe they have a plan.

What plan?

A plan to get us out of here.

There’s no fucking plan, said David Hartley. It’s me that does all the planning round here. Without me they’ll neither be able to lace their boots nor wipe their yellow cowardly backpipes.

They fell quiet for a moment.

What’ll become of us? Will they let us out tomorrow?

David Hartley said nothing.

Another long silence followed. The street was empty now, and the inn was shut and no stage coaches had stopped to alight.

I said what will happen to us, King David?

I heard what you said.

What do we do?

We keep our mouths shut.

But they know what we’ve done, said James Jagger.

They know nothing. They can prove nothing. There’s neither of us been caught at the clipping red-handed.

They say a man would hang for forging coins.

David Hartley spoke quietly again.

How many men do you know who have clipped a guinea James Jagger?

Many. Scores I would say.

Scores in the Upper Calder Valley alone.

Yes.

And how many have swung for it?

None.

Well then. That is what is going to happen.

What?

Nothing.

Nothing, King David?

Nothing. You keep your mouth shut and your teeth clenched, and best keep your fists curled and ready for whatever them bastards bring to us for breakfast because you can be sure it won’t be eggs and ham hock. These bastards are out for us but no one keeps this king down. We’ll get out fighting if need be. Just bide your time, Jagger. Bide your time.

To the darkness David Hartley said this, and his voice was so calm and steady he almost believed it himself.

At nite now I taykes to singin sum of the old songs The songs that the boys did synge an some they rote themselves Songs they say is good for the mood and I reckon that to be true enuyff because weed always singed when weed worked our fingas to the bone clipping a goode haul Singen too before that when farmen or loomin or bildin and the man had given us good coyne honest coyne then weed filled our skin with ale and slakund ower tungs and be feelin like all ower trubbles had been drowned like rats to the ayle barrel That was wen weed tayke to singing the old songs Aye songs like Sing one sing orl Coiners tayke your hole and steal your sorl or maybe King Daevid king Daevid he is the graytest king that ever warked the earth or maybe weed sing summat like Clip a coyn and fuck the crowne if a lawman comes knocken choppum down.

Or maybe even a vers of Valley boys clip an valley boys sin Valley boys kneel to none but ther Kinge.

Good songs old songs new songs Songs that tell the tayle of me and mine So at nite now I sing them lowd an prowd an that’s when the men start showting at us to turn it in Turn it in they says Turn it in you bellowing thundercunt But I jest larfs at this an I gets to singin even lowder and make sure I waken all the silly sossidges soes that I’m sure they orl no about King David because I do this nite after nite Aye nite after nite for weeks on end I sing my good songs and now ther all bangin and moanin but none of them says wat it is theyll do to us if I don’t stop my singin becors they knows I is King Daevid of the Crags and to mayke a threat against King Daevid of the crags you mite as well take that hemp rope an not that hemp rope an sling it over the gibbet yersel becors to do that wud be to lose an eye or your tung or wark only on broken bones for ever more or maybe even greet death himsellf Jussed as the cundemt man nose his fayte.

An so I showts out I shout Get a wash yer blacc Lancastreen bastuds becors even tho the most of them is Jórvíkshire men lyke myself its the bestst way to get theyr blud and piss boilin by corlin them black Lancayshite bastids like that and so on and on I sings on with my good song I sings Valley boys clip an valley boys singe and Valley boys bow to none but ther King over and over and sure enuff in time I do beleef my mood now begins to lift just as I thort it would An my hart too it swells beneath my ribs so strong Rite good it is Rite bluddy good.

Away from the eyes of the valley the brothers William Hartley and Isaac Hartley met deep in Bell Hole. They walked down through bosk and spinney to a clearing by the stream. They took circuitous routes, made sure they were unseen. It was a place of their childhood. A place of conspiracy.

Here the water ran down through small falls and spouts and levels. Often when it rained for days the stream flooded the surrounding lea and turned it into a thick dark mire.

They have our brother, said William Hartley, the younger of the pair.

Yes, replied his sibling. But not for long.

Not for long?

No. I don’t believe they can hold him, said Isaac Hartley. He’ll be out from Halifax gaol by nightfall.

But he is not in Halifax,

Not in Halifax? Where then?

They have already moved him to York castle. Have you not heard? They say there is a testimony.

What testimony?

That one belonging to the cursed black devil Deighton, said William Hartley. They say he already has a signed testimony that is enough to have our David committed for trial at the assizes. It is a witness statement.

Who would go against the Coiners and bear witness to this lawman? There is no-one in the valley who would have the hide to cross us.

Do not be so sure, brother. I believe someone has turned – just as David predicted.

One of our own?

Perhaps.

But who?

Someone who has seen enough to spill his guts, said William Hartley.

But why would they do this?

William Hartley walked to the stream. He crouched and scooped cold water into his mouth. He looked for fish – a habit of a lifetime – but there were none. This stream ran straight from the moor; none had ever made it this far up.

Choose a reason. Spite or jealousy. Perhaps the devil Deighton has them blackmailed. But most probably it is greed. Wanton greed. An offer of money can turn any man.

Not our men, said Isaac Hartley. They have plenty of money. A river of coins does flow from these moors and down through this valley. Between us we have made sure that them and theirs want for nothing.

A river can always run deeper and wider.

But why ask for more?

Because some men are never satisfied.

Greed then it is, said Isaac Hartley.

Yes. Or power. Perhaps this turncoat fancies the crown of the valley for himself.

You mean one of our own would sell on our brother’s soul to the lawman so that he could take over? Anyone that would do that is ready for the asylum. It could never work.

No. It could never work.

From high up in the slopes of the woods William Hartley could hear the raven’s croak, dry and throaty. Another one joined it in a slightly higher pitch. A nesting pair. William Hartley stood and searched for their blue-black shapes against the sky but he could not see them. He looked to the tree tops for their bowl-shaped nests lined with mud and bark and roots and softened with snags of deer or sheep fur. He could not see them.

As boys they had climbed these trees here in Bell Hole to seek out such nests and take eggs. Scores they had collected, from the nests of birds of dozens of varieties, David Hartley always scaling the most obscure trees to heights where the branches seemed too thin to hold the weight of an adolescent swaying in the breeze. Cliffs they had climbed too, to find the eyries of falcons and their woody, nut-coloured eggs. Kestrels they hunted down for their clusters of mottled cackleberrys. Owls also, their eggs often as perfectly pure white as the moon.

Such rare finds were kept as treasures or occasionally traded with other valley boys, the brothers’ collection set on the beam above the beds where they slept so that their translucent shells were best illuminated by a morning sun that crept over the brow of the moor.

William Hartley turned back to his brother who had lit a pipe and was letting the smoke swirl around his face like the unravelling bandages of a shot-blasted soldier back from the far-flung killing fields of the bloody rebellions.

So what do we do to free him? he asked.

There is only one way.

Tell me.

We must flush out the rat, said Isaac Hartley. He passed the pipe to his brother who took the mossy smoke into his mouth.

And cut strips off him? he said.

No, said Isaac Hartley. We flush out the rat and we get him to change his testimony. Without that, any trial would surely crumble. There’s none of us have been caught at it. It’s all hearsay, is that. The black devil man Deighton has not seen the clipping, nor does he have the tools of our trade or any evidence save surely for a few coins he has accrued from barmen and butchers here and there. They mean nothing. Anyone could clip a coin. It all rests on this rat. This turncoat.

We must find him.

We must.

And we shall.

James Broadbent felt the warm ale slip down his throat and wished that he had a pipe because although he rarely took one he felt like scorching the anger that was burning in the pit of his stomach. He felt like burning his insides and raging and smashing and breaking all in sight. He felt like punching chunks out of the valley. Great holes into it. He wanted to bite boulders. Burn houses. Slit the throats of calves and daub William Deighton’s name in blood across the face of the Halifax clock tower. Of all that he felt capable.

Without the money to drink all day the bitter embers within him were only further fuelled by thoughts of poverty. He ruminated on the work he had done for two opposing sides and the outcome was always the same: neither had given their dues.

He poured his drink down quickly and shouted for Barbara to bring him another. With each swallowed mouthful those one hundred guineas that were owed to him seemed further beyond reach, intangible and nebulous like early morning bog fumes. They were mythical coins now, less real even than those they had milled and stamped and sent back into circulation. Because at least those moidores and shillings and half guineas and pennies had been something to touch and hold and feel and bite with your teeth to confirm they were real. Deighton’s guineas had been nothing but a lure. Mythical money. He saw this now. He saw this and he cursed William Deighton and he cursed David Hartley and he cursed himself.

In the early afternoon the day outside spilled into Barbary’s and a shaft of autumn sun crossed James Broadbent. He raised an arm to screen his eyes, to block it out, and with it came James Stansfield, looking first to the left where a small huddle of turnpike workers were taking their beer and then to the right where James Broadbent sat slumped, one foot raised onto a stool, eyes squinting into the momentary brightness. He made straight for him.

Have you heard? said James Stansfield. They’ve got the king.

James Broadbent looked and leered. Sneered. He did not like James Stansfield. Never had. Stansfield was slight and weak and blond. One of the soft ones. Everything about his appearance annoyed him: his small wet mouth, his beardless chin, his girlish blue eyes. Stansfield was under the Hartley brothers’ thumb and without the Hartleys he was nothing.

Without the Hartleys most of them were nothing. They could never stand alone; not like him. When the Hartleys swung – and that was surely soon – this lot would go back to being land labourers and weavers and farmers scratching at the soil for vegetables in their shallow, barren plots. They did not have the courage that he, James Broadbent, had. They were as low as field mice that seek the warmth of a man’s home in winter; they were nothing but rodents but he was the mythical wolf of old England that stalked the woods alone, crunching skulls. By season’s end he would be gone.

He said nothing. He just looked at James Stansfield, flush-cheeked and short of breath. James Stansfield stared back and saw a man whose eyes could not focus and a jaw that was slack. The face of a savage in his cups.

The Jagger lad too, said James Stansfield. They got Jagger.

James Broadbent wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and then rubbed his neck.

Much money, he said, his words sticking in his throat.

What’s that you say?

Many guineas.

Yes, said James Stansfield. Between us we have milled many coins. They say The Alchemist can work magic with metal and fire. But now they say this bastard devil Deighton has pulled in our king and James Jagger on false charges. They say he has sworn statements.

James Broadbent rolled his head around on his neck until it cracked and then he took a drink.

William Deighton is indeed a bastard, he slurred. A bastard of the very worst kind.

James Stansfield saw that the big man’s eyes were wet and glassy, his teeth crooked and chipped. He saw the dirt beneath nails that never got scrubbed and the dirt too that coloured the creases of hands too large and cumbersome to ever properly make the working of a loom worth a man’s while; hands only good for cleaving, pummelling and pounding. Wasn’t that why the Hartleys had taken him on – because James Broadbent had been turned out of the army and had failed at the loom and was too lazy to burn the charcoal like his father, but yet had greater strength and fighting skills than almost any other valley man?

Deighton is as worse a bastard as the bastard David scatmouth Hartley, said James Broadbent.

James Stansfield looked around him then pulled up a chair and sat. He leaned in.

You’d be minded to watch your drunken words, James Broadbent. People will get to talking.

You don’t tell me what to do, growled James Broadbent in response. You’re nowt but a cunny-thumbed Miss Molly, just like Queen David Hartley, you.

James Stansfield ignored the insult.

Again I warn you to mind that tongue of yours less someone cuts it out.

Beneath lidded eyes James Broadbent stared back.

No sane man would durst to.

They say there is a rat amongst us, said James Stansfield.

And the rat is me.

James Broadbent said this and then began to chuckle quietly to himself. But it was laughter without a smile. James Stansfield saw that it disguised something ugly and damaged; a harlequin’s mask worn askance.

Aye, he continued. It was me what put the men in. Hartley and Jagger.

You’re ligging, said James Stansfield.

James Broadbent’s smile faded. The laughter crumpled in on itself and died in his mouth. He looked away, indignant.

Please yourself.

James Stansfield studied his face.

I think I do believe you, he said.

A wise man would.

Then your life has a limit.

All life has a limit.

Let me test my head handles one more time, said James Stansfield. Are you saying now that you have turned against your own? That it is you that has spoken to the exciseman they call William Deighton of Halifax?

The Coiners aren’t my own, said James Broadbent. Your own looks after you, protects you. The Hartley’s have done nowt for me. Fuck all.

They’ve kept you fed and paid and seen you right.

They’ve given me piss but no pot to put it in. That’s all.

You’re part of something. This is the brotherhood of the valley.

James Broadbent took a big drink. He drained his cup and felt his head hanging heavy.

Brotherhood bollocks.

They’ll come after you.

I’m here.

Not just you either. They’ll fix your old man too.

A rogue’s move they call it, said James Broadbent. The blackmail.

What do you mean?

The exciseman. He has tricked me and my father, an ill man with the reaper’s scythe flashing in his eyes, with threats and promises and lies. But I too can string out a line of lies like a baited wire in the pike pond. Yes. I too can feed ligs to the ligger. You all think I am short on thinking, but I am not.

You swore a statement to the law man though?

A trough of pig-swill is what that was.

But why? asked James Stansfield.

Fetch me a drink.

I will not.

James Broadbent’s head lolled to his chest for a moment as if he were falling asleep.

Fetch me a drink, he said.

Again I will not, said James Stansfield. I do not buy for turncoats. Tell me why you did it.

There was a moment’s silence and then James Broadbent raised his head and spoke quickly, as if to beat the sleep that was settling behind his eyes.

You want to know why I fed that devil-cunt Deighton a mouthful of lies about the bitch-born Hartley?

Yes, said James Stansfield.

James Broadbent’s head began to dip again. It reminded James Stansfield of a fell shepherd’s dog nodding off in front of a roaring fire.

For my freedom. And for money. And because he had threatened to put me over a barrel. It’s simple.

I still don’t understand.

James Broadbent hiccupped and then sighed and then hiccupped again.

And people say it is I that is dim like a fading candle. Listen doylem: I gave the man what he thought he wanted to hear, but as you say it is of no consequence.

You have done wrong, Broadbent.

We have all done wrong.

You do not strike me as someone with a conscience.

I’m the one they laugh at. I’m the one whose cupboard is empty while the Hartleys get fat.

You must make amends, said James Stansfield. That is what you must do. Reparations.

All is broken.

You must take back your words. Scrap this statement. You must tell Deighton that it was all lies – if that’s what it was.

Big hairy bull bollocks to that.

James Broadbent spoke this in a loud voice that caused the turnpike navvies to look over.

You say that now but wait until you’re upright and the froth has blown, said James Stansfield.

I’ll stay drunk then.

You need to speak to Deighton.

I’ll stay in ale forever.

You need to take those words back.

But then he’ll have me. He’ll have me and the old man.

For what?

For coining.

Has he seen you at it?

No, said James Broadbent. Because I’ve never wielded a hammer. I’ve never owned one. Who needs a hammer when you’ve got these?

He lifted his large hands up and looked at their knotted knuckles and crooked fingers as if they were strange foreign objects.

Well then, said Stansfield. Has he found the spoils of this forging business of ours?

No. I have nothing but the clothes I sleep in.

Well. So. William Deighton has nothing to link you and the Coiners but your own admittance.

James Broadbent shrugged.

Get me a drink, he said. Fetch me a finger of gin.

We need to get you to the Duke of York.

Isaac Hartley?

Of course Isaac Hartley, said James Stansfield. Is there anyone else with that nickname? Listen, there is still time to straighten out these crooked actions of yours. Isaac will know what to do. If your statement is pig swill then this case cannot stand. If it’s a choice between the exciseman and Hartley I know whose side I would want to be on. It’s about choosing the better of two enemies now, for you will surely have no friends left.

It’s too late for that. It’s too late for any of that.

Think with your brain-pan, man. Coining we might be guilty of but neither King David Hartley nor James Jagger will kick the wind because of the greedy foolishness of some born-backwards sot that’s been on the rant since he first tasted ale.

Who’s this sot? said James Broadbent.

You are.

James Broadbent pushed his chair back and made to stand but his legs gave and he stumbled sideways. James Stansfield grabbed at the larger man and guided him back onto his seat. James Broadbent slumped back and then reached for his cup but only managed to knock it over. It was empty. It rolled to the floor and broke. His chin sank to his chest.

I should slit your throat right now and be the hero of every Coiner for what you’ve done said James Stansfield. But what good would that do when our king is rotting in a York cell and you’re the only hope for his freedom? So listen to me and I might just save a life.

James Broadbent lifted his head.

Is mine a life worth saving though?

James Stansfield stared back at him with disdain.

It’s not your life I’m thinking on.

They corls it hangin in chaynes but really it is not chains at orl but summat more like a rort iyun cayge that they rivet on to the body of the poor hanged man like bones of metal worn on the outside with his head held fassed and his legs held fassed and the arms held fassed And the only acksool chayne is that which dangles the poor godforsaykun bastid in this most fearful and barbrus suit from the gibberd mast And what happens is they leeve the dead man dangling this way for all the four seesuns long Aye for all the valley fowk to see and thur chillum to see too and what happens is the rain it does sile down and the wynde it does blowe strong and the frossed it does frees and the birds they do come a-pecken for a nip and twist of flesh and insex too Great big insex in the summer layern thur eggs in the drippy woonds though they says it is the eye borls that do go first been as they offer the tastiest morsulls to scavengers And then in thyme what was wans a man becomes something else He becomes a dark shadder on the hill as the chayne rusts with the rains and his boddee feeds the beasts of the air and oh how it creaks and oh how it mones laike you wuddent no.

As the brees does turn the cayge and that mans head lolls on his snapped neck and all the crowes and rayvuns and jackodaws gather thicker still and that mans meat it does become a meal for menny more still and they leeve him hangin until the sky is black with clows of screechin birds and that hanged man is carryun now and his flesh is stript away as the birds sit on the mettle bars of his rort iron suit And down the hill at nite the folk of the town can heer the chayne and then there is meet no more and we are down to the corr of it now Down to the bones what first were red and then browne and then grey in culler then after that yeller and then finally they are boans of pure wite and there is nothing left to hold that man together but the idear of him But still the rort iron cayge in whose mettul bayse his parts gather and in time they will be nout but dussed and the cayge it will further rust and the plump birds swollen will sing sweetlee and hope against hope that another hangd man will be brung up and strung up and suspended like a grate gift to the skye Gods if you go in for all that godly preechin shyte wich as it goes I dunt but still But still I moan his nayme.

o God.

O god.

Sequestered in their square stone cell, James Jagger finished noisily urinating in the sluice channel that ran down one side of the space then he shook himself off and dropped down into the straw that covered the floor.

It burns when I piss he said, then he took off one of his clogs and removed a sock. He began to pick at his big toe-nail. He took a piece of straw and scraped a layer of grime that looked like a millipede out from beneath it. He flicked it away.

Stop that, said David Hartley.

What?

That.

This?

James Jagger held the stem of straw aloft.

Aye. Cleaning your fucking wagglers. Stop it.

But it’s ailing us. It’s sore.

I don’t give a tinker’s tit for your toe.

I fear it has turned septic. There was juice coming out of it in the night. Yellow water, brother.

David Hartley stared at James Jagger until the latter looked away.

A full minute passed before they spoke again.

This stonejug is full of queans, said James Jagger.

They say gaols can make a man that way.

Not me but. Yesterday in the courtyard some big lump tried to touch me down there. Grabbed at it while passing. I gave him short shrift, don’t you worry about that. Like an angry bull I kicked him hard right between the left toe and the right toe. Clang went his sweetbreads. He fell like a flour sack from a cart just like that time you told us about when you were away down there in the forges of the midlands.

What time? said David Hartley wearily.

I mean fancy trying that with a Cragg Vale Coiner. He must be bent in the head to do that. Well, anyroad. He’s limping now.

I do believe I’ve not met anyone who talks as much as you Jimmy Jagger, said David Hartley.

I thank you.

It wasn’t meant in kindness. I never noticed how much you rabbit before.

Our lass says I am a sunny person.

Does she.

She says nothing gets us down.

Not even the hangman’s shadow?

No. I have faith.

What faith? said David Hartley. No-one told me you were a bible man.

Give over. I have faith in you, King David. You’ve steered us to success and now I believe you’ll steer us out of these dangerous waters too. Deighton is just a worm in the apple barrel. He can’t get at us all. Someone’ll burst him first.

A face appeared at the cell door. It was the turnkey Charles Claxton and one of his aides. They unlocked the door and the two men slowly stood.

Bread day, said Charles Claxton as his aide passed David Hartley and James Jagger a six shilling loaf each. They were hard and weighted in their hands. Uniform in size. James Jagger rapped at his with his knuckles and then sniffed it.

What’s this made from – wood shavings?

Charles Claxton turned away.

Is that it? said James Jagger.

Until Tuesday.

What happens on Tuesday?

You get another loaf. If you’re paid up.

Paid up?

Aye. You didn’t reckon on getting owt for nowt did you?

Well, what fucking day is it now?

Friday.

Incredulous, James Jagger glared back.

What I am supposed to scran in the meanwhile?

The Turnkey shrugged.

Your socks? he said.

James Jagger raised his voice.

We’re the fucking mighty Coiners of Cragg Vale.

Not my concern.

The gaoler’s aide spooned water into the empty jug on the floor.

Oh, what I would do for a bowl of something hot, said James Jagger. A dollop of sweetened furmenty would do for me.

Them that pays get fed, said Charles Claxton, dropping his ladle back into his bucket.

I’ll be wasting away, said James Jagger again.

Charles Claxton said nothing. Charles Claxton shut the door.

James Broadbent did not wonder what Isaac Hartley was doing in the sodden parrock that lay behind Elphaborough Hall in the fading light of day; instead he accepted only that he was there and that his fate lay in the man’s hands.

Already the courage that ale gave him was ebbing away and when he saw the shape of Isaac Hartley in the far corner with his back turned to them he slowed his pace and he said in a low voice this not a good idea but James Stansfield, feeling a reversal of roles, and recognising that his part in the saving of King David Hartley would not go unnoticed or rewarded, replied: this is the only choice that you have now James Broadbent.

They trudged across the field that had been churned by horses, and the mud clung to their boots. It added another sole and made the walking heavy.

When they reached somewhere near the centre James Stansfield said: you better wait a while. James Broadbent said what – wait here, in the mud like a bloody donkey? and James Stansfield replied: yes, exactly that – like a donkey, and he strode off across the field.

Again James Broadbent wished he had a clay pipe to clean and fill, to ignite and inhale while he waited in the softening evening light, if only to give purpose to hands that he put in and out of his pockets and then ran through his hair and used to adjust his clothes on his frame. He wanted another drink and he could smell himself as he watched James Stansfield, a queer sot if ever there was – a man that he would never otherwise have call to socialise with, had not the yellow trade brought them together through greed and geography and circumstance – call out to Isaac Hartley.

They walked to one another and conferred for some time. Aware that he suddenly needed to urinate James Broadbent walked to the edge of the field and pissed against the wall and then walked back to the centre. James Stansfield and Isaac Hartley were deep in conversation and the latter kept looking over at him. He could see anger.

They continued talking and then there was a sudden raised voice and Isaac Hartley pushed James Stansfield aside and walked across the field with purpose. He strode across the ruined furrows and quickened his pace as he approached James Broadbent, who saw the rage on the man’s face, yet still nullified from a day’s drinking he did not think to move out of the way but merely watched on impassively as Isaac Hartley, the smaller of the two, threw a heavy right hand to his nose, which cracked beneath his fist, nor did he dodge the short, tight jab that dug deep into the soft space beneath his arm-pit. When this second punch landed he felt all the breath being drawn from his body in one swift exhalation; his lungs felt flattened and his stomach lurched with nausea. A howl of distress rang through his entire system as he struggled to take in air. Isaac Hartley ended him with a third button-punch straight through the centre of the man’s waistcoat.

James Broadbent bent double and could hear himself wheeze but a well-aimed knee to his temple sent him slipping sideways into the dirt. Pain did battle in three different parts of his body and his pride ached too. He had not been beaten this way since he was a child.

He thought of all the men he had punched and kicked and stamped, and wondered if it had felt like this for them – or worse?

What hurt more was that he knew he could fight this man. On any given day he could mince him but he could not do that now, for that would bring about a whole more trouble and trouble he had plenty of as it was.

Get up, said Isaac Hartley.

James Broadbent felt the soft mud beneath them. He saw the old tree at one end of the field, and he saw the rookery of nests that had been constructed in the fork of its branches, and he heard the birds too. The hoarse mocking chorus of them was like cruel laughter; the very sound of autumn itself.

Get up, said Isaac Hartley again, and he grabbed James Broadbent beneath one arm. James Broadbent touched his hand to his broken nose and though there was no blood he could feel his eyes swelling in sympathy on either side of it.

That’s for what you’ve done, he said, and he took a large knife from his pocket and said and this is for what you have yet to do.

He moved towards James Broadbent and said: turncoat, I’ll cut your fucking tongue out.

James Stansfield stepped forward and laid a hand on Isaac Hartley’s arm.

Now just one moment Isaac, just one moment he said, putting his body between the two of them. This man has already confessed to me his wrong doings but also confessed that his words are worthless. It was not your brother that he wanted to see arrested, but his own skin that he was saving. You see, this bastard William Deighton is cunning and we all know that Broadbent here is more like the blind poxed rabbit that sits in the sun all day long, and yet wonders why he gets his neck snapped. He has been had by Deighton, that is all. He is a drunkard and a ligger too, and he has filled the man’s papers with nothing but lies about the business of the Coiners. I do truly believe that there is nothing in there that can be proven and that this man and this man only is the one who can get your brother, our king, freed. And after that – well, then it is up to you and yours to decide what to do next. Cut his tongue out then if you see fit but I imagine by then James here will have made amends and will surely be indebted for life.

Isaac Hartley looked from James Stansfield to James Broadbent.

Well? he said. What say you, turncoat?

James Broadbent dropped his eyes.

I will do whatever it takes to get him freed.

And Jagger?

Yes, Jagger too.

I will cut your tongue and cock off and feed them to my guffies if you do not do this.

I will speak to the man that has wronged me said James Broadbent quietly. I will speak to the cunt Deighton. I will spend my time in that cell instead of your brother, if that is what must be done.

Aye, not a bad thought, said James Stansfield. You’d be safer there than here.

And you’ll swear before the magistrate? said Isaac Hartley.

Yes.

I don’t believe you, turncoat.

You have my word.

Your word isn’t worth a tagnut on a sheep’s scut, said Isaac Hartley.

You have it all the same.

James Broadbent felt the bridge of his nose again.

I thought you were a brawler, said Isaac Hartley. But it seems you’re not so solid.

I’ll fight any man, me.

I licked you in two punches, turncoat – and you’ll get the same twice daily if you don’t get yourself to York Castle and beg forgiveness from your king. You’re lucky you have someone speaking up for you.

James Broadbent said nothing.

Soon it will be Samhain. Two weeks hence.

James Broadbent shrugged.

The beginning of the darker half, said Isaac Hartley. And them stone holes are no place to be in winter.

Especially for a king, nodded James Stansfield.

The one true king of the north, nodded Isaac Hartley.

James Broadbent looked sullen. He said nothing.

Death awaits you should you fail, turncoat.

I said I would help and I will.

By Samhain eve my brother and James Jagger will be at their fire-sides, giving their wives a tickle. The bastard Deighton’s case will have collapsed and you might yet still be alive to see another Calderdale day. That is what will happen.

Perhaps, said James Broadbent.

Isaac Hartley moved closer.

No, not perhaps. That is what will happen. Otherwise every day you will get a beating like this. Mob-handed the Coiners will seek their revenge. Every day a new broken bone.

James Broadbent grunted.

Tomorrow I will travel to Halifax and do this business you ask of me he said.

Halifax?

That is where the black devil Deighton resides.

At this Isaac Hartley exploded. His face was suddenly animated and his spittle flecked the face of James Broadbent

Fuck the black devil bastard cuntsucking Deighton, he cussed. It’s the king’s forgiveness you first must find, because without that you’re as good as dead and buried.

Fine. Tomorrow I will go—

Isaac Hartley stood as close to James Broadbent as he could. Stared him down. His nose nearly touched the other man’s chin.

Tomorrow? My brother rots in the dungeons of York in another county and you talk about tomorrow. Tonight. Tonight you go to York and you get down on your knees and you beg for forgiveness. You beg for your life and that of your family.

James Broadbent did not flinch. A small, slight trickle of blood ran from one nostril and settled in the stubble of his upper lip. His tongue darted out to taste it.

And I will go with you, said Isaac Hartley.

You?

Only an imbecile would let you out of their sight when my brother’s liberty hangs in the balance. No. I’ll fetch us horses.

And what of my father?

What of that mangy dog?

Can he come too?

He is an old man with one foot on death’s doorstep – and a fool with it too said Isaac Hartley. No. He will only slow us down.

Not by horse he won’t.

He does not need to come.

I would prefer that he was kept within sight.

Do you think I’ll have him killed in your absence?

James Broadbent did not reply. Isaac Hartley gave a knife-wound smile and nodded.

Then you’re finally learning how this works, turncoat.

Beneath the shadows of the stone edifice that had darkened under the sheets of rain that fell in the night, David Hartley and James Jagger walked the iron palisade between the right wing that held the debtors and the governor’s chamber, and the left which housed the inmates.

Above them loomed the clock turret, the large ticking hands a form of torture to those held without conviction. Below, they paced the quadrangle whose bars looked out directly onto the street. City life was out there, just inches away, as people passed by going about their morning business.

York gaol may have been admired for its architecture and close proximity to the neighbouring court by those visiting dignitaries, writers and clergymen who received tours of the gaol, yet its inmates knew little of this. A fever had killed a quarter of its felons in one cruel month the previous winter and the noise that echoed around the stone dungeon chambers now robbed the inmates of any chance of unbroken sleep. Only in the infirmary did men have the luxury of reclining on rudimentary mattresses – and only ever in their last dying days.

Minor ailments went untreated. Fights were a daily occurrence as old grievances found a new home and inmates included some as young as eight or nine years old, easy prey for the many predators awaiting trial for a litany of transgressions.

The two valley men walked the length of the gaol and then back again as the sky darkened and the fine morning rain danced around them.

As they passed by cells they saw their fellow inmates. Some sleeping, others slumped in their straw. Faces looked out blankly from between their bars, others attempted conversation with acquaintances further along the wing.

They saw one felon crouched over the drain runnel with his trousers around his boots, another huddled naked and covered in drying brown streaks of his own effluence. His eyes wide and white, watching like a cornered animal.

The rain drew down and David Hartley tilted his head to it; he tasted it, let it wash his face. He opened his mouth and tried to catch the elongated droplets. While James Jagger cursed, David Harley let the drizzle mat his hair and soak his shirt until it was so wet that he took it off and draped it around his neck, letting the cold October air tighten his white flesh and bring it out in tiny bumps.

He felt Yorkshire on his skin. Then they were called back in.

The three men rode through the night.

James Broadbent felt his ribs and his nose and his head ache, and his sick stomach moil sour from a lack of food and the hangover that had set in, while alongside him his father coughed and quietly moaned about having to undertake another nocturnal journey. Isaac Hartley, the second of the Hartley brothers, rode with quiet determination, saying little.

At the Kings Arms in Leeds they took drink and food and had the horses fed and watered and then proceeded on to York. For fifty miles they rode through darkness. Twice there were violent downpours that soaked them through and once a badger flashed before them to send the horses skittish.

They entered York in the middle of the night and found a place to tie up the horses, then they climbed a bank of dirt to take shelter in a dark triangle of shadow cast by the old wall that ran around the city. From here they could rest and watch the animals.

James Broadbent and Joseph Broadbent and Isaac Hartley arrived at York Castle in time for the daybreak turn-out of those inmates allowed to slop out their basins and water jugs and stretch themselves with a half hour’s exercise in the yard. From the street side they could shout through the bars. Isaac Hartley called to the nearest man. He slowly sauntered over.

I’m looking for the one they call King David.

The prisoner stared at him a moment.

The only king I know is the one that sits on the throne down that London he said. George I believe they call him. No kings in here though.

I’m talking about the true king of the north – David Hartley the king of the Cragg Vale Coiners of Calderdale. My brother.

Now them I have heard of. The Coiners is the ones that do the clipping.

So they say, said Isaac Hartley.

Clever idea, is that. Is he one of that lot then, your brother?

He is.

In here, is he?

He is.

Well then. He’ll not be long for the gallows I expect. They say it’s a capital crime is that.

Isaac Hartley reached through the bars and yanked the man towards him. He cracked his forehead on them once and then a second time. The inmate howled in pain. Other men in the yard looked over but no turnkey appeared. They did not care what happened in the yard; whatever went on in the outside air was prisoners’ business.

Go and find him.

The man stepped back and scowled, touching his fingers to his brow.

Now, said Isaac Hartley.

Or what?

Or I’ll have someone in here slit you from cock-end to bottom lip in your sleep this very night.

A few minutes later David Hartley and James Jagger crossed the yard and greeted Isaac Hartley. They shook hands and grabbed at each other’s forearms between the bars. Isaac Hartley pressed a sackcloth parcel through.

There’s good food in there brother, he said. A cooked chicken and apples and boiled eggs and plenty of your Grace’s biscuits. Enough for a few days. A jar of stingo too.

And coins for the turnkey?

Of course, brother. Of course. A Coiner without coins is no man at all.

Jagger took the sack and rifled through it. He pulled out an apple and bit into it.

Seeing James Broadbent and his father lurking behind him David Hartley raised a finger and said what’s that rat-cunt doing here?

He has some explaining to do.

About what?

You’re not going to like it.

To imajun I went back in my sell full of hope that day thinken on that perhaps Jaymes Broadbean cud stop us having to do the Tyburn Frisk and that mebbe he had sumhow been dubble cerossed by the bastid Dyeton which is not summat I woud put past the eggsize man becors remember the bastid Willyam Dieton dus this type of thing for a liven Yes he is payde by the crowne to trick and snare his prey just as the poacher tricks and snares the fesants from the trees at night or russels the stag from under the nose of the growndsmen Not that I wud ever kill a stag haven seen what Ive seen becors I know a stag is more than a meer deer of the wuds and hill and moors No a stag is summat else Aye but hees a crafty bastid all the sayme is Willyam Dieton As crafty as they cum.

But what I didunt reeleyes was that it was Broadbent that was pullen the strokes on us by tellen us he cud get us owt the York hole and if weed have been smart weed have kilt that man stone ded in his bed the very day he confessed in his cups to our Isaak what it was he done That is him becoming turncoat for the tacksman an all that Yes for that we shud have fed him his own borls and the old mans too for by orl accownts the old charcole burner Josuff Belch Broadbent was in on it as well and my own father did say Belch was a yellow belly rat breeder Thems two go back way back to when they was just sprats Spynluss fucks the pear.

Greed it was that oiled there tungs to the man Greed and cowerdyse and a streek of beetrayul.

No I never did truss Broadbent for he was big and stoopit and of cors the mayne thing is he didunt like King Dayvid Hartley His respect I did not have for one reesun or another.

Still it makes me mornful to think that that man walks the vally freely while I sit here lonelee with me pensil stub and paper and not even a tallow candul to lite us as I rite these memwars By jingo I think I woud even tolerate that gobby stinkpot Jaymes Jagga for a half hour or so.

After taking food at an inn by the York fortifications where a mildew pattern had formed on the wall in the shape of cat poised as if ready to launch itself, Isaac Hartley took James Broadbent and Joseph Broadbent on to an attorney called Wickham who held an office up a flight of stairs off Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate, and whose windows looked over the whipping posts and old stocks that stood in the street below.

Here they sat and stated their case.

Wickham listened impassive and close-faced as James Broadbent lied to the attorney about lying in his statement, and as he did he secretly took pleasure in the fact that no-one but he and his father knew the full truth of the situation, not even Isaac Hartley – especially Isaac Hartley – whose punches from the previous day had turned his nose crooked and blackened both his eyes and caused his breathing to be short. It would, if he got his way, which he fully intended to, come at a very high price to the Hartley brother that they called Duke Of York but who in fact was anything but that, for when they walked down the cobbled streets of the old city no-one gave them a double glance, suggesting to James Broadbent that Isaac Hartley was nothing but a braggart like the rest of that clan.

Isaac Hartley didn’t even know his way around the city of the nickname bestowed upon him and the humiliation of the beating sat heavy in James Broadbent’s sour, empty stomach.

Wickham listened and quietly catalogued what he saw: men of the hills of ill education. He saw black eyes and swollen knuckles. He saw a broken old man who looked set to expire right there in his front office. And he saw through the litany of lies with which James Broadbent was furnishing him. He saw bandits, vagabonds, and forgers out to cut each other’s throats at the first opportunity. He saw the jostling throng of Tyburn and the snap of the hangman’s trapdoor. He saw a lot of trouble for no money, for hanged men rarely pay their debts.

Isaac Hartley asked Wickham if bail could be secured for the two imprisoned men, to which he sighed and then patiently replied that this would first require William Deighton being called before a magistrate, which was unlikely, and that Broadbent would have to admit perjury before the same magistrate, and even then it would almost certainly be judged that Broadbent had done this of his own volition without solicitation from the exciseman who, these three ragged men from the hills should be aware, had an impeccable record. Not only that, he urged, but they should also note that Deighton was on crown business and, if that week’s newspaper reports were to believed, was on the very cusp of ending the biggest financial fraud on English soil that there had ever been. At this the men smirked. A smile even played about the corners of the stone-set mouth of Isaac Hartley

So how do we get my brother, King David Hartley, freed? asked the latter.

You go to trial at the assizes and prove his innocence, said Wickham.

How do we do that?

The same way any man would. You hire an attorney. You refute the evidence. You find others to vouch for your brother’s good character and standing. And you have an alibi.

This feckless fucker’s statement is all lies, said Isaac Hartley.

Then with God’s will the court will recognise this and your brother’s liberty will be assured said the attorney. If he is guilty then it is up to the court to mete out an appropriate punishment; though of course you’re no doubt aware such an offence as forging coins brings with it the highest penalty.

Our David is a man of notoriety now, said Isaac Hartley.

Wickham replied.

Yes. I believe I have heard of him.

And this exciseman has it in for us.

For all of you?

Yes.

Now why would that be?

Because.

Wickham frowned.

I find it difficult to believe that one single man in the employment of the crown’s own office would persecute dozens of lowly hill farmers and weavers – if that is what you say you are – purely for his own entertainment.

He does not work alone, said Joseph Broadbent. There is a lawman called Parker behind him. A young lad, but wealthy already.

That’s as maybe, said Wickham. But William Deighton clearly believes he has a case against both David Hartley and –

Here he paused to thumb through the papers before him.

James Jagger of Turvin, Calderdale, West Yorkshire. And of course a case against the others that he has named as forgers in the newspaper also.

What newspaper?

Wickham reached into a drawer and handed Isaac Hartley a folded copy of the London Gazette.

Our David is the book learner, he said quietly, and gave it to James Broadbent, who shrugged and then passed the paper to his father who held it an inch from his face for a moment and then passed it back to the attorney.

Even if I could my eyes is shot, he rasped. All is mist now.

Wickham considered the men.

Well it names at least a dozen men as good as guilty of this foul practice he said. And I do not believe that all of them are innocent, though they will no doubt protest it just as you protest the charges laid against your brother, Mr. Hartley. Nor do I know this William Deighton in person, though it seems to me he is a true hero of England, a man doing God’s work in a valley blighted. Now if you will gentleman.

Wickham stood. He did not offer his hand.

Does this mean Hartley’s not getting out, said James Broadbent as he slowly stood, pressing a hand to his broken ribs.

It means it is time for you to leave.

Fog filled the valley holes and pockets. It appeared as if it were living thing – a chimera that stalked the hollows, rising up from a river that was running thin after a mere three dry days in succession. It draped itself over the trees so that only the tips of the tallest branches reached out from this dense vapour like the fingers of a drowning man.

The swirling fog softened everything. It dampened all noise to a muted hush; the frantic chatter of the last roosting birds became restrained and the expansive sky which seemed so often to roar with the last scratches of dying light was now silent, an unseen ceiling.

Through this the men came down from their isolated homes. Again they gathered. Again in Barbary’s by night, where secrets could be better shared and strangers sent away, less they overhear something they’d have to be silenced over.

Yet still amongst friends, the eyes of the men would not settle. Restless, they flitted about in case they revealed their suspicion of one another – or worse, a suggestion of their own guilt.

The room too was thick with smoke as if the fog had seeped through the key-hole to bear witness to the conversations that were taking place.

Here were Coiners. Coiners subdued and shaken. Coiners concerned and fearful.

But still Coiners one and all.

They gathered in tight groups of two or three and drank slowly, for this was no celebration time.

There was Abraham Lumb and Absolom Butts.

John Wilcox and Joseph Hanson and Jonathan Bolton.

William Harpur and William Hailey and William Folds

Jonas Eastwood and Joseph Gelder and James Crabtree.

James Stansfield and Jack O’Matts Bentley.

Thomas Sunderland and Crowther O’Badger and Peter Barker and Aloysius Smith.

Tommy Clayton and Johnny Tatham.

John Parker and James Green.

Benny Sutcliffe and Nat Horsfall .

Eli Hill and Jonas Tilotson and Thomas Spencer and Israel Wilde and Matthew Hepworth and Ely Crossley and Brian Dempsey and Eli Hoyle.

Others.

And then finally Isaac Hartley and William Hartley, the pair known affectionately amongst the men as the Duke of York and the Duke of Edinburgh, who arrived last, making straight for their usual corner table, for they knew a Coiner should always sit with his face to the exit and his back to the wall.

It was the largest gathering of Coiners and clippers and strong-arm men since the previous summer’s meeting up at Bell House. This time the mood was as different as the season itself.

Best of order, said Isaac Hartley. You all know why we’re here. Not for jokes or riddles or song. Not for ale or skittles or skirt. We’re here for our brother, the one they call the king of Calderdale, the true king of these northlands, David Hartley, who dwells in a dungeon in York, rotting away because of one man.

Broadbent, said Joseph Hanson.

Broadbent will pay, said William Folds.

Broadbent will indeed pay, said Isaac Hartley. But this man was outsmarted, tricked, misled by a greater foe, someone who will do or say anything – who will go to any length imaginable – to bring about our downfall. Granted, Broadbent is as dumb as a donkey and will be lucky to see next Lent, but even so he remains a Coiner and he is needed for our brother’s freedom. This man Deighton who is a representative of the crown of England would sooner see us starve than live as free, enterprising men. They do not give a fuck about us hill-dwellers in their palaces down in London. They sleep under silk while we have only straw. They eat goose and pheasant while for years we sucked on pebbles. They have five fires blazing while we burn green wood.

Hear, hear, said several voices in agreement. Isaac Hartley continued.

Broadbent fell for the devil Deighton’s trickery and so here we are. Make no mistake: William Deighton might live a humble life in Halifax but he is another king’s lickspittle. Follow the chain and you will find Robert Parker, a man younger than most of us, yet who is buying up half the hills in the valley, and already deep in talks with these mill men. Don’t you see them measuring up their plots to split and share and sell – the land we farm and dwell upon? And behind Robert Parker, others like him. Men of wealth and privilege out to line their own pockets.

What then must be done? asked Eli Hill.

Each and every one of you has answered this question in your heads already, said Isaac Hartley.

Some of the men glanced at one another. Others looked to the floor, to the ceiling. They chewed at thumbnails and callouses. Picked at their noses. Made busy with their pipes.

Fixing is what Deighton needs, said William Folds.

Fixing. He left the word hanging. Open-ended. Fixing.

James Stansfield cleared his throat. He was not used to speaking openly but his role in bringing James Broadbent to account had emboldened him. He cleared his throat a second time.

But who is it that is to do the fixing? he asked.

The men were silent for a moment.

And who is it that will pay them, for a man to do something like this would surely require a reward?

Isaac Hartley spoke.

Payment would not present a problem. William Deighton is the problem. When that is solved everything else will follow.

There are enough valley folk that would up good coins to see that dog dead.

Crowther O’Badger said this. Then he added:

I know of two lads.

Who would that be then, Crowther? asked Isaac Hartley.

Crowther O’Badger looked around at the faces of his fellow forgers.

Matthew Normington is one of them, he said. And Robert Thomas is the other.

Thomas of up Wadsworth Banks? asked William Hartley

That’s the one.

I know of him, said Isaac Hartley. But who is this Normington?

He’s from Sowerby. They’re farm-hands the pair of them – when they’re not out stealing or up to skulduggery. They’re desperate and merciless with it. They’ll do anything for money them two.

They don’t clip though.

No. King David would not have them, said Crowther O’Badger. Reckoned on them being a yard too shifty.

William Hartley nodded and addressed his brother.

He’s right. I remember the name Normington now. A right pair they make.

Well I heard that Matthew Normington did rut a horse said Thomas Sunderland.

The men laughed.

Rut a horse? said Crowther O’Badger.

Aye.

You’re a liar you are.

I’m not though but.

Yes you are. It wasn’t a horse.

What were it then?

Crowther O’Badger paused.

It were a donkey.

The men laughed harder at this. Some of them shoved and cajoled him. Slapped him on the back and in turn he enjoyed the attention. It felt good to laugh. That which had gone unspoken had now been intimated, and though the consequences for all men were perilous there was nevertheless a lifting of the tension. The drinks slipped down more quickly now. More rounds were bought and without it being said directly it was decided.

Isaac Hartley picked up a drained jug and brought it down on a table several times.

Enough of this he said. Thomas Spencer – you know every corner and cranny of this valley.

Indeed I would say that’s true.

Then you are to gather the funding. Starting now. Deighton’s days are dwindling and the king himself has pledged twenty guineas so dig deep into your cloth pockets, Coiners. Dig deep and think of the mouths of your children, them that have them. Tomorrow you take to the hill-side hamlets Tom Spencer. You need not tell folk what their coins are for, only that they are funding their own futures. That will be enough. The valley is on our side.

And what of Normington and Thomas? said John Tatham.

If they are as cut-throat as Badger here reckons then they are the men for this job. I will arm them myself. I will arm them and send them off into the savage night.

A Malkin an all I seen malkins stows of times up ont moors A Malkin been the man that’s made of shirts stufft with straw to scare the crowes I seenum moving about thrae or for at a time at nite Circlin they were just like the stagmen done circlin And dansin and laffen too Onse I saw a malkin with his feat and hans on fyre On fyre they were And he was runnen Runnen across the moor he was as if to reech a tarn or sluice ditch to save himself from the friteful burnin And I say with my hand on the book I did heer that Malkin man screem becors even though he were maydde of straw and cloth there was life in him too and oh the sound he made it was like no man or annymul yoove ever herd Friteful it was.

Friteful A fritefull site indeed.

Believe me when I say that I seen Scarecrowes dancing and laffen and screaman on more than wan occashun Yes lissen but I say this now as a man what sleepes with deths shadder cast across his face at night A man who lives with deth close by now I say this with nothing to loose but my reputayshun and I only say it now becors men mite reckon I was mad if Id told of the dancing laffen screamun bugaboo with a head made of flour sacks and a besum stick for a back bone before Only now can I tell the hole whirld that the moors is a special place A secrut place where things do occuer beyond any explanayshun Things you must never meddul with No No.

But ah still it sadduns me to think that eyell never get to see the screemun Malkins of the moors or the dansun Stagmen or all them other sites again even if they did put the willies rite up us.

Rite up us I say.

Tom Spencer walked to Horsehold and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Burnt Stubb and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Boulder Clough and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Midgley and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Luddendenfoot and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Luddenden Dene and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Old Town and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Pecket Well and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Midgehole and folk there gave up their coin. Tom Spencer walked to Lumb Woods and Slack Top and Tom Spencer walked to Mytholm and Charlestown and Callis Wood and Jumble Hole Clough and Hanging Royd and Eastwood and folk there gave up their coin. Many purses he carried back to Bell Hole, each bulging with grubby money not for clipping but to pay for the head of one William Deighton. This was the payment pot to give to men who would gladly trade a bag of coins for the heart of another with little time for thought, feeling or consequence. The valley closed in. The valley drew together. Folk gave up their coin.

Samhain morning and the early sky was swollen grey. Soon it become too heavy to hold itself and it sagged through the night, finally falling apart in fragments of sleet. Swollen drops of water froze and settled briefly in the form of snowflakes that blew in on the diagonal, blurring the sharp edges of tree lines and jutting the jet-coloured crags that the valley seemed to wear as a crown.

Dawn as was dusk and then the temperature dropped and the sleet flakes hardened into tight little balls of hail that rained and rattled down on slate roofs and brought still ponds to life. They littered the troughs and ditches by the newly-dug turnpike.

Then when the downpour eased and the clouds passed over to slowly bank across the open moors in the direction of Haworth, the valley slopes were left with a fresh dusting of white, a patchwork of powdered shapes divided by the black streaks of stone walls that snaked over and around copses, hamlets and the top quarries whose embedded stones had been used to build all the dwellings, byres and barns for ten miles in any direction.

The sun rose then, for it had only skulked like a struck cat at the sight of the incoming storm, but now it yawned and stretched itself in layered lengths of light reaching crossways along the smallholdings of the Calder Valley, each named for the wood or landmark, creature or farm that occupied it: Wadsworth, Red Acre, Daisy Bank.

Old Chamber. Roebucks.

Brearley. Crow Nest.

Sandbed.

The day began, and with it came the first winds of winter, bone-cold and unadorned.

Thomas Spencer heard the dusty sound of a flail whipping the threshing floor as he approached the grain store at the back of the Salter place at Sowerby, where Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton were hired hands brought in for work that should have been completed weeks ago.

He found the former elbow deep in a grain barrel and the latter raising the flail that loosened the seeds as he struck the corn heads. Their hair was speckled with grain and chaff, their eyes dry with harvest dust. Surrounding them in the store were sacks and sieves. Bushels of wheat were tied and stacked to one side. Despite the day outside, Matthew Normanton was stripped to the waist.

Thomas Spencer saw that the threshing floor was cobbled to help loosen the grain in readiness for winnowing. It gathered there in the crevices. He entered the barn. Matthew Normanton looked at him as he lifted the flail, paused for a moment and brought down the two sticks that were hinged by a metal loop with a violent grunt. The sound ricocheted. He lifted it again and whipped it down, once, twice, three times. Dust danced upwards in puffball spurts.

With a scoop Robert Thomas poured more grain onto the floor and then picked up a flail and joined him. The men swung their sticks with determination, with violence. First Robert Thomas and then Matthew Normanton. They found a rhythm. An alternating pattern. The Coiners’ messenger Thomas Spencer watched. He counted twenty alternate cracks before the men straightened together, breathing deeply.

I’ve a job for you pair, he said.

What job’s that then? said Robert Thomas as he wiped his brow with the back of his forearm, his breath shallow in his throat. Collecting grubby coins from the palms of toothless old maids while your leader chokes his chicken to the sound of the gaoler’s whistling lament?

Beside him Matthew Normanton grinned at this, but said nothing.

It’s not a job to be taken lightly.

Go on, said Robert Thomas.

There’s good money for those that do it rightly.

Might this be doing the dirty work of yon David Hartley?

Does that matter? said Thomas Spencer.

Robert Thomas shrugged.

Not if the price is nice, said Matthew Normanton. He folded his threshing stick and held it in his hand. His chest was slowing to its regular breath.

It pays better than the threshing of summer corn on a cold afternoon. I reckon this coming winter to be a long one. Could be that it’s cursed with lean times; Samhain today, and we’ve already seen sleet and hail. The wise men will be holing up already, not out in a barn bashing rocks and waiting for the fever to take them.

Talk on.

It’s not my place to say more on the subject, said Thomas Spencer. I am only here to confirm that you are interested.

What queer business this is friend, Robert Thomas said to Matthew Normanton. I do believe this moor-man speaks in riddles.

Not riddles, replied the Coiner. I speak only with discretion and ask you one more time: do you want to earn good money – enough money to live well for many months – doing a job that few men would dare to; a job that would raise any lawman’s hackles?

Yes, said Robert Thomas with little hesitation. I do believe we would.

Then I can tell you that Isaac Hartley wishes to speak to you.

So it is for you coining lot after all. You that have never once extended an invitation to me and my friend here to come in on this yellow trade that they say keeps the valley flowing gold?

That’s as maybe, said Thomas Spencer. But we’re asking now. And it’s a damn sight more than a small coin’s cut you’ll be getting for your labours here. This is real work for real men with the guts to do it. Isaac will be the one to explain it to you.

When?

Now.

Now? said Matthew Normanton.

Now.

We’re threshing.

Surely the grain can wait.

Robert Thomas reached for his shirt.

Aye, he said. I imagine it can.

It was mizzling when the three men walked over the back of Scout Rock and dropped down into the sunken holloway that led to Stake Lane. The Coiner Thomas Spencer led. Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton followed at their own pace.

As the branches closed in and the track dropped them below the level of land that surrounded them – a long sloping open pasture downhill, a tangle of scrub above them – Matthew Normanton stopped by the mound that held the complex rabbit warren that had a dozen holes or more, each littered with neat clusters of droppings.

What he’s doing? said Thomas Spencer. What are you doing?

Matthew Normanton reached into his pocket and pulled out a ball of twine.

Snaring, said Robert Thomas.

Snaring?

Aye, what’s it look like? He’s snaring for his pot.

We haven’t got time for that.

It’ll only take us two shakes, said Matthew Normanton over his shoulder. I’ll pick us up a coney or two on the way back.

He searched the undergrowth for a branch or twig.

Fuck your rabbits said Thomas Spencer. There’s a hundred guineas waiting for you down Hollin Hey Bank if you wriggle. But Isaac Hartley is not a patient man.

Robert Thomas sniffed the air.

Maybe he’s right, friend, he said to Matthew Normanton. Might be we’ll be bathing in goose fat and picking our teeth with duck bills by Gunpowder Treason Night. I expect the rabbits can wait this one time.

Matthew Normanton put his twine away and the men continued down the tunnel that had been trodden deep into the Yorkshire dirt by hundreds of years of passing men and horses back through the days of Saxons, Normans, Brigantes, Romans, Celts and Vikings.

Isaac Hartley was crouched by a wall on Hollin Hey Bank when he saw them. As they approached he stood. His voice met them first.

You’re the boys who are fit for this job then?

Fit we are, said Robert Thomas but boys we are not.

We be men, said Matthew Normanton.

Men then. Even better for taking down a tax man.

I’ve told them what’s needed, said Thomas Spencer.

Isaac Hartley took the measure of them.

Money is what’s needed, said Robert Thomas.

You’ll get your money, said Isaac Hartley. I heard you was greedy.

We’ll be wanting it now.

You’ll be wanting it now I’m sure, but you’ll be getting it after the deed is done, he said. One hundred good milled guineas that Tom here has collected rests on the devil Deighton’s head. If the exciseman goes on there’ll be no living for any of us.

Isaac Hartley reached into his pocket and flipped a guinea first to Robert Thomas and then one to Matthew Normanton.

Get yourselves fed and watered with that. Your pockets will soon be full with plenty more like them.

How do we do him? asked Matthew Normanton.

I’ll get some guns to you. Tom here will bring them up.

And when do we do this Deighton?

This night.

Tonight?

He’s not hard to find, said Isaac Hartley. Bull Close Lane is where he lives and he takes ale at the corner inn until it shuts. When it’s done the money will be with you. Don’t come to me. Don’t come anywhere near me. Anything else?

Aye, as it happens said Robert Thomas. How come it’s not one of your Coiner boys that’s doing the killing? If you lads are as tough as teak and run the valley like everyone round here reckons you do, why is it you’re asking me and him here to do it. Has your nerve left you along with this one they call the king?

Which one are you? replied Isaac Hartley.

Thomas.

Well listen, Robert Thomas. A hundred guineas I’ve promised and a hundred guineas you’ll get. That’s all there is to it.

That doesn’t answer my question, does that.

You’re asking why I’m hiring on a couple of simple corn threshers to kill William Deighton?

A man could take your tone as insulting.

Take it any way you like.

We do a lot more than fucking thresh corn, said Matthew Normanton, stiffening his stance.

Yes, said Isaac Hartley. That’s what I heard. My ears told me that Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton are the two most ruthless bastards around. Do anything for money those two – that’s what I heard.

The men smiled at this. They nodded with approval.

My boys reckon you’ll kill for coins. That’s why I asked you. The only reason.

Then I have one more question to ask, said Robert Thomas.

What?

How come you never had us coining or collecting for you?

Because you are the two most ruthless bastards around. Do anything for money those two, they said.

So?

So any man who does anything for money is not to be trusted. And that’s why you’ll get your guineas when Deighton’s blood is running cold across the stones and pooling around the shining cobbles. Now trot on.

Through icy rain and lifting wind they walked. Beneath their coats Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton carried pistols and a twist of gunpowder. Two pieces of guns and slugs to fit. The coiner Thomas Spencer went with them.

They took the long way back round, through the villages of Sowerby and Sowerby Bridge. Down one side and up the other they walked, crossing swilling waters where foam gathered in swirls, and then passing by still dark pools and hamlets of houses and inns with lights in the window, and the rain began to fall harder. And then they were in trees and the wind blew and it took two long hours to reach the top of King Cross bank where they saw Halifax below them, and suddenly the night was real, and the guns were real and the slugs in their pockets were ready to bring death.

They reached Bull Close Lane and the street was quiet so they took up positions in the shadows of houses, and it was not yet late but the cold came in with a vengeance now.

The sky fattened and the rain fell, and they waited.

Time passed slowly, slower than the clouds across the autumn moon, slower than the dull distant chimes of a midnight bell that came and went, and they shivered wet in their wool layers, sopping right down to their undershirts. Robert Thomas did not have a hat nor Matthew Normanton a light for his pipe and Thomas Spencer watched the men watch Deighton’s door from afar until no-one came and the night defeated them, and after several senseless hours spent shivering in silence they departed for their beds, silent still save for the wet squeak of their boots and the rattle of unspent slugs still full of death in their pockets.

Stolen coyns they tork of a lot in here now that many of my fellow poor shackled sods no ecksackly who it is I am and what it is I did For the word on the Crag Vayle Coiners has spread far and wide these passing munths Yes a lejun I am becummin as I sit in the condemmed mans cell awaytin my fate Stolen coyns they say are buried around the Royd and now every day they axe me about it King Dayvid King Dayvid they corl across the eckersise yard or down the airless corrydoor Where is it you hid the ginnys and I shouts back What fucken ginnys and they say The wans your own men stole off you and I shouts No Coyner stoll a fucken penny off me you daft and dirty black Lancastreen bastids and they laff and says Thats not the werd from the valley The werd from the valley is there was so much munny being clipped that there was yung lads what absconded with great bags of it from rite under your greesy nose and they burryed it in the wuds and in the crags and on the moors and they hid it in worls and roots and midden pits and horse byres and now they say that Calderdayle is rich with treshurs so menny treshurs that one day in the fucher men will find it and they will be rich rich rich And to this I bellow back turn it in you silly cunts But that nite as I lie moiling and tossen I carnt help but wunder if its true what they say Meanen wud my men really steel from the mitey King Daevid of Bell Howse becors after all this enterprise got so big so fucken quick hoo can relly say how much munny was clippt and filed and milled and melted Aye becors when orls said and done hoo can reely no owt about owt that goes on.

Green clumps of wet goose scat dotted the flag stone path that cut through the field as the honking birds were driven from cart to fold to pen. Their owners used stripped willow sticks to steer the waddling, hissing creatures to the showing circle where they were paraded in gaggles of a dozen or so.

Every November valley men brought down their best birds for the goose fair. It was a sign of winter incoming, a final chance to trade and gossip and boast before they holed up for the shortest darkest days. Cheese-makers came down too, and bakers with loaves and brewers with fresh furmenty, and a butcher with smoked sides and prime cuts to sell and a great pot of beef water being stirred over a smouldering fire.

Children ran screaming amongst the chaos of birds and people and baskets of wares.

To one side, by the pasture wall, the hired collaborator Robert Thomas and coiner Thomas Spencer watched as geese were paraded, and they puffed on their pipes and exchanged an occasional word through gritted teeth. When Matthew Normanton arrived he took them to one side, away from the bustle of the birds and their drovers.

He has gone to Bradford now, he said. Deighton has gone to Bradford.

Bradford is no use to us, said his partner Robert Thomas.

No it is not, but tonight he will return.

Then tonight he will be full of slugs.

Thomas Spencer shook his head.

And I will not be joining you.

Has the yellow trade made you a yellow coward now? asked Robert Thomas.

I will not be joining you. Already I have been to Halifax and it is you who are getting paid. I work for the Hartleys, not you two. I’m staying here.

This man is a coward, Robert Thomas said to Matthew Normanton. He’d rather be amongst the goose shit and kiddies games than doing man’s work.

Call it what you will, said Thomas Spencer. But I’m not coming.

This is the work of three people, said Matthew Normanton. One to bide as lookout and for making distractions and two to do the deed.

Thomas Clayton will take my place.

Thomas Clayton the farmer?

And Coiner true. He will be waiting.

Waiting where?

Matthew Normanton asked this.

At your abode, said Thomas Spencer.

When do we go?

Now. Isaac wants it done this night.

Christ, said Matthew Normanton.

He sends another guinea.

Thomas Spencer handed over another coin.

Where’s mine? asked Robert Thomas.

That is to split.

To split now, is it?

Yes.

What do you take us for – bloody Coiners with rusted shears? said Robert Thomas.

Nevermind that, said Thomas Spencer.

Is it true about them other missing bits though? asked Matthew Normanton.

What other missing bits?

They say that there’s a stash of coins gone missing and been buried somewhere. Somewhere close. They say that folk have been skimming.

I don’t know about any of that said Thomas Spencer. I just run the messages and collate the intake. Only a fool would skim though.

That’s right, said Robert Thomas. Folk say that there’s Coiners got their hauls stashed in tree roots and rock holes. That some of them have been stealing and others have been clipping their own coin on the side and giving nothing to your Hartley brothers.

I don’t know, said Thomas Spencer. And I’ll not say it a third time.

Because if that’s true we’ll be the first to find it, isn’t that right Matty?

Rest assured brother, said Matthew Normanton. I have a nose for gold. And he who finds it keeps it. That’s the law of the land, is that.

You’d have to ask Isaac Hartley and I wouldn’t advise doing that while his brother sits in the dungeons of York gaol because of the doings of one of his own.

That nugget Broadbent you mean?

Yes, said Thomas Spencer. Broadbent.

Shall we kill him too? said Matthew Normanton through a yawn as he waggled a finger in one ear to dislodge some wax that was stuck there. It’ll cost you another hundred guineas but I’d gladly slit that sly bugger like a breached sow.

No said Thomas Spencer. Broadbent is not your concern. Enough of this talk: you need to go now.

Robert Thomas looked at Matthew Normanton and said: do you have food at your home, my friend?

Barely. I have bread.

And the guns?

The guns are there too. I’ve put them in a poke out back.

Then let us fetch Thomas Clayton now and we will eat on the way said Robert Thomas. Then we will go to Fax and kill this devil Deighton and get this business resolved. Then we will live like gods. Not scrawny hill-top, deer-fucking false kings, but gods. True gods of the valley. Come, I’m tired of standing around in the shadows talking to forgers too yellow to clean up their own mess.

He looked at Thomas Spencer for a lingering moment and then turned and left, kicking a goose that blocked his path out of the way as he did. Ruffled, the bird stumbled and then cut a zig-zag path through the crowd.

For several months a John Walton and a James Lord had been in dispute over the purchase of a barn at the end of the village of Cottingley, and the amount of hay contained within in it. Twice they had nearly come to blows in the street over the transaction. Lord, as purchaser, had claimed the hay had turned rotten and so reneged on the full payment, and then one night in revenge Walton’s brother-in-law attacked the brother of Lord, who was but an adolescent. A blood-feud had developed and now William Deighton had been called upon to take out a warrant on both men over unpaid duties.

Accompanied by a Justice of the Peace, one Colonel Patrick Peasholme, the exciseman travelled the ten miles from Halifax to the village in the Bingley ward of Bradford. This day they took a coach as Cottingley was the far side of Bradford.

Each valley across the West Riding seemed to wear its own weather – those further to the west suffered the clouds that blew in from the Irish Sea and dropped their sheets of rain onto the spine of the Pennines, while those older wapentakes to the east and south had their skies blackened by the clouds of industry blowing over from Bradford and Leeds and all the cotton towns in between. North beyond the Ridings led to miles and miles of nothing but the sheep-rearing Dales and beyond those, the coal fields of Durham and tin mines of Westmorland.

It was an evening dusted with sparkling stars as the sky cleared itself of cloud and the temperature dropped further; it was not a night for riding, nor was it a time for Coiners business.

Afterwards, with the Walton-Lord matter only partially resolved, William Deighton and Colonel Patrick Peasholme took a coach back to Halifax. In The Nag’s Head inn they met with an attorney Tommy Sayer. They talked. They drank. They drew up an agreement that they hoped would settle the matter between the two men, whose idiocy they happily mocked, and Deighton ensured the necessary tax levee and fines for non-payment were to be made to the crown.

He was hungry. He had travelled twenty miles and neither John Walton nor James Lord had thought to offer him a bite nor an ale all day long. He thought now of the meal his wife would have waiting for him. There was always something. Even when he had returned in the middle of the night from the godforsaken Eringden Moor aback Bell House there was a pot on the range or a plate under a cloth. Always something. A serving of stew. Slices of ham and baked eggs maybe. Or chops in the cold store. Cobs. Fruit cake and cheese. The bottle of brandy and his glass beside it. The fire banked and glowing. The log basket never empty. Upstairs his family asleep.

With these in mind he bade farewell to Tommy Sayer and to Colonel Patrick Peasholme, whose company he had found fatuous and condescending, as so many men with military titles were, and he rose to leave.

William Deighton opened the door and the night came flooding in. It was still and clear and bitterly cold. The stones of the street winked with frost as he walked downhill only slightly unsteadily. Swires Road swayed before him, most of its windows cast in darkness, and the inhabitants of each domestic residence asleep, as his family were, and he soon would be.

Tomorrow he would rise a little later than usual, he decided. Tonight he would drink three fingers of brandy slowly and tomorrow he would not hurry to do his daily tasks. He would raise the glass to King David Hartley and he would smile, knowing that his own belly was full and his bed warm, and his liberty boundless.

He heard his feet. The comforting clett-clett of leather on stone.

He turned down Savile Park road towards Bull Close Lane and the night seemed so cool and clear, the sky so bejewelled, that he felt as if he could chip a piece of it away and mount it on a ring for his dear devoted wife.

They heard the footsteps – expensive shoes pacing the frosted pavement – and like phantasms they rose from the tight shadow by the wall that cornered the meeting of three lanes. Their joints were stiff with the cold. Finger-tips benumbed.

Clett-clett.

Two men. Hired.

Matthew Normanton. Robert Thomas.

Two guns. Loaded.

A third man was on lookout. The farming Coiner Thomas Clayton. Up the hill he waited, his eyes set on the silent street for the past two hours. The night was still but not so beautiful to him; it could not be beautiful when he knew it was shortly to be poisoned.

Clett-clett.

Matthew Normanton became a shifting shape. Matthew Normanton was black liquid. Matthew Normanton was pure silence.

Beside him Robert Thomas was unfolding. Robert Thomas was rising.

Robert Thomas was seeing.

And Thomas Clayton crouched up the hill. Thomas Clayton was looking out and Thomas Clayton was looking on.

Matthew Normanton was a spectre now. Matthew Normanton was a spirit.

Clett-clett.

Leather on stone. He raised his musket. His joints stiff. Finger-tips numb.

He rested the butt on his shoulder. Wood against wool. Wool against flesh. Flesh against the future.

Robert Thomas had a pistol. Robert Thomas had a pistol that was small and snug in his hand, and the trigger was cold as his cold numb finger-tip touched it. Frost rimed the bony barrel.

Clett.

And that was when William Deighton stopped and saw them, off to one side, two shapes hesitating. Two shapes hanging there, draped like dyed-black shalloons drip- drying on a worsted twill man’s rack. Two blank phantoms framed by the night; betrayed by it.

He turned to them squarely. And he looked.

He looked deep into the brilliant blue of eternity and the night gave William Deighton that jewel that he thought he had wanted – a gleaming flash of diamond, a final exploding star – and it was in him forever, a jolting powdered flash like a gemstone lifted to the sun between thumb and forefinger. Something dazzling lit the back of his eye and lodged there. The street pitched sideways and the cut stone came to greet him.

A bullet sat in the centre of his skull.

Robert Thomas fired too, his small, snug gun louder still. He felt its power in his wrist and arm and elbow. It recoiled up his shoulder.

The stone was cold and wet to William Deighton’s cheek. His breath was short but though one eye was a ruined mess like a blooming flower, the other was blinking clearly, wet and alive with a flinty look of indignation.

The bullet just sat there. He was aware of the path it had taken, and the space it now occupied. He felt it in his core, an icily indifferent intruder.

From further up the street Thomas Clayton watched.

Several short steps brought Robert Thomas to the exciseman first and he did what he always did when death was close by: he met it head on. He stamped William Deighton with his feet. He jumped on his heaving, rasping chest with shoes that had spiked nail soles to provide traction, and he punted the taxman’s face and then Matthew Normanton was beside him, fighting to get at the prone body with the butt of his gun. He swung it like he swung the threshing stick, and he felt wood on bone, and heard things crack and split and give and spill, and then they were going through his pockets, the two of them, pulling out coins and a watch and a tin of snuff and a spectacles case and a knife and a roll of papers and a seal and a jar of ink and a notebook and lozenges and matches and a crucifix.

From up the street Thomas Clayton watched as they took William Deighton’s cufflinks and they took William Deighton’s wedding band. They took William Deighton’s wallet and they took William Deighton’s life.

Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton.

They took these things and then they turned and vaulted a wall and ran off into the long night of a million shining flawless crystals.

The guns splashed and then sank in the gelid waters of Mill Dam below the valley bottom village of Luddendenfoot, and in the moonlight they flashed silver like the taut bellies of young darting trout as they fell to the river bed. Robert Thomas and Matthew Normanton followed the guns with rocks and boulders hoisted in the same direction to make sure they were covered and hidden from view.

Then they turned and walked the short way back along the river route to Mytholmroyd.

Oh we have done for yonder black devil tonight, said Robert Thomas.

Indeed we have, said Matthew Normanton. When it is men’s work that needs doing it is to men they come. Never again will this Deighton one enter the valley and seek out business that is not his. We fettled him right good, we did.

Is it not true that these Coiners are as soft as tripe in their own ways? They must be if they can’t take care of their own grim business.

That is true, Bobbsy.

Then is it not also true that their riches could be our riches, said Robert Thomas. That is – they are there for the taking?

There are many of these Coiners to contend with, said his companion.

The men continued walking briskly into the freezing night.

Indeed there are but their leader is locked up now and they say he will swing for it. These coining men are nothing. They scrape together shavings and they melt them and stamp them and pass them on. That is all. Even then they say there is only one of them who truly knows the art of coining.

But with great success it seems, said Matthew Normanton.

With some success, yes – if you consider your new home address of York Gaol a success, as it is now of their leader. No, it is you and I who are the ones with the hearts of killers, brother. Cold blood does not bother us.

Matthew Normanton smiled into the nothingness. Robert Thomas continued.

All we need is the coins – and they are not hard to come by – and, of course, this man that has the knowledge of the fire and metal. An alchemist. They say there are a hundred Coiners or more sharing the profits of this golden venture.

Yes.

Well think on brother. All that could be ours. Yours and mine. The wealth of one hundred fools and cowards.

No more threshing corn, said Matthew Normanton.

No more threshing corn.

They let their feet guide them through the cold mud. They were quiet for a few moments and then Matthew Normanton spoke again.

Certainly this is worth some thought. But perhaps not on this long night. I am algid and weather-worn.

So too am I.

You can rest at mine – it is closer. And tomorrow we shall go and collect one hundred good milled guineas from that daft cunt Isaac Hartley.

He threw an arm around the shoulder of Robert Thomas.

A hundred golden guineas, he said again. One for every bint we’ll fuck.

At Normanton’s lodgings they made straight for his room where they peeled off stiff clothes that reeked of sweat and death and they fell into bed together, shivering naked in the night, white skin taut and touching in the eldritch winter dark, both awake under a heap of blankets, both thinking of coins – hundreds of them, thousands of them. Millions. More coins than there were sheep turds in the whole of the crooked valley. Then they slept and in their leaden slumber they dreamt of coins too.

So they say the lore man is ded As ded as moldy blue bread Deightons ded its said Blassed in the phiz with shots of led an stomped abowt the hed The nite street paynted a bluddygud red.