Chapter 2: THE COTTAGE

It is a dreary damp, late summer day and the coach shudders as wheels crash into pothole after pothole, the degree of depth and danger disguised by the many full to the brim puddles strewn over the road surface, there barely being a yard length of flat road surface in the entire Weald and Downland of this county. Lord Ferdinando Briant, pulls back a drawn curtain to glance out of the unglazed coach window. There is little to see as the mist from the fields reduces visibility to less than a few feet past the thick hedgerows. At least, he thinks, there was no low early evening sun to further ravage his ruined face, sensitive as it is to the slightest sunlight, an incurable condition from which he has always suffered. The coach judders once more as another pothole threatens to wrench off the wheels and toss his Judicial Lordship unceremoniously from his wooden seat. Then the coach finally lurches to a halt.

“Mud, my Lord, ‘tis naught but Sussex clay in these ‘ere parts,” the coachman Handley apologises, while he and his cousin Jones levers the wheel out of the rut. “The land round here were great for growin’ forests but when they’d cleared the trees for iron smelting in the last century or three, there weren’t nothin’ to suck up the rain water what now lies here, stagnant upon the impenetrable clay.”

Ferdinando sniffs in reply. The air smells damp, familiarly foul with rot and decay.

“Thee looks tired, my Lord,” Handley ventures quietly, the devotion to his master evident, “more than I’ve seen before. Does thy time draw near for...”

“Retirement? Aye, I feel my years, John, but I’ll rest up this winter, and maybe work another five years, then we can all go home to stay for the duration and you can train up your eldest to serve me once more.”

He consults his trusty John Bennett of Clerkenwell watch, an amazing instrument which is rarely out by ten minutes a day. He had set off ten hours earlier, but ‘twas necessarily stopped in Swainley, three miles away, for four of those hours. In six hours on the road, the coach had traversed twenty eight miles of mud, with yet two more miles to go! Nine leagues, faster than walking, he thinks, but barely.

He left Whitehall yesterday after lunchtime and happily travelled 32 miles on good roads before arriving at an inn by tea-time; today he’ll be lucky to arrive at Dellamere Manor Hall, the home on the Alburys, before dark. Insufferable roads, he mutters, but travel as this he must, only witches apparently fly by broomsticks! He had barely dozed in the bucking coach thus far and he was more than ready for a hot meal and a quiet bed.

A fat honey bee flies slowly past him, going no faster than his coach had at any single time today, and settles precariously upon a dusty Ragged Robin at the roadside, gathering nectar, before wriggling free of the clutching bloom and flying off.

Briant smiles at the bee’s movements. Ferdinando loves bees. But he could not yet return to his neglected Cornish estate, to his beloved hives, while his superstitious King denies his retirement until infirmity or death rendered his service useless to the Crown. Almost 70, according to his Manor’s parish records, the Lord Chief Justice Investigator feels he has earned his rest after fifty years of toil at his inherited career. His grandfather and great great grandfather before him had been Judges or “WitchFinder Generals”, serving Crown and or Parliament, until aged retirement to the ancestral estate relieved them of their appointments, and he was forced by duty to follow their lead, though he’d never seen a true witch and is entirely convinced in his doubts as to their very existence.

It is an hour later that the coach limps under the rapidly darkening skies into the rural village of Dellamere and stops outside the first cottage showing signs of life by a flickering light within, to ask directions to the Hall. It is a crisply whitewashed cottage, its stout oaken frame black in the twilight. Ferdinando barely hears the exchange between the coarse coachman and gentle burr of the tall, dark haired lady giving directions.

“The lady of the ‘ouse, ‘as ‘eard tell we’s comin’, my Lord. She reckons the hall belongin’ to Sir Valentine Albury, be past the Green an’ Church, an’ up the first lane on the left, and is most likely closed up for the night,” Handley, reports back to the Judge. “An’, she says, ‘The Fightin’ Cocks’ inn here be a rough billet at best o’ times, and present full to burstin’ of trav’llers ‘ere for the barley harvest gatherin’. The lady offers a spare room with a comfortable bed for thee tonight, an’ a barn by the side for the horses, with a warm dry loft above for Jonesy ‘n’ me to bed down. A groat a night for the lot of us, she says, or one-an’-six for the week. And, my Lord, she ‘as a mutton stew on’t parlour fire what smells like it wus heaven sent!”

Ferdinando sniffs, conscious that this is proving a habit, and decides to decline the spinster’s offer, although he hears a voice inside his head, curiously, that of a young woman’s, speaks to him, ‘come in and save me, only thee can save me’ over and over again, like a mantra. The Judge shakes his head at his foolish thoughts, yelling for the coach to move onto the Manor Hall.

The Hall is completely in darkness, beyond a smooth and serviceable gravel drive up to the front door. He descends from the coach, while Handley raps the handle of his whip on the front door. No answer.

The Hall is closed fast and no one opens, even in the King’s name, while Lord Ferdinando Briant’s name announced to the fastened door cuts even less ice.

From inside the Hall, a woman finally speaks in harsh tones, thick with the local Sussex accent and muffled by the thick wooden door, and tells him to “Bugger off, there be no one enterin’ this house at dead o’ night, no matter who ‘ee says ‘ee be!”

The girl’s voice, the same young woman he heard inside his head at the white cottage, says to him, ‘come back to the cottage, all will be well, trust in me, Nando, trust in me.’

No one had called him Nando for more than fifty years, it took his mind back to the West Country, to a different time, of warm pleasant unhurried summers and the contented buzzing of bees, and memories of another loving housekeeper, Anna, who cared for him on his long road to recovery, almost a whole lifetime ago.

Ferdinando decides to return to the white cottage.

Handley, the senior coachman, grins when given his instruction, remembering, the Judge has little doubt, the mutton stew aforementioned. It would be rude fare and a rough billet no doubt, Ferdinando thinks, but a warm welcome was preferable to the present stalemate outside the darkened Hall.

Ferdinando steps from the coach immediately it returns to the cottage, its painted whiteness glowing in the rising moon on his stride up to the front door. The cottage’s thatch roof looks serviceable from what he can make out in the rising moon, his eyes better than most a’night. He peers through the cottage window, where a cheery fire could be seen blazing in a snug parlour within. Having heard his coach’s return, the lady of the house has opened the front door, standing straight, tall and slim, framed dark and featureless with the light behind her in her doorway, surrounded by climbing roses in full late summer bloom. Well, he thinks, here’s a promised welcome, so why not stay here?

“Welcome, my Lord Chief Justice,” she says in a soft warm gentlewomanly voice, cultured, but with a charming hint of the Sussex burr which had otherwise sounded so alien and coarse on the lips of the Manor Hall’s housekeeper. She stands aside and, with a gesture in the form of a low waving hand, welcomes him into her home, then waving high to the coachmen to enter the kitchen around the side of the cottage. “Come to the back door when you are ready to eat,” she entreats Handley and Jones, “there be water already set out for you in the barn to wash. So, my Lord, you find no welcome at the Hall?”

“Aye, you were correct, Madam, no welcome was forthcoming,” Ferdinando replies as he enters the cottage, straight into the cosy front parlour, “I feel a cheery invitation more preferable to an unwanted intrusion, besides, I have no wish to be influenced in my judgements by close association with parties involved in this curious happenstance.”

“Ah,” she smiles, “in that case you might wish to reconsider staying here, my Lord. I confess I am the mother of the man accused of some unstated wrong, the Headman of our little Borough here, Benjamin fforde. Although I have no wish to influence your judgement in this matter, I do believe every uttered word from my son, and always have done throughout his upbringing.”

“I see,” Ferdinando nods gravely, the aroma from the wholesome mutton stew already filling his nostrils, “I applaud your open honesty, Madam, but, between you and I, I have already eliminated any lingering suspicions of guilt on your horseless Headman Mister Benjamin fforde’s part. We have sworn affidavits that state your son was fast asleep when Sir Valentine went mad, and upon waking was commendably fearless in defending his Master’s person from harm by his similarly possessed tenants.”

“I see. Then, my relationship being no undue impediment to your stay, I will show you to your room, my Lord, where a basin and jug awaits you to refresh yourself after your journey, while I serve the bread and stew to your servants.”

She leads the way up a dark staircase, onto a spacious landing, where a single fat candle burns on a side table. From there she guides him through a doorway to a comfortable bedchamber to the left of the house, which has a window looking onto the village green and a second casement facing east, where she promises the early morning light would see him wake refreshed.

“Alas, Madam, my skin has a complaint since childhood, that is sensitive to bright daylight. I fear I will have to draw the curtains against the dawn.”

The woman seems to examine his poor ravaged face, pockmarked and painfully reddened either side of his axe-like beak, a visage fit to place fear into accused innocents and pump mortal dread into the guilty. Yet she smiles pleasantly at him and nods. “The curtains are thick and lined, my Lord, I’m sure you’ll be perfectly comfortable here.”