‘Every time of the year is a busy time. That’s no reason why we should never see each other.’
I thought how pretty she looked, leaning against the wall of the passage just next to one of my hunting prints—prettier even than Diana, her full but finely proportioned body shown off by her blue silk dress, yellow hair smoothly piled up to reveal her handsome ears. ‘I know,’ I said.
‘Then do something about it I’m your business partner and housekeeper and Amy’s stepmother and that’s it.’
‘Is it? I make love to you too, don’t I?’
‘Sometimes. And lots of people make love to their housekeepers.’
‘I haven’t noticed you being a very active stepmother, I must say.’
‘I can’t be it on my own. You and Amy have got to join in, and neither of you ever do.’
‘I don’t think this is the time, the right day to start—’
‘It’s the right day of all days. If you’ve got nothing in particular to say to me the day after your father dies, what would have to happen to make you talk? I can’t remember the last time we … No,’ she said, catching my wrists as I stepped forward and tried to embrace her, ‘I don’t count that. That’s not talking.’
‘Sorry. Well; when would you like to have a talk?’
‘Talk, not have a talk, and when’s no good. Hopeless. There’s no time now, anyway. You go and have your nap.’ She walked past me.
Some talk was certainly going to be called for, I reflected, not only in order to get Joyce into bed with Diana and me, but as prelude to that conversation. I must start working on that first thing in the morning. Meanwhile there was work (of an unexacting sort) to be done.
I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.
However, the book I had come to fetch lay in none of the categories mentioned. It was Joseph Thornton’s massive Superstitions and Ghostly Tales of the British Folk, in the second edition of 1838. I took it down from the shelf, poured myself a medium-sized Scotch (say a triple bar measure) and went and sat in my red padded-leather bedroom armchair.
Thornton devotes nearly three pages to Underhill in his chapter on ‘Magicians and Conjurors’, but the greater part of the passage concerns Underhill’s alleged reappearances in supernatural form during the century and a half or so after his death, together with an account of that other being said to have been heard making its rustling, crackling progress round the outside of the house after dark. The treatment of the murders and their aftermath is less full; through lack of time or sheer absence of surviving evidence, as opposed to just talk, Thornton failed to establish any tangible link between Underhill and the two unsolved killings, and had to be content with recording the strength and persistence of the tradition—among people in Baldock and Royston as well as in the surrounding hamlets—that the man had acquired the ‘mysterious and evil art’ of striking from a distance at those foolhardy enough to cross him, ‘of causing his victims to be torn to pieces by hands that were not mortal, so that a villager would not pass his house, by day no more than by night, for dread that the nefarious Doctor’s eye would light upon him and find in him a fresh object of fear or hate.’
With no clear idea of what I was looking for, I read inattentively through the four or five long paragraphs, or rather reread them for the dozenth time. Then, towards the end, I came to a couple of sentences I could not remember even having seen before:
‘… Such were the events attending the obsequies of this infamous creature, for such I hold him to have been at the least, whatever be the truth of the copious testimonies to his wizardry. His effects, whether by chance or by malignity, appear to have been dispersed: the greater proportion of his books and papers suffered destruction at a fire on his premises (for which I can find no cause adduced) the second day following his death; some small part, at his own request, was buried with his person; a fragment of a journal survives in the library of his college, All Saints’ at Cambridge. Of this relic it should be said, that it is not worth the pain of perusal, save by him whose curiosity in the manners of that still barbarous age may be sufficient to abate his natural aversion from the task.’
I thought I saw something faintly odd about the last part of this. Why should Thornton, normally keen to infect his readers with his own enthusiasms, to the extent of (perhaps too often) exhorting them to go and look up his sources for themselves, have mentioned this bit of journal, together with its location, and then warned them off taking the trouble to ‘peruse’ it? Well, any mystery here might easily be cleared up tomorrow. If that Underhill manuscript had been in the All Saints’ library in the early nineteenth century, there was a good chance that it was there still. Anyway, I was going to drive to Cambridge in the morning and find out. I could not have said why I was immediately so determined to do this.
Between the pages of the Superstitions concerned with Underhill, I used to keep a few papers relating to him that had ‘come with the house’, chiefly Victorian local-newspaper cuttings of no great interest, but including a statement made by a servant at an earlier period. In the past, I had dismissed this too as dull, and had not looked at it for four or five years, but now I felt it was important to me. I unfolded the stained, dry single sheet.
‘I, Grace Mary Hedger, chamber maid in the service of Samuel Roxborugh, Esquire, being xlix yrs of age, & a Christian, do solemly avouch and declare, that yesterday evening, the third day of March, Aº D. MDCCLX, at about v o clock, I enterd the little parlour [then part of what was now the public dining-room] about my tasks, & there saw a Gentleman standing near the window. His cloathes somwhat like the cloathes of old Revd Mr Millinship I saw when I was a young girl. His complection very pale, but scarrd wth red, his nose long & turnd to the side, his mouth like a woman’s. He apeard in distress of mind. When I asked him his pleasure he was there no longer, he did not quit the chamber, of a sudden he was not there. I was much affrighted & shreikd & swoond & my mistress came to me. I would not see such a Gentelman again for an hunderd poun. All this I swear.’
Grace Mary had added a careful signature and somebody called William Totterdale, rector of the parish, who had obviously written out the statement, had been a witness. Between them they had put my mind at ease, on one matter anyhow: the three accurately expressed facial details were enough on their own, without the reference to a kind of clerical garb to which the nearest parallel in Grace’s experience would have been what she remembered having seen an old clergyman wearing in the 1720s. I drank to her and blessed her for her powers of observation and recall.