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Perhaps, as Hawthwaite had remarked, it all helped, but as far as Brent could see it was still difficult to lay hold of a continuous and unbroken line. It puzzled him, being still a stranger to the habits and customs of these people, to see that life in Hathelsborough went on, amidst all these alarums and excursions, very much as usual.
"Supposing he was the nine hundred and ninety-ninth Mayor of Hathelsborough," he asked quietly, "what then?" "He should have a public funeral," declared the Town Clerk promptly.
Peppermore laughed and wagged his finger. "Bull's, sir?" he said. "Bull's? centre of all the gossip in Hathelsborough. Come across there and have a quiet glass with me, and keep your eyes and ears open. I've been trying all the morning to get some news, ideas, impressions, about the sad event of last night, Mr. Brent now, for current criticism, Bull's is the place.
"It is the oldest church, not only in Hathelsborough, which is saying a good deal, but in all this part of the county," replied the witness with emphasis. "St. Hathelswide, the parish church, is old, but St. Lawrence ante-dates it by at least five hundred years. The greater part of St. Lawrence, as it now stands, was complete in the eighth century: St. Hathelswide was built in the thirteenth."
"I heard about that last night," answered Coppinger. "Tansley told two or three of us at the club. This fellow Brent has bought that property of old Chillingham's Acacia Lodge. Freehold, you know; bought it right out. He's a Hathelsborough man now, right enough." Then they both turned and glanced at Mallett, who was re-reading Brent's election address with brooding eyes and lowering brow.
He was thankful that there were few guests in the house he had no wish to be stared at as a principal actor in the unfolding drama. Yet he speedily realized that he had better lay aside all squeamish feelings of that sort; he foresaw that the murder of its Mayor would throw Hathelsborough into the fever of a nine-days' wonder, and that his own activities would perforce draw attention to himself.
There were a few very few progressive folk in Hathelsborough who regarded Spizey and his semi-theatrical attire as an anachronism, and openly derided both, but so far nobody had dared to advocate the abolition of him and his livery.
And then why legally I'd be as much a Hathelsborough man as, say, Simon Crood?" Tansley took his hands out of his pockets and began to search amongst his papers. "Well, you're a go-ahead chap, Brent!" he said. "Evidently not the sort to let grass grow under your feet. And if you want to buy a bit of nice property I've the very goods for you.
In plain words, there are about a hundred men in Hathelsborough who have used the seven or eight thousand other folk as a means to their own ends. The town has been a helpless, defenceless thing, from which these harpies have picked whatever they could lay their talons on!" "That's the conclusion he'd come to?" asked Brent.
Brent," she said at last, "in a little town like this, folk will talk Hathelsborough's a particular bad place for talk and gossip; for all that, Hathelsborough people's as secret as the grave when they like, about their own affairs. And, as I say, I've heard things.
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