Skin and Bone--A Mystery

by Robin Blake

  ‘No, Furzey, it is incredible. Stop fooling. Have you gathered news of our jurors? Shall we be able to resume the inquest tomorrow?’

  ‘There’s no chance of that. Half of them are as hoarse as donkeys; they’re all mortally afraid. Word has gone around that the fire was set on purpose. After what we all went through they don’t want to have owt to do with this inquest.’

  I sighed.

  ‘They will have to in time. Oh well, let us wait two days and speak to them again.’

  Chapter 12

  THAT EVENING I acquainted Elizabeth with the Mayor’s accusations and threats. In spite of my earlier jocosity, the suspicion had begun to nibble at me that Furzey was right, and that I really might be ejected from the coronership in this ridiculous way. As for my wife, she took the news indignantly.

  ‘That Lady Rickaby! How she draws attention to herself. It is nothing but pride, and quite unseemly as well as absurd. But you must be careful, my love. The Corporation has little love for you and they will pick up this charge by Lady Rickaby as a stick to beat you with.’

  ‘A very thin and absurd stick. It would not hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. It might if you charge into the Scroop family accusing them of concealed pregnancy and baby killing.’

  Later, I lay uneasily in bed for a long time, turning this way and that, while my wife slept beside me. As Elizabeth had said, the matter was very delicate. Abraham Scroop was a powerful man. Without presentable evidence of the fact, or at least a strong indication, his daughter could hardly be asked the question direct: had she been with child? With that problem still foremost in my mind, I did at last sink into sleep – only to awake an hour later from a fearful dream.

  What the devil is the mind doing when it dreams? Lucretius wrote – if I read him right in Book 4 of his poem – that dreams are the worn-out thoughts of the mind, cast off in sleep as snakes shed their skins. I have also heard it said that dreams are the games of a childish brain given licence to caper around all forgetful of decency and decorum. Yet some dreams are more dreadful than we dare to think of waking, and raise terrors that linger long in the memory. They seem charged with meaning and portent, according with our much older belief that gods and spirits talk to us through dreams.

  In this dream I was in our vegetable garden out beyond the Friar Gate Bar, and there I found to my great surprise a tan-pit exactly like those I’d seen at the skin-yard. Approaching it I saw the dead newborn baby floating there half submerged, its unformed face and swaddled body lying ghost-like in the tanners’ stinking, leather-making soup. I bent and reached down to pull the little victim out, whereupon its eyes flashed open and stared at me with horrid accusation. Then a hand – its own hand it seemed to me – appeared out of the swaddling clothes and seized my thumb and gave a sharp jerk. Pulled off balance by what seemed incommensurate strength, I found myself pitching helplessly forward into the vileness of the pit, when I jumped awake covered in a hot sweat of horror.

  I have just offended against the rule that I once read in The Spectator, ‘Never narrate your dreams. You enjoy telling them, but no one enjoys hearing them’. Very well, but I cannot help it, for the dream did not just frighten me, it convinced that I must proceed with care, or I would end up falling into a trough of shit.

  * * *

  That morning as I dressed I meditated on the problem of Harriet Scroop, and how I could ever find out if she had been pregnant and given secret birth. At breakfast, bringing me the food, Elizabeth bent and scrutinized my face.

  ‘You look tired, my love.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep much.’

  I was on the point of telling her the dream, but restrained myself, not wanting to look foolish in her eyes.

  ‘It was this very delicate Scroop business. I cannot come out and ask Harriet Scroop if she has been pregnant. We must find it out another way.’

  It was then I thought of how Elizabeth might help.

  ‘I wonder if you would by any chance be calling on Mrs Scroop, my dearest?’

  I asked this in a sidelong sort of way but, as quick as a pipit, she grasped my intent.

  ‘Titus, are you asking me to spy for you?’ Her eyes sparkled with amusement. ‘I don’t know what the town would say to your using your wife as an agent.’

  ‘I am asking you to try the air of the house, that’s all. You have the most sensitive nose that I know. You can smell trouble. I would like to find out how that household smells, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘Well, I have the very thing in the cold press to take with me: a restorative milk jelly that Matty made this morning. I will carry it to the Scroops in such a neighbourly way that no one will guess my ulterior motive.’

  ‘A junket! Shall we not have any junket, then?’

  Elizabeth laughed at my fondness for the dish.

  ‘Matty will make another immediately. It will restore you, too.’

  * * *

  In the evening at supper, as helpings of Matty’s second junket lay before us on the table, Elizabeth gave me a full report on her visit.

  ‘Of course I asked first for Mrs Scroop, but she would not or could not see me.’

  ‘She is very reclusive, it seems.’

  The milk jelly was cool, but with the musty tang of nutmeg. I enjoyed the slipperiness of it on my still-rough throat as Elizabeth continued.

  ‘So I requested the company of Harriet Scroop instead and she came in to me. So far, so good. Harriet is still only fifteen, but I fancy she has grown up since I saw her last. She is more composed than the stammering girl that she was. And she has not quite lost all that puppy fat. Anyway, I gave her the junket and we exchanged a few polite words. I asked how her mother was and the children, and then her busy father. Of course we did not touch on the nature of his business but I had the impression he is very occupied with it, and a great deal absent from the family. After a little time she asked about myself and then after you, which gave me my opportunity. I described how you were absorbed in the case of the murdered newborn child, and in how to restart the inquest, and that you had even been as far as Wigan making enquiries. I affected to know no details – being just a wife, I made her understand – but I kept an eye on her manner as I raised the matter. There is no doubt, Titus. Her interest in it is keen, very keen. “Was your husband looking for that Kathy Brock, then?” she asked. I pretended not to know, and asked why she thought you might, and she said she knew Kathy was in Wigan, and that the word was she was suspected of murder, and that she, Harriet, wouldn’t put it past her, as when she was a servant in the household she had always been saucy and a hussy. “And now she has run away to her uncle in Wigan, hasn’t she?” she said. “Does not that prove her guilt? I hope she is brought back and made to confess her guilt.”

  ‘Then she became rather quiet for a moment, and it seemed she might have had something to say but found it difficult to put whatever it was into words. Then Dr Harrod came in. You know he is such a friend of the family that he comes and goes almost as he likes in the house. His joining us only increased Miss Scroop’s difficulty and she began actually to stammer. “Now, now, my dear,” he said. “Don’t say your stutter has returned, that I took so many hours to cure you of?” But still she failed to produce words and instead she fled from the room.’

  I have given Elizabeth’s account shorn of my own interrupting exclamations and superfluous questions, just as Cervantes does in Don Quixote. This may not be how people talk in life, but it keeps the matter brief. However, at this point I asked her a question worth recording.

  ‘What did Dr Harrod say about this?’

  ‘Oh, he made light of it, before changing the subject – complimenting me on bringing the junket and telling me what a busy day he was having.’

  ‘He has a wide practice and is much respected, though not by Fidelis, who calls him a medical buffoon with his astrology and old-fashioned nostrums. As for me, I am inclined to think his nostrums have stood the test of time, and his talk of the conste
llations is only an embroidery to cover the rather less pretty facts of disease.’

  ‘He is very popular with the ladies. He does not discuss their insides with them.’

  ‘Yes, and by God, one of them’s … How could I have forgotten? A minute before I opened the inquest, Harrod told me he was in a hurry to give his evidence, as he had been called to the bedside of a lady with a very bad bandaged abscess.’

  ‘What is remarkable about that?’

  ‘Because he told me the lady’s name. Lady Rickaby.’

  ‘How odd. Lady Rickaby was in the inquest room.’

  ‘Exactly. And, unfortunately for me, I saw her legs. There was not a bandage to be seen. So why tell this lie? Why would she pretend to her doctor she was ill?’

  All the threads of this inquiry were getting confused, just as fishermen’s lines tangle in the wind. Everywhere was the suspicion of underhand dealing and lies. I did not know why the fire at the Skeleton Inn had been started, and nor could I tell the Mayor’s reason for hurrying me to judgement in the matter. As for the lies, what credence could I give Kathy Brock? And why had Lady Rickaby lied about her health?

  And all the time that friendless little body lay in the bath house. Still no prayers had been said for it, and no grave dug, and I knew I would feel the tugging of this, even as I went about my mundane legal tasks – for now my story begins a new day, being Wednesday.

  * * *

  The sky this morning was broadly patched with blue between white scuts of cloud, and it was pleasant to walk about town. After breakfast, I stepped out into Cheapside and turned left towards the top of Friar Gate. My job this morning was to go the rounds of our coffee houses in search of an executor who had repeatedly dodged all my attempts to obtain his signature on a letter. However, the elusive fellow I was seeking was not in any of the coffee houses I put my head into, but when I came to the last, the Turk’s Head, I saw Luke Fidelis sitting, with a pot of coffee before him, as he studied the Preston Journal. The air in the room was spiced with the smell of tobacco and roast coffee beans, and I breathed it with pleasure as I joined him.

  Fidelis called for another cup and poured for me.

  ‘It is the coffee our grandfathers used to drink,’ he said. ‘Plumtree tells me his supply of Jamaican beans has been interrupted by a shipment to Liverpool going down in a hurricane. He’s obtained a supply of Arabian beans from somewhere in London. I fancy it will sharpen you up.’

  ‘I require sharpening up,’ I said, tasting the brew. It was darker and more bitter than what we were used to. ‘I am getting nowhere with the case of the dead baby and now I am accused of assaulting a lady.’

  ‘I have heard. The woman is a fool. You must take no notice, Titus. Have a pinch of snuff with your coffee instead.’

  He placed his snuffbox on the table between us. I picked it up and saw that it was of unusual design, being circular and with a motif in a foreign alphabet.

  ‘I haven’t see this before. It is handsome.’

  ‘A lady gave it to me,’ he said. ‘I am fond of it.’

  I tried to flip the lid up with my thumb in the usual way, but nothing happened. Fidelis watched me intently, but offered no help until I had revolved the box in my fingers and found I could not nick it open from any point in the circumference.

  ‘How the devil do I open it?’

  ‘Oh, the lid twists,’ he said, rising now and heading out by the back door towards the jakes.

  I continued to struggle to open the snuffbox. Taking a firm hold of the lid with the fingers of one hand and of the base with those of the other, I twisted. There was a slight movement and then it stuck entirely. I put the box down and waited for Fidelis to return.

  ‘I cannot open it,’ I said. ‘It is too tight.’

  Fidelis took the snuffbox and had it open in seconds.

  ‘You see?’ he said. ‘It is not too tight, you merely tried to open it in the wrong direction. This is an old Russian box. The thread on the lid is counter and so you must twist it counter.’

  I took a pinch of what was evidently good Seville tobacco dust and said, ‘I have read that Russians cross themselves by touching the right shoulder before the left. Do they by the same token screw lids in the other direction also?’

  As I snuffed, he laughed.

  ‘A delightful idea, but the truth is better. A hundred years ago Tsar Michael forbade all tobacco taking. He specially hated snuff and punished those caught taking it by having their noses cut off.’

  ‘He was a harsh ruler.’

  ‘But a stupid one. The courtiers had their snuffboxes made on this pattern, so that the Tsar would be unable to open them and discover what they contained. Now, you must tell me how you do in proving Kathy Brock’s story?’

  I sneezed and at once my head seemed clearer, my brain less oppressed.

  ‘Not well. Jack Thwaite has spoken to me. He raised this absurd idea that I attacked the lady, and then said I was negligent in dragging out the skin-yard inquest. He does not like the place and considers all its inhabitants degenerate. Kathy he sees as the only possible culprit in the matter and he wants to hurry the thing along.’

  ‘It is not for him to decide.’

  ‘Well, he is chief magistrate. He can if he wishes take the matter into his own hands even though it would be customary not to do so until he knows the inquest’s outcome. But this haste to blame Kathy Brock looks dubious, I think. A matter of policy, not of justice. There is a project to remove the skinners from the skin-yard in order to set up a new tannery or something of the kind, and it will be easier to turn the Brocks and the Kites out of the skin-yard if one of them is tainted as a murderer.’

  ‘Where is Ephraim Grimshaw in this? Let us not forget the Grimshaws are curriers and themselves have an interest in the products of the skin-yard.’

  ‘Yes, they must make powerful allies for Scroop – even without the addition of Lord Grassington’s nephew. However, there’s a part of me, too, that wants to get this inquest over and done. I wish it had not been thwarted and we had got to a verdict, one way or the other.’

  ‘It would have gone against her, I think. Margery Brock’s evidence was damning.’

  ‘Yet it was about another state of affairs, another man and last year. I wish Kathy had had the chance to speak for herself.’

  ‘And that would have helped her, you think?’

  His tone told me he thought not.

  ‘You are probably right,’ I said with a sigh of regret. ‘If she did come back, the gallows or transportation would almost inevitably await her.’

  ‘Then it is up to you to sort the lies from the truth.’

  I laughed ruefully.

  ‘Lies! I have already found one out, though I don’t know the meaning of it. I haven’t told you, have I, what Dr Harrod said to me when we came back from viewing the body? It seems remarkable, but I don’t know how. I only last night remembered it.’

  ‘What was it?’

  I told him that the doctor had informed me he was hurrying away to a patient whose leg was eaten by an abscess.

  ‘What is remarkable about that?’ he said. ‘I see one of those every fortnight.’

  ‘I’d wager you can’t guess who the lady was.’

  ‘You would be right: I can’t.’

  ‘Lady Rickaby.’

  Showing no surprise, and little enough interest, Fidelis took another pinch of snuff.

  ‘So I want to know this,’ I went on, ‘and I hope you will tell me: if the lady had an abscess, I mean a bad case of it, would she have been able to go out and come to the inquest?’

  ‘I doubt it. If it was indeed a bad suppuration, she would have been resting in a curtained room with a poultice on it. She would hardly have been able to attend an event in public without it being lanced. Where is this leading, Titus?’

  ‘To the question why did she call for him to lance it and then miss the appointment? Did she make an unexpected recovery? You know I saw her legs. There was nothing. Was it
all pretence?’

  Fidelis sighed, impatient at the dragging pace of my thoughts.

  ‘No, Titus. At least, not on her part. She might have pretended to a migraine, perhaps, but would never have made up anything so easily discovered as an imaginary abscess. Ergo, Lady Rickaby did not lie to Dr Harrod. It was Harrod who lied to you.’

  ‘Well, I am at a loss to see why.’

  ‘He did not want to waste time. He wanted to give his evidence early, so he invented the appointment.’

  ‘It probably doesn’t signify and was only a whim of his.’

  ‘Perhaps he had some assignation. It is whispered here and there that the good doctor is a man with secrets, by which I suppose they mean he is a lady’s man.’

  ‘In which case, that is his business and I revert to the more important question – how to proceed in this matter of the baby’s death. I am checked in every direction.’

  ‘You are not, Titus. Let me suggest two ways you may go. Remember the state of the baby’s navel cord? It had been tied and cut – it had been dealt with by someone who knew the necessities of childbirth. So here is my first suggestion: find the person who tied that knot. It would be one with some experience of childbirth.’

  ‘A mother? A midwife?’

  ‘Those are two possibilities.’

  ‘And what is your second idea?’

  He tapped the snuffbox.

  ‘Do not the French say cherchez la femme? I say, turn the question the other way, like the lid of this box. Look for the man in the case. The seducer of Kathy last year may be the same man as the father of the baby we are dealing with this year. If you can find him you may discover the truth.’

  Chapter 13

  BY MIDDAY I had crossed the river and gone to Penwortham. The morning’s bright weather had faded now and the wind had dropped, so that the air felt oppressive. I walked up through the woods to the west of the village, taking what began as a lane, became a ride and finally thinned to a muddy path. The trees were still green, but it was a desiccated, dull, September greenery, which depressed my spirits. After less than a mile the woods came to an end, and now there was a view down across moss and reed beds towards the river. But seeing the pig-iron sky and muddy river in spate did little to relieve me, and I felt more misgivings than ever for my mission. I had to force myself to press on.