Constable Across the Moors by Nicholas Rhea Read Free Book Online Page A

Atkinson?”
    “I am, but Reg is my son. He’s the boss here – I’m just an old lady who lives in. Our Reg’s wife, that’s young Mrs Atkinson, is down at Ashfordly, shopping. Susan, that is.”
    “It’s really young Agar I want to see,” I explained.
    “Why would you want to see him, then? He’s not in trouble is he?”
    “No,” I said, “but I hear he’s been making a pest of himself.”
    “Pest? What sort of pest?”
    I provided brief details of his alleged misbehaviour and she listened intently, leaving me standing in the middle of the floor. She smiled fleetingly, and when I’d finished, she said, “Lads will be lads, it’ll be due to his sap rising, Mr Rhea!”
    “I agree it’s nothing serious, Mrs Atkinson, but his behaviour is unnerving for Miss Hardwick.”
    “Hardwick, did you say?” she threw the question at me, with those eyes flashing brightly.
    “Yes, up at Oak Crag Cottage.”
    “Then she ought to know better than to bring you in, should that one,” the old lady said. “Fancy bringing you all the way in for a trifling thing like that … she ought to be ashamed.”
    “It’s not nice, Mrs Atkinson, having unknown lads making nuisances of themselves when you’re a woman living alone. I don’t mind coming out to help put a stop to it.”
    “Nay, it’s not that, Mr Rhea, it’s that woman. Hardwick. It’s the first time I’ve come across a Hardwick woman that couldn’t sort things out by herself.”
    “Why?” I asked, intrigued. Katherine Hardwick seemed a perfectly ordinary young woman.
    “They’re witches,” she said with all seriousness. “All Hardwick women are witches.”
    I laughed. “Witches?” I said, thinking she was joking.
    “You’ll have heard of Nan Hardwick, haven’t you? Awd Nan Hardwick, who was a witch in these hills years ago?”
    “No,” I had to confess.
    “Then just you listen, young man,” and she motioned me to a wooden chair. I sat down, interested to hear her story. I knew that old ladies tended to ramble and reminisce, but Mrs Atkinson appeared totally in control of her senses, and deadly serious too. She spoke with disarming frankness.
    After leaning forward in her chair and eyeing me carefully, she unravelled her extraordinary story. She was in her late eighties, she told me by way of introduction, and then related the fable of Awd Nan Hardwick. She was a witch whose notoriety was widespread in the North Yorkshire moors when Mrs Atkinson was a young girl; everyone for miles around knew Awd Nan.
    She told me a story about a farmer’s wife who was expecting a baby. One afternoon, Awd Nan chanced to pass the house and called in for some food and a rest as she was several miles from home. She asked for a ‘shive o’ bread and a pot o’ beer’. The food was readily given to her and during the conversation, she let it be known she was aware of the young wife’s condition. She wished the girl well and said, “Thoo’ll have a lad afoor morning , and thoo’ll call him Tommy, weeant thoo?”
    The girl replied that she and her husband had already decided to name the child John if it was a boy, but Awd Nan replied, “Aye, mebbe thoo has, but thoo’d best call him Tommy. And now, Ah’ll say goodbye,” and off she went.
    Both the husband and the girl were determined to name the child John, and later that evening, the prospective father drove a pony and trap across the moors to collect his sister-in-law. She had offered to help with the birth. Three miles from the farm, he had to cross a small bridge, but the horse stopped twenty yards before reaching it and steadfastly refused to move. Try as he might, the farmer could not persuade the animal to proceed, so he tried to leave his seat on the trap. To his horror, he found he was unable to move. In his words, “Ah was ez fast as owt.”
    Eventually he concluded that Awd Nan had put a spell on him and shouted into the air, “Now, Nan, what’s thoo after? Is this tha work?”
    To his