Blood On the Stone

by Jake Lynch

  Emily looked out from the open side of the cheese-loft across the valley, the breeze catching in the spinneys and the hawthorn boughs shaking their blossoms by way of mute reply to the sallies of songbirds and the turning of seasons. Her thoughts flew unbidden to the day when she and Richard found themselves alone in the cottage – sundry minor farmyard emergencies having called both her parents to their duties at once – and ‘one thing led to another’, as it was later said. The youngest of three surviving children and the only one remaining in the family home, through early years she had always been their ‘pet-lamb’. Now, she had been obliged to grow up quickly as she contemplated her own portion of adult responsibilities.

  Weeks of worry, followed by the awful hardening certainty occasioned by missed periods, had culminated in a tearful confession to her mother. That encounter had been gentler than she had feared, however, and – notwithstanding a few knowing grins from the labourers, which crimsoned her cheeks – Emily’s ‘condition’, as it was known, had been accepted seamlessly into the warp and weft of farm and family life. Initially shocked, Jacob had rapidly come round to an optimistic cast of mind, being of the view that Richard was ‘a steady feller’, who evidently intended to do right by his daughter. Indeed, the first banns of marriage had lately been read at St Andrew’s.

  Now, just as the dripping of the whey seemed to take up Emily’s inner lament over the fate of her two milch-cows, she suddenly espied a far-off but familiar figure striding purposefully up the path towards them. Yes! It was Richard. She felt her heart lift within her breast for the first time since last night’s misadventure.

  The young couple would be allowed time to walk in the sunshine, but not to be indoors unsupervised: a stipulation Richard seemed happy to accept, to Emily’s relief. She recalled with a shudder the occasion, shortly after the revelation of her pregnancy, when her mother had seen fit to issue some indelicately phrased advice not to ‘let him eat of the pie before he’s paid the price’ – a form of words she would go to some lengths to avoid having to listen to again.

  ‘So how come you’re here at this hour?’ she asked, when they were together.

  ‘Ain’t you glad to see me then?’

  ‘’Course I am, silly! Only ’tis usually later.’

  ‘They finished us a bit early. Short of stone.’ Oxford since the Restoration had seen a building boom, which had placed considerable stress on supplies of limestone. Headington Quarry was all but worked out, at least of the best-quality material that was in demand by the colleges for such projects as their precious libraries.

  ‘So you heard, then, what happened last night to them poor milchers?’ she enquired, her features taking on a mournful expression.

  ‘Aye, Jacob came by the site to tell us, about the shooter, an’ all. What a rogue! Said you was in low spirits, like. I got away soon as I could, after that.’

  Through bright orange bills, the gaggle of white farmyard geese hissed disapprovingly as the couple picked their way past. Presently, they reached a narrow, overgrown laneway which meandered down a slope towards a long-neglected outbuilding. Unobserved, they slipped inside. ‘Richard…!’ she said warningly as she felt the passion of his embrace, and her own answering inner thrill. The structure was earmarked for conversion to their own cottage after the wedding. ‘We haven’t long to wait now – then we’ll come in here whenever the fancy takes us.’ The man looked down into her face with a merry twinkle:

  ‘We’ll only come out when the fancy takes us, you mean.’

  Disengaging from their clinch, Richard ran his fingers along the tiles that he was in the process of fitting to the roof, when the master mason could spare him.

  ‘So Father came by your site this morning, with Master Pawling?’ she asked.

  ‘That he did.’

  ‘They went for to see Luke Sandys at the Guildhall, and he said he’ll get the shooter and put him on a charge.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’

  ‘Only Master Pawling said some odd things when he came back. As how he’d given something to Master Sandys, and the feller might hang for it.’ She was wide eyed at the thought.

  ‘Well, you know what they say – Mayor Pawling do like the sound of his own voice.’

  ‘Fie, Richard Bourke! He’s been that kind to us,’ she said reprovingly. ‘Given us our new cottage, for one. Now, see you do put up the rest of them tiles!’

  *

  That evening at the cottage, the women were gazing silently into the fire, each lost in her own thoughts, as Jacob enjoyed the last of his frumenty.

  ‘Now, heed me, Liza, and you too, Emily,’ the father said, pushing away his empty bowl. ‘I heard a strange tale in town earlier. Aye, a strange tale indeed, and a sad one.’ Liza regarded her husband with some scepticism – she had heard such tales from him many times before, and what struck Jacob Hopkins as strange often turned out to have a simple explanation.

  ‘This one’s about a ghost,’ he announced, relishing the surprise with which this news was greeted. ‘’Tis said ’twas the ghost of old Noll Crumble himself.’ The women settled themselves into their chairs.

  ‘There was these two old soldiers, see, what fought in the Holland wars, and they was both wounded. Jack ended up with a hump-back, and Tom lost his leg, and had to walk with a crutch.’ Mother and daughter now gave their full attention – mutilated war veterans had been familiar figures in both their lifetimes, not only from the Anglo-Dutch wars but also the Civil War, decades earlier.

  ‘Well, anyways, these two fellers, they was both out drinking one night in Oxford, and got to jawing, and they realised they’d miss the curfew. So Jack ups and says, “I better take a short cut home, across St Thomas’s churchyard.”’ They shivered involuntarily. St Thomas the Martyr’s was an ancient church in Osney, from King Stephen’s time it was said – and the subject of many a tale concerning supernatural events and manifestations.

  ‘But when Jack’s halfway across,’ Jacob continued, ‘out from behind a gravestone pops a ghost – the ghost of Noll Crumble. And he says to Jack, “Here, what’s that on your back?” And Jack says, “It’s a hump.” So the ghost says, “Well, I’ll have that,” and quick as a flash, takes the hump away and disappears, like.’

  The mention of Noll Crumble – or Oliver Cromwell – was enough to impart at least a slender thread of plausibility. Soldiers from Cromwell’s parliamentary army, captured by Royalist forces in the Civil War, had been locked up in St Thomas’s – a portion of recent history that was rued locally because the imprisoned men, Puritans all, had promptly smashed the stained-glass windows, for their supposedly idolatrous imagery.

  ‘So, the next night,’ Jacob continued, ‘the two of them meets up again, and Jack’s standing straight now, for the first time in years, and he tells his mate all that have happened. And Tom says, “I shall have to try that tonight, I might get my leg back.”’ Liza leaned forward to poke the fire into life.

  ‘So he sets off, and sure enough, the ghost pops out again. But old Noll, he says, “Here, what’s that on your back?” and Tom says, “There ain’t nothing on my back.” So the ghost says, “Well then, here you are, have a hump!” And sure enough, poor Tom’s still got no leg, only now he’s got Jack’s hump an’ all! So – like I say, ’tis strange – and sad.’

  Emily struggled to stifle a guffaw at her father’s air of solemn satisfaction with the climax to this narrative, but her mother burst out:

  ‘Why, you clodpate, Jacob Hopkins! Have you checked your own legs, to see if one’s not longer than the other? ’Cause they’ve surely been pulling it for you, whoever told you that tall tale!’

  ‘Why, ’twas some of Luke Sandys’ men, at the Guildhall,’ the husband replied, a misty sense beginning to form that he had, indeed, been the butt of their joke. The three of them looked at each other and laughed out loud.

  ‘Ah, but ’twas rich, going in there with Farmer Pawling,’ Jacob recalled. ‘’Twas as though he owned the place. We was left in there, when M
aster Sandys and Master Robshaw was called away, and Pawling, he was on his legs and off straight away into the back parlour, for to look at a corpse that was in there, on a table. ’Twas said ’twas from a murder.’

  ‘Cussed if I’d have cared to look at a corpse,’ his wife exclaimed. ‘Was it covered in blood, like?’

  ‘Oh, I never looked,’ Jacob replied. ‘I had no stomach for it, but Pawling, he couldn’t wait.’

  Chapter 18

  An Arrest Warrant

  Ed was in the hall when Luke returned to Magpie Lane. With Elizabeth absent on church-related duties, Luke came straight to the point.

  ‘Robert Pawling came to see us this morning, at the Guildhall.’

  ‘Last year’s mayor? What did he want?’

  ‘’Twas about your Guardsmen. You never mentioned one of them had fired his flintlock and stampeded some cattle.’

  ‘Slipped my mind last night. Stupid thing to do, though. Trooper, name of George Gregory, one of Tom Lucy’s company. How did Pawling know about it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard what happened to the animals, then?’ Ed shook his head. ‘Well, the beasts were from Magdalen Farm, where Pawling’s been the tenant for many years. I’m afraid two of them died.’ His brother made suitably sympathetic noises. ‘It seems they stumbled down a steep slope and into the ruins of an old chapel that’s being demolished for the stone. One was impaled on a pickaxe the men had left there, and the other broke a leg and had to be destroyed.’

  ‘Well, Gregory’s on a charge – “Conduct Prejudicial” – that should cover it. The Colonel will make sure Pawling’s compensated.’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Luke pressed on. ‘Did you see that trooper again after you reached Oxford?’

  ‘No, I came here as soon as I could get away. They were all off for the night by then. I could find out where he’s billeted.’

  ‘That would be helpful. I’ll need to talk to him myself. In fact we’ll have to take him in.’

  ‘What, for frightening a herd of cows? We’ll deal with that within the regiment. ’Tis standard military discipline.’

  Luke looked evenly at his brother.

  ‘I’ve reason to believe that the same man who fired that pistol later stabbed William Harbord to death.’

  It took a moment or two for this to register, whereupon Ed exhaled with an audible ‘pfff’.

  ‘I hope you’re sure of your facts, Luke. The Colonel will hate it.’

  Luke confirmed with Ed that Gregory’s gun had backfired, and explained the connection with the singed blue cloth found on the body. The pair both examined Ed’s own matching tunic through the magnifying glass, which Luke had brought home for the purpose. Sure enough, it was of the same fabric he’d seen at the Guildhall an hour or two earlier. A murder is a murder, the brothers agreed – and firmly in the bailiwick of the civil authorities to investigate and prosecute.

  *

  Positively ambushed at his breakfast table the next morning, above his mercer’s shop on the High Street, Mayor Bowell acceded to Luke’s request with bad grace: ‘Very well, I’ll sign your damn letter.’

  His face pruned in anguish as the implications sank in. Two powerful interests – the Whig faction in Parliament, and the Royal Guards – were now to be set at odds, with the City seemingly in the role of troublemaker.

  ‘You’ll have to take it in to the Guildhall, and get Paynton to seal it.’ Paynton, the town clerk, cultivated a dusty, disobliging manner to deter what he considered excessive demands on his time, with the paradoxical result that any request for his services tended to drag out into a lengthy, nitpicking argument over protocol. Having finally persuaded him to seal the mayor’s missive to the Earl of Oxford, seeking permission to take one of his men into custody, with the City’s official imprimatur, Luke betook himself to meet Ed at Merton College, where the regimental top brass were billeted.

  *

  ‘What the Devil d’you mean by it, sir?’ Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford, was quivering with indignation. The City’s request had not gone down well on top of the alcohol he’d consumed and its after-effects this morning. His luxuriant chestnut wig draped over the corner of his chair, the Colonel’s head was instead covered with a damp towel. The effort of shouting sent a fresh paroxysm of pain through his temples. Snatching for his phial of Goddard’s Drops, he knocked a quill pen from its inkwell and sent it skittering across the desk, spreading dark blotches in its wake.

  ‘Slingsby!’ he roared, then winced again.

  The Sandys brothers had met the chastened figure of Captain Lucy on their way in. Failure to lodge the requisite paperwork pertaining to the charge against Trooper Gregory had earned him the rough side of the Colonel’s wine-furred tongue, and the aide-de-camp, Captain Slingsby, was now in the anteroom, instructing the young officer on what it should say. At his master’s summons, he scurried back in. Rubbing his eyes, the Colonel lowered his voice to a tone of generalised disgust with a deeply unsatisfactory world.

  ‘Captain Sandys’ brother here wants to arrest Gregory and take him into the custody of the City.’

  ‘Out of the question, sir,’ Slingsby snapped. ‘Discipline is a regimental matter.’

  ‘He is wanted for murder,’ Ed volunteered, provoking a fresh eruption.

  ‘You’ll speak when you’re bidden, sir!’

  However, the Colonel soon tired of holding up his end of the argument, indicating his grudging assent to the arrest and mumbling an instruction to bring him coffee and small beer. He countersigned the mayor’s letter, which Luke carefully folded and slipped into his inside pocket. In the anteroom, they held a hurried conclave with Slingsby before he embarked on his latest errand. The aide-de-camp pored over a sheet of paper, on which the addresses of the Guards’ Oxford billets were listed.

  ‘Yes, it says here – Gregory and Ladlow are staying at number two, Goat’s Head Yard, wherever that may be.’

  ‘Off St Michael’s Street, over by the north gate,’ Luke said. ‘We should be able to pick him up there.’

  ‘Well, Godspeed to you. If he’s gone out, you’ll have a job finding him – the men have a day’s leave today, they’ll be in mufti.’

  ‘They would,’ Luke remarked grimly. ‘And, as it’s market day, it’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

  ‘Better make haste,’ Ed said.

  *

  At Goat’s Head Yard, however, the Sandys brothers drew a blank. The door was answered by a tow-headed youth with a pink complexion, who was apparently either a simpleton or intimidated out of his wits by the appearance of a constable and a Guards officer together on the doorstep. Wordlessly, he disappeared back inside to be replaced by a middle-aged woman, a greyish mob-cap surmounting her distinctly disagreeable countenance.

  ‘Worrizit?’ she enquired, smoothing her apron. The cook-maid proved a voluble, though singularly uninformative interlocutor. ‘I ain’t been paid nothing yet,’ she complained. ‘Do you tell your colonel that, cavalryman!’

  The new Disbandment Act, passed by Parliament two years earlier, meant soldiers could only be billeted on householders by consent, so it was a chance to earn a bit of extra cash – but the system was already notorious for long arrears. In answer to their questions: the men had been gone that morning by the time the household rose for the day; to exercise their horses, she supposed, which were stabled at Christ Church. No, she didn’t know where they were going next; no, they hadn’t discussed any plans, ‘least not in front of me.’ At Luke’s prompting, she yelled for the boy: ‘Cuthbert! Get back here!’ But, when the same queries were put to him, Cuthbert merely blushed still redder, and shook his straw-coloured head.

  ‘Well, let’s go to my office,’ Luke said. ‘Could you draw a likeness of this Gregory, with pencil and paper? Then Robshaw and I can take that, and you can take one of the other constables, and we’ll just have to look everywhere we can think of, till we find him.’ In childhood, the outdoors-minded younger brother had j
ust about sat still for long enough to absorb basic principles of draughtsmanship from their father, and, seated at the desk in the room at the back of the Guildhall, he quickly produced a serviceable sketch, showing the moustache and beard and capturing the suspect’s characteristic expression of barely suppressed anger.

  ‘Looks a choleric sort of character,’ Luke observed.

  ‘Not the most biddable,’ Ed agreed. ‘Mind you, he’ll come quietly enough, I would think, at least if I reach him first. He knows he’s on a charge, so he’ll probably assume the Colonel wants to deal with it there and then.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know he’s wanted for murder.’

  ‘Quite so. I can imagine his face when he finds that out.’

  Chapter 19

  Market Day

  Magdalen Farm was all a-flutter. There were chicken’s necks to wring – a task Emily’s mother performed with brisk efficiency – along with eggs to place in boxes lined with straw, and Emily’s own special job of arranging the cheeses in a wicker basket, with a fresh linen cloth over them to keep off the sun’s morning rays. All were destined to be sold to market traders for eagerly anticipated bonus rates, as Oxford strove to meet the surge in demand from its suddenly expanded population. Mistress Hopkins took the reins as her husband fixed the shafts of the old cart into the halter worn by the piebald nag, while Emily made herself comfortable behind as best she could.