The Adventures of Tom Leigh Read online

“Where are you? In Barseland poorhouse, to be sure. Where did you think you were?”

  “Poorhouse?” I exclaimed in horror. “What am I doing in a poorhouse? What will my father say? I must leave at once.”

  “Now, don’t fret yourself, love,” said the fat woman, pressing her hand kindly on my shoulder. “It’s no use leaving here till tha’s somewhere else to go, tha knows.”

  “Where is my father?”

  “Well—he’s not in Barseland, and that’s a fact.”

  “Where is Barseland? Is it near Halifax?”

  “Aye, it is.”

  “Then I’ll go to Halifax. My father will be there.”

  The fat woman stepped to the door, and called out: “Mr. Gledhill! Mr. Gledhill!”

  After a moment a tall thin serious-looking man with a very long face and grey hair came into the room.

  “This is Mr. Gledhill, the Barseland Constable and Overseer of the Poor,” said the fat woman to me. “So answer him as straight as you can. He’s asking for his father,” she said to Mr. Gledhill.

  Mr. Gledhill looked graver than ever.

  “What is your name, my boy?”

  “Thomas Leigh. Most people call me Tom.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You were with your father, were you? What were you doing down Mearclough on such a wild stormy night? Where had you come from? Where were you going to? Those are a lot of questions; take your time and answer as fully as you can.”

  I told him all about our home at Lavenham, and why we had come to Yorkshire, and how we had lost ourselves, and the scene at the inn, and the voice that had sent my father stumbling down the bank—at this he and the fat woman exchanged looks of disbelief, which vexed me. But on the whole he seemed pleased, I thought, with my account.

  “Your father had a trade, then?”

  “Of course! He’s a weaver. A very good weaver.”

  “Not a vagrant, then,” said the fat woman.

  “Seems not,” said Mr. Gledhill.

  “What is a vagrant?” I asked.

  “Somebody who wanders about the country without money—a man with no trade—a beggar.”

  “How dare you say my father is a beggar!” I shouted angrily.

  “We just said he wasn’t, love,” said the fat woman. “Since he had a trade.”

  “He has a trade and he has money,” I cried. “He has five guineas in gold and a handful of silver—well, nearly a handful,” I corrected myself, remembering my father paying for our meat and drink at the Fleece. “I’ll go to Halifax and find him, and then he’ll explain it all to you.”

  “Listen, lad,” said Mr. Gledhill. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, my boy, but it must be done. You’ve lost your father, Tom. He broke his neck when he fell into the stream. He fell on the rocks, you know.”

  “Do you mean he’s—dead?”

  “Dead and buried,” said the fat woman.

  At this I fell into a kind of violent stormy shouting and weeping and beating my hands against the coverlet. The fat woman threw up her hands and left, but Mr. Gledhill drew up a chair and sat through it all in solemn silence. When from sheer exhaustion I quietened at last, he began to question me as to my family in Lavenham. But I had no blood kin living anywhere, and so I told him. He stroked his chin thoughtfully.

  “We shall have to send you back to Lavenham, Tom,” he said. “You don’t belong to Barseland, you’ve no settlement here, you see. We can’t pay out Barseland rate money for a Lavenham pauper.”

  “I am not a pauper,” I said indignantly. “My father had money with him. Surely that money is now mine?”

  “Aye, it is. Or it would be if we could find it,” said Mr. Gledhill. “Your father had no money on him when we found him. I examined him myself, Tom. There was no money.”

  “It was in a bag in an inner pocket of his jacket.”

  “There was no money, Tom.”

  “Then somebody stole it,” I cried.

  “Are you accusing me?” said Mr. Gledhill coldly.

  “No, no. But the money was there.”

  “We found no money, we entered him in our records as a vagrant. At present you are a pauper and must stay in this poorhouse until you can be sent back to Lavenham. You are under the orders of Mrs. Hollas, whom you have seen, and her husband, who is the Master of this poorhouse. They will set you to work as soon as you are able. I hope you soon will be able, for we have kept you for a fortnight already.”

  “A fortnight?” said I, staggered.

  “Aye, a fortnight. You have been ill of a fever. What with lying out all night in Barseland stream, with rain and wind beating on you, and the bang on your head, perhaps it is no wonder,” said Mr. Gledhill.

  His voice, which had turned so cold when I said my father’s money had been stolen, seemed now to warm again, and I took courage.

  “Mr. Gledhill, I accuse nobody, believe me I accuse nobody, but my father had money, just as I told you, it was in a calfskin bag. Maybe the bag fell into the pool? Please have a search made for it. Please, Mr. Gledhill!”

  “Well—when the pool has dried a little in this fine weather, I will have it dragged. Meanwhile, you had best keep quiet about the money, Tom. If money has really been stolen from a dead man, it will be a bad lookout for Barseland. Happen the bag fell into the pool. Let us hope so. If, indeed, there was a bag at all.”

  “My father had a leather bag with five golden guineas in it,” said I firmly.

  Mr. Gledhill’s face twitched with annoyance, and he rose and made to quit the room. At the door, however, he paused, and turned to me, saying:

  “Try not to grieve, Tom. When you are recovered—” he hesitated—“when you are recovered I will take you to see your father’s grave.”

  He went out. So there I was, of all boys, I thought, the most wretched. Fatherless, destitute, a pauper in a poorhouse in a strange land. I felt so lonely, so helpless, so desolate, that it was all I could do not to throw myself face down on my pillows and cry like a girl.

  Since that time I have heard bad accounts of many poorhouses; how the inmates were ill fed and ill clothed, slept in dirty beds and were employed continually on hard exacting tasks. But except for the tasks, I did not find life too hard at the Barseland poorhouse. Mrs. Hollas, though bustling and rough in her manner and somewhat coarse in her speech, was kind at heart. Her husband I did not like so well. A thin wiry little man with red eyebrows, a very pale hollow face and strong freckles, he was mean in disposition, and I thought would have cheated Barseland and us if he had been able. But Mr. Gledhill in his quiet dour way delved into all the expenditure very closely and often. Before one of his visits Mr. Hollas was always in a bad temper, and took it out on the inmates, cuffing the younger and shouting at the older amongst us. Indeed he was too much given at all times to cuffing heads, boxing ears and hitting our wrists with his bunch of keys; we were always happiest in the poorhouse when he was away on one of his expeditions into the north of the county to buy provisions. It seemed that further north in Yorkshire there was more fertile land than in our part of the West Riding, and Mr. Hollas had a cousin who lived up that way, in Skipton, and from him he bought cheese and sides of mutton for our benefit. At cheap rates, he said, and certainly I never heard Mr. Gledhill grumble overmuch about these prices when he and Mr. Hollas went into the barn together to check the purchases. Mr. Hollas was always agitated and fidgety as he unlocked the door, Mr. Gledhill very slow and quiet, with long bills in his hand.

  Partly, therefore, owing to this useful cousin of Mr. Hollas, but more, I thought, to the watchfulness of Mr. Gledhill, our food, though neither ample nor varied, was sufficient; the cheese and oatmeal porridge and milk were plentiful, the meat, though not plentiful, was enough to give us all a small slice a day, and as the days went on I grew used to eating oatcake. At first these thin spongy ovals which were hung up on strings above the fire to dry filled me with dislike, but I soon found that when they were crisp
their sharp taste and crackle were not disagreeable.

  The poorhouse was kept clean, and we were given the chance to wash our linen. Though as regards clothes I was in evil case; our bundles had vanished with my father’s money, so I had but one shirt, my shoes had dried out of shape and split, and my breeches were so torn and stained by my adventure in Barseland stream that I was ashamed to be seen in them.

  There were only nine of us at that time in the poorhouse, five very old people, three young children and myself. Thus I had no one of my own age to talk to, and this increased my feeling of being alone. However, I had not much time to think of this, for from morning till night I was busy with the tasks set me by Mr. and Mrs. Hollas. I ran errands in the sparse, bleak, hillside village of Barseland, I washed floors and dishes, I peeled potatoes, turned the meat on the spit, chopped wood, cracked coal, harnessed the horse, Dobbin, in the cart for Mr. Hollas to go to Skipton, unloaded the sides of mutton he brought back.

  One day when Mr. Gledhill came I was scrubbing the floor of the porch. He seemed vexed, and calling Mr. Hollas told him sharply that he should be teaching me a trade.

  “Let Lavenham teach him a trade,” growled Hollas. “I have no time.”

  “When shall I go back to Lavenham, sir?” I asked.

  “Tom, I have bad news for you, I fear,” said Mr. Gledhill. “I have come to tell you that Lavenham will not accept you. They say your father gave up his settlement there. They say Halifax should take you and pay.”

  “And will Halifax do so?”

  “I shall not even ask them,” said Mr. Gledhill grimly. “We must apprentice you to some master here, a clothier or a collier. Your father was a weaver, you say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know aught of his trade?”

  “My father taught me to card and spin as a child,” I answered proudly, “and I have been learning to throw the shuttle on the loom for two years now.”

  “It had best be a clothier, then,” said Mr. Gledhill. He looked me up and down distastefully, and said to Mr. Hollas: “We must find some better clothes for him before I take him to Sir Henry. If he’s in rags nobody’ll want him.”

  Mr. Hollas growled and grumbled. “We’ve no breeches here for a lad his size,” he said.

  “He’s a gradely lad all t’same,” said Mr. Gledhill, giving me a solemn smile. “I’ll see if I can beg some breeches and a shirt or two for him in the village. His jacket’s not too bad.”

  I hardly knew what to feel when Mr. Gledhill had left me. To leave the poorhouse would be a joy, a renewal of hope; but to wear clothes that had been begged for me was to be a pauper indeed. The worst thing of all was that saying nobody’ll want him. It struck me hard that nobody in the wide world wanted me; from being the chief point of my father’s life I had become a useless, unnecessary thing, a nuisance, something to be thrown away. This was hard to stomach.

  Presently there came a day when Hollas told me Mr. Gledhill would fetch me next morning to go before the magistrate. Sir Henry Norton, he told me, was the Justice of the Peace for these parts; a widower he was, with one son. I rose early and washed myself all over and combed my hair and tidied my dress as well as I could, for though my heart was in my shoes I was too proud to show it. While I was at my porridge, Mrs. Hollas—Mr. Hollas had set off on one of his excursions—called me to come to Mr. Gledhill. She was laughing and nodding and nudging me in the ribs, so I saw she meant there was some good news, but Mrs. Hollas’s notion of good news would not be mine, I thought, so I went in quietly. But the news was really good, for there on the table lay some new clothes: a narrow grey cloth coat and a pair of breeches of the same stuff, a clean shirt, a blue-coloured neckerchief, a pair of grey knitted stockings and some strong wooden clogs.

  “These are for you, Tom Leigh,” said Mr. Gledhill with one of his solemn smiles.

  Suddenly, seeing them lying there, I felt how greatly I had hated slouching about in my stained rags, and I could hardly find my voice to speak my gratitude.

  “Is it you I have to thank, sir, or Barseland rates?” I said in a stifled tone.

  “Neither, Tom. The men who were at the Fleece Inn when you and your father called there that night have had a whip round to fit you out. It seems they feel themselves to blame that they didn’t come out and set you on the right road.”

  “They were to blame!” I cried, but I stopped short, remembering the rain and how we were strangers. “But I thank them very heartily, all the same.”

  I dressed myself in my new clothes, with my shirt collar out over my jacket, and tied the blue neckerchief round my throat, and set off along the road beside Mr. Gledhill, to Sir Henry Norton’s mansion. This was a very large old house, with fine tall chimneys and gables, and a double row of mullioned windows in the centre. The house was of stone, as all West Riding houses seem to be, and there was no moat round it, such as you often see round such houses in Suffolk. But then, the hills in the West Riding are so steep and frequent—everything seems to be built halfway up a hill—that you do not have to dig moats to drain off the water; the rain pours down the hillsides in hundreds of streams, as well I knew.

  “Wait here till you are fetched,” said Mr. Gledhill, going into the house by the back door.

  There was a kind of paved courtyard where I stood, and presently a groom brought out a lively little horse, ready saddled, and led him to the mounting block, and then a boy about my own age, very fair in complexion, with big grey eyes, and handsomely dressed in a black riding suit with well polished boots, came out of the house and made to mount.

  “You are late, Robert!” he cried to the groom, laughing. “Now that I have a watch I shall expect you always on the hour.”

  He drew out of his fob pocket a watch and showed it to the groom, and they both laughed.

  “I shall remember, Master Harry,” said the groom.

  It was such a pleasure to me to see a boy of my own age that I could not help drawing near to observe them, and suddenly I sprang forward and shouted:

  “That is my father’s watch!”

  “What do you mean?” said Harry, his fair face crimsoning.

  “Give it to me!” I jumped forward and tried to snatch the watch from Harry’s hand, but the groom put out his arm between us.

  “That is my father’s watch!” I panted. “My father was murdered and his watch stolen!” (I had never used this word murdered to myself before about my father’s death, but now I was sure it had been so.)

  “My father gave me this watch!” shouted Harry, jumping down and pushing the groom aside. “Are you calling my father a thief?”

  “Somebody was a thief!” I cried.

  I was about to explain how my father had been drowned when Harry hit me hard under the chin. Taken by surprise, I was felled to the ground. But I had been in fights before, at Lavenham; as Harry came for me I rolled aside, and got to my feet, and sprang at him and hit him hard in the face; he staggered back, for he was hampered by his hold on the watch, and we grappled and both fell to the ground together and rolled about, struggling to get free and strike each other. The horse danced in alarm, its hoofs clattering on the paving stones, and the groom yelled and we shouted at each other, and altogether there was a great noise and Sir Henry and Mr. Gledhill and two other gentlemen and a serving-man ran out of the house to us. The serving-man and Mr. Gledhill pulled Harry and me to our feet and parted us and we stood there rather hangdog, both our noses bleeding and our hair tousled and some buttons off. Mr. Gledhill dabbed at my nose with his handkerchief, for which I was grateful though I knew he was thinking only of my new shirt’s safety.

  “For shame, boys! What are you about? Harry, you should know better! Gledhill, I thought you said Tom Leigh was a quiet lad of peaceable disposition?”

  “Disgraceful!” said Gledhill, giving me a shake.

  “Nay, hold hard. Wait a minute,” said Sir Henry. “Let us get to the root of this. Who was the first to strike?”

  “Me,” said Harr
y gruffly. “He said you were a thief, Father.”

  As sometimes happens when two boys who have been fighting are scolded by grown men, we began at once to feel more kindly to each other than to our elders.

  “I did not mean to say you were a thief, Sir Henry,” I said quickly. “Only this watch is my father’s watch, it was given as a reward to my great-grandfather; my father had it in his pocket when he was killed in the stream. It does not go.”

  “Has he spoken of the watch before?” said Sir Henry to Mr. Gledhill.

  “No, Sir Henry. Only of his father’s guineas.”

  “Why have you not spoken of it before, boy?”

  “I never thought of it,” said I miserably.

  “My boy,” said Sir Henry, not unkindly, “I bought this watch a week ago in Bradford market. It is going well.”

  “It is my father’s watch!” I cried, scarlet with rage and shame. A sudden thought struck me. “I can tell you what is engraved on it, inside.”

  “Give me the watch, Harry,” said Sir Henry quietly. His son passed it over, still in its tortoise-shell cover. “Did you show the watch to Tom?”

  “No, sir. He couldn’t have seen it close, sir,” said Harry with a sniff.

  Sir Henry turned aside and drew out the watch, unseen by all.

  “Well, boy?” he said.

  “It has the letters T.L. and the date December 16th 1660,” said I triumphantly.

  “I do not like this, Gledhill,” said Sir Henry at last, turning round. “The inscription is as the lad says. Yet I bought the watch in Bradford market last Thursday. Has anyone from Barseland township journeyed to Bradford lately, do you know?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” said Mr. Gledhill, shaking his head.

  “Well, I will enquire of the man who sold it to me, though I have known him long and he is reputable enough. Meanwhile, Harry, I fear I must take your watch from you lest it should be damaged and then prove to be not lawfully yours. I will keep it safely, Tom Leigh, until this doubt be cleared. Now, come all within, and let us finish this business of the apprenticeship. You two boys, shake hands, your enmity was founded on a mistake.”