The Greenstone Griffins (Mrs. Bradley), page 3
At about that time she won her first prize at school. It was awarded, as were the other prizes, by the squire’s wife and was a Bible. There was already a Bible at the cottage, but it was seldom opened. It was an enormous tome and had a small table all to itself in the sitting-room. Inside its front cover were inscribed the names of her father’s parents, his own name and date of birth and those of his brothers and sisters, the dates of his parents’ deaths, the date of his marriage and the maiden name of his wife and her birthday, and the date of Jessica’s birth.
When she took her prize home her mother said, “You better read a vess or two every Sunday. Better the day, better the deed, eh?”
“We have scripture every morning at school,” said Jessica. “It ent very interesten.” However, there was satisfaction in possessing a book of her own and she began to find that there were many pages in it which were very interesting indeed, but which the teachers and the vicar, who came once a week to give a lesson called Prayer Book, seemed never to have heard of. Her favourite chapters by far were those contained in the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Here she found matters more weird and wonderful than anything she had heard in the stories told by teacher or that were to be found in the reading books used in school. Far from keeping her Bible for Sunday reading only, Jessica studied it diligently on most weekdays, too.
There were the magical names of the seven churches. She could not pronounce all of them and she had no idea that they had geographical locations. To her, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea were islands, like Patmos itself, each guarded by a fearsome dragon.
Once, she said to her mother, “Teacher says everything in the Bible be true.”
“Yes, of course it be.”
“Squire’s only got two lamps of gold. It says seven in the Bible.”
“Then seven’s right,” said her mother, flicking water on to the garment she was ironing.
“Where would t’other five be?”
“How should I know? Put the Bible away and lay the table and do ’ee look sprack about it.”
So the squire must have stolen the dragon candlesticks from two of the magic islands, Jessica decided, and some day there would have to be restitution or dire punishment. With this conclusion firmly fixed in her mind, she was probably the only person in the neighbourhood not to be shocked or surprised by the tragedy, when the squire’s only son, the heir to the estate, was shot dead.
The Denefields had a personal interest in the matter and Jessica, pretending to be absorbed with her own affairs, heard a great deal about the inquest which was held. There was much that she did not understand, but her imagination filled in the blanks so that, rightly or wrongly, she obtained a picture of what must have happened. The death had taken place in the kitchen garden at the Hall; her father had been working there at the time and had been called as a witness at the inquest.
The verdict was of accidental death, but Jessica knew that somehow or other the dragons had had a hand in it. The squire was being punished for stealing them from their magic islands, although it was his son who had been killed.
That piece of seeming injustice, however, was easily accounted for. The Bible had a word for it. The sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children. It was the squire, not the unfortunate young man who had fired the shot, who was responsible for Mr. Ronald’s death. The dragons had breathed out the fire of their vengeance and in that fire the squire’s heir had died, just as a woman had died by fire all those years earlier and for the same reason. The theft of the golden lamps was avenged.
“I knowed as it would happen,” Jessica said to her mother.
“Knowed what ’ud happen?”
“About Mr. Ronald.”
“Don’t talk branten! How could ’ee know? And look, now! Don’t you go sayen things like that to nobody else. Do you year me? There’s bin enough niggle-naggle goen around without you starten. You ent to listen when me and our dad be talken. That ent talk for little childern.”
“Why not?”
“Because I say so. It wasn’t our dad’s fault as he had to speak up to crowner the way he did. Anyway, crowner brought it in as accident, so that’s what it was and that’s what’s gone down in the book.”
“What book?”
“A book as is kept by the Law. Now you just get them dirty boots off and give ’em a bit of a clean, ready for school in the mornen.”
The outline of the tragic story was simple and was understood even by a child. Despite her parents’ reluctance to talk about it, Jessica managed to discover most of the facts. Two young men and a girl were involved. The butler, who gave his evidence in a way which indicated that he was anything but happy about the circumstances in which he found himself, was obliged to tell the first part of the story, although he was not the first witness to be called.
On the evening preceding the death, the two young gentlemen, Mr. Ronald and Mr. Stone, had been, well, no, (in answer to a question), he would not say drunk, but perhaps a bit over-excited and a lady’s name had been, well, no, not bandied—he would not go as far as that—but, anyway, mentioned. Then the butler had heard Mr. Stone call Mr. Ronald by an opprobrious name and a bout of fisticuffs had ensued, during which Mr. Ronald had given Mr. Stone a nasty black eye and steak had been asked for which he, the butler, had personally applied to Mr. Stone’s eye.
Mr. Stone, however, seemed to take the matter light-heartedly and only said to Mr. Ronald that he would “pay you out for this shiner, you see if I don’t.”
The coroner asked what interpretation the butler had put upon these words, but the answer was that young gentlemen would be young gentlemen and that he had thought nothing of the words at all, especially as Mr. Stone had “said it with a grin on his face.”
The story, up to this point, was clear enough. There had been a quarrel followed by a fight. There had been a black eye. Steak had been put on it. “What a waste of lovely meat,” her mother had said. “I never sees steak except in the kitchen up at the Hall, and then that ent for the likes of us.”
What Jessica could not gather from hearsay was the appearance and demeanour of the young man who had fired the shot. The only description her father had ever given of him in her hearing was that “except for his shiner, which certainly was a beauty, his face was as white as boiled rice pudden.”
Jessica had to invent the rest and the invention became more romantic and more detailed as she grew older. By the time she was thirteen, she had a complete picture of Mr. Stone in the witness-box: tousle-haired, wild-eyed (she had eliminated the “shiner” in the interests of aesthetics), nervous, and grief-stricken, his hands clutching the edge of the witness-box, his voice almost inaudible.
As for his evidence, she remembered parts of it from her parents’ conversations and made up the rest in order to include one of the griffins, for those had to be brought into the picture somehow and she soon worked out how this could be done.
“Will you tell the court exactly what happened, Mr. Stone?”
“I can’t bring myself—it was terrible! I’m too shocked to talk about it. He was my best friend and I—and I—”
“We quite understand. Just take your time. All we want is for you to tell the court what you saw, heard, and did. Use your own words and if you would just speak up a little, please? The jury and I must be able to hear what you have to say.”
“Oh, sorry! Well, it was one of those mornings, breakfast over, lunch a long way off, nothing much to do, hunting fixed for the next day, but meanwhile all of that day before us, so when Ronnie suggested this shooting practice I was all for it.”
“The shooting match was Mr. Ronald Havant’s idea, was it?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. It would have to be. I mean, I hadn’t been invited to shoot, only to visit and be lent a mount, so I hadn’t brought my guns, so the suggestion naturally had to come from Ronnie. But it wasn’t a shooting match. There was no competition, no rivalry, I mean. It was just target practice.”
“No rivalry, when you were being watched by a young lady? I understand a young lady was present.”
“Oh, Stephanie wasn’t interested. She stayed barely five minutes to watch. She wanted to have a go, but Ronnie said the gun kicked too much and might put her shoulder out, so then she wandered off and a bit later she went through a door in the kitchen-garden wall. The gardener chap had left it open, so I suppose she thought she might as well see what was on the other side of it.”
“What kind of target did you use?”
“Target? Oh, rather unique, actually,” Jessica seemed to hear Stone saying, “only, of course, the thing itself wasn’t the target. It was only, so to speak, the target-holder, but Ronnie said his father wouldn’t mind if one of us made a boss shot and damaged the thing, because there was a hoodoo on it, anyway.” (This was all part of Jessica’s romantic reconstruction. This was where the griffins had to come in.)
“So what was this target-holder?”
“Actually a stone ornament, sort of, a thing about a foot high in the form of some fabulous beast or other. It had an eagle’s head and a lion’s body and it had wings and the top of the head—well, on top of the head—was a kind of crown ending with a candlestick sort of thing. Ronnie put a candle in the candlestick and then attached a postcard to the candle with a drawing-pin and then he measured out twenty paces and put down a walking-stick to mark the distance, and then we put our initials on the rest of the postcards. There was a whole packet of postcards. We took half each and wrote our initials on them and then the number of shots we’d put on them after we’d fired, and the other chap initialled it to say he agreed.”
“I thought you said it was not a competition.”
“Well, no, it wasn’t, but naturally we had some money on it. Stephanie (the name was Jessica’s invention) watched my first six shots and then Ronnie’s and then she got bored, I suppose, as she wasn’t taking part and she sulked a bit.” (Did young ladies of wealth and social status sulk, Jessica wondered, or was sulking an exhibition of bad manners and childishness reserved for the lower classes?)
“She was not pleased at being kept out of your pastime?”
“That was it. She walked over to the door in the garden wall which the gardener chap had left open and we forgot all about her and went on shooting, six shots to me and six to Ronnie, and put down the scores on the postcards.”
“Where did each of you stand while the other was shooting?”
“Stand? Oh, I don’t know. Here and there. Well, after a bit, Stephanie called out that she still wanted to have a go, although Ronnie had said not. He ran across to reason with her. I must have had my finger on the trigger because—O God! I didn’t mean to do it—”
Jessica almost wept as she told herself, time and again, the story, but she was certain that the coroner’s voice was calm. She saw him as a kindly man concerned with Stone’s obvious distress.
“How high had Mr. Havant fixed the target?” This was a crucial question for Jessica and she had invented it because she felt that it needed an answer. Mr. Ronald had been shot in the head. If his head had been on a level with the target, she reasoned (this in her later years), the verdict of accidental death was justifiable, but if the target had been lower than that? Her fantasies left the answer to the youth in the witness-box.
“Well, it was a bit higher than we really wanted it. There was a sawn-off tree about half-way down the garden (her father had mentioned this), and Ronnie thought we could pin the target to that, but the bark had been peeled off and the drawing-pin wouldn’t go into the hard wood, so Ronnie went off to the house and came back with this stone thing and a candle. If only he hadn’t! Then I would only have got him in the shoulder!”
“A candle? Oh, yes, you mentioned that.”
“The thing was a glorified candlestick and made of stone, so Ronnie pinned a postcard to the candle because the pin wouldn’t go in anywhere else, and that made the target quite a bit higher than we’d intended. Except for that—except for that—oh, why did the silly fool have to streak across my line of fire?”
The target—Jessica had it all worked out—must have been head-high to Mr. Ronald, then. He had been shot in the head. Everybody knew that. The next part of the story was authentic and not the product of Jessica’s imagination, for her father was the next witness and had told his wife more than once about his appearance in the witness-box. He was proud of it and had been treated at the public house in return for his story.
“And afore crowner could put me through my paces, I up and told him straight. ‘I can’t see Mr. Ronald doen anythen so foolish as to run acrorst a gentleman as must have been taken aim,’ I says.” He had been working in the kitchen garden when Mr. Ronald, with a young lady and another young gentleman, had come along and bid him go and work some place else, as they wanted the middle of the kitchen garden for target practice. He had gone through into the walled garden and “done a bit of tidying up to the apricot espaliers,” leaving the door in the wall open.
“Why did you do that?” asked the coroner.
“Mr. Ronald said he ’ud call to me as soon as they finished their shooten, so I could get back to my work, as I was under orders from the head gardener to cut down the sparragrass stems afore the seeds dropped.”
“I see. Go on, Denefield.”
“I left the door open and I reckon that was what give the young lady the idea to come through and watch me at work. She asked me what kind of fruit was growed on me espaliers, so I tells her and we talks. Then she wanders off for a bit and the next thing I hears is she calls out to Mr. Ronald.”
Jessica had no difficulty in visualising the scene which must have followed. She realised that there had been nobody to check Stone’s story. The girl and the gardener had not been eye-witnesses of the shooting. They merely saw the fatal result of it. Her father, she knew, had been sent post-haste back to the house to report the accident and a doctor had been sent for, while a white-faced boy and a sobbing girl had knelt beside the dead youth. That part was factual, she knew.
The girl had been much too shocked and ill to be called as a witness at the inquest and her evidence would have been of as little value as that of Jessica’s father, and only a repetition of it. What had struck Jessica most forcibly was her father’s conviction of how unlikely it was that a young man accustomed to firearms should have done anything so foolish as to dash across in front of a target when he must have known that a marksman was taking aim. The squire, she decided, had had some grounds for suspecting that his son had been murdered. She wondered whether he and her father would ever be proved right. It was an intriguing thought. She gave much of her mind to it. The story was romantic in the extreme. There was the drunken quarrel of the night before, the fight, the black eye, the threat overheard by the butler, and its dreadful fulfilment in the kitchen garden.
Yet the shooting practice had been Ronald’s idea, not Stone’s. Would he have trusted his companion with a lethal weapon if the overnight quarrel had not been resolved?
“Did father ever pass any other opinion about what happened?” she asked her mother during one of their many discussions of the matter after Jessica was grown up.
“Nothen as mattered, and so he never mentioned it in court. When Mr. Ronald said as the gun was too fierce for a young lady, she must have walked off for a bit, because Mr. Ronald asked her if she wasn’t goen to stay and watch the shooten. Seemenly she didn’t have nothen to say to that, but, any road, she ji’ned our dad, a bit later on, in the walled garden, then wandered off somewhere else. Next thing our dad yeard was her call to Mr. Ronald, like he told crowner.”
“I suppose she went indoors in a huff and then thought better of it.”
“Not knowen, can’t say. ’Twudn’t have made no difference to what happened.”
On the day of the funeral the school had been mustered in the playground and marched to the church for the service, although nobody but the squire, his wife, and a few close friends were to be present at the actual interment in the family vault.
The schoolchildren were given places in the pews beyond the north aisle and the villagers—mostly women and elderly men, since the breadwinners, unless they were employed by the squire, could not afford to lose pay by taking time off from work—sat behind the children and the teachers. The pews beyond the south aisle were occupied by the squire’s indoor and outdoor servants and the seats in the centre of the church were for the squire and his party. This included an impressive number of his business associates and their wives—people whom the village had seldom seen before.
After the vicar had preceded the coffin and had intoned the sentences from St. John, Job, and St. Timothy, the choir, which included a dozen of the village boys (one reason why the school had been closed for the day) sang the Ninetieth Psalm. The lesson was read and a hymn sung. During the hymn the schoolchildren were quietly ushered out and the rest of the day was a holiday for them.
Jessica’s mother slipped out, too, as did other women who had a midday meal to prepare, and she and Jessica walked the two miles home together.
“The servants and gardeners and grooms and all will set down to a dinner up at the Hall, so I ent to expect our dad ’til evenen. Wasn’t the flowers lovely?”
“Did he come to the church?” asked Jessica.
“He? What he? Oh, him! I shouldn’t think he’d dorstan to show his face, not after what he done to poor Mr. Ronald.”
But Jessica knew better, although she did not voice her conviction. It was not Mr. Stone who had killed Mr. Ronald; it was the dragons.
“There’s got to be three, I s’pose,” she said.
“Dree? Dree what?
“I dunno. Teacher said misfortunes always comes in threes.”
“Maybe teacher’s right, at that, but what dree be ’ee a-bletheren about?”
“Our dad said as a young lady was brent to death up at the Hall when the old summerhouse cotched fire.”
“He’d no right to tell ’ee about such things. You just forget all about it. Any road, it was long afore our time and I reckon as it’s one of them tales as hasn’t lost nothen in the tellen. It wasn’t a young lady, the way I yeard it. It was an old lady as had bin sleepen in the summerhouse of a very warm arternoon and Mr. Ronnie was on’y a little boy at the time. I reckon he got larken about—”
