Love and Money (15 page)

“But isn't there a road I can take?” I asked, not altogether relishing the prospect of a quarry appearing suddenly beneath my feet.

“No,” said the landlord grimly. “No road.”

A few minutes later I stood by the bramble-grown remains of the Whin Head Mutual Spinning Mill. The project had clearly been as ambitious as the poster had led me to believe,
for the masses of tumbled masonry covered a quite extensive area of ground. Here and there broken portions of wall towered high above my head, and the smooth round chimney still retained the ten feet the landlord had indicated. The stonework struck me as remarkably solid, of sound workmanship, built to last. But what a site to choose! Preposterous! Miles from anywhere! The Whinburn flowing strongly by offered an admirable supply of water-power, no doubt, and the quarry provided the necessary building stone on the spot, but there was no trace of any roadway down which heavy spinning machinery or raw material could reach the mill. Indeed there was only one possible place for such a road. Crags stretched away on the left through the land marked on the plan as belonging to the executors of Thomas Thornton Archibald, Esquire; the quarry cut across the direct route from the mill to Delph Lane. Only on the right, on the Boocock land, did the ground slope in a reasonably gentle declivity from brow to stream. But this land lay beneath grass, an unbroken bright green.

I leaned against the pediment of the chimney and imagined the racking anxiety, the protracted disillusionment, the final agonising catastrophe, of the men whose money built the Whin Head Mutual Spinning Mill. Who were they? Of what nature and circumstance? Why
Mutual?
Not a common word for a textile enterprise in the 1860's, I thought. Why build here? What prevented the mill's completion?

In brief, my curiosity about the Whin Head Mutual Spinning Mill was strongly roused, and I could not rest till I had discovered its history. I tracked down its outward happenings, as I say, through newspapers and registers and directories, with a certain amount of oral tradition. But the cause, the motive, the emotion, which brought the mill enterprise crashing down in tragedy and broke so many hearts, remained obscure to me until this very year, when an item in a Corporation waterworks scheme cast on the whole affair a most lurid and poignant illumination.

Here is the story I uncovered.

It was in the late 1850's that young Dr. Thomas Thornton Archibald came to Whin Head.

Naturally his arrival caused a good deal of talk. It seemed strange that such a handsome, elegant, clever young man should wish to settle so far out of town, and there were not wanting sour persons who hinted that he had got himself into trouble in his previous practice—with a young woman, of course—and had left the southern county of his former abode because it was too hot to hold him. Others however, perhaps better informed, indignantly denied this and contended that the young doctor was in a sense a native of the West Riding; though
Archibald
of course was a fancy “foreign” name,
Thornton
proved his Yorkshire connections. His mother in fact, stated Dr. Archibald's Whin Head partisans, was one of the wealthy well-known Thorntons of High Roebuck, a village lying on a hilly spur between Whindale and Annotsfield, and Dr. Archibald had actually inherited from her both a considerable fortune and some land in Whindale. He certainly visited with the High Roebuck Thorntons, and on part of his own Whindale land he built himself a substantial Victorian house, halfway up the hillside on the left bank of the valley, almost opposite the Delph Inn which lay halfway up the hillside on the right bank. After all, more than a thousand persons lived in upper Whindale; they should afford plenty of work for a physician. Dr. Archibald himself, when asked bluntly in the Yorkshire way why he had come to Whindale, replied, colouring a little, that his mother, especially in her last illness, had always spoken to him of the West Riding where she had spent her youth with such affection that he had conceived a great desire to see the place. Now that he had seen Whindale he felt that he belonged to it and wanted to stay.

This was at first thought rather “south-country,” rather sentimental, more likely to be a cover for a less creditable reason than the truth; Whindale smiles were derisive and Whindale heads were shaken doubtfully. But as time went
on Dr. Archibald's devotion proved to be genuine. He gave liberally to Whindale charities, and was a regular and earnest attender at the Whindale church, where he soon was made Vicar's warden. He always came to a patient immediately he was summoned, and made no complaint however rough the road, inconvenient the time or inclement the weather. He remembered Whindale names and relationships when they were once explained to him, liked to watch local knurr and spell matches and attained a certain proficiency in the game about which he remained quietly modest. Moreover, though he kept a neat horse and trap to drive on professional visits when the lanes allowed, he was often to be seen in his leisure hours walking about the valley and the surrounding moors, and soon knew a great deal about the topography and traditions of the place—indeed it was rumoured he meant to write a book about it. In a word, Whindale slowly and cautiously began to like Dr. Archibald.

In appearance, as the photograph in the
Annotsfield Recorder
shows, the young doctor was tall and erect, with a graceful slender figure; his hair and whiskers were dark and curly; his eyes, large, brown and bright, had a remarkable expression of kindness and affection. His high forehead gave his face a look of noble seriousness, but his smile was exceedingly merry and pleasant. He walked with a springing, lively gait; his hands were long and slender and his touch was gentle. He had a particular tenderness for children, whose confidence he seemed able to win without making any of those artificial bids for their favour which are so nauseating. He could be stern on occasion, however, as his first visit to the Delph Inn was to show.

Rosa Boocock had summoned him there to see her husband Michael, who as all Whindale knew was rapidly drinking himself to death. When Archibald entered the inn that evening with his light quick step, three or four men, of whom Michael's cousin Eli was one, were drinking and smoking in the taproom, Rosa and an Irish maid she had, called Annie Callaghan, were behind the bar, and the Boo
cocks' child Susan, a mite of five or so, was clinging to her mother with her face buried in Rosa's skirts, and wailing on a high persistent whining note, very irritating to the ear. Silence fell as the doctor entered except for Susan, whose crying sounded even more shrill now it was not half-drowned by the noise of the men.

“I'm glad you've come, doctor,” said Rosa. She lifted the flap of the bar and came out to greet him, and Susan perforce • dragged after her, “He seems in a right fever. But whether he'll see you or not is more than I can say.”

“I must see him,” said Dr. Archibald, in his courteous gentlemanly tones, quiet but firm.

“Well, I'll go up and see,” said Rosa reluctantly. “Leave go, Susan!”

She turned towards the stairs, which ran straight up out of the taproom.

But just then Michael Boocock himself appeared at the top of the stairs. He was raging with drink and fever, his face flushed deep red and his black eyes rolling; a heavy, swarthy coarse-skinned man, in his nightshirt, which he had torn open at the neck, with his hairy legs and chest showing, he looked an ugly and frightening customer enough, and it was not surprising that Susan screamed at the sight of him.

“Will you keep that damned child quiet, Rosa!” shouted Michael. “How d'you think I can sleep through her everlasting bloody howling?”

Susan screamed again, and Michael, swaying on his feet, stumbled down a step or two and leaning over the wooden railing snatched up a bottle of gin from the bar and brandished it over Rosa's head. There was a gasp of horror from everybody present except Rosa, who threw up her head and glared defiantly at her husband. Then all in a moment Dr. Archibald sprang up the stairs and with the edge of his hand hit the side of the drunken man's wrist sharply. I suppose being a doctor he knew just the right spot to strike; at any rate Boocock's hand jerked upwards, the bottle flew up out of his hand in a wide curve and fell heavily, Dr. Archibald caught it in his left hand in mid-air and replaced it quietly
on the bar. It was done so neatly and skilfully, almost like some trick at a fair, that some of the men could hardly help giving a guffaw, and Michael himself burst out into wild laughter. But you can imagine that Rosa and Annie and little Susan stood gazing up at the young man as if he were an archangel. Dr. Archibald himself was not at all amused.

“Think shame to yourself, man,” he said sternly to Michael, “for frightening the child so. Go up to your bed at once if you value your life—you should never have left it.”

He did not attempt to touch the drunken man, nor did he spread his arms across the stairway to prevent him descending, either of which might have provoked Michael. He just stood there with one hand hanging by his side, the other resting lightly on the banister. Perhaps frightened by the doctor's reference to the serious nature of his illness, Michael after a pause turned and shambled away upstairs. Dr. Archibald followed him.

The doctor remained quite a while upstairs, and when he came down his face was serious.

“Is there anyone you can send across to Whin Grove for medicine this evening?” he said. “If not, I will return with it myself.”

Whin Grove was the name he had given to his new mansion, from a copse of trees which lay just below it on the hillside. A footpath led down through this copse, across a footbridge over the Whinburn and up over the crag to Delph Lane.

“Eli can send someone—or Annie Callaghan can fetch it,” said Rosa in an indifferent tone.

“Very good. Tonight, please. And now, little one, let us look at you,” said Dr. Archibald, lifting Susan up and seating her on the bar.

The child gaped at him. Considering what a handsome mother she had Susan was something of a disappointment. Rosa was a tall, strong, bosomy woman, with flashing dark eyes and a great deal of coarse dark hair and a rich carmine complexion; in his sober moments Michael was proud of her beauty and he had given her some big dangling earrings
with red glass in them, which suited her grandly. But poor little Susan—perhaps because of her father's intemperance— was a thin pale slip of a child, not exactly “wanting” as Whin Head folk say, but not very bright. At this time she had a nasty crusted spot on her cheek, and another of the same sort on one forearm—I imagine they were a kind of impetigo. Dr. Archibald turned her face gently to the light, and then took the flabby little arm in his hand and examined it. I don't suppose Susan Boocock had ever experienced so kind and delicate a touch before; she gave one last sob and was silent.

“She's very fretful, doctor,” said Rosa.

“It's no wonder. These spots are very irritable and uncomfortable,” said Dr. Archibald. “They need a soothing antiseptic application. Miss Callaghan is beginning to suffer from them too, I see. I'll send you a couple of boxes of ointment. Please see that they both apply it regularly.”

At being mentioned like this and called Miss Callaghan in the doctor's courteous tones, Annie blushed, as she was apt to do, being young and modest. Although she was Ulster Irish and Whin Head people are usually suspicious of strangers, she was well liked and to some extent pitied, for her situation at the Delph Inn cannot have been easy between Rosa's temper and Michael's drunken fits. Indeed no local girl would stay long at the Delph, and no doubt that was why Eli Boocock had brought Annie over from Ireland to be maid to his cousin's wife. Eli was a cattle dealer and went over to Ireland regularly from Liverpool, returning with cattle which he drove across Lancashire and rested at Whin Head, before selling to butchers in the West Riding. It was understood that Annie was the youngest of one of those enormous poverty-stricken starving Irish families of that time who eked out a wretched existence on potatoes. Her picture—where I saw it I will tell you later—shows her all the same as a very sweet, kind, tranquil young girl with a beautiful budding young figure, a pure delicate profile, fine large hazel eyes, light brown hair and a very fair complexion. She was very good always to poor Susan, feeding her and nursing her and comforting her when she cried, and this was
doubtless how she had caught the infection from the little girl's skin. She took the child up in her arms now and went away into the back parts of the house with her at Rosa's command, glad to escape from notice.

Everyone in Whin Head began to think a good deal of Dr. Archibald after this Delph Inn incident, and it was from this time that they began to call him Dr. Tom. It was not only his courage in facing a man mad with drink and his neat trick with the bottle, though they admired both. Whin Head folk have plenty of sense and they respected a young doctor who in a mere moment, and while he appeared to be completely engaged with Michael, had seen what was wrong with little Susan and Annie, and decided how to cure them. For cure them he did. Annie's wild-rose cheek was soon free of blemish, and though Susan was never either a pretty or a healthy child, at least her skin cleared. It is possible too that Rosa, though never a very fond mother, paid the child more attention now that the doctor showed such interest in her.

Michael Boocock, however, was beyond curing because he was beyond obeying the doctor's instructions. Dr. Tom brought him round that time and once or twice again, and after each cure kept him off the drink for some months by a mixture of stern measures and personal influence. But in spite of all his efforts Michael each time relapsed, sinking deeper each time into alcoholism, and at last died a year or so after Dr. Tom's first coming to the district.

There were those in Whindale who said in the next year or two that Dr. Tom and the widow Rosa Boocock might make a match of it, but others were equally firm that he wouldn't dream of so demeaning himself. Some pointed to Rosa's very great beauty, which before she married had driven men wild about her, and seemed greater than ever now that Michael was gone and she had more time to care for herself. But others said that a young man with a fortune of his own, who had been to Cambridge University and was related to the Thorntons of High Roebuck, would not ally himself to an innkeeper—Rosa having taken on the Delph
licence. Certainly Dr. Tom visited at the Delph regularly— but then Susan, poor mite, was always ailing and in need of him. Dr. Tom never drank at the Delph Inn—but then he never drank anywhere, being a strong temperance man, almost a teetotaller.