A Dark Anatomy

by Robin Blake

  The playwright Webster observes that ‘detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance’. I can put that in a more Lancashire way: if you know nowt, you’ll say owt.

  I was satisfied that it was not the Prince of Darkness who cut Dolores Brockletower’s throat. Folk only said it was because they knew nowt – about her, or about the ways of the Devil. With her Spanish name (from the Spanish Main), her riding astride, her unwillingness to go about in society, and now her violent death, she was bound to be the object of all manner of fantastic gossip. The English borough towns and countryside are not used to, and do not like, the influx of strangers, even from neighbouring places. Dark-skinned, rough-voiced ladies from far overseas will never take on, unless they go to great pains in winning people over.

  For a few moments, a certain sympathy for Dolores’s loneliness tugged at me, though it was apparent that she hadn’t tried very much to win the confidence or love of the people around her. I remembered Sarah Brockletower’s manifest dislike, and her scathing word for her sister-in-law: a ‘hoyden’, she called her. I trusted Sarah’s judgement. If she did not value a person I was prepared to believe she had good reason for it.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a thunderous sound, followed by a loud crash. A man had hurled down the stairs from the floor above and burst violently through the door at the bottom of the staircase. The next moment he was thumping the innkeeper’s counter and in a loud voice calling for his horse to be brought from the stable. It was Ramilles Brockletower himself. To say he looked agitated would be quite inadequate. His face was wreathed in ferocious purpose as he stood drumming his fingers on the counter while he waited for his mount.

  The squire, who seemed to be making a point of not surveying the room, had not seen me. He was so preoccupied that I debated with myself whether to speak to him at all. But at a time when Mrs Brockletower’s death was talked of everywhere I felt my coroner’s dignity would suffer if I appeared to avoid him in public. So I pushed back my chair and rose to my feet.

  ‘Mr Brockletower, sir,’ I called across the room in the even but sonorous tone of voice that I use in court to calm obstreperous witnesses. ‘Good day to you. Might I have a private word?’

  He swivelled towards me, and saw who I was. If, as Mr Spectator has it, a man hangs a picture of his mind on his countenance, the squire’s mind was in a state of turmoil. The face he turned to me when I spoke his name was painted in appalled and fearful colours. But in an instant it changed, perhaps by an effort of will. His upper lip lifted fractionally on one side, his eyes narrowed. Emotion drained from him and he began thinking about his dignity and position, knowing they were not enhanced if he showed public weakness.

  Squires in England believe they are little kings. They often draw a curtain between themselves and the good and honest people that sustain them. Though they know this causes them to be feared and hated, they cannot help it. In their pride I think they may even welcome popular disdain since it allows them to act freely, and with disregard for the feelings and circumstances of their inferiors, be they servants, tenants or professional men. Brockletower had behaved like this from the moment he set foot in his ancestral home after the voyage from Jamaica. He had put on the armour of cruel masculine force. To him attack and defence were one and the same, a principle which I have heard is held to be sovereign by naval tacticians.

  So he attacked me.

  ‘You can have a word with the Devil first,’ he snarled. ‘Lawyers!’

  He pointed his finger like a pistol directly into my face.

  ‘You are parasites, do you know that? You are the scum that forms on scum!’

  The discourtesy was so gross and unexpected that I did not immediately register it. So I continued in patient terms.

  ‘But, sir, it is my duty—’

  ‘I piss on your duty! You have no duty to me. You are nothing to me.’

  At this moment the landlord, a bow-legged fellow, came through to inform the squire that his horse awaited him, and Ramilles Brockletower strode out of the inn by the rear door that led to the stable yard, slamming it behind him.

  I sat down again and took a deep draught of my beer. William Wigglesworth came up to see if there was anything I needed and I asked for a refill.

  I cannot explain why, but I was moved to apologize for the squire to the innkeeper.

  ‘Mr Brockletower is not well,’ I said when he came back with my replenished tankard. ‘It isn’t surprising. The murder of his wife and then the sudden disappearance of her body.’

  ‘No sir. Not surprising. And he is already a man of high passions, I can vouch for that.’

  ‘So you see much of him, do you? In Yolland, I mean. I wonder what brought him here this morning.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no difficulty about that, Mr Cragg. He was meeting his architect. Name of Barnabus Woodley.’

  ‘Yes, I have met the gentleman.’

  ‘Then you know he is a very refined young gentleman, with what I call London manners. He has lodged with us since the works at the Hall were started, back in January.’

  ‘And does the squire meet Mr Woodley here, at the inn?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sometimes they are in the snug together, over a jug of punch. Or in the room where Mr Woodley has his drawing-table. Very close friends they are. When I’ve gone in with refreshments I’ve found them examining plans, discussing all about columns, architraves, plasterwork and what-have-you, and sometimes just arguing over art in general. The arguments are heated to a degree at times.’

  ‘What do they argue about? Be specific.’

  ‘All sorts. One time my Belinda went in with tea and it was pictures. Very passionate, they were, about pictures. Being a naval man, Squire favoured seaskips, while Mr Woodley, he was a landskip man through and through. While me, I’m more in favour of pictures of the chase.’

  I drained my tankard, paid what I owed for the commons and returned thoughtfully to the yard. As I led my horse towards the mounting block, around which the old cobbles had been removed, I saw that a new bed of sand had been smoothly laid around it.

  ‘I shall rough up your sand, lads,’ I called out to the workmen.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind that, sir,’ said the older of the two, strolling over towards me. He was glad of the chance to stop work. ‘Gentleman that’s just left has already done the same, but we can rake it over again quick enough.’

  I looked at the sand and a thought struck me, a memory of Fidelis’s keen eye surveying the damp ground on which Dolores Brockletower’s body had lain. I handed my horse’s reins to the labourer and crouched to look at the hoofprints of the squire’s gelding. It had stood stock still beside the mounting block and the four impressions left by its hooves were plainly visible.

  ‘By God!’ I exclaimed before I could help myself.

  Three of the impressions had been made by middlingly worn shoes. But the fourth, the front nearside, looked crisp and new. It looked very much as if Squire Brockletower had had cause, very recently, to get the near-fore foot of his riding hack re-shod.

  Chapter Eleven

  MY FIRST IMPULSE, which I acted upon, was to run back to the smithy and bring Pennyfold across to inspect the hoofprints. I did not tell him whose horse the prints belonged to.

  ‘That’s right,’ he confirmed, lowering himself to his haunches and closely eyeing the marks in the sand. ‘The near-fore’s a new shoe. The others are worn, and should be replaced soon.’

  ‘Is the new one produced from your forge?’

  He considered the question, drumming with his fingers on the breast-piece of his leather apron.

  ‘No, it’s not one of mine I should say. It’s not easy to tell from a print like this, but it’s got a mite less of width than we would allow for. But why do you want to know if it’s one of ours, sir?’

  I again produced from my pocket the shoe picked up in the Fulwood, crouched down beside him and pressed it into the sand beside the impressions of the worn off-fore shoe left by Brockletower’s hor
se.

  ‘For a comparison. I want to know if the impression of this old shoe, that I showed you earlier, has the same degree of wear as this horse’s three worn shoes. Could this old shoe, in fact, be the one that the new shoe replaced?’

  ‘For a true match you will have to press down much harder, sir. Think of the weight of the horse.’

  He reached forward, resting his fingers on the shoe where it lay, then with a grunt pressed firmly downwards before carefully lifting the crescent of iron up again. He examined the impression.

  ‘Well, it’s near enough the same, as you see.’

  ‘But not conclusively?’

  ‘Not conclusively. Approximately. It may indeed be the old shoe that the new one replaced. Then again it may not.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Pennyfold,’ I said, taking back the horseshoe from his hand. ‘I must be satisfied with that.’

  Five minutes ride from the inn, along the Preston road, is St Michael’s Church. This is not one of those piles from the Middle Ages, the stones of which, having got a good strong scrubbing from time, show forth a blurred surface, lacking edges and definition. St Michael’s Church, with its vicarage across the road, was built in brick at the beginning of the reign of King George the First, and it was wonderfully crisp and new. The prime mover had been the former vicar of Preston, Mr Peploe. When he heard that the Christians of Yolland faced a three-mile trudge to Longridge to attend divine service, he’d established a curacy and raised enough money to build this plain little church for the village. Not long afterwards Yolland was made a parish, and old squire Brockletower got the right to name his brother as its first parson.

  As I reached this spot on the road I could clearly see the church porch, with its four small-scale Grecian columns. The Very Reverend Oliver Brockletower himself was standing under it. The afternoon sun, which had been playing chase with the clouds, sent down a beam from the south-west that lit him just as you might see in an Italian picture, to indicate divine benevolence towards a praying friar or saint. Not that Mr Brockletower was a saint, or anything like. Very Reverend he may have been, but his chief reverence was for wine and worldliness. Nor was the priest, at this moment, devoutly praying. Having blinked a few times in the sunlight, he turned and locked the church door with the large iron key in his hand.

  Being a genial man of the world was the way the world preferred Oliver Brockletower to be. Aside from the circles that Timothy Shipkin moved in, people liked their vicar to ride to hounds, to dance, to play at cards and the fiddle and enjoy the robust consolations of roast beef and port wine. The English don’t want a vicar to be an impoverished hermit, living half out of this world before he is ready to leave it for good. How can a man run to the aid of others if he is weighed down by self-reproach, self-pity or self-loathing? Who can hope to be absolved of the reluctance to leave this life, if the absolver himself knows nothing of life’s pleasures? In Spain it may be different. In England we want our men of God to have tasted life.

  The sunbeam still gilded the Reverend Brockletower’s wig, which hung down the sides of his face like the ears of a sheep. But then, as if abandoning the effort to sanctify him, it dipped behind cloud. I called out a greeting and slid from my horse as the vicar launched himself unsteadily down the path to greet me. He showed none of the distaste that his nephew had earlier displayed, but welcomed me ebulliently and with outstretched hand.

  ‘Coroner Cragg! What brings you into my humble parish?’

  I told him only that I had been looking over the room I wanted to use for the forthcoming inquest. He pursed his mouth and shook his head, which set the loose skin under his jawline flapping.

  ‘But that is an inquest you will not be holding now, I fancy.’

  ‘Not today, no. Without a body—’

  ‘Precisely! No body. And who is to say if this nobody will ever be found, eh?’

  He looked pleased with his conceit. He almost laughed and I realized that he was the worse for drink. Very much the worse. The syllables of his words were eliding, the consonants here and there exchanging places.

  ‘If her body is not actually consumed, I am confident it will be found,’ I insisted.

  Mr Brockletower turned to me with a kind of leer.

  ‘Not actually consumed, you say? Ah, yes, very possibly. But I suspect her soul, her soul is already consumed, you know. By fire!’

  He set his dewlaps wagging again.

  ‘We are all sinners, you know, all sinners. But that one …’

  He tailed off and as he breathed out I could smell the wine on his breath. Just what was he telling me? It was not very usual for the Reverend Brockletower to speak in the voice of a vicar – of sin and the like – when not actually mounted in the pulpit. In society he preferred to discourse on music, poetry and horse-racing.

  ‘Shall we take a turn around the churchyard?’ I suggested. ‘In the interests of the inquest – should it ever be held – I would like to know a little more about Mrs Brockletower’s character.’

  ‘Willingly, Mr Cragg. The clergy must always assist the civil power, if to do so does not conflict with our spiritual duties.’

  His tongue had a lot of trouble with the word ‘spiritual’. It came out as ‘spurtchal’.

  So we set off along the paved path that circled the church. Catching his foot, he almost tripped on an uneven flag, but I seized his arm before he fell.

  ‘When you spoke about sin just now,’ I asked as I steadied him, ‘did you mean to imply that Mrs Brockletower had been an unusually sinful person herself?’

  Having recovered his balance and his composure the vicar straightened his wig.

  ‘Oh, yes. From what my nephew has told me she was quite wicked in herself, you know. Ramilles came to me very stricken in his conscience. His marriage was troubled, very troubled indeed.’

  A conscience-stricken Ramilles Brockletower sounded unlikely, but I did not remark on it.

  ‘It has been suggested,’ I said, ‘that Mr and Mrs Brockletower were out of countenance with each other because she had not conceived a child – an heir for Garlick Hall.’

  ‘I am struck that you should say that. I was of the same opinion and mentioned it to him. And do you know what he did? Scoffed. Said his wife was not going to conceive by any such means.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The vicar came to a halt and turned to me, grabbing my forearm in a histrionic gesture, his breath breaking against my face in stale, crapulent gusts.

  ‘Dark matters, sir. Very dark.’

  I thought of the things Dolores Brockletower had stood accused of in the popular mind.

  ‘Not witchcraft, surely? I myself do not credit it, but there has been talk that she dabbled in such things.’

  The vicar frowned. My question seemed to perplex him for a moment.

  ‘No, no,’ he interrupted. ‘Not the dark arts. Not the machinations of the Evil One. Though I should not be surprised to learn she was familiar with those, since we know her origins, do we not?’

  He spoke with a sigh, and without malice. For a moment silence fell between us until with a jerk he resumed his shuffling stride. He had lost the thread of his narrative.

  ‘No,’ he went on. ‘I refer to those mysterious matters the, er, offices of the bedroom, and so forth.’

  This at last was a solid hint to get hold of.

  ‘And such offices are … distasteful to Mr Brockletower in some way?’

  ‘Without any question. And that was the very word he used: what had once been a delight had become distasteful. It is why he desired to alienate her. That was my point, you see. That he wanted to divorce her.’

  ‘Good heavens! Divorce?’

  In my astonishment I had raised my voice. In our part of England the word divorce, in reference to marriage, is so rarely heard that it invariably causes sensation. The vicar in his cups had just confided a piece of almost incredible news.

  I went on, ‘Did he come to you for advice on this matter?’
/>   ‘Indeed. He asked me if I knew about the procedure whereby he could obtain one. Well, I told him I am merely a clergyman who warns men not to sunder marriages. How would I know about the means to become di-div-divorced – you see? I can hardly pronounce the word, it so revolts my tongue. But I did caution my nephew. I reminded him he would damage his own material circumstances by such a course, she being, as I believed, the only daughter of a Jamaican sugar plantation with enormous pecoon … pecuniary expectations. My nephew inherited my brother, the late squire’s, estates and I know for certain they were encumbered with very considerable debts. And as you see for yourself at the Hall, the spending still goes on.’

  ‘Do you know if the present squire pursued the question of a divorce? Perhaps by consulting elsewhere?’

  The fleshy underchin wobbled again.

  ‘I do not. We had the one conversation and he never returned to the matter. I felt it would be an indelic … an in-deli-ca-cy to refer back to it myself.’

  ‘And can you remember when exactly this conversation took place?’

  He stopped walking to consider for a moment, stroking his chin.

  ‘Not exactly. A matter of seven or eight weeks ago. Before the beginning of Lent. Shall we say that?’

  The Reverend Brockletower and I set off again. Soon we had completed a circuit of the church and I already had much to think about. I offered to help with him back to the vicarage but he declined the offer, as if mildly affronted. After bidding me farewell he tottered across the road to his vicarage gate. I mounted my horse and set off again on my way to town.