Mehalah (Gothic Classic). Baring-Gould Sabine
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said, but certain it was, that the taverns found no difficulty in obtaining their supplies as often and as abundant as they desired.
The villages of Virley and Salcot were the chief landing-places, and there horses and donkeys were kept in large numbers for the conveyance of the spirits, wine, tobacco and silk to Tiptree Heath, the scene of Boadicaea's great battle with the legions of Suetonius, which was the emporium of the trade. There a constant fair or auction of contraband articles went on, and thence they were distributed to Maldon, Colchester, Chelmsford, and even London. Tiptree Heath was a permanent camping ground of gipsies, and squatters ran up there rude hovels; these were all engaged in the distribution of the goods brought from the sea.
But though the taverns were able to supply themselves with illicit spirits, unchecked, the coastguard were ready to arrest and detain run goods not destined for their cellars. Deeds of violence were not rare, and many a revenue officer fell a victim to his zeal. On Sunken Island off Mersea, the story went, that a whole boat's crew were found with their throats cut; they were transported thence to the churchyard, there buried, and their boat turned keel upwards over them.
The gipsies were thought to pursue over-conscientious and successful officers on the mainland, and remove them with a bullet should they escape the smugglers on the water.
The whole population of this region was more or less mixed up with, and interested in, this illicit traffic, and with defiance of the officers of the law, from the parson who allowed his nag and cart to be taken from his stable at night, left unbolted for the purpose, and received a keg now and then as repayment, to the vagabonds who dealt at the door far inland in silks and tobacco obtained free of duty on the coast.
What was rare elsewhere was by no means uncommon here, gipsies intermarried with the people, and settled on the coast. The life of adventure, danger, and impermanence was sufficiently attractive to them to induce them to abandon for it their roving habits; perhaps the difference of life was not so marked as to make the change distasteful. Thus a strain of wild, restless, law-defying gipsy blood entered the veins of the Essex marshland populations, and galvanised into new life the sluggish and slimy liquid that trickled through the East Saxon arteries. Adventurers from the Low Countries, from France, even from Italy and Spain—originally smugglers, settled on the coast, generally as publicans, in league with the owners of the contraband vessels, married and left issue. There were neither landed gentry nor resident incumbents in this district, to civilise and restrain. The land was held by yeomen farmers, and by squatters who had seized on and enclosed waste land, no man saying them nay. At the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a large number of Huguenot French families had settled in the 'Hundreds' and the marshes, and for full a century in several of the churches divine service was performed alternately in French and English. To the energy of these colonists perhaps are due the long-extended sea-walls enclosing vast tracts of pasture from the tide.
Those Huguenots not only infused their Gallic blood into the veins of the people, but also their Puritanic bitterness and Calvinistic partiality for Old Testament names. Thus the most frequent Christian names met with are those of patriarchs, prophets and Judaic kings, and the sire-names are foreign, often greatly corrupted.
Yet, in spite of this infusion of strange ichor from all sides, the agricultural peasant on the land remains unaltered, stamped out of the old unleavened dough of Saxon stolidity, forming a class apart from that of the farmers and that of the seamen, in intelligence, temperament, and gravitation. All he has derived from the French element which has washed about him has been a nasal twang in his pronunciation of English. Yet his dogged adherence to one letter, which was jeopardised by the Gallic invasion, has reacted, and imposed on the invaders, and the v is universally replaced on the Essex coast by a w.
In the plaster and oak cottages away from the sea, by stagnant pools, the hatching places of clouds of mosquitos, whence rises with the night the haunting spirit of tertian ague, the hag that rides on, and takes the life out of the sturdiest men and women, and shakes and wastes the vital nerves of the children, live the old East Saxon slow moving, never thinking, day labourers. In the tarred wreck-timber cabins by the sea just above the reach of the tide, beside the shingle beach, swarms a yeasty, turbulent, race of mixed-breeds, engaged in the fishery and in the contraband trade.
Mehalah went to the boat. It was floating. She placed the lanthorn in the bows, cast loose, and began to row. She would need the light on her return, perhaps, as with the falling tide she would be unable to reach the landing-place under the farmhouse, and be forced to anchor at the end of the island, and walk home across the saltings. To cross these without a light on a dark night is not safe even to one knowing the lie of the land.
A little light still lingered in the sky. There was a yellow grey glow in the west over the Bradwell shore. Its fringe of trees, and old barn chapel standing across the walls of the buried city Othona, stood sombre against the light, as though dabbed in pitch on a faded golden ground. The water was still, as no wind was blowing, and it reflected the sky and the stars that stole out, with such distinctness that the boat seemed to be swimming in the sky, among black tatters of clouds, these being the streaks of land that broke the horizon and the reflection.
Gulls were screaming, and curlew uttered their mournful cry. Mehalah rowed swiftly down the Rhyn, as the channel was called that divided the Ray from the mainland, and that led to the 'hard' by the Rose inn, and formed the highway by which it drew its supplies, and from which every farm in the parish of Peldon carried its casks of strong liquor. To the west extended a vast marsh from which the tide was excluded by a dyke many miles in length. Against the northern horizon rose the hill of Wigborough crowned by a church and a great tumulus, and some trees that served as landmarks to the vessels entering the Blackwater. In ancient days the hill had been a beacon station, and it was reconverted to this purpose in time of war. A man was placed by order of Government in the tower, to light a crescet on the summit, in answer to a similar beacon at Mersea, in the event of a hostile fleet being seen in the offing.
Now and then the boat—it was a flat-bottomed punt—hissed among the asters, as Mehalah shot over tracts usually dry, but now submerged; she skirted next a bed of bulrushes. These reeds are only patient of occasional flushes with salt water, and where they grow it is at the opening of a land drain, or mark a fresh spring. Suddenly as she was cutting the flood, the punt was jarred and arrested. She looked round. A boat was across her bows. It had shot out of the rushes and stopped her.
'Whither are you going, Glory?'
The voice was that of Elijah Rebow, the last man Mehalah wished to meet at night, when alone on the water.
'That is my affair, not yours,' she answered. 'I am in haste, let me pass.'
'I will not. I will not be treated like this, Glory. I have shot you a couple of curlew, and here they are.'
He flung the birds into her boat. Mehalah threw them back again.
'Let it be an understood thing between us, Elijah, that we will accept none of your presents. You have brought my mother a keg of rum, and I have sworn to beat in the head of the next you give her. She will take nothing from you.'
'There you are mistaken, Glory; she will take as much as I will give her. You mean that you will not. I understand your pride, Glory! and I love you for it.'
'I care nothing for your love or your hate. We are naught to each other.'
'Yes we are, I am your landlord. We shall see how that sentiment of yours will stand next Thursday.'
'What do you mean?' asked Mehalah hastily.
'What do I mean? Why, I suppose I am intelligible enough in what I say for you to understand me without explanation. When you come to pay the rent to me next Thursday, you will not be able to say we are naught to each other. Why! you will have to pay me for every privilege of life you enjoy, for the house you occupy, for the marshes that feed your cow and swell its udder with milk, for the saltings on which your sheep fatten and grow their wool.'
The brave girl's heart failed for a moment. She had not the money. What would Elijah say and do when he discovered that she and her mother were defaulters? However, she put a bold face on the matter now, and thrusting off the boat with her oar, she said impatiently,