Late Harvest

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  ‘But Philip would never …!’ Bronwen left the end of the sentence in the air.

  ‘Let’s not pretend,’ said Josiah wearily. ‘There’s no knowing what passionate young men will do if they’re stirred up enough! What do you say, Ralph?’

  ‘I can’t believe it of Philip. He’s my brother! I know him! I’d put my money on that Wheelwright fellow.’

  ‘It seems that Wheelwright can account for himself while Philip can’t,’ Josiah said. ‘I gather that the day the girl vanished, Philip was out nearly all day, on a pony, moving sheep from one Standing Stone pasture to another. On his own. All there was on his side was the fact that the sheep had been moved all right and Uncle Stephen would confirm it. No one has said he was seen near Dunster or anything like that, but he could have been there. Poor lad thought he’d be arrested straightaway!’ Josiah groaned. ‘I think they let him go because there wasn’t really anything against him and they still had Wheelwright in view!’

  Laurence had also been released after questioning and joined the hunt, but had voiced his indignation all over Dunster and when Josiah reached the Luttrell Arms that evening, was holding a wrathful court. He had, he said, been in company all of the day when Maisie vanished, repairing a barn roof in a field belonging to the farm – it was called Alders – where he worked.

  ‘He said another fellow was working on the barn roof with him,’ said Josiah. ‘Young Daniel Hopton. Well, I know Daniel. So does Ralph here.’

  ‘He’s not a special friend of Laurence’s,’ said Ralph. ‘Wouldn’t lie for him, I think.’

  I remembered, on the night when strange things were happening in the yard below my window, hearing someone call the name Daniel, and a youthful voice replying. Josiah and Ralph no doubt knew Daniel Hopton very well indeed.

  The days went by. The search was repeated, when men could spare the time. We heard nothing from Philip. June was passing. The search was given up. Prayers were said for Maisie in St Michael’s at Minehead and St George’s in Dunster but few really believed she was still alive, although somebody did suggest that she had got herself into such a tangle between Laurence and Philip that she had run away.

  There was some exasperated comment about that theory. Silly girl, people said. What’s she to do, all on her own? Others said, She’ll have gone to hide in Taunton (Somerset’s populous county town) but fancy giving up a good place at Avill? Silly girl, silly girl. The majority, however, said: No, she’m dead, that’s what she be. Or her parents’d have heard from her. She were always a good girl that way. It’s one of they two boys, Duggan or Wheelwright, mark my words.

  On the last day of June, after a five-day stretch of hot, dry weather, Mr Stark, the farmer at Alders, took a young sheepdog out on Dunkery, the highest point of the moor, to work on training the animal to obey commands. Mr Stark went up to the great heathery slope called Codsend Moor. It is wild and bleak up there and there are bogs. They spread and overflow in wet weather, but the heatwave had shrunk them considerably. Mr Stark came back faster than he had gone, with his dog on a leash and his face bloodless under its outdoor tan. Josiah, who had been in Dunster that day, arranging for some more pine logs, came home with a grim face. Dunster was brimming, he said, brimming with news, bad news.

  He told us: ‘They’ve found Maisie Cutler.’

  The young sheepdog had found her, to be precise. Josiah actually met Mr Stark in Dunster’s main street the next day and heard it from him, first-hand. The animal had gone running ahead of his master – ‘I’m having a right old time,’ Mr Stark said, apparently, ‘tryin’ to teach ’un to do as I tell ’un; I were whistling for ’un to come back but would he come? No, he wouldn’t. Kept on runnin’ and nosin’ and then sits down and lets out such a howl, I thought he’d hurt hisself. So I start running too and oh my God …!’

  The dog was howling because he had found human remains and somehow known them for a tragedy. He was crouched by a shrunken bog, all among the shrivelled reeds round its edge. The dry weather had done its work and the bog had yielded up what it had been hiding.

  The inquest took place in the Luttrell Arms, in a big upstairs room with a medieval ceiling, whose beautiful carved beams drew my eyes at once, though not for long. The business in hand was too serious for that. All the Duggans attended, including myself, as an honorary member of the family, so to speak, and also including Stephen Duggan, who had abandoned his reclusiveness for once to give Philip his support. I recognized some of the jury but I can’t remember the name of the coroner, though he was an impressive man with a military air, probably an Acland or a Luttrell. He was past middle age but straight in the back, with a ginger moustache and what is called Presence. He was not the kind of man who is ignored.

  There was no doubt, it appeared, that the body was that of Maisie Cutler. It must have been a horrid sight. Mr Stark’s description and his pallor as he recited it, were evidence of that, and so was the haggard face of her father as he confirmed his formal identification.

  Both he and his wife had identified the good leather shoes, complete with brass buckles, which they had given her last Christmas, and there was a seed-pearl brooch and a little matching necklace that Philip, his voice taut with unhappiness, said he had given her for her seventeenth birthday the previous November. They were shown to him and he recognized them. Most of her abundant fair hair was still recognizable too, or so her father said, crying.

  There was little doubt either as to the manner of her death. A bone in her throat – a doctor testified that it was called the hyoid bone – had been fractured and that was a sign of death by strangling.

  Evidence was taken from Philip, from Laurence Wheelwright, and from Daniel Hopton who had worked with him on the barn roof on the day when Maisie was last seen. He was a skinny lad, no more than twenty, I thought, with large ears and a dust-coloured tuft of unruly hair just above his forehead. He had sounded nervous when I heard him speak that night in Minehead and he sounded nervous now. I recognized his voice. This, for sure, was the same man.

  Their evidence repeated what they had said before, and the whole community knew what that was. Daniel swore that neither he nor Laurence had left the roof that afternoon. Laurence, still exuding indignation, said that the roof had been completed and couldn’t have been if he had spent the afternoon murdering Maisie and transporting her, dead or alive, to Codsend.

  Philip swore that he had been with the Standing Stone sheep all that day. He wasn’t that clever at the work as yet and had taken a young dog that needed experience as well, and the task had taken longer than it normally would. His Great-Uncle Stephen testified that the sheep had been moved in accordance with his orders. He had not noticed the time of Philip’s return though he agreed that it was quite late in the day. On the face of things, as Philip was mounted, it was possible that he had finished with the sheep quickly and then gone on to Dunster.

  It was agreed that no one had seen Maisie with either Philip or Wheelwright and that no one could possibly have intercepted and quarrelled fatally with her and then got her body to Codsend in broad daylight, without someone noticing. But, after a fatal quarrel somewhere near Dunster, her body could have been hidden and then moved after dark. The movements of the two young men that evening had to be established.

  It transpired that both young men had been in company. Laurence had been with friends in the inn at Timberscombe and Philip had been at supper with everyone else at Standing Stone. Either, however, could have crept out at dead of night, and got back unnoticed. Mr Stark glumly admitted it, and so did Stephen Duggan though with such reluctance that the coroner fairly had to drag it out of him. Beside me, Bronwen wept quietly during Uncle Stephen’s testimony and Philip’s face was like white marble.

  The jury, however, took some time to reach a verdict and when they did, they were cautious, which was natural enough since they were local men and well acquainted, therefore, with many of those present. Josiah whispered to me that two constables were in the room. One was the man
who had organized the search, a tall individual with a craggy face. The other was burly, with a beard. They were not sitting together. The room had two doors and the constables were strategically placed, one close to each of them. Josiah did no more than say who they were, but I knew at once, with a cold worm of fear in my stomach, that they were there to make an arrest if required.

  Finally, however, the foreman of the jury stood forth and explained, in rather convoluted terms, that it was known to them all that the poor young woman had had a flirtatious nature, the which was not to be wondered at in a girl only seventeen and said to be pretty, and it was known that two young men, not so long ago, had fought over her, but where there were two there might be three or even four and whatever some of them might think privately …

  One of the other jurors muttered something which was inaudible and the foreman broke off to glare at him.

  ‘Your verdict, please,’ said the coroner, becoming impatient.

  ‘We won’t name names,’ said the foreman, glaring again at the man who had muttered. ‘It’s murder by a person or persons unknown.’

  ‘What was it that man was mumbling, who interrupted the foreman?’ Mrs Duggan said as we were filing out.

  ‘My name or Laurence’s, I should think,’ muttered Philip bitterly. ‘Well, we all know where Laurence was when Maisie vanished. Up on a barn roof with Daniel Hopton! And where was I? Moving sheep on Standing Stone land and who’s to say I didn’t sneak off to meet Maisie? I’d known for a few days that I’d be told to move those sheep, and I knew when. I could have fixed things with Maisie beforehand, talked her into not keeping her word to her parents for once and met her on the moor.’

  ‘But you didn’t!’ said Bronwen nervously.

  ‘No, of course I didn’t! But I could. I could have met Maisie and quarrelled with her over the way she’s been seeing Laurence – she might have laughed about it to me, just for the fun of seeing me get wild with her! She’d done that before and it made her giggle, can you believe it? And then I could have got back and no one the wiser. I could have slipped out at night and taken her to the bog … Oh, dear heaven, as if I’d have done that to Maisie! I’d never have hurt her, never, no matter how wild she made me! Poor Maisie, she must have been so frightened!’

  By then, we were standing beside our tethered mounts. Momentarily, Philip buried his face in his pony’s mane and as he straightened up, he used the mane to wipe his eyes. Defiantly, he said: ‘I could have done it. Only I didn’t. Didn’t. Didn’t. Oh, poor Maisie, my darling, if only you’d let me marry you and keep you safe! I loved her,’ he said bitterly.

  Josiah said: ‘Best not worry about it. That foreman was right. Where there’s two there could be three – or four or five. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, son, but could be she wasn’t the best wife for you. It’ll all smooth itself out, you’ll see.’

  Escape

  After the inquest, Philip went back to Standing Stone with Stephen Duggan and for a while we heard nothing from him. I was now preparing to go home to Foxwell, dreading the parting from Ralph, but also looking forward to being with my mother again – and planning for my wedding and thinking about my bride clothes.

  And then came a day that I still recall with pain.

  We’d done plenty of talking about the inquest, of course, but on that day, I don’t think it was mentioned. At supper that evening, Ralph remarked that a merchant brig, the Sheila Marie, was expected into Minehead harbour in a few days’ time and Ralph was interested in her because when he was in the north, he had helped to build her. She was bound for Antigua, he said. He had learned of her impending arrival from a sailor whose ship had just arrived at Minehead from Bristol where, at the moment, the Sheila Marie was preparing for her voyage to the New World.

  At Bristol, it seemed, she had picked up a cargo of luxury goods for the owners of sugar plantations – ‘things like expensive chess sets and good bronze and earthenware and fine furniture and some oak timber as well’ – and in Minehead was to add a consignment of ironware. ‘Then she’s for the high seas and the West Indies. One of these days, I’ll make a voyage like that.’

  He saw me looking at him and laughed. ‘But not yet, my love. And maybe when I do go, you’ll come with me.’

  We all laughed then, and went cheerfully to bed.

  In the depths of the night, I woke to the sound of a furious hammering on the door. I heard Josiah going down the stairs, shouting to know who it was, heard Ralph echoing him as he hurried from his own room to follow his father down, heard the front door bolts being drawn back and then recognized Philip’s voice, exclaiming: ‘Dad! Oh, Dad!’ in such agonized tones that I had sprung out of bed before I even knew I meant to. It was cold. Hastily, I pulled on a robe and a shawl, thrust my feet into slippers and ran from my room, almost colliding with Bronwen, similarly clad and clutching a candle. We sped downstairs together.

  Moments later, all five of us were gathered in the parlour, staring at each other in the light of a three-branched candlestick that someone had put on the table, and Josiah was twitching the window curtains to make sure that no lights showed outside. Philip was there, pale and dishevelled, trembling visibly and saying, over and over: ‘They came for me. They came for me.’

  ‘Who did?’ asked Josiah, turning away from the curtains. ‘Sit down in that chair there, son, and tell us what happened.’

  ‘They came to arrest me! Constables. To Standing Stone. Just on dusk and pounding on the door as if they wanted to break it in – Uncle Stephen was furious, went to the door shouting at them to wait, he was coming, what did they mean by carrying on as if they were an invasion of Frenchies …’

  Bronwen handed him a mug of cider and he gulped it thankfully. Josiah said: ‘Go on. You got away – how?’

  ‘I were upstairs,’ Philip said. ‘Supper were done. Uncle and me meant to play a game of backgammon. I’d gone up to fetch my set. I heard the men downstairs, saying they’d got a warrant to arrest me … for the murder of Maisie Cutler!’ His voice broke and the candlelight showed the glint of tears. Philip was younger than I was and I was not yet twenty-one. What was it like, at our age, to face death by hanging?

  ‘I got out of the landing window,’ said Philip, wiping his eyes and trying to command himself. ‘Didn’t stop to think; I was so frightened. That window’s just over the kitchen roof. You know Uncle had a new kitchen built on, just one storey?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go on!’ Bronwen urged him.

  ‘Well, I got out. I slithered to the ground from there, ran to the stable. Uncle’s got four ponies there and his heavy horses. I just bridled one of the ponies in a hurry – no time for a saddle – picked the pony with the white sock; he’s the fastest – and got out of the place. Didn’t know where to go, so I came here. Dad, I didn’t do it, I didn’t. I’d never have hurt Maisie; it’s unthinkable. I might have murdered that Laurence Wheelwright,’ said Philip, a gleam of spirit returning. ‘But never Maisie. Never Maisie.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Josiah said shortly. ‘Whether you did it or not, you’re our son and your ma and I’ll look after you. Where’s the pony now?’

  ‘Out there, tied to our gate,’ said Philip, jerking his head. ‘It was an awful ride,’ he said miserably. ‘Took hours. I didn’t dare go down the Avill valley, through all those villages. The men that came to Standing Stone would guess I’d make for home and chase me down the valley because it’s the obvious way, and for so much of it there’s no getting off the track; it’s nigh on straight up one side, and straight on down to the river on the other …’

  ‘That’s my boy,’ said Josiah soothingly. ‘Always try to think what the enemy might do and then fool them. You came over the moor, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, over Dunkery. The night’s clear and there was a half-moon but it made everything look so weird; I felt I were being hunted … I came past Codsend; awful, I saw it in the moonlight, that bog poor Maisie was found in; gave me the shivers; I thought what if her ghost rise
s out of it and comes after me …’

  ‘Steady, lad!’ said Josiah.

  ‘After crossing Dunkery I came down into the woods, and then through all those tangled lanes, into Minehead. It was as creepy under the trees as out on Codsend! I was frightened all the way! All the time I felt there were … beings I couldn’t see, all round me, watching. Never believed in piskies before but …’

  His young voice was terrified. I looked at him with pity, realizing that he was little more than a child, and how frightening it must be, to be hunted by the law and then driven out alone to the midnight moors and woods.

  Josiah took control. ‘I shouldn’t start believing in them now,’ he said. ‘All your imagination, that was. Imagination and panic. Now then. We’ll have the law here, sure as sure, once they know you’ve bolted. You’re right – they’ll guess you’d make for here. So we’ve to get you out of sight, and that pony, too. Well, I’ve had it in mind that something of this sort might happen. I knew if you got warning in time, you’d likely turn up here. Ralph!’

  ‘I know what to do,’ Ralph said. ‘The Bucket’s been ready for days.’

  ‘I’ll pack the hamper,’ said Bronwen, turning towards the kitchen.

  ‘You’ll be needed for getting rid of the pony,’ Josiah said to her. ‘There are folk enough in Minehead, including two constables, that know quite well how many animals I’ve got in my stable, and know I don’t keep ponies and certainly not a pony with one white sock and the Standing Stone brand as well. You’ll have to swap its bridle for a halter, lead it from Tansy and …’

  ‘We ought to turn the pony loose on Dunkery, but it’s too far,’ said Bronwen, sounding exhausted. ‘I couldn’t get there and back before dawn …’

  ‘No, I know.’ Josiah sounded like someone who was thinking fast. ‘Best go up North Hill and along to Selworthy Beacon. That’ll have to do. Then take the halter off the pony and scare it away. Let it wander till it finds its own way home or someone notices it and takes it there. Since it does carry the Standing Stone brand, it’ll be got back home in the end. I’ll let Uncle Stephen know what we did with it. Get dressed now, hurry with the hamper while I saddle Tansy. I’ll halter that pony and hang up its bridle among the rest of my tack. Bronwen, I’m sorry, but I can’t deal with the pony myself; I’ve got to be here when the law arrives and that might be any time soon! I’ve got to keep my finger on what’s happening.’