Damn His Blood (28 page)

Over the following weeks Evans continued to sink. Frightened and light-headed, he begged Bowkett to sit by his bedside at night, ‘which she did till he swore at her’. One Sunday morning as Bowkett climbed the stairs she heard the Captain thrashing in a fit of delirium. He called out, ‘Banks, Banks! Dick, Dick! Damn the parson!’

Bowkett sent for Banks, who arrived at the cottage shortly afterwards. She informed him that the Captain was haunted by visions and harrowed by madness. ‘It was enough to break the heart of a stone to be with him,’ she told Banks. ‘He [Banks] changed colour very much,’ she remembered. ‘He seemed frightened, but did not say anything.’

The Captain lingered wretchedly for a week longer with, a local chronicler later recorded, ‘a fearful apprehension and forebodings in his mind’. During the day he sat with his Bible opened before him, and visitors ‘frequently heard him praying aloud’. But his mood was fragile and at the merest provocation he would scream ‘the most horrid oaths and imprecations’. Captain Evans was a broken man, torn at his death between God and the Devil. In
The Bishop’s Daughter
, Erskine Neale dwelt on those awful days.

He became moody, restless,
¹⁶
and reserved; abhorred being alone; and though at no period of his career discreet and guarded in his expressions, seemed, latterly, to lose all self-command, and indulged, when irritated, in a licence of thought and language mournfully inconsistent with his age and station.

Illness came on. Death appeared imminent; and was most unwillingly contemplated. He was incessantly watched by certain individuals who were about him. For this vigilance various reasons were assigned. In his last hours he appeared extremely desirous to make some communication to a gentleman who visited him; but there were those who took care, by opportune interruptions, to frustrate his intentions. His death was anything but calm and peaceful – marked by little resignation to God’s will, and no apparent realisation of his promises.

The Captain’s death was recorded in a stark notice published in early June in the
Worcester Herald
: ‘Died, lately, at Droitwich,
¹⁷
in the 96th year of his age, Samuel Evans ESQ, for many years a magistrate in the borough of Droitwich.’
^fn3

In the months after he died the Captain’s end was considered puzzling. Locals wrote to newspapers and exchanged views on street corners. For Georgians the deathbed was a place of confession and remorse, where the condemned trembled before God, where the secrets of their souls were unlocked and exposed. While the wretched were doomed to suffer, the pious and the good were relieved mercifully.

Fascination with the deathbed was reflected in countless works of contemporary art and literature. In Charles Dickens’ ‘The Stroller’s Tale’, published in the second instalment of the
Pickwick Papers
(1836), Dickens vividly recounted the horried death of a pantomime actor, a wicked drunkard who had beaten his wife and starved his son. Helpless, wretched and frightened, the actor moaned and withered for two days, beset by violent visions from his tortured past.

The walls and celling were alive
¹⁸
with reptiles – the vault expanded to an enormous size – frightful figures flitted to and fro – and the faces of men he knew, rendered hideous by gibing and mouthing peered out from among them; they were searing him with heated irons, and binding his head with cord till the blood started; and he struggled madly for life.

Seven years previously, the Captain’s death foreshadowed that of Dickens’ clown, but between the two stories, one fictional, one real, there were crucial differences. Unlike the actor, Evans was neither young, helpless nor destitute, nor had he ever been convicted of any crime. Ostensibly, the Captain’s life had been one of success and progress, marred only, perhaps, by his inability to settle and produce a family of his own. Yet his deathbed ravings hinted at something deeper: of an uneasy conscience or an unbalanced mind. It was a puzzle with a catch. For while the strange malady had loosened his tongue, it had not revealed his secret.

Perhaps Samuel Evans sensed that he was approaching the end even before his final illness struck. On 8 January 1829 he completed and signed a will which named Banks as executor. The farmer himself was one of the chief beneficiaries of the document, which stated that he was to inherit Evans’ cottages at Droitwich and Oddingley and all other unspecified personal effects. Symbolic of the Captain’s varied interests and many connections was his ownership of a ‘Bullary of Salt’ – a share in the profits of a local salt spring – which he left to Lord Foley. But his main legacy was reserved for a girl, Naomi R. Mary Cartwright Banks, who upon her eighteenth birthday was to receive a bond for £500 and all its accrued interest. He also bequeathed the infant girl his ‘neat set of china,
¹⁹
twelve silver tea spoons to match, and two other silver tea spoons, a tea caddy and also two books. One of which is the History of England and the other the History of Rome.’

His funeral was held on 6 June 1829 at St Peter’s Church, which stood high in the grassy fields to the south-east of Droitwich town. Here his body was laid next to Catherine Banks’ in the same stone vault that he had prepared seven years earlier, in the shade of an ancient yew tree. The Captain’s life had spanned almost all of the Georgian era. He was born just 19 years after the accession of the first George and died almost precisely a year before the death of the last. He was one of the few survivors of a fading world: a military man, a magistrate and a gentleman. One of the chief mourners, George Banks, stood with his head bowed.

^fn1
Farriers were often characterised by their hard-headedness, which made them suitable for tasks avoided by more squeamish members of a community. In 1776 Parson Woodforde had John Reeve, the local farrier, draw a tooth ‘but shockingly bad indeed, he broke one of the fangs of the tooth and it gave me exquisite pain all the day after, and my face was swelled prodigiously … Gave the old man that drew it however 0–2–6. He is too old, I think, to draw teeth, can’t see very well.’

^fn2
In December 1829, six month after his death, Samuel Evans’ name was added to the
Worcester Miscellany
’s ‘Record of Remarkable Longevity from 1796’. The list also included 108-year-old Sarah Smith of Worcester, who had died in July 1811 and had spent her life as a ‘mender of chair bottoms’.

^fn3
This report casts a slight doubt on Evans’ age at the time of his death. Most sources agree that he was 96 years old, and the most likely explanation for the variation between these sources and the affirmation here that he was in his ‘96th year’ is a simple reporting error.

CHAPTER 13

The Old Barn

Netherwood Farm, Oddingley, 21–24 January 1830

THE CHRISTMAS OF 1829 passed and the new decade began with an exceptional spell of cold weather. Sharp frosts and swirling blizzards swept right across England, delaying mail coaches and rendering foot travel almost impossible. In London the
Morning Chronicle
informed its readers that ‘coachmen and guards describe the cold to have been the most severe they have ever experienced’, describing how 14 mail coaches had been buried in snowdrifts outside Marlborough. At Worthing on the south coast the local newspaper declared the cold had not been so intense for around 30 years. Further north the
Sheffield Courant
complained, ‘This is the severest winter we have had for some years and since our last we have experienced it in its wildest characteristics.’

Worcestershire was similarly chilled by the cold.
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
reported that the Birmingham and Worcester Canal had completely frozen over and that, in some stretches, sheets of ice extended right across the Severn. As the weeks passed, the temperatures showed little signs of change. On 20 January there was the heaviest snowfall yet. Roads leading into Worcester were blocked and London traffic was stopped indefinitely. The next day
Berrow’s Journal
recorded, ‘Yesterday morning Fahrenheit’s thermometer stood,
¹
in an exposed situation, at eighteen degrees below freezing.’ In the countryside the extreme weather made almost all farmwork impossible, and except for the carting of manure and the organisation of stables and barns all labouring jobs were abandoned in Oddingley for the first three weeks of 1830.
²
Across the valley, fields, lanes and hedgerows all lay swathed in ice and snow.

Far from the village crossroads, isolated from the bulk of the parish by the canal, Netherwood was the most vulnerably situated of all Oddingley’s farms. The meadows and fields belonging to the property stretched out across the valley floor and were so deeply covered that no work could possibly be attempted. In Netherwood’s fold-yard, however, Charles Burton and his son were continuing stoically through the worst of the weather. Burton was a well known and dependable local carpenter who took on short-term contracts around Droitwich. He had worked at Netherwood for Thomas Clewes years earlier, and had been engaged by Henry Waterson, the farm’s current master, to pull down an old barn. It was a typical but time-consuming job for Burton, who had been forced to spend several frozen weeks in Oddingley, a place he was connected to through family as well as work: Elizabeth Newbury, whose first partner had been Richard Heming, was Burton’s elder sister.

This link, though, was an almost-forgotten one. Thomas Clewes’ tenure at Netherwood had finished in 1816, and since then the property had been leased by Waterson who had inherited a farm in disrepair. For years after his arrival he had strived to improve the condition of the barns and the outhouses, repeatedly petitioning his landlord, first Foley and later Galton, to replace a decaying barn that flanked one side of the yard. Each time he had been refused. Only at Christmas 1829 had Galton finally acquiesced and agreed that Waterson could engage Burton to dismantle the old structure and build a replacement. Burton had begun the job on 28 December 1829, and by 21 January he had spent three weeks at Netherwood, dismantling the barn roof and pulling down the supporting walls and wooden frame. All that remained was for Burton, now joined by his son, to dig out the shallow foundations, salvaging as many of the bricks as he could.

A woodcut depicting Netherwood Farm in the early nineteenth century. Trench Wood looms in the background

The twenty-first of January 1830 fell on a Thursday. It was late afternoon and almost all the light from the weak wintry sun had melted away in the clear Midland skies. It was a cold, lonely scene: father and son wrapped in thick frock coats and woollen scarves, gripping iron spades and hand forks in their gloved hands. They were two dimly lit figures at work on a bleak, white landscape. A woodcut depicting Charles Burton at the barn survives. It shows a tall man with a sharp nose, a thin mouth and breezy beard that flows to a point below his chin. Burton is wearing a tight pair of corduroy breeches, a loose-fitting greatcoat and a brimmed hat pulled down almost to his eyebrows from which unkempt hair escapes in little tufts at either side.

It was around four o’clock in the afternoon. Burton was digging at a foundation trench ‘not quite two feet deep’ a few yards from where the barn door had once stood, close to the edge of a frozen pool. Labourers dug trenches using iron spades or, when the ground proved too hard, the mattock – a pickaxe with a sharp blade, which was hacked into the earth to break it up. Burton lifted his spade and forced it down into the trench, scooping the clay away. He drove the spade down again, but this time it jarred against something blunt and hard.

It could have been a stray brick or the root of a dead, forgotten tree, but Charles Burton, so he later told a magistrate, instantly felt it was something more. He put down his spade and peered into the trench.

There was still enough light to reveal a smudge of a black object. Crouching down, Burton could see he had caught against the top of a leather shoe. Extending from the shoe were two thin flat bones that disappeared away into the earth. Burton clawed at the cold red clay. He found a second shoe and, stretching away at a steady depth, he began to uncover more and more bones as he dug further, and clusters of the frosty earth came away in his hands.