davywavy | The hands of God

As promised, a short tale. RBS asked first, and he for a mystery. It is one of sorts, although probably too short to be p[roperly mysterious, and the method isn't too obscure; Instead, it's more of a further experiment into an older style of writing - those of you who remember my last piece will recall that it was written in a 1920's style - here, I'm aiming for something about the 1860's-70's.
It's not my best work, I'm sure, and it feels a bit contrived, but overall, 3,500 words is not bad for two hours work on Sunday night. Let me know what you think.

Oh, I'll post the next when I get to 70-ish people on my friends list, and I'm indebted to

dreamingchristi for helping me sort out some of the more unconvincing aspects of the story into something more likely.

I first met the good Doctor Morris when he came to take the stipend as parish vicar in 1848. He had been, it seemed, quite a hope at Cambridge, having taken high marks in doctorates for both Theology and Medicine, but he had decided that the halls of academia were not for him and instead taken to the quiet contemplation of a rather more sedentary life. Naturally, I felt then, and ever after, that Cambridge's loss had been the gain of both myself and our little parish, as the good doctor was not only an excellent minister to the flock of St. Luke's, but also a good friend and a skilled physician, a skill which was of great use on more than one occasion. In addition, my
friend had a prodigious intellect, which was both a joy to converse with, and also a wonder to observe in action, as I hope the following little narrative shall indicate.
St Luke's church and parish centred on the small town of Pranton, just outside of Plymouth. Always a bustling town, what with the navy based there, Plymouth became quite the little Metropolis after the arrival of the railway in 1844, and the wealthy and good of Plymouth largely dwelt within Pranton, which lay in a small dale one stop up from the city itself.
I had been visiting with Doctor Morris one afternoon - it was the afternoon of August the fourteenth, if I recall aright - in eighteen fifty-one, when a loud commotion outside the rectory indicated that his presence as both doctor and vicar was required due to a man having been shot and, as we discovered hurrying from the house and inquiring of the man who had come, it seemed a murder had been done and already an arrest had been made.
Questioning further, we discovered that a house guest of Sir Henry Patterson, who owned a large house overlooking the village, had been shot and Sir Henrys wife, the Lady Emmiline Patterson, had already been arrested by the local constable on suspicion of having committed the deed.
The man who had come to the door was Wilkins, Sir Henrys' groom, and, cutting out his thick accent and tendency to offer his own opinions, he told us the following story:
Sir Henry was an important member of the local railway society, an organisation of rail enthusiasts from the surrounding area who would gather and talk about such things as the relative merits of differing locomotives, whether sulphur coal or bituminised coal were of use in the pulling of carriages, whether it was suitable or healthy for ladies to travel at greater than thirty miles an hour, and other such pressing matters of the day. Sir Henry had been playing host to a certain Doctor Black, a known expert on the railway system who worked for a ministry in London. Doctor
Black had been invited by the society to address them on rail-related matters, and had arrived only earlier that day to stay at Sir Henrys house.
At lunchtime the maid had gone to look for Doctor Black and had found him stone dead on the garden behind the house which overlooked the town, having been shot in the head.
During the subsequent hue and cry, the local constable had been called and, after looking the situation over, had taken Lady Emmeline into custody upon suspicion of being a murderess. Sir Henry, who had departed earlier in the morning had not yet returned and the entire household were awaiting him with bated breath.
With this intelligence we arrived at the house and were immediately shown to the gardens, where the mortal remains of Doctor Black were to be found.
"I didn' touch 'im nor nothin'", we were reassured by the constable, and my friend knelt to look at the corpse, and say a few small prayers.
The view from Sir Henrys house was simply spectacular; it looked down over the town, where one could see the houses and tradesmen's shops, and even the church and town hall, and then over the dale to the moors on the other side.
I looked over at this as Doctor Morris performed certain last rites before standing.
"It a terrible thing, a murder", he said. "The greatest of the mortal sins."
Doctor Black's body was a horrible sight - he had been shot in the head from a short distance, making a terrible mockery of his once intelligent features. Morris turned to the constable and requested that the body be taken into the house and laid out with a little more dignity, and the constable and servants of the household moved to carry out his request, although not too enthusiastically. With that, the Morris turned to me. "You'll see, Maybridge", he said, "that poor Doctor Black was shot in the back of the head, possibly whilst he was admiring the view, or possibly looking at his watch." Morris pointed down, and there I saw lying next to where the body had been a gold pocket watch, broken, clearly bearing the time of eleven. "That," continued Morris, "would indicate that the Doctor was shot at eleven, and the watch broke when he fell."
With that, he re-entered the house to talk to the Constable.
Wainright, the constable, had indeed seen the broken watch and, taking it upon himself to ask questions of the servants, had learned that Sir Henry had left earlier that day to catch the eleven A.M. train down to town to make arrangements for Doctor Black's speech. Looking over the house, he had found Lady Emmeline in tears in the drawing room, seated at desk upon which there were a number of letters from Doctor Black to her of 'a remarkable, intimate nature', and under the chair she was seated on sat a case for duelling pistols. Upon examination, it was clear that one had been fired
recently and, although Lady Emmeline denied all knowledge of the crime, Wainwright considered this sufficiency of evidence to present the a judge at the assizes when the circuit came about again.
Morris asked whether it was possible that the murderer could have been anyone else, but Wainwright answered with a good-natured shake of the head. Sir Henry had been seen onto the eleven o’clock by Wilkins, who had driven him there in his coach, and, as if it clinched that matter, Wainwright drew forth a gold winding-key, which he told us had been in Doctor Black's valise in his room. It was impossible that his watch might have been changed to show a different time without this key, meaning that the only possible suspect was the good lady of the house herself, and her motive had obviously been some sort of secret lovers quarrel between her and the Doctor. When
asked why nobody had taken notice of a gunshot, the groom replied that the glorious twelfth had just two days passed and so the hills were full of hunters bagging grouse by the brace, and so one more gunshot would indeed go unnoticed under the current circumstances.
All seemed in order, and with that Doctor Black's body was taken to the crypt and a funeral arranged.

As you will gather from the fact I have written this narrative, my friend Morris was perhaps the only one not convinced by the sequence of events, and he took to talking it through with me in the weeks leading up to the assizes. He paid visits to Sir Henry, who was pale and deeply distressed by what had befallen his wife, claiming ignorance of the letters that she and his guest had exchanged, and the apparent understanding that existed between them despite her married state. Doctor Black had been a long-time friend of his, and the betrayal of his wife and his friend obviously left Sir Henry
distraught.
After our visits to Sir Henry, Morris and I would walk slowly to the station, as Morris would insist that the good Lady Emmeline was indeed a good lady, and he had known her for several years, had he not? And was not it his duty to be aware of the state of grace of the souls in his entire parish? And, furthermore, could things feel any more wrong? A fallen woman she may be, he insisted, but a murderess he was sure she was not.
My own feelings in these walks were mixed; I had long held the good Lady in high regard, perhaps higher than a gentleman of my station should, but due to her wedded state I had never said a word of it. She was a noted beauty, a renowned letter-writer and speaker, and she kept her house in remarkable order. She was famous for her quick wits, and in the local inns about many who had suffered the rough side of her tongue through their own fault now were only too happy to say how they long had known of her sharp temper, and that any affair of the heart and subsequent death involving her were pure inevitabilities which they had long predicted. I would pull my hat over my eyes and depart when such topics arose.
During our walks to the station, Morris would talk through Doctor Black’s last hour upon this earth, as if trying to find some gap in the chain of logic that lead to his death. He had arrived that fateful morning upon the ten o'clock overnight train from London, where he had been met at the station by Sir Henry and his groom and driven up the cutting from the station to the house Sir Henrys dog-cart. There, he had greeted Lady Emmiline with all indication of amity (but no impropriety!) and deposited
his bags in the guest room. From that moment, it was believed nobody had seen him alive again, save his killer. Sir Henrys groom had sworn under oath that he had driven his master to the station at ten-forty five, only thirty minutes after last trip and, as all the servants at the house could vouch for one another it was impossible, saving the action of some other party of whom we were unaware, that the murderer could be anyone other than the lady of the house.

The dates of the assizes were duly set, and Lady Emmiline was duly arraigned to appear before Judge Mortimer Pudsley, a fervent and enthusiastic hanger, upon the twenty-ninth of August. During that last week before the trail I confess that I resigned myself to moroseness and drank more than can have been good for my health. Doctor Morris, on the other hand, became ever more animated and trotted about the countryside in his characteristic way, talking to anyone and everyone who might have seen any of the parties of that fateful day. It was on the night before the trail that he came knocking upon my door with a gentleman whom I knew to be the defence brief for the Lady.
"If I may, my friend, a moment of your time." I nodded dumbly and instructed my man to escort them to my study. When I joined them there the two were smiling at each other like old friends sharing a private joke. I asked the good rector what put him in such high spirits when it was almost inevitable that a dear lady should be sentenced to hang upon the morrow.
"I was, like you, almost ready to give up hope of light", said the Doctor. "However, in the book of Luke, the Lord constrains us not to lose hope – in fact, he insists that he is hope - and so I put my faith in his wisdom and went to the library, where I met my friend here also upon a similar quest.
We worked long and hard, but in all the legal tomes we read, we could find nothing that might help our case. Eventually, for the purposes of restoring my spirit, I turned to the copy of the Bible which all public buildings keep ready for the education of lay readers, and there I found our information."
I sat up, startled. "In the Bible? Which book?"
"In the book of Job, where, I suppose, one might expect to find such things" - he chuckled - "Well, when I say in the book of Job, I meant more as a bookmark, marking the misadventures of that poor old patriarch." Here he passed me a crumpled slip of paper, which upon examination turned out to be an old note from the local Railway society. It was a flyer a month old announcing that Doctor Black would be coming to speak to the society, and expressing that hope of the chairman of the society for a good turnout.
I confessed that I was baffled.
Doctor Morris smiled. "The Lord worketh in most mysterious ways. I know not who was reading the book of Job one day this last month, but the Lord has constrained him to give us a most unusual but timely secret."
With this, he and his friend laughed like men at a private joke once again, but would not be drawn further.

I write this story at a distance of some years, and many have now forgotten the events of the next day. However, at the time they were something of a nine-days wonder in that part of the world, and the Doctor made his reputation the next day, as he stood for the defence of Lady Emmiline Patterson. He was the first witness called by the defence, and when asked to do so he sternly said that he had no doubts whatsoever about the innocence of the lady, and, with the indulgence of the court, he would prove it to the satisfaction of all there present. With the assent of the Judge, he took the
stand.
"Ladies and gentlemen, as you all well know, the Lady Emmiline Patterson has been charged with a most terrible crime. One which, if indeed she is the perpetrator, she will hang for, and rightly so. However, I mean to show that he was not the perpetrator, and instead that the death of the good Doctor Black was caused by another, cunning, assailant. "Firstly, I should like to establish the movements of all present on that day of August the fourteenth. Doctor Black arrived at Patterson Hall a little after ten o'clock in the morning, having travelled down overnight on the late sleeper train from London. He was driven to the Hall up the deep cutting which runs from the station to the house, and there greeted by Lady Patterson and her household. Notwithstanding any relationship that may or may not have existed between the two of them, all seemed cordial and friendly. Nothing seemed not as it should be "Having made his introductions, Doctor Black deposited his belongings in his bedroom and set out to look over the house. It was the last anyone saw of him alive. In the meantime, Lady Patterson set to arrange luncheon, and spend a short while with cook, leaving her when she heard her husband departing to catch the Eleven o'clock train at ten forty-five. Once again, she also was not seen by anyone again until after the body was found. "Now, when Doctor Blacks' body was found, next to it was his broken pocket watch, showing the time of eleven o'clock. It is agreed by all present that it must have been broken as it dropped from the dying mans fingers, and so accurately shows time of death. Now this I do not dispute. It could not have been altered in time, as the winding key was in the Doctors valise - and who would have known to look for it there? No, it is inconceivable that the watch did not show the right time.
"But it is also inconceivable to me that Lady Patterson was the killer, and so she was not, as she has an unassailable witness to say she was innocent."
This caused some disturbance in the court, and some of the rougher sorts at the back who attended such occasions to see death done legally had the ill-grace to heckle the Doctor. However, he waited patiently for silence before continuing.
"I say again, that she has a witness to prove her innocence, and I shall demonstrate as much. Doctor Black had come to Plymouth to address the railway society upon an important matter. Upon his arrival at the house, he wandered into the garden, probably to think about his speech the next day, and to examine the view - in particular the tower of my own church, easily visible from the gardens
"Why did he wish to examine my church tower? Well, ladies and gentlemen, the reason is simple - my church clock showed a time considerably different to that shown upon his pocket watch."
At this, there was disturbance again, but for the life of my I could not understand what was being said, or what was meant by it.
"For centuries, ladies and gentlemen, timekeeping has been kept by the sun; clocks, even in this enlightened age, are set by sundials - but not for much longer. And the world being round, the sun takes time to travel across the earth, meaning that a sundial in Plymouth is will show noon twenty minutes later than one in London. It is only through the enlightenment of men of science like Doctor Black that upon January the first of next year, all clocks throughout the United Kingdom will show the same time. Doctor Black had travelled to Plymouth to speak upon the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time, a system by which all clocks, all railways, will use the same time, no matter where in England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales they lie.
"Doctor Blacks watch, ladies and gentlemen, whilst correct for the time in London from whence he had travelled was, according to our local clocks, twenty minutes fast, meaning that his time of death, to us, was ten-forty.
"At ten forty, Lady Patterson was speaking to her cook about luncheon, and Sir Henry Patterson has no story to cover his movements at that time at all."
With that, the court turned as one to stare at Sir Henry, only to find that he had vacated his chair some minutes previously and left the building.

Of the rest of this tale there is little to relate; Sir Henry was apprehended in Exeter, ironically due to a late-running train. He was found guilty of the death of Doctor Black and hung later that same year; after he was found guilty he admitted the killing due to Doctor Blacks pursuit of his wife, and said had deliberately broken the pocketwatch to throw suspicion away from himself and onto her - he felt it served he right for being unfaithful.
Doctor Morris and I joined together in turning the huge iron screw of his church clock on January the first, putting it back twenty minutes to the new time that was being introduced.
And two years later, he was pleased to act as officer at the wedding of Lady Emmiline and myself.