Gamekeeper's Gallows

by John Buxton Hilton

  He raised his eyes to invite Brunt’s response.

  ‘And Mildred Jarman, Captain Kingsey – how well did she do?’

  ‘Mildred Jarman was learning fast. I was disappointed when she announced that she felt she had to leave. But when she said that she was only going as far as the inn in the village, I had the feeling that she would shortly be back.’

  ‘Which would have afforded you very keen satisfaction.’

  ‘Of course. I am as keen on my reputation as an employer as is any of your radical paternalists.’

  Kingsey dealt with irony by stubbornly refusing to recognise it.

  ‘But sooner or later, Amy Harrington would have had to go, would she not – as have other girls who proved themselves less than ideal?’

  ‘Regrettably.’

  ‘So where have they all gone? Where would you send me to look for them now? In Cremorne Gardens? Or Windmill Street?’

  ‘Sergeant Brunt, I find you disappointingly crude. Fletcher is also in charge of the resettlement of misfits, and his sense of duty is as well defined as my own. Sometimes, of course, a girl does fail to match our standards, though we are usually able to provide her with honest references which will open the door for her into some less demanding household. My own town house, which I hardly ever use, is grossly and expensively over-manned, and this provides a channel for some whom we cannot immediately place elsewhere. And if others are temperamentally attracted to such spheres as those you have mentioned, then all I can say is that they reflect the varied attitudes of society as a whole. Sad; but their own affair.’

  Brunt decided that the moment was ripe for specific realism.

  ‘Did you know, sir, that Fletcher shared a bed with Mildred Jarman in a hotel near Cheltenham?’

  ‘Did he, by Jove? I can only say that I applaud his judgment.’

  Kingsey laughed, and there seemed nothing counterfeit about it.

  ‘I must say that my own preferences would run to greater maturity. Wouldn’t yours, Sergeant? But I’ve no doubt that Fletcher enjoyed himself. I hope so. I’ve never tried to hold him on too tight a rein.’

  ‘In fact, the incident seems to have culminated in an act of swingeing will-power on Fletcher’s part – to the bewilderment of Mildred. Nothing came of their proximity.’

  ‘You have Mildred’s word for it?’

  ‘It seems as if Fletcher’s one aim was to confirm her virginity.’

  ‘Having done which he thenceforward left her alone? How extremely magnanimous of him. And wholly characteristic.’

  ‘You must pay him well,’ Brunt said.

  ‘He can live comfortably. And he is by nature a thrifty man.’

  ‘May we talk a little more about Amy Harrington?’

  Kingsey got up and went to a cabinet of shallow drawers from which he withdrew a portfolio and unfastened its tapes.

  ‘Here, Sergeant Brunt, is Amy Harrington: Head of a Young Girl, by Jan Vermeer of Delft. No – not an original. I fear that even Isaac Mosley could not have achieved that for me. But look, Sergeant, at that promising immaturity. That small-boned frame. Those liquid eyes, looking at a man – such innocence as one could not bring oneself to despoil. But for how much longer? Those lips, moist and parted, but not yet ready to be kissed. Until when? Next month? Next week? You never actually met the Harrington girl, I think, Sergeant Brunt? I ask you to believe me, the resemblance to Vermeer’s model was incredible. So much so that I got Mrs Palfreyman to hunt out a square of blue and yellow silk to wrap round her head; a pearl to put in her ear. I set her in the light from that window, and stood back and looked at her …’

  He was very credibly carried away by the memory. Brunt ruthlessly punctured the mood.

  ‘You’re rather fond of putting young ladies under the light from that window, aren’t you, Captain?’

  ‘Am I?’ If the reference meant anything to him, he convincingly disowned it.

  ‘Mildred Jarman, again,’ Brunt said.

  ‘She had a habit of misunderstanding me.’

  ‘And hadn’t Amy Harrington?’

  ‘Amy Harrington was an embarrassment to me at every turn, though the fault was not hers, poor child. Poor Head of a Young Girl. Amy Harrington, I am sorry to say, Sergeant Brunt, was so misguided in her inexperience, as to fall in love with me. There was nothing very much that I could do about it, except to tread as carefully as I could, for her sake. Any little thing that I said in her presence could send her away in agonies of misconception. That, Sergeant, was why she took to going out and wallowing in bitter-sweet distress in the romantic surrounds of Brindley’s Quarter.’

  ‘You wrote to her father that if she came back you would prosecute her for the theft of the Turkish baubles – though you had taken no other steps whatever to try to retrieve them.’

  ‘Unwise of me – and unpardonably unkind. The truth of it is that when she disappeared, it threw me into a state of mind—’

  ‘The truth of it is …’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Brunt?’

  A flash in his eyes, now. It was the first time that Brunt had really succeeded in rattling him. And Brunt knew that he had to rattle him. It was the only way to make him show some of his other facets.

  ‘You’ll have a better shot at telling me the truth about myself than I can? Come along, then, man, let’s hear your insolent piece of truth.’

  ‘You were warning her that if she turned up anywhere at all and started talking about some of the things that go on in this house, you were ready to put her out of credence and circulation for a very long time. You had your scheme ready laid to discredit her before she spoke. Just as Fletcher – your model pupil – had abducted her from Rowsley with a framework of trumped up charges, and Mildred Jarman from Gloucester …’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  If Brunt had been a Kaffir, and Kingsey had had a sabre in his hand …

  And then he subsided. It was not the first time that Brunt had witnessed his sudden masterly control of his temper. Sometimes in his younger life, of course, he may have left it too late; one of these days he would do so again. But now he actually managed to smile.

  ‘I’m glad that that is what you think, Sergeant Brunt, devious and wrong-headed though your ideas are.’

  ‘Why, if I may ask?’

  ‘Because if that is what was on my mind when I wrote to her father, it shows that I must have thought at the time that she was still alive.’

  ‘Or because that was what you wanted to make people think,’ Brunt said.

  But Kingsey seemed entirely to miss the flavour of the remark, so impressed was he by what he considered the success of his debating point. He sat back in self-satisfaction and followed it up with a stiff little speech.

  ‘I will throw myself on your personal mercy, Sergeant – though not on your professional discretion, for I have broken no laws according to your book. I have no doubt there are issues you would eagerly like to take up – moral issues, I suppose you would consider them. But I can assure you that I have always been scrupulously careful to stay within your laws. On the other hand, I must confess that my blood runs cold whenever I think of what might possibly have happened to Amy Harrington. It runs colder still when I think that I might mistakenly be held to account for it. And I know how satisfying you would find it to lay murder at my door. That is why I am going to be honest with you. I make no attempt to conceal the fact that I set out to seduce Mildred Jarman.’

  And others.

  But now was not the moment for provocative interruptions. Brunt sat prepared to listen. He knew he need not be surprised at this confession. Kingsey was no fool, and Brunt had meant him to grasp that Mildred Jarman had left nothing unsaid.

  ‘And others. I know what you are thinking, Sergeant Brunt, and it does not particularly interest me. Any fool can be a seducer. For me the girl must be a willing party – if necessary must become a willing party, by a process of long-term persuasion. I have neither the physique nor the
temperament for rape, and I hope I am too proud for any of the conventional tricks. If, for example, I have in my time offered a young lady a glass of light wine, that has only been to steady her nerves. I did not think that when the Jarman girl left here to go to the inn there was any finality about it. I argued that if she had really wanted to run away from me, she would have left the village. And I felt sure that this was just another stage before her resolve broke down. Once she realised the Nadins’squalor, I thought she would soon come back to me. I was, as you know, mistaken.’

  ‘And Amy Harrington?’ Brunt asked. Kingsey dropped his eyes, as if he were coyly reluctant to meet Brunt’s, then remembered himself and raised them again.

  ‘One did not think in terms of seducing Amy Harrington. If that is not apparent to you from what I have already told you about her, then I fear that my powers to convince you must remain forever inadequate. And that is not only all I shall say to you on the subject: it is all there is to be said.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘The Old Man was up and about again last night,’ Blucher said.

  ‘Did you go out looking for him, then?’ one of the other drinkers asked. There was a little knot of men who seemed to be permanent features of the bar.

  ‘Me? No, the Old Man can come and go as he likes, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘The Old Man never did any harm, anyway, unless it was somebody up to no good in one of his old galleries.’

  ‘That night old Eddie Clayton broke his leg up on the North Scar, and it was not till next morning that we got up there with an old barn door to bring him down, he heard the Old Man walking the Quarter Cord all night: crunch, crunch, crunch. Looking after him, in his own quiet way, Eddie reckoned.’

  A pause; and then a more serious enquiry.

  ‘Where was it you heard him, then, Blucher?’

  ‘Up by Benedict’s. What’s the matter then, Sammy? You getting worried?’

  ‘It’s only that I thought I heard something too, but it wasn’t the Old Man.’

  ‘You can tell the Old Man’s footsteps from anybody else’s, can you?’

  ‘Whoever it was set my hens a-flurrying. The Old Man doesn’t frighten hens. They take no notice of him.’

  The subject petered out of the conversation. They would all have said that they believed in the Old Man, yet anyone who showed in The Crooked Rake that he took him too seriously could easily become a butt of the others. No one had mentioned traps missing from the warren above Brindley’s Quarter – there was no sign that any two of them together had anything secret on their minds.

  ‘Thos is late tonight,’ somebody said.

  ‘Taking time to think up tonight’s rappit story.’

  ‘A right old bugger, Thos is. You’d wonder where he gets all his ideas.’

  Whereupon Sammy Nall took it upon himself to disabuse Brunt of any misleading notions.

  ‘You need to take some of the things Thos tells you with a pinch of salt,’ he said.

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘He never really did have a rappit that could read and count.’

  ‘You amaze me.’

  And that was repeated by someone on the other side of the room: a witticism memorable by the yard-stick of The Crooked Rake, a new historic quotation for their annals.

  ‘It’s the same thing with half the tales he tells about the railway.’

  ‘Some of them, anyway.’

  ‘Always trying to make us believe that the shed foreman doesn’t know he’s got an engine out. Half the time it isn’t true. But he doesn’t like people to think he has to do as he’s told.’

  ‘There was one time, though,’ Sammy Nall said, ‘when the bosses didn’t know he had one in steam. That was the time Tommy Ashmore’s second was born – or was it his third? They came knocking Thos up, saying they’d have to have the midwife out. Old Annie Smethurst it was, from up on Burbage Edge. Old Thos galloped up to Ladmanlow at midnight, fired and watered the old loco himself and went up the Edge to fetch her in it. The old engine stood the rest of the night in the cutting outside Tommy’s, showing a wisp of steam from its blower-pipes.’

  ‘Was that the one she delivered with the fire-tongs?’

  Brunt was careful to keep his interventions into their dialogue to a minimum, but there were one or two points on which he wanted to hear opinions, unguarded ones if possible.

  ‘I suppose it’s the same with all that talk about his two wives,’ he said.

  But this was received with a certain glum certainty.

  ‘Oh, I reckon he’s stuck with those two.’

  ‘But is he actually married to them? Legally married, I mean?’

  ‘Legally? Thos reckons so.’

  ‘There’s always been talk,’ someone else suggested. ‘Some say it’s Dora and others say it’s Lois.’

  ‘That, of course, narrows it down significantly,’ Brunt said.

  ‘Whether it’s both of them or neither, Sergeant Brunt, Thos always did have a bit of an eye for the ladies, and when he fancied two of them at once, it ended up with them both landing him.’

  Brunt looked sideways at Potter. Potter was thoroughly enjoying the idiotic talk. So had Brunt, the first time he had come in here, but it was wearing very thin now. He turned when he heard someone else coming in, the door sticking as it did for its less practised users. It was Kingsey’s butler who come in, carrying an empty flagon in his canvas bag. And this time he did at least acknowledge Brunt – nothing as matey as a nod – but a signal of recognition in his eyes. Respect? Hardly; and not, certainly not, the admission of a mere sergeant of police to social equality. But while Nadin was filling his bottle at the tap of a barrel, Edwards brought out his pocket-book, from which he drew a letter, which he handed to Brunt.

  Brunt, assuming it to be from Kingsey, looked at the hand-writing with interest: it struck him as effeminate, which did not entirely surprise him. But when he tore it open, he saw that it was signed H. Palfreyman, and begged him to come and talk to her that evening, on a matter of some urgency.

  Brunt glanced again at Potter. He wanted Potter to stay here. He didn’t want them to miss a trick if a word was said about those traps. And in addition, Potter could sit through an interview looking so comprehensively insensitive that he might inhibit any real confidence. On the other hand, Mrs Palfreyman’s letter might be a subterfuge on Kingsey’s part to get him out there alone. It might be foolhardy at this stage to venture alone into Kingsey’s stronghold.

  ‘You’ll be returning presently to the Hall?’ he asked Edwards.

  ‘In about another ten minutes, sir.’

  ‘In that case, we can keep each other company.’

  ‘That will be an unexpected pleasure, sir.’

  Brunt turned to Potter.

  ‘You heard that? If I’m not back by ten thirty, come for me.’

  Brunt made sure that he spoke loud enough for Edwards to hear.

  Brunt had once attended a lantern lecture on Scenes from the Holy Land by a committed traveller whose banality of observation was matched only by the monotony of his delivery. A donkey – a child on a donkey (applause) – a woman leading a donkey whilst pater familias rides (laughter) – a tree similar to the one on which our Lord pronounced a curse on the road to Bethany.

  Edwards could have made a name for himself in that idiom. From the inn to the Hall he kept up a steady prattle without saying a thing worth hearing. Perhaps he was under instructions to engage Brunt in sterile conversation. Perhaps his vocational training insisted on his avoiding the controversial by a blinkered adherence to the obvious. Or perhaps, God help him, this was his natural turn of mind.

  ‘The soil hereabouts is neither rich nor copious enough to support marketable crops.’

  And once, on his observation of a zoological specimen which he apparently judged exotic enough to deserve introduction to a town-dweller, he said, in disciplined, undramatic tones, ‘A sheep, sir.’

  Brunt attempted to vary this diet b
y inserting an occasional sharp question, less in the hope of enlightenment than as a conversational challenge. The answers were mostly monosyllabic; Edwards combined obstinacy with lethargy – and moved deftly on to more absorbing topics.

  ‘The rabbit, I fear, sir, is a creature of limited intelligence.’

  ‘Tell me, Edwards, did you serve in the Army with Captain Kingsey?’

  ‘I was his Quartermaster-Sergeant. Sir, I have timed the setting of the sun behind that spinney. It takes exactly four minutes for the disc to traverse its own width behind the branches.’

  The Hall, when they reached it, was so silent as to appear uninhabited: a black hulk, that made itself felt rather than seen within the natural envelope of darkness. Edwards knew his way through the grounds as if he were mentally counting their paces along every stretch: several times Brunt bumped lightly against his shoulders as the footpath took sudden turns. The butler took them in by the kitchen entrance, suggesting furtiveness by the self-consciousness of his own movements. If this were the case, then Brunt’s visit might have been arranged behind Kingsey’s back – and had better not become known to him. And Edwards, then, was at least temporarily in league with Mrs Palfreyman. Brunt’s brain was racing in pursuit of innuendoes, a conscious mental excitement familiar to him from several critical points in his career.

  The kitchen was deserted, a solitary oil-lamp turned down to the merest bud, and there was a faint hiss of combustion from the cooking range. Edwards did not actually raise his forefinger to his lips, but his whole bearing betokened conspiracy. As soon as the door was closed behind them, he side-stepped towards his own pantry, as if in the greatest relief that an agreed duty was discharged.