Five hundred and sixty pounds in circular discs of grubby metal takes up a lot of space. At a quarter ounce a coin, it weighs heavy in the hand too. One hundred and fifteen ounces of metal in all.
She has the boy hoist it across the moortops for her. There is no need to fear thieves or highwaymen up here, for he carries the family name and that still means something up on the moor.
Her oldest boy is growing. He will be bigger than his father. Stronger and taller. He is filling out young, and already Mary and Isaac the younger look up to their older brother David, born the year after his father returned from the Black Country.
He knows the moors well. He has a feel for every porous bog and calamitous fissure. He knows the archipelago of remote farmsteads, and those that live there; he knows whether their owners had been a friend or foe to the Coiners and his late father whose face he no longer remembers.
His uncles have told him so. Schooled him. Old grudges have been carried over and vendettas remembered, but most profited well enough from what the King had done for them. A martyr, some call his father now. The Martyr Hartley. A gentleman. One of their own.
And they show gratitude still. His father’s headstone is never bereft of phlox flowerheads and ale bottles both full and emptied, or yarn balls and sprigs of summer heather. Apples in the autumn, the occasional coin from those that can spare it. And once a stag skull sliced at the scalp, its young antlers flowering like coral, the dark ridges of its twisted bone stems stained dark by the Pennine peat.
Only a handful talk ill of his father, and even then they are words whispered behind closed doors amongst trusted company. The fear is still there because the stories still circulate: of burnt heads and broken bones. Hot pokers and musket sparks.
There are those treacherous bastard traitors who have fallen in with the mill men at the first opportunity, of course: those valley folk that sold up and let the money men take their soil and fence off their streams to sink water-wheels there, and build these great stone monstrosities in which boys like him were made to work for fourteen hours a day.
Many of his friends were in the mills now. Some had lost fingers, hands and limbs. One was blinded by the backlash of a snapped spinning belt, another left shrunken from lack of food and light and sleep, a half-formed boy kept small by industry.
The turnpike has brought noise and offcumdens and now there is talk of sinking another fresh stretch of canal through the heart of the valley too, as if a river wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t work. His mother said so and his uncles said so and all the men who paid a visit to Bell House with food and drink and clothes and clogs said so. All this was a passing fad, they said. Hand-looms were still the best way; any right-minded valley man or woman knew that. A hand-loom in a wool loft never killed a child. Only the men from the cities with their stone cathedrals of mass production killed children.
Down in the vale below there were already new mills. Not just for the cotton, but paper too. Mills brought people, families. Chimneys had grown from the ground as if born out of spring snowdrop bulbs, and Cragg Road was paved with slabs now. There were new cottages in the trees. Three had gone up in Hollin Hey Wood last summer, three more in the spring. Spa Wood echoed to the sound of more building; another mill. Whams Wood and Sandy Pickle Wood were shrinking; great gaps had appeared in their silent centres to make way for buildings to house dye vats and storage barns, combing racks and foremen’s quarters.
There was a constant procession of stone and timber passing through these days, and the sound of the workers’ voices rang up to the moor tops. Noise carries here. Always has. Couldn’t the cough of a coming lawman be heard a mile off?
Yes. It was only a matter of time before the trees of Bell Hole would feel the bite of the forester’s axe too. Mills needed fuel and it was all around them. Already David Hartley the younger pined for the old times when men with courage and initiative could control their turf. He finds himself nostalgic for a time he has never known.
He carries the coins right across the moor’s interior now, where a flat dullness gives an impression of eternity until finally after a hard hour he drops down to an obscure valley called Sandbeds above the hamlet of Eastwood, and Lodge Farm, their new home, perched high and alone.
The dog goes with him. It trots alongside and then bounds ahead, stout chest puffed, short muscular legs flexing. It is still strong despite the advancing years, and the dog’s blood runs on in many offspring it has spawned across the valley and beyond now. He has sired several similarly stubborn little dogs of the moors.
He whistles. Calls the dog’s name. Moidore. The beast turns and runs back to him, tongue lolling, ears flapping.
The farmer is waiting for him when young David Hartley arrives. He has a sheaf papers for the boy to take back. Once signed, the house and out-buildings will be theirs. The Hartleys’ new home. Paid for in cash once stashed. This was his mother’s foresight and good thinking, as these coins have been brought up from the soil, raised like ghosts. From beneath twisted roots. From holes in walls. From boxes buried. From beneath boulders. Some even tethered in purses deep in slow-flowing stream beds. Coins going green and mouldy, coins battered and bent but all perfectly milled and perfectly kept.
Tomorrow with their uncles’ help they will hitch up the cart with their chairs and beds and tables and lanterns and rugs and plates and pots and their father’s tools, and his mother and his brother and his sister and the dog and he will trek across the moor and move into the new house on the far edge of the moor.
And they will begin again.