We invited Fidelis to join us on our visit to the priest but he excused himself, having correspondence to complete for the next day’s postman to Preston. So Elizabeth and I left Matty to watch over Hector and walked briskly by the northward road through Old Accrington. After passing the gates of Hatchfly Hall, the road climbed up the fell to the north that is known as Henfield Moor.
‘Did you happen to see Michel de Montaigne’s essays among your priest’s books?’ I asked.
‘I did not, but I never looked very closely.’
‘I’m hoping he has them. There is a passage somewhere that bears on imposture – which is what Susan Bacon has been telling me about today.’
I mentioned that I had learned that, supposedly, the Harry Hawk who went to war was different when he came back.
‘He certainly was different,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He was very much disfigured by his injuries.’
‘I mean, what some are saying is that it was an impostor, and not Hawk at all. Mrs Gargrave was the one that started the rumour. She spread it all over the village.’
‘I can hardly believe it. His wife would recognize her own husband.’
‘I don’t know. French cannon fire did alter his appearance and his voice. But it is a puzzling thing all right, which is why I want to get hold of a volume of Montaigne’s essays. I am sure he mentions a similar case in France in his own day.’
‘Perhaps Mrs Hawk is not particular as to the man’s true identity, Titus. To be a widow in a lonely spot is a hard prospect. Maybe she connives in the deception.’
I sighed.
‘That’s something like what Susan Bacon says.’
At the top of the fell, desolate and windswept under the glaring sun, was a crossroads. Here we turned right and after a couple of miles descended steeply into Altham, a settlement more than twice the size of Accrington. At the village centre an ancient bridge crossed the River Calder, a more substantial river than Accrington’s stream.
Constable John Gubb lived in one of a row of cottages close to the bridge. A tiny woman came to answer my knock. When I told her who I was, she immediately reddened and executed an inexpert curtsey.
‘Is John Gubb at home?’
‘Excuse him, Your Honour, but he’s not. He’ll be back shortly, or I can send our boy for him.’
‘Oh no, don’t trouble. Are you Mrs Gubb?’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘Would you give him this commission and say I shall call again in a couple of hours, if he will be kind enough to wait in for me?’
I handed her the sealed paper, which she held as if it were a holy relic. Leaving her and crossing the bridge, we continued along the street and a quarter mile after the point where the houses petered out we reached the junction with a narrow lane.
‘He lives down here,’ said Elizabeth.
The lane was grassy and, as I remarked, evidently little used.
‘Mr Vaux keeps as far as possible out of view. The families that come here for his Sunday Mass are few.’
‘Is that all he does – say Mass?’
‘I’m sure he instructs the children and does baptisms, confessions and marriages. But there cannot be many of those.’
The way was soon enclosed by a grove of oaks, on the other side of which lay a scattering of homes around a duckpond. All but one of these were hovels, walled in the material they call ‘clat and clay’, with roofs of an inferior thatch of wheat stalks and crooked doors roughly assembled from split logs and a carpenter’s offcuts. The people were as unkempt as their homes – the children had no shoes, just as the windows had no glass. I thought to myself what marvellous civilizing inventions are shoe leather and window glass, for those that can afford them.
Vaux’s house was the exception to this general dilapidation, being larger, glazed upstairs and down, and more solidly built. We found him dozing by his door in a basket chair, with a book and pair of spectacles on his lap. He was a short man in his fifties, with a straggling white beard and straw hat. His dress was respectable but threadbare: nothing about him suggested the priest.
Starting out of his sleep at the sound of our steps, he greeted us with every sign of pleasure.
‘Come inside! Come in, dear Mr and Mrs Cragg! I am glad to welcome you. My mother will bring tea and cakes to the library.’
He ushered us through a hall and into a sizeable room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. There were no signs of the religious uses the room had been put to earlier in the day.
‘Oh! You have put everything out of sight,’ exclaimed Elizabeth.
‘Discretion, Mrs Cragg. It would be unwise of me to display the sacred vessels or have the room look in any way like a chapel. I must keep my head below the battlements, you know, and besides I need this room on weekdays for my library.’
The elderly Mrs Vaux came in with the tea tray. She set it on the table and invited us to sit round. Apart from her apparel and lack of beard, the mother looked very much like the son, and seemed to have a similarly benign temperament. She poured from the pot and distributed the cakes, which were oaten rounds sweetened with honey. The tea was weak.
‘So tell me, dear people, what brings you to this corner of the world?’ she asked. ‘I can only think you were obliged to come, else why would you favour this wilderness over the town?’
‘Mother, Mr Cragg is our County Coroner,’ said Henry Vaux. ‘He is enquiring into the terrible events at Accrington last Sunday.’
‘Oh, but that is not why we came here in the first place,’ said Elizabeth.
She explained about the outbreak of disease in Preston and our fears for our baby son.
‘So your arrival just after the death of Anne Gargrave (God rest her soul) was a matter of chance?’ said the priest. ‘That doesn’t much surprise me. Folk round here wouldn’t be calling in the likes of a coroner, unless they had no choice. They prefer to settle all matters of life and death amongst themselves, not least in a case like this.’
At this juncture old Mrs Vaux sensed we were broaching matter unseemly to be discussed over tea, and turned to politer subjects – the weather, the high price of Flanders lace, the doings of the Court. I was nonplussed by the last topic, as she kept referring to events in Italy, until I understood she was speaking of the court of the Pretender, in Rome, though ‘Pretender’ was not the title she gave to James Edward Stuart.
After half an hour of tea and conversation, she offered to show Elizabeth her herb garden, leaving Vaux to give me a tour of the library.
‘What I love most in life is an old, rare edition and I have quite a number here,’ he told me with pride.
First he showed me some volumes of his father’s and grandfather’s. Vaux’s grandfather had been a great playgoer once, and a lover of the works of William Shakespeare, of which the priest’s library had some unusual editions. He showed me with reverence one entitled All Is True.
‘You may know it under its other title, King Henry the Eighth. The printer expected that he would sell vastly more copies if his customers thought there was nothing invented in it. He was disappointed, however, as the book is exceedingly hard to find.’
‘I wonder if you have a volume of Michel de Montaigne’s essays? There is a particular one I should like to consult.’
‘Sadly not in their original French. I fear they are listed in Rome’s General Index of forbidden books, Montaigne being a far from godly writer. I do allow myself a little equivocation in the matter by keeping a copy of them done into English by John Florio. Allow me to lend them to you.’
He quickly found three volumes and, bringing some string from his pocket, began to tie them up. After assuring myself that the women were not yet rejoining us, I reminded Vaux of what he had been saying earlier at the tea table, before his mother’s intervention.
‘Mr Vaux, you mentioned that around here the people like to deal with a dubious death without calling in any outside agency. That should not continue. It does not do for people to mete out rough justice.’
‘They do have magistrates to call on, though it is a pity good Mr Turvey as a Roman Catholic cannot be one. Although he is one of my flock, he does not visit here in the regular way. Poor Thomasina is rather confined to the house, so I have to go to New Manor to give the sacraments.’
‘Do you know anything of the circumstances of Mrs Gargrave’s death? There is a smell of guilt throughout the village – I sense it everywhere, though no one speaks out. That greatly hinders my enquiry.’
‘They may not be guilty so much as ashamed, Cragg. Guilt makes us into cheats and liars but shame wants only to hide itself from sight. Perhaps the people are ashamed for the hatred they have in their hearts.’
‘Hatred for what?’
‘For us Catholics, of course. We may no longer be liable to be hunted down and arrested, then given a farcical trial and tortured to death. But the laws are still in place and there are those around here who would cheerfully string me up, and many more who would look the other way while they did it. So I suggest the fate of poor Anne Gargrave is merely an instance of the same emotion – which, by the way, no one knows better than Mr Turvey, whose family held to the old religion throughout the worst persecution.’
‘Yet anti-popery is not part of the story that’s going around,’ I said. ‘The men I’m led to suspect of instigating the outrage don’t appear to be religious men. Two are poachers and the third is an ex-soldier.’
‘Forgive me, but that is beside the point. I am saying they believed their actions would escape censure by the majority because the Gargraves are Catholics. Here anti-Catholic feeling is all around us. It is in the air we breathe. So, even if they had non-religious reason to persecute that couple, they could expect to be protected by that sentiment.’
‘It is very different in Preston,’ I said. ‘The Catholics are left alone. There are many of them.’
‘Including your delightful wife, and your friend the doctor.’
‘Exactly. Preston is a town that prides itself in a certain tolerance in religious affairs.’
Vaux sighed.
‘I wish that were the case here. Instead it is all whispering, suspicion and festering hatred. Well, here you are Cragg! Your books securely tied.’
As I took the books and tucked them under my arm the women returned, Elizabeth carrying a large pot of parsley, a gift from the Vaux’s garden. It was time to go, and as we said our farewells Vaux pointed to the books he had lent me.
‘I am rather inclined to believe the judgement of Rome upon Monsieur de Montaigne. He could not accept the mercy of God.’
‘He does not accept much of anything,’ I said. ‘That is the cast of his mind. It is a mind full of doubt.’
‘Ah! Doubt. I am afraid in my profession I am not allowed it.’
‘Did you like Mrs Vaux?’ I asked as Elizabeth and I made our way back towards Altham.
‘Extremely. She is old-fashioned but does not sacrifice her common sense. She has promised, by the way, to bring her son to dinner on Wednesday.’
I must have looked doubtful, for she reproved me with a poke in the arm.
‘It will be Midsummer’s Eve, Titus. It will be good to have company.’
After crossing the bridge at Altham, we knocked once more at the house of Constable Gubb. A wizened tufty-haired old man with bandy legs and a trembling head came to the door.
‘I seek Constable Gubb,’ I said. ‘Would you be kind enough to fetch your son to me?’
The old fellow let go of the door, tottered sideways, and bounced off the door cheek. He shook his head.
‘My son, Sir?’ he asked in a reedy voice. ‘I have no son, not on this earth, any road. No, it is me you are wanting.’
‘Are you the constable?’
Gubb’s head continued to shake.
‘You are not …?’
‘Have been for the past twenty-six year.’
I realized it was not only his head that shook but his entire body. The man was palsied. With rapidly weakening faith in his powers, I made my formal request that he summon Hawk to the inquest.
‘Don’t fret, Mr Cragg,’ piped Gubb, showing a bare set of gums. ‘I’ll have Harry down there in irons if I have to.’
It had become my habit to rise in the middle of the night when Elizabeth got up to see to little Hector, and to read to her while she fed him.
‘Tonight we shall have a rest from Dean Swift’s ironies and try a passage from Montaigne’s essays, which I got from Mr Vaux and are very sincere.’
I had regarded this author as a sure guide to sensible thought ever since Mr Sweeting, my bookseller, had sold me a volume of his essays a couple of years before. I was particularly anxious to try out on my clear-headed wife the passage I had already mentioned where the author discusses an imposture not unlike the one alleged in the case of Harry Hawk. To give it in his own words, it was one whereby ‘two men presented themselves one for another’, and one of them was hanged, which Montaigne thought unjust.
‘Is that what Susan Bacon told you has happened in this case?’ asked Elizabeth, lifting our son to her shoulder and patting his back so that he gave a lusty burp. ‘Did Hawk and another man exchange places?’
‘Not exactly. Supposing her story is to be believed – and I say “supposing” because who is to say if it is true? – we do not know what happened to the old Harry Hawk. The first intelligence was that he had been killed in the battle, and perhaps he was.’
‘Then it is different from what your Monsieur is writing about, for he says two men exchanged places.’
‘It’s close enough. Anyway, Montaigne’s point is to question whether the impostor should have been hanged; on the grounds that the full truth of the case remained unknown, or at least misunderstood. And that bears strongly on my own duty, don’t you agree? To find the cause is not always to find the truth, or at least it risks only finding a narrow truth and missing the larger and more important one. That is exactly what Henry Vaux was trying to tell me, also.’
‘In what way?’
‘He’s got me thinking I am pursuing the wrong wolf.’
‘Is this a wolf hunt?’
‘Anne Gargrave died savagely enough. But you see I’ve been hoping the inquest will find the particular wolf or wolves responsible for it.’
‘But we know who they are – the Stirk boys, who obtained the piece of wood.’
‘That’s very important, yes. And there is also the question of how far Harry Hawk, so-called, was behind them. But these men only started things off. Vaux reminded me that the fatal ride was attended by almost the whole village. So it wasn’t a lone wolf, but a wolf pack.’
‘More like a herd of cows.’
In spite of myself, I laughed.
‘Very well, but that presents the same difficulty. Even if we could identify which cow’s trampling hooves struck the fatal blow, we could not with justice simply prosecute that cow. We would have to indict them all.’