Cheating the Hangman by Judith Cutler Read Free Book Online Page A

spring-cleaned this every day until well into the autumn before she could declare herself satisfied. Meanwhile my coat would act as duster for the leather armchair to which he gestured me.
    Since he had a glass of Madeira on the reading stand beside his chair, I felt it would be churlish to decline whenhe raised the decanter in my direction. The aged butler who had grudgingly admitted me reappeared with a glass – I cannot say a clean glass – on a salver that only its tarnish told me was silver.
    ‘Without roundaboutation, Wychbold,’ I said, suspecting that to implore him as a humble clergyman would be less effective than to exhort him as an equal, ‘I am come to tell you that more must be done for your meanest tenants. I do not suggest you are obliged to build a model village for them, but the very least they need is a supply of fresh water and adequate drains. You treat them less well than the beasts of your fields, sir!’ Truth to be told, they too were unhealthy enough, with very poor pasturage to sustain them.
    He peered at me, though with little evidence of real interest. He might have been a tortoise, sniffing the air before sallying forth. But his eyes were sharper than they appeared. ‘Ah, Hartland’s errant son. I heard you were wont to tell your betters how to conduct themselves. Well, sir, I tell you that what happens on my land is none of your business. It was good enough for Adolphus Coates. It should be good enough for a mere curate.’
    I stifled an absurd desire to point out that I was no curate but a fully-fledged rector. ‘It is the duty of any Christian man to love his neighbour as himself. These people are more than neighbours: they are your tenants, whom it is your privilege to aid and protect. For heaven’s sake, My Lord, do you really want their death by starvation on your conscience?’ I knew his sort all too well. By giving his labourers a huge Harvest Home feast and their children a few sugar plums at Christmas, he prided himself on his generosity sufficiently tobe able to ignore them for the rest of the year.
    He muttered something, and rang the bell. For a moment I feared I was to be unceremoniously ejected; instead, he pushed my card in the direction of the butler. ‘See that Eacott waits upon Dr – what do you call yourself? – Dr Campion. And now, sir, good day to you.’ Donning a pair of spectacles, their tiny lenses like full stops between me and his hooded eyes, he turned his attention once again to the tome he had been perusing when I arrived.
    I would in courtesy have asked any other man the object of his scholarship, but it was clear that to give an explanation would have given him no pleasure at all.
     
    Whatever his instructions, no one from Lord Wychbold’s estate ventured to see me during Holy Week; the most charitable interpretation, if not one I clung to, was that Eacott had no wish to disturb me during such a sombre and prayerful period. A more prosaic explanation might lie in the weather, blowing up unseasonable thunderstorms despite the cold, particularly on the day I buried Eliza. There were no mourners except Edmund and her poor widower, who clutched a miserable bundle containing all his worldly wealth and muttered that since he had nothing in the area he might as well go and die a soldier.
     
    Both Good Friday services being concluded in Lenten bare, stripped-down churches, my own dear St Jude’s and All Souls’, Clavercote, I looked forward with solemn joy to the greatest day of the Christian calendar, Easter Day, when the very fabric of the buildings would be celebrating Christ’s resurrection. My engagement at All Souls’ meant I wouldmiss the innocent pleasure of the egg-rolling competition on the village green, in anticipation of which Mrs Trent and Susan had been hard at work boiling and dyeing a vast quantity of eggs, our chickens not having heard that they were not supposed to lay during Lent. Mrs Trent, unsure what celebration might take place