A Dark Anatomy

by Robin Blake

  With Sarah’s consent the body of her sister-in-law had continued to lie locked in the Garlick Hall Ice-house for a week past the inquest. For all that it was a body condemned and cursed by the jury’s decision it had undergone little additional decay.

  In the meantime Reverend Brockletower had read his nephew’s obsequies and laid him decently to rest in the family vault, under the chancel of Yolland Church. The funeral was the last time I had seen Sarah, and it had brought an unbidden, sad and sudden memory of my first-ever glimpse of her, across those same pews. But at least I could assure myself that she would in future be provided for, if not luxuriously, then decently. I knew this because one of Sarah’s first acts as mistress of Garlick Hall had been to remove her affairs from the firm of Rudgewick & Tench, and return them to my office. I found looking over them that there were heavy debts and encumbrances, but by arrangement with her banker I had ensured that the Hall’s dairy income would be hypothecated to her personal needs and costs, while the rents from tenant-farms would furnish the bank interest.

  Wintly brought the cart to a standstill, but stayed on his box, keeping firm hold of the driving reins. His jades tossed their heads, stamped their hooves, and looked for a moment as jumpy as unbroken colts in the edgy and desolate moonlight. But Wintly was a man of faint courage, and I could tell he, too, wished himself elsewhere at this moment.

  So it was left to Sutch and his trooper, with Stonecross and myself, to seize the box between us and slide it over the cart’s tail, then heave it clear. We carried it without ceremony to the graveside and placed it across two bands of strong webbing that Crowther had lain in parallel on the ground, so that the coffin could be lowered hand over hand into the grave.

  But one awful piece of ritual yet remained before that descent, and it was Stonecross’s to perform. The celebrated executioner was a strong, well-set man in his fifties, wearing a sober and gentlemanly black coat, almost clerical in cut, and a neat, business-like wig. He fetched his saddlebag and laid it beside the box, before kneeling himself and drawing on a pair of white kid gloves. He took a short crowbar out of the bag and began, with infinite care, to jimmy the crowbar under the coffin lid. As he exerted leverage the nails creaked and finally popped loose, allowing the lid to be opened. We all peered down at what was revealed. Dolores Brockletower was wearing the clothes she had died in. The caked wound to her throat was plainly visible, the hands were crossed on her chest and the eyelids lay closed. In form she looked frayed, and dirty, but anyone would have said that she also looked peaceful.

  Not for long, Stonecross returned the crowbar to his bag, and rummaged in it again. Finally he produced a short-handled mallet and a stake, whittled in white wood and sharpened at one end. With these in his fists, he looked back questioningly towards me. I held up a hand in warning and, once again, extracted watch from pocket. It was now five minutes to midnight.

  ‘Not yet,’ I told him.

  It was a long-drawn-out five minutes. The feathering breeze was from the north and chilly, but I felt hot. I had twice before presided over this ritual of purgation, if that is the right word for what we were about to perform, but one did not become accustomed to it. Fidelis, who refused to attend though I had invited him, called it a damnable desecrating act. But how can one desecrate a suicide? I asked. By decision of the law she is found to have desecrated herself.

  ‘But the procedure is abominable!’ he spluttered. ‘It is intolerable to reason. And, besides, she might have repented between letting go the blade and falling from her horse. She might have saved herself after all.’

  This was just like Fidelis. He could speak of reason in one breath and mouth papist quibbles the next. That, however, was his personal confusion, and my Elizabeth, though she shared his religion, had clearer thoughts.

  ‘If it must be done,’ she said, ‘it is better supervised by a good man like you, Titus, with a pure heart. The people are bound to be afraid of one that dies by her own hand. They cannot help believing she will wander the earth, spreading alarm and doing all sorts of evil, until Judgement Day. In their eyes it is for you to stop her, and so you must.’

  ‘Thank heaven it will not be me, but the public executioner who does the stopping. I doubt he has a pure heart.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he has!’ she exclaimed, charitably.

  ‘Are we ready yet, Mr Cragg?’ said the pure-at-heart now. ‘Shall I proceed?’

  His voice was dark and musical, its sounds intoned on one melancholy note. My watch said it was still one minute before midnight.

  ‘Wait for my signal,’ I told him.

  The two soldiers took up positions one at each end of the coffin. Crowther and I stood opposite Stonecross, on the other side of the box. We watched as Stonecross bunched his left fist around the stake and poised its sharpened point directly over Dolores Brockletower’s frozen heart. I waited, watching the alignment of the minute hand as it imperceptibly moved towards the vertical.

  ‘Now!’ I whispered.

  With sudden dispatch, and not a second’s hesitation, Stonecross struck the head of the stake hard with the mallet. And, as the point penetrated, the body seemed to convulse for a moment, to convulse again, and then the eyelids flipped open.

  The fusilier swore. Crowther gasped, and I felt that a clammy hand had clutched at my guts. The eyes of Dolores Brockletower were staring upwards. They were not directed towards the five of us who gathered around. They were staring beyond, far beyond, at the full moon.

  ‘Put the lid back on, quickly!’ I ordered.

  And so we returned her to the dark.

  My pledge to Sarah had left me with one more task. If the jury in the inquest on Benjamin Woodley should happen to give the true verdict – his murder by the squire – the law would after all require the forfeiture of his estates, and leave her destitute as she had feared. Yet, to prevent this was easy. I had only to maintain a judicious silence. Apart from myself, only Fidelis and Elizabeth knew the truth, and I trusted them to follow me. Without the letter that I pulled from the squire’s pocket and never made public, there was no other material evidence.

  So I was faced with the question that bedevils many who hold official positions: which ought to take precedence, the public or the private duty? It was Elizabeth who made up my mind.

  ‘Titus, you gave the woman your word. You owe nothing to Woodley and, anyway, he and his killer are both dead and beyond the reach of human justice. You must keep your peace now, and save poor Sarah.’

  So it happened at the inquest that twelve men of Preston, destitute of evidence, sent Woodley into the ground under the rubric ‘murder by person or persons unknown’. A few weeks later, after getting my inquest fee of thirteen shillings and fourpence, I slipped one day into St John’s Church. After muttering a few words of prayer for Woodley’s soul, I quietly dropped the money into the poor box.

  Historical Note

  MID-GEORGIAN PRESTON, where this story is set, was one of England’s ancient self-governing charter towns. By the 1600s it had grown into the prime social and legal centre of Lancashire, being pleasantly and strategically located in the heart of the county, with a busy agricultural market, and a significant community of craft workers amongst its stable population of about 5,000. It remained like this until the end of the century when industrialization transformed the town into the grimy, overcrowded manufactory that Charles Dickens called Coketown, his setting for Hard Times.

  Today hardly anything pre-Victorian remains except the central medieval street-plan: the three principal streets of Church Gate, Fisher Gate and Friar Gate, leading east, west and north-west from the focal point of the flagged marketplace and the site of the medieval Moot Hall. This building collapsed in 1780 to be succeeded by three further civic structures, the latest a 1960s office block of remarkable ugliness. So, to conjure up the pre-industrial scene, you have to vault back from today’s ring-roads, pre-stressed concrete and glass, over sooty Victorian stonework and uniform red-brick back-to-backs, to ima
gine a vanished townscape mixing medieval, Tudor and Georgian styles.

  Administratively eighteenth-century Preston was, like most other borough towns, an oligarchy. The council’s twenty-four members (or burgesses) appointed each other and parcelled out the senior offices, including that of the Mayor and two bailiffs, annually between themselves. Charter towns like this were virtual city-states where (in Tom Paine’s scathing words) a man’s ‘rights are circumscribed to the town and, in some cases, to the parish of his birth; and all other parts, though in his native land, are to him as a foreign country’. These communities reserved the right to run their own affairs, and keep ‘foreigners’ away at all costs.

  I have taken liberties with a few local details, not least in the coroner’s own office. In historical Preston the unusual custom was for the annually appointed Mayor to sit as coroner ex officio. But, preferring him to stand apart from local politics, I impose the more typical English model whereby Titus Cragg is directly appointed by the crown, with life-tenure. My other inventions include Garlick Hall, the nearby village of Yolland, and most of the cast of characters.

  ‘Mr Spectator’, one of Cragg’s heroes, is the imaginary writer of the London periodical The Spectator, written in the reign of Queen Anne (March 1711 – December 1712 and June – November 1714) largely by Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Cragg also reveres ‘Mr Isaac Bickerstaff’, the persona behind Steele’s earlier Tatler, which appeared in 1709. These single-sheet papers had a character very like today’s Internet blogs: they appeared several times a week to ruminate on public issues as they cropped up. Both Tatler and Spectator were then collected in book form and their contents remained hugely popular as arbiters of taste and good sense throughout the Georgian age.

  Bodies Politic

  By Robin Blake

  A Cragg & Fidelis Mystery

  PRESTON, 1741

  The drowning of drunken publican Antony Egan is no surprise – even if it comes as an unpleasant shock to coroner Titus Cragg, whose wife was the old man’s niece. But he does his duty to the letter, and the inquest’s verdict is accidental death. Meanwhile the town is agog with rumour and faction, as the General Election is only a week away and the two local seats are to be contested by four rival candidates.

  But Cragg’s close friend, Dr Luke Fidelis, finds evidence to cast doubt on the events leading to Egan’s demise. Soon suspicions are further roused when a well-to-do farmer collapses and it appears he was in town on political business. Is there a conspiracy afoot? The Mayor and Council have their own way of imposing order, but Cragg is determined not to be swayed by pressure. With the help of Fidelis’s scientific ingenuity the true criminals are brought to light …

  An extract of the gripping sequel to

  A Dark Anatomy follows here.

  Chapter One

  A HUMAN BODY IN the salmon traps was not such a rare event. The one they caught in the spring of 1741 was the fifth during my eight years as coroner in the borough of Preston. On the other hand, from my point of view, there was something very particular and personal about the latest one. This corpse was my kith, if not quite my kin.

  But I had no idea of that when the call to the riverbank came early on that Monday morning, exactly seven days before we were due to begin a week of voting in that year’s General Election. I immediately hurried out to perform the coroner’s first duty – that of answering the summons to a questionable death, and judging the need for an inquest. On my way to the stretch of the River Ribble in which the traps were laid, I naturally had to pass along Fisher Gate, where my friend Luke Fidelis lived on the upper floor of the premises of Adam Lorris, the bookbinder. Reaching Lorris’s address, I mounted the steps to the door and pealed the bell. If Fidelis was at home he could be of some use to me. When bodies were found floating in the river, the initial questions were always the same: How long had they been there? How far had they travelled? Doctor Fidelis’s knowledge of physiology, and such things as the progressive effects of total water immersion on a corpse, was far ahead of mine.

  Mrs Lorris went up to tell Fidelis I had called and of course, as was his habit, my friend was still lounging in bed. I chatted for a few minutes at the foot of the stairs with Lorris and Mrs Lorris. He told me of his progress with my old childhood book of Aesop’s Fables that I had brought to him for rebinding.

  ‘I read the book through with Mrs Lorris before I started, and we were vastly entertained, were we not, my heart?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Cragg!’ Dot Lorris exclaimed, her face breaking into creases of remembered enjoyment. ‘Such tricks those animals got up to.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Aesop was a clever fellow,’ I agreed. ‘He had a charming way of translating human nature into the behaviour of beasts.’

  I glanced up the stairs for a sign that Fidelis might be stirring himself. There was none.

  ‘There’s some of the fables, mind, that a husband would do better not to put before his wife,’ observed Lorris.

  ‘Oh? And which are those, Husband?’ Dot challenged.

  ‘The Fox and the Vixen for one. Remember it, Mr Cragg?’

  I said I had a vague memory of it.

  ‘That vixen,’ said Lorris, shaking his head, ‘she stayed under cover and let the fox run from the farmer by himself. There’s little wifely love in that, or trust.’

  ‘Trust!’ laughed his wife. ‘What was there to trust? He calculated that if both of them ran, his wife would be caught and he would get away. The farmer could only chase after one of them, and that would be the vixen, as she was the slower.’

  ‘No, she calculated that if she stayed under cover, she’d save herself and damn the fox.’

  ‘The fox damned himself when he lost his nerve,’ was Dot Lorris’s pitiless rejoinder.

  Before the discussion grew too heated I steered it towards the election. The people of Preston were excited at having a contested vote at last. In the previous parliament, and the two before that, our borough members had simply walked-over, as no one could be found to stand against them. This time four men would be fighting over the two seats, making for a much livelier prospect.

  After a couple of minutes we heard Fidelis’s voice calling down.

  ‘Cragg, I’m in my nightshirt, but come up if you like.’

  Instead I called up to him.

  ‘Get dressed, Luke. It’s almost seven and I’m taking you for a walk by the river.’

  ‘A walk? Before seven? Surely it can wait.’

  ‘No. It is now or not at all.’

  At length, the tall, fair-haired figure of Preston’s youngest and most adventurous doctor appeared on the stair. He was grumbling, as usual, when asked to do a thing before eight in the morning.

  ‘I only wanted half an hour more of sleep, Titus,’ he growled. ‘I was drinking until past midnight.’

  In consideration of Luke’s aching head I did not set too sharp a pace as we went along Fisher Gate and then, by a turning to the left, into the lane that passed the playhouse and headed down from the bluff, along which the town is ranged towards the riverbank.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Luke asked. ‘I don’t suppose this outing is for the improvement of my health.’

  ‘No. There’s a body in the river.’

  ‘Ah!’

  We walked on in silence to the bottom of the steep path, before striking across the meadow beside the riverbank. But I sensed an increased spring in Luke’s step. He was stimulated by the opportunity to assist me in my inquiries; more so, I think, than I was in leading them.

  In many towns, the river is a high street. The buildings line up expectantly alongside it, waiting for trade to come across its wharves and quays, while locks upstream and down regulate the water for the traffic of lighters and barges. None of this is so at Preston, for the river is at a distance, and on a different level. Abreast of the town to the south, it is at this point wide and, being close to the estuary, tidal. But it drains a great area of uplands to the east and, after heavy or prolonged rains com
bined with a tide, it can go so high that the water meadows flood up to a hundred yards on either side. To keep its skirts dry, therefore, the town stays aloof on its ridge, a quarter mile distant from the waterside, and it is possible to live one’s life there without any particular consciousness of the river, except as a barrier to be crossed when travelling south, and as the regular provider of fish suppers.

  On this morning, breezy after yesterday’s downpour, the current was big and tumbling, but it had stayed within the banks. A group of men wearing knee-length boots of greased leather were working the traps from boats that bobbed and pitched in the boiling stream. They were gaffing the last of the fish that had come into the traps during the night, and bringing them ashore to add to the neat row of those already landed. As we came near enough to see the display of salmon, like spears of bright polished pewter in the riverbank grass, we saw a gaggle of women in bonnets and full-length cloaks, advancing along the bank towards us, laughing and singing. It would be their job to pack the fish in rush parcels and carry them up to the market.

  The women arrived at the same time as we did, and immediately their laughter died as they saw the thing lying, stretched companionably alongside the row of fish, as if it was itself an enormous example of the species. It was wrapped in a net like a parcel, but this did not fully conceal the fearful truth: the head end was rounded, from which the shape swelled smoothly up to the belly in a small mound before tapering away again. At the end where – had it really been a monster salmon – the tail should be, two splayed feet protruded. They wore the wooden-soled clogs of the countryman, strengthened like a horse’s hoof with curves of steel nailed into them.