by John Buchan
I do not know if Hurrell was serious — possibly not — but to our surprise Leithen was serious enough. This shrewd, matter-of-fact lawyer, who rejoiced to prick most speculative bubbles, suddenly revealed an unexpected credulity.
‘It needn’t be only in the air,’ he said. ‘Why should it not be in the whole physical environment — stones, trees, a glen, a hillside? We do not know what queer intricate effects the human soul may have on inanimate things. A physical environment may be charged with psychical stuff as a battery is charged with electricity, and, when the right conductor appears there may be the deuce to pay.’
He stopped.
‘Go on,’ said Hurrell. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘I can’t,’ said Leithen. ‘It’s only a whimsy, and won’t bear explanation.’
Then Burmester showed his acumen.
‘There’s a story here,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it, Ned.’
Leithen looked embarrassed.
‘There is a story. It’s about Scaip — where Thomasson died. But I’m not sure that I should tell it.’ He hesitated. ‘Yet, I don’t know. We were all friends of his — and I’ve rather got it on my mind... I think I should like to tell it you. I can trust your discretion, for, as you’ll see, it’s not a thing that should be talked about.’
It all happened years ago, he said, just after I acquired Borrowby. Borrowby was rather a ruin, and I had to do a good deal to make it habitable, besides putting in bathrooms and lighting and that sort of thing. I employed a young architect who understood what I wanted, but I was so desperately keen that I couldn’t keep away from the place, and was always running down to see how the builders were getting on. So that year, when the courts rose before Easter, I decided to spend my vacation in the Cotswolds. I meant to put up at a local pub, but suddenly out of the blue came an invitation from Barnes Lacey to stay with him at Scaip. Scaip is only five miles from Borrowby, so I gladly accepted.
You remember old Lacey? Bankers often dabble in scholarship, but he was the only stockbroker I have ever known who cultivated the Muses. Pretty arid Muses they were, for his hobby was the backstairs of the Middle Ages — all the dustiest backstairs, too, for he didn’t care a rush for poetry and art, but only for conundrums in law and custom. He has been dead for some time, and I gather that his reputation is growing - constantly quoted by the pundits, for apparently he had some original theories which Maitland pooh-poohed, but which people nowadays are inclined to accept. He was the genuine antiquary and never so happy as when he was up to the neck in grubby charters. How he was so successful in the City I can’t explain, but he was. He made a pot of money, and was just about to retire and look for a country house, when he inherited the family place from a distant cousin.
Scaip was the right kind of house for him. It is in one of those steep little valleys that cut into the west side of the Cotswold escarpment. Coming from the east, you cross the upland plateau with its stone walls and beech clumps and wild thorny meadows, and come suddenly to an edge and look over the Severn to the Welsh hills forty miles off. The glen drops straight from your feet, with a stream in it that lower down is dammed into a string of ponds. Near the top on a shelf is the village of Greenbourton, one of the prettiest in England — thirteenth-century church, green, cross, well spreading into watercress beds, and twenty grey stone-roofed cottages that look as ancient as hillside boulders — the most delicious place on earth, especially in April when it is smothered in a foam of cherry-blossom. Half a mile down on the next shelf stands the manor-house of Scaip, to which all the glen and about ten square miles of the uplands belong.
Have you ever seen Scaip? Well, go and look at it, for you won’t forget the first sight of it. It has all the gloom and mystery of the back-world of England. Seen from the hill above it appears to be a little town, with all manner of tiny quadrangles and falling terraces, but if you look up at it from below it is more like some Tyrolese Schloss, a dark, craggy, impenetrable fortress. Or it is like a Border keep built to protect the gates of the Marches. There is Norman work in it, but the tower dates from just before the Wars of the Roses, and tacked on to it is the main block built about the time of Henry VII. It is the austerest kind of early Tudor, a grim façade broken up by a few shallow rectangular bow windows. The remarkable thing about it is that it has not been altered, except for a classical Jacobean porch at the main entrance, and a kitchen built out in the eighteenth century. Below it, dropping to the stream and the ponds, are funny little stone curtains, and terraces flanked with things like dovecots, and twisting stone stairways. All the purlieus are a maze of fantastic stonework, but the house itself rises above them as solid and self-contained as a mountain.
Inside it was the last word in discomfort, for it had been scarcely lived in for a century, the Laceys having another place in Norfolk which was not entailed and so had not descended to Barnes. The staircases ran at impossible angles, and to find your way about was a perpetual game of hide-and-seek. A good deal of the furniture was three centuries old and I have never seen such a museum of day-beds and settles and chairs in which ease was impossible. Barnes, who liked his comforts, had done his best, and he had excellent servants, but we had to bathe in hip-baths, and all the water had to be fetched from the courtyard well, and the food was apt to be cold, since it had to be brought about a quarter of a mile from the kitchen. His antiquarian conscience would not allow him to alter much, so he himself roosted in a medieval bed-chamber which smelt of mould, and put up with tepid meals. But he had introduced some reasonable armchairs and had the chimneys altered so that they did not smoke, and he knocked two rooms on the terrace together so as to make one decent guest-chamber. I, being a disconsidered bachelor, had a medieval cubby hole next to his own.
The weather when I arrived was the quiet, hazy, early April kind before the riot of spring begins. I arrived late and saw nothing of Scaip till the next morning, and then it seemed to me the last word in perfection, so that I fell sadly out of conceit with my own Borrowby. I looked from my window over the falling courts and gardens to the shining waters of a little lake, and beyond to a green shoulder of hill where sheep were feeding. I couldn’t lie in bed, so I went for a walk before breakfast and looked into the terrace guest-room. It had not been spoiled by the reconstruction, and the small dark panels, the stone fireplace, the exquisite plaster mouldings of the ceiling, and the tapestry of the bed hangings and the curtains, were as they might have been three or four centuries ago. The view outside, too, had nothing modern in it, and I had a pleasant feeling of having cheated time as I paced the terrace. There was a far-off sound of bleating sheep, and a great cawing of rooks from the hillside beeches, and somewhere very distant the slow sweet chiming of bells. I thought what a kind and habitable land our England was, and how Scaip had an extra share of its graciousness. No harshness, I told myself, could ever have broken the peace of this happy vale.
On the second afternoon of my visit Barnes took me for a walk along the slopes of the hills in brisk shiny weather. A south wind was blowing that made the buds swell visibly. He wanted to show me the church at Fanways, which I had never seen, and which contained several Lacey tombs. We came to it about four o’clock, which I have always considered the cheerfullest hour in the day. I won’t try to describe Fanways, for I daresay most of you have been there, for it is the show place of that bit of country. The village straggles on both sides of a narrow road and the cottages are perched high up on the banks with, below them, rock-gardens which were blazing with aubrietia and arabis. The church is at the foot, rising out of the water meadows like a baron’s keep, and dwarfing the village, dwarfing even the hills. You cannot imagine anything more snug and comfortable than that string of ancient homesteads, each sending up its drift of smoke from its stone chimneys. But not so the famous church. Even in the clear April sunshine it threatened and commanded, pulled the mind out of its ease and warned it of the mystery of life and the terrors of death. Seen under a wild December sunset, it must be a solemnising sp
ectacle.
I had this impression strong on me as we passed through the churchyard yews to the main porch. Barnes didn’t seem to share it. He became the pitiless antiquarian, calling my attention to all kinds of architectural tit-bits, and talking a language I imperfectly understood. In the interior gloom, heavy with incense, for the vicar was an extreme Anglo-Catholic, he scarcely showed decent reverence, for he was eager to point out a dozen things in the carved woodwork and stonework which he pronounced to be grotesque and obscene. Other people had discoursed to me of the traces of diabolism in the holy places of our ancestors, and I did not pay much attention to Barnes.
But as we were leaving, and stood under the great eastern buttress, he suddenly revealed a sensitiveness with which I had not credited him. ‘A noble house of God,’ he said. ‘Yes, but I swear that the Devil had a good deal to do with the building of it.’
He held the point of his stick at my breast in a way he had when he wanted to be emphatic.
‘There’s no greater nonsense,’ he said, ‘than the stuff the modern medieval sentimentalist talks about simple piety flowering into stone and lime and craftsmen working solely to the glory of God. There was a little of that, no doubt, but there was a pretty ugly other side. A great church often had its origin in the vulgarest rivalry. One magnate wanted to score off another, and that was the best way he could do it in public. “As sure as God’s in Gloucestershire,” the proverb says. Well, I’ve unearthed some pretty queer tales which show that the Almighty can’t have been very happy about some of the houses built for him.’
‘Not only that,’ he went on. ‘Someone ought to tell the truth about the medieval craftsmen. They had their gilds as you know, close corporations which were often guilty of the bloodiest tyranny. Our innocent trade unions today don’t know the first thing about their jobs. Some of them — the masons especially — had secret societies with a fairly devilish side to them. They were under the special protection of the Church, you see, in their work, and made sure of Heaven at their death, so in their lives they could dabble with impunity in Hell. They might be building a shrine for the Virgin or St Peter, but it was Priapus or Nodens or Vaunus, or some other old Pagan miscreant that often inspired their work. You can find it here and in many other places — there’s a spirit in the stone, a spirit of black malice and blood and cynical mockery. They were queer lads, some of those old masons, and they have left behind them something which is not quite dead. Often their work speaks to me, and what it says scares me. So when I read rhapsodies about the Ages of Faith, and the consecration of the old builders, and their gentle ribaldry which belongs only to people who are assured in their faith, I’m inclined to laugh. I know too much about the merry masons.’
That night, I remember, Barnes buried himself in family papers which he was trying to put into some order, for the Lacey muniment room had been neglected. It was a chilly evening and we sat in two new armchairs before a blazing fire, in what I suppose had once been the withdrawing-room behind the dining-hall and was now the library. I was re-reading Guy Mannering for the tenth time, and he had a pile of documents beside him on the floor from which he was making notes. He had another pile on an adjacent table, which he would often get up to consult, and he had a vast family tree opened out on another table to which he added pencil jottings. His occupation made him a restless companion, especially as he kept frowning and muttering to himself as if he were being constantly puzzled.
‘What’s shortness of breath?’ he suddenly asked me.
‘The thing we all die of,’ I said.
‘I know. But why should anyone want to set down that as the cause of death? It’s foolish tautology — like saying a man died because he ceased to live.’
‘Not worse than heart failure,’ I said, ‘and that’s a common finding of the doctors.’
‘No. Heart failure is a specific thing. It means that there is something organically wrong with the heart. But shortness of breath! Unless something like asthma is meant. But I don’t see...’
‘What have you got there?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been trying to find out what my forebears died of, the few who happened to die in their beds. And “shortness of bryth” spelled in twenty different ways, seems to have been their favourite affliction. It must mean some definite disease, like asthma or lung trouble. But I don’t see how it could have been that either, for apparently it took them suddenly. Here is Giles Lacey, who was one of the strongest men of his time, and Henry VIII’s favourite boon companion. He carries all before him in the tilt-yard in London, comes back here, and forthwith dies of shortness of breath. Don’t tell me that a fellow who could clear the lists in plate armour that must have weighed a ton was a consumptive. His nephew Christopher was one of Raleigh’s men, and a sun-dried, whipcord mariner. Same thing happened to him after he had ridden from Plymouth in thirty hours, which must have been a fairish achievement. Sir John Lacey came here after Naseby to hide, and was dead in two days of the same ailment. There’s a funny sentence in his brother’s letter about him. “Poor Jack,” he says, “hath scaped the sword of the godly and the stranger to be the prey of his familiar devils.” Now, what on earth did he mean by that?’
‘It looks like some disease in the blood,’ I said.
‘It does,’ he replied. ‘But what could it be that carried off strong men without warning in the prime of their strength?’
I told him that there were very odd ailments in older days. ‘Could it have been some pestilence that lingered in this valley?’ I suggested. ‘Or in this house?’
He was clear that it could not have been in the valley. The place, he said, was about the healthiest in England; he had made inquiries and there was never any legend of maladies in the village. He thought much the same about the house. ‘It’s stuffy, of course,’ he said, ‘like all very old buildings, but I had it carefully vetted, and there’s not a hint of dry rot, and the water is perfectly pure. I daresay that in old days the absence of drains was appalling, but bad plumbing wouldn’t kill a strong man in twenty-four hours. Besides, that would have meant a fever, and fever is never mentioned. Only shortness of breath.’
I asked what the later record had been, and was told that the Laceys had left Scaip shortly after the Restoration for Bartleham, in Norfolk, which had come to them by marriage. ‘And that’s also a queer thing,’ he said. ‘They were great sportsmen and mad about hunting and fowling. Bartleham was quite a little place till it was added to in the time of George III, and it lies in a dull unsporting county, whereas Scaip had everything that a sportsman could wish. But once they migrated they never returned here, except on a short visit, though they saw that it didn’t fall into disrepair. They never let it, either — perhaps they couldn’t find a tenant. Another thing — at Bartleham there seems to have been no more shortness of breath. They took to perishing of surfeits and apoplexies and paralytic strokes and such-like Christian diseases. I’d give a good deal to know what ailed them at Scaip.’
As I went to bed in my powdering-closet I puzzled a little over Barnes’ tale and concluded that his ancestors had probably suffered from some form of congenital epilepsy. But what stuck in my memory were his words that afternoon at Fanways, and I wondered in what kind of spirit my beloved Borrowby had been built. I had a sort of nightmare about it, for I saw myself on Borrowby lawn surrounded by a host of little men with trowels and mallets, horrid red-eyed fellows, who leered at me and sang ‘Ho, the merry masons’.
Next day we motored over to Coldbrook to the local point-to-point. I had been keeping horses there and hunting regularly that winter, and had entered a mare for the Hunt Cup. I am not much of a performer over the sticks, and had ridden in few races except in the Bar Point-to-Point, but since I was settling in the neighbourhood I thought I might as well do the thing thoroughly. The course was an easy one, in good condition, and I was getting on nicely, till the second time round, at the second fence from the finish, I was cannoned into by a half-witted undergraduate. The conseque
nce was a bad take-off, and a most hearty spill. I didn’t quite roll clean, and got kicked by the mare just above my left eye.
As is usual in a concussion, I remembered nothing after the moment we lined up for the start. I was unconscious for about half an hour and came to myself in the kitchen of an adjacent farmhouse, where the local doctor was preparing to sew up the cut. It was deep, right down to the bone, but the skull was unharmed, and he promised me a good recovery if I would lie up for a week. Barnes was in a great fuss and wanted to get a nurse, but the doctor told him that the case was simple and that all I needed was quiet. ‘Scaip’s the very place for him,’ he said. ‘Thick walls and not a railway whistle or a motor-horn within hearing. He’ll probably have a headache for twenty-four hours and then feel as fit as a fiddle. No. There’s no dope for that kind of headache. He must grin and bear it.’
Barnes took me home at a snail’s pace, and decided that I must have the new guest-room on the terrace, so as to avoid the steep stairs. So about six o’clock I found myself in a great four-post bed, with a fire crackling on the hearth, and the windows filled with the green April twilight. I was given a light dinner and told to go to sleep as soon as possible, since I must neither read nor talk. Barnes’s butler, a man called Thistle, attended to me and, since there was no electric light at Scaip, he put matches and a couple of candlesticks on the bedside table. There was also an electric bell with its own battery. He informed me that he slept two storeys above me, but that Mr Lacey had experimented and that the bell could easily be heard in his room. The doctor was coming first thing in the morning, and his chief injunction was that I was to keep perfectly still.
My feeling, I remember, when he left me was one of great comfort and peace. I did not regret my accident, for I would have a few quiet days for reflection, and I had too few of such spells in my life. I lay for a little with both candles burning, watching a small corner of the ceiling, which was all I could see because of the bed curtains. The plastering was new and an admirable piece of work, but everything else in the room was hoar-ancient. The walls with their dark panelling were in gloom, broken only at one point by the glow of the fire. I had the fancy that the tiny bit of plaster moulding I could see was my one link with the familiar world, and that for the rest I had been snatched back into the deep comforting shadows of the past. It was what I hoped to achieve at Borrowby, and I blew out the light with a pleasant sense of bodily and spiritual well-being.
