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Authors: Robin Blake

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He turned to me with suddenly renewed ferocity.
‘
Divorce
? Has someone suggested this to you? Who have you been speaking with?'
He raised his eyes upwards and his hands too, in a gesture of hapless understanding.
‘My uncle! You've been gossiping with my reverend uncle. You know he is a sot? Nothing he says is reliable. Nothing he says will stand up as evidence in any court, not even your own miserable gutter-court of inquest.'
‘You are jumping to conclusions, Mr Brockletower. No one
is speaking of evidence in court. I am merely trying to determine Mrs Brockletower's state of mind at the time of her death.'
‘Why? Why would
you
want to do such a thing? In what precise way is it any business of yours?'
‘You yourself are a magistrate,' I went on, my voice straining to convey patience and peacemaking. ‘You know that I must hold an inquiry into the death, because of its suddenness and violence. The ultimate responsibility, I agree, is that of the empanelled jury. But I must preside over the proceedings, and my duty entails calling proper witnesses and marshalling the facts so that a coherent narrative of events prior to the death is put before that jury.'
At this Brockletower raised his index finger and shook it at me.
‘Ah! But you have no body, sir. You cannot hold your inquest without a body. I know the law to that extent, at least.'
We had come almost full circle in our exchange, and I permitted myself the small pleasure of closing it.
‘Which is why we are searching your estate,' I told him. ‘And why we must go on until we find what we are looking for.'
 
As I left the squire I felt a peppercorn's weight more sympathy for him, after the glimpse I'd had of the more relenting side to his character. Virile ferocity may be necessary for the advancement of civilization across the world, but it gives way to more domesticated emotions from time to time. On the other hand, Brockletower had neither confirmed nor denied his reverend uncle's story about his desire for a divorce.
In hope of getting nearer to the truth of this, I strolled around the side of the house and into the yard, entering by way of the kitchen. I found it in its usual condition of heat, steam and brothy smells. Bethany Marsden was in supervision of a
sturdy girl with bare forearms who was mixing a duff in a large bowl.
The housekeeper did not ask about the search and I did not mention it, but I did request the opportunity to speak to Miss Brockletower. A few minutes later my request had been granted and I was seated in the same chair I had occupied before in Sarah's darkened room, opposite her rocker.
‘Well, Titus! Events have taken a theatrical turn indeed since we spoke last. I hear the sounds of men outside, quite different in tone from those of Mr Woodley's builders. Are they by any chance a search party for my late sister's body?'
I told her about the soldiers, and the methods they were applying.
‘“Combing”, is it? I like the notion.'
I asked if I might speak with her so confidentially as to exclude her relating the matter even to her brother.
‘As he is my brother and protector, that is too much to ask,' she said. ‘But let's say I shall not reveal anything without warning you first, and in any case not without very good reasons. Will that satisfy you?'
I said it would.
‘Then what is it you want to discuss?'
‘First, your own feelings about Ramilles. Are you affectionate, the two of you?'
‘That question comes close to prurience, Titus.'
‘It must seem so. But I trust your judgement of human nature, Sarah, and I am trying to form an estimate of your brother's nature – his character and temperament.'
‘You want to know if he killed her, in other words?'
I flinched. Her directness had once again abashed me.
‘Hypothetically, yes.'
‘So be it. Hypothetically. Let me think. I don't think I know
the answer. He is my baby brother and as a baby I loved him. I would cuddle and kiss him endlessly, wishing I could see him. But later he became a very selfish boy, wrapped in his own concerns. He did not bother himself about me and I hardly knew him. And then he went to sea. When he returned a dozen years later with his wife there was a great deal of reserve between us. So, although I respect him as my brother because it is my duty, and as one whom I had once truly loved years ago, I do not now love him well enough to say no, he cannot be a killer. There! You must be satisfied with that. I've told far more than I should.'
‘You have expressed yourself finely, Sarah.'
‘Never mind finely, I've told the truth. I hope that is all you need to know.'
I looked into the fire, and then at her poodle lying on the hearthrug. The words she had just spoken, ‘one whom I had once truly loved years ago', might be meant for me, too. ‘Wishing I could see him': had this also been what she had felt about me? Sadness at the way human feelings can be changed by time and distance overwhelmed me. During our juvenile walks arm in arm, in the clumsily phrased messages we exchanged, and the words we spoke between kisses, it had been Sarah's blindness that bound us most tightly together. I told her she would never need sight, because I would always be her eyes. And she told me – I remember her words exactly – ‘How can I hope to see more happily than through my Titus's eyes?'
But now this same function that I'd wished to perform was done by a poodle, and her sightlessness, which had made our babyish love so potent, had fallen like a curtain between us. So was I, in relation to her, no different from all the rest of the seeing world? I saw, at least, how utterly changed I was since we had first known each other. The boy who had wanted to be nothing but a blind girl's trusted Cicero was now a man of the
world, who thought nothing of driving frightened people to tears with his questions. And the girl – she was still blind, and still alone, though no longer a girl.
‘Why are you silent, Titus?' she demanded sharply. ‘I do not like it, you know. Silence to the blind is like darkness to everyone else.'
‘All right, I shall come straight out with it. There is a story going about that your brother and his wife had become so unhappy that he wished to part from her.'
Sarah gave a gasp and clapped her hands to her cheeks. At last I had surprised her. I went on.
‘You will understand how important it is that I find out the truth of this. Do you know anything about it, Sarah? Did he confide this to you?'
She shook her head.
‘No, he did not. But … part from her, you say? Well, I am shocked. There is no surety in the affection between men and women, is there?'
‘It is only a tale I heard. But it does perhaps fit the case. After our last talk, it was apparent to me that the couple were not happy.'
‘They were not particularly happy, no, but most people are not. Such a step! Separation? Divorce? I was privy to nothing of the kind. You must ask elsewhere.'
It seemed she was signalling the end of the interview. I began to take my leave when she stopped me.
‘Before you go, I do have one piece of advice, Titus. Look to Mr Woodley for the source of the wickedness in this house. I consider him an evil influence, ever since he kicked Jonathan.'
‘Jonathan?'
‘My dog.'
At the sound of his name the dog raised his chin from his
forepaws and gave Sarah an enquiring look. She tilted her chair forward, stretched out her hand until it found his head and stroked it as she explained.
‘Jonathan and I were walking together alone in the park, as we often do. He is on his leash and I allow him to take me where he likes. I fool myself that it gives him a sense of freedom and dignity but the poor creature's driven by his routines and mostly does the same round every day. First we visit the cedar tree, which he circles several times before cocking his leg. Then it's down to the gardener's toolshed under which live rabbits. And on to various other places that his nose leads him to. It's so curious. Jonathan is happy to be my eyes but for his own purposes he employs his eyes less than his nose.
‘Anyway on this occasion he led me into the wood, well, not exactly into it, but along a tongue of the lawn that makes a grass walk curving into the trees. Quite suddenly Jonathan got excited and he pulled the leash out of my hand, then ran off ahead barking. A few seconds later I heard Mr Woodley shouting at Jonathan in the coarsest language that he shouldn't go in there, that he'd have him shot if he did, and then I heard a penetrating yelp and Jonathan came running back to me. I can only suppose that Mr Woodley gave him a violent bunt with the toe of his boot, as he was still whimpering when he reached me. So we turned around and came home.'
‘Did Woodley speak to you?'
‘I don't think he even saw me. As I said, the walk curves sharply to the right. I was standing around that bend and out of view, or so I think.'
‘And what business did Woodley have in that place?'
‘Why, don't you know, Titus? The end of the walk, that's where they're building this temple of his. But I don't think a man so cruel to a dumb animal should be building temples.'
She fondled Jonathan's ears.
‘Which is why we call him Jago, isn't it, Jonathan?'
‘Jago?' I said, a little puzzled. ‘Forgive me, I don't …'
She sighed.
‘You are dull-witted today, Titus. I refer to Jago, in
Othello
. Take my word for it, Mr Woodley is not to be trusted.'
 
 
O
UTSIDE, I FOUND the troopers a hundred yards from the house and sitting in a circle under the shade of the great cedar of Lebanon that rose from the middle of the lawn. They were dividing loaves of bread and taking turns to drink from a breaker of beer. A smartly turned-out horse stood picking at the lawn nearby. This belonged to Captain Fairhurst, who had ridden over to review Sergeant Sutch's progress.
‘Well, Mr Cragg,' the captain called out as I walked towards them. ‘The men are enjoying success!'
Nonplussed, I turned to the sergeant.
‘You don't mean you've found what we're looking for?'
‘No, no, sir,' replied Sutch hastily between chews of his bread. ‘And, though we don't know where it is yet, we do know much more about where it is
not
.'
Producing from his tunic pocket the sketch map that I had seen at the tavern in town the previous day, he unfolded it and traced with his finger a circle around the square, which represented the Hall.
‘We can safely rule out these four areas in the immediate vicinity of the Hall, which I have cross-hatched as you see. I have also sent three men to go through the workmen's camp, which I set aside as a separate area of search. We shall now proceed,
under system, to the outer ring, which has seven defined areas. We shall work our way through these one by one.'
‘Will you finish before dark?'
‘That will depend on how much digging we must do. I hope we can.'
‘And they may not need to finish at all,' broke in Fairhurst, with one of his crowing laughs. ‘About the whereabouts of poor Mrs Brockletower: before dark we are in the dark, but in daylight the lamp may yet be lit!'
Unwilling to engage with these elaborations of wit, I wished them luck, returned to my horse and rode back into town.
 
When I reached the office, Elizabeth had not returned from her mission to the Moor. I put the Brockletower case out of my mind, and applied myself instead to drafting a complicated trust deed. Saturday is Furzey's
dies non
and I was so absorbed in my solitary work that midday came, and went, without my noticing. It was half past two when Elizabeth returned, her cheeks glowing from her exertions.
‘We got rid of nearly all the food, Titus. But Mr Broome's horse went lame and we had to return home. Have you eaten?'
I told her no.
‘Then quickly! Come through to the house. I'll feed you and tell you about my adventures.'
As I sat down in front of a plate of pickled herring and a half loaf of bread (‘I told you we couldn't quite give it all away,' she explained, a little ruefully) Elizabeth told of the hovels she had been into, and of the mixed response of the poor people in receiving her charity.
‘Some of them spat when they saw me, as if I were the cause of their destitution. They took the food anyway, of course. But I have marked down two or three cottages where the
ingratitude is truly discouraging, and I shall not be visiting them again. But now, I
must
tell you something else. The whole countryside is talking about the death of Mrs Brockletower. And do you know what they are saying?'
I said that I didn't.
‘They are on fire with the notion that she was a werewolf, Titus. A werewolf, who roamed the woods at night. She transformed herself by a belt that she put on, made from the hide of a real wolf. She brought it with her from the West Indies, they say. The night she died in the Fulwood, she had met the Devil himself, and it was him who tore out her throat. And as she lay dying she transformed back into a woman, which was how she was found as she was – on all fours.'
It was a variation, though more elaborate, of what Miriam Patten told me when we met at Gamull, during my ride with young Jonah to the Fulwood on Tuesday.
‘So what do they say about William Pearson's testimony, that he saddled her horse and watched her ride out in the morning? And all the others that saw her in the morning before she went riding?'
Elizabeth shrugged.
‘Only that they were lying, or under some spell.'
‘This is nonsense! I doubt there
are
any wolves in the West Indies. Surely you don't give credence to this kind of talk.'
‘No, of course not. But it is interesting, don't you think?'
‘I think it's twaddle.'
‘I don't say she
was
a werewolf, Titus. But the idea must have come from somewhere.'
She shuddered briefly, betraying something in herself more deep-seated than academical curiosity about this phenomenon.
‘It came from the ravings of half-starved brains.'
Elizabeth reached forward and picked an uneaten shred of
herring from my plate, tilted back her head and delicately dropped it into her mouth.
‘Yes, well, that's a possibility,' she went on, after she'd swallowed the fish. ‘But in a bushel of lies there is a grain of truth. And there was definitely something odd about that woman. If there
were
werewolves—'
‘There are not!'
‘But if there
were
,' she insisted, ‘and it was proved Dolores Brockletower really had been one, the discovery would not surprise me at all.'
I returned to the office and my work on the trust deed, but now I could not concentrate as I was still hoping for news from the search party at Garlick Hall. But I was even more distracted by the imaginary spectre of Dolores Brockletower as a she-wolf, running and running by moonlight through the woods with bared and bloody fangs.
 
For supper we had Elizabeth's economical invention, being rissoles of yesterday's salmon, minced with spinach, capers and breadcrumb. Afterwards I left her embroidering by the parlour fire and went into my library. Feeling a tiny pricking of guilt, I began taking down books that might yield further information on lycanthropy. As I knew quite well, stories of transformation, or metamorphosis, run deep in literature and pagan religion. The myths of the Greeks and Romans teem with them and Ovid had merely collected all of the ones he could find. I looked up what Mr Spectator has to say about Ovid's stories: ‘Here we walk upon enchanted ground,' he says, a phrase to stiffen the hairs on the back of one's neck, if any phrase can. But stories of people becoming animals, more particularly metamorphosing into wolves, are not only cases of Ovidian enchantment, but of satanic business. And they appear to have much to do with cannibalism.
Lycaon was the first lycanthrope, I read. He was older than Zeus and lived before the flood, which, in part, was his fault. He had dished up the flesh of his own sons in a stew for a banquet, to which he had invited the gods. But his murderous impiety was discovered and he was condemned to roam the trackless wilderness as a wolf, tormented by an insatiable hunger for human flesh. He was not destroyed until the great flood was summoned to obliterate all living wickedness.
In old tales from Asia Minor I found the same creature, but now in female form – a woman guilty of frightful sins. For seven years she was condemned to transform each night into a she-wolf, first devouring her own children, then those of her neighbours, before ranging ever wider to spread fear and havoc throughout the land.
Finally, after more than an hour of turning pages, I happened on a remarkable passage in Verstegan's
Restitution of Decayed Intelligence
. I read:
The werwoolfs are certayne sorcerors who having anoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, doe not onely unto the view of others seeme as wolves, but to their owne thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves so long as they weare the said girdle. And they doe dispose themselves as very wolves in wourrying and killing most humane creatures.
My first thought was to take this immediately into the parlour and read it to Elizabeth. I quickly suppressed the impulse. I did not want to frighten her, but there was something else. I was more than a little ashamed at my own curiosity, and at the faint pulse of pleasure, repulsive but undeniable, that I felt
when reading about this absurd hocus-pocus. So I quietly posted Verstegan back to his shelf, and hurriedly returned to the parlour.
 
Although my wife's religious beliefs did not lean towards the established church, she never failed to come with me to Divine Service on a Sunday morning. Her habit was to slip out before eight and go, by herself, to the discreet house where her co-papists gathered to worship – with, on most Sundays, Luke Fidelis among them. She then came back to breakfast with me at nine and, forty-five minutes later, we stepped out into Cheapside and walked arm-in-arm the short distance from our home to St John the Divine, the parish church, arriving in time for the ten o'clock service. She did this purely out of duty and the wish not to embarrass me in front of the townspeople. She was not permitted to take Communion, of course, but her mere presence was proof that she honoured me, and it made me proud. It is for such everyday tokens of affection that I love her, as much as for her sweet character and her beauty.
This morning I carried in my pocket a sealed letter delivered by the postboy a few minutes before we quit the house. It had come from Yorkshire and was addressed in the hand of Luke Fidelis. I had not yet had time to open it, though I could hardly contain my impatience to know what news it contained.
Mr Brighouse, our vicar, was a contrast to the rotund and ruddy Mr Oliver Brockletower. Stick-like and shrivelled, though he is no more than my own age, his ministry was benign enough, but blighted by his complete inability ever to say or do anything interesting. His sermons were particularly painful to hear, though he regarded it as his duty to preach at considerable length, and in a thin, scrannel monotone.
As usual, he creaked to the pulpit with the face of a
condemned man climbing the scaffold ladder. He announced his text, and the congregation settled in for up to an hour of prosaic moralizing, unsalted by a modicum of wit or enlightened learning, yet hedged about by thickets of qualification, gloss and biblical quotation. They did not mind much. As the sermon washed over them they lapsed into the embrace of their own thoughts and daydreams. Some quietly dozed, others went into a reverie, or drew up mental lists of things to do in the week ahead. People animated by real religious passion were meanwhile having their spirits lifted at the Dissenters' Meeting House along Fisher Gate, or (like Elizabeth) had received the Sacrament in their own peculiar style beforehand, at the papists' chapel.
I eased Fidelis's letter out of my pocket and gently broke the seal, keeping my thumb on it to muffle any cracking sound. Then I unfolded it, careful to keep it below the rim of the box pew, and began to read.
Dear Cragg,
 
I am now at York but yesterday attended my consumptive patient Mr Templeton at Harrogate. He is a co-religionist to me and though a young man of my own age he is not only gravely ill but reduced further by the bite of the recusancy laws. I expect him to require Last Rites before we reach the solstice.
But I know you will prefer to hear news of the matter that has been puzzling us at home. Some of my enquiries have yielded interesting results, though I fear you may find others disappointing.
I shall spill the disappointing news first. I have been following Mr Brockletower's supposed returning route in reverse, and I found that people along the upper Ribble valley remembered how he passed through, riding hard
and yelling other traffic out of the way. They knew the reason for his haste of course: the finding of Mrs Brockletower's body had already reached that part of the county. It was about three in the afternoon when he rode through the village. Further along my eastward road I came to the village of Slaidburn where the squire had stopped at the inn for food at midday on Tuesday, and where they told him of what had happened at Garlick Hall. It is a remote, fell-top place but a post rider had come through from Clitheroe on his way north to Kendal and brought the information, which he himself had heard in the marketplace that morning. You will observe that this does not yet preclude that Mr Brockletower was in Fulwood early in the morning. He could just have ridden from there to Slaidburn in four hours. But when I reached Settle eight miles to the north-east, I again found the story he told us tallying. He had certainly spent the night there, as he said, at the largest inn. The landlord told me he had arrived at seven the previous evening (Monday the 17th) and taken a room. Supper had been eaten in the chamber (mutton chops, cheese and claret) and he had not been seen again downstairs until he paid his account and rode away at eleven the next morning. I do not think this is consistent with his having been in Fulwood during the early part of the morning. To do so he must have used a different horse, and the time was not sufficient for him not only to make the journey, but to dispose of the exhausted horse afterwards without anyone's knowledge. And to get back into his bedroom without being seen would have been no easy matter. That is all I can write now. I will write again from York.
 
L.F.

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