Ye Little Hills Like Lambs

By GMW Wemyss

Et ego in Arcadia.... The Downland parishes are safely gathered in to the Woolfonts combined benefice. January 2016 begins quietly and contentedly: the villages are recovering from panto season and Christmas, His Grace hasn't done anything outrageous, Professor the baroness Lacy and Prof. Farnaby are eager to return, come Springtide, to the archaeological survey....

All is calm.

And in the next six months, there shall be tragedy, and crime, and dirty dealings, and a scholarly discovery which rocks the Downlands and the academic world; and it shall take all of Canon Paddick's saintliness, all of the duke's cunning, and all of Lady Lacy's formidable wisdom, to bring the District through and see all right in the end.

Simply another half of the year in the Woolfonts and Downlands, really.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310009457

GMW Wemyss

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic’s sinking and Churchill’s ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the West Country’s beloved essayist; author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, of 1937 – that year of portent – and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame.

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Ye Little Hills Like Lambs

GMW Wemyss

Bapton Books

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of Cross and Poppy: a village tale and of its sequels, Evensong and The Day Thou Gavest; of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and of Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observation; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; '37: the year of portent; and of the forthcoming history, The Crisis: 1914; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

This is the fourth novel in the Village Tales series.

Mr Wemyss' Twitter account is @GMWWemyss. The Twitter account for Bapton Books is @BaptonEditor. The partners in Bapton Books maintain a Tumbler presence, to be found at baptonbooks.tumblr.com; the Bapton Books website is at www.baptonbooks.co.uk.

Copyright © 2016 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for GMW Wemyss)

All rights reserved

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For Alessia

and

for Jeffrey & his Prince

who had made this a far better book

had not my dilatoriousness

left them not time enough to do so

Contents:

A Note from the Author

Epigraph

All we like sheep

Sheep may safely graze

In a green pasture

Worthy is the Lamb

The sheep of his pasture

Feed my sheep

And the Lamb shall overcome them

Here endeth the Lesson

A Note from the Author:

It ought not to be necessary that I remind my very intelligent readers that the opinions, political and otherwise, of my characters, and their personal views of events and of public persons in this our world, are theirs, not mine; and that the views of that unruly man, Charles Taunton, or of the combative and irrepressible Edmond Huskisson, are especially rather theirs than mine. Personages appearing in these pages under their own names are not to be construed as being what His Grace or Huzza may call them as or think them: the views of the characters as to men and measures, politics and politicians, events and outcomes, are their own, and not mine as their chronicler. I may add that my editors can attest that the duke has, from before the Referendum was called, predicted a win for Leave; and, dramatically, I almost wish the infuriating wee man had been wrong for once. As it happens, we must rely upon other events to chasten his intolerability: for he is unruly and intolerable, as are Dr Witchard and Edmond Huskisson after their fashions, and one wants to bear that in mind when one or the other says or thinks anything at all about events or public personages. They are not impartial guides, and do not necessarily represent mine own views – or represent, at all fairly, the facts.

Ye Little Hills Like Lambs

8 Therefore shall ye keep all the commandments which I command you this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land, whither ye go to possess it;

9 And that ye may prolong your days in the land, which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give unto them and to their seed, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

10 For the land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs:

11 But the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven:

12 A land which the Lord thy God careth for: the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year.

13 And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,

14 That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.

15 And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.

16 Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them;

17 And then the Lord's wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.

18 Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.

19 And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

20 And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:

21 That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.

– Deuter. xi. 8 – 21, the First Lesson at Evensong appointed for the Monday of the Fifth Sunday after Easter (the Monday before Ascensiontide)

All we like sheep

When Israel came out of Egypt : and the house of Jacob from among the strange people,

Judah was his sanctuary : and Israel his dominion.

The sea saw that, and fled : Jordan was driven back.

The mountains skipped like rams : and the little hills like young sheep.

What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest : and thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?

Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams : and ye little hills, like young sheep?

Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord : at the presence of the God of Jacob;

Who turned the hard rock into a standing water : and the flint-stone into a springing well.

– Ps. cxiv, In exitu Israel

'So far as I can see,' said, bitingly, His Grace the duke of Taunton, 'what we're going on with is this.' Councillor Gates sat sternly beside the duke; Mr Huskisson, a new-minted JP, brigaded Cllr Gates; the Rector was quite discernibly meditating upon the Seventy-Second Psalm, Deus, judicium, and very possibly upon one of the lessons for Sexagesima Monday and its synoptic counterpart in the Gospel According to S Luke; and Fr Bohun, although no doubt equally contemplating those well-remembered words – defend the children of the poor, and punish the wrong-doer, and, Suffer little children to come unto me … Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein –, was, silently and stonily watching, rather clearly, at the moment, all Sandhurst and very little Mirfield.

The ducal words should have read, alone and shorn of context, as mild. The ducal tone, however....

Charles Taunton was that always ominous thing, a half-sized basso; he tried conscientiously to use a high head voice (itself inevitably baritone) so as not to boom at people; when he roared (as happened from time to time, he having something of what is politely called 'a temperament'), it caused foundations to shift and strong people to quail. When, as now, he spoke with a deadly quietness, yet from the diaphragm, and in tones of supercooled vitriol, only the unwary and the finalists for a Darwin Award failed to look to their own safety.

'On the one hand, Tommy and Lachlan –' these were the Chief Constable and the Police & Crime Commissioner, respectively, for Wiltshire – 'have uncovered – and are dealing severely with – what appears to be a systematised refusal, at the inspector-to-superintendent level, to credit, and treat as worthy of any save the most perfunctory investigation, claims – current ones, not historic – of the sexual exploitation of children: a refusal or a reluctance in the name, you understand, of community cohesion and political correctness.

'On the other, you jumped-up jills-in-offce.... Words fail me. Or, rather, there is a limit to what I'll say with two clergymen in the room.'

'There ought to be the same limit when there is not,' said Fr Paddick, quietly. 'You are always attended, as are we all, by a great cloud of witness; and always in the sight of God.' The Rector – a youthful canon now, and rightly – was not interested in Charles' trained rhetoric, or his political tactics of putting people off balance the better to pounce upon them, or his strategy for dealing with the issues before them, or even his quite legitimate outrage. His business was souls. Charles'; those of the functionaries the duke had apostrophised just now as 'jumped-up jills-in-offce'; and, specially so, those of the children, and parents, in whose interest they were gathered.

The duke was, and had been even before his late heart attack and treble bypass, a decent man, and, for a duke, a staunch High Churchman and not careless of his own soul. He also represented a very different tradition to that of his friend and rector: one which lean Fr Bohun, unlike his ecclesiastical superior, had once shared, and had put away to become rather a soldier of the Cross. His Grace the duke of Taunton had been an Int Corps offcer, doing close OPINT support at the sharp end, and his views were military and his tradition, that of the secular arm. If Noel Paddick and Gib Bohun were to impose a penance on him after, he'd endure it without complaint. But there was very little, if anything, at which Charles would not stick in the service of justice and right, Crown and country.

And his soldierly virtues were, after all, that of a late major in the Intelligence Corps. None save the duke – and he wasn't saying – could say had he or had he not anticipated Noel's interjection; but he certainly turned it with suspicious celerity to his own purposes.

'Evidence, yes, and witnesses in clouds and great numbers: my point. These proceedings are an open scandal – and the more scandalous as they ain't open, and indeed take place in the dark, as is apt to dirty deeds. Now you are going to get me every damned file-jacket, damn it all, and answer every question I ask, damn your eyes, and –'

'I most certainly am not.' Madeleine Elsworth spoke quite firmly, and in tones which should have won her the role of Lady Bracknell in any West End production.

'Damn me if you ain't, Madam Jobsworth,' said His Grace. 'Devil d' you think you are, woman, damn it all?'

***

That confrontation, with all which led to it and all which came of it, was one of the two cardinal points on which the first half of 2016 turned in the Woolfonts: and the first such hinged point, in time.

The second and last had its own sting in the tail.

It was what came before, and after, and between, which made these what they were.

***

That Most High, Noble, and Potent Prince, the Right Honourable His Grace the duke of Taunton KG GCB GCVO KBE MiD TD PC JP DL MA (Oxon) FRHistS, marquess of Templecombe, earl Fitzwarren, earl of Dilton, viscount Malet, baron Daubeny, baron Chard, baron Beechbourne, baron Marden and Widham, Major (Ret'd) the Intelligence Corps, and Fellow of All Souls – otherwise Charles Arthur Donald Ivor Waldemar Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet; otherwise Charles Taunton, 'Snarly Charlie' to detractors, and 'Tempers' to some of his Eton contemporaries of long ago – a trim and tidy man with a deep chest for all his being precisely the height of Old Father Time atop the stand at Lord's, with a basso five times the size and depth of his frame: conventionally fair and floppy-haired even at fifty-four, but dangerous even at a glance, with his electric blue glare and martial moustaches, and peppery to a marked degree – the duke, then, was a man who took his amusements where he found them.

And on this fact hinged the second and last of the cardinal points of the half of the year: Here beginneth the Second Lesson.

In this habit of taking one's fun where one finds it, the duke's nephew and heir, Rupert, the Master of Dilton, that autumnal-hued (although not precisely ginger) youth who looked like a rower but was in fact a brilliant cricketer (Rupe's younger brother Jamie being a flaxen youth who looked the model of a 'flannelled fool at the wicket' but who was instead a noted wet-bob), took after his uncle. The year prior, owing to the death of Rupert's father the duke's brother, Lord Crispin, Rupert had missed playing the last few 'Tics matches in the fag-end of Trinity Term. (Rupert was up at the House; James was now an Oriel man.)

This had been, of course, universally recognised as excusable and excused; and it had not prevented his being capped for Blues in his second year. It had, fortunately, been only after the hard-fought Varsity match that England had been set down to play Pakistan at Old Trafford; and Rupert, with his Uncle Charles and HH the Nawab (all Vincent's Club and MCC ties and dash, the both of them, and, frankly, though they did their best not to put it on, side), and the Nawab's nephew Sher Mirza the Deputy Head of the Free School in Beechbourne, and the Rector, Fr Paddick, had – with James, doing his best to join in in recompense of their having dutifully trailed along with him in turn to the Boat Race a few weeks prior – all gone to Tidnock Hall, the ducal demesne in Cheshire, for the week, so that they might take in the match.

(The Nawab had gone because he and the duke had been vice-captain and captain, respectively, of their Eton 1st XI, and their era's Authentics, and Blues, and were fast friends as well as the Charters and Caldicott de nos jours in their fanatic devotion to cricket; and because His Highness always supported Pakistan just as the duke always supported England come what might. Charles' captaincy of Authentics and then of Blues, when up, had not infrequently been compared by contemporaries to Nelson for genius and Bligh for charm: Charles had been said to put the 'tick' in being a 'Tic. Which (chorus: tutti) had not bothered Charles in the least. Sher had gone because his uncle the Nawab had expected it – and because the duke had invited Fr Paddick. The Rector had come along because Charles had asked … and because Sher wanted the support. The Deputy Headmaster, absurdly handsome and dowered with a Byronic façade over his marshmallow interior, and the extremely fit, hopelessly loveable rector, that young widower, were deeply in love – and deeply and honourably adamant in renouncing its expression, maintaining the chastity they regarded as owed to their Creator. But, if they had renounced eros, they expended the last reserves of the other three loves upon one another, storge, philia, and agape: full measure, pressed down, and running over.)

And of course they'd all gone along, as well, because their friend and neighbour Brian 'The Breener' Maguire, that retired and much-honoured England wicketkeeper, was doing the broadcast of the Test Match, and had already been sent (by Charles) to Tidnock as a base of operations, where he'd been joined by his wife, the Hon. Gwen, and their rampageous twins: who were precisely, even in this their infancy, what one might expect – in temperament and in the promise of future beauty – of the offspring of an Anglo-Welsh stunner and a madcap Irishman who was regularly compared to a brunet Broady. (The Hon. Gwen ran the Woolbury Stud there in the Woolfonts; she was perfectly at home at Tidnock, which housed its own celebrated National Hunt stud.)

Teddy Gates, the more than celebrated Hipsta Chef who presided charmingly over the Michelin-bestarred Woolford House Hotel in Woolfont Abbas – that ancient and famous inn –, and his partner the former Premier Leaguer turned activist Edmond Huskisson, were to meet them all at Tidnock: 'rather a homecoming for Tedders', as the duke said, Chef Gates being a Delamere native (where his contemporaries remembered him as The Laughing Faun, the lanky, all-too-charming, Brian-May-maned youth who'd never left a lover of either sex bitter when he'd gone on to greater things far away); rather a bittersweet journey for Edmond, who, playing for City, had been injured and forced by injury to retire from footer when playing a Manchester derby match, only to become an activist and a gay icon (and pin-up: Sher might sark that Teddy and Edmond remained the Twinks Who Never Grew Up, but for Edmond it was a truth universally acknowledged that it was the legendary bum Wot Did It). It was a family outing of a new and different sort for Teddy and Edmond … and their household.

(There was, after all, some justification for the obsessive insistence of the duke's niece, Henrietta Maria, upon comparing The Lads: Sher, Noel, The Breener, Edmond, and Teddy: to an older iteration of Hetty's favourite boy-band. Although the friend of Hetty's bosom, Penelope Carruthers-Wriothesely, one of the more besotted members of rather an avenging fandom, did tend rather to compare – breathlessly – the Rector to an Aussie avatar of one of the Æsir, in much the same way in which Edmond teased Noel as being 'a spaniel-eyed Becks in a biretta' – and with the same unspoken undertones....)

Tidnock and its demesne maintain their dignified port and state between Congleton and Macclesfield. And Tidnock seems worlds away from the blatancy of a milieu which is in sober geographic fact almost upon the ducal doorstep.

Two days before the Test, Rupert went to Macclesfield, to meet one of his friends from the House who was arriving from his grandparents' mouldering pile near Kites Hardwick, near to Rugby. Guy and Rupert were planning upon a round of golf at Wilmslow, and Guy was to be Rupert's guest for the first day of the Test, after. His Grace, who knew Guy's father all too well (and liked young Guy despite that fact), was joining them in that town of silk and treacle, with the Nawab, for an indulgently grown-up pint at the Pelican (a charge from the ducal arms: Tidnock's reach is long).

Maxonians have long since learnt, with not unmixed feelings, that the 'Golden Triangle' of WAG-land has begun steadily to envelop Macclesfield.

This sort of thing does contribute to the sum total of human amusement, once in way, for those prepared to be amused by a comedy of manners.

The duke and the Nawab (His Highness as ever looking lean, hawk-like, and remotely amused at what fools these mortals be) had already secured a table in the pub – to no one's surprise whatever, The Breener, a man of infinite resource and voracity, who could sniff out a proper pie and real ale from the midst of the Sahara, had managed to turn up and join them, along with that Macclesfield native, Aggers (although, alas, or, as the case might in the event be, fortunately, sans dear old Blowers) – what time Rupert, Master of Dilton, and the Hon. Guy Wilmot-Herdwycke, heir apparent to Lord Draycote, made it in from the scrum at the station. With the innocence of the young, both youths (dreading utterly anything which appeared or might appear to be Putting On Side) were so attired as to pass – or so they fondly believed – as Average Lads, in polos and KD trousers which might, to the inattentive, have been taken as being off the peg and out of a Boden or Barbour catalogue.

His Grace, typically, having been going 'round stables with the Hon. Gwen before driving like Jehu to the pub, was in breeches and top-boots, and a tattersall shirt, and a wool tie, all, naturally, bespoke: the tie was a concession to Charles' not wishing even yet to be seen in open collars which revealed the scar from his treble bypass operation of the year prior. The Nawab, sipping squash, was soberly dressed, in twill and tattersall and summer tweeds, as well: Nobby, like Charles, was a tribute to Anderson & Sheppard and should be even were he mucking out and dressed to do so. The Breener and Aggers were in cavalry twill and polo shirts and light jumpers precisely as anyone familiar with TMS should expect.

This had its role in the comedy.

The Pelican, in all its piety, has resisted so far as is possible the disadvantages which so often attend success. But a public house is a public house; and profit, profit; and patrons, patrons.

And WAGs and their footballer husbands and partners are increasingly spreading out from Alderley Edge and Prestbury, Wilmslow and Mottram St Andrew, on jaunts and junketings and shopping excursions, all gold-plated and glamorously vulgar.

There was something of a crush at the bar when Guy and Rupe went up to speak a round in; and they were rather taken aback, although too polite to say anything, when a brassy, blowsy, cod-tanned WAG elbowed them aside and said, with blatant insincerity and a poisonous quantity of saccharine, ''M in a bit of a rush, loves, y' won't mind, ta?': and was then somewhat stunned – though not into wise silence – when the barmaid pinned her with a glare and turned to Rupert to take in his order.

Silence had been the course of wise discretion; but the WAG – a literal Essex girl, from Wickford, and rejoicing in the Christian name of Danielle – was neither wise nor discreet. Certainly she was neither wise enough, nor suffciently discreet, to know how fatal was the question she next asked: 'Excuse me, do you know who I am?'

The barmaid looked her over coolly. 'I know who these gentlemen are, reet enough.'

The clamour which commonly attends a busy and successful local had died away: bar the giggling and sniggering of Aggers and The Breener, who were well on their way to the sort of hyænas-on-laughing-gas hilarity for which TMS is infamous. To levels previously reached only by Bearders, Blowers, and Jonners.

The Wickford WAG whined. 'Oh, if you're going to give preference to your little local friends....'

Her unfortunate boyfriend, with a look of absolute horror, was pushing through the scrum to get to her before she could drop another hod-ful of bricks. It was a trifle behind time for that. An injury had kept him relegated to inactivity At Home whilst his club did their pre-season round of friendlies (for which read, Exercises in Naked, Catchpenny Commercialisation) across the Pond; he was clearly wishing his injury had been such as to have kept him out of the Pelican as well, and far from this humiliating scene.

Mr Stanway, the landlord, had gently shunted Mabel aside. 'Now, miss,' said he to Danielle; and got no further.

'If Kevvy and me can't get a drink in some manky little pub after shopping –'

Kevin – who, poor bastard, had now openly and publicly been called, 'Kevvy', in front of a large and smirking crowd – had reached Danielle's side. And opened his mouth to reprove her: to no avail.

'A whole day shopping for the last bits and bobs of the non-couture part of the furni'ure –'

Everyone heard the resounding ducal snort from – by now – a few paces away. Charles certainly hadn't forgotten Michael Jopling's perfect skewering of Heseltine, as a man who bought his furniture. And by now, The Breener and Aggers were wheezing helplessly, and pounding the table. Kevvy, poor bugger, caught the sympathetic and equally mortified eye of Rupert, and that of Guy, as Mr Stanway drew himself up in righteous wrath. 'Young lady –'

'Oh, get stuffed, you 'orrid little man! Me and Kevvy –'

Everyone could hear The Breener's anguished, 'Jaysus, why couldn't Huzza have been here, sure an' t'is is gold', and Aggers' gasps for breath amidst his laughter.

'You and your … Kevvy … miss, bain't welcome here together, though I see he's decent enough to know better'n you do. It 'ouldn't matter if these two gentlemen was farm labourers in from Leek or Longnor, you don't shove in and queue-jump, not in my house, and you don't abuse my girl, not in my house you don't, and you damn' well don't throw your money and your name – which are Kevvy's, any road – about; not in my house. And these two young gentlemen bain't farm labourers or shepherds, so as you know. That there's the Master of Dilton, nephew and heir to His Grace the duke o' Taunton, up from the Hall down Tidnock way; and, for all he's got taller since last I seen him, I rackon that's the son of Lord Draycote with him. And I know damn' well that's His Grace behind you, and His Highness the Nawab of Hubli aside him, and the two gentlemen at their table as is laughing at you to wheres they can't sit up, is Breener Maguire and Jonathan Agnew, up to do TMS at the Test at Old Trafford. So you tell me again, miss, who it is you are and why you're so damn' much more important than reg'lars o' mine.

'Now, get out, and go back to the Edge, and count yourself lucky I don't have you banned from every pub in Cheshire.'

Lip calculatedly trembling, eyes liquid on command (although careful not to spill a tear and ruin hours' worth of careful maquillage), Danielle looked piteously and beseechingly at Kevin.

He ignored that calculated look. 'Master; Sir; Your Grace; Your Highness.... I. God, I apologise for –'

The duke, who had managed as usual to take centre stage, raised an eyebrow. 'As I recall, Bagnall – I do try not to forget local lads made good –, you weren't a bad youth cricketer, in Codsall. It's what I always tell Gary Lineker: the pay packet is less obscene, but you do find a better class of people in cricket. You chose the wrong sport, m' boy.'

'Charles,' said the Nawab, feeling obliged to enter the conventional protest.

'Come, come, Nobby, you know it's true. And now the poor sod'll be all over TMS anyway.'

Kevin Bagnall looked over towards the ducal table, whence The Breener – Aggers was still too weak from laughter to speak – gave him a cheeky wave.

'You'd best get her home,' said Charles, kindlily enough: 'and I'd recommend you have her bake a cake for the TMS box.'

'I don't think so, Your Grace,' said Kevin, slowly. 'She and I want to talk, but I don't think she'll be stopping at the new house very long, not even to bake.'

Danielle gasped.

'I won't be embarrassed in this way,' said Kevin, implacably. 'And I won't allow this sort of behaviour in any woman I'm seeing.'

She slapped him, resoundingly, and incontinently fled as best she could on her absurd and impractical heels.

'My dear Bagnall,' exclaimed His Grace, hurrying to give aid.

''S all right, Your Grace. And I'm not going to have her charged: so long as she goes.' He managed a grin which increased markedly the respect in which everyone in the pub now held him. 'I didn't like that damn' furniture anyway.'

The duke bent his bristling brows, dauntingly, upon Aggers and The Breener. 'None of this is to be mentioned on TMS,' growled he, as Rupe and Guy treated Kevin Bagnall to a much-needed pint. He knew it was hopeless to beg that Edmond Huskisson never hear of this.

Here endeth the Second Lesson. Or: not quite.... There was, for those catching a fleeting glimpse, a sting in the tail as in the ale.

***

That had been amusing: taking, as did His Grace, one's amusements where one found them, and taking them when sardonic.

It had been one of the few amusing moments in the year.

The sadder and less happier moments had begun early: on an icy early evening, the dimpsey quick and cold and mistful, the light early thickening, the skies close and cold and pewter, bough and branch bare to Wintertide: just the worst time of the year, to take a journey, and specially a long journey in, the ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of Winter.

Thus had it begun.

***

That Most High, Noble, and Potent Prince, the Right Honourable His Grace the duke of Taunton KG GCB GCVO KBE MiD TD PC JP DL MA (Oxon) FRHistS, marquess of Templecombe, earl Fitzwarren, earl of Dilton, viscount Malet, baron Daubeny, baron Chard, baron Beechbourne, baron Marden and Widham, Major (Ret'd) the Intelligence Corps, and Fellow of All Souls – otherwise Charles Arthur Donald Ivor Waldemar Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet; otherwise Charles Taunton, 'Snarly Charlie' to detractors, and 'Tempers' to some of his Eton contemporaries of long ago – took, it might be, his amusements as and where he found them; but amusement and mirth had been, since his brother's death, few, and rare, for him. He had long been something of a man in a hurry, for fear that some chance should lead to his predecease of his scapegrace brother Crispin; Crispin's death, which had hit him hard, had not, surprisingly, caused him to relax his pace, for all that this left the reliable Rupert as Charles' presumptive heir and successor. Nor had the duke's heart attack, and consequent bypass operation, slowed him any more than he could grudgingly prevent, even at the cost of risking another. His Grace was a middle-aged man in a hurry even now; perhaps all the more so, now, with the sense yet on him of the nearness of what he had always acknowledged, his own mortality. He seemed specially driven – 'Snarly Charlie' indeed, and 'Tempers' all too aptly – by what had always driven him: his sense of duty; and since Crispin's death, with which he nor his sister-in-law Lady Crispin had dealt altogether well or at all as might have been foreseen, his temper was much shorter, his patience increasingly non-existent, and his humour all the more cutting. He was, in fact, an increasingly choleric man.

He was sanguine enough about the outcome of the looming, louring Referendum: confident of a win for Leave: but, of course, exerting himself against over-confidence in that end he so much desired, which laxity and laziness might, after all, see slip from his grasp. Complacency was always to be guarded against. (And his opinion of some Leavers was sulphurous: he had less than no use for any purported Conservative, laying blasphemous claim to Maggie's mantle, who palled it with Putin. Charles was an Old Cold Warrior.)

A man of preposterous energy, with a Catherine-wheel mind forever shooting off new sparks, Charles did not permit himself to concentrate wholly upon but one cherished project, all the same, however dear it was to him and however necessary to the interests, truly understood (by which he meant, As understood by him) of Crown and country. (His intellectual arrogance, which he recognised as the most besetting and the worst of his sins, had grown monstrously in his hurry and his frenetic pace of work since his brother's death. He was aware of it, but helpless against it, as, with middle age, habit hardened into character; and, with all his undertakings, the pace was too good to enquire.)

Charles was sanguine, too, about domestic politics, even apart from his wager that Leave should win by about the same margin as that by which the Union had won in the Scottish referendum: moved to choler though he regularly was by Corbynism, he was cheered all the same by the prospect that, so long as that man – whom he described in terms even more scabrous than those he applied to the Wets and the Cameroons … and Nige – retained his cult-leader's grip upon the Labour membership, for all the pinioned writhings of the PLP, Labour should never win a general election. Had Frank Field, of whom His Grace was admiringly fond, been the face and soul of Labour, Charles should have contemplated a Labour government with equanimity, even with a certain satisfaction; as matters stood, however....

The fact of the matter was that Charles was, in his own estimation at least, a fierce and combative believer in free men, free minds, and free markets, despising all threats to these as threats to liberty: whether from crony capitalism or from swivel-eyed 'Social Justice' commissars, from bankers or from Brussels. As a direct intellectual consequence, his politics were on the side of property: that is, on the side – as he saw it – of aspiration, and that liberty of action opened to the humblest by having both a stake in society and a competence to live on: and all that flowed from an ownership society. It simply happened that His Grace owned a good deal of property: effectively, very nearly all of the District outwith the market towns (and not a little in these), as the freeholder: from the Northward parts, the Beef Country, unto the Vale to the Southwards all Butter and Cheese, and the vast realm of Sheep Country, Champion Country, upon the Downs in between: precisely as he was the magnate and proprietor at Tidnock and at Melverley, at Clentwood, at Camserney, and at Luineag. To his credit – whatever one thought of his philosophical politics of property – he regarded this as a matter of stewardship, not only as to his heir and that heir's heir's heirs, but to his neighbours and to the countryside, the land itself. The land, he knew (if sometimes only with his mind and not his heart), did not outlive the souls of men; but the land abided over the generations, changing at last only in deep geologic time, after the bodies which had housed those souls had returned to the land.

His Grace was a man in a hurry, even at the risk of accelerating his own reasons for haste, determined to do his full duty and not leave it undone, or – competent though Rupert with Jamie's aid should be – to impose the onerous responsibilities on his nephews whilst they were yet young and untried, not as yet given their chance to win their spurs in their young adulthood.

No one condemned his motives. His sister-in-law and his friends and neighbours were, however, alarmed by his quick and quickened anger, and his imperiousness grown all the vaster. His sister-in-law Lady Crispin – that handsome and Titian-haired Great Lady who herself indulged the temperament which red hair proverbially excused and justified – concluded that there was no hope for the duke save marriage to some good lady who could manage him: which certainly should not be her.

Charles duke of Taunton, historian, Fellow of All Souls, the man with the Catherine-wheel mind, all boundless energy, was becoming a bit of a rogue elephant. He remained, all the same, Charles duke of Taunton, historian, Fellow of All Souls, the man with the Catherine-wheel mind, all boundless energy; and – not least to shore these fragments against his own ruin, and to leave, if he must early leave, guidance to nephew Rupert and nephew James – Charles duke of Taunton, historian, Fellow of All Souls, the man with the Catherine-wheel mind, all boundless energy, had undertaken amidst all his schemes and projects a few others, all to serve his stewardship and do his duty: not least, the collection and collation of the letters and diaries (and half the muniments) of his Malet and Fitzjames ancestors, forming a sort of history not only of them but of the land and its management; and, not least, the restoration and rescue of the long-neglected parishes of the Downlands, as parishes and not merely as tenancies. Charles firmly believed – he often declared – that growth must be organic, and that centralised planning was not only a mug's game, but a threat to liberty; Charles inevitably acted, as the proprietor, upon the principle that unchecked growth was a unweeded garden, and that the slow, careful, controlled growth of his demesne must be trained and espaliered and coppiced to bear its sound flowers and fruits and sound timber.

Charles duke of Taunton, historian, Fellow of All Souls, the man with the Catherine-wheel mind, all boundless energy, was a scholar as well as a steward, and the land, his charge. Already, his mind had thrown off sparks and gledes which had caught archæological fire; and he had now new projects in mind: not least a census of ancient and veteran trees, and specially of yews. And he had called already into being, under the direction of Professor the baroness Lacy and of Professor Den Farnaby, Student of Christ Church, Fellow of All Souls, and Tauntonian Professor of Ancient British History and Antiquities in the University of Oxford, a team which had made – already – exciting and striking discoveries in the abiding land. The land was to be invigilated, or His Grace should know the reason why: with consequences unintended but fortunate in ways not yet foreseen.

In time, Dr Emily Witchard, the sceptical GP whose allergy to any religion other than the Church of the NHS was notorious, should ask Canon Paddick the Rector if the duke had been moved to undertake these particular tasks by divine Providence (at which she snorted as she said it). The Revd Canon Noel Paddick SSC was to give a mild but firm answer.

Thus had it begun.

***

The duke's nephews and niece: Rupe, Jamie, and Hetty: had been shocked and saddened by the death of their father Lord Crispin; they had not – even the sentimental Henrietta Maria had not – been overthrown by it, bouleversé. He had been too long absent, a scandalous absence preventing nearer scandals under their and their mother's nose, for that.

Lady Crispin herself, however, had been shocked – and that very shock had shocked her, and surprised all her acquaintance – by the depth of her very complicated feelings upon and reactions to the death of a husband she had seen but fleetingly for most of their daughter's lifetime. She had reacted to the shock in a fashion she, nor her friends and family, could quite comprehend (unless, perhaps, that cynical historian the duke and that cynical budding historian up at Oriel, her second son James, did so). Crispin's very unreliability had for so long been a reliable foundation of her life. His more permanent removal from it had left her somewhat adrift; the loss of his minatory example as a domestic bugbear had stripped her of half her maternal arsenal. And he had died, with his usual flair for inconvenient timing, at an awkward moment. With Rupert up at the House and Jamie now up at Oriel, only Hetty – herself yet at school, assuredly, but also yet away at school, in Cheltenham – was left to her as the object of the redoubled maternal protectiveness and possessiveness which Lady Crispin roundly denied demonstrating or feeling.

The death of her cousin Arabella, also, had had its effect. She had not seen Arabella in years: quite as long as she had been spared the presence of her rackety and scandalous husband Crispin: for Arabella had kicked over the traces, in a very different fashion, many years before, going off to that Other Place in the Fens and then becoming, of all unlikely things, a wildlife biologist in the Canadian Arctic, which had worn her early out. The sting in the tail of those choices made in nescience long before, was that Rupert was now, with Crispin's death, heir presumptive to his uncle's dukedom … and, with Arabella's death precluding the prospect of an abeyance, heir presumptive also to their elderly cousin Lord Mallerstang and his ancient baronies. An unsettling prospect, and one which required a mother's guidance, considered Connie, not least in choosing a suitable wife for him....

And she was, after all, a widow now. This unexpected and unfamiliar, this unlooked-for, freedom, was daunting, even to so staunch a great lady as was Lady Crispin. Lady Crispin was, in her widowhood, the same Lady Crispin as ever, only more so: as she had been since she was in fact the Hon. Constance. If, as was commonly suggested with indulgent smiles, her ducal brother-in-law had been born, not in the purple, but rather in tweeds, she in turn had entered this world and mortal life – whatever Patriarch, Psalmist, or Apostle might say – in twin set and pearls.

That was all very well; and yet.... The habits of the grande dame, a woman who wanted only years to be a Platonic archetype of The Dowager, were hardening into more than habit in her. Connie in her widowhood was coming to alarm her brother-in-law and all their acquaintance, friends, family, and neighbours, horse, foot, and artillery, by her monstrously increased imperiousness and her growing acidulation. Her brother-in-law the duke concluded that there was no hope for her save marriage to some wise and patient gentleman who could manage her: which certainly should not be him.

True to her class and type, Lady Crispin in her widowhood threw herself all the more into good works and redoubled meddling in the District, after her usual tactless and high-handed fashion of giving good works a bad name.

Thus had it begun.

***

His Grace, a slave to public duty, was one of the public – one could hardly call him, 'lay' – members of the Wiltshire Police and Crime Panel, as well, naturally, as a magistrate. And being who he was and what he had been (most pertinently, a retired offcer of the Intelligence Corps), he was a considerable and indeed compulsive consumer of news and reports, offcial and very much unoffcial. And given to seeing patterns.

Joseph Plank of ... Church Road, Wanborough … pleaded guilty at Swindon Crown Court when charged with being involved in the supplying of crack cocaine and heroin and has been sentenced for two years imprisonment, suspended for two years.

… Police witnessed Plank in Pinehurst Road, by the fields and the Austradius Brook, conducting what appeared to be a drug deal. When challenged, he ran away, but a short while later, after a short chase, was caught and found to have an amount of cash and a mobile phone containing evidence of his involvement in the dealing of drugs.

After searching his home, Wiltshire Police also found a package of 42 individual wraps of crack cocaine and heroin worth between £425 and £675.

As well as the suspended sentence Plank must also carry out 100 hours of unpaid work, rehabilitation activity and pay a £100 fine.

***

In the year prior, and reaching back beyond that, the three adjacent counties, Somerset, Dorset, and the duke's own Wilts, had begun working, where they might, to join efforts and reduce at once overhead and jurisdictional conflicts by the merger of some services and by the creation of cross-boundary agencies and working groups.

It had been a reasonable notion. Its execution had been not unmixed, but generally not unsuccessful. Its unintended consequences were unfolding yet.

And in that same period, after years of playing Box and Cox with County boundaries and County constabularies, the strain of black sheep in the otherwise respectable flock of the Rideouts, in the Vale, had managed to attract and partly to defeat the outraged attention of just such cross-boundary agencies and working groups: with certain consequences the unpleasantness of which was yet unfolding.

Thus had it begun.

***

In years prior, and reaching back beyond that, a son of two prosperous families of the Vale and the country adjacent, over towards Honey Coombe, Wolchester, and Wolminster, had become an independent scholar, and rejoiced in a competence suffcient to allow himself that leisure in a pleasant cottage at Maidensigh.

John Treasure Voss was a fussy, apparently asexual man, with the brains of a scholar, the helplessness of a maiden aunt in dealing with the world outwith his books, and the greedy selfishness and utter solipsism of the nursery.

He had also – perhaps not unrelatedly – made himself the acknowledged expert on the works and life of Lewis Carroll.

There were circumstances in which these traits, the admirable and the exasperating alike, should come to be dangerously regarded as ominous, and indicative of dark habits.

There were circumstances in which the cross-boundary agencies and working groups, resentful, denied their prey in the Rideouts, might well and should, under the political pressure of a frustrated local purity campaigner, vent their frustrations upon even the most innocent of targets.

Thus had it begun.

***

In years prior, and reaching back beyond that, a lad had come of age in the Vale, in a simple and earthy family, who, by some quirk of genetics, had a mind like a razor, the morals and cultivation of a gib-cat, the technical talents of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and the body of a porno star.

This young Revel, in recent years, had become a very successful and prosperous cam-boy, managing always to remain on the windy side of the law.

He had also thereby made himself the Questing Beast to the furious errancy of the divorced Mrs Brickell, that village Mary Whitehouse, inglorious but alas by no means mute, and in no elegiac mood and with no shades of grey whatever.

Her furious pursuit of deviancy, momentarily checked (though daily redoubled) as to young Revel, with all her frustrations at the check, sought other targets whilst she planned her next assault upon that defiant citadel.

Thus had it begun.

***

Betty Stamford, whose daughter, now some years dead, had been married to that then-young curate Noel Paddick, had, with her family and the Paddicks, been lured to the Woolfonts some years prior by His Grace. It was, naturally, and quite obviously, for their and Noel's sake that the duke had done, but that fact neither wanted nor got any mention. For it had also been done by the duke for the sake of the land, and the community, the Stamfords and Paddicks between them taking on the most important tasks at the new community real-ale brewery and the restored, steam-driven Woolfonts & Chickmarsh Railway, which Charles and Sir Tom Douty had between them conjured into being.

Betty's son Will, brother to the late Pauline (Mrs Noel) Paddick, had married, back in Wolvo; and he and his cheerful wife, and their wee daughter who had been brought to be christened in the Woolfonts, by her uncle, before ever the Stamfords and Paddicks had removed there, lived in the Woolfonts now. For one thing, the duke had insisted on standing godfather to Wee Molly.

And in the cold of January, Betty Stamford had been feeling a