by Mike Ashley
All too often in my walks from one part of my parish to another, I would find evidence of what my parishioners insisted was his favourite pastime: killing innocent creatures. Living in the country, one cannot be squeamish. If the Almighty provides for our sustenance the birds of the air and the animals that creep on the earth, then we know that we must kill them first. A pig-sticking is a village event: it means plenty in the midst of lack. Moles that destroy crops will contribute to a warm winter waistcoat. No villager would simply kill an animal or bird – one of God’s creatures – and leave it a bloody mess attracting vermin, as young Matthew, the head gamekeeper’s son, pointed out.
He scuffed a shallow grave next to the path and kicked in the stinking rabbit, first its body and then its head, torn off, apparently, by the killer. “Confound his lordship! Would have filled someone’s pot, that,” he said. “Letting good food go to waste!”
I forbore to tell him of the food left lying untasted at the end of one of the Elmstead dinner parties – and at the rest of their meals as far as I knew. Matthew, quite unlike his sober and modest father, was inclined to be a hothead, questioning the natural order. I had reasoned with him countless times when I had prepared him for confirmation. “Even our Lord told us that the poor were always with us,” I urged.
“He hadn’t seen the way those up at the House, our betters –” he almost spat out the word “– disport themselves!”
“Such revolutionary words do you no credit at all,” I told him.
He nodded ruefully, but not entirely in agreement. “Aye, getting rid of their rightful king didn’t do them Froggies much good, did it? We don’t want no Boney setting himself up as an Emperor over here.”
Indeed we didn’t. It was bad enough that he should be rampaging over Europe, and that any able-bodied young man was likely to be recruited, or worse, press-ganged into fighting him. Of course, there was great honour to be won, and the prize money was a tempting bait, but even in the most just of wars, there was pain and suffering, and not just for the young men seeking the glory.
Would young Matthew sign up? Had he not been walking out with the most beautiful girl in the village, I’m sure he would have been tempted. But the knowledge that some half a dozen young men, more eligible than he, were more than half in love with Lizzie Woodman, must have inhibited him. Her swains were not just village lads or farmers’ sons, either. Employed as she was in the kitchen at Elmstead House, she was the honey pot around which all the menservants buzzed, yes, and their masters too. Low born though she was, she could have had her pick – many a gentleman had been pleased to pluck a woman from her place and embrace her as his duchess, or, I fear, his inamorata.
And who could wonder? She was tall for a woman, but neither willowy not Junoesque. Indeed, her figure was perfection itself: the plain clothes of her household uniform could not deny it. Her complexion was pale, as you often find with hair the shade Titian would have been proud of, her eyes the blue-green of the far-distant sea and her voice as sweet and low as the Bard himself would have liked.
Lizzie was one of my parishioners, of course, and a more humble and devout churchgoer there could not have been. When I preached my sermon or chanted a psalm, there were all too many moments when I wished that I could approach her not as a man of the cloth but as a lover might. My head insisted that with her skill with the cooking pot and with the needle she would have made a wonderful parson’s wife. My heart confessed that I cared not the least for such accomplishments, only for her.
Had she not already made her preference clear for Matthew – but I must not let my thoughts run that way. I must turn them to something else.
Many of my fellow clergymen took advantage of their regular perambulations about their parishes to study what they saw about them. I was in regular correspondence with a friend from Cambridge who had become a keen astronomer as a result of long rides back from night-time deathbeds. Another was a meteorologist of note, while a third was credited with important geological observations. What could my humble brain espouse as an interest? I mildly enjoyed flowers and birdsong: could I develop a passion for either?
From time to time I would sit on a fallen log or a convenient stile and look around me, hoping to be inspired by the sublimity of nature, but in truth merely reflecting on my own unhappiness.
In one moment, however, my unhappiness was to become the deepest anxiety, and soon true anguish.
My servants were all too used to the clangour of my doorbell and the beat of the knocker at any time of night or day. Both death and the onset of new life had no regard to the clock and I was as accustomed to the summons of those in need as my good friend the doctor: indeed, Dr Edmund Hansard, a sage old man still sporting a wig, and I often rode side by side. But this time it was no young husband or grieving son who burst into my study, but Matthew, his face distorted with panic
“She’s gone!” he cried. “She’s gone, no one knows where! Lizzie, Mr Campion. My Lizzie!”
Pressing into his hand a glass of wine, I begged him to elucidate. What I heard was almost enough to unman me, too.
He had waited and waited for her on her monthly afternoon off, ready to walk her home to her parents’ cottage and then back to Elmstead House before the night-time curfew. That was the sum of their courtship, except for the fortnight at home grudgingly permitted to domestic staff and changed at will by such as Lady Elmstead. Thinking that some whim of her ladyship had prevailed that afternoon, he made his way up to the servants’ entrance and asked when she might be free.
I could see the young man standing there, wringing his hat between his hands, and trying not to jiggle from one foot to the other like a guilty child. I could almost feel his pain as the housekeeper declared implacably that Lizzie Woodman had never returned to the house after divine service the previous Sunday.
The pain now recollected made him forget his manners.
“What have you done with her?” he thundered, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me.
I shook my head. I had done nothing except look upon her sweet head deeply bowed in prayer. I had shaken hands with her as she left, bestowing a silent blessing on her, retaining in my heart the gentler and respectful pressure of her fingers against mine. Perhaps – yes, her hands were shaking. Certainly her eyes were awash with tears. In my selfish concern for my own feelings, why had I never asked dear Lizzie the cause of her distress?
Such reflections were useless, however. What was needed was immediate action. Seizing my hat, I almost dragged Matthew to the Woodmans’ cottage. I had a suspicion that despite her deep curtsey and respectful offer of refreshment, Mrs Woodman was not pleased to see us, and that while she appeared duly shocked when we explained our mission, and denied all knowledge that anything might be wrong, there was something she was concealing. Perhaps I would pay a further visit without Matthew.
My persistence was rewarded. With much circumlocution and many tears, Mrs Woodman confessed a terrible truth, one I was glad Matthew did not have to hear. Lizzie was with child. She had absolutely declined to name the father, but had insisted to her mother that Matthew was innocent, that she herself was innocent – that the child was the product of a quite undesired union. In short, she had been raped by one she had believed a gentleman. It was clear, however, that in some obscure way Mrs Woodman thought Lizzie to blame. Terrible words penetrated the inarticulate sobs: ‘No daughter of mine,” I distinguished.
It was clearly my painful duty to confront Lady Elmstead, whose very presence in the house should have prevented such a terrible violation. I believe it was divine fury that enabled me to overcome my natural reticence and confront her with the facts as I knew them. Never had her ladyship looked more regal, so intimidating, staring down that beak of a nose.
“The wench has been taken care of,” she declared, the rouge standing out on her otherwise ashen cheeks.
“Some workhouse –!”
“Indeed no. And,” she added, with a thin smile, “I can guarantee tha
t the babe will not be abandoned in some foundling hospital. We Elmsteads know better than that. There is one proviso, Mr Campion, to my generosity. Neither you nor any others of her suitors will attempt to find her. Or my protection will be at an end.”
At last the long icy winter of our grief turned to spring. The whole of nature declared itself a time of rebirth. Where there had been cold earth, now there were snowdrops and crocuses; there were early buds; birds scurried forth building their nests. Charmed by their energy, their ability to build from nothing, I resolved to make ornithology my study. But I was slow to learn, despite my eagerness to find something to assuage my grief. Though I knew the little bird I was watching, flitting two and fro through the woodland to what must be his as yet unseen nesting place, to be one of the genus Sylviidae, the warblers, I could not tell in the dim light whether he was a sedge warbler or a whitethroat. I resolved to tread softly in the hope of seeing him more closely – perhaps even finding his nest.
A rank, sweetish smell permeated the otherwise perfect sylvan scene – no doubt one of Lord Elmstead’s illicit kills left to rot. A badger, perhaps. If I saw it, I would send Matthew to bury it.
There! I was almost upon the little bird! A whitethroat, surely, with the building material of its nest in its beak – soft, delicate tissue, blowing in the breeze as it darted purposefully into a rowan tree. The tissue was red.
It was red hair.
It was Lizzie’s hair.
Cursing my morbid imaginings for such a fancy, I stumbled blindly away, only to find the source of that sweet nest-lining – a wash of hair tumbling from a sinister mound. A cloud of flies confirmed what I knew – that this was the source of the evil, pungent, sickly smell. I fell in what I hoped would be eternal oblivion.
“It is she, my good friend,” Dr Hansard whispered, pressing a draft of something bitter between my lips. I had swooned again when I had returned with him to this terrible place. “The poor child. I will see that she is prepared for a decent burial. Will you wish to see her again before you read the service?” He regarded me from beneath his thick brows: clearly he had penetrated what I had hoped was a secret, and resumed his gentle brushing of the earth away from the shallow grave.
“Of course,” I whispered, steeling myself for the ordeal. “And what better place than in this vernal setting?”
The church has constantly reminded us that we must return to earth. The Bard makes Hamlet joke about worms. This was the first time I had seen either process for myself. Waves and waves of nausea reduced me to the weakness of a child, but I forced myself to observe what the good doctor indicated – the long slice that had almost severed poor Lizzie’s head. There was another gash.
“They plucked out her womb,” Hansard breathed, ashen as myself.
As Justice of the Peace, Hansard had another function: he had to determine the identity of the killer. The poor body decently stowed in the cool of his cellar, he pressed me to join him for dinner to assist him, as he kindly put it, in his cogitations. The meal was a homely affair, his housekeeper sensing that quality rather than quantity was needed. We drank deeply first of sherry, then of claret, or I swear no morsel of the excellent pheasant could have passed my lips. But when he offered port and brandy, I waved the decanters away. We needed our wits, I said, to be un-fuddled.
“You are sure, my young friend, that young Matthew is innocent?”
“I take my oath that when he came to see me that day which seems so very long ago he did not know where she was. Indeed, he believed me in some way responsible for poor Lizzie’s disappearance.”
He leant across and patted my arm. “I know, Tobias, I know. You are a good man never to have pressed your case. And even better not to accuse your successful rival.”
“Not so successful that he was responsible . . . that he would have fathered a child upon her.”
“Indeed no, God rest her soul. So what Lady Elmstead says may be true – that someone at the House betrayed her.”
“Violated her,” I corrected him with a shudder.
He nodded. “We both know Lord Elmstead’s proclivities – the decapitation of squirrels, disembowelment of rabbits. Would he be capable of committing such atrocities on a woman?”
I leapt to my feet, ready to go and challenge him directly. “The villain who did that to her is capable of anything!”
“Sit down, Tobias. That is not the question I asked.”
I subsided.
“Fortunately as Justice of the Peace I am in a position to ascertain whether he was in residence at the House when the crime may be presumed to have occurred.” He lifted a finger in admonition. “You must leave that to me, my friend. You have another role to play. You are to play a parson grieving for a parishioner he found in quite normal circumstances – as if the poor child was caught on her journey by inclement weather and simply collapsed with exhaustion seeking the shelter of a hedgerow.”
“A stout countrywoman? Never!” In any case, all feelings would be offended by such an insinuation.
“In my experience, a criminal can best be unmasked if he believes that he has not been found out. Trust me, Tobias. We both have our parts to play.” He helped himself to a thimbleful of brandy – with the War in Europe this was indeed a precious commodity – as if to end the conversation.
“Have you ever known of a case where the perpetrator was a woman?” I pursued.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because her ladyship told me that she had taken poor Lizzie under her protection! That neither she nor her babe would ever be forced on to the parish! Could it be that it was she who –?” I was on my feet, ready to make the accusation to her face there and then.
“Can you imagine, my dear young friend, the scandal if we confront her without a shred of proof? We need,” he said, raising a strong finger to mark each point, “a motive, an opportunity and evidence.”
“A confession? The Church of England neither insists nor denies confession – it permits it.”
“And if her ladyship were unwise enough to make one, would it not have the same confidentiality as a similar one in the Roman Catholic Church? You are using your passions, not your powers of deduction. I have instructed my housekeeper to make up a bed for you; I myself have prepared a draught to help you sleep. Lead my little household in our evening prayers, Tobias, and then allow yourself to rest. We have much to do over the next few days.”
I found Matthew waiting for me when I returned to the rectory, taller and broader than ever, in the bright spring sunshine.
“They say in the village that you’ve found her, Rector. May I say one last goodbye?”
I led him round to the back garden, to my favourite bench in the pretty wilderness where I sometimes blow an evening cloud. Although he withdrew his tobacco pouch, he made no effort to fill a pipe.
“Why do you want to bid her farewell, Matthew?”
His face worked, but at last he straightened and spoke like a man. “Because I wish to walk out with another young maid, Mr Campion. And I want to do the decent thing by everyone.”
What better philosophy could that be? I was torn between two desires: to show him the poor corpse, and revolt him into a confession, and to let him think of the girl as she once was, so that he might take his new sweetheart without care. Patting him gently on the shoulder, I left him there while I repaired for a moment’s silent prayer.
I returned with my smaller Bible in my hand.
“I want you to swear on this, with as much solemnity as if you were in a court of law, that you had nothing to do with her death.”
Without hesitation he laid his rough hand on the Book. “I take God as my witness that I loved sweet Lizzie Woodman and harmed not a hair on her head. Nor did her any other harm neither,” he added, as if wishing to cover all points. “And I swear that had I had her by my side now, my thoughts would never have strayed to any other maiden, be she never so beautiful.”
It seemed to me a good oath. Would it satisfy Doctor Hans
ard?
“Why did you not walk with her back to the Big House after morning worship?”
“Because her ladyship had decreed that walking out was no longer permitted. The House servants must walk two by two on their way there and back.” He had removed his hands from the Bible.
I recalled the tears shimmering on her lashes. “Or had you had a lovers’ tiff?” I asked suddenly. “She was plainly unhappy.”
He flushed deeply. “No! No!”
“Had she told you she was carrying your child? Did you wish to dispose of her so you could walk out with this young woman of yours?”
“With child?” I had shocked him on to his feet. “But she was as pure as the day she was born! With child!” He turned to me, his eyes awash. “Had it been my babe, Mr Campion – here, give me the Good Book again – I swear I would have run straight down here with all my heart and soul to ask you to read the banns!”
I nodded. It was the way of things down here. Long courtships often led to the young anticipating their marriage vows. Indeed, some coarser souls said the young men liked to test their sweetheart’s fertility before they took her on.
“Off you go now, Matthew,” I said. “As for saying your farewells to Lizzie, let me think on it a little longer.”
I found Dr Hansard in his potting shed, selecting hyacinths for his study. Blinking at me over his spectacles, he greeted me with the news that Lord Elmstead was no longer at home. The steward had informed him that his lordship had embarked on the Grand Tour.
“The Grand Tour? It was one thing for young men of his father’s generation doing it – indeed, I remember the late Lord undertaking it some eighteen or twenty years ago – but today, with Europe in uproar? What is the man thinking of?”