'Humf. Heh. Didn't arrive?'
The rattle of the train, Rampole thought, must shake Payne's bones apart. He blinked, and continued to massage his chin.
'No. I expect,' said the lawyer, suddenly pointing to the wine-bottle, 'he's had too much of that already. Perhaps Mr.-ah-Rampole can tell us more about it. I knew he didn't fancy his little hour in the Hag's Nook, but I hardly thought any prison superstitions would keep him away. There's still time, of course.'
This, Rampole thought, was undoubtedly the most bewildering gibberish he had ever heard. 'His little hour in the Hag's Nook.' 'Prison superstitions.' And here was this loose-jointed brown man, with the deep wrinkles round his nose, turning the whites of his eyes round and fixing Rampole with the same pale-blue, glassy stare he had fixed on the corridor window awhile ago. The American was already beginning to feel flushed with wine. What the devil was all this, anyhow?
He said, 'I–I beg your pardon?' and pushed his glass away.
Another rasp and whir in Payne's throat. 'I may have been mistaken, sir. But I believe I saw you in conversation with Mr. Starberth's sister just before the train started. I thought perhaps-?'
'With Mr. Starberth's sister, yes,' said the American, beginning to feel a pounding in his throat. He tried to seem composed. 'I am not acquainted with Mr: Starberth himself.'
'Ah,' said Payne, clicking in his throat. 'Just so. Well?'
Rampole was conscious of Dr. Fell's small, clever eyes watching through the joviality of his glasses; watching Payne closely.
'I say, Payne,' the doctor observed, 'he isn't afraid of meeting some one going out to be hanged, is he?'
'No,' said the lawyer. 'Excuse me, gentlemen. I must go and dine.'
Chapter 2
The rest of that ride often came back to Rampole as a sinking into the deep countryside; a flight into cool and mysterious places as the lights of towns went out with the hours, and the engine's whistle called more thinly against an emptier sky. Dr. Fell had not referred to Payne again, except to dismiss him with a snort.
'Don't mind him,' he said, wheezing contemptuously. 'He's a stickler for things. Worst of all, the man's a mathematician. Pah! A mathematician,' repeated Dr. Fell, glaring at his salad as though he expected to find a binomial theorem lurking in the lettuce. 'He oughtn't to talk.'
The old lexicographer did not even manifest any surprise at Rampole's acquaintance with the unknown Starberth's sister, for which the American felt grateful. Rampole, in his turn, refrained from asking questions about the odd statements he had heard that evening. He sat back, pleasantly padded by the wine, and listened to his host talk.
Although he was no critic in the matter of mixing drinks, he was nevertheless a trifle appalled at the way Dr. Fell poured down wine on top of stout, and followed both with beer towards the close of the meal; but he kept up valiantly with every glass. 'As for this beverage, sir,' said the doctor, his great voice rumbling down the car, 'as for this drink, witness what the Alvismal says: `Called ale among men; but by the gods called beer.' Hah!'
His face fiery, spilling cigar-ashes down the front of his necktie, rolling and chuckling in his seat, he talked. It was only when the waiters began to hover and cough discreetly round the table that he could be persuaded to leave. Growling on his two canes, he lumbered out ahead of Rampole. Presently they were established facing each other in corner seats of an empty compartment. Ghostly in the dim lights, this small place seemed darker than the landscape outside. Dr. Fell, piled into his dusky comer, was a great goblin figure against the faded red upholstery and the indistinguishable pictures above the 'seats. He had fallen silent; he felt this unreal quality, too. A cool wind had freshened from the north and there was a moon. Beyond the flying click of the wheels, the hills were tired and thick-grown and old, and the trees were mourning bouquets. Then Rampole spoke at last. He could not keep it back. They had chugged in to a stop at the platform of a village. Now there was absolute silence but for a long expiring sigh from the engine….
'Would you mind telling me, sir,' said the American, 'what Mr. Payne meant by all that talk about `an hour at the Hag's Nook, and-and all the rest of it?'
Dr. Fell, roused out of a reverie, seemed startled. He bent forward, the moon on his eyeglasses. In the stillness they could hear the engine panting in hoarse breaths, and a wiry hum of insects. Something clanked and shivered through the train. A lantern swung and winked:
'Eh? — Why, Good Lord, boy! I thought you knew Dorothy Starberth. I didn't like to ask..:.'
The sister, apparently. Handle with care. Rampole said:
'I just met her today. I scarcely know her at all.'
'Then you've never heard of Chatterham prison?'
'Never.'
The doctor clucked his tongue. 'You've got something out of Payne, then. He took you for an old friend… Chatterham isn't a prison now, you know. It hasn't been in use since 1837, and it's falling to ruin.'
A baggage truck rumbled. There was a brief glare in the darkness, and Rampole saw a curious expression on the doctor's big face, momentarily.
'Do you know why they abandoned it?' he asked. 'It was the cholera, of course; cholera-and something else. But they said the other thing was worse.'
Rampole got out a cigarette and lighted it. He could not analyse his feeling then, though it was sharp and constricting; he thought afterwards that it was as though something had gone wrong with his lungs. In the dark he drew a deep, breath of the cool, moist air.
'Prison,' continued the doctor, 'particularly prisons of that day, were hellish places. And they built this one round the Hag's Nook.'
'The Hag's Nook?'
'That was where they used to hang witches. All the common malefactors were hanged there, of course. H'mf.' Dr. Fell cleared his throat, a long rumble. 'I say witches because that fact made the most impression on the popular mind
'Lincolnshire's the fen country, you know. The old British called Lincoln Llyn-dune, the fen town; the Romans made it Lindum-Colonia. Chatterham is some distance from Lincoln, but then Lincoln's modern nowadays. We're not. We have the rich soil, the bogs and marshes, the waterfowl, and the soft thick air-where people see things, after sunset. Eh?'
The train was rumbling out again. Rampole managed a little laugh. In the restaurant-car this swilling, chuckling fat man had seemed as hearty as an animated side of beef; now he seemed subdued and a trifle sinister.
'See things, sir?' the other repeated.
'They built the prison,' Fell went on, 'round a gallows… Two generations of the Starberth family were governors there. In your country you'd call 'em wardens. It's traditional that the Starberths die of broken necks. Which isn't a very pleasant thing to look forward to.'
Fell struck a match for his cigar, and Rampole saw that he was smiling.
'I'm not trying to scare you with ghost stories,' he added, after he had sucked wheezingly on the cigar for a time. 'I'm only trying to prepare you. We haven't your American briskness. It's in the air; the whole countryside is full of belief. So don't laugh if you hear about Peggy-with-the-Lantern, or the imp on Lincoln cathedral, or, more particularly, anything concerned with the prison.'
There was a silence. Then Rampole said: 'I'm not apt to.laugh. All my life I've been wanting to see a haunted house. I don't believe, of course, but that doesn't detract from my interest…. What is the story concerned with the prison?'
' Too imaginative by half,'' the doctor muttered, staring at the ash on his cigar. 'That was what Bob Melson said. - You shall have the full story tomorrow. I've kept copies of the papers. But young Martin has got to spend his hour in the Governor's Room, and open the safe and look at what's in there. You see, for about two hundred years the Starberths have owned the land on which Chatterham prison was built. They still own it; the borough never took it over, and it's held in what the lawyer chaps call `entail' by the eldest son — can't be sold. On the evening of his
