The House of the Wicked

10





The Land of the Dead





He was roused rudely from his leaden slumber by the loud clamour of voices and footsteps from beyond his window. He cursed and turned over in his uncomfortable bed. A sharp rapping at his door chased away the last remaining dregs of sleep, much to his annoyance.

“What?” he shouted.

“Mr Denning, sir, the wetting of the keels – the launching – you’ll miss it. Shall I enter and prepare your breakfast?”

“No you shall not!” he retorted. He sighed heavily and noticed the thin cloud of his breath. Why was it so damn cold? “Please go away, Mrs Carbis. I’ll be there presently.”

By the time he had shaved and dressed and made his way down to the beach the Reverend Biddle was concluding his business, being helped down from a large, upturned wooden box that had obviously served as his makeshift pulpit from which he’d addressed the considerable crowd of people.

There was an air of excitement about the place, children running around like packs of dogs, women dressed in their Sunday bonnets and dresses, a group of fiddlers at once striking up a jolly tune as men scattered eagerly from the crowd, racing across the beach to their boats. Biddle saw Denning and smiled. He was clearly taken with the occasion. He beckoned Denning come over. Having little option he scored a path through the throng of people to reach him.

He raised his hat. “A fine morning, Mr Denning!” he said, his spectacles flashing in the weak sunlight.

“An early morning,” he observed.

Biddle put his hat back on. “They have been here since well before dawn. It is a significant occasion for them. The launch. You have just missed Mr Hendra and his daughter. I believe Gerran has gone over to the palace to supervise preparations.”

“I hope the queen is in residence,” he remarked tiredly. Above an insubstantial smile Biddle’s eyes burnt cold in response. “I will find them in due course.”

Teams of men had gathered around each boat, levering them onto wooden rollers, some taking the strain of thickly coiled, sinewy ropes, others putting their broad backs against blackened prows. Men began barking orders.

“The men who stretch their lungs are the Launchers,” Biddle explained. “Their task is to guide the men in their work. And see the others in their high-pole hats? They are the Head Launchers – a role not unlike that of a conductor in an orchestra.”

The teams began to chant: “Haul away, heave away! Heave away, haul away! Bear up, bear away, heave away my lads!”

The large black seine boats, each weighing many tons, began to grind slowly down the beach. Shouting young women, with chiming laughs, darted between the men, clambered into the boats, helping others to do the same. They yelled down in encouragement, as if they were in a race and they were willing their teams on, the many faces of the labourers pinched with gravity, concentration and exertion. The Head Launchers stepped this way and that, keeping a watchful eye on each of their numerous charges , occasionally having to bound across and remove a young boy from out of the way of the men who fed the rollers beneath the massive, crushing keels, but at no point did they put their hands to the ropes or the moving of the boats.

Denning noticed a familiar-looking man standing at the edge of the beach watching the unfolding scene. He tried to place the mean, pinched features, the sunken eyes. Then it came to him. It was the undertaker from Penleith, the one he saw leading the cortege. The one called Doble, or something liked that. He wondered what he found of interest here in Porthgarrow. Potential new business perhaps?

“Did you ever see such a noble sight?” exclaimed Biddle. Denning didn’t reply. He’d left off looking at the undertaker to scour the buildings for a glimpse of Jenna. “Mr Wilkinson was here earlier,” said the Reverend.

“Really.”

“Making sketches of the boats. A man truly dedicated to his craft, to be abroad so early as to require a lamp to light his sketchbook.”

“A martyr to the cause,” he said dryly. He nodded to the boats being lumbered down to the sea. “They make such a fuss over so ordinary a task.”

“Ordinary to city eyes, Mr Denning.” He left it at that. “Tell me, if it is not too presumptuous, or too obvious a question: why are you here?”

He gestured with a loose sweep of the hand. “To see – this.”

“Forgive me. I meant, why are you here in Porthgarrow?”

“To paint, of course. What else?”

The lenses of Biddle’s spectacles magnified his quick, darting eyes. “To paint…” He let the words hang in the air. He watched as the first of the boats touched the water and annoyed little waves drummed silently at the hull. A small explosive cheer went up, and women abandoned the boat, landing joyously into the cold water and running up the beach to find another berth. Men leapt aboard, oars rising like the trunks of denuded trees before dipping into the sea and dragging the craft out into the harbour.

“You see, for the people of Porthgarrow their lives hang in the balance, for whether they go hungry or have plenty depends upon what the sea delivers unto them. These marvellous craft are more than mere wood, nails and tar; and this ‘fuss’ is more than taking a boat down to the sea. It is a ritual of life over death.”

Consider yourself rebuked, thought Denning.

“Would you care to walk with me, Mr Denning? I have something I would like to discuss with you.”

“I rather hoped I would speak with Mr Hendra and his daughter. I need to make certain arrangements.”

“They are busy tending to the urgent affairs of the launch, and they are going nowhere. You have time a-plenty. Please?” Hardly disguising his reluctance, Denning agreed. “Let us watch proceedings from up there, in the Huer’s hut.” He indicated the building high on the headland. “We will have a fine, uninterrupted view.”

“I am told it is a frequent haunt of yours,” Denning said.

“I am sure you have been told many things, but you must learn not to trust everything you hear.”

The sounds of the crowd faded as they left the beach and took the path up the headland.

Biddle pointed. “From the hut yonder the Huer keeps watch for the shoals. An extraordinary but enigmatic sight to behold. They first appear as a discolouration in the water, far out to sea. As the shoal comes closer the Huer will cry out ‘Hevva!’ and directs the boats onto the fish through a combination of signals, both hand-held and hoisted onto the beam there.”

“Ah, the gallows,” mused Denning. “Or so they appeared.”

“Gallows?” echoed Biddle. “Yes, I can see the resemblance. Each body of craft, for the seine boat is accompanied by others in its task, will stay within its stem – the position allotted to it by the Registrar – and following the directions of the Huer will bear down on the shoal and shoot their nets into it.”

“Fascinating,” said Denning evenly as they reached the grassy summit.

Standing outside the stone-built hut was a middle-aged man, staring fixedly out to sea. He barely acknowledged the two visitors. They stepped onto a wooden balcony edged with wooden rails, and Biddle indicated two chairs placed conveniently at one end. They sat with clear views over the entire cove. Many more boats were in the sea now, looking like tiny black water beetles on a pond. A whirl of distant laughter wafted over to them on a mocking breeze.

Biddle reached into his coat pocket and took out a pipe, tamped the contents of the bowl with his thumb and planted the stem between his lips, a tiny click of bone on clay.

The churchman became aware of Denning studying him cautiously. “It is not what you think it is,” he said, striking a match, the flame being sucked into the bowl. “You’ll soon learn that stories tend to grow, here in Porthgarrow, beginning with but two or three flakes of words, fast becoming a rumour that gathers size like a snowball with every turn, until it is a veritable avalanche of untruths and conjecture. Opium, or indeed any other form of narcotic, it most assuredly is not.” He held out the pipe. “Care to see for yourself?”

He smiled uneasily and waved it away.

Biddle pointed with the stem of the pipe to the sea. “They will land pilchards, as their ancestors did, and thousands of hogsheads will be shipped out to Italy, who will eat the fish over Lent. Strange, is it not, a Protestant feeding a Catholic? Two worlds for hundreds of years distrustful of each other coming together over a common little fish.” He blew out a satisfying billow of blue-grey smoke. “As the city meets the humble village, eh, Mr Denning? Rich meets poor. Intellect meets brawn. Culture meets the ignorant.”

“You said you wished to ask me something, Revered Biddle?”

Biddle looked over to the Huer. He was too absorbed in his task to pay the two men any attention. “Do you believe in spirits, Mr Denning?”

“Ghosts?” He was faintly taken aback by the question, at which he smirked.

“Call them what you will. A restless, tortured soul, chained to earth, unable to pass on.”

“Bread and butter to a man of the church like you, surely.” He sighed his resistance but the silence defeated him. “No, I do not believe in ghosts, or the ludicrous notion of eternal life after death, for that matter.”

“Your forthrightness does you credit, if your lack of faith does not. But we all have our weaknesses. Mine is curiosity. I warrant Kenver was quick to relate to you what happened in the house you rent? His tongue runs like a gurgling stream when he has a willing audience and a lurid tale to tell.”

Denning admitted he had a troubled night because of it, but that daybreak revealed it for what it was – yet another tall tale that stretched credulity. “I am already getting used to it,” he said.

He sucked hard, forcing the tobacco to glow. “Alas it is not such a tall tale. Jowan Connoch murdered his wife, and he threw himself from the cliffs beyond the spit of land yonder.” His eyes traced the line of the cliffs from grassy top to scummy sea. “People to this day have sworn they hear his moaning, or that of Baccan, carried on the wind.”

He found Biddle’s seriousness amusing. “And where is this leading to, sir? Is this all that you wished to ask me, that I believe in ghosts?” The lookout turned briefly to look at them and there was something in his tanned face that he found unsettling. He watched the sea again. “I am sorry to disappoint, but I do not, and the sorry tale of Connoch, or whoever he was, happened so long ago in the past that it should trouble people no more.”

As he said it he found that the events of Pont Aven swept into the channels of his mind and washed at the unsteady banks of his assertion. The past was always there, he thought. All that one could do was pile up yet more defences against it and hope it did not breach them.

“Ah,” exclaimed Biddle, “would that I believed that to be true. For you see, I have seen things with my own eyes, through my telescope, out there at the base of the cliffs where no man can possibly walk. Man or beast, for what I beheld looked like no earthly man.”

Denning was unsure how to respond, so he remained silent. Both men joined the Huer in scrutinising the sea. Boats were taking up their places. A cruel-looking gull landed on the rail opposite and fixed them with a footpad’s covetous eyes.

“It has long been my habit to spend many contemplative hours up here,” explained Biddle. “It is a hobby of mine to observe, to make notes on the moods of the weather, the comings and goings of the seabirds, the colour of the sea. I rather fancy myself as a naturalist.” Biddle took a notebook from his pocket. “Over the years I have been witness to a number of strange things. Once, during a storm, I saw a ball of light flit across the sea, meet the base of the cliffs and rise vertically up into the sky. A most remarkable sight.”

Denning glanced at the pipe. “Remarkable,” he said.

He flicked open the notebook and adjusted his spectacles. “See here, I have been keeping a regular watch and making a note – January 19th ’78; October 30th ’79; and last month, July. On these dates I have seen the same figure. Always at dusk. Brief glimpses only, a second or two, long enough to confirm I saw something, not long enough to believe it.”

“What can it be? An illusion?”

He drew on his pipe. “Perhaps. For no one alive could inhabit that stretch of shore and no one may find their way down to it. It is Baccan’s Maw, inaccessible by boat or from up on the cliffs. I have kept this to myself, for it would do no good to disturb the people of Porthgarrow. But I am convinced it is the spirit of Jowan Connoch, unable to pass on. Mr Denning – ” he said suddenly, tapping out the remaining tobacco from his pipe and scaring the gull into flight, “- I have been for some time troubled by something that I believe has a connection with this. But I cannot fathom exactly what that is. Your family is steeped in law. You have sharp, incisive brains that have the ability to cut through the fog of speculation and arrive at hard facts.”

“I am not a lawyer, but an artist, Reverend Biddle.”

“But I know it is in your blood, and has been for generations. It can be thinned but will not disappear. As an artist you are gifted with acute observation, and I am hopeful that a combination of this and your inherited deductive reasoning will help solve my riddle.”

He shrugged. “If it would please you,” he agreed, in the hope he could shake off the man. “What will you have me do?”

“If you are not of a squeamish disposition, Mr Denning, I should like you to look at my collected images of the dead.”



* * * *



Many a time Jowan’s mind had wandered, almost against his wishes, as if possessed of its own independence, to picture the grown Jenna Hendra. The young girl now a woman. The young girl who had promised him – told him – that one day she would marry him, a vow spoken with alarmingly reassuring conviction and confidence for one so innocent and untrained in the discipline of love.

A Canadian woman, selling fruit behind a stall; a Lieutenant’s pretty wife in Valparaiso; a costermonger’s daughter in Camden – was this how the grown Jenna might now appear? He could not help himself. He saw her everywhere and would chastise his foolish, free-spirited imagination for such pointless, stabbing speculation.

But now he looked upon the real woman, and she was every bit as beautiful as the wispy spirit he conjured up on lonely nights or that haunted milling crowds. He was both lifted by a warm thrill, and driven down by despondency as he watched her pause at a distance under the sweeping curve of the ruined monastery’s sole remaining archway.

How would she look upon him? As a tired, unkempt and wretched man aged by the harsh file of his life? He rose from the shattered pillar that had been his cold stone seat. He had to fight the urge to bolt from the place, to hide his sorry carcass amongst the brambles. But when he saw her fix her eyes on him, assuring herself it was him, he knew retreat was impossible. She lifted her skirts a little to avoid the mud and swept slowly over to him.

The little girl was a ghost behind her face.

“Jowan, is it really you?”

His insides crumpled at the sound of her voice. At first it was all he could do to nod. “Yes, it is I,” he croaked through a dry mouth. “You are…changed,” he said. “You are grown so.”

She smiled thinly and his insides crumpled some more. “I should hope so. It has been many years.” Eyebrows sank into a frown. “What has happened to your mouth? It is bleeding.”

Instinctively he put a finger to his lips. It came away tipped in crimson. “It is nothing,” he said, remembering the hefty fist that met with his cheek outside Tunny’s cottage a little while ago, a brutal full stop to the warning to stay away from the old man and leave the village. “You look well, Jenna.”

“You look ill, Jowan. So pale. So thin. Have you not been eating?” She looked him up and down, taking in his stained, threadbare clothes. “I often wondered what became of you,” she said quietly, almost as if to herself. “When you left the cove I missed you terribly. I would often go to the old cross and await your return. But then I grew up and you became a fond memory, fixed forever as a ten year old boy. Till today when I received this…” She opened her small fist to reveal the crumpled up note Jowan had hastily scribbled and given to his small messenger to deliver. “…and at first I scarce believed it. Yet you are here, as large as life. The same boy now a man. But you must let me fetch you some food for you look fit to drop at any moment.”

He held up his hand. “I am well, Jenna, I am recovering from an illness caught abroad. I will soon be as right as rain.”

She looked at him doubtfully. The surprise and pleasure of seeing him again was crowded out by the reasons for his swift departure from Porthgarrow. “Your poor mother,” she said. “I am so sorry.” She noticed him wince. “What became of you, Jowan? I asked but everyone evaded my questioning.” Then tales of his happiness living somewhere under the wing of a loving family floated into being and everyone was satisfied and ignorance fell like a shroud. As if the murder had never happened. As if to raise the subject were to raise the devil.

“I was found a family elsewhere. There were none in the cove would shelter a demon’s orphaned child,” he said acidly. “Beaten, starved, near killed – “ he pointed out a deep scar on his forehead that was hidden just under his curtain of hair “ – I took myself away and off to sea as soon as I was able and made the best of things.”

She had heard black rumours but did not want to believe them. “And your sister?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what became of her. I fear she is dead. But what does it matter if she is or isn’t? She’s as good as dead to me.”

“That is terrible, Jowan,” she said genuinely, the sense of injustice causing her chest to rise and fall deeply. “Who did this to you? Who ordered it so?”

Jowan shrugged. “It does not matter much who did it, but that it’s happened.”

“Your father brought this upon you, upon your poor family. You should not have to pay for his sins.”

“No!” he retorted. “That is not true. My father was innocent!”

“But – “

He was innocent!” the word stretched out plain and clear. He saw how she looked at him, as if his illness filled his mind with the pus of delusion. “Jenna, I need your help. I have no one else to turn to, not a single friendly face or helping hand. I would not have deigned to meet with you, for you to see me in this pitiful state, had it not been of the utmost importance.” His head crashed with pain, in part due to the fresh beating he’d endured, but also by the strength-sapping meeting with Jenna. He sat down on the splintered column. “Forgive me; my legs are a little tired.”

She sat down beside him. “He killed himself,” she said gently, “to atone for his sin. His action is like a pointing finger to his guilt.”

He spoke, but avoided her searching eyes: “Do you remember, when we stood by the old cross at the crossroads, and you told me the tale of the king who could not live without his bride; how he put a blade to his heart rather than live without her? My father loved my mother with just such a passion. Might this have been the reason he threw himself off the cliff’s edge?”

He avoids the fact that he was found with the knife in his hands, she thought. His eyes have the spark of the wild in them, as if he were still in the throes of a scorching fever. She did not reply. Left him to chew on his fantasy.

It is hopeless, Jowan thought. Her face tells me she thinks I am raving. Any moment she will flee this place, aware that she is in the presence of the old Jowan no longer, but of a stranger that has grown to replace him.

He is sapped of the last dregs of strength by his own realisation that he is clutching at a cause that is all but hopeless. No one believes a word he says. He has no solid proof to back those words except a rusty old key that even he does not know what lock it fits. The sweet smell of her drifted over in fingers of scent and he wondered how she was receiving the smell of his own unwashed body. It reminded him of who she was; the powerful man who claimed her as a daughter; the vast gulf between their worlds. It reminded him that he was regarded as little more than a turd under foot.

And I probably smell like one too, he thought.

The fiddle-like screech of a buzzard high overhead drew his attention, the pale undersides of its wings almost aglow against the dark clouds. It rode the air effortlessly, but it was being harried by a crow that circled it, every now and again lunging down towards it, causing the bird of prey to twist in the air, lash out with its talons. Wherever the buzzard flew, the crow followed, delivering one attack after the other, till the crow was satisfied it had driven the intruder far enough away. It performed a jagged wheel in the air and abandoned the unequal fight.

The tiny drama gave Jowan new heart. The ragged crow triumphs over the noble buzzard.

“Jenna, I know how you must perceive me. It has been so long since we have known each other and all things have changed. I am now a stranger to you. My very name is reviled and I am beaten because of it. But I need to find out the truth, whichever way that truth shall fall. For as long as there is the slightest doubt I shall not find peace.”

It was so heartfelt that Jenna could all but feel the sorrow that dogged Jowan. “Even as a stranger, I could not deny you help. But you are no stranger, Jowan. It is only time, not memory, that has passed.”

“What is the Jacobite Bolt, Jenna?”

She frowned. “That is a curious and unexpected question, Jowan. What has this to do with your father?”

“I don’t now,” he said helplessly.

He searched the sky but the buzzard had fled and left it empty. Filaments of rain hit his face.

“I know of it,” she said, though its importance to you is lost on me. It is said that in times long gone our home – or a home on its current foundations – once belonged to a Catholic family who lived in fear of persecution because of their faith. Legend has it they built a secret tunnel by which they might escape if officers of the Crown should call. The tale goes that it was last used in earnest following the Jacobite rebellion over a century and a half ago. Cornwall laid claim to many pockets of Jacobites who mourned King James’ exile and longed to see his son, the young Catholic Pretender back on the throne. When Charles Edward Stuart’s army was defeated at Culloden his supporters were hunted down. The authorities were informed that the then owner of our house had provided money and arms to the doomed cause, himself having fought with the Prince at Prestonpans. The King’s men came to arrest him, but it is said he narrowly escaped through the tunnel and fled to safety in France. Ever since it has been known in the family as the Jacobite Bolt.”

A sudden rush of hope surged through his veins. “Do you know where it is, this tunnel? May I see it?”

“I knew where it was, for it was reputed to be under a locked wooden trapdoor that sat in a corner of an old barn just outside the house. But all along it is thought to be a fanciful story, as with so many stories around here. I am told in reality it was an old disused well, the trapdoor put in place to prevent accidents. And I say I knew were it was because father has since had the old barn pulled down and a set of new stables built in its place. The Jacobite Bolt, or whatever it was, is no more.”

Given with one hand, denied with the other, thought Jowan, his insides sinking like lead. “Then this is useless,” he said, taking the string necklace from round his neck, the rusted key swinging like a ponderous pendulum. He tossed it away, the sharp sound of metal hitting stone. “All is folly,” he whined, his head in his hands. “A fool’s errand.” He rose. “I am sorry to have burdened you, Jenna, please forgive me.”

The material of her dress whispered as she got to her feet, her hand reaching out and resting lightly on his arm. “It is understandable. You have been through so much, far more than you deserved.”

“Our hands are dealt before we are born,” he said. “Coming here has opened up further what was already a painful wound. Staying enflames it further. It is insanity to prolong this agony on the back of a few scrambled words of doubt from a man who refuses to come out of hiding to back them up. John Carbis may have been drunk when he wrote them for all I know, or mad, or both, and I have been driven on by that same madness. The key – the Jacobite Bolt – was my last, physical hope of discovering what happened, but even that mystery has vanished and I am left with only fresh air in my hands. I am chasing shadows, and I tire of the chase.”

“John Carbis? My father’s old secretary? I thought he was dead.”

“He was the ghost that visited me and as quickly disappeared.”

“A good, honest man, as I recall.”

“As was my father,” said Jowan. “In my heart I know it is so. I am sorry to have dragged you from your business to listen to a man’s foolish meanderings.”

So much life spilling from her, he thought, as if it oozed from her very pores. She stood in stark contrast to himself. Shunned by his own people, shunned even by the outsiders on the cliff top camp; how fitting it was, then, that he made his bed here amongst the stones of the ravished monastery, occupying the land of the dead.

She was about to speak as he walked away, but could not think what to say. He was soon a purple shadow wandering amongst the ivy and bramble-encrusted walls, lost from sight as if absorbed into the very fabric of the ruins.



* * * *



He tipped forward his Derby so that the brim sat just above his eyes. From his chair outside the only inn in Porthgarrow, where he had managed to secure a cramped but not altogether unpleasant little room, Benjamin Croker sat studying the seine boats moored out in the bay. They’d been there for many tedious hours, and were bound to stay till the first shoals arrived. And that could be today, tomorrow or even the day after. Nobody was entirely certain.

He saw a number of crews erecting canvas tilts over their craft as the rain came down in sporadic gusts, making life aboard a little uncomfortable. He imagined them sharing yarns, playing cards, singing lusty sea shanties, or whatever it was dullard fishermen did to whittle away time whilst cooped up in old boats for hours on end, waiting for a shoal to arrive, or till they were relieved by another crew.

He abandoned them to take something to eat at midday, and when he returned and took up his chair again the scene had changed only in the position of the gauzy sun and the thickening cloud. Such dumb patience, he thought.

Even he could smell a change in the air. The crystal tang of salt. Something else, more primitive, harder to define, a sort of electric charge, like a long-time build up of static awaiting discharge.

He smiled at himself. He was starting to think like the natives and shook away the thoughts as if he were shooing an annoying cloud of midges.

Benjamin Croker was a satisfied man. From his vantage point he felt a little like a monarch watching over his small universe, studying his milling subjects as they went about their unimportant everyday business, passing superior judgement on them from his elevated position upon his aged wooden and wicker throne.

King Croker. He rather liked the ring to it. Very amusing. A master puppeteer.

He imagined Wilkinson and Denning as marionettes jerking to his manipulation of their strings, and they had no inkling, not a jot, that the threads of their lives were wrapped around his dancing little fingers. One deft pull here, one sharp tug there, and they would stand, fall, lie down or waltz at his whim.

But we are all pulled by someone’s strings, he thought; the puppeteer but a puppet himself.

His father had scraped a living from marionettes, touring many thankless places in thankless carnivals. He never recovered from being smashed over the head with his own pine Zeus following some back room brawl or other. Died quite raving, talking to his wooden family as if they were real. Yes, Croker understood puppets, the theatre of it all, the fine line between the false and the real, and when the false is real and the real becomes false. The world being a stage, he mused.

And what a final act is set, he thought; what a scene that is yet to play out and bring down the curtain, to prepare the way for the first act in a brand new play.

A play in which he, Benjamin Croker, would take centre stage, and in which Wilkinson will play no further part, for he must meet his oh so tragic end in the last.

In his mind’s eye he pictured Wilkinson being whacked over the head with a puppet of Zeus and laughed. Oh, how it all amuses me, he thought, taking out a fat cigar.



* * * *