Enter Pale Death Page 11

  “Here they come! They’ve caught our scent.” Hunnyton gave a high-pitched whistle.

  A quarter of a mile away in the distance something in the landscape was breaking loose and on the move. Hunnyton continued his swift march towards the centre of the field. Coats shining like conkers in the sunshine, ten horses were whinnying a greeting and thundering towards them. Joe counted eight fully grown, one-ton, seventeen-hand Suffolks and two smaller, but not much smaller, colts. Probably two years old and as yet unbroken, Joe estimated. They came on in a line, ever accelerating, pounding the ground. Half a minute away. Joe swallowed, unsure whether the shaking in his body was due to the tremors in the earth or his own increased heartbeat. Joe had stood up to both cavalry charges and machine gun bursts and knew that it was a waste of time to tell a soldier that the mechanised assault of a stream of bullets was more lethal than the charge of a mounted division. Every Tommy knew in his head that in terms of numbers it was. But the onward rush of heavy horses, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, right in amongst you, way above your head height, brought with it a terror that froze your guts and your limbs as no impersonal attack from a distance ever could.

  Joe found himself, ridiculously, reaching down to his side for a weapon—any weapon. It was Hunnyton’s sliding glance backwards, assessing the effect the charge was having on the city gent, that roused Joe. He stepped forward defiantly and took up his place at Hunnyton’s shoulder. Waiting.

  With one mind the horses hauled themselves to a halt only feet from the men, carving up the turf with their braking back hooves, front ones pawing the air in a dramatic flourish. A row of rampant, Sienna-red medieval horses. Riderless and uncontrolled. Joe was aware of wild manes tossing from side to side, the smell of sun-scorched hide, the whiff and dampness of horse-foam in the wind and above all the insane cacophony of neighing and whinnying, the whole tumult erupting well over his head. He managed somehow not to flinch or cry out. He stayed very still, hands behind his back, eyes lowered, unthreatened and unthreatening.

  The older horses, neighing with delight, ignored Joe and pranced up to greet Hunnyton with slathering tongues and nibbling lips while he talked to them in a language Joe could barely make out. The affection between man and horse was unmistakable. Joe could have sworn the animals knew their place in the welcoming line. It was hardly an orderly greeting queue but somehow the figure of Hunnyton, insignificant alongside the tonnage of muscled horse-flesh, managed to stay upright and unmangled and able to call each beast by its name.

  The trained horses were clearly no menace to a stranger who entered the field in the company of their adored horseman but the unbroken pair, inquisitive, unaware of their strength, were where the danger lay. Jostled to one side by the older horses, they sought another outlet for their excitement. Not recognising Joe’s scent, they moved in skittishly towards him, muzzles extended, noisily sniffing, inexperienced feet clumsily trampling the ground and any human foot left unthinkingly in their way. They were unaware of their killing strength, emboldened by the presence of the older members of the herd and excited by the unknown. A potential disaster.

  Hunnyton broke off from thumping a big chap called Scot in the ribs and looked round sharply. Belatedly? Aware of the danger at any rate.

  Joe kept his stillness but turned his head towards the bolder of the pair of colts and began to murmur a few pleasant words. He backed away, creating the space he knew a horse liked to keep about itself. “Let him come to you, laddie!” The remembered words always rang in his ear when he met a strange horse. In response, the youngster showed an increasing interest, following him with confidence, butting him lustily with his nose when Joe turned again. The nose followed up with a more intimate inspection, twitching as it moved with slobbering, sensitive lips around Joe’s neck and face. A foam-flecked tongue emerged and began to lick his neck. At this point, Joe gently brought forward a hand and caressed its ears. As this gesture was well received, he leaned forward and breathed, as he’d been taught, into the huge nostrils, continuing to speak the words he’d learned so many years before. Gaelic? Latin? Chinese? It could have been anything. Horses knew no language. They were responding to his tone. It wasn’t difficult to speak with delight and love for these beautiful creatures. They seemed to understand that he admired them. The second colt edged the first away, eager for its share of attention. Joe fumbled in his pocket and found a Chelsea bun. He broke it in two and gave them half each, sending the pair into ecstasies and provoking a concerted attack on his pockets.

  Hunnyton, he sensed, was intrigued and mystified by this behaviour. Should he tell him that his father’s head groom had been a member of the Scottish Society of Horsemen? More than just a member—a Grand Master in that secretive Masonic world. A possessor of the Word. One of the last in the land, Auld Angus had calculated; with the arrival of the new-fangled tractor, the days of the horse—and their horsemen—were numbered and his skills and knowledge would be extinct within a generation. His standing in his own community would disappear, was already disappearing. Thousands of years of acquired knowledge was laughed at and rejected by the young lads who preferred to turn a handle and steer with a wheel rather than feed, brush and harness up the great Clydesdales Joe’s father kept. Virtually turning his face to the wall, Auld Angus, with the first appearance of a motorised vehicle on his land, had taken the decision to pass on his knowledge to the one youngster who’d shown a willingness to listen and believe. He’d broken all the rules of the Society by confiding it to the son of a farmer. Farmers and landowners were excluded from the knowledge but with his life and his world coming to an end he’d reckoned he had little choice.

  Joe had paid careful attention, committing the words and signs to memory, writing down nothing, swearing a fearsome oath never to reveal the secrets of the craft until his own last moments. To his astonishment, the Word whispered to him over a sack of corn in a barn at midnight—a hasty approximation of the initiation into the Society of Horsemen—had been two words, two words in Latin. Though he’d made no comment at the time and made no reference to it ever after, Joe’s classical education had led him to suspect, with an awe that was almost religious, that the whole ceremony and structure had been devised in a very ancient past. Romano-British, most probably. The traces they’d left behind in the landscape showed that the Roman army had had a stronger and more peaceable presence in these northern lands than was generally supposed. They’d farmed and kept stock. They’d married local girls. A good number of the soldiers were also horsemen by trade, some from far eastern lands, Persia and beyond. It had pleased Joe to think that when he’d whispered the Roman words into the ears of horses he’d ridden in India and Afghanistan that he was using a link in an unbroken chain reaching back from Britain, through Mithras, god of the soldiery, and Epona, goddess of horses, to some ancient, horse-taming homeland.

  His life had taken him away from the country and finally anchored him to an office desk. The skills were not forgotten, though. Joe would say nothing to Hunnyton, as he’d said nothing to anyone, not even to Dorcas. His oath was his oath.

  Lightly he remarked, “Amazing what an effect a Fitzbillie’s Chelsea bun will have! I nipped out after breakfast and bought a bag of them in Trumpington Street. I say—do you think they’d have the same effect on girls? Shall we try it?”

  He made no reference to the tiny bottle of oil of cloves he’d bought for an alleged toothache from Lloyd’s the chemist next door. A few drops of that on his handkerchief and a discreet smear on his face and neck had done its job. Better than a calling card. Always a good stand-by in horse country.

  “There’s Frank come to round them up,” Hunnyton said. “We’d better be off and leave them to their work.”

  “Well, thanks for that! I enjoyed meeting your friends.” Hunnyton peered at him. “Got a hanky have you? You might like to wipe the crumbs and froth off your chin before we encounter civilised society.”

  THE VILLAGE OF Melsett was indeed small. A strung-out length o
f timber-framed cottages, plastered and painted, with small windows squinting out under the weight of low-hanging reed thatch, undulated with the rise and fall of the land for half a mile. Each had a neat and extensive plot under cultivation at the back and the small front gardens, where there was space for one between the skirts of the cottage and the road, were ablaze with hollyhock, delphinium and foxglove. At the centre, where the road dipped into a water-splash, there was a village pub—unsurprisingly, The Sorrel Horse—and, opposite, a building which, judging by its size and the bell mounted on the roof, could only be the school. The Friday fishmonger—Mr. Aldous of Southwold, apparently, from the name painted on the side of his Morris van—had arrived to sell his wares from a box of ice in the back. They passed slowly along the high street, Hunnyton pointing out his own cottage as they drove by until they arrived at the ancient village church mounted on a slight rise above the village.

  “We’ve time to stop here and look about before we go to see the vet,” he said, showing Joe through the sheep-gate. “There’s something you’ll want to see, Sandilands.”

  Joe set off up the path, his eye intrigued by the many headstones engraved with a name he thought he recognised. As they approached the church Hunnyton caught him by the sleeve and pulled him off to the left. “No, this way. Never go round a church widdershins. If you do, the Devil will have you!” Joe doubted the Devil knew his widdershins from his elbow but if Hunnyton favoured a clockwise approach, he was happy to indulge him.

  They went off beyond the church and away to the furthest perimeter hedge that divided the church land from the cultivated farmland. A solitary grave with a simple stone marker seemed to be their destination. Joe noticed before they arrived at the spot that the plot was tended, grassed over and carefully trimmed. A stone vase held a bunch of white roses. Buxom, overblown garden-variety roses. A scatter of petals over the grave told Joe that they had been placed there some days ago. Hunnyton was not the only one in the village who remembered her, it seemed.

  Joe knelt and read the name. PHOEBE PILGRIM. BORN: 1892. DIED: 1908. MAY SHE REST IN PEACE.

  “I noticed other Pilgrims in graves a bit nearer the centre of things,” Joe said. “A Suffolk name?” Hunnyton nodded. “So why is Phoebe laid to rest here, away from her family?” he asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from Hunnyton.

  “There were some as said she’d no right to be on hallowed land at all. They wanted her planted out at the crossroads.” He snorted with disgust. “Medieval barm-pots! You’ll still find ignorant old shell-backs in these parts who think a suicide has no place in Christian soil.” His voice had taken on a rougher countryman’s edge to give traction to the remembered emotion. “I were that mad you could ’a boiled a kettle on my head! I gave that no-good preacher what for—right there in his own church and I got the old man to back me up.”

  “Good man! Glad to hear you’re dragging them into the twentieth century. But—suicide? You don’t have to be a countryman to find that a bit tricky. It’s still regarded as a crime by the law, even in sophisticated London Town. Poor child. She was only sixteen.”

  Joe knelt at the grave and said a silent prayer. Deep in thought, he removed a dead flower and rearranged the rest.

  “Are you ever going to tell me why you’ve lured me here, Hunnyton? You’ve managed what no official body has managed in a quarter of a century—you’ve got a Scotland Yard officer on his knees at a graveside on Suffolk soil. Quite a feat! Look—there were twenty-five recorded self-inflicted deaths in the Suffolk police authority in 1908 and, apart from the war years when the rate went down, it’s been pretty steady ever since. I check these things! So, I’m wondering why you want the Yard here, six feet from the bones of little Phoebe Pilgrim, asking questions.”

  Hunnyton knelt down opposite Joe, putting his right hand on the grave and staring at him across the small plot, using the earth as he might have used the Bible offered in court. A gesture of sincerity. An accepted guarantee of truth.

  “It wasn’t a suicide. Someone murdered her. I’ve always known that. I let it go all these years but this latest—another woman in the Truelove household dying unnaturally—I had to stir myself and do something. It needs a good brain and an influential position to get to the bottom of this and sort it out. It needs you, Sandilands. I didn’t just pick your name off a list. Oh, no. The insubordination and the clout I hear about appealed to me, but I chose you for a reason that’s personal to you though you don’t yet know it.”

  Joe shied away from things personal. “Shall we start with Phoebe?” he said crisply. “What was she to you?”

  In Joe’s experience, faces usually crumpled as confessions were made, truths revealed. Hunnyton’s stiffened into sandstone slabs. They ground together as his mouth opened with reluctance. Difficult to read. “I loved her. Intended to marry her. She was two years younger than me but there was only one class in the little school where everybody started. She was scared when she came for the first day. She was five—a little, pale creature, all eyes. Her shoes were a size too big. Her socks were more darns than socks. I took her under my wing and kept the bullies off. Sat next to her on the bench and looked after her. I took the teasing and bloodied a few noses in return. Teacher never dared say anything to me—Miss Lackland knew who my father was.” A slight smile cracked his mouth a little further. “God! I must have been objectionable! I scrupled not in those days to take advantage of either one of my fathers’ positions.” He shuddered at the memory. “ ‘Diddled old Mrs. Mutimer out of her rent money, they’re sayin’, Sammy? My dad wouldn’t like to hear that …’ and ‘That old donkey o’ yours lookin’ a bit scrawny these days, Noah. Will you start feedin’ him properly or shall I ask my dad to come an’ check up on ’im …?’ They were never quite sure which father I had in mind. Not sure I did myself sometimes. Still—I’m not going to blame myself for that,” he added rebelliously. “Precious little else going for me.”

  “Phoebe worked at the Hall, you imply?”

  “Yes. Housemaid. Started when she was fourteen. Eighteen hours a day, heaving buckets of coal and baths of water up and down four floors. Slavery. I saw her on Sunday afternoons, her only time off. She was looking forward to the time I could stand on my own feet and marry her out of there. Trouble was—when she was rising sixteen I was eighteen and Sir Sidney was sending me off to Cambridge for three years.”

  “You forgot about Phoebe in all the excitement?”

  “Never! No! I reckoned I could offer her a better life if I worked hard and made my own way in the world. It wasn’t to be that simple, though. As she got older she caught the eye of someone at the Hall. Not difficult to guess who. The last two times I saw her, she was withdrawn, losing weight, nervy, clinging. She kept trying to tell me something but could never get the words out. Pretty little thing she were. A young gel in her fair prime and pollen …” His voice had taken on the sad slowness of Suffolk speech as his mind concentrated on the distant past. He broke off to fumble in his breast pocket and draw out a wallet. Joe held out a hand to take the much-worn studio photograph he was being offered.

  The young face looked back at him wide-eyed. Startled by the flash or overawed by the occasion of having her photograph taken in distant Stowmarket? Long fair hair fell in tidily combed ripples over her shoulders. She was wearing her Sunday best—possibly her only—dress and buttoned ankle boots. A large silk bow emphasised the tiny waist.

  The image of that slim little frame now rotted to dust only feet below him triggered in Joe a response he suspected to have been carefully calculated, though it was none the less instinctive and inevitable. He swallowed and tried manfully to keep emotion out of his voice as he handed back the photograph.

  “ ‘Fair was this young wife, and there withall / As any weasel, her body gent and small,’ ” he murmured. “Though I’ve never been able to understand ‘gent.’ ” When words fail you, Chaucer could always come riding to the rescue with a pithy phrase, Joe reckoned.

 
Hunnyton’s smile was full of warm surprise. “He weren’t wrong! We still use the word over here. It means neat, worthy of the gentry. Chaucer’s Alisoun was lithe as a weasel and so was my Phoebe. She was proud of her eighteen-inch waist. Prettiest girl in the county. May Queen in her last year at school. Clever too. She was wasted emptying chamber pots and scrubbing floors. She could turn her hand and her head to anything. Only one thing she never learned—how to swim.”

  The abrupt pause invited Joe’s next question. “Are you ready to tell me how she died?”

  “She drowned. One summer night. In the moat behind the Hall.”

  Joe waited.

  “She were afeard o’ water. She’d never have gone near it willingly.”

  “The household at the time—1908?—remind me. Sir Sidney and Lady Truelove were in residence?”

  “Yes. Sir Sidney was … oh, forty-six years old. A man in his prime, you’d say. His prime lasted him thirty years. And to prove it—his wife was heavily pregnant at the time with what turned out to be young Alexander.”

  “James? What of him?”

  “You had to feel sorry for him. No longer the centre of attention. Down from Eton for the holidays. Rather embarrassed by his mother’s late showing of fecundity, I’d say. Not easy at that age to be told you’re about to acquire a baby brother or sister.”

  “How did he cope with it?”

  “By ignoring it. He disappeared off into the woods playing with catapults and shooting off his airgun from dawn to dusk.”

  More and better particulars required from that source, Joe decided. Boys stalking about in the woods saw more than they were supposed to and remained, themselves, unseen.

  As he got to his feet, Joe caught a stirring of foliage, at the periphery of his vision, a flash of colour. He turned his head casually to check the source. The nerve endings on the back of his neck were sending an alert, as was the sudden stillness where there had been movement.