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

  Sir Anderton was exactly the kind of country aristocrat these men understood. Heavy-drinking, capricious — had not opened a book these forty years. Sentenced them to be flogged or deported for petty theft, sent them a guinea at the birth of each of their brats and allowed them to live in tumbledown housing around his ill-managed estates. If he had been at home, they would have fetched him, he would have ridden away and let them do what they wanted to the gypsy, and a great deal of torment would have been saved thereby Sir Anderton has, to put it mildly, no passionate urge for truth, and justice is a word that I do not think has ever figured in his vocabulary. He merely sits on the magistrate’s bench and hands down sentences. That, for him, is justice.

  And it may be that it would indeed have been the better course, to do as Sir Anderton would have done, to ride away and forget the incident altogether. The gypsy would be killed, as he no doubt richly deserved, and buried in some God-forsaken spot — no injustice there, for he was almost certainly not a Christian — and the family of the murdered men would be spared the prolonged ordeal of the trial. The county would be saved the expense of keeping the gypsy in prison and Sir Anderton would be saved the trouble of doing anything at all.

  But I could not do this, I found. Somehow, in spite of all my resolutions, I was fool enough to get involved in humanity, there at Crawshay’s farm, with idiotic scruples about finding evidence and observing the rule of law. The truth is that I had a sudden and unaccountable attack of the idealism which I had forsworn, that impulse that had once driven me to fight for the chimera called liberty. I thought it had been dead and buried long ago, buried in the sparse and rocky earth of Crete. Somehow, here, in this English setting, it sparked again from some hidden, banked-up embers, and kept me there, kept me between the cart and the crowd, to defend a man whose life was undoubtedly worthless.

  “Untie him!” I said again. But Seliman pressed on. “My lord, this gypsy is a killer! Let us finish him now and save the King the trouble of trying and hanging.”

  There was a murmur of assent from the crowd, and they pushed in closer around my mare. Would they rebel against authority?

  We in the south of England had not been much troubled by disorder among the people, although I knew there had been riots elsewhere in the country, especially in the factory towns of the north, where the weavers had been told to take wages lower even than the miserable pittance they were already receiving. Some had marched through the streets bearing black silk banners embroidered with sayings such as “We trust in God to bring us through,” poor devils. And in the docks and alleyways of Bristol city the grievances of the poor shame the heavens, and must one day burst into riot. Riot, not revolution. Revolution is a word for other countries, where there is more hope of change.

  In England today, God, of course, is on the side of the masters. The weavers might starve in the streets for aught any being, human or divine, would care. It is true that the mill-owners had a few frights — at Rochdale, new-fangled looms and spinning jennies which did the work so much faster and cheaper than human beings were smashed up by angry crowds. And there had been a touch of menace in a Macclesfield riot, where an angry crowd carried a pole with human teeth suspended from it, and a banner below the teeth bearing the words: “To let, the owners having no further use for them.”

  So elsewhere the local gentry had been threatened and magistrates had called out the militia, but here, far from Satanic textile mills or the hellish cotton factories, we had known peace and men lived as they had done for centuries, deferential, forelock-tugging. Our small country disorders, rarely more than tavern brawls, were easily quelled, and I had no fear of this mob at Crawshay’s. I was not afraid of giving orders — had in fact held command over ruffians far more fierce than a bunch of farm hands, and I spoke out so that my voice would carry to all the group, including a few stragglers I saw at the back, men less certain than Seliman Day of their right to do what they would with the gypsy, especially now that there was someone to give orders. It is amazingly easy to command Englishmen: generally speaking, they have a longing for someone to take charge, they love to have authority over them, it makes them feel secure and they themselves need not trouble to think further. At least, that was my opinion, and it had this merit: that I had no fear of taking command of that rustic rabble.

  But I needed an ally — one, at least.

  I beckoned to the fellow who had stood aloof — an ex-soldier, if ever I saw one. He came forward.

  “Name?”

  I barked the word out in true military fashion, and got the automatic response of the well-drilled solider.

  “Thomas Granby, sir … that is, my lord.”

  “Well, Granby, you have seen some service, I would say.”

  “I served King George, my lord.”

  Our eyes met. Men who have seen death on a battlefield share something in common, wherever they have fought.

  “What regiment?”

  “North Somersets, my lord.”

  Yellow facings on their red coats, silver lace — I had seen the North Somersetshire Infantry parading resplendently through Taunton, their recruiting sergeant luring just such country fellows as this to join them: to take the King’s shilling and enter the antechambers of hell.

  I saw that he had a clasp knife in his hand, held discreetly at his side. Would he use it for good or ill?

  I took a chance.

  “Granby, cut the prisoner free from the wheel and set him in the cart.”

  I turned to the assembled men.

  “You know the law. The man is entitled to a trial.”

  Would the ex-soldier still prove obedient to orders? If he did not, he might well turn the balance against me.

  There was a long pause.

  Tom Granby stepped forward, raised his knife, and began to saw at the bonds.

  There was an angry buzzing, curses uttered below the breath, from the men. Sir Anderton would have kept silent and let them have their way — of that they were well aware.

  As for the cruelty of the death envisaged for this man, why, indeed it would teach those thieving gypsies to keep out of the county.

  But just now authority in the county was represented not by the red-faced Anderton, familiar as the leading magistrate in these parts for some thirty years, but by myself, by the unreliable, shadowy and mysterious person of Lord Ambrose Malfine.

  And authority was now ordering them to give up their prey.

  Acceptance was ingrained, enforced by centuries of obedience to the local landowners and bowing their heads when a carriage swept by. They would do as I ordered. But I had to stare them down, raise my whip, edge Zaraband in a sideways dance towards the cart to get between the men and their wretched quarry.

  My words were having some effect. A couple of the men were now pleading with the others to see reason; they were older, more sober heads. They knew the whole lot might hang on one gallows at the next assizes, because young Lord Ambrose did not see things in the same light as old Sir Anderton, and he might not turn a blind eye to what they did to their captive. Which would be, and even these country idiots knew it, one thing only. There was only one name for it.

  Murder.

  The ropes tying the gypsy to the wheel were cut through at last, and, on my orders, with kicks and curses, the men set the stranger up in the cart, tying him to the boards.

  He was talking, calling out something, in a language they did not know, but which I could partly follow.

  “I did not kill them. By God, I did not kill them.”

  And then, despairingly: “Tatcho! Tatcho!”

  Which is to say, in their tongue, “It is truth! Truth!”

  Why should he lie in the Romany language, which he thought none around him could understand?

  One of the men was pulling at the stirrup of the bay.

  “My lord, they are in the barn there. The men he killed.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I dismounted and walked to the barn, the men following me.
r />   The outhouse was stone-floored, whitewashed, clean. There were two trestle tables in the barn, and here, as if in an obscene parody of some farmhouse feast, lay the farmer, old Gideon Crawshay, and his handsome son Edmund, side by side in death.

  As I drew closer to the bodies, the insects rose in a buzzing mass. Old Gideon was the nearer to the door. I saw what was left of the dead face, saw that the eyes were open and glaring, the teeth bared, the mouth in a fixed rictus. Was it an expression of rage? It seemed to me that it was of amazement rather; something had astounded old Crawshay at the very last, something that had left him with this incredulous glare upon his features as he died.

  A big man, Gideon Crawshay, bushy-browed and full of hate. So he had been for most of his life and so he was in death.

  I drew closer and peered over the body. Yes, old Crawshay’s evil countenance agreed with all reports of his character in life; at any rate, until his recent supposed attack of virtue.

  I had heard of this recent reformation of the old sot, a sudden conversion to civilised living; it was a titbit that Belos had reported to me a few months back, that old Crawshay the farmer had sobered up, got himself some fine clothes and dined at table like a human, the dirty old goat. Why or how this reformation had come about, the village did not know.

  It made his death even more of a mystery. Old Gideon had frequently been fighting drunk when in his cups, and might have picked a quarrel with a saint: there must have been a score of men hereabouts whose ancestry, sexual powers and financial honesty had all been the subject of spirited abuse by the foul-mouthed old creature, but what had happened to him now did not fit with the image of a drunken brawl. I stepped further into the outhouse and closer to the body. To the bodies. Gideon and his son.

  God help the coroner’s jury when they came to view these corpses, I thought, for there was already a smell of putrescence in the air. The others had fallen back.

  There were few men in England, unless perhaps they had gone the whole three days at Waterloo, who had seen what I had seen in the way of death. As it happened, I was the best person they could have sent for, since I have had very considerable experience of dealing with dead men in hot weather and do not puke at the smell.

  I took mental note of what I saw. Crawshay had been killed by a bullet, probably from a pistol. And it had been fired at close range, tearing out half of his throat, a terrible wound from which the blood had gushed and dried in the heat to form an obscene brick-coloured cravat, a velvety crust of blood that spilled over his breast, vivid against the handsome white linen of his shirt, starched and ruffled.

  On the other table, a long form with the head hanging down over one end, fair hair trailing in the dust. Crawshay’s son, Edmund. His heir.

  But not, so village gossip had it, his pride and joy. Crawshay had openly despised his son, and I remembered fragments of grown-up conversations in whispering rooms, things I had overheard but not understood, as a child, before I had gone away, tittle-tattle about the Crawshays passing round the village from one clacking tongue to another. Edmund had not resembled his father at all, except that now he had shared the manner of his death. He had the light gold hair, the wistful good looks of his long-dead mother. And he had her softness.

  Here now they lay, father and son, side by side, and the blond hair that women had thought so attractive and Crawshay had sneered at so often was darkened with blood, and handsome Edmund was handsome no longer because a bullet had carried away the side of his face and his jaw was smashed to white fragments of bone, and his beautiful even white teeth were blown to stumps.

  Seliman Day was behind me, the only one of the village men to have come into the barn. He had a cloth bundle in one fist. “My lord, they was shot inside the house — that’s where we found ’em. But Mistress Crawshay, she were making such a hollering and weeping, we brought them out and laid them here, and she were calmer then. And then she told us about the gypsy-man, and we caught ’un straight away. He must hev been making for that caravan of theirs when we git him. He were carrying this. Caught red-handed, and thet’s the truth.”

  He handed the bundle to me and I unwrapped it in silence. In my hands lay some fine white linen with tiny smocking — a child’s shirt, perhaps — with reddish-brown smears upon it. And inside that, something heavy and gleaming — half a dozen gold guineas fell out into my palm, and there was a big old-fashioned silver watch, the kind which is so appropriately called a “turnip,” such as farmers have. It had dark, dry smears on it, dulling its brightness as I held it up to the light.

  “That’s his watch. That’s old Crawshay’s watch. He were an evil old bastard, Crawshay, and I’ll say that even over his dead body. But bin murdered here like a beast, and he were one of us, and shall us see his killer here and do nowt?”

  He had only to call on the men outside and it was still possible they would break the frail bounds of obedience that contained their lust for revenge, their feverish, almost sexual excitement at the prospect of seeing the gypsy's physical agony. And they might not stop at the gypsy. If I tried to come between them and their prey and they were in a truly murderous mood of self-righteous revenge, why, then Lord Ambrose and the gypsy both might go the same way to a hideous death at the hands of a mob. Danger was screaming through the stench and the heat. But something told me the greater danger would be to back down now, to lose my stance of authority. Once I showed any sign of fear, once they sensed for an instant that I was not their master, they would be out of control.

  I stepped outside the barn. There was a menacing little crowd still gathered around. But the gypsy had been freed from the wheel of the cart. They had obeyed me in that, at least — it was a good sign.

  “This bundle here is evidence for a warrant and one will be issued as soon as I get back. The gypsy is to be taken to Malfine and locked away in the cellars. We’ll get him to Callerton Assizes and then he’ll swing in the end — if he’s guilty. But you must leave it to judge and jury. You know the consequences otherwise — I cannot protect you from the results of any wrongdoing you commit. You all know that. Now step back and do as I tell you! Step back, I say!”

  There was some murmuring, but a kind of grudging assent to what I had said. There were hotheads here, but not fools. They would obey me. I could tell when a man would be obeyed and when he would not.

  I walked outside and over to the cart where the Romany lay lashed down inside it, like a beast trussed for market. I climbed up and looked down into his dark eyes and I could read nothing there — not guilt, not even fear. There was an animal sense of danger, a foxy alertness in his body, rather than human knowledge. But it might have been the smell coming from him, a sour, piss-drenched stink, that put me in mind of a fox.

  “Take him to Malfine and hold him there till I come,” I said. “You, Day — and you — Granby, is it?”

  I pointed at the ex-soldier, the man who had cut the gypsy from the wheel in response to my orders.

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “Well, you two, Day and Granby, you are responsible for the safety of this man, d’you hear? I want him in one piece when I get back to Malfine. You’ll hang for it otherwise. I’ll not have the law flouted here!”

  That should keep the gypsy safe for the moment. Those two knew I had their names, knew they would be held responsible for what happened. Granby had some ingrained discipline and training, and Seliman Day could clearly have some influence on a crowd — I hoped he would now use it for the good, that is to say, to protect his own skin. Those two would swing their weight against a lynching party.

  I don’t know why I was so concerned with the fate of the gypsy. Why didn’t I leave the wretch to be dealt with then and there? No one would have bothered about it, even if the outside world had ever heard of his untimely demise.

  I could have turned my back. I could have walked away. Certainly, I felt nothing about the creature. Or had there been something, when I looked into his eyes? A kind of movement within my mind, as if somethin
g were opening, slightly, like the cage of an animal feared by its keeper?

  I knew what to do with the bodies, and it must be done immediately. They could not receive burial, for the coroner’s jury must see them. But they could not lie here — I knew only too well what happened to men’s bodies in such heat. Stinking carrion within a few hours.

  The Malfine icehouse, like most of the other architectural delights and follies on the estate that had been built to accommodate a semi-palatial lifestyle, had not been used for a quarter of a century, but it was partly underground, chilled by a running stream, and furnished with cold marble benches. Two of those would make fitting biers for the Crawshays in this heat.

  “Day, where is Mistress Crawshay? I'll have to talk to her. Mistress Edmund Crawshay, is it not?”

  “Aye, my lord. The old un had no wife — leastways, not yet, though some do say he had intentions that way. But ’tis Mistress Edmund runs the ’ouse, and she were in a terrible state when we come, but she’s calmed down a bit by now. She were crying and shrieking something terrible, but ’tis all quiet now. There’s a wumman with ’er. The governess is taking care of her.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Go to the farmhouse. Tell them I am coming.”

  Granby advanced in long strides to the looming doorway. His lanky form moved up the shadowless path.

  At least the women could be forewarned. I waited for a few minutes, gazing round at the dilapidated outhouses of the farm, and then walked up to the front of the house. The long barrow known as Wayland’s Mound rose behind it. It made the house darker, but I suppose old Gideon had never thought to have it levelled.