Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery) Read online

  LET THERE BE BLOOD

  A LORD AMBROSE HISTORICAL MYSTERY

  JANE JAKEMAN

  © Jane Jakeman 1997

  Jane Jakeman has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1997 by Headline Book Publishing.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For J. M.

  and in memory of P. and C.

  Table of Contents

  ENGLAND, 1830

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  INTERLUDE IN FRANCE

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  “Let there be light,” said God, “and there was Light!”

  “Let there be Blood!” says man, and there’s a sea!

  Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII. Stanza XLI

  ENGLAND, 1830

  CHAPTER 1

  In the shimmering heat, I saw from my library window that there were men coming up my drive. Two men from the village stumping fearfully along, breathless, their mouths open, their red faces contorted with expressions of fear and horror. They were bewildered, that was the truth. Like silly sheep searching for a shepherd, dumb innocents looking for any kind of authority, they came to me. That was the first I knew of the killings, when those round-faced country bumpkins dragged me back to the grubby business of humanity.

  I have little contact with the world and have shunned it as much as I can, ever since my return from Greece, believing that I do my neighbours and myself a favour thereby. Scarred as I am, I am not a pretty sight and the young ladies hereabouts would wince in horror if they saw my face at their rustic dances and country amusements. Belos, my manservant, drives the gentry away when they call on me, and, to tell the truth, there is nowhere to receive them. The rooms have all fallen into decay, except for the few that Belos has cleared out for our residence. He and I are the only permanent dwellers in this great place. You can follow me, as I walk through my mansion of Malfine, through room after darkened room, and judge whether it is suitable for a polite gathering of local society. The reception rooms, the ballroom, the dining rooms, the grand suites and bedrooms, the endless hutches for maids up in the attics of the house, where dust, the beggar’s velvet, drifts across the floors. All is deserted; the moonlight is falling through the chinks in the shutters, touching on faded marble and gilded cornices, on inlaid chests and brass-bound cabinets, glistening on the pendant milky drops of cobweb-bound chandeliers. Brocade and velvet curtains hang at the windows, all torn and rotting. The curtains are left as they were: if they were open twenty years ago, when the house was abandoned, they cannot now be drawn, for they are so decayed they would fall apart.

  And if they were left drawn across the windows they cannot be opened. The rooms behind them are in permanent darkness. The silks and ruffles of my sister’s bedroom. And my mother’s rooms, her scent still drifting through them on warm nights, rising from her skirts and cloaks in chests and armoires, still packed away, as they were twenty years ago.

  If the gentry do not call, the rustics shun me and all my works. I know that rumours circulate in the village, for Belos occasionally calls in at the tavern and listens to the talk. He holds that it is always safer to be aware of the feelings in the neighbourhood where one lives, to keep an ear to the ground as we would say, and the feelings towards me are compounded largely, it seems, of superstition and fear. For the rustics, I am the scarred and mysterious lord of the manor, no bluff squire such as they are used to. I leave them alone, and that troubles them — I do not sit on the magistrate’s bench, or chaff their clod-hopping daughters or demand they till my fields. I do not give them porter and mince pies at Christmas. I have no lady who dishes out repulsive bowls of gruel to relieve their wretched old creatures, nor do I have a good old dowager mother who amuses herself by dosing their sick and palsied with noxious remedies. The common people keep away from my doors. Belos turns the nobility from the front of my mansion, the villagers do not dare to approach the servants’ entrance at the back, and so my reputation as the hermit of Malfine grows.

  Yet I cannot totally escape the world. News of outside events occasionally reaches us here, although I shun society. Belos is sent from time to time on an errand to a banker or merchant, and usually returns with some tittle-tattle, sometimes with a newspaper no more than a few days old, perhaps the Morning Chronicle or The Times; the sole effect of perusing them is to confirm me in my dislike of human company.

  Only a month before the murders at Crawshay’s farm, I had learned of the death of that Most Sovereign Heap of fat and satin, His Gracious Majesty King George the Fourth, the old rake who had ruled first as Regent and then as King in his own right, till at last he succumbed, a mountain of flesh, in June of this year. His doctors had issued a bulletin explaining that the old despot had difficulty in breathing, and then that he could no longer hold a pen to sign a document. Finally, after they had punctured his legs like cooks putting sausages on a spit, to try to draw off the dropsy that bloated his limbs, those educated horse-butchers announced his imminent decease, and he finally bust a blood vessel in a fit of coughing.

  Now we are ruled by that dreary creature, William, the fourth of that name, plain in dress and manners, and a new age of dullness descends, for, gross obscenity though George the Fourth may have been, in his youth he was an ardent and lively prince. He was a lover of art, the only monarch since King Charles the First to care tuppence for a picture, unless it showed some naked nymph or bare-bottomed cherub being rammed by a hairy satyr, and left behind him the biggest collection of works of art ever assembled in this benighted island. In his youth, there were ideas of liberty current in the land, ideas such as have never flourished before nor since in this kingdom.

  As a young man, of good family and the heir to a great inheritance, I sat at his dining table. I was even present at that famous banquet where a stream with live goldfish in it ran down the centre of the table. Talk and wine flowed freely there, and I had the dreams of youth; in those days men talked of things now long forgotten, of revolution, of freedom from tyranny. Shelley and Byron — ah! my heroes then — scribbled of the golden future that lay ahead for all mankind if we could be freed from the despotism of Church and Monarchy. That was the time when my mother’s country of Greece sought its liberty from Turkish rule.

  But why should all this concern me now? I am, after all, the heir to an English estate, to Malfine, with its thousand acres, its lake, its coverts and spinneys, even to the very ground on which the villagers toil, the earth on which they squat, the furrows where they till their wretched living. A man cannot shit but I own the very soil beneath him — and probably the shit as well, if my lawyers had their way. Because of this, this engagement with the world that even my hermit’s existence in Malfine represents, I am thus hopelessly enmeshed in the toils of life.

  And I cannot leave here. The decayed melancholy of the place suits me exactly. I cannot bear to rebuild, but I cannot let it fall apart, either, cannot let the house where I grew up, the land where I ran wild as a boy, go to absolute rack and ru
in. As for signing and sealing it away, selling it to strangers, that is beyond my power, for the land is entailed.

  Thus, after my return from Greece, in due course I had to receive a lawyer, with a fat white dough of a face and eyes like blackcurrants sunk into a pudding. From my library window I saw him draw up, and as he got out of his carriage, I prepared myself. The scars on my face were still raw so I took pity upon him. I wrapped a black kerchief across my jaws and waved him to a chair at my mahogany library table; he was seated directly opposite me, and I took much amusement from his fearful determination to look away from my face.

  He kept his gaze fixed on the wooden panelling behind me as he told me I could not sell my inheritance, no, nor gift it away, nor deed it away: this pile of masonry, the mansion of Malfine, was slung round my neck like an albatross, a weight that I must bear for the rest of my life, such as that might be.

  So be it. Malfine would shelter me, and I would bear the burden.

  I signed papers, issued orders. A bailiff was hired to execute my instructions concerning the grounds. Some of the overgrown fields and thickets have been cleared, though the foxes still race through the knotted woods, their high, yapping barks resounding on summer nights, their cubs leaping and snapping as they dance for me in the moonlight round the velvet clearings and the silver pools of Malfine. A few streams run clean again, the rotting sedges have been cleared from the lake. The roof of the house may collapse next year, or the year after, but, with any luck, not this year, though water still runs down the old silk wallpaper of the ballroom in a heavy rainfall and the winter winds blow like demons through the tumbling chimneys.

  And these tiny involvements, the lawyer and the bailiff and the dredging of the streams, these hair-thin cracks in my fortress against the world, these tiny gaps in my defences, caught me up in the world, in all the business of murder and justice and law which I could not escape even here at Malfine. Because they knew of my return, knew there was a master at the great house, the men from the village came to me at Malfine that day, the day of the August killings, the day of the blood and heat when the corpses were already blown and moving with the busy flies.

  CHAPTER 2

  The dust flew up from my horse’s hooves along the track to the farm. The soil hereabouts is poor and sandy at the best of times and after a dry summer it is almost like powder. This summer had been the hottest in living memory, the green fields parched and withered — it was a summer that reminded me of Crete, of that dry and dusty land of yellow rocks and mauve-tinted mountains where I had once fought and bled. England did not seem like England at all, so parched was it, so unlike the verdant and lush country one pictures at the thought of an English landscape. In the Malfine estate, the ground opened up in great cracks where streams had run dry, and on the neighbouring pastures cattle lay in wretchedness in the fields, keeping in the shade of the trees, tormented by flies. The land was a brownish-gold and as I rode along there was a haze of heat and dust hanging over all, the soil, the scrubby hedges and the Crawshay farmhouse in the distance.

  The farmhouse is at least three miles from the village: a strange old place I remembered from my childhood, a great long timbered house like a galleon, an antiquity in this year of grace eighteen hundred and thirty. The wooden beams bowed out like ships’ timbers and the old casements and timbered eaves jutted out over the paths around the house like the oaken forecastle of a great vessel overhanging the waters around the ship.

  I could hear, as I urged Zaraband along the track from the manor towards an outbuilding, mutters and shouts that resolved themselves into men’s voices: angry, raging. And then the smell reached me on the hot air — blown with the fine sandy dust — a sweet, sickening odour. Zaraband snorted and kicked up her heels at the stench, but we pressed on towards the farm and clattered into the cobbled yard.

  There was a man tied to the wheel of a cart, lashed around the massive crude wooden rim.

  I had seen this before. The cruellest form of mob justice, summary retribution handed out for murder. Death by the wheel.

  But I had not seen in it England. I had not thought they had fallen to this barbarity in my own country. Evidently times had changed, and new cruelties had been learnt here, things that would go unpunished in this remote countryside where law depended on the whim of the local magistrate. New cruelties had been learned in the wars England had fought recently, new tortures from the men who had fought Napoleon’s troops in Portugal and seen the mutilations and carnage inflicted there, new barbarisms from men who had themselves suffered from the cat or the triangle, and been discharged upon their native countryside to live as best they could. Or as worst as they could. As I recall, not long since a soldier was sentenced by a court martial to four hundred lashes for stealing a silver spoon from the officers’ mess. His backbone was laid open, and he was tied to an open cart and sent jolting home, dying slowly inch by inch on the track that led north.

  I too was one of those disillusioned returners from a different world. I too, like a discharged soldier, now roamed my lands with bitterness in my heart and the knowledge of cruelties hidden in my brain.

  As I rode towards Crawshay such thoughts of the past were uppermost in my mind, but I knew also that for my own health I must get my musings back into the present. Those two anxious yokels who had come to Malfine had informed me of the only intriguing event that had taken place in the neighbourhood during my long convalescence: the deaths in this present life, not of a gallant band of heroes, but of two perfectly uninteresting and commonplace country farmers. Dull boors, no doubt, for whom life had been a sodden heap of toil and rough pleasures, and who would probably have died in some drunken quarrel, or fighting over a miserable bag of copper coins or an alehouse slut.

  The man on the wheel had been tied with his back arched around the rim, lashed to the spokes, so that when they started to turn, the rim would crush his bones into the ground under the weight of the cart. The wheel would move an inch at a time, crushing first his feet, and then his legs, and then would turn slowly, slowly, with his face moving inexorably towards the ground. He would be conscious enough to see the earth coming up towards him as he screamed and begged for mercy and his blood spurted out into the thirsty earth of the cart-track.

  He was a dark man, brown-faced, covered in sweat and dust, with a ragged shirt and breeches and a red neckerchief around the powerful throat. His face was grazed and his upper lip had been split open by a blow from a fist. Blood had trickled down upon his shirt.

  “Steady — steady now, back her in, back up there!”

  A small red-haired creature, wiry and busy, was directing the others. A great carthorse was being urged between the shafts, bucking and tossing, terrified of the smell, the rage, the shouts.

  I glanced round to take in the scene. The men stood about the cart in a threatening band, their faces twisted with hatred. One man alone was aloof from the mob: fair-haired and open-faced, he stood at a distance, his arms folded, his face impassive. Like the rest, he wore a rough countryman’s shirt and britches, but his bearing was different: he held himself upright, his shoulders back, like a soldier awaiting the order to act. I marked him as a useful fellow.

  Zaraband forced a gap through the throng, the men dodging to avoid her hooves.

  I pointed my whip at the red-haired man.

  “You! You know who I am. I am Lord Ambrose Malfine. Tell me what’s going on here!”

  The little man scrambled out from the shafts of the cart and stood before me with a kind of servility, yet looking aside, like the others.

  “Look at me! Your name?”

  The little man jerked his head and gazed straight up into my face. He was red-veined, a drinking man, a stalwart of the local tavern, I would guess, but controlled withal. His eyes closed and flickered for a moment when he looked at me, as I had seen in so many faces, but he held his gaze upon me steadily enough after that. I grudgingly gave him some respect for that. But it meant he was the more dangerous for it, a ma
n not easily scared or intimidated.

  “Seliman Day is my name, my lord, and I have no shame for my name. You can see here what has happened, plain as a pikestaff. That gypsy’s killed ’em. Killed old Gideon Crawshay the farmer and his son, the both of them. Shot ’em in the farmhouse yonder. The gypsy were found with their money in his shirt in this very place. No use troubling to tek him to assizes. Finish him here — break him on the wheel. Thet’ll teach ’em all — them thieves of gypsies.”

  He spat into the eyes of the bound man, who did not flinch or try to turn his face aside. He reminded me of a young bear I had seen on my travels, beaten, its claws and teeth drawn, made to leap with live coals, and then slumped with a terrible animal resignation to await whatever happened to it, all spirit broken, all hope gone. Where had I seen such a sight? Yes, in that hot country, a long time ago. The sickening smell of the beast’s scorched pads, its blood and spittle, came like a flash of memory to taunt me.

  Another man stepped forward.

  “Aye, thet’s what old Sir Anderton would hev done, my lord. He just let us hev ’em when ’twas gypsies like this ’un — said they ain’t men, they comes out of nowhere, and they has nowhere and nothin’. We allus done what we liked to ’em. Them’s vermin, like foxes and rats.”

  He waited for my acknowledgement, for my token of understanding that there was a clear difference between decent-living, respectable torturers such as Seliman Day and his cronies, and thieving ruffians like gypsies.

  I did not hesitate. “Untie him!”

  The red-haired man, Seliman Day, came forward, as if to protest. He would not dare to directly oppose me for I represented the greatest authority in a radius of a hundred miles, and disobedience to a member of the local gentry, even a strange specimen like myself, would be unthinkable. Sir Anderton Revers was the squire whose lands lay on the other side of the village, bordering with the grounds of Malfine for much of the way, and he was at present in London, as Belos had informed me, trying to find a suitor for his country blowsabella of a daughter, a Prince Florian who would lift the curse of the mortgage from the Revers estate. Lady Revers had given up any hope of me as a presentable candidate for her daughter’s hand — even the prospect of money could not make the Revers desire to deliver up their plump little sacrificial lamb to the scarred and terrifying hermit of Malfine, for they had some natural parental feelings after all.