Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  A heated argument blew up over this last point, as it was popularly hoped that Preston would indeed be sidestepped by Prince Charles in favour of Northumberland and Yorkshire. I regarded it as a delusion. This was his most direct way to London. It was his way to glory. I snapped my clay pipe and left.

  Later, sitting up in bed with Elizabeth, I gave her an account of the day. She had brought a jar of pickles up and was eating them one by one, generously giving the odd one to me. I allowed myself the pleasure of withholding until last the information that the headless body they’d found in Ambleside’s windypit and the head Fidelis found in the lane did not match. I then added that Luke Fidelis had convinced me there had been two murdered Highlanders from the Pretender’s army, and that the head of one and the body of the other were still to find.

  She said nothing for a few moments but spooned another pickle into her mouth while she thought.

  ‘Which leaves you with a dilemma, Titus. What does the County Coroner do in such a circumstance?’

  ‘Furzey says I can’t lawfully inquest either a headless corpse or a stray head. I need the corresponding parts of both bodies.’

  ‘That is not the dilemma I mean. As Coroner, you are servant of the crown. But which crown? The crown that the victims gave their allegiance to – the Old Pretender – or the crown that the murderers support, which we can assume is Farmer George’s? If the rest of these two bodies are found, and you insist on an inquest, you will have to decide in whose name it is done.’

  ‘So you think I should do nothing about the Highlanders.’

  ‘I know you, Titus. You have a way of storm-chasing in search of justice. But there is an argument for keeping your head down once in a while and allowing the storm to pass over you.’

  As if to underline her remark, there was a howl of wind and a battering of rain on the window.

  FOUR

  All night it stormed. Across the county, rills became rivers, and streams torrents. Trees were lifted as easily as carrots, loose thatch was ripped out, scaffolding was scattered. Carcasses began to appear in the river, drowned sheep and cattle, a dog or two; and then, in the afternoon of the next day, a human body, naked, was spotted as the spate rolled it under the bridge at Ribchester. A fisherman found these grisly remains early in the morning a few hundred yards further downstream, entangled in roots under the southern bank. When they pulled it out of the water, they found it was headless.

  The weather had resolved once more to a steady drizzle by the time Fidelis rode out with me along the eastern road to the village which, as antiquarians tell us, had once been a camp of the Roman army. Ribchester’s importance had long ago faded, but it still boasted a twice-weekly market, a church dedicated to St Wilfrid and a population of clogmakers and handloom operators.

  Norris met us in the parish rooms, a stone building like a barn where meetings and get-togethers were held. Here the head and body from Ambleside’s farm had been brought, as had the corpse newly discovered in the riverbank. Norris had placed the bodies beside each other for comparison on trestle tables. The river corpse’s neck had been cut through low down, close to the shoulders and below the thyroid cartilage, which meant that when Fidelis placed the windypit head atop the body, there was no doubt that they belonged together.

  As Fidelis began to work on his examination, a group of local gawpers drifted into the building, mainly old ones and children, all of whom were raggedly dressed and barefoot, or wearing wood-soled clogs.

  ‘It’ll be best if you turn them out, please,’ said Fidelis to Norris. But no sooner had Norris done so than they reappeared at the window, or clogged up the doorway, trying to see what was what. They were not threatening or active in any way, and in the end they were allowed to return as long as they kept well back from the anatomical proceedings. I noticed that the individuals in this group continually changed as people came in for a lingering look at Fidelis at work before going about their business again, but that one little girl of perhaps ten, with a lot of dark curly hair tied back with baling twine, stubbornly remained with us.

  I never assist Fidelis with the more visceral of his physical investigations, though I like to be on hand while he works. So I was loitering about, talking idly with Norris, when the dark-haired little girl came up and tugged at my sleeve.

  ‘Well, well!’ I said. ‘What do you want, my dear?’

  She looked up at me boldly.

  ‘Our Margery, she knows where something is. She’s seen it in its hiding place.’

  ‘Wait a minute! First things first. What is your name?’

  ‘Susannah.’

  ‘And who is Margery?’

  ‘My little sister.’

  ‘So what has Margery found in its hiding place?’

  ‘She won’t say.’

  ‘That could be anything, then, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it frighted her. That’s why she won’t say.’

  ‘And why are you telling me, Susannah?’

  ‘I think it’s what you want to find.’

  ‘Which is?’

  She nodded towards Fidelis bent over the table, plying one of his tools with considerable force.

  ‘He’s got two bodies and only one noddle, which he needs two of, don’t he?’

  This was a child who didn’t mince her words.

  ‘What exactly did Margery tell you?’

  ‘She just says she’s seen this man hiding. She said it were a buried man, all except his noddle staring at her, and she thought he were left over from Halloween. She were that frighted she won’t say more about it.’

  ‘A buried man? Where was this?’

  ‘Well, I think it’s not buried at all, me. I think it’s the noddle you want that goes with the rest that they got out of the river.’

  ‘Won’t she say where it is, this, er, noddle?’

  Susannah shook her head.

  ‘And where is she now?’

  ‘With our mother. At home.’

  ‘Perhaps you had better take me and Mr Norris there.’

  She took a step backward and pointed at Norris.

  ‘I won’t take him.’

  I took Norris by the elbow and turned him away from the child for a moment.

  ‘Who are they, Norris?’

  ‘Family called Bruff. He’s a farmworker, casual. She works a hand loom.’

  ‘Is this child reliable?’

  Norris shrugged.

  ‘Well, the family’s honest enough, though poor. But she’s a child. They make things up, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m going to have a word with the mother anyway and perhaps we can get little Margery to spit out some more detail or show me the place. You stay here in the meantime and keep the curious off the doctor’s back.’

  With pride of possession, Susannah took my hand and led me out into the street.

  The Bruff cottage lay about a hundred yards down the street and up a muddy weind. The interior was as clean as a house-proud woman could make it, but however hard she scrubbed and besomed, she would never give it the appearance of prosperity. There was almost no furniture and a pitifully thin turf fire in front of which we found Mrs Bruff kneeling and brushing the hair of another little child – Margery, I supposed, as she was a smaller edition of Susannah.

  ‘Hey, mother!’ said Susannah from the door. ‘I’ve brought a man with me that wants to see our Margery.’

  Her mother stood up and faced us as Susannah led me in. Awkwardly, I took off my hat.

  ‘Mrs Bruff, I believe. I am Titus Cragg, the County Coroner.’

  Mrs Bruff was not above thirty, with a somewhat boney face and a glint of intelligence in her eyes. She shook her head dubiously.

  ‘Nay, Mr Cragg, I hope you’ve not been listening to our girl. She’s that full of fancies she’ll see faces in the floor and make a horse of the wind, so her father says.’

  I smiled, as I thought, diplomatically.

  ‘Nevertheless, Mrs Bruff, she insists she has information that
will help me. A body which we believe to be that of a stranger turned up early this morning in the river downstream from here. But the body as it was found was unfortunately, er, decapitated. It was without its head.’

  ‘I know what decapitated means.’

  There was impatience in her hand-on-hip stance. She was the opposite of the village busybody or the gulper-down of sensational news.

  ‘Your daughter Susannah here believes that her sister knows where the missing, er, part is.’

  ‘She’s said nowt to me.’ She turned to the little girl. ‘What’s all this, our Margery?’

  Margery began immediately to cry and her mother went down on her knees to mop the tears. Mrs Bruff and her younger daughter then held a secret conversation directly into each other’s ears. Finally, Mrs Bruff rose and took her younger daughter’s hand.

  ‘She’ll show us where.’

  All four of us proceeded to the village street and turned down it in the direction of the riverbank meadow.

  ‘She says she were playing on the riverbank just this morning,’ said Mrs Bruff. ‘Her father will give her a leathering for going down there by herself so soon after the flooding, which is why she’s so shy of telling.’

  We’d left the last village house two hundred yards behind and were now walking along the riverbank. The entire meadow had been flooded only a few hours earlier, but the stream, though still much swollen, had already withdrawn to its normal confines, leaving large puddles, patches of silt and rafts of imported reed and other detritus in the middle of the meadow. We soon came up to a pair of willows spreading over the river, their trunks joined together as they emerged from the bank. Margery pointed at them but would go no nearer than twenty yards. Susannah was told to stay with her sister while Mrs Bruff and I approached the trees.

  The fused bases of the willows, coming out almost horizontally from the sloping bank, formed a natural receptacle in which water could collect, making a summer bird bath, say, or a hedgehog’s drinking bowl. Today a great quantity of sticks and other debris had piled up around the tree and its roots, entirely covering this declivity. But when we looked more closely at the heap of flood deposits, we saw something else was there, within the detritus. It was a human eye staring out.

  ‘There’s a head in there all right,’ said Mrs Bruff, as stating a matter of quite ordinary fact.

  Together we began lifting the covering matter away until we could clearly see the object as the flood had left it, right way up but askew in the hollow of the two willow trunks. To me, though I have seen most of the extreme manifestations of death, a sight like this never loses its aspects of horror and woe. The eyes seemed to protrude maniacally, the forehead and cheeks were streaked and smoothed with grey river mud, and the muddy hair had dried to form itself into stiff little worms. It might have been a Medusa head had it not been for the abundant russet-coloured face-hair of a fellow who, from the weather-beaten lines that creased his face, might have been forty years of age.

  ‘Eh, it’s a fright to look at is that,’ said Mrs Bruff. ‘You’ll be wanting to reunite him, I’m thinking.’

  Indeed, I did want to reunite him, but one cannot openly carry a severed head up a village street on a Thursday afternoon for all to see.

  ‘What are we going to wrap it in?’ I said.

  I was, a little reluctantly, about to take off my coat when I felt another tug on its sleeve and turned. Susannah was pointing to a muddy heap in the middle of the meadow.

  ‘There’s a blanket, mister. Shall us fetch it?’

  She didn’t wait for my say-so, but ran across to the place, with little Margery scampering after her, and returned in triumph, dragging a sopping, filthy piece of broadcloth. Mrs Bruff and I took the cloth by its corners between us and gave it a shake to remove twigs and pebbles, then twisted it to squeeze out some of the river water. Finally, Mrs Bruff spread the cloth on the ground and we saw it was a Highland tartan, though very muddy and indistinct. I lifted the head by its ears and put it down to be wrapped.

  So we returned to Fidelis in the parish rooms. He was too absorbed in his almost finished task to pass comment on our discovery of the severed head. But a few minutes later he had finished sewing up his incisions and I was able to offer him the dripping bundle.

  ‘So you have the head. Excellent. Let’s see if it fits.’

  He placed it down, severed neck to severed neck, and we saw at once that it was a match for the body found on Ambleside’s land.

  ‘First of all, this second body is smaller and slimmer,’ said Fidelis. ‘Less mature, though a young man rather than a youth.’

  ‘The head confirms it. He looks about twenty.’

  We were riding back to Preston, having left Norris with instructions to secure the two bodies and draft a jury for an inquest to be held in two days’ time. I was not sure what Elizabeth would say, but if we were indeed going to be overwhelmed by armies of Highlanders and redcoats, I wanted to get this business over first.

  ‘His hands are younger too,’ Fidelis went on, ‘but even so they look less used. And I don’t think that he wore the kilt.’

  ‘No tell-tale brown knees, then?’

  ‘No. Lily-white, they are. However, the most important new evidence from these bodies comes in the form of the wounds.’

  ‘You mean we have some wounds to inspect at last?’

  ‘We do. We have a bullet hole in the chest of the younger man and a great crushing at the back of the skull of the elder – he was struck hard on the back of his head. Both injuries, I think, would have resulted in immediate death.’

  ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Yes, there were two other indicative differences between these two men. One is in their stomachs.’

  ‘Neither man had a fat belly as far as I could see.’

  ‘Exactly. As far as you could see. But I’ve seen inside their bellies and they ate different food. This young man had dined on some sort of game in a ragout, perhaps pheasant. His stomach also contained traces of nuts, dried fruit and sweetmeats, and he had been drinking wine. Different from his companion, who had dined off boiled oats mixed with offal and the blackest of black beer.’

  ‘So, if they were this supposed scouting party travelling together, it does not seem they were eating together.’

  ‘And what they ate doesn’t look like two foragers living and eating rough. The old one might possibly have been fending for himself, but the last time the youngster was victualled it was by a chef.’

  ‘Were they maybe travelling as a young master and his servant?’

  ‘Or somebody’s precious callow sprig and a muscular bodyguard appointed by his doting dad. You have the cloth from the riverside that you carried the head in, I hope.’

  ‘I have it. I’ll get it washed and we’ll be able to see it better tomorrow. You mentioned a second difference between the two heads. What is it?’

  ‘In their mouths. The second head, the one found by the river, had nothing in its mouth.’

  ‘No note from the loyal covenanters?’

  ‘No. There may have been, but if so, it was washed away.’

  ‘Do you have any other observations?’

  ‘I saw no new injury marks or wounds in the remains found here at Ribchester. But there is something about the beheading in both cases. It was done with a saw, and rather a delicate one.’

  ‘Not a woodsman’s saw?’

  ‘More like one of my own instruments. The cut edges were hardly rough at all, and the work was done with precision. Whoever did it knew what they were about.’

  ‘A butcher, then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s possible.’

  I could tell that he regarded the manner of the cutting as a significant detail, but he said no more about it, turning instead to a more general conversation until we reached Preston.

  My horses were kept at Lawson’s Livery in Old Shambles, and as I turned into the yard, Old Lawson himself came out to speak to me.

  ‘I am holding a
meeting of all my customers, Mr Cragg, to tell them about certain dispositions I must make with all this scrowing and dicking about up north. Please will you be good enough to attend? It’s tomorrow morning at ten, here in the stable yard.’

  ‘Very well, Lawson, I’ll be there.’

  Over supper I told Elizabeth of my proposed inquest in forty-eight hours. She listened attentively.

  ‘If this dead lad’s as precious as you say, there may be consequences for whoever killed him, and for anyone thought to be helping his killers.’

  ‘I am wondering if he was a messenger. The killers left a note claiming both dead men were rebels from the Pretender’s army. Fidelis believes this, based on his finding of a pair of sunburned knees.’

  Elizabeth grasped at once what this meant, and laughed.

  ‘Of course! Because their men wear skirts and go bare-arsed, as it’s said.’

  ‘The common soldiers go bare-arsed, I think, my dearest. Not the officers.’

  ‘Bare-arsed or not, they have a fearsome reputation. The word around the town is that they do not stop at beheadings.’

  ‘Have you been talking with Miss Colley? Well, whatever the truth, the events that happened the last time they were here don’t make for a pretty tale. No wonder people are trembling in their beds.’

  She grasped my hand across the table.

  ‘But we do not tremble, do we, Titus? We do not huddle under our blankets and cover our heads for fear of civil war and bare Scotch arses. That will do no good. Surely not all of them are savages. Some may be like the sergeant in the Sergeant’s Letter.’

  That night in my library I took down a volume of The Spectator and read again the celebrated ‘Sergeant’s Letter’ with the editor’s approving remarks on it. This sergeant had been at the battle of Blenheim and his letter to a fellow soldier relates the slaughter of comrades and his own head wound (which he makes light of), and goes on to promise he will send the contents of a dead comrade’s purse to the man’s grieving widow – seven shillings and three pence in total. The letter has a stoicism and nobility about it, despite the fact that it was not the writing of any officer or gentleman, but a fellow from ‘the Heap of the Army’. I tried to take heart from The Spectator’s assurance that the common soldier, for all that is said of him, is a man of natural gallantry and generosity. And I tried to believe that the Highland soldier would be no different from this sergeant in Marlborough’s army. But the image that Miss Colley and Elizabeth had left in my mind, of beheadings and anthropophagy, and Scotchmen in skirts with bare arses, would not go away.