The Wench Is Dead

Chapter Nineteen

Morse was glad that the Colonel had ignored Doctor Johnson's advice to all authors that once they had written something particularly fine they should strike it out. For Part Four was the best-written section, surely, of what was proving to be one of the greatest assets in Morse's most satisfactory (so far) convalescence; and he turned back the pages to relish again a few of those fine phrases. Splendid, certainly, were such things as "sated the sadistic fascination"; and, better still, that "ghoulish insensitivity". But they were more than that. They seemed to suggest that the Colonel's sympathies had shifted slightly, did they not? Where earlier the bias against the boatmen had been so pronounced, it appeared that the longer he went on the greater his compassion was growing for that disconsolate crew.

Like Morse's.

It was such a good story! So it was no surprise that the Colonel should have disinterred the bare bones of this particular one from the hundreds of other nineteenth-century burial-grounds. All the ingredients were there for its appealing to a wide readership, if once it got its foot wedged in the doorway of publicity. Beauty and the Beasts – that's what it was, quintessentially.

At least as the Colonel had seen it.

For Morse, who had long ago rejected the bland placebos of conventional religion, the facility offered to errant souls to take the Holy Sacrament before being strangled barbarously in a string seemed oddly at variance with the ban on the burial of these same souls within some so-called 'holy ground'. And he was reminded of a passage which had once been part of his mental baggage, the words of which now slowly returned to him. From Tess of the d'Urbervilles – where Tess herself seeks to bury her legitimate infant in the place where 'the nettles grow; and here all unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others… ' What was the end of it? Wasn't it – yes! – 'others of the conjecturally damned are laid'. Well, well! A bit of plagiarism on the Colonel's part. He really should have put quotation marks around that memorable phrase. Cheating just a little, really. Were there any other places where he'd cheated? Unwittingly, perhaps? Just a little?

Worth checking?

That floating chapel interested Morse, too, particularly since he had read something about it in a recent issue of the Oxford Times. He remembered, vaguely, that although the Oxford Canal Company gave regular monies towards is upkeep the boat on which it was housed had finally sunk (like the boatmen's hopes) and was terrestrialized, as it were, later in the century as a permanent chapel in Hythe Bridge Street; was now, at its latest conversion, metamorphosed to a double-glazing establishment.

Without looking back, Morse could not for the moment remember which of the other crew-members had been married. But it was good to learn that Oldfield's wife had stood beside her husband, for better or for worse. And a pretty bloody 'worse' it had turned out to be! How interesting it would have been to know something of her story, too. How Morse would like to have been able to interview her, then and there! The recipient (presumably she had been) of that terrible card addressed to her, and handed to the Chaplain at the very foot of the gallows, she must have found it well-nigh impossible to believe that her husband could commit so foul a deed. But then had been only a small role in the drama: only a couple of walking-on appearances, the first ending with a dead faint, and the second with a poignant little message from the grave. Morse nodded rather sadly to himself. These days there would be a legion of reporters from the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, and the rest, hounding the life of the poor woman and seeking to prise out of her such vital information as whether he'd snored, or been tattooed on either upper or nether limbs, or how frequently they'd indulged in sexual intercourse, or what had been the usual greeting of the loving husband after coming back from one of his earlier murderous missions.

We live in a most degenerate age, decided Morse. Yet he knew, deep down, what nonsense such thinking was. He was no better himself, really, than one of those scandal-sheet scouts. He'd just confessed – had he not? how much he himself wanted to interview Mrs Oldfield and talk about all the things she must have known. And what (sobering thought!) what if she had invited each of them in, one after the other, separately – and asked for £20,000 a time?

No chance of any interview or talk now though – not with any of them… But, suddenly, it struck Morse that perhaps there was: Samuel Carter's Travels and Talks in the Antipodes. That might be a most interesting document, surely? And (it struck Morse with particular pleasure) it would certainly be somewhere on the shelves of the three or four great UK libraries, the foremost of which was always going to be the Bodleian.

Lewis had already been given his research project; and work was noe beginning to pile up for his second researcher in the field: what with Jackson's Oxford Journal, and now Carter's book… Had the Colonel consulted that? Must have done, Morse supposed – which was a -little disappointing.

That Friday evening, Morse was visited by both Sergeant Lewis and Christine Greenaway, the latter suddenly changing her mind and foregoing a cocktail reception in Wellington Square. No trouble at all. Just the opposite.

Morse was very happy.