The Woman in the Water Read online

  The Woman in the Water

  Will and Sheila Barton

  © Will and Sheila Barton 2016

  Will Barton and Sheila Barton have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work.

  First published in 2016 by Endeavour Press

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Even though it was already well past nine o’clock, there was still a rim of red at the edge of the sky. Sunrise had been spectacular – clear and fiery above the frost encrusted ground. Now the early February sky above him was a bright, cold blue, with only the rose tinged horizon a reminder that he’d already been labouring for three hours. At least the lifting, the pushing, the pulling, the shouting to his mates to hold steady kept him warm. It was absolutely freezing.

  The stone was pretty much loaded onto the waiting boat now. The last of the railway trucks had been emptied and was ready to be pulled back up the hill to Ralph Allen’s mines and be filled up again. The railway was one of Bath’s wonders – though a simple enough idea – and people came to watch the open carriages steadied by brakes, running on iron wheels and wooden rails from the top of the hill to the bottom to deliver their contents to the wharf. There the soft, yellow blocks of stone, already hardening in the air, were transferred by a wooden crane on a boat, which was waiting to carry them away. Building, building, building – they had never known a time like it. Just as well for him – it meant plenty of employment for men strong enough to dig and cut and load and unload. Week on week, the stone that didn’t go to Bristol or London was transformed into the terraces of houses that hung like golden necklaces on the slopes of Bath, a city apparently held by nature in the cup of its green and prosperous hand. Fine streets, squares and walkways, as well as stylish rooms for gambling and dancing rose month on month in a seemingly never ending parade of elegance and prosperity.

  He and his mates stood back from the trucks and he pushed his hat to the back of his head before signalling to the crane operators to swing in the last load and guide it expertly onto the deck of the boat. Then he sat with the other railway men, unwrapped the cloth that held his bit of bread and cheese and started to eat. They passed a flagon of ale from hand to hand and he hooked in a finger, tipped it back over his shoulder and took a swig. Soon the cold began to gnaw at him again so he rose and went onto the boat. He liked to check that the blocks of stone were steady and well balanced on the deck. Finding it all well stacked and secured by firmly knotted rope, he stood back to admire his city, the city that he, in his way, was helping to bring into being. His eyes went first to the hills above and then to the buildings below, glowing in the winter sun. From there his eyes came down to the water winding between the gold and green, dark and shining, almost still, on this windless day.

  Then something caught his eye. Lining the banks, trees hung over the river, spare at this time of the year, but still gracefully dipping the ends of their branches into the water. Under one, not easy to make out, there appeared to be something wedged. It bobbed occasionally but remained stuck between branches and bank. He shielded his eyes and squinted into the light. All sorts floated down in the winter storms, but there was something strange about this bundle. It was long – a good four and a half feet – and appeared to be swathed in some kind of once white wrapping.

  “What d’you think that is then?” he asked, touching the boatman’s shoulder.

  “What?”

  “There.” He pointed, “Stuck against the bank there. It’s big.”

  “Aye. It’ll be some rubbish.”

  “It’s big, though.”

  “Aye.”

  He was drawn from his curious thoughts by a shout from one of the other men.

  “Thomas, you done, me lad? We’re ready for the uphill now.”

  “Aye, I’m with you.”

  He jumped from the deck onto the wharf and turned to wave the boatman on. Then he re-joined his mates, harnessed the horses to the wooden trucks and eased off the brake as they began the journey back up the hill.

  Chapter 1

  3rd February 1761

  The black plumes on the coffin quivered in the fading afternoon light as six pallbearers lifted it – one, two three, now – onto their shoulders and settled it in readiness. A light drizzle was turning to steady rain as the cortège assembled outside a house in Saw Close. City council men, hospital beadles, Abbey churchwardens and minor clergy busied themselves in arranging and ordering the mourners. The city, normally quieter at this time, while the people of quality dined and their servants waited upon them, was today packed with people of all classes, intent on watching the great civic display. Crowds thronged around the Guildhall market, blocking the roads where stage coaches were trying to set down their passengers. Horses snorted fretfully, their breath hanging in the cold air like the smoke that poured from the chimneys of every house. Their hooves slipped and scraped on the damp cobblestones as coachmen and ostlers struggled to restrain them. Sedan chairmen, doing better business than on any day they could remember, jostled through the crowds to set down their fares at the side of the route. Their passengers were dressed in their best finery, vying to be, not mere observers of the pageant, but a part of it.

  At five o’clock a single funeral bell rang from the Abbey, then its half-muffled companions began to peal. Under the direction of the churchwardens, the procession began the final journey of the late ‘King of Bath’, the gambler, libertine, scoundrel, gentleman, philanthropist and benefactor Richard “Beau” Nash, from the house of the last of his numerous mistresses, via a funeral service of sedate municipal ceremony, to an unmarked pauper’s grave.

  As the bells were ringing out, Jonathan Harding left his house on Duke Street to attend the funeral. In his mid-thirties, with clear, brown eyes under a short, powdered wig and above a plain white collar, he was easily recognizable as a clergyman. Turning into the elevated walkway known as the North Parade, he continued past the Assembly Rooms and gaming houses and through the disciplined lines of trees that formed the Orange Grove beside the Abbey church. Harding’s eyes were drawn by the funeral bunting decorating the buildings around the Abbey. The town was strangely bright in mourning, about to witness not just a funeral but a triumphant procession. It seemed to him quite appropriate that such extravagance should end the story of the man who had, perhaps more than any other, shaped and steered the city to its present fame and prosperity. The man who had invested in roads and gambling, this latter to be his downfall.

  Beau Nash had not put up the elegant golden terraces, although he had filled them with musicians, dancers and card tables. Neither had he developed the curing waters, the baths and their attendant hospital, although he had worked hard alongside the men who did. The man who was to be laid to rest today was an altogether more extraordinary person – a master of ceremonies, a king of revels, who had come to Bath in the 1730s when its social life was rough and unrefined and had transformed it into the elegant place it now was. Now, in this second year of the reign of King George III, men no long
er carried swords in the streets, or wore their spurs in drawing rooms. The slightest disagreement over status, etiquette, cards or dice was no longer inevitably followed by a squalid duel the following dawn, which had constituted the precise downfall of Captain Webster, his predecessor. Beau Nash, an irascible Welshman of no social standing, had, by sheer force of character, succeeded in what many would have thought impossible – he had civilised fashionable English society.

  Harding turned and looked about him towards the ring of hills surrounding the city. I will lift up mine eyes onto the hills, whence cometh my strength the psalmist had written. The strength that came from these hills, he reflected, was the soft, golden stone that clad all the great new buildings of Bath, making it a unique and impressive sight – a wholly new city designed and built for a new kind of life in a new kind of world. No longer a centre of monastic life or the shabby market town that had remained for two hundred years after the monks had gone, it was now at the centre of fashionable life in England. All classes of society came: from the barely respectable to the most high-ranking; from country landowners to royalty; from soldiers of fortune to dukes. For Beau Nash had eased the rigidity of class in this place. If you had money you were welcome to pursue what this city could now offer: healing allied to hedonistic diversion, fashionable company, new styles in clothing, music, dancing, and gaming – and Europe’s premier marriage market.

  Harding wore a black coat – the best of his three – not the old one he wore at work in his garden or when walking or riding about the countryside, or the plain but respectable one he wore on most other occasions. This one was of fine wool with shiny buttons which he wore in the presence of better society. His wife had once almost persuaded him to obtain a blue coat to wear to fashionable engagements but in the end he felt it would not be proper for a clergyman and now she was gone he had no taste for such engagements. Today, as he stepped briskly across Orange Grove and entered the Abbey he was grateful for the warmth of his best.

  *

  Lizzie Yeo was considerably less well protected from the weather as she stepped out of an apothecary’s shop on Cheap Street with the last of her deliveries. Shivering, she pulled up the hood of her old, brown woollen cloak to cover her cotton cap, walked briskly up the street and turned the corner. She knocked sharply on the door of a house giving out onto the pavement and stepped in quickly when it opened. Within two minutes she was out again but without the bottle she had been carrying. She judged that she would be just in time to catch a glimpse of the funeral procession if she moved fast.

  The funeral cortège wound its way out of Saw Close as the muffled bells wove in and out of the children’s dirge. First came the charity girls, two by two, then the boys in their uniform coats and badges. At their beadles’ direction they began to sing:

  Most unhappy are we here,

  Full of sin and full of fear,

  Ever weary, ne'er at rest,

  When, O Lord, shall we be blest?

  Their wavering trebles were taken up by the marching musicians who came after them, made up both of the City Music and the remnant of Nash’s own band. The procession moved off towards Westgate Buildings then turned left down Westgate Street, crowded with onlookers, some of whom had come to honour the memory of a prominent citizen, some to mourn the passing of a benefactor and philanthropist, many to see the spectacle and to be a part of the occasion, and not a few to take advantage of the crowds to proposition, solicit or pick pockets. Among them, Lizzie, having pushed her way to the front, stood for a few minutes to watch. Her clear, young face was still hidden by the hood of her cloak, from which brown, wet curls escaped.

  Earth's a clog, a pageant life,

  Fill'd with folly, guilt, and strife;

  'Till we all unite in thee,

  With ourselves we disagree,

  sang the charity girls and boys. Three clergymen followed the musicians, robed in heavy cloaks, and behind them followed the black coffin, borne on the shoulders of Bath’s six most senior aldermen. Its sable plumes, increasingly weighed down by rainwater, bobbed to the rhythm of the pall bearers’ footsteps.

  The masters of each of Bath’s two assembly rooms, in their roles as chief mourners, followed the coffin. Behind them marched the beadles of the hospital, each in a heavy coat and tricorne hat and brandishing his ceremonial staff of office. And last, behind the beadles, came the poor patients of the hospital, the beneficiaries of Nash’s largesse. Limping and shuffling, they wept openly for their loss.

  Lizzie, absorbed for a few moments in the splendour of the procession, turned her head suddenly. She thought she had felt a tap on her shoulder, and there was someone likely to be about who she was most anxious to evade. The throng was dense and the light almost gone. It was hard to see clearly through the veil of rain, but it seemed to her that a few feet back in the crowd was a dirty face, pitted with smallpox, that she particularly wanted to avoid. She turned her head calmly back and continued to watch the cortège. It would take him a minute or two to push his way through to her, and besides she was sharp-witted and quick on her feet. If she timed it right she’d be fine.

  What's our comfort here below?

  Empty bubble, transient show,

  Wrapt in the body's vile disguise,

  None truly is until he dies.

  As the last of the processing mourners passed her, Lizzie took her chance. Quickly and silently she lost herself in the crowd, slipping behind the last of the hospital patients into an alleyway and disappeared into the darkness. As she turned into Avon Street, it became clear to her that its inhabitants were marking the funeral of Beau Nash in their own style. All eleven of its taverns were heaving with customers, with crowds of people outside each one. As Lizzie passed the first on her way to the rooming house where she lodged, she was forced to step round a number of men in various stages of inebriation, one of whom was relieving himself into the stinking gutter. Another lunged towards her, without losing a drop from his tankard. Sighing, she dodged the unsteady hands and walked on, holding her skirts up a little. The steady drizzle had at least settled the dust that usually rose from the street, but it had turned it to mud mixed with droppings from horses and pigs and churned up with slops thrown from the houses and urine from the drinkers. When Lizzie reached her front door, she turned her head, checked that all was clear, and knocked to be let in.

  *

  As the funeral procession approached the great west door of the Abbey, it seemed as if even the carved stone angels climbing up and down Jacob’s Ladder above it were animated by the occasion. Some appeared to be scurrying headfirst down the ladder to stare at the spectacle, while others were fleeing back to heaven in distress at the pomp and piety being shown to so flagrant a sinner. At the head of the cortège, the charity children were directed to their places in the abbey by Mr Harding and his colleagues. Cold and damp, they struggled to maintain appropriately solemn faces. The musicians wheeled off to the side of the great west door as the Rector of Bath greeted his fellow clergymen, and then preceded the coffin into the Abbey church, intoning the opening words of the liturgy for the Burial of the Dead:

  I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

  The coffin was set down before the pulpit as the Rector’s sonorous voice continued:

  I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.

  Harding stepped to one side of the pall bearers who now formed a guard of honour around the coffin:

  We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away

  Harding had officiated at many funerals and the words of the service were completely familiar to him. On many such occasions he realised that he had recited long passages completely correctly and clearly, yet without any conscious memory of what he had done. But each time he heard them now, he was shocked back into the world by the memory of the funeral he
had conducted only a year after arriving in Bath. Then he had laid to rest his young wife, taken from him in childbirth, with one of the twin children she had delivered. They had been married for a mere eighteen months. Death was a common enough thing and especially in childbirth. A clergyman saw much of it and while he had never become completely hardened, he had learned a sort of reserve. But Jonathan Harding’s marriage had been a love match, long-awaited and made possible by the bishop’s gift of this position in Bath, and then so short-lived as to twist a knife in his heart whenever he thought of it.

  He had been strongly urged to remarry. He was a young man with good prospects, favoured by Septimus Wellbeloved, the bishop, and popular with the congregations of the Abbey. He had a young son who had no mother and a household with no mistress. A clergyman, it was often said, ought to be married, not least as a guard against temptations of the flesh, with which Bath was well provided. But Harding did not want another wife. He remained faithful to the one whose memorial plaque hung above him on the Abbey’s north wall and whose body lay in the Abbey graveyard.

  In Memoriam

  Jane Harding

  1732-1753

  Beloved wife of Revd. Jonathan Harding and mother of George

  He lived modestly in a small town house with only a housekeeper as a live-in servant. He preached two or three sermons a week at the Abbey, and assisted with other matters when requested by the rector. He read and prayed, took his exercise by walking each day around the city and occasionally rode about the countryside on a horse kept in the livery stables in Widcombe Village across the river. He maintained a keen amateur study of mathematics and logic that had stayed with him since his days as a student at Cambridge. Sometimes he was called upon to deal with business arising in one of his three parishes - Ponting Magna in Wiltshire, a large and prosperous village from which he had £400 a year, Lower Pother, a little to the west, near the Welsh border, a more modest settlement but still worth £220 a year and Rayleigh-in-Marsh in Somerset, which was to all intents and purposes deserted. But mostly he lived a quiet and reasonably contented life in Bath.