Reginald Hill - The Stranger House

“Yes, assist you with your inquiries. I have… connections. I live at Candle Cottage, beyond the church. I’m at home most of the time. Goodnight to you now.”

He went back into the bar.

Funny folk! thought Sam as she climbed the stairs. Two invites in a night. Maybe that was the automatic next step if you survived being pushed off a ladder! Anything was possible in a place where Death had his own door, the sausages were six feet long, and they held competitions for telling lies and making faces through a horse’s collar…

She pushed open her bedroom door and all thought of funny folk fled from her mind.

Someone had been poking around her things. This wasn’t feeling but fact. Her eidetic memory didn’t only work with the printed page. A postcard home she’d been scribbling was a couple of inches to the left of where she’d set it down on the dressing table, one of the drawers which had protruded slightly was now completely flush, and her rucksack leaned against the wall at an altered angle. And it wasn’t just Mrs. Appledore tidying up. The intruder had clearly been inside the rucksack as well as out.

She thought of going downstairs to make a fuss. But there was nothing missing, and anyone in the bar could have come up, or someone who just came into the pub.

She brushed her teeth, got undressed, pulled on the old Melbourne University T-shirt she slept in, and climbed on to the high old-fashioned bed. Usually she launched herself into sleep on a sea of math. She’d started age seven with an old edition of a book called Pillow Problems which Gramma Ada had picked up in a secondhand shop. In it the guy who wrote the Alice books laid out a variety of calculations he occupied his mind with when he couldn’t sleep. By the time she was twelve she’d moved beyond Carroll’s problems, but the principle remained. Nowadays she usually played with things like Goldbach’s Conjecture which required her to hold huge numbers in her head.

Tonight, however, she turned to the measured nineteenth-century prose of Peter K. Swinebank in search of a soporific.

She found the page she’d reached in the bar and reread the last line:

Be advised, it is not a tale for the fainthearted.

Sam paused and consulted her heart. No sign of faintness there, though a little lower down there was an awareness that sometime in the not too distant future her consumption of all that excellent beer was going to require another trip to the bathroom.

“OK, Rev. Peter K. Swinebank,” she said. “I’m ready for you. Do your worst!”

And turned the page.

Some time toward the end of the sixteenth century, a waif boy was taken into the care of the Gowders of Foul-gate Farm whose descendants still live and work in the valley.

The boy’s age is variously reported as from twelve to sixteen and his origins have been just as widely speculated. Some suggested he was the bastard child of one of the local gentry, kept locked away from public gaze for shame these many years till finally he escaped. Equally popular was the notion that he was a child abducted by the fairies in infancy and returned when puberty rendered him of no further interest to the little people. Some even asserted that he was Robin Goodfellow himself. Such theories at least have the merit of facing up to the supernatural elements of the legend without equivocation.

To my mind the most likely explanation (supported by references to his swarthy coloring and lack of English) is that this youth was in fact a scion of that strange nomadic group misnamed Egyptians who had become increasingly prevalent in Britain during the past hundred years. Perhaps he had been ejected from his tribe because of some fraction of their strange and pagan law. Being young, he was likely to be much more fluent in the Romany tongue than in the English vernacular.

Where all versions agree is that, by taking him in, the Gowders displayed an unwonted degree of Christian charity. Though since somewhat declined, in those days the Gowders of Foulgate were by local standards a well-to-do and powerful family. They were not however famed for their generosity of spirit and their position in the parish seems to have been achieved as much by force of will and arms as agricultural skill.

At the time of our story, the head of the family was Thomas Gowder, a man of about thirty, whose young wife, Jenny, after three years of marriage had yet to provide him with an heir. Also living at Foulgate was Andrew, Thomas’s brother, three years his junior, with his wife and two infant sons.

It is maliciously suggested by some that, in taking the waif boy in, the Gowders were inspired less by charity than the prospect of acquiring an unpaid farmhand. Whatever the truth, they paid dearly for it. After some months of living at Foulgate and being nursed back to health, the youth repaid this kindness one night by assaulting Jenny. On being interrupted by her husband, he wrestled the man to the ground and slit his throat from ear to ear, almost severing the head from the neck. Brother Andrew, hearing the sound of the struggle, called to ask what was amiss, upon which the murderous gypsy seized whatever of value he could lay his hands on and fled.

Drew Gowder roused the village, procured help for his sister-in-law, then got together a posse of villagers to go in pursuit of the fugitive.

It was that time of year when spring though close on the calendar seems an age away on the ground. The night was black, the weather foul, good conditions for an outlaw to make his escape. But the pursuers knew their valley stone by stone while the fugitive was a stranger, driven by guilt and panic. His blundering trail up the fellside above Foulgate was easy to follow and within a very short time they cornered him attempting to hide in Mecklin Shaw, a small oak wood on the edge of Mecklin Moss.

Trapped, he offered no resistance and they would have bound him and taken him back to the village, but Drew Gowder was so inflamed with grief and rage that he demanded summary justice. A blasted oak stood close by, most of it decayed and fallen away, but what remained was the solid bole, its jagged upper edge in silhouette taking the form of a beast’s gaping maw, with the stumps of two branches giving the loose impression of a cross. Pointing to this, Gowder declared that when God provided the means, he was not inclined to reject His bounty. When they understood his meaning, it is to be hoped that some of the others demurred. But Gowder was a strong man, and a deeply wronged man, and it should be remembered that, while the framework of our Common Law was well established, yet in such remote communities as this, the tradition of self-sufficient and local justice was very strong, as indeed it remains to this very day.

So they seized the fugitive murderer and bound him to the blasted tree. At the same time, Gowder had taken himself to a nearby charcoal-burner’s hovel and there gathered several scraps of fire-hardened wood which he rapidly shaped into small stakes a few inches long. Then, using the haft of his dagger as a hammer, he drove these stakes through the young man’s hands and feet before cutting away the binding ropes, thus leaving him hanging from the tree by those wooden nails alone.

Satisfied with his handiwork, he now led his companions out of the wood and they made their way back to the village, leaving the murderer to die.

That appetite for the macabre still existent in our own day and catered for by the new literature of sensation and the Police Gazette was at its ravening height in an age when our greatest poet could soil his pen with the foulness of Titus Andronicus, and to this we owe the illustrative woodcut of the event reproduced overleaf, which was attached to a broadside ballad allegedly composed by one of the posse.