THE MILL IN THE DALE

You can't get there any more. Of course, walkers could if they wanted. But they just read their Wainwright, and keep on going, coast to coast. From above all you'll see is trees, dark and green, their roots going down into rocks, tumbled rocks as if a giant's child had been playing and got bored.

Somewhere, a long way off, a stream slips out of the hillside, fresh and bright and cold. It comes from there, I think, but round here it's hard to tell where anything comes from or goes to.

Once, a long time ago, there was a valley there, a narrow dale with steep sides that shut out the light for most of the day and altogether in winter. That was why nobody lived there. It was hard enough to make a living from weaving without having to pay for candles or oil for lamps. But when the machines came, that clattered and rattled and made everyone work faster, there was a man from over Macclesfield way who wanted to build a mill in the dale, because of the stream that ran through it. Only a small stream, mind you, but rapid. You could feel the power in it when you put your hand in. And it was cold. Cold as charity, which was why people called it Charity Dale, I suppose. Not that the owner ever showed any charity, though he said he did, and perhaps he thought so too. You can't ever really be sure what people think, especially when they're as solitary as he was.

He used to go up on to the hills, sometimes for days at a time, coming back wet and muddy, his clothes torn and his eyes wild, but if anyone asked him what he had seen or done he wouldn't answer. He'd been that way when he was young, but he was an only child so he could get away with things like that. I know, I'm an only child myself. His father was rich, a mill owner, and he wanted his son to run the business after his death. The best method of training was to let him run his own mill first. But he didn't want his son as a rival, so he told him to go up into the dales, away from the town.

That was good for other reasons too. I said the son was solitary. Perhaps strange would have been a better word. You know they have that big Sunday School in Macclesfield they're so proud of. His father paid for most of it, so perhaps that's why they didn't make any trouble when his son didn't go there. The other kids were all scared of the nobbler, as they called him, the man with the big stick who went round looking for children who weren't in those fine rooms, reading their Bibles of a Sunday afternoon. But young Mr Charity didn't care. He walked the hills and looked down on the town where his father had made all his money, the money he would have one day. He looked down on most things. He looked down on money, too, unless he had made it himself.

He embarrassed his father in other ways besides not going to Sunday School. When he was a youth, he would walk through the streets of the town at night, looking closely at the mill girls who were also walking through the streets, trying to earn a little bit more than they were paid for the other hours of the day. And who could blame them for that? Well, young Mr Charity could. The girls didn't take kindly to being looked at in the way he did, and they knew who he was, so they went to his father, who looked at them differently, especially when his wife wasn't about, which was mostly the case. He knew what they were asking for and he gave it them, usually in the form of money, though some took it in kind, since he was still a handsome man despite or maybe because of his silver hair. He gave those girls money as well, to show his gratitude and his generosity. After all, he had already demonstrated his other qualities.

Young Mr Charity took his father's money likewise, but the transaction was much less pleasant for both sides. He bought a large area of the high moors very cheap, which pleased him, and set about building a mill up there, away from the wicked town where his father lived. If he had known about all the evil deeds that went on among the navvies that did the building for him he would have been upset, but he saw them as hewers of wood and drawers of water and therefore not part of his moral world. He didn't feel the need to cleanse the sacred edifice with any elaborate ritual. After all, he was there himself and that was enough.

But it had all taken time, and meanwhile things had changed. Water was no longer the best source of power. Steam was the thing. They burned coal to make it. There was black smoke everywhere. It grimed the creamy stone of the new buildings in the towns, but no one minded because it meant money. It meant more work, faster work, and no one grumbled too much if there were smuts on the washing, except for the woman who had washed it and she didn't count since she wasn't actually working.

But young Mr Charity didn't like coal. He didn't like fire. He knew where there was a fire that didn't ever go out. Looking down on the towns that spread away on the plain to the distant sea, he saw smoke and he thought all those towns were forms of hell. Maybe he was right, too. But that didn't make things better up where he was. So he didn't use coal to make steam to drive his mill. He stuck with water, which was slower and not so reliable, especially in summer. The people up there knew that, which was why they decorated their wells with pictures made of flowers: to cosset them, to cajole them, to make sure they didn't run dry. They worshipped the God of Water, though they made the pictures about things in the Bible, so no one else would notice what they were really doing.

Young Mr Charity knew, though. He sensed it. He didn't like images. He wanted things to be in the mind. His father, now, there's pictures enough of him. Like I said, he was handsome, and he knew it, and he made sure others did, too. He had a painter over from Derby once, just to render his likeness in oils, with a fine strong light to show up his fine strong nose. There's many an Old Mr Charity looking down on you in the boardroom of a mill, or the upper room of an inn where they used to meet to plan their projected schemes for railways and canals and soughs for the mines, those long channels they built to drain them when they dug down so deep the water came. Money in those, there was, if you guessed lucky and took a cut of the profits till the water came again.

Not for Young Mr Charity. No pictures of him. No graven images. He may not have been to the Sunday School, but he knew his Bible. They said his mother would never let him have another book beside it, not even Jack the Giant-Killer. They said lots of things about his mother. Pretty, she was, when she was young.They said Old Mr Charity offered to marry her on the strength of a miniature he saw. Others say, it was her father's account-books that inspired his passion. Leastways, she brought him the capital to start his first mill. And she gave him a son. But that was all. Or so they said. After that, she spent most of her time in her room. On her own. At first, she locked the door from the inside, to keep her husband out. Later on, they said, they had to lock the door from the outside. So maybe the son was more like the mother than the father.

Was there love between the mother and the son? Hard to tell, especially at this distance of time. Those were the days when they thought it was good to be stern and bad to be soft. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Besides, the mother had her own troubles, and her son was the result of one of them. Old Mr Charity was nice enough, for a mill-owner, but he was busy morn to night, since he didn't trust a factor to do his work, and right enough. They weren't going to build an empire for him. They never thought beyond the inside of their own pockets. He had his son fed and clothed and taught what he would and could learn. What more can you ask for? There's more that can be given, that's true, but it isn't the sort of thing that you can ask for.

When his mother died, they sent the news up to him with the carrier. That was the first time they found out what things were like up there. Or rather, they didn't. Narrow roads, narrower paths, easy to block. Drag a tree across, and two men with pistols, loaded and cocked, take away all your desire to travel further, so you hand over your message and are happy to go back down the hill. Happy, too, to have spared your horses and your waggon the further strain and the jolting to the springs and axles that the road on would have cost them.

If no one gets in, then no one gets out, and you may ask why. You may also ask: who'd go to work for such a man. Well, that's a hard question because it has so many answers. He had a name, you see, for religion. If you let your pretty daughter go to work for Old Mr Charity, that was one thing, and you knew what was likely to happen. It all depended if you minded. But if she went to work for Young Mr Charity, why, she was safer than if she'd been at home. What could the wicked world do to her up there, on the edge of the High Moors? Where were the silks and the satins to turn her head? Where were the young men with their fine gold watches and shiny canes to wait outside the mill-gates and make her tipsy with flattery before they made her tipsy with wine?

There were those with weak lungs, persuaded that the air was healthier up there, out of the smoke. There were those who, for this reason and that, wouldn't be given work down in the town. And they knew there was no contact between up there and down here, so they lifted up their eyes unto the hills whence came their help. Moreover, there were rumours about the wages Young Mr Charity paid. If anyone had thought, they'd have known they couldn't be true. But you don't want to think, when not thinking is to your advantage. The cartage alone, for the raw material and the finished product, was going to swallow up the profit. Food, too, had to be brought that weary way. It was a slow old water-driven mill that would make less in day. And it was dark, so he had to pay for light.

It was true, though. He paid higher wages than anyone else for miles around. But you had to spend them there. Down in the town, he could never have demanded that. Oh, there were companies that gave you some of your wages in tokens that had to be spent at the company shop - but that was a device already challenged, by shopkeepers who argued that it restricted trade. The workers would never have had a chance to object, but all the other tradespeople who wanted their money had the power to get a law passed.

Up there, though, it was clear that no one else was going to sell them what they needed. And it was clear that things must cost more, this far away from the town. To be sure, you could choose not to eat. You could choose to save all the money you could and then ask to leave. But then you would have to pay the bill for your lodging and your water, before you could get past those men on the road. Only the foolhardiest would try to climb the slopes of the dale. And if you had eaten enough to keep up your strength for such an enterprise, you would not have enough to carry with you to make it worth your while.

Some left: the old, the sick, those who were needed at home in the town to nurse their parents. Young Mr Charity was not a monster. Those he let go in this way spoke well of him, so that others came to take their places. It was always his own men that went and fetched the food, and they would only speak well of him.

Then, as I say, his mother died. They told him, and he came. I've never rightly understood the differences between all these various kinds of Christians. I mean, Catholics aren't the same as Protestants, and that I comprehend - but Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists and Primitive Methodists and Peculiar Methodists - if there's one God and He's up there in the sky, isn't it up to Him to decide who's He's going to listen to and whether it makes a difference how they talk to him? And all their little sheds and shacks and barns, and sometimes large stately churches and sometimes small, discreet chapels - so many places, all to the same purpose: what a waste of space, and stone and wood and bricks and corrugated iron, for one day in the week.

The funeral was to be held in one of those tasteful mock mediaeval chapels, tucked away behind shops whose rent had paid for it in the first place. I dare say Old Mr Charity was a shareholder at some stage in the organisation, never being one to miss an opportunity for a sound investment. Indeed, you'll find his name on the gates of the Municipal Cemetery, the Necropolis, as the Greek-minded Town Clerk wanted to call it, thinking the name Deadtown not elegant enough and likely to lead to confusion. Old Mr Charity's fellow-businessmen thought his involvement a sign that his mind was turning to Last Things, but he pointed out that people were not likely to stop dying in the foreseeable future and that it only made sense to have a stake in a business that would never be short of customers. Since cremated bodies would need less space, he decided to hold back on that issue until he saw what the demand was and whether the fee for cremation could equal the price of burial. In anticipation of abundant returns and to show due confidence in the undertaking, he had erected an ornately impressive family vault, designed to stand till Doomsday or beyond, at a highly visible junction of the main avenues through the cemetery.

It came, therefore, as all the more of a shock, when Young Mr Charity arrived at the chapel with a small group of armed riders, two of whom bundled the driver of the hearse from his box and drove the vehicle and its contents away at a pace which seemed like a liberating change for the horses drawing it, to judge by the head-tossing and snorting they displayed as they clattered off over the cobbles. Those modern-minded worthies who demanded the instant whistling-up of a special train to give pursuit had to submit to a patient explanation from the rest of the funeral guests that a train could only follow the rails laid down for it, and that it was unlikely the impromptu undertakers would be so obliging as to follow the elaborately ascending curves of the permanent way in making good their escape from the town. The only motive for the whole action had to be derived from Young Mr Charity's statement, as he reared up his own horse and turned it to follow the hearse: "This is an abomination before the Lord!"

All things considered, Old Mr Charity took it very calmly. He had long since publicly disclaimed responsibility for his son's debts, which disclaimer clearly included any responsibility for his son's actions. He paid the undertaker for transport to the chapel, but no more, since the body had not been conveyed to the cemetery, nor had the services of the mutes and pall-bearers been required. The undertaker was mollified by the recovery of his horses and vehicle from the yard of the Cat and Fiddle, halfway to Buxton. The distance they had been required to cover, and the speed at which they had been required to cover it, to say nothing of the fearsome gradient, had made such an impression on them, that ever afterwards they were renowned as the slowest, steadiest and most stately team he had in his stable, and were in particular request for those funerals where elderly acquaintances and relatives wished to follow the hearse on foot.

The landlord of the inn had seen the coffin being transferred to a pair of pack-horses, but knew no more, and the only clue to the eventual resting-place of his mother's mortal part was given by a note that Young Mr Charity sent to his father: I have bought a cave where our dead may rest in peace. Those who knew their Old Testament saw an allusion here to Abraham's practice on his arrival in the Holy Land.

That, of course, should have given a clue to many other aspects of Young Mr Charity's behaviour, had anyone been concerned to think about such things. But those who were most affected lacked the knowledge, and those who had the knowledge lacked the motivation. Old Mr Charity instructed the local paper, which he naturally owned, to suppress all but the most indirect mention of the events which had made his wife's funeral, as he asked them to put it, "one of the most memorable the town has seen in recent times." But some of the guests kept diaries.

Once his wife's name was securely inscribed on the mausoleum, he turned his attention firmly to issues of life, and married, if not quite the prettiest, then the most determined and educable of his mill-girls. The ultimate purpose of this liaison was made clear by the slightly premature arrival of a male heir, who, it was generally agreed (though not in his presence) resembled the father much less than the mother. (But what matters most? Who you are? or who your father was? The Old Testament, now, is full of lists of fathers, but it doesn't pay quite as much attention to the mothers.)

It was never known with certainty whether Young Mr Charity had full knowledge of these events, nor, indeed, whether he would have been capable of comprehending them in the way that you or I do. What we do know (and how we know it is something I shall reveal at a later stage) is that he had already begun to make clear to those about him how he saw the world, in a way that he had not done hitherto, though again it is not altogether certain how much of this explanation was actually understood by those for whom it was meant.

If God lives in the sky, then the higher up you go, the nearer you are to Him and the closer to understanding His purposes, which you can convey more clearly to those who are beneath you. If Moses had come back up the hill with the tablets, he would not have been believed.

Do you know Edale? Do you know the moorland up and beyond Edale? It's a country that is best passed through, and not dwelt in. There are no trees, except for the odd stunted and crippled specimen in a sheltered hollow by a stream where wind or bird has dropped a seed by chance and misfortune. The wind always blows, and agitates the grass, which is not like the grass of the lowlands, but always thin and sere, and looks incapable of giving nourishment. There is a tawny sheen over it all, even clumps of heather are rare, and a deceptive undulation conceals not the firmness of rock but the engulfing darkness of peat. This is not the wilderness from which life has been banished, or where life could never have been sustained, it is a kind of spirit world where the forces of life have been let loose without their customary forms. You are used to seeing water as pools or streams, rivers or lakes. Here, it oozes out of the ground at every step. Where there is a gash in the spongey orangey surface, the earth bleeds water. One drop will finish in the Atlantic, the next in the North Sea. This is the Great Divide. The clouds are so low, they seem to brush it, and often they do, covering it with mist without a warning. Sometimes they drop their moisture, sometimes they seem to suck it up again. When the clouds part, and the sun races across this light brown barrenness, it's just another form of the will o' the wisp, transitory, misleading, frustrating.

He went up there after his mother's death, he wandered through that solid nothingness, looking for an explanation to make sense of the life he was leading, the universe in which he found himself. Above him, the clouds boiled. Below him, the ground oozed. Around him, light and lightnings flickered, now letting him see the whole world spread at his feet, now limiting his vision to half the length of his arm.

All he knew was the Bible. Was it any wonder that he took it as the key? The Holy Land, promised by God to those that served Him, was never a real place, but a country of the mind, with its high places and its low places, with its mighty cities, and one mightier than all others, and its deep pastoral ruralities from which the prophets emerged, the shepherd-boys who had learnt about loneliness and were therefore equipped to rule. He was not the first to see the realm of England as the Holy Land, not the first to interpret the Bible as literal truth to be re-enacted in the Here and Now.

The Prophets didn't write their own stories. Nor did he. He had a book-keeper, his father's old one. Do you need to ask why a man turned sixty would leave the security of his home-town for the wildness of the moors? Old Mr Charity hadn't wanted to know why he needed the money. Trust was trust. So far as you can tell, he kept Young Mr Charity's accounts faithfully. He also wrote down what happened in other ways.

Thus we know about Blasting Tom, the impatient expert in explosives, wandering the High Peak after an unfortunate accident in the lead mines over Wirksworth way. He was needed. He had been sent to them. He would help plan and execute the Great Scheme, by which the Waters should be Stopped, and prevented from flowing away again.

There are drawings in the book, competent, accurate, surveyed and measured drawings, calculations of depth and pressure and flow rates. You can sense the pleasure the book-keeper took in being allowed to do real calculations, instead of this piffling adding up of greasy pence. Rock was to be blasted out, and assembled into a dry-stone dam, plugged with clay on the upstream side, that would give a lasting head of water to drive the machines more regularly and efficiently, even in the dry seasons. Worries that the dam might not hold were met by Young Mr Charity's assurance that the Lord had promised Noah He would not Destroy the World with Water a second time.

It seems that this grand work was actually carried out - or else Figuring George had an imaginative gift that went well beyond any authors he might have read, for there are descriptions of the Inauguration of the Dam and the Opening of the First Flow which read like the wildest fiction and present Young Mr Charity as a full-fledged Moses, Parting the Waters, Smiting the Rock that Water Might Flow, Saviour of his People, and so forth.

Yet, as with the Old Testament, nothing was perfect. The stream that flowed through Charity Dale had been wonderfully chill and clear and pure. But when it was dammed, the still water was black and dank and began to stink. It became clogged with vegetation and the flow was impeded. At the best of times Charity Dale could have been called the Valley of the Shadow, but the stream had always sparkled as it flowed. Now, the unruffled lake sucked light into itself and gave nothing back.

The stagnant water began to breed disease, perhaps because it prevented natural sanitation. Hardly any died, but the malady lingered, and weakness persisted after it, so that those affected became takers and not givers, eating to regain their health, but unable to work and earn their keep. There was only one course. They were conveyed at night to nearby towns and villages and deposited outside workhouses and charitable institutions. At first, small sums of money were left with them. Later, this practice ceased.

Figuring George sets all this down with enviable clarity and straightforwardness, as a record of events in which he suppresses all discussion of motivation and causality, which we modern readers have to supply. For example, there is the section entitled Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon. In the winter, it could sometimes be so dark in Charity Dale you could barely tell day from night. Young Mr Charity confiscated all clocks and watches, saying There shall be one time for all of us, and no one shall have their own time. Reading between the lines, it is clear that he instituted a three-shift day, with everyone (including himself) working eight hours on, eight hours off, in order to increase production, which he no doubt regarded as vital, in view of the drop in numbers he had just experienced, and the problems he was having with power. The consequent exhaustion produced an increase in the rate of sickness, so, as spring came and the ruse was easier to see through, despite artificial light and heavy hangings at the windows, he adjusted his own chronology to that of the rest of the world, and ceased to imitate Joshua's attempt to bring time to a stop.

But there were other ways in which he emulated the Old Testament, and tried to make its events and experiences part of the world about him. A female worker - it hardly seems right to talk about "mill-girls" in Young Mr Charity's establishment - had attempted to escape by bribing the guards on the road with the offer of her sexual favours. She was brought before Young Mr Charity for judgement (whether her offer had been taken up by the guards before they handed over was not clear). She was judged to be in the same case as Lot's wife, who, although offered the chance to escape from the destruction that was visited on the Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrha, turned back from the safety of the mountains to look upon them again and was changed into a pillar of salt. The punishment was, to Young Mr Charity, clear. Warm water, in which gypsum had been dissolved until the solution was super-saturated, was poured over her until it began setting in a solid crust. How long this treatment continued, and whether it resulted in her death, is not clear from Figuring George's account, which is only concerned with the ingenious and exemplary nature of the punishment in its creation of a human stalagmite.

Young Mr Charity's other activities did not always have such clear analogies in the Old Testament. Blasting Tom persuaded him that the sough, or drainage channel, from a distant lead mine (perhaps the one that had dismissed him?) was responsible for lowering the water table generally and thus producing a decline in the flow of Charity Stream. He suggested an armed expedition, aimed at using explosives to bring about a cave-in and thus blocking the sough.

Figuring George himself spoke against this plan, having by now assumed a position of some importance. It would, he said, be an inappropriate use of resources that were becoming more limited. Presumably Young Mr Charity had been sent off with a large sum of money, perhaps the greater part of his mother's marriage settlement, which his father felt he could afford, as an investment in the future. Now, it was nearing its end, and it would certainly not be replenished from the previous source, nor through any profits from the mill, which seems, by this stage, to have ceased working altogether. Nor was it the only mill to close, especially among the older and less efficient ones, during this period of general depression.

His father had diversified sufficiently to be completely secure against the collapse of the textile market, and many of the mills and other enterprises that still proudly bore his name in letters you could see from the far end of the valley (as you will have realised, he was not actually called Mr Charity) had ceased to be owned by him long before his death at the age of eighty-five. His widow, who had no reason to stay in a country where her lowly social origins had only been tolerated because of the respect her husband commanded, left the business in the safe hands of its managers and took her sickly son on a tour of the finest spas of Europe, he vainly seeking health , she sucessfully finding excitement. Before leaving, she took care to have both their names carved on the family mausoleum, with a space for the dates. There would be plenty of space for them, her husband having decided on cremation, as the cheaper option.

Whether Young Mr Charity was aware of his father's death is hard to say. Had he read a newspaper or had contact with anyone outside the dale where he lived, it would have been more or less inevitable, sooner or later. Whether, under those circumstances, he would have laid claim to his inheritance, and whether he would have been successful in such a claim, is even harder to say. Presumably he could have provided proof of identity a little stronger than the strawberry-shaped birthmark so beloved of Victorian melodrama. Then it would have been necessary to see whether his father had really gone so far as to disinherit him in all form and written a will that expressly said so. As it was, he had made over the ownership of everything that mattered to his wife and her son well before his death, to avoid all that kind of trouble.

Of course, such things had been known in the Old Testament, where the all-important right of primogeniture had often been abrogated in dubious ways: birthrights sold for a mess of pottage, paternal blessings snaffled away in the darkness of a smelly tent by dint of a hairy disguise. But could such goings-on have been tolerated in a nineteenth-century that was stuffed full of lawyers specialising in the law of inheritance?

But was Young Mr Charity actually living in the nineteenth century, even if he could look down from the end of his dale and see a steam-train pass four times a day? (It took the milk and brought the post and took the post and brought the empty milk churns back again.) The last adventure recorded in Figuring George's book makes that seem unlikely.

Somewhere in his mid-forties (George's dating, From the Foundation of the Mill, In the Third Year of the Dam is quite erratic and sometimes incomprehensible, or plain wrong) Young Mr Charity conceived a desire for a gypsy woman he had seen on one of his wanderings. Tribes of gypsies passed through the Peak not infrequently, either on their way to somewhere else, or over-wintering in the many convenient caves. Because they camped well away from fixed settlements, they were well-tolerated.

We twentieth-century people look back on this and say: Mid-life crisis! Sexual deprivation! Maybe we should say: He just wanted to be like King David. That was what George suspected when his master confided in him. He refers specifically to the unpleasant business with Uriah the Hittite and his wife, Bathsheba, whom David saw bathing and desired, so that Uriah was immediately despatched to a military position in which he was bound to be killed. George tried to dissuade him, but Young Mr Charity had been reading the Song of Songs, with all its lines about breasts and bellies, and there was no stopping him. "George," he said, "spare me the New Testament, with its tales of forgiveness. I am not worthy of it. Let me keep to the Old, with its tales of men's acts and their consequences. Wickedness and retribution I understand, but not that other." Poor George, trying to be like a father to him. Young Mr Charity preferred God the Father, the Father who demanded obedience, rather than offering persuasion, the Father you could defy, and take your punishment like a man, not this namby-pamby "my will is your will" stuff.

It must have taken all his money to get the last few men who were loyal to him to kidnap the girl. It doesn't seem they actually had to kill anyone, though they implied so when they asked for additional payment, which was refused, and took their discontented leave. But she was independent enough to be wandering around alone, and probably had no idea that anyone lived in the dale, what with the mill being idle and silent.

But she wouldn't do what he wanted. Not even for the money he had left. Especially not for money.

By now, the other members of her band had tracked her and surrounded the dale. Young Mr Charity had thought of this, and got Blasting Tom to rig charges either end of it that would blow and close them all in if it came to it. When you read George's account, you get the feeling of a kind of contagious madness and admiration. These two sensible older men should never have got themselves involved in a mess like this. But here was somebody who knew what he wanted from life and was going to try and get it, come what might - and they'd never had the courage to do that. But it fascinated them. So they stayed. And they helped - as far as they could.

For the moment, it was a stand-off. The gypsies are sound judges of character. They knew he was crazy enough to do what he said at the first sign of their trying to climb down. The girl, it seems, communicated with them from her prison by imitating bird-cries. That's what George guessed - after the event. He had always missed the birds, he said, after they dammed the waters. Fewer of the songbirds came. He heard them again when the girl was there, and thought it was her influence. Only now did he realise that she had been signalling to her family above.

The gypsy girl asked for a book to read, to while away the hours. They gave her the Bible - what other book did they have? Not renowned for reading, the gypsies, but the womenfolk knew how, it was one of their special skills.

Hard to tell how much time went past - it was winter, a rainy one. One day, she said she'd thought it all over and she'd consent. Young Mr Charity was overjoyed. Cautious, but overjoyed. Said he'd never have raped her, because he knew that was wrong and couldn't even be made good if you married the woman afterwards. He gave her the reference for that, too. The Israelites massacred all the men who were responsible - having first agreed that they could marry their sisters, and demanded they should be circumcised, to which they agreed - then they fell on them when they were still recovering from the circumcision. Lying, deception, all allowed, in the name of God, for the greater glory of the chosen people.

Even so, he still insisted she be tied down. One hand free, that was all he'd allow. Enough, he said, to push him away if she changed her mind. Not enough to harm him. And enough, still, to caress him, as it said in the Song of Songs.

George discovered him afterwards. She'd found a flint somewhere in the cave where she was kept, and sharpened it day and night - that was why she waited so long. Cut his throat with it, one blow. Then she cut her bonds, left hand first, then the feet. No sound. Then up and away, up the cliff. George ran outside and saw her, just a white dot, almost at the top, her family waiting. They didn't see him, otherwise they might have shot at him. He went back in. There was his master, dead. What to do? Consult the Bible, of course. It was in her prison-cave. He found it open at the story of Judith, who saves Israel by agreeing to go to bed with Holofernes, the enemy general. No sooner has he had his wicked way with her, than she cuts off his head.

George wakes Blasting Tom, with whom he's been sharing guard duty all this while, and tells him to get out of the dale, but be careful because the gypsies will be watching. Then he writes down what's happened. because he's a conscientious man is George, wraps the book in oil-skin, puts it in an old crate and drops it in the river, which is flowing quite strongly this winter. Then he fires the charges.

Was it noticed anywhere else? Well, the train always had to stop and clear boulders off the track in the winter.

How did I come by George's book? My great-grandfather found it one day, years after it must have been, when he was walking by the end of Charity Dale. No river there, of course. There had been, once, boulders everywhere, you could see, but now it was dry as a bone, and the stream came out of the hillside way, way down. My great-grandfather was quite an old man at the time, out walking with my grandfather who was very young. Sounds like a fairytale, really, but my grandfather was a foundling. Left at my great-grandfather's door as a newborn baby. They'd always wanted a child and never had one. Came as the answer to their prayers, if you believe in prayers, and they did. The villagers said it must have been the gypsies, but then that's what they always say, isn't it? Last house before the moor. Funny place. On the one hand, it's normal, green fields, trees, all cultivated, human; and a few yards on it's wild, bare, stones poking through, no sense or plan to it at all..

He was a vicar, my great-grandfather, and taught in the school to have enough to live on. My grandfather couldn't take the religion, but he enjoyed the teaching fine, as did my father after him. I do, too.

I've often thought about giving George's book to a museum. That's where dead things go, if you don't want to throw them away. I expect my father and grandfather thought about doing it, too. But they didn't, and I probably shan't, either. My great-grandfather never showed it to anyone, you know. Kept it in the attic. It only came to light when his things were cleared out, after he died. My father showed me when he thought I was old enough.

Like most books, really, it has to be read the right way. And you have to compare it with what you see around you. Especially the places where people put their heart and their money.

Charity Dale, now, that's all right to look at from a distance. Even if you saw it close to, it wouldn't do you much good. The stones wouldn't let you in. And the dark black lake's gone away.

Down in Macclesfield, though, that fine Sunday School of theirs has been turned into a Heritage Centre. Their mills are all museums, too, those that aren't warehouses for mail-order knitwear made in Korea. And the chapel has become a night-club.

I think Old Mr Charity would probably approve. Providing it made money.