Hosts of Rebecca

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

It is the time of the Rebecca Riots when economic turmoil and unjust taxes have left the communities of south Wales in dire poverty with many on the brink of starvation. A time when young men ride through the night smashing and burning the symbols of their oppression. The Mortymer family have left their home in the iron-making country of Blaenafon to seek work in the coal mines of the south. Young Jethro Mortymer decides that he must join the rioters in their bitter struggle even as he is tortured by his own struggle to conceal the love he has for the beautiful Mari, his brother's wife. THE HOSTS OF REBECCA is a brilliant continuation of Alexander Cordell's classic story of mid-nineteenth century Wales which began with THE RAPE OF THE FAIR COUNTRY.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

 

A PEBBLE HIT the window, bringing me upright.

In the sea of Grandfer’s fourposter bed I sat, staring into the nothingness between sleeping and waking, shivering in the pindrop silence.

A handful of gravel at the glass now, spraying as thunder. Out of bed head-first then, scrambling over the boards. Nightshirt billowing, I raised the sash.

“Hush you for God’s sake,” I said. “You will have Morfydd out.”

“Then move your backside,” said Joey in the frost below. “It is damned near midnight.”

Twelve years old, this one – a year and a bit younger than me, with corn-coloured hair and the face of a churchyard ghost, starved at that. A criminal was Tramping Boy Joey, the son of a Shropshire sin-eater; raised in a poorhouse, thumped by life into skin and bone, but the best poaching man in the county of Carmarthenshire. Our bailiff had fits with his legs up when Joey was loose, for he poached every meal. You keep from that Joey, said Morfydd, my sister – you can always stoop to pick up trash.

I dressed like a madman in the stinging silence of December with the window throwing icicles into the room, for it was a winter to freeze dewdrops, and the moon was shivering in the sky that night, rolling over the rim of the mountain. Ice hung from down-spouts, water butts creaked solid and the white plains were hammered into silence. Black was the river where the hen coots were skating, and the whole rolling country from Narberth to Carmarthen city was dying for the warmth and tumble of spring.

“You got a woman up there or something?” whispered Joey, blowing on his fingers and steaming.

I flapped him into silence.

A house of ghosts, this one; ruined and turreted, where the creak of a board was clatter. I listened. No sound but Grandfer’s hop-reeking snores from the kitchen below. A hell of a Grandfer I had – back teeth awash every night regular, head sunk on his chest and bellowing in the place like a man demented, legs thrust out before the fire. Had to get past him somehow. A peep and a listen at the bedroom door and I crept back. Under the bed now, fish out the china, wrap it in a bedsheet and lay it snug, with a pillow below it for the curve of the body. Enemies right and left when you are thirteen. Back to the window with me like lightning.

“Right, you,” I said.

“About time, too,” said Joey, stroking his ferret.

With my boots in my hand I crept down the stairs, pausing outside Morfydd’s door, for she was the true enemy. Thunderbolts could fall and nobody stir but Morfydd, my sister, for when my mam hit the bed she died. But Morfydd’s sleep was the sleep of a conscience, breathing as something embalmed but one eye open for saints. And the step of a mouse would bring her out with hatchets, a wraith on tiptoe that peeped round doors and bent over beds.

Down to the kitchen now with its smells of last night’s supper. A shadow moved from under the table, a crescent of whining joy that encircled my legs. Ever wakeful was Tara, like all Welsh terriers, and already hearing the stamp of the rabbit.

“Quiet!” I breathed, gathering her up. With my hand over her muzzle I tiptoed past Grandfer. Flat out in the armchair was Grandfer, his snores spouting up from his belted belly, his goat beard trembling in the thunder of his dreaming. The big lock grated its betrayal, but I got out somehow and clicked the door shut.

“Look!” whispered Joey, pointing. “Rebecca is at it again,” and the name snatched at my breath. For bonfires were simmering and flashing on the white hills and a rocket arced in a trail of fire and drooped, spluttering into stars.

“Rebecca rioters, is it?” I whispered.

“Come,” said Joey. “While Waldo Bailiff is out chasing rioters he is not trapping poachers. You got the towser?”

“Under my arm,” I said.

“You scared of mantraps, Jethro Mortymer?”

Just looked at him, and spat.

“Right, us. Away!” whispered Joey. “We will give him Waldo.”

As ragged heathens we ran down to Tarn, to the white-bouldered world of skulls and skinny sheep – to the burrows of the rabbits that riddled Squire’s Reach, leaping frozen streams, plunging through undergrowth and wallowing in the marsh track till we came to the fence of Waldo Bailiff. Gasping, we rested here, steaming, flat on our backs. Tara and the ferret were running in circles about us, playing as children in bounds and squeaks, working up a joy for the coming hunt.

“Easy now,” said Joey, sitting up. “Under the fence and follow me, and watch for mantraps.”

This was Joey’s world and he knew it backwards. Wild as a gipsy, this one, his bed under the moon in summer, seeking warmth on the rim of the limekiln fires in winter. He had lived alone since Cassie, his mam, hoofed it out of the county two years back – wanted by the military for caravan stealing. Joey baked his hedgehogs in balls of clay; was a better cook than Morfydd when it came to a rabbit, roasting them on spits or stirring them in stews.

“Mantraps are against the law,” I said.

“O, aye?” said he, old-fashioned. “And who do say so?”

“My grandfer.”

Joey jerked up the wire for me to crawl through. “Mantraps with spikes is against the law,” said he. “Waldo’s are legal, for they only break the leg. You watch for spikes, though – the spikes I fear for they rip and tear – like little Dai Shenkins down at New Inn – you heard about Dai?”

“No,” I replied.

“Night before last, it was. Addled was Dai, poaching without a moon, for the moon shows mantraps, never mind bailiffs. Over at Simmons place he caught it, did Dai.”

“Bad?”

“Rest another minute,” said he. “Jethro Mortymer, d’you think much of me?”

“Pretty tidy.” Strange was his face turned up to the moon. “What about Dai Shenkins, then?”

“Never mind him, you think about me.” He sighed. “Look, these old nights are shivery, and you got a henhouse back home at your grandfer’s. Hens are warm old things in nights of frost. Could you get me in?”

“A booting, mind, if Grandfer do find you.”

“Aye, a stinkifying grandfer that one,” said he, vicious.

“Could try, if you sleep quiet. You slept with hens before?”

“O, eh! Often,” and deep he sighed, his face pale and shadowed in the blue light and his eyes all mystery and brightness. “You ever stopped to think, Jethro Mortymer, hens are better’n humans. Humans be thumpers and hens gentle old women. Sorry I am for hens, too, being done down for eggs all their lives and finishing up between knees. But I do not love cockerels, mind – there’s lust in them cockerels, says Cassie, my mam – always leapfrogging and crowing to tell the neighbourhood. You eat a cockerel every Christmas for the rest of your life and you will eat more sin than me eventually.”

“You eaten sin?”

“Aye, and why not? Folks got to eat something, says Cassie, my mam, so we did the funerals – swallowing the sins of the dear departed, taking the blackness off the poor soul going down, or up – case may be.”

“Good God.”

“You know Clun?”

I shook my head.

“Eight years old, me, when we did Clungunford – first time at sin-eating, for me. We knew we were into something pretty shocking when we got a spring chicken and wine to wash it down. And us that hungry we’d have stained our souls with child-killing for a piece of poorhouse bread, said Cassie. And the dear departed a clergy, at that.”

“Chapel?”

“Church of England, but we sent him up clean as a washday. Eh, dear me, I reckon I be loaded black. Who started all this?”

“Hens,” I said.

“Right, then – you fix me in your henhouse?”

“Out at first light, is it?”

“And not an egg missing. God bless you, Jethro Mortymer.” He rose and stretched. “Right you, Waldo,” he said. “Just look out.”

“Come easy or she’ll spring.”

On tiptoe I came, peering.

“Throw me that stick. Watch the towser,” said Joey.

I saw the steel jaws of the mantrap, gaping, smothered in leaves, and the spring steel curved tight and ready for the footstep.

“Eh, Waldo, you swine of a bailiff,” said Joey, and swung the stick and the jaws leaped and slammed shut. “But not as bad as some – all legal. You seen Dai’s leg?”

“Dai Shenkins?”

“Neither has Dai. Spikes, see? Took it off neat at the knee. And the Simmons bailiff found it next morning and followed the blood right up to New Inn. They’d have had little Dai, but he died. Died to spite them, his old mam said – hopping his way to his Maker for a rabbit, you can keep your old Botany Bay – she’s a regular cheek is Dai’s old mam. You got the towser?”

“Aye.”

“Right,” said Joey, and fished in his rags for his ferret, parted bushes and stuffed it down a hole. “Put the towser by the hole near that tree. Ready?”

I nodded, and set Tara down. And out came the rabbits in a stream.

I have seen dogs at rabbits but never one like Tara, my little bitch, for she threw them up as soon as they showed their eyes – two in the air at a time, hitting the frost as dead as doornails.

“Some terrier!” cried Joey, delighted.

Five rabbits came from the burrow and then came Joey’s ferret, nose up, sniffing for more, and Tara got him square, for the light was bad that minute. Six feet up went that ferret, dying in flight, and Tara ran round him, sniffing delighted.

Good God.

“You black-faced bitch!” yelled Joey, and aimed his boot, but I caught his ankle and brought him down flat. With the mantrap between us we faced each other, sitting, and the silence grew in the shivering yard between us with Tara going round us in circles of joy, counting the dead.

“Here, Tara!” I said, and she leaped into my arms, licking and grinning.

He wept then, did Joey, with the tears leaving tracks on his grimed face.

“I am sorry,” I said.

No sound he made in that sobbing, and he reached for the ferret and put it against his face; just sitting there with the wind stirring the branches above him, wisping up his bright hair.

Minutes I stood there kicking at leaves, for words are useless things in the presence of injured friendship, then I gathered up the rabbits and put them tidy at his feet, but he made no sign that he noticed.

“Rebecca is about,” I said. “You heard they carried Sam Williams on the pole for blowing up that serving-maid down in Plasy? And the hayricks of the gentry are blazing something beautiful. Look, Joey boy, you can see them from here.”

But he just went on weeping and kissing the ferret.

“Look, now,” I said, short. “There is more than one ferret. That old thing was a rabbit-feeder, anyway. I will buy you another and train him rigid. Heisht you, is it?”

“Go to hell,” he said, and his eyes were as fire.

“It is only a ferret, Joey – let us be friends.”

Up with him then and blazing. “Out you get, Mortymer – you and that black-faced towser!” he shrieked. “You be bastards the pair of you, you and the bitch!”

With Tara held against me I watched as he turned and climbed the fence, bending to the hill on his way to his limekiln sleep.

“I will slip up the catch in the henhouse, Joey!” I called.

Not even a look. Just me left, and moonlight.

Nothing to do but go back home, taking the. short cut this time along the road to Carmarthen, but I dived into a ditch pretty sharp as the cavalry came galloping. Helmeted, spurred, they rounded the bend, thundering hooves, jingling and clanking, flashing to the moon, their big mares sweating and snorting smoke. Trouble in St Clears by the look of it; twelve dragoons this time of night.

I stopped near the shippon of home and unlatched the henhouse to give Joey a welcome, and the feathered old things grumbled, fearing the fox. In the back now, put Tara under the table; tiptoe past Grandfer who was snoring in shouts, up the stairs as a wraith and I got to my room. Up to the bed, throwing off my clothes. Shivering in the nightshirt I reached for the china; touched Morfydd’s face and nearly hit the ceiling.

“Right, you,” said she, rising up like the Day of Reckoning. “Poaching again with Tramping Boy Joey. Account for yourself, and quick.”

Black hair over her shoulders, eyes narrowed with sleep, face as a madonna and looks like daggers. Beautiful, she was, to anyone but a brother.

“Quick,” she said, thumping the blanket. “And no lies!”

A saint of a mother I had, but a tidy old bitch of a sister.

JUST A couple of months me and my women had been at Cae White, Grandfer’s house – Morfydd, my sister; my mother, and Mari my sister-in-law – running to Carmarthenshire from Monmouthshire iron; from the flash and glare of the Top Town furnaces where my father had died to the pasturelands of the west. Quiet and sweet it was here, a change from starving and sweating; far from the bellowing industry, as the opening of a Bible after a bedlam of labour.

Hitting it up for fourteen I was at this time, and coming a little hot with me about women. There are women and women, said Morfydd my sister, who was no better than she ought to be, but my mam, as I say, was a saint. Even the neighbours admitted she was a cut above the rest of them, with Good morning to you, Mr Waldo Bailiff, and Good afternoon to you, Mr Tom Griffiths, and God help even a seller of coloured Bibles who put his foot in the door without her permission.

“Rebecca was burning the hayricks last night,” I said at breakfast, aware of slanting eyes.

“And how do you know when you were in bed and asleep?” asked Grandfer.

Five feet exactly, this one – every inch of him pickled in hops. The villagers said he was Quaker blood that had slipped off the black shine of the Book, though some said he was gipsy. But whatever his blood he soused himself regular five nights a week on the profits of the farm – ten jugs on a Tuesday when the drovers came down; with a crag for a settle and the moon for a blanket, snoring in icicles out in the mist, singing his bawdies in the company of goblins. Reckon Mari, my sister-in-law, was ashamed of her Grandfer Zephaniah.

“Big fires, though,” said my mam. “Looked like tollgates – saw them myself.”

“Read your history,” said Grandfer. “Hayricks. Rebecca rioters – eight barns went up last night – and the dragoons came out from Carmarthen. I would give them rioters if I got my hands on them.”

I chewed the black bread, watching Morfydd. Flushed and angry she looked, spooning up the oatmeal broth.

“Eh,” sighed Mam. “We run from Monmouthshire iron for a bit of peace and we bump into riots all over again. Isn’t just, is it?”

“You will always have riots while we bear such injustices,” said Morfydd, eyes snapping up.

“Now, now!” said Mam, finger up. “Not our house, remember.”

“I would burn the damned gentry, never mind their ricks,” said Morfydd, and she swept back her hair. Excellent at rebellion and speeches, this one, especially when it came to hanging the Queen. Beautiful, but a woman of fire; an agitator in the Top Towns, married to an agitator once but no ring to prove it, and God knows where she would land us if she started tricks here, for we got out of Monmouthshire by the skin of our teeth.

“Let her speak,” said Grandfer. “Let her be. Does she also write poetry?”

“Aye,” said Morfydd, and fixed him with her eyes. “The centuries of Time echo to the tread of the clog going up the stairs and the buckle coming down. Burning hayricks – chopping down tollgates? A barrel of gunpowder would bring this county alive.”

I looked at my mother. Her face was agonized. For this was the old Morfydd sparring for a fight, and we were here by the grace of Grandfer. But he smiled, to his credit, and stirred his tea.

“Speak, child, speak,” said he. “You know your Bible? Genesis twenty-four, verse sixty. Let us draw your teeth.” And Morfydd raised her dark eyes to his, saying, “‘And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, thou art our sister. Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’”

“Amen,” said Grandfer, eyes closed, and turned to my mother. “God help me, woman. Retired, I am, and I have opened the house to a nest of Welsh agitators.” He swung to Morfydd. “The first tollgate burned, young woman?”

“Efail-wen, just this year,” said she.

“When?”

“May the thirteenth – by Thomas Rees of Carnabwth. Burned twice since, thank God – June the sixth and July the seventeenth. Tollgates!” Morfydd sniffed. “Back home in my county we fought it out with redcoats.”

“Remarkable,” said Grandfer, quizzy.

“Aye, remarkable,” said Morfydd. “If your people had half the spunk of the Welsh I come from you’d have taken to arms and marched on Carmarthen. Look at the place! The people are either starving or pinched to the bone, your workhouses are filling up daily – they transport you here for poaching rabbits,” and here she looked at me, “and all you can do is burn a tollgate when you ought to be hauling up cannon. Good God!” Sweating now, the beads bright on her face, and she sighed and wiped it into her hair.

“You see what I have to put up with?” asked Mam, hands empty to Grandfer. “She lost her own man to the riots in Monmouthshire, and I lost mine to the iron. You see what I have for a daughter?”

“I see that you are harbouring a vixen,” said Grandfer. “But the goals are the same north or west.” Down came his fist and he thumped the table. “Keep a grip on that tongue, young woman – I have no use for it here.”

And Morfydd rose, shaking off crumbs. “And I have no use for yours. Thank God for starving, thank God for kicks. If the damned house burned down you’d be too frit to fetch water,” and she slammed back her chair, looking knives. As she reached the door her son came through it – Richard, her beloved, aged three, and she stooped and snatched him up and held him against her. “Come, boy,” said she. “There is no place for us here.”

That is what it was like in those early days at Cae White Farm; my mam the sandwich between Grandfer’s dislike and my sister’s fire, but it settled down after a bit, thank God. To hell with Morfydd, I used to think; to heaven with my mother, she being all gentleness in the face of rebellion. Eh, did I love my mam! If I had to die on the breast of a woman I would die on my mother’s – Morfydd’s next, though hers was mainly occupied. But where my mother went, I went; touching the things she touched, smoothing her place at table. Sometimes I wondered who was the more beautiful, Morfydd or Mam, who could give her twenty years, for Morfydd was lifting up the latch for thirty. Smooth in the face was my mother, carrying herself with dignity; pretty with her bonnet streamers tied under her chin, five feet of black mourning that turned every set in whiskers in the county. The basses went a semitone flat in the Horeb when she was present, but there beside me, singing like an angel, she didn’t spare the men a look. A smile for everyone, her contralto greeting, she was alive and dancing outside. Inside she was dead, in the same grave as my father. My father had joined the Man in the Big Pew over twelve months now but he still lived with us, I reckoned. For sometimes, when the house was sleeping, I would hear my mam talking to him in a voice of tears. And next morning at breakfast the redness was in her eyes and her mouth was trembling to her smile, as if it had just been kissed.

“Somebody slept in the henhouse last night,” said Grandfer now.

I got some more barley bread and packed it well in.

“Not rioters?” whispered Mam.

“Boys,” said he, eyeing me. “Same thing. And anyone this applies to can listen. If Tramping Boy Joey shows his backside round Cae White I will kick the thing over to St Clears, understand? Poachers and thieves, stinking of the gutter – I will not have him near!”

Chewing, me, eyes on the ceiling.

“Did you see anything of that Joey last night, Jethro?” asked Mam.

“How could he have seen him?” asked Morfydd from the door with Richard in her arms. “He was in well before dark and he slept with me. Come, Jethro, bach, it is cleaner outside.”

A bitch one moment, sister the next.

Two months of hell, it was, living with Grandfer.

Yet I remember with joy the early spring days in the new county, especially the Sundays in the pews of the Horeb. Mam one side of me, Morfydd on the other, she with an eye for every pair of trews in sight, until she caught my mother’s glance which set her back miles. Proud I felt, the only man in the family now; well soaped up and my hair combed to a quiff, singing quiet according to instructions, because my voice was breaking, but dying to let things rip. Little Meg Benyon was hitting it up on the harmonium, eyes on sticks, feet going, tongue peeping out between her white teeth, one missing; with Dai Alltwen Preacher beating time and the tenors soaring and basses grovelling. Deep and beautiful was Mam’s voice in the descant, and Morfydd with her elbow in my ribs.

“‘All hail the power of Jesu’s name …!’” Tenor, me, threatening to crack, hanging on to Mam’s contralto. Double bass now, with the crack turning heads and bringing me out into a sweat. And the hymn of Shrubsole flooded over us in glory and Dai Preacher lifted his eyes to the vaults of Heaven.

“‘Crown Him, Crown Him, Crown Him …!’” Top E, and me hitting soprano.

“For God’s sake!” whispered Morfydd as I hung on the note.

“Leave him be,” said Mam with her soft, sad smile.

“I will be doing some crowning when I get you back home,” and I get the elbow.

“Mam,” I said, “look at this Morfydd!”

“Hush!”

Aye, good it was, those spring Sundays, with the smell of Sunday clothes and lavender about us, and peacock feathers waving and watch chains drooping over stomachs begging for Sunday dinner, and the farmers had twenty quart ones in this county. There is Hettie Winetree in front of me done up in white silk and black stockings, all peeps and wriggles around her little black hymn book – second prize for missing a Sunday School attendance, presented by Tom the Faith – fancies herself, does Hettie Winetree. Behind me sits Dilly Morgan, tall, cool, and fair for Welsh, her tonic-solfa beating hot on my neck. Down comes Meg Benyon’s little fat behind as she thumps the keyboard for the Amen and Dai Alltwen Preacher is up in the pulpit before you can say Carmarthen, leaping around the mahogany, working up his hwyl, handing hell to sinners from Genesis to Jonah. Motionless, we Mortymers, though other eyes may roam and other throats may clear. For a speck of dust do show like a whitewash stain on strangers wearing the black, says Mam.

Sunlit were those mornings after Chapel and the fields were alight with greenness and river-flash from the estuary where the Tywi ran. This was the time for talking, and the women lost no chance, giving birth to some, burying others while the men, in funeral black, talked bass about ploughing and harvest. Waldo Bailiff was always to the front, the devil, handsome and bearded, little hands folded on his silver-topped cane and his nose a dewdrop. Very sanctimonious was Waldo, loving his neighbour, and a hit over the backside for anyone breathing near Squire’s salmon steps, never mind poaching. A big fish in a little puddle, said Morfydd, and when his dewdrop falls Waldo will fall like the leaning tree of Carmarthen. I never got the hang of how that dewdrop stayed with him; stitched on, I reckon, for when a gale took every other dewdrop in the county Waldo’s was still present. But Welsh to his fingertips, give him credit, as Welsh as Owain Glyndwr but no credit to Wales, and more Sunday quarts died in Waldo than Glyndwr could boast dead English. But he drew me as a magnet because of Tessa, the daughter of Squire Lloyd Parry.

A lonely half hour, this, waiting for Sunday dinner, and grown-ups chattering. Lean against the chapel gate and watch them. Crows are shouting in the tops of the elms for you, half boy, half man. Yellow beaks gape in the . . .