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97 pages

English

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We are in the sleepy village of Sherburn in Elmete, Yorkshire, in the year of grace 1729. When George Bywater, the vicar's servant, is clubbed to death as he collects the parish tithes, the vicar undertakes to track his killer. Unfortunately, his efforts are thwarted at every turn. Threatened with violence, arrested and tried on three separate occasions, on charges that include murder, harbouring a felon and poaching, he is saved from transportation - or worse! - only by an act of God (naturally). He is hauled before the archdeacon and then the archbishop himself for carrying out his investigation at the expense of his pastoral duties. Forbidden to proceed as he wishes, he yet takes advantage of a tip-off from a local magistrate and a chance encounter with a reformed footpad to pursue his inquiries - in a pure spirit of duty, of course - and comes up with a peculiarly delicate challenge to his conscience.This light-hearted tale is the third Chronicle from Sherburn, in which Julius Falconer presents for the modern reader the absurd adventures penned by the hapless vicar.

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Publié par	Pneuma Springs Publishing
Date de parution	22 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782283492
Langue	English

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The Trials of Thomas Roxby

A Country Parson’s Rum Tale

Julius Falconer
Copyright

First Published in 2014 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing The Trials of Thomas Roxby - A Country Parson’s Rum Tale
Copyright © 2014 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: 9781782283461 ePub eISBN: 9781782283492 PDF eBook eISBN: 9781782283522 Paperback ISBN: 9781782283430 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

Л e н a Бєл ĸi на
-Попелюцка -
в шанобливому захопленні

To Lena Byelkina
- la Cenerentola -
In respectful admiration
ONE
We received the melancholy news of Mistress Goodhall on the morning of 8 January. She was John Goodhall’s relict – you may remember him, the boot- and shoe-maker from Ledston: a small man, whose large red nose sported a very noticeable wen on the end of it and whose ears protruded like jug-handles. No? then it doesn’t matter – and a sad image of widowhood she made, by all accounts. She being from a neighbouring parish, I had only scant acquaintance of her myself. She had, it seems, been disordered in her mind for some time. Anyway, this particular day, in all the frost and cold, she rose at three or four o’clock in the morning, wandered round, nobody knows exactly where, in her gown and two petticoats without stockings, and no news was to be had of her for two days. She is supposed to have drowned herself in the Aire.

Jane, my dear wife, and I were discussing this matter at table, amidst the racket set up by our squabbling children. I merely pointed out that the story lacked credibility on at least four counts. One, if her body had not been found, how was it known what she was wearing? Two, if she lived on her own, how was it known at what time she rose? Three, how was it known that she ‘wandered round’? And four, there were – unfortunately – many fates that she could have suffered other than drowning. Jane retorted, with her usual forcefulness, that I constantly looked for difficulties where there were none, that all my cavils could be satisfactorily countered, and that I was in any case a small-minded, overcritical, peevish and acidulous parson, given to absurd metaphysical disquisitions at table and was generally insufferable company when in one of my less attractive moods.

Well, dear reader, there being no point in gainsaying my wife, who is always right, I contented myself with a quiet harrumph and let the matter drop. Our next topic of conversation, which ran less risk of turning sour, was the wedding, on 28 December last, of Daniel, eldest son of the Earl of Nottingham, to the Lady Frances Fielding, the Right Honourable the Earl of Denbigh’s sister. (The celebration took place at the house of Col. James Otway – he’d married Lady Bridget Fielding. Our interest was simply that the Otways lived at the manor-house at Upper Hardres near Canterbury, and a second cousin of mine was for a time rector of SS Peter and Paul there: a small connection, I grant you, but we lowly people must catch at celebrity, however slender, where we can!)

Now, patient reader, why am I telling you this? Because I wish you to be aware at the outset of the story that, although I am undoubtedly all of these things my wife accuses me of being, and plenty of others besides, I have an interest in the truth which was profoundly tested in the matter of the murder of my servant George; and you will see that it was my habit of not being satisfied with hearsay and bald allegation, however plausible, that stood me in good stead in the matter.

I had hired George the previous Michaelmas for one year, at the rate of 7 li. for the year with an earnest of 2 s. 6 d. He was a young man of twenty-one or thereabouts, physically robust but perhaps a little slow in his mind. His father was a quarryman at Huddleston: a dour man known for the violence of his temper and for the number of his children. You may remember his wife’s family, the Gells of Sherburn. No? Well, no matter. George was the third child: stolid, taciturn, perhaps lacking in humour and, as I say, not one of life’s geniuses, but conscientious and utterly reliable. On the occasion on which he met his untimely end, I had sent him to Aberford to collect the annual tithes. I shall tell you about tithes in a minute, because they are relevant to the story. He left the vicarage on the morning of Monday 17 January, armed with a list of the names of the four people he was to contact and a scrip in which to put the money they were supposed to give him. I expected him to return well before nightfall, as the distances are not great and, even if some of the debtors were not immediately available, I did not foresee any particular difficulty in tracking them down. After all, we live in quiet times in which people travel little and their range of interest (as one might say) is sober and godly.

I first sensed that not all was well when the horse on which George had set out returned to the vicarage riderless. Uh-huh, I told myself: poor George has met with an accident and needs my assistance. I therefore saddled up and set off in pursuit of him. Now you may recall that the distance between Sherburn and Aberford is little above four miles. Moreover, the church is on the Aberford side of the village, and the glebe lands for which George was to collect the tithes were on the Sherburn side of Aberford. I calculated therefore no more than forty minutes to cover the journey. As I approached the Great North Road, a small knot of people waved me down. I was left in no doubt that my servant, whose body lay at the side of the road, was no more: bludgeoned to death. The conflicting opinions of the bystanders agreed on the essential, namely, that he had been waylaid on his way home from Aberford, dragged from his mount, robbed and killed. His horse had found its own way home, perhaps aided in its intention by a blow to the rump administered by one of the attackers, or perhaps merely in panic. Thereafter opinions differed: George had tried conclusions with a drunken gang from Lotherton and come off worse, he had been aggressed by a highwayman, an opportunist robber from Aberford had followed him out of the village, and so on – all on the basis of no firm evidence whatsoever.

In my usual decisive and masterful fashion, I took charge of the situation. I asked one of the bystanders to organise the carriage of the corpse to Sherburn parsonage, where the faithful and efficient Jane would see to its decent preparation for burial, while I made forthwith for Parlington to inform the local magistrate, Sir Ralph Gascoigne, of the misadventure. For the sake of those who are reading one of my chronicles for the first time, Sir Ralph and I were long-standing acquaintances. He was scion of a long-established, wealthy and influential Yorkshire family; I came from a long line of humble and insignificant people with nothing to boast about but their integrity. I cannot say I cared much for the Gascoigne way of life. For one thing, Sir Ralph was riddled with Popery; for another, Parlington Hall, the family seat, was a sprawling undistinguished sixteenth-century house which offended my aesthetic sense; and finally, as if these two reasons were insufficient, Sir Ralph preferred country pursuits to judicial duties. That said, he was not in himself unlikeable. Then in his late forties – five or six years older than I - he had married Mary Hungate, of Huddleston Hall, and by her had three sons and two daughters. He was a tall, spare individual, clean-shaven, balding but with a certain aristocratic jauntiness about his person which carried weight. I found him at home in a colourful wrapping-gown and tight-fitting nightcap, taking his ease in the drawing-room. When the butler had left us, the magistrate invited me to take a seat, expressed his pleasure at my visit and inquired how I thought he could help. I wasted no time in apprising him of the tragedy that had befallen. Although he expressed his shock and sense of outrage with an impressive show of sincerity, I knew from experience that I should be hard put to it to convert his superficial concern to action of any kind. We both entered the spirit of the occasion, he asking questions – what was George doing at Aberford, how many people would have known he had money on him, had his visit been announced beforehand? and so on – I responding where I could, but I knew it was a pantomime: expertly choreographed and finely tuned, but a pantomime nonetheless. The magistrate, insisting on my taking refreshment, endeavoured to enter into other topics of conversation, to cover his almost total lack of interest in my case, but my mind was too full of poor George to cooperate. After some consequent awkwardness, the magistrate repeated his (empty) promises of vigorous action.

My next task, I knew, was to inform the family: one of the most wretched duties it had ever been my lot to undertake. Leaving Parlington, therefore, with as much haste as I could muster without discourtesy to its master, I rode back towards Sherburn, guiding my doleful nag down the Huddleston track to the poor cottage where I knew the family lived. It was by this time almost entirely dark, and, as I had no l