Devil's Day Read online

‘Or we could leave them here,’ I said.

  ‘For when we visit you mean?’ said Kat.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘We can come whenever you want to, you know,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to keep you locked up in Suffolk. Anyway, I like it here.’

  She smiled to herself as she chased her reflection in the mirror that Dadda had strung from the roof-beams like something in a budgie’s cage. A woman was coming to stay, he’d thought, and women wanted to know what they looked like. They expected to find a bedroom pretty, too, and so he’d given her the piss-pot with the flowers on.

  Kat shivered as she got under the blankets and moved closer to me, crossing the crack where the two beds met and getting into mine. It seemed strange that I was lying there in my childhood bedroom with a wife, a pregnant wife, looking at the same books that had always been there on the shelves, listening to the sounds outside in the valley that never changed.

  It had stopped raining now and what had fallen on the moors all evening came tumbling down the clough. Beyond that, the voice of the river seemed larger than it really was, as if it were flowing close to the window and yet distantly too. Sound moves strangely in the Endlands. Adam always says so. It can’t lift itself over the walls of the fells and so it flutters from one side of the valley to the other like a bird trapped in a room.

  ‘What would the Gaffer have thought about us having a baby?’ said Kat. ‘Would he have been happy for you?’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ I said.

  But more than that, he’d have been thinking what I’d been thinking since the doctor had confirmed that the two faint lines on the testing kit were telling the truth: that the child belonged to the Endlands. That Kat and I had a duty to come back and live here.

  She wrapped herself around me, her hand on my shoulder blades, one cold foot rubbing my shin.

  ‘Poor Grace,’ she said. ‘I hope our boy has a happier life than hers.’

  A vixen yelped in the trees by the Beasleys’ bridge, hollow with hunger. And further away I thought I heard the moaning of the stags on the moor.

  Funeral

  These last few days, I’ve been telling Adam about the maps that the Gaffer used to draw. Every October before Gathering, he’d take the book from the kitchen dresser and reset the boundaries of our land.

  The maps had been made on large sheets of baking paper, so that each year the new could be copied, with whatever amendments were required, from the old. The whole of the valley was drawn out, from the two beech trees to the old wall on the moors where our pastures ended.

  He’d deal with the village first, carefully tracing the position of the houses with a pencil that he stopped to sharpen between drawing New Row on one side of the river and the Nine Cottages on the other. Each little rectangle was labelled with the names of the occupants, and births and deaths were indicated by addition or absence. Look back far enough and there were names that no one in the village had any more: Clifton, Bullsnape, Calder, Mitton. Families that had moved elsewhere or come to an end with marriage, like the Curwens, who disappeared from the maps when Angela’s father, Henry, died and the farm passed to her and Jim, whom she’d married two years before.

  I suppose it must have been quite a momentous occasion really. The Curwens had lived in the valley for a long time, and along with Joe Pentecost and Vernon Dyer, Henry had been instrumental in buying the Endlands from the landowners in 1920. After that, the maps had been drawn up each year around the anniversary of the purchase.

  In those years after the Great War, the Gaffer told me, when the toffs didn’t have much money any more and the big houses were closed and they decided to cut their losses on what they owned rather than throw good money after bad, the Endlands had gone for a song. But even so, it must surely have still been beyond the means of three families of farmers, and down in Underclough there was a great deal of suspicion at the time about where they’d found the capital.

  According to the Gaffer, accusations of poaching did the rounds—after all, no one had come to shoot in the Wood or on the moors for years and there was plenty of game to be had if someone was determined to steal it. But while knocking off a few rabbits or grouse might have helped to pay some small portion of the rent, it would hardly have been enough to buy the plots outright. And anyway, we weren’t exactly habitual thieves. We just accommodated those who were.

  The Gaffer remembered how butchers from Clitheroe and Burnley would come up at dusk with a few likely looking fellows with shotguns and slip Joe Pentecost and the others half a guinea for an hour or so in the Wood. The next day: pheasant and partridge and hare in the shop windows. Or young men, bored without war, would come with hunting rifles for the deer and were more than happy to pay for the privilege of having the Gaffer take them across the moorland to the choicest hiding places.

  Yet, it still didn’t seem to add up and whenever I pressed the Gaffer about it, he said the same thing.

  ‘They’re ours now, Johnny lad. That’s all that matters.’

  And he’d inch his chair closer to the table and sharpen his pencil again.

  It was in drawing the borders of our land that he took the most care. The plots of the Endlands were not made of neat rectangles or straight edges, but sutured by the ragged lines of the cloughs. They were the remnants left by the Norsemen, who’d come to the valley centuries before and been the first to settle here. They were people of high places as well as people of the sea and when a Norseman staked out his land for the first time, the Gaffer told me, he started at the ridge and worked his way down to water.

  ‘The three farms, if you look closely, Johnny lad, are all like that,’ he said. ‘We’re living like the Norsemen lived.’

  And so the Endlands were ringed by a wriggling line that followed the ridge of Kite Fell above the Dyers’ farm and on to Wolf Hill above ours. From there it went off over the moors to run along the Wall before coming back across the top of Long Edge that loomed over the Beasleys’ place and dropped down to meet its starting point on the village side of Sullom Wood.

  ‘No one can ever move that line, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said, showing me the edges of the Endlands again. ‘Don’t ever let anyone try. That land were bought fair and square. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.’

  Once the outline had been correctly copied, the Gaffer sharpened his pencil again and began to fill in the details. At the very end of the valley were the Three Sisters—Fiendsdale, Whitmoor and Bleaweather—a cul-de-sac of high fells that were split here and there by hernias of rock. And even the smaller features were important to document; all the curious corners of fields and marshes, like Sour Bend, that conical polyp of grass around which the river horseshoed on its way to Sullom Wood. Or Reaper’s Walk, which wasn’t a lane as such but the hedgerowed levee between the two hay fields.

  These things hardly changed from one year to the next, but there were other features that required surveying and this meant that the Gaffer had to go out with a notebook and a tape measure. Not only for posterity but for more practical reasons, too.

  The banks into which the Beasleys’ bridge had been built were slowly eroding and sooner or later they would have to be shored up. Likewise, the track over the Moss could be damaged by floods and we’d need to know where to build defences or widen the ditches. The ash coppice in Sullom Wood had to be properly managed, the trees counted and replaced if we were all to have enough winter firewood in the years to come. Ash had always been favoured over oak and beech. It burns well even when it’s damp and green. A useful attribute when we’re at the mercy of so much rain. It chokes the river and fills the cloughs so that they derail from their usual lines and the deluge comes sweeping down the fells towards the farms. Wooden barricades were built in the Gaffer’s time and the overflow channels angled towards the river but they don’t always work and they have to be maintained, of course, like everything else here. Every so often I put up new fencing panels and unsilt the drains.

  W
e’re shepherds of water as well as sheep, I say to Adam.

  We always have been.

  ∾

  According to what I’d always been told, the Pentecosts had been here in the valley much longer than the other families. We were direct descendants of some of those tough Norwegian migrants. Why else had Joe Pentecost been so tall? Where had the Gaffer got his blue eyes from? Our line stretched way back. When William the Conqueror doled out this portion of England to the Bonyeux-Lacys, we’d already been farming the Endlands for a century or more.

  The Bonjour-Lazies, Adam calls them. Were they friends of the king? he asks.

  You didn’t get two names unless you were, I tell him.

  Were they rich? he says.

  Rich enough to give away their land to the Church, I say.

  Great sweeps of it. Acres and acres. It paid for a safe passage into heaven when the time came, but they were probably glad, too, that someone else was tending this northern backwater for them.

  There were decent flushing meadows down by the Ribble—and these the abbey stocked with sheep whose fleeces ended up in the market places of Bruges and Venice—but the moorland valley was next to useless. The oak groves and beech clumps were too thick to be cleared for fields and the high pastures only fit for rough-coated ewes that were best cared for by the shepherds who already lived there. The monks didn’t like to go up on to the moors. There was something unwholesome about the place, they said. There were strange shapes far off on the ridges and sometimes noises under the peat. When they came to collect kindling and fuel for the abbey’s fireplaces, they wouldn’t go too deep into the Wood either. There was something worse than the wolves in there, something that always seemed determined to follow them out into the open.

  That was why they’d built the chapel. Not only as a shelter from the wind and the rain, but as a gatehouse. Whatever pursued them out of the trees would surely shrink back when it saw that God was present in the valley.

  It’s hard to imagine, I say to Adam, but in those days, change was geologically slow, and one generation of Pentecosts was no different to that which preceded or followed. They farmed sheep for their mutton and their coats, made their small contribution to the Church’s coffers, and lived poor, short lives. Century after century.

  Of course, the wool business was shaken every now and then by war and taxes like every other, but not enough for it to fall apart, and not enough for men to stop growing rich. Even when friend Henry came along and dismantled the abbey by the Ribble with such thoroughness that the foundation stones were taken up, there were new pockets waiting to be lined. The Bonyeux-Lacys might have been ousted (or executed for their treason in the Pilgrimage of Grace) and the monks chased from the fields, but the Protestant Ashetons were there to take their place, and their sheep.

  They’d become even wealthier than the abbey, the Ashetons, not least because they were canny businessmen. They’d been quick to poach the Calvinist weavers escaping the spikes and screws of the Inquisition. Quick to buy up land in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, where they could pasture sheep for worsted rather than woollen and see a bigger return. Having said that they extracted a healthy revenue even from the shaggy fell sheep of their northern moors, turning their fleeces into the coarse cloth that the poor were forced to wear by law.

  It was on these profits that they’d built Brownlee Hall over in the Wyresdale Valley, where the Cutting came down into prettier flatlands. We’d been taken there from school one day by the aptronymic Mrs Broad for our topic on local history and herded from musty room to musty room, watched over by the huge portraits of those nib-bearded merchants in stockings and vair.

  The Ashetons had done brisk business for a century or more, until the Civil War robbed them and every other wool merchant of their workforce and then a run of hard winters and wet summers wrecked their northern grazing land. The farmers in the Endlands carried on, but the family left and headed south to live and die in a warmer county.

  By the time the last Asheton, Matthew, passed away in 1805, the family’s wealth had dwindled, and as each generation had sold off a little more of what they’d once owned, there was nothing left but Brownlee Hall and the Briardale Valley estate.

  Having no heirs of his own, Matthew handed on everything to his nephew, Edgar Denning, a wine merchant in London. But he had no interest in a mouldering house or two hundred acres of boggy heather and just as the Ashetons had done when they fled to the Cotswolds, he collected what was owed to him without ever making the journey north.

  That’s not to say that he tossed the heirloom aside as if it were a broken watch. He was shrewd enough to know easy money when he saw it, and took the opportunity to introduce himself as our new landlord by putting up the rent and then again the next season. For years, the farmers petitioned him to think of the Endlands as one plot, rather than three, so that the lease might be set at a lower rate and the responsibility of paying it shared. But for one reason or another, though always financial, the request was consistently refused.

  So the three families found ways of making sure that each could afford to live. Every autumn, a few sheep, pigs, cows and geese were set aside and when they were butchered the meat was evenly distributed. Whatever was poached from the moors or from Sullom Wood was sold in quick, clandestine exchanges on the next market day in Clitheroe and the money divvied out three ways to help with the rent when Denning’s man came knocking.

  Nothing changed when Joe Pentecost and the others bought the Endlands in 1920. Everyone still looked out for each other. We shared what we could. No one bought what would be freely lent. Fences were there to contain the animals rather than keep out the neighbours. If anything, the three families became closer, making the Endlands virtually self-sufficient, as it still is now. The world outside the valley might well collapse but we wouldn’t necessarily feel the ripples here. And that was what had been given to each generation since Joe Pentecost’s time, that opportunity to live by our own hands, the freedom not to have to dance at the ends of someone else’s strings.

  But a farmer in the Endlands was only ever a custodian. Nothing ever belonged to anyone, but was always in the act of being handed on. It’s the same now, I tell Adam. The Endlands are always teetering, and it’s up to those who come after us to hold them steady. No one here spends money on insurance policies; we have children instead.

  ∾

  Kat had a restless night and only settled properly in the early hours of the morning. I left her sleeping and went downstairs, finding the map book open on the kitchen table. Dadda had made a start on tracing the new page but, as usual, he’d been called away by another job. I found him in the scullery, which smelled as it had always smelled (and still does now) of turpentine and softening apples and the cat-piss of ever-damp shoes. A place for oilskins to drip dry and game to hang until it was ready to be skinned and gutted.

  The window at the end was smeared with moss and shadowed by the straggling damson tree outside. Dadda had been meaning to cut it down for years to let in more light but had never got around to it, and I knew why. It reminded him of Mam, as it did me. One of the few solid memories I have from that long ago is watching her standing on a paint-flecked stepladder reaching up into the branches for damsons and her heels lifting out of her slip-on shoes.

  Through the braces of limp, glass-eyed rabbits that hung from the ceiling, Dadda sat on a low stool with the Peek Freans biscuit tin of brushes and polish next to him on the floor. He had his hand inside one of the Gaffer’s boots and was coughing loudly as he dug out the dried mud from the sole with a penknife.

  ‘Why don’t I do that, Dadda?’ I said. ‘You go and get yourself ready.’

  He stopped for a moment, looked at me, and then turned his attention back to what he was doing. It was pointless of me to offer. The son always cleans his father’s boots.

  On the shelf above the paint tins, they were all lined up—fathers next to fathers next to fathers, back to old Arthur Pentecost, who’d been shepherdin
g in the Endlands when the Ashetons were still collecting our tithes. His boots were colossal things, held together with hobnails and still skull-hard at the toes. The laces had perished but for a sprig still threaded through the bottom-most eyelets, brittle as a dried worm.

  The other two farms were the same. Everyone had their shelf of old boots so that no one would forget what had been preserved and passed on to them. How much work had been done on our behalf to keep the farms for us.

  ‘Who did Mam’s boots?’ I said, finding hers leaning against the others and scuffed at the toes.

  ‘You did,’ said Dadda. ‘You sat here for hours at it. I couldn’t get you to go to bed. The Gaffer found you asleep on the floor.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I said.

  So little comes to me from that time now. The cork heels of Mam’s shoes on the top rung of the ladder. A drift of jam sugar spilled across the oilcloth on the kitchen table. She and I in the hay meadows watching the lapwings. Like salt boiled out of water, these things remain. Everything else has evaporated.

  ‘He’d have been made up, you know, the Gaffer,’ said Dadda, working polish into the leather. ‘About you and your lass.’

  ‘And are you?’ I said.

  ‘Of course I am, John,’ he said.

  ‘What’s up then?’ I said.

  ‘Nowt.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I know there’s something. If it’s Grace, we didn’t tell her, you know.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.

  ‘Is it that we told Kat’s parents first?’ I said.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you tell them first?’ he said. ‘You live within spitting distance of them, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want you to feel put out,’ I said.

  ‘If I start to feel put out about things like that, John,’ he said, ‘then I’ll know I’ve too much time on my hands.’

  ‘It’s just that they were round at the house and it seemed strange not to say anything.’