The Gallows Pole - Softcover

Myers, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997457856 ISBN 13: 9780997457858

Publisher: Third Man Books, 2019

Synopsis

Set in the moorland hills of 18th century Yorkshire, The Gallows Pole is the true story of an organized crime of forgers known as the Cragg Vale Coiners. Lead by the charismatic ‘King David Hartley, a man prone to violence and mystical visions, they rise to glory until the bloody murder of a government official brings them to the attention of the authorities. An English western, The Gallows Pole is a poetic and visceral telling of a secret history and a wild landscape. It explores contemporary themes including wealth, abuse of power, class, corruptions, borders and boundaries and national identity. Includes a Foreword by Benjamin Myers exclusive to this USA edition from Third Man Books.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976. He is in an award-winning author, poet and journalist, translated into several languages. His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature and was recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award. Pig Iron (2012) was the winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize and runner-up in The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller, chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year. Myers’ ‘folk crime’ novels Turning Blue (2016) and These Darkening Days (2017) were widely acclaimed by critics including Val McDermid.

His latest book Under The Rock, a non-fiction work, has been described as “a bold and original exploration of nature and literature that firmly establishes him firmly among the first ranks of Britain’s most exciting writers of landscape and place.”

The Gallows Pole was the recipient of Roger Deakin Award and longlisted for both the 2018 Walter Scott Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

As a journalist he has written about music, the arts and nature for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, The Spectator, NME, Mojo, Time Out, New Scientist, Caught By The River, Record Collector, Vice, The Quietus, Melody Maker, Metal Hammer, Alternative Press, and many others. His short stories and poetry have appeared in dozens of print and small press anthologies, chapbooks and underground obscurities.
His new novel The Offing is published by Bloomsbury in August 2019.

Benjamin Myers currently lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, UK.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Yes. That. On the pot. What’s it meant to be?
That, said The Alchemist. That represents the bladed
branches of the stag.
His voice was dry in his mouth. His voice was fire-cracked
and heat-worn.
Why, said David Hartley. Why?
Because the stag is the life force of the moors just as fire is
the life of forging. I thought you’d know that.
I do know that, said David Hartley. I do know that.
Only then did The Alchemist look at the brothers and
their father, and the glances that passed between them. In
the latter he saw an aged man who had lived for six long
decades of turf-digging and loom-mending, of flint-slitting
and rock-breaking and pond-dredging and rabbit-trapping and
slate-fixing, all with nothing to show for it but twisted fingers
and a locked left knee, a squint and a crooked spine. He saw
that the old man’s dark eyes seemed to hold the seeds of fire too,
and that his chin was pointed and one temple scarred with a
white mess of flesh healed into a tight pattern like the fossilised
form of flowering lichen across a wet valley rock. The mashed
markings of a true coin smelter.
The Alchemist extended an arm. He held out a palm,
requested alms.
David Hartley produced a pouch and poured half of it into
the hand of The Alchemist who took the shears and clipped
each coin in turn until he had a small pile of slivers.
With neat movements he circled the fire and roddled the
coals and pumped the bellows.
The remaining coins he deftly stacked in a tower on the floor.
With his poker he tapped the pot and the four men leaned
in to see that the guinea shards were changing shape. Softening
and collapsing. They were gaining a liquid sheen.
The Alchemist signalled for the men to step back as he
unwrapped another cloth and set down beside him a selection
of moulds and dies of different sizes. He carefully arranged
5 5
them. He touched them once. He touched them twice, then
with tongs he lifted the pot from the fire and poured its contents
into four of the moulds. The pot he set aside.
Still squatting and stock still, The Alchemist muttered words
to himself. The Hartleys could not determine what he was saying.
His whispered words ran into one another. Strange incantations.
He uttered a song without a melody. An inaudible spell for the
casting of the metal. A twisting of the tongue.
Then in a sudden burst of movement The Alchemist snatched
up a spelter stamp in one hand and hammer in the other. The
stamp he pressed down onto the first mould and he twirled
the hammer once and then twice over the back of his hand
in a conjurer’s display of showmanship before swinging it and
bringing it down hard on the head of the stamp. He struck again
and again, the shrill judder of metal on metal reverberating.
The stamp he cast aside before seizing the next one – this
slightly larger – and swinging and striking in quick succession.
Four times he did this, one after another; the stone space
echoing with the hammer’s call.
Then he laid his tools aside. There were beads of sweat on his
brow now. They looked black. As black as the dew that settles
on the coomb of a coalman’s shovelled remnants.
The Alchemist turned the moulds upside down and tapped
the bottom of each so that their contents fell into a bowl of
water that steamed with each newly-forged coin. Then he spoke.
He said: the white hot hiss is a vicious liquid kiss from the lady
of the fire who is softer than silver and swifter than light.
What’s that? said Isaac Hartley. What’s he saying?
The mottled dirty water he threw onto the hot coals and
these too hissed and steamed and spat tiny gobbets of dead and
dying embers in a cloud of smothering muffled smoke that had
all the men but The Alchemist, who seemed impervious to it,
hacking and rubbing at their eyes.
He rattled the bowl and swirled its contents then flicked the
newly-forged and stamped coins into his hand. From a pocket
5 6
he produced a rag and a small snuff box of dark daubing into
which he dipped a blackened digit and dabbed some of its
contents onto each coin. With an economical flourish he buffed
each disc.
He slowly stood and handed a coin in turn to young William
Hartley and Isaac Hartley and the old man William Hartley
the elder. At David Hartley he paused and held the coin aloft
between thumb and forefinger and in the half-light it seemed to
turn and spin of its own accord and he said come, come press a
coin into my palm and I’ll return you two like a curse reversed
on a gypsy’s tongue.
David Hartley took the coin.
He touched it. He studied it. It still held within it the warmth
of the fire. He examined it further.
He said: this work is good.
The Alchemist said nothing.
Here, he’s milled the rim, said William Hartley, and David
Hartley studied the tiny writing that ran around the side of the
coin.
Do you know what these words say? asked The Alchemist.
No, I do not said, David Hartley. They are not in any language
that any right-minded man round these parts would know even
if they were book learners.
That’s because these words is Latin, said The Alchemist.
Decus Et Tutamen . They say: An Ornament and a Safeguard.
A hundred years or more this coin has carried these words and
I’d wager it’ll carry them for a hundred more.
What’s all this Latin for?
Latin is the language that the crown favours, said William
Hartley Sr. It’s what they speak across foreign waters and it
makes the king think he’s better than common folk.
I’m not no fucking common folk, said David Hartley. I’m a
king too; a king that’s more respected amongst his own folk
than these betterny-bodies who think their shit smells as sweet
as pollen. And I’m a king that doesn’t need no fucking foreign
tongue from across no foreign waters to make him feel big about
himself, nor a crown upon his napper. All I wear is the sky above
me, and the only throne this man needs is that which sits above
the shitting pit.

About this edition

• Publisher: Third Man Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0997457856
• ISBN 13: 9780997457858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350