Dark Waters (44 page)

‘Willingly,' she cried. ‘How shall we feast?'

‘On roast chicken,' he replied.

Watching the farmer and the vixen go in together, Mr Scarecrow began to lament.

‘Alas, that we cannot eat roast chicken, like the farmer and the vixen,' he cried.

‘No,' said his wife. ‘The price of chicken is too high. We are better off as we are.'

Background Note

1. POLITICS

B
Y
1741
THE
terms Whig and Tory, which had once stood mainly for attitudes of mind, had begun to define parliamentary parties. Whigs, who governed the country for most of the eighteenth century, were modern, metropolitan and supportive of the Protestant settlement of 1688, and of the later Hanoverian succession to the throne. The Tories were country-minded and conservative, often with a nostalgic affection for the ousted Stuarts.

The country was ruled by a coalition of the King (the second of four successive German Georges), his ministers and Parliament. In the 1730s the most powerful figure was Robert Walpole, the first British ‘Prime Minister'. Walpole had an unrivalled ability to manage George II, while maintaining a majority of Whig MPs to vote with him. He carefully kept out of foreign wars and, though there is some truth in his enemies' charge that this only provided more money for filling his own and his cronies' pockets, the policy was genuinely beneficial to trade (including, it must be admitted, the slave trade).

By the 1741 election Walpole was losing his grip. The bribing of MPs with sinecures infuriated the public, as did taxation (too high and on the wrong things), the size of the army (too large), the cost of defending German territories (not our business), and attacks on British shipping by the Spaniards. Meanwhile the Pretender, James Edward Stuart, still claimed the throne from faraway Rome. The Jacobites had been in long-term decline, yet some felt that this government's unpopularity had revived them, especially in country areas.

In about 1740 a new group of dissident Whigs grouped around the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Lord Bolingbroke wrote them a manifesto, entitled
The Patriot King,
for a new kind of monarch, like King Alfred the Great, who would unite the country under the supposedly fundamental principles of English government: common law, ancient rights and economic, military and naval security. All these ideas were encoded in the masque
Alfred,
and in its rousing hit tune, ‘Rule Britannia!', which was first seen privately by the thirty-three-year-old Frederick and his friends at Cliveden House in the summer of 1740. The Earl of Derby's son, Lord Strange, who in my story mounts the play in Preston on the eve of polling, was one of the prince's friends, and had probably been present at that original performance.

The general election of May 1741 went badly for Walpole. Although there were only 94 contests (two at Preston) for 558 seats, his support in the new House of Commons shrank drastically. By February 1742, after deaths and further defections, his majority had disappeared, and he resigned.

2. MONEY

Readers may wonder about the system of money in Cragg and Fidelis's time. The smallest single unit of account was the farthing and the largest was the guinea. Values rose as follows: 4f. (farthings) = 1d. (penny); 12d. = 1s. (shilling); 20s. = £1 (pound). A crown was 5s. and a guinea 21s. Other common coins were the halfpenny, sixpence and half-crown.

The value of money is hard to express in modern terms. A boy could get 1½d. for an hour's wood-chopping. A labourer earned between 10d. and 1s.3d. for a day's work, while live-in servants earned £3.10s. to £5 a year, on top of their board and lodging. A shopkeeper might live on annual profits of about £30–50, also the sort of money earned by a craftsman in a high-value trade. A middle-class family would be quite comfortably off on £350, while anyone with £500 or more was regarded as rich. Government sinecures could draw £2,000 or more, out of which underlings were paid to do the work, if any was involved. A very small handful of super-rich landowners had incomes in excess of £25,000.

Here are a few prices I have picked up from various sources:

½d. – a pint of milk or half a loaf of bread

1d. – a day's fee for a child at a dame school or charity school

3d. – postage on a one-page letter going 80 miles, paid by recipient

5d. – 1lb (500g) of butter or cheese

6d. – dinner of cold meat, bread and a pint of porter beer

6d. to 1s. – a pamphlet or paper-covered book for popular reading

1s. – a music lesson

1s.6d. – to dry-clean a coat

2/6 – 1lb of candles

4/6 – petticoat for a working woman

4/9 upwards – 1lb coffee depending on quality

5/7 – worsted stockings

6/6 – bridle for riding horse

7/6 – 1lb cheap tea or a new novel by Samuel Richardson

10/6 to £1.15s. – men's wigs

16s. – silk stockings

£4 to £15 – a riding horse depending on age and condition

5gn. – a silver watch or half-length portrait by provincial artist

£22 – a year's rent for a single man's small apartment in London

£77.6s. – a new four-wheel coach

£350 – freehold on a house in Soho, London

£20,000 – lottery prize in 1769

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

DARK WATERS
. Copyright © 2012 by Robin Blake. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blake, Robin, 1948–

Dark waters / Robin Blake.—1st U.S. ed.

   p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-00673-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-03148-8 (e-book)

1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Coroners—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—History—1714–1837—Fiction. 4. Preston (Lancashire, England)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6102.L347D39 2013

823'.92—dc23

2013010682

First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

First U.S. Edition: August 2013

eISBN 9781250031488

First eBook edition: July 2013