A Dark Anatomy

by Robin Blake

  She fondled Jonathan’s ears.

  ‘Which is why we call him Jago, isn’t it, Jonathan?’

  ‘Jago?’ I said, a little puzzled. ‘Forgive me, I don’t …’

  She sighed.

  ‘You are dull-witted today, Titus. I refer to Jago, in Othello. Take my word for it, Mr Woodley is not to be trusted.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  OUTSIDE, I FOUND the troopers a hundred yards from the house and sitting in a circle under the shade of the great cedar of Lebanon that rose from the middle of the lawn. They were dividing loaves of bread and taking turns to drink from a breaker of beer. A smartly turned-out horse stood picking at the lawn nearby. This belonged to Captain Fairhurst, who had ridden over to review Sergeant Sutch’s progress.

  ‘Well, Mr Cragg,’ the captain called out as I walked towards them. ‘The men are enjoying success!’

  Nonplussed, I turned to the sergeant.

  ‘You don’t mean you’ve found what we’re looking for?’

  ‘No, no, sir,’ replied Sutch hastily between chews of his bread. ‘And, though we don’t know where it is yet, we do know much more about where it is not.’

  Producing from his tunic pocket the sketch map that I had seen at the tavern in town the previous day, he unfolded it and traced with his finger a circle around the square, which represented the Hall.

  ‘We can safely rule out these four areas in the immediate vicinity of the Hall, which I have cross-hatched as you see. I have also sent three men to go through the workmen’s camp, which I set aside as a separate area of search. We shall now proceed, under system, to the outer ring, which has seven defined areas. We shall work our way through these one by one.’

  ‘Will you finish before dark?’

  ‘That will depend on how much digging we must do. I hope we can.’

  ‘And they may not need to finish at all,’ broke in Fairhurst, with one of his crowing laughs. ‘About the whereabouts of poor Mrs Brockletower: before dark we are in the dark, but in daylight the lamp may yet be lit!’

  Unwilling to engage with these elaborations of wit, I wished them luck, returned to my horse and rode back into town.

  When I reached the office, Elizabeth had not returned from her mission to the Moor. I put the Brockletower case out of my mind, and applied myself instead to drafting a complicated trust deed. Saturday is Furzey’s dies non and I was so absorbed in my solitary work that midday came, and went, without my noticing. It was half past two when Elizabeth returned, her cheeks glowing from her exertions.

  ‘We got rid of nearly all the food, Titus. But Mr Broome’s horse went lame and we had to return home. Have you eaten?’

  I told her no.

  ‘Then quickly! Come through to the house. I’ll feed you and tell you about my adventures.’

  As I sat down in front of a plate of pickled herring and a half loaf of bread (‘I told you we couldn’t quite give it all away,’ she explained, a little ruefully) Elizabeth told of the hovels she had been into, and of the mixed response of the poor people in receiving her charity.

  ‘Some of them spat when they saw me, as if I were the cause of their destitution. They took the food anyway, of course. But I have marked down two or three cottages where the ingratitude is truly discouraging, and I shall not be visiting them again. But now, I must tell you something else. The whole countryside is talking about the death of Mrs Brockletower. And do you know what they are saying?’

  I said that I didn’t.

  ‘They are on fire with the notion that she was a werewolf, Titus. A werewolf, who roamed the woods at night. She transformed herself by a belt that she put on, made from the hide of a real wolf. She brought it with her from the West Indies, they say. The night she died in the Fulwood, she had met the Devil himself, and it was him who tore out her throat. And as she lay dying she transformed back into a woman, which was how she was found as she was – on all fours.’

  It was a variation, though more elaborate, of what Miriam Patten told me when we met at Gamull, during my ride with young Jonah to the Fulwood on Tuesday.

  ‘So what do they say about William Pearson’s testimony, that he saddled her horse and watched her ride out in the morning? And all the others that saw her in the morning before she went riding?’

  Elizabeth shrugged.

  ‘Only that they were lying, or under some spell.’

  ‘This is nonsense! I doubt there are any wolves in the West Indies. Surely you don’t give credence to this kind of talk.’

  ‘No, of course not. But it is interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think it’s twaddle.’

  ‘I don’t say she was a werewolf, Titus. But the idea must have come from somewhere.’

  She shuddered briefly, betraying something in herself more deep-seated than academical curiosity about this phenomenon.

  ‘It came from the ravings of half-starved brains.’

  Elizabeth reached forward and picked an uneaten shred of herring from my plate, tilted back her head and delicately dropped it into her mouth.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s a possibility,’ she went on, after she’d swallowed the fish. ‘But in a bushel of lies there is a grain of truth. And there was definitely something odd about that woman. If there were werewolves—’

  ‘There are not!’

  ‘But if there were,’ she insisted, ‘and it was proved Dolores Brockletower really had been one, the discovery would not surprise me at all.’

  I returned to the office and my work on the trust deed, but now I could not concentrate as I was still hoping for news from the search party at Garlick Hall. But I was even more distracted by the imaginary spectre of Dolores Brockletower as a she-wolf, running and running by moonlight through the woods with bared and bloody fangs.

  For supper we had Elizabeth’s economical invention, being rissoles of yesterday’s salmon, minced with spinach, capers and breadcrumb. Afterwards I left her embroidering by the parlour fire and went into my library. Feeling a tiny pricking of guilt, I began taking down books that might yield further information on lycanthropy. As I knew quite well, stories of transformation, or metamorphosis, run deep in literature and pagan religion. The myths of the Greeks and Romans teem with them and Ovid had merely collected all of the ones he could find. I looked up what Mr Spectator has to say about Ovid’s stories: ‘Here we walk upon enchanted ground,’ he says, a phrase to stiffen the hairs on the back of one’s neck, if any phrase can. But stories of people becoming animals, more particularly metamorphosing into wolves, are not only cases of Ovidian enchantment, but of satanic business. And they appear to have much to do with cannibalism.

  Lycaon was the first lycanthrope, I read. He was older than Zeus and lived before the flood, which, in part, was his fault. He had dished up the flesh of his own sons in a stew for a banquet, to which he had invited the gods. But his murderous impiety was discovered and he was condemned to roam the trackless wilderness as a wolf, tormented by an insatiable hunger for human flesh. He was not destroyed until the great flood was summoned to obliterate all living wickedness.

  In old tales from Asia Minor I found the same creature, but now in female form – a woman guilty of frightful sins. For seven years she was condemned to transform each night into a she-wolf, first devouring her own children, then those of her neighbours, before ranging ever wider to spread fear and havoc throughout the land.

  Finally, after more than an hour of turning pages, I happened on a remarkable passage in Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. I read:

  The werwoolfs are certayne sorcerors who having anoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, doe not onely unto the view of others seeme as wolves, but to their owne thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves so long as they weare the said girdle. And they doe dispose themselves as very wolves in wourrying and killing most humane creatures.

  My first thought was to take this immediately
into the parlour and read it to Elizabeth. I quickly suppressed the impulse. I did not want to frighten her, but there was something else. I was more than a little ashamed at my own curiosity, and at the faint pulse of pleasure, repulsive but undeniable, that I felt when reading about this absurd hocus-pocus. So I quietly posted Verstegan back to his shelf, and hurriedly returned to the parlour.

  Although my wife’s religious beliefs did not lean towards the established church, she never failed to come with me to Divine Service on a Sunday morning. Her habit was to slip out before eight and go, by herself, to the discreet house where her co-papists gathered to worship – with, on most Sundays, Luke Fidelis among them. She then came back to breakfast with me at nine and, forty-five minutes later, we stepped out into Cheapside and walked arm-in-arm the short distance from our home to St John the Divine, the parish church, arriving in time for the ten o’clock service. She did this purely out of duty and the wish not to embarrass me in front of the townspeople. She was not permitted to take Communion, of course, but her mere presence was proof that she honoured me, and it made me proud. It is for such everyday tokens of affection that I love her, as much as for her sweet character and her beauty.

  This morning I carried in my pocket a sealed letter delivered by the postboy a few minutes before we quit the house. It had come from Yorkshire and was addressed in the hand of Luke Fidelis. I had not yet had time to open it, though I could hardly contain my impatience to know what news it contained.

  Mr Brighouse, our vicar, was a contrast to the rotund and ruddy Mr Oliver Brockletower. Stick-like and shrivelled, though he is no more than my own age, his ministry was benign enough, but blighted by his complete inability ever to say or do anything interesting. His sermons were particularly painful to hear, though he regarded it as his duty to preach at considerable length, and in a thin, scrannel monotone.

  As usual, he creaked to the pulpit with the face of a condemned man climbing the scaffold ladder. He announced his text, and the congregation settled in for up to an hour of prosaic moralizing, unsalted by a modicum of wit or enlightened learning, yet hedged about by thickets of qualification, gloss and biblical quotation. They did not mind much. As the sermon washed over them they lapsed into the embrace of their own thoughts and daydreams. Some quietly dozed, others went into a reverie, or drew up mental lists of things to do in the week ahead. People animated by real religious passion were meanwhile having their spirits lifted at the Dissenters’ Meeting House along Fisher Gate, or (like Elizabeth) had received the Sacrament in their own peculiar style beforehand, at the papists’ chapel.

  I eased Fidelis’s letter out of my pocket and gently broke the seal, keeping my thumb on it to muffle any cracking sound. Then I unfolded it, careful to keep it below the rim of the box pew, and began to read.

  Dear Cragg,

  I am now at York but yesterday attended my consumptive patient Mr Templeton at Harrogate. He is a co-religionist to me and though a young man of my own age he is not only gravely ill but reduced further by the bite of the recusancy laws. I expect him to require Last Rites before we reach the solstice.

  But I know you will prefer to hear news of the matter that has been puzzling us at home. Some of my enquiries have yielded interesting results, though I fear you may find others disappointing.

  I shall spill the disappointing news first. I have been following Mr Brockletower’s supposed returning route in reverse, and I found that people along the upper Ribble valley remembered how he passed through, riding hard and yelling other traffic out of the way. They knew the reason for his haste of course: the finding of Mrs Brockletower’s body had already reached that part of the county. It was about three in the afternoon when he rode through the village. Further along my eastward road I came to the village of Slaidburn where the squire had stopped at the inn for food at midday on Tuesday, and where they told him of what had happened at Garlick Hall. It is a remote, fell-top place but a post rider had come through from Clitheroe on his way north to Kendal and brought the information, which he himself had heard in the marketplace that morning. You will observe that this does not yet preclude that Mr Brockletower was in Fulwood early in the morning. He could just have ridden from there to Slaidburn in four hours. But when I reached Settle eight miles to the north-east, I again found the story he told us tallying. He had certainly spent the night there, as he said, at the largest inn. The landlord told me he had arrived at seven the previous evening (Monday the 17th) and taken a room. Supper had been eaten in the chamber (mutton chops, cheese and claret) and he had not been seen again downstairs until he paid his account and rode away at eleven the next morning. I do not think this is consistent with his having been in Fulwood during the early part of the morning. To do so he must have used a different horse, and the time was not sufficient for him not only to make the journey, but to dispose of the exhausted horse afterwards without anyone’s knowledge. And to get back into his bedroom without being seen would have been no easy matter. That is all I can write now. I will write again from York.

  L.F.

  I folded the paper and discreetly slid it back into my pocket, while Mr Brighouse’s voice wheedled on. My mind went back to the indiscreet revelations of his clerical colleague, the squire’s uncle. According to these, Ramilles Brockletower had become angry with his wife – a theme that was, by chance, under consideration at this very moment in Mr Brighouse’s sermon. He was quoting (as he told us) Proverbs, chapter 6, and its warnings against unbridled passion.

  ‘“Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” ’ the vicar squeaked, raising a twig-like admonitory finger. ‘“Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?”’

  I did not think Mr Brighouse knew a great deal about fiery bosoms, for a more passionless man could hardly be imagined. But I rather liked the words. And I was taken even more by what followed.

  ‘If I may be permitted a profane aside,’ Brighouse continued, ‘one of our secular writers (of the reign before last) closely echoes the sentiments of Scripture in commenting on “how pernicious, how sudden, and how fatal surprises of passion are to the mind of man”. Although these are not sacred words, they are sensible ones, and all men would do well to take heed of them.’

  I was startled by the quoted words, for I thought I knew them. But from where? I silently repeated to myself twice and three times: pernicious … sudden … fatal. And then, with delight and surprise, I placed them. Surely they were from the Tatler, the words of Mr Isaac Bickerstaff (as was the paper’s conceit) writing upon … Upon what? I could not remember.

  I determined to look it up in my four-volume edition of that excellent forerunner and companion of my darling book, the collected Spectator.

  In my library, with a few minutes’ leisure before dinner, I looked up ‘passion’ in the index of my bound edition of the Tatler. I found that the vicar’s reference had been to one of the numbers in volume III, where Bickerstaff reflects on the differences between men and women, and recounts the murder of a Mrs Eustace by her husband. This was interesting enough, but there was more, very much more and of such momentousness that a few minutes later I was excitedly telling Elizabeth about it over our Sunday meat.

  ‘It’s the most surprising discovery. I don’t know if it is chance, or part of a design. But it seems to bear on the Brockletower case.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘As you know,’ I said, ‘the Tatler was written every other day by Sir Richard Steele, pretending to be Mr Isaac Bickerstaff, a retired gentleman who commented freely on coffee-house news, political gossip and anything that took his fancy. The vicar’s quotation on passion is from Bickerstaff’s story of Mr Eustace, a landowner who lived together with both his wife and his sister. The two women were always arguing and in these disagreements Eustace invariably took his sister’s side. And then he killed his wife, in her bed at night, as Othello kills Desdemona, but with a dagger rather than by strangling. He stabbed her, my dear, and was himself shot dead by a cons
table while making his escape.’

  Elizabeth clapped her hand to her mouth.

  ‘What a shocking thing, Titus! Why did he do it?’

  ‘That’s one of the points of interest. No reason is given. But the story is preceded by a discussion of the different tempers of men and women. Sir Richard suggests, I think, that Eustace’s motive for murder was not explicit, but implicit. His mind was poisoned with the notion that male and female are in essence irreconcilable. Ergo, he could never agree with Mrs Eustace, or she with him, and that his only recourse was to murder her.’

  ‘Then his mind was deranged. Why are you so pleased with this horrible tale?’

  ‘Because when you think about it, there are extraordinary affinities with the Brockletower case. And, when I was in Garlick Hall’s morning room on the day of the death, I found a commonplace book in her writing table. The last entry was a quotation “The Soul of a Man and that of a Woman are made very unlike”. I now know where it came from. Can you guess?’

  ‘The same Tatler essay?’

  ‘Precisely. I have just seen the same words in my own edition. But there was one thing more. Dolores had added six extraneous words: “Imagine therefore: my pain and fear”.’

  ‘Not words from the Tatler?’

  ‘No. These are not the fictional Bickerstaff’s words. I think they are the real Mrs Brockletower’s. So what should we make of that?’

  Elizabeth laid down her knife and fork and thought for a moment.

  ‘That she was reading the Tatler and was struck by similarities in the situations of Mrs Eustace and herself.’

  ‘The husband’s passionate rages, sharing the house with his sister.’