with a tattered leather strap and kept out the howling wind. There were even a few sticks of furniture. I kicked apart a rickety chair for kindling, and after a few attempts I managed to start a little fire, which crackled and generated actual warmth. We stripped off our sodden cloaks and huddled in front of it. I discovered I still had half a jug of ale, and this improved things even further.
“Young Ned gave it to me, before I left. Young Ned and his father—that’s who I went to see.”
“You mean you really were seeing a parishioner?”
I wasn’t offering it as proof that I’d been telling the truth, but apparently she took it as such.
“Do you want to search my pockets for pheasants?”
“Oh, don’t sulk. You think it makes you look dark and brooding, but it doesn’t.”
Her expression was sour, but there was also a certain—well, if not warmth, then at least neutrality. She was sitting on an old blanket that I’d found on a shelf and spread out in front of the fire. Her dress clung to her, and as I uncorked the jug I caught her sneaking another sidelong look in my direction.
The fact is, I was a good-looking fellow in those departed days of 1849. It wasn’t the face I show to the world these four long decades later, ruined by the years and much else besides—a face that would cause you to start if you saw it, and flinch. For that’s what you would do—oh yes you would—if I looked up abruptly from my glass in some low tavern, or perhaps came upon you suddenly in the London fog. But back then I was quite the lad, in a crookedly smiling boyish sort of way. The brown eyes were large, and there was a wing of brown hair that would fall down over them, which I had a way of flipping back with a movement of my hand. The overall effect might indeed have been too boyish, except for the scar: a horseshoe-shaped scar by my left eye, courtesy of a childhood set-to with a butcher’s apprentice who had been bullying my brother. I’d been carried home in a cart, to be sewn up on the kitchen table, but apparently I’d inflicted some damage in return, for my adversary never troubled poor Toby again. And I afterwards discovered that the girls were quite affected by my scar—it gave me a rugged cast—so all in all I decided I’d come rather well out of the bargain.
Miss Scantlebury and I shared the ale, and divided the loaf of bread and the lump of cheese that I’d brought with me too. Soon enough we were feeling warmer, and beginning to talk. Then we were talking some more, and laughing, and agreeing that this was a very odd place for a picnic. I found myself telling her about the old Welsh pony I rode as a boy, and never saw the Devil until it was too late.
“The last behind in Cornwall?” She eyed me aslant.
“Yes, well. I apologize,” I said. “That was rude, and ungentlemanly.”
“I shouldn’t forgive you,” said she, with a little pout. “But under the circumstances, I suppose I shall.”
“You’re very good.”
“No I’m not. I’m not very good at all. That’s what you like best about me.”
“Miss Scantlebury, what are you doing?”
For a hand was upon my leg.
You’ll have guessed the sequel, of course. Someone like yourself, who knows the way of the world and the frailties of the human heart. And of course I knew it was wicked, and wrong, and hateful in the eyes of God. But the Devil had slipped in from the storm without our noticing, and now there was the dark sweet murmur of Infernal blandishments—go on, my friends, for you want to so much; it’s lovely, it’s harmless, and who’s ever to know, on a night so dark and God’s eyes surely elsewhere?—and then the lash of his riding crop. Before I quite realized what was happening, Bath-sheba was a wondrous writhing rubbery thing. Breasts burst from linen; she cried out. The first hot cascading plunge, and finding the stride, and then the great gallop—ears pinned back and the Devil’s whip-hand flailing—thundering around the turn and down the stretch to the last gate, the storm raging both within us and without. We were up and over and tumbling down the other side, utterly spent and lying limp as rags. And then, just as triumph began to give way to the first cold stabbings of remorse— that familiar sick lurch into self-loathing—just at that very point, I felt an icy gust of wind. The door was open, and someone was standing in the doorway, holding up a torch.
“Bathsheba?!”
It was her younger brother, the Cabin Boy. Behind him loomed Little Dick. I exclaimed, grabbing at the blanket to cover myself. Despite my confusion, I expected to hear Bathsheba’s voice, uttering furious oaths and ordering them out.
“Help,” whispered Bathsheba.
“I beg your pardon?” I said, bewildered.
“I tried to fight him, but he forced me.”
“I did not!”
“Oh God, oh God, oh God, my Virtue.”
I sprang to my feet. But a sledge-hammer fist came whistling, and the world exploded into blackness.
THIS IS WHERE my account grows unreliable. The memory of what happened next has the swooning unreality of nightmare; I have been forced to conclude that some of it—much of it?— was pure hallucination, brought on by that first concussive blow. But I have pledged to tell my tale to the best of my ability, and so here is what I seem to recollect.
I am swimming back to consciousness. A vast echoing room, with great rough wooden beams, lit by torchlight. A cavernous fireplace, and tapestries on the walls, and animals stuffed and mounted: the heads of stags and boars, and the entire forms of smaller predators—ferrets and badgers and stoats—frozen forever in attitudes of coiled malevolence. Among these are human portraits: bloated grandsires with bulging eyes, and cold-eyed viragos as coiled and malignant as the stoats.
Even in my disorientation, I can guess whose ancestors these were. This shrine to slaughter and misanthropy is Scantlebury Hall, and here assembled are the current denizens. Sir Richard on a vast oaken chair, with Little Dick louring beside him. Bathsheba recumbent nearby on a low divan, wrapped in a blanket and managing to look shattered, attended by the curly-haired Cabin Boy.
I struggle to my knees.
“Look here,” a voice says woozily, as if from a good distance. Apparently it is mine. “I don’t—you can’t just—dear God in Heaven.”
The voice that replies is like metal grinding upon stone. “The charge against you is as follows. That you did lie feloniously in wait for a virgin of unimpeachable character, viz. my daughter, upon whom you did perpetrate an act of savage assault and rapine, in such a manner as to place you beyond any appeal to common humanity, and all hope of mercy in this life or the life to come.”
Sir Richard Scantlebury, Bart.
“A charge? What are you talking about?”
“How do you plead?”
“I didn’t touch her!”
This is not of course strictly true. A stammered emendation: “I mean, yes, of course I—well, you know. And it was wrong— a priest—obviously. A shitten shepherd—a disgrace to the cloth—I condemn myself utterly. But we walked down that path together, and I swear I am not the sort of man who would ever—just ask her!”
“You
