The Raven's Seal

by Andrei Baltakmens

  A stray draft of the wind outside the door swept through the hall, and though it moved the hanged man not at all, it made the ghostly candle bob and dance.

  “Oh, what shall we do?” moaned Miss Cozzens. “He has ruined me, the beastly fool! What shall we do?”

  “Hush. Close the door! I must think,” growled Mrs. Wenrender.

  “For God’s sake,” said Cassie, “let us bring the poor man down.”

  “If he is seen, if this should get out, if the servants should see it, I shall be undone,” exclaimed Miss Cozzens. “Why would he do this to me?”

  “Perhaps he felt comfortable here. Perhaps it soothed him, to entrust himself to you,” said Cassie.

  “He cannot be found here,” said Mrs. Wenrender stonily. “Certainly not in this fashion. Think of the scandal.”

  “Brock,” said Cassie. “Mr. Brock. Send Barker to fetch him. He will know what to do.”

  In that instant of uncertainty, shock, and need, Mrs. Wenrender did not question how Cassie should come by that name, nor show any confusion or doubt that he could be summoned. She went outside to call her driver.

  “Come,” said Cassie. “There is not a moment to lose. Where are the servants? Who found him?”

  “I found him.” Miss Cozzens’s tears were running again. “He sent the cook and the maid away. They could come back at any time! I shall never forget the horrid sight. Oh, I cannot stand it—how shall we get him out of here?”

  “We must get him down,” said Cassie. “There are two of us to hold him, and one to work the rope.”

  Mrs. Wenrender returned, after sending her driver on his errand. In a hush, the women set about taking Kempe’s corpse down. Miss Cozzens crept up the stairs and tried the knot about the banister with her fingers, but it was too tight for her. Cassie went to the kitchen and returned with a cook’s knife. At length, while Miss Cozzens cursed and moaned and sawed at it, the rope parted. The body fell. Cassie and Mrs. Wenrender tried to support it, but the weight of inert flesh, the cold heaviness of it, repellent to the touch, was too much for them, and it tumbled slackly to the floor. With a gentler hand, Cassie straightened out the limbs and closed the eyes, as the old women laid out the dead in the parlour rooms of The Steps. Last, Miss Cozzens fetched a rug and covered the remains.

  “Come away you little fool,” said Miss Wenrender, when this was done. “I am weary of this sentimentality.”

  Together, they brought Miss Cozzens into the parlour. Quickly, Cassie lit two or three candles. There was a sound of wheels in the street. Mrs. Wenrender went at once to the window.

  “Mr. Brock is here,” said Cassie, crouching before Miss Cozzens as she lay on the sofa. “Is there anything else of Mr. Kempe’s left behind?”

  “Oh!—Oh, some of his clothes are here. And his coat and hat and stick. It is so dreadful!”

  “You must be sure to destroy or remove them all.”

  “And there is this!” said Miss Cozzens, with a start. With shaking fingers, she plucked out some folded papers, tied with a black string, from her skirts. “He left these here. I am sure he wanted me to find them. I want nothing to do with them! Wretched man!”

  Cassie took the papers. Mrs. Wenrender was speaking to someone outside. Cassie heard a man’s voice, low and harsh. There were more footfalls in the hall.

  “It will be done now,” said Cassie. “He will be taken away. You need not trouble yourself.”

  Cassie rose. The papers she concealed beneath her own bodice. Mrs. Wenrender returned. Exhausted, the women waited while the sounds of activity, the scuffling and the going in and out of heavy boots in the hall, faded away. Before the dull, grey dawn pressed against the glass and the wind was stilled, Miss Cozzens dozed.

  WITH THE FIRST sounds of traffic in the lane, Miss Cozzens’s cook returned to the house. Her mistress was taken upstairs. She shuddered and turned her face to the wall as they guided her up to the landing, and would not consent to sleep until she had taken some drops. Cassie and Mrs. Wenrender crept back to the carriage, and they were driven through the streets, as dull and secretive as two thieves returning sullen and empty-handed from a night of stealth and murder.

  “It is odd,” observed Mrs. Wenrender, staring out at the window at the passing houses, “that that desperate and foolish man left no sort of note behind.”

  Cassie stiffened, but Miss Wenrender was gazing moodily out of the carriage.

  “Perhaps,” said Cassie, “he addressed a note of some sort to his wife.”

  “A curious honour he does her,” remarked Mrs. Wenrender sourly, “to remove himself from this world in the hall of the house he has taken for his mistress, and yet justify himself to his wife.”

  “Perhaps the poor man thought to find gentle handling there. To disappear discreetly and spare his wife the shame of his chosen death and finding him this way, if not the distress of losing him.”

  “I expect you are right,” said Mrs. Wenrender with a yawn. “Such a strange man.”

  Returning home, Mrs. Wenrender sought her bed. Cassie attended to her and then retired to her own small room. Fatigued as she was, dulled by tiredness and a sense of universal grief, she could not rest until she had read some part of Kempe’s last testament. She unwound the black ribbon from the bundle of papers, unfolded them, and smoothed the edges. The vague morning sunlight on the window was sufficient. She scanned the top page. The handwriting was not firm nor energetic, but lean, cramped, and hasty:

  My Dear Arabella,

  I have not a warm temperament. Nor am I expressive. I do not believe that even you, who have listened to me so patiently, will much comprehend what I set down here. But I will unburden myself. You may burn this when I am done, and you know my heart a little better. I do not have the firmness to destroy these meanderings myself. Perhaps it is because I have hope of only one sympathetic reader. I appeal for mercy only in this lower world, among imperfect souls. When I come to Judgement, I will assuredly be weighed and found wanting.

  Your devoted friend,

  Austin Kempe

  Cassie turned to the next page. It began:

  A JUSTIFICATION.

  My mother was the strongest of my parents, in thought and purpose, and though my father’s family was respected and well-known in the county, she nurtured greater ambitions for her eldest son. My father, a pleasant, dull, idle man, began as a corn-merchant and became a grocer, though much of his modest success he owed to my mother’s firmness. I went to a good school, and although I was not clever, I was staid and industrious, and carried myself well. I was too retiring for the clergy. Too meek for the army. And so, soon after, I came up to town to “look about.” What I was looking about for, how to claim it when I found it, I cannot say. I suppose I was expected to make my fortune.

  I fell into the usual vices of young men in the town, though not in any decided way. I caroused; I gamed; I ran up small debts, none of them significant in themselves. My temper is not strong, but rather meek and retiring, and I have always been subject to firmer, surer wills, even in the matter of debauchery. So it was that, within a short interval, I fell in with Piers Massingham.

  Massingham had no fortune. His mother had remarried after the death of his father, and as Lady Tarwell she was well-connected in the highest circles, but Piers had no title of his own, only his step-father’s allowance. This made him ambitious, insinuating, and superior. I do not believe he cared one whit for me as a friend, but I was useful to him, I suppose. I believe that Massingham had always thought to marry well, so perhaps his jealousy of Mr. Grainger was not entirely unfounded.

  I say that I was in debt, that my mother had high expectations of me, but hardly understood my difficulties. Mr. Massingham, coldly and greedily, played upon my weaknesses and made me dependent on him. I was snared by easy credit and promises of many advantageous connections. When my debts and other matters grew too much, when I was too far entangled in these matters to see my own way clearly (of course, my mother would have brought me out of
it, had I asked, but I dared not her wrath), Massingham offered to assist me. I was too much the country-fool to see how he had travelled this route before. He introduced me to the Withnail brothers. Two good-natured, smiling, warm-hearted old bachelors, they seemed, who would consolidate my difficulties and guide me out of them. But, once I had committed myself to them, I was their subject, more bound than any indentured labourer.

  And being ensnared, and lacking purpose or will, I became the bellwether, to lead others the same track to slaughter. To draw others, like Palliser, into the grasp of the Withnails was our main work. Massingham said my countenance was too miserable to suggest duplicity, and so we inveigled the young men of our acquaintance into debt and dissolution, and brought them hence to the moneylenders, who made short work of them.

  And once their hold was established, fraud and malversion followed. Massingham was deep in their schemes. I do not defend myself when I say I was but an adjutant. I have seen them take from men their rights, their hopes, their expectations. I have seen forgery and dissimulation, the abuse of the law and the destruction of property.

  The Withnails exerted a kind of fascination over Massingham. Though he treated them slightingly, as he did everybody, they intrigued him also. This came to a head when we made the acquaintance of a bubble-headed youth called Palliser. Young Palliser was impressed by Massingham’s sense of status and mastery. I believe he took him for a true friend, and came to follow him and rely upon him like a puppy. Coward that I am, I did not correct him. But, Palliser had expectations in certain properties, including a sort of right apparent in Seddington Commons, and as soon as the Withnails made themselves his executors and advisors, they established that right (through a forgery that they commissioned), enclosed the village that had stood there for centuries, evicted the tenants, and made, as we heard, a mighty profit.

  Massingham had brought them a great prize, but he was not satisfied. The triumph—he imagined—he had engineered himself, and he resented dividing the spoils. He was convinced that the brothers were cheating him. He mistrusted them, and he mistrusted even more thoroughly their invisible partner. How he came to suspect this third, through what prying and spying, I do not know. It is likely that the brothers (who secretly disparage each other, though they cannot go alone), let slip some scruple over some difficulty that gave Massingham the notion that they were subservient to another. No matter. Mistrusting them, he spied them out, followed them in secret, bribed their servants, and had his own men trail them.

  I believe he had the secret, or some part of the secret. Certainly, he became even more presumptuous and overbearing than before with the brothers. He insinuated that he had the means of securing a great fortune. He made one other reference to this, which perplexes me still. It was a little before his death. I made a comment about our masters in Staverside, meaning the moneylenders, and he laughed at my ignorance.

  “Our real master is a black bird who perches on yonder hill,” he said, and pointed to Cracksheart Hill. I could not make out if he meant the slums, or the prison, or the gallows there.

  And this, like all he said in his vaunting humours, I passed on to the brothers themselves.

  Let me not deceive you, Arabella, as I have deceived so many others. I say I was Piers Massingham’s minion, and so I was. But I reported in secret to the Withnails and hence to their dark master. While we cheated our friends out of their expectations, Massingham suspected that the brothers cheated him. They did so, more comprehensively than he understood.

  They called on me privately. I remember it well. My mother had died almost a year before, leaving my father desolate. They were gentle as lambs, but they showed me certain notes that had come into their hands, which informed me that within the space of months, my father had brought our family fortunes to the brink of ruin. I had, by that time, amended my own course, but now I was doubly and triply bound to the Withnails, considering myself, my father, my brothers, and my sister, who was then engaged to be married. Henceforth, wherever and however Massingham observed the brothers, I observed him with the same intensity.

  Let me now come to the fatal occasion of the duel.

  They renewed their quarrel over a pretty girl.…

  Cassie paused to rub her eyes and splash a little water on her face before reading on:

  …Massingham disliked and mistrusted Mr. Grainger, whom he saw as an impediment who had frustrated him on other occasions. Grainger, in turn, was heedless of the enmity Massingham nursed, and too vain to draw away from the encounter, no matter how slight the pretext.

  Before the morning set down for the matter, the letter came for me in my chambers. I had expected it for many days. It was folded exactly, written in a fluid, old-fashioned hand. It was sealed with a black seal that I had never seen before, but which the Withnail Brothers had warned me presaged a command that could not be refused. The seal bore the impress of a single clawed or taloned bird’s foot. I am not fanciful, but I saw the mark of a carrion bird left in the mud at the foot of the gallows.

  The letter was plain: If Massingham were to be killed, I would report at once to the Withnails, and there the matter would rest. If he were to survive, we were to return to the inn. I was to send a note to the Withnails, and at the appointed time, make our way alone to the churchyard on Nocket Lane, by the old Steergate portal. At no time was I to leave Massingham’s side. If I did this simple task, I was assured, my family difficulties (as they were described so delicately) would be resolved.

  I will not recount the duel, or Massingham’s chance thrust, or the wound Mr. Grainger sustained. Out of no good impulse, I secretly hoped that Mr. Grainger would prevail. It was not to be.

  We returned to the inn. Mr. Palliser was too sickened and alarmed to come with us, but he met us there. I sent my note by a porter boy. That dolt, Harton, drank himself into a stupor. Massingham was by turns hectic and elated. Many times he took out a letter, scanned it, and returned it to his pocket, as if imagining that its contents were unknown to me. I knew he had threatened the Withnails with exposure, and that they had feigned capitulation; that their partner had agreed to meet Massingham and a companion later that night; that he had no choice but to bring me as his witness.

  The room we had hired was so arranged that, at the hour, we could leave in secret.

  We left the inn. The streets were dark, and it was icy cold. I thought we would be concealed by the night, for I had a horror of being seen abroad with Massingham. But then we passed a man, a servant, I thought, carrying a beer-pot. I was struck, then—I don’t know what to call it—by an idea, a devilish, damned inspiration. I had seen how Mr. Grainger was taken from the field that morning, and I thought in an instant that I would feign a limp. I began to favour my right side as we walked.

  “What the devil are you doing?” Massingham demanded. He was irritable.

  “Why, did you see how he limped away, like a bird with a broken wing?” I said, “I would not be surprised if Mr. Grainger walks like so for the rest of the season. It will make an end of his dancing with Miss Pears!”

  “You are a damned fool,” said Massingham. “Stop it.”

  I looked behind. It was enough. The servant had moved on, but I was sure that all he would remember would be two men walking in the snowy night, one hale and upright, one limping.

  We came to the Steergate. The passage was filthy and dark, and Massingham cursed as we walked inside. About halfway through, I saw the shadow of a man at the other end, and I knew. I knew what would happen then. I hesitated, and—God help me!—Massingham turned to face me. His back was exposed. He was annoyed at my stopping. “What is it now?” said he, and the blade sank home.

  I ran. I cannot remember where or how. I was consumed by a horror of myself. I confess it now. I cannot write it. Oh, Arabella, I murdered him, though the dagger was wielded by another, I brought him, with all his prideful blindness upon him, into the place of slaughter, and my hand is branded with the cold steel that let out his life. I have that fat
al stain against my soul.

  None of these particulars came out at the trial. I had never intended, I say, that Mr. Grainger assume the role of penitent for the crime for which I was the instrument. But it was convenient to make a murderer of him, and displace all the attention from Massingham and his intrigues, else his dupes, or his grieving mother and her connections, discover us. I stood therefore, and told my tale, fabricated from actuality and half-truths, and the words choke me still. The witness who had seen me counterfeit a laming wound in the snow was called, and looked past me like a ghost, to fix the blame on the prisoner.

  My silence was sealed, like my father’s debts. I passed into my reward, married for a good settlement and without sympathy, and sought to master myself and my affairs honestly.

  But honest men do not prosper in the shadow of a murder. Often and again, stray thoughts of Massingham tormented me. The shadow of the gaol fell on me, as well. At certain times I saw the prison, the cells, the bars and fetters, more clearly than the walls and windows and open streets before me. In dreams, I stole through imaginary prisons and took the place I well deserved, instead of Piers’s condemned rival.

  To account of my reversals, mistakes, hollow calculations, would be as tedious to me as any reader, and repugnant to you, Arabella. Wherever I turned, failure and condemnation lurked for me. I was surrounded by dishonesty, cant, thievery. I have maintained the appearance of prosperity only, supported by the men I despise, and I know how all that will fail as well, if for a moment my account of the murder comes into doubt.

  That doubt is now plain before me. Mr. Quillby has hunted me and haunted me these past few years. I believe the Master of the Watch himself has some scruples about my testimony, and now, in a few lines, Mr. Quillby hints at the whole of my lie, my flimsy attempt to dissemble and use even you as a cover, and my inevitable exposure, and I cannot survive it.