But the church – the screens are removed, the antique coloured glass is all broken up, and, if you please, thrown in the town ditch. The Hungerford and Beauchamp chantry chapels are gone too. I cannot describe to you adequately the effect of the fellow Wyatt’s labours – ’tis a most astounding work of destruction. There has been nothing like it since the Reformation. The entire church within is now like a single great barn, with plain light, plain stone, nothing to stay the eye as it strays from one naked grey surface to another.
’Tis greatly admired.
Forest is recently made a lord. He had not forgiven you for deserting him. He owns both land and cotton factories in the north, I understand; but his affairs grow too large for my poor comprehension now.
I am sorry that you never saw young Mr Pitt come to power. He is the third son, you know, of the great Chatham, and I am bound to say has acted as boldly in peace as ever his great father did in time of war. William Pitt younger is a most economical fellow – as we need after all our wars with your America. He now taxes not only the windows of great houses but even my modest number. I was obliged to brick one of them up. And he taxes us not only for our manservants, of whom I now have none, but serving girls as well. I tell my Jenny, who is a good girl, that though Mr Pitt may consider her a luxury, she shall nonethless never be put out of doors by me.
The king was mad last year but is recovered. The Radicals complain he was never sane.
There has been a Revolutinn in France. King Louis is imprisoned, I think, and his queen too. We await to know what this portends. The enthusiasts say ’tis the dawn of a new age. I hope not.
And now I turn to a most disagreeable matter. Your sister Frances is to be married. The name of the man is Mr Porteus, a young clergyman of very substantial income.
Your sister has become a great favourite of our Bishop Barrington who – except for his allowing the ass Wyatt to ruin the cathedral – I think highly of. I fancy by marrying your sister, Mr Porteus seeks to please him; and since I shall leave her but a small income, and Ralph without a protector in the world, I suppose I should be glad of his offer. Frances is twenty-five now and so it is more than time she was settled.
So there the matter rests. I have had to accept him. Ralph is full of radical notions. I shall send him to talk to Porteus who, you may be sure, has none.
I grow very old. My three score years and ten were done nine years ago. But many Shockleys are cursed with long lives.
I regret that you cannot see Mr Porteus. You would relish him.
Pray give my duties to your good wife.
Yr. affectionate father,
J.S.
BONEY
1803
It was the dead of night; there was no moon. In the shallow harbour below the small but ancient town of Christchurch no sound broke the cold stillness of the October night, except the faint murmur of a light wind.
The harbour was empty.
On the island side of the harbour, the flat marshes extended for several miles before giving way to the gravel, peat and sandy soil of the huge deserted heath that led towards the vast tracts of the New Forest. There was not a light to be seen.
Had anything changed in that empty region by the sea? Very little. Medieval kings no longer hunted in the great forests that still stretched from the coast up to Clarendon and beyond. But the deer still inhabited them. Men living in their tiny thatched cottages, in deserted hamlets, still had their ancient rights to gather wood, still lived their quiet and secluded existence. Furze cutters, charcoal burners, small folk who might not see a stranger in months, still held their tiny habitations on scores of miles of heathland to east and west of the little harbour. The little town of Christchurch with its square-towered Norman church and its long since ruined little castle, still nestled at the place where the two rivers Stour and Avon ran together into the harbour, and its people still sometimes used the old Saxon name of Twyneham to describe the place.
One thing had changed. The brown and turbulent waters of the English Channel had drawn a little closer, eating steadily year by year, century by century, into the soft sandy coastline, just as, thousands of years before, it had broken down the ancient barrier of chalk. It had taken a good part of the headland now. The southern end of the old earthwork walls that had protected the Celtic camp were already sliding onto a sand and shingle beach. The low hill at the centre of the headland had been remorselessly attacked by sea and weather too. Seen from a distance from the sea, it now looked at if the hill had been cut from end to end with a knife.
But the long headland and its sand bar was still there, losing its contact with the sea by only a few inches a year, still sheltering the still harbour waters and their mud flats on the inland side, where fishing boats could safely moor, where swans nested and herons stalked the flats or skimmed over the waters.
One thing had changed: the place had acquired a new name. For an antiquarian had hit upon the notion that the old Celtic hillfort was in fact the camp of none other than the legendary Saxon chief Hengist, one of the first of his race to colonise the island. It was spurious history, but popular, and the new and evocative name of Hengistbury Head soon became so firmly attached to the place that people thought it did indeed come from the mists of antiquity.
The harbour was empty. Behind it could be heard the gentle hiss of the sea. The sea was empty too, or so people hoped.
For on the other side of the English Channel in the ports of northern France, a huge armada of transport ships was being prepared. One still night when the sea was calm – as soon as the transports could be well enough organised and defended against the British naval squadrons – they would push out into the Channel, and fall upon the English coast. The people of Christchurch trembled at the thought. As well they might.
For the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, on the French coast, was invincible; against it could only be pitted a small force of British regulars and a half-trained local militia, some of whom carried only pikes.
This was the nightmare of England, caused by the French Revolution.
Of course, there were still those – extreme Whigs and Radicals, men like the brilliant Charles James Fox – who spoke with favour of the new age of liberty, equality and fraternity they believed had begun in France. When the Revolution came, idealistic young men like the poet Wordsworth truly believed they beheld a new and happier dawn. But that was before the terror of the guillotine, the killing of the king and queen and the astonishing conquests of young Bonaparte. Few in England praised the Revolution now. Italy had fallen to the French; Egypt nearly been annexed. If he had not been stopped by Nelson destroying his fleet and supplies, the extraordinary conqueror who modelled himself on Caesar and Alexander would have marched across Asia to India itself.
Worse still, when Bonaparte took the Hapsburg province of the Netherlands the thing England always dreaded most happened – the whole opposite Channel shore fell into the hands of her enemy. The powers of Europe had fought to a standstill: there was an uneasy peace which was soon broken. And the one man who stood like a rock through all these storms, William Pitt the Younger, son of the great Chatham and perhaps the greatest minister the island had ever known, even Pitt had gone, resigning his post because King George refused to give the Irish Catholics the vote.
Now the brief peace was over. Who knew what move Bonaparte with his mighty armies would make next? England had only her navy to protect her, and she stood alone.
A sound: a faint splash, followed by the soft creak of an oar on wood: almost indistinguishable from the water lapping on the muddy shore of the harbour. A sound, but no light.
Young Peter Wilson waited patiently on the bank in front of the carts.
The luggers began to arrive.
There were seven of them: long, light vessels, with well-rigged foresail, carrying oars as well, with decks for only a few feet at stem and stern. Otherwise they were open, for quick unloading of their precious cargoes. They were manned by crews of strong men,
and being so light and easy to handle, they could run ahead of almost any of the revenue cutters who tried to arrest them.
“Here comes the moonrakers’ run,” Peter whispered.
For Peter Wilson was a smuggler.
To pick him out and call him a smuggler would have been absurd. There was hardly a person he knew in Christchurch or the surrounding region, from gentlemen, like the rich Wilsons in the manor near the town, to the humblest peasant, who was not involved in some way in the trade. He himself came from a family of ten. All of them were. So were their cousins – a vast network of sea and rivergoing people, some descended from the many illegitimate children of Captain Jack Wilson, before he married Nellie Godfrey, others deriving from who knew what ancient sources; some, like Peter, had thin and narrow faces, but they came in all shapes and sizes, and they infested the rivers, the ports, and the heathland villages for miles around. Slippery Wilson, his father, did well. But he was only a minor figure compared to the great, the legendary Isaac Gulliver, the father figure of smuggling in the whole area south of Sarum. Gulliver had organised tonight’s run, paid for it and drawn his profit. The contraband would pass that very night along roads his men guarded, rest at inns he owned, and in this way pass westwards across open heathland, up over Cranborne Chase and then down to Sarum.
Peter always took part when the luggers landed at Hengistbury Head. He knew every inch of the headland and could have driven a cart of rum and brandy safely across it with his eyes closed.
Tonight’s cargo consisted of a little tobacco, but chiefly brandy, rum and Geneva spirits. As the luggers came in close, dozens of men sprang forward and began to help unload. The work was accomplished in a quarter of an hour. Then twenty carts, each with an armed man riding up front, wound slowly along the headland, past the earthwork walls, and made their way westward. They were unlikely to be troubled by the excise men, who knew better than to interfere on land; some years the smugglers travelled in broad daylight, but in times of war it was wisest to be discreet.
In fact, the smuggling business was pestilential to the government for reasons which had little to do with the contraband itself, or the charming sideline of taking eloping couples to be married in the island of Jersey. For the smugglers exported gold, of which England was running perilously short, to pay for the contraband from France: the fantastic sum of over ten thousand guineas a week was leaving the island this way. And the smuggling sailors did not hesitate to sell information to the French about England’s naval and shore defences.
But Peter Wilson knew nothing of that. Tomorrow, at Sarum, he would be handsomely paid. Then he would buy a wedding ring. For the very next week, on his nineteenth birthday, Peter Wilson was going to be married. He smiled to himself contentedly as they began the run into the moonraker country.
No one knew when the men of Wiltshire first came to be called moonrakers; but it was smuggling that gave them the name.
A party of Wiltshire smugglers, hearing the excise men approaching one night, had pushed their load into a pond. Later, thinking the coast was clear, they had begun to try to get the barrels out again with poles and rakes. They had just started, however, when the excise men returned. It was then, when the excise men demanded to know what they were about that one of the men, pointing to the reflection of the full moon in the water explained: “See that cheese – we’re trying to pull it over here,” and he began slowly to rake the water. Slow and simple these Wiltshire men, the excise men had concluded as they rode away. And slow and simple, when it suited them, the Wiltshire men had always been, especially when it came to getting the better of interfering government officials.
Peter Wilson liked the run into moonraker country.
“I’ll buy that ring tomorrow,” he thought.
Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel paused before the door.
Could he go in?
Of course he could. He must. He had particularly been asked to come on urgent business, by the owner of the house.
He looked at the door worriedly. If only he could trust himself not to give everything away; if only he did not blush; if only at this moment he were not trembling.
He had been particularly summoned, on a matter of delicacy. Discretion was required. He was a doctor.
Still he paused.
It was pleasantly warm. The morning mist, hours ago, had given way to a mellow autumn sun. All around the close the yellowing leaves were gently falling in the faint northern breeze. They rustled along the north walk, gathered along the edge of the choristers’ green, piled into the stone corner of the little lodge by the south gate that led to the old bridge.
The cloistered seclusion of Salisbury close, with its cathedral rising like a stately tree, its sweeping lawns, and its low, receding lines of gracious houses, always seemed to Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel to have a poignant melancholy all its own in the Michaelmas season when the leaves were falling. But perhaps it was just his mood. The summer birds that infested its gracious old houses – the swallows, swifts, martins and the small company of starlings in the trees, had all long since risen with their shrill, busy cries and wheeled away, leaving the precincts to its year-round inhabitants – a few sparrows and thrushes, the daws who were sombrely picking over the green by the plane trees, the rooks in the elms, gazing down like so many black-robed canons in their stalls, and lastly a pair of kestrels who nested in the cathedral tower and from time to time circled the spire in a manner plainly suggesting that they were the true owners of the ancient building.
Only half the leaves were down, and the sun found warm and subtle colours everywhere upon the precinct’s crumbling surfaces. It was not only the green and moss in the crevices, not only the tawny and golden leaves, nor the grey green Chilmark stone, the long-leaded roof of the cathedral or the delicate shades of the red brick, red tile and the stuccoed fronts of the houses; no, the joy of the cathedral close was in the lichen. It was everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on great stone surfaces or the uneven churchyard wall: greens, yellows, rusty reds, ochres, creamy blues, light browns: the living lichen with its subtle colours grew everywhere.
He knew why he was summoned.
Had she not come to him privately, three months before, and begged him to speak to the young man?
He had done so.
It was a long interview. He made the position very plain. He warned, persuaded, even begged. And it had been useless. First the fellow rambled, then laughed at him, finally told him, in a friendly way, to mind his own business.
“Can you see no danger?”
“Frankly Doctor, no.”
“But what of your wife, man?” he had burst out. “Do you not realise you are giving her pain, and anxiety?”
“She has been to you?” The young man looked at him shrewdly.
“It would have been through concern for you if she had,” he replied.
“Doctor,” there was a trace of anger in his voice now. “There is nothing about which you need concern yourself, and nothing to fear.”
What more could he have done?
The house before which Doctor Barnikel stood was a handsome brick and stone fronted building on the northern side of the close.
The house belonged to Canon Porteus, who lived there with his wife Frances. He was not afraid of either of them. He was certainly not afraid of the young man. No, he hesitated because she would also be there.
He stood by the gate for a full minute.
It was while he did so that, from the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear, the small figure of Peter Wilson emerged and walked away. Barnikel smiled. He had only to look at the scruffy young fellow to guess that he had been with the housekeeper delivering contraband.
“After all,” he murmured, “even the clergy must have their brandy, too.”
It seemed to break the spell. He went in.
It was ten years since Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel had come to Sarum from a village north of Oxford.
He was thirty-five, an excellent and respected doctor and
he had soon built a solid reputation in the city. He lived in a pleasant, modest, white-fronted house in St Ann Street.
He was a kindly man. No one in Sarum had ever seen him say a cruel word, or lose his temper: indeed, the last time he had done that was twenty years ago, and even then, it had been because he saw a man in Oxford whipping his dog so viciously he thought it would be maimed. At that moment, to his own surprise, he had been suddenly transformed into a state of towering rage. A minute later, when the dog’s master picked himself up off the ground, he found that his dog was no longer in his possession but being carried away in the arms of a slightly chubby, red faced but determined fifteen-year-old. And the boy’s attack had been so sudden and so devastating that the fellow had not cared to argue but had slunk away.
Thaddeus kept the dog, named Spot, which had lived on for ten years.
He was now a well-built, broad-chested man, just over average height, with thinning hair and, despite the fact that he was a respected doctor, a tendency to blush sometimes in the company of women. Surprisingly he was still unmarried.
“A strange name, Barnikel,” old Bishop Douglas once remarked to him. “What’s its origin?”
“Danish, I believe,” he replied. He had heard of the legend of the Danish warrior who cried. ‘Bairn-ni-kel’; but he smiled at this as no more than a charming myth.
She was there.
She was sitting quietly beside Frances Porteus in the drawing-room, working on a piece of embroidery, and she looked up as he came in.
“I fear my husband has not yet returned, Doctor Barnikel,” Frances Porteus said politely. “But we expect him presently. Pray sit with us until then.”
Barnikel bowed.
He tried to keep his attention on the older woman.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Frances Shockley had been a gay young woman. Many in Salisbury could remember it. But that was before she had married Mr Porteus.