Damn His Blood (26 page)

Here Rowe was wrong. His suggestion that Pyndar had not investigated the crime properly rested on the fact that no formal proceedings had been brought and his belief that the magistrate had failed to uncover the farmers’ intentions. This was not true. Pyndar had good evidence; he had a probable scenario and motive. His difficulty lay with the law, which required Heming to be convicted before the farmers could be charged as accessories. But Rowe’s story could not be ignored. It added further evidence to the case against the Captain, Barnett and increasingly Clewes, and it also introduced a new participant in the plot, James Taylor.

James Taylor would already have been well known to Pyndar. As a farrier, he toured the local farms, tending to sick animals and providing a range of rudimentary services which included the creation and administering of various mercurial elixirs. Taylor was particularly known as an expert in the skilled art of bleeding horses, cattle or sheep, a practice which was believed to purge disease. It involved securing and blindfolding a feverish animal before opening its jugular vein and drawing off a portion of blood with the sharpened blade of a fleam, an instrument which resembled a physician’s scalpel.
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Although Pyndar may have known Taylor for his skill as a farrier he would have more readily identified him as a man of murky repute. To William Barnett in Oddingley he ‘bore a bad character’ and for a chronicler in Worcester, who would set down a little biography of him several years later, ‘he had the reputation for being the biggest rogue in the county’. In Rowe’s testimony Taylor certainly emerges as a curiously loose individual. He had the temerity to approach an acquaintance in daylight with a proposal to commit murder and then, in spite of a sharp warning, to repeat the offer just a few hours later. Such actions bear the mark of a determined, amoral personality, seduced to collude in a capital crime. Some questions linger, though. If the money was to go to Rowe for committing the murder, then how would Taylor benefit? He neither lived in Oddingley nor had any known connection with Parker, so why should he want him dead? A further problem lay in the timing. Why would Taylor approach Rowe on Midsummer Day when Heming was already primed to commit the attack? It made little sense.

But James Taylor could not be discounted. He was already well known to local magistrates for a variety of petty offences and it seems possible that he might have somehow also entangled himself in the Oddingley affair. He was an opportunistic man who worked in a transient environment, visiting farm after farm, his course steered through the lanes by offers of work or rumours of trouble. And trouble is often what he found. Of all Taylor’s little infamies throughout the years, one in particular had passed into local folklore. Around the year 1790 he had been arrested for sacrilege for stealing the communion plate from the parish church at Hampton Lovett, just north of Droitwich. The case had seemed clean cut, but a flaw in the indictments had led to him being unexpectedly acquitted. Having slipped so magically through the fingers of the law, Taylor was popularly remembered in the area as the ‘Churchwarden of Hampton-Lovett’. And it was to dismay or amusement several years after that he managed to wed a pretty widow from Worcester, a triumph which only added to his cherished identity as the local rogue.

But Rowe’s evidence suggested that Taylor might have had a more sinister side. After receiving Rowe’s testimony, Pyndar had the farrier arrested and committed to gaol, and the Captain and Barnett were once again called before magistrates to explain themselves. No records of these proceedings survive, but it is clear nothing more came of the matter and Taylor was released shortly afterwards. The incident, however, was significant. It added weight to Pyndar’s theory that the farmers had plotted Parker’s death and engaged Heming for the purpose. It also suggested that their operation had not been confined to Oddingley, but stretched into Droitwich and its adjoining parishes. That Rowe was approached indicates that he was considered of a sufficiently violent disposition to execute the task. There is a hint of this violence in his language and brisk treatment of Taylor. Was Rowe the man the farmers were looking for in 1806? Venal, ruthless, tractable, unfussy? Someone who could get the job done?

Yet John Rowe’s evidence seems suspiciously elusive. He carefully shields himself from any accusation of wrongdoing by emphasising his reaction to Taylor’s offer. But while he is defensive in this detail, in others ways he must have been astonishingly brave. Two years after Parker’s murder Rowe became the first person to speak out against the farmers, and for this he risked being treated as a pariah by his peers in the Droitwich area. This appears to have been Rowe’s fate. ‘The boys used to call after me: “Who killed the Oddingley parson?”’ he claimed years later, adding bitterly, ‘They were set onto this by Captain Evans.’

Still the focus remained fixed on Richard Heming and his whereabouts. A popular theory maintained that he had escaped to a faraway corner of Britain, where he had blended into a new community under a different name. Various sightings supporting this argument were fed back to Pyndar, including a persuasive account from a servant girl who had grown up in Droitwich and claimed to have seen Heming begging in Portsmouth. Her story was relayed back to Pyndar by the son of a Worcester magistrate, but the speed of communication was such that no action was taken for a fortnight. In the end nothing came of the report, which was filed away in Hadzor amid the growing piles of notes.

A more widely accepted explanation was that Heming had escaped overseas. For nearly a decade after his disappearance the Napoleonic Wars rumbled on, drawing men from British shores to battles on the continent. Around 300,000 of these were never to return, lost in campaigns and conflicts that stretched across Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Netherlands, and it was imagined that Heming was among them. Another suggestion was that he had somehow slipped past Richard Ward’s careful watch in Bristol in the days following the attack, and managed to steal himself away in a boat bound for the New World. A letter was circulated in Droitwich to this effect some years after 1806, ‘stating that he had escaped to America, and giving a circumstantial account of the way in which he got out of the country’. This letter was supported by the evidence of man named Creswell, a Droitwich resident, who told his friends he had seen Heming while travelling there. Although it appeared extraordinary to have chanced upon a figure as elusive as Heming in a continent as vast as North America, Creswell’s account was accepted by many.

Mary Chance’s claim that Heming had returned to Oddingley was generally not credited. Her sighting had been an isolated one, and the prospect of him dashing about the fields and lanes on Midsummer night while all eyes were watching for him seemed unlikely. Yet there were those who still suspected that Heming had met the Captain, Barnett or Clewes after his disappearance. Elizabeth Heming in particular was not placated by letters from America or by the farmers’ dismissals and denials. In
The Bishop’s Daughter
, a novel by the Reverend Erskine Neale, published decades later in 1842, Elizabeth Heming is portrayed. Neale had visited Oddingley after the murders. His plot drew heavily on the case and was strikingly accurate.

She was assured by the Oddingley farmers
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that Heming was gone to America; and from time to time, names of persons were given who had seen him there; and more than once extracts of letters, said to be written by him, were distributed in the neighbourhood. To none she gave credence. Her remark was, ‘I know better. He would never abandon his wife, and his children, and his home, without a word. No; he is near me! I am sure of it; and it must be the business of my life to discover where. I know my mind is not so clear as it was; and that my troubles have nearly got the better of me; but still in my dreams he would not stand by me so often and warn me, if there was not an effort to be made and a secret to be discovered.

Elizabeth believed that Richard had been lured back to Church Farm by Captain Evans and John Barnett on Midsummer Day. What happened to him after this was unclear but she had heard about the clover rick that George Banks had built at Church Farm on 25 June, and she felt sure that something – perhaps Heming’s body – was hidden inside. This theory drew on other evidence that placed him at Church Farm in the hours and days after the murder. William Chellingworth was one farmhand who said he had seen Heming slip out of the farmhouse as Baker searched it, boasting to a local man that ‘he could hang all the head men in Oddingley’.
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William Rogers of Dodderhill, a neighbouring parish, quietly told friends that his son-in-law had seen Heming at Evans’ on the night of the murder. None of these reports had ever been passed to Pyndar.

The clover rick stood at the heart of the mystery. For Elizabeth it was the key to discovering what had become of Heming. The years following his disappearance had been cruel. The suspicions against him had left her ostracised in the area, and in June 1807 Elizabeth and her three daughters had been issued with a removal order by their parish in Droitwich. Within a few years all three children were dead. These misfortunes preceded her marriage, to Edward Newbury, a labouring man, but shortly afterwards he died too. Battered by a sad series of circumstances, none of which were of her own making, Elizabeth Newbury – as she had now become – retained her conviction that the Oddingley farmers were hiding something about Heming’s disappearance.

With little left to lose, in the spring of 1816 she finally testified against them. On 29 March she stood before a panel of seven magistrates in Droitwich and deposed that she believed that Richard’s remains had been concealed in the clover rick. A warrant was granted for its search the following morning, and, almost a decade to the day after Elizabeth Fowler had discovered the shotgun under the staddles, a team of parish constables prepared to descend on Church Farm.

Elizabeth’s theory was a plausible one. Why had a rick been built so hastily after the murder? Why had Banks not mentioned anything about it to William Chance before? Rick construction was an art and required careful planning. But this one had seemingly been built on a whim in the earliest hours of the morning before the clover harvest had even been completed. Since then it had stood for ten years and had been re-thatched twice by William Barnett.

A team of constables arrived at Church Farm the next morning to find that the clover rick was gone. Having stood undisturbed for a decade, the night before the warrant was due to be executed it had been dismantled and removed. The constables executed their orders as best they could, digging up the area around where the structure had been, but found nothing. The tension and anticipation created by Newbury’s testimony and the issuing of the warrant had been replaced, once again, by frustration.

The vanishing clover rick was another riddle in a parish that seemed filled with secrets. Just as those who knew about Heming’s escape kept silent in 1806, those who knew the truth about the rick did the same a decade later. Perhaps they were too scared to report what they knew; perhaps they were too loyal, too proud or too sensible to split. For all that John Rowe had told Pyndar about the plot to kill the parson, there were many others who must have known far more. But what these villagers did know was stowed away: like the harvest tools in deepest winter, fastened in their sheds, hidden out of sight. For those who lived nearby and others who occasionally visited, Oddingley was becoming known as an enigma and an ill-omened place. It was as if a hint of its shadowy, alluring character could be derived from its very name, with ‘oddity’ variously defined in the dictionary as ‘a strange or peculiar person or thing / a strange attitude or habit / an eccentricity that is not explained’.

Mary Sherwood was drawn to Oddingley during these years. She was the sister of Reverend Butt,
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Parker’s replacement, spent lengthy periods in the parish and later recorded a sadly vivid portrait of it full of pathos and lamentations. Oddingley was, she wrote, an unhappy place. Villagers crowded about their chimney corners in winter to discuss the murder again and again, turning the story over and over in their conversations, like a precious object – first to be examined and then understood. She visited Parker’s glebe, that ‘sanguinary field … where the assassin had affected his deadly purpose’ and she complained of the parishioners, ‘many of whom acquiesced or rejoiced in their bloody achievement so that land was defiled by blood, and filled with the images of death and horror’. With a heavy air of Gothic melancholy, she continued:

And is it not astonishing
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that many who visited this place while its chief inhabitants lay under the dark suspicion, were filled with a sort of sadness, of which they could not divert themselves? In vain the sun shone on the fair fields of this unhappy parish. In vain an infinitude of beautiful wild flowers added perfume to every breeze, and every charm of rural life was scattered around, and a thousand interesting pictures presented themselves. For that alas! was wanting which could alone make these things delightful. Namely, a spirit of sincerity and harmony and benevolence, among its inhabitants, arising from the consciousness of being at peace with God.

To Sherwood, Oddingley was a community adrift. Only a parish blighted by vice and devilry could stoop so low as to murder its own clergyman. It was a view echoed by others in the years following the murder, as the idea that Oddingley was somehow cursed permeated the surrounding countryside. John Noake, a noted local antiquary, journalist and author of
Worcester in Olden Times
, detected a lingering sadness when he visited St James’ Church. His piece chimed darkly with Sherwood’s.