A Dark Anatomy

by Robin Blake

  Yet to pity the architect was useless, as I had already reminded Elizabeth. It didn’t in any way advance my understanding of how he came to be lying dead in this garden, and of who killed him. How, for instance, did he come in? I returned to the gate and examined it. The lock had been intact on our arrival. Dead or alive, Woodley could not have come in that way. So I walked the perimeter of the garden outside the fence – a few steps along the road and then I plunged into the narrow pathway that separated my garden plot from my neighbours’. Similar pathways snaked around and between all the plots here-about, making a kind of maze, walled on each side by tall lattice fencing that was overgrown with climbing plants to form high hedges, all but impenetrable. But in one place, well in from the road, I found what I was looking for. A ragged hole had been hacked right into the fence, large enough for a man to pass through to my garden. I looked down at the surface of the path beside the hole. There were hoofprints faintly discernible in the dry mud. A horse had been here, and recently, though the path was not intended for horses. Whoever rode this horse in must have done so with the sole purpose of breaking the fence and entering my garden unobserved.

  I forced my way with a little difficulty through the hole and stood once again inside the garden. I was certain Woodley had come in by this means. But in what condition was hard to know. Had he walked through himself, or been dragged? And who had made the aperture? On the ground just inside it lay a hatchet, which was not from the stock of tools I kept in the garden. I picked it up and weighed it in my hands. It was well-balanced and sharp. No doubt it had been the means by which the fence had been breached.

  I went back to the body. The exposed face was scratched and grazed, but there was very little blood on it. Still holding the hatchet I knelt and used it to lever the rigid body up and over, until it was lying face down. I now saw that a single savage wound had been inflicted on the back of the head. The blood had gushed down the man’s nape and neck and soaked his shirt and coat to the small of his back. I looked closely at the split in the skull. It was like a notch, about four inches long. Carefully I placed the hatchet’s blade against the lip of the wound. It fitted exactly.

  ‘Stay! Don’t move, there!’

  A booming voice echoed around the garden and I looked up. Sergeant Mallender was coming towards me, holding up his hand. With him were two constables, followed by Bailiff Grimshaw, who was bustling in through the gate with a look of officious determination. I rose to my feet. Mallender and his two acolytes – they were the brothers Esau and Jacob Parkin – arrived breathlessly and surrounded me while Grimshaw hurried to catch up.

  ‘Well? What are you waiting for, Sergeant?’ the bailiff called as he stumbled through the leek bed, kicking a hen out of his way. ‘Take this man up! Can’t you see? He has a weapon in his hand and a body at his feet. Do your duty, man! Arrest him, at once!’

  They had taken my coat and I was sitting in my shirtsleeves, on the filthy mattress of a narrow pallet, looking into the beady eyes of the only visitor so far allowed me. The brown rat, up on his haunches amidst the stinking straw and cleaning his whiskers fastidiously, was staring back with the fixed attention of someone who has just asked a question, and wants a reply.

  Grimshaw, his face set in an expression of grim delight, had brought me with Mallender and the Parkin brothers in an ostentatious parade up Friar Gate, across Market Place and into the town lock-up. This occupied part of the cellars of the Moot Hall, a clammy, subterranean accommodation reserved for those taken up and awaiting a charge, or their trial, or the judge’s sentence. These cellars extended beyond the aboveground perimeter of the building, and it was plain my own cell lay directly below an area of the market itself. The space was faintly lit by holes in the ceiling that had been drilled through the market’s pavement, so there were spots of light high above my head shining like constellations. I could hear market traders’ faint cries, the clop of hooves, and the rumble of barrows. The whole point of a prisoner is his exclusion from normal life. I had been incarcerated for only an hour, but these ordinary sounds were already making me feel painfully alone.

  The walls were thick, but I could make out the sounds of other prisoners, hammering the doors for water, food, or some human contact. Not all of them were suspected felons: there would be strangers among them, condemned by Grimshaw and his cronies as interlopers and awaiting expulsion from the town. These were, by definition, friendless in town, and therefore hungry. I could hear their beseeching cries – ‘Bring bread! Bring meat!’ – which made me conscious of my own hunger.

  With squeaks and groans the door had swung open and I heard the voice of Ephraim Grimshaw.

  ‘Well, Cragg, this is a pretty pickle of a mess you’re in.’

  The bailiff stepped inside, attended by the gaol’s keeper. The brown rat scuttled out of the way.

  ‘Am I? I should say that was you, Grimshaw. You have unjustly imprisoned His Majesty’s coroner on a specious excuse.’

  Grimshaw sneered.

  ‘Did I? You were found with a dead body at your feet, in your own garden, holding the weapon that, as seems likely, inflicted the fatal injury. Even a coroner is not immune from suspicion in such a circumstance.’

  ‘I went there with Mrs Cragg. The body was already lying there, and it was cold. The weapon was also on the ground. I picked it up to examine it. That was after I had sent my wife to find Mr Furzey, and tell him to inform you, which I presume is what happened. You know quite well I didn’t kill the fellow.’

  ‘That will be for the Mayor alone to decide.’

  ‘In the meantime I demand that you let me out of here.’

  ‘That too is for the Mayor.’

  ‘Can I have pen and paper?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A candle then, and a visitor? I am sure Furzey’s out there, asking for me.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Then let me see him.’

  As Grimshaw considered the request he sighed, which made his gleaming waistcoat shimmer in the gloom. Suddenly he swivelled and made for the door.

  ‘All right,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘If your man is up there, we’ll send him down. But you won’t be out of here until the Mayor bails you.’

  ‘Bails me?’ I protested. ‘There’s nothing to bail me for.’

  But the bailiff and gaoler had already left. The heavy iron-bound door thudded shut behind them.

  Furzey appeared ten minutes later. Tucked under his arm was a linen-wrapped parcel and, in his hands, a flagon and a lighted tallow candle. The dancing light of the candle animated his face and I wondered if it was only the effect of this that made him appear likely to laugh aloud at any moment. In the event, he didn’t laugh, though I suspected vast amusement at my situation on his part.

  ‘So, here you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘How you got yourself into gaol would bamboozle philosophy. Mrs Cragg sends food and beer.’

  He stooped to place the candle on the floor, and the package on the bed beside me. Then he unstopped the flagon and handed it across, watching critically as I tipped beer into my thirsty mouth.

  ‘Let’s just apply ourselves to getting me out of here, shall we?’ I asked a little testily, as I laid the flagon down and turned my attention to Elizabeth’s food. It was half a loaf of bread and some pieces of ham. I was truly ravenous.

  As I tore at the bread and ate it, turn by turn with the ham, Furzey gathered himself to leave.

  ‘You don’t need to eat so desperately. I’ll see to it. Mayor upstairs’ll have you out of here within the hour.’

  Furzey’s parting words cheered me, but presently it grew dark outside and the candle, which my clerk had ‘forgotten’ when he left me, burned itself to nothing. My spirits dwindled with it as no word came from upstairs. I could see nothing in the pitchy dark and was by now shivering uncontrollably from cold. I hammered on the door, shouting for a blanket and, eventually, the leather-hooded turnkey appeared. I tried to talk to him about my release but he only grunted. He proffe
red a horse-blanket, then pulled it back as I made a grab, wagging his finger. I found a coin in my pocket, which he took. Then he threw the blanket at me with a menacing growl and pulled the door shut. Disconsolately, I wrapped his coarse offering around my shoulders, took a last pull from the beer flagon and, with only my inquisitive (and now invisible) rodent for a cell-mate, I lay down in the dark to think about the afternoon’s events.

  Who was the late Barnabus Woodley? A peculiar sort of man, Elizabeth had said. And Fidelis had learned ‘particulars’ of him that he could only pass on by mouth. Would these provide reasons why someone wanted to kill the man?

  One or more of his workmen might have. If Peg Miller’s words meant anything, none of the gang or their women thought highly of their employer. On the other hand, if they had killed him, would they have engaged in the rencontre with the soldiers? That only happened because Piltdown – so he claimed – had been threatened by Woodley with a stoppage of wages if damage occurred to the building works. The gang would hardly have run the risk of death by musket fire on the threat of a man they knew to be already dead.

  I returned to the more dramatic idea that Woodley had in some way come between Squire Brockletower and his wife: that he was their Jago and betrayer, their poisoned mouth, ‘more fell than anguish, hunger or the sea’. But if this were true, what did Woodley know? What did he tell Ramilles Brockletower? And could he have carried through his role as the squire’s Spartan dog or bloodhound as far as cutting her throat? I doubted it.

  I ran through one supposition after another, but in my particular situation there was one central fact that I could not remove from my thoughts: that it was me, and not the murderer, that lay here in prison. From being the agent of inquiry, I was suddenly the subject of it. But why had the body been brought to my garden and left there? Cui bono? Who gained by this crude attempt to incriminate me? Falsehood was outrunning the truth in every direction, I thought, as I fell asleep at last to the sound of the rat, darting this way and that through the straw to scavenge the breadcrumbs I had dropped from my supper.

  The rusty hinges of the cell door screeched and I awoke. Light penetrated in scattered spots through the holes in the ceiling. It was morning.

  ‘Wake up, sir! Wake up! It’s Furzey back again.’

  I rolled into a seated position and rubbed my neck, stiff from lying without a pillow.

  Furzey held a paper in front of my face.

  ‘Your manumission. You can come out.’

  ‘You said it would take an hour,’ I groaned. ‘It’s been all night.’

  Instead of replying, Furzey turned and walked out, past the turnkey who was standing immediately behind him holding a lantern, and a thick bunch of keys threaded onto an iron hoop. I followed, stepping out across the cell threshold with that slight hesitation which all prisoners feel upon release.

  ‘Last night Mayor had the toothache, displacing all other business,’ my clerk explained over his shoulder as we made our way along the dripping passageway that led to the stairs. ‘There was nothing I could do.’

  We passed door after door, all closed and iron-bound, from which issued whining, sing-song appeals for relief in response to the sound of our tread.

  ‘Did you not think of Lord Derby?’ I replied. ‘He would not have let me stay incarcerated in this hellish place.’

  ‘His lordship is on his way to London.’

  ‘And it was no good applying to Bailiff Grimshaw, I suppose.’

  Furzey snorted.

  ‘Hardly. He’s hardened his heart against you. ’

  Soon we had climbed back to the daylight. As we left the Moot Hall the sun was bright, and my spirits lifted, though I felt much in need of clean linen and a shave.

  Elizabeth greeted me at home with a shriek, some brief tears, and a set of fresh underwear. Less than an hour later, having breakfasted, I was sitting in Gilliflower the barber’s chair in the Shambles, with lather covering my lower face. The street door opened and shut behind me.

  ‘So, did the prisoner reflect with profit on his crimes?’

  The laughing voice was not that of the barber. Luke Fidelis had come in.

  ‘The lock-up is a bad place for reflection, Luke,’ I retorted. ‘Cold and damp. Rats. The incessant cries of the damned in one’s ears. But what about you? Did you meet the lady, and buy the forceps?’

  ‘The less said about any lady the better, Titus, but the forceps are a ridiculous contraption, and positively dangerous to the unborn, as anyone can see except the conceited fool who invented them.’

  ‘When did you get back?’

  ‘Not until late, and half dead, so I dived straight into bed. Didn’t learn of your incarceration until Furzey told me at your office, a few minutes ago. What in heaven’s name happened?’

  I related my wife’s discovery behind our beehives.

  ‘The body was cold, you say?’

  ‘Quite cold.’

  ‘Had it stiffened yet?’

  ‘It was stiff as a log.’

  ‘And had you yourself been in the garden during the previous twenty-four hours?’

  ‘No, not for days.’

  Luke laughed again.

  ‘And yet you were arrested! The stupidity of our bailiff is boundless.’

  ‘It isn’t stupidity. It is vindictiveness.’

  ‘That’s the same thing, in his case.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Grimshaw wanted to demonstrate his power. That was his whole intention. He knows I didn’t kill the architect.’

  Gilliflower finished with my face. After patting the remnants of soap from my jowls he allowed me to rise. As I paid him, Fidelis took my place in the chair.

  ‘Come with me to look at Woodley,’ I said. ‘They have him in the Old Friary.’

  Fidelis took out his pocket watch.

  ‘I am expecting a caller at my lodging in thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘But he will not keep me long. Come then and I will go with you. We have much to discuss.’

  Chapter Twenty

  FISHER GATE LEADS west from the Moot Hall, just as Church Gate heads east. Both these thoroughfares are lined by a mix of houses, ancient and new, but generally well found and creditable to the town. They lie along the length of the high bluff, or ridge, which runs parallel to the north side of the Ribble valley, placing us between the river to the south and the moor and forest to the north. It is our height that gives the town its healthy and advantageous position. Houses on the north side of Church Gate and Fisher Gate look out across to the moor, but those on the south command a prospect of river and the old road that snakes across it and away to the villages of Leyland and Chorley and the undulating country beyond. Far fells lie to the east while in the west the flat marshes stretch to the coast.

  Fidelis lodged on this more favourable southern side of Fisher Gate, at the house of Lorris, the bookbinder, of whom I was a good customer and friend. I had myself secured the rooms for the young doctor after convening an inquest on their previous tenant, Lorris’s aged father-in-law, who had created a vacancy by fatally setting fire to himself. Repaired and repainted, the rooms were pleasant and spacious, on the top floor of the premises, looking onto the street on one side, and over the roof of the playhouse to the distant country on the other.

  Admitting me to the hall, Lorris’s lady gave me a quizzical look. She clearly already knew where I had lodged overnight – as, I guessed, did most of the town.

  ‘It was a cruel thing, Titus,’ she said. ‘The bailiff is no friend of ours after this.’

  ‘Thank you, Joan. He has his reasons for what he did, I must suppose.’

  ‘Not reason enough, anyway.’

  A big-boned lad came clumping down the stairs, carrying a leather valise, the contents of which clanked metallically. Glancing at him, I realized it was the young artist’s assistant who had waited in the anteroom at Patten House during his master Winstanley’s audience with Lord Derby. Having collected his greatcoat, he departed with only a mumbled farewell and I ask
ed Joan Lorris if she knew his name. She did not, only that he had arrived ten minutes before to see Dr Fidelis.

  The doctor himself came down a minute later, in coat and hat. I said goodbye to his landlady and we set out.

  ‘The young fellow I have just seen leaving the house,’ I said as we crossed Fisher Gate and started down Chapel Lane, which cuts through to Friar Gate. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘That’s George.’

  ‘I’ve seen him at Patten House, with the portrait painter Winstanley.’

  ‘He’s Winstanley’s assistant, or apprentice. And according to himself with more talent below the joint of his thumb than Winstanley in his entire body. They’ve been staying at the Bull whilst painting his lordship.’

  ‘Was George here to paint you, too?’

  Luke laughed.

  ‘No. I am not yet ready to be made immortal. George takes a strong interest in the anatomy of the body. He came to borrow some instruments, because he wants to dissect a fox, so he says. Dr Dapperwick with whom he has taken instruction is so long retired and so poor that he has none of the latest engines and contrivances.’

  ‘Dapperwick!’

  In my excitement I jumped ahead of Luke and turned to stop him in his tracks.

  ‘I saw the doctor last week at his house, just after your departure for York. It was part of the inquiry into the missing body. He obviously couldn’t help. But he mentioned he had a young assistant, whom mysteriously he would not name.’