by Robin Blake
Chapter Twenty-seven
I LEANED OUT OF the window, with Luke beside me. A horse, hard-ridden, was clattering away towards Church Gate. I withdrew my head.
‘He has gone. Back to Garlick, probably.’
‘If, as you say, he’s lost his reason, perhaps he should be pursued. He might endanger the people there.’
‘He is out of his wits, all right. He admitted just now that he is Woodley’s murderer. We shall send word to his sister through Mrs Marsden, explaining what’s happened, and warning them to be on their guard. There are still Lord Derby’s soldiers on hand, if need be.’
I stooped to the floor to pick up one of the pens that, a few minutes earlier, had saved my life. Gently Luke took it from my fingers.
‘Your hands are shaking, Titus. You are still shocked. Let me write for you.’
Luke drew up a chair and sat down at the table. An inkpot, a stick of sealing wax and a sheaf of paper lay ready for use, and on the top sheet he immediately noticed a faint line of indentation.
‘Someone wrote on the previous top sheet.’
He looked under the table and saw a waste-paper basket. He reached inside and fetched out one crumpled sheet, which he flattened on the tabletop.
There was just one half-line of writing, in a scrawled hand. I leaned forward to read it. Ephraim, I cannot sustain this. My way of life—That was all.
‘The squire wrote this before he sent for me. I wonder what it was he could not sustain?’
‘Finishing the letter, anyway.’
‘Maybe he abandoned this and drafted another,’ I proposed.
‘No. The indentation means this was the last sheet used. Now, at the time of writing, he expected to die shortly. This would have been his last statement.’
‘But why was he addressing himself to the bailiff?’
‘We must ask the bailiff, though I do not think he will help us.’
Luke flipped open the inkpot, squared up the paper and briskly wrote a note to Sarah Brockletower, which he sealed and handed to me. Then he rose and walked slowly around the room, noting everything he saw. He carefully examined one corner of the oak table.
‘This is where he struck his head, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can see the blood.’
Going downstairs, we found the Parkin brothers, Grimshaw’s constables. Ignoring their knowing smirks, I stood them down, saying the danger was over. Then I gave the note Luke had written, with a shilling, to Noah Plumtree, who had a postboy on hand to ride with it express to Garlick Hall.
I felt a mixture of emotions. Though tingling with shock after my confrontation with death, I was at the same time profoundly tired. More surprisingly I felt hungry. I crossed the saloon to the table that Luke and I had occupied, picked up my cold, uneaten chop from where it lay in a congealed pool of fat, and walked with it to the door.
‘I’m going home,’ I told Fidelis, tearing off a chunk of meat with my mouth and chewing rapidly. ‘This has been a long day.’
He walked with me up Turk’s Head Court and towards the Guild Hall and Cheapside. It was a gentle evening, the air still as the light slipped into gloaming. Approaching my door I looked back in to Market Place, now empty but for the stallholders’ detritus, a few pedestrians criss-crossing its open space, and a figure I recognized sitting beside the water-fountain. I took Fidelis by the arm and guided him to follow me.
‘Before I go in, there’s someone over there I want you to meet.’
Peg Miller was crouching on the fountain steps, with a tin cup in front of her to collect alms. The cup was empty.
‘Mistress Miller,’ I said. ‘I hope you remember me.’
She tilted her shrewd face towards me.
‘You are the crowner.’
‘I am. May I present my friend, Dr Fidelis?’
She responded to him with a lady-like inclination of the head. I noticed some of her clothing was also that of a lady, in particular a riding jacket, which rather hung about her, as it was several sizes too big. As were the good boots on her feet. I went on.
‘I thought you and yours had left the vicinity. You struck camp at the Hall.’
‘Mr Brockletower ordered us off Tuesday. He sent up his bulldog, Pearson. Mr Woodley’d already gone, and now I hear he’s killed. I’m not sorry, except for there’s never a penny of money for us, though they owed a month’s wages. This is why I am waiting here, to see my Lord Mayor. I want justice.’
‘Justice?’
‘For my boy Sol that we buried back at Garlick Hall.’
‘He has escaped justice, Peg. He was caught absconding with a body under inquest, which is a serious offence, you know. But now, after this accident, no one can touch him.’
‘True, he has escaped. But I want justice against them that used him. And then I want payment of what is due for my man’s work the past month.’
‘Your man – Tom Piltdown?’
‘Yes, him that was my man I should say. I’ve broke with him now, because I know what he did.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Mr Woodley knew. Now you shall have to ask Squire.’
Fidelis dropped to his haunches, so that his face was level with Peg’s.
‘Was Tom the father of Solomon?’ he asked.
She turned her head to the side and spat.
‘Never. I might have wished it. I been with him five year, and with Sol’s father it were more like five minutes. I never even knew his name. And, if Tom were that lad’s father, happen he’d have been kinder to him.’
‘Was he unkind to Solomon, then?’
‘I’ll say no more till I see the Mayor.’
I took out my purse.
‘Don’t count on him seeing you,’ I said, peering inside. ‘And look out for a fat man in uniform called Mallender and his two ferrets, the Parkin brothers, whom he will surely set on you if he finds you here begging openly. But meanwhile I hope you will eat something.’
I dropped a crown into the cup.
‘You’re most welcome,’ she said with simple grandeur.
‘I see at any rate you have good clothes on your back, and boots on your feet,’ observed Fidelis, as he felt in his pocket and contributed a further shilling.
Peg Miller looked down and smoothed a crease in her jacket.
‘These are the dead woman’s clobber,’ she said.
‘Mrs Brockletower’s?’
‘Squire cleared out her wardrobe. Wanted rid of it. Sent a big roll of clothes and shoes up to the camp for us women to share around. The sizes are all too big for me, but clean and strong at least. The younger girls wanted her fine stuff – the ball gowns that look like they’ve never been worn, fancy undergarments, stockings. Silly. I like to keep warm, me.’
The conversation with Peg Miller had the effect of calming me. Going home I sat down in my fireside chair and told Elizabeth how I had met the Squire of Garlick Hall in the Turk’s Head, and that he had tried to kill me. I was perfectly even-headed and able to make light of it: I had had a momentary brush with danger. That was all. A bad dream, and now over.
Nevertheless my wife rushed to the kitchen and brought me a cup of wine with a few hartshorn drops in it.
‘It’ll help the shock, Titus,’ she said, sinking to the floor by my chair and resting her arms on my knees. ‘Drink a bit and then I want to hear every detail of what happened.’
So I told her, ending with an account of my encounter in Market Place.
‘I was wrong about Peg,’ I admitted.
‘How wrong, Titus?’
‘I was wrong when I said she would be philosophical about her Solomon’s death. She is not. She is angry and she has come to haunt the town, wanting justice.’
‘That’s what I thought she would be like. A mother. But what kind of justice can she get?’
‘None. No one will listen. There is no justice for people like her; not for those that haven’t a threshold to cross at nightfall. ’
‘N
or for many of those that have.’
‘Maybe not. But there’s another reason also. When he died, Solomon Miller had himself been wanted for the crime of stealing a corpse. It hung over him as heavy and deadly as the block of stone that actually hanged him.’
‘He was not really guilty, though. He was a simpleton and put up to it.’
‘That’s true. The immediate instigator was Tom Piltdown, the ganger who lived with Peg. She’s broken with him now, because she says he took advantage of her idiot boy. But don’t think the likes of Ephraim Grimshaw are going to pursue a charge like that. Piltdown is gone. The trail of accusation reaches above his head to Woodley – who’s gone too – and then as far as the squire. Grimshaw regards himself as hand-in-glove with the gentry. He won’t agree to cudgel Brockletower on Peg Miller’s say-so, you can be sure of that.’
‘Well, from what you say, the squire has done a good job of self-cudgelling. He killed Woodley and admitted it. Now he’s running.’
I lifted my glass and drained it, then yawned deeply.
‘Running? I wonder if he can. He is desperate but he is also injured. I say he will be found, but the question is, what will he do when they have him at bay?’
The hartshorn drops did their work. I slept well, and dreamlessly, and awoke early, feeling refreshed and ready for the resumed inquest at Yolland. Over breakfast I determined in my mind how to proceed. Brockletower’s madness the previous night was more than a brainstorm or temporary aberration. There was no chance he would be able to continue his evidence. So I would call Sarah, his sister, and Fidelis as witnesses. Fidelis would tell just what he had found in his examination post-mortem. Whatever happened I reckoned it was going to be a day of revelations.
For once Fidelis was at my door before I was ready to leave, carrying his medical bag. He took me aside and felt my pulse, then examined my eyes. I told him I was quite well and felt no after-effects from the evening before. After laughing at my belief in the hartshorn, he seemed satisfied, and we rode away together. I explained how I would conduct the business, and then we reverted to the subject of my frightening interview with Brockletower in the Turk’s Head.
‘At one point, he was raving about Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice. Thought he was Othello himself, and Dolores was Desdemona.’
‘And was there a Jago in the plot?’
‘He implied it was Woodley, which I too have suspected.’
‘Have you? Maybe the real Jago was inside himself: at some point that part of him turned against the very thing about Dolores that before had fascinated him. Her monstrousness. It was all very well in alien Jamaica, but just try to domesticate it here, in Lancashire, and the case is hopeless.’
Fidelis gave a single, heartless laugh.
‘I think, in the first instance, his intentions towards her were not criminal,’ I said. ‘He raged against humanity more hotly than Dean Swift, but he didn’t want to kill his wife. He wanted her back in the West Indies, and out of his way.’
‘So we already know he didn’t kill her personally, and now you’re saying he didn’t order her killing either.’
‘I am certain he did not. She had come to fear him as much as he hated her but her fear was more bitter than his hatred.’
‘That is part of the reason she left the words from the Tatler story in her commonplace book about the souls of men and women being different. “Imagine therefore: my pain and fear”. It must have been bad for her, Titus. A war in her nature – half man, half woman. That is why she wanted us to imagine her pain and fear.’
‘Yet there is more to it than that,’ I said. ‘She gave her husband the Eustace story to read. Brockletower believes she wanted him to kill her just as Eustace did in the story. She wanted not only to die, but him to kill her and pay for it with his own life. This is the darkest of the secrets we’ve uncovered. But since Brockletower did not kill her, even that doesn’t tell us how she died.’
‘And you are heading in a straight line for the finding of murder by person or persons unknown.’
‘So it looks. That’s better than self-murder, but an empty assertion all the same. I wish we could avoid it.’
We arrived at Gamull where, like a wraith fated to haunt me whenever I passed through, I saw the wizened, hag-like form of Miriam Patten standing in the road.
‘Stop!’ she croaked.
‘Are you not coming over to the inquest today, Miriam?’ I asked. ‘I saw you there yesterday.’
She stood before us with her legs parted and her bony arms flung out sideways as if trying to turn a running pig.
‘Eh, Mr Cragg, there’s cause for another now,’ she called out.
‘Another? Another what?’
We pulled up our horses to hear her better.
‘They sent word,’ she said. ‘I been told to wait and divert you.’
Fidelis laughed.
‘Divert us, Miriam? What are you going to do, sing “Tom Bowling”?’
‘You what?’
She cupped her hand behind her ear, looking puzzled and twitching her head slightly to the right, then the left, and then back again.
‘You say there’s cause for another,’ I said. ‘Another what?’
‘Of your inquests, they’re saying, and you must go again to the hollow oak. They’ve found Squire lying there.’
I looked at Fidelis, then turned back to Miriam.
‘At the hollow tree in Fulwood?’
‘You heard. So they sent word that I must wait for you, and tell you.’
To my old cob’s great surprise I gave her a double kick and urged her into a slow and stately, but palpable, gallop towards the Fulwood.
It was still not nine o’clock when we came to the hollow oak, our mounts blowing hard. William Pearson, with two others, stood below it, but it was what lay at their feet that compelled the attention. Here, on more or less exactly the spot where Dolores Brockletower had fallen less than a week earlier, was the body of her husband, not lying flat but twisted around, with his face turned upward and his eyes staring open in a look of frozen surprise.
An old man and woman, dressed in filthy rags, stood nervously by, he protectively gripping her by the arm. These were the finders. I dismounted and approached to question them. The pair were a married couple who had been gathering wood with their granddaughter, so they said. More likely it was setting illegal rabbit-snares that had brought them so deep into the forest. In either event, they had found the squire lying on the ground and sent their granddaughter running for help while they stayed to mind the body.
‘Did you recognize the man?’
‘We did that. It’s Squire.’
‘Where is your granddaughter now?’
‘After she brought Mr Pearson here from Hall, he sent her away to find you, sir. First she went to leave word at Gamull for you to come here, instead of going to Yolland. Then she will have run on to Yolland in case you had already passed through.’
‘And what time did you find him?’
The old man gave his wife an apprehensive look.
‘What d’you mean, time?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Of the clock.’
He looked at me as if I were mad.
‘There’s no clock here, sir. We’re in woods.’
‘I know that, man! But was it before or after sunrise?’
‘Half hour after, no more,’ he said.
That meant about three hours ago.
‘Did you touch the body at all? Was it warm, or cold?’
‘Oh no, no! We didn’t touch it. We wouldn’t dare touch it.’
‘Well, was his horse nearby?’
‘Yes, I caught it. It were picking grass, on top of that bank. I tethered it and it’s still there.’
He indicated a place fifty yards away, where the forest floor rose to a clearing that was covered with grazing. I saw and recognized the horse as Squire Brockletower’s.
I circled the body and crouched to go through his pockets. I rolled the body over to ge
t at the right-side pocket of his coat, which was lying under him. It contained a pistol, apparently the one he had picked up from the floor at the coffee house. It was not loaded. Nor had it been cleaned since its last firing – which I presumed to have been the accidental discharge at the Turk’s Head. I pushed the pistol into my belt and investigated the breast pocket. It contained a letter, the seal broken and the handwriting not the squire’s. I stood up.
‘Luke, can you tell the manner of death?’
Fidelis took my place beside the body and began his examination by opening the squire’s clothing. I unfolded the paper I had found, and began reading silently to myself.
My dear sir, consider it! You were born to enjoy more
worthy attachments than you ever had with that thing.
I can well comprehend the hold a person like her – or
him – no, let’s say ‘it’ – gained over one such as yourself,
but …
Luke Fidelis remained busy over the body but Pearson and the old pair had been drawn towards me like cows to a gate, and were looking curiously down on the paper in my hands. To the two old ones the letter could mean nothing, however closely they inspected it, but Pearson might have read it. So I walked away from them among the trees.
… but soon, in place of the attractive idea you
encountered in Jamaica, you had perforce to
accommodate the unattractive person here in Lancashire.
And, having done so, you received less and less, and
eventually nothing at all, of pleasure, so that at last
you had only an impediment to pleasure. Well now,
the impediment is removed! All that remains wanting is
assurance that no person shall ever know the truth of it.
I can give you that assurance. I have the truth stowed and
safe from all eyes. All that remains is for your recompense
to seal it up for ever. Five hundred guineas shall satisfy us
both and the rascally coroner shall never find the truth.
