The Devil at Saxon Wall

by Gladys Mitchell

  Worn out and terrified, she braved Hanley’s maniacal rage, and went to appeal to the vicar for advice. He advised her to return to her parents. Constance herself had often debated whether this would not be the wisest course to pursue. She was convinced now that Hanley was mad. ‘It’s as though he had a devil,’ said the tearful Constance.

  ‘Demoniacal possession?’ said the vicar. ‘Well, the village people have tried for years to convince me that the devil haunts here. They even tell me that occasionally he manifests himself. Fortunately I am fully occupied with my Minoans, and have no time for their nonsense.’

  To Constance it appeared that he had no time for hers, either. She remembered that she had let him down over the opening of his bazaar, and that, although he was not annoyed with her, neither was he inclined to take her burdens upon himself. He indicated this, she thought, politely but unmistakably, and Constance, more sensitive than might have been expected of her mother’s daughter, went back to the house. To her relief Hanley was in silent mood. He glowered at her, but said nothing. That night she followed him out of the house and into the village to find out where he went, and, if possible, what he did, on his now frequent midnight excursions. She thought, in a muddled but tenacious way, that if she could go to a London doctor with definite evidence of Hanley’s peculiarities, he could be removed for treatment and cured. In spite of his usage of her, she was full of goodwill towards him, and explained his condition by supposing that he was suffering from shell-shock.

  He walked past the small dower house and out into the park. Here he pursued a zig-zag path among the trees for no reason that Constance could see at first. In a few minutes, however, she realised that he was going from elm to elm, avoiding the other trees, and was gently stroking the trunk of each elm tree as he passed it. At last, when she was tired of the apparently interminable pilgrimage, he turned off to the south and left the park by climbing over the wall. Giving him time to get far enough down the road, Constance followed him. It was easy enough to climb the wall because he had loosened at some time three bricks to make footholds.

  To her surprise, Hanley led her to the church which was at the opposite end of the village. Pullborough never locked it. She stood just inside the south doorway, filled with amazement and fear, disliking the notion of following Hanley into the blackness of the interior, although she could hear him stumbling as he ascended the chancel steps. She supposed, in her muddled way, that she ought to make some attempt to rid the church of his sacrilegious presence, but was too much afraid of him to betray the fact that she was at hand. Presently she heard in the stillness the murmur of his voice as though he were praying, and, a short time afterwards, his stumbling footsteps coming towards the door.

  She stepped aside, into the folds of the doorway curtain, and out he lurched. Again she followed him. This time he walked about the churchyard as though searching for something among the graves. At last he bent down and she saw a circle of light from his electric torch illumining the ground. She crept nearer. The torch went out. Hanley straightened himself, and, turning, began to walk straight towards her. Constance, crouching behind a yew tree, let him go by, then followed him again.

  This time he led her to the only cottage in the village which still had a light burning. She knew little of the village homes, and had no idea who lived in this one. Hanley kicked at the little front gate to open it, walked up the garden path, and kicked at the front door. The door was opened to him, and immediately closed.

  Constance realised, suddenly, that she was very tired. She knew, too, that it was useless to attempt to peer in at the window, which was lighted, because of the banked aspidistra and geranium plants which formed an effective screen to all that went on in the room.

  She sat down on the dew-wet grass by the side of the gate, and waited for Hanley to re-appear. She supposed that he had gone to spend the night with the woman of the cottage, whoever she might be, and she decided that as soon as she was rested she would return to Neot House and go to bed. She had made no plan for dealing with Hanley. Vague ideas of divorce passed through her mind, but she had singularly little idea of what evidence she would require in order to procure an annulment of the marriage, and, in any case, her upbringing had been such that something akin to instinct rebelled at the thought of the dissolution of her vows, made when she had been optimistic about the future and happy in her husband.

  But Hanley did not give her very long to rest. The door soon opened, and out he came, and, after him, hanging on the air like a sinful departing spirit, a voice which wailed:

  ‘Bury un in the name of the Old Man, don’t ee forget, master, else nothing won’t come of your trouble.’

  Constance recognised the voice. Three days previously she had been instructed by Hanley to interview a new maid, a girl named Fluke. This was the mother. She had accompanied her daughter to Neot House, and had done most of the talking—more of it, in fact, than Constance herself. She had a reputation for witchcraft, Constance had heard. Witchcraft, which, in London, had seemed a matter of intellectual interest, fascinating geographically, historically and philosophically, seemed a force to be feared and loathed in Saxon Wall. It was all too likely, Constance had decided, that the old creature really was a witch. Were there not stories of the redness of the moon, and gliding snakes, and crouching hounds of hell?

  She heard the old woman chuckle. Then the door was closed. Hanley, bearing a burden, passed close to Constance sheltering in the hedge, and, as he passed, a light touch rested on Constance’s shoulder as though a leaf had fallen. She put her hand up and her fingers touched a dry harsh stalk. It was a stalk of corn. Exploring carefully, she could feel the ears, and, with a gentle rubbing, she detached the seeds and automatically ate them.

  Then she rose and followed her husband back to Neot House.

  When they had first come to Saxon Wall to live, Constance had suggested that the ground-floor room immediately under her bedroom should be a kind of little den where she could read and knit and play with her clay-modelling things, and do embroidery, and get out of Hanley’s way when he wished to be alone. Hanley had fallen in with the idea, and the two rooms had become, in later months, a sanctuary to her where she could escape from his moodiness and his fits of violence.

  Hanley walked round the house until he came to this part of it. Then he laid his sheaf of corn on the edge of the lawn, and, followed by Constance (who was now more than ever convinced that he was mad) he procured a lantern from the stables, lighted it, and went back to the sheaf. From the shadowed flower bed he took a spade. By the light of the lantern, and in the devil’s name, he buried the sheaf just beside the wall of Constance’s little den, went into the house, and, presumably, to bed.

  Constance waited for about a quatter of an hour.

  Then, feverishly, she dug up the sheaf, which was fashioned, with pins in the joints of the stalks, into a shape she would have had some difficulty, even by daylight, in recognising as her own, and, having left the catch up for that very purpose, she opened the window of her den, crammed in the sheaf, and scrambled over the sill.

  She possessed a small amount of money and, having set fire to the sheaf in the grate, she counted her store, and, weary as she was, set out on foot for the station, determined to stay in the hag-haunted village no longer, but to return to her parents and ask her father’s advice about doctors for Hanley. She reached the station at daybreak, waited two hours for a train, and, arrived at her father’s house in Kensington, was discovered to be in a feverish condition and in urgent need of immediate medical attention.

  Her father and mother were horrified. She was zealously nursed by the anxious and puzzled parents, and, chiefly because of her babblings during periods of delirium, they discovered the cause of her utter physical collapse, and decided between themselves that she must not return to her husband.

  Convalescent, Constance proved unexpectedly obstinate. She must return, she said. She had spent long hours in brooding over her own curious conduct in
having dug up and set fire to the sheaf, and she really believed she must have imagined the incident. However, a pin-prick she had sustained when she tore the sheaf to pieces had festered rather badly, and seemed disinclined to heal.

  During the time of Constance’s convalescence her mother had made spasmodic but determined efforts to find out from the doctor the point at which, in the eyes of the medical profession, oddity of behaviour was regarded as certifiable mania.

  The doctor, who knew nothing of Hanley, and who thought that Constance’s mother was in a highly nervous state about her daughter’s sanity, was so bluffly reassuring that the poor woman conceived an unshakable notion that nothing short of mass-murder would convince a doctor of insanity. It was in this despairing belief that she was compelled to give in to Constance’s grim determination to return to Saxon Wall.

  Both parents did their best to dissuade her, but all their arguments were finally defeated by Constance’s reiteration of the statement that her husband needed her.

  Terrified, her mother let her go.

  ‘He must have put a spell on her,’ she said. Her husband grunted, but his eyes were full of fear.

  Chapter Two

  ‘What outcries pluck me from my naked bed, And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?’

  THOMAS KYD

  The Spanish Tragedy. Act II, Scene V.

  AT THE END of a month, having put off the evil hour as long as her conscience would let her, Constance decided to return. It was six o’clock in the evening when she arrived. A cross-country railway journey, followed by the long drive from the station to Saxon Wall, had taken five and a half hours, and she was tired. She had no idea what to expect when she reached Neot House. She had written three times to Hanley, at her mother’s instigation, but he had not replied to her letters.

  ‘You had better stay here with us,’ her mother told her. ‘Let your father go to Neot House, and deal with your precious husband. If only you had been a little more cautious, dear, about rushing so hastily into marriage with a man we knew nothing about—beyond the fact that he thought of committing suicide—how much trouble and anxiety might have been saved to us all! But it’s too late to think about that now. The only thing is, that you simply cannot go back to him. I won’t be responsible if you do anything so foolish!’

  ‘I am going at the end of the month,’ said Constance flatly. ‘He’s my husband, and I ought to go to him.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said her mother decidedly, but she was afraid as well as annoyed.

  Her father offered to accompany her, but Constance refused his escort uncompromisingly; she did, however, promise him that she would return home if matters proved too difficult for readjustment.

  She heard voices coming from the dining-room, and the sound of Hanley’s laughter. She had so seldom heard him laugh that the sound of itself was startling. She hastened up the stairs to her room. The double bed had been slept in, was still unmade, and had not even been stripped for making. The sight of tumbled bedclothes and a pair of crumpled pyjamas did not prepare her, however, for what she found when, at length, having tidied up, she descended to her husband.

  Hanley was sprawled in an armchair, the half-clad maidservant Fluke, a white-skinned, black-eyed piece, handsomely sullen, in his arms. About the young woman’s neck the pearls which Constance had received from her father on her eighteenth birthday scarcely showed up at all against the creamy skin.

  Constance halted at the door, turned slightly giddy, and then, recovering, said:

  ‘I——Hanley, I’ve come back, dear. What would you like for tea?’

  Hanley’s face lost its expression of amusement and sensual gratification, and became cunning, and suddenly wary. He showed his teeth, but not in a smile, and said to the girl on his knee:

  ‘Delilah, somebody’s come to call. Go and order tea, my dear. Go along.’ He pushed her off as though she had been an importuning dog.

  Constance advanced and said:

  ‘Hanley, I don’t want tea. I can easily wait until dinner time. I expect you’ve had your tea. It’s six o’clock or more.’

  ‘No dinner,’ said Hanley, leering. ‘Not a servant in the place. All gone. They all went away from here when Constance died. You wouldn’t remember Constance. Perfect idiot. Couldn’t stand her at any price. Drove me mad. Quite glad she’s gone.’

  There was not a servant in the place as he had said. A pile of dirty dishes and some cups and glasses were in and about the kitchen sink; the scullery reeked of onions. Blood, where, presumably, a joint had been prepared, was staining the wooden draining board; the copper was full of feathers. Three quart bottles which had contained stout lay on top of the feathers, and a row of cocks’ combs and feet were nailed to the woodwork of the scullery window.

  Mechanically Constance set to work. Then, when she had reduced the kitchen regions to some sort of order, she made herself a cup of tea out of what had been the cook’s private store, and, having drunk it, she stole out of the house and went to the doctor, an old man named Crevister, who lived at the far end of the village near the vicarage. There Constance, seated in a dark red leather-covered armchair out of which the horsehair stuffing peeped in the half-pathetic, half-revolting manner of its sort, stated her fears about her husband’s sanity. The doctor shook his head.

  ‘Probably suffering from prolonged nervous strain,’ he suggested. ‘May end in insanity, Mrs Middleton. Did you know that a child has died in the house since you went away? My opinion is that between the lot of them they murdered it.’

  ‘Murdered it?’ said Constance, with a ghastly attempt at a smile. ‘You can’t mean that!’

  ‘The child died, anyhow. And it was a perfectly healthy baby. I saw it into the world myself, and so I know. Oh, the mother didn’t want me to! Neither did that old terror the grandmother, I can tell you! But I insisted. Threatened them with the police, you know. I wouldn’t trust that old woman Fluke out of my sight with any baby, let alone an unwanted one belonging to her own daughter. Your husband cleared out, by the way. He’s only just come back.’

  ‘But all the same, it died,’ said Constance, in a toneless voice. Suddenly, without even the warning of a sigh, she fell forward unconscious.

  The doctor, who was a kindly old man, arranged for her to stay the night with friends of his, a married couple in the nearest town, a place called Stowhall, and two days later Constance went back to her parents. A week or two after that, to general amazement, Hanley joined her, with Martha Fluke in tow.

  He seemed better tempered than Constance had ever known him. Her parents, astonished and utterly dismayed at the ménage à trois which was being forced upon them, were at a loss how best to deal with it, or how to end it. They appealed to Constance to assert herself, and then, finding this useless, they commanded her, with hysterical histrionics, to try for a divorce. Constance was no trier. She also realised that, except on the subject of Martha Fluke, from whom he refused to be parted for even half an hour, Hanley appeared as sane as she did. Saner, in fact, for whereas Constance grew thin, peaked, pale and worried, Hanley appeared to be in better health than he had enjoyed since the first weeks of his marriage.

  This curious and unlikely state of affairs continued until November, 1923, when Hanley suddenly discarded Martha Fluke, who was again with child, and demanded that Constance should return at once with him to Neot House.

  Constance was affronted, terrified and obstinate. Her parents supported her. Her mother went from sentimental pleading to stern command, and from stern command to hysterical wailing. Then the father died very suddenly, at a masonic banquet, and, after the funeral, the exhausted woman gave in, and consented to return with her husband to Neot House.

  Her mother pleaded with Constance and threatened Hanley, but off they went in spite of her.

  For about three and a half months her life resembled that of the first weeks of her marriage. Hanley was silent but not ill-tempered, and the servants, under his apparently terrifying eye, were
outwardly respectful to Constance.

  She herself was little more than an automaton. She rose, ate, made a pretence of ordering meals and keeping house, and never travelled farther afield than the end of the park or the limits of the apple orchard.

  Towards the end of the third month she consulted Doctor Crevister and was confirmed in her opinion that she was with child.

  Since their return, Hanley had never left the house after dark. He appeared to have forgotten Martha Fluke, and did not go near the witch, her mother. He made no comment when Constance told him her news, and all was sufficiently peaceable to cause Constance to speculate whether the tranquillity she was enjoying was not too good to be true.

  Hanley, with a jeering note in his voice which rather disquieted her, had found her a new name. She pretended at first to like it, but finding that this apparently spoilt the joke for him and tended to encourage that same kind of moroseness which had led up to his previous excesses, she showed her true feeling, that of petulant mortification, and this seemed to please him so much that she kept it up even after she had become accustomed to the name.

  ‘Griselda!’ he would call, and, at the sight of her expression, he would chuckle delightedly. ‘Patient Griselda!’ he would continue, and then, when he had extracted all the pleasure he could out of her distress, he would tell her what he wanted.

  Besides this, which was the only form of cruelty he appeared to indulge in at the time, there was something which caused Constance such vast uneasiness that she tried all the while to put it out of her mind. A trier at last, she tried in vain. The horrid thought persisted. He was gloating over something. At times she surprised upon his face an expression of insane and devilish glee, and it increased, she was perfectly certain, as the time for the birth of the baby drew nearer. Another sinister fact was his censorship over the whole of her correspondence. He would not allow her to write to her mother to say that the baby was coming, and he would not have her invited to the house. Constance, cut off from her only means of comfort and support, grew frightened and ill, and looked into the future with dread. She did not know what she feared. Horror seemed everywhere present. Persistently in her dreams she saw Hanley’s devilish face, and woke from her sleep with a scream.