Gunpowder, TREason and Plot, or How We Dug Up the Ancestors

171 Pages·2016·0.76 MB·English

by  Frost Allan

GUNPOWDER,
TREASON AND PLOT
or
How we dug up the Ancestors
Allan Frost
The right of Allan Frost to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-
sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

© Allan Frost 2012.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-872989-13-6

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Published by Wrekin Books
1 Buttermere Drive, Priorslee, Telford,
Shropshire, TF2 9RE, England.
Article from Yesterday’s Past magazine:
T.R.EASON:
‘I’d like to be a ghost writer’
Historical research is not the sole province of decrepit academics sitting silently
gathering dust alongside handwritten tomes and dog-eared parchments in
libraries and archive establishments.
Subscribers will be familiar with the brilliant work done in recent years by a
relative newcomer to our illustrious journal, Timothy Richard Eason.
Unlike most dedicated historians, Mr Eason is a quiet, unassuming young man
who gained a First Class Honours degree in British History. He lives in a
terraced house in a quiet residential area of a West Midlands market town.
We had the rare opportunity to talk to Mr Eason at a recent conference on late
Tudor and early Stuart politics and their effects on the lives of ordinary citizens,
during which he delivered an enlightening lecture on recent discoveries
concerning the circumstances surrounding the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a
subject upon which he has become one of the world’s leading experts.
‘I sometimes wish we were able to talk to deceased eye witnesses and get first
hand information,’ he said. ‘But, unfortunately, ghosts don’t exist, do they?’
I
The silvery sliver of a moon in its last quarter shed an eerie half-light, just
enough to show the way along the narrow lane winding between contorted
silhouettes of whispering branches. A candle-lit lantern, hanging from a wooden
pole fixed with a rusty iron bracket at the side of the driver’s seat, squeaked as it
swung from side to side. Its dim glow barely illuminated deep ruts in the
compacted, well travelled, surface in front of the horses snorting steam into the
crisp night air.
The wagon lurched irregularly and uncomfortably from side to side, up and
down. The driver, struggling to stay awake, had one hand holding the reins while
his other arm was completely numb with trying to keep hold of something
propped up against his shoulder.
Suddenly, a cloaked man slid from the shadows and stood at the edge of the
road. His right arm extended. Moonlight reflected off a short length of metal. He
shouted but his words couldn’t be heard. He shouted again, this time with his left
arm gesticulating wildly while the mouth of the metal tube pointed straight at the
driver’s chest.
The bundle resting on the driver’s shoulder stirred. The man on the grass
verge yelled silently again. His left hand moved to adjust something attached to
the metal. Was it a gun?
Yes! Hell’s teeth, he’s going to shoot!
The driver, powerless to move, heard a dull click, followed by . . . nothing.
No bang, no flash, no deadly pain. Just … nothing.
The man fiddled with the pistol again, this time with greater urgency.
The driver whipped the horses into a gallop. He bent low in his seat, forcing
the bundle beside him to do likewise.
He heard the firearm discharge with a loud CRACK!
Beads of sweat dribbled from Tim’s brow into the corners of his tight-shut eyes.
He wiped them with the duvet cover, exhaled deeply and took a tentative peek at
the shadows of branches clawing at the curtains. If there were shadows then it
must be before one thirty, when the street lights went out.
He rearranged the pillow before lying on his back. He closed his eyes, trying
to resurrect the nightmare. The more he concentrated, the more awake he
became and the further the detail of the dream drifted away. He gave up and
flung the duvet to one side.
He’d had this same nightmare for as long as he could remember, since
childhood. And, as it happened, his father, and his father’s father, had
complained of similar dreams. Surely nightmares don’t pass from one generation
to another!
He fumbled to put on a blue paisley-patterned dressing gown and a pair of
well-worn slippers before going downstairs into the kitchen. He desperately
forced his thoughts away from the dream, waiting for the kettle to boil, before
carrying a mug of decaf coffee into the study.
Tim sat down in the dark brown leather swivel chair next to his desk and
sipped his drink. Fawkes, his black cat with white socks, jumped onto his lap
and snuggled into a comfortable position, purring loudly. Tim’s eyes drifted
towards the mantelpiece along which the faces in old family photographs stared
back.
There was his father, Richard Eason, smiling out of the frame and looking him
straight in the eye. What was it he once said? Oh, yes. ‘The only way you can be
sure about past events is by talking to the people involved, and even then you
can’t be sure if they’re telling the truth.’ He’d been right, of course. You
couldn’t always believe what newspapers reported either, nor accounts of events
written by folk who had been witnesses.
No, research was very much a matter of trust backed up with independent
evidence wherever possible. The trouble with Tim was that he was devoted to
researching the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 which had almost succeeded
in blowing up the then Houses of Parliament. In fact, he had made quite a name
for himself in historical circles by shedding snippets of new light on the
circumstances surrounding the affair.
Apart from diligently seeking out papers from private collections and delving
ever deeper into those held in public museums and archives, it appeared the only
way of really knowing what happened was to interview the ghosts of those who
were involved, wasn’t it?
Fat chance!
Tim didn’t believe in ghosts, although his grandfather Richard and
grandmother Rachel had. Richard, by the way, was a common name in the
family, even though it often caused some confusion when post dropped through
the letterbox. It was when he first began tracking down his family tree that Tim
devised numbers to make it easier to remember which Richard was which, so his
father became Richard I, his grandfather Richard II, great-grandfather Richard
III and so on.
Richard I and Rachel were adamant they had felt something extraordinary
while taking an illicit weekend away together, years before they were married. It
had been in Rhyl, in North Wales, where both had been affected with an
overwhelming sense of despair shortly before dawn. It transpired that the room
had been the scene of a gory murder in the late eighteenth century.
They had had a similar experience in an old manor house in the countryside
near Leicester. Their dog, a Highland terrier, just wouldn’t stop whimpering and
cowered in a corner of the room while staring with eyes fixed on the fireplace.
Richard and Rachel had also felt uncomfortable throughout their stay; both were
certain someone dressed in black had walked up and down their room, peering
out of the window, at various times during the night. Some years later, while the
hotel was undergoing refurbishment and modernisation, the skeleton of a
sixteenth century priest was discovered in a hidden recess inside the chimney of
their room. It made the national headlines and countless readers, including
Richard and Rachel, wrote in with their own spine-chilling experiences.
Whereas Tim acknowledged people are able to feel ‘supernatural’ forces at
work, he couldn’t accept the existence of ghosts, nor would do until or unless he
saw one for himself.
The memory of his father brought a smile to his half-awake features. He
recalled the main reason why he had become interested in history in the first
place. It had all begun with his parents recounting family stories. Like the one of
his grandfather Richard II who had tried to sit on a floating wooden packing box
in the flooded cellar of the bakery owned by his great-grandfather at Wellingley
in Shropshire. The makeshift raft tipped young Richard into the freezing cold
water and, when his woollen jumper and knitted shorts were removed to be dried
in front of the bread oven, the dye in the clothes had run, turning his skin into an
interesting shade of maroon. It had taken several days and a lot of painful
scrubbing to disappear.
Either because or in spite of the experience, Richard II became an
accomplished swimmer, thinking nothing of swimming non-stop for over a mile
up and down Wellingley public baths in a single session. He was also the only
person ever to swim two complete lengths under water and would have done
more if an anxious attendant hadn’t dived in to stop him. Tim had a silver medal
somewhere, the prize in an all-comers freestyle race in which Richard II had
come a creditable second. The fact that there were only two people in the race
and the winner only had one leg didn’t lessen the achievement. Fact is often
more fascinating than fiction.
Tim recalled the tapes of conversations he’d had with his grandfather. How
he’d managed to survive what seemed a never-ending list of calamities, God
only knows. On one occasion when in his early teens, the horse pulling the bread
wagon bolted and set off down a hill at a tremendous pace. Richard II had been
thrown from the driving seat when the horse tried to turn into the road at the
bottom of the hill, smashing the wagon into the wall opposite. And, less than a
year later, the bakery burst into flames when flour combusted; fortunately, no
one was injured and damage was superficial.
Another near miss occurred while on a weapons course in 1943. Richard II
was supposed to learn about hand grenades and anti-tank bombs so that he could
instruct the men in his Home Guard platoon. Unfortunately, the anti-tank bomb
(which resembled a Thermos flask) fell apart in his hands and, fortunately, didn’t
explode. Furthermore, several wartime hand grenades, two smoke bombs and
almost a hundred rounds of rifle ammunition were discovered in the attic when
Richard II died in 1984. Talk about taking work home!
All of this made Tim’s thoughts turn to his great-great-grandfather. Richard
IV had been chartermaster of a coal mine near Priorton. One morning in March
1839, he sent one of the pit girls to his home to fill a large jug with gunpowder.
When she arrived, four of Richard’s children were playing in the kitchen
while their mother lay in bed upstairs nursing her latest newborn child, Tim’s
great-grandfather Richard III. The girl brought a keg of gunpowder up from the
cellar and rested it on the kitchen table while she filled the jug. She then returned
to the pit.
She hadn’t been gone more than two minutes when, it was later assumed at the
joint post mortem held in the Priorton Arms public house, one of the children set
light to the gunpowder she had stupidly left on the table.
The whole house blew up. Richard IV’s wife and newborn son Richard III
were saved when one of the beams supporting the bedroom floor collapsed onto
an old grandfather clock in the corner of the kitchen, thus breaking their fall.
However, all four children in the kitchen died (one lingered for nine days until
he, too, succumbed); their communal gravestone, recording death by explosion,
still stands in Priorton All Saints parish churchyard.
Why did his ancestors seem to be more accident prone than those of other
people? It was sobering to think that, if his great-grandfather had died in the
house explosion, or his grandfather in the flooded cellar, the bakery wagon crash
or blown to smithereens by the anti-tank bomb, Tim wouldn’t be here today.
What was it with explosions, anyway? Why this fascination with fire?
Admittedly, his father had been a crack shot on the rifle range at the annual
fairground (Tim still had half a dozen plaster dogs and similar useless trophies
somewhere in the attic; best place for them) but had rather overstepped the mark
when he made his own fireworks using chemicals sneaked out of lessons at
Wellingley Boys’ Grammar school in the 1950s. It had been an exciting venture,
even if they did fizzle out very quickly and emit clouds of green smoke which
filled the lounge (not the best place for pyrotechnics, all things considered) and
left the room smelling of cordite for days.
Home made bombs using a specific weedkiller and sugar sealed in a Tate &
Lyle syrup tin had been much more impressive; they exploded when left in the
heat of the sun, preferably well away from the house; paying for a replacement
window pane from his meagre pocket money was a lesson he wouldn’t forget.
Tim even had a 1954 letter somewhere from the police cautioning his father
for letting fireworks off in the street. It had come as something of a relief to the
family when Richard I’s pyrotechnic proclivities confined themselves to garden
rubbish bonfires in his later years; even they were a work of art, carefully
constructed to burn continuously for at least a week, much to the annoyance of
neighbouring housewives wishing to hang out their washing on Mondays.
Yes, what was it about accidents, explosions and ghosts? And why did the
same nightmare continue from one generation to the next?
Tim finished his coffee, turfed Fawkes from the warm comfort of his lap and
went back to bed.
While Tim mulled over his family’s past, a clandestine meeting was taking place
in a small country town.
Priorton was one of those places which time had almost, but not quite, passed
by. It had medieval origins, a fact evident from the number of half-timbered
buildings on either side of its narrow main street.
Recent rain had transformed itself into small rivulets which trickled between
cracks in the cobbles before joining the natural stream redirected along the
kerbside a hundred years earlier by the newly-created Urban District Council. If
nothing else, the stream was probably the main tourist attraction the town had to
offer, apart from several antique shops, the Saturday market and occasional
weekends when the grounds of Priorton Hall were open to the general public.
There was little else to attract regular visitors to the town, especially after the
former flourishing livestock market closed down in 1989.
All Saints parish church clock struck a sonorous, doom-laden one o’clock. A
light breeze gently rocked the sign outside the Priorton Arms public house. The
town was fast asleep. Except for one small group of conspirators.
Light streamed through a window that hadn’t been cleaned for at least three
decades. The street lamp outside barely illuminated a tarnished brass plaque
hanging dejectedly from the one remaining screw on a door badly in need of a
coat of paint. The sign read:
FIDDLIT & WYNNE
SOLICITORS
Please Enter
Someone inside stabbed the battered oak desk with a finger, as if to emphasise
a point. The desk wasn’t the only thing showing stress. The room hadn’t been
cleaned, let alone redecorated, for donkey’s years. Legal papers were strewn
haphazardly wherever a horizontal surface offered a resting place. Some
documents had been nibbled by mice who no longer enjoyed regular meals since
the occupant of the premises stopped having sandwiches for lunch, now that he
was in a position to eat bar snacks at the pub over the road.
One man refilled three glasses of single star Greek Metaxa brandy and
screwed the top back into position, a subtle hint that this was to be their last. No
point throwing money around, not yet, anyway. But, if all went according to
carefully laid plans, he’d be able to afford something better that didn’t taste like
highly inflammable firewater; Ashbach brandy, perhaps.
Smoke hovered like dense smog trapped a few feet below the ceiling. To the
casual passer-by, it wouldn’t be obvious whether this was cigarette, cigar or pipe
smoke, or due to the chimney needing a good sweep. An occasional flicker of
flame emerged languidly from the dying embers of a coal fire.
One man sucked on his pipe while stroking his forehead thoughtfully. Another
took a long, satisfying suck on a fat Havana cigar and blew smoke rings absent-
mindedly into the cloud above. The third nervously fiddled with a roll-your-own
cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers, allowing the ash to fall onto the
threadbare carpet. He looked up at one of the long school and college
photographs hanging at a jaunty angle from a rusty nail.
‘I thould never have got involved,’ he muttered, more to himself than the
others. He sniffed his brandy before downing it in one gulp. Fortunately, Fiddlit
was not renowned for the generosity of his measures. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘’What don’t you like, Strubble? The brandy or the photo?’ asked the pipe,
glancing from Strubble’s tearful eyes to the wall. ‘Can’t help what I looked like
at school: you can’t change history.’
‘No, although the photo’th bad enough. I don’t like all thith.’