Gamekeeper's Gallows

by John Buxton Hilton

  Brunt was left standing alone, casting his eyes over the austere tidiness of shelves and table. Nothing was out of place, not a knife, pot or bowl lying about at random. There was a proprietary calendar on one wall, a sentimental picture of children playing in a garden; a month’s tradesmen’s bills were spiked on a hook; but there was not time for Brunt to satisfy his habitual inquisitiveness. Within a few seconds the housekeeper appeared through the further door, which had been standing ajar. Obviously she had been holding herself ready for his entrance, perhaps had even been standing waiting in the passage.

  ‘Would you like to come this way, Sergeant?’

  She led him up the steep treads of a back staircase, taking care to move quietly. But when Brunt, on the first-floor landing, exaggerated the stealth of his own movements, she spoke in quite a loud voice.

  ‘I’d rather we didn’t disturb the Captain, but there’s little danger of that. I’ve worked for him for a quarter of a century, and I’ve never known him leave his study after nine until it’s time for bed.’

  She showed Brunt into a room that was partly office, partly a store for bed-linen and partly a workroom for minor needlework repairs. But there were also a couple of quite acceptable armchairs and a few framed photographs, presumably of her relatives. It was a room which evidently played a substantial part in her life. She offered Brunt a chair and sat down facing him. He saw, then, that she was barely recognisable from the confident figure who had dominated the line-up in the Captain’s study the previous morning. How long ago was that? Less than a day and a half, but within that time something had happened to drain her of colour, to accentuate the lines beside her cheeks: the realisation of something that must have come as an utter shock to her. Confirmation of something she had long suspected? Of something monstrously unexpected?

  ‘Sergeant Brunt, I don’t want you to think that I’ve asked you to come here just so that I can tell tales. Least of all do I want to create suspicion where there might not be grounds for any.’

  Her voice was soft, not much more than a whisper, but she spoke fluently. She had not taken one of the easy chairs, but was sitting on a hard-backed one, looking at him over her writing-table, her wrists laid out parallel in front of her.

  ‘On the day that Amy Harrington left here, Sergeant Brunt, I saw her go.’

  She paused, as if to examine the effect on him of what she regarded as a startling revelation. She clearly hoped for a response, and Brunt was careful to give her none.

  ‘I saw her leave the Hall. A few minutes before seven, it was. She was carrying her hold-all against her hip and moving quickly and quietly – guiltily, I can only call it. And she went off in the direction of Brindley’s Quarter.’

  She paused again. Brunt remained impassive.

  ‘You did not try to stop her?’ he asked indifferently.

  ‘No. I did not.’

  ‘Although it looked as if she was leaving for good?’

  ‘I make no pretence about that. I was relieved to see her go. She had spelled nothing but trouble here.’

  ‘But you had to tell the Captain?’

  ‘An hour later. When someone else had noticed she was missing.’

  She stopped in some unease. ‘Sergeant Brunt, you must use your own discretion, of course. I am talking to you as an individual in my own right. I hope you will not consider it necessary to tell Captain Kingsey …’

  ‘I can be discreet,’ Brunt said.

  ‘He would never forgive me – but I told myself, it was only Mildred Jarman all over again. But that is not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  She waited a moment. Despite the stress, she had not lost her feminine taste for a little dramatic finesse.

  ‘Someone else had also seen her go – someone who did go after her – although, later on, when it was announced that she had disappeared, he expressed nothing but surprise.’

  Again a little pause: a semi-colon preceding her climax.

  ‘Fletcher.’

  Brunt nodded, unexcited. And did this disappoint her? Did she take a wearier breath than usual before continuing her story? Did it all seem drab and pointless to her now, in face of his unwillingness to be impressed?

  ‘I think Fletcher must have seen her from an upstairs window. I am judging by the short delay before he followed her across the yard. She was already out of sight by the time he had let himself out of the Hall.’

  ‘But he went in the right direction? Like you, he assumed that she was heading for Brindley’s?’

  She allowed herself a contemptuous little smile.

  ‘Amy Harrington’s favourite spot was no secret to any of us here.’

  ‘But well out of her way if she were thinking of walking down the Clough to catch the Fly.’

  Though worth making the diversion if she were going to pick up something she had cached there—

  ‘Sergeant Brunt, I had long since given up hope of keeping track with what that girl had in mind. I do know that Fletcher went after her – and was back half an hour later without her. But he did not return through the kitchen. He must have let himself in by the main front door. The next time I saw him, he was coming out of the study.’

  Mrs Palfreyman looked at Brunt with peculiar intensity.

  ‘You don’t live amongst us, Sergeant, so you cannot be expected to realise all that that means. The Captain’s attitude to his study is something that has to be learned by experience, and it has to be respected down to the finest detail. One of the girls – a chosen one – has the job of keeping it clean – but not tidy. Only the Captain is allowed to move any book or object. For sweeping, dusting and fire-laying, the girl must choose her moment. She must pick her time so that he never sees her at work – or coming and going. And no other member of the household is ever allowed in there without invitation. I mean to say—’

  In the midst of essential narrative, she found it necessary to stress her own élite position.

  ‘Of course, I would like to think that if ever I deemed it necessary to go in there alone, he would not rebuke me for it. But this is not something that I would lightly want to put to the test.’

  ‘So you saw Fletcher come out? Into the long corridor? Did you speak to him?’

  ‘I said, “What are you doing in there, Mr Fletcher?” If anything had been interfered with, the Captain would be sure to blame the girl, and I would have to be the go-between.’

  ‘And what did Fletcher say?’

  ‘He just walked past me – derisively.’

  ‘Had he anything in his hands?’

  ‘A large brown envelope. And it must have been something he had picked up in the study. He had been empty-handed when he left the Hall.’

  Or had it been handed to him at Brindley’s Quarter?

  ‘And you did not mention this to the Captain, either?’

  ‘I meant to. Time and again I meant to. But I never seemed to get the opening. One has to be careful, you know, what one says to him about Fletcher.’

  ‘But you’ve spoken to the Captain about it now?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Since my visit yesterday morning?’

  ‘You can imagine that after you had gone, we talked over every slightest thing that any of us could remember.’

  Undoubtedly. But Brunt thought that this had all been too glib, too fluent – too pointed and too conveniently shaped. That in itself need not necessarily have a sinister significance, of course: one must expect any woman with this sort of statement to make to run over it more than once in her mind beforehand. But the story had not been told without skill. It had been shorn of any adornment or purpose other than the certainty of incriminating Fletcher. The unknown quantity now was whether she had initiated and composed it herself, in order to exonerate a third party, or whether she was merely acting as the Captain’s well-rehearsed agent. Brunt veered to the latter view; it was supported by the butler’s somewhat facile connivance at getting him here.

  ‘The Captain told me,’ Brunt said, �
��that Amy Harrington was in love with him.’

  And this thought produced in Mrs Palfreyman a new kind of smile, and not a pleasant one – a curling back of her lips from her teeth that implied a scalpel-like dissection of men’s motives.

  ‘Did he also tell you that he was in love with her?’

  Brunt looked back at her with carefully controlled blankness.

  ‘But it all depends on what you mean by love,’ Mrs Palfreyman added. ‘It is an overworked word.’

  Spoken with feeling, albeit with cynical overtones. What was this woman’s experience? Where had she learned her obviously consummate management of the girls whom she groomed for Kingsey? In what walk of life had Kingsey unearthed her? What was the secret of her complex loyalty to Kingsey? How could she be so patient with his perverse demands? Was she, too, in love with him – another eccentric application of the word? In love with him in full knowledge of and despite his self-indulgences and deviations? Could a woman be in love with a man to whom she was delivering an unflagging supply of hand-picked and fastidiously trained virgins? What other possible hold could Kingsey possibly have on an intelligent and meticulous servant who could clearly earn her keep in many a setting less nerve-racking than this?

  ‘You were saying that the Captain was in love with her,’ Brunt prompted.

  ‘Sergeant Brunt, I don’t know what sort of picture of this girl you have in your mind.’

  Brunt thought of the clumsy, peaky, adenoidal lass he had seen falling over her skirts and boots at old Eleanor Copley’s.

  ‘There was something of the chameleon about her, Sergeant. Her very appearance was affected by what was going on behind and about her. The night that Fletcher brought her here – it has always been one of the Captain’s strictest rules that he is on no account to see a girl on the night of her arrival. Sometimes it needed the better part of a week. In the case of Amy Harrington, I despaired. I have worked wonders in my time, though I say it myself, but I thought that Amy Harrington was going to be beyond me. Even clothes made to measure would not sit about her shoulders; she sagged away from anything we put on her. Her legs were skinny. The bows of her apron would not stay tied. I kept putting off taking her into the study – for so long the Captain insisted on seeing her, whether I thought she was ready for him or not. I could not think what had got into Fletcher.’

  There was energy behind what Mrs Palfreyman was saying now. She had got away from her set-piece, was speaking very much from her heart.

  ‘She was a girl whose very appearance depended on her state of mind at the moment. Hurt her feelings, sap her spirit, and even her health seemed to flag. The colour went from her cheeks and the spring from her step. When she came to us, she was still smouldering with the injustice that Fletcher had done to her at Rowsley. I don’t quite know how he handled it – he had been in that district, buying some Jacobean pieces from a family in Over Haddon. I don’t know how he managed to put pressure on Amy Harrington, but it had something to do with getting her suspected of theft. I’ve no idea what his detailed methods were. I certainly was at a loss to know what he thought he had seen in her – until I suddenly saw her looking her best.’

  Mrs Palfreyman was more relaxed now, more colour in her own cheeks.

  ‘My heart was in my mouth, wondering how Captain Kingsey was going to respond to that first sight of her. But he was surprisingly placid, saw something in her which I obviously hadn’t, put her in the window, then sent me off searching for bits and pieces to turn her into the likeness of a Dutch painting.

  ‘The effect on Amy Harrington was galvanic. It was not merely a superficial change that came over her. To be set apart from the rest of mankind, to be put on a pedestal – any kind of pedestal – that was her fulfilment; from that moment onwards she was in love with the Captain, couldn’t take her eyes off him, hadn’t even the wits to hide from the rest of them in the kitchen what was going on in her tiny little brain. And, in all fairness, I don’t think that anyone had ever treated her with the respect and tenderness which Captain Kingsey invariably showed her. But, of course, it was fatal. In Amy Harrington’s case, anything was possible – especially when she first came to us, before she changed – brought up as she was on chapel sermons and silly novels, where the poor beggar-girl discovered in the last chapter that she had blue blood in her veins after all. She entirely mistook the Captain’s kindness, took it for granted that he was courting her with marriage ultimately in mind—’

  ‘Whereas what he really had in mind,’ Brunt began. But Mrs Palfreyman looked at him with deeply felt accusation.

  ‘I think you ought to be careful how you judge the Captain, Sergeant. You know so little about him.’

  ‘Mildred Jarman did not mistake his motives.’

  ‘Mildred Jarman was a different proposition.’

  ‘You mean it was Amy Harrington who was the different proposition,’ Brunt said. ‘And how long did it take the Captain to wake up to that fact?’

  He could see anger gathering to breaking-point behind the housekeeper’s features.

  ‘Do you know how many girls he succeeded in bending to his will, Sergeant?’

  ‘You keep a tally, do you?’ Brunt asked her, but she ignored his deliberate crudeness and simply raised a single forefinger in front of her face. ‘One, Sergeant Brunt. Just one. And that was long before my time. I don’t know the whole story, or anything like the whole story, only what I have been able to piece together from the hints that have been dropped over the years. But it was in his youth; I think it was within the opportunities offered by a country house-party. I think it was with a parlour-maid of the sort that I would be inclined to judge supercilious. I am sure that it is something which he is pathetically anxious to recapture. That is why he sometimes puts on the silly little cap that he wore when he was an officer-cadet. And I am equally sure that he has always failed. Some of them have resisted too obdurately, as did Mildred Jarman. More often they have showed themselves a trifle too ready and he has turned his back on them in disgust.’

  ‘And Amy Harrington?’

  Mrs Palfreyman preceded her answer by a well-judged silence.

  ‘He started by taking her on the grand tour of his galleries – and I must say, she played up beautifully. She was not without a feeling for his pictures – in an unschooled way. But it did not go as deep as he convinced himself it did. He brought out lithographs and etchings that he had not looked at himself for years.’

  Took her to locked rooms which no one but himself had ever visited?

  ‘He said that her taste and discernment were faultless, all she lacked was the critical vocabulary. He set about teaching her. He said she helped him to see new angles in his own old favourites. He could show the rest of us pictures, he told me – but it was a new experience to him to have them shared. Deluding himself—’

  Mrs Palfreyman resented it still. Vivid red spots had appeared over her cheek-bones.

  ‘He found her work to do. He would have her believe that she was really helping him: he taught her how to stretch a canvas and mount a print: inflated trivialities in which she could hardly go wrong after she had spoiled the first expensive few. It was from her naive remarks in the kitchen that I first realised that she thought that one of her precious sentimental romances was coming to life: that he really was building up to ask her to marry him.’

  She expected Brunt to share spontaneously her view that such a possibility could not have been considered. If only to keep up the vitality of the dialogue, he declined to oblige her.

  ‘You would not have approved of that?’

  She gasped her horror. ‘Even at the height of his infatuation with her, he knew that there could be no question of it. Their difference in age, in intellect, in social outlook. She, of course, had read some story of a novelist who had married his amanuensis because his inspiration deserted him when she was not sitting near him with her pencil and her pad. She regaled me with it at length – and him. My fear was not that his wisdom would waver
, but that he would let himself be trapped in spite of himself. If she could have inveigled him into making any kind of promise, he would never have retracted. He is that kind of man. And a man can be flattered, which can in some cases be more fatal than physical enticement. Then one evening, she went up to him dressed of her own accord as the Vermeer girl. He was so overwhelmed that he sent her away again, angry with her, angry in that way he has, leaving one wondering what one has actually done. It upset Amy Harrington almost beyond her toleration – and thank God it did. The real reason for it was that the costume accentuated her immaturity. He said all along that she was immature. He was forcing himself to wait, and almost enjoying the self-torture.’

  Was Kingsey mad? Were there times when even Mrs Palfreyman’s influence on him could not break through? And what was the nature of that influence?

  ‘That was the stage at which I had to take a hand. I have learned in my life, never mind how, a good deal about the way of a woman with a man. I spoke my mind to Captain Kingsey. And to the girl – I took that upon myself. That was the time that she started to mope about the old mine. Mercifully she had started a head-cold, and I was able to change the duty-lists and keep her away from the study. The Captain has always had a horror of avoidable infection. I hoped that the gap would help him to see sense.’

  So he had not seen it as easily as she had claimed. But she would have been able, would she not, to threaten him with the collapse of his entire establishment? She would have deserted him, and perhaps taken Edwards and some of the others with her. But many an infatuated man would have settled for the less practical alternative in such an issue. But perhaps she had not been afraid to threaten him with things that really would make him stop and think: she must know, for example, a great deal about some of his art-deals.

  ‘I also had a word with Fletcher and told him to buck up about looking around for some fresh talent. Then I found that in spite of my instructions and the Captain’s agreement, Madam Harrington had done a duty swap with one of the other girls, and was waiting on him again without my knowledge – managing to make herself look like a tart in spite of her uniform, sidling up to his chair and giving him the sort of back-street look that he would not have tolerated a month previously. I am afraid I had a scene with him that I would rather not remember: how can a woman manage house for a man who countermands his own orders without even telling her?