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93 pages

English

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It is the summer of 1728, and we are in the village of Sherburn, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its handsome church, boys' grammar-school, ancient tavern and tranquil rural population. Below the church lies the site of the palace of the kings of Elmete. Nearby, across the common and past the woods, are the grand houses of commissioner of the peace Squire Hawley at Scarthingwell Hall and magistrate Sir Ralph Gascoigne at Parlington Hall. An apparent conspiracy to re-establish the sixth-century Ancient British kingdom of Elmete has worrying, and sometimes hilarious, consequences for the hapless vicar, whose meagre detective skills are stretched to their limit. Both the squire and Sir Ralph are only too happy to leave it all to the vicar - until, that is, the vicar is arrested for gun-smuggling and the squire disappears. It then transpires, however, that the conspiracy is merely camouflage for a more interesting crime altogether ... This neat tale both faithfully recreates the atmosphere of an eighteenth-century Yorkshire village and offers the modern reader rare entertainment.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

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Publié par	Pneuma Springs Publishing
Date de parution	26 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782283249
Langue	English

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Extrait

The Bite of a Mad Dog
A Country Parson’s Curious Tale

Julius Falconer
Copyright

First Published in 2013 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
The Bite of a Mad Dog: A Country Parson’s Curious Tale Copyright © 2013 Julius Falconer
Julius Falconer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Mobi eISBN: 9781782283195 Epub eISBN: 9781782283249 PDF eBook eISBN: 9781782283294 Paperback ISBN: 9781782283140
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: admin@pneumasprings.co.uk W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Dedication

To
Catherine Helen
the apple of my eye
the sweetest companion of my widowerhood
the bedrock of my declining years –
my daughter
Publisher’s Note.
For reasons of copyright and public order, Mr Falconer’s name appears on the title page of this book, whereas the vicar of Sherburn in Elmete, servant of God, family-man, part-time farmer, herbalist, physician and arbiter in all manner of parochial disputes, is the true author of this tale. To relate how his MS came into Mr Falconer’s possession is not to the present purpose. Suffice it to say that Mr Falconer is responsible for presenting the text in a format suitable for modern readers of a sensitive disposition whose standards of orthography, grammar and syntax correspond roughly with those of our modern examination boards. Incidentally, the editor assures readers that the four recipes in the book to cure the bite of a mad dog are genuine early to mid-eighteenth century remedies. He invites you to avoid them.
The Novel
ONE
This strange story could be said to have begun on the 20 April of this year of our Lord 1728, because it has its roots in an accusation of murder based on an episode that took place on that day. Now an accusation of murder is a serious business. While murder is not the gravest crime a human can commit – no, not by a long chalk! – to accuse someone of it is to unleash a sequence of responsibilities that may, for the criminal and his accomplices if any are foolish enough to join him, end in the hangman’s noose. The crime and its aftermath, if advertised in this way, can bring about the destruction of the murderer’s family if he has one, the rocking of a community, maybe even a dislocation of the course of history; as if the grief of the victim’s family were not enough. In the Old Testament – forgive me, I’m far from learned, but some of my biblical knowledge isn’t bad! - the ‘hue and cry’ required anybody within hearing of a victim of crime – rape, it may be, theft, robbery, assault - to hurry to the victim’s aid on pain of unspecified penalties. When Cain struck his brother down, Abel’s blood itself set up a ‘hue and cry’, and God heard it; and we all know what the consequences of that were! (Just in case you are unsure, here’s the text: ‘Cain said unto the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth”.’ Pretty chilling stuff.) My beloved wife Jane – admirable woman! – argued that I should never have become involved in the business to start with, in which case this story would not have been penned, but then she did not appreciate, I believe, the awesome responsibility of one appealed to by another setting up a ‘hue and cry’. In the case in point, it was more a ‘call’ for help than the technical ‘cry’ for help, but the Old Testament makes no such fine distinction. I felt myself under a solemn pastoral duty to follow it through to the best of my ability.

The day to which I refer was otherwise indistinguishable in its banality. I had spent most of it totting up my various items. Forty-two sheaves – forty-two, mind – had yielded a mere six loads of marketable wheat. On the other hand, the wood came in from Barkston Close – two jogs of hardwood and twelve and a half hundred faggots – and Mr Saddlethorp delivered the half-chaldron of coals I had already paid for. John Grant had ploughed up the close for barley but found it too hard to harrow. Early in the evening, I did a few brief sums on another matter. John Taylor charged me 1 li . 4 s . 4 d. for hedging and ditching and 1 li . 11 s . 2 d. for the faggots. He started work on 9 March and finished on 15 April, but mark this, dear reader: he had also in that time worked three days at John Ruddy’s and was hindered by a great deal of rain. All in all, the work had taken him little over four weeks. Rare wages, I say!

You may remember how John Ridd, in telling any reader who cared to listen the story of his wooing of Lorna Doone, summed up the farmer’s year:
The sheep-shearing came, and the hay season next, and then the harvest of small corn, and the digging of the root called ‘batata’ (a new but good thing in our neighbourhood, which our folk have made into ‘taties’), and then the sweating of the apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the stacking of the fire-wood, and netting of the woodcocks, and the springlets to be minded, in the garden, and by the hedgerow, where blackbirds hop to the molehills in the white October mornings, and grey birds come to look for snails, at the time when the sun is rising.
All right, he was referring to Devon, and the year was 1676, but our year up here in Yorkshire is not much different: steady routine through the seasons, not the stuff of story-telling.

However, one thing did happen on the evening I am talking about which I later had occasion to bring to mind. John Clayforth and John Standridge came to see me, having fallen out over the land, hedge and willows on Green Way. Standridge had brought a suit against Clayforth, but they thought they would see what I had to say about the matter. After a long discourse, they agreed to put it to me and to abide by my decision. I determined that Standridge should withdraw his action, make over to Clayforth, at his own (Standridge’s) expense, the title of the disputed land, hedge and willows, and that Clayforth would confirm Standridge’s right to the neighbouring lands. Both were to pay their own lawyer, and for the time to come they should do their best endeavour to live peaceably and lovingly.

Thereafter the thing slipped my mind, mainly because I fell ill. May I tell you about it briefly, as a tribute to my wife’s restorative powers? Yes, she figures in this story, at times quite forcefully! There was a horse-race in Cow Meadow, near Tadcaster, you see, promoted chiefly by the Hon. Marmaduke Hawke of Towton Hall, there not having been one at Towton before in anyone’s memory. I watched one Flockton, master of Grimston horse, win the plate (value 25 li. ). The following day, there was another horse-race there, the 50 li. plate being won by Mr Shepherd of Tadcaster. Three days later, my servant John Palmer died of a violent fever, having caught it, as I presumed, at the races. Two days later I was seized with a violent shivering about three in the afternoon, which continued about four hours, after which followed great sweating, which lasted all night. In the morning I took a vomit and went to bed again and took the bark, which purged me (I supposed by taking it too soon after the vomit); and so the fever began. I was very restless all night, but, my ever-efficient wife Jane having some papers of Mr Whitworth’s Sweating Powders, I took them, which at last procured an intermission. So I took the bark again – and thank the Lord I did – with good success and had no more of it.

I was no sooner on my feet again than my daughter Sarah fell ill, to our great consternation. At my wife’s insistence, the poor girl took a vomit and the bark at some distance after, but the fever returned the next day, and she was troubled with fainting fits. She took the powders, at my insistence, and they procured an intermission. A day later she took the bark again, which took off the fever, and thereafter she was fine. However, as she had not had a stool for three days, my wife gave her some stewed prunes and senna, and they cleared up the trouble in no time. However, it would be irksome to the reader for me to detail all that happened in those weeks, usual and unusual. This is not the diary of a country parson but a tale of misdoing, misunderstanding and misprision which you may find more interesting than my life-story. (I have often wondered what motivates people to write and publish their memoirs and autobiographies. Even my own kinsman Sir John Reresby had a go at it – a good time ago now, of course. However, I’m wandering, aren’t I? The bad habit of a lively mind, I like to think. Forgive me.)

Well, as I say, I had completely lost to memory the suit that John Clayforth had taken out against John Standridge and then, at my instigation, abandoned. I am told that all one’s experiences are lodged in the memory, some more vividly than others, and can be brought back to life by those who care to cultivate this work, but I am not learned enough to comment. The matter of the suit, now some months old, was brought back to me, in the most startling way, by the discovery of the body of Thomas Clayforth, John’s brother: not murder at that stage, just accidental death. A beastman on his way to Foxglove Close to check his sheep, chancing to look over the pond in the Great Close, spied a