Chris Nickson - Cold Cruel Winter

Jesus, he thought, he’d believed them when they called this a road. It was no more than a track winding up the side of the valley to the rock edge above, barely wide enough for a cart, the ruts frozen and slippery as man’s sin. His boots, thin enough already after the walk from Liverpool, could feel every hard, awkward step, and his breath plumed abruptly around his mouth. With a short sigh he drew the coat around himself, even though it wouldn’t keep him any warmer in this raw winter cold, and hitched the pack high on his back.

In every manner it was a long way from the Indies. There the heat had prickled his skin every day and his sleeves had been sodden from wiping the sweat out of his eyes. For a moment he almost longed for that again. But then the ache from the scars on his back stopped his mind from playing him false. That was the true memory of those years, along with the screams of men in the wild delirium of yellow fever before they died. Freeborn, convict, soldier or slave, few came back from the Indies.

He paused, looking back down at Hathersage, watching the smoke from a few chimneys rising dark and skimming across the air. A mile or two further, he’d been told, and he’d find the marker for the Sheffield road. Less than a week and he’d be back in Leeds, if he didn’t freeze his bollocks off on this God-forsaken moor first.

But he knew that wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen, he wouldn’t allow it. He had business in the city, and he’d come too far and staked too much not to manage the last few miles. His feet trudged on, calves burning as he kept climbing the hill, sliding sometimes on the ice. Frigid slurries of wind, a few carrying flecks of snow that were as cold as a whore’s heart, battered against his face. Six months before, his skin had been burned dark by the sun. Now some of that colour was gone, washed away first by the long sea journey, then another two weeks of Shanks’s mare that had brought him here as winter still held the land tight into February, and drifts rose high against the dry stone walls. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a puddle as he left the village, hair grey and lank under a cap, face pinched thin, his body hunched and spindle legs in patched breeches and torn hose. An ugly sight, he conceded wryly, but none would recognize him and his situation would improve.

At least he had a small purse in his pocket now, courtesy of a traveller over Winnats Pass who’d not be found until spring, and by then the animals would have picked him clean. No one would know who he was or that a slash across the throat had killed him. But it served the bugger right for befriending a stranger on the road.

So he’d afforded an inn in Hathersage last night, dozing on a bench at the George and letting the warm embers of the fire dry his boots and ease through to his bones. For the first time since setting out he’d felt some peace in his rest. At daybreak, with a heel of bread and a mug of small beer in his belly, he’d set out. The journey would take him close to the village where he’d been a boy, but he was damned if he’d ever go back there.

Another few days and his life could begin again. After eight years, life would begin again.

The road felt hard as iron, and Richard Nottingham guided the horse carefully, avoiding patches of ice that glittered softly in a weak afternoon sun. He hated riding at the best of times, but in the bleak days of winter every mile seemed gruelling. At least he was almost home; the welcoming smoke from the chimneys of Leeds rose tantalisingly just beyond the horizon. He’d be back in his house at the dying of the day, aching and exhausted.

He’d ridden to York yesterday and given his evidence at the Assizes this morning, before staying to joylessly hear the verdict of murder on a man who’d killed his wife and children rather than watch them starve. As Constable of the City of Leeds he’d made the journey many times over the years, and sat and spoken in the grand courtroom at the castle, dressed in his good periwig and best coat. Often he’d enjoyed the trips; he stayed at the Olde Starre off Stonegate, where they said the cries of men treated there for injuries during the Civil War could still be heard at night. Not that he’d ever heard them in the evenings of conversation and drinking with other travellers.

This time, though, he simply wanted to be by his own hearth, to try to shore up the world that had collapsed around him four weeks before.

It had begun early in December, when gales swept viciously from the north to batter the city, followed by the endless snow and brutal cold that stayed, day after day, week after week, until they seemed like facts of life.

At first it had been the old and the weak who died, many frozen in their unheated cellars, others, always teetering on the edge of life, fading quickly from hunger. Throughout Advent, then Christmas, the lists of the dead rose. By the middle of January 1732, with ice still thick on the streets, death was everywhere, a plague made of winter. The ground was too hard for burials, and corpses were lodged in every cool place, a village of bodies lurking in the darkness as the toll rose higher.

No one was immune. Every family, it seemed, fell prey to the unrelenting weather, although the rich, insulated by thick walls, warmth, and money, suffered less than most as they always had. And always would, he thought grimly.

Then in early February, just as the days grew longer and people began to raise their hearts and hope towards spring, Nottingham’s older daughter, Rose, barely twenty and married just the autumn before, began to cough and run a fever.

Her husband spent every possible hour at her bedside. Her mother nursed her with the old medicines, and the Constable rousted the apothecary away from the homes of the wealthy to tend to her, but try as they might, there was no heat or medicine that could touch the girl’s body or soul. All they could do was watch helplessly, hopelessly, and pray as the flesh slipped quickly from her bones. She vomited up the broth they fed her, and her pains grew stronger and her breathing shallower until the end almost seemed like a release. All it took was a single, shocking week to turn her from a healthy young wife into a wraith.

Nottingham used his position to have her buried when the earth thawed briefly at the end of month, the service conducted by a curate while the vicar stayed close to his roaring hearth. Just a day after he’d thrown a sod on the coffin and stayed to see the earth mounded on the girl whose childish glee still rattled in his head, the freeze returned. Since the funeral the Constable had barely slept. Even in the bare, brief hours he managed, the dreams that came pulled at his heart like a chain of beggars.

At home, he and Mary, his wife, moved as if there was a fog between them that neither could penetrate. They still talked about the everyday things, but the topic of Rose lay off to the side, pushed away behind a fence, never mentioned but always on the edge of view. They lay in bed side by side, and he knew full well that hours would pass before her breathing subsided into the uneven rhythms of a grieving sleep. Sometimes his fingers would start to reach across the sheet for her hand, but he always stopped short of touching her skin. What could either of them say that would help? In this world, simply living past childhood was an achievement. If God had robbed them of their joy, it was nothing more than He’d done to thousands of others. Every toll of the corpses he’d filled out since December bore testament to that.

Emily, their younger daughter — their only daughter now — had lost her wilful ways with her sister’s death. She’d become eerily quiet and obedient, and even more withdrawn, as if Rose’s passing had also killed a spark in her. Her eyes, once so bold and lively, had become dull and lost. Where she’d loved to read, losing herself for hours in a book, now she’d close a volume after a few minutes and gaze emptily. At what he could only guess.