Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery)

by Jane Jakeman

  “My own thought exactly, Belos. If the gypsy is innocent, then who is guilty? Have you heard anything in the village — any gossip in the alehouse? It seemed to me that the little fellow, Seliman Day, that he was keen enough to set the blame on the Romany. Was there any quarrel between him and the Crawshays?”

  “I have heard nothing of that nature, my lord — the Crawshays were not loved in the village, to say the least of it, but they kept pretty much to themselves — and I know of no quarrel with Day, nor with any of the villagers, come to that.”

  “Perhaps the gypsy is guilty,” said I. “Or perhaps this matter will never be resolved.”

  “‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.’”

  “Macbeth, I believe, Belos — oh, forgive me!”

  I had forgotten that theatrical folk count it the most unlucky thing in the world to mention the title of that work, an odd superstition, but one which Belos adheres to, though God knows he quotes from the Scottish play often enough, and so I told him.

  “You quote too much literature for a member of the lower orders, Belos. Have I not told you so before?”

  “Yes, my lord, but you will pardon a broken-down actor.”

  “And that you were when I found you penniless in Greece, Belos, but you tread the boards no longer. Kindly confine your dialogue to something more appropriate.”

  “As my lord pleases.”

  Belos gave an irritating, exaggeratedly thespian bow, and withdrew with an offended flourish.

  I gazed out of the tall windows of the dining room to where the deer park shimmered in the heat. The deer would be panting under the trees in the little spinney in their parkland, their rough wet tongues hanging out.

  The night would be hot and sultry. There had been no thunderstorms to give relief.

  It seemed ironic that in all that enormous mansion of mine, the only person who would spend the night in comfort and not sweating and chafing with the heat would be the gypsy, imprisoned in the cold, damp cellars deep underneath the house.

  The more I wilted in the dining room, the more interesting an interview with the gypsy, in his cool imprisonment, began to appear. Finally, I drained my glass and made my way to the back of the house.

  Here, leading down behind an oak door, was a flight of steps that seemed to disappear into the earth. This was the last relic of the medieval Danby family who had owned the castle which had once stood on this spot. Their towers above ground had long since vanished, but their dungeons remained. Here they had exerted their feudal powers, imprisoning rebellious tenants and aggressive neighbours when they could catch them, and, when times were particularly hard, locking up anyone at all from whom they might expect a decent ransom. They were average feudal thugs.

  The rooms at the foot of the staircase were actually caves, hollowed out of the solid rock on which the castle had been built.

  The dungeons had been intended to bring about the appropriate sense of fear or repentance in the Danbys’ prisoners. They were as damp and cold as could be contrived without actually extinguishing life. One of Lord Charles Danby’s architects had toyed with the idea of converting them into a Gothic crypt, but the wet running down the walls had washed away his enthusiasm. My grandfather, old Hedger, saw no point in any expenditure at all on the cellars. He did not intend to extend his wine stores into them, preferring ale himself, and was unwilling to do anything more than provide a stout door to make sure the cellars were shut off.

  I felt the cool air striking up from the depths at the bottom of the staircase.

  At the foot of the stairs, a dim light burned in an iron mount on the wall. There was a grille fitted to the wall of the cell. I peered through its bars for a minute or two before I turned the key in the lock and entered.

  The man was seated at a rough table in the middle of the room. His head was propped on his hands. His hair hung loose and disordered in thick black locks, shiny with grease in the rushlight. He was crooning something to himself:

  “Kek man camov te jib bolli-mengreskoenaes,

  Man camov te jib weshenjugalogonaes.”

  I recognised it as a fragment of an old Romany song:

  “I do not wish to live like a Christian,

  I wish to live like a dog of the wood.”

  The “dog of the wood” is the fox, in the old gypsy speech. The man was of the real old gypsy clan, who wander from India to the distant northern wastes, and whom I had encountered in my own roamings; I had endeavoured to learn a little of their talk at one time, and had even jotted down some phrases in a notebook. The man I had rescued was a kaulo Romany, a “black Romany” in their own tongue. They will not sleep in a house nor enter a church, and say that a curse will befall any of their children who bury their parents in a churchyard.

  Was this the man who had killed the Crawshays, father and son, raising, aiming and firing first one pistol, then the next? Perhaps. This was, after all, the man whom Marie had described bending over the bodies when she had peered through the crack in the door.

  There was a heavy bar across the outside of the door, and I raised it. As I entered the cell, the gypsy stood up from the table, but quietly, unthreateningly: I did not fear him. He was like an animal that has recently been caged, but has ceased to struggle.

  There was some blood on the front of his dirty shirt, but that could have come from the cut on his lip: I had myself seen the blood dripping down from his face when he had been tied to the wheel of the cart in the farmhouse yard.

  There was plenty of evidence against him. I rehearsed it in my mind. There was the testimony of Marie Crawshay, who had seen him standing over the bodies with her own eyes. But it was not Marie’s word alone that damned him. Some of the men had seized the gypsy and searched him, and had found a bundle of linen. Wrapped in a child’s shirt buried in the depths of the bundle were the guineas. And Crawshay’s heavy silver fob watch, taken from his dead body.

  I could hear the voice of the prosecution in court, of the lawyer holding up that very watch for the eyes of the jury: “And whence gentlemen of the jury, whence had he come by these items, the linen and the watch: Why, he said that Mistress Crawshay had given them to him! Did you ever hear such a wicked tarradiddle! He claims that she gave him some old linen, and he did not know that gold and silver lay wrapped within it! And when those stout fellows from the village detained him, and opened the bundle before his very eyes, why, who was more surprised than he, when out rolled the guineas and the watch! And he, the gypsy-man, he had never known that there was anything inside the bundle of old linen that Mistress Crawshay had furnished him with!

  “I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, was there ever such a wicked tissue of lies?”

  And then the prosecutor would put the final nail in the gypsy’s coffin. Holding up the watch, gleaming silver in the light through the courtroom windows:

  “And there, gentlemen of the jury, is the watch taken even from the body, the still-warm corpse, of Farmer Crawshay! From the dead body of one of the honest yeomen of England! And that smear upon it, gentlemen, why, that is the blood of the murdered man, upon it still!”

  “Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?” The judge’s voice, droning, uninterested, the outcome a foregone conclusion, his clerk already holding the black cap over his lordship’s frazzled old wig.

  “Guilty, upon my honour!”

  But there was one problem still in my mind. There was not enough blood in all this.

  Anyone unused to the sight of sudden death from pistol wounds might have thought there was blood in plenty, but I had seen many men killed in such a way, and the effect at such close quarters was inevitably to spatter blood and brains like a fountain. Some would splash on the walls, some would collect in pools under the bodies, as I had observed on the table and floor at the farm.

  And there should be some on the murderer, who had stood so close to the victims as the deadly shots were fired. Yet the only signs on any personage had been the mark on the bosom of
the governess’s velvet dress, and the obscure smears on the child’s shirt in which the guineas and the silver watch had been wrapped. No blood on the gypsy, who had committed the murder and afterwards rifled one of the dead, except such as might well have come from his own cuts and abrasions. No blood on Marie Crawshay, who had discovered the bodies of her father-in-law and her husband. Had she not brushed against them, not leaned over them, nor in her terror and grief touched them, felt the stillness of death upon their bodies, cradled her husband in her arms? None of those things, evidently, for if she had, her dress must have borne traces of it.

  I recalled a few words of the gypsy’s language.

  “Hokka tute mande htavava tute!”

  That is to say: “If you tell me a falsehood, I will kill you!”

  He moved back in astonishment, taken by surprise at hearing the words. I took the rushlight from its iron holder and held it closer to the gypsy’s face. The huge dark eyes, without fire, seemed like the great mournful eyes of cattle. He pulled back a little from the light.

  “It wasna’ me, your lordship. I did naught there, at Crawshay’s. They was good to me at Crawshay’s. The givengro was good to me.”

  He used an ancient word for farmer: givengro, the wheat-fellow, one who grows crops and settles the land, not one of us, the gypsies and we who roam free. His accent was strange, unfamiliar to me, and to the villagers he might have been speaking in the voice of the devil itself. His words rushed on.

  “I was nowhere near the house, I swear to your honour, I swear it on the life of my child, when they was killed, the old man and the young master. I was walking in the fields, on the way to Crawshay’s, when I heard the shots — if any man saw me then, they could prove that I was not guilty.”

  Hopeless chance, thought I, for if anyone in this district knew of aught that would prove the gypsy’s innocence, would they come forward? Not the slightest possibility, for he was guilty, as the country folk here had decided amongst themselves, and any who gainsaid this lawless verdict would doubtless lose all popularity amongst their fellows. No, no one would come forward to testify that they had seen the Romany man walking through the fields as the shots that killed the Crawshays were fired.

  But he was not finished.

  “I heard the sounds, lord, but, God forgive me, I thought nothing of it. First one shot, then another, a little while later.”

  “A little while later, say you?”

  This was strange. And, therefore, interesting to my jaded mind.

  “How long afterwards? How long between the shots?”

  “A while, lord.”

  A deeply irritating answer, but I could not show my impatience: most of these country folk have no sense of time by the clock, even in this day and age when elsewhere there is a busy world of scientific invention. Why, I read but lately in one of Belos’s old newspapers (no more than three months stale, I promise you) that an inhabitant of Ayr in North Britain, one Dick Irvine, has taken out patents for an improved railroad and method of propelling carriages thereon, and a Mr. Gurney has invented a steam carriage that will run on four wheels. Yet here, men still tell the time by the sun rolling round the sky, and if it rains and the sun is obscured, why, they cannot work in the fields anyway, so there’s an end on it. But as for knowing the hour by any other means, that is beyond the bumpkins hereabouts. The better houses have long-case clocks, a farmer like Crawshay carries a lumpy silver timepiece in his pocket, but for the rest, time is measured as it was for their ancestors five hundred years ago. The villagers take their time from the church bells, and a man such as this gypsy would read his hours in the passing of the sun across the heavens. I doubted he could tell the time from a clock if it were shown to him.

  Still, no point in showing any impatience.

  “A long while, would you say?”

  This time I got a surprisingly sensible response.

  “The space of time it took me to walk across Quillan’s Field. I were at the bottom of the held when I heard the first shot, and near the top of the rise at t’other end when there came the second.”

  I knew Quillan’s Field; this was an old name in the district for a patch of ground that lay between the place where the gypsy family was encamped and the Crawshay farmhouse. I calculated it would take an active man a few minutes, or a little longer, to cross it. About five minutes, perhaps?

  Had not Marie Crawshay spoken of the shots as if they had been fired almost together? I tried to recall her words: “I heard a couple of loud bangs from the direction of the house.” Perhaps I had just assumed the sounds were close together.

  So why might there have been a delay between the shots of the pistols that had killed the men in the farmhouse? Both guns had been fired; the murderer would not have had to reload.

  What had the killer been doing between the shots? There might have been a fight, of course: one of the Crawshays might have grappled with the murderer before the second shot could be fired. But there was no sign of a disturbance in that room where the killings had taken place. Nothing overturned or broken.

  “What did you think when you heard the shots?”

  “I thought nothing, lord.”

  That I could certainly credit.

  “Thought they was after rabbits or pheasants in the corn stubble near the house. ’Tis nothing, a few gunshots round a farm. Course, I did not know they was from inside the farm. And when I got there, all seemed to be as it always was and Mistress Crawshay gave me a bundle of clothes — she were like goodness itself to us. I went no further in than the kitchen. I believed naught was wrong in that house, and that’s the truth. I swear it, O raia — O lord. I hurt none at Crawshay’s! Mistress Crawshay gave me the old shirt — she gave it me!”

  I broke through his protests.

  “It will not be for me to try you. You can save your breath — it’s no use pleading with me. You may face the nashimescro yet.”

  The nashimescro is the hangman, a figure with whom the gypsies, persecuted as they are throughout Europe, are only too well acquainted.

  He was ever more agitated.

  “My romany chi ta chavali. My gypsy-woman and my child — I fear for them more than for myself. She and my girl — they be still in the keir vardo, the caravan, near Quillan’s, where any men can get them if they do so please, and they will torment them sorely. Those men are the animals, though they say Romanies are no better than the beasts. Let them have me, take me out and give me to the men at Crawshay’s, but help my woman and the little chavali!”

  “I can do nothing more for you — haven’t I already said so?”

  He fell back on the straw, silent and despairing. Yet, as I turned and began to mount the stairs, he called after me:

  “You could save them, my lord! You could!”

  I could no longer hear the man’s cries. Malfine was empty, silent in the heat, as I climbed the stone steps and passed over the marble floors that echoed under my feet.

  The thought of the gypsy’s family edged into my mind again, though I pushed it away. I supposed they were ragged, thin and dark creatures, like the man himself, alien in their looks to the native dwellers in the English countryside. They were outsiders, with no one to speak for or protect them. The caravan sitting defenceless in a clearing, a mob gathering around it … I thought of the faces I had seen at the farm, filled with rage and hate.

  Perhaps there was something I might do. If I could be roused to it.

  I found myself a while later unlocking a cupboard in my bedroom, and taking out a pistol. A plain and unadorned workaday weapon. Nothing flashy, no engraved barrel or chased mounts, quite unlike the duellists weapons at the farmhouse. Only a gunsmith would have recognised its quality — a piece of blue metal with the deep watered-silk gleam of tempered steel.

  But why should I do aught? I had saved the man himself, saved him for his trial, and that was both the full extent of my obligation and beyond my inclination. The whole affair was nothing more to do with me.

 
CHAPTER 7

  The afternoon still held much of its heat as I rode Zaraband along a bridle path skirting the crops. Dust rose up from her hooves as we passed between the fields, some with the stubble of harvest, others still with their burden of ripened wheat waiting for the harvester’s scythe. The heat haze shimmered and the mare’s hooves made little sound on the soft dust. Now and then she flicked her ears to drive away a fly, and the sun still beat down on us, though it was lower in the sky. I felt a sweat breaking out under my shirt.

  The countryside seemed empty except for man and horse.

  The path which I somehow found myself taking, towards Quillan’s Field, led round the side of a steep little hill, farmed only on its lower slopes. I let the mare take her time going uphill, and we were moving slowly upwards along the path when there came a strange muffled thumping sound from the other side of the little knoll. Zaraband checked suddenly and whinnied nervously. There came what sounded like a human gasp, cut off as suddenly as it had begun.

  I urged the mare round the slope and the group on the other side of the hill came into sight.

  They looked to be country labourers; I thought at least two of them were from the village. And two were scarcely more than boys, their round, fresh faces too young and innocent to be doing what they were doing.

  The woman was lying in the middle of the ring of men. One man held her arms above her head. A red garment of some sort, a scarf or a torn petticoat, perhaps, had been thrust into her mouth, cutting off her cries. Two men, kneeling as if in a gross parody of religious ecstasy, held her legs apart. Another, one hand on his belt, was pulling down his britches as he stood over her, his hairy white buttocks thrusting out as he bent forward.

  I saw a small child, its face stained with dirt and tears, leap at the man who was standing over the woman. The man knocked the child back with his free hand, a vicious blow that landed with a crack on the child’s face.

  The woman’s body was nearly naked, with her rags pulled up above her thighs. One of the kneeling men reached out and pulled the cloth from her breasts. His fingers dug into the soft flesh and the woman threshed helplessly beneath his hand.