by Robin Blake
‘Bawty!’ the soldier growled at his dog. I grabbed at Suez’s lead to drag him towards me, but it turned out that the Scotch monster did not want to fight or, if it did, it was a play-fight. Without so much as a growl, Bawty nosed Suez’s backside then bounded back, making three or four lolloping circles, before adopting the canine come-and-play posture, with his chest and forelegs flat to the ground and his backside and beating tail in the air.
‘That’s a marvellous dog you have,’ I said, reaching out and scratching the animal behind its ears. The soldier obviously did not think so.
‘Bawty, ya bloody girl. Ya stupid cur, come here.’
He darted towards the dog and, seizing its collar, administered three sharp knuckle-raps across its broad nose. With a whimper, Bawty sank down in submission.
‘Well, we will be on our way,’ I said, embarrassed at this unnecessary display of cruelty. ‘I wish you goodnight, Mr MacGregor.’
I raised my hat and started to retreat. After half a dozen strides, I turned and saw Bawty’s eyes following us. I had the sense they were imploring us. Then I heard another sizzling spit.
‘It’s Sergeant, ya bloody Sassenach.’
I let myself in, expecting the house to be in darkness, but saw that there was a light in my library. Letting Suez run into the kitchen, I opened the library door to find Madame Lachatte sitting beside the embers of the fire with a candle and a book open on her knee.
‘You are a reader, Madame?’
‘Am I just! Only romances and stories of adventure. And fables. I am devoted to them, but I find I have read all the ones I brought in my luggage.’
‘I have little of that kind, I am afraid. Have you found something to your taste?’
She showed me the book: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
‘It is an old favourite of mine, but I have read it so many times I had much rather have a new story. Perhaps there’s another by this author, Defoe. Do you have one?’
‘I regret, no. But if you will allow me to conduct you in the morning to my bookseller, Mr Sweeting, I am sure he will be able to supply something suitable.’
She agreed to be guided to Sweeting’s shop after breakfast, then yawned and, rising, bade me goodnight.
I was about to go up myself when I heard the front door opening and found Luke Fidelis with his medical bag, shaking snow from his greatcoat.
‘A late call to a patient,’ he told me. ‘And there is another from the house of one you may know – Mr Limmington in Penwortham. It is a pro bono job as he is a pauper. I shall attend him in the morning.’
‘Good heavens! I saw him only today. What ails him?’
‘He was struck on the head. His housekeeper wrote that a party of Highlanders came to the house demanding money and cracked his skull.’
‘How is he?’
‘Unconscious. I am hoping he will have awoken when I go to him first thing tomorrow.’
‘If he dies, I suppose I shall have to inquest him. That will be a tricky matter if rebel soldiers were responsible.’
We went up the stairs and said goodnight on the landing outside our temporary attic bedrooms.
Later, lying beside my sleeping wife, I closed my eyes and found Madame Lachatte’s flawless skin, rich red hair and, above all, her eyes appearing unbidden to my mind’s eye, and fell asleep thinking of them.
ELEVEN
‘Will you take a snuff, Madame?’ said Sebastian Sweeting when I had introduced him early next morning to Madame Lachatte. He flipped open the lid of the big snuffbox that he kept on the counter for his customers, and we both took a pinch.
‘How may I help you?’ he said.
‘I would like to purchase a novel for my entertainment,’ she explained, after she had indulged in a hearty sneeze.
‘I have some of the kind.’
He retreated into the dusty and shadowed rear of the shop and came back with several volumes, which he placed on the counter. He picked up the first and opened it at the title.
‘Here is one of a serving girl called Kitty O’Mara.’
The lady’s interest was piqued.
‘Irish?’
‘Evidently.’
He read out the information under the title.
‘“Being the History of a Young Woman from the Country taken into the Home of a Noblewoman as a Chambermaid who doth Wantonly Steal from her Employer her Dresses, Jewels etc. and after Numerous Vicissitudes is discovered and doth repent and accept as the Will of God her Condign Punishment at Tyburn Gallows.”’
‘Oh, Mr Sweeting!’ she exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me the ending, please! To know the ending of a story before you begin – it’s like swallowing a cake without tasting it.’
Sweeting laid this volume aside and picked up another, glancing at the title.
‘This concerns a lad whose family is suddenly cast into hardship and he is made apprentice to a notorious highwayman.’
She shook her head.
‘I have no taste for it. It smokes of boys who think they are men, and of men no better than boys.’
Sweeting opened a third volume from his pile. Glancing at the title, he quickly closed it again and laid it aside. But Madame Lachatte saw what he had done and took up the rejected book for herself.
‘Ah!’ she said, opening it. ‘This looks more the sort that I like.’
‘Madame,’ said Sweeting, alarmed, ‘I am not sure it is quite suitable.’
‘No, Mr Sweeting, I cannot agree.’
She read the title aloud.
‘“The Fortunate Mistress or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess of Wintselsheim in Germany Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the Time of Charles II.” This promises to be good. I’ll take it.’
By his face, I could see Sweeting was put out. He valued his reputation for perfectly matching customers and books, and yet here was one rejecting his recommendation. Still, he made a parcel of The Fortunate Mistress. She handed over half a guinea and tucked the parcel under her arm.
It was only a few steps back up Church Gate to Cheap Side and the Market Place. Friday market was in progress, but a troop of soldiers had cleared away all the stalls surrounding the monument, while half a dozen of their fellows set to work turning some traders’ tables into a platform. Trading in the market had almost ceased as people gathered around the small stage to see what was going to happen.
‘You may find this of interest,’ said my companion. ‘Shall we watch?’
We took our place at the back of the crowd and waited. Soon, from the direction of Friar Gate, we heard the sound of bagpipes and drummers, and a path was cleared through which a body of troops marched up and formed up around the monument. A number of standards were now raised on poles around the platform, the largest being a red flag with a white square at its centre. The clock on the parish church struck eleven. At once the music stopped as a tall young man dressed in white breeches and a blue coat trimmed with gold braid, a white cockade in his hat, jumped on to the stage. This caused some cheering, ragged at first but gaining confidence until he had to raise his hand to be heard. He held a paper in his hand from which he began to read.
I strained to hear but we were at the back of the crowd and the words were lost under the buzz of the audience, which was punctuated by cries of ‘Huzzah!’ and ‘God save the Prince!’ The young man’s voice rose to try to overcome the noise. I heard odd words from which I gathered he was denouncing the Elector of Hanover as a false and illegitimate king. He continued speaking, but his words were whipped away by the wind. As he finished, there was a climactic cheer, which he acknowledged by flourishing the paper. He then jumped down and mounted a horse, from which he continued to wave the proclamation in the air as he rode through the throng.
‘There you have it,’ said Madame Lachatte. ‘This is done in all the towns we pass through. King James the Third is proclaimed the undoubted King of England and all its dominion
s, and the Elector of Hanover denounced for a usurper.’
‘That was the Prince himself who spoke?’
‘Yes. Is he not handsome? And how the people acclaim him!’
The acclaim I could not deny, as the many convinced Jacobites in the town had turned out to cheer their hero, while the rest kept indoors. As to the Prince’s good looks, I was not close enough to see his face as anything but a blur or a fog. But there was something familiar in it, I supposed, from portraits I had seen, and this led in turn to thoughts of my conversation with Mrs Parkinson at the Entwhistle house, when we had examined the medal with the Prince’s portrait. I had never looked up those lines in the Georgics to which the inscription Hunc saltem everso juvenem may have referred.
We had reached the steps up to my front door when I saw Luke Fidelis rounding the corner from Fisher Gate. He raised his arm and shouted, and having handed the lady into the house, I waited for him.
‘You must come with me to Penwortham,’ he said.
‘Is it poor Limmington?’
‘Yes. His housekeeper has sent word. He died in the night.’
‘Then I will come.’
They say that a house in which someone dies is colder by the thermometer three days continuously, and then the temperature returns to normal. Limmington’s house in Penwortham was certainly cold, though it seemed no colder than when I’d visited the previous day. Cold, however, sharpens the nostrils, and as soon as the housekeeper let us in, I smelled pipe smoke. We were not admitted to the parlour – from where the smoke seemed to originate – but taken immediately up the stairs to Limmington’s bedroom. It was a good-sized but Spartan apartment, the bed without hangings and the chandelier lacking candles. The corpse of Horace Limmington lay on its back with eyes closed as in sleep. His arms were neatly crossed over his chest, the hands palm down.
Fidelis immediately went to the bedside. He removed his hat, pulled off his gloves and opened his medical case. He first lifted the eyelids and flexed the fingers and arms.
‘Rigor mortis is already well advanced,’ he remarked. He looked at his watch. ‘And the time is half past ten.’
He turned to the mouth.
‘Is there no candle?’
There was none, so Fidelis took a tinderbox and small oil lamp from his bag, and lit a match to fire the wick.
‘Hold this, will you? Bring it close to his mouth cavity.’
Fidelis levered the mouth open with finger and thumb, and I held the oil lamp as requested while Fidelis bent to peer inside. After this he put down the lamp and took a thermometer from his case. This was to measure the corpse’s temperature (I will leave the reader to imagine where he’d be putting the instrument), which he would note down in a notebook against the time of its taking. No doubt he would then roll the body on to its side to see the condition of its back before turning to the wound on Limmington’s head, which he would measure, smell and palpate, then put his eye close to it for minute inspection. These were things I had watched him do with many previous corpses.
My own job was not a physical examination but a verbal one – of the housekeeper. She had left the room, and hearing her voice in the hall, I followed her. From the stairtop I could see the open front door, where she was conversing in a low voice with a man I could not see. A neighbour who had come to condole, I supposed, and no doubt the author of the tobacco smoke. I coughed coming down the stair, upon hearing which she closed the door.
‘May I have a word?’ I said.
She led me into the parlour.
‘What time did Mr Limmington breathe his last?’
‘In the night. A half hour before morning light.’
‘Five o’clock, then?’
‘Happen.’
‘Had he been able to speak?’
‘Just huffs and snorts and wheezes. He never came round after he was hit.’
’And you were there when he died?’
‘I watched by the bedside all night.’
‘That is commendable. Why did you not have his doctor to him, from here in Penwortham?’
‘Thomas Ross won’t so much as snap the catch of his doctor’s bag without a fee. And I have no money. I sent to Doctor Fidelis in town because I’ve heard he’ll doctor you for nowt.’
‘Did Mr Limmington have no family you could appeal to?’
‘Not here. His wife has upped and left and gone to Macclesfield. They’d no bairns that lived.’
‘Tell me how Mr Limmington came by the wound that felled him.’
‘The rebels did it. They rode in, four of them, collecting money. They came hammering at the door. Well, I let them in, not knowing what else to do, and showed them in to the master. Pay up, I heard them tell him, by order of the paymaster-general, or face military execution. They’d got his name down as being a collector of excise taxes, they said, and those taxes belong to the King – him that should be king, not him in London, so they said.’
‘You were listening at the door?’
She sniffed.
‘I do not pry, sir. I wouldn’t lower myself to prying. They were in the study and I was in here, cleaning. I could not help the hearing of it.’
Cleaning? My eye flicked involuntarily at one of the dusty cobwebbed corners of the room.
‘How did your master reply?’
‘Mr Limmington said he was never excise collector but would have been turnpike collector, only it never came about, so he didn’t have a brass farthing to give them. He shouted, angry-like. He said even if he had, why should he? It was then that the soldiers, or one of them, attacked him.’
‘With what weapon?’
‘Oh, an axe, Mr Cragg. A terrible big axe such as those savages carry into battle.’
‘What clan were they? What regiment?’
‘I know nowt about regiments and clans.’
‘And what time did they come? When was the attack itself?’
‘Before dark. Happen half three.’
‘And they went away with nothing?’
She smiled grimly.
‘No. They went away with a lot. After they’d axed Mr Limmington, he lay there on the floor gasping and groaning. And as I was attending to him the best I could, those devils were searching the house. They found them golden guineas as Mr Limmington came upon on the Liverpool Road. The ones he was asking you about when you came Wednesday.’
‘Well, that was quite a sum. Those rebels will have gone away highly gratified.’
‘When the devil’s abroad, murder eats dainties, as they say.’
‘Poor Limmington. Luck was not his friend. However did you get him upstairs to bed?’
‘I managed.’
‘But he was unconscious. Did you have no help?’
‘He was dazed. He could almost stand, and I found the strength to support him. I scorn help.’
Fidelis appeared in the doorway, hatted and gloved once more.
‘There’s no need for me to cut him open, Titus. It’s the blow to the head that killed him. I will give you a report later. Meanwhile, I shall visit my patient here.’
‘And I must speak to the constable about a jury.’
So we left Griselda and parted in the street.
‘Yes, the rebels were here yesterday,’ Constable Gibbins told me at the door of the Swan Inn, which he kept. ‘A party of four rode through, looking for money by what they called lawful authority. Thievery, more like.’
Gibbins was a good, fat man – not rich, but comfortable enough from what he earned as innkeeper.
‘Did you see them?’
‘Aye, they came to the inn first. They were drinking ale and warming themselves.’
‘Could you identify them in any way? The regiment? The clan?’
‘No, I couldn’t, Mr Cragg. I’m sorry.’
‘Did you hear them talking?’
Gibbins beckoned that I come inside, where he pointed to the fireplace.
‘They sat there talking in their own language and looking at a list on a paper they
had with them. Then one of them called me over and asked me in English where they could find Ezra Potter, John Wilkinson and Horace Limmington. They showed me the names on their list, which they said were names of tax collectors, and I reckon they’d been copied from receipts in the tax and excise books in town. They promised to burn down the inn if I didn’t tell them.’
‘Ah! It seems the rebels have taken over King George’s tax revenue for themselves.’
‘It’s a strange way to gather taxes, threatening to burn down a man’s business.’
‘They are soldiers, who are hard men, and many act without scruple.’
‘Any road, they must have been copied, those names, from old excise books, see? Not the present ones.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because, while it’s true Ezra did work for the excise, he’s been dead two years, which I told them. And I said they wouldn’t find Big John here either. He was an excise man an’ all – how d’you think he got so rich? – but he’s been gone to Ormskirk since last year and built a fine new house for himself.’
‘I suppose they could not get hold of the current receipt books. They would’ve been hidden away. What about Limmington, though?’
‘That’s the odd thing. He was never a tax collector at all, not with the King’s excise. He was made tolls collector for the new road, but that was never finished. Limmington never collected a single toll.’
‘But you nevertheless said where he lived?’
‘I did, God forgive me, because I thought he would explain and they’d believe him. But they didn’t, it seems. Am I not therefore the cause of his death?’
‘You had no choice, man,’ I said consolingly. ‘You might’ve lost the inn, or even your own life. But they were thwarted here in Penwortham by their out-of-date intelligence and they killed Limmington in a fit of frustration, I think.’
So we turned to our arrangements for Limmington’s inquest. I told him it would be on Monday the sixth of December – five days’ time. Gibbins offered the use of his inn for the hearing and engaged to have a panel of jurors recruited in time.
‘We shall need the servantwoman Griselda to give evidence. What’s her surname by the way?’
