Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 7: Off With His Head, Singing in the Shrouds, False Scent

Here, five men jumped: cleverly, with concentration and variety. For one dance they had bells clamped to their thick legs and, as they capered and tramped, the bells jerked positively with an overtone of irrelevant tinkling. For another, they were linked, as befitted the sons of a blacksmith, by steel: by a ring made of five swords. They pranced and leapt over their swords. They wove and unwove a concentric pattern. Their boots banged down to the fiddle’s rhythm and with each down-thump a cloud of dust was bumped up from the floor. The men’s faces were blank with concentration: Dan’s, Andy’s, Nat’s, Chris’s and Ernie’s. On the perimeter of the figure and moving round it danced the Old Guiser, William Andersen. On his head was a rabbit-skin cap. He carried the classic stick-and-bladder. He didn’t dance with the vigour of his sons but with dedication. He made curious, untheatrical gestures that seemed to have some kind of significance. He also chided his sons and sometimes called them to a halt in order to do so.

Independent of the Guiser but also moving as an eccentric satellite to the dance was ‘Crack’, the Hobby Horse, with Wing-Commander Begg inside him. ‘Crack’ had been hammered out at Copse Forge, how many centuries ago none of the dancers could tell. His iron head, more bird-like than equine, was daubed with paint after the fashion of a witch-doctor’s mask. It appeared through a great, flat, drumlike body: a circular frame that was covered to the ground with canvas and had a tiny horsehair tail stuck through it. ‘Crack’ snapped his iron jaws and executed a solo dance of some intricacy.

Presently Ralph Stayne came in, shaking the snow off his hat and coat. He stood watching for a minute or two and then went to a corner of the barn where he found, and put on, a battered crinoline-like skirt. It was enormously wide and reached to the floor.

Now, in the character of the man-woman, and wearing a face of thunder, Ralph, too, began to skip and march about the Dance of the Five Sons. They had formed the Knot or Glass – an emblem made by the interlacing of their swords. Dan and Andy displayed it, the Guiser approached, seemed to look in it at his reflection and then dashed it to the ground. The dance was repeated and the knot reformed. The Guiser mimed, with clumsy and rudimentary gestures, an appeal to the clemency of the Sons. He appeared to write and show his will, promising this to one and that to another. They seemed to be mollified. A third time they danced and formed their knot. Now, mimed old William, there is no escape. He put his head in the knot. The swords were disengaged with a clash. He dropped his rabbit cap and fell to the ground.

Dr Otterly lowered his fiddle.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I must be off. Quite enough anyway for you, Guiser. If I knew my duty I wouldn’t let you do it at all. Look at you, you old fool, puffing like your own bellows. There’s no need, what’s more, for you to extend yourself like that. Yours is not strictly a dancing role. Now, don’t go on after I’ve left. Sit down and play for the others if you like. Here’s the fiddle. But no more dancing, understand? ’Night, boys.’

He shrugged himself into his coat and went out. They heard him drive away.

Ernie practised ‘whiffling’. He executed great leaps, slashing with his sword at imaginary enemies and making a little boy’s spaceman noise between his teeth. The Hobby Horse performed an extraordinary and rather alarming antic which turned out merely to be the preparatory manœuvre of Simon Begg divesting himself of his trappings.

‘Damned if I put this bloody harness on again tonight,’ he said. ‘It cuts my shoulders and it stinks.’

‘So does the Betty,’ said Ralph. ‘They must have been great sweaters, our predecessors. However: toujours l’art, I suppose.’

‘Anything against having them washed, Guiser?’ asked Begg.

‘You can’t wash Old ’Oss,’ the Guiser pointed out. ‘Polish iron and leather and hot up your pail of pitch. Dip Crack’s skirt into it last thing as is what is proper and right. Nothin’ like hot pitch to smell.’

‘True,’ Ralph said: ‘you have the advantage of me, Begg. I can’t turn the Betty into a tar-baby, worse luck.’

Begg said: ‘I’d almost forgotten the hot pitch. Queer sort of caper when you come to think of it. Chasing the lovely ladies and dabbing hot tar on ’em. Funny thing is, they don’t run away as fast as all that, either.’

‘Padstow ’Oss,’ observed Chris, ‘or so I’ve ’eard tell, catches ’em up and overlays ’em like a candle-snuff.’

‘’Eathen licentiousness,’ rejoined his father, ‘and no gear for us chaps, so doan’t you think of trying it on, Simmy-Dick.’

‘Guiser,’ Ralph said, ‘you’re superb. Isn’t the whole thing heathen?’

‘No, it bean’t then. It’s right and proper when it’s done proper and proper done by us it’s going to be.’

‘All the same,’ Simon Begg said, ‘I wouldn’t mind twenty seconds under the old tar barrel with that very snappy little job you introduced to us tonight, Guiser.’

Ernie guffawed and was instantly slapped down by his father. ‘You hold your noise. No way to conduct yourself when the maid’s your niece. You should be all fiery hot in ’er defence.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Ralph said quietly.

Begg looked curiously at him. ‘Sorry, old man,’ he said. ‘No offence. Only a passing thought and all that. Let’s change the subject: when are you going to let us have that smithy, Guiser?’

‘Never. And you might as well make up your mind to it. Never.’

‘Obstinate old dog, isn’t he?’ Begg said at large.

Dan, Chris and the twins glanced uncomfortably at their father.

Dan said: ‘Us chaps are favourably disposed as we’ve mentioned, Simmy-Dick, but, the Dad won’t listen to us, no more than to you.’

‘Look, Dad,’ Chris said earnestly, ‘it’d be in the family still. We know there’s a main road going through in the near future. We know a service station’d be a little gold mine yur on the cross-roads. We know the company’d be behind us. I’ve seen the letters that’s been wrote. We can still have the smithy. Simmy-Dick can run the servicing side on his own to begin with. Ernie can help. Look, it’s cast-iron – certain sure.’ He turned to Ralph. ‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

Before Ralph could answer Ernie paused in his whiffling and suddenly roared out, ‘I’d let you ’ave it, Wing-Commander, sir. So I would too.’

The Guiser opened his mouth in anger but, before he could speak, Dan said: ‘We here to practise or not? Come on, chaps. One more dash at the last figure. Strike up for us, Dad.’

The five brothers moved out into the middle of the floor. The Guiser, muttering to himself, laid the fiddle across his knees and scraped a preliminary call-in.

In a moment they were at it again. Down thumped their boots striking at the floor and up bounced the clouds of dust.

And outside in the snow, tied up with scarves, her hand-woven cloak enveloping her, head and all, Mrs Bünz peered through a little cobwebby window, ecstatically noting the steps and taking down the tunes.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_6b886aa0-ab15-5f18-89d1-f9fc89aebb39)

Preparation (#ulink_6b886aa0-ab15-5f18-89d1-f9fc89aebb39)

All through the following week snow and frost kept up their antiphonal ceremony. The two Mardians were mentioned in the press and on the air as being the coldest spots in England.

Up at the castle, Dame Alice gave some hot-tempered orders to what remained nowadays of her staff: a cook, a house-parlourmaid, a cleaning woman, a truculent gardener and his boy. All of them except the boy were extremely old. Preparations were to be put in hand for the first Wednesday evening following the 21st December. A sort of hot cider punch must be brewed in the boiler-house. Cakes of a traditional kind must be baked. The snow must be cleared away in the courtyard and stakes planted to which torches would subsequently be tied. A bonfire must be built. Her servants made a show of listening to Dame Alice and then set about these preparations in their own fashion. Miss Mardian sighed and may have thought all the disturbance a bit of a bore but took it, as did everybody else in the village, as a complete matter of course. ‘Sword Wednesday,’ as the date of the Five Sons was sometimes called, made very little more stir than Harvest Festival in the two Mardians.

Mrs Bünz and Camilla Campion stayed on at the Green Man. Camilla was seen to speak in a friendly fashion to Mrs Bünz, towards whom Trixie also maintained an agreeable manner. The landlord, an easy man, was understood to be glad enough of her custom, and to be charging her a pretty tidy sum for it. It was learned that her car had broken down and the roads were too bad for it to be towed to Simon Begg’s garage, an establishment that advertised itself as ‘Simmy-Dick’s Service Station.’ It was situated at Yowford, a mile beyond East Mardian, and was believed to be doing not too well. It was common knowledge that Simon Begg wanted to convert Copse Forge into a garage and that the Guiser wouldn’t hear of it.

Evening practices continued in the barn. In the bedrooms of the pub the thumping boots, jingling bells and tripping insistences of the fiddle could be clearly heard. Mrs Bünz had developed a strong vein of cunning. She would linger in the bar-parlour, sip her cider and write her voluminous diary. The thumps and the scraps of fiddling would tantalize her almost beyond endurance. She would wait for at least ten minutes and then stifle a yawn, excuse herself and ostensibly go upstairs to bed. She had, however, discovered a back stairs by which, a few minutes later, she would secretly descend, a perfect mountain of handweaving, and let herself out by a side door into a yard. From here a terribly slippery brick path led directly to the near end of the barn which the landlord used as a store-room.

Mrs Bünz’s spying window was partly sheltered by overhanging thatch. She had managed to clean it a little. Here, shuddering with cold and excitement, she stood, night after night, making voluminous notes with frozen fingers.

From this exercise she derived only modified rapture. Peering through the glass which was continually misted over by her breath, she looked through the store-room and its inner doorway into the barn proper. Her view of the dancing was thus maddeningly limited. The Andersen brothers would appear in flashes. Now they would be out of her range, now momentarily within it. Sometimes the Guiser, or Dr Otterly or the Hobby Horse would stand in the doorway and obstruct her view. It was extremely frustrating.

She gradually discovered that there was more than one dance. There was a Morris, for which the men wore bells that jangled most provocatively, and there was also sword-dancing, which was part of a mime or play. And there was one passage of this dance-play which was always to be seen. This was when the Guiser in his rôle of Fool or Old Man, put his head in the knot of swords. The Five Sons were grouped about him, the Betty and the Hobby Horse were close behind. At this juncture, it was clear that the Old Man spoke. There was some fragment of dialogue, miraculously preserved, perhaps, from heaven knew what ancient source. Mrs Bünz saw his lips move, always at the same point and always, she was certain, to the same effect. Really, she would have given anything in her power to hear what he said.

She learnt quite a lot about the dance-play. She found that, after the Guiser had acted out his mock-decapitation, the Sons danced again and the Betty and Hobby Horse improvised. Sometimes the Hobby Horse would come prancing and shuffling into the store-room quite close to her. It was strange to see the iron beak-like mouth snap and bite the air on the other side of the window. Sometimes the Betty would come in, and the great barrel-like dress would brush up clouds of dust from the store-room floor. But always the Sons danced again and, at a fixed point, the Guiser rose up as if resurrected. It was on this ‘Act’, evidently, that the whole thing ended.

After the practice they would all return to the pub. Once, Mrs Bünz denied herself the pleasures of her peepshow in order to linger as unobtrusively as possible in the bar-parlour. She hoped that, pleasantly flushed with exercise, the dancers would talk of their craft. But this ruse was a dead failure. The men at first did indeed talk, loudly and freely at the far end of the Public, but they all spoke together and Mrs Bünz found the Andersens’ dialect exceedingly difficult. She thought that Trixie must have indicated her presence because they were all suddenly quiet. Then Trixie, always pleasant, came through and asked her if she wanted anything further that evening in such a definite sort of way that somehow even Mrs Bünz felt impelled to get up and go.

Then Mrs Bünz had what she hoped at the time might be a stroke of luck.

One evening at half past five she came into the bar parlour in order to complete a little piece she was writing for an American publication on ‘The Hermaphrodite in European Folklore.’ She found Simon Begg already there, lost in gloomy contemplation of a small notebook and the racing page of an evening paper.

She had entered into negotiations with Begg about repairing her car. She had also, of course, had her secret glimpses of him in the character of ‘Crack’. She greeted him with her particularly Teutonic air of camaraderie. ‘So!’ she said, ‘you are early this evening, Wing Commander.’

He made a sort of token movement, shifting a little in his chair and eyeing Trixie. Mrs Bünz ordered cider. ‘The snow,’ she said cosily, ‘continues, does it not?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, and then seemed to pull himself together. ‘Too bad we still can’t get round to fixing that little bus of yours, Mrs – er – er – Bünz, but there you are! Unless we get a tow –’

‘There is no hurry. I shall not attempt the return journey before the weather improves. My baby does not enjoy the snow.’

‘You’d be better off, if you don’t mind my saying so, with something that packs a bit more punch.’