by Robin Blake
In the hall we met a dull-witted boy, Toby, with disproportionately large feet. He was carrying a couple of long-handled warming pans, one tucked under each arm. I asked him if we could see either of his mistresses, but before he could spit out a reply one of them, Mary-Ann, came tripping down the stairs. She was a stringy, bony girl with the straightest hair you ever saw, and a markedly sharp nose. Yet she was as strong and capable a twenty-two-year-old as any in the world, and she had a musical voice, with the timbre of my favourite woodwind instrument, the oboe.
‘Hello, Cousin Titus,’ she cried when she saw us. ‘And Dr Fidelis. You’ll take a glass of something. Have you had your breakfasts?’
‘Your father—’ I began.
‘Never seen him yet this morning,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘Hogging his bed till late, as he does every morning. Business, is it? You and the doctor go into the parlour. It’s empty but for the last of last night’s guests having his breakfast, and his man has already carried down his luggage, so he’ll be on his way. I’ll send Toby up to root Father out – though whether you will get any sense out of him at this hour is doubtful.’
‘It’s not him but yourself and your sister I’ve come to see. Can she be found?’
‘You want to see me and Grace together? But what for?’
By now we had walked ahead of her into the parlour, where the guest she’d mentioned was sitting alone with what remained of his meal, looking through some handwritten documents. A man of about thirty, with a mass of curly red hair, he nodded his head at us, but said nothing, while Mary-Ann turned back to tell Toby to fetch her sister. Then she came in, crossed to the guest’s table and whipped the plate, knife and napkin away from under his nose, leaving him in little doubt that it was time to pay what was due, collect his traps and stretch his legs in the direction of the ferry stage. Abrupt was Mary-Ann, and always busy. It would be impossible to break my news until she became quiet and composed.
She paused a moment while the guest obediently drained his mug, gathered his papers and stood, then she bustled him out and across the hall to her business room. Overlaid by sounds from the kitchen, and the carpet beater’s thuds, Fidelis and I could hear their conversation about the reckoning only as a mumble. We were standing together at the parlour window. The outlook was of the riverbank, with patches of scrub and a few willows, that sloped away from us down to the river itself, and of shallow tongues of shingle protruding out into the surging brown water. Beyond that we had a clear sight of the patchwork of gardens and orchards patterning the land on the other side as it rose to the line of roofs and smoking chimneys along the ridge – the houses of our town.
‘How will they take this news?’ murmured Luke as he scanned the view with only half of his attention. ‘They think he is sleeping soundly in his room. This will hit them like a thunderbolt.’
‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back, ‘except that the man was already much despaired of by his family.’
I had heard Grace’s voice, higher and lighter than her sister’s, in the hall. A moment later we were turning to greet her.
How is it possible for sisters to be so alike, by which I mean such unmistakable sisters, and at the same time so different? Where Mary-Ann was angular, Grace was curved and charming; where the first was brown haired and had flawless skin, the latter was fair and carried a light but distinct strawberry mark across her lower face and neck. This is not to say either of them was more agreeable than the other; in character I liked them both equally, though in different ways. They were salt and sweet: Mary-Ann forthright and trustworthy, Grace shy and lovable. It was a twin-ship of complementary opposites, not of peas from the pod.
Grace greeted us happily, with a guileless smile for me, and (if I was not mistaken) the hint of a blush for my handsome friend.
‘We are so glad to see you, Cousin, and Doctor. My sister says you have some affairs to discuss here. If so, you know you’re better advised talking to Mary-Ann than to me. She has the brain for business. It’s not much good saying anything to our poor father, either. He is very much reduced.’
I was able to let this remark go by without comment as Mary-Ann now came in, having taken her guest’s money and seen him on his way.
‘It’s wonderful how some people will haggle over a penny while they shovel out their shillings,’ she said. ‘Last night that man paid a crown for a bottle of our best port wine. This morning he baulks at a penny farthing for the bootblack.’
She sat on one of the fireside settles and with a sideways movement of her head signalled her sister to sit beside her. Grace did so while Fidelis and I took our places on the settle opposite.
‘Now,’ Mary-Ann went on, ‘my father is not in his room, Toby tells me. Happen he’s gone out to the privy. So we can rely on being undisturbed for a few minutes.’
I cleared my throat in a lawyerly way.
‘I am afraid your father hasn’t gone to the privy.’
‘Oh! How do you know that, Cousin?’
‘Because we have just come from the townside riverbank, downstream by the salmon traps. He’s been found there.’
‘Eh?’ broke in Grace. ‘What is he doing there, at this hour?’
But Mary-Ann had more accurately picked up my tone of voice.
She said, ‘What do you mean, he was found?’
‘They pulled him out of the river. I’m very sorry.’
At once the hands of both girls went to their mouths like sprung traps. After they had exchanged a look, Mary-Ann was the first to remove hers.
She whispered, ‘So is he…?’
‘Yes, he’s drowned, Mary-Ann. Dr Fidelis has confirmed it. I am truly unhappy to bring you this news.’
I studied their faces. Mary-Ann’s eyes were wide, but her face was otherwise expressionless. Grace’s was beginning to twist and crumple as the emotion took hold. The next moment she had pressed it into the palms of both hands and lowered both hands and head almost to her lap. She was whimpering.
‘Oh, my poor father! Poor, poor Father!’
After a short interval, during which Grace cried and Mary-Ann sat immobile except for clasping and unclasping her fingers, I gave them the facts as far as I knew them. Then Fidelis told them how we had laid the dead man on his front and the water had gushed from his mouth, showing he had tried to breathe while submersed in the river.
Finally I said, ‘They’re bringing him back here now, to lie at his family home. And I’ll be calling an inquest to sit on the matter tomorrow. I’m sorry to trouble you with this at such a time, but this is the only usable place for the hearing. We’ll need your largest room. The dining room?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘I’ll see to it.’
A silence followed between us. Grace reached out and seized her sister’s hand, gripping it tightly, as the two women cast down their eyes and thought about this change to their existence.
‘You know,’ said Mary-Ann at last, ‘there’s something fitting about it. He loved the river, my father. He adored it, I think, almost as much as he loved a drink.’
‘He didn’t, Mary-Ann!’ Her sister was indignant, and suddenly shrill. ‘I mean, he didn’t love to drink at all. He hated it, because it had taken hold of him and wouldn’t let go.’
She turned to Fidelis, her face pinched with distress.
‘You understand that, don’t you, Doctor?’
Fidelis nodded.
‘Yes, I do, Grace. I’ve seen it very often.’
Grace gave an emphatic sniff.
‘He couldn’t stop, and it turned his brains to mush.’
‘It did that!’
This was Mary-Ann again, taking her turn to break in. She’d allowed Grace’s interruption without complaint, except to shake her head slowly, like a person walking into cobwebs. Now she threw off her dullness and was as animated as her sister.
‘You know what he did every night of his life, Cousin Titus?’ Her voice had tightened now into something like anger. ‘He waited till the las
t customer’d been packed off, or gone up to bed, and we were well into clearing the tables. He’d watch us for a bit, then he’d put down his pint pot, he’d wipe his mouth with a napkin, and he’d drum the table for a bit with his fingers. Then his face’d light up as if he’d just had a new idea and he’d say, Oh! I think I’ll take a turn outside.’
‘Every night, you say?’
‘Yes, and often as not, if you objected in some way, for instance that it was damp out, he’d say he wanted to see if the moon was shining in the water. Even with it cloudy, or on a new moon and not a sliver of it to be seen. He would find his way out – because I wasn’t going to help him – holding the furniture as men do in a ship at sea. And he’d stay out till God knows when before finding his way back in. We’d often not see him till morning. That’s how mushy his brains were.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘the moon in the water! It’s an odd preoccupation, but harmless enough.’
Mary-Ann shook her head.
‘But it wasn’t harmless, was it? Just see what happened!’
Fidelis leaned forward, suddenly interested.
‘So he was out looking for the moon in the water last night?’
‘Course he was.’
Fidelis glanced in my direction. ‘What time was that?’
‘Quarter or a half after midnight,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘It always was. When you run an inn you have to keep regular hours. We serve no customers after twelve.’
‘So he was out after midnight last night.’
‘As I said, every night he was. Ask John.’
John was the ancient night porter at the inn.
‘Of course, John. He would have seen your father last night, going out?’
‘You must ask him.’
Mary-Ann’s voice had tightened up, as if this conversation was becoming too much to bear. So I turned from her to her sister.
‘And where exactly would your father go in his search for the moon in the water?’
‘Down to the ferry stage, Cousin. He got a clear view of the water from there.’
‘Did you not worry about him wandering out that way, inebriated?’
‘He knew it as well as the way from his hand to his mouth. We thought—’
‘We thought he could come to no harm,’ butted in Mary-Ann, ‘like you just said, Cousin Titus. We know better now, but too late.’
As they sometimes do, and in this case appropriately, the words ‘too late’ sounded like a funeral bell. We sat quietly for a while, feeling their resonance.
‘He will miss the election, too,’ said Grace, sighing deeply. ‘He had plans. He spoke of going up in fellowship with a gang of folk from Middleforth Green and Walton, to do their voting. He would have so liked it. Oh, well.’
She sighed again. I got up softly and reached for my hat.
‘We must go back to town ourselves now, Cousins, and be about our business. But I am sure Elizabeth will be down for a visit as soon as she hears the sorry news. I wish we had not been the bearers of it.’
In farewell, Luke kissed both the young ladies’ hands. I am not sure if this was, in etiquette, the correct gesture, but it worked its magic. Mary-Ann smiled and Grace’s cheeks again faintly reddened.
‘About the inquest,’ I said, ‘we’ll begin at noon, I think. And don’t worry, I’ll tell them not to expect too much in the way of victuals … the jury, I mean.’
But Mary-Ann stood and fixed me with an intense, beady look. She had recovered some of her fight.
‘Cousin, we’ll victual them royally, if that is what they require. We are glad of the business, aren’t we, Sister?’
With a momentary smile and nod, Grace tearfully concurred.
‘And I will come over a little before,’ I went on, ‘to speak with both of you and also any of your staff, especially John, who might have information about what happened last night. That way we can get the whole thing over and done. You will be able to bury him on Wednesday.’
* * *
The ferry stage was 70 yards downstream of the inn, along a continuation of the road from Walton. This road carried on westward along the riverbank to the riverside settlement of Penwortham and then, by a looping course, south towards Liverpool. It was a pitiful road, more like a lane, and the going was both rutted and potted.
‘For a very drunk man in the dark this might be a challenging walk,’ observed Fidelis.
‘Antony must have been driven by a strong desire to come out here every night.’
‘Is desire the right word, Titus?’
‘I can’t think of another.’
‘I can. He was in an unhappy state at the end. “Mush” was his daughter’s interesting word to describe his mind. But has “mush” desire, reasoning – will, even? No. Mush doesn’t drive a man to do anything. It can’t make plans, it can’t look forward. But daily living requires these things. There must be some kind of structure in the mind, I think, or life collapses.’
Once Fidelis got hold of a theme, the jaws of his intellect bit so hard that they could not easily let go.
‘Well,’ I floundered, ‘Antony got by because … I don’t know … others – such as his daughters – made the frame of his life for him, maybe.’
‘To an extent they did. But I am talking about something more fundamental than that. A person needs an inner skeleton to keep its shape, or it too becomes inchoate and falls apart. A suit of armour, say, worn on the outside won’t stiffen it at all. We are not snails.’
‘The brain is a bit like a snail, don’t you think?’
Fidelis laughed.
‘That’s amusing, but inaccurate. I am not speaking of the brain, but the mind. That requires an intrinsic skeleton of ideas to keep its shape. For most of us this consists of hope, looking forward, schemes and projects and reasonable optimism. Without these, what remains?’
I had no idea what he was getting at.
‘Mush?’ I hazarded.
‘Exactly. Mush.’
Still no wiser, I took him back to his original proposition.
‘So what was it, in your opinion, that did cause Antony to come out here night after night to chase a delusion? I mean, if not that he just wanted to.’
‘Habit, Titus. Habits were all he had left. He drank, he sat in the same chair, he said the same things, he went out to look at the reflection of the moon at the same hour. A hopeful, self-projecting man has no need of such repetitions, but the chronically unhappy can keep going only in that way.’
‘He was certainly miserable, I can vouch for that. His son’s death, then his wife’s. But he had a few sparks of spirit left in him. You heard what they said – his plans for the election…’
‘They’d have come to nothing, Titus, and you know it. His feeble thread of life was so reduced he had nothing but habits left to him, with not a sensible thought in between.’
‘That is not a charitable estimate of my wife’s kinsman, Luke. Though it may be true.’
‘Of course it’s true. The man was a helpless sot, was he not?’
With a sigh I let this go.
We came to a break in the left-hand hedge, on the opposite side of the track to that of the river, where there was a cottage standing a little back from the road. At the gate, leaning with a pipe in his mouth, was the cottager himself. His name was Isaac Satterthwaite and he was the local rat catcher. Isaac was sixty-five years old and fully bearded, but neither withered nor bent. Long ago he had been a soldier serving under the Duke of Marlborough himself, and even now his back was straight and military, his cheeks full, and his grey hair abundant enough to be drawn back and worn as a pigtail at the nape.
We stopped to talk to him.
‘How do, Isaac,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard what’s been found?’
‘I have that,’ he growled. ‘Antony Egan’s fell in the water and drowned himself. It’s only a wonder it took him so long.’
‘You didn’t see him last night, by any chance? In the lane here, on his nightly walk?’
&n
bsp; ‘No. Not last night I didn’t.’
‘Did you sometimes? He took the same walk every night, I’m told.’
‘Aye, we’ve seen him out late before now, down by the landing, or in the lane. Always drunk.’
‘Did you ever speak to him?’
He swivelled his head and spat.
‘Before, I might have. Not now.’
‘Before what?’
‘A disagreement, a year or more since.’
‘You fell out?’
He turned his head, this time the other way, and spat again.
‘There was little to fall out of. We were neighbours, like, and sometimes I took a mug of beer at the inn. But he considered himself above a man in my line of trade, though he had not much cause to, when you looked at him. And then there was what they said about my granddaughter, who used to work for them. Well and good they could give her the sack, but to say … what they said.’
He straightened up and knocked out his pipe.
‘Well, I must go in. Good day to you, gentlemen.’
Fidelis and I walked on.
‘What was Maggie dismissed for?’ Fidelis asked.
‘I don’t know. I heard nothing about it.’
‘They must have given her a bad character. The old man took umbrage badly over it.’
I shook my head.
‘I don’t know. From what I’ve heard she’s a winsome enough young girl.’
We arrived at the ferry stage, and found it deserted, the last of the market traffic having now gone across. I looked for the curly-haired guest who had earlier departed the inn, but Battersby had evidently transported him while we were in conference with the sisters. So Fidelis and I stood together alone on the slipway. It was here that the ferryman lowered his ramp to land carts, horses and livestock. Here too the southern end of the shore-to-shore rope, along which the ferry travelled, was attached to the top of a heavy post whose base was sunk deep into the riverbed. The wind was still gusting and the sunshine patchy. I looked across to the far side of the river, where one momentary patch illuminated the area near Battersby’s hut. A knot of people had gathered there, watching four men who hurried towards them carrying a litter along the bankside.
