The Ragged Valley
Dedication
Dedicated to my grandparents
Lily (Hinchliffe) Booth 1920–2016
George William Booth 1919–2017
True Sheffielders
Chapter 1
On a gale-driven afternoon in March, Silas Hinchcliffe breasted the summit of the hill like a swimmer coming up for air.
Except for one detail, the valley beneath his muddy boots was no different to the undulating landscape he’d been stumbling across since before dawn, a runaway’s adrenaline coursing through his veins. Here were the same old foggy shades of green and brown, tamed by a jigsaw of drystone walls. Sheep pressed their ropy hides against damp hedges and cows stood in the rain in stoic surrender.
His soaked britches clung to his legs and rain belted his face like gravel, but Silas paid no heed. His narrowed eyes found and followed the movements of a man, ant-sized, who was hurrying across the earth embankment that straddled the gorge below. Silas was a taller than average youth, hard-muscled from farm work, but he reckoned he’d make an equally puny sight, if the man looked up, if he lifted his face to examine the skyline against which Silas stood. But the man didn’t. He scurried along, oblivious, his head bent against the wind.
A vast reservoir held at bay by the embankment was the additional detail on the landscape Silas had been told to look out for, the signpost that meant his journey was almost, but not quite, at an end. The bulging mass of water looked barely contained to Silas. It would be a small job for one of those white-capped waves to reach up and devour the man walking so precariously beside them.
A fierce eddy of wind blew fresh rain into his face. He whooped – a nonsense yelp – to relieve the wave of excitement that rose from his innards to his throat, and stamped his feet, pushing his hands through his thick wet tangle of hair. He’d forgotten his cap in his haste to leave. An unwanted sneer echoed in his skull, his father’s voice, Tha not made o’ sugar, are tha? Won’t melt, will tha?
A firm nudge into the palm of his hand brought him back to the moment, restoring the bubble of anticipation in his stomach. Silas bent to pat the collie.
‘It’s stair rods, Shandy!’
He fished an apple from his satchel and chucked it in the air to enjoy the sight of the dog springing and twisting to catch it with a snap of her jaw.
‘Good lass.’
He was glad, now, to have her by his side. Shandy had risen from the rug by the cold embers of the farmhouse fireplace, followed Silas out of the house, had waited for him to lift and replace the gate and had stayed at his heel as he had crept down the lane. He’d assumed she would soon turn tail and had ignored her. But she had continued to pad by his side, and then – as dawn broke across the shadowy shapes of roadside foliage, revealing spiked leaves and dew-laden cobwebs – she ran circles around him, threatening to trip him. Silas had imitated as quietly as possible the harsh noises his father made in the field, and gestured back the way he’d come. It had been her turn to ignore him.
The daft dog had only been getting in his path because of her bred-in urge to round him up. It amused him that they had been each trying to turn the other around and he hollered again into the sky. It was a good sound. Freedom. Oh, he’d seen the path set out for him, had understood the role he was expected to play more clearly than ever after yesterday’s visit from Reverend James. The vicar had come to speed along preparations for the wedding of Silas’s older brother, Peter, to his bride-to-be, Ginny. She was one of several girls that Peter had rolled into the hay, but the first to grow round, and anyway, Peter was twenty now and needed a wife.
Peter would inherit, while he, Silas, wasted his life grafting on a farm he’d never own. That was the way of it. He had no prospects that would convince a girl to roll about with him. There was no reward for being the second son. Then the Reverend James, who had conveniently arrived at dinner time to discuss the wedding, had loosened his tongue over the meat and potato pie and told Silas about the town away over the hills and the opportunities that awaited a strapping and hard-working young man.
‘Don’t turn the boy’s head,’ his mother had said, too late.
Silas felt the weight of the coins from the housekeeping jar in his coat pocket. Thou Shalt Not Steal. He would repay his mother. He would send double the amount he had taken, with a letter to his father, emphasising his good fortune. The good fortune he was bound to encounter.
He pressed his fingertips against the ache on his cheekbone and winced. Peter had beaten him for as long as he could remember and rarely gave an explanation for any of the unexpected blows he landed on Silas’s face, torso or back. Brothers fight, his father said over his mother’s protests, and just look at the size of the lad. He can take it.
Not anymore.
Shandy was at his side, licking the palm of his hand industriously.
Silas bent to tousle her ears and allow her to coat his face with her tongue and her damp doggy breath.
‘Father’s lost his hardest worker in thee, eh? An’ Peter’s kicked me across the yard for the last time, ha’nt he?’
Shandy had spotted the man below. She barked, three sharp retorts that were lost in the wide-open sky. The hem of the man’s cloak lifted in the wind as he disappeared into a small stone building near the bottom of the embankment.
Silas crouched on his haunches to pat Shandy’s sleekly wet head, tracing the thin bones of her skull. ‘No goin’ back, girl. Never goin’ back. Think tha can round me up a hot meal and a warm bed for the night?’
Shandy at his heel, he strode down the valley’s steep hillside. He knew, because he had been paying quiet attention to the enthusiastic chatter of the Reverend James, that he was heading for the newest and largest of several reservoirs set like stones in a jewelled necklace on the high ground all around the town. This grey lozenge of water could use a polish from the cloth of a blue sky. Fat chance of that today.
Now, as he descended, the river that led towards the town emerged as a thin grey ribbon from the foot of the dam. He came to a road that ran parallel to the river, about sixty feet above it. A gig that Silas assumed must belong to the man he had seen on the embankment was parked here, the horse hitched to it staring into the rain. Silas fed the horse an apple, his last.
At the bottom of the valley, he came to the deserted pavements of a hamlet of pretty stone cottages and found the river again, walking alongside trees that poked still bare branches into the sky. There was not a soul about, and who could blame them, in this downpour. Silas grinned down at Shandy as he turned east towards the town, the town that was the beating heart of the kingdom’s steel industry.
Chapter 2
Harriet Wragg blew a wayward strand of hair from her eyes as she reached the top of the staircase. The bedlinen she was carrying had blocked her view of the floor. If her cousins had left toys on the varnished planks for her to stumble over then her exasperation would be complete.
She could hear the two younger boys playing in the bedroom they shared, the thump of feet on floorboards, a blood-curdling yell. Savages rampaging through a jungle of their own making. She had no wish to investigate. Meanwhile Adam, the oldest at thirteen, should be working on the grammar and spelling she had given him ahead of his matriculation. It was hoped he’d go to boarding school this year, if the money could be found. She passed his door without pausing. Alice was downstairs in Harriet’s room, practising needlepoint with all the stubbornness a six-year-old could muster. She’d been stabbing her own pudgy fingers more frequently than the cloth and refused all assistance, even when a drop of blood blotted her stitching.
All the cousins were accounted for, and occupied, thank goodness. Her uncle had called for her to attend her aunt from somewhere in the depths of the house, and now, as she dropped the heavy linen onto the bureau, she heard the front door slam. Walter would be out until mid-evening. On his return, he would host a supper, with Harriet’s help.
Harriet quietly entered the master bedroom.
The drapes were drawn and Polly was a hunched shape sitting on the edge of the bed. Harriet suppressed a sigh and went over to crouch before her.
‘Aunt. Do you need the…?’
‘Yes.’ Embarrassment clipped the older woman’s voice. ‘You’re limping today.’
‘My foot pains me.’
She bent to help Polly rise to her feet and manoeuvred her across the room, aware the two of them must look like a grim parody of a waltzing couple. She knew that Polly felt as mortified as she, as she lowered her aunt onto the commode.
‘Just rise up a little, Aunt.’
Harriet tugged Polly’s nightgown out of the way and retreated to the rain-lashed window. The roof of a passing carriage was as blackly velvet as a moonless night.
‘I am sorry,’ said Polly. ‘When I ask your uncle for help, he delays and delays. I sometimes think he enjoys my discomfort.’
Harriet made a sympathetic noise but wasn’t really paying attention. She placed a bet on two raindrops meandering down the glass. If the one on the left reached the windowsill first she would be rescued by a handsome prince, a fairy-tale ending to a dark fable that had begun six years ago when her parents died. If the other drop won, she’d be stuck here forever, slowly transforming into a bitter old maid.
‘He’s gone out with his new acquaintance, Mr Boothby, to solicit business for their venture. House building, if you can credit it. From banking to bricklaying, although of course Walter won’t be getting his own hands dirty. And Boothby might be a rich man, but Walter needs to drum up more cash, which is where your brother comes into the equation.’
James. He’d been packed off to boarding school when their parents died and was now doing well for himself in London where he rented a set of chambers in a fine house. Investments, or something like that. Harriet was expected to be grateful for the occasional, if not brief, letter.
The two raindrops converged on each other before reaching the bottom of the windowpane. Harriet sighed.
‘There’s a high demand in the town, your uncle tells me. I have a demand of my own, I tell him. This was once a relatively quiet spot by the river, but we’ve been swallowed up. Why, we’re in the very stinking centre of the town now! And he wants his own horse and carriage. No man of business can be taken seriously without his own horse and carriage, he says. Mr Boothby keeps several vehicles. A curricle, a chaise… I’ve finished, Harriet.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Harriet. I’ve finished.’
‘Oh! Sorry, Aunt.’
Harriet averted her eyes from the contents of the bucket, and helped Polly back into bed, the sharp odour of piss in her nostrils. She washed her hands as quickly as she could in the basin on the bureau. The water was numbingly cold.
‘You’re forever washing your hands. You’re a fastidious child, aren’t you?’
Harriet laughed. ‘Aunt, I’m twenty-three.’
‘I cannot remember the last time I heard you laugh.’
‘Well.’ She wanted to say she had little to laugh about, but knew she would feel ashamed of herself if she spoke out. Twenty-three. Life was sliding past like a swan on a lake while she was the silly goose on the bank, running in circles around children that were not her own, an invalid aunt, largely absent uncle, and a house that, even after all this time, did not have the comforting scent of home. But no other occupation was open to her and she was not in the acquaintance of any young and eligible men, let alone a handsome prince.
‘I would like a cup of tea, if you have time, dear.’
‘I have time.’ Harriet swept strands of hair away from her face. One of her braids had come undone in the effort it had taken to manoeuvre her aunt onto the commode and back.
‘Look at the state of your hair. Come here.’
Harriet knelt by the bed to allow Polly to unravel, tug and twist her hair back into an orderly state.
‘You have the same lovely, thick red hair as me and your dear mother,’ Polly said. ‘I know mine is thinner now but that’s what bearing four children and suffering such a loss has done for me. Your mother will be young and beautiful for always. That is a comfort.’
Harriet’s eyes smarted. ‘I would rather have her here with us.’
She wished to have her mother’s gentle fingers comb through her hair, not a woman who gave birth in this bed six years ago and never got out of it, handing the raising of four children to Harriet without a word. Walter talked vaguely of disorders of the mind, while the doctor prescribed tonics.
Polly had finished. She patted Harriet’s shoulder. ‘Will you take the bucket down?’
Harriet set her jaw as she tugged the wire handle of the tin bucket to free it from the seat of the commode. Like a snail clinging to a stem, it never came easily, and it sickened her to see the contents sloshing up the sides.
She left the bucket at the foot of the stairs and poked her head into her bedroom, to check on Alice and ensure she hadn’t accidentally sewn herself to the armchair. But the little girl was gone, leaving only a discarded piece of cotton on the seat with a needle poking from it. Harriet would have heard her if she had come upstairs to her own room. She frowned, her head cocked for raised voices. She hoped Alice wasn’t pestering the boys. They were frequently cruel to her in return. She hurried across to the front parlour where the board games, children’s books and some of Alice’s toys were stored.
Harriet stopped on the threshold of the room, clapping her hand to her mouth.
Alice was standing in front of a roaring fireplace that dwarfed her, straining on her tiptoes to fan the flames with the edge of her pinafore.
‘Alice!’
The little girl jumped in fright and stumbled closer to the grate. Harriet lunged forward, got a tangle of soft hair in her fist and hauled her back. Alice wailed. ‘Ow! You pulled my hair! That’s mean, Harriet.’
She dropped to her knees and cupped Alice’s face. ‘My darling. You could have burnt to death. I’ve told you over and over about this.’
‘I was just trying to help!’
Harriet took a deep breath to steady her heart, which was tripping over itself. ‘It doesn’t help to set yourself on fire, does it? Where’s the fireguard?’
Alice pointed to the corner of the room. ‘I moved it over there. It’s heavy.’
Harriet replaced it on the hearth. ‘Yes, you shouldn’t touch it. Out you go, go on. Go and visit your mother.’
‘Will you tell her on me?’
‘Not if you promise to never do this again.’