Rampole said, "I suppose it revived the old superstition."
"It did. But then we've always had superstitions hereabouts. No, this business suggested something worse than that."
"You mean”
"Murder," said Dr. Fell.
He was bending forward. His eyes had grown large behind the glasses, and his ruddy face looked hard. He began to speak rapidly:
"Mind! I say nothing. It may be fancy, and it's no concern of mine. H'mf. But Dr. Markley, the coroner, said he'd got a blow across the base- of the skull which might have been caused by the fall, and then again might not. He looked, it seemed to me, less as though he'd had a fall than that somebody had trampled on him. I don't mean by a horse, either. Another thing: it was a damp evening in October, and he was lying in marshy ground, but that didn't seem to account wholly for the fact that the body was wet."
Rampole looked steadily at his host. He found that his fingers had closed on the arms of his chair.
"But you say he was conscious, sir. Didn't he speak?"
"I wasn't there, of course. I got the story from the rector, and from Payne, too; you remember Payne? Yes, he spoke. He not only spoke, but he seemed to be in a sort of ghoulish high spirits. Just at daybreak they knew he was dying. He had been writing, Dr. Markley said, on a board propped across him; they tried to prevent it, but he just showed his teeth. `Instructions for my son,' he said-Martin was in America, as I told you-'there's the ordeal to be gone through, isn't there?' "
Dr. Fell stopped to light his pipe. He pulled the flame down fiercely into the bowl, as though it might give him clearer sight.
"They hesitated in calling Mr. Saunders, the rector, because Timothy was an old sinner and a furious hater of the Church. But he always said Saunders was an honest man, even if he didn't agree with him, so they brought him out at dawn to see whether the old man would agree to prayers for the dying. He went in to see old Timothy alone, and after a while he came out wiping the sweat off his forehead. `My God!' says the rector, as though he were praying, `the man's not in his right mind. Somebody go in there with me.' `Will he hear the commitment?' says Timothy's nephew, who was looking queer. `Yes, yes,' says the rector, `but it isn't that. It's the way he's talking.' `What did he say?' asks the nephew. `I'm not allowed to tell you that,' says the rector, `but I wish I could.'
"In the bedroom they could hear Timothy croaking gleefully, though he couldn't move for the splints. He called out to see Dorothy next, alone, and after that Payne, his lawyer. It was Payne who called out that he was going fast. So just as daylight was growing outside the windows, they all went into the big oak room with the canopied bedstead. Timothy was nearly speechless now, but he said one clear word, which was, `Handkerchief,' and he seemed to be grinning. The rest of them knelt down while the rector said the prayers, and just as Saunders was making the sign of the cross, some froth came out of Timothy's mouth, and he jerked once and died."
During a long silence, Rampole could hear the blackbirds piping outside. The sun was growing long and wan in the branches of the yew.
"It's, odd enough," the American assented at length. "But if he said nothing, you've hardly any grounds to suspect murder."
"Haven't I?" said Dr. Fell, musingly. "Well, maybe not. The same night — of the day he died, I mean-the same night there was a light in the window of the Governor's Room."
"Did anybody investigate?"
"No. You couldn't get any of the villagers near there after dark for a hundred pounds." Oh, well! A superstitious imagination―" It wasn't a superstitious imagination," the doctor affirmed, shaking his head. "At least, I don't think so. I saw the light myself."
Rampole said, slowly, "And tonight your Martin Starberth spends an hour in the Governor's Room."
"Yes. If he doesn't funk it. He's always been a nervous chap, one of the dreamy kind, and he was always a little ticklish about the prison. The last time he was in Chatterham was about a year ago, when he came home for the reading of Timothy's will. One of the specifications of the inheritance, of course, was that he should pass the customary `ordeal.' Then he left his sister and his cousin Herbert in charge of the Hall, and returned to America. He's in England only for the the merry festivities."
Rampole shook his head.
"You've told me a lot about it," he said; "all but the origin. What I don't see is the reason behind these traditions."
Dr. Fell took off his eyeglasses and put on a pair of owlish reading-spectacles. For a moment he bent over the sheets of paper on his desk, his hands at his temples. -
"I have here copies of the official journals, made from day to day like a ship's log, of Anthony Starberth, Esquire, Governor of Chatterham Prison 1797–1820, and of Martin Starberth, Esquire, Governor 1821–1837. The originals are kept at the Hall; old Timothy gave me permission to copy them. They ought to be published in book form, one day, as a sidelight on the penal methods of that day." He remained for a time with his head down, drawing slowly on his pipe and — staring with brooding eyes at the inkwell. "Previous to the latter part of the eighteenth century, you see, there were very few detention prisons in Europe. Criminals were either hanged outright, or branded and mutilated and turned loose, or deported to the colonies. There were exceptions, like the debtors, but in general no distinction was made between those who had been tried and those who were awaiting trial; they were flung in willy-nilly, under a vicious system.
"A man named John Howard started an agitation for detention prisons. Chatterham prison was begun even before Milbank, which is generally supposed to be the oldest. It was built by the convicts who were to occupy it, of stone quarried from the Starberth lands, under the muskets of a redcoat troop commissioned by George III for that purpose. The cat was freely used, and sluggards were hung up by their thumbs or otherwise tortured. Every stone, you see, has meant blood."
As he paused, old words came unbidden to Rampole's mind, and he repeated them: " There was a great crying in the land…"
"Yes. A great and bitter one. The governorship, of course, was given to Anthony Starberth. His family had been active in such interests for a long time; Anthony's father, I believe, had been deputy sheriff of Lincoln Bourough. It has been recorded," said Dr. Fell, a long sniff rumbling up in his nose, "that every day during the building, light or dark, sun or sleet, Anthony would come riding out on a dappled mare to oversee the work. The convicts grew to know him, and to hate him. They would always see him sitting on his horse, up against the sky and the black line of the marshes, in his three-cornered hat and his blue camlet cloak.
"Anthony had one eye put out in a duel. He was a bit of a dandy, though very miserly except where his person was concerned; he was stingy and cruel; he wrote bad verses by the hour, and hated his family for ridiculing them. I believe he used to say they would pay for making fun of his verses.
"They finished the prison in 1797, and Anthony moved in. He was the one who instituted the rule that the eldest son must look at what he'd left in the safe of the Governor's Room. His governorship, I needn't tell you, was a trifle worse than hellish; I'm deliberately toning down the whole recital. His one eye and his grin…. it was a good job," Dr. Fell said, putting his palm down flat on the papers as though he were trying to blot out the writing―"it was a good job, my boy, that he made his arrangements for death when he did."