A Red Herring Without Mustard

The Life of Simeon Hoxey; Notes on the Septuagint; Prayer and Penance; Pew’s Thoughts Upon Godliness; Astronomical Principles of Religion Natural and Reveal’d; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Polycarp of Smyrna; and so forth.

Just above these was Hydraulicks and Hydrostaticks, a relic, no doubt, of Lucius “Leaking” de Luce. I pulled the book from the shelf and opened it. Sure enough, there was Lucius’s bookplate: the de Luce family crest, with his name written beneath it in a surprisingly childish hand. Had he owned the book when he was a boy?

The title page was almost completely covered with dense, inky calculations: sums, angles, algebraic equations, all of them more hurried than neat, crabbed, cramped, and rushing across the page. The entire book was somewhat rippled, as if it had once been wet.

A folded paper had been inserted between the pages which, when I opened it out flat, proved to be a hand-drawn map—but a map unlike any I had ever seen before.

Scattered upon the page were circles of various sizes, each joined to the others by lines, some of which radiated directly to their targets, while others followed more rectangular and roundabout paths. Some of the lines were thick; some thin. Some were single; others double; and a few were shaded in various schemes of cross-hatching.

At first I thought it was a railway map, so dense were the tracks—perhaps an ambitious expansion scheme for the nearby Buckshaw Halt, where trains had once stopped to put down guests and unload goods for the great house.

Only when I recognized the shape at the bottom of the map as the ornamental lake, and the unmistakeable outline of Buckshaw itself, did I realize that the document was, in fact, not a map at all, but a diagram: Lucius “Leaking” de Luce’s plan for his subterranean hydraulic operations.

Interesting, I thought, but only vaguely. I shoved the paper into my pocket for future reference and resumed my search for books that might contain some mention of the Hobblers.

Sermons for Sailors; God’s Plan for the Indies; Remains of Alexander Knox, Esq.

And suddenly there it was: English Dissenters.

I must say—it was an eye-opener!

I suppose I had been expecting a dry-as-dust account of hellfire parsons and dozing parishioners. But what I had stumbled upon was a treasure trove of jealousy, backbiting, vanity, abductions, harrowing midnight escapes, hangings, mutilations, betrayal, and sorcery.

Wherever there had been savage bloodshed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English history, there was sure to have been a Dissenter at the heart of it. I made a note to take some of these volumes up to my bedroom for a bit of horrific bedtime reading. They would certainly be more lively than Wind in the Willows, which had been languishing on my night-table since Aunt Felicity had sent it to me for Christmas, pretending to believe it was a history of corporal punishment.

With English Dissenters in hand, I climbed down the ladder, dropped into the upholstered wing-back chair that Daffy usually occupied, and began flipping through its pages in search of the Hobblers.

Because there was no index, I was forced to go slowly, watching for the word “Hobblers,” trying not to become too distracted by the violence of the religious text.

Only towards the end of the book did I find what I was looking for. But then, suddenly, there it was, at the bottom of a page, in a footnote marked by a squashed-spider asterisk, set in quaint old-fashioned type.

“The mischief of Infant-baptism,” it said, “is an innovation on the primitive practice of the church: one of the corruptions of the second or third century. It is, moreover, often made the occasion of sin, or is turned into a farce as, for example, in that custom of the sect known as the Hobblers, whose dipping of a child held by the heel into running water, must be understood as no more than a bizarre, not to say barbaric, survival of the Greek myth of Achilles.”

It took several moments for the words to sink in.

Mrs. Mullet had been right!

TWENTY-SEVEN

UP THE EAST STAIRCASE I flew, English Dissenters clutched in my hand.