Now, with Peter warning him to stop, he felt as though everyone knew about his stealing.
Earlier on that same grey and overcast Tuesday, Hamelin had been working in the cold mizzle. Groaning, he slowly stood upright and stared out over the moors with the exhausted gloom of a broken man.
‘You all right, Hamelin?’
‘Christ’s Ballocks!’ he murmured, leaning on his old spade. ‘How could a man be well in this; Hal?’ His tongue reached up to the sore lump in his gum. It was painful, hot to the touch, and he couldn’t speak too loudly because the swelling hurt like a cudgel-blow with every movement of his jaw.
‘Poor bastard!’ Hal, older and, to Hamelin’s eyes as cragged and tough as one of the dwarf oak trees from Wistman’s Wood, dropped his pick and walked to his side. ‘You’d best get a man to pull that tooth. Your whole cheek’s blown up.’
Hamelin gave a non-committal grunt. Although he was grateful for the sympathy he had no money for treatment.
The last tooth he’d had pulled had cost nothing; it had been done by another miner, a brawny man with thick, stubby fingers and no sense. He’d grabbed Hamelin’s jaw and jerked it down, then shoved the large pliers in and squeezed tightly before trying to drag the tooth out. That tooth and the one next to it had both broken off, leaving Hamelin in agony for weeks until the abscess which had grown beneath had finally burst, flooding his mouth with foulness. The mere memory of that was enough to put Hamelin off the idea of going to another tooth-butcher.
‘That barber, Ellis, he’s supposed to be good,’ Hal said after a while.
This was true, but Ellis was a professional and wanted money in return for his skill, and Hamelin had nothing. Anything he did have, he should save and give to his wife. Emma needed the money for food, for her and for their children.
Hal shrugged his shoulders and returned to his tool. ‘You should pay that Ellis a visit when we go to Tawie for the coining on Thursday.’
Hamelin nodded slowly. Gazing about him at the scatterings of soil with the leat tumbling down its narrow way in the middle, he felt the desolation of the place sinking into his soul and infecting him with despair.
Hamelin was not born and bred on Dartmoor. His father had been a serf who had run away from his master in Dorsetshire and made his way to Exeter, where he had lived for a year and a day without being captured, thus securing his freedom. Hamelin had been brought up as a poor freeman with no training, for his father couldn’t afford to apprentice him, and yet he had managed to make himself a small sum of money by hard work. Then his little shop burned to the ground and he lost almost everything. All his spare money was tied up, but he was lucky, so he thought, that at least he had loaned cash to a local man who was plainly wealthy enough to repay the debt with a good rate of interest. Except he wasn’t. He had gambled the lot away, and then he went to the abbey, so the debt couldn’t be enforced.
That was why Hamelin had hurried to this desolate place. Cold, wet and grim, he had a loathing for it that bordered on the fanatical. He had come here determined to find a rich lode of tin. From all he had heard in Exeter, it was easy. You walked about until you saw traces of the tin-bearing ore in a riverbed, mid then traced the river back upstream until you found the source. You might have to dig a few times, exploratory little pits designed to see whether you had the main line of the tin, but that was it. It had seemed incredible to Hamelin that everybody didn’t run to the moors to harvest the wealth that lay beneath the soil.
But after six long years of intensive searching, after wearing through spades, after all but breaking his back moving lumps of moorstone and trying to bale water from pits he was trying to dig, he felt as though it was all in vain. Luckily Hal had taken him under his wing. Apart from Hal’s friendship, the only wealth he had found was Emma. She was the only source of joy in Hamelin’s fife. The children he was fond of, but they were a continuing drain into which all his money was tipped, while Emma, with her smiling round face, was a comfort to him.
He had met her on one of his journeys to the Stannary town of Tavistock years ago. She had been serving in a pie-shop, and he had bought one pie, and then stayed there for the rest of the day, chatting and teasing her. He had adored her from that moment. It was something he had never thought could happen to him, but she was kind, generous of heart, and made him laugh; and he seemed to make her as happy in return. Soon they betook themselves to a tavern and drank, and that night they fell together on her bed. Within a week they were wedded, with many witnesses watching at the church door.
That happiness was blessed with children, as the priests liked to say, but Hamelin spat on the idea. Blessed! How could children be thought of as a blessing? They needed food, and that meant money. Hamelin had nothing. The children stared at him with their sunken eyes, their swollen bellies, each time he went to see them, every few
