“Nah. The present Lord Seaton’s grandfather did away with the old open-field system here at Northcott Abbey long before I came here. In the sixties or seventies, it must’ve been.”
Enclosures had been taking place since the thirteenth century, when the price of wool began to exceed the price of grain. Although the practice had increased under the Tudors, it was never popular with them, as it tended to expand the number of poor beggars and vagrants. As a result, the monarchy eventually turned against the practice. But everything had changed in the last fifty years, when cheap cotton from America and India brought down the price of wool just as the cost of grain was skyrocketing. Now enclosures were seen as a way to increase crop yields. And this time, the King and his supporters had embraced the movement with gusto.
“The thing is,” Atwater was saying, “the old Squire and his lordship’s grandfather weren’t greedy. Not like George Irving. The way Irving did it was naught but a giant swindle.”
“I suspect my wife would be interested in interviewing you, if you’re willing. She’s writing an article on the effects of the enclosure movement.”
“Is she, now? Well, there’s a story to be told, that’s for certain.”
“I understand there were some significant disturbances around Ayleswick fifteen or twenty years ago.”
Atwater’s pleasant face hardened. “That there were, thanks to bloody old George Irving. Fixed it so that not only did the commissioners give him the best land, but they also exempted both him and the vicar from paying their share of either legal fees or fencing costs. It all fell to the smaller landowners. Those who couldn’t pay—and that was most of them—were forced to sell. And Irving paid them next to nothing.”
“It created unrest?”
“Of course it created unrest.” The steward’s nostrils flared with the intensity of his emotions. “Irving never understood country people. He came from merchant stock, you see; bought Maplethorpe when the last of the Baldwyns died out. He couldn’t understand the centuries-old bonds that tie even the poorest Englishman to the land of his village. Take away people’s rights to graze their cows and geese on the commons and cut fuel from the wasteland, and how are they supposed to live?” He shook his head in disgust. “Just because you use Parliament to make something legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Sebastian looked at the steward with renewed interest. It was a fairly radical statement for anyone to make, let alone a man whose life had been dedicated to managing his wealthy employer’s estate. “Tell me about the men who were hanged.”
Atwater stared off across sunlit fields. “That was right ugly, it was.”
“When was it, exactly?”
“’Ninety-three.” He gave the date without hesitation or thought, as if it were painfully engraved in his memory.
“Why were they hanged? For pulling down fences and leveling ditches? Or did they fall afoul of the Black Act?” The Black Act had introduced the death penalty for more than fifty new offenses, most of which entailed countrymen trying to exercise the ancient communal rights of which they’d been deprived.
“Oh, they did all that and more. But they were actually charged with high treason—conspiring with the French, of all things. Crazy, it was.”
Sebastian became aware of the plaintive cry of a curlew from somewhere out of sight down the hill. “You don’t believe they were guilty?”
“No. Never did. The man accused them of it was a spy planted by the government. Ask me, he made it all up out of whole cloth.”
“How many were hanged?”
“Four, with another half dozen transported to Botany Bay and the youngest lads forced into the army. You can imagine what it did to the families around here—losing so many of their able-bodied men and boys all at once.” He shook his head. “Wives, mothers, sisters, children, all left behind to fend for themselves, just when prices were rising and they’d lost all their old common rights. Was an ugly time, it was.”
“How many were gibbeted?”
“Just one. The poor bugger identified as their leader.”
“What was his name?”
“Dalyrimple. Alex Dalyrimple.”
“Oh, my Lord,” said Hero later, when Sebastian told her of his conversation with the steward. “Wasn’t that Jenny Dalyrimple’s husband?”
“Yes.” He found it interesting that Jenny had identified herself as Alex Dalyrimple’s wife, as if the man were still alive. She would have been just sixteen when the Crown made her a widow. Yet she’d never remarried, never forsaken her first love.
Sebastian said, “I’ve been thinking about the timing. Jamie Knox was thirty-six when he died, and he told me once he took the King’s shilling when he was sixteen.”
“In other words, in 1793.” Hero tilted her head to slip the wire of a pearl drop through one earlobe. She had now changed into a scoop-necked evening gown of velvet-trimmed midnight blue silk in preparation for their dinner with Lady Seaton and her guests, the Lucien Bonapartes. “You think that’s why Knox left Ayleswick and never came back?”