Gibbet Hill, page 1
Contents
GIBBET HILL
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
L'envoi
Author’s Note
GIBBET HILL
A Tale of Dartmoor
A prequel to the William Quest novels
eBook Edition
John Bainbridge
By the same author
The Shadow of William Quest
Deadly Quest
Dark Shadow
Balmoral Kill
Dangerous Game
Loxley
Wolfshead
Villain
Legend
www.johnbainbridgewriter.wordpress.com
Gibbet Hill was first published in Great Britain in 2023 by Gaslight Crime. © J and A Bainbridge 2023. Cover image © Shutterstock 2023. The right of John Bainbridge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. This publication must not be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is now published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters and places in this novel are fictitious and the creation of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to places or real persons, living or dead, firms and institutions, is purely coincidental.
John Bainbridge is the author of over thirty books, including novels, thrillers and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction and topographical books about Britain. He has also written widely for newspapers and magazines. John read literature and history at the University of East Anglia. He campaigned for nine years as chief executive of the Dartmoor Preservation Association – one of Britain’s oldest environmental campaigning groups. He spends his spare time walking in the countryside.
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prologue
Dartmoor, Autumn 1816
‘Sweet Jesus, I’m cold.’
They called it the year without a summer. The skies always dark. And when there wasn’t rain there was snow. Even in June, they’d fought through blizzards to rescue the grazing animals. In July the Amill came to the Moor, its crystalline brightness of ice coating every single twig and heather stalk. Crops had died with the beasts and there was precious little to eat…
And Reuben Jay was dying.
He raised a hand and groaned.
‘Can you not make the fire brighter?’ he called out to his daughter.
Tryphena looked across at the wasted face of the old man.
‘There’s precious little peat,’ she said.
She sighed and put two more vags on top of the spluttering twigs. They had no peat stack, for their little house was new, just a few days old. Built in a day between dawn and sunset, the fire only there thanks to the generosity of friends who had so little for themselves.
Tryphena looked up at the heather thatch. The rain had stopped this past hour, but the dark clouds suggested there was more on the way. It was a hurried thatch, like the walls of grey granite. Put up in a day so they might claim the right to have a home at all – an old Dartmoor tradition. They didn’t own the land the house stood on. It belonged to the Duchy, the Dartmoor lands owned by the Prince of Wales.
The girl scarcely knew who he was. A fat man in London, the sailor had told them a week before, when they were crammed in the little room of the Newhouse Inn, three miles away; one of several Newhouse drinking dens that had sprung up in recent years. The sailor had come up from Plymouth, his ship docked with the end of the war with Napoleon. They’d been stationed in the Pacific, he told them, and it had taken months to come home around the Horn. He said they’d watched a great volcano explode, sending up its ash to hide the sun. That’s why the skies were dark.
The sailor was going home. He’d been pressed into the navy ten years before in Portsmouth. Snatched away from his wife and children. He’d blasphemed into his small beer and wondered if his little family still lived? He’d called the Prince Regent a fat bastard. If he could he’d kill him, he said. They’d watched the matelot stride off along the turnpike to Moreton, still muttering and cursing. Tryphena had asked her father what a volcano was?
She became aware that her father was looking at her and knew what he was thinking. Tryphena was the plain daughter of Reuben Jay, with her lank brown hair and pale face. A strange accident of nature, the moor-folk said, for Reuben had been handsome in his youth, and her mother – now seven years dead – a great beauty for a peasant lass. Tryphena was nineteen and she’d overheard her father declare she’d surely die an old maid.
‘I got an awful pain!’ Reuben cried out.
‘Drink this.’
It was a liquid of herbs Mother Crocker of Bellever had prepared for him. The old woman was thought to be a witch, but her potions often worked. This red concoction was her suggestion for a failing heart.
‘We should never have built this place,’ Tryphena said. ‘Not least till you were better.’
Despite the hard work of their friends, Reuben had insisted on doing much of the toil on that long hard day. Lifting the stones for the walls, thatching the roof with the gathered heather.
‘We needed a roof over our heads.’
‘We should have waited for better weather.’
‘You think there ever will be, maid? There’s some who do say the world itself be dying. Still, I suspicion I’ll be buried before that happens. Why hasn’t my Kitty come home?’
‘Chagford’s a good march, father. Even on a bright day. Catherine’s a fast walker, but it’s grey weather. She won’t be back before night.’
The old man looked at the tiny window.
‘I thought it already was,’ he said.
~
‘Kitty…’
Catherine Jay paused in her walk, looking around the wild and open moorland, convinced someone was calling her name. She’d followed the long lanes out of Chagford as far as Fernworthy, before striding out across the open heath. She carried an ashplant to aid her across the rough terrain, struggling under the pack upon her back.
She’d managed to get a little food. Not much. There had been a bread riot in the village only a few days before and the shop had been looted. A kind and old friend of her family, who lived in a cottage hard by the church, had shared his own meagre ration.
‘Kitty…’
The sound of her name seemed to come in the chilling breeze sweeping across Sittaford Tor. She looked across the open country, but there was nobody in sight. The rain had stopped but, although it was only the middle of the afternoon, it was as dark as if it was the dimpsy light of evening.
She was at a place she’d never liked. Grey Wethers. Two ruined stone circles standing on a broad ledge below the rocky tor. A temple built by the old folk who’d inhabited the Moor in time out of mind, the farmer at Stannon had told her. ‘And who knows what horrors happened there…’ he’d added, shaking his head.
Kitty rested against one of the fallen stones, adjusting the pack higher up her back. She took in some deep breaths. She hated this place but was glad to be well away from Chagford.
There’d been lots of strangers in the village, some of them soldiers still in uniform, seeking something to do now the war was over. More than a few of them had gazed long and hard at her. Old Jed, their friend, had put her out through the back door of his cottage and told her to go warily through the darkening lanes.
‘They’m drunk, maid. Broke open the cellars in the inns. You’m a pretty thing and they’m not to be trusted. Think on! Go warily…’
Jed had guided her between the gravestones in the churchyard and had wrapped her in his great cloak, so that the soldiers might think it was two men who walked there. He’d seen her a long way up the lane to Fernworthy, only leaving her when there seemed to be nobody about.
‘You’m the spit an’ image of your ma,’ Jed had said. ‘Ah, she were a pretty maid too,’ he nodded as he waved farewell.
Catherine Jay had indeed caught the beauty of her mother, fine-faced and with chestnut hair. Many a lad on the Moor had come courting but she had a shyness that kept her away from company. Kitty envied her sister’s self-confidence. A quality she would never have.
She shivered in the dying light, walking faster down into the valley of the Dart river. Nearly home now to the new little house that she’d help ed to build on the long stretch of rough ground across the brook from Hartyland Farm.
Not much of a shack, but they’d had little choice when the farmer up at Stannon had been obliged to lay the family off and their room with them. The wild weather had put an end to the ambitious plans of the Duchy and the tenement farmers to “improve” the Moor.
For a while, Reuben Jay had worked Duchy land over to Prince’s Town, trying to get any sort of crop growing. They’d tried to plant flax there years before. That had failed. Kitty remembered the bitter old Dartmoor saying, “scratch my back and I’ll pick your pocket”. So true. So many moorland ambitions and men’s sweat were cast away in this harsh place.
And with this wild weather, the Dartmoor peasants were fighting just to survive. And the Prince of Wales, now the Prince Regent, who owned the land, did nothing to help the moor folk and never visited.
‘Kitty…’
Who’s calling me?
She was down by the river now, passing the lonely farmhouse at Stannon, when she saw Old Coaker and his nephew making a wall out of huge granite blocks, struggling and sweating even in the cold breeze. Kitty thought that the old man was long past such work and the boy Jonas was only fifteen, a clever lad by all accounts, who could read and wrote odd little verses about the Moor.
They stopped work as she approached, swigging water from a glass bottle.
‘Did you call me… a while back?’
‘No, maid,’ the old man replied. ‘We only just see’d you.’
A shiver ran up her spine as she glanced back the way she’d come.
‘Somebody called me…’
‘Where’ve you been?’ asked the boy.
‘Chagford. Tried to get some bread.’
The old man spat, ‘Hard bliddy times! But you should be wary, maid. There’s scores of soldiers living wild in the woods. Taint safe. You had no trouble?’
She shook her head.
‘Thank you for helping us build the house,’ she said.
Old Coaker looked grim.
‘Not much of a house. We’d a done better if the rain and wind had stopped. It was bliddy hard to get that thatch on. How’s your pa?’
‘Not well. Not well at all.’
‘I were coming to see un on my way home. But you can give un a message. Tell him that bastard Cratcher’s about. He were at Huccaby yesterday putting squatters out through their doors. Old Sam Satterley told us when we was over to Hexworthy.’
~
The two men were riding along the turnpike from Two Bridges to Postbridge, going at a steady walk so that the dozen men on foot behind them could keep up. They’d had a busy day since setting off from the Duchy house of Tor Royal soon after first light – pathetic though that light had been in these dark times.
They’d visited the deserted War Prison, empty since the last French and American prisoners had gone home. Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, secretary to the Duchy and personal friend to the Prince Regent, was on a prolonged stay in London, suggesting new uses for the prison. He’d been away for two months as idea after idea was rejected.
Cratcher and Haynes had been glad to see the back of him.
Tyrwhitt was, in their opinion, a dithering idiot who’d persuaded the prince to allow the new town on one of the bleakest stretches of the Moor. Suggested it as a site for the War Prison, instead of the much lower Roborough Down. Thought that you could replace the boggy yellow moor-grass with flax and other crops. For a while the Prince’s Town had prospered, but with the war over and the closing of the prison the town had died.
They’d found several redundant soldiers lurking in the empty gaol. It had took a violent two hours to round them up and evict them. Then there’d been the cottager at Rundlestone who couldn’t pay his rent. Haynes had found some satisfaction in seeing him weep as they evicted him.
‘Let these bastards starve on the Moor,’ he’d said to Cratcher. ‘Sweep the place clear of them. The Prince of Wales won’t care. And he pays us well for our trouble.’
As they rode along, Haynes thought briefly of his old father, a charitable man who’d meant his only son for the church. But then the old man was an idiot like Tyrwhitt. That’s what he told Cratcher. John Haynes had got to know the Prince of Wales over a game of cards in a gambling hell. They’d got on very well and the Regent had taken an interest in his advancement.
‘It’s boring I know,’ he said to Cratcher, ‘but if we do a good job here who knows what employment his Highness might find for me. And where I go, my dear Cratcher, you can come with me.’
Cratcher screwed up his face at this patronising suggestion. He so desperately wanted to say something cutting. But not yet… not yet.
Times were hard. And there had been some profit in working for the Duchy. When the War Prison closed, Cratcher had thought it likely that he’d be as redundant as the soldiers they’d just evicted.
Bosun Cratcher, proud of being a hero of Nelson’s navy, even though he lied when he claimed he’d been at Trafalgar.
His time at sea had been short and unspectacular. Much of his naval career had been spent trawling the taverns of Plymouth for men who could be pressed aboard ship. Press Gang Cratcher they’d called him for his efficiency. So much so that he’d been transferred to the War Prison as a guard, where he’d took particular delight in persecuting prisoners in the cachot, the foul little punishment block. Cratcher had thought the French and American prisoners beneath contempt. Only the contemptible ever got caught. Cratcher had had fun teaching them the error of their ways.
It was this notoriety that made Haynes seek Cratcher out when the War Prison closed. John Haynes was not a brave man. He’d needed someone at his side who was handy with his fists. So much to do on the Moor and no wish to prolong the work. Better to get it over with and move on.
‘I’ve acquired some land,’ Haynes said after a long silence.
‘Oh, where?’ Cratcher feigned an interest.
‘You know Belstone?’
‘Top end of the Moor?’
‘Well, there. A goodly bit. Adjoining the Duchy land, though I’m renting a corner of the prince’s holding as well.’
‘What for?’ asked Cratcher. ‘It’s just rough grazing. And the commoners up there are a barbarous lot. They’ll have all your beasts and won’t remove their own. Not worth the trouble. It’s open common.’
‘Not for much longer. I intend to enclose my land. Wall off the common. Put a great boundary across it to keep the commoners out. If it works at Belstone, I might extend my wall all the way along the northern commons.’
‘You won’t get anyone to build your wall. The villains up there’d slice the throats of any wall-builder you took on.’
Haynes grinned.
‘I don’t intend to use local labour. I’ve a cousin in Wicklow. I’ve written to him. I intend to bring across an army of barefoot Irish peasants to build the wall. They’ll be glad to do the work just for food and ale.’
‘You won’t be liked.’
‘I’m not liked now.’
~
Tryphena saw them coming up the track from the turnpike. She knew who they were. She’d seen Cratcher’s foot-followers drunk on the deserted long street of Prince’s Town. Saw them tupping village girls in the overgrown churchyard. They were seldom sober except when they marched on an errand for the Prince of Wales.
‘Trouble.’
Catherine was at her side, wrapping a shawl across her shoulders to fend off the freezing breeze. She’d been back at the shack for less than an hour.
‘Trouble,’ she said. ‘As if we didn’t have enough.’
‘Both of them. Haynes and Cratcher.’
If it had been just the one there might have been some hope. Or if it had been the meek little clerk who rode the moorland once a month to collect the Duchy rents. But both Cratcher and Haynes…
And they had their men with them. The sweepings of Devonport who held life cheap and women cheaper.
‘You’d best get inside,’ Tryphena said.
‘I’m not afraid of them.’
‘You ought to be…’
But she felt a relief that her sister stood by her as the men rode up.
‘We want to see Reuben Jay,’ said Cratcher.
‘You can’t,’ said Tryphena.
‘We can see whoever we want to see,’ said Cratcher. ‘This is Mr Haynes, representing the Prince of Wales.’
‘I know who he is,’ said Tryphena.
