Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  She opened the door to Isobel and knew at once who she was. Frank had said very little about the woman whose touch was so obvious about his home. And although Hetty could not, from one circumstance or another, be said ever to have known him well, she was adept at reading any man’s silences. She could not, by any twisting of psychological subtleties, be said to have been in love with Frank Lomas, either now or at any other time, but she was not prepared to countenance the competition of those curtains. They seemed to stress his contempt for her; for although she did not love him. and did not want to, she expected him to show some signs of being moved by her. She was galled by that stiff-backed sense of moral duty with which he showed that he was prepared to tolerate her; only because he thought he must. She writhed at the unfeeling courtesy with which he thought himself obliged to treat her. There was a type of man, she knew only too well, who scorned her; but Frank Lomas had no right to consider himself in that class. He had not scorned her once; he had wanted her badly enough to marry her.

  The sight of Isobel, framed in the doorway, was like seeing an embodiment of those curtains. Hetty had expected someone who fancied herself a lady; she saw here a woman who possessed all the things that she herself would never have – and not material things, at least, not only material things. It was not merely Isobel’s natural poise, nor the fact that she was clearly conscious of it. It was something she seemed to parade.

  Isobel saw the material on the table and her own curtains ignominious in a heap on the floor. And there is nothing more remarkable than the manner in which two women of widely differing quality and aspirations can immediately see into the depths of each other’s motives and vulnerability. And nothing can be more devastating than a skirmish between them, with all the preliminaries taken for granted. They are like two chess-players who know each other’s game so well that they might as well start with an almost empty board.

  Isobel Fuller, looking at Hetty Lomas against the background of the home which she herself had done so much to create, almost held her breath. She was determined not to lose her aplomb. For a few seconds, it looked as if Hetty was going to be the one to break down.

  ‘Yes?’

  A spate of vulgar abuse was not far beneath the surface.

  ‘I’ve come for the rent, if you please.’

  ‘Rent? I shall have to ask my husband.’

  They stood and looked at each other. Hetty, not having taken the trouble over her face that she had judged worthy of the back-streets of Derby, no longer looked eighteen. Some suggestion of her true history was to be read in pores that had been clogged for most of her adult life. Even the whites of her eyes seemed to Isobel sluggish. She hoped that the last two sleepless nights would not be apparent in her own face.

  ‘There’s no need for that. If you’ll excuse me a moment –’

  Isobel took a step into the room, to such purpose that Hetty, whose first instinct was to defend the hearth with tooth and claw, moved aside to let her in.

  Isobel put up her hand to the mantel-shelf and lifted down the rent-book without disturbing the pile of receipts on which it lay.

  ‘May I? I know where he keeps it.’

  She reached for the old biscuit-tin in the shape of a lantern with a conical lid, emptied three shillings and four pennies into the palm of her hand and held the sum out for Hetty to see. Then she signed the receipt in the book with a silver propelling pencil from her handbag and held out the page also for examination. Hetty turned her eyes away, as if it were beneath her to show interest in the transaction. She left Isobel to stretch up and put back the rent-book where she had found it, and in doing so, this time she dislodged one of the other papers, which fluttered down to the rug. She picked it up and put it back, making an exaggerated movement with her eyes to make sure she could not be accused of trying to read private business. (She knew the paper well enough. It was one of Frank’s sketches of tools for the blacksmith.)

  ‘That’s all you’ll be wanting, then?’

  Like the inhabitants of Derby, Isobel was unable to place Hetty’s accent. She classified it merely as common.

  ‘That’s all I am wanting. You would not challenge my right to collect my father’s rent.’

  ‘You come for it every week at this time?’

  Isobel felt an insane desire to laugh. She had been coming more or less every day, and usually had to be reminded to take the rent when it was due.

  ‘We can no doubt think of some other arrangement, if you prefer.’

  Hetty shrugged her shoulder. To show that she did not care, that was the nearest to an insult that she could offer. Isobel stood for a moment, waiting to see whether anything else needed to be said. But Hetty’s eyes shifted back to the work waiting for her on the table. Isobel turned and walked away from the cottage. She did not close the door behind her, and Hetty made no move towards it. It seemed unfamiliarly hard going, walking across the slag towards her horse. After she had ridden some fifty yards from the mine, she heard the door closed, roughly and rudely. She did not look back over her shoulder.

  She was usually able to come and go from the Hall without bothering her father with her movements. Today, however, it was her luck that he should come out of his room as her foot was on the stairs. She turned to speak to him, and he was shocked by the weariness in her. She opened her bag and gave him the three shillings and four-pence.

  ‘I’m sorry, lass. There’s nowt else I can say.’

  When he was deeply moved, he had a habit of lapsing into the speech of his indigenous Lancashire. It did at least appear to simplify issues. Today she felt that it was the one thing calculated to break her heart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunday, 27 March:

  Evening: As usual, Lomas went to Chapel. As usual he took his seat in a side-pew at the back, amongst men whom by now he knew well by sight, but with whom he had not struck up a deeper acquaintance.

  One more day of reaping o’er,

  One more sheaf to crown our store,

  One sweet hour to bathe the soul,

  Here in the streams of joy that roll.

  Unusually, his abrasive tenor did not dominate the singing tonight. As a matter of form he had his hymn-book open, but not at the right place. Once, he sat down before the beginning of the last verse, so little was he aware of what was going on. And there was something in the sermon – on the text Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? – that either offended or emotionally upset him, for he stood up in the middle of it and clumsily eased his way past the knees in the pew, out into the grey and deserted street: half an hour at least before he might have been expected to have appeared there. Perhaps that was why Gilbert Slack did not, as he had promised Hetty, meet him at the chapel door to take him off somewhere until well after midnight. Or perhaps Gilbert Slack had thought better of the rendezvous, and felt that two pairs of hands might make lighter work in the miner’s cottage? That was one of the things we were left to find out.

  And Gilbert Slack was not the only one who claimed to have intended to meet Lomas after the service. That was the reason given by Isobel Fuller, when we called on her to account for why she was wandering disconsolate about the hills, at an advanced hour of the night. Knowing Frank’s habits, she said, she had proposed to confront him at that quiet hour. She was going to compel him to explain himself and his appalling treatment of her. Yet she did not want to blame him entirely until she had heard all that lay at the back of it. She knew Lomas well, his strengths and his weaknesses. She knew there were moral dilemmas before which he might become immobilised; though she might see her way through the same problem in a second. Why had he never told her of this marriage? If it was a marriage? She knew; she did not know. She wanted to know; she did not want to know. She never wanted to see him again; she had to see him again. Isobel Fuller, when first we tried to talk to her, was no paragon of clarity. She was being so cruelly pulled in opposite directions that something must surely give under the strain – if it had n
ot already done so.

  But she was a brave woman – or at least she wanted to persuade herself that she was. At bottom she was a reasonable one. I did not yet know her well enough to know where the truth lay, but I determined at the outset not to close my mind to the possibility that she was telling the truth on one issue: that she had indeed meant to give Lomas this one chance to explain himself. It was in character that she should sink her pride to do what seemed just.

  But when Lomas did not come out of Chapel with the rest, she was assailed by one principal thought: that the hold of this woman was so strong over him that for her he would even forsake his religious observances – which she respected, though they meant nothing to her personally. It was a deep-dyed mood that prevailed in her. She saw only blackness, and went off into the dark countryside, so she told us, to try to think things out, to refashion her view of the future.

  She did not tell us then, in that opening interview, that she was pregnant. That only came to light later. And I am inclined to believe that Lomas did not know it until I told him myself. So perhaps that was what she really wanted to tell him as they walked together that night out of the quiet Sunday village.

  But Frank Lomas, too, went off in a fugue into the hills. The hills, as he told us, whence cometh my help. He was still in a state of repetitive and confused religious fervour when first we talked to him.

  Little help did actually come to him in his wanderings over damp fields and through dark woods, but out of those hills came yet another unexpected visitor to the Adventurers’Arms. The usual knot of men were sitting in their usual seats, talking their usual talk and lapsing into their usual silences when a commotion at the door let in the wild and hag-like figure of Florence Belfield. Not one of them had ever seen her in the inn before, in fact they had long since given up thinking of her as capable of intelligible communication. But tonight she was so genuinely and frighteningly upset that someone eventually put a glass of brandy into her fingers, fortified by which she succeeded at last in telling some sort of story.

  At first it seemed like one of her usual tales. She still believed that she was running her late husband’s mine, and that most of the derelict galleries around her were being worked by gangs hostile to her. Tonight there had been a fight on the forefield – the actual working face of her mine – a foray such as had happened more than once in her youth. She believed that her holding was being attacked by the new man at Dead-Nettle. Some of the regulars were beginning to laugh, but the mention of Dead-Nettle brought some attention. Over to Dead-Nettle she had plodded, her mid-century mourning skirts sweeping the slag, and she had found Dead-Nettle ablaze with light, the windows uncurtained, the door staring open, a woman screaming. Then the screaming had stopped, horses’hooves had ridden off. Florence Belfield was barely articulate when she tried to explain what she had found there. But she opened a fold in her skirts and showed the Adventurers’inhabitants blood; not a smear, not a spattering, but a soaked patch that still clung stickily. Ghosts there may be in Florence Belfield’s life; but ghosts do not bleed.

  ‘We’d better get over there.’

  That was how the men from the pub came upon the body of Hetty Lomas, a sight appalling to see. It looked at first as if she had been trying to prise stones out of the inside wall and had started a minor avalanche that had crushed in her skull. Broken stone lay everywhere; blood and brains were soaked into the limestone dust like purple gruel. Then someone saw one of Frank Lomas’s custom-built iron wedges, and it looked as if that, too, had been buried deep in her cranium.

  So the men from the Adventurers’undertook their own tour of the hills, and brought in severally, for custody by their constable, the various people they found who claimed to be seeking inspiration from benighted nature. There were Gilbert Slack and his friend Harry Burgess, who said that they had their master’s authority to take rabbits by night; though it was not rabbit’s blood, judged by quantity alone, that made caked patches on Slack’s trousers. They found Isobel Fuller, looking outwards from the wall coping of a spinney, the light of incipient madness in her eyes. And they found Frank Lomas, with blood on his boots, muttering that the Lord above was mightier than the noise of many waters.

  The next morning I came into the story in my own right.

  Chapter Fourteen

  For custody by their constable –

  There was pathetically little that P.C. Newton could have done single-handed. He was a country version of P.C. Kewley at Derby – about the same age, too, though he looked older. And slower moving; he was deliberate, but inexorable; a man who did not often emerge from the hills. He had found that in his experience tomorrow always did come – and that there had been time to do then, with calm judgement, some of the things that he might have botched yesterday.

  Custody? He could not arrest them all, and he had no reliable holding charge, even against the one whom he must obviously regard as culprit. Surveillance was beyond his resources: but it was not beyond the resources of the unpredictable men of Margreave. If any single one of the suspects – Frank Lomas, Gilbert Slack, Florence Belfield or Isobel Fuller – had clearly been guilty, then that mob might well have shown an ugly disposition. But there was safety in uncertainty, for once. Constable Newton acted as catalyst while vigilante guards for the night were mounted over the various homes.

  Newton had also this in common with Kewley, that he had hoarded over the years suspicions on which it would have been premature, tactless or primitively unjust to have acted. In the heart of that night after the killing of Hetty Lomas, he made painstaking, eloquent notes – primarily memoranda for his own guidance, to try to get some order into the things that he knew I would be asking.

  My first job was to try to get some order, too – into the filth and detritus in the cottage at Dead-Nettle, to have the corpse taken away and arrangements made for the surgeons to report on it. Lomas had been shut up for the night in the frightful, stinking hovel, guarded by sentries inside and out, shouldering farm-yard tools and ancient sporting musketry. I dismissed them and brought Lomas out into the morning sunshine on his waste-tip. He was dazed and unwashed. He hardly seemed to grasp who I was. And his mind was still running through his store of half digested texts.

  ‘He that is surety for a stranger shall surely smart for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We sat on the wreckage of the mine’s old crushing wheel. I sent other people away.

  ‘Cause and effect, Mr –?’

  ‘Brunt. Inspector in the detective department of the county constabulary.’

  ‘Cause and effect, Mr Brunt. For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.’

  I let him drivel on for a few minutes – at the same time casting my eye over P.C. Newton’s notes.

  LOMAS, Frank: Formerly coal-miner and discharged wounded soldier; came to Margreave last September with obsession to work old lead-mine. Former acquaintance of G. SLACK, who seems to have exerted an unusually strong influence on him throughout his adult life.

  SLACK, Gilbert: Involved in robberies about this district in his youth. Accepted army service as alternative to term of imprisonment. Other burglaries of which he was suspected included Moorbridge Hall, Stores at Youlgreave and offices at Hurdlow Quarries. Commonly believed to have hidden the proceeds of some of his felonies locally. Possibility that Dead-Nettle Drift was one of his caches.

  Question: Did Lomas come upon his wife rifling a hoard in the cottage while she thought him at Chapel?

  Question: What connection between Lomas’s wife and his and Slack’s common past?

  Suggestion: Slack’s constant companion, Harry Burgess, is unintelligent and has been known to be indiscreet. More likely than Slack to be careless under questioning.

  FULLER, Miss Isobel: Daughter of manor. Settled in Margreave with her father less than two years ago. Appears to have become infatuated with Lomas. Compromising overnight stay at mine-cottage; justified by weather conditions, but free and unconvention
al relations seem since to have become a habit.

  ‘O spare me a little that I may recover my strength,’ Lomas said. ‘Before I go hence and be no more seen.’

  ‘The psalmist was a wise man,’ I told him, ‘but he doesn’t get either you or me out of our present predicament. You won’t be going hence for a while yet, and as to your being no more seen, I must reserve my opinion about that for the time being.’

  I must confess that as we sat there, I had few other thoughts than that Lomas was my man. I did not think the case was going to call for much detection. It would be a question of classifying facts that were fairly readily available and knocking them into some sort of order for prosecuting counsel. The time had come to have Lomas concentrating his mind.

  ‘You know your bible pretty well,’ I said.

  ‘For years it was the only book I had in my kit-bag.’

  ‘You didn’t enjoy your army service?’

  ‘Given my time over again, I wouldn’t opt that way. I don’t know that any man in his senses would.’

  ‘You knew Gilbert Slack in the army?’

  ‘From the start.’

  ‘Under his thumb, were you?’

  I asked it sharply. I was working almost completely in the dark. I had little information beyond the constable’s notes, so my only hope was to try to get the leading suspect to tell it all. I did not much care what we talked about at first. One thing would lead to another.

  ‘No. That’s not true. I was not under his thumb. I was a corporal and he was a private. There was one time at least when I made that count.’

  I was on the right lines. I could see that he was biting the bait, looking already outside his present distress and confusion.

  ‘It is true that it was Gilbert who persuaded me to join, and took me under his wing in my recruit days. And Gilbert’s a rogue, I know – but he isn’t a bad man. I’ve been glad in my time of Gilbert’s company and help. And he of mine.’