The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  “What’s that, boy?” demanded Mr. Craddock, pointing at the basket with his whip.

  “Treacle and candles, sir, for Lapwater Hall.”

  Mr. Gil Craddock squinted fiercely at the boy for twelve seconds, and made him repeat the words. Whereat he clouted the boy on the head, and stalked on.

  In Leigh his reception was not of a piece. Some pulled off hats, others stared over fences. He strode into the Smack, and the company, half a dozen fishermen, stopped their talk on the instant; some rose, and some sat stolidly in their places. Among them that sat was Big Sam Gill, a smuggling, hard-drinking ruffian, eminent among the ruffians—no scarcities—of Leigh; who cared for nobody, and would much rather fight the first man he saw than not. Big Sam Gill resumed the conversation with a raised voice and offensive emphasis.

  “Gen’elman! He ben’t no man, let alone gen’elman! Ta ben’t no man as tells another to drink out o’ t’hoss-pond. ’Tis a swine. An’ so they carls it Lap-water Hall! Ha! ha!” Big Sam guffawed in Mr. Gil Craddock’s face.

  At the beginning of the speech that gentleman’s ill-sorted eyes had turned ferociously on the group. At its end, with one stride and a reach, he clutched the big red ear that was on the near side of Sam Gill’s shaggy head, and drove the head a great thump against the wall.

  Sam was up in a flash, and hurled himself at his aggressor, but was met with a straight smash of the left, flush in the face, like the kick of a horse. Then, even while he stood and blinked, the butt of Mr. Gil Craddock’s riding-whip beat across his head a dozen blows; till Big Sam Gill lay heaped on the floor with broken head enough for three. Mr. Craddock was a prompt man, whatever else might be said about him. He snarled across the faces of Big Sam’s friends, gave them a curse between them, with a thump of his whip on the table that made the pots jump, and stamped out.

  It was a brisk mile to the house for the brown mare, for she carried an ill-tempered man. In the road before the house Mr. Craddock saw a waggon, laden with many pots and pans and a deal of crockery; and as he turned for the stable-yard, Nan Tricker, bringing a mug of ale, met him full in the way, and began explanations forthwith.

  “’Twere onny for Tim, sir—Tim o’ Belfairs. Waggoner were carryin’ the crocks to Black House as guessin’ ’twere the Leigh House meant, but Tim bringed him on, knowin’ ’twere Lapwater—” Nan checked the word too late.

  “Go on, damme! Go on! Lapwater Hall! Lap-water Hall ye’ll call my house, will ye, ye drabs?” Mr.

  Craddock snatched the mug, and flung it across the yard. “Lapwater Hall, eh? It sha’n’t have the name for nothing, damn you all! For water you shall drink, or nothing I Burn ye, I’ll slit the gullet of the man, woman, or child that drinks aught but water in this place! I’ll let the liquor out of ’em, damme! D’ye hear?” he roared for all to hear, dancing furiously now on the lawn before the house; “d’ye hear? If a soul drinks my liquor, begad, I’ll take it back with a carving-knife!”

  And Mr. Gil Craddock bade fair to stick to his resolve. He kept the cellar key in his own pocket. He would have no brewing on the premises, and all good drink he kept for himself, under lock and key. Moodily he nursed the affront put upon his house, and magnified it day by day. Not a rustic could show himself about the place, on whatsoever innocent errand, but drew forth Mr. Craddock with a torrent of curses and “Hey! you want my beer, ye sodden swine, don’t ye? And this here’s Lapwater Hall, is it? Hey! Lapwater Hall, ye call it? Go and lap water then, you ill-got dog, lap water!”

  Poor Mrs. Fidler fell off sadly, from privation of mild ale. It was a privation to which she was unused, and again and again she protested secretly to Nan Tricker it was one she wouldn’t abide. Nevertheless she stayed in the service, being so far in terror of Mr.

  Craddock as equally to fear staying and leaving; while Amos Tricker fell into a despondency which only an Essex farm-hand deprived of beer can ever know.

  It needs scarce be said that Mr. Gil Craddock made no friends, high or low. No man inhospitable with his drink could make friends in South Essex; and so this man had no friend but his brown mare, who lapped water with content. Even now that he was so well established in the house Mr. Craddock was away from home as long as not, but for such irregular periods that the household got little relief by his absence. Still nobody could guess where he went. At times he would lock himself in a room and drink and sleep two days together; and the differing opinions of the neighbourhood merged into a steady belief that he was the Devil.

  And so things went for months till a winter’s night when the moon was ringed and the clouds swarmed fast across her face. All Rochford Hundred, Foulness, and Canvey lay wetter and marshier than ever; and Lapwater Hall was barred, bolted, and shuttered. Mrs. Fidler and Nan Tricker sat in the kitchen, sewing little bags in which to stuff chips from the gibbet at Hadleigh Cross: a very useful remedy for ague. Mrs. Fidler’s spirits were low, for a dog had been howling wofully since nightfall, and now a huge winding-sheet was visible in the candle. But a howling dog must rest sometimes, and a fresh draught will always cure a winding-sheet.

  For these reasons the troubles were lessening, when Nan’s ear caught the sound of a horse’s feet—feet that went with a regular break and fall that told a plain tale. The sound neared, and came in at the stableyard.

  “’Tis the master,” said Nan, “and the mare’s lamed.” She began to draw the bolts, and had scarce drawn the last when the door flew open from a kick, and Mr.

  Gil Craddock stood before them, haggard and miry. “Law, sir!” said the women.

  “Shut your mouths,” he answered hoarsely. “Tear that apron and tie this arm.”

  Then they saw that his right arm hung loose at his side, and blood dripped from his fingers to the floor. Mrs. Fidler, terrified, scissored the sleeve away as he directed, and wound her torn apron tightly over a wound by the elbow joint.

  Mr. Craddock took a jug of water and emptied it at one pull. “Any more lights?” he asked, pointing to the candle.

  “No, sir.”

  “Dowse it. Bolt and bar, and neither stir nor breathe, or I’ll come back and twist your two necks. Say nothing, whoever comes.” And with that he went out.

  The two women sat in the dark and trembled, neither daring to speak. They heard him go toward the fence at the roadside. In a few moments more they could hear him returning, this time with a quiet and stealthy step; and they clung together in a terror. Was he creeping back to murder them? No, he passed round by the back.

  And now there came the noise of many horses, pounding through the mire of the road and nearing fast, till they stopped before the house with tramplings and shouts.

  “House there! Hullo, hullo!” The gate slammed, and they were within the fence.

  “Hullo there! Hullo!” And with that there came a great thumping at the front door. The women sat and quaked.

  Many voices called without.

  “Come on, come on! Why stand here?”

  “Maybe they’ve seen him.”

  “Get away ahead!”

  “Where?”

  “He’s doubled.”

  “Knock again, or go round. They’ll lend us fresh horses.”

  The thumps on the door began afresh, and some turned into the stable-yard, shouting. Nan Tricker wept, biting hard on a thick fold of Mrs. Fidler’s gown to keep back a scream.

  In the midst of all the hubbub arose a cry of “Here’s the nag! He’s close about!” And then a shower of blows fell on the door behind which the women cowered. “Open the door! Open, open! In the King’s name! King’s officers!”

  Some heavy thing was driven thrice against the door, and then with a fourth blow it crashed in, and Nan Tricker and Mrs. Fidler fell together into a corner with a dismal howl. They were dragged out, limp and hysterical, among half a dozen muddy men with steaming horses, and they wept and gasped unintelligibly.

  Then the
men took lights and searched high and low, in the house, the yard, and the outbuildings. For two of them were officers, and the man they sought they described as a powerfully-built fellow with a squint—Cutter Lynch, the highwayman.

  So large and so daring had been his work on the great Essex Road and some others, that he had long “weighed enough,” in the matter of rewards, to make it worth while to raise a party to run him down. There was no other way of getting him. He worked alone and confided in nobody; he never drank while on the game; and in all things he was the most businesslike and watchful high-tobyman unhanged. The party had had the luck to flush him near Shenfield, and he had shot one man dead in the saddle before he got away across country with a bullet in his own arm. By Ingrave, Horndon, Laindon and Pitsea they had hunted him, and the brown mare must have been already well spent, or they could never have kept within hail of Cutter Lynch, who knew every dyke and fence. Down in the marshes, this side of Bemfleet, he had bogged them cleverly, and walked his nag slowly up the hill before their faces, toward a farther stretch of the road they had lately crossed, leaving them to come out as they got in; and so they followed the road and came to Lapwater Hall.

  All that night lanterns flashed about the house and the land near it. In the grey of the morning the brown mare was seen shivering and whickering piteously by the pond, and in the pond floated a hat. They took one of those great rakes called cromes, and dragged from under the culvert at the end the staring corpse of Mr. Gil Craddock.

  It was there he must have hidden himself, hanging on by the broken ragstone till he fainted from the drain of blood and fell; so the officers judged, and so it was told about. As the day came and the news flew the Leigh people gathered about the pond and stared and whispered. Here was a judgment! The man was drowned in the water he had offered thirsty men when he owed them ale.

  Staring thus, they found another thing floating on the water and clinging near the edge. They fished it out and turned it over in amazement, for it was a pair of horses’ ears joined by a strap and fitted with a catch to hold to the headstall. They were the false ears that Brown Meg wore when Mr. Gil Craddock was Cutter Lynch, the high-tobyman!

  There was the end of Mr. Gil Craddock in the body. A few mouths afterward, at Nan Tricker’s wedding, there was a deal of rejoicing, and whatever was drunk did not come from a pond. For it was drink of a quality so good as to give Amos Tricker an idea. He would descend into the cellars of Lapwater Hall, which stood tenantless, and would make definite investigation into the contents. But he got no farther than the cellar steps, for there, in a gloomy corner, stood the ghost of Mr. Gil Craddock, mug in hand, squinting on him and beckoning him to drink his fill of the old ale. And nothing could be juster or more likely, when it is remembered what deadly sin the highwayman had to purge, in the denial of good drink owing his fellow-man; though Amos would have none of the invitation, but ran till he fell headlong, and there slept.

  And of the many witnesses, illustrious drinkers, who have seen old Gil since that time, it is said that not one has accepted his offer of drink, and so helped him to redeem his otherwise unpardonable fault. Though it is not easy to believe Essex men so implacable as that.

  THE BLACK BADGER

  Roboshobery Dove had unstrapped his wooden leg, as was his way when he sat in this place to smoke his pipe and tell me the tales of his youth. He stuck the peg into a convenient cleft on the hillside, so that the socket made a comfortable rest for his elbow, and looked out from under the brim of his glazed hat at the scene that was most familiar and grateful to his eye: the scene wherein he read the news of the outer world more readily than he could have done in any newspaper in Essex. There below lay the vast space of soft and sunny water where the Thames and the sea were one; at our feet the marshes, green like a billiard table, mapped over with the geometric lines of dikes and ditches, and seamed along the middle with that thin brown line that had wrought such little change as the countryside had known since Charles the First: the railway.

  Roboshobery Dove was always an old man, in my memory, though a sturdy old fellow to the last. As I write it is some way short of twenty years since he died, yet he fought the French in a King’s ship as a boy, and was never tired of saying so. He was an old man, very, when he taught me the cutlass drill and told me tales in half-holidays; and he lived to tell me many more tales in years when I was a schoolboy no longer: tales of smuggling on the Essex coast, of fights with Dutch fishermen in the lowland seas; and of Cunning Murrell, the witch-finder, he told me all that I have written and much that I can never write. And now, at the time when he told me the story that I am to tell again, he still stumped his way near and far without a totter, square and upright in his green smock, brown and hard in his face, and no more than iron-grey in the hair that curled over his earrings, though he was nearer ninety than eighty.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the old man, “I often wish I was young again myself, an’ knew all about everything. I don’t remember ever bein’ particular new-fashioned, but I was young once, an’ I knowed a deal. I dunno a quarter so much now.” He sucked hard at his pipe, and his eyes twinkled. But, indeed, I had done no more than hint a trifle of doubt as to the value of a curious charm against rheumatism, long used by a wise woman of Foulness.

  “No,” he repeated, “not a quarter. An’ I ha’n’t forgot much neither.” His glance moved about the great expanse of air, land, and water before and below him, over villages, marshes, hill-slope, and copses, and I foresaw a story. For here, spread before us, were the scenes of a hundred, told and untold, and Roboshobery Dove was but looking for an excuse or a reminder. Presently he took his pipe from his mouth and pointed. “See there, sir,” he said; “d’ye know the cottage down there with the roof new-tiled? Black clap-boarded cottage, onny one floor: just lookin’ over that spit o’ the hill, on towards Leigh.”

  I saw the cottage, but knew it only because I had seen it before.

  “Well, this is the second time I’ve seen it new-tiled; ’twere thatch when I were a lad. ’Twere there as one o’ the things happened, I ha’n’t forgot—an’ sha’n’t, neither. An’ a fine young man—aye, two of ’em—lamed summat fresh, young as they were; an’ that were the end on ’em.” The old man stopped, and smoked in silence, waiting to be asked for the story.

  So I said, “What was it they learned?”

  “They larned, sir, they larned—well you’ve heard tell o’ Mother Lay, th’ oad witch?”

  “Didn’t she give Cunning Murrell work a long time ago?”

  “Aye, she did, sir—’fore you were born or your father either. He puzzled her once or twice, sarten to say, when he were a young man, in a comparin’ way o’ speakin’. But he den’t hey nothen to do with this consarn. Why, oad Mother Lay—oad Nanny Lay, as most called her—she were the badger witch, as you may ha’ heard. You don’t chance to ha’ heard o’ the black badger, up at the Crown? No, there aren’t many alive to tell ye, an’ if they were ’haps they wouldn’t, some oad parties bein’ feared o’ raisin’ a laugh. But I’ll tell ’ee, an’ ye may laugh, if ye like; I can stand it. Well, oad Dave Cloyse kep’ the Crown at that time—Sim Cloyse’s elder brother he were, an’ dead long enough ago. Dave Cloyse, he trapped a badger, or somebody else trapped it for him, an’ he putt it in a barr’l in the yard, for to be drawed. Now there were cur’ous things about this badger, an’ the fust cur’ous thing it were arl black, every bit. Never saw a black badger, did ye? No, nor nobody else as I know. Well, this badger were no sooner safe putt in the yard than a chap—Sam Prentice it was; he were young then, like me—sets his dog to draw it. It were a tough oad dog, an’ had drawed many a badger; an’ it were a noisy oad dog. But this time it rushes in—an’ drops dead in the barr’l, without a sound. Sam, he pulled it out by the hindquarters, but ’twere dead enough—bit hard over the neck an’ dropped like you never see a badger do afore. Sam takes the oad dog round to the pump an’ pumps on him, but ’twere arl for noth
en—neck broke. An’ when he an’ Dave gets back to the barr’l the badger were gone, clean, in broad daylight! Now, sir, you know well enough no nat’ral badger ’ud leave his hole in open day, barrio’ he were dragged out with main force. An’ more, you’d ha’ thought somebody’d ’a’ noticed such a thing as a black badger, in the open street, in broad daylight, wouldn’t ye? But nobody did. No. But what they did see—two on ’em—were oad Nanny Lay. Oad Nanny Lay, in her big bonnet, coming out o’ the Crown yard at a trot! Out o’ the Crown yard she came, an’ up the street, an’ away!

  “That were the first seen o’ the black badger, but the next time meant more ’n killin’ a dog. Now, at the time I’m tellin’ of—’twere ’fore I lost my leg—two brothers lived in the cottage down there we were speakin’ of, with their mother. Eli Drake an’ Robin Drake were their names, an’ they were twins; an’ twins an’ all as they were, one was a preventive man—what you’d call a coastguardsman now—an’ t’ other a smuggler. That sound queer in these days, but ’twere all right then, an’ a very convenient arrangement when George Fourth were king. Why, the revenue cutter Swallow ran a cargo of its own into Wakering now an’ then—aye, an’ more than now an’ then! Ah, them were great times—plenty o’ good money an’ plenty o’ good drink about then! Well, Eli Drake were a preventive boatman on the Leigh station, as I’ve said, an’ his brother Robin were as desprit a young rip as ever handled the tubs along this here shore; and we’ve had some desprit rips, too, in my time! The chief officer had been a sleepy oad chap, doin’ nothing but waiting for his sup’rannivation, an’ lettin’ the station go as it liked—same as most o’ the preventive officers at that time. So Eli an’ Robin, bedmate brothers, gives each other the fair tip when a cargo’s to be run; where the tubs’ll be, an’ where the guard’ll be, an’ all convenient an’ comfortable; an’ the chief officer, he snores asleep all night, and the guard-boatmen they pulls off the other way, and the cargo comes in fair an’ easy, and goes inland on the carriers’ backs, or on the pack-horses, comfortable an’ straightforward as if ’twere crops off a field. As for poor oad Stagg, the ridin’ officer, we den’t care a stick for him. Everybody just laughed at poor oad Stagg. O’ course, the preventive men, they den’t lose by it; every man had his little complimentary tub, so to say, just for his own use, an’ here an’ there other folks had their little complimentary tub—parson had his reg’lar—an’ so everybody was happy an’ agreeable, which were a great deal better than rows an’ disagreements among neighbours, an’ fights on the marshes an’ sich.