An Instance of the Fingerpost

by Iain Pears

  I must point out one thing here, which is that my account of my talk with Blundy is accurate in every single detail; it could hardly be other, for her words were engraved on my mind for years after. I say this, because it contained confirmation of everything I knew, and justification of everything that occurred thereafter. There is no room for doubt or misinterpretation: she threatened me with worse and she could hardly do me harm in any other way except through her magic. I do not need to persuade or assert on this matter: she admitted it quite freely when she had no need to do so, and it was only a matter of time before she made good on her promise. From that moment I knew that I was engaged in a battle which would end in the destruction of one or the other. I say this plainly, for it must be understood that I had no choice in what I did: I was desperate.

  Instead of Thomas, I went to see Dr Grove, for I knew that he still believed in the power of exorcism. He had once lectured us about this, when he had heard of an affair of sorcery in nearby Kineton when I was about fifteen. He warned sternly about dabbling with the devil and that evening, most strangely and generously, led us in prayer for the souls of those suspected of compacting with darkness. He told us that the invincibility of the Lord can so easily turn back Satan’s powers, if it is genuinely desired by those who have delivered themselves into his arms, and it was one of his major contentions with the Puritans that, by disparaging the rite of exorcism, they not only lowered the priesthood in the eyes of the population (who continued to believe in spirits whatever their ministers said) but also removed a potent weapon in the never-ending battle.

  Apart from catching a glimpse of him in the distance when once I was walking down the High Street a few months earlier, I hadn’t cast eyes on him for nearly three years and I was surprised when I entered his presence once more. Fate had been kind to him. Whereas I remembered a man barely enough fed, with threadbare clothes a size too big for him and a mournful expression on his face, now here before me was a roly-poly character evidently too eager to make up for lost time in the matter of food and drink. I liked Thomas and wanted only the best for him but I felt then he was wrong in thinking Grove unqualified for the parish of Easton Parva. I could see him already rolling down to the church, after a good dinner and bottle of wine, to lecture his parishioners on the virtues of moderation. How they would love him, as well, for everyone likes a character to fit the part life has allotted to him. The parish, I felt, would be a happier place with Grove as its leader than with Thomas, even if it would be less mindful of the awesome fear of the Lord’s chastisement.

  ‘I am glad I find you well, Doctor,’ I said as he allowed me into his room, as packed with books and as littered with paper as I recall the quarters allotted to him at Compton Wynyates.

  ‘You do indeed, Jack, you do indeed,’ he cried, ‘for I no longer have to teach snotty-nosed youths like yourself. And, if God’s will be so, will shortly no longer have to teach anyone at all.’

  ‘I congratulate you on your escape from servitude,’ I replied as he gestured me to move a pile of books and sit down. ‘You must relish your improved estate. From being a family priest to being a Fellow of New College is a grand recovery for you. Not that we were not all extremely grateful for your earlier misfortune. For how else would we have had such a learned tutor?’

  Grove grunted, pleased at the compliment, but half-suspecting I was joking at his expense.

  ‘It is indeed a great improvement,’ he said. ‘Although I was grateful to Sir William for his kindness, for if he had not taken me into his household, I would have starved. It was not a happy time for me, I’m sure you realise that. But then, it turned out to be an unhappy period for you as well. I hope that life as an undergraduate is more to your taste.’

  ‘Well enough, thank you. Or at least it was. At present, I am in grave trouble, and I need to beg you for help.’

  Grove seemed concerned at this bald statement, and earnestly asked what was the matter. So I told him everything.

  ‘And who is this witch?’

  ‘A woman called Sarah Blundy. I see you know the name.’

  Grove looked dark and angry at the mere mention, and I thought that perhaps it might have been better had I not said, but in fact I did well.

  ‘She has caused me great grief recently. Very great grief.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said vaguely. ‘I did hear some slanderous talk.’

  ‘Did you indeed? Might I ask from whom?’

  ‘It was nothing, merely tavern gossip. I had it from a man called Wood. I straightway told him his words were shameful. I came close to boxing his ears, I must say.’

  Grove grunted once more, then thanked me for my kindness. ‘Not many people would have had such an honourable response,’ he said curtly.

  ‘But you see,’ I continued, pressing my advantage, ‘she is a dangerous character, in one way or another. Everything she does causes trouble.’

  ‘The witchcraft is confirmed by astrology?’

  I nodded. ‘I do not trust this Greatorex absolutely, but he was adamant that I was bewitched and that she was formidably powerful. And there can be no other source of it. As far as I am aware, no one else has cause to resent me in any way.’

  ‘And you have been attacked in your head and your guts, is that right? By animals, and visited in dreams.’

  ‘On several occasions, yes.’

  ‘But if I remember, you had such headaches when you were a child as well, is that not the case, or is my memory playing false?’

  ‘All people have headaches,’ I said. ‘I was not aware that mine were of any greater intensity.’

  Grove nodded. ‘I feel you are a troubled soul, Jack,’ he continued in a kindly fashion. ‘Which distresses me, for you were a happy child, even though wild and untameable. Tell me, what concerns you, that your face is become set in such an angry expression?’

  ‘I am under a curse.’

  ‘Apart from that. You know there is more than this.’

  ‘Do I need to tell you? Surely you know the disasters that have afflicted my family. You must; you were in Sir William Compton’s family long enough.’

  ‘Your father, you mean?’

  ‘Of course. What distresses me most is that my family, my mother in particular, wishes to forget the whole matter. There is my father, his memory weighed down by this accusation, and no one except myself seems concerned to defend him.’

  I had misjudged Grove, I think, for I had a childish apprehension of seeing him, half-expecting that the passing of years would be as nothing and he would again pull out his rod; it was as well that he was more able to treat me as an adult than I was to think as one. Rather than telling me what to do, or lecturing me, or giving advice I did not wish to hear, he instead said very little, but listened to me as we sat there in his darkening room, without even getting up to light a candle when the evening lengthened. Indeed, until I spoke of my troubles that evening in New College, I had not realised I had so very many of them.

  Perhaps it was Grove’s way of religion that made him so quiet, for although no papist, yet he believed in the confessional, and would give absolution in secret for those who truly desired it, and whom he trusted to keep their mouths shut. In fact, it occurred to me that, if I so wished, I could at that very moment blight his chances for ever and secure Thomas’s place. All I had to do was beg him to hear me, and then report him to the authorities as a hidden Catholic. Then he would be too dangerous for preferment.

  I did not do so, and perhaps it was a mistake. I thought Thomas was young and another parish would come along in due course. It is natural (so I now know) for youth to be in a hurry, but ambition must be tempered by resignation, enthusiasm by deference. I did not think so then, of course, but I like to believe there was more than simple self-interest in my decision to spare Grove from the disgrace I could have visited upon him so easily.

  Self-interest there was, as I shall reveal; in fact I later wondered at the mystery of Providence which led me to him, for my distress led me
to my salvation, and turned the curse under which I laboured into the agent of my success. It is remarkable how the Lord can take evil and turn it into good, can use a creature like Blundy to reveal a hidden purpose quite the opposite to the intended hurt. In such things, I believe, are the true miracles of the world, now that the age of prodigies is past.

  For Grove was teaching me again, in the best disputational fashion, and I never had a better lesson. Had my real tutors been so skilled, I might even have taken to my legal studies with more of a will, for in his hands I understood, if only fleetingly, the heady brew that argument can be; in the past he had confined his instruction to fact, and drilled us ceaselessly in the rules of grammar and suchlike. Now I was a man and entered into that age when rational thought is possible (a sublime state, given to man alone, and denied by God’s will to children, animals and women), he treated me as such in matter of education. Wisely, he used the dialectic of the rhetor to examine the argument; he ignored the facts, which were too tender in my mind, and concentrated on my presentation to make me think anew.

  He pointed out (his arguments were too close for me to remember the precise stages of his reasoning, so I present here only an outline of what he said) that I had presented an argumentum in tres partes; formally correct, he said, but lacking the necessary resolution and thus incomplete in evolution and hence in logic. (As I write this, I realise I must have paid more attention to my lessons than I realised, for the nomenclature of the scholar comes back to me surprisingly easily.) Thus the primum partum was my father’s disgrace. The secundum was my penury through being disinherited. The tertium was the curse I had fallen under. The task of the logician, he pointed out, was to resolve the problem and unify the parts into a single proposal, which could then be advanced and subjected to examination.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘consider afresh. Take the first and the second parts of your argument. What are the common threads which link them together?’

  ‘There is my father,’ I said, ‘who is accused and who lost his land.’

  Grove nodded, pleased that I could remember the basics of logic, at least, and was prepared to lay out the elements in the correct fashion.

  ‘There is myself, who suffers as a son. There is Sir William Compton, who was executor of the estate and comrade of my father in the Sealed Knot. That is all I can think of at present.’

  Grove inclined his head. ‘Good enough,’ he said. ‘But you must take it further, for you maintained that without the accusation, the first part, your land would not have been lost, the second part. Is that not the case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, was this an indirect, or a direct causation?’

  ‘I don’t know that I understand.’

  ‘You posit a minor accident; that the second was an indirect consequence of the first, without examining the possibility that perhaps the link was the inverse. You cannot argue, of course, that the loss of your land caused your father’s disgrace, for that would be temporally impossible and thus absurd. But you might, perhaps argue that the prospect of losing the land led to the accusation, and that in turn led to the actual loss; the idea of alienation generated the reality through the medium of accusation.’

  I stared at him in bewilderment as the words hit home, for he had spoken the suspicion that had nagged at me ever since that night I spent in my uncle’s office. Could this possibly be the case? Could the accusation that destroyed my father have been prompted by nothing more than greed?

  ‘Are you saying . . .?’

  ‘I am not saying anything at all,’ Dr Grove said. ‘Except to suggest that you think through your arguments with greater care.’

  ‘You are deceiving me,’ I said, ‘because you know something of this matter which I do not. You would not direct me to think in this direction if you had not good reason to do so. I know you well, Doctor. And your way of argument would also suggest that I must consider the other obvious form of accident.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Which is that the link connecting the two states of accusation and alienation is the fact that my father was indeed guilty.’

  Grove beamed. ‘Excellent, young man. I am pleased with you indeed; you are thinking with the detachment of the true logician. Now, can you see any other? We may, I think, leave out random misfortune, which is the argument of the atheist.’

  I thought long and hard, as I was pleased that I had pleased, and wished to win more praise; I had rarely done so in lessons and I found it a strange and warming experience.

  ‘No,’ I said eventually. ‘Those are the two main categories which must be considered. Everything else must be a sub-class of the two alternative propositions.’ I paused for a moment. ‘I do not wish to diminish this conversation, but even the best of arguments requires some matter of fact to give it ballast. And I have no doubt that at some stage you will indicate that in crucial areas this is lacking.’

  ‘You are beginning to talk like a lawyer, sir,’ Grove said. ‘Not like a philosopher.’

  ‘This is surely a question where law is applicable. Logic can only advance you so far. There must be some way of distinguishing between the two propositions, which are either that my father is guilty, or that he is not. And that cannot be accomplished by metaphysics alone. So tell me. You know something of the circumstances.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘There I must disabuse you entirely. I only met your father the once, and while I found him a handsome, robust man I can hardly offer any judgement, or even assessment of him. And I heard of his disgrace only incidentally when I overheard – quite by chance – Sir William telling his wife that he felt obliged to tell what he knew.’

  ‘What?’ I said, lurching forward in my seat with such violence that I believe I frightened the man. ‘You heard what?’

  Grove queried me with an air of genuine bafflement. ‘But you must know this, surely?’ he said. ‘That Sir William was the person who made public the accusations? You were in the house at the time. Surely you heard something of what was happening?’

  ‘Not a word. When was this?’

  He shook his head. ‘Early in the year 1660, I believe. I cannot really remember with any exactness.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was in the library, searching out a volume, for Sir William gave me free run of his books for as long as I was there. It is not the best of libraries, but it was a small oasis in the desert for me and I drank there frequently. You remember the room, no doubt; it faces east for the most part, but turns a corner towards the end, and off there is the office in which Sir William conducted all the domestic business of the estate. I never disturbed him in it, because he always got into a fearsome temper when he had anything to do with money; it brought home his reduced state too painfully. Everyone knew to steer clear of him for many hours afterwards.

  ‘On this occasion his wife did not, and that is why I know to tell you this. I saw little, and did not hear all, but through a crack in the door as it stood ajar, I saw that good lady on her knees before her husband, imploring him to think carefully about what he was to do.

  ‘“My mind is decided,” he said, not unkindly, even though he was unused to having his actions queried. “My trust has been betrayed, and my life sold. That a man could act in such a way is difficult to imagine, that a friend could do so intolerable. It cannot go unpunished.”

  ‘“But are you sure?” My Lady asked him. “To level such an accusation against a man like Sir James, who has been your friend twenty years, and whose son you have brought up almost as your own, cannot be done in error. And you must bear in mind that he will – he must – challenge you. And such a contest you would lose.”

  ‘“I will not fight him,” Sir William replied, more kindly this time, for he could see that his wife was concerned. “I acknowledge my inferiority in arms. Nor do I have the least doubt that my accusations are the absolute truth. Sir John Russell’s warning leaves no doubt of that at all. The letters, the documents, the notes of the meetin
gs he had from Morland; I can confirm many of them from my own knowledge. I know his handwriting and I know his cipher.”

  ‘“Then the door shut, and I heard no more; but My Lady spent the next few days in great distress, and Sir William was more than usually preoccupied. He left for London at the end of the week, in a most secret departure, and I imagined there communicated his suspicions and evidence to others in the king’s circle.’

  I almost laughed as I heard this tale, for I remembered those times well. Sir William Compton had indeed left the house and galloped away one morning. The household had been sombre indeed the previous few days, as though the body was taking a sickness from the head which rules it, and I remember again Sir William talking to me before he left and telling me that I must soon leave. It was time he said, to return to my own people, as I was old enough to attend to my duties. My childhood was now over.

  Three days later, the day after Sir William rode away at dawn, I was put on a cart with all my belongings and sent to my uncle. I had not known anything of the storm that had been brewing under my very nose.

  But the way I left Compton Wynyates is far from my story, and I must tell more of my meeting with Dr Grove. On the matter I had called on him for, he refused to help. He would not perform an exorcism, for Blundy had reached into his soul ahead of me, and made his selfishness such that he was afraid to open himself to criticism at this most delicate moment of his career. Try as I might, I could not persuade him; all he would say was that, if I could provide him with better demonstration of the enchantment, then he would reconsider the matter. Until then, he would only offer that we might pray together. I did not wish to offend him, but I demurred at the prospect of spending an evening on my knees; besides, the news he had given me had galvanised my senses and I was willing, for a while, to put all superlunary matters aside.

  The important thing was that I now had a further connection in my chain of deceit, and I questioned the Doctor closely on the matter. ‘Documents he had off Morland via Sir John Russell.’ Which meant that Sir John had merely forwarded these materials from someone else. He was happy to spread the rumour, it seemed, but had not initiated it. Was that a fair inference? Dr Grove said it sounded so, although he was sure that Russell had acted in good faith. But he could not help me further about the source. It was infuriating; one word from Russell would have saved me much trouble but I knew, from the way he had behaved in Tunbridge Wells, that I would never hear that word from his lips. As I left Grove’s room in New College, I decided it was time to visit Mr Wood.