“I knew that his confession was false, sir. I knew he couldn’t have killed Lord Palmer. There was no reason for him to do so.”
“Then why did he confess?”
“It’s complicated, sir. Sebastian has a self-destructive streak about him, which...”
“Sebastian, is it?”
“I meant Mr Forrester, sir. He was down and out at the time and death must’ve seemed like a relief to him.”
“And what made him change his mind?”
“I believe it was seeing his mother.”
“His mother?”
“She came with me to his cell.”
McMurphy looked at the file again. “His mother is Cecilia Forrester. Wife of Frederick Forrester. Who also happens to have been your guardian.”
“That’s right, sir. They looked after me when my parents died.”
“I see.”
McMurphy fell silent for a while. He tapped his fingers on his desk as he looked at Billings. He was scrutinizing him, staring into his eyes. It was clear that he didn’t know quite what to make of all this. Billings just stared back at him, earnestly.
“This arsenic, then,” McMurphy continued. “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You believe he took it himself?”
“I do, sir.”
“And why would he do that?”
“I believe he felt ashamed, sir.”
“Ashamed?”
“He is a proud and honest man, sir.”
“Not that honest, Billings, if your accusation is true.”
“He must’ve felt very desperate, sir, to have agreed to Mr Krym’s proposition. We all have our weaknesses.”
“Well, I suppose we will just have to wait, won’t we? Until Jacobs recovers – which his doctors have assured me he will – and see what he has to say about all this.”
Billings breathed a sigh of relief.
“As for this Barnabas Crooke, I suppose we had better alert the Berkshire Constabulary and the river police to see if they can pick him up. And we had better alert the magistrate too and let this Mr Forrester go. Because I agree with you, it doesn’t look like we have enough of a case against him. But as for you, Billings... I don’t think you’ve handled this at all well. You should have come to me if you had any suspicions. You should never have let it come to this.”
“I realise that now, sir.”
“You can go home now, Billings. I am suspending you until we have cleared this whole thing up, and that won’t be until after Jacobs has recovered.”
Billings turned to exit the office, but then he hesitated and turned back to face McMurphy.
“Sir, I was wondering...” He stopped. (Was he being tactless?)
“Well, what is it, Billings?”
“May I read Mr Forrester’s letter?”
17. Statement written by Sebastian Forrester, Tuesday 2nd December, 1890
I found myself wandering the streets of Whitehaven in the summer of 1880. It is not necessary for you to know how I landed there, suffice to say that this was just one stop in a much longer journey, the route and destination of which were in the hands of a greater power and completely unknown to me. I remember stumbling through the cobbled streets of the West Strand, penniless and mute, listening to the rhythm of the surf crashing against the shore. In the whisper of the wind and the waves I suddenly heard a voice calling me. It was the sea. “Climb onto my waves,” it said, “and let me take you to paradise.”
I was younger then – and passionate and ignorant and desperate to do something glorious – but I was also ill (I recognize that now). The infection in my mouth had given me a fever and I was burning up and sweating profusely. What I then considered to have been a religious experience, I now know to have been mere delirium.
I must have collapsed at that point and fainted, because the next thing I remember is waking up on a pile of skins in a small brick room with four unknown men staring down at me and muttering words of concern.
“He’s awake!” I heard the oldest one say. He had a large red head with small round spectacles and cheeks which trembled every time he moved his face. “Philip, he’s awake! You fainted, good man,” he said, turning to me. “Just out there, by the pier.”
Philip, who I assumed to be his son as he was equally round and red but younger, pushed past the other two men and stood beside his father, grinning down on me.
“What is your name?” he asked.
I was about to reply. I started putting my lips together and I was about to utter ‘Brendan’ when I suddenly remembered that I had no tongue. It had been three or four days since the episode occurred in which I lost my tongue, but only now did I feel the first pang of regret.
“He’s thirsty,” Philip concluded and turned to the young labourer standing behind him. “Go fetch some water for the patient.”
“My name is Jonas Cranson,” the father said, articulating carefully. “And this is my son, Philip. We are Cranson and Son. This is our tannery you’re in.”
I suddenly noticed the foul smell of smoke, bait and rotting skins wafting in the air.
The young labourer returned with a cup of water. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I’d been until the sight of water put my instincts into action and made me yank the cup off his hands and pour the contents down my throat. The four men looked on with silent awe as I drank the water, like an audience watching a starved animal being fed in a circus. “He wants more,” said the father as he watched me tip the cup over my face to let the last drops of water slide into my mouth. “Well, go on, get him some more!”
The young labourer took the cup back off me and shuffled out of the room. He must’ve been only fifteen or sixteen, with shifty eyes and a slouched back. Years of put-downs, reprimands and humbling had taken their toll on his thin body.
I downed the second cup of water as avidly as the first. As soon as I felt the hot, throbbing flush in my head ease away, I placed the empty cup on the ground and started pushing myself up. I don’t know whether it was the stench of the tanning liquor, or being confined in that small brick room with four strangers towering and fussing over me, but something made me want to get up and walk out of the room.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the father said, concerned. “Don’t get up, good man. You’re not well.”
I ignored him and stumbled past the large pits in the yard where the skins were soaking in their liquor and out the door, leaving the four men chattering behind me.
“Where are you going? Where’s he going, Philip?”
“Let him go, Pa. He’s obviously feeling well enough. Right, back to work, you two! Have you de-fleshed that last batch of skins yet?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, you haven’t. It’s still there.”
“Oh, that batch. No, I ain’t done that batch.”
“Well, get on with it then.”
As I stepped out of the yard, I instantly felt the fresh sea breeze hit my face and I could hear the roar of the waves crashing against the pier. That call I’d heard shortly before I fainted hadn’t ceased. If anything, it had become stronger. A strange instinct led me back to the pier, and there I sat, still and upright, listening to the meditative rhythm of the ebb and the flow and longing, like St Brendan of Clonfert, to be set adrift on this watery desert.
I was still there on the pier the following morning, shivering on the outside but flushing hot inside, when two men approached me from behind.
“It’s him, Da! Look!”
I turned around and saw the two labourers from the tannery approach me, the put-upon boy and his father.
“Ayup, what’s tha doin’ here?” the father asked, squatting down before me and looking me in the eyes. “Tha’ll catch thy death, tha will, sitting out here. Looks like tha art halfway there already.”
“Look Da, money!” The boy was pointing to some coins which had miraculously appeared on the ground before me. How did those coins get there, I wondered? Had an e
arly morning stroller mistaken me for a beggar and thrown the coins at me?
“And tha should be careful with that and all,” the father said, picking the coins up from the ground. “Hast tha not got a pocket tha can keep them in?”
I was wearing the clothes given to me by the Whitehaven police, as I had none of my own: a pair of woollen trousers, a shirt, and a long, ragged frock coat with no pockets.
“Och, well. I’ll keep them for thee, then.” He put the coins in his own coat pocket. “Tha should be more careful, man. ’Tis a nasty place tha hast landed in. Full of robbers and bandits and thieves. Eh, Oswald?”
The boy laughed.
“Why doesn’t tha come with us? We’ve got a bed. And this’ll do nicely for the rent.” He tapped the coins in his pocket. “Come along. I’ll make thee a nice cup of hot grog. That’ll warm thee up.”
Father and son pulled me up by the armpits and started dragging me down the road.
“The name is Crooke, by the way,” the father said, taking my hand and shaking it. “Barnabas Crooke. But tha can call me Barney.”
There is a certain quality to my face which has always attracted the pity of others. I have often heard people speak of my ‘melancholy eyes’. Perhaps it’s the shape of them, or the colour, but there is something about them that moves people to care for me. I have taken advantage of this all my life; my mother, Mr Crickshaw, Janie Drew, they have all put up with things they would otherwise not have tolerated.
Barnabas Crooke made good use of this too. He had me sit on street corners all day long and beg for money. He would place me at various points all over Whitehaven. Mondays and Tuesdays, I sat on the corner of Queen Street and Lowther Street. Wednesday and Thursdays, I sat outside the tavern on Tangier Street. And Fridays and Saturdays, I sat against the wall of the small pavilion in Duke Street. I didn’t mind. I was happy to sit still all day, ignoring the discomforts of the weather, staring ahead of me and meditating, only moving on when I was told to do so by the police. I earned mostly pennies and farthings, but occasionally there’d be a shilling or even a half crown. I could make up to six shillings on a good day, just by sitting still and looking pitiful. Crooke would pocket the money and in exchange he’d give me a bed and a warm meal every day.
Crooke lived in a crowded collier tenement on Mount Pleasant, right at the top of a flight of stone steps which led from the docks to the high land. We shared a small, dark room, furnished only with a stove and two iron beds. I slept in one bed and Crooke and Oswald slept top to toe in the other. It was a smelly room. The stench of the tanning liquor (which was composed of lime water and dog dung) clung to the tanners’ clothes and they brought it back into the room with them every night. But I soon grew accustomed to their smell and they grew accustomed to mine. We were an odd and dirty trio, but a peaceful one. We only came home to sleep. Crooke spent his evenings in the tavern and Oswald was up to no good on the waterfront. As for myself, when I was not begging (at the time I didn’t think of it as begging) I was on the moorland, constructing a currach.
My desire to set out to sea had not left me. I had studied St Brendan’s Navigatio in my previous life and was very clear about how to construct the vessel which led him to the Isle of the Blessed. I had already assembled some timber to build the frame and all I needed were a dozen or so oak-soaked hides to stitch together. Crooke, of course, was in a good position to provide me with these and was willing to do so. Obviously I knew that he would be stealing them from his employer, but I could overlook that. This was providence. God had not introduced me to the acts of the Irish sea-faring monks for nothing. Nor was it coincidence that I woke up in the courtyard of a tannery.
I don’t know what Crooke got out of my company (other than a few shillings). I suppose I must have been a distraction from his mundane existence and he was intrigued by my nightly labours. He and Oswald would often join me on the moorland and watch me work. Sometimes they’d even help out. Soon it wasn’t just the Crookes who’d watch. The slum’s children, who were constantly hanging around the steps and alleys of Mount Pleasant like gannets on a sea rock, would come up and watch me work with curious delight. They looked on with wonder as I stitched the skins together and strapped them to the frame, all the while guessing as to its purpose.
“Is it a tent?”
“No, it’s a kite. It’s a really big kite.”
“I know what it is! It’s a hot air balloon.”
“It’s a tent, dummy. He’s building himsen a tent.”
It took me five months to complete the boat. On a cold November night, when everyone was asleep, Crooke, Oswald and I descended down to the dock carrying the currach over our heads. I was feeling nervous about my adventure and I didn’t want great crowds of people waving me off. After all, the currach had not yet been tested and it might sink the moment I stepped into it (although I had smeared the skins repeatedly with sheep wool grease, which should have made them waterproof). I also didn’t want large crowds to attract the attention of the authorities, who might have stopped my expedition.
Crooke and Oswald watched with a bemused expression as I climbed into my ramshackle vessel and rowed off to meet the waves. What must they have thought? ’There he goes, the poor, mad bugger. Off to meet his death.’ Well, death was on my mind. Of course it was. I knew perfectly well that many an Irish monk had sailed into oblivion, led astray by the winds and the currents. But like me, they must have felt God had a bigger plan for them and would see them safely to their destination – whatever that might be.
The night was cold, but the wind was smooth and the sea was calm. My sail billowed gently as I left the protection of the pier and the boat started skipping over the waves, almost hovering over the sea. There was another pang of doubt and regret as I looked back and saw the shoreline move farther away from me and the figures of Crooke and Oswald becoming rapidly smaller. I quickly sank down into the hull of my boat and turned back towards the stars and the dark horizon, biting my lips and fighting my tears. Never look back at a burning bridge, I thought. No good can come from that, as Lot’s wife would surely testify.
Although the sea remained calm throughout the journey, the boat was so light and flexible that it twisted and curled over every single wave, making me profoundly sick. I spent six nights on that boat, most of them curled up on the floor in a puddle of my own vomit. It was agony. After three days of nausea, my whole body had stopped functioning. I lost all sensation in my limbs and was barely able to move. The spray of the waves kept splashing over my face as I lay half-conscious in the hull, making my skin sticky and salty. And the seagulls kept circling over the boat and screeching. Every now and then a daring gull would come down and land on my disabled body, like a vulture on a carcass, to pick up a morsel of my throw up. I drank little and ate less. I had taken enough food and water to last seven days; seven leather flasks of drinking water and a basket full of dried bread and biscuits. I was able to collect rain water on the tarpaulin, in case the journey should last longer than expected, and I had a hook and thread for catching fish or gulls. But all this proved unnecessary, because on the seventh day of my journey, my boat was hurled onto a rock off the coast of Whithorn and I was thrown out of the vessel and onto a rock pool, where I was rescued the following day by a local fisherman.
I remained in Whithorn for ten years, living among the fishermen, sailors and dock workers. I waited patiently for the first five years for another sign from God, for an indication of my purpose in this desolate outpost. But none came. God had become silent and I was left stranded, spiritually and physically. After five years of waiting, doubts finally started creeping in. Had I misinterpreted everything? Had this powerful yearning to leave behind my life of comfort and follow God’s call been nothing more than a fantasy? Had this been nothing more than the usual restlessness of youth? If so, then all my sacrifices (by which I mean not only the loss of my tongue, but also the loss of my family and my position) had been for nothing.
I tried desperate
ly to regain those glorious old passions again by committing acts of random asceticism (at one point I even drove a nail into my palm), but it was all in vain. The passion was missing and had been replaced by feelings of uselessness, frustration and regret. Something someone once told me came to mind: ‘Real suffering doesn’t come in one intense sweep. It is a slow, creeping thing which gradually engulfs you and traps you for the rest of your life.’
It was a dark episode of my life and it pains me to remember it. There is one person in particular – whose name I do not wish to mention in this report – who has been wronged and mistreated by me and who deserved better. Should the contents of this report ever come back to her, and I hope that they will, I want her to know that I am sorry. All I can say is that hope is a desperate thing. Man clings to it for much longer than he should and it took me ten years to realise that.
One morning I was wandering along the harbour, recovering from a hangover. I hadn’t been home all night and the thought of doing so filled me with dread. I still had a couple of shillings in my pocket and when I saw the Liverpool ferry getting ready to depart, I suddenly felt the urge to board it. So I did. I left that same morning, suddenly and unexpectedly, without telling anyone. Escaping once again a life which had become dead, dull and unbearable.
I wandered throughout the country for a number of months, slowly edging southwards, sleeping in sheds and haystacks, indulging in the charity of others and working wherever I could. I wanted to return home, to the life which I had left behind, but I didn’t dare. I was ashamed. Ashamed of the wretch that I had become. Ashamed of the pain and grief I had imposed on my parents. They must surely have assumed me to be dead by now and they must have adapted to life without me. My appearance could only cause greater upheaval and further grief. And yet… I did so long for home.
By January I had drifted down to the Thames Valley in Berkshire. It was just outside the village of Appleford when I picked up a discarded newspaper from the street to line my coat with and saw Lord Palmer’s advertisement. He was looking for a hermit to live on his estate and was offering three shillings a week and a hundred-pound bonus after completing a full year. It was providence. God had finally spoken again and had offered me a way out of my predicament. I could pull myself together with a hundred pounds. Find some treatment for my putrid wound. Set myself up in some sort of business, so as not to be reliant on charity. I might even bring myself to be reunited with my parents.
The Ornamental Hermit Page 22
