Cheating the Hangman (5 page)

Lord Wychbold, a man in his later forties whose pallor suggested an aversion to outdoor activity, permitted himself a sneer of surprise at my precipitate arrival at Lambert Place, a huge establishment dating back to Elizabeth’s time, but now in sad want of repair. Ensconced in his library, an untidy room one end of which he clearly used as his study, he raised his eyeglass at my travel-stained garments as he bade me, with clear reluctance, to take a seat. A pile of folios tottered on the floor beside him; with an irritated sigh he closed the one on his lap and placed it on the others. On the vast and elegant range of shelves, the books in regular use could be distinguished from the others by the presence of fingermarks on the spines; the rest were covered in a rich patina of dust. Mrs Trent would have spring-cleaned this every day until well into the autumn before she could declare herself satisfied. Meanwhile my coat would act as duster for the leather armchair to which he gestured me.

Since he had a glass of Madeira on the reading stand beside his chair, I felt it would be churlish to decline when
he raised the decanter in my direction. The aged butler who had grudgingly admitted me reappeared with a glass – I cannot say a
clean
glass – on a salver that only its tarnish told me was silver.

‘Without roundaboutation, Wychbold,’ I said, suspecting that to implore him as a humble clergyman would be less effective than to exhort him as an equal, ‘I am come to tell you that more must be done for your meanest tenants. I do not suggest you are obliged to build a model village for them, but the very least they need is a supply of fresh water and adequate drains. You treat them less well than the beasts of your fields, sir!’ Truth to be told, they too were unhealthy enough, with very poor pasturage to sustain them.

He peered at me, though with little evidence of real interest. He might have been a tortoise, sniffing the air before sallying forth. But his eyes were sharper than they appeared. ‘Ah, Hartland’s errant son. I heard you were wont to tell your betters how to conduct themselves. Well, sir, I tell you that what happens on my land is none of your business. It was good enough for Adolphus Coates. It should be good enough for a mere curate.’

I stifled an absurd desire to point out that I was no curate but a fully-fledged rector. ‘It is the duty of any Christian man to love his neighbour as himself. These people are more than neighbours: they are your tenants, whom it is your privilege to aid and protect. For heaven’s sake, My Lord, do you really want their death by starvation on your conscience?’ I knew his sort all too well. By giving his labourers a huge Harvest Home feast and their children a few sugar plums at Christmas, he prided himself on his generosity sufficiently to
be able to ignore them for the rest of the year.

He muttered something, and rang the bell. For a moment I feared I was to be unceremoniously ejected; instead, he pushed my card in the direction of the butler. ‘See that Eacott waits upon Dr – what do you call yourself? – Dr Campion. And now, sir, good day to you.’ Donning a pair of spectacles, their tiny lenses like full stops between me and his hooded eyes, he turned his attention once again to the tome he had been perusing when I arrived.

I would in courtesy have asked any other man the object of his scholarship, but it was clear that to give an explanation would have given him no pleasure at all.

Whatever his instructions, no one from Lord Wychbold’s estate ventured to see me during Holy Week; the most charitable interpretation, if not one I clung to, was that Eacott had no wish to disturb me during such a sombre and prayerful period. A more prosaic explanation might lie in the weather, blowing up unseasonable thunderstorms despite the cold, particularly on the day I buried Eliza. There were no mourners except Edmund and her poor widower, who clutched a miserable bundle containing all his worldly wealth and muttered that since he had nothing in the area he might as well go and die a soldier.

Both Good Friday services being concluded in Lenten bare, stripped-down churches, my own dear St Jude’s and All Souls’, Clavercote, I looked forward with solemn joy to the greatest day of the Christian calendar, Easter Day, when the very fabric of the buildings would be celebrating Christ’s resurrection. My engagement at All Souls’ meant I would
miss the innocent pleasure of the egg-rolling competition on the village green, in anticipation of which Mrs Trent and Susan had been hard at work boiling and dyeing a vast quantity of eggs, our chickens not having heard that they were not supposed to lay during Lent. Mrs Trent, unsure what celebration might take place in Clavercote, pressed me to fill my saddlebags with enough for the youngsters there to eat, if not race. She also produced an attenuated version of her famous box for the new baby, which still, according to Edmund, clung desperately to life; not expecting any of the garments to be returned, she picked out the least good, though she made sure that each was laundered to within an inch of its life.

Sunday had dawned with the total perfection of a spring day. The sun was warm, trees were throwing out their blossom, birds sang as sweetly as any choir and all my congregation seemed to share my joy. All Souls’ was but half full, and the singing was sadly perfunctory. The few farmers’ daughters flaunted their spring finery; of the poor cottagers there was unsurprisingly no sign. Accepting, with a reluctance I hoped I concealed, an invitation to return to Squire Lawton’s home for a festive sherry, I asked as I sipped if Lord Wychbold had shown any sign of improving the dwellings on his land.

‘Wychbold? Up at Lambert Place? A curst rum touch if ever there was one. All that book learning has fair addled his brain, if you ask me, with all those break-teeth words. There are those,’ he added judiciously, sucking his teeth and looking around to see that no one in the empty room might overhear – the rest of the household were preparing a tempting-smelling repast to which I was not invited – ‘who
say it’s more to do with what he got up to when he was young.’ He gave the most enormous wink, touching the side of his nose with a dirt-engrained index finger. ‘Goings on, they say. Devil worship,’ he clarified ghoulishly.

‘The rumours have not escaped me. This is surely not a suitable topic for such a day as this, Mr Lawton.’

Not quelled at all by my repressive tone and words, he added, ‘And now there’s all that to-do at Orebury House. Rakes and barques of frailty turning the fine old place into a brothel. And every man jack with a fine title to his name, as well as a fine—’ He made an indecent joke.

For nothing would I have pointed out that by insulting Lord Hasbury and his friends he was insulting friends of my father – and, heaven forbid, my father himself. As it was, I verily believe that he could not fathom the reason for my real displeasure at his unsavoury humour. Thanking him tepidly for his hospitality, I made my excuses and left.

Wishful to cleanse my head of his sullying conversation, I resolved to ride home not via the lanes but through the healing verdure of fields and woodlands. While not entirely embracing Mr Wordsworth’s fervour, I truly felt the cares of the last few days lifted from my shoulders as I felt the sun on my face. Titus, in tune with my mood, had relaxed to the slowest of walks.

However, as we approached the path through the woods, which was our nearest way home, it became clear that his reluctance to move forward was nothing to do with his attunement to my current humour, but to something that offended him. His ears and nostrils flared. He knapped. However much I might urge him forward with kind words, he resisted.

At last I dismounted, going to his head and talking softly but firmly to him. Still he resisted my blandishments, though he reluctantly consented to let me lead him on a tight rein into the wood. Fifty yards we walked – and no further. Him having veritably dragged me back whence we had come, I tied him to a sapling, fearing that for once his obvious anxieties would inspire him to return to his stable without me on his back.

I had penetrated perhaps a hundred yards beyond the point at which Titus had dug in his heels when I first noticed the smell. At first it was simply a sweet tinge to the verdant air. Then the sweetness became unmistakeably sickly. I was in the presence of a dead creature, one beginning to putrefy. Covering my nose and mouth with my handkerchief, I moved gingerly forward.

I cannot tell how long it took me to come to my senses so that I could run from the sight, and I believe that were it not for Titus’s anxiously nuzzling my face I might have swooned again, as the vile smell seemed to have followed me. And I had to return: somehow I must protect what remained of the dead man. All I had with me was my surplice. That would cover at least his face, though I had to disperse a million flies to do it. God would give me the strength to do it.

I clung to Titus on my return as a drowning man to a log. Now at last I could heave myself on to his saddle and quit this awful place. It would of course be but a temporary reprieve: I would have to guide Edmund and a party of servants to carry the body to a place of decent privacy. At least I had the sense to tie my handkerchief to a sapling to
remind myself precisely where I entered the woods.

I was on Lord Wychbold’s land: perhaps the information I had to impart would shake him out of his book-fuelled complacency. But as far as I knew he was not a magistrate – for that I must seek out Lord Hasbury, over at Orebury House, since the nearest, Lord Chase, had been living in retirement in Wales for some time. Would I see scenes to shock me? Would any of his guests be sober and decent? Just now I cared not: all I wanted was to remove myself from this accursed place.

Tumbling from Titus, I cared not for my appearance as I ran up the elegant semicircular flight of steps to the front door of Hasbury’s superb Palladian house. But the butler who responded to my vicious tug on the bell obviously did. The epitome of disdain, he gestured to the side of the house. I was being sent to the servants’ entrance.

‘My man,’ I said, in my best imitation of my father’s tones, ‘I am here to see Lord Hasbury in his capacity of magistrate in order to report a murder. You will kindly inform His Lordship of my presence – and there is to be no leaving me to cool my heels because you are too lily-livered to disturb him,’ I added as he showed me with the greatest reluctance into the library – a room as tidy and pristine as Wychbold’s was chaotic and filthy. There was, in fact, no evidence that it might ever have been used for its intended purpose. Meanwhile, it appeared that no orgies were currently in train.

‘Good God, man, you look as queer as Dick’s hatband,’ Lord Hasbury announced as he swept into the room. He stopped abruptly. ‘And a parson, too. I thought Coates had flit the coop.’

‘I have the honour of being his temporary replacement. Tobias Campion of Moreton St Jude’s at your service, My Lord.’

A slight frown edged between his eyebrows, but he did not indicate what it might signify. In any case it disappeared as swiftly as it had come. All courtesy, he stepped forward to offer me his hand. He might be in his fifties, but he had the complexion of a much younger man, and though he was plump he did not need the Cumberland corsets so vital to improve the outline of so many of his cronies. His light step suggested he was free from gout, the complaint that so afflicted my father.

‘And you want to report a murder? Surely this is the day when you should be celebrating the very opposite of death?’

I chose to take seriously what I feared he had meant as a jest. ‘Indeed so. And what makes this heinous crime even worse, My Lord, is the way the victim met his end.’

Seeing that I could barely frame the words, he poured me a bumper of brandy. ‘Here. Pull yourself together. Sit down before you fall down.’

I complied. Indeed I could do nothing else. At last, fortified by a second burning gulp of brandy, I said, ‘I would ask you to send a servant to summon Dr Edmund Hansard of Langley Park. It is too late for his services as a doctor, but he has extraordinary skill in deducing the circumstances of a person’s death.’ Not that it would take a genius to work out how the man had died – but Edmund would bring with him his calm common sense. ‘When he has arrived, and only then, we need a party of men to – to deal with the corpse.’

His face might be bland and unlined, but his eyes showed a clear comprehension. ‘You believe that the circumstances will reveal who perpetrated the act?’

‘So I would hope. But I know that like Moreton St Jude’s, Clavercote lacks a village constable. Would your steward deputise? However it is done, I must ask that you use your authority to instigate enquiries amongst local menfolk. Every tenant, every labourer, every beggar must be questioned: this is not a murder a man could have committed on his own. I found the victim as I rode between Clavercote and Moreton St Jude’s. I will undertake to have the inhabitants of the latter village interrogated, but as you are aware, over here I am no more than a visiting parson.’

‘Very well, Dr Campion, I will do as you ask.’ Perhaps there was an ironic stress on the last word. ‘All that you ask.’ Now there was no doubt of the irony. ‘Meanwhile my advice to you would be that you avail yourself of a modest nuncheon my butler will bring to you here. You will understand that I do not wish this news to reach my guests, to whom it would cause undoubted distress.’

His guests. For a moment I had forgotten them. I bowed, acknowledging the wisdom of his advice by pushing away the rest of the spirit. ‘But it must reach Wychbold’s ears, and in a proper manner. Would one of your servants convey a note to him?’

Nodding carelessly, he pointed to a standish and paper, and left the room. Trimming the pen, I gave careful thought to what I might say to Wychbold. At last I wrote something of which I was not ashamed, though the pile of discarded paper testified to the difficulty of the task. For good measure, I wrote notes to my new and sadly inexperienced
churchwardens, Mr Mead and Mr Tufnell, asking them to interrupt the good cheer of the egg-rolling and other celebrations by speaking to every male in the village. I should be there myself! But how could I be, when only I knew the location of the body? I was torn indeed, covering my face with my hands in my distress.