The Nine Tailors (41 page)

* * *

The banks of the Thirty-foot held, but the swollen Wale, receiving the full force of the Upper Waters and the spring tide, gave at every point. Before the cars reached St. Paul, the flood was rising and pursuing them. Wimsey’s car—the last to start—was submerged to the axles. They fled through the dusk, and behind and on their left, the great silver sheet of water spread and spread.

* * *

In the church, the Rector, with the electoral roll-call of the parish in his hand, was numbering his flock. He was robed and stoled, and his anxious old face had taken on a look of great pastoral dignity and serenity.

“Eliza Giddings.”

“Here I am, Rector.”

“Jack Godfrey and his wife and family.”

“All here, sir.”

“Henry Gotobed and his family.”

“All here, sir.”

“Joseph Hinkins... Louisa Hitchcock... Obadiah Holliday... Miss Evelyn Holliday....”

The party from the sluice gathered awkwardly about the door. Wimsey made his way up to where the Rector stood on the chancel steps, and spoke in his ear.

“John Cross and Will Thoday? That is terrible. God rest them, poor, brave fellows. Will you be good enough to tell my wife and ask her to break the sad news to their people? Will went to try and rescue Johnnie? That is just what I should have expected of him. A dear, good fellow in spite of everything.”

Wimsey called Mrs. Venables aside. The Rector’s voice, shaking a little now, went on with his call:

“Jeremiah Johnson and his family... Arthur and Mary Judd... Luke Judson...”

Then came a long, wailing cry from the back of the church:

“Will! Oh, Will! He didn’t want to live! Oh, my poor children—what shall we do?”

Wimsey did not wait to hear any more. He made his way down to the belfry door and climbed the stair to the ringing chamber. The bells were still sounding their frenzied call. He passed the sweating ringers and climbed again—up through the clock-chamber, piled with household goods, and up and on to the bell-chamber itself. As his head rose through the floor, the brazen fury of the bells fell about his ears like the blows from a thousand beating hammers. The whole tower was drenched and drunken with noise. It rocked and reeled with the reeling of the bells, and staggered like a drunken man. Stunned and shaken, Wimsey set his foot on the last ladder.

Half-way up he stopped, clinging desperately with his hands. He was pierced through and buffeted by the clamour. Through the brazen crash and clatter there went one high note, shrill and sustained, that was like a sword in the brain. All the blood of his body seemed to rush to his head, swelling it to bursting-point. He released his hold of the ladder and tried to shut out the uproar with his fingers, but such a sick giddiness overcame him that he swayed, ready to fall. It was not noise—it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable torment. He felt himself screaming, but could not hear his own cry. His ear-drums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than any roar of heavy artillery. That had beaten and deafened, but this unendurable shrill clangour was a raving madness, an assault of devils. He could move neither forward nor backwards, though his failing wits urged him, “I must get out—I must get out of this.” The belfry heaved and wheeled about him as the bells dipped and swung within the reach of an outstretched hand. Mouth up, mouth down, they brawled with their tongues of bronze, and through it all that shrill, high, sweet, relentless note went stabbing and shivering.

He could not go down, for his head dizzied and his stomach retched at the thought of it. With a last, desperate sanity, he clutched at the ladder and forced his tottering limbs upward. Foot by foot, rung by rung, he fought his way to the top. Now the trap-door was close above his head. He raised a leaden hand and thrust the bolt aside. Staggering, feeling as though his bones were turned to water, and with blood running from his nose and ears, he fell, rather than stepped, out upon the windy roof. As he flung the door to behind him, the demoniac clamour sank back into the pit, to rise again, transmuted to harmony, through the louvres of the belfry windows.

He lay for some minutes quivering upon the leads, while his senses slowly drifted back to him. At length he wiped the blood from his face, and pulled himself groaningly to his knees, hands fastened upon the fretwork of the parapet. An enormous stillness surrounded him. The moon had risen, and between the battlements the sullen face of the drowned fen showed like a picture in a shifting frame, like the sea seen through the port-hole of a rolling ship, so widely did the tower swing to the relentless battery of the bells.

The whole world was lost now in one vast sheet of water. He hauled himself to his feet and gazed out from horizon to horizon. To the south-west, St. Stephen’s tower still brooded over a dark platform of land, like a broken mast upon a sinking ship. Every house in the village was lit up; St. Stephen was riding out the storm. Westward, the thin line of the railway embankment stretched away to Little Dykesey, unvanquished as yet, but perilously besieged. Due south, Fenchurch St. Peter, roofs and spire etched black against the silver, was the centre of a great mere. Close beneath the tower, the village of St. Paul lay abandoned, waiting for its fate. Away to the east, a faint pencilling marked the course of the Potters Lode Bank, and while he watched it, it seemed to waver and vanish beneath the marching tide. The Wale River had sunk from sight in the spreading of the flood, but far beyond it, a dull streak showed where the land billowed up seaward, and thrust the water back upon the Fenchurches. Inward and westward the waters swelled relentlessly from the breach of Van Leyden’s Sluice and stood level with the top of the Thirty-foot Bank. Outward and eastward the gold cock on the weather-vane stared and strained, fronting the danger, held to his watch by the relentless pressure of the wind from off the Wash. Somewhere amid that still surge of waters, the broken bodies of Will Thoday and his mate drifted and tumbled with the wreckage of farm and field. The Fen had reclaimed its own.

* * *

One after another, the bells jangled into silence. Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity and Batty Thomas lowered their shouting mouths and were at peace, and in their sudden stillness. Tailor Paul tolled out the Nine Tailors for two souls passed in the night. The notes of the organ rose solemnly.

Wimsey crept down from the tower. Into the ringing-chamber, where old Hezekiah still stood to his bell, streamed light and sound from the crowded church. The rector’s voice, musical and small, came floating up, past the wings of the floating cherubim:

“Lighten our darkness…”

THE BELLS ARE RUNG DOWN

The bronze monster had struck him dead.

JULIAN SERMET: The Rosamonde.

For fourteen days and nights the Wale River ran backward in its bed and the floods stood in the land. They lay all about Fenchurch St. Stephen, a foot above the railway embankment, so that the trains came through snorting and slowly, sending up a wall of water right and left. St. Peter suffered most, its houses being covered to the sills of the upper windows, and its cottages to the eaves. At St. Paul, everything was flooded eight feet deep, except the mound where church and rectory stood.

The Rector’s organisation worked brilliantly. Supplies were ample for three days, after which an improvised service of boats and ferries brought in fresh food regularly from the neighbouring towns. A curious kind of desert-island life was carried on in and about the church, which, in course of time, assumed a rhythm of its own. Each morning was ushered in by a short and cheerful flourish of bells, which rang the milkers out to the cowsheds in the graveyard. Hot water for washing was brought in wheeled water-butts from the Rectory copper. Bedding was shaken and rolled under the pews for the day; the tarpaulins dividing the men’s side from the women’s side of the church were drawn back and a brief service of hymns and prayer was held, to the accompaniment of culinary clinkings and odours from the Lady chapel. Breakfast, prepared under Bunter’s directions, was distributed along the pews by members of the Women’s Institute, and when this was over, the duties of the day were put in hand. Daily school was carried on in the south aisle; games and drill were organised in the Rectory garden by Lord Peter Wimsey; farmers attended to their cattle; owners of poultry brought the eggs to a communal basket; Mrs. Venables presided over sewing-parties in the Rectory. Two portable wireless sets were available, one in the Rectory, the other in the church; these tirelessly poured out entertainment and instruction, the batteries being kept re-charged by an ingenious device from the engine of Wimsey’s Daimler, capably handled by the Wilderspins. Three evenings a week were devoted to concerts and lectures, arranged by Mrs. Venables, Miss Snoot and the combined choirs of St. Stephen and St. Paul, with Miss Hilary Thorpe and Mr. Bunter (comedian) assisting. On Sundays, the routine was varied by an Early Celebration, followed by an undenominational service conducted by the two Church of England priests and the two Nonconformist ministers. A wedding, which happened to fall due in the middle of the fortnight, was made a gala occasion, and a baby, which also happened to fall due, was baptised “Paul” (for the church) “Christopher” (because St. Christopher had to do with rivers and ferries), the Rector strenuously resisting the parents’ desire to call it “Van Leyden Flood.”

On the fourteenth day, Wimsey, passing early through the churchyard for a morning swim down the village street, noticed that the level of the water had shrunk by an inch, and returned, waving a handful of laurels from somebody’s front garden, as the nearest substitute for an olive-branch. That day they rang a merry peal of Kent Treble Bob Major, and across the sundering flood heard the bells of St. Stephen peal merrily back.

* * *

“The odour,” observed Bunter, gazing out on the twentieth day across the dismal strand of ooze and weed that had once been Fenchurch St. Paul, “is intensely disagreeable, my lord, and I should be inclined to consider it insanitary.”

“Nonsense, Bunter,” said his master. “At Southend you would call it ozone and pay a pound a sniff for it.”

The women of the village looked rueful at the thought of the cleansing and drying that their homes would need, and the men shook their heads over the damage to rick and barn.

The bodies of Will Thoday and John Cross were recovered from the streets of St. Stephen, whither the flood had brought them, and buried beneath the shadow of St. Paul’s tower, with all the solemnity of a muffled peal. It was only after they had been laid in the earth that Wimsey opened his mind to the Rector and to Superintendent Blundell.

“Poor Will,” he said, “he died finely and his sins died with him. He meant no harm, but I think perhaps he guessed at last how Geoffrey Deacon died and felt himself responsible. But we needn’t look for a murderer now.”

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“Because,” said Wimsey, with a wry smile, “the murderers of Geoffrey Deacon are hanged already, and a good deal higher than Haman.”

“Murderers?” asked the Superintendent, quickly. “More than one? Who were they?”

“Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul.”

There was an astonished silence. Wimsey added:

“I ought to have guessed. I believe it is at St. Paul’s Cathedral that it is said to be death to enter the bell-chamber when a peal is being rung. But I know that if I had stayed ten minutes in the tower that night when they rang the alarm, I should have been dead, too. I don’t know exactly what of—stroke, apoplexy, shock—anything you like. The sound of a trumpet laid flat the walls of Jericho and the note of a fiddle will shatter a vessel of glass. I know that no human frame could bear the noise of the bells for more than fifteen minutes—and Deacon was shut up there, roped and tied there, for nine interminable hours between the Old Year and the New.”

“My God!” said the Superintendent. “Why then, you were right, my lord, when you said that Rector, or you, or Hezekiah might have murdered him.”

“I was right,” said Wimsey. “We did.” He thought for a moment and spoke again. “The noise must have been worse that night than it was the other day—think how the snow choked the louvres and kept it pent up in the tower. Geoffrey Deacon was a bad man, but when I think of the helpless horror of his lonely and intolerable death-agony—”

He broke off, and put his head between his hands, as though instinctively seeking to shut out the riot of the bell-voices. The Rector’s mild voice came out of the silence.

“There have always,” he said, “been legends about Batty Thomas. She has slain two other men in times past, and Hezekiah will tell you that the bells are said to be jealous of the presence of evil. Perhaps God speaks through those mouths of inarticulate metal. He is a righteous judge, strong and patient, and is provoked every day.”

“Well,” said the Superintendent, striking a note of cheerful commonplace, “seems as if we didn’t need to take any more steps in this matter. The man’s dead, and the fellow that put him up there is dead too, poor chap, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t altogether understand about these bells, but I’ll take your word for it, my lord. Matter of periods of vibration, I suppose. Yours seems the best solution, and I’ll put it up to the Chief Constable. And that’s all there is to it.”

He rose to his feet.

“I’ll wish you good-morning, gentlemen,” he said, and went out.

The voice of the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul: Gaude, Gaudy Domini in laude. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. John Cole made me, John Presbyter paid me, John Evangelist aid me. From Jericho to John a-Groate there is no bell can better my note. Jubilate Deo. Nunc Dimittis, Domine. Abbot Thomas set me here and bade me ring both loud and clear. Paul is my name, honour that same.

Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul.

Nine Tailors Make a Man.

The End