At any rate, one cannot understand the persistent attempt to connect the so-called “Blue Room” of the present house with the fatal bedroom. If there is any truth at all in the story of Master Cole, his tragical ending was accomplished in a house demolished eight hundred years ago; for we have it, in the words of the writer of Thomas of Reading, that “the King (Henry the First) commanded the house should be quite consumed with fire and that no man should ever build vpon that cursed ground.”
In the same manner, the recent attempts to connect Turpin with the “Ostrich” will not bear the least investigation.
YARD OF THE “OSTRICH,” COLNBROOK.
This ghastly story claimed, with such extraordinary zeal, by the “Ostrich” is by no means the only one of its kind, for many an old tale of horror has for its central feature the wicked innkeeper who robbed and murdered his guests. The most famous, and most revolting, legend is that included in the career of St. Nicholas of Myra, which serves to show that this licensed-victualling depravity was international. The true story of St. Nicholas is not miraculous, and is simply earnest of his good and pitiful nature. He entreated, and secured from Eustathius, governor of Myra, the pardon of three men imprisoned in a tower and condemned to die, and is often represented with a tower at the side of him and three mannikins rising out of it. In the course of time the tower became a tub, and the little men were changed into children, and those changes in their turn gave rise to a wholly fictitious story that fairly outranges all the other incredible marvels of the dark ages. According to this tale, an innkeeper, running short of bacon, seized three little boys, cut them up, and pickled them in a salting-tub. St. Nicholas, hearing that they had gone to the inn and had disappeared there, had his saintly suspicions aroused. He asked for the pickle-tub, addressed it in some form of words that unfortunately have not been preserved to us, and straightway the fragments sorted themselves out, and pieced themselves together, and the children went off to play.
A curious feature of the old frontage of the “Ostrich” was the doorway made in coaching times in the upper storey for the convenience of passengers, who were in this manner enabled to step directly into the house from the roofs of the coaches. There are those still living who remember this contrivance; but the space has long been filled in, and the sole vestige of it is an unobtrusive wooden sill resting on the timbering beneath the swinging sign.
Romance, very dark and gory, clothes the memory of the “Blue Boar” at Leicester, a house unfortunately pulled down in the ’30’s of the nineteenth century. According to tradition, Richard the Third, coming to Leicester and finding the castle already dilapidated, stayed at the inn before the battle of Bosworth, and slept in the huge oaken four-poster bed which remained in the house until the date of its demolition. It was not only a bed, but also a treasure-chest, for in the time of one Clark, who kept the house in the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier part of the reign of James the First, a great store of gold coin was discovered in the framework of it. Mrs. Clark, making up the bed hastily, shook it with more than usual vigour, when, to her surprise, a gold coin dropped out. Examination led to the discovery that the bedstead had a false bottom and that the space between was one vast cash-box. Clark did not at the time disclose the find, and so became “mysteriously” rich. In the course of a few years he was gathered to his fathers, and his widow kept on the house, but was murdered in 1613 for the sake of her gold by a maidservant, who, together with no fewer than seven men accomplices, was duly hanged for the crime.