“Littleton Grange,” he would say-“that was a place we took over. Now my great-grandfather had a story about one of the daughters there. Round about seventeen-forty-seven it would be. The young man she was to have married had got himself mixed up with the Jacobite rebellion, and she ran off to France and married him. That was the truth of it, but the family gave out she died of smallpox. It was an empty coffin they buried. My father remembered his grandfather saying so, and when they opened the vault to put away the last of the family a matter of seventy years ago, he was there, and he said it was true enough, for he saw the coffin himself, with the side fallen in and as empty as your hand.”
Then when they had been going on for a bit he would come out with a yam about Betsey Fulgrove who was ducked for a witch on Burlingham Green-“The same his Lordship picked to take his title from. And you can say what you like, but all I know is that when my grandfather had to see about the dry rot in the floor of what used to be her cottage they came on the bones of an infant wrapped in a fine linen sheet, so when Betsey died of her ducking-and die she did-it’s likely enough she got no more than her deserts.”
Edward found it extraordinarily soothing. Old Barr, with his ruddy, wrinkled face and the tang of the country on his tongue. Rural England, and the slow procession of the individual lives which go to make its history. The rise and fall of a family. The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s “Folly.” There was a fellow who said he had got a new way of brewing -that was in Barr’s great-grandfather’s time. There were fads, fancies and follies enough. There was sin, failure, and reviving. There was crime, and murder, and sudden death. There was the year when the Plague came to Embank. There was the year of the great storm that sent the spire of St. Luke’s in Littleton crashing right through the roof into the middle aisle. There were endless stories about an innumerable variety of people.
After a time it began to come slowly into Edward’s mind that whatever had happened to him, he did not stand alone. He was one of a company, even here in this small corner of England, who through the centuries had struggled, suffered, failed, sinned and repented, or sinned and sinned again-some leaving the world better for the struggle, and some leaving it worse. As the days went by, things in him which had been dead began to quicken-not all at once and not all the time, but now and again. For an hour-or two-for the part of a day or a night, there was a warming and a waking-a time when the currents of thought ran normally-hours of the night when he slept and did not dream.
On the day after Clarice had been up to London he sat in what Mr. Barr called the front parlour of the agent’s house. It had a bow window looking on to a neat garden, and a double set of curtains, lace ones next to the glass, and very old plush ones drawn across the bay. It was seven o’clock in the evening and they were drawn now, making the room a good deal smaller than it was by day. It was full of tobacco-smoke and rather hot. Impervious to the weather out of doors, when he was at home Mr. Barr preferred shut windows and a nice bright fire. He was a short man, broad in the shoulder and broad in the beam. His strong white hair curled all over his head, and it was his boast that he could still keep his books without a pair of spectacles to help him. If the parish register had not been there to give away his age, no one could have guessed him to be eighty-five. He might be going to retire, but Edward was under no illusions as to its being a very genuine retirement. As long as old Barr had a finger to poke into a Burlingham pie, that finger would not only be poked but it would be in it right up to the hilt and stirring vigorously.
The books had been closed. Old Barr was filling himself another pipe.
“And you needn’t think I’ll be interfering with you once I’ve handed over, because that’s the last thing I’ll do.”
Edward was on his feet and ready to go. He laughed and said,
“I certainly expect you’ll be doing it right up to the last, if that’s what you mean. And I’m not expecting anything else, so don’t worry about it.”
Old Barr chuckled.
“I’m not worrying. Never made a habit of it, and what you don’t make a habit of don’t have a chance of getting hold of you. Men don’t worry a lot, I find-not nearly so much as the women. Real bad worriers women are, and wives are the worst of the lot. One of the things that put me off marrying was hearing the way they go on. If it isn’t their husbands it’s their children, and if it isn’t their children it’s their clothes, or their hens, or their cats, or their dogs, or what their neighbors think. No woman’s going to put her worrying on me-that’s what I made up my mind to more than sixty years ago, and none of them has ever got me from it!” He chuckled and drew at his pipe. “I won’t say some of ’em didn’t have a pretty good try, but I held my own with ’em-I held my own. A respectable person to come in for the cooking and cleaning-that’s all I want, and that’s all I’ll have, and Mrs. Stokes, she does what I want. You can’t expect a woman not to talk, but she keeps it within bounds, and that’s as much as anyone can look for.” He dived into a baggy pocket and came out with a screw of paper. “Here’s that chap’s name-the one I was telling you about, Christopher Hale. Came to me in the night, and I got up and wrote it down and put it in my pocket. Must be getting old, or I wouldn’t have to wait for a name to come back to me. But here it is for you-Christopher Hale-drowned in the splash eighteen-thirty-nine. I was round by the churchyard this morning and I went and had a look. The stone was put up by Kezia, his wife, with a lot of fancy verses. And my grandfather always did say she believed her husband was murdered. Maybe he wasn’t, and maybe he was. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be so easy to drown natural in the splash-would it now?”
The small, very bright blue eyes of old Barr looked sharply at Edward from under a thatch of white woolly eyebrow.
Edward said,
“Oh, I don’t know-a chap might if he’d had one or two over the eight-just as William Jackson did the other day.”
The sharp gaze persisted for a moment. Then Mr. Barr swung round and kicked at a log in the fire. It broke in a shower of sparks. He came about again and said, bluff and casual,
“Oh, well, that’s as may be, but Kezia always thought her husband had been murdered.”
Edward went out into a dark cloudy evening. The air was cold and fresh after Barr’s fuggy room. There was a good driving road to Embank, and a lane about a mile away which connected it with Greenings, but he took the bridle-path through Lord Burlingham’s woods and came out upon the rough track which led down to the splash, a saving of nearly half a mile and pleasanter walking at that. He liked the crack of a stick under foot, the stir in the undergrowth which told of other creatures abroad on their no doubt unlawful occasions. Only who was man that he should say to fox or rabbit, badger, stoat or cat, “I only have the right to hunt”?
He walked on, not hurrying. The nights were getting colder. These woods were very old. There were oaks that must have stood five hundred years, yews that were older still. He had seen a map of the county dated 1469, and it showed forest right across this corner, and since then owner after owner had come and gone. Norman names, English names-tombs in the churchyard, brasses in the church. And in the end Lord Burlingham taking his name, as they all had done, from Burlingham village three miles away. He had been born Tom Thomson and had run barefoot and sold papers in the streets when he was a boy, and now he was Lord of the Manor like all the rest of them had been. The new trees grew up amongst the old, and they were strong and lusty.