Content warning. This episode contains a description of a suicide. Log of the Demeter, 1st August. Two days of fog. and not a sale sighted. Had hoped, when in the English Channel, to be able to signal for help or get in somewhere. Not having power to work sails have to run before wind. Dare not lower, as could not raise them again. We seem to be drifting. To some terrible doom. Mate now more demoralized than either of men. His stronger nature seems to have worked inwardly against himself.
Men are beyond fear, working solidly and patiently with minds made up to worst. They are Russian. He... Romanian. Mina Murray's journal, 1st August. I came up here an hour ago with Lucy. and we had a most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think must have been in his time a most dictatorial person.
He will not admit anything and down-faces everybody. If he can't out-argue them, he bullies them and then takes their silence for agreement with his views. Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock. She has got a beautiful colour since she has been here. I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming up and sitting near her when we sat down. She is so sweet with old people. I think they all fell in love with her on the spot.
Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her, but gave me double share instead. I got him on the subject of the legends and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down. It be all fool talk. Lock, stock and barrel. That's what it be and not else. These bands and wafts and boo ghosts and... bar guests and boggles, and all anent them is only fit to set bands and dizzy women a-builderin'. Maybe not what air bubbles!
They and all grims and signs and warnings be all invented by Parsons and Ilsem Boot. bodies and railway touters to scare and scunner halflings and to get folks to do something that they don't either incline to. Makes me eyeful to think of them. Why, it's them that, not content with printing lies on paper and preaching them out of pulpits, does want to be cutting them on the tombstones.
Look here all round you at what Archie will. All them stones holding up their heads as well they can out of their pride is a cant. Simply tumbling down with the weight of the lies wrote on them. Here lies the body, or sacred to the memory he wrote on all of them, and yet nigh half of them there bein't no bodies at all, and the memories of them bein't care a pinch of stuff about.
Much less sacred. Lies, all of them. Nothing but lies of one kind or another. Oh my god, but it'll be a queer scouriment at the Day of Judgment when they come. tumbling up in their death sacks, all duped together and trying to drag their tombstones with them to prove how good they was. Some of them trembling and dithering. with the hands that dozzened and slippy from lying in the sea that they can't even keep their grip of them.
I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was showing off, so I put in a word to keep him going. Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong. Goblins, there may be a poor issue not wrong, saving when they make out the people too good.
For there be folk that do think a bomb bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here, you come here a stranger, and you see this Kirkgarth. I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church. He went on. And you can say that all these stones be among folk that be happed here, snod and snog? I assented again. Then that be just where the law comes in.
Why, there be scores of these laybeds that be tomb as old Dunn's tobacco box on Friday night. He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed. And my God, how could they be otherwise? Look at that one. Left us above the beer bank. Read it. I went over and read. Edward Spenceley, Master Mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April 1854, at 30. When I came back, Mr Swales went on. Who brought him home?
I wonder what happened here, murdered off the coast of Andres, and you can say that his body lay under? Or I can name you a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland Seas above. He pointed northwards. Where the currents may have drifted them, there be the stones around ye. You can, with your young eyes, read the small print of the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowry, I knew his father, lost in the lively off Greenland in 1920. Or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in 1777.
Old John Paxton drowned off Cape Farewell a year later, or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned in the Gulf of Finland in 50. Do you think that all these men will have to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds? I have my anthems about it. I tell you that when they got here, they'd be jumbling and jostling one another that way, that it'd be like a fight up on the ice in the old days, when we'd be at one another from daylight to dark.
and trying to tie up our cuts by the light of the Aurora Borealis. This was evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his cronies joined in with gusto. But, I said, surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to take their tombstones with them on the day of judgment. Do you think that will be really necessary?
Well, what else be the tombstones for? Answer me that, miss. To please their relatives, I suppose. To please their relatives, you suppose? This he said with intense scorn. How will it pressure their relatives to know that lies is wrote over them, and that everybody in the place knows that they be lies? He pointed to a stone at our feet, which had been laid down as a slab, on which the seat was rested, close to the edge of the cliff. Read the lies on that trough stone.
The letters were upside down to me from where I sat, but Lucy was more opposite to them. So she leant over and read, Sacred to the memory of George Cannon, who died... in the hope of a glorious resurrection on July 29th, 1873, falling from the rocks at Ketleness. This tomb was erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son,
He was the only son of his mother and she was a widow. Really, Mr Swales, I don't see anything very funny in that. She spoke her comment very gravely and somewhat severely. You don't see Aunt Fanny, but that's because you know God the Sorrowind Mother was a Hellcat that hated him because he was a crooked, regular lameter he was, and he hated her.
so that he committed suicide in order that she mightn't get an insurance she put on his life. He blew nigh the top of his head off with an old musket that they had for scaring the crows with. It weren't for crows then, for it brought the clegs and the dubs to them. That's the way he fell off the rocks, and as to hopes of a glorious resurrection.
I've often heard him say myself that he hoped he'd go to hell, for his mother was so pious that she'd be sure to go to heaven, and he didn't want to handle where she was. Now isn't that stone at any rate? He hammered it with his stick as he spoke. A pack of lies! And won't it make Gabriel cackle when Geordie comes patting up the grease with the tombstone balanced on his hump?
and asked it to be took as evidence. I did not know what to say, but Lucy turned the conversation, as she said, rising up. Why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot leave it. And now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a suicide. That won't harm ye, my pretty. But it may make poor Geordie gladsome to have so trim a lass sitting on his lap.
That won't hurt ye. Well, I've sat here off and on for now twenty years past and hasn't done me no harm. Don't you fash about them as lies under ye. Well, that doesn't lie there either. It'll be time for you to be getting scared when you see the tombstones all run away with, and the place as bare as a stubblefield. Well, there's the clock, and I must be going.
My service to you, ladies. And off he hobbled. Lucy and I sat a while, and it was all so beautiful before us that we took hands as we sat. And she told me all over again about Arthur and their coming marriage. That made me just a little heart sick. For I haven't heard from Jonathan for a whole month. The same day.
I came up here alone, for I am very sad. There was no letter for me. I hope there cannot be anything the matter with Jonathan. The clock has just struck nine. I see the lights scattered all over the town. sometimes in rows where the streets are and sometimes singly. They run right up the Esk and die away in the curve of the valley. To my left, the view is cut off by a black line of roof of the old house next the abbey.
The sheep and lambs are bleating in the fields away behind me, and there is a clatter of a donkey's hooves up the paved road below. The band on the pier is playing a harsh waltz in good time. and further along the quay there is a Salvation Army meeting in a back street. Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I hear and see them both. I wonder where Jonathan is, and if he is thinking of me.
I wish he were here. This episode featured Alistair Stewart as the captain of the Demeter, Isabel Armako Young as Mina Murray, Beth Eyre as Lucy Westenra, and Graham Rowett as Mr. Swales. Directed by Hannah Wright. Dialogue editing by Steven Indrasano. Sound design by Tal Minear. Produced by Ella Watts and Pacific S. Obadiah. With executive producers Stephen Indrasano, Tal Minear, and Hannah Wright. A Bloody FM production.