“I’ve forgotten to go to the bathroom — and just when I was getting nice and cosy.” She sighs. “I suppose I shall have to get out.”
“That’s one thing I can’t do for you,” says Albert.
“Snuggle down, dear. I shan’t be long.”
From the bathroom Rose collects a chair and takes it to the landing, stands on it and removes the bulb from the landing light. She returns the chair to the bathroom and collects the length of Albert’s fishing twine she has earlier concealed under the mat. She takes it to the top of the stairs and attaches it firmly to a nail in the skirting board.
Then she ties the other end to one of the banisters to form a tripwire over the top stair. In the dark at six in the morning he will never see it.
Rose returns to bed and gets in.
“Nighty-night, my darling.”
“Sleep well, sweetpea.”
They exchange the goodnight kiss and turn out their lights.
The Odstock Curse
“Finally, ladies and gentlemen, finally I want to come close to home, to your home, that is to say, to Odstock and the bizarre events that happened in your village almost two hundred years ago, events that I venture to suggest still have the capacity to chill your spines.”
Dr Tom Staniforth peered over half-glasses at his awestruck audience. Truth to tell, he felt uneasy himself, not at his spine- chilling material so much as the fact that he had consented to give this talk to an open meeting in a village hall on — of all evenings — October 31st. The timing had not been his suggestion and neither had the title, Horrors for Halloween. He dreaded the possibility that some university colleague had seen the posters or otherwise got wind that a senior member of the Social Anthropology Department was sensation-mongering in the wilds of Wiltshire. He had come simply because Mother had insisted upon it. Pearl Staniforth had arranged the whole thing as a personal tribute to a former colleague of her late husband. And now, wearing one of her appalling red velvet hats, Mother was seated beside this old gentleman in the second row giving a sub-commentary and beaming maternally at regular intervals.
He was almost through, thank God.
“Forgive me if what I have to say about the Odstock curse is familiar to most of you, but I suggest it can still bear telling. I thought it would be instructive in the first place to relate the legend and afterwards to pick out the truth as far as one can verify it from reliable sources — by which I mean parish records, legal documents and, perhaps less reliable, the memoir of a contemporary witness, the village blacksmith. In the anthropological scale of things, it is all very recent.” He paused, widening his eyes. Having abandoned his academic scruples, he might as well milk the subject for melodrama. Spacing his words, he went on, “In the churchyard is an old gravestone partially covered by a briar rose. The stone has an intriguing inscription: “ ‘In memory of Joshua Scamp who died April 1st, 1801. May his brave deed be remembered here and hereafter.’ ”
With strange timing came a distant rumble of thunder that cued an uneasy murmur in the audience. The storm had been threatening for hours.
“Thank you, Josh, we heard the commercial,” Tom Staniforth adroitly remarked, giving the opportunity for everyone to laugh aloud and ease the tension. “The brave deed is a matter of record. The unfortunate Mr Scamp allowed himself to be hanged for a crime he did not commit. He was a gypsy accused of stealing a horse, which was a capital offence in those Draconian times. The real thief and villain of the piece was his feckless son-in-law, Noah Lee, who not only stole the horse but planted a coat belonging to Joshua at the scene of the crime. Joshua was arrested. He refused to plead and maintained a stoic silence throughout his interrogation and trial. He went to the gallows — a public execution in Salisbury — without naming the true culprit. You see, his daughter Mary was expecting a child and he could not bear to see her bereft of a husband, facing a life of misery and destitution.
“Joshua’s heroic act might have gone unremarked were it not for the gypsy community, who protested his innocence. They recovered the corpse of the hanged man from the prison authorities, brought him home to Odstock and gave him a Christian burial. Hundreds attended. And later the same year the real horse-thief, Noah Lee, was arrested at Winchester for stealing a hunter. He was duly hanged, which you may think made a mockery of Scamp’s noble sacrifice. But the truth emerged because Joshua’s daughter Mary no longer felt constrained to remain silent. Great sympathy was extended to her and she was well cared for. And Joshua Scamp became a gypsy martyr. The briar rose was planted at the head of his grave and a yew sapling at the foot. Each year on the anniversary of his execution they would make a pilgrimage here, large numbers from all the surrounding counties.
“Now it seems that after some years the annual visit of the gypsies became a nuisance.” Another clap of thunder tested Staniforth’s powers of improvisation.
“Have it your way, Josh,” he quipped, and earned more laughter, “but there must have been some justification for the rector of Odstock to have sworn in twenty-five special constables to keep the peace. Well, the blacksmith’s memoir claims that the yew tree by the grave had become unsightly and the rector insisted that it was pulled up by the roots — a job that the sexton duly carried out. Unfortunately this measure deeply upset the gypsies and a mob of them descended on the church. There were scuffles as attempts were made to keep them off the sacred ground. The crowning insult was when Mother Lee, the Gypsy Queen, was evicted from the church, where she had come to pray, and the door locked behind her. The lady in question was venerated by the gypsies. She was the elderly mother of Noah Lee, the horse-thief, and she had earned enormous respect for disowning her son and praising the bravery of Joshua Scamp.
“Whatever the rights and wrongs of it — and I imagine there was cause for grievance on both sides — the gypsies were deeply angered. They took their revenge by breaking into the church and attacking everything inside. The pews, the windows, the communion plate, the vestments, the bell-ropes: nothing was spared. The constables were vastly outnumbered and powerless to prevent the desecration. This is all on record.
“Late in the evening, Mother Lee, having allegedly spent some hours in the Yew Tree Inn, returned to the churchyard where her people were still at work uprooting trees. Perched on the church gate, she called them to order and addressed a crowd that included most of the villagers as well as her own flock. Gypsies, as you know, have always claimed powers of divination. Speaking in a voice of doom Mother Lee pointed to the rector and told him that he would not be preaching in Odstock at that time next year. She told the church-warden who had engaged the special constables, a farmer by the name of Hodding, ‘For two years bad luck shall tread upon thy heels. No son of thine shall ever farm thy land.’ The sexton was informed that by next April he would be in his own grave. Two half-gypsy brothers unwise enough to have been employed as special constables were told, ‘Bob and Jack Bachelor, you will die together, sudden and quick.’ And finally she dealt with the door that had been slammed in her face: ‘I put a curse on this church door. From this time whoever shall lock ’un shall die within a year.’ And legend has it that all the curses came true.”
Tom Staniforth let the drama of the story hold sway for a moment. He looked out at his audience and made brief eye contact with several. How gullible people are, he thought. They patently believe this codswallop.
“However, I promised to deal in facts, not legend,” he resumed in a businesslike tone. “Let us see what survives of the Odstock curse when we test it against reliable sources. The parish records are helpful. They tell us that the rector retired within a year, so that part is true, though we have no contemporaneous evidence for the throat cancer which was said to have robbed him of his power of speech. Nothing is known of bad luck afflicting Farmer Hodding except that his wife had a series of stillborn infants, which was not unusual in those days. I was unable to verify the story that his crops failed and his herd had to be slaughtered after contracting anthrax. The sexton, it is true, appears in the records of burials a few months after he was cursed. As for the Bachelor brothers, they are not mentioned in the register again, but superstition has it that a pair of skeletons found in 1929 in a shallow grave on Odstock Down belonged to them.” Staniforth raised his hands to the audience. “So what? Even if they were the brothers, a supernatural explanation is unlikely. The possibility is high that the gypsies took revenge and disposed of the bodies. The so-called power of the gypsy’s curse is undermined if they had to resort to murder to make it come true. To sum up, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say that I find the Odstock curse a beguiling story that, sadly for believers in the occult, falls well within the bounds of coincidence and manipulation.”