Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

Cheating the Hangman by Judith Cutler

Fans of this historical series featuring early 1800s Reverend Tobias Campion won’t want to miss Judith Cutler’s two novels starring the sleuth: 2008’s The Keeper of Secrets and 2009’s Shadow of the Past. The British author also has two recent novel-length installments in her Lina Townend antiques-dealer series, which frequently appears in EQMM at short-story length. See Ring of Guilt, Severn House Publishers (February 2011) and the earlier Silver Guilt.

Of all the days in the Church calendar, Easter is surely the most important — when the Master I serve defeated death that we might all be saved. This particular Easter Day I was given the joy of celebrating Holy Communion twice over — once with my own dear friends in Moreton St. Jude and once at All Saints, Clavercote. The incumbent of this parish, never very assiduous in his duties, had recently and at the shortest of notice informed the bishop that he was about to travel on the Continent for the sake of his health. Why, with Europe in its present state, the Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Coates did not choose to repair to Bath or to Cheltenham, no one knew. Suffice it to say that the church in his care was but half full, and there was surprisingly little joy in the voices raised in the Easter hymns.

Having blessed them all and offered what I hope were comforting words, I mounted my faithful Titus and set off for the village I now thought of as home — although my parents, in the vastness of their Derbyshire estate, would have disagreed. The shortest route was through the woods of Lord Wychbold’s estate, though the rides were badly maintained and the byways little more than rabbit tracks. Lord Wychbold, a man in his seventies, led the quietest of lives, receiving no visitors and only venturing out if he considered the occasion was pressing. Perhaps if he had set a better example, more of his estate workers would have been in church today.

Comprehensively losing my way, I resolved to follow what seemed the most recently trodden path in the hope that it would bring me to a clearing where I could orientate myself by the sun, the overhead canopy being far too thick for the early spring rays.

Despite the chill beneath the branches, there was a hum of insects: flies. And a sickly smell that spoke of death. Thinking an animal had died in a trap, I dismounted and led Titus very slowly, keeping my eyes peeled, lest he or I be similarly caught.

Alas, the corpse I found was all too human. And it was not caught in a trap. In a dreadful parody of what we had just been celebrating, a man hung on a tree, nailed by his ankles and wrists, a deep gash in his side. But for a loincloth and a crown of thorns, he was naked. Even a local could not have recognised him, for his face was beaten to a pulp. There was a great deal of dried blood.

“You have done well to find your way back here, Tobias,” Dr. Hansard said, trying in his kind way to distract me from the horror we faced. We had brought with us my former groom, Jem, whose new post as village schoolmaster had not rendered him too grand to assist Dr. Hansard whenever there was a need. Now he was carrying what was once an old tabletop, adjusted to carry either the living or the dead in need of the doctor’s skills. For Edmund was developing an extraordinary prowess in examining bodies to help determine the cause of death, a process at which I found myself totally unable to assist.

We had brought a couple of trusted men to assist us in the grisly task of removing the corpse from the tree. Hansard and I placed them under the most solemn oath not to reveal what they had found, but I was sure that by the time we were back in Langley Park, Dr. Hansard’s residence, our activities would be all the way round the two villages and probably others besides.

I was deputed to break the news to Lord Wychbold. A surly butler showed me into a shabby morning room. After near on twenty minutes, Wychbold entered the room, reading my card. “The Reverend Tobias Campion! My idiot of a butler did not tell me a man of the cloth had called! What can he be thinking of, to leave you cooling your heels in here? Pray, come with me to my library, which has the advantage of a fire, and join me in some sherry and biscuits.”

Only when we were seated, one each side of a fitful fire, did I break the news to him.

“A corpse? In my woodland? And in such a state? Dear God, how can that be?”

His face went so grey I wished Edmund had been there to administer restorative drops. But a sip of sherry did much to improve his colour, and he was soon able to speak quite rationally, offering me the help of all his estate workers to search for the evidence so beloved of my friend.

“Dr. Hansard insists that he wants but two or three of your most trusted men,” I said. “And they must work with the utmost discretion — we do not want to frighten away the killer.”

He rang for the surly butler and gave his orders.

“You told Lord Wychwood the method of the corpse’s death?” Edmund expostulated, slapping his glass down so hard the port slopped over the rim. “Dear God, Toby, I took you for a man of discretion. Surely you know the rumours surrounding the old reprobate? That in his youth he was a member of the Hellfire Club, and most assiduous in its vilest practices? Of all the men I can think of, he is the one most likely to have been involved in such a sacrilegious parody!”

Mrs. Hansard laid a calming hand on his arm. When we supped informally, she never retired while we men drank our port, instead sipping a glass of champagne and joining in the conversation. “My dear, even if you had personally sewn Tobias’s lips together, and employed only blind and dumb men to assist you, the news of the man’s death and the manner of it would have reached his lordship before nightfall. At least Tobias was able to observe how he received the news.” Her bright eyes prompted me.

“His colour was poor, his breathing shallow. I feared for his health, and indeed cursed that I had forgotten to take some of your restorative cordial when I went on my errand. But a sip or two of sherry restored him.”

“So he was shocked,” Jem said.

Edmund nodded. “Did you at any point feel that his shock might have its roots in guilt?”

I considered. “I thought he was simply as appalled as any man might be. And I cannot think differently now.”

“Very well. We have,” he continued, “a victim aged between forty and fifty, I would say, strong of build. So whoever overpowered him and killed him must have been even stronger.”

“Who would choose such a dreadful method of execution?”

“An interesting choice of word, Tobias. You would be right, had the victim actually been killed on that tree. But when Jem and I examined the corpse, we came to believe that the man was killed first — that knife thrust into his side. I will spare you and your ticklish stomach the details, my friend,” he said with a laugh. “However, even assuming the man had expired, it would not have been an easy task to lift him and nail him in place.”

“A dead weight,” Jem observed, with a dry smile.

I asked bravely, “How do you know he was dead before he was crucified?”

“Apart from that wound? Well, you may have observed that there was surprisingly little blood from his hands — very well, Maria, I will not ruin an excellent supper by making Tobias cast up his accounts. I will just say this, Tobias — we are sure, Jem and I, that there is a sexual motive to the crime. An element of revenge, I would say.” He looked meaningfully at his wife and said no more.

Mrs. Hansard, however, was a redoubtable woman. “Do you imply that a female avenged herself by stabbing and then mutilating—?”

Jem overrode her. “We are sure a woman was at the heart of the problem. But not as the killer, unless she were an Amazon indeed. Even her jilted or outraged lover would surely have needed assistance.”

She nodded sadly. “So we need to find the betrayed young woman.”

“If only Dr. Coates were here to consult,” I said. “I suppose that in his absence we must refer to the verger.”

Maria smiled enigmatically. “If you and Tobias are going to Clavercote in the chaise, my love, perhaps you will take me as your passenger. An old friend of mine, the widow of a steward at a noble house, has retired there to share her son’s house. I think it is time to pay her a visit.”

The verger at All Saints, a man of few smiles, insisted that he had no forwarding address for Dr. Coates. He was entirely uninformative, in fact. If any villagers had hurriedly quit Clavercote, if any strangers had been in the neighbourhood, he knew not — and seemed to care less. Frustrated, Hansard and I retired to the tiny inn, hunched round-shouldered on the edge of the village. Perhaps the landlord would offer us information as well as ale.

We were just abandoning our attempts to squeeze more than a monosyllable from the sour-faced man, and were waiting for the chaise to be brought round, when a party of riders trotted by. Mine host, forgetting the claims of his existing customers, was all at once full of smiles and forelock-tugging, clearly recognising members of the ton from forty yards’ distance. But it was not his toadying that brought the party to a halt.

One of the riders wheeled his horse and brought it back to where I stood. “Tobias, you whelp — what in Hades are you doing outside a foul drinking-den like this?”

I was ready to faint with shock. I had been estranged from my father for many years, ever since I took Holy Orders, and had never dreamed to see him in this neighbourhood. But from somewhere I drew enough strength to bow low, and to kiss the hand he extended. “Father! Sir, may I present Dr. Hansard? Edmund, Lord Hartland.”

Both, one from the height of his magnificent horse, the other an equally proud pedestrian, bowed with great civility. Neither eyed the other with any pleasure.

With less haste, the other riders had turned their mounts and gathered round us. I recognised one as Lord Ewen, whose estate adjoined Lord Wychbold’s. He greeted me far more cordially than my father had done, bidding me to sup with them that very night. “And your friend, too,” he added with a careless smile. “You must both join us for dinner and a hand of cards. It’s a bachelor establishment, Campion, so do not expect more than a mutton stew.”

“I regret that I am engaged, my Lord,” Hansard said, as I knew he would, since his love of gambling had once near ruined him and he no longer played whist for so much as a matchstick. “A friend of my dear wife’s...” he murmured.

“Another evening,” Ewen declared with a smile. “Campion shall furnish me with your address.” He nodded to me. “We sup at six-thirty.”

“Of course you will go, Tobias,” Mrs. Hansard said severely as, in the chaise on our way back to Langley Park, I explained what had happened. “You are the first to preach reconciliation and forgiveness: Now you must act on them. I have no doubt that you parted from your father with great anger on both sides, but in my experience, that simply shows how much love you bear for one another. And my dear Edmund is quite right to have cried off, so that you may have private conversation with Lord Hartland, though I hope he will present himself on a more eligible occasion — no country doctor can afford to spurn a possibly lucrative acquaintance,” she added, impish dimples belying the mercenary motives she suggested.

Silenced by her logic, Edmund and I exchanged a sheepish glance. Edmund recovered more quickly than I. “But we have far more important matters to discuss. What gossip did you two old biddies dish over your tea?”

Since, with her fine complexion, excellent teeth, and elegant figure, Maria might have passed for a lady ten or more years her junior, to stigmatise her as an old biddy was a gross slander. But it earned him no worse a rebuke than an ironic raising of her eyebrow. “No one has left the village in a hurry, man or woman. There has been no talk of broken betrothals. All is, it seems, perfectly well. I must tell you, however, that Mrs. Hendry’s little serving-maid looked at me as if I were an avenging angel when I asked how she and her family did. And Mrs. Hendry reports more gossiping in corners, a greater sense of unease about the village, than is usual. In short, my dears, everyone knows something and no one dares admit anything.”

Edmund nodded.

“I rely on you to be our eyes and ears at Ewen Court tonight, Tobias,” he declared.

The murder might be on everyone’s lips, in everyone’s thoughts, but my father took a different view. “Investigating a crime! With some bumpkin sawbones!” he repeated, so that the words, originally spoken quietly, echoed round the dining room. “You are a man of the cloth, Tobias, not some flea-bitten parish constable.”

Ewen, perhaps shamefaced, though the amount of port he had consumed made it hard to tell, explained that Dr. Hansard was a medical man of considerable reputation. As for the constable, none of the small villages in the area had such a representative of the law.

“Then it is about time you did,” my father growled, topping up his own glass. Such were his potations that I was alarmed; many a time I had seen an evening like this followed by many days of painful, gout-ridden repentance.

Soon cards were called for. Although, unlike Edmund, I had no fear of gambling, I had neither taste nor money for the occupation. So at last I made my excuses and left, with an odd sense that my action irritated and pleased my father in equal measure.

I make no excuse for failing to concentrate on the journey home. My mind, when I let it wander, was still afflicted with images of the crucified man. Then there was my strange reconciliation with my father, in which nothing at all was said about the six or seven years since our last meeting. Titus was used to my absentmindedness, and was as surefooted as any horse, but even he could not have been calm in the face of two men jumping up in front of him and grabbing his bridle. Wrenching me from the saddle, they set about me with a will. I tried to fight back, but at last I lost my footing and slipped into the darkness surrounding me.

The first face I saw was the dour verger’s. Then Edmund’s swam into view.

“Stay where you are, Tobias. You have taken a rare beating. It is only thanks to Mr. Weller here that you escaped worse. He saw you lying in a ditch and gathered you up and brought you here to his own home.”

I managed to frame a few words of gratitude. “Titus? My horse, Mr. Weller?”

“Long gone. Run off. Stolen. Who knows?”

I could not hold back a deep groan. Titus and I were old friends — I had depended on him to take me to deathbeds and weddings alike.

“And I am come to take you home to Langley Park, where Maria is even now preparing you a bed. I don’t think any bones are broken, my young friend, but you are as bruised as if you had taken on the great Cribb himself. Let me help you into the fresh garments I have brought for you.”

Even as I pulled on my breeches — an agonising task — I heard a commotion outside the cottage. Against the low drone of the verger’s protests, a man’s voice rose in desperation and anger. Edmund went out to see what the matter was, returning long-faced.

“Here’s a pretty pickle. I have one patient who should be conveyed as swiftly as possible to his sickbed, and I have another who has been brought to bed of a child and is likely to die. Can you remain here, Tobias, awhile longer, if Mr. Weller permits?”

I forced my arms into my coat. “Indeed I cannot stay here. My place is with you and the dying woman, Edmund, as well you must know. If you would be kind enough to lend me an arm — and you, Mr. Weller, if you please — then I can pray while you heal.”

The wretched young man likely to lose his wife and his son was distraught twice over, weeping that his son would die unbaptised. I sent him reluctant but hot-foot to the church, for holy water and wine and wafer. His son would be baptised and his wife receive the Sacrament on her deathbed.

“So both live? Edmund, what a miracle! But Tobias should be in bed — no arguments now.”

I could not argue. Nor could I tell how long I slept.

There was no sign of Hansard when I awoke to find Maria sponging my face and hands with lavender water.

“Edmund left these drops for you,” she said, “Only think, he has already been summoned to Ewen Court to treat one of the gentlemen there. How wonderful it would be if he became their regular medical man.”

“It would indeed,” I agreed. Idly I wondered who needed his ministrations; I also wondered if he had been admitted to the front door, or if, like many a country doctor, had been forced to present himself at the servants’ entrance.

Voices downstairs and a tap at my chamber door took Maria from my side. In her absence I resumed my drowsing state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, dimly aware that whoever attacked me must have been provoked by our questions.

Edmund returned home with a huge basket of fruit from Lord Ewen’s succession-houses and an even larger smile. “You’ll never guess who my patient was,” he said gleefully, his enthusiasm distracting me as he embarked on the painful process of replacing my various bandages. “Lord Hartland himself! Yes, of course — the gout. I prescribed for him a lowering diet and perhaps a sojourn in Bath, where you might do well to accompany him to allow those bruises to heal. The inner ones, Tobias, as well as the outer ones. But perhaps you are two men who will always love each other more when you do not have to rub along cheek by jowl. Certainly neither of you is in any position to visit the other at the moment. Almost done — hold still awhile longer! But he wants above all to hand over your assailants to the justices. Like you, he believes Dr. Coates would be well placed to know the cause of all the unhappiness in the village, and has promised to locate him.”

“My father has friends in many of the embassies in Europe,” I said. “If anyone could run the man to earth, it is he. Thank you, Edmund, I am much more comfortable now.”

“You lie, of course,” he said cheerfully. “The pain may get worse before it gets better. But there is good news. Titus found his way back to his stable, safe and sound. And now I am off to Clavercote to see how my other patients do.”

Soon I was able to sit in a sunny corner of the Hansards’ terrace, absorbing the healing rays of a suddenly benign sun, which greened the hitherto joyless browns of the fields and promised a future of plenty — at least to those who still had unenclosed land to farm. Edmund wanted me to rest. But I insisted I needed to make three journeys — to my own dear church and to All Saints, to take divine service in each, and then to Ewen Court, to pay my respects to my father and thank him for his endeavours on my behalf.

Once again he surprised me by not asking for the latest news of our investigations.

“These strange potions this quack friend of yours insists I drink — will they kill me, do you think?” he demanded the moment I entered his chamber.

“If they are herbal remedies, based on the folklore round here, then you should obey to the letter his instructions,” I said cautiously. “Just because they are derived from innocent-looking flowers does not mean that they are harmless. But — in the quantities he recommends — are they doing you good?”

He surveyed his foot balefully. “He says himself he doesn’t know if it’s the plain regimen he insists I follow or the tinctures that are doing me good. Seems a decent enough fellow, Tobias.”

“He is. He has the most charming wife, too, possessed of true elegance of mind and person.”

“You are telling me this because there’s something you don’t want me to know,” he growled, looking at me from under his eyebrows. “Admit it!”

“I do indeed,” I said, not knowing whether to be pleased by this sudden allusion to the way he had always dealt with my childhood peccadilloes. “But it is not my secret I would betray if I told it.”

“Oh, everyone’s told me he married his doxy of a housekeeper—”

“Then everyone has misled you, sir. He married a lady who was someone else’s housekeeper — and was far more intelligent and learned than those who employed her. Indeed, it is she who introduced Edmund to many of the simple remedies he now employs. When you do me the honour of dining at the rectory, sir,” I pressed on bravely, “you will have the chance to meet them — for I would not invite the one without the other. And if Mama happened to be of the party, I would say no different.”

He looked suddenly furtive. “Your mother must know nothing of this, do you hear?” He pointed at his foot. “Or I shall never again have peace in my own home.”

We exchanged a smile: This was the first time we had ever entered such a conspiracy together.

Edmund’s other patients continued to do well. In due course, I was able to church the mother, having must needs baptised her first, Dr. Coates never having formally welcomed her into the church. Edmund and Maria sponsored her, Edmund regarding with covert concern the two frail men, her father and father-in-law, who accompanied her and her husband to the font. One was detailed to hold the lusty babe, who had had a much less formal baptism, but Maria soon seized him, for safety’s sake as much as anything else.

After the ceremony, the two old men hung back. And for the most solemn reason. They wanted to confess to Edmund and me that they had committed the vile murder and crucifixion. Along with horror, my first impulse was to laugh. How could these two living skeletons have overpowered such a powerful specimen? They insisted that they had acted in concert, to kill a vagrant who had in some unspecified way insulted them. Despite our questioning, they would say no more. So, in his capacity as justice of the peace, Edmund was bound to have them confined in the local lockup, a poor affair of but three pitiful rooms — two cells and the jailer’s office.

Justice soon took its course. They were found guilty after the most perfunctory of trials and condemned to death within the week. Privately, Edmund doubted whether the elder would survive to take his punishment.

Since the lockup could not provide the men with more than the most rudimentary sustenance, I was permitted to take food with me when I visited them each day to preach the Gospel and assure them of the forgiveness of sins.

I was not the only visitor, nor the only provider of food. On their last day, several of the womenfolk of the village came to say their farewells, bearing pies and a cake, so small the jailer made a sad jest about it not being big enough to contain a file.

So tender were their final embraces I could scarce forbear to weep. At last we all wended our way home; only Edmund and I could promise to be there to accompany them on their final earthly journey.

“Dead!” I had repeated, staggering back as the jailer broke the astonishing news. “What? Both dead?”

He had nodded, equally amazed. “You may see for yourself, Mr. Campion. There they lie, with as sweet smiles on their faces as if they had never done the dreadful deed for which they stood condemned.”

“But which, I am as sure as I am sitting beside you in this chaise, Tobias,” Edmund confided, as we returned to Langley Park, “they did not commit. When I anatomise them — and I promised it would be me and no other, remember — I am sure I will find signs of mortal illness in both. They were dying, Tobias, and knew it. They confessed — mark my words — to protect someone else.”

“But surely it is more than coincidence that they both died the night before they were to be hanged!”

“No coincidence at all. I can only surmise what was in those pies and cakes. And surmise, too, who put it in. There must have been half a dozen women bidding them goodbye, and others outside the jail. How can we bring them all to justice? Or any of them? Now, I intended to call on your father, while we are so close to Ewen Court: Will you accompany me?”

“This Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Coates of yours,” my father greeted us, “has not presented himself at any of our embassies in Europe, nor is he known by reputation. I tell you straight, gentlemen, there’s something havey-cavey about this vicar of yours. As Lord Wychbold here avers.”

The aged earl had ridden over to greet Lord Ewen and his guest and now sat with my father, an old political ally.

“I fear that in my youth I did great wrong, gentlemen,” he said. “But I repented and changed my ways. So imagine how I felt when none other than a man of the cloth invited me to join him in the most nefarious debauchery. It is my opinion and that of Hartland, here, that Dr. Coates never fulfilled his aim of escaping to the Continent. The wronged villagers must have got wind of his plans and decided to make his journey from this place his last.”

I frowned. “Surely they would do so secretly? And dispose of his body where it might never have been found?”

“Who knows what anger his regular betrayals of village maidens — aye, and some young men too! — may have caused? Anger that drives the perpetrator beyond common sense. Anger that wished you dead, Mr. Campion. Anger that quailed in the face of your kindness to sick strangers when you were so ill yourself.”

“So those two poor old men may have put themselves forward as soi-disant murderers,” my father mused, “in order to protect other men.”

“My theory exactly,” Edmund declared. “And what the men started, the women completed. Human justice has prevailed, even if state justice was gulled.” He stroked his chin. “I must ask my dear wife if she has any idea what herbs they employed.”

“I will be pleased to hear the answer myself,” my father said. “I propose to dine at this rectory of his before I return to Derbyshire. Young Tobias is such a scatterbrain he may well have engaged a cook who cannot distinguish culinary herbs from those with — let us say — a deeply soporific effect, and undoubtedly we need your expertise: yours and Mrs. Hansard’s, if you please.”

And to my joy we exchanged a second conspiratorial smile.

Copyright © 2011 by Judith Cutler