What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  The widow had protected his youth from their scrutiny, keeping him in shadow, muffling his old-young face again into its woollen shawl. Too late now to find another; she had done her best—she wanted no argument. She prompted him, murmuring, fearful, the opening words of the sin-eater’s terrible prayer.

  He had heard his father rehearsing it often enough—the sibilant muttering, the pauses while the food was gobbled down, bit by ceremonious bit, the crescendo of importunity, storming heaven, the shriek of horror, real or pretended, as the prayer at last was answered, the sins transmitted to the living from the dead: the precipitate flight, eerily wailing, staying only to pick up the money, by custom flung after the outcast into the farmyard mire. But the words… The howl of a fox he could imitate so that the vixen cried back to him, the hoot of an owl, the scream of the kite, but these sounds had no words; he knew no words… He began to mumble, desperate—imitating, apelike, a meaningless babel of sound. They shifted their feet uneasily—only half listening, only half watching him, afraid of the moment to come, part of that moment and yet wishing to be no part of it, giving him, deliberately, only a divided attention; yet conscious, and with a growing consciousness, that all was not as it should be. The widow made small, urgent, hidden gestures towards the body. The time had come to eat.

  The butter was yellow in the candle-light, gleaming gold sovereigns of it ringing the brown batch loaves; his bowels melted within him, inside his mouth, his cheeks seemed to sweat saliva. He stretched out a shaking hand towards the food…

  But his mother’s voice hissed in his ear: ‘Not one scrap, not one crumb!’ His hand dropped back.

  She had counselled him, feverishly coaching him in the part he must play, knowing him not capable of improvisation. Now, obedient, he stumbled through the simple sentences. ‘You must all go. I am one that eats alone.’

  The old men were astonished, protesting. ‘The sin-eater eats before witnesses.’

  The boy repeated: ‘I am one that eats alone.’

  ‘Witnesses must be present to see it, when the sin passes.’

  ‘You shall hear it,’ said the boy.

  The shriek of mortal terror, the terrible wailing… ‘If we stand in the next room,’ urged the widow, abetting him, ‘we shall hear when the sin passes.’ The sin-eater was not as other sin-eaters, in her heart she doubted his efficacy but he was the best she could do, her husband must be buried tomorrow, she prayed again for no argument; and meanwhile, uneasy but indomitable, drove them all out, reluctantly shuffling, into the kitchen next door.

  Ears pressed against oak, they heard the mutterings again wordless, unmeaning. Then silence. The boy, obedient, was stuffing his threadbare pockets with the food, was lining the torn shirt with it, close up against his naked body, fat against thin—white, glossy fat pressed close against the hard rib-caging that painfully ridged the blue-white skin… The faggots, crushed by the all-concealing shawl, exploded dry and mealy, aromatically fragrant, the hard whites of the eggs were slippery and cold; pressed between narrow oval slices of bread, the butter oozed and melted, yellow as gold. He set up a shrill chanting, importuning heaven in a stream of wordless sound, for the shifting to himself of the dead man’s sins.

  When we hear the scream, said the old men, avidly listening, it will be the sin passing.

  The chanting ceased. Within the little parlour the boy was nerving himself for the screaming. There was nothing for him to scream for, he had not eaten the food, the sins would not pass to him: and yet he must somehow open his mouth and, weak and sick as he was, find the strength to begin. In its corner, the grandfather clock ticked away the minutes, urgently; pale against dark gold of old lustre, the candle-light flickered from the tall oak dresser; uneasily the dead man lay, shifting beneath his shroud with the shifting of the shadows. On the still breast, the dish lay empty.

  His mouth opened, he dragged up a deep breath from his labouring lungs; lurched, sick and trembling against the bier, knowing that he had no strength, no power, no will to meet the task before him—crouched there, shuddering, and did not know how to start screaming…

  But the lurch against the bier had shifted the weight of the dish, tipped it crazily, unbalanced now as it was by the loss of the food. He saw the beginning of the slow slide, impeded by the folds of the shroud, but inevitable nevertheless; and flung out a hand to save it. His fingers grasped it, he hung over the corpse clinging to the edge of the dish; but, heavy and greasy with bacon fat, it slid inexorably out of his hands and a moment later had crashed into a thousand fragments on to the scrubbed white stone of the floor…

  He let out one startled yell: the door burst open, they all stood gaping: and, hysterically screaming, he thrust his way through them and was out—out into the night air, under the stars and fleeing down the mountain-side to the place he called his home. If they flung gold after him, if the servant recollected his promise of safe conduct, he waited for neither. After the long strain of the night, panic had him fast; and, faint with lack of food, he yet rushed on and on, stumbling through the hanging forests, across the rough grassland, plunging through the river, waist high, through scrub oak again and so at last collapsed, sobbing, outside the ruined cottage, at his mother’s feet.

  She could not wait even to comfort or assist him. She burst out: ‘Have you brought the food?’

  He dragged himself to his feet, painfully; began to unwrap the shawl, to extract from beneath it the poor, battered remnants of that once splendid feast—the crumbled faggots, the split and bulging eggs, the fine white bacon fat gone limp and greasy now from long contact with the sweating body. She took it from him, silently, piece by piece, scraped with a cupped palm the melting butter from the hollow of his waist, scraped it off again on to a crust of bread. She said at last: ‘Is this all of it?’

  All of it. Not one morsel eaten, not one crumb. His heart rose, light as a bird at the thought of it—the mission accomplished, temptation resisted, the reward, untarnished, now to come. But the cunning crept back, frightened, defensive, as she took the food and turned away into the house. ‘Where are you taking it? It’s mine, you promised.’ Famished, exhausted, he began to drag himself after her. ‘You’re not going to eat it yourself? You’re not giving it all to him…?’

  ‘You shall have it,’ she promised. ‘All of it. All of it.’ The sins of the simple farmer—what are they? An ounce of mutton underweight, a drop or two of water in the milk; a woman coveted, a word in anger, a curse, a blow… But the sins of the sin-eater—the long accumulation of sin upon sin, of sins unrepented, unshriven, unforgiven, of sins stolen from dead men’s souls for gain: who shall take on the sins of the sin-eater?

  She had known all along that he was at the point of death; and now the mother came out and took her son’s hand and led him, innocent, through to the inner room where the father lay: with the food spread out upon his naked breast.

  11

  After the Event

  ‘YES, I THINK I may claim,’ said the Grand Old Man (of Detection) complacently, ‘that in all my career I never failed to solve a murder case. In the end,’ he added, hurriedly, having caught Inspector Cockrill’s beady eye.

  Inspector Cockrill had for the past hour found himself in the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks. He suggested: ‘The Othello case?’ and sat back and twiddled his thumbs.

  ‘As in the Othello case,’ said the Great Detective, as though he had not been interrupted at all. ‘Which, as I say, I solved. In the end,’ he added again, looking defiantly at Inspector Cockrill.

  ‘But too late?’ suggested Cockie: regretfully.

  The great one bowed. ‘In as far as certain evidence had, shall we say?—faded—yes: too late. For the rest, I unmasked the murderer: I built up a water-tight case against him: and I duly saw him triumphantly brought to trial. In other words, I think I may fairly say—that I solved the case.’

  ‘Only, the jury failed to convict,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

/>   He waved it aside with magnificence. A detail. ‘As it happened, yes; they failed to convict.’

  ‘And quite right too,’ said Cockie; he was having a splendid time.

  ‘People round me were remarking, that second time I saw him play Othello,’ said the Great Detective, ‘that James Dragon had aged twenty years in as many days. And so he may well have done; for in the past three weeks he had played, night after night, to packed audiences—night after night strangling his new Desdemona, in the knowledge that his own wife had been so strangled but a few days before; and that every man Jack in the audience believed it was he who had strangled her—believed he was a murderer.’

  ‘Which, however, he was not,’ said Inspector Cockrill, and his bright elderly eyes shone with malicious glee.

  ‘Which he was—and was not,’ said the old man heavily. He was something of an actor himself but he had not hitherto encountered the modern craze for audience-participation and he was not enjoying it at all. ‘If I might now be permitted to continue without interruption…?’

  ‘Some of you may have seen James Dragon on the stage,’ said the old man, ‘though the company all migrated to Hollywood in the end. But none of you will have seen him as Othello—after that season, Dragon Productions dropped it from their repertoire. They were a great theatrical family—still are, come to that, though James and Leila, his sister, are the only ones left nowadays; and as for poor James—getting very passé, very passé indeed,’ said the Great Detective pityingly, shaking his senile head.

  ‘But at the time of the murder, he was in his prime; not yet thirty and at the top of his form. And he was splendid. I see him now as I saw him that night, the very night she died—towering over her as she lay on the great stage bed, tricked out in his tremendous costume of black and gold, with the padded chest and shoulders concealing his slenderness and the great padded, jewel-studded sleeves like cantaloupe melons, raised above his head: bringing them down, slowly, slowly, until suddenly he swooped like a hawk and closed his dark-stained hands on her white throat. And I hear again Emilia’s heart-break cry in the lovely Dragon family voice: “Oh, thou hast killed the sweetest innocent, That e’er did lift up eye…”’

  But she had not been an innocent—James Dragon’s Desdemona, Glenda Croy, who was in fact his wife. She had been a thoroughly nasty piece of work. An aspiring young actress, she had blackmailed him into marriage for the sake of her career; and that had been all of a piece with her conduct throughout. A great theatrical family was extremely sensitive to blackmail even in those more easy-going days of the late nineteen-twenties; and in the first rush of the Dragons’ spectacular rise to fame, there had been one or two unfortunate episodes, one of them even culminating in a—very short—prison sentence: which, however, had effectively been hushed up. By the time of the murder, the Dragons were a byword for a sort of magnificent un-touchability. Glenda Croy, without ever unearthing more than a grubby little scandal here and there, could yet be the means of dragging them all back into the mud again.

  James Dragon had been, in the classic manner, born—at the turn of the century—backstage of a provincial theatre: had lustily wailed from his property basket while Romeo whispered through the mazes of Juliet’s ball-dance, ‘Just before curtain-up. Both doing splendidly. It’s a boy!; had been carried on at the age of three weeks, and at the age of ten formed with his sister such a precious pair of prodigies that the parents gave up their own promising careers to devote themselves to the management of their children’s affairs. By the time he married, Dragon Productions had three touring companies always on the road and a regular London Shakespeare season, with James Dragon and Leila, his sister, playing the leads. Till he married a wife.

  From the day of his marriage, Glenda took over the leads. They fought against it, all of them, the family, the whole company, James himself: but Glenda used her blackmail with subtlety, little hints here, little threats there, and they were none of them proof against it—James Dragon was their ‘draw’, with him they all stood or fell. So Leila stepped back and accepted second leads and for the good of them all, Arthur Dragon, the father, who produced for the company as well as being its manager did his honest best with the new recruit: and so got her through her Juliet (to a frankly mature Romeo), her Lady Macbeth, her Desdemona; and at the time of her death was breaking his heart rehearsing her Rosalind, preparatory to the company’s first American tour.

  Rosalind was Leila Dragon’s pet part. ‘But, Dad, she’s hopeless, we can’t have her prancing her way across America grinning like a coy hyena: do speak to James again…’

  ‘James can’t do anything, my dear.’

  ‘Surely by this time… It’s three years now, we were all so certain it wouldn’t last a year.’

  ‘She knows where her bread is buttered,’ said the lady’s father-in-law, sourly.

  ‘But now, having played with us—she could strike out on her own?’

  ‘Why should she want to? With us, she’s safe—and she automatically plays our leads.’

  ‘If only she’d fall for some man…’

  ‘She won’t do that; she’s far too canny,’ said Arthur Dragon. ‘That would be playing into our hands. And she’s interested in nothing but getting on; she doesn’t bother with men.’ And, oddly enough, after a pass or two, men did not bother with her.

  A row blew up over the Rosalind part, which rose to its climax before the curtain went up on ‘Venice. A Street’, on the night that Glenda Croy died. It rumbled through odd moments offstage, and through the intervals, spilled over into hissed asides between Will Shakespeare’s lines, and culminated in a threat spat out with the venom of a viper as she lay on the bed, with the great arms raised above her, ready to pounce and close hands about her throat. Something about ‘gaol’. Something about ‘prisoners’. Something about the American tour.

  It was an angry and a badly frightened man who faced her, twenty minutes later, in her dressing-room. ‘What did you mean, Glenda, by what you said on-stage?—during the death scene. Gaolbirds, prisoners—what did you mean, what was it you said?’

  She had thrown on a dressing-gown at his knock and now sat calmly on the divan, peeling off her stage stockings. ‘I meant that I am playing Rosalind in America. Or the company is not going to America.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection,’ he said.

  ‘You will,’ said Glenda.

  ‘But, Glenda, be sensible, Rosalind just isn’t your part.’

  ‘No,’ said Glenda. ‘It’s dear Leila’s part. But I am playing Rosalind—or the company is not going to America.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go to America?’

  ‘I can go any day I like. You can’t. Without me, Dragon Productions stay home.’

  ‘I have accepted the American offer,’ he said steadily. ‘I am taking the company out. Come if you like—playing Celia.’

  She took off one stocking and tossed it over her shoulder, bent to slide the other down, over a round white knee. ‘No one is welcomed into America who has been a gaolbird,’ she said.

  ‘Oh—that’s it?’ he said. ‘Well, if you mean me…’ But he wavered. ‘There was a bit of nonsense… Good God, it was years ago… And anyway, it was all rubbish, a bit of bravado, we were all wild and silly in those days before the war…’

  ‘Explain all that to the Americans,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve no doubt I’d be able to,’ he said, still steadily. ‘If they ever found out, which I doubt they ever would.’ But his mind swung round on itself. ‘This is a new—mischief—of yours, Glenda. How did you find it out?’

  ‘I came across a newspaper cutting.’ She gave a sort of involuntary glance back over her shoulder; it told him without words spoken that the paper was here in the room. He caught at her wrist. ‘Give that cutting to me!’

  She did not even struggle to free her hand; just sat looking up at him with her insolent little smile. She was sure of herself. ‘Help yourself. It’s in my handbag. But the information’s still at
the newspaper office, you know—and here in my head, facts, dates, all the rest of it. Plus any little embellishments I may care to add.’ He relaxed his grip and she freed her hand without effort and sat gently massaging the wrist. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘what lies people will believe, if you base them on a hard core of truth.’

  He called her a filthy name and, standing there, blind with his mounting disgust and fury, added filth to filth. She struck out at him then like a wild cat, slapping him violently across the face with the flat of her hand. At the sharp sting of the slap, his control gave way. He raised his arms above his head and brought them down—slowly, slowly with a menace infinitely terrible: and closed his hands about her throat and shook her like a rag doll—and flung her back on to the bed and started across the room in search of the paper. It was in her handbag as she had said. He took it and stuffed it into his pocket and went back and stood triumphantly over her.

  And saw that she was dead.

  ‘I had gone, as it happened, to a restaurant just across the street from the theatre,’ said the Great Detective; ‘and they got me there. She was lying on the couch, her arms flung over her head, the backs of her hands with their pointed nails brushing the floor; much as I had seen her, earlier in the evening, lying in a pretence of death. But she no longer wore Desdemona’s elaborate robes, she wore only the rather solid undies of those days, cami-knickers and a petticoat, under a silk dressing-gown. She seemed to have put up very little struggle: though there was a red mark round her right wrist and a faint pink stain across the palm of her hand.

  ‘Most of the company and the technicians I left for the moment to my assistants, and they proved later to have nothing of interest to tell us. The stage doorkeeper, however, an ancient retired actor, testified to having seen ‘shadows against her lighted windows. Mr. James was in there with her. They were going through the strangling scene. Then the light went out: that’s all I know.’

  ‘How did you know it was Mr. Dragon in there?’