The Hidden Man (23 page)

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Elizabeth always attended my inquests and I relied on her to let me know with candour where I had made my worst mistakes. But this time I already knew where I had been at fault.

‘I am very disappointed with myself,' I told her that night as we lay in bed. She had just closed
Pamela
and snuffed her candle.

‘How so, my dearest? Not about the inquest?'

‘Yes, I allowed my feelings about the trade in Africans to get the better of me. I should not have let the discussion go into the moral sphere. It was bad practice and to make it worse the public were joining in most disorderly. My father would never have permitted such a thing to happen in the conduct of an inquest.'

‘Well, I for one am proud of your words, husband, and I wish you had pressed the matter more. We know so little of this Guinea Trade, because no one is talking about it openly. It appears to be a mightily secret process, though one that makes a great deal of money. But people ought to be powerfully interested in the philosophical question that you put to the court – the question of the negroes' humanity?'

‘And what do
you
say to the Trade, Lizzie?'

‘I am with those in the audience that called out against it. I say that the negroes are people, and have immortal souls. And I say too that I don't understand how in conscience one can buy and sell such beings.'

‘Mr Jackson says these traders are righteous men, who are bringing the negro to Christianity.'

Charmingly, she laughed.

‘I doubt it. Their purpose is to make money, not Christians! And our Lord would not endorse that purpose, or their methods, I think. The camel and the needle's eye – remember?'

‘Yet if there are indeed men among them who wish to bring the Africans to Christianity, perhaps they at least should be applauded. It is hard to judge right and wrong in a cloud of ignorance.'

‘Tybalt Jackson is not a man of means anyway – not from his appearance. I suppose he is a lowly clerk in the service of rich masters. He does their bidding.'

‘Did he do that today, though? When he first came forward to speak, I thought that he was spurred on by the warmth of his blood; and that when he sat down he became increasingly guarded, and afraid of what he was revealing.'

‘I saw the same, my love. Mr Jackson started his evidence as a bull and finished it as an owl.'

I was seized with sleeplessness that night. I had confronted during the day, for the first time, the question of slavery and the traffic of people as if they were cattle. Of course I knew this had existed in the ancient times, and never been opposed by great men. Pericles, Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar all had been the owners of slaves. But in our own modern world we had begun to prize the liberty of men.

People say the African has a black skin and a thick skull and wears no clothes, and so cannot be the same as ourselves. I thought about this. In his essay on cannibals Montaigne advises not to take things on trust from vulgar opinion, but to look at them with the eye of reason. Reason says the negroes are not the equal of us in many things: they cannot build great warships, great cathedrals or engines of great power. They hold perhaps to a rudimentary philosophy of life, and to religions of blood sacrifice, fire-worship and the like. But in these things, they are not so different from our own ancestors, as may be learned from the scholarly writings of Sir Thomas Browne in the last century – and we do not call our ancestors anything but our family. Clothing and a fair skin are not tokens of humanity, but of living in a cold climate, out of the sun. Even cannibals, Montaigne finds, are very sensible people and, though different from ourselves, are not in everything inferior. In some ways they are better than we are.

There is another side of this, I told myself. Some people cannot be trusted with freedom and to enslave them is best, while they learn how to be free. That is what we do with children. They are beneficially the property of their parents until they reach the age of freedom. Might that not also be the case with the negro when he comes to the civilized world?

I had decided I must seek out Jackson tomorrow and question him further. I burned to know for my own satisfaction the condition of the slaves and whether they can be civilized. But now I was becoming drowsy, and my mind began drifting on to disparate things – the coat that I would wear tomorrow, the lovely blue of the sky, the beauty of my wife sleeping beside me, how I must pay the roofer that patched the hole in our thatch, the worn cover of my copy of Hobbes's
Leviathan
, that took such a pitiless look at the savage beneath the skin of the civil man. Yes, I thought, I might get that book down and see what it says on the matter that had been occupying me.

A furious thunder shattered these peaceful thoughts, and all peace throughout the house. I started up, and so did Elizabeth.

‘What's that?'

It took me a moment to realize that someone was hammering at the front door, which lay immediately below one of our bedroom windows. I eased from the bed and slid the window open.

‘Who's there? And what do you want?'

There was a small group of men gathered round the door, one or two of them holding lanterns, others with poles and one, I saw, with a musket. They all started shouting up at me.

‘Send down the Coroner, if you please.'

‘Urgently wanted.'

‘Are you Mr Cragg? We need to speak to Mr Cragg.'

‘They've found a dead man.'

‘They've got a corpus.'

‘Dead he is, up on Moor.'

 

Chapter Seventeen

T
HERE HAD BEEN
no time to fetch a horse, and so we walked it. The dawn was breaking over to our right, where the hills made a dark barrier of the horizon. Morning birds darted along the hedgerows and, as the light crept out across the land, rabbits hopped here and there and a hare moved with its limping, wary walk alongside a ditch. Most of the night creatures were fast in their nests and burrows: I did see one late fox slinking guiltily away from us as we entered upon the Moor, and there was the slightest smudge of white on the edge of a copse as a badger went home to bed. Above all, the night's cloud had moved away to the north and the sky was clearing. It promised to be a warm day.

The men with me were an assorted group that had been out all night after game. They were excited, and a little overawed by the discovery they had made and, as we walked, I tried to get a clearer idea of how exactly it had happened.

‘It were a man, Mr Cragg, lying flat out on the Bale Stone. I saw him but I didn't know him. No, his face were battered so bad we couldn't recognize him, not from ground. So Michael got up to shine lamplight on his face – I got up on the Stone, see, and they handed me up the light and, as I stood over him, I brought the light across and I saw the terrible thing right below me. We could all see it from where we stood. There were this great stake right through his heart, a terrible rough stake of wood driven deep into the chest. No chance that he was alive. No chance. We left him as he was with Leo Porter and two others to look after him and so we came down, and we decided amongst ourselves it should be you, Mr Cragg, we should knock up, and that you would know what to do.'

I assured them they had done the right thing.

‘Did anyone find him first?' I asked, ‘Or were you all in a group?'

‘Not one group. Different groups. It were me and Simon here and John Bailey that's stayed up there with the corpus that saw it first. The rest came up later.'

The speaker was a man called Edward Etherington, a carpenter, whom I knew to be literate and fairly sensible on the whole. I marked him out in my mind as the first finder.

We reached the Stone after a stiff walk of less than twenty minutes. Now morning sunlight was bathing the Moor, making dew and cuckoo-spit glisten and picking out the green of the trees, the yellow of gorse and the velvet purple of the heather. The combination of silvery early light and receding dark made my senses dance, heightened as they were by sleeplessness.

Three men emerged from the Stone's shadow to greet us. One of them, Porter, hailed me and cheerfully volunteered the latest news.

‘He hasn't stirred, Sir. He hasn't uttered.'

‘Have you seen anyone else about?'

‘No. No one's been near.'

I could see the outline of a man's bulk lying on top of the Stone.

‘Here, Sir, you should get on top for a look.'

Porter, a man built like a bear, laced his hands to make a stirrup. I planted my foot on it and he heaved me easily up until I stood on the Stone beside the corpse, which lay on its back, splayed and empty of life.

The sun was high enough now and there was no need for a lamp. I could see how grievously the fellow's face had been assaulted. It was glazed in blood and there was little left of its original features, an ear half torn off, the nose and cheekbones smashed, and the jaw taken right out its hinges by what must have been a scything sideways blow. The eyeballs caught a ray of the sun, but nothing could animate their rigid stare.

The Stone was large enough to enable me to walk all round the body. I did so, noting that the coat, breeches, shirt and stockings were of very ordinary cloth and that the one visible shoe – the other being absent – was of sturdy manufacture. And, although I could never have sworn to the identity of the man from what was left of his face, I knew who he was. I had seen all of these pieces of clothing in my courtroom on the previous day, when they had been worn by Tybalt Jackson, insurance agent of Bristol. Now they covered Mr Jackson's mortal remains.

I knelt, pulled out the tail of his shirt and pushed my hand under it, up as far as the armpit. Fidelis had taught me that I should do this on every occasion that I came across a body, to test the temperature. In this instance the flesh felt cool by comparison with my own body heat and I turned my attention to the object jutting, some way out of the vertical, from Jackson's chest, with about three inches of it showing. The men's enthusiastic evocation of a ‘great stake' driven into his heart had made me visualize something the thickness of a fencing post, sharpened and malletted with mighty blows through the body. It was nothing like that, but thinner and unshaped, like a piece of wood split for kindling. I grasped it and pulled upwards. It must have penetrated between two ribs, for it was wedged quite firmly. I left it in place.

I took out my watch. A quarter past five. The sooner Fidelis got out here the better for we could not leave the body long exposed to the June sun. I vaulted down from the Stone and asked which of the men could stay and assist. I really did need help: a messenger to convey a summons to Dr Fidelis in Fisher Gate and then, unfortunately but inescapably, to Sergeant Mallender at his house in Tithe Barn Street; and I required some of them to fashion an awning for the body, and then a litter, in order to be ready, when the time came, to carry it back to town. But I also wanted to detain as many of these men as I could, to delay by a little the spread of the news. In truth, I had little real hope of this. The word would be carried with the baker's boy and the dairyman, so that by breakfast-time it would be in every house and hovel in town. But I did not relish the lot of gawpers that would be trailing out here as a consequence.

Two or three of the men nevertheless insisted that business called them away, though the greater part were so much enjoying the dramatic moment that they did not want it to end. While Etherington got a group of them to work on the awning – saying they would improvise a screen for the body from the long-nets they had with them, which would later form the bed of a litter to carry it – I set to work speaking to each of the men, starting with those wanting to leave us.

The picture that I formed from these discussions was inconclusive. The men divided into three groups. Each had been out on the Moor, or ranged further off into the Fulwood or over the fields beyond Cadley, and had come together around the dead body after Etherington, with his brother Simon and brother-in-law Bailey, had first found it. Etherington's own group had only just come out from town. They had set the Stone as their meeting place, being intent on erecting long nets nearby in which to drive the morning's crop of rabbits as they ventured out of their burrows. A second group, that came up shortly after, were five fellows with a pair of lurcher dogs. They had been up all night beating the edge of the woods, hoping for a deer but now bringing home only a brace of hare. Finally there had been Leo and his son, a lad of sixteen built along similar lines to his father's massive frame, who were on their way back after a night's fishing on the little Savage River above Cottam Mill.

None of these ten men reported seeing or hearing anything suspicious on the Moor. I had made sure to take each one apart from his fellows to question him, but separately no man had anything to disclose that contradicted what another had said – except that both Leo and young Alan Porter claimed to have caught the fine pike that lay in their fish bag.

A drumming of hooves was heard coming from the north of us, and I recalled that was where the path of the racecourse passed the Stone. I looked and saw John Barton with a stable boy, each of them riding a strapping courser heavily rugged and bonneted.

Barton pulled up his mount and called out when he saw me.

‘Cragg!'

I walked towards him and down the shallow bank until I stood on the track itself.

‘Someone was fatally attacked here last night,' I said. ‘Have you seen anything? Heard anything?'

Barton shook his head.

‘No. This is our first string to come out. I was dreaming in bed until twenty minutes ago, all night undisturbed since ten o'clock.'

He looked at the boy.

‘Seen anything suspicious last night, Bobby?'

Bobby shook his head.

‘So who's dead?' Barton went on, turning back to me. ‘Anyone I know?'