by Robin Blake
‘You don’t do that, man! After exercise you wash them down, you comb them.’
‘Of course, yes. I just thought, in the heat of the moment … you know. And, er, when that was being done, was it noticed that the mare wanted a shoe?’
I rose and picked the horseshoe from the mantel.
‘This shoe, for instance.’
Pearson took the shoe from me and turned it in his hands.
‘The mare was soundly shod when she went out,’ he said firmly. ‘I made sure of it, that being my job. And when she returned she was still shod in all four. I made sure again, that also being my job, Mr Cragg.’
Some witnesses are like a hot cup on a cold day that should be drunk expressly. William Pearson was such a one, cooling fast towards me and, it seemed, anxious to get back to his duties. I hurried on.
‘Well, what about the shoe itself? It was found not far from Mrs Brockletower’s body. Does it come from a Garlick horse?’
‘It looks like one of ours, but that’s not to say it is. It might well be the work of our farrier Pennyfold, the blacksmith at Yolland. Then again, it might not.’
He handed me back the shoe and pushed himself impatiently out of the chair.
‘Will that be all?’ he asked abruptly.
Before letting Pearson go, I told him I’d want him, too, at the inquest. And then, as he went out of the room, another question hatched in my mind. This suddenly seemed of such significance that I jumped up and called him back.
‘Tell me about the mare,’ I said. ‘What was she like? I mean in temperament. Was she difficult to ride?’
The man came back to me reluctantly, and with an audible, insolent sigh.
‘Mistress, say what you like about her, she could handle a horse,’ he stated. ‘That mare is a very naughty one. You have to keep her to herself. Other horses, she’ll bite them. She doesn’t like them near. Now, I have my duties. Good day to you, Coroner.’
One by one over the next two hours the servants trooped into the parlour and then, after delivering themselves of whatever information about Mrs Brockletower they could call to mind, trooped out again. In every case they went back to their allotted tasks, the succession of small incessant functions which when added together are the life of a great house – the cheese-making, shall we say? The silver polishing, the currying of horses, the felling of beeches, the pedimentary works. Mr Spectator mounted an argument in his paper that all things pale compared to the significance of death. They had not seemed to do so in this house. If they had, the house itself would sicken and die. But its routines did not flinch in the face of mortality.
So what did I learn in those ten dozen minutes? Almost all I spoke to agreed that Mrs Brockletower had been in a fury or a fret for much of the day before she died, saying hard words to the servants and sending them scurrying around to fetch and carry. She had been calmer and quieter on the day before that, the Sunday, when she had given the day’s instructions to Leather the butler, a fat red-headed fellow with the sonorous, booming voice of a dragoon sergeant.
‘She asked me to find her a reel of fishing line, she did. I thought it was queer. She was no angler.’
‘Did she intend to take up fishing, then?’
‘She didn’t want a rod, or hooks and bait. Just the line, she said.’
‘What for?’
‘She said it was for the hanging of pictures.’
‘And you fetched some for her.’
‘I did. Ten yards of it, wound on a stick. I asked her if she wanted it cutting but she says no, she’s got scissors.’
And the day before that, I learned, Mrs Brockletower had been to town.
‘To be measured for a dress.’
‘Who is her dressmaker?’
‘Talboys in Friar Gate.’
‘Did he not attend her at home?’
‘At first he did. But she took against his visits and preferred to go into town.’
‘Why did she prefer that?’
‘You’ll have to ask Mr Talboys that, sir.’
I must have spoken to a dozen witnesses when, just as I had finished with Philip Barkworth – who divulged nothing I did not already know – there came a clatter of hooves from the yard. A single rider had come in, leading a pack pony slung with baggage. This, Barkworth told me, was the squire’s valet, Tom Cowp, who had accompanied his master to York. Barkworth and I both hurried outside and found that Cowp had ridden in, and was alone.
Tom Cowp was a slim young fellow with a knowing look. I brought him into the parlour, still bespattered by mud from the road, to find out just what it was that he did know.
‘Have you heard what happened here this morning, Tom?’
‘About Mistress, sir? Yes, I heard about it on the road. People were talking about it already.’
‘Saying what?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t say, sir. People are that spiteful.’
I did not press him, remembering the remarks of Miriam Patten as I’d ridden through Gamull. But I noted that his demeanour was like that of the other servants, indeed like poor blind Sarah. None of them felt grief at the death of Dolores Brockletower.
‘Well then, how far had the news got when you heard it?’
‘I stopped in Skipton the night. By this noon I was in Clitheroe, where I heard the name Brockletower spoken. I enquired what was up. They said she was dead, and a lot else beside. People all over the marketplace were talking about it.’
‘Why was the squire not with you?’
‘He was with us as far as Skipton. But last night he rode away north to Settle, to speak with a gentleman about a horse he wants to buy. Told me to cut along ahead and he’d be home himself tomorrow.’
‘Did you bring with you a letter or message from the squire to his wife?’
‘No, sir, no letter. I was just to say that he’d be here tomorrow.’
‘I see. Well, let’s go back a little. What was his reason for going to York in the first instance?’
‘Squire was looking at a house he might take for the races’ week and Assizes, in August. And to view some horses, fast runners, maybe for racing. We visited some stud farms and other places where they had horses for sale.’
‘And this horse he’s eyeing up in Settle is one of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘So at York, you hadn’t spent all the time in the city itself?’
‘No. Only two or three days, looking at the house Squire might take, and paying calls. And one day we went out to Bishopsthorpe.’
‘The archbishop’s palace?’
‘Yes. To see Archbishop Blackburne was the idea.’
Lancelot Blackburne was the most important person in York. His worldiness was the subject of much amused, or discontented, tittle-tattle. Many repeated the story that, before assuming holy orders, he had been a buccaneer in the West Indies. Some added that the Church of England had not very much changed him since, except to make him fatter.
‘Did you go to Bishopsthorpe for any particular reason, or was it only a politeness to Mr Brockletower’s relative?’
‘You’ll have to ask Squire that.’
The questions I had to ask, not only of the squire, were beginning to infest my inquiry like wasps in the roof. Dolores had been to town on Saturday. Was that significant? She had not been to church on Sunday. Did that mean anything? She had been angry – what about? And was she in truth frightened of the squire?
Then there was Squire Brockletower himself. Did he indeed go to Settle, or did he ride west ahead of his man and keep a fatal appointment with his wife early this morning in the Fulwood? After hearing Polly’s account of what had allegedly happened there a month ago, I hardly dared think it. But I had no choice.
And finally the only certain witness to Mrs Brockletower’s death – the horse. Why was there blood on her neck? I picked up the horseshoe and weighed it in my hands. Horses are all around us. They do the hundreds of tasks we ask of them with little complaint. How much do we in return think of them
? Do we consider their natures and their needs? This horseshoe was heavy enough for a paperweight and I found myself speculating what it must feel like to be an animal with one of these nailed to each of your four feet.
Chapter Five
A NEW CLATTER FROM the yard caught my ear and, putting the horseshoe in my pocket, I went to the window. A post rider from Preston was dismounting. His hard-ridden horse’s nostrils flared and contracted as it breathed deeply. He hitched the horse and drew a letter from his bag.
I went out to see if, as I suspected, it might be addressed to me. It was. As I tore through the seal I saw it had been impressed by the signet ring of Luke Fidelis. I read:
Titus, I am in receipt of your lines, by hand of Furzey.
I cannot come today as I must operate on a fistula in
ano, which I have so often postponed that my patient
Mr Norris is patient no more. So Mrs Brockletower must
await me until tomorrow, which she, unlike Mr Norris,
will not mind. Shall we meet at the Turk’s Head this
evening? I will be glad to hear all of the circumstances.
Meanwhile I urge you to store the corpse overnight
in Squire Brockletower’s Ice-house. Your friend,
Luke Fidelis.
‘Is a reply paid?’ I asked the post fellow, who nodded. I returned to Mrs Marsden’s parlour to scribble a note assuring Luke I would be at the coffee house at nine. I shall want to know why the Ice-house, I added.
Having dispatched Luke’s reply I asked William Leather for the key to the Ice-house, which he lifted from a hook-board in the kitchen. I then recruited Isaac Barrowford and Philip Barkworth to carry the body from the stable in which it had, until now, been laid. Hoisting the litter between them, they followed me to the Ice-house, which lay outside the confines of the yard. Here, isolated in the centre of the orchard that stood behind the stable block, on the lower slope of Shot’s Hill, the fruit trees would in summer give it shade. It was a brick building half-buried in the ground and entered down steps and through a passage about five yards long. There was a door at each end of this passage, the inner one being kept closed by a spring, and thickly lagged on the inside with straw.
The interior was a double-vaulted space, built in brick and dimly lit by two lantern skylights, one at the apex of each vault, which brought not only light but ventilation. There were blocks of ice parcelled in straw and ranged on the ground along the walls. Above these, on slatted racks, were rows of wicker baskets similarly packed with smaller lumps of ice. A work table stood against the far wall. Above it, on hooks driven into the brick wall, hung a variety of hammers, picks, hatchets and saws for breaking, cutting and crushing the ice into cubes, shards, or slush for the making of the desserts that had lately become a fashionable refreshment to the palates of the gentry.
As we entered, our breath smoked in the cold air. I began manhandling the work table, a solid piece of furniture a good six feet long, into the centre of the space. Barrowford and Barkworth were taking pains behind me as they negotiated the litter down the steps and along the short corridor. There was just enough room. Barkworth in particular was breathing hard. ‘Lay the litter directly on this,’ I told them when I had finished manoeuvring the table.
‘Why is it, Mr Cragg,’ Barkworth panted as they deposited their burden, ‘that the dead’s heavier than the living?’
‘Are they? I don’t know. We must ask Dr Fidelis when he comes.’
‘It’s stone dead she is, and that’s why,’ declared Barrowford, rubbing the sweat off his hands on the front of his smock. ‘And stone’s pulled her soul down to bottom of all.’
Mr Spectator observes that a noble sentiment, depressed with homely language, is far preferable to a vulgar one, inflated with sound and expression. His subject is tragedy and the stage, but the sentiment applies equally, I believe, to ordinary discourse. However I did not commend Barrowford for his remark in these terms, as I found I could not be quite sure what they had meant. Instead I lifted the edge of the horse blanket that covered the corpse’s face.
When I had last seen it, that face had been pressed to the ground, so that there was difficulty in viewing it properly. Now I was looking squarely down at the features. The prominent cheekbones were perhaps a little too sharply defined for the purer forms of female beauty, which authorities agree ought to tend towards softness. But this boniness was at least offset by a pair of full lips of which the alluring London actress Mrs Peg Woffington might have been proud. Presumably William Pearson had closed her eyes before loading her onto the cart. I have often noticed how as a general rule the dead body with its eyes closed looks not at all like the person who once inhabited the same flesh, not even like to that person asleep. At any rate I did not at this moment fully recognize Dolores Brockletower, whom I had seen only rarely over the past couple of years. Under this examination, closer than a man (other than a husband) might have decently given her in life, she appeared harder and bonier than she had then seemed.
What had happened to her? I made my inspection as a matter of habit, but could find no help here. In my early days as coroner, I had been convinced that to read the expression on a dead face would be to see the truth of the death itself, as if it recorded an impression of what had occurred, fossil-like. But I was soon obliged to conclude it did no such thing. Faces, which look in death as if they accused someone, turn out to have died of a seizure; others, which appear placid as a sheep, are found to have been violently murdered. In death, everything is contrary and opposite to what might be expected. But still I continued the habit, in spite of experience, of examining the faces of the dead.
I then took another look at the wound in the neck. It was, as I had already guessed, a continuous gash, and there seemed little doubt that it was what had killed her. I flipped the blanket back into place without comment. Barkworth and Barrowford were standing heraldically on either side of the door. I ushered them out along the passage and through the outside door of the Ice-house, which I locked behind me. Then I sent them back to their work.
Returning to the kitchen I replaced the Ice-house key back on the hook-board and enquired yet again if there had been any word from the squire. As there was none, and with nothing else to do at Garlick Hall, I asked William Pearson to bring out my horse. He held the head while I mounted and, before he let it go, I made one last request.
‘I would like to make a trial of the circumstances of Mrs Brockletower’s death, Pearson. Will you be so kind as to ride out to the hollow oak tomorrow morning on the very same mare ridden this morning by your mistress – what was the horse’s name? Yes, Molly. Ride Molly out to the oak at seven in the morning, where you will meet me. It will only take a few minutes.’
Pearson’s pitted, lumpy face looked up at me as if I was making him eat a bad almond, but he agreed to do it. Then I set off on the way home.
At Gamull, on my way back, I again saw the ragged woman Miriam Patten, who had quizzed me from the roadside that morning. She was breaking up some small branches of forest firewood outside her cottage door.
‘Mr Lawyer, sir! Mr Lawyer!’ she croaked as soon as I approached. ‘What news? Did the Devil come for the squire’s lady last night?’
‘No such thing,’ I told her firmly. ‘It is mischievous prattle, is that.’
The woman had dropped her wood and was scrambling along beside the horse, eager for the news – as if it would feed or clothe her.
‘What struck her down, then? What killed her?’
‘That I cannot say.’
‘Ah, you cannot say! You cannot say!’
Her tone was full of the scorn country people show in private discussions of gentry affairs. She had stopped trying to keep pace with me now and, not wishing to let her sally go by, I turned in the saddle to reply. She was standing by the roadside with her fists propped on her hips, looking after me.
‘Come along to the inquest, Miriam,’ I called back. ‘You can hear for yourself. The jury w
ill find out the truth, and all can attend.’
‘Will it, though?’ she retorted. ‘Will they let it?’
I rode on, leaving her standing looking after me. But after twenty-five yards I turned my horse around again and trotted back.
‘Miriam – have you seen or heard tell of Squire Brockletower being in the vicinity yesterday, or today?’
‘No, sir. The man’s not been seen here today, nor yesterday. ’
‘Or at any time in the last ten days?’
‘No, sir. I heard he was away to York. Any road, he’s not been here-about. Why do you want to know, sir?’
‘Oh, a fancy, that’s all.’
I wheeled the horse, but on an impulse pulled her up again. I felt in my pocket and found a coin. Miriam still stood with her hands on her hips, looking up at me, and suddenly I had a vision of her as she must have been as a young girl forty years ago, with flowing hair and straight back. It was only a moment, I blinked, and then it was gone. She raised her withered palm and I deposited the coin there.
A few minutes further along the road I met Mrs Marsden returning to Garlick from her visit to town. She was seated beside the drayman that brought empty milk churns back to the farms. I thanked her for the safe delivery of my letters, and for the cooperation of the Garlick Hall servants in answering my questions. I explained that we had placed the body of Mrs Brockletower in the Ice-house, at Dr Fidelis’s suggestion.
‘It will be a good enough resting place,’ I said, ‘until the doctor comes for his post-mortem examination in the morning. I shall return with him. By the way, Tom Cowp’s returned ahead of the squire.’
Her eyes widened in surprise.
‘Why, and Squire not with him, sir?’
‘He sent Cowp on ahead with his baggage while he diverted to Settle to look at a horse. But Cowp says we shall see him tomorrow.’
We parted then and I continued on my way to the town.
