Ill Will. Michael Stewart

to say for yourself.’

      She just nodded.

      Young in years but old in temper, I thought and chuckled inwardly. I took myself to my den, where I read some more from the book. I read about the righteous Job, of which I’d heard many times from Joseph. He was fond of quoting from the book and fancied himself as a bit of a Job figure. The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away. He called it the grandest thing ever written. But reading it for myself was a very different experience. I saw Job and God in a different light. I despised Job’s piety, and God’s malevolence. I saw in God a Hindley-like tyrant. God killed Job’s children and he didn’t even have the guts to do it himself. Instead, he got Satan to do it. At least Hindley had the balls to kick me in the face with his own boot.

      The next day, while mowing with my scythe, I saw Dick, the farmer’s son, in the field yonder. I had little to do with him, but even so, I had picked up that there was something wayward about him. Sticks had been right about that. I’d had one altercation with him a few days ago, when he had accused me of taking tobacco from his tin. When I pointed out that I didn’t smoke, he had just laughed and said that I could have taken the tobacco to sell to another man.

      ‘There’s money in shag, we all know that.’ I merely shrugged. But he had squared up to me and said, ‘I don’t like you, William Lee. I don’t like the way you carry off. Every gypsy I’ve ever known has been a liar and a thief.’

      I stared into his black eyes but there was no life there.

      I’d felt the heat of anger rise in my belly, but Sticks had been standing nearby and had signalled for me to leave it. I’d kept my mouth shut and wandered up to my den. Sticks was right. It wasn’t worth losing my work or my head over. I would just add him to my list. Beneath you and Hindley.

      Now here was this Dick fellow, making his way to where we were cutting hay. There was a file of us, grafting. It was late on, and although she’d kept up until now, the girl with the white-blonde hair had got behind. I saw Dick approach her.

      ‘You need to keep up,’ he said, ‘no place here for stragglers,’ and he pushed her.

      ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ she said.

      ‘Well, it isn’t fast enough,’ he said and pushed her harder. She fell over. Dick laughed.

      She stood up and brushed herself off, then she said something to him that I couldn’t make out. We’d all ceased working now and were watching this. Dick stopped laughing and his face went pale. The bones of his skull seemed to protrude more prominently. He was going to say something but seeing he had an audience, he marched off. As he walked past me, I heard him mutter under his breath, ‘I’ll teach her to curse.’ But there was no more incident after that and we worked on throughout the afternoon.

      Some of the workers sang songs to pass the time. Saucy and bawdy numbers in the main. Songs about drunken monks and tragic sisters, cruel brothers and comely shepherds’ daughters. I listened to a song about a farmer who, in paying off a compact with the devil, tries to rid himself of a shrewish wife. The man offers his wife gladly. But the woman proves too much for Old Nick and he returns her to the farmer. There was another song about a young woman who gives up her true love for a wealthy landowner. She marries the landowner, who she doesn’t love, and lives an unhappy life. The man she really loves goes off to make his fortune, but perishes in the wilderness. At last the girl realises she needs to be with her sweetheart and she goes off to find him. Instead she finds his corpse. I wondered when you would come to your senses, Cathy, and realise what a fool you’d been.

      Although many of these songs were known to the other workers and through repetition of their verses became known to me, I did not join in. I had a voice that was hardly made for talking let alone singing. But listening to them made the work more bearable and I was thankful for them. Afterwards we downed tools and scoffed supper. I took hold of a flask of water and tucked it inside my coat, saving it for later. It was the end of the seventh week and I now had three pounds and ten shillings saved. I was almost there and was thinking about my departure and how this flask would come in useful for the journey. Just one more week, I said to myself. I would make my way west. To Manchester town.

      When the pipes and cards came out, I took my leave. I walked across the fields towards the wooded area where my bag of pennies was hidden. I groped in the hollow until I retrieved it. I took out the pennies from that evening’s sale and put them with the others. I counted up the new total. Three pound and eleven shillings. In fact, I could be on the road in just five more days. I’d been spending quite a lot of time there of an evening, listening to the evensong of titmouse, finch and warbler, catching sight of an owl from time to time, either at its plucking place or roosting in the trees. I was struck by its eyes, which were made of the same cold grey glass as those of the girl with the pale blonde hair. The haymaking was nearly over. Just the top field now left to reap. The farmer had talked of further work, bringing in the harvest, but I had almost saved up my pennies now and was nearly ready for the road. The big town beckoned.

      There was no showing from the owl, nor was there much evensong to soothe my ears, but the night still felt young and I was not tired. Nor was I in the mood for my usual book-learning. So I walked through the wood and onto the moor, past my makeshift den. The ground became tussocked and sopping. There were paths made by rabbits and foxes across the morass. I thought back to our moor, patterned with these types of paths. Some days we would follow them, me and you, Cathy, and they would stop dead. We used to say that those paths led to another place, beyond the physical world. A witching place from where you drew your magic. Past cottages, barns and turbary roads, turf and peat cuts healing over like scabs. Packhorse tracks, homesteads, landholdings. When all signs of human life vanished, that’s where we would stop and sit. Sometimes we’d watch fox cubs play or hares box. Other times, we’d lie back and look at the paintings in the sky that were far superior to those done by human hand and brush, for they were ever-changing from one thing to another. I’d see a castle, but you’d see a dragon’s eye. I would see the branch of a tree stretch into a withered arm, which would change again into a fish, then a bear. I’d point out the shape and try and get you to see what I could see, but you’d already spotted another thing of wonder and you were pointing it out to me: a rat, a bat, a frog, a fox.

      The sun was slipping down past the horizon and the sky was closing in. The grass had given way to heather and I could hear the grouse croak like old crones cackling. Wet green moss grew like a soft woollen blanket, leggy heather, bracken, moss and sedge. Tangled sphagnum. Cotton-grass and bilberry. It was a moor like our moor where we used to watch the hatching of the peewit, whaap and sea pie. I remembered the moor as the place we had lived in and by. To run away to the moor in the morning and remain there all day. The moor was our school and our refuge. It was a place of solace and a place of wonder. Finding the gamekeeper’s heap of dead crows, or his gibbet of weasels. Once we came across a stoat trap, with a stoat still in it, miraculously unharmed, and we let it go, watching it scurry through the grass. A morning chorus of uncountable larks, uncountable beauty. Watching glead soar and hawks hover. In winter, snowdrifts deep enough to blanket the bog. In summer, the white tufts of cotton-grass waving over the same marsh. Yellow gorse, red poppies, purple heather. Every moss, every flower, every tint and form, we two noted and enjoyed. Even the smallest waterfall or heather-stand was a world of joy. The moors were an eternity where life was boundless and our bliss was endless.

      No punishment could rob us of those moments. No braying deterred us. You plucked some white stalks of gorse and said they were bones. Our bones, whitened by the weather. We watched a puttock wheel in the mist and listened to the cackling moorcock flap through redding heather.

      I felt such a strong yearning for those days, when it was just you and me and the moor, Cathy, that I felt it as a physical pain. Why had you let Edgar come between us? What did he have that money couldn’t buy? I ached for you. It was a sharp pang in the middle of my breast. Sometimes the longing got so bad that I could hardly breathe. It felt as though a viper was coiled around my heart, squeezing the life out of me. And I couldn’t unclasp it. I was suffocating. I was drowning. I was choking. All