by AJ MacKenzie
‘Good day to you, Mrs Kemp,’ he said, taking the reins in his hands.
‘Good day to you, Dr Morley,’ the housekeeper replied without looking up.
*
The rector remained in the tack room for some time, staring at the body. Then he raised his head, a little like a man waking from a dream, and ran a hand through his sandy, thinning hair before turning and walking out into the sunlight.
It was a glorious morning on Romney Marsh, warm and sweet with the scents of spring. Scattered puffs of cloud drifted across the blue sky on a hurrying wind. Seagulls wailed and squawked in the distance. Hardcastle inhaled deeply, breathing in the fresh air, as questions formed themselves slowly in his mind.
One question that nagged him – and he did not know why it nagged him – concerned the gunfire he had heard last night. Morley had said the skirmish between smugglers and Excise men had been up the coast, halfway to Dymchurch. Therefore, the fighting had taken place well over a mile away to the north-east; indeed, closer to two miles. Surely the southeasterly wind would have blown the sound of any gunfire away from him. Yet he had heard shots, quite clearly, and he had been certain they came from the direction of St Mary’s Bay to the east and – experience told him – much closer to the village, probably not more than half a mile away.
But . . . he could have been wrong. A fluke of the wind might have carried the sound of more distant gunfire to his ears. Or Morley might have been mistaken about the location; as he said, he was not there.
And, did it matter? The shot that killed the young man had come from close by. A good rifleman could kill a man at two hundred yards, but only in clear light. Last night had been inky black. The killer must have been close when he fired the fatal bullet, probably even inside the grounds of the rectory. He remembered the crack of the rifle as it fired, the sound sharp and distinct. Yes, it had come from near the house. Yet, he could not get the sound of that more distant gunfire out of his head.
The rector frowned, his concentration deepening. Why had he lied to Morley? He had been surprised by his own glibness, by the ease with which the invention came to his lips. He realised that if he and Morley had been more friendly, he would probably have told the truth.
He drew a deep breath. He did not want to think about the doctor. He listened to the distant rasp of the scouring brush as Mrs Kemp scrubbed steadily at the doorstep, and something about the noise brought back to his memory those terrible last breaths of the dying man. What did those breathed last words mean? Tell Peter . . . mark . . . trace . . . They must mean something; the boy had clung desperately to the last shreds of his life so as to get those words out, to pass on what he knew to someone, anyone. Why? What was so important about that message?
A long time would pass before he could forget that dying voice.
The rector shook his head. ‘Poor lad,’ he said softly to himself. ‘I can make nothing of it, nothing at all. The fates served you badly indeed, if they chose me to hear your dying words. The doctor, I am sure, would have understood.’ But still he did not regret not telling Morley.
Still the questions echoed in his mind. Who was the young man with the good if not entirely fashionable clothes from London? What had brought him to Romney Marsh in the darkness of a new moon? And who was the midnight rifleman who had killed him?
*
The rector roused from his reverie. Leaving the tack room, he walked back to the house, stepping carefully past the housekeeper, and fetched his hat and coat and walking stick. ‘Mrs Kemp,’ he said, ‘I am going out for a while. I will return in a few hours.’
‘I will leave some cold beef out for you,’ said Mrs Kemp, still not looking up.
‘I am sure that will be capital,’ the rector said kindly. He was not certain how badly his housekeeper had been affected by last night’s events, and thus his behaviour towards her had an unaccustomed gentleness. Hardcastle had enough self-knowledge to realise that he was not an easy man to live with, and that in Mrs Kemp he had found one of the few people who would put up with him.
Buttoning his coat against a chilly spring breeze, he walked down the drive through the garden. Ahead of him the squat brown tower of St Mary the Virgin lifted over the trees; beyond it he could see the line of low hills above Appledore, where the Marsh ended and the rolling hills of Kent began.
As he reached the gates, Hardcastle turned on impulse and looked back at the rectory. Two big elms flanked the carriage drive. Beyond the right-hand elm lay a thick hedge, about four feet high and rather ragged and in want of a trim, separating the rectory gardens from the road and then the churchyard of St Mary on the far side. An open lawn ran from the trees back to the house.
The grass needed cutting. He spotted a dandelion thrusting its yellow head insolently out of the lawn and lifted his stick to behead it; but halfway through the stroke he paused and then slowly lowered the stick. There had been two shots. The first had killed the boy. The second, fired as he bent over the body, had flown past his head into the hall and narrowly missed the housekeeper standing at the far end.
The voice in his head whispered again. Tell Peter . . . mark . . . trace . . . What did it mean? Mark, trace. Trace a mark? There was a mark that must be traced? A mark on something, on a person, on a map? Trace a source, trace a reason, trace a clue?
Tell Peter, tell Peter. Tell Peter.
Suddenly alert, Hardcastle turned and looked at the rectory, a handsomely proportioned building of mellow red brick with a stone portico. The housekeeper had left the door open while she worked, but from this angle he could not see inside the house. He walked swiftly around the left-hand elm, stopped on its far side, and turned to look at the house again. This time he could see through the doorway and straight down the hall.
This, then, was the angle from which the rifleman had fired. He looked down, and saw that the grass around the base of the tree was flattened; someone had been standing here. He saw too a greenish score on the smooth bark of the elm at about shoulder height, showing where something hard had been rested against it; something like the barrel of a rifle, for example, braced against the tree as its owner steadied it for a shot in the dark. A mark, certainly, but not one the dead man could have known about.
He searched around for confirmation of his theory and found it: a fragment of charred cloth lying on the grass six feet away in the direction of the house. Hardcastle recognised it at once: wadding, a patch of cloth that had rested between powder and bullet in the barrel of the rifle, and had been blown out of the barrel when the weapon was fired.
The marks in the grass were few; the rifleman had not been here long. Walking back to the hedge that enclosed the rectory garden, the rector found a few broken twigs on the ground. Someone had come over the hedge in a hurry, either the rifleman or his victim; quite possibly both. He moved swiftly now, walking through the open gates and across the road to the churchyard. Here, under the branches of the great spreading yew tree that grew next to the lychgate, there was soft ground and here he found the definite marks of running booted feet. He traced them across the churchyard between the fading headstones and then over the low stone wall into the fields beyond for about fifty yards, but here the ground grew firmer, and the trail faded.
It did not matter. He knew now that two men had passed through here last night, both running, moving across the churchyard from west to east towards the rectory, the pursuit of hunter and hunted. He paused, turning back towards the rectory with a frown of concentration on his face. Another question occurred; the boy had been shot in the chest, not in the back as one might have expected had he been facing the door. What had happened? Might he have heard some sound behind him, and turned just as the rifleman pulled the trigger?
‘I failed him,’ the rector said aloud. ‘Had I been faster to my feet, had I not fumbled with the bolts, he would have passed safe inside.’
He stood a moment longer, remembering opening the door, the wind and the darkness. He tried to thin
k of anything he might have missed, any slight sound, anything that would give him a clue; but in his memory there was only the wind, and the flash of the shot that nearly killed him, and then the scattering of further gunfire blowing in on the wind from the sea.
Those shots! Why did their memory nag him still? What could they possibly have to do with this matter? Frowning, he turned his face into the wind, crossing the road and followed a gently meandering footpath that led past the rectory grounds, then east through pastures full of sheep towards St Mary’s Bay and the sea.
*
It was a truly glorious day. The wind hissed gently through the grass around him. White-faced Romney ewes raised their heads as he approached, bleated once and then went back to eating. Lambs galloped insanely across the path, stopped and stared stiff-legged, then turned and began head-butting each other. A skylark carolled its delight into the spring sky. In the meadows that had not yet been grazed, daisies bloomed in snowy profusion. The rector walked quietly through the profusion of spring life, seeing and hearing very little. His mind still echoed with the sound of the dying voice. Tell Peter . . . He wanted – no, he needed – to know what had happened last night, and why.
Twenty years ago, someone had said of Hardcastle that he had the finest mind in the Church of England. That mind had become rusty of late – its only intellectual exercise was composing letters to The Morning Post – but it still functioned when it needed to. Now, as he walked, the rector began to analyse the problem. Three questions required answers. First, who was the dead man? Second, what did those dying four words mean? Third, what exactly had happened out on the Marsh last night? If he could answer these questions, he should find the way to the truth.
But how in heaven’s name was he to answer them?
He reached the dunes at the edge of the sea, their rearward slopes covered in coarse grass, and climbed twenty feet up to their crests without slackening pace. I may be thirty-nine, he thought with satisfaction as he climbed, but I still have it in me . . . Then at the top of the dunes he had to stop and lean on his walking stick, wheezing and recovering his breath. That damned doctor would doubtless say that this was because he drank too much. What nonsense. The rector took his drinking seriously, and regulated it strictly. He rarely drank more than two bottles of port a day, and as a matter of routine limited himself to nothing stronger than small beer before midday. Drink too much? What rubbish.
When he could breathe freely again, he looked around. The seaward face of the dunes glowed pale in the sun, while below them the waves foamed creamy white as they broke and rolled inshore. Out at sea two coasters were making their way north, the wind on their quarter filling their dark red sails as they worked their way inside the Varne Bank on a course for Dover. Further east, shimmering a little in the sea spray, stood a white line of chalk cliffs, the coast of France.
The rector glowered darkly at France, then looked again at the coasters. He was no expert in nautical matters, but he guessed that, running before the wind, they were making six or seven knots towards the English coast. The English Channel was perhaps thirty miles wide at this point. What had he said in his unfinished letter? Given favourable winds, a French invasion fleet could cross the Channel in just a few hours.
‘And if the French do land here,’ he said aloud, ‘there is not a damned thing to stop them.’
3
The Star
‘Nothing but you and me,’ said a voice in response.
The rector turned. He could see no one at first, and he wondered briefly if he had imagined the voice. Then he looked down at the beach and saw a man standing at the foot of the dune. About twenty, sturdily built with a mop of wind-blown fair hair, he wore duck trousers and a polychrome-stained smock. Hardcastle recognised him at once; his name was Turner, and he had come down from London to stay at St Mary for the spring and summer.
‘Mr Turner,’ said the rector, still blowing a little. ‘You gave me a start.’
‘My apologies, sir,’ said Turner a little curtly. He was standing in front of an easel, on which a large canvas was anchored securely against the wind. As the rector scrambled down the face of the dune, Turner walked to one side and raised his paintbrush, pointing it at the coasters and squinting along the handle as if he were sighting a rifle. Then he returned to the easel, picking up his palette and making a series of careful strokes on the canvas. The rector climbed down the dune, boots slipping in the soft sand, and came to a halt a couple of yards or so behind the painter’s shoulder, watching silently as the other man worked.
‘An interesting picture,’ he observed when Turner next paused and lowered his brush.
‘Oh? What makes it so, do you think?’
The rector paused. ‘The quality of light, I expect. You have a way of magnifying the light in your painting. There is a great contrast between light and shadow.’
‘I do not magnify anything, sir,’ said Turner sharply. ‘I paint exactly what I see.’
The rector looked at dunes and sea and ships crisp in the bright clear light, and then at the canvas, where the entire scene seemed to be blurry and shrouded with mist, the outlines of everything vague and out of focus. The light was brighter than in reality, the shadows much darker. No, he thought, this man paints much more than he sees . . .
He changed the subject. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, Mr Turner, how long have you been here today?’
‘About three hours,’ said Turner. ‘I came to get the morning light. Why do you ask?’
‘Mere curiosity. You see, I had a fancy that the smugglers made a run here last night. I wondered if you had seen anything when you arrived, marks in the sand, or other signs of disturbance?’
‘Wondering if your brandy had arrived safely, were you? No, I have seen nothing here this morning. But I heard plenty, last night.’
The rector’s ears began to tingle. ‘Oh? When was this?’
‘Just on midnight. I was outside, but I heard a clock in the Star toll the hour, and then I heard the gunfire.’
Hardcastle reckoned he owed the younger man one for the crack about the brandy. ‘I see. And what was your business outside the Star at midnight?’
‘I was waiting for Bessie Luckhurst to open a window and let me in,’ said Turner. ‘And to save you the trouble of guessing further, it was her bedroom window. While waiting, I heard the shots, quite clearly.’
‘Oh? Where would they have come from, would you say?’
‘From this direction, from St Mary’s Bay. But not as far as the sea; rather further inland, closer to the village.’ Turner began to paint once more.
‘You are quite certain?’ asked the rector.
‘I am quite certain,’ said Turner. ‘I’ll tell you what. When I am finished here, I will cast around and see if I can see any sign of where the action took place.’
‘Be careful if you do,’ said the rector. He looked up at the sun. It was approaching midday, and all this walking and talking had made him thirsty. ‘If the free-traders see you, they might think you are spying on them. Watch your step, young fellow.’
‘I don’t need your advice, granddad,’ muttered Turner as the rector turned away, but the latter was labouring to climb back up the dune and did not hear him.
*
The rector walked back to the village, thinking hard once more. Turner was younger than himself, and his hearing was probably better. If he too had heard gunfire coming from the direction of St Mary’s Bay, that was good enough; that was certainly where the fight between smugglers and Excise men had taken place, and never mind what Dr Morley had said.
He might have questioned Turner further about what he had heard, but the young painter was clearly in a prickly mood. He had seen the scowl on the younger man’s face as he passed on his well-intentioned warning against taking too close an interest in the smugglers. But the risks were real. Young, excitable people thought there was something romantic about smuggling and went out onto the marshes or the dunes to watch the f
un; but smugglers did not like spectators, and sometimes these young excitable people came back with broken limbs and staved-in skulls. He had seen it before.
Many of the shepherds and farmers and fishermen who drank at the Star, St Mary in the Marsh’s watering place, also engaged in smuggling. Hardcastle was fairly sure that Luckhurst, the landlord, was involved in the trade too. In fact, it would probably be easier to make a list of his parishioners who were not involved in smuggling in some way, than to try to enumerate all those that were.
The rector knew that the smugglers existed; they knew that he knew. Neither side ever spoke of the fact, and a quiet laissez-faire had developed. The smugglers often used the tower of St Mary’s church to hide goods run in from the coast before transhipment up to London; at night, when the wind blew from the right direction, he could find his way from the village back to the rectory without a lantern, simply by following the smell of tobacco on the wind. He never reported this; he was a clergyman, not a Preventive man, and he had spent six years earning the respect of his parishioners. He was not about to throw that away over a few bales of run tobacco, or tubs of untaxed gin, or bottles of French scent.
The smugglers appreciated his discretion in these matters, and were willing to pay for it. Early in his tenure as rector, Hardwick had woken the morning after a run to find a tub of gin on his doorstep. That evening in the Star he had remarked casually to his neighbour, a fisherman named Stemp, that he was not fond of gin. By the following morning, the keg had disappeared and a dozen bottles of extremely palatable Hennessey cognac had appeared in its place. These thoughtful little gifts had continued over time.
The rector stopped, gazing unseeing out over a field of sheep. He had advised Turner to be careful. That advice applied equally to himself. The smugglers tolerated him because he was harmless; he was the genial, alcoholic old buffer up at the rectory, easily bought off with a few bottles of brandy. If he started to investigate any business concerning them, he could be putting himself into harm’s way. The smugglers referred to themselves ironically as ‘the Gentlemen’, but there was nothing gentle about their practices. If they thought he was a threat to them, they would stop him. The penalty for smuggling was death by hanging. These men had everything to lose.