Dennis Wheatley - To The Devil A Daughter

`It was while I was still in that state that I got involved with Hettie Weston. She was the parlourmaid here. Pretty young thing and the flighty type. She asked for trouble and she got it. If it hadn't been me, it would have been the next feller who came along. I didn't give a cuss for her, but she set her cap at me, and if ever a chap needed a warm blooded young woman to take him out of himself, I did. I bought it all right, and the next thing we knew was that the silly young bitch had let herself get in the family way.

`Well, plenty of them do that in these country parts long before there's been any talk of marriage. If the feller is willing they make a go of it and put up the banns. If he's not, there are usually a few tears, but no harm done. The girl picks on another likely lad to go hedging and ditching with on her evenings off, and lands him with the kid. Second or third time lucky, and she usually gets some mug to the altar. That's what would have happened in Hettie's case if it hadn't been for the old woman.

'Hettie spilt the beans to the mistress and I was put on the mat. I suppose I could have told her to go take a running kick at herself. If I had, the worst that could have happened was that I'd have lost my job and had a maintenance order made against me for seven and six a week. But I didn't. I was still in a state of not giving a damn what happened to me, and believing that I had no future worth making a struggle for. You must add to that several other factors, one of which I was certainly not aware of at the time.

`To start with, there was the hereditary angle. Youngsters of my class had allowed themselves to be dictated to for countless generations by old women in Mrs. Durnsford's position, especially when it seemed that moral right was on their side. Next, as a person she was pretty formidable. When those beady black eyes of hers bored into you, it wasn't easy to say “No”. Lastly, although I didn't realise it then, she knew all about me. She knew both how ambitious I had been, and what it was that had caused my ambitions temporarily to take a line that had nothing to do with engineering. It wasn't any high falutin' motive of wanting to see the right thing done by Hettie that made her row in as she did. It was the malice that was in her. From what she knew had gone before, she got a special kick out of getting me married to a parlourmaid and saddled with the sort of liabilities that make it near impossible for a young working man to rise above his station.

`Anyhow, she bullied me into making an honest woman of Hettie and we settled down in the flat above the stables, where the Jutsons are now. It took a bit of time for me to realise what a muck I had made of my life; but in a young man ambition dies hard, and in me it started to stir again after the new experience of being married began to wear off. I somehow couldn't find the energy to take up my correspondence courses again, but I was subconsciously seeking a way out. Then, three nights before Ellen was born, it seemed as if it had been thrust right at me.

`I'd been out doing a bit of poaching, and returned late. The curtains of one of the drawing room windows were not quite drawn, and through the chink I caught sight of a flicker that might have meant the place was on fire. I took a peep in, and what d'you think I saw? The flicker I'd seen was fire all right, as the room was lit only by a pile of logs blazing on the hearth. But all the furniture had been pushed back to the sides of the room, a lot of circles and figures had been drawn on the parquet, and in the middle of them stood my mistress and the Canon. Both of them were stark naked.

`He must have been getting on for forty then, so he was already well past his youth and had a little pot. I found him comic rather than repulsive, but there was nothing the least funny about her. She was twenty years older and the scraggy kind. Her withered shanks and flabby, hanging breasts made her a horrible caricature of what a woman should be. You can imagine how weird they looked against the firelight, and how I stared. But after a minute it was not at them I was looking; it was at the thing that stood between them. I can only describe it as a sort of blacksmith's anvil, and belly up on it they had tied a live cat.

`The cat didn't remain alive for long though. As I watched, the Canon produced a knife and slit its throat. Old Mother Durnsford caught the blood in the sort of chalice you see on the altar of a church. Of course, I know that it must have been stolen from one; but at the time all this made no more sense than if I'd found myself at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Still, this was clearly no tea party, as the next thing they did was to each drink some of the cat's blood.

`The sight turned my stomach, so for a bit I missed seeing what they got up to after that. When I looked again they both had some clothes on. She was rubbing the chalk marks off the floor and he was pushing the furniture back into place. Knowing her reputation as a witch, I suppose I ought to have put two and two together, but somehow I didn't. It was catching them naked that was uppermost in my mind. I thought then that he was a proper clergyman, and that the business with the cat was some sort of sexual perversion, or that drinking cat's blood might be a way of making old people feel young again.

`Anyhow, as far as I was concerned one thing stuck out a mile. Here was my opportunity to break out of the dead end in which I had landed myself. Setting up house with Hettie had cost me the hundred or so I had put by. Since we had been married I'd had little chance to start saving again, and I knew that once the baby arrived I'd have even less. By then I was twenty seven. Ten years had slipped by without my getting very far ten of the best years of my life and I didn't want to remain a chauffeur all my natural. Here was my chance to make a brand new start.

`We may as well call a spade a spade. My mind instantly turned to blackmail. I reckoned that the Canon and the old woman were good for five hundred smackers between them, and that they'd pay that to keep my mouth shut. For a pound a week I could park Hettie and the baby on her parents. Then I'd go to London. Four hundred, eked out by taking night jobs in garages now and then, would see me through two years as a full-​time student at a technical college. Before I was thirty I'd emerge as a qualified engineer, capable of earning good money. It didn't take me long to work that out, or how to set about it.

`They had to dispose of the body of the cat. I reckoned they wouldn't risk the stench that would fill the house if they burnt it on the drawing-​room fire; so all the odds were that the Canon would take it out to the furnace. I nipped round there and hid behind the boiler. Sure enough, a few minutes later in he comes, opens the furnace door, rakes up the coke a bit and pops in the dead pussy. The moment he had gone I fished the animal out. Its fur was a little singed, which showed that an attempt had been made to burn it, and its throat was slit from ear to ear; so it provided the evidence I needed to turn the heat on him.

`Next morning I put it in an oyster-​barrel filled with brine, to preserve it, and hid the barrel in the loft. Then in the evening I cycled over to The Priory to have a little talk with the Canon. But I was told that he had gone to London and was not expected back for about a week. Two days later Hettie had her baby. As it happened I didn't have to call on the Canon after all, as the day he got back he came to see the old woman. Having seen him go into the house, I lay in wait for him in the garden until he came out. As he turned a corner of the shrubbery we came face to face. Nice as pie, he congratulates me on becoming a father and asks me what I would like for the child as a christening present.

`I say, “Five hundred pounds in pound notes to be delivered before the end of the week at a place and time chosen by me.”