Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  Having rested for a while with the calves, it occurred to me for the first time that the soldiers had forgotten to reapply my leg-iron. Small mercies. I got up and prowled in the dark around the perimeter of my cage, testing the bars. They were strong. Without a tool of any kind, I stood no chance of penetrating them. And the ground was frozen hard: there was not the slightest possibility of digging my way out. I was as helpless as the two calves, but unlike them I could have no hope that someone would arrive to pay my ransom.

  What would it be like to be shot? Wearing a blindfold, if I was lucky. Some sort of stake that I’d be tied to. Would there be one shooter or more than one? I had the idea that it was customary for a military execution to be by a troop of gunners, so that no individual could accuse himself of being the unique one that did the killing. It was a combined effort by comrades, and if there be any doubt afterwards, it would be a shared doubt.

  I wished I had a light and writing material, to put down some thoughts on the solemn occasion of my facing death. I remembered once our schoolmaster reading to us from a book of Raleigh’s melancholy poems those he composed in the Tower before his execution. We had been made to learn one of them by heart, but now I could remember just three lines. They ran, more or less:

  Such is time, which takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys, and all we loved,

  And pays us back with age and dust.

  These were not words likely to brisk me up.

  I have never been much of a poet – not much of a Raleigh, come to that. But I still wished I could write a letter, for Elizabeth, for Hector, to be something left of me after I’d gone. Not the possessions I would leave in my will, though there were plenty of those (and how meaningless!). And not my journal, which is mostly a dull daily record. No, I meant something of my thoughts on saying farewell, and my love for them. Otherwise, my family would only have rough memories for things I had said in affection, and many times only half said, as well as some few of my better actions. Such things live on in human memory, but only for a while. Memories erode, lose their shape and definition, and eventually disappear entirely. And when they disappear, one disappears oneself. That was the regrettable side of what I learned from a great friend of mine in childhood, Jerome Greatorex, my father’s clerk. Jerome was an old man by the time I knew him, and I treated him as a kind of additional grandfather. We held long philosophical discussions together and once, speaking of death, and the fear of it, Greatorex told me, ‘Remember, boy, you’re never dead until the last one that knew you is dead. Until then you live in memory.’

  Once I reached manhood, like Greatorex at the same age, and partly through his influence, I lost belief in the soul – or, at least, in its immortality. Greatorex told me that he did not consider there was a single soul in hell. I challenged him (as still youthfully credulous) by asking, ‘What about the truly wicked people such as murderers, who surely can’t go to heaven?’ He told me he did not think much of heaven either.

  ‘We come on to this earth inexplicably, and we leave it the same way. One day you may believe this too. It is not an opinion you want to go around shouting about, but it is one I believe educated people increasingly share in these days. Sir Isaac Newton and Mr Locke have shown us the mechanics of the universe and of society. They have nothing to say of the soul.’

  So that was it. I was looking annihilation directly in the face. I thought of those Calvinists who believed in predestination; it didn’t matter now if they were right or wrong. If life itself is the interval between nothing and nothing, all theories of God and his intentions are equally ridiculous.

  I heard the scrabble of a rat and what sounded like gnawing. I shuddered. That I was spending my last night on earth in the company of young cattle and rodents was not cheering. The other prisoners they had brought here were in other cages, and none of them close by. The nearest thing to human company was when a shadow passed before the bars of my cage – one of the soldiers on sentry duty. I got up and crept to the wall. I could see him through gaps in the cage wall, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers. Steam plumed from his mouth as he breathed out into the freezing air. I did not feel like speaking to him, even if he had been able to understand English. After all, he might be the one to put a bullet through my heart in the morning. I watched as he moved off to do the rounds of the other cages, and it became quiet again.

  The rats resumed their gnawing and scrabbling, louder this time. Were they trying to get in? Or out? Suddenly, there was a mighty crack, like a pistol shot. I froze. The hairs on my neck bristled. Then the scrabbling became louder, fiercer, and I began to doubt my original rodent hypothesis. The noises were too loud.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  There was a second cracking sound, multiple compared with the first, and all at once moonlight came into the calf-cage. An aperture had opened up in its far back wall, blocked now by a dark figure that was forcing its way inside. Having succeeded, it stood up on two legs.

  ‘How d’you do, Titus?’ said Luke Fidelis. ‘And how in thunder did you get yourself into this pickle?’

  FOURTEEN

  I am not ashamed to say that I embraced him, and that tears welled up in my eyes. Perhaps I would have saluted any deliverer in this way, for I was certainly in a distressed and feeble state. But Fidelis being my close friend, and frequent colleague, made it impossible to suppress my emotion.

  Fidelis, however, was the same as always – rational and cool in the face of physical danger. At other times he displayed a warmer side, usually in connection with a beautiful woman, for in love he was woundable and perhaps even capable of weeping (though I had never seen it). Also at certain sporting contests – boxing, or a cockfight, or (as I remembered) one particularly barbaric football game – he might become extremely heated about the money and honour that lay at stake. But at times when an entirely cold calculation was needed to face extraordinary jeopardy, Fidelis was your man.

  ‘We must leave,’ he said in a low voice as he disentangled himself from my arms, ‘and be quick and quiet about it. The sentries should have reached the far side of the compound by now. They’ll be stopping there ten minutes for a smoke.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve been watching them. You go first.’

  He pressed me down by my shoulder and I sank to my hands and knees, then crawled towards the narrow opening that Fidelis had somehow created in the ashwood wall. As I pushed through it, my hand touched a tool, which proved to be a hand axe, and another, which proved to be a short crowbar. Then I was outside. I stood up in the lee of the calf-cage, pressing my back against it, and sucked air deep into my lungs, drawing tremendous breaths of freedom and escape. Fidelis came out immediately behind me and, as soon as he stood, crept to the corner of the building and peered round it.

  ‘Come on, Titus! You must run if you can.’

  The moonlight made the frosted grass of the compound glitter. To anyone watching, there was enough of it to pick us out as two black shadows flitting across the whitened ground. But the sentries must have been fully engaged with their pipes for we heard no cry of alarm or sound of feet running towards us across the frozen earth.

  But as we neared the gate, there was a new danger. I made out the silhouette of a large dog kennel, and from it a huge, shaggy, drooling hound emerging to greet us. He gave out a low growl, his gigantic mouth agape, and we both pulled up and stood facing him.

  ‘Is it chained?’ whispered Fidelis.

  ‘I don’t know. Didn’t you meet him on the way in?’

  ‘I came over the fence on the other side.’

  ‘Then why don’t we go back there now?’

  ‘Because Towser here will run after us if he can. He’ll certainly bark and probably bite. Even if they’ve chained him, he’ll make a lot of noise and bring the sentries down on us.’

  ‘I don’t think he will,’ I said. ‘We can easily get past this dog. And he isn’t called Towser. She’s a bitch.’

&nbs
p; I had suddenly understood who the dog was.

  ‘I have met her,’ I went on, ‘and she’s nothing but a softling.’

  I went towards the dog, and she moved her massive head up and down, sniffing the air around me. Her memory stirred and she in her turn knew me – as the owner of that pleasant little buffle-dog that she’d met in Preston and had wanted to play with a few nights back.

  ‘Bawty,’ I said, softly.

  I placed my hand on her broad head to scratch it in a friendly way, as I had before. She wagged her tail and very quietly whined, as if pleading for a favour. I now saw the screw-clip that attached her collar to a long trailing chain which, at its other end, must have been locked on to an embedded ring inside the kennel. For some reason of pity for the dog, or defiance of her master, it came into my head to set her free. In just a couple of seconds I had unscrewed the clip, unhooked the chain from Bawty’s collar and thrown it aside. Knowing she was free, the dog then began capering around, as I had seen her do on Playhouse Green when she had tried to press Suez into a game.

  ‘Come on,’ pressed Fidelis. ‘Leave the mutt. We must go.’

  We crept out of the pinfold and past Pitt’s house, which lay in darkness, before taking to our heels along the track that led away from the house and towards the road. Bawty bounded joyfully after us.

  ‘Bawty, no!’ I whispered sharply when we reached the road. ‘Go back! Go back!’

  I pointed the way back, but Bawty sat on her haunches and looked at me from the depth of her soul, her tail thumping the ground.

  ‘Titus!’ said Fidelis sharply. ‘I have a horse tied to a tree in that copse over there. Forget the dog and come on, or we may never get away.’

  With Bawty still in close attendance, we hopped over the stone wall that lined the other side of the road. The rebel army was camped on the other side of town so that the field we landed in was deserted. It contained a small stand of trees about fifty yards back from the road, and here we found one of Luke Fidelis’s horses haltered to a tree and patiently awaiting us.

  ‘So your horse wasn’t discovered by the rebels?’ I asked.

  ‘No indeed. I concealed him just in time. My neighbour luckily has an unusually capacious pigsty.’

  He patted the horse’s flank.

  ‘The poor fellow didn’t much like the stink, but it stopped the rebels from having him for their cavalry, which he would have hated much more. Here. Take this. You must be thirsty and hungry.’

  He had unbuckled a saddlebag and now pulled out a flask, a lump of bread and another of cheese. When I had devoured them, Fidelis mounted the horse, a large, strong animal easily capable of carrying the two of us without strain. Fidelis pulled me up behind him and we started off, taking roads that skirted the edge of the town at a distance of about a mile. Some way north of the village of Standish, we met the Great North Road and were soon making strong progress towards Preston. Bawty, who had raced around us in boisterous circles at the start, soon settled down in our wake at a steady and contented trot. She was now a confirmed deserter from the rebel army.

  ‘So how the devil did you find me?’ I asked.

  ‘Mr Freckleton at the Bear’s Paw Inn here in Wigan. I’d been calling on patients around Preston all day, but when I returned and Elizabeth told me you had been taken, I set off at once to follow. I made a reckless promise to Mrs Cragg to bring you back. Well, Freckleton knew the pinfold had been put to use for prisoners and directed me there. I was watching as they brought you in. You looked extremely depressed.’

  ‘I was depressed. I was a condemned man. The early hours of the morning had been set aside for getting me shot and I could see no way out.’

  Waking to a new day, Preston found it had a sore head. The rebels’ stay had been brief enough, and the soldiers had been more or less well behaved, but no one sees the backs of more than six or seven thousand uninvited guests without there being much to set right, repair and clear up. Also the occupation had given the townsfolk a heady intermission from reality, a spree if you like, and they were now crapulously out of sorts as they went about this business. As we crossed the bridge at Walton and rode up to Church Gate, we passed the time of day with a few men and women along the wayside. They growled rather than spoke and did not walk erect, but shifted along with heads bowed, as if to avoid suspicion or accusation.

  While the political division of the town was by no means healed, it was clear that neither the Whigs nor the Jacobites knew quite what to make of matters. Had the Chevalier (or Pretender) proved his honour or his shame? Was the Pretender (or Chevalier) scuttling down the road to miserable defeat or marching towards refulgence and glory? No one was quite sure of anything.

  My own first concern on opening the door of my home was with my family, and most particularly how Elizabeth fared. I called loudly to her from the doorstep, and she came into the hall with a look of incredulity mixed with wonder.

  ‘Oh, Titus! I had quite made up my mind they had killed you.’

  ‘They wanted to, and might have, but for this man.’

  I turned sideways to show her Fidelis, astride his horse in the street. He raised his hat and she went down the steps to give him grave thanks. I did not hear exactly what she said – something along the lines that she was sorry if he had put himself in danger on her account. Well, I thought, Fidelis might have gone to my aid in any case, but an appeal from a beautiful woman had always stirred his chivalrous soul, compelling him to respond at any cost to himself.

  Suez came out and barked in a friendly way at Bawty and ran circles around her, which she seemed delighted with. I had suggested during our ride that as we had Suez already, Fidelis might like to take the big dog into his own establishment. After some thought, he liked the idea, and now a rope was found by which Bawty was towed away behind Fidelis, protesting a little at the parting from Suez, to her new home. Before he left, Fidelis raised a matter that had escaped from my mind as completely as I had escaped from the pinfold.

  ‘We must talk about Horace Limmington,’ he said. ‘I suppose you will not change the date of tomorrow’s inquest.’

  So we arranged to meet next day at the coffee house after Divine Service and I returned indoors, where I gratefully allowed myself to be pampered by Matty. A warming pan was put in my bed and a great fire lit in the bedchamber; meanwhile, a hot breakfast was prepared for me. By ten o’clock, when I had eaten my fill, the warming pan came out and I slipped into its place. I slept deliciously through the rest of the morning.

  By Sunday the town had been more or less set to rights, but many waited eagerly for news of the rebels’ progress. Word had come in that the Duke of Cumberland, the King’s third son, was returned from service in Flanders to take command of a government force now in Staffordshire and would undoubtedly (according to some) intercept the Pretender and bring him to battle. In church on Sunday the vicar’s sermon praised the young military Duke, with a text from his favourite prophet, Jeremiah: ‘The lion is come up from the thicket and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way.’ In his ringing (but long-winded) way he went on to foresee the lion’s imminent mauling and disembowelment of the Jacobite army.

  My own attention went elsewhere. I had the Limmington inquest to conduct at Penwortham the next day, in preparation for which I decided that after dinner I would ride over to Penwortham on Jones – the other horses having still not returned to Lawson’s – and follow Luke Fidelis’s advice by paying a visit to Limmington’s doctor, Thomas Ross.

  The doctor’s house showed the man’s considerable prosperity, the kind more likely to be found in a physician of Preston. Mrs Ross, a lean, fine-boned woman with an anxious look in her eye, received me. She became noticeably agitated when I said who I was.

  ‘Oh, Mr Cragg, we are honoured, so honoured to receive you. Please forgive my husband as he is in his laboratory making up some powders.’

  ‘No matter,’ I said. ‘Will you show me through to him?’

  ‘Oh no! No. Oh no! He would n
ot like that at all. Not at all. I must fetch him to you.’

  I waited for five minutes in the hall before Ross himself appeared, a man even bonier than his wife, and with intense staring eyes.

  ‘This way,’ he said, opening a door into what I could immediately see was his consulting room. ‘I have heard of you, Cragg.’

  He said this in such a way that I felt as if he had shaken a warning finger at me. He now pulled a watch from his vest pocket and, noting the time, laid it on the writing table. Then he continued in abrupt style.

  ‘I am a busy man. Kindly state your business.’

  Before I could do so, Mrs Ross flitted in, offering me refreshments of currant-breads, shortcake and tea. Her husband gave her a stern glare.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, woman. We are in the consulting room. This is not an occasion of biscuits but of business. Leave us.’

  When she had gone, I asked if he had heard of the death of Horace Limmington (he had) and whether he knew anything of his last hours (he did not).

  ‘I haven’t seen the man for a number of months. He lacked the funds, it seemed, so I closed my books to him. I cannot afford patients that are non-payers.’

  ‘I see. And how was he when you last saw him in a professional way?’

  ‘Very unwell. On the last occasion I noted many signs of decline in him – his spleen, his liver and his stomach were all somewhat disordered, and his heart was weak. He had allowed his troubles to overwhelm him. He had succumbed to poverty and loneliness, and these make very deadly companions, I find.’

  ‘Yet his fortunes had recently turned somewhat. He had found a large sum of money which, he told me, if he could make good his claim to it, would set him back on his feet.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Ross, wagging his head sagely. ‘He had dizzy spells, tingling in the limbs, cloudy urine and a morbid itching in the testes.’