“How did he die?”
“Seaton? Fell off his horse drunk one night, riding home from the Blue Boar. Hit his head on the side of the bridge not too far from his gatehouse.” Lowe wrapped his hands around the back of his chair, his dark eyes narrowed, thoughtful. “It all happened long ago. Why are you bringing it up now?”
Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “Knox’s sister, Jenny, never remarried?”
“No. She had a boy, Nicholas, born just a few months after they hanged Alex. I think he’s what kept her going at first. But the lad died when he was still a wee tyke. And when he did, it was like any joy she had left in life just drained away. Those were hard years hereabouts. Right hard.”
“Hard and dangerous,” said Sebastian.
But Lowe simply shrugged one shoulder, as if for the villagers of Ayleswick the two were one and the same.
Chapter 41
After Devlin left, Hero hired the little mare again from Martin McBroom’s stables and rode out to Northcott’s home farm for her appointment with Samuel Atwater. She found the steward supervising the storing of a load of newly harvested grain in the ricks.
“Devlin tells me you’re a critic of the enclosure movement,” she said after her groom had taken the horse off and they turned to walk up the lane.
“That surprises you?” said Atwater.
She found herself smiling. “Actually, it does. I would think that as a steward, you’d be the first to criticize the ancient open-field system.”
The laugh lines beside his eyes deepened as he squinted into the distance. “Perhaps I’m simply getting old. I liked England the way it was when I was a lad. But we’ll never see those days again, will we? And it isn’t only the look of the land that’s changed, I’m afraid; the people have changed too. Time was, Englishmen were part of a community; they had a stake in the land they worked. But not anymore. The enclosures have changed our entire sense of who and what we are.”
“You must admit the old ways were wasteful,” said Hero.
“You mean, the three-course rotation system? Oh, aye; but that wasn’t the fault of the open-field system. Four-course rotation can work in an open field as easily as on a rich man’s enclosed estate.”
“Yet surely it’s easier to get one man to change his ways than to get fifty to agree to it?”
“Not if those fifty are educated. But then, that’s the last thing those pushing for enclosure want, now, isn’t it? Education makes men dangerous.”
It was a remarkably radical thing to say, and Hero found herself wondering if Samuel Atwater, like Alex Dalyrimple, had been a member of one of the Corresponding Societies that sprang up across England in the first days of the French Revolution.
“Those are the arguments used to justify enclosures,” he was saying. “But they make about as much sense as the argument that access to commons makes men too lazy to work for wages.” He gave a rough laugh. “I wonder how willing the likes of Malthus and Burke would be to spend sixteen hours working in a factory for a shilling a day.”
“Or down in a mine,” said Hero.
He threw her a quick, penetrating glance. “You’ve read Adam Smith?”
“I have, yes.”
“Smith claimed the best way to help the poor is by making the rich richer. And we’ve seen how well that’s worked, now, haven’t we? I suppose that’s why the population of America is swelling with all the families we’ve pushed off the land here. Those who lived long enough to make it there, at any rate.”
Hero watched the sun slip behind the oak trees lining the lane, leaving them in shadow. She said, “I’ve seen what’s left of the hamlet of Maplethorpe. It’s very sad.”
“You should have seen it back in ’ninety-five, when wages were falling as fast as prices were rising, and folk took to wearing shirts made of sackcloth and eating acorns. A lot of the little ones died—the little ones, and the old.” He took a breath that lifted his chest. “The thing is, you drive the cottagers and small farmers off the land, and most everyone else suffers too, don’t they? How’re the millers and thatchers, the carpenters and shoemakers, to feed their families if there’s no work for them? Only ones don’t suffer are the rich men in their big houses.”
“Yet George Irving is dead, and his big house a ruin.”
“Aye, that’s true enough.”
“I’m told you had a run-in some years ago with a group of men in blackface.”
“I did, yes. But they did me no harm. You’ll find no mantraps or spring guns on Northcott—not while I’m steward here, at any rate. It’s a sorry state of affairs when a rich man’s deer, hare, and pheasant are allowed to eat a poor man’s crops, and there’s nothing he can do about it without hanging.”
“Was Irving behind the hangings and transportations that took place in the parish twenty years ago?”