DINNERTIME PURDAH
At dinner that evening, my already dim view of the Allerthorpe family as a whole was in no way improved. For that was when Holmes and I met the remaining resident members of the clan.
We sat at a table roughly the size of a cricket pitch, in a room not much smaller than the dining hall at a Camford college. Aside from the four Allerthorpes whose acquaintance I had by then made, there were three others. These were Shadrach Allerthorpe’s wife Olivia, a prim, pinched-looking female whose eyes were rather too large and chin rather too small; their daughter Kitty, who had her mother’s looks and appeared to take scarcely any more pleasure in life than she did; and Kitty’s husband Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd, who was quite the rakish devil, with his mane of wavy, dark hair, array of bright teeth and firm, jutting jaw.
With regard to the food, I could have no complaints. A rich oxtail soup was followed by a nicely suety steak and kidney pudding, with blackberry and apple crumble for afters. All of it was fine, tasty fare. The wines were excellent, too, and were poured by a butler whose name, I quickly gathered, was Trebend. This man, solemn-faced and slight of stature, was the husband of the Mrs Trebend whom Thaddeus had mentioned earlier in the day, the cook.
With regard to the company at table, however, that was another thing altogether. The Allerthorpes did very little to make Holmes and me feel at home. For most of the meal their conversation revolved around the many relatives who were due to turn up at Fellscar the following day, as well as other family matters, subjects to which my friend and I could offer no useful contribution. I do not know whether we were being deliberately excluded, but it certainly seemed so. Only Eve, and to a lesser extent Erasmus, made any effort to engage with those poor souls not blessed with Allerthorpe blood or married into the clan. By the rest we were consigned to dinnertime purdah.
While I was disgruntled at this treatment, Holmes appeared to find it entertaining, if his wry expression was any indicator. He observed the family much as though their antics were a play staged for his amusement.
What struck me as notable was the undue amount of attention Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd paid to Eve. Seated next to her, he monopolised her for the first two courses. Whenever her interest strayed elsewhere – to speak to me, for example, about a novel she had recently read, Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, with a view to garnering my thoughts on Gothic fiction – Danningbury Boyd would tap her arm and practically demand that she occupy herself with him instead. He leaned towards her in a manner one might almost call impertinent, from time to time resting an elbow upon the back of her chair, and his eyes were alive with fascination. It was clear to me that Eve did not reciprocate this fascination but was too timid to rebuff him as perhaps she ought.
The effect Danningbury Boyd’s behaviour had upon his wife was all too obvious. The looks she shot him across the table were venomous, and on more than one occasion she addressed him peremptorily, in an effort to divert his focus away from Eve and towards a more appropriate recipient, namely herself. Each time, her husband responded with a complacent smile and an uxorious compliment or two, which just about mollified her.
Only when the ladies withdrew did the talk around the table broaden in scope and encompass Holmes and myself. Over port and cigars, Thaddeus Allerthorpe challenged Holmes to reveal what insights he had gained into “this twigs foolishness”, if any, during the day.
“On the face of it,” my friend said, “one must at least give some credence to the idea that the culprit is none other than the Black Thurrick.”
“Oh, bosh!”
“Please, Mr Allerthorpe, hear me out.” Holmes began counting off on his fingers. “Point one. It is Christmas time, when the Thurrick traditionally makes its rounds. Point two. Twice has a bundle of birch twigs manifested in a place to which nobody could obtain easy access by climbing – no ordinary human, that is. Point three. What does anyone who is not the Black Thurrick have to gain by leaving the twigs around the castle?”
“Why can it not be a hoax?”
“I did not say that it was not. I was simply enumerating all the reasons why this Christmas demon might be regarded as a likely suspect.”
“Then there’s the fact that Eve saw the Thurrick with her own eyes,” said Erasmus.
I fixed the young fellow with a hard stare. Had he not, just a couple of hours earlier, assured his sister that he would tell no one about her sighting of the creature upon the lake? Yet here he was, blurting it out to his father and uncle. Erasmus had been drinking heavily throughout dinner, and eating little of the food in front of him which might have mitigated the effects of the alcohol, with the result that his inhibitions were lowered. Still, that was no justification for betraying Eve’s confidence.
He remained oblivious to my baleful look as, in a tone somewhere between jest and deadly earnest, he regaled Thaddeus and Shadrach Allerthorpe and Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd with a potted version of everything Eve had told him.
His father was quick with a repudiation. “Pshaw! The girl is either making it up or confusing fancy with fact. Knowing Eve, the one is as probable as the other. Desperate for attention, she is. All the more so since her mother passed away. She’s not been in her right mind for months. Hit her hard, Perdita’s death did. Hit us all hard.”
For the briefest of moments Thaddeus’s face darkened, and I caught a glimpse, or so I thought, of something beneath the man’s irascible exterior, something wounded and tragic. It did not linger long. Swiftly enough the bluff and bluster reasserted themselves.
“Doubtless she wishes to have seen the Black Thurrick,” he continued, “because it affords a link to her late mama. It was Perdita, after all, who would tell those stories about the Thurrick and all the rest. With this fabrication Eve, in a roundabout way, is trying to demonstrate that she has not forgotten her mother and still mourns her.”
“That,” said Holmes, “is an astute piece of psychological insight, if I may say so, Mr Allerthorpe.”
“You are too kind, sir,” came the droll reply.
“Interesting thing about the Thurrick…” Shadrach Allerthorpe began.
“Here we go,” said Thaddeus, rolling his eyes. “Shad is about to share with us the benefits of his book-learning. My brother, Mr Holmes, in case you didn’t know, is the brainy one. Did far better at school than I, and now styles himself an amateur historian.”
“There is a little more to it than that,” Shadrach interjected.
“If you insist. Out of the pair of us, you see, Mr Holmes, Shad got the intellect. Whereas all I got was the property, the title deeds, the money…” Thaddeus chortled at his joke.
Shadrach Allerthorpe sighed. “All I was going to say was that the Black Thurrick is a Yorkshire variant on other, similar Christmas-related figures which may be found all over Europe. There is Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter, in the Low Countries – a fire-singed devil who was enslaved by Saint Nicholas and is now forced to accompany him on his rounds. If children misbehave or disobey their parents, Zwarte Piet is permitted to thrash them soundly. Then there is the Germans’ Knecht Ruprecht, likewise an indentured helper of Father Christmas. He carries a staff and a bag of ashes, and invites children to pray. If they pray well, he rewards them with sweetmeats. If they do not, he belabours them about the head with the sack of ashes. There is the shaggy, horned Krampus, who is found in the Christmas iconography of not only the Germanic countries but their eastern neighbours. He uses birch branches to swat wayward children. In Francophone nations you will find Père Fouettard. He is usually depicted with a bundle of sticks on his back, with which he, too, is wont to beat children. His name, after all, translates as ‘Father Flogger’. Sometimes he carries a wicker basket as well, into which the bad children are thrown so that he can bear them away.”
“Much like the Thurrick and his sack,” said Erasmus.
“There are countless other similar folkloric beings,” said Shadrach. “The same characteristics recur: twigs or branches and a violent disposition at odds with Father Christmas’s benevolence, as if you cannot have the one without the other. A necessary counterweight, perhaps. No light without shadow. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that, in the dim and distant past, travellers from abroad visited the north of England and shared anecdotes about their own Christmas demons, and so was born a regional equivalent, the Black Thurrick.”
“Alternatively,” opined Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd, “the Black Thurrick might be the original, the progenitor of his European counterparts.”
“Alternatively still,” said Erasmus, “the Black Thurrick is real.” There was a glint in his glassy, crapulous eye, and I discerned that his purpose now was mischief-making. “If Eve saw it, it must be.”
“For heaven’s sake, Raz!” Thaddeus barked. “I’ve had about as much as I can take of this. Bad enough that you live under my roof, on the allowance I give you, and have not yet shown any inclination to learn about running the estate. Must I put up with listening to your inane jabber as well?”
Erasmus Allerthorpe flinched, as did I to a lesser extent. His father’s outburst was even more vitriolic than it had been this afternoon and, in my view, just as unwarranted. I anticipated a ferocious rejoinder from the young man, and might even have applauded it; but, as before, Erasmus simply bit his lip. Then, abruptly, he thrust back his chair and stalked out of the room, snatching a decanter of whisky off the sideboard as he went and slamming the door behind him.
“Don’t think me too harsh on the lad,” Thaddeus said to Holmes and me, as if in answer to our unvoiced question. “I am simply losing patience with him. He is coming to the age when he should at least be giving thought to his duties as a prospective heir. I won’t be around forever, and keeping things going at Fellscar is a full-time job. So is managing the family’s finances. We have sold off our businesses but somebody has to keep an eye on the money; it can’t be left entirely in the hands of stockbrokers. I try to get the lad interested in these things, but he would rather fritter his life away, either here or with his ne’er-do-well friends down in London. I drive him hard because much is expected of him and he is signally failing to live up to his responsibilities. One day I hope the pressure I put on him will yield results.”
I refrained from saying what I wanted to – that the results might not be ones that Thaddeus Allerthorpe would like. My own brother, as the firstborn son, had had onerous expectations imposed upon him by our father, and the consequences had been a life of anxiety and dissolution and a premature death.
“Anyway,” Thaddeus said, rising from the table, “the ladies have had plenty of time to themselves. Shall we join them?”
We made our way to the drawing room, where, it transpired, a loud argument was taking place. Shrill feminine voices were raised, and I recognised them as Eve’s and Kitty’s, although the sound was muffled and I could not make out any words.
Just as we arrived at the door, it was flung open and out came Eve, in floods of tears. She brushed past us and hurried down the corridor.
I looked at Thaddeus, Shadrach and Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd. None of them seemed perturbed, or indeed greatly sympathetic, not even Eve’s own father. I turned to Holmes. He, intuiting from my expression that I desired to go after the girl, gave me the merest of nods.
I hastened along the corridor, catching up with Eve just as she reached the central hallway.
“Miss Allerthorpe,” I said, “whatever is the matter? What has upset you so?”
Her face was red, her eyes swollen. “It is nothing.”
“It is abundantly not nothing. I am happy to listen, if there is something you would like to get off your chest.”
“I have had a few sharp words with Kitty, that is all. She… She accused me of flirting with Fitzhugh at table.”
“But that is absurd! I was watching. You did nothing to encourage him. If there was flirting, it came from only one direction.”
“Fitzhugh is an incorrigible lecher,” Eve Allerthorpe said. “He always has been. It is his practice with every halfway presentable woman he meets. Kitty is well aware of this, and it isn’t as if he has never acted like that towards me before. She has borne his roving eye patiently during the three years they have been married. Perhaps this evening it just proved too much for her, and she snapped.”
“You must in no way shoulder any of the blame. Your cousin has been unfair. You should seek an apology from her.”
Eve sniffed hard in an effort to compose herself. “Maybe tomorrow I shall. Tonight, I am just too distressed. I am going to bed. Goodnight, Doctor. Thank you for being so kind and understanding.”
“You are more than welcome, Miss Allerthorpe. Goodnight.”
I returned to the drawing room, where Olivia Allerthorpe was consoling her daughter. Thaddeus, Shadrach and Fitzhugh, meanwhile, stood around in various attitudes of embarrassment and unconcern. Holmes, for his part, affected an amused detachment.
My dander was up, and I did not trust myself to speak temperately to our host or any of the assembled company. Rather, I excused myself and said I was going to bed.
“A capital notion, Watson,” said Holmes. “I shall do so too. Allerthorpes, Danningbury Boyds, I bid you all good evening.”
At Thaddeus’s instruction, Trebend the butler fetched an oil lamp for us, which Holmes carried as he and I navigated through the illuminated sections of the castle to the unilluminated area where our rooms lay.
Along the way, my friend said, “What did I tell you, Watson? Families! They never know contentment. Some of them will present a united front to the world, all smiles and ease, while the undercurrents of disharmony reveal themselves only in private. With others, the turbulence shows all too readily upon the surface, even before strangers.”
I was relieved to discover that the fire had been lit in my room and the air was not quite as frigid as it had been that afternoon. The bed, however, was old and extraordinarily uncomfortable. I say this as someone who has endured the meagre padding of a boarding-school pallet and, moreover, slept on the bare, rocky ground of the Hindu Kush with insidiously bitter winds whipping down from the Himalayas and only a thin blanket to cover him, and still in both instances managed a decent slumber. My bed at Fellscar Keep was an abomination of poking-out springs and mattress ticking so threadbare I could feel the coarse fibres of the horsehair through it. The bedstead rocked and groaned at the slightest movement of my body. It was a fitful night, and I rose at five o’clock feeling hardly at all rested.
As I dressed, I opened the curtains to look out at the lake and the countryside beyond. The moon had set, but the starlight scintillated, giving the scene of snow and ice an eerily beautiful lustre.
My eye fell to the window ledge, where sat a small, dark object, nestling in the layer of snow.
I let out an involuntary gasp.
It was a bundle of twigs, fastened with string.