I copied out these three entries, but I had a feeling that the missing pages could have revealed a very startling tale. Massey was kind enough to invite me to luncheon in hall and, consequently, it was early evening before a slow train deposited me at Upton Stonewold station.
The village of Upton Stonewold is one of those lovely places which appear to have been left undisturbed by the passing centuries. There is a street of gabled houses ending in a wide green with the church and the Tudor rectory on one side of it and a charming old inn on the other. Beyond are a few mellow red-brick houses dating from the time of Queen Anne and, still further afield, three or four Elizabethan mansions which are now farm-houses.
Of the church much has been written. Any guide-book to East Anglia will tell you of its graceful tower, the sixteenth-century bells, the old coloured glass, the curious bench-ends, the unique sedilia carved with fenland flowers and birds, the rare brasses, and the fragments of medieval wall-paintings. Bourne was justly proud of its beauty and our first day together was spent in examining the building and its treasures. My friend, being a man of means, could afford to spend his own money lavishly upon beautifying the church, and he had already brought about many improvements. I could see that the high altar, with all its trappings, was of recent installation and its severe dignity was in keeping with its surroundings. Two of the side chapels had been refurnished and, in one, a lamp burned before a veiled aumbry. This type of restoration always pleases me, for I resent seeing an ancient church looking like a Primitive Methodist chapel. Anglo-Catholicism has, at least, given back warmth and life to these old shrines, and I should be the last to decry a belief which has done so much to restore beauty and atmosphere to places mutilated by ignorance and intolerance.
It was late afternoon before we descended into the crypt and I realized that Bourne had left the finest thing until the last. Two acetylene flares illuminated the undercroft and the workmen were busy opening up a group of three arched windows. This lovely underground chapel is now familiar to all visitors to Upton Stonewold but, when I first saw it, it had been closed and forgotten for three hundred years. Little is known of its history and it certainly belongs to the late Norman period. The well, which still occupies the centre of the crypt, is fed by a chalybeate spring and has medicinal properties. One of the coping stones was later found to be a Mithraic altar, and is now preserved against the west wall. In the place where the altar now stands was the low table-tomb described in Bourne’s letter. It was marked with no cross or other symbol of Christianity. In the centre of the slab were the initials and the date and, below them, roughly cut into the stone, a grotesque figure of a huge cat. The tomb is now in a deep recess in the south wall, and cannot easily be seen.
As we left the crypt one of the workmen was beginning to chip away some of the mortar which held the slab in place above the tomb. He appeared to be finding it a difficult job and complained that the hardness of the material was blunting his chisel.
The strange happenings which, for a few days, disturbed the peace of Upton Stonewold actually commenced during the second night of my stay in the village.
After dinner that evening Bourne and I retired to his study to examine the extracts I had made from the manuscript in the library of St Hugh’s. The first could be linked up with a local tradition that St Etheldreda had once visited the village, and it was not improbable that she had blessed a well formerly associated with pagan rites. We found confirmation of suspected witchcraft at Upton Stonewold in Steele’s History of East Anglia, published at Cambridge in 1709. The writer states that two witch-finders toured the district in 1619 and, at this particular place, discovered four reputed witches. Two of the women, Elizabeth Manning and Jane Brannings, had been hanged at Ipswich, and the others suffered terms of imprisonment. In the report of the trials Elizabeth Manning is said to have stated that she ‘acted upon the orders of one who came with her face veiled, and neither I nor any other knew from whence she came. And sometimes this stranger did appear to us as a monstrous cat with her mouth dripping blood and her eyes glowing like lanterns.’ Had this stranger anything to do with the Joanna Stanning who ‘bought ye house of ye Hadwickes’? Bourne said that Hadwicke was still a common name in the district, but he had no knowledge of a particular house which may have been the family home.
The mention of ‘terrible things’ in the last extract evidently referred to events which had been recorded in the missing pages. Bourne had searched the diocesan archives, but could find no reference to the closing of the crypt. We came to the conclusion that there may have been two reasons for such action. If people continued to resort to the well because they had faith in its healing properties the bishop might have ordered the entrance to be blocked as a way of ending what he considered to be a ‘popish superstition’. On the other hand the hint that witchcraft was practised in the undercroft was sufficient cause for its closure. Yet, in those days, witchcraft and the practice of the Catholic religion were deliberately linked together by those who had no love for the old Faith.
We puzzled over these things and discussed the matter far into the night. It was nearly one o’clock when we retired. I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, for I had had a tiring day. But I was rudely awakened, it seemed almost immediately, by a most hideous caterwauling. From the awful noise it seemed that all the cats in the neighbourhood must have congregated in the rectory garden and raised their voices in chorus. I lay there hoping the din would subside. But it only increased in volume and, at last, I jumped out of bed and flung the window wide. The moon was shining and, beyond the garden hedge, I could see the white tombstones in the churchyard. Perched on one of them was an enormous black cat with eyes shining like green lamps and, around it, were the dark shapes of thirty or forty of the creatures. As I watched this scene in amazement there was a tap on my bedroom door and, in response to my invitation, Bourne came in and stood at my side.
‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘I swear there isn’t a cat of that size in the whole county.’
‘I wonder if the moon is creating an illusion of size by magnifying the shadow of the animal.’ I suggested.
As if in defiance the monster stretched its neck towards us and howled with ear-piercing insistence. The whole mob of cats increased their hellish din—an eerie shrieking which made one’s blood run cold. Then the sound suddenly ended. We saw the leader leap from the tombstone and the feline company slunk away among the trees. We waited until we were fairly certain that the pandemonium would not break out again, and then I closed the window and faced my host.
‘Good heavens, Jocelyn!’ I exclaimed. ‘What devilish thing has been let loose in this place?’
He did not reply for a few moments and then he spoke softly as if to himself. ‘What did Elizabeth Manning say in her confession? “And sometimes this stranger did appear to us as a monstrous cat with her mouth dripping blood and her eyes glowing like lanterns.”’
‘Don’t tell me that you blame all this upon witchcraft,’ I chaffed him in a vain effort to reassure myself. ‘There must be plenty of cats in the village and, if they all choose to dance attendance upon a visiting Tom, it is to be expected that their serenade should be something out of the ordinary.’