Cheating the Hangman (4 page)

‘We cannot change Nature,’ Mrs Hansard reflected. ‘But it would be good to find a better way to distribute her bounty, so that all might share and there were less hardship.’

‘Pray, my love, take care where you utter sentiments like that, or they will take you as a veritable revolutionary, keen to raise a guillotine or two over here.’

‘When one hears of goings on like those at Orebury House,’ she retorted, ‘one is surprised that our poor did not take arms as the French did.’

‘My dear Maria,’ Hansard said, raising a hand, ‘pray do not take rumours as facts. Or servants’ gossip as gospel.’

I stared at him, amazed that he should rebuke her so publicly. A glance at Burns’s normally inscrutable countenance suggested that he was shocked, but I knew that he would have bitten off his tongue rather than reveal any domestic secret. Though younger than I, and the most vicious bowler and attacking batsman in the village team, here he was the embodiment of sober respectability and discretion.

Within a heartbeat, however, Hansard was apologising. ‘I beg your pardon, my dear. I should not have uttered those words, especially in such a tone. In truth, I lost yet another babe this morning – delivered well before term, and with no hope of survival even had it ever drawn breath.’ He raised his eyes in challenge. ‘I trust you will make no objection to burying it in hallowed ground, Tobias?’

‘
Suffer the little children to come unto me
.’ I drained my sherry as if defying those who would argue, and did not protest when the silent Burns refilled it.

Once Burns, whose skills as he served at the table improved by the day, was no longer present, we lingered over our port, Maria sipping what always seemed to me her only real indulgence, a glass of champagne. Only then did I venture to refer to the issue that had caused controversy before dinner. ‘You spoke, my dear friends, of gossip about Orebury House. Even if it is no more than servants’ tittle-tattle, I should be glad to hear it. Forewarned is forearmed.’ Perhaps I spoke disingenuously. Lord Hasbury, who withdrew to his
country seat, Orebury, when his creditors pressed too hard in London, was an old friend of my father’s – and not, according to Mama, a good influence. What if my father were present?

‘Oh, as to that, it is little more than the most idle of talk. The
on dit
is that there is a large house party gathered there: tons of food and gallons of champagne have naturally arrived by the cartload. Furthermore, coaches full of light-skirts have hurtled through the night, depriving honest folk of their sleep. In short, Tobias, an orgy is planned if not already in progress.’ His raised eyebrow indicated how much he believed the rumour. ‘Orebury’s doings are not illegal, and possibly not even immoral – but given the hunger hereabouts, they are tactless. But when did the Upper Ten Thousand ever consider much apart from their pleasure? Nor,’ he said, with a wink, ‘do I want them to. Where would I be without their gout and their vapours?’

There was a scratch at the door. Burns padded to Edmund’s side. We held our breath: most likely this was another summons to a sickbed. But he announced another visitor.

‘Oh, bid him come in, Burns – I do not know why he or you should stand on such ceremony! Jem, dear friend, welcome! I dare say Cook can find you a crumb of cheese. A crust of bread. The lees of our wine.’

Mrs Hansard embraced him as if he were her son; Edmund and I shook him warmly by the hand.

‘Now our circle is complete,’ Maria declared.

‘I am sorry to come so between-times,’ Jem said. ‘Too late for dinner and too early for supper. In truth, I had
rather lost count of time, as you do when you are thinking about something else.’

‘Something is troubling you, Jem,’ Mrs Hansard said: it was a statement, not a question. As Burns withdrew, she stretched out her hand, and seated him beside her. ‘Tell us how we may help.’

‘So it is too late for me to offer my services gratis?’ Edmund said sadly. ‘Both the young mother and her baby? Dead and buried?’

Jem bowed his head. ‘Both. Both done to death by the mother’s own hand. A maiden from near Clavercote. Molly Fowler, and the child unnamed. Despair drove her to it, they said: she was dead within a week of being brought to bed. The mill race.’ Edmund mouthed something to his wife, who nodded in sad agreement. ‘The villagers probably thought that the girl had brought disgrace on her family. So I know not that your help would have been accepted even had you been in time to offer it.’

‘Damned for having a child in her belly before she had a ring on her finger? Pshaw! I would wager that at most ten per cent of country girls are virgins when they are married: am I right, Tobias?’

It was Edmund’s way to fend off emotion with intellectual truculence, so I indulged him. ‘In my limited experience you are. But there is a consensus that, by wedding her, the
young man is making an honest woman of his bride, is there not? And in country eyes, I fear it makes sense to prove that both man and woman are fertile before they are irrevocably bound together.’

Jem stared. ‘Do I hear aright? You are usually the most morally upright of men, Tobias!’ He sounded as much outraged as surprised.

I raised a mollifying hand. This was not the place to burden him and the Hansards with the pungent opinions of both my mother and the archdeacon and my reflections upon my treatment of Robert. Who was I to cast the first stone? ‘As Mrs Trent says when Susan drops yet another plate, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” I suspect that however much I disapprove of the practice, I can never change it. And at least the potential parents turn to the church to regularise the situation. I must thank God for that.’ I could not resist the urge to add with a smile of hopeful joy, ‘And every couple I bind at the altar brings to the font the infant that appears six months later.’ I added ruefully, before Edmund could voice the same thought, ‘Though that might owe less to a reverent desire to ask for the blessing of baptism than to Mrs Trent’s good offices with the layette box.’ My housekeeper’s skill with the needle was far superior to her uneven accomplishments in the kitchen. Each new mother received a sturdy box full of vital items of tiny clothing. As the child grew, the mother would launder the clothes one last time and return them to Mrs Trent, who would supply the next size. As for the box itself, it was big enough for the infant to sleep in for a few weeks. Mrs Trent liked to think that the idea was her
own; Maria and I had long ago tacitly agreed not to remind her of its true origin.

Jem’s jaw tightened stubbornly.

Hansard laid a hand on his arm. ‘For my part, I cannot fault the injunction I am surprised that Tobias has not already repeated: “Judge not that ye be not judged.” But we digress. The poor young woman, I collect, was not betrothed to some village lad desirous of wedding her?’

If anything, Jem’s face became even grimmer. ‘’Tis said that the maid was the paramour of a gentleman – one of Lord Wychbold’s cronies, maybe. Him of Lambert Place.’

It was indeed not unlikely that a man of the
ton
had taken advantage of an innocent maid, as I was about to observe when Hansard thundered, ‘Accursed rumour once again! And is there any evidence?’ Nonetheless he placed a glass of port beside our friend.

It took Jem a few moments to reply. When he did so it was with the uncomfortable shift in his chair that he must have seen many of his young charges make when posed an awkward question. ‘There are always tales flying round about the noble lord,’ he said, his voice weighing down the last two words with irony, ‘and his devil worship.’

‘There have been ever since I moved to Moreton,’ Mrs Hansard corroborated. ‘And indeed his choice of society is to say the least unconventional, though not to my knowledge actually depraved. You cannot accuse him of belonging to the Hellfire set, surely? Look at that poet, for instance: he’s a mere boy. Mr Julius Longstaff. The worst that is said of him is that he spends more time peering at his flowing locks in a looking-glass than worrying about his metre and his rhyme.’

‘The vanity if not the talent of Lord Byron,’ Edmund agreed. ‘Apart, however, from rumours that he has a regrettable penchant for recondite words and laboured rhymes, I too have heard nothing truly ill of him. Or, before you ask, of his two neighbours. Provided one does not pay any attention to their clothing.’

‘It is hard to do anything else. At least to Lady Blaenavon’s, I understand, if not to Miss Witheridge’s. By all accounts she at least is as conventional in dress as you or I,’ Maria said. ‘Lady Blaenavon, however …’ She shrugged. ‘The
on dit
is that she is a great ugly woman given to wearing a strange mishmash of clothes. There is, of course, something eminently practical about jacket, cravat and heavy skirt divided into two like very wide sailors’ trousers if one is striding about one’s land. Especially were one to tuck them into one’s boots … Consider,’ she continued, apparently blissfully unaware of the impropriety of her opinions, ‘how the toil of the poor laundrymaid would be eased, did she not have to wash the muddied flounces of her ladyship and the young ladies of the house when they returned from walks down dirty lanes. And in truth I will say that other housemaids would be able to accomplish other tasks with more decorum if they could wear them.’ She cast an impish glance at us all. ‘Before you upbraid me, dear Tobias, consider the inconvenience if you have to wear your surplice at all times. On horseback – what would Titus make of a side-saddle? Your ablutions under the pump? And to my mind, breeches might be no less indecent than the dampened muslin gowns of certain fast young ladies who wish to leave nothing of their figure to the imagination.’ Her smile gathered us up. ‘Now I have
shocked you all to the core, let us adjourn to the drawing room.’ She did not add, though it was true, that there our tea drinking would be watched over by ladies from the distant past, whose painted selves suggested no major preoccupation with modest attire.

Poor Molly Fowler – at fourteen no more than a child herself – had been one of Mr Coates’s parishioners. Since it was clear that he was in no position to pay a visit of condolence to her family, I went myself, taking a discreet package containing flour, cheese, part of one of Mrs Trent’s home-cured hams, and a little money. I did not wish them to feel patronised by any excess, but I had no doubt that like all the villagers they would welcome honest sustenance.

There was a straggle of ragged children eager to guard Titus, unaware, of course, that Titus had his own way of dealing with would-be riders yet to make his acquaintance. I warned them to keep clear of his hooves. Hallooing but getting no response from within the dwelling that the urchins assured me was occupied by the Fowlers, I stooped almost double to enter, via a doorway secured by nothing more solid than a sheep hurdle, what was little more than a gloomy hovel. A hole in the bedraggled thatch passed, no doubt, for a chimney when there was a fire on the cold hearth but currently admitting occasional flurries of the unseasonably cold rain that had squalled across my path this morning. Only a couple of crude shelves occupied by some primitive earthenware showed that this was a habitation meant for man, not beasts.

It was indeed unoccupied. Or did something stir in
that bundle of rags in the deepest corner? Something? Or someone!

As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I understood the origin of those groans, those ill-suppressed screams. And knew that the woman – for that was what this creature was – needed more help than I could provide.

Shouting to the boys to fetch a woman to the hovel, I summoned Titus to me, and threw myself on to his back. This was a case for my dear friend Edmund and his medical instruments, and possibly for the precious case I kept ready by my own door: I knew not whether I would have to offer Holy Communion to a dying woman or to baptise a child emerging dying or even dead from the womb.

Whenever there was a situation like this, Edmund and I would make our independent ways, speed being more important than companionship. Both of us would ride what my young sister romantically described as
ventre à terre
: not for her the concept of two ordinary men doing their best to ride swiftly on not always easy terrain. Assuredly as he got older, and was now blessed with a wife, Edmund was more circumspect than he was wont to be; I fully expected him to be there perhaps fifteen minutes later than I. What I could not therefore comprehend was a horse and rider heading away from the hovel. From this distance – I was still over half a mile from the hamlet – I could recognise neither the rider nor his mount, a handsome grey. Who but a rich gentleman could afford an animal flying with such ease and grace over hedges and ditches? And why should a rich man appear as eager to get away from the hamlet as I was to reach it? And what might such a man be doing in such a sad forgotten corner of God’s good earth in the first place?

The track was now so deeply rutted that it was time to offer guidance to Titus, who took my advice as if he really needed it. We picked a delicate route through mud and worse, arriving once again outside the hovel. As before, we attracted urchins, probably of both sexes. Mrs Trent – or Robert – had filled any space in my saddlebags with last autumn’s apples, many too wizened to be eaten by anything except a hopeful horse or starving children. I tossed a few around as I threw balls at cricket practice, soft, easy catches, but, picking out the most likely child, passed not one apple but two. One was for Titus, the other for himself. As I mentally girded myself to enter the place of suffering, a figure emerged, carrying a bundle, from which a thin mewling struggled to emerge.

‘’Tis Eliza Fowler’s babe, Your Reverence,’ she declared, bobbing a hurried curtsy. ‘There’s a woman down yonder as has just lost her own. Sarey Tump. I thought – but I’d best be quick.’

‘I’ll be with you on the instant. First I must look to the poor mother.’ Fortunately I was not called on to do this alone. The sound of hooves heralded Edmund’s arrival.

The woman looked at him bleakly, sniffed, and scurried off with her tiny burden.

Having said prayers I could not be sure the dying woman could hear or comprehend, I baptised her puny infant with the swiftly chosen name of Joseph, Sarey, the newly bereaved mother, standing as godmother. Her bemused daughter, a child of perhaps seven, set off to find her father in the coppice, wherever that might be. Feeling that for the moment I could do no more, I returned to see if I could
assist Edmund, but he had already pulled what passed for a sheet over the dead mother’s face and was forcing a little brandy down the throat of a man so begrimed and wizened it was impossible to attribute an age to him. Assuring him that I would conduct the funeral free of charge and that Edmund would pay for the grave, and leaving to hand the food I’d brought, we waited as he slid into a brandy-induced slumber.

Edmund had other calls to make in the area so when we reached our horses, still guarded by a platoon of half-starved children to whom we distributed a shower of pennies, we parted company. Titus picked his way disdainfully to the home of Mr Boddice, the churchwarden, with whom I had a short and forceful conversation concerning Mrs Fowler’s burial service and interment.

Once again I mounted Titus, startling him by not turning for home. To be sure, it was late for a morning call, and I had not done him the courtesy of leaving my card beforehand. But I had a few observations to make to the landlord of this pitiable apology for a village and they would not wait for a more eligible occasion.