And yet, kind though he was to me, I don’t believe he was a very nice man. Certainly not a very good one. For he treated his sister badly when she was very young and in difficult circumstances. I remember that when I learnt that the entire fortune had gone to Mr Stonex’s sister who had turned out to be living in Harrogate in sadly reduced circumstances, I felt – as did many in the town – that some kind of justice had at least emerged from the horror of the old gentleman’s brutal murder. It was learnt that the sister had lived in a tiny cottage for some years and had recently had a stroke and become bedbound. There was something profoundly romantic in the idea of the forgotten relative being raised suddenly from illness and poverty to vast wealth.
Some years after the murder an article appeared about it in the Daily Mail in February 1903. The journalist revealed that Mr Stonex’s sister had always believed that her brother had cheated her of her share of their father’s estate. The article recounted this story: her father had always preferred her above her elder brother and the animosity this created between the siblings had been enhanced by the fact that they were temperamentally opposite: he was cautious, unsociable and shy. She was flamboyant, extravagant and easily bored. Their father died when the girl was fourteen and her brother, some seven years older than she, had treated her badly to get revenge.
At sixteen she had been one of the greatest heiresses in the district, but her brother had refused her a dowry, and by doing so had discouraged the interest of young men from distinguished families in the county. As a result of his ill-treatment of her, she had been seduced by a much older man – an actor visiting the town with a theatrical company – who had taken her away. She tried to earn her living on the stage herself but, apart from a few early triumphs, failed in this career. She was a brilliant, passionate, compelling and daring actress but she would wilfully depart from the text and improvise her lines in the heat of the moment, with the consequence that other performers refused to go on stage with her and managers declined to employ her. During the years that followed, her brother succeeded, she maintained, in stealing her share of their inheritance. When she reached twenty-one and tried to claim it and failed, her lover abandoned her and their young child. The writer of the article claimed that the seducer was himself closely related to an aristocratic Irish family and had some expectation, therefore, of making a good marriage despite his somewhat dubious manner of earning his living.
All of that, of course, happened some thirty or forty years before the time I am speaking of – the afternoon when I sat opposite Mr Stonex at that big table in the houseplace and he talked to me about the sacrifice of the hopes that he had had as a boy. It occurred to me some years later that he felt guilt at what he had done to his sibling and even that he had seen me as the child of his sister whom he had more recently turned away penniless from his door. I sympathized with him for I know how oppressive and corroding a sense of guilt can be, since if any living person is responsible for the unjust and cruel death featured in the foregoing account, it is I. Much later again, however, I realized how wrong I was about the old man’s feelings.
After our tea-party I spoke to him only twice more – and since the first of these occasions was about a week after I had been to tea, it must have been only a week or ten days before he died. I met him in the Close and he asked me where I would be during the Christmas holiday and I told him I would have to stay at the school for my aunt and uncle had decided they were too old and frail to take responsibility for me again. He said nothing but looked thoughtful. I did not speak to him again until the day of his death.
I have been obsessed by the Stonex Case all my life but until a few months ago I never expected to learn more about it or, indeed, to make public what I knew. The article in the Daily Mail started a chain of events which eventually brought the truth to light, though it was itself no more than a tissue of lies about the case. It was published on the occasion of the death of Professor Courtine and the journalist took advantage of the fact that you cannot libel the dead to make grave allegations against him. Ever since the murder, the most outrageous stories had been told and grave calumnies made against a number of unlikely people. A strange feature of the article is that, because the writer was not sure if Austin Fickling was still alive, he simply omitted him entirely – in a most cowardly and dishonest fashion – from his speculative account of events on the fatal afternoon.
The article was called ‘The Thurchester Conspiracy Unmasked’. The author began by asserting that there were rumours from the very first that Dr Courtine – as he then was – had been involved himself in some way. Nobody had ever seriously suggested until then that Dr Courtine had lied – though many believed he was deceived about certain matters. The journalist argued that the theory about a mysterious brother of the victim propounded by Dr Courtine when he gave evidence at the inquest was a calculated distortion of the truth. His grotesque claim was that Dr Courtine had himself battered Mr Stonex to death when he arrived for tea, and then spent several hours ransacking the house for money and securities. So, the writer insisted, the young doctor was right when he asserted that the old gentleman had been dead for several hours by the time he saw the body.
Although I knew how completely absurd this was, I resisted the temptation to reveal the information I possessed. I could not, however, forbear writing a brief letter to the Editor of the newspaper saying that I had been at school there at the time and had even known Mr Stonex slightly, and pointing out a circumstance which destroyed the article’s argument completely. This was the fact that Austin Fickling had been at the New Deanery with Dr Courtine on the afternoon of the murder and that the two men had contradicted each other at the inquest about what had happened there. That made the idea that Dr Courtine had been involved in a conspiracy virtually impossible. The letter was published and some correspondence followed on the topic. It was because of that letter that a few years later Miss Napier, the author of the book that was eventually published as The Thurchester Mystery, wrote to ask me for my help.
The old gentleman’s kindness helped me more than he could have known to endure the next few weeks when every misery seemed to worsen. I had never known an English winter and this was a harsh one with a hard frost that gripped for weeks and a thick, choking fog. In our big room in the Old Gatehouse, we had to break the ice in the buckets to wash in the mornings. And during the night, under our thin blankets, with the windows leaking what heat there was despite the rags we stuffed into the cracks, we were often too cold to sleep. I suffered from chilblains and had a cough and a constantly running nose.
As Christmas approached I became more and more unhappy at the prospect of spending it alone in the ancient building. We boys used to terrify each other with tales of the ghosts that haunted it and certainly there were often creaks at night as if someone was on the stair, perhaps creeping up to the empty attic-room under the roof. There was a story which had been handed down from generation to generation of schoolboys about a ghost – a canon of the Cathedral in the old times – who used to sneak up the stairs to the attic at night for some mysterious purpose. Many a time I would be lying awake in the middle of the night and would hear him on the stair. This was frightening enough while surrounded by my sleeping companions. The prospect of facing this by myself for the ten days of the Christmas vacation was terrifying. Particularly since I suspected that sometimes there really would be someone creeping up the stairs. On Christmas Day – which fell on a Sunday that year – all the other choristers would go home after the second service in the morning and I would be alone. The Headmaster and his wife would keep an eye on me but it would be an ungenerous – as well as an unsteady – one. I dreaded that Dr Sheldrick might have me to spend the day with him – though at least it would be too cold for photography.
And so my friendship with Mr Stonex was important to me. The fact that there was an adult who seemed to like me for myself without wanting anything from me, gave me reason to believe that I was of some worth. And the fa
ct that it was a secret made me feel powerful. In bed at night I hugged it to myself like a magic talisman. I knew something the other boys did not. Something even the masters did not know. (I’ve remained good at keeping secrets, perhaps too good. The habit of reticence has become deeply engrained.) I allowed myself to imagine that the old man would adopt me as his grandson and take me away from the school to live with him. More realistically, I hoped he would ask me to have Christmas dinner with him.
On the Thursday before Christmas Day I was coming back from Early Practice in the company of another chorister. It had snowed overnight, which was extraordinary to me for I had never seen the stuff before. I didn’t notice the old gentleman – who must have been on his way to the Bank – until he was close upon me because I was lost in my thoughts, for I had been plunged into a state of horror during Practice that morning by something the choirmaster had announced. Mr Stonex suddenly addressed me by my name. The other boy went on ahead, turning round curiously to look at us and it happened that at that moment young Mr Quitregard came past on his way to open up the Library as he always did at that hour on Thursdays.
Mr Stonex asked me if I would care to come to him for Christmas dinner. Then he said: ‘You still haven’t seen my maps, have you? Well, I expect to receive a fine old atlas this afternoon which I will show you if you come.’
‘I should like that very much, sir,’ I said. ‘When?’
‘This afternoon,’ he said. His words were ambiguous and I so much wanted him to ask me to come to his house that very afternoon in order that I might avoid Late Practice, that I persuaded myself that he was asking me to visit him that day. I half knew that he meant that the atlas was arriving that afternoon and he would show it to me on Christmas Day, and also that visiting him was not merely not a justification for missing Practice, but was to compound the offence. But I was desperate and was clutching at straws.
Miss Napier wrote to me four years ago, just as the dark shadow was beginning to fall across Europe which has only just been lifted, asking for help with her book. I declined. My reason was not a lack of interest – on the contrary, I call myself the last victim for not a day passes but I think, with considerable anguish, of poor Perkins. The famous set of keys from Mr Stonex’s house about which so much to-do was made at the time, sat for many years on my desk where I saw them every day. Those keys went to the heart of the mystery of how the murderer got out of the house leaving it locked and were therefore crucial to Perkins’s guilt or innocence.
I did not explain any of that to Miss Napier but merely said that I had taken a resolution many years before to divulge nothing about the case that was not already public knowledge. But because I liked the straightforward and friendly tone of her letter, I offered to read the manuscript in order to save her from errors of fact of the kind that had rendered the article so nonsensical. I made it absolutely clear that I would offer no advice on any speculation contained in the manuscript. The author thanked me and accepted those terms. And so some months later I received the manuscript of The Thurchester Mystery and corrected a few facts and was thanked in the ‘Acknowledgements’.
That reference to myself, and my earlier letter to the newspaper, led in a roundabout way to my editing the foregoing Account. For it was because my name appeared in the book and I was described as a master at the Choir School and its Archivist, that the Librarian of Colchester College wrote to me about a year ago. (I should explain that immediately after gaining my degree I had returned to Thurchester where – strangely, perhaps – I became a schoolteacher at the school where I had been so unhappy. Whether I had some idea of making up for my own unhappiness by helping others or was drawn back to the place simply because of how much I had endured there, like a ghost haunting the scene of its misery, I do not know. By that time, of course, which was nine years after the death of Mr Stonex, most of the people mentioned by Dr Courtine were long gone. But this is not an account of my life – which cannot be interesting to anyone else and is less and less so even to myself – and therefore I shall say no more.)
The theory propounded in The Thurchester Mystery, which was widely discussed and generally accepted, was of little interest to me since I knew it was wrong. I derived much amusement from listening to the heated arguments about it that took place in many of the houses and bars of the town. I would shake my head gravely when appealed to as someone who might have firsthand knowledge of what happened that afternoon inside the New Deanery. It would have been more truthful to have made it clear that I chose not to divulge what I knew. Although Miss Napier’s book disclosed no facts about the murder which I did not know already, I found I was fascinated by the material which she had discovered about the early life of the victim and his relations with his sister and his extraordinary father, and also the subsequent life of those involved.
Miss Napier confirmed that as soon as their father died Mr Stonex brought to an abrupt end the many indulgences he had lavished on his daughter – the costly dresses, the lady’s-maid, the succession of governesses whom she bullied, and the pony-cart which was at her sole disposal. It must have seemed to the headstrong, spoilt teenager that he was getting his revenge for years of humiliation and contempt at the hands of their father. It was true that for the next two years he refused to promise her even a share of their joint inheritance, and that he so neglected her that she was able to meet the actor with whom she eloped. And Miss Napier confirmed that five years later, when the sister reached her majority and demanded her share of what she imagined to be a large inheritance, he gave her nothing. They had fought a fierce legal battle and it may well be that he used underhand means to thwart her claim, though Miss Napier revealed that he had a good reason for what he did. When the father of her child realized that she was never going to be wealthy, he deserted her.
Left entirely without resources and having failed on the stage, she found a position as a housekeeper in Harrogate, and that is how she earned her living for the next twenty-five years. It was there and in those difficult circumstances that she brought up her son. He grew up deeply embittered towards both his father – for deserting his mother and himself – and his uncle, for refusing to surrender his mother’s share of their inheritance. His mother called herself Mrs Stonex and gave the impression that she was the widow of a member of the well-known West-country family of that name. Perhaps she hoped that her son would eventually be recognized by her unmarried brother as his heir. Yet in giving in to her hatred she defeated her own purpose by poisoning her son against the brother she believed had wronged them both. She constantly reminded him that if they had had what was due to them in both morality and law, she would not be drudging for her living and he would be facing a glittering future. As a consequence the boy, who turned out to be wild and rebellious, so hated his uncle for what he had done that when he was eighteen he repudiated that side of his ancestry and adopted his father’s name.
He tried to find his father and went to Ireland where he attempted to claim kinship with the grand families of Ormonde and de Burgh to which his father had always insisted he was related. But they unceremoniously rejected him and denied that he or his father had any legitimate connection with themselves. He had then hunted down his father and found him to be a hopeless drunkard who was deeply in debt and burdened with another young and illegitimate family. He now turned violently against him and blamed him for all his misfortunes, including the fact that he walked with a limp – though the truth is that that was not due to an accident caused by his father but to a congenital defect. Baffled in that direction, he then developed a passionate interest in his mother’s family and her stolen inheritance. But while he had been dazzled by his father’s aristocratic pretensions and had suffered a severe disappointment in discovering the reality, he had no feelings towards his uncle, except resentment and the desire for retribution.
I was particularly interested by what Miss Napier had discovered of the later destiny of the victim’s sister after she inherited the estate. That was
related to the matter about which the Librarian wrote to me when he informed me that Professor Courtine, who on his retirement had returned to Cambridge as an Emeritus Fellow, had left in the Governing Body’s trust a sealed Account. This, it was assumed, would shed new light on the Stonex Case. In a covering letter written some years before he died, he had stipulated that the Account had to remain unopened until fifteen years after his death (a period which, the Librarian explained, had just expired) and could only be opened then if certain conditions had been met. It was in order to fulfil these requirement that the Librarian was soliciting my help.
I wrote back saying I would give him what assistance I was able to. And so in his next letter he enclosed a copy of Dr Courtine’s covering letter. I need hardly say that I was astonished that an account by somebody so closely implicated in those events should come to light so many years later and was very anxious that the conditions should be met. I had never expected that my version of events – that of a child of twelve – would be believed. Now I knew that there was testimony which would confirm my own. It was that of someone else who had been in the New Deanery on the fateful afternoon and had had reasons for holding back some of his evidence.
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