Dead-Nettle Page 2

  Frank Lomas was manifestly not welcome, though he had achieved this goal at the end of a pilgrimage of some six and a half thousand miles. The Peakrels are an unforthcoming and unself-revealing community, and in the case of Margreave in the opening years of this century, this was exacerbated because the more outward looking and ambitious of the male population had long since departed to earn elsewhere a more substantial living than these hills could afford them. Of those that remained, most worked in the limestone quarries or the kilns; a few scraped the parlous soil for a reward that scarcely fobbed off starvation. Their instinct was to distrust the unfamiliar and more especially to conceal, even from each other, the fact that they were capable of any human feeling other than a mute stoicism. I, too, had suffered from their sullen silences when first I had been drafted into this area. Frank Lomas found it particularly hard to understand; he had learned to survive by cocking a snook at privation. Not so these men. They laughed occasionally, but only amongst themselves. They were capable of personal loyalties and a sustained battle against their environment. But they would rather lay claim to a twisted motivation than confess to a candid one. Your Peakrel does not wear his heart upon his sleeve; he prefers the fiction that he has no heart at all.

  And Frank Lomas had several characteristics which the men of Margreave found unendearing. He was, for one thing, openly inquisitive. On his way up the last hill, the last short lap of his journey, he had paused to take an interest in a drainage channel from one of the abandoned lead workings in the flank of Ranters’ Hill. And he had no right to be taking an interest in derelict mines. They were essentially the heritage of Margreave men. Later, when the main oracular force of the Adventurers’had gathered for the evening, he had had the temerity to ask his neighbour at the bar some questions to which he seemed to expect specific answers – questions about the present state of mining in the district. It was a dangerous subject on which to display curiosity; to the Peakrel, the desire for knowledge might all too easily seem the first step towards unfair advantage. Indeed, they were already beginning to believe that this man must be something of a fool into the bargain. It was fifty years or more since anyone had endeavoured to tear any sort of living from the mineral deposits in Margreave’s four hills.

  But there was another failing which, more than any other, caused the men of Margreave to combine in telepathic accord against Frank Lomas. He already knew a good deal more about their town than could possibly be healthy. He seemed as familiar with Margreave’s byways and personalities as if he had already lived here half his life. He referred to Mrs Bassett, the acidulous postmistress, as Old Fan. He knew old Tiggy Slack by name and nickname before either had been spoken in his presence. Yet he made mistakes, too. He thought that Edward Fothergill was still Bar Master of the Moot Court, whereas the old man had died five years ago. He spoke of old Edward as if he had been a shining example of the probity of the previous century, whereas things had come to light about some of the Fothergill transactions that made a plain villain of anyone who spoke in his favour. Men began to talk pointedly to each other in low voices and to exclude Frank Lomas from their conversation. But he persevered.

  ‘Is Dead-Nettle Drift being worked these days?’

  ‘Dead-Nettle?’

  There was a stir of interest, even amongst those who had turned their backs on him.

  ‘Dead-Nettle Drift? The man who works Dead-Nettle might well take his time over his last square meal.’

  ‘I’d not take Dead-Nettle if you paid the Lord’s Seam for me before I hung my outside door.’

  ‘There must be lead left in these hills,’ Lomas said.

  ‘Aye – lead – copper and silver too, if you’d like to take a reading-glass to what you find. There’s lead aplenty. Enough to see this country’s muskets through another war, if ever need be. And water, too. That’s been the curse of all time in the Margreave mines. Who can afford a pumping-engine, on top of the royalties? Do you know how the Lord’s Seam works, lad? Do you know what flogging dead horse means? Working for the mineral owner’s rights, and hoping she won’t flood before you strike your pick into another scrin that they’ll let you call your own.’

  ‘The Moot Court still meets, then?’

  ‘The Moot Court exists. There’s a Master and a Steward and a standing jury, if only to pass judgement on Florence Belfield’s ghosts. Thinking of working the Drift, were you? You wouldn’t fill your freeing-dish with what’s left in Dead-Nettle. There’s nowt left in Dead-Nettle, only toad-stone.’

  A surprising spate of fluency. Lomas did his best to exploit it.

  ‘So who owns the manor now? I’m told there’s a new landlord.’

  ‘And I’d starve on crusts before I put a penny into that bugger’s bank. Not that it matters who’s owner of the land. You fill your dish, and you’ve the right to work the seam as long as there’s work left in you. That’s the law of the liberty.’

  A strange sort of excitement had come over them. It was fifty years since the ore had been seriously worked. There were not many here who could ever have taken an active hand at the rock-face. But the talk had roused some spirit in them.

  ‘And for all that’s just been said, those would be the last of my reasons for not working Dead-Nettle. It’s a bad luck gate. Always has been.’

  ‘Aye.’

  And even Frank Lomas, for all his monumental simplicity of outlook, knew better than to press the point any further.

  ‘You’re a miner, then?’ somebody asked him.

  ‘I have been in my time. Not lead, though.’

  ‘You have been in your time? Why, you’re nobbut a lad.’

  But there was no pressing interest in his history.

  ‘Coal,’ he volunteered.

  ‘Oh, aye?’ and a contemptuous echo from the spittoon.

  ‘You’ll find no coal up round here.’

  ‘I know that. If I did, I’d run ten miles.’

  ‘Run, would you?’

  The man cast his eyes down at Lomas’s surgical boot. Perhaps that was the beginning of their hostility. A surgical boot made a man different, and no man had a right to be different.

  Perhaps I seem less than charitable to the Margreave men. Perhaps I am prejudiced; it has more than once fallen to my lot to rely on such frankness as I could cajole from them. If ever they wanted to outwit me, I was outwitted. Maybe they could rise to selflessness, sacrifice, even bravery, under the right kind of persuasion. I suppose there might even be circumstances under which they could be tolerant of what they do not understand. But on this theoretical point I remain unconvinced. Frank Lomas found them perplexing; but at bottom he did not care whether they – or any other man – understood him or not.

  The morning after his arrival, he was busy in the village in a manner which suggested a plan drawn up beforehand. He went first and looked in the window of Tiggy Slack’s Stores in the grey, sloping Market Place: chopped firewood, pots of jam, sides of bacon, lamp-wicks and canisters of tea. It had been a lesson of Lomas’s youth, one of his father’s adages, that when you were faced with half a dozen jobs to do, you squared up first to the one that you had the least taste for. He looked in through the panels of the shop-door, saw Tiggy Slack, the man he had identified last night, a balding stoat of a figure, plunging a metal scoop into a bin of rice. He was serving a round-shouldered, black-weeded widow; excuse enough for Lomas to postpone his visit. He went instead to a white-washed Queen Anne house at the lower end of the Square, where the footpath became so steep that it devolved into a flight of stone steps protected by a hand-rail.

  He was told by a housekeeper to wait in a cold, stone-flagged hall. Five minutes later Isaac Grundy, Bar Master, appeared and took him into an equally cold parlour. Lomas’s impression was that the Bar Master knew of his errand without needing to be told. But he tried to behave as if he had no inkling what it was all about, waited for Lomas to tell him; a clean but fragile old man, with owl-like round lenses in nickel-framed spectacles.

  �
�Dead-Nettle Drift? You’re talking of freeing the Drift?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  The old man went to his sideboard and took from it a register bound in scuffed leather, its entries dating back to the seventeenth century. He sought out a line with his forefinger, though he must surely have known the last hundred years of the liberty by heart.

  ‘Dead-Nettle hasn’t been worked since the 1830s. You know the law?’

  Lomas nodded.

  ‘Fill the dish. And I shall want to see some evidence that there really is a seam. No salting it, no faking. Prove you’re into a seam, and yours is the right to work it.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘You must put a door on and keep the quarter area in safe and respectable repair.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  Grundy looked over the top of his spectacles. ‘There’ll be a rent to pay. It was fixed three hundred years ago. A groat a year: four pence. You pay that to the Steward.’

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  Grundy was about to close the book, but allowed his eye to run over the rest of the page.

  ‘There isn’t a working in the liberty but’s waiting to be freed. You can take free choice. You can dig anywhere bar the churchyard or in a man’s orchard; which needn’t trouble you, since no man here has an orchard. You could let the water out of Murchison’s Swallet with a month’s hard work. There’s a vein down there that could keep you busy for years.’

  ‘I fancy Dead-Nettle.’

  ‘That’s your affair, then. You know it’s a stope?’

  Lomas didn’t, but pretended that he did. Grundy was not fooled.

  ‘A stope – the cavity from a worked-out vein. There was an outlying scrin in Dead-Nettle, almost an outcrop. And when it was done, it was done.’

  ‘I’ll drive deeper. Happen there’s another seam.’

  ‘Then your first job is to collect your showing. When you’ve got it up, I’ll open the Court House and get out the dish.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Grundy.’

  Grundy moved towards the door of his parlour.

  ‘I shall be wanting lodgings in the town,’ Lomas said. ‘If you know anyone who might have a room to spare?’

  ‘You weren’t thinking of quartering up at the Drift, then?’

  ‘I’m no man for my creature comforts, Bar Master, but I’ve had my fill of hard lying.’

  ‘There’s a cottage at Dead-Nettle,’ Grundy said, making no reference to his ignorance of the point. ‘And in a mess. But a man like you could make it habitable in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Go and see Esmond Fuller about it. He’s the new landlord – bought Margreave Hall a year and a half ago; though God knows why. I don’t think he’d jib at accepting a shilling or two of rent.’

  ‘I was going to see him anyway, about the mine.’

  ‘No need for that. The mine is the concern of the Moot Court.’

  ‘I know, but it’s only good manners.’

  Grundy let him out. There was gratifying freshness in the air of the Market Place after the dankness of Grundy’s front room.

  This time he did not shirk his confrontation with Tiggy Slack, pushed open the door of the shop, which set in motion a hand-bell. There were two other customers, and a tomato-faced woman, possibly his wife, was helping Slack to serve. Lomas waited his turn. The atmosphere was an amalgam of coffee and tallow candles, of smoked bacon and paraffin, of old cheese and soap. It reminded Lomas of something from his own past. The red-faced woman was speaking to him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was wanting a private word with Mr Slack.’

  The man looked at him sideways. The bell announced yet another customer.

  ‘You can see that I’m busy.’

  ‘It isn’t on my own account. I was asked to deliver a message.’

  Slack looked at him sceptically. The woman turned her eyes on him again, then looked anxiously at Slack. She was his wife, then.

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘In private, if that’s at all possible.’

  Lomas talked like a man of good manners, prepared to be patient. Slack had been weighing flour. He brushed his hands together and took Lomas behind the counter into an office where there was only room for a roll-top desk and a man to sit at it. There was a litter of ledgers, an open day-book, stacks of coins counted out in the lid of a meat-cube tin.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s some months now since I saw him, but I am to tell you that Gilbert is well.’

  ‘We know no Gilbert here.’

  He said it like a bad actor declaiming the would-be key-line of a hackneyed melodrama. At the same time, he glared at Lomas with all the theatrical hatred he could muster. He was speaking figuratively, of course, but what he said was meant to be final. Lomas looked back at him with unaffected calm.

  ‘That was the message. I have done what I was asked to.’

  Slack stretched over to open the office door, pinned with wholesaler’s price-lists and proprietary calendars. Then he had an additional thought.

  ‘So now we know who’s filled your mind with Dead-Nettle Drift.’

  ‘I shall be working Dead-Nettle Drift according to the letter of the usages.’

  ‘No doubt. We can do without the likes of you in Margreave,’ Slack said.

  And thereupon Lomas closed the door behind him with his elbow, pushed Slack gently in the chest with the flat of his hand, yet firmly enough to catch him off balance and jam him against the side of the desk. Then he pinched the little man’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, giving it a little tweak, insulting rather than painful.

  ‘I could mention one or two uncomfortable little spots where Gilbert and I have been. And the likes of you ought to be glad of it.’

  He plunged out of the shop, not waiting for Slack to collect himself, not lingering to learn Mrs Slack’s reaction, though her hand reached out to try to touch his sleeve.

  And how is it that I am able to record all this in such intimate detail? Because before I was finished it fell to my lot to tease the memories of a lot of people in Margreave, including Isaac Grundy and the Slacks. Most telling of all, I was closeted for long hours with Frank Lomas. That is an aspect of a policeman’s work that is sometimes overlooked by the public at large. Sudden shafts of intuition can be very impressive; so are strokes of luck and an eye for anomalous details. But the most memorable, to my mind, of all the cases that I have ever broken have depended on the long, patient build-up of confidence in some essentially lonely man. Often it has been confidence unfairly gained and falsely sustained. Equally commonly I have betrayed him the moment the climax was won. Yet I would not call myself a ruthless man; sometimes I fear I am in danger of becoming a mere sentimentalist. But that can help, too. It sometimes leads me into temporary sympathy with men even more sentimental than myself. And if a man will commit murder for anything other than material gain, he must be sentimental indeed.

  When he left Slack’s shop, Frank Lomas made his way directly up to Dead-Nettle Drift. He knew exactly where the mine was. There were things that he knew about Margreave in mind-shattering detail. But there were other things that he did not know at all. And certain other aspects he had worked out in his imagination, sometimes with remarkable felicity. But often he was ludicrously wide of the mark, too.

  So Dead-Nettle Drift, though he knew exactly where it was, came as an initial shock to him. Situated on a waste corner of the Margreave Hall estate, it was visible for a torturing time before he succeeded in reaching it: an ashen gash in the hill-side, a neglected chute of waste and rubble, a partially ruined hovel, a minimal cluster of out-buildings. He had to plod through a bowl of deceptive dead ground, ankle-sucking bog and reed-bed. It promised badly for the drainage of the mine itself. When he had finally scrambled up the waste-tip, his unrelieved impression was of dereliction and sterility. He picked up a handful of cat dirt – the miner’s name for decayed and crumbling rock-refuse – and saw tha
t there was indeed a glint here and there of galena, lead sulphide, the basic mineral. He picked at its bed of calcite with his finger-nail and was left with a sliver of ore that would have been lost in a thimble.

  Frank Lomas is basically an uncompromising man – stern with himself, strongly moved by copy-book aphorisms and chapel texts. He unshakably believes that the moment of deepest discouragement is the one that most calls for astringent rededication. He is an almost uncrushable optimist which is, and has been at every cross-roads of his life, the source of his most bitter tragedies. He let the gritty cat dirt fall over the toe of his boot and moved over to look at the living quarters. It was a limestone cottage, the door missing, the windows long broken, the damp plaster rotting from the inside walls. A ladder, which needed replacement, served as a staircase up to a floor divided into two bedrooms, one very small. There were slates missing from the roof, their fragments lying on the slag-heap below. A fortnight, three weeks, a month, to make the place barely habitable, before he even started to work on his dish?

  Behind the house was a shippon for a couple of cows, a rough pasture, less than a quarter of an acre, marked out by a dry-stone wall conspicuous for the gaps in it, a bin, rusted into holes, that had once contained corn. You couldn’t call the place a farm, hardly even a smallholding. But the hills of the Low Peak are scattered with such miserable agricultural parcels. They were the miner’s attempt to eke out the thinness of his ore with an equally treacherous hope of subsistence.

  Lomas walked into the entrance to the mine itself. A drift is a horizontal, or almost horizontal channel driven into the surface rock. Dead-Nettle went down at an angle of thirty degrees for some sixty feet, culminating in two lateral galleries, neither more than ten feet in depth, hacked out obliquely from the main heading: an unfinished cross-cut. There was little evidence of ore in the walls: one dark patch hardly as big as his head. As Grundy had said: a stope. The vein – it might originally have been a substantial one – was worked out.