Rifling Paradise

by Jem Poster

  Also by Jem Poster

  Courting Shadows

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 2009 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 2006 Jem Poster

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-609-5

  For Kay, Tom and Tobi

  Contents

  Also by Jem Poster

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part II

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part III

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part IV

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgements

  About RIFLING PARADISE

  I

  1

  It occurred to me later that I must have registered their approach a minute or so before the first stone struck the window. Certainly something had disturbed me as I dozed beside the fire – a murmured word perhaps, the click of the gate latch, a shoulder brushing the overgrown laurels beside the path – and I was already out of my armchair and moving towards the window at the moment of impact. Quite a small stone by the sound of it, such as one might imagine tossed against a young girl’s casement by an importunate lover. I put my face against the glass, cupping my eyes with my hands, and peered out into the night.

  The second stone must have been flung with considerable force. It struck one of the panes at waist height, sending shards of glass skittering across the floorboards. I remember starting backward, my head averted and my right hand held protectively to the side of my face, and then seizing the lamp from the chiffonier and stumbling through the hallway to the front door.

  In those days – why not confess it along with the rest? – I was usually half cut by the time I turned in for the night, and possibly the claret was responsible on this occasion for what might have looked to my persecutors like a display of courage. But you have to realise that when I threw open the door and stepped out into the garden I had no particular reason to consider myself in danger. I had in mind, I suppose, a gang of mischievous schoolboys up from the village, a misguided but essentially innocuous prank.

  Not schoolboys. The figures hovering at the margin of the oil-lamp’s muted glow were all but featureless, but I could see at once from the stance and bulk of the two nearest that I wasn’t dealing with children. I hesitated. Away to my right, someone cleared his throat and spat. Nobody spoke.

  It was difficult to assess the situation. I was, in the first place, uncertain of the size of the gathering. Besides the half-dozen men dimly discernible at the lamplight’s edge, there were indications – a stifled cough, the crack of a snapped twig, feet scuffing the damp leaf-litter where the beeches overhung the lawn – of perhaps as many again in the deeper shadows beyond. And what had brought them to the Hall at such an hour? I could hardly interpret their visit as a conventional courtesy, though I could see, on rapid reflection, a certain wisdom in treating it as such. I forced a smile.

  ‘You were lucky to catch me,’ I said. ‘Another twenty minutes and I’d have been sound asleep in bed.’

  ‘We’d have been sorry to have had to rouse you, Mr Redbourne.’ The voice was quiet and even, but not entirely reassuring. I felt my pulse quicken.

  ‘Might the matter not have waited until morning?’ I asked, peering uncertainly towards the speaker.

  ‘Might have. But the sooner the better, we thought.’

  ‘In that case, you’d better come directly to the point.’

  ‘I’ll come to it soon enough. We were in the Dog, drinking a drop to poor Daniel’s memory – you’ll remember Daniel Rosewell – and it came to us that, living such a tidy step from the village, you mightn’t have heard of his passing and that you needed to be told.’

  ‘Daniel dead? How?’

  ‘Six foot of rope and a milking stool. Hanged hisself last night in Waller’s barn. Janie Waller found him this morning when she went out for kindling – his toes not two inches off the ground, she says, but two inches or twelve, it makes no difference.’

  I was silent, thinking, I confess, less of the dead youth than of the trail that must have led this dubious company to my door.

  ‘That’ll grieve Mr Redbourne, we said. Or if it doesn’t, it ought to.’ Just the faintest hint of venom now. It was vital, I knew, to keep the discussion on a civilised footing.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It was good of you to bring the news. Would you convey my condolences to the boy’s mother?’

  ‘Thanks and convey be damned.’ A second voice, less measured than the first and with a harder edge to it, speaking out of the shadows to my left. ‘You’re to blame for the lad’s death, Mr Redbourne, and you know it.’

  ‘But that’s absurd. I barely knew him.’

  ‘That’s not true. Five years back you fed and lodged him at your own expense for a month and more. The whole village knows it.’

  ‘I gave him such employment as he was capable of and quartered him in one of my cottages while he worked for me. I’m accommodating three labourers in a similar fashion at this very moment.’

  ‘Yes, but you visited him.’

  I stared into the murk, wondering how much more my faceless accuser might know.

  ‘At night. He told Nathan Farr. He said you put your arms about him.’

  ‘Daniel was a troubled soul, and I offered him such consolation as I could. I may have embraced him on occasion.’

  ‘Other things too. It wasn’t only what you’d call embracing.’ I thought I heard the trace of a sneer in the speaker’s precise articulation of the word.

  ‘What kind of things?’ I asked. There was, I could see, a degree of risk in pressing for greater specificity, but I needed to know exactly how matters stood.

  ‘That’s not for us to say. You know better than we do what kind of mischief you visited on the lad.’

  ‘You touched him, Mr Redbourne.’ A third voice cutting in now, reedy, distinctive. I listened intently, trying to place it. ‘Wrongfully. Like you touched Nathan Farr.’

  ‘Nathan? Is Nathan here?’ I lifted my lamp and leaned forward, scanning the shadows. It was as though I had bent suddenly over a rock pool: the same instantaneous spasm of alarm, the same collective recoil.

  ‘Not with us tonight, Mr Redbourne. But he’d take an oath on it. The touching. And the photographs. He told us about those too.’

  I had it now. ‘Maddocks,’ I said sharply. ‘Maddocks, is that you?’

  A strained silence suggested that I had hit th
e mark. When the voice resumed, it was with a shade less aggression.

  ‘It makes no matter who, sir. What I have to say goes for us all. For the whole village.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said, my spirits rising. Maddocks – a wastrel, a petty schemer, a hen-pecked nonentity. Who was he to set himself up as my inquisitor? ‘I very much doubt it, Maddocks. And in any case, you’ve had your say and I’ve heard you out. Now I suggest that we all get to our beds.’

  ‘You may have heard us, Mr Redbourne, but you’ve not heeded us.’

  I hadn’t had a word from Samuel Blaney, civil or uncivil, since he had left my employ, but I should have recognised his voice anywhere. He must have known as much. He strode forward and stood squarely in front of me, his massive head thrust defiantly forward into the lamplight.

  ‘It’s a subtle distinction,’ I said.

  I’ve heard you out.’ Blaney’s mimicry of my own clipped tones was at once inaccurate and offensive. ‘I’ve heard you out. That’s what you told me when you dismissed me. My children will go hungry, I said – and so they did, believe me, for a good twelvemonth after – but you wouldn’t heed my words. Hearing and heeding, Mr Redbourne – they’re not the same thing, now, are they?’

  ‘I had others to consider, Blaney. I’ll not have my workforce intimidated, by you or by anyone else. And I’ll not have you sneaking in now to settle old scores under cover of other business.’

  I’m a tall man myself, but Blaney stands a good couple of inches taller. He reared himself to his full height and stepped up to within a yard of me. I edged back, bringing the lamp between his body and my own.

  ‘Sneaking, is it?’ he breathed. ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? Creeping like a thief around your own grounds after nightfall, dodging in where you’d no call to be. That’s sneaking, Mr Redbourne, the way a man acts when he doesn’t want to be seen.’

  I gestured out to the shadowy figures behind him. ‘And this?’ I asked. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Samuel’s right, Mr Redbourne.’ I tried to locate the voice, anxious to re-establish connection with the group from which Blaney had so pointedly and menacingly detached himself. ‘If you’d heeded what we’ve told you tonight, you’d be weeping now – weeping for the lad and for what you brought him to.’

  This was outrageous. I sidestepped Blaney and thrust myself angrily forward, feeling the blood rise to my face. ‘A man doesn’t grieve to the orders of a mob,’ I said heatedly. ‘And I’ll not be held responsible for what the lad chose to do to himself.’

  ‘But why did he choose it?’ the voice insisted. ‘Why would a young man want to do away with himself? And as a child – well, you’d not have found a happier face for ten miles around. Bright as an April morning till he fell in with you.’

  ‘Daniel?’ I felt my self-control slipping, heard my own voice as though from someone else’s mouth, shrill with incredulity. ‘That’s nonsense. The child was beaten black and blue from the time he could walk. Go and stand outside his mother’s door if you want an answer to your questions.’

  ‘A mother strikes her child to keep him on the straight and narrow. That’s natural, and what’s natural does no harm to a youngster. But what you’ve done—’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’ll not stand for any more of this. Let me advise you, as a magistrate, that your accusations and innuendo amount to slander, and furthermore’ – I glared around me as though my gaze could penetrate the enveloping darkness – ‘that I could have the whole pack of you charged with trespass and malicious damage. Now get back to your homes and leave me in peace.’

  I swung round and, as I did so, Blaney took a step to his left, positioning himself between me and my doorway.

  ‘The Farr boy,’ he said softly. ‘He’ll take an oath, remember. In the witness box if need be.’

  ‘Let me pass.’ I made a move to circumvent him, but he was too quick for me.

  ‘You’ll pass when I give you leave,’ he said. And he reached forward and laid the flat of his hand against the lapel of my smoking-jacket.

  It was a surprisingly unemphatic gesture, casual, almost caressing, but I knew at that moment that Blaney was prepared to steer us all into deeper and more dangerous waters. The men at my back knew it too, I could tell, sensing in their stillness a new expectancy, a sharpened focus. ‘When I give you leave,’ he repeated, slowly withdrawing his hand but without yielding ground. He was staring into my face with an expression of such malevolent intensity that I was obliged to avert my eyes. And as I did so, I was aware of some faint stir, subtle but unmistakable, in the group behind me. Nothing, I remember thinking – not a word, not a glance, not the smallest gesture – would be lost on this audience. I looked up at Blaney again, forcing myself to answer his gaze.

  ‘With or without your leave,’ I said, as firmly as I could, ‘I intend to retire to my bed. You must excuse me.’

  His silence made me think momentarily that I had retrieved the situation; then he reached forward again and gripped me by the right wrist, pressing his thumb sharply into the flesh just beneath the edge of my cuff and making the glass chimney of the lamp jitter in its housing. I tried to pull away but he held me fast and drew me, with a horrible suggestion of intimacy, to his breast.

  ‘I could put you on the ground,’ he whispered, the stink of ale coming off his breath, ‘as easy as I could put out that lamp.’ And then, after a tense pause, viciously, gratuitously: ‘You’ve hands like a girl’s, Mr Redbourne. I hate that in a man.’

  ‘You can’t threaten me like that, Blaney. The law doesn’t allow it. And no one, let me remind you, is beyond reach of the law.’

  ‘Just so, Mr Redbourne. No one. That’s a lesson you’ve still to learn. A lesson’ – his gaze flickered briefly outward – ‘we’re here to teach you. Because there are those who learn of their own accord, and there are those who won’t learn until they’re taught. And you’ – he released my wrist and, before I had time to step back or even to register his intention, struck me across the cheek – ‘you need teaching.’

  Blaney was, I knew, capable of considerable brutality, but this was not in essence a brutal action. It was, rather, a finely calculated insolence, delivered without force and with a knowing eye on his audience.

  ‘How dare you!’ I was trembling violently now, caught between rage and fear. ‘I could have you charged with assault.’

  ‘Assault? How do you make that out, Mr Redbourne?’

  ‘You just struck me in the face. I don’t imagine you’re going to deny it.’

  ‘A tap, that’s all. A friendly tap.’

  ‘An unprovoked act of aggression, and in the presence of witnesses.’

  ‘Witnesses, sir?’ He was playing shamelessly to the gallery now, grinning hugely, sweeping the shadows with exaggerated movements of his heavy head. ‘I can’t see any witnesses.’

  ‘Don’t act the fool, Blaney. There must be a dozen men out there, any one of whose testimony would be enough to convict you.’

  The grin faded. He leaned close, his mouth against my ear. ‘We’ll see who’s the fool,’ he said quietly. And then, lifting his head and voice: ‘Did anyone see me assault this man?’

  There was a long, uneasy silence. Blaney bent towards me again. ‘Like I said, Mr Redbourne. No witnesses.’

  In my father’s time, a cry would have brought a dozen servants running from the house and its outbuildings, but those days were long gone. Under my own straitened regime, the groom and the cook, man and wife, lived in a cottage at the far side of the estate, housework was attended to on an irregular basis by a girl who came up from the village as required, and only Latham slept on the premises. Well into his seventies, deaf as an adder and barely able to carry out his routine duties, he was hardly a man to be counted on in a crisis, and I could have nourished no realistic hope of assistance from that quarter. Even so, I found myself, in my agitation, turning helplessly towards the house. Blaney was quick to spot the movement.

  �
�The old man won’t hear you,’ he said. ‘Not even if he was awake, which I doubt. And don’t go fancying you might make a break for it neither. I’d have you before your foot was off the ground.’

  A sudden gust of wind, raindrops spattering the laurels. I spread my hands in a gesture of appeasement. ‘What do you want of me?’ I asked.

  The question seemed to catch him off guard. He glanced outward as though in need of a prompt.

  ‘After all,’ I continued, heartened by his momentary discomfiture, ‘we can’t stand around talking in the garden all night.’

  My attempt at levity was clearly a misjudgement. He turned slowly back to me, his eyes glittering dangerously. ‘You’re in no position to say what can or can’t be done, Mr Redbourne. I’ll do what I damn well like, on or off your blasted property.’ And, as though to reinforce the point, he lunged clumsily towards me.

  I stepped sideways, anticipating another slap, and felt my right heel sink deep in the freshly turned soil of the flowerbed. I might have retained my balance; but Blaney, seeing me stagger, put out his hand, fingers extended, and prodded me in the chest. The barest touch, but it was enough. I fell awkwardly on my side among the lavender bushes with the lamp beneath me. I heard the glass crack against my ribs, felt the heat of the wick and its fitting through my jacket. In the darkness that engulfed us, I imagined Blaney towering above me, poised to deliver whatever kicks or blows would satisfy his appetite for revenge.

  In my sometimes confused memory of the events of that night, this stands out with the most extraordinary clarity. You have to think of me huddled there among the crushed foliage, knees drawn up to protect my midriff, the side of my face hard against the damp earth. Whatever faint hope I might have entertained up to that moment – hope of rescue, some vestigial trust in the essential humanity of my tormentors – had been extinguished with the lamplight. And yet out of my very hopelessness, something – grace is the word that comes to mind, though I find myself more comfortable with the notion of some profound form of resignation – rose like the fragrance from the bruised lavender, stilling my agitation; and I lay quietly in that merciful state of suspension, waiting incuriously for events to unfold around me.