I WENT FOR a walk in the morning. This was partly to cogitate over Ruby’s plight away from the confines of my study, which was failing to inspire me.
A bad writer blames her desk, Ruby cobbled a proverb that I doubted would merit an entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
I was good enough to invent an excellent heroine, I defended myself and she conceded gracefully.
My main reason for going out though was to escape my maid. Agnust belonged to the tiny Sect of Pre-Markians who believed that the gospels of Mark the Evangelist were forged by Satan in 666 AD. Amongst other practices the believers crossed out a word of his writings upon rising every day, knowing that when they reached the final it, the world would burst into flames. This did not seem an especially worthy ambition to me, but it had all been revealed to Ethel of Ickworth in a dream and was, therefore, unalterable. I only wished that Ethel could have had another dream that maids should act respectfully to their mistresses.
It was Pre-Markian Christmas Day and Agnust had been warbling such stirring hymns as ‘Oh Little Town of Ethel-lyhem’ and ‘Once in Royal Ickworth Village’ at the top of her voice since dawn. To make matters worse my larynx had decided to act independently and hum along.
There was a concrete cube near the ruins of the monks’ refectory in Monastery Gardens. Approximately ten-foot high along each side it was not a thing of beauty, but it attracted more sightseers to the park than the shrine of Saint Aegbald had done for centuries. This was where Marvellous Farthingale – not his real name, I suspected – had partly performed his greatest trick. The astonishing Mr F had allowed himself to be manacled, shackled, blindfolded and encased in a block of concrete from which he was going to spring unscathed after it had set. Eight years later we were still waiting.
There were moves to have the block broken open or even interred in its entirety, but there was such vigorous opposition to these suggestions from hawkers of postcards, paperweight models of the block and refreshments that the council let it be.
Some still believed that Marvellous was going to escape and swore that, if one pressed one’s ear to the side, one could hear him chipping away industriously as he burrowed towards the surface. At Agnust’s insistence I had tried, expecting to hear only the ocean though that could not possibly be in there because it was in every shell and empty teacup already. To my consternation, though, I had definitely heard a regular faint clinking. It was the fob watch around my neck, Ruby had explained patiently that night. Her condescension might have been understandable had it not been her who had excitedly drawn my attention to the sound.
I headed for the block, intending to view not it but the profuse deep pink flowers of the oleander bushes, and in the forlorn hope of finding a cool breeze in the shade of the horse chestnut trees. It was then that I spotted him – not Mr Farthingale, of course, but a man standing on the grass.
A slightly built man in a tattered buff-coloured canvas coat and with a shallow-crowned floppy wide-brimmed hat, I recognised him immediately.
Immediately after I reminded you, Ruby said, though I rather thought that it was I who had refreshed her memory.
It was the blind man I had seen in the square before that poor woman had been shot and this time he was wielding a walking stick. He appeared to be beating at something in the undergrowth. An adder? We had had a few of those that year and a cow had died near Stolham St Ernest from being bitten, probably after accidentally treading on one. If it was a snake though, how had he detected it? Perhaps he was not completely blind.
Or a fraud, Ruby suggested. She was sceptical about all beggars after a pauper had attacked her on St Patrick’s Day with a shillelagh swaddled like a baby.
Leanbh, Ruby translated, for she had learned a little Old Gaelic while searching for the only Tyrone man claiming not to be descended from the last king of Ireland.
This was a remarkably resilient snake though; the beggar was raining a good many blows upon it as I approached. It was then that I heard a squeak. Was he thrashing a dog? If so, even one of those blows would have been inexcusably brutal.
I quickened my pace and it was then that I heard a small cry of No!
‘You there!’ I called and broke into a trot.
Ladies never trot, Agnust had told me and, when I asked how they played tennis, had insisted that they did not, for jumping about muddled their insides so that their children would be born with tangled chitterlings.
The man stiffened, stick raised high over his head. Then, when I was still twenty feet away, he lowered his stick and shot off.
A fraud, Ruby reasserted, though I had already come to that conclusion myself, for no blind man could have skirted the memorial stone to Biffo the brave cat who had saved a man’s life by running for help, but I suspected that the animal, bored of watching his master lying unconscious, had wandered home for its supper.
I would have chased him and could possibly have caught him as he was not especially fleet of foot, but my primary concern was the object of his attack.
A young woman lay supine in the bushes. Her hands were raised, crossed over her face, but I could see a large weal traversing her mouth up to a swollen left eye.
‘Please,’ she whimpered and I knelt beside her.
‘You are safe now,’ I assured her. ‘He has gone.’
I glanced up to check but the man had disappeared, probably towards one of the smaller side gates in the tumbled monastery walls.
The woman uncrossed her arms and touched her cheek gingerly.
‘He’s mad,’ she whispered.
A signpost had fallen across her legs. I lifted it aside and the board reading Floral Clock fell off.
‘Do you know him?’
‘No. He come at me from behind.’ She was neatly, though not expensively, dressed in a light blue skirt and a white shirt discoloured with dust and splattered, as was her flaxen hair, with blood. ‘I never see him proper.’
Properly, Hefty corrected her.
Was that really the best that London’s premier police detective could contribute?
‘We need to get you to a doctor,’ I said and she winced.
She was little more than a girl, I judged.
‘Crumbs! It hurt.’ She felt her nose tentatively. It was bleeding heavily. ‘Excuse my language, miss.’
Crumbs hardly merited an entry in a lexicon of expletives, but I have often noticed that the speech of those lower in the social orders is milder than that of their alleged betters, for it is the servants who are castigated for their language while their masters curse like Cornishmen.
I looked about. I did not want to leave the girl unattended while it was possible that her assailant might return but there was nobody else in sight.
‘Can I help you?’ a man said suddenly at my side.
Now you know why I never take you on my escapades, Ruby said. Looking about involves more than glancing over one shoulder.
I know that, I said testily, now.
‘This woman has been attacked,’ I said.
From his green coat and trousers and matching peaked cap I could tell he was one of the park keepers, whose main purpose seemed to be threatening unaccompanied children in danger of enjoying their visits.
‘By you?’ he guessed. Being the only person about, I must be the suspect.
‘No of course not.’
‘Only,’ he said edgily, ‘from the way you grasp that cudgel…’
I had not realised that I was still holding the post and let it fall, narrowly missing Inspector Hefty, who was slipping a suspicious-looking daisy chain into a manilla envelope.
‘It wint her.’ The girl insisted, patting herself as if checking that all her limbs were still present. ‘Least I dint think so,’ she added less insistently.
It’s the devil’s claws for you my girl, Ruby forecast with relish, the claws being the arrows on a convict’s uniform and, if her forecast proved correct, I resolved to take her with me.
‘Of course it wasn’t me.’ I tossed my head haughtily, not easy to carry off when you are kneeling with your neck cricked to look backwards and up. ‘I am Lady Violet Thorn.’
A title, as everyone knows, guarantees that the holder’s word is unimpeachable.
What about… Ruby began.
I was not talking about him, I broke in.
Or…
Nor her, I snapped before she trotted out the whole of Burke’s Peerage. We both knew full well that there were as many aristocratic criminals as poor ones with no lineage behind which to shelter. I was commenting on the public’s perception of the nobility.
‘A lady,’ he marvelled thereby proving my assertion. ‘I int never caught a real lady afore,’ he added with great satisfaction, thereby disproving my assertion. ‘Prob’ly get a medal.’
The girl struggled to a sitting position despite my attempts to restrain her gently.
‘It wint her,’ she declared again but this time, to my relief, she did not recant.
I was not seriously concerned about spending the rest of my days on a penal treadwheel, but I could imagine with what relish The Chronic would report my being taken in for questioning.
‘Are you sure?’ the park keeper asked in disappointment.
‘It do be a man,’ she remembered. ‘A stranger.’
‘A stranger what?’ he puzzled.
‘What did he look like?’ I asked as she inspected her shirt in dismay.
‘Evil,’ she stated.
Hettie Granger occasionally helped the police by drawing wanted posters and a description like that would give her plenty of scope, I mused – glaring yellow eyes and a slavering mouth of fangs.
‘Did you see his face?’ I pressed gently as she rearranged her skirt.
‘Yes.’ The girl grabbed my wrist in both hands. ‘It look evil.’ She hauled herself onto her feet and, very nearly, me off mine. ‘And he was blackened,’ she added, ‘like a sweep.’
Clearly she had seen her attacker a great deal more proper than she had led me to believe.
‘I know it,’ the keeper asserted, though he had known no such thing.
He made another spitting action but was disappointed to find that he had run short of saliva.
Something glinted on the dry, cracked earth and I picked it up – a florin.
‘Is that yours?’ I asked the girl and she snatched it from me.
‘’Tis now,’ she declared.
‘Bribin’ a witness.’ The park keeper wiggled his moustaches as if trying to shake them off and I could not have blamed him. They were meagre and unkempt. ‘Tha’s a crinimal ’ffence.’ She had already exonerated me so I ignored him.
‘Did your attacker say anything?’ I enquired and he spat spitlessly again.
‘Of course,’ she told me crossly. Everybody knows that attackers engage their victims in conversation. ‘He say You shouldn’t have worn that hat.’
I glanced around and saw it lying a few feet away, a battered but otherwise inoffensive straw bonnet with a blue ribbon tied in a twisted bow at the back.
‘Anything else?’ I pressed her and she struggled onto all fours.
‘What time is it?’
‘He dint need beat you to find tha’ out,’ the keeper commiserated. ‘Unless you wint tell him.’
That would make his actions perfectly acceptable, Ruby fumed.
‘I need to know,’ the girl clarified. ‘I’m back waitin’ table at noon.’
I checked my watch.
‘It is twenty minutes to twelve.’
‘Lorr!’ she cried getting to her feet in a disjointed way that was painful to watch and must have been agonising to perform.
‘Mrs Frow-Fulford goo crackle-headed.’
I had come across Marjory Frow-Fulford. She ran the Empire Café in Market Square and I could not imagine her going insane, but then I had not expected Petra Volent to decide that she was a cormorant and launch herself off the cliffs at Sackwater.
‘You cannot go to work like that,’ I told her. ‘I will explain the situation to your employer.’
The girl shook her head and my hand off her arm.
‘And do you explain why I’m late yisdee and day ’fore yisdee?’ she demanded. ‘Int my fault I do be unreliable.’
‘’Tis,’ the keeper assured her and it probably was, but the girl was brushing aside my offers to take her to a doctor or accompany her to the café, hobbling and half-tumbling towards the main entrance as if the ground were the deck of a ship in a storm.
‘She leave her hat,’ the keeper noted. It was little more than broken straw now, though the ribbon might be salvageable. ‘You better take it otherways it’s litter.’
I glanced back at the block.
Marvellous is getting out! Ruby exclaimed, poking me in the ribs excitedly and, sure enough, I saw it – a grey fist emerging triumphantly from the top of the concrete block. Oh, she said disappointedly as it moved closer towards the edge. A squirrel.