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Authors: Robin Blake

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‘Abby, the coroner is here, particularly to see you. You must open, you know.'
There was no reply. He put his ear close to the door, then tried the handle. It was locked.
‘Abby! I am your father. There can be no doors locked against me in my own house.'
He rattled the handle and knocked again. I heard a muffled voice from within.
‘Go away.'
‘Abby! Is that how you speak to your father?'
His pained remonstrance had not the slightest effect. Apparently there
could
be doors locked against Talboys in his own house. And even against public officials. But I thought it unprofitable to pursue the matter just now, and suggested I call again in hopes that her docility would return. So we tramped back down to the shop where, before we parted, he spoke ruefully.
‘Father of four girls, you know, Titus, and however I try I cannot get their obedience. I defy any man to rule four daughters.'
 
Five minutes later I was re-entering the office, where Furzey greeted me in the outer room, his face animated with alarm.
‘He's here, sir. He's waiting for you. I couldn't keep him out.'
‘Who, Furzey? Who's here?'
Furzey regarded me as if my lack of clairvoyance were a mental deficiency.
‘
Who's here?
Need I tell you? It's Mr Grimshaw – who else? In the inner room. And even by his own lights he is huffing strong. Huffing strong as it blows off Fleetwood Sands.'
I went through to confront the bailiff.
I have never had the misfortune to see Ephraim Grimshaw stark naked, but I fancy that, in such a state, his spindly legs and distended belly would make a very ridiculous show. Fully dressed, however, he was alarmingly splendid, with silks, lace and silver buckles enough to adorn Lord Derby himself. His waistcoat alone, stretched tight around the globe of his belly, was a dazzle of gold thread. And his manner was high as the King of France.
‘This is incredible news, Cragg,' he shrilled. ‘In-cred-ible. You have lost –
lost! –
the body of Mrs Brockletower!'
‘Well, I haven't personally—'
But Grimshaw was not to be deflected.
‘Not personally? Let me correct you. You personally superintended the deposition of the corpse in this …
Ice-house
. The next time you looked –
personally
again – it was not there. I call that losing, sir! I call that gross losing. In fact I call it neglect of duty.'
With a snort, he now started towards the door, shaking a raised finger.
‘I shall make my report accordingly to the Mayor. And I have sent Mallender without delay to Garlick Hall, with my firm instructions to make good this distressing business by finding her. I trust he will not be long about it. Good day, sir.'
It took a minute or more, accompanied by a few deep breaths, to repair my humour. It was always the same when I encountered the bailiff, but this occasion was particularly provoking because Grimshaw had called for no other reason than to admonish me, as a school Dame pulls down the breeches of a mitching boy. After a few deep breaths I called for Furzey.
‘I have never known him take such interest in an inquest. I wonder why he does.'
‘I have heard something on that,' said Furzey, who was one of the best-informed men in town. To underline the nature of his information he put the back of his hand near the corner of his mouth.
‘They're
saying
he has a cousin in Lancaster, with no estate and a trio of young daughters. This cousin is also Ramilles Brockletower's nearest heir after Miss Sarah and Uncle Oliver. So with three husbands to find in due course, his prospects are substantially improved if he can number Garlick Hall among his expectations. The Reverend Oliver and Miss Sarah would have only a life interest, of course, being childless. And the
bailiff will be well pleased to be assured his young cousins will not become poor spinsters and a burden on him.'
This was interesting.
‘In that case we must handle the bailiff warily,' I warned. ‘In all matters touching on the pecuniary interests of his family, Mr Grimshaw is dangerous. Now, I have been with Dr Dapperwick this morning. Just think for me. About twenty-five years ago, did we not act for him in some matter? I don't know what it was, but the doctor suggests there was such a case, and that the results were favourable.'
Furzey frowned and jerked his head towards the ceiling, as if shake up his memory.
‘The doctor and your father were friends in the twenties, all right. Not like brothers, you understand, but they drank together often enough, and borrowed books from each other. I'll go and look at the rolls. If your father ever represented the doctor, the records will be there.'
Furzey was rarely happier than when grubbing around in the firm's archive. He lit a candle and shuffled off to the basement room where he keeps all the old rolls. For the next hour, while I took up my pen and resumed the drafting of a will that I had begun before the Brockletower affair broke out, the sound of his rummaging and accompanying cries of discovery and disappointment reached my ears from below. Finally he reemerged with a document dangling its ribbons and seals, and the light of triumph in his eye.
‘I have it!' he crowed. ‘The 27th of October, 1725 at the Court Leet, my Lord Mayor presiding. Dispute between Dr Jonathan Dapperwick and William Sutton, potter. I remember the case quite well now.'
I congratulated him and asked if he would outline the matter.
‘It was a case of slander,' said Furzey. ‘Pure slander, if there can be such a thing. A grave in the churchyard had been disturbed during the night, after the funeral of a young woman, ah …'
He unrolled the record and squinted at it.
‘Eliza Sutton was her name, a young woman not yet twenty. There was also her child in the grave with her. She was not married, and the baby had already died in the womb when she gave up her own life giving birth to it. There, you see, it is the familiar story.'
‘Who was the child's father?' I asked.
‘That was Jack Hargreave, her father's apprentice. Living together in the same house, the two of them found nature more persuasive than religion. Behold the result.'
I brought him back to the subject at hand.
‘So what happened to her grave, Furzey?'
‘Yes, yes, I'm coming to that. On the morning after the interment it was found that a spade had been taken from the verger's shed during the night, you see. And it seemed that this had been used to attempt to excavate the freshly filled grave of poor Eliza. The spade was found stuck in the ground just beside it.'
‘And the bodies …?'
‘Had not been touched. Whoever was doing the spadework never got far enough down. He might have been disturbed, or alarmed in some way, or had an attack of conscience. But he ran off before he'd finished the job, leaving the spade behind. When it was discovered next morning, as you can imagine, it was talked about all over town. People were shocked, properly shocked.'
‘Not surprisingly. A desecration like that. We might not be safe at sea, Furzey, or even in our own houses, but six feet down
one does expect a certain security. So, the William Sutton that made the accusations against Dapperwick, that was the girl's father?'
‘Yes. And he began putting it about loudly, in taprooms up and down Church Gate and Fisher Gate, that in his opinion the digger was a doctor of this town, engaged in the evil business of obtaining bodies and dissecting them. Then, in the White Horse Inn, he named Dr Dapperwick as the one who did it.'
‘Whereupon the doctor consulted my father.'
‘Who concurred that the words were actionable and drew up a complaint which was then heard by His Worship the Mayor sitting in Court Leet. Sutton could produce nothing against our client and the doctor was able to show he was attending a patient in Penwortham on the night in question. So the jury found for him. No one was ever convicted of the crime, and poor Eliza and her child lie there to this day.'
‘Were damages awarded? Or costs?'
Furzey raised his index finger.
‘No, that's a notable point. Particularly notable. The jury evidently remained suspicious of Dr Dapperwick. It is to be assumed they speculated (though without evidence) that he might have commissioned the attempted crime, even if he had not been present at the graveside on the night in question. He certainly never denied being deeply engaged in anatomy. So, though they found for him, they only gave him a halfpenny in damages, and didn't even make Sutton pay his costs.'
I thought of the pickled hands and feet in Dapperwick's library. He had got these from somewhere. But from freshly dug graves? I took the papers on the Sutton case from Furzey.
‘The jury may have been right in their suspicions,' I said. ‘It is impossible to know at this remove. And as to the disappearance of Mrs Brockletower, it cannot have been Dr Dapperwick
in person. But he tells me he has a younger associate. We must find out who that is, and in the meantime I shall read through these for myself.'
I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket. Suddenly I felt greatly in need of air.
 
 
G
OING OUT OF my front door I turned to the right up Cheapside, crossed to the south side of Church Gate and entered the churchyard through the sagging, moss-covered lychgate. It took me a few minutes of pacing up and down between the graves before I found what I was looking for, a lichen-crusted headstone on which was carved:
R.I.P.
 
ELIZA SUTTON
 
DIED 4 OCTOBER 1725
AGED 17
 
With her, an infant daughter.
 
‘All that honoured her despise her
because they have seen her nakedness.
Mine eye runneth down with water.'
I stood for a time in contemplation. Seventeen. It was the same age as that of my own Eliza when we married. Children were not granted us, so we have never endured the danger and
anxiety of childbirth. How could I know what it must have been like for Hargreave, her swain, or for her parents, who had carved such bitter lamentations on her stone?
But I became even more pensive over the suffering of Eliza herself. She must have realized her child was dead when the labour began. A woman feels the kicking in her womb and, I suppose, she feels it also when the kicking stops.
I moved across to a stone bench beside the path and sat down to unfold the record of
Dapperwick versus Sutton
. But before I could start reading a voice from behind startled me.
‘How do, Mr Cragg?'
It was Robert Crowther, the old labouring man who dug graves and tended the churchyard, trailing a long-handled scythe. I greeted him and gestured at the grave.
‘Eliza Sutton. Do you remember her?'
He leaned against the scythe, wiped his nose on his sleeve, spat, then growled.
‘I do. A pretty lass, but flighty.'
‘There was some talk of her grave being disturbed on the night after the funeral.'
‘Aye. I mind that too. They never found the chap that did it.'
‘What happened to Eliza's young man?'
‘Hargreave? Flit out of the town. I've no notion where he went.'
‘And who do
you
think desecrated the grave?'
He cleared his throat and spat again.
‘There was talk at the time of it being doctors, you know. The kind that steal dead bodies to cut them up for the amusement of themselves and the Devil. Happen it really was one of them. Or happen it was Hargreave. I've seen that before now, a mother and child being unburied by a father crazed with his grief, or dreaming she was never dead in first place.'
After listening to two or three dry, well-worn tales of corpses Crowther had known, I left him and returned to my house. It seemed to me, suddenly, that I should be worrying about the business of the murder, and let Grimshaw and his men make whatever shift they could to retrieve the missing corpse. I had little confidence in their wit, but there was no one else to do the job. In Paris, I have read, a department of government exists – the Police – which concerns itself with all manner of crime, both discovering it and suppressing it. If we had such a police office in Preston, I dare say law and order would be more rigorously enforced than it ever can be by our magistrates and bailiff, who are more interested in making money than keeping the peace. But we would all pay a heavy price in the loss of liberty, since this Police is the very apparatus of Bourbon despotism. The English don't want French tyranny to come here. And the thought of Ephraim Grimshaw in the guise of a Frenchified director of Police was a disturbing one indeed.
I would not be able to hold an inquest unless the corpse was found. But it was my clear duty to continue to prepare for one, so that I could convene it as soon as Dolores Brockletower did turn up. During the period of waiting for Luke Fidelis's report from Yorkshire, what could I do? Then I remembered the horseshoe. I could at least find out something about the only piece of possible evidence found at the scene of the death.
 
With the curve of forged iron weighing down my pocket I rode out along the Longridge road to the intervening village of Yolland. I pulled up at the village forge which served the Garlick Hall estate, lying only a mile away. The smith's name was Pennyfold.
I entered the yard where stood a coalman's dray, from which two men were unloading black sacks, and stacking them under
a thatched shelter. I approached the forge itself and stood in the wide doorway, waiting for the smith to register my presence. Pennyfold was working on an iron bar that seconds earlier had been withdrawn from the hellish temperature of the fire and now glowed red as a sunset. He was holding the bar down on his anvil in a great pair of pincers, and hammering the end of it flat with a rapid succession of mighty dings. His muscles were prodigious.
‘Stay back while I cool this,' the farrier shouted, though he did not turn round. He had noticed the light change as I stepped through the doorway.
Looking around I spotted on a window-ledge three octavo volumes, which I picked up out of idle curiosity. One was Bishop Taylor's
Sermons
, the second Snape's
Anatomy of an Horse
and the third Swift's
Gulliver
. A very curious trilogy.
Pennyfold had now lifted the iron from the anvil. It was still glowing, though not as fiercely as before. He took a couple of strides towards his water butt, which stood to one side, and plunged it in. The hiss was like that of a monstrous cob swan about to attack.
The smith laid the bar back down across the anvil and turned to me, wiping his hands across the front of his leather apron.
‘So, Mr Cragg, isn't it, sir?'
‘It is. I wonder if I may have a word.'
‘Willingly. How can I help?'
Pennyfold reached down a copper mug from the windowsill, dipped it in his water butt and drank deep. Then he dipped again and offered the cup to me.
‘Drink of best forge water, sir? Very good for the constitution, I guarantee. And an antidote against arsenic poisoning, you know.'
‘Is it indeed? I've never heard that.'
‘I am lucky never to have had cause to benefit, myself. But it's what my old gammer used to say.'
I took the mug, and sipped experimentally. The taste was metallic, or did my sense of taste merely play up to an association of ideas? I sipped again in order not to seem ungrateful and replaced the cup on the sill.
‘Thank you, blacksmith. For a medicine, it's very tasty.'
‘Is this on the business of the inquest, sir?' Pennyfold asked. ‘I was one of those summoned by Oswald Mallender to attend today for jury service at the inn, but then we had back-word this morning. Inquest's not to be held today after all.'
‘No. It has been delayed. You have heard why?'
A broad grin broke over Pennyfold's cheerful face.
‘Aye, I have that. There's not much a farrier doesn't hear about any local goings on.'
‘The event has amused you?' I said.
At once the man's smile disappeared, and he looked more dutifully serious.
‘No, not amused, sir. Not exactly
amused
.'
‘But not grieving. Is that true of people in general?'
‘It may be. I don't say the parish is rejoicing, but there's not many crying. That woman, she was a stranger, colonial born. She had secrets, they say, and secrets make suspicion. She was singular, anyway. And not from here.'
I drew the horseshoe from my pocket and began unfolding the handkerchief in which I had it wrapped.
‘Well, at the moment I'm not concerned with the, er, disappearance of her body,' I told him. ‘The bailiff is enquiring into it, as is Mr Brockletower. She will be discovered in due course, I have no doubt. I am first of all interested in how she came by her death.'
‘It was a vagabond they're saying killed her.'
‘Perhaps and perhaps not. This horseshoe was found at the place in the Fulwood where she lay dead. It lay a few yards from the body. It probably has no connection with the death, but I would like to find out where it comes from. Do you recognize it as a forging of yours?'
Pennyfold took the shoe and turned it in his hand.
‘Can't be certain, but it looks like one of mine all right. See the flange here?'
He put his finger on the slight rim-like projection that fit snug against the leading edge of the hoof when the shoe was nailed in place. It had three tiny v-shaped notches in its upper edge.
‘These three nicks are our signature. No other local smith puts them in just so. But I'll not warrant there's none other in the country. This shoe might come from the other side of Clitheroe, or Lancaster, or away to the south if there's smiths there unknown to me signing with the same three nicks. But if it came from round here, it's one of mine.'
‘And if it is yours, can you say if it's the kind of shoe you'd make for horses at Garlick Hall?'
‘It's what you might call gentry quality, yes. But beyond that there was nowt special about the forgery we do for Garlick, not over what we do for other gentlemen.'
‘Can you tell in any way if it fell by accident from the horse's foot?'
‘Was there nails bent through holes when they found it?'
‘No, I asked about that. There were none.'
‘Cast shoes are usually picked up with some of their nails still in them, aren't they? But just from the look of it, I'd say this could have been taken off on purpose, because it's a well-worn shoe that's got to the end of its use.'
Pennyfold gave me back the horseshoe and reached for the rod on which he had been working before my interruption. I took this as a signal, thanked him and bade him good day, after mentioning that he and all the others remained under summons to the jury, and should stand ready to attend the inquest when the time came. Of this, he made no complaint.
 
The Plough Inn stood across the road from Pennyfold's forge and, feeling suddenly hungry and thirsty, I led my mount across and into the inn yard, where a couple of labourers were at work recobbling the ground. I tethered the horse to a hitching rail and went inside through the yard door. It would do no harm, I thought, to take a prospective view of the place where the inquest on Mrs Brockletower would, with luck, soon be held.
Ten minutes later I had spoken with innkeeper William Wigglesworth and looked over the barn-like room which adjoined the main building. The village folk used it for dancing, so I was informed, and for communal feasting at Yuletide, and also at midsummer if the rain fell and they could not sit at trestles on the village green. The room seemed more than adequate for my purposes and I returned to the taproom for some bread, cheese and ale, for the consumption of which I established myself in a window seat looking out at the road. I was thinking over what Pennyfold had told me. This was patently an intelligent man. His explanation of why the shoe was not cast by a horse on the spot was convincing, though it did not help me to understand how it got there. Being hardly rusty at all, how long had it lain on the ground? I could remember the weather prior to the murder. There had been heavy rain three days before, which would have made a coating of rust inevitable. But could it have been coincidental that someone had dropped the shoe at
the very same unfrequented spot where a woman would die in less than three days? I didn't know the answer to that.
I reminded myself that I was no nearer to knowing
why
she had died. Pennyfold had confirmed my estimation of how little sorrow the death had caused. Mrs Dolores Brockletower was not a reputable person to the people in this part of the County Palatine. A ‘stranger', Pennyfold had said. But she was also ‘singular', ‘not natural' and ‘colonial born'. And she had ‘secrets'. It all added up to one thing, the thing no one except hotheads like Timothy Shipkin, or half-witted gammers like old Ma Patten, would utter: that she was a witch; that she came from the Devil's islands; that she communicated with Satan.
The playwright Webster observes that ‘detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance'. I can put that in a more Lancashire way: if you know nowt, you'll say owt.
I was satisfied that it was not the Prince of Darkness who cut Dolores Brockletower's throat. Folk only said it was because they knew nowt – about her, or about the ways of the Devil. With her Spanish name (from the Spanish Main), her riding astride, her unwillingness to go about in society, and now her violent death, she was bound to be the object of all manner of fantastic gossip. The English borough towns and countryside are not used to, and do not like, the influx of strangers, even from neighbouring places. Dark-skinned, rough-voiced ladies from far overseas will never take on, unless they go to great pains in winning people over.

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