Hag's Nook dgf-1 Page 3

  "There's the prison," said Dr. Fell.

  They had topped a slight rise, and both of them stopped. The country sloped down and out, in flat fields intersected by hedgerows. Some distance ahead, muffled in trees, Rampole could see the church spire of the village; and farmhouses slept, with silver windows, in the rich night fragrance of the soil. Near them and to the left stood a tall house of red brick, with white window-frames, austere in its clipped park beyond an avenue of oaks. ("The Hall," Dr. Fell said over his shoulder.) But the American was staring at the promontory to the right. Incongruous in this place, crude and powerful as Stonehenge, the stone walls of Chatterham prison humped against the sky.

  They were large enough, though they seemed much bigger in the distortion of moonlight. And "humped," Rampole thought, was the word; there was one place where they seemed to surge and buckle over the crest of a hill. Through rents in the masonry vines were crooking fingers against the moon. A teeth of spikes ran along the top, and you could see tumbled chimneys. The place looked damp and slime-painted, from occupation by lizards; it was as though the marshes had crept inside and turned stagnant.

  Rampole said suddenly: "I can almost feel insects beating against my face. Does it get you that way?"

  His voice seemed very loud. Frogs were croaking somewhere, like querulous invalids. Dr. Fell pointed with one cane.

  "Do you see that" - queer how he used the same word - "that hump up there, on the side where there's the fringe of Scotch firs? It's built out over a gully, and that's the Hag's Nook. In the old days, when the gallows used to stand on the edge of the hill, they'd give the spectators a show by attaching, a very long rope to the condemned man's neck and chucking him over the brink with a sporting chance to tear his head off. There was no such thing as a drop-trap, you know, in those days."

  Rampole shivered, his brain full of images. A hot day, with the lush countryside burning dark green, the white roads smoking, and the poppies at the roadside. A mumbling concourse of people in pigtails and knee-breeches, the dark-clad group in the cart creaking up the hill, and then somebody swinging like an unholy pendulum above the Hag's Nook. For the first time the countryside really seemed to be full of those mumbling voices. He turned, to find the doctor's eyes fixed on him

  "What did they do when they built the prison?"

  "Kept it. But it was too easy to escape that way, they thought; walls built low, and several doors. So they made a kind of well below the gallows. The ground was marshy anyhow, and it filled easily. If somebody got loose and tried a jump he'd land in the well, and they didn't pull him out. It wouldn't have been pleasant, dying with the things down there."

  The doctor was scuffling his feet on the ground, and Rampole picked up the valise to go on. It was not pleasant, talking here. Voices boomed too loudly; and, besides, you had an uncomfortable sensation that you were being overheard.

  "That," added Dr. Fell, after a few wheezing steps, "was what did for the prison."

  "How so?"

  "When they cut down a person after they'd hanged him, they just let him drop into the well. Once the cholera got started .."

  Rampole felt a qualm in his stomach, almost a physical nausea. He knew that he was warm despite the cool air. A whispering ran among the trees, lightly.

  "I live not far from here," the other continued, as though he had mentioned nothing out of the way. He even spoke comfortably, like one pointing out the beauties of a city. "We're on the outskirts of the village. You can see the gallows side of the prison very well from there - and the window of the Governor's Room too."

  Half a mile on, they turned off the road and struck up through a lane. Here was a crooked, sleepy old house, with plaster and oak beams above, and ivy-grown stone below. The moon was pale on its diamond-paned windows; evergreens grew close about its door, and the unkempt lawn showed white with daisies. Some sort of night bird complained in its sleep, twittering in the ivy.

  "We won't wake my wife," said Dr. Fell. "She'll have left a cold supper in the kitchen, with plenty of beer.”

  “What's the matter?"

  He started. He wheezed, and gave an almost convulsive jump, because Rampole could hear the slither of one cane in the wet grass. The American was staring out across the meadows to where - less than a quarter of a mile away - the side of Chatterham prison rose above the Scotch firs round Hag's Nook.

  Rampole felt a damp heat prickling out on his body.

  "Nothing," he said, loudly. And then he began to talk with great vigour. "Look here, sir, I don't want to inconvenience you. I'd have taken a different train, except there isn't any that gets here at a reasonable hour. I could easily go to Chatterham and find a hotel or an inn or-"

  The old lexicographer chuckled. It was a reassuring sound in that place. He boomed, "Nonsense!" and thumped Rampole on the shoulder. Then Rampole thought, "He'll think I've got a scare," and hastily agreed. While Dr. Fell searched after a latch-key, he glanced again at the prison.

  These old woman's tales might have influenced his outlook. But, just for a moment, he could have sworn that he had seen something looking over the wall of Chatterham prison. And he had a horrible impression that the something was wet.

  Chapter 3

  SITTING now in Dr. Fell's study, on the afternoon of his first day at Yew Cottage, he was inclined to question everything in the nature of the fanciful. This solid little house, with its oil-lamps and its primitive plumbing, made him feel as though he were on a vacation in some hunting-lodge in the Adirondacks, say; that presently they would all go back to New York, and that a car door would slam, to be opened only by the doorman of his own apartment house.

  But here it was - the bees astir in a sunlit garden, the sun-dial and bird-houses, the smell of old wood and fresh curtains; not like anything except England. Bacon and eggs had a savour here that he had never fully appreciated before. So had pipe tobacco. The countryside here didn't look artificial, as country has a habit of looking when you live in it only during the summer; nor did it at all resemble the shrubs on the roof of a penthouse.

  And here was Dr. Fell, pottering about his domain in a broad-brimmed white hat, looking sleepily amiable and doing nothing with an engrossed thoroughness. Here was Mrs. Fell, a very small and bustling and cheerful woman who was always knocking things over. Twenty times in a morning you would hear a small crash, whereupon she would cry, "Bother!" and go whisking on with her cleaning until the ensuing mishap. She had, moreover, a habit of sticking her head out of windows all over the house, one after the other, to address some question to her husband. You would just place her at the front of the house when out she would pop at a rear window, like a cuckoo out of a clock, to wave cheerfully at Rampole and ask her husband where something was. He always looked mildly surprised, and never knew. So back she would go, previous to her reappearance at a side window with a pillow or a dustcloth in her hand. To Rampole, lounging in a deck-chair under a lime tree and smoking his pipe, it suggested one of those Swiss barometers where the revolving figures are for ever going in and coming out of a chalet to indicate the weather.

  The mornings and a part of the afternoons Dr. Fell usually devoted to the composition of his great work, The Drinking Customs of England from the Earliest Days, a monumental labour into which he had put six years of scholarly research. He loved to trace out the origin of such quaint terms as drinking supernaugulum; carouse the hunter's hoop; quaff upse freez crosse; and with health, gloves, mumpes, frolickes, and other curious terms of the tankard. Even in speaking of it to Rampole, he took violent issue with the treatises of such authors as Tom Nash (Pierce Pennilesse, 1595) and George Gascoigne (A delicate Diet for daintie mouthed Dronkardes, wherein the fowle Abuse of common carowsing and quaffing with hartie Draughtes is honestlie admonished, 1576).

  The morning passed, with the blackbirds piping from the meadow and drowsy sunlight drawing all suggestion of evil from Chatterham prison. But the mellowness of afternoon brought him to the doctor's study, where his host was tapping t
obacco into a pipe. Dr. Fell wore an old shooting-jacket, and his white hat was hung on a corner of the stone mantelpiece. On the table before him were papers, at which he kept stealing furtive glances.

  "There will be guests to tea," said the doctor. "The rector is coming, and young Martin Starberth and his sister - they live at the Hall, you know; the postman tells me they got in this morning. Perhaps Starberth's cousin, too, though he's a sullen sort of dog for your money. I suppose you'll want to know more about the prison?"

  "Well, if it's not-"

  "Violating any confidence? Oh no. Everybody knows about it. I'm rather curious to see young Martin, myself. He's been in America for two years, and his sister has run the Hall since their father died. A great girl, that. Old Timothy died in rather a curious way."

  "A broken neck?" Rampole inquired, as the other hesitated.

  Dr. Fell grunted. "If he didn't break his neck, he broke most of the rest of him. The man was fearfully smashed up. He was out riding just after sunset, and his horse threw him - apparently while he was coming down Chatterham prison hill near the Hag's Nook. They found him late that night, lying in the underbrush. The horse was near by, whinnying in a kind of terror. Old Jenkins - that's one of his tenants - found him, and Jenkins said the noises his horse was making were one of the worst things he'd ever heard. He died the next day. He was fully conscious, too, up to the end."

  Several times during his stay Rampole had the suspicion that his host might have been making game of him as an American. But he knew differently now. Dr. Fell was plodding through these gruesome anecdotes because something worried him. He talked to relieve himself. Behind the shiftings of his eyes, and his uneasy rollings in the chair, there was a doubt-a suspicion-even a dread. His asthmatic breaths were loud in the quiet room, turning dusky against the afternoon sun.

  Rampole said, "I suppose it revived the old superstition."

  "It did. But then we've always had superstitions hereabouts. No, this business suggested something worse than that."

  "You mean”

  "Murder," said Dr. Fell.

  He was bending forward. His eyes had grown large behind the glasses, and his ruddy face looked hard. He began to speak rapidly:

  "Mind! I say nothing. It may be fancy, and it's no concern of mine. H'mf. But Dr. Markley, the coroner, said he'd got a blow across the base- of the skull which might have been caused by the fall, and then again might not. He looked, it seemed to me, less as though he'd had a fall than that somebody had trampled on him. I don't mean by a horse, either. Another thing: it was a damp evening in October, and he was lying in marshy ground, but that didn't seem to account wholly for the fact that the body was wet."

  Rampole looked steadily at his host. He found that his fingers had closed on the arms of his chair.

  "But you say he was conscious, sir. Didn't he speak?"

  "I wasn't there, of course. I got the story from the rector, and from Payne, too; you remember Payne? Yes, he spoke. He not only spoke, but he seemed to be in a sort of ghoulish high spirits. Just at daybreak they knew he was dying. He had been writing, Dr. Markley said, on a board propped across him; they tried to prevent it, but he just showed his teeth. `Instructions for my son,' he said-Martin was in America, as I told you-'there's the ordeal to be gone through, isn't there?' "

  Dr. Fell stopped to light his pipe. He pulled the flame down fiercely into the bowl, as though it might give him clearer sight.

  "They hesitated in calling Mr. Saunders, the rector, because Timothy was an old sinner and a furious hater of the Church. But he always said Saunders was an honest man, even if he didn't agree with him, so they brought him out at dawn to see whether the old man would agree to prayers for the dying. He went in to see old Timothy alone, and after a while he came out wiping the sweat off his forehead. `My God!' says the rector, as though he were praying, `the man's not in his right mind. Somebody go in there with me.' `Will he hear the commitment?' says Timothy's nephew, who was looking queer. `Yes, yes,' says the rector, `but it isn't that. It's the way he's talking.' `What did he say?' asks the nephew. `I'm not allowed to tell you that,' says the rector, `but I wish I could.'

  "In the bedroom they could hear Timothy croaking gleefully, though he couldn't move for the splints. He called out to see Dorothy next, alone, and after that Payne, his lawyer. It was Payne who called out that he was going fast. So just as daylight was growing outside the windows, they all went into the big oak room with the canopied bedstead. Timothy was nearly speechless now, but he said one clear word, which was, `Handkerchief,' and he seemed to be grinning. The rest of them knelt down while the rector said the prayers, and just as Saunders was making the sign of the cross, some froth came out of Timothy's mouth, and he jerked once and died."

  During a long silence, Rampole could hear the blackbirds piping outside. The sun was growing long and wan in the branches of the yew.

  "It's, odd enough," the American assented at length. "But if he said nothing, you've hardly any grounds to suspect murder."

  "Haven't I?" said Dr. Fell, musingly. "Well, maybe not. The same night - of the day he died, I mean-the same night there was a light in the window of the Governor's Room."

  "Did anybody investigate?"

  "No. You couldn't get any of the villagers near there after dark for a hundred pounds." Oh, well! A superstitious imagination-" It wasn't a superstitious imagination," the doctor affirmed, shaking his head. "At least, I don't think so. I saw the light myself."

  Rampole said, slowly, "And tonight your Martin Starberth spends an hour in the Governor's Room."

  "Yes. If he doesn't funk it. He's always been a nervous chap, one of the dreamy kind, and he was always a little ticklish about the prison. The last time he was in Chatterham was about a year ago, when he came home for the reading of Timothy's will. One of the specifications of the inheritance, of course, was that he should pass the customary `ordeal.' Then he left his sister and his cousin Herbert in charge of the Hall, and returned to America. He's in England only for the the merry festivities."

  Rampole shook his head.

  "You've told me a lot about it," he said; "all but the origin. What I don't see is the reason behind these traditions."

  Dr. Fell took off his eyeglasses and put on a pair of owlish reading-spectacles. For a moment he bent over the sheets of paper on his desk, his hands at his temples. -

  "I have here copies of the official journals, made from day to day like a ship's log, of Anthony Starberth, Esquire, Governor of Chatterham Prison 1797-1820, and of Martin Starberth, Esquire, Governor 1821-1837. The originals are kept at the Hall; old Timothy gave me permission to copy them. They ought to be published in book form, one day, as a sidelight on the penal methods of that day." He remained for a time with his head down, drawing slowly on his pipe and - staring with brooding eyes at the inkwell. "Previous to the latter part of the eighteenth century, you see, there were very few detention prisons in Europe. Criminals were either hanged outright, or branded and mutilated and turned loose, or deported to the colonies. There were exceptions, like the debtors, but in general no distinction was made between those who had been tried and those who were awaiting trial; they were flung in willy-nilly, under a vicious system.

  "A man named John Howard started an agitation for detention prisons. Chatterham prison was begun even before Milbank, which is generally supposed to be the oldest. It was built by the convicts who were to occupy it, of stone quarried from the Starberth lands, under the muskets of a redcoat troop commissioned by George III for that purpose. The cat was freely used, and sluggards were hung up by their thumbs or otherwise tortured. Every stone, you see, has meant blood."

  As he paused, old words came unbidden to Rampole's mind, and he repeated them: " There was a great crying in the land ..."

  "Yes. A great and bitter one. The governorship, of course, was given to Anthony Starberth. His family had been active in such interests for a long time; Anthony's father, I believe, had been deputy sheriff of Lincoln Bouro
ugh. It has been recorded," said Dr. Fell, a long sniff rumbling up in his nose, "that every day during the building, light or dark, sun or sleet, Anthony would come riding out on a dappled mare to oversee the work. The convicts grew to know him, and to hate him. They would always see him sitting on his horse, up against the sky and the black line of the marshes, in his three-cornered hat and his blue camlet cloak.

  "Anthony had one eye put out in a duel. He was a bit of a dandy, though very miserly except where his person was concerned; he was stingy and cruel; he wrote bad verses by the hour, and hated his family for ridiculing them. I believe he used to say they would pay for making fun of his verses.

  "They finished the prison in 1797, and Anthony moved in. He was the one who instituted the rule that the eldest son must look at what he'd left in the safe of the Governor's Room. His governorship, I needn't tell you, was a trifle worse than hellish; I'm deliberately toning down the whole recital. His one eye and his grin .... it was a good job," Dr. Fell said, putting his palm down flat on the papers as though he were trying to blot out the writing-"it was a good job, my boy, that he made his arrangements for death when he did."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Gideon!" cried a reproachful voice, followed by a fusillade of knocks on the study door which made Rampole jump. "Gideon! Tea!"