Chapter 23
Death was beginning to visit the parish of Brandwick so regularly that the Reverend Lightfoot rarely left the church during what few hours of daylight there were. He found himself either in the vestry, writing up the register of deaths—there were very few baptisms and no marriages at all—or conducting funeral services in the nave. Only yesterday he had buried two more men and a child not four years old. Joseph Makepeace had asked for an extra pair of hands to help him turn the graveyard sods. In fact, the vicar was coming to regard funerals as rather mundane. They were neither celebrations of lives lived well, nor mournful services for those tragically cut short in their prime. They were mere formalities.
He looked at the miniature of Margaret that he kept on his desk in the study. How he missed her guiding hand in everything he did. He still found himself asking for her opinion on matters, then turning to find no one there. So often he had told those recently bereaved that their loved ones had only passed to the other side. They were still present, albeit invisible. Only now he was coming to realize that this was not as simple as it sounded—it may even be a falsehood. When he spoke to her she never replied and soon, he feared, he would forget her voice, the way she walked, even her smile.
The sun’s angry face had been screened behind the fog yet again, so he had worked by candlelight. The study door was open and, as he gazed at the little portrait, he heard his maid’s footsteps coming along the corridor. There was a knock.
“You have a visitor, sir,” she told him. “Mistress Kidd.”
For a moment he froze.
“Shall I show her in, sir?”
“Yes. Yes,” he said slowly, as if in two minds about receiving her. A moment later, Susannah appeared at the threshold.
“Mistress Kidd. What brings you here?” he asked, rising from his chair. She walked in slowly, carrying a basket.
“I have come to thank you, sir,” she replied.
“For what?” His manner was strangely abrupt.
“For the funeral service, sir.”
He nodded his head.
“And to say sorry, sir,” she continued.
“Sorry?”
She lifted her gaze. “For the way I . . .”
His body grew rigid at the recollection of the moment in the cottage; how a thousand volts of electricity had surged through his frame at this woman’s touch, as if he had been struck by lightning.
“Very well,” he said, not daring to look at her.
There was an awkward silence until she stepped forward. “I brought you this,” she said, removing a cloth from her basket to reveal a pie. “ ’Tis apple,” she told him with a smile. “From my own orchard.” He did not look at it as she placed the pie dish on his desk, but kept his eyes lowered.
“Thank you,” he said.
Another difficult pause followed before the widow took her leave.
“I best be on my way, sir,” she told him, giving a shallow curtsy.
“Very well,” he said. Then he instructed the maid: “Show Mistress Kidd out, if you please.”
The girl did as she was told, bade the visitor a good day, and returned to the study. “Is there anything else you need, sir?”
The vicar shook his head. “No, thank you,” he replied. But just as she was heading toward the door again, he called her back. “There is one more thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
He pointed to the apple pie on his desk. “Take that and feed it to the pigs.”
Gabriel Lawson lived in a comfortable estate house that had once been inhabited by the late, and not-at-all lamented, lawyer James Lavington, who had died at the hands of Francis Crick. It lay overlooking Plover’s Lake on the Boughton estate. He had been given a small staff and a reasonable living, even though he found it necessary to supplement his income by other means on occasion. His gambling habits were proving a little costly and he had resorted to what he called “borrowing” a few pounds a month from the estate’s accounts to cover his expenses.
That evening he had poured himself a brandy and was sitting by the fire awaiting his supper when there was a knock. A moment later his housekeeper appeared and exhorted him to come to the back door. There stood Ned Perkins in the half light of a murky evening. He was fingering his hat and looking troubled.
“What is it?” asked Lawson.
“Sorry to bother you, sir, but I thought you needed to know he’s back.”
Lawson sighed. “The knife-grinder?”
The foreman nodded sheepishly. “He be talking to the men now, by the threshing barns. Stirring things, he is.”
Without a word, Lawson brushed past Perkins and marched over to the stables. Saddling up his horse, he rode out of the yard. “I’ll soon put paid to that troublemaker,” he said, galloping off toward the barns about a mile down the track.
The steward found Joshua Pike standing on a bale of hay, addressing at least two score men. The light was dim and a few carried flaming torches. Lawson could see some of their faces in the half glow, men like Jack Budd and Tim Blackwell, men who were good workers. He was disturbed that they had allowed their heads to be turned by this rabble-rouser. Even more worrying was the fact that here were others, too, whom he did not recognize. Strangers, workers from nearby estates, he guessed.
As he approached he could hear some of Pike’s words.
“Every day this poison fog lingers you are risking your lives, and for what?” he cried, his arm rising and falling as he spoke.
Some of the men cried “Aye,” in response. He was confident, belligerent, confrontational in his manner. If he wanted a fight, Gabriel Lawson told himself, he was ready for one.
Skirting ’round the crowd, he guided his horse up to the bale where Pike was standing and loomed over him. Yet instead of falling silent, the young man, without bothering to look at the steward, pointed at him and cried out: “See, you are not free men. They would keep you in chains!”
Incensed, Lawson nudged his horse closer to the knife-grinder, so that the animal’s breath wreathed his head. “You are trespassing, Pike,” he snarled. “This is private land.”
But the troublemaker ignored Lawson’s words. Instead, he carried on addressing the men. “Have you no right to the land you work, brothers?”
The steward felt his blood begin to boil. Such insolence. Such effrontery. He surveyed the men below. Some of them had directed their gaze toward him. Budd and Blackwell and a few others wore worried frowns. They started to retreat into the shadows. Seeing their wavering, Lawson decided to take advantage.
“Have you not been given scarves and gloves to protect you from the fog while you work?” he cried. A few men mumbled in reply. “Have your hours not been lessened?” They were turning. He could see it in their gestures. Some of them muttered to each other. “Go home to your families and no more will be said,” he told them.
The workers began to peel off in twos and threes, despite the knife-grinder’s exhortations. “We will win, brothers!” he called. “Be strong!” But his appeals were now falling on deaf ears, as more and more turned their backs on him and melted away into the murky darkness, Perkins among them.
Now Lawson bent low from his horse down toward the bale, so that his face was level with Pike’s. Finally the young man turned; his tanned features bathed in the glow from a sconce that blazed nearby. He was smiling insolently.
“If I catch you on this land again, I’ll see that you swing,” hissed Lawson.
Still smiling, Pike shook his red-swathed head. “Your men may give you no choice,” he said. “If this fog kills many more, you’ll have to up their wages.”
Lawson was minded to wipe the brazen smirk from his face with the back of his hand, but he restrained himself. The law was on his side. “Get out of my sight and never come back here again,” he growled through clenched teeth.
The knife-grinder nodded, but he knew he had scored another small victory. He jumped down from the bale, strode over to his mule, and mounted it.
“You should never underestimate the power of your men, Mr. Lawson,” he called as he turned and headed down the track.
The steward shook his fist at him as he watched the mule carrying this thorn in his side back down the lane. That was the problem, he told himself. He knew only too well the sort of things his men were capable of.