Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

The following summer, shortly before harvest, Diggory's eldest girl went to try and sell some baskets in the village of Swan. There she met the defendant, whom she asked to look at her wares, relying on not being recognised as a daughter of Diggory's, through having been in service at another farm when her father was working at the Gibbertys'.

The defendant seemed pleased with the baskets, bought two or three, and got into talk with the girl about the basket-making industry, in the course of which she learned that the best osiers for the purpose were very poisonous. Finally she asked the girl to bring her a bundle of the osiers in question, as making baskets, she said, would make a pleasant variety, of an evening, from the eternal spinning; and in the course of a few days the girl brought her, as requested, a bundle of the osiers, and was well paid for them.

Not long afterwards came the news that the farmer Gibberty had died suddenly in the night, and with it was wafted the rumour of foul play. There was an old custom in that part of the country that whenever there was a death in the house all the inmates should march in procession past the corpse. It was really a sort of primitive inquest, for it was believed that in the case of foul play the corpse would bleed at the nose as the murderer passed it. This custom, said Diggory, was universally observed in that part of the country, even in cases as free from all suspicion as those of women dying in child-bed. And in all the taverns and farm-houses of the neighbourhood it was being whispered that the corpse of the farmer Gibberty, on the defendant's walking past it, had bled copiously, and when Christopher Pugwalker's turn had come to pass it, it had bled a second time.

And knowing what he did, Diggory Carp came to feel that it was his duty to lodge an accusation against the widow.

His two reasons, then, for thinking her guilty were that the corpse had bled when she passed it, and that she had bought from his daughter osiers the sap of which was poisonous. The motive for the crime he found in her having a young lover, whom she wished should stand in her dead husband's shoes. It was useless for the defendant to deny that Pugwalker was her lover—the fact had for months been the scandal of the neighbourhood, and she had finally lost all sense of shame and had actually had him to lodge in the farm for several months before her husband's death. This was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by the witnesses summoned by Diggory.

As for the bleeding of the corpse: vulgar superstitions did not fall within the cognizance of the Law, and the widow ignored it in her defence. However, with regard to that other vulgar superstition to which the plaintiff had alluded, fairy fruit, she admitted, in passing, that very much against her wishes her late husband had sometimes used it as manure—though she had never discovered how he procured it.

As to the osiers—she allowed that she had bought a bundle from the plaintiff's daughter; but that it was for no sinister purpose she was able conclusively to prove. For she summoned various witnesses—among others the midwife from the village, who was always called in in cases of sickness—who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who all of them swore that his death had been a painless one. And various physicians, who were summoned as expert witnesses, all maintained that the victim of the poisonous sap of osiers always died in agony.

Then she turned the tables on the plaintiff. She proved that Diggory's dismissal had been neither sudden nor unjust; for, owing to his thieving propensities, he had often been threatened with it by her late husband, and several of the farm-servants testified to the truth of her words.

As to the handful of florins and the sack of lentils, all she could say was that it was not like the farmer to load a dishonest servant with presents. But nothing had been said about two sacks of corn, a pig, and a valuable hen and her brood, which had disappeared simultaneously with the departure of the plaintiff. Her husband, she said, had been very angry about it, and had wanted to have Diggory pursued and clapped into gaol; but she had persuaded him to be merciful. The long and the short of it was that the widow left the court without a stain on her character, and that a ten years' sentence for theft was passed on Diggory.

As for Christopher Pugwalker, he had disappeared shortly before the trial, and the widow denied all knowledge of his whereabouts.