Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  And Frank Lomas suddenly felt sobered and cold. Could this imply that Isobel’s father knew? Or had this just been some shaft of his managerial intuition? Had his commanding officer seen no need for personal discretion in his letter to Fuller? Or had Gilbert Slack, who could not sit on blackmail evidence for ever, already opened his weak and evil mouth?

  Frank tried to persuade himself that if the old man already knew, then he would not be sitting here as a guest at his table. Then Isobel got up and quite unnecessarily went down to visit the kitchen. The cook and her assistants were now sipping Marsala and eating mince-pies. Isobel stayed and gossiped with them. When she returned to the dining-room, the men were all laughing together, raucous, undisciplined, no differences now. They did not seem aware that she had come back into the room, so she side-stepped out again, went up to her bedroom and began writing ‘thank you’letters for presents from relatives who seemed now to belong to a detached existence.

  An hour and a half later, coming down to offer – she did not know whether there was any sense in it – to make a pot of tea, she found them all asleep: her father slumped sideways at the head of the table still, Harry with the side of his face in a plate of congealed goose-fat, Lomas and Slack in the two fireside chairs.

  I think that Frank might have found it difficult to repair himself in her esteem, had not her father remained equally incapable for the remainder of the day. As it was, she largely blamed the old man for the whole range of stupid events. But she spared him direct rebuke. It would have been superfluous. On Boxing Day he was a contrite and seedy man. Slack and Harry kept wisely out of sight. She did not go over to Dead-Nettle. But the day after, she went there again – and Christmas was not mentioned.

  There is much that remains unclear about the three months that followed. There were things that a man and a woman could not be expected to speak of – and could perhaps not be relied upon if they did.

  The cottage at Dead-Nettle was far from its apogee of neatness and care when I came to see it, and it certainly did not strike me at first as an ideal love-nest. But, after all, it is not rush-matting and great-auntly bed-spreads that make the nest. There was much snow that winter, and it did not always play into the couple’s hands, as on the night of that first blizzard. Sometimes they were frustrated: Isobel was incarcerated in the Hall. Once this lasted a fortnight, and at the first signs of thaw – she was so inexperienced in the vagaries of Low Peak weather that she did not know that going conditions could be even more treacherous in melting snow than over frozen drifts – she rode out to Dead-Nettle with no effort to dissimulate her sense of urgency.

  At some point during those weeks, Lomas made his rational decision to give up his battle against the rock. I do not know whether this was gradual or finally sudden. I do not think that Isobel encouraged him; but nor did she allow him to have second thoughts. Untypically, I do not think he had any idea what he would do next; for the moment, I do not think he cared. I do not believe that either of them cared. He was not without some choice – and spring, when it came, would be the time for choosing. They reclined into a haven of timelessness and did not let other things matter.

  Then spring began to advertise itself as a reality. Coltsfoot flowered and went to seed amongst the gangue, celandines in the moister earth of the bank of a rill. One afternoon in March when Isobel came to the mine, she found the place deserted and the padlock on the cottage door hanging like a leaden seal that seemed to be ordering her away. There was no sign anywhere of Frank. He had left no kind of message. The nearest neighbour was old Florence Belfield, and she was unlikely to know anything.

  It was on the evening of that day that Lomas, uncaring for traffic, walked down the middle of a Derby street, advancing to meet the woman in crushed strawberry and green whose aspect seemed, according to bystanders, to bring him surprisingly little joy. A man and two women held fast to the shadows in which they had been waiting to ambush her.

  Three days later I was sent to Margreave in my official capacity.

  Chapter Eleven

  We had no grave difficulty in reconstructing Frank Lomas’s evening in Derby. A little conventional groundwork and we were in a position to be specific. At 8.01 p.m. on Thursday, 24 March 1905, he arrived by a slow passenger train from Wirksworth, three minutes behind tabled time. He had been one of the last out of the carriage and had clumped along the platform like a man uncertain of his surroundings, having to look for the Way Out sign and appearing to have forgotten that he would be asked at the barrier for his ticket, which he then had some difficulty in finding, though it was in the obvious place in his waistcoat pocket. From the Entrance Hall he had stood looking for some moments of indecision, as if the size and shapelessness of the town not merely confused, but actually offended him. Our informant on this nicety was the cabby whom he turned back to ask for direction to St Mary’s Gate, and to whom he showed a slip of paper with the address of Hetty Wilson’s lodging written on it. It was now 8.10 precisely: the cabby looked at the clock, because he was to pick up a fare on the 8.09 from Burton-on-Trent. Lomas obviously did not loiter on his way across the town. We know that P.C. Kewley had met his Sergeant in Irongate at 8.37, as recorded in both their note-books, and it was at 8.44 exactly, according to the constable, that he had moved across to part the crowd round a dying horse in Edward Street. So it must have been between 8.39 and 8.41 that Lomas met Hetty Wilson in the middle of the road, close under the eyes, though unaware of them, of Tilly Sutcliffe, Martha Lang and Duncan Mottershead.

  We were proud of our precision, and it did our machine good to be put through its motions; but it was all relatively uninformative. If only someone could have told us a single phrase that passed between the pair of them. The ticket inspector who reported Lomas’s exit from the platform described him as a man with something on his mind. The cabby said that he had seemed shy of asking his way, as if the address on the piece of paper were something to be ashamed of. Tilly Sutcliffe, when I pressed her over a second port and lemon, came out with the information that Hetty Wilson had seemed overjoyed to see him, but that he had simply stood looking at her as a drawing-room cat might curl his lip away from a dish of stale food. The cabby, whose gentleman from Burton-on-Trent had not appeared, and who was now waiting on the off-chance of custom from the Manchester express, saw them arrive back at the station a little after nine o’clock. Lomas was carrying the woman’s Gladstone bag, but they were walking with a gap of a foot or so between them: a striking couple, she in her musical comedy crushed strawberry, he self-consciously dark and sober, his four-soled boot stumping heavily in the comparatively deserted Waiting Hall.

  But weren’t they talking at all? Wasn’t there a soul amongst those who had seen them who had heard them exchange a word?

  They had over half an hour to wait for the next train to Wirksworth. Lomas bought the woman a cup of tea and an iced currant bun. He took nothing himself. The attendant at the refreshment counter did not hear anything that either of them said. They seemed close, in that they appeared to want to keep themselves apart from other travellers, yet distant in that when she made a move to take his arm, he gave the impression of wanting to thrust her aside. Demure, brazen, pretty, delicate, coarse, coquettish, shy: these were all adjectives that appeared in our notes of people’s impressions. And Lomas’s mood was severally described as moody, dignified, surly, anxious, aloof, pre-occupied, proud and distraught. Once murder was out, observers took their particular sides, and saw what they wanted to see.

  They shared a compartment on the train as far as Duffield, had only each other for company thereafter. At Wirksworth he had waiting for them the same hired cart which he had borrowed to bring his load of furniture to Dead-Nettle. It was open to the elements and bore no trace of upholstery. The charred wicks of its lamps did no more than cast flickering pools of light on the undulating verges. I asked the late-night porter who had locked up the station after them whether the woman had appeared in any way to protest at the crudeness of their
transport. He said that she had taken half a step backwards in shock and dismay, but that Lomas had appeared not to notice the gesture. He swung her bag on to the boards and left her to clamber up as best she could over the shafts. When, however, she let out a little whimper to tell him that she was in extreme difficulty, with her heel caught up in her skirts behind her, he did move to help her with one hand under her elbow. He lifted her up to the front of the cart – there was no seat – and there, it seemed, she was going to be likely to have to remain, unless another moment of passing chivalry eventually moved him to help her down again. He mounted beside her, signalled to her that she would have to move her body sideways to make room for his outstretched leg, twitched the reins and sent them cantering out of such nocturnal light as remained in the town.

  Margreave did not fall over itself to bear witness to their arrival. It must have been well after eleven by the time they were on the final road to Dead-Nettle. I did not doubt that more than one pair of eyes was drawn to the edge of the bedroom curtains by the sound of wheels and hooves at that hour. But no one came forward to talk about it.

  There was one event, however, that came to light as if by community accord. Dead-Nettle was a long way from other habitations, yet Margreave, to its last soul, was aware that the iron-rimmed wheels had crunched through the cat dirt outside the Drift, that Lomas had unlocked the door of his cottage for the woman, lit the lamp for her inside, then come out alone to unharness and stable the cob. After a short while he had gone indoors again, and for a long while the pale light behind the living-room curtains which Isobel Fuller had hung was visible across the slag. Lomas possessed only one lamp, and he must have picked it up to show the woman up the ladder. It was the bedroom window that now showed across the deads.

  Silence then, emphasised by the normal rustles of the night, whilst the watcher who brought this piece of news back to the village waited for the extinction of the light and whatever thoughts that moment might inspire in him.

  But the light remained behind the bedroom window for a long time – a long time, that is, in view of the fact that lamp-oil was expensive and Lomas was known to be a thrifty man. Then suddenly the night was pierced by a long series of screams from that upper room – the shrieking of a terrified and hysterical woman, cutting like a broken-edged knife across the empty shadows of Whim Hill.

  I am in considerable doubt as to whether even such noise as this was declared to be could possibly have penetrated to many who claimed to have heard it. Yet all Margreave seemed to be able to give a personal account of it. It was not an individual report, it was a community rumour, established as a legend by half way through the next morning.

  During the course of my investigations, I came across only one description that had the freshness of conviction behind it – and that from the one witness who had not known who or what it might have been – old Florence Belfield, the miner’s widow, who lived in her own nightmare galleries of yesterday’s misery, who heard it and thought that someone was being murdered for some ancient treachery of internecine miner’s strife. She did not come forward about it immediately. By the time that she did, she had been able to embroider it with at least half a dozen possible explanations, all of them absurd, and some of them in conflict with each other. But somehow I found her account more impressive than the prosaic common story current in the village. Florence Belfield said that they were the cries of a woman who draws a curtain in a closet to find the eyeless sockets of death within inches of her face.

  But the next morning, Friday, 25 March, the woman we have hitherto known as Hetty Wilson was not dead. She appeared in the village, admittedly looking round herself with the uncertainty to be expected from a stranger, but without unease, and certainly without the humility which people, in all circumstances, felt that they had the right to expect of her. She behaved as if she knew that she had every right to be there, and to be served by the tradespeople without question or comment; as, by and large, she was, so metallic was her confidence. She bought cottons and a packet of needles at Matty Cooper’s little drapery and a single penny stamp from the acidulous Old Fan at the Post Office. Then she went over to Tiggy Slack’s grocery and, looking with critical curiosity round the shelves whilst waiting customers were served, eventually ordered sugar, flour, Snowflake biscuits, Carlsbad wafers, French stoneless cherries, jellied meats in glass jars. Whatever of the exotic had penetrated into Margreave, she chose as her own. She asked if her order could be delivered to the mine.

  It could not. It was the satisfaction of Tiggy Slack’s life to plead that he had not bought his errand-boy a new bicycle to have its frame shaken to pieces riding over scree. Hetty sweetly said that she would arrange for the things to be called for.

  ‘And put them down to the account,’ she said.

  Frank Lomas did not have a credit account. He paid, a few pence at a time, for everything he bought. But Tiggy Slack did not demur. My private opinion is that it would have delighted his heart to be able to pass around the word that Frank Lomas was a bad debtor. It would have been worth the debt.

  ‘With pleasure, Mrs –?’

  ‘Mrs Lomas,’ she said, evidently surprised that he did not know.

  Chapter Twelve

  Saturday, 26 March:

  A.m.: Hetty Lomas appeared again in the Market Square in Margreave, bought one or two small things at Slack’s: half a pound of butter, lambs’tongues in aspic, a packet of Abernethy biscuits. Her method of shopping was to buy things as they caught her eye, and in small quantities. Evidently she had never kept house according to a plan.

  Next she went again to the drapery, bought curtain material: printed art muslin with a cherry-coloured trefoil device. Old Matty Cooper tried to save her pennies by getting her to be precise about lengths, widths and selvedges, but she did not seem to have taken measurements, except with her eyes.

  ‘About half as long again as the brass rule along the counter-top – no, quarter as long.’

  But she had certain qualities, a pouting lip and a pleading eye, that affected even as static an observer as old Matty Cooper. He was like a man running races with himself to help her. She smiled, both with evident enjoyment of this for its own sake, and because she saw him for what he was: another man.

  ‘If she is his wife – and she’s wearing a ring,’ he said to his own wife afterwards, ‘it’s a shame he’s brought her up here to live in a hovel like that.’

  Outside the shop she caught the eye of Gilbert Slack who, for once without Harry, was examining bib-and-brace overalls on a market stall. An unbiased eavesdropper (and, to be sure, there was one – within days I was talking to that bib-and-brace salesman) might have formed the impression that the pair were strangers to each other. She began to finger through a pile of dungarees, and they carried on a conversation without facing up to each other.

  ‘So you’ve not brought him round yet?’

  ‘He’ll come,’ she said. ‘But it will be a long business. He’s an obstinate swine.’

  ‘But you know your stuff, Hetty. You used to, anyway.’

  The bib-and-brace man moved away to a further corner of his stall – but not so far as to risk losing any of this.

  ‘It just happens that the man I am married to is the one who doesn’t want it.

  ‘And listen, Gil – you owe me something, after that doss-house in Derby.’

  ‘We had to get him to fetch you, Hetty. There was reason behind that. If you’d arrived out of the blue, he could have turned you away. And there’s another thing: coming to fetch you from away – it shows folks he wants you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Wants me!’

  ‘He had to break a meeting with his lady-love to go and meet you.’

  ‘You’ve told her I’m here?’

  ‘I haven’t. But she’s heard rumours. Fruity ones. I’ve taken good care of that.’

  ‘And how has she taken it.’

  ‘Mad as a cat.’

  ‘Just let’s get this all over. She can have him b
ack, and welcome. If I could only get him off my shadow for an hour. I daren’t start looking. I never know when I’m going to hear that foot clumping over the step.’

  ‘I’ll see to it for you. Tomorrow night. He always goes in the evening to his Chapel service. You make sure he does. And don’t go with him.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘The moment he’s out of the house, get to work. Look for freshly turned flooring, loose stones in the wall, hollow places behind the chimney breast. I’ll guarantee he won’t be home before midnight.’

  Saturday, 26 March:

  P.m.: Lomas had a new interest. For some time now, facing up to the reality that there was no fortune, not even an existence for him out of the lead, he had thought of developing the sparse but certainly under-used farming potential of his small-holding.

  He knew nothing about farming. There was no clear-cut plan in his mind. To fatten a few beef-cattle, perhaps? To build a sty and rear pigs? Whatever he might scratch from the land, it was clear that he must first make good his dilapidated boundaries. The wall at the lower end of his rough pasture was in poor repair. To be out and mending it was a reasonable occupation for a Saturday afternoon in spring.

  Besides, he found life in the cottage with that woman unendurably claustrophobic.

  The first thing that struck Isobel Fuller as she rode up to the mine was that the curtains that she had made had been taken down. The blank window-panes seemed to be gaping at her across the slag like eyes sightless in death. It was not, of course, that Hetty had worked any miracles with the material she had bought this morning. She had done no more than unwrap it and lay out her needles and thread on the table, ready to start. But it had been an act of compulsion to pull down the old ones as soon as Frank was out of the house.