The Tell-Tale Heart Page 6

  ‘If we wait until eighteen years of age they can force us to go for nothing,’ Tom whispered to me from over his pot of ale and we agreed that the better choice now would be to be taken as Volunteers for the bounty of two guineas. Tom and me had reached our seventeenth birthdays at around the same month. We convinced ourselves we could pass for eighteen.

  So we set off for Peterborough and our mothers acted as though we was leaving for Botany Bay. Pa was still mouthing his rebellion, and he had an injured foot too, unhealed after a skating accident that winter past, so he stayed at the cottage in Littleport. Pa was angry with our decision. Sat up from his cot where he was coughing and resting his raised foot on a plank. Shouted that Boney was nothing to us and only a fool would fight for a country where wheat was stacked sky high in the Farmer’s barns and feasted on by mice, but never sold at a fair price to the poor buggers whose hands was raw and backs bent double and foots broke from its harvesting. (We did not dare point out that his injury could not be blamed on the Farmer but on his own high jinks on the ice when he was pulling Jenny, the youngest, on her sledge, never heeding her screams to slow down.)

  Tom and me got out of there fast and shut the door heavily behind us. We got as far as the fields at Oundle. Was a multitude of lawless fellows there: a great stink of male flesh – all of it unwashed and sweating in the summer sun and farting to make a stench like the great bad-egg smell that comes off the rotted reeds in water. Over a thousand of them. The Captain was trying to sort us into some sort of companies. Me being short, my only chance could be the ‘Bum Tools’, though Tom might be lucky and be classed a ‘Light Bob’. Both of us dreaded ending up in the Awkward Squad, which stamped you with the distinction of uselessness for the rest of your soldiering life. But we was found out.

  On our stepping forward, the louse-looking Corporal barked, ‘Names! Date of birth!’ and Tom always had a voice as high as a girl’s when he was nervous, and piped up, ‘Where’s my two guineas?’ The Corporal screwed up his face and screamed at us. Air puffed out of him for some full two minutes. The main theme was who was in charge and that we was not old enough to have balls that was dropped and other familiar insults about us being web-footed (on account of living not long ago in houses on water) and about our opium-addled mothers and our Fen hovels.

  So that was a long walk wasted. Facing the return one, we decided to spend our last few pennies on a boat-ride down the river for some of it and Tom was silent and in a black temper and it was the first time I ever saw him take fright. Evening, and a flock of geese flew over us honking like hounds in chase, and the mist was drawing in over the river, and Tom said he was sure it was Black Shuck hounding us towards the Pearly Gates. When I called him a fool (enjoying the tables turned) he screamed that he’d seen a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ on the water in front of us and cried for his mother.

  On my hearing this, hairs started to tickle on the back of my neck. The boatman was rowing, chewing on a pipe, at the other end of the boat from where we two huddled. Somewhere out on the water was a sudden light, flickering wildly, and a crackling sound like pea straw burning. Maybe they was lanterns held by someone on the bank. The mist wrapped everything so it was hard to tell. It looked to be hovering over the water, not the land. Kept my eyes on the pallid light for a while – was Tom right, was it the ghostly villain we called ‘Jack with the Lantern’? Always was a disbeliever in ghosts but when you find yourself lonely and rejected by the army and no hope of bettering your impoverishment, and your belly empty, your mind will clutch at fancies.

  Pa had told me will-o’-the-wisps was a natural phenomenon and I forced myself to repeat this to Tom now. ‘It’s something to do with the gases from the stagnant water,’ I said. Then a scream ripped through the air. The boatman dropped his pipe in the water and cursed.

  ‘Damned badgers,’ said he.

  Tom did not stop his shaking. I could not easily make him out but had the feeling that his red hair stood up like the head of a brush. His ready handful of jokes and ditties was for once lost to him. The hairs on my own neck did not lie down either, nor my heart quieten its drumbeat. Badgers screaming when you are deep in a Fen mist sound exactly like a woman being strangled or horribly mangled. And fear – the fear of being further from home than we had ever ventured, being in fact over the other side of a horizon that we knew as flat, flat – meant we had surely dropped over the edge of the world, into a next life?

  So, as we huddled and the boatman set his teeth against his lack of a pipe, I stared at the pale, guttering light – like a flame caught in a bladder, whisking along – and watched it closely, hoping by my boldness to extinguish it. Yet as I stared, something more horrible still occurred. The light reshaped itself into the figure of a man. Though what kind of man I could not tell. Tall and dark and atop some kind of terrifying horse, the like of which I’d never seen. Behind him the light fanned out and turned red, the way a drop of blood will colour water. Closed my eyes for an instant to shake the terrible vision of the spectre flying fast towards me and I swear there was a strange roaring sound too, like a thousand lions, and when I reopened my eyes, he was vanished. Put my hand to my heart, to check whether it had stopped in fright. But no, all was still there. I was alive and on a boat on a misty river, I was Willie Beamiss, a Fen lout in love with Susie Spencer, travelling home.

  Tom and me did not speak of the will-o’-the-wisp and I never troubled to ask him if he saw the terrible man.

  By the following year when the crops was bad and we had finally squashed Old Boney for good, most of the soldiers returning now all ravaged and one-legged from Waterloo, Tom and me not having signed up to the Awkward Squad turned out to be important. If you was a soldier you was barred from receiving the poor relief when you was desperate poor. A time which came much sooner and sharper than anyone predicted.

  That night began much like another. Tom and me went to the Globe tavern on the high street for ale. We’d saved and scrimped but barely had our eightpence entrance fee for the meeting since the main business of the night was to decide who needed assistance that year. Beneficiaries out of work or incapacitated receive seven shillings a week.

  Pa was there too, and taking a leading part in the meeting. His foot had healed but the time he’d been laid up had increased his vexation, and politicising. While he’d been resting the foot he practised some of his old trade, shoemaking, hogging the candlelight to sew the leather. ‘Wherever the spirit of reform is stirring you find a cobbler,’ he was fond of saying. Time when your hands was occupied but your brain idle meant that you got in the habit for thinking. Pa’s spirit was strongly knitted with independence and if truth be told it was a lifetime of hard labour had crippled him by forty-five, but he refused to see it because he was stubborn as you know already and he still had little mouths to feed. After making shoes at night he would put stones in the ruts in the road in the morning for five shillings a week, alongside all the hairy-bearded, returned-home seamen, and that only worsened his rheumatics further. There was just too many men swarming everywhere, grubbing after the same mean work.

  Tom was in a huddle with a friend of his, Aaron Layton, a twenty-year-old bricklayer covered in pockmarks, and no favourite of mine. That night the Globe was full and the door to the street was wedged open with bodies. As fifty men jostled for space none could sit down. Mud from labourers’ boots coated the floor and the stink of sweat mixed with the smell of ale, pipe smoke and snuff. The May day still hung warm and bats flitted above us in the thatch of the inn, like they was suddenly diving down to eavesdrop.

  All talk was of events at Hilgay and Southery where there had been rucks aplenty in recent months. Barns burned down, a riot in Brandon. Give us bread or blood this day! ‘The Norfolk Banditti’, Aaron called them. He was a strangely powerful figure in his fustian jacket and fancy blue stockings. Seemed like I was the only one in the inn to stifle a laugh at the labouring men of Norfolk being given such a grand title.

  ‘Bring us another pot,’ Tom
shouted, spellbound.

  This Aaron was a mystery to me. He was an ugly bugger with his freckled and pock-pecked face and he had work too, unlike the rest of us, being a skilled brickie, so why was he full of sedition? He liked a ruck, was all. Robert Johnson, the landlord of the Globe, thumped two pints down on the counter top and told us to shut up, and pay up, or he’d pour ours over the cat’s head. He was growing weary of our shouting about the price of bread. We could never afford it and yet everywhere we looked there was wheat piled high in farmers’ barns, that was the complaint, over and over, though we tried it in different tunes.

  Some talk and laughter fell upon a fellow’s slapping the Cambridge Gazette on the wooden table and pointing out that if we was accused of ‘liberally partaking at the shrine of Bacchus’ (the very words the newspaper had used to damn meetings such as ours, although ignorant that this particular one was taking place), what about this fool parish clerk who had fallen over in the middle of a service? Someone repeated the true tale of Anne Green – sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for breaking off the limb of a walnut tree and trying to carry off some branches bearing nuts – and we damned the mad clergymen who sat on the benches and passed down such laws to us.

  ‘Damn all the parsons to hell – what have they ever done for the poor!’ shouted Aaron. Then we damned the clergy with all our might, and farmers and millers too. ‘Whether enclosures or old Bonaparte – not a thing remains in common hands!’

  I found myself fearful of Susie’s father being blamed – he was small beer, a tenant farmer, as Susie had explained to me. I was sure I was not the only one in the Fens who had not until then been mindful of the differences. Hadn’t seen Susie in a while, yet when we did meet up things between us was sweet as ever. It was Farmer Martin who had much of the land for miles around sewn up. Where it wasn’t him it was the Commissioners, and, if not them, the clergymen who owned the rest of the land and controlled the charities that was set up to help us.

  ‘I remember when wheat was only fifty-two shillings – only earlier this year!’ Aaron said. Wheat was now over a hundred shillings a quarter.

  ‘Henry Martin just laid off three more, including our Jack . . .’

  ‘Shirt on his back costs him more than three men’s wages!’ This was Pa.

  ‘Aye, but what’s to gain by—’ This was me.

  Tom burst in, his red hair all abristling with excitement, the way a dog gets when a bitch is in heat: ‘Over in Denver they’ve had a ruck . . . said they’d join us, show us how it’s done—’

  ‘Damn your eyes, no Denver men here – let’s have a fray ourselves!’ Aaron thumped his tankard down on the counter top and pushed his way out onto the street.

  Someone – perhaps pock-pecked Aaron – had a seed-drill spout that he was holding over our heads and trying to use as a horn. No one heard him above the racket but I saw his cheeks puff in vain. He shouted once – ‘Bread or blood!’ – disappeared again and the jostling grew, with each man voicing some new grievance, and the sound of pots of ale smashing down onto wooden tables, and that deep sound of rabble that gives a mob its name.

  Men streamed out onto Crown Street. I thought for a second that I saw Susie in the crowd of fifty men with her vivid head bobbing above the rest the way a poppy stands out in a field of corn, but then I wasn’t sure. There were two girls, one dark, one fair, but it was a glimpse only: was one of them Susie? Aaron and Tom was blustering and yelling and everyone’s blood was up. Each was possessed by their own devils, bellowing into each other’s faces, not listening but spitting out their complaints. Violence scented the air. An ale-house brawl, a boxing match, a cockfight – the smell, the first glint, when men knew a ruck was on its way – I followed it, two steps behind.

  We poured down Crown Street, and now Aaron was blowing a lighterman’s horn, and the sound blew out over our heads, calling the whole of Littleport to join us. Looking about me, I saw others was carrying weapons: pitchforks, cleavers, clubs. Tom had a long pole with a piece of cotton print attached – a flag of sorts – and he waved it drunkenly. Searched the faces for Pa, but could not then see him. Searched for something to arm myself and spied a piece of broken beam propped up against Mingey’s shop. As I went to grab it there was the sound of glass shattering and at first, startled, I thought it was me who’d caused it. Glanced behind me and saw that a rock had been thrown by one of the youngest with us, a small fellow and a real hothead: John Badger. A cheer followed it. No light shone in Mingey’s shop. If anyone was home there was no sign. The clamour in the street grew: looking around I now saw more had joined us, perhaps fifty more men, with lamps lit, and held high.

  Perhaps some people rushed into Mingey’s shop at this moment. I did not. Others had quickly moved on, further down the street, and, as a tide, I surged with them. I remember Tom beside me, and the moment I first saw him with a butcher’s cleaver in his hand. It was dark by then, around ten o’clock; he had dropped the flag on a pole. The silver blade glinted in firelight from a lamp held in his other hand; he must have snatched it from Mingey’s shop.

  Already the picture blurs. So many times I was asked to tell it. Where next? Mr Clarke’s shop. What did you do there? Nothing, sir. Did you throw his wares onto the street? (I remember the drawers. The small wooden drawers with their hand-smoothed knobs – so familiar to all of us who had used his shop every day as children – and every one of them opened and dashed to the floor like a gaping mouth with its teeth pulled; and sawdust and blood, and the contents: nails and string and every kind of nut and bolt, the contents of every drawer spilled.) Then smashing the windows of Josiah Dewey, surging in through the broken-down door of his home, Aaron demanding a pound. Not me, sir.

  Once the breath from Aaron’s lungs filled the horn, was already too late. The notes rang out. The long, loud, thrilling joy of it. The lighterman’s horn. The same one that called to us as boys to tell us that pleasure parties was going to Downham Market Fair and we should run along the river chasing the boats and waving. We always obeyed it unthinkingly: like whistling for a dog. Our ears pricked, our hearts drummed, our boyish selves leaped into our limbs. Before too long the hundred or so of us numbered two hundred, and the touchpaper for the night’s bad deeds was lit.

  What next? The Reverend Vachell reading us the Riot Act. His tiny eyes, squinty with sleep, his well-padded body and the hatred he produced in us, how the sight of him in his nightgown outdoors on that May night, well fed; cowardly behind the figure of his wife – did nothing to quell our anger but flamed it to boiling point. What did he know of our privations? Did he have six children at home with nothing to put in their bowls but water and potatoes? Damn old bugger did nothing to help the folk of Littleport. This was Pa. Pa now at the head of the crowd, inciting.

  Didn’t see Reverend Vachell scurry back to his house, like a dog with its tail tucked, but not long after, we followed him there. The vicarage door had already been smashed by the time I arrived. Tom said that the damned Reverend Vachell had brandished a gun and run out the back, but I never saw that myself. Now men swarmed in the dining room, knocking over candles and the smell of wax and seared wood was in the air.

  Found myself with others in the storeroom where the stocks could not fail to amaze us: and seeing so much, seeing it all there, the boxes, the food, the silver, the beer, well, my eyes was bedazzled and my heart ready to burst with outrage and yes, I picked them up, I picked up the four silver gravy spoons and I remember looking at them and feeling their weight in my hands and in the light from the candles marvelling at their beauty and all slowed down while I thought about this, how lovely things lived with unlovely people, and just as I’m about to take them, to pack them into my waistcoat, there above the crowd I spy the fair slip of a girl I thought I saw with my Susie, it’s the Carter girl, a servant of the Waddelows, and she’s calling to me, saying, ‘Beamiss! Give them to me!’ – Vachell has sent her to carry back his goods.

  ‘He’s sent a girl! What a man! The Reverend! He
sends you, does he?’ I shouted.

  Tom was beside me. Tom heard it. He heard what I said but he didn’t see Elizabeth Carter mouth her reply. Was full aware of that cleaver Tom held, the frenzied chopping, the smashing he had achieved with it. The sound of wood creaking and breaking; of table-legs snapping, all around me like a crackling fire. And the blood pumping, pumping hard throughout our bodies so that we beat as one.

  Elizabeth Carter begged me. She took fright at the mayhem in the room and she mouthed something in all exaggeration. Something hard to read across the heads of others, but something like: ‘Mistress Susie says . . .’

  I held the spoons out to her. The court record shows it. Elizabeth Carter, the servant girl, under cross-examination, told it so in court. Beamiss held the spoons out to her to carry home. The moment she asked Beamiss for the spoons, he endeavoured to give them to her; she verily believed he meant to give them to her, but he could not reach her.

  Those spoons. Four silver spoons. My life hanging in the balance, all of me a-dangle in that kitchen, and the four silver spoons, glinting. But it wasn’t the servant girl Elizabeth Carter I saw there. It was the dark, lovely, glowing face of my Susie. Susie who could do nothing quietly, nothing stealthily. A girl all riotous herself and hot as blood: it was her lovely figure that was trying to hide behind Elizabeth – the mob would molest her, her being a Spencer, a Farmer, the enemy – and her dark head that bobbed and ducked and sent its message to me. A look that flew through the room like an arrow, and saved me.

  Witness on the night of 22 May 1816 through the window did spy Beamiss with several spoons in his hand. There were other persons in the room. About ten minutes after, saw him in the garden with the spoons in his hand. While he was coming in the house, there was an alarm of horse-soldiers coming. Saw Beamiss with Thomas South in the garden, the one they call Tom Foolery though that is not his Christened name. Some conversation took place between them. Spoons afterwards found in the thatch of a house of the mother of one of the rioters.