The Meaning of Night

from her again, but no letter came. Six months passed, sir, six whole months, and I was going quite mad with worry – you ask Mrs Rowthorn if I weren’t. So John Brine, to set my troubled mind at rest, says he would go down to London and find her and send word back. Oh, sir, how I trembled when his letter came – and weren’t I right to tremble! I couldn’t open it, so I gave it to Mrs Rowthorn and she read it to me.

‘It was the worst news that there could be: my poor sister had been murdered by that brute – savagely beaten, so bad, they said, that you could hardly recognize her darling face. But he had been taken, and would stand trial, and so I took some comfort that he would be hanged for his evil deed, though that was too good for him. But even that comfort was denied me, for some villainous lawyer got the jury to find another man guilty. They said that this other man had been her lover! My Agnes! She’d never do such a thing, never. So her husband was set free to murder again, and the other man was hanged – though Lord knows he was as innocent as my poor dear sister.’

She ceased, tears beginning to well up in her pretty brown eyes. I laid my hand on hers, to offer some comfort before asking my final question.

‘What was the name of your sister’s husband, Mary?’

‘Pluckrose, sir. Josiah Pluckrose.’

^*[‘The written word remains’. Ed.]

^*[‘HENRY by the grace of God King of England Lord of Ireland Duke of Aquitaine to his well- beloved liegeman Maldwin Duport of Tansor, knight, Greeting.’ The writ, which is of great historical interest, is now in the Northampton Record Office. The Latin text was printed in full in Northamptonshire History, vol. xiv (July 1974), with a translation and commentary by Professor J. F. Burton. Ed.]

25

In limine^*

Pluckrose.

I remembered the cynical smile of contempt he had given the jury when he was acquitted of the murder of his wife, Mary Baker’s sister, Agnes. ‘You fools,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘You know I did it, but we’ve been too clever for you.’ And he had me to thank – me! – for escaping the noose.

He was a beast of a man, tall and heavy, though quick on his feet, with shoulders even broader than Le Grice’s, and huge hands – one of which, the right, was lacking an index finger, amputated accidentally during his butchering career. Now, I am afraid of no man; but there was something about Josiah Pluckrose that I did not care to confront: an intimation in those narrow eyes of a raw, unbridled capacity for purposeless and terrible violence, rendered all the more unsettling by the suavity of his dress and manner. If you met him casually in the street, by his appearance you would almost think him a gentleman – almost. He had long ago scrubbed the gore of Smithfield from his fingers, but the butcher was in him still.

Everything about him proclaimed Josiah Pluckrose to be guilty of the remorseless murder of his poor wife following some trivial domestic disagreement; and yet, because of me, he had cheated the bells of St Sepulchre’s,^* and lived to murder again. After his acquittal, he had returned to his house in Weymouth-street, in defiance of his neighbours and opinion generally, as if nothing had happened. Of course, Mr Tredgold had never expressed any wish to know how the trick had been done. I had seen the excellent M. Robert- Houdin^† perform in Paris, and had witnessed for myself the effect of the art of illusion, when practised by a master, on those who wish to believe in the impossible. I could not use mirrors, or the power of electricity, to produce the impression of guilt that would condemn an innocent man, and deny Calcraft,^‡ or some other nubbing cove,^§ the pleasure of stretching Pluckrose’s miserable neck. Nevertheless, I had other well-tried means at my disposal, just as productive of complete persuasion in my audience: documents, apparently in his own hand, setting forth the unfortunate dupe’s guilty association with Mrs Agnes Pluckrose, nee Baker; and witnesses – some ready to swear to the furious temper of the man, and the fact of his being in the house on the fateful afternoon, and others to affirm the presence of Pluckrose in a public-house in Shadwell at the time of the murder. Having done their work, the witnesses – carefully chosen, exhaustively coached, and extremely well paid – had then sunk back into the deeps of London.

And so it was that, following the conclusion of a new investigation, Mr William Cracknell, chemist’s assistant, of Bedford-row, Bloomsbury, stepped out of the Debtors’ Door at Newgate, one cold December morning, to keep his appointment with Mr Calcraft, whilst Josiah Pluckrose, swinging the heavy silver-headed stick with which he had smashed his poor wife’s skull, and wearing the boots that had crushed her ribs as she lay dying, sauntered forth that same morning with a view to taking the air on Hampstead-heath. After the trial, I was not in the least inclined to congratulate myself on my triumph, and neither I nor Mr Tredgold felt any satisfaction that our client had gone free. And so Pluckrose had been forgotten.

After Mary had gone, and I was walking about the stable-yard, I could not help recalling the evidence of Mr Henry Whitmore, surgeon and apothecary of Coldbath-square, Clerkenwell, concerning the violence done to the person of Agnes Pluckrose. Overcome by rage, I left the yard in a kind of daze, walking at a furious pace out into the darkness.

Mary’s tale of her sister’s seduction by this brute had moved me more than I would have thought possible. But there was more than Pluckrose to consider; there was Phoebus Daunt – again! He seemed to haunt me at every turn, a jarring, discordant basso continuo to my life. I was completely baffled by the association revealed by Mary. What common interest, I wondered in bewilderment, could possibly unite this murderer and the son of the Rector of Evenwood?

After wandering aimlessly in this morbid state for an hour or more through the Park, I found myself at the foot of a steep track that wound its way up to the Temple of the Winds. Feeling disinclined to go back to the Dower House just yet, I followed the track up the artificial mound on which the Temple was built, eventually reaching a short flight of steps leading up to a terrace. Here I turned for a moment to look back across the Park to the twinkling lights of the great house.

I was about to make my way back down the steps when I noticed that the door of the Temple’s North Portico was open. On an impulse, I decided to look inside.

The building – partly modelled, like the more famous version at Castle Howard, on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza – was in the form of a domed cube, with four glazed porticos set at each point of the compass.^* The interior, which, even in the deepening gloom, I could see was decorated in superb scagliola work, smelled of damp and decay, and as I entered I could feel myself treading on fragments of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. In the midst of the space stood a round marble-topped table, and two wrought-iron chairs; a third chair lay on its back some distance away. On the table stood a stub of candle in a pewter holder.

I placed my hat and stick on the table, took out a lucifer^* from my waistcoat pocket, and proceeded to light what remained of the candle, followed by a cigar to cheer my dismal and unsettled mood. The