THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY.
"Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray,
Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way;
I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour,
It fears me quite—it's Friday night!—and then Nell Cook hath pow'r."
"And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the King's Scholar answers:
"It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift,
And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift;
There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk;
He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark.
"The Canon was a portly man—of Latin and of Greek,
And learned lore, he had good store,—yet health was on his cheek.
The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made of rye,
The beer was weak, yet he was sleek—he had a merry eye.
"For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin,
The Canon's house it stood without;—he kept good cheer within;
Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look,
And Ellen Bean ruled his cuisine.—He called her 'Nelly Cook.'"
It is not a very proper story that the King's Scholar unfolds; of how a "niece" of the Canon comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy of the good-looking cook, whose affections that "merry eye" of the Canon had captured. Nell Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon and the strange lady with "some nasty doctor's stuff," with which she flavours a pie destined for the Canonical table, and the two are found as the Scholar tells:
"The Canon's head lies on the bed,—his niece lies on the floor!
They are as dead as any nail that is in any door!"
Nell Cook, for her crime, says Tom Ingoldsby, adapting to his literary uses the legend long current in Canterbury, was buried alive beneath one of the great paving-stones of the "Dark Entry"; when, local history does not inform us:
But one thing's clear—that's all the year, on every Friday night,
Throughout that Entry dark doth roam Nell Cook's unquiet sprite.