‘Another unwelcome visitor. Breezed up one afternoon, eighty years old and babbling foolishness. I’d not underestimate the damage this mule head has done in a lifetime of sticking his prick into other people’s compost. Makes a hobby of the d’Urberville family. Can you credit it? Preacher digs about in someone else’s history for jollies. Even my daffy aunt knew better than let him cross her threshold. With her gone, Tringham wanted another stab at getting into “the archives”. I should’ve had the Albino cut his throat and dump him in The Chase. Instead, Braham turned him away. He slunk to the saloon and told his tale of a dog.’
Now, we were getting to it.
‘I had this later from Lazy-Eye. He’s courting Car Darch, a local strumpet. They do their carousing in the Red Dog. Tringham came in, settled by the fire, ordered a pint of ole goat piss, and yarned to the starving serfs — they’ve tin enough in their pockets for drink, notice. He told ’em how their pub got its name…’
As he talked, Stoke leaned forward, voice low, cheroot-end burning bright, eyebrows like horns.
‘My uncle bought the d’Urberville name outright. I couldn’t tell you who his father… my grandfather… was, but I’ve a parchment listing d’Urbervilles all the way back to Sir Pagan, who came over in 1066. Simon Stoke was from no one out of nothing and laid out gelt for centuries of tradition. He bought ancestors. Also, the family seat, a pew in the church and a mess of ghost stories. A phantom coach heard when a d’Urberville is about to die. Just to confirm that Uncle Si got the family curse with the name, it was reported running to schedule when Cousin Alec was pig-stuck. Tess the Knife is supposed to haunt us too. Her spook can be recognised because her head lolls the wrong way, on account of vertebrae separating when she was hanged.’
‘I seen the Brokeneck Lady,’ Dan’l said. ‘By The Chase, at night, net over her face, wailing…’
The giant shook in his fleece. Stoke was irritated by the interruption.
‘You can set aside the phantom coach and the moaning murderess. It’s the dog that’s a bother. A great red hound. A big bastard beast. This is what I want killed. I want its hide above the fireplace in Trantridge Hall. I want its paws made into tobacco pouches. I want its teeth on a necklace for my fancy woman. I want its tail wound round the brim of my tall hat.’
Moriarty tapped his teeth with a yellow knuckle.
‘This dog of yours…’
‘He goes by “Red Shuck”.’
‘This “Red Shuck”? Am I to understand this is not a living animal but a ghost?’
Stoke stubbed out his cheroot and nodded grudgingly.
‘Yes, it’s supposed to be a ghost, but, answer me this… Can a ghost rip out a strong man’s throat?’
III
I’m going to interrupt. I know, just as we’d got to the dog. So far, like Tristram Shandy, Red Shuck has barely figured in a story which purports to be all about him. Now, I’ll tell you about the dog.
Stoke gave us the gist he had from Lazy-Eye Jack of what Tringham told the Trantridge soaks — which the parson, in turn, had gleaned from old Wessex wives. At the end of this chain of Chinese whispers, we got great red hound… big bastard beast… said to be a ghost… ripped-out throat. Very ominous and in line with Stoke’s stated policy of theatrical effect, but scarcely useful intelligence. Moriarty had me pop round to the British Museum and look up our prospective quarry. The prime source on Sir Pagan d’Urberville is the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis [30] and there’s a chapter on Red Shuck in the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-Wolves [31].
So, herewith, the terrible tale of the ‘Curse of the d’Urbervilles’. Read it by candlelight at midnight and be prepared to whiten your hair and soil your drawers.
As Stoke mentioned, Sir Pagan ‘came over in 1066’. This signifies that, like many of the best families, the d’Urbervilles were founded by a bandit whose crown-snatching patron could bestow estates as he saw fit. During the Norman Conquest, Pagan was a sly, ginger-headed youth. How anybody could advance in a priest-ridden era with his name is beyond me! I imagine he spent his life trying to convince folk it was pronounced ‘Pah-ganne’.
He was one of seventy-six Frenchmen who claimed to have put that fatal arrow into Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Several began the day fighting on the English side and three didn’t even have right arms. An ancestor of the spotty prig who flogged me for misappropriation of buns at Eton shot the King from Calais. He claimed God’s winds fetched his shaft straight into Harry’s eye. This leads me to deem the typical eleventh-century frog no more trustworthy than today’s nation of moustache musketeers, bedroom bandits and painted midgets. Sir Pagan, at least, was at the battle.
Having just taken over a whole country, the new king had a lot on his plate. For a start, he was on a tear to get everyone who’d scorned him as William the Bastard to hail him as William the Conqueror. Bill the Conk couldn’t be bothered to sort through the claims, so seventy-six lying bowmen got knighted in a job-lot. After that, they felt literally entitled to claim their own fiefdoms. Sir Pagan d’Urberville’s land-grab netted him a third of Wessex. He built himself a castle at Trantridge.
Titled and landed, Sir Pagan toadied less to the Conqueror, but knocked along with the Bastard’s son, William Rufus. William I was an empire builder, a man with a mission; William II was an empire enjoyer, a pursuer of virile pastimes. Junior succeeded to the English throne in 1087 and grumbled that he would have preferred Normandy, which went to his older brother. With his pal crowned, Sir Pagan became eminent. After William Rufus remarked offhand that d’Urberville’s forest offered the finest ‘chase’ in his kingdom, it became known as The Chase.
The new king was a fiend for hunting. His primary interest was any game animal which might provide horns, hide or tusks to decorate his castles. William II was killed by a close friend while they were out after deer. Something similar happened to a tiger-stalking crony of mine in India. It was said Walter Tyrell, William Rufus’ slayer, was too good a bowman to make such a mistake. A like criticism was laid against me. I refer the interested reader to my earlier remark about how difficult it can be to just miss a shot.
With English game ripe to be brought down by Norman sports, Sir Pagan threw himself into the pursuit. Every huntsman has to have his dogs. The Trantridge kennels became famous. Though he cleans it up somewhat, Baring-Gould recounts a rumour that Sir Pagan d’Urberville himself sired the litter which became his hunting pack, getting puppies on a she-wolf imported from the Harz Mountains. The dogs came out big, hungry and red.
Even taking the she-wolf story with a pinch of the proverbial, Sir Pagan remained essentially French in his habit of tumbling anything which strayed past. You’re aware of the custom of droit de seigneur, that the feudal lord is entitled — nay, obliged — to take first jump at any local bride on her wedding night? Pagan imported the custom to England. When grooms complained, he ruled that, to be impartial about it, he’d take his pleasure with them too. Extensive romping and riding to hounds made Sir Pagan a fine, rollicking fellow to lordly Norman chums and a bitterly hated tyrant to smelly Saxon underlings.
After a few years’ happy hunting, Sir Pagan’s dickybird got him into trouble. Comes to us all, I’m afraid. Sir Pagan, like several of his lineal and nominal descendents, came a cropper because he stuck it in the wrong hole — or at least the wrong hole-bearer.