Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (18 page)

‘I like Saul,’ Dan’l said. ‘He talks to me.’

‘That’s all you can say for Saul Derby,’ conceded Stoke. ‘He rubs along with Dan’l. He even cosies up reasonably with the Albino, who frightens most as much as... well, as much as you do, Professor.’

Moriarty smiled, not unpleased.

‘The Derbys are like Injun scouts, you know. Injuns don’t ever really go tame, but once they’re beaten they see reason. Wessex, it transpires, is as fraught as the West. Adders in the fields. Mires on the moors. Dyed-red rabble-rousers. Escaped convicts from Prince Town Gaol. It’s a marvel they don’t have f---ing Earps, while they’re at it. Though I’d rather be up against a Buntline Special than Parson Tringham’s campfire bogey. You can backshoot even the fastest
pistolero.
With Tringham’s dog, bullets don’t take.’

‘Who is Parson Tringham?’ asked the Professor.

‘Another unwelcome visitor. Breezed up one afternoon, eighty years old and babbling foolishness. I’d not underestimate the damage this mule head has done in a lifetime of sticking his prick into other people’s compost. Makes a hobby of the d’Urberville family. Can you credit it? Preacher digs about in someone else’s history for jollies. Even my daffy aunt knew better than let him cross her threshold. With her gone, Tringham wanted another stab at getting into “the archives”. I should’ve had the Albino cut his throat and dump him in The Chase. Instead, Braham turned him away. He slunk to the saloon and told his tale of a dog.’

Now, we were getting to it.

‘I had this later from Lazy-Eye. He’s courting Car Darch, a local strumpet. They do their carousing in the Red Dog. Tringham came in, settled by the fire, ordered a pint of ole goat piss, and yarned to the starving serfs – they’ve tin enough in their pockets for drink, notice. He told ’em how their pub got its name...’

As he talked, Stoke leaned forward, voice low, cheroot-end burning bright, eyebrows like horns.

‘My uncle bought the d’Urberville name outright. I couldn’t tell you who his father... my grandfather... was, but I’ve a parchment listing d’Urbervilles all the way back to Sir Pagan, who came over in 1066. Simon Stoke was from no one out of nothing and laid out gelt for centuries of tradition. He bought
ancestors.
Also, the family seat, a pew in the church and a mess of ghost stories. A phantom coach heard when a d’Urberville is about to die. Just to confirm that Uncle Si got the family curse with the name, it was reported running to schedule when Cousin Alec was pig-stuck. Tess the Knife is supposed to haunt us too. Her spook can be recognised because her head lolls the wrong way, on account of vertebrae separating when she was hanged.’

‘I seen the Brokeneck Lady,’ Dan’l said. ‘By The Chase, at night, net over her face, wailing...’

The giant shook in his fleece. Stoke was irritated by the interruption.

‘You can set aside the phantom coach and the moaning murderess. It’s the dog that’s a bother. A great red hound. A big bastard beast. This is what I want killed. I want its hide above the fireplace in Trantridge Hall. I want its paws made into tobacco pouches. I want its teeth on a necklace for my fancy woman. I want its tail wound round the brim of my tall hat.’

Moriarty tapped his teeth with a yellow knuckle.

‘This dog of yours...’

‘He goes by “Red Shuck”.’

‘This
“Red Shuck”?
Am I to understand this is not a
living
animal but a
ghost?’

Stoke stubbed out his cheroot and nodded grudgingly.

‘Yes, it’s supposed to be a ghost, but, answer me this...
Can a ghost rip out a strong man’s throat?’

I’m going to interrupt. I know, just as we’d got to
the dog.
So far, like Tristram Shandy, Red Shuck has barely figured in a story which purports to be all about him. Now, I’ll tell you about the dog.

Stoke gave us the gist he had from Lazy-Eye Jack of what Tringham told the Trantridge soaks – which the parson, in turn, had gleaned from old Wessex wives. At the end of this chain of Chinese whispers, we got
great red hound... big bastard beast... said to be a ghost... ripped-out throat.
Very ominous and in line with Stoke’s stated policy of theatrical effect, but scarcely useful intelligence. Moriarty had me pop round to the British Museum and look up our prospective quarry. The prime source on Sir Pagan d’Urberville is the
Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis
^[5]
and there’s a chapter on Red Shuck in the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s
Book of Were-Wolves
^[6]
.

So, herewith, the terrible tale of the ‘Curse of the d’Urbervilles’. Read it by candlelight at midnight and be prepared to whiten your hair and soil your drawers.

As Stoke mentioned, Sir Pagan ‘came over in 1066’. This signifies that, like many of the best families, the d’Urbervilles were founded by a bandit whose crown-snatching patron could bestow estates as he saw fit. During the Norman Conquest, Pagan was a sly, ginger-headed youth. How anybody could advance in a priest-ridden era with his name is beyond me! I imagine he spent his life trying to convince folk it was pronounced ‘Pah
-ganne’.

He was one of seventy-six Frenchmen who claimed to have put that fatal arrow into Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Several began the day fighting on the English side and three didn’t even have right arms. An ancestor of the spotty prig who flogged me for misappropriation of buns at Eton shot the King from Calais. He claimed God’s winds fetched his shaft straight into Harry’s eye. This leads me to deem the typical eleventh-century frog no more trustworthy than today’s nation of moustache musketeers, bedroom bandits and painted midgets. Sir Pagan, at least, was at the battle.

Having just taken over a whole country, the new king had a lot on his plate. For a start, he was on a tear to get everyone who’d scorned him as William the Bastard to hail him as William the Conqueror. Bill the Conk couldn’t be bothered to sort through the claims, so seventy-six lying bowmen got knighted in a job-lot. After that, they felt literally entitled to claim their own fiefdoms. Sir Pagan d’Urberville’s land-grab netted him a third of Wessex. He built himself a castle at Trantridge.

Titled and landed, Sir Pagan toadied less to the Conqueror, but knocked along with the Bastard’s son, William Rufus. William I was an empire builder, a man with a mission; William II was an empire enjoyer, a pursuer of virile pastimes. Junior succeeded to the English throne in 1087 and grumbled that he would have preferred Normandy, which went to his older brother. With his pal crowned, Sir Pagan became eminent. After William Rufus remarked offhand that d’Urberville’s forest offered the finest ‘chase’ in his kingdom, it became known as The Chase.

The new king was a fiend for hunting. His primary interest was any game animal which might provide horns, hide or tusks to decorate his castles. William II was killed by a close friend while they were out after deer. Something similar happened to a tiger-stalking crony of mine in India. It was said Walter Tyrell, William Rufus’ slayer, was too good a bowman to make such a mistake. A like criticism was laid against me. I refer the interested reader to my earlier remark about how difficult it can be to
just miss
a shot.

With English game ripe to be brought down by Norman sports, Sir Pagan threw himself into the pursuit. Every huntsman has to have his dogs. The Trantridge kennels became famous. Though he cleans it up somewhat, Baring-Gould recounts a rumour that Sir Pagan d’Urberville himself sired the litter which became his hunting pack, getting puppies on a she-wolf imported from the Harz Mountains. The dogs came out big, hungry and red.

Even taking the she-wolf story with a pinch of the proverbial, Sir Pagan remained essentially French in his habit of tumbling anything which strayed past. You’re aware of the custom of
droit de seigneur,
that the feudal lord is entitled – nay, obliged – to take first jump at any local bride on her wedding night? Pagan imported the custom to England. When grooms complained, he ruled that, to be impartial about it, he’d take his pleasure with them too. Extensive romping and riding to hounds made Sir Pagan a fine, rollicking fellow to lordly Norman chums and a bitterly hated tyrant to smelly Saxon underlings.

After a few years’ happy hunting, Sir Pagan’s dickybird got him into trouble. Comes to us all, I’m afraid. Sir Pagan, like several of his lineal and nominal descendents, came a cropper because he stuck it in the wrong hole – or at least the wrong hole-bearer.

Word got out that d’Urberville was regularly rogering peasant bridegrooms. Venic of Melchester, a Saxon monk, left his monastery to raise a fuss about such shocking behaviour. He turned up at Trantridge in the middle of a feast and had the poor judgement to deliver a fiery sermon against sodomy, fornication and the wicked habit of calling English meats by French names. Sir Pagan was a firm adherent of the philosophy that you could hunt or prod anything and often do both. He had Venic whipped and set off after the monk with his dogs. Baring-Gould doesn’t go into what happened after Pagan ran down his prey in The Chase – but it’s a fair bet Venic got served in the Bulgarian fashion and staggered away bow-legged. Don’t see the attraction myself, but Mrs Halifax says it takes all sorts to butter a biscuit.

Aggrieved, Venic took a petition of complaint to the court, calling for the King’s Justice upon Sir Pagan. When William Rufus laughed off his pal’s high-spirited prankery, the monk went to the church and called for Heaven’s Justice. The Bishops knew the king and his axeman lived closer to their palaces than the Pope in Rome, let alone God Almighty, and dismissed Venic as a crank. At this, he despaired. He swore aloud at a crossroads that he would deal with the Devil, if Hell’s Justice were levelled against Sir Pagan d’Urberville...

Now pledged a monk for Satan, Venic returned to The Chase, where he lived wild, more beast than man. He harried Sir Pagan’s men-at-arms, killed the livestock and raided foodstores. Sir Pagan made his own vow to kill Venic and – for months – set out regularly with his dogs. Even before Venic moved in, The Chase was reputedly haunted. Paths were ill mapped and changed from day to day. If you walked around the wood, it was no larger than a small-holding; if you walked through, it seemed the breadth of a kingdom. Still, Sir Pagan knew his woods and should have been able to catch Venic again.

Failing to bring back his monk’s head, he grew moody. He let serfs go inviolate to their marriage beds. He failed to attend court and slid from Royal favour – making room for the rise of Walter Tyrell... and we all know how well that turned out.

He laid off hunting anything but the mad monk.

Cheated of regular prey, the pack became unruly, vicious, and fought among themselves. Soon, they were killing and eating each other. That’s when Sir Pagan first noticed Red Shuck. Originally the runt of the she-wolf’s litter, he grew stronger, surviving many battles. He grew wilder, redder even, as if taking on substance from dogs he killed, ’til he stood tall as a pony, long as a boat – with bloody froth about his mouth and fangs like daggers. Sir Pagan’s remaining cronies cautioned him against the dog, but the Master was pleased with Red Shuck. He thought that only when it had consumed the hearts of the rest of the pack would it be able to root out Venic. At last, Red Shuck had the kennel to himself, as Sir Pagan was left alone with his servants by the desertion of his household. His wife and children removed themselves across Wessex and established the d’Urberville seat of Kingsbere.

Still, Venic was not found, no matter how knight and dog sought him. He would appear in the village, speaking against Normans in general and Sir Pagan in particular – but when d’Urberville and Red Shuck came, he was back in The Chase. This went on until Sir Pagan took it into his head to flush out his quarry by burning the forest to ash. In India, this is known as
hunquah.
It’s a tricky practice, as likely to raze the village as flush out the tiger.

Hayricks were carted to a clearing and a fire started. It wouldn’t spread, as if the breath of Hell kept it back. At sunset, Sir Pagan sensed his enemy nearby and sicced his dog. Red Shuck bounded from the clearing, intent on rending Venic apart. Fearful cries, human and animal, were heard. Sir Pagan’s last servants abandoned him – except one page, necessary to recount the end of the story. Sir Pagan ranted at the trees, his failing fire and the skies. Then, who should step into the clearing but Venic of Melchester, wearing the bloody skin of Red Shuck.

Most versions of the tale throw in ‘hold, varlet’/‘Norman dog’/’Saxon swine’/‘have at thee, sirrah’ chatter out of
Ivanhoe.
I imagine the actual talk between mortal enemies ran to free exchange of Old English and French words not in Sir Walter Scott’s vocabulary.

Sir Pagan reached for his sword. Venic wrapped the dog-hide around his shoulders, until it was tighter than his own skin. Then his eyes got big. He had more and longer teeth. He was covered in red fur. He was, in fact, Red Shuck, walking on his hind legs like a man. Baring-Gould’s version is that the dog was the monk all along, but
Orderic Vitalis
has it that Venic commingled with Red Shuck just as the top dog had taken on the strength of the pack – by consuming his flesh and spirit. At any rate, this thing which was both Red Shuck and Venic fell upon wicked Sir Pagan and tore out the knight’s gullet. To finish off his meal, the big dog ate d’Urberville’s still-beating heart.

Since that day, the legend goes, Red Shuck has lived in The Chase, snacking off lost children, feasting on d’Urberville meat whenever the family produces a tyrant or villain. Which, as you might expect, has happened often.

Over the centuries, dozens of dastardly d’Urbervilles have been killed in circumstances ambiguous enough to allow the legend of the avenging demon dog to enjoy periodic revivals. Few of the family died in bed – unless you count those stabbed by their popsies like Alec Stoke-d’Urberville or poisoned by impatient heirs like Puritan General Godwot d’Urberville. No wonder the true line was extinct when Shylock Si was rooting for a new name. It’s a mystery the d’Urbervilles lasted as long as they did, considering an apparently hereditary predisposition to suspicious accident, outright homicide, unusual suicide (Sir Tancred d’Urberville arranged to be eaten by rooks), inexplicable mutilation and unsolved disappearance.