Cunning Murrell (4 page)

John Martin and Reuben Thorn had long househunting troubles, and got over
them at last by renting between them the cottage over Hadleigh Castle Lane.
It was empty and badly out of repair, and it had a vaguely evil name, in some
indistinct way acquired from the memory of the man who hanged himself in the
castle barn. But it had advantages. First, after so long lying empty, it was
cheap; it enabled the two related couples to live together, and share
expenses; and it was some little way removed from other cottages, so that the
men could come and go without being under common observation. It was the
property of one Simon Cloyse, of Leigh, a man of Dutch descent, like many
hereabout. He was a “warm” man, of various trades; he kept an inn and a shop;
he held shares in divers fishing craft; sometimes he lent money; but it was
said that he, as well as his father before him, had done best out of
smuggling. Not as an active smuggler, taking personal risks, for it was never
Sim Cloyse’s way to take a risk of any sort; but as a freighter, who found as
much of the money needed as would enable him to take to himself the best part
of the profits. To keep such transactions wholly secret in such a community
as that of Leigh were an impossibility, but it was a fact that nowhere, and
at no time, could the keenest eye have detected a single scrap of positive
evidence connecting Sim Cloyse with a contraband operation of any sort. Still
matters seemed so to fall out that few of the active and more daring
smugglers, the boatcaptains and the like, but found themselves, in some
mysterious way, in Sim Cloyse’s debt—a condition no Leigh man was ever
known to get out of. Golden Adams, in particular, a daring and perhaps a
rather quarrelsome young fellow, was said to have run a rare rig on Sim
Cloyse’s money for a while, and now to be growing desperate in
consequence.

In other circumstances the superior officers might have looked with
disfavour upon the relation of tenant and landlord between the coastguardsmen
and this honest jobber. But it was this house or none, and a regular
inspection of rent receipts made debt on that score an impossibility. So John
Martin and Reuben Thorn took up their quarters and brought their wives and
Martin’s little son, young John; and perhaps, on the whole, the women
quarrelled less than might have been expected. After a little more than two
years, indeed, they quarrelled not at all, for Mrs Thorn died; died in giving
Reuben Thorn the child who was called Dorrily. She was the second, but the
first had died at a day old.

So Mrs Martin took the child and reared it, and little John and his cousin
Dorrily grew up together and played together, much apart from the other
children of Lady Sparrow’s School at Leigh; for the Leigh fishermen were a
desperate hard lot, the coastguardsmen were their natural enemies, and their
children carried the feud to school with them; though, indeed, not many of
the fishermen’s children went to school at all at that time.

By the time that John the younger was twelve and Dorrily eight, there had
been no change in the fortunes at the cottage. Martin and Thorn had rowed
guard, walked patrol, and once or twice fought fiercely with smugglers, and
they were much as ever save for a trifle of ageing and a scar or two. Then
there came a wild winter night when the brothers-in-law went out together for
guard and never came back. It was not till the morning that Martin’s wife
knew they had gone off shore, for none of the men themselves knew his own
night’s duty till he was told off. And six hours later still, the water being
little less rough, a boat was found bottom up and stove, and that was all.
There was talk of three men being sent to watch for smugglers approaching a
suspected sunk “crop” of tubs, but neither guard nor “crop” was ever heard of
again, though the tubs were dragged for exhaustively. So it grew plain that
no “crop” was there, and that the boat had come to grief in the bad
weather.

The blow was staggering enough, and, though she met her fortunes bravely,
Mrs Martin never wholly lost traces of the wound. The isolation in which the
household had lived made the double loss of brother and husband the bitterer;
more, ways and means must be considered. Both John and Reuben had been
thrifty, sober fellows, and there was a little prize-money saved to eke out
the “compassionate allowance;” and soon the boy began life on a
fishing-smack; but the struggle was hard enough.

Simon Cloyse behaved well on the whole. He was no very lenient landlord in
general, but now he did not turn Mrs Martin out, for he had no other tenant
to put in her place. He even allowed a small reduction of rent when he found
she could never pay the full amount. And, by one means and another, the fight
was won. John earned wages of a sort, and his mother did a little field work
now and again, and so the years went.

Now that there were no coastguardsmen in the house the neighbours might
well have grown more friendly. They did so, in fact. But Mrs Martin had
acquired a habit of detachment, which was slow to leave her, and for some
while after her trouble she had other habits unattractive to the neighbours.
She had long fits of silence, and, at times, fits of talking to herself. She
would disregard the presence of others, and even pass hours in company with
the children, without in any way regarding their existence, though, indeed,
her affection was beyond the common. And once she was found in the castle
barn gazing at the rafter from which the traditional suicide had hanged
himself, and she was taken home by force. She grew better as time went,
however, and as her troubles fell away from her fits of brooding were rarer,
and at last they ceased altogether. So that the passage of years, in some
small measure, wore away the barriers between Mrs Martin and her neighbours.
But then it came to pass that young John, grown big and tall, and a skilled
seaman, was himself accepted for service in the coastguard, and so the
barriers rose again.

Still they were scarce such stark barriers as before, for things had
changed. Smuggling had altogether declined, as a regular trade, within the
ten or twelve years since the two cousins were left orphans, though it still
persisted in a small way, insomuch that the knowing men of Hadleigh, Leigh,
and Canvey got whatever of brandy and hollands they might need for private
use without obtruding the transaction on the notice of the customs officers.
The Queen’s men were more efficient, though they were few enough even now,
and though the gap of seven miles still lay between the stations; so that it
was no longer a matter of ordinary experience for a late watcher to peep from
his window and see a procession of packhorses, with muffled feet, passing
through Hadleigh street on the way inland, each with its two double ankers,
or a file of men similarly employed with half-ankers; and no longer could the
neat housewife afford to polish her window panes with strong gin, as in old
times. But though no more small fortunes were made in smuggling, any
comfortable householder In the neighbourhood would have conceived himself
tyrannously ill-used if he were altogether prevented from supplying himself
with the good drink to which he had been accustomed, at a price inconsistent
with entry at the customs office. And a little later, when the regular
coastguard (and Jack Martin among them) had been drafted off to the war, and
an odd lot of substitutes were attempting their duty, it were a clumsy
smuggler indeed who could not go aboard a Dutch lugger and bring away
anything he needed, in reason.

Thus it was that although, as was natural, no great cordiality existed
between the coastguard and the villagers, these latter were not so
ill-affected toward the revenue men as in the days when they were at war with
a profitable trade. And when they went away to fight the Russians they became
even popular characters; for every smuggler in Essex had ever been a
patriotic Englishman, and Roboshobery Dove, old man o’-warsman, fisherman,
and retired smuggler, the most positive patriot of them all.

Young Jack Martin and Dorrily Thorn were parted by all the sea that lay
this side of the frigate
Phyllis
, with the Baltic fleet; but a broken
half of the same sixpence hung about each of their necks, and when
Roboshobery Dove winked invisibly in the dark lane it was because he knew
that young Jack was grown more than cousin and old playmate to the watching
girl.

IT was the way of Hadleigh Fair to begin betimes on
Midsummer Day morning, so that it had pushed Hadleigh village almost out of
sight before breakfast was generally in progress. It was not great among
fairs, perhaps, but neither was Hadleigh great among villages. The Fat Lady
came there, and the Living Skeleton, and, one fair in three, the Fire-eater
of Madagascar, when free from engagements before All the Crowned Heads. There
had been two Mermaids within living recollection, though the last, as a
sight, was considered unworthy the penny admission; but the really great
exhibitions that graced Rayleigh Fair a month earlier—Wombwell’s,
Clarke’s, Johnson and Lee’s—these rarely or never took stand at
Hadleigh. So that there was all the more money left to buy gingernuts,
bull’s-eyes, ribbons, and—more important than all—Gooseberry
Pies. And if the Fat Lady, and the Living Skeleton, and the rest of the
prodigies were not enough, the sight-seer would find peep-shows
everywhere—half a dozen of them at least. And as to every other sort of
stand, booth, stall, shanty, or wigwam, they made Hadleigh village a town for
the day, whereof the chief population was contributed by Leigh, Prittlewell,
Eastwood, Rochford, Bemfleet, Canvey, Hockley, and a score more parishes.
Little was spent in the serious matters of cattle, horses, and farm produce
at Hadleigh Fair, and the dealings—beside those in Gooseberry
Pie—were mainly in ballads, spicenuts, penny toys, gown pieces,
garters, peppermint stick, china and watches sold by Dutch auction, and
gingerbread bought outright or knocked down by the expert with a stick.

The visitors from a distance bought their gooseberry pies at the booths
and stalls, except such as had friends living in Hadleigh, with home-made
pies of their own. The home-made pies were in general esteemed superior,
because of a greater substance in the crust and a more liberal disposition of
fruit. Those at the stalls, though handsome, plump, high, delicate, round,
and full to look at, had a disappointing way of collapsing “aw to crumbles”
at the first bite of a healthy jaw, revealing in the remains the hidden
chamber of air that had given the pie its goodly seeming; a hidden chamber
filled and widened, it was commonly reported, by a puff of the bellows under
the paste before baking. Moreover, to put no more than four gooseberries in a
penny pie was justly regarded as an act of rapine. The homemade pie, on the
other hand, offered something for the teeth to get to work on. Made in the
biggest pie-dish available, it was roofed over with a noble arch of crust,
solid and enduring, more often than not made of bread-dough an inch thick;
and its complete filling of gooseberries left no room for air. It was a piece
of politeness to exchange wedges of this pie among friends, or even, for them
that aspired to a gentility beyond that of their neighbours, to exchange
little separate pies made for the purpose: with the accompanying message:
“Please, mother say will you accept of a bit o’ gooseberry poie?”

The person thus addressed was commonly as well assured of the coming of
the pie as of the coming of fair-day, and might even have witnessed its
hazardous transport through crowds of merrymakers the length of the village.
But it was good form, nevertheless, to affect ineffable surprise and delight
at the present, and to make the return in kind (if, indeed, the present were
not itself a return compliment) with expressions of depreciation of her own
handicraft. “I am that ashamed arltogether…if your mother will axcuse…”
and so forth.

And so the gooseberry pie circulated with the proper compliments, the
gingerbread was knocked down, ballads were bought and rolled up, the girls
and women “argle-bargled” for gown pieces and garters, and all things went
very merrily together. At the Castle Inn and the Crown the thirst induced by
spicenuts and peppermint and the general circumstances was quelled in many
pots of “thruppenny;” but again those with friends in the village had the
advantage; for in half-a-dozen of the better keeping-rooms at least the man
of the house would shut the door with a wink, and elicit from some obscure
retreat a bottle; a bottle charged with cognac or hollands of a strength and
quality that were a sufficient certificate of origin to the man of
experience.

Very early on fair-morning Roboshobery Dove was astir, and planting out
young cabbages in his garden. He stood on a plank, and used his wooden leg as
a dibble, driving a proper number of holes at suitable distances apart. This
done, he loosened the buckles, knelt, and set and packed his plants in the
holes thus prepared. Ever he kept an eye on the road for early arrivals, for
that way came all passengers from Rayleigh, Pitsea, or Bemfleet, and he
greatly desired a peep at yesterday’s
Chelmsford Chronicle
, if by
chance a copy might have been brought in.

His breakfast he took in two instalments, before and after the planting
out, and then left his cottage to the care of the old woman who “tighted up”
for him. Spick and span, in a clean green smock, with his hat shining in the
sunlight, Roboshobery Dove stumped down the road to the village, now busy and
gay. A group of small children with daisy chains on sticks went straggling
along in mock procession, singing each his or her own perversion of the old
rhyme:

Oliver Cromwell lay buried and dead,
Heigho! buried and dead!
There grew a green apple-tree over his head,
Heigho! over his head!
The apples were ripe and all ready to drop,
Heigho! ready to drop!
Then came an old woman to gather the crop,
Heigho! gather the crop!
Oliver rose and gave her a crack,
Heigho! gave her a crack!
That knocked the old woman flat down on her back,
Heigho! down on her back!
The apples are dried and they lie on the shelf,
Heigho! lie on the shelf!
If you want e’er a one you must get it yourself
Heigho! get it yourself!