A World Apart (11 page)

One Sunday Eliza noticed that conversation after church was infected with unease. Four farm labourers from Tolpuddle, a village not ten miles away, had been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay. Their crime had been to plot against the King and their master, it was said. One of Marley's parishioners was related to two of the luckless men.

‘And right God fearing men they be too,' he told his peers. ‘A body cannot see it that they was plotting — not those men. I hear tell it was them as asked for their pay to be made up to nine shillings again.'

‘Nine shillings? But that's barely enough to keep body and soul together.'

‘I knows it. But the poor men of Tolpuddle was cut to eight shillings, then to seven shillings.'

‘Seven shillings?'

‘Aye. Little wonder they said they would rather starve than work for seven shillings. So they formed a society. The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, they called it. And the men of that society vowed to keep together and support one another, like soldiers in battle. Then, when they said they would down their tools and starve, their master accused them of plotting against the King.'

‘Aye. These be sorry times. I hear tell the men in the North are put out of work by steam engines. And the lacemakers, they be starving on the streets. All without work since their jobs were taken over by the flying shuttle. Where it will end, I do not know.'

There was also disquiet in the gentry's smoking rooms.

‘Dammit! The village folk are stepping beyond themselves. Did you hear tell of those rogues from Tolpuddle? Downed tools and told their master they'd rather starve than work for seven shillings. And they did too. Poor fellow must have been frantic. Couldn't get his harvest in while the good weather lasted. There's been little enough dry weather this summer in any event.'

‘Indeed. That would have made for three bad harvests in a row. Deuced weather. As if we need yet another pestilence.'

‘Damned rogues! If any man of mine tried that, I'd horsewhip him to within an inch of his life. We have to take a stand, by God!'

Then the Tolpuddle landowners had used their influence to have members of the society arrested and charged with administering unlawful oaths. The Tolpuddle Four were held up as an example. It became well known that soon after their appearance in court they were put in irons and transported to Botany Bay never to set eyes on England again, for all they knew.

In the days that followed the news of the troubles at Tolpuddle, Eliza was sought out by several of her fellows, perhaps after church, or as she walked from the kitchen of the Great House to her parents' cottage. One night just before bed, she heard a tapping on the cottage wall. Alarmed, she stepped outside to see what was happening. Rufus Hunter, a labourer from the village, was hitting the stone wall gently with a stick.

‘Ah. Thank 'ee, lass,' the man said, touching his cap. ‘I needs to talk to 'ee, quiet like.' Silently, she escorted him inside. ‘This talk of shorting our wages,' the man began nervously. ‘Is it the King as gets the shilling we've lost? How can us keep body and soul together on eight shillings? Must I put my Jane into service, and her but seven years old, and sickly? Else how can I feed my other children?'

Eliza thought before she spoke. She did not know the details of this latest move by the local aristocracy, and poor Rufus in his anguish and fear could not be relied upon to talk objectively. She must not give him cause to think that she was a militant sympathiser with the labourers' plight. If Rufus's neighbours were to call on her, someone at the Great House must eventually see one or more of them in discussion with her. And like as not they would put the wrong complexion on it.

‘Those men came from another parish, Rufus,' she said. ‘And our master is a kindly gentleman at heart. And certainly, the King cannot take your money.' The man looked at her with reverence in his lowered eyes. She saw that even for her eighteen years against his forty, he looked up to her. It was strange that her knowledge had earned her such awe in the little community.

‘Go back to your wife and children, Rufus. I can say only what I see, and I see no harm coming to you.' She let him out. She would read for a few minutes before bed. The brightness of the stars told her it would be a frosty night. She changed into her nightdress and pulled the covers over herself, determined to put Rufus out of her mind. She was not to know that his visit had been observed. The eavesdropper behind the cottage's garden wall waited till she blew out her candle, then stole towards the Great House.

Crash! Eliza was woken by a battering noise. In the dark, she sprang out of bed and ran to the door.

‘There she is, lads! Take her!' A flash of light from a lantern dazzled her for a moment. Two big men pushed the door off its hinges so it fell flat on the floor, then burst inside. She felt herself seized, one arm by each man, and dragged outside. As the men bundled her into a cart and she drew her nightdress about her, she saw Hannah come to the door.

‘Eliza! What — ?' Hannah screamed. Then her words were drowned by a whipcrack and the thudding hoofbeats of a pair of horses urged into a wild gallop. Eliza lurched onto the floor of the cart, terrified.

‘Sir John will deal with you in the morning, milady.' As the cart bounced its way to the stables, one of the men who'd seized her snarled at her in the dark. ‘Then we'll see how traitors gets what's coming to ‘em.' Eliza lay hunched, dumbfounded. As she framed questions to ask her captors, the cart stopped at the stables. The men dragged her from the cart and flung her into the tack room. She heard the door thud shut and the bolts scrape home.

‘Sleep well, little traitor,' she heard one man call. ‘Sir John will be pleased to find we've caught you.' Eliza huddled in her nightdress in a corner, wrapped in a saddlecloth she'd found by groping her way round the room in the dark. She sat, miserable with cold, revolted by the smell, gaunt with fright, until daylight came. If only Harry still lived in the Great House… She imagined him coming to the stables, comforting her, ordering her captors away, holding her close until her tears dried. And all the while she dreamed of him, she knew it was not to be. Harry was far away in Oxford, and for all she knew, he had forgotten her, their vow, and their oft-shared murmurings of love for each other.

‘Sit, girl.'

Sir John rose after the two burly constables had escorted her to his study next morning. She looked up into his face. Since she had last seen him at close quarters, his hair and beard had grown white. His paunch, sitting oddly with his otherwise tall angular frame, signalled that he had continued his life of genteel indulgence. Eliza could tell from his thin smile that he had made an effort to gild his accustomed coldness. From the chaise longue on which he rested his gouty leg, he motioned to a nearby chair. His arm rested on a low table on which stood a glass and a port decanter. A smock had been sent to Eliza as she sat imprisoned in the tack room, doubtless at the urging of Mrs Hawkins. She gathered the garment about her and sat, barelegged and barefoot, on the carved chair which had been placed too close to the chaise longue for her comfort.

‘What's this I hear about you plotting with the labourers to cheat me, girl?'

‘Oh, sir, I surely didn't.' She tried to master her fear, slow her thudding heart. She would give a better account of herself if she could calm her disquiet. In all her time in the Great House, she had not been in this room since the morning Sir John had summoned her from the kitchen all those years before. Even his children knew it was out of bounds to all but a hand-picked few. The instinctive fear of the lowly for their masters had been woven through Eliza's bloodlines for perhaps a hundred generations. She had sat face to face and alone with the viscount perhaps twice, even though she had taken her place in the schoolroom hundreds of times.

‘But sir. The folks are sore troubled by the happenings at Tolpuddle. They came to ask me about their wages, and I — '

‘So it's you, girl! Inciting the villagers to strike against me. Me! Who's treated you more kindly than my own children! The infernal ingratitude. It was I who caused you to share lessons with Louisa and Harry. I did it because I had word you were a cut above your class in native intelligence.' His face reddened as he spoke. ‘You! You learn to read and cipher through my benevolence, then use my generosity against me. That you, of all people, would pitch your wits against me!'

‘No sir, I wouldn't. I've never said aught against you, sir.' She wrung her sweating hands. She saw the viscount's face relax its sternness, the colour fade in his neck. She watched him force his mouth into the false smile she had seen when she was first led into this castle-like room years before. He sat upright on the chaise longue and held out his hands.

‘Come here, girl. Sit beside me. Tell me truthfully you wouldn't plot against a poor sick old man.'

She moved towards him, more timidly as she came within his reach. Suddenly his smile contorted. His hand darted between her legs and gripped the flesh high on her bare thigh. In a frightened reflex, she jumped backwards, choking a scream. The chaise longue pitched onto its side and spilled him onto the floor like a sack of wheat sliding off a dray. He roared like a wounded lion, then painfully raised himself to a sitting position on the carpet, legs splayed, eyes flared with rage, mouth wide, panting. Then he lunged at Eliza again. Her body, frozen with horror, snapped alive. She jumped away from the hand that reached under her smock.

The old man was up to no good. Now he likely sought to have his way with her, taking advantage of the way the tables had suddenly been turned against her. Like as not, he expected her to become submissive, dumb as he exploited his opportunity. Likely, the sight of her bare legs had triggered his male lust. She ran to the closed library door, opened it, and fled along the hall, down the unfamiliar stairs, and out into the garden via the kitchen doorway. Panting, blinking away tears of fright, she made for a secluded arbour. She would compose herself, plan her next move.

She sat thus for some minutes, catching her breath. Then, as she made to step outside the arbour, Tobias Pollock, the overseer, slid across the entrance to block her escape.

‘Here's the wench, lads,' she heard him sneer. ‘Ain't that a treat?' The two constables appeared from behind a hedge. They pinned Eliza's arms and threw her on to the cart which had carried her to the stables the night before. As she clutched its side rail for support, one of them slipped a chained shackle round her wrist and fastened the other end to the rail. A whip cracked and the cart lurched forward. The shackle wrenched her wrist so violently she thought it had snapped. She fell to the floor of the cart, eyes stinging, as the horse galloped away from the dairy and turned onto the road to the village.

The prisoners, four men and two women, had been brought to the cells the afternoon before the trial. Eliza and her female companion were separated from the men by bars, but the two small rooms, their walls of rough-hewn sandstone stained with mossy rivulets from the leaks in the ceiling, shared views of each other. There was a pile of straw for beds on the stone floor, a wooden pail for a privy. At nightfall, all the prisoners were fed a bowl of gruel and given a pail of water for drinking. The two women sharing the cell divided the straw between them.

The other woman was perhaps thirty, although a hard life rather than the mere passage of time might have incised the lines on her face. For all that, she had a handsome figure, tall, slim-waisted, and erect. The once fine clothes she wore, more befitting a lady than a felon, had become tattered with neglect, their lace and gathers frayed. From the swathe of hair piled on her head long blonde wisps hung down, matted from lack of washing. From time to time she ran her fingers backwards past her ears in an instinctive gesture of grooming, ineffectually tucking the wayward strands of hair out of sight. Her pale blue eyes glowed from her well proportioned face. They looked out on the world direct and open, as if to say this is who I am
and I'll not bow the knee to anyone. As a lackey came to remove the lantern for the night, she turned to Eliza.

‘I'm called Susannah West. And thee?'

‘Eliza Downing.'

‘And what's thee here for then, dearie?'

‘For being female, I suppose,' Eliza said.

‘You mean a man tried for to have his way with you, and you didn't give in?'

‘Yes.'

‘A gentleman, I'll warrant.' Susannah's sneer was theatrical.

‘The viscount,' Eliza said.

‘Men! Damn them all to hell!' Susannah shouted. ‘The gentry are the worst. Poor folks doesn't have no rights at all.' She spat. ‘Justice! It's made for the rich to have their way with the poor. God knows, but England is rotten; rotten to the very core.'

Susannah was working up a spleen. Eliza settled herself in a corner, padding the wall and floor with handfuls of straw, and sat knees drawn up, her arms folded over them for warmth.

‘A body should die rather than have to live in England,' Susannah continued. ‘I near murdered a man, or so he says. Would that I'd succeeded. I'm sure to get transported to Botany Bay. And I'll love it. Love it, you hear! Away from the gentry and the constables and the snivelling working class. For ever.' Eliza could not hold back a sob.

‘You poor mite. How old are ye?' Susannah asked.

‘Nineteen.'

‘Shame! And plucked from your family forever, while you're yet a maid. Don't cry, love. You'll be well off where you're going. The poor hasn't got no chance in England.' She paused, ran her fingers past her ears, again tidying imaginary strands of hair. Eliza hoped Susannah would not return to her tirade. Her words would not give Eliza the comfort she sorely needed. But the older woman continued.

‘See how those poor men from Tolpuddle was treated. Cruel! For standing up against the gentry. The gentry, they grabs everything off the land. They squeezes the poor till they gets their last drop of blood from them, I tells you. You're well rid of them. England's no place for a poor maid. Not a beauty the likes of you, dearie.' Her voice died.