Here, their little tête-à-tête was interrupted by Mr
Savidge’s father himself. Like his son, Mr Thomas Savidge
was a large, beefy-handed man. But whereas the younger
man seemed to have a rather placid disposition, the
innkeeper was a loud, boisterous fellow whose voice could
have substituted for a hunting horn. He immediately took
over the conversation, paying outrageous compliments to
Lydia which she took no heed of since it was clear that they
were simply what Mr Savidge mistakenly believed to be
proper etiquette in addressing young ladies.
‘You mustn’t prose on about horses or anything to this
fair damsel, John,’ he chafed his son. ‘Don’t want her to be bored by idle chatter.’
‘We were discussing the murder,’ Lydia informed him.
Mr Savidge frowned. ‘What a cod’s head you are, boy!’ he
cried loudly, causing several heads to turn in his direction.
‘A fine thing to be filling a young lady’s head with night
mares and such. You have no notion how to get on, my boy!
Flirting: that’s the ticket.’
‘Oh, I do not mind at all,’ Lydia hastened to inform him.
‘I find it absolutely fascinating. And I assure you, I know no
more of flirtation than your son does.’
The innkeeper would have none of it, however. He continued to instruct his son in quite improper ways of
dealing with the fair sex, until he was finally abducted by
Mrs Wardle-Penfield and incarcerated at one of the card
tables. Lydia and John were therefore free to resume their
discussion.
‘Sorry about m’father,’ John muttered.
‘Oh, don’t be!’ Lydia said. ‘I thought him prodigiously
amusing.’
‘He can be a little - overwhelming.’
‘I am surprised that his hostess can so easily control
him,’ she answered with more truth than tact.
‘No trouble in that quarter.’ John chuckled. ‘Papa thinks
Mrs P can do no wrong. Hopes to rise in society under her
patronage.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, I’ve no such ambitions.’
‘Thank goodness for that!’ Lydia was very pleased by her companion’s easy, unaffected manners. He neither was, nor
considered himself to be of the gentry. It was most
refreshing.
‘No use pretending to be what you ain’t. I may have been
educated at Harrow, but I’m an innkeeper’s son and not
ashamed of it.’
‘But tell me more about the murder,’ she persisted.
‘Whoever the guilty party might be,’ John told her, ‘they
either had a grudge against the victim or didn’t mean for
anyone to know his identity.’
‘But the victim
is
a man?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Horribly disfigured by a stone, though....’
‘More than that, Miss Bramwell.’
‘Good heavens! What more could there be?’
‘The body was covered in oil and lit on fire—’
Lydia caught her breath. It was better than she could
ever have imagined.
‘How horrible!’ she breathed. ‘No wonder, then, that nobody can
tell who it is.’
‘I have my suspicions.’
‘Do you?’ She eyed him with growing respect.
‘I’m almost certain it’s your friend, the Nose.’
In spite of herself Lydia blushed. Still, she could not
allow embarrassment to spoil her fun.
‘The gentleman from the Mail?’
‘That’s right. A Mr Cole.’ John nodded emphatically. ‘He
was putting up at the inn, but hasn’t been seen in several
days. Left his bag and his belongings there, though.’
‘Could it really be him?’
‘I’d bet a goodly sum on it.’
Lydia glanced around the room at the smiling, gesticu
lating group. Her eye fell on an ornate clock which graced
the mantel on the opposite side of the room and a sudden thought came to her.
‘Do you know if there was a silver watch found on the -
the body?’ she asked.
A look of surprise crossed the face of Mr Savidge. ‘I
believe there was.’
‘Carved with some kind of grotesque faces?’
‘The masks of Comedy and Tragedy.’ He nodded.
‘I saw him take it out several times on the journey,’ she
explained. ‘I believe he wanted to impress Ears with it.’
Naturally, she then had to explain the curious
appendages of Mr Cole’s travelling companion, which
almost caused John to go into whoops. When he had gained
control of himself, he said that he would pass along this information to his father. It seemed that the dead man had
now been identified beyond all reasonable doubt.
‘But then,’ Lydia said to her aunt the next morning as they
sat together over their breakfast, ‘it makes no sense.’
‘I do wish you would leave off this subject, Lydia,’ Aunt
Camilla protested faintly. ‘My nerves are all a-jangle as it
is.’
Of course there was no possibility of ignoring such a
momentous event, even had Lydia wished to do so.
However, she had no such wish.
‘If the motive for killing Mr Cole was robbery,’ she
persisted, heedless of her aunt’s sensibilities, ‘why was his
watch not taken? From the looks of it, I’d wager it was his most valuable possession.’
‘Well then, there must have been another motive,’ her
aunt snapped, apparently accepting the fact that there was
no escaping her niece’s morbid fascination with this unfor
tunate incident.
‘Precisely. But what reason could there possibly be?’
Lydia demanded. ‘Why would anyone in Diddlington
murder a perfect stranger?’
‘Perhaps it was an accident,’ Camilla suggested hope
fully.
‘I think it unlikely that anyone could accidentally smash
someone’s head in with a stone; nor could they set fire to
the corpse in error.’
Camilla shuddered at the vivid images which this speech
conjured up in her mind.
‘Please ...’ she whispered, fortifying her nerves with a
few sips of strong Gunpowder Tea.
‘John thinks that it was all an attempt to disguise the
identity of the victim. But then it would be foolish to leave
the watch. Of course,’ she mused aloud, ‘that may have
been an oversight.’
‘I daresay one can be quite forgetful when committing a
murder.’
This was a more trenchant remark than was usual for
her soft-spoken relation, so Lydia deemed it politic to keep
any further conjectures to herself. If she wished to discuss
the matter with anyone, the most logical person was John
Savidge. He was in a position to know more than any other
of her aunt’s acquaintance, and he certainly seemed more
intelligent than anyone else she had met in Diddlington.
* * * *
Her estimation of the mental powers of the village’s inhab
itants was not improved by developments over the
following week. No sooner had the first wave of astonish
ment crashed upon the imaginations of the populace than
it was followed by a surging tide of superstition and
fantastic supposition.
From the meanest yeoman farmer to the most exalted
residents of the hamlet, speculation swelled from a furtive
whisper to the deafening roar of a mighty torrent.
To begin with, there was what was now grandly termed
the ‘previous incident’. This telling phrase referred to
another murder which had occurred some three years before in almost the same spot. Nobody had ever been charged, and
the unsolved crime had been banished from the collective
imagination of Diddlingtonians until it was brought so force
fully to mind by what appeared to be its twin.
‘Horrible it was!’ Mr Berwick, the vicar, intoned piously,
when Aunt Camilla mentioned the matter to him. He had
called to see how the two ladies got on and, naturally, he
did not refuse the offer of tea - especially since he had
timed his visit precisely at the hour when he knew they would be partaking and would undoubtedly include him in their repast
.
‘Dear Mr Berwick,’ Camilla said, catching her lips
between her teeth to keep them from trembling. ‘What has
anyone in Diddlington done to deserve this - this display of
divine wrath?’
‘The wrath in this case seems rather human than divine,’ Lydia opined before the gentleman could respond.
‘Indeed, you are quite right Miss Bramwell,’ the good
man agreed. ‘The human heart, as the Scripture saith, “is
deceitful above all things and desperately evil.” Who can
know the wickedness hidden within it?’
This did little to console the elder of his two charming
companions. Camilla continued to bemoan such a terrible
occurrence until Mr Berwick’s stomach was full and he
dismissed himself.
But while he might be of the same mind as Lydia, others
had far more dramatic views of what had happened in the
darkness of Wickham Wood. It was said that the wood had
once been the meeting place of a coven of witches. Many
expressed the view that the spirits of these long-dead prac
titioners of the Black Arts continued to haunt the groves where their perverse ceremonies had been held.
‘The Devil is in it, mark my words!’ This phrase, or some
variation thereof, was heard more than once on the street
and in the tavern where the men gathered to while away
the evening hours.
But even this was not enough to satisfy those who appar
ently had read
The Monk
one too many times. Knowing
that Mr Cole’s corpse had been burned beyond recognition,
these folks looked back toward an even more distant and
mysterious past. There were local legends of a fire-
breathing dragon which had menaced the countryside in
the days of St Augustine. The hardy old saint had
vanquished him with a silver crucifix. Perhaps this beast
had risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes and was bent on
reclaiming what was left of the woodlands he had once
inhabited!
Lydia hardly knew whether to laugh or weep when she heard one of the maids solemnly express this charming
theory to another servant - who seemed much impressed and easily persuaded. For herself, she rather suspected a
more alarming beast which walked on two legs and used
two hands to accomplish what serpentine scales and
monstrous wings could not.
Mrs Wardle-Penfield refused to entertain the possibility that anyone in their village could have committed such an
atrocity. However, her theories on the subject came
perilously close to creating a rift between her and Aunt
Camilla.
‘Not one of
our
people could have been involved,’ she declared.
‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ Aunt Camilla stiffened
slightly.
‘It must have been someone from outside the village,’ the
older woman explained, as though to a child.
‘Of whom are you thinking?’
‘Frankly,’ Mrs Wardle-Penfield stated, ‘I would look into
that Frenchman, if I were Mr Savidge.’
‘That is absurd - and slanderous!’
Lydia had hardly believed that her aunt could be so
animated. She fairly trembled in her outrage.
‘I know that you have a partiality for him, my dear
Camilla, though it seems absurd at your age,’ her friend
replied, not a whit perturbed. ‘But what do we really know
about the man?’
‘We know that he was not living here when the other
murder occurred,’ Camilla flung at her, as if to say, ‘There! Explain that, if you can.’ Mrs Wardle-Penfield did.
‘Monsieur d’Almain arrived to take up residence in
Diddlington very soon after that incident,’ she reminded
her with a speaking glance. ‘Who knows where he might
have been hiding before that?’
‘Hiding!’
‘Of course,’ the
grande dame
added graciously, ‘he may
not have been involved in that case. But that is no reason
to suppose him innocent in this.’
‘Is there any reason to suspect him, ma’am,’ Lydia asked
drily, ‘other than the fact that he is French?’