Babbicam Read online

  When I was 10 or 11, my Mom and Dad took me to that attraction called the House on the Rock near Spring Green. That was when my folks were still around. The place was an amazing building on top of a rock going out into a lake. There was a big room there filled with every sort of orchestral musical instrument. All of a sudden they’d come to life and start playing by themselves with no musicians. I thought it was so cool although Dad said they were automata and the sound came from hidden organ pipes and they weren’t really playing at all—but I preferred to believe in the illusion. John Lee’s recordings are a bit like that. They seemed to just start all by themselves out of that old Webster machine and a forgotten faraway world jerks into life.

  Lee has a strong growly voice on the recordings. He doesn’t really sound sick and at first I wondered why Doctor Kaiser was recording him. It’s clear that Lee is in bed as he speaks into the machine and he seems to be at home. There’s so much unexplained stuff leaking out of these wire loops. All I can say is, ‘caveat viator’: that means, ‘let the traveler beware’. I might as well warn you now. I’m nuts about Latin. I use it all the time. It started as a defense tactic in Waukesha South High School. They kept on hazing me because my head shook like a bobble- head doll all the time. And because I was weird already. I started learning Latin so I could put freaky-sounding hexes and spells on the mean dickweeds who kept on bullying me. It didn’t stop Cody Breadwood from beating me to pulp in the swim team locker room though but it did make me feel better to have a secret language that no one else understood. Okay, back to Lee. Let’s lay it out. There is little about the next three years of Lee’s life on the spools. The thin wires could become twisted or broken. If they snapped they formed a bird’s nest around the driver spool and they were a pain to rewind. Quite a few had to be spliced and so they might seem a bit herky-jerky at times. I’ve had to reconstruct some of it.

  It turns out wire recorders hung on for a surprisingly long time though tape machines gradually replaced them. They gave off a pure sound as they spun out at two feet per second, no background hissing like those granular magnetic tapes. They were still being used in aircraft black box devices and cockpit recorders as late as the 1970s. I keep thinking of all those doomed voices, the dead crews’ last messages held on the indestructible wires.

  I’ve done a whole lot of checking to get clear about those bits of Lee’s story that the recordings miss out. It seems he first went to Babbacombe when he was barely a teen. The Glen itself was a quiet spot, a white-walled place right next to Babbacombe Beach. It looks somehow different in each photograph I have seen of it. The thatched roof gave it the look of a cabana but it was a big place with ten bedrooms, a music room, dining room, conservatory and ante-room. Behind the Glen, steep slopes and deep beech woods led to The Vine, another even larger house belonging to Miss Keyse. She kept that place for guests. Her whole lot covered thirteen acres. Beyond the Vine you went up Beach Road to Babbacombe Downs on the crest of the bluffs. The big houses and great hotels stood there where the well-heeled elderly and invalids came to spend the warm winters and to soak up the healthy climate. Here also was the property of Miss Keyse’ half sister, Mrs McClean. Her place was called Compton House. Beyond lay the suburbs of Torquay (let’s get stuff straight, the Brits pronounce it to sound like ‘tor-kéy, with the stress on the ‘e’). They called this suburb St Marychurch. It was where Miss Keyse shopped, worshiped and socialized. The main part of Torquay was spread out to the south of St Marychurch around the next headland. It was a popular market town and resort, famous for its warm weather and good class of visitor.

  Miss Keyse herself had never married. She was sixty two years old when Lee first came to the Glen. She was very religious and a tad left field. Her loyalty to the unreliable John Lee was one example of her kookiness. Her neighbors tolerated her weird ways because she was well-connected but she was gradually sliding from high society as her money drained away over the years. A whole lot was made of her royal connections. The British Royal Family had visited Babbacombe several times when the Royal Yacht had anchored in Babbacombe Bay. Miss Keyse had entertained the Queen’s husband, Prince Albert, and his sons a few years before and there was another visit a few months before Lee arrived. A bedroom called ‘The Honeysuckle Room’ was kept always ready at the Glen for any future regal appearances. Lee didn’t seem to like it at the Glen that much. He stayed less than a year then set his mind on joining the navy. His Pa apparently tried to prevent it. He didn’t want the boy ending up like his Uncle Fred who had left to be a sailor and had never come back. Lee seems to have resisted both his Pa and Miss Keyse who also tried to make him stay.

  On enlisting at fifteen, Lee was sent to nearby Devonport and served as ship’s boy on the Napoleonic hulks that were used as training ships. These were old boats from a previous century. You can see details of him and his crew mates in the online census records of those days. He was not to find a settled life in the Navy though. At first it seems he did reasonably okay. He was proud of his Admiralty Prize awarded by the Commodore of the training brig. The records show that he caught pneumonia and was invalided out the service after a year but in reality he was probably an awkward, creepy-ass kid who did not fit in with the smooth-functioning life on board. The census showed he was’ second class boy’ while most of his contemporaries were ‘first class boys’.

  Discharged from the service, he went to be a pot-washer at the Yacht Club Hotel in Kingswear, along the coast from Torquay. Rumor has it that he was thrown out for breaking the crockery. He came back to Torquay to work on the railway at Torre Station, toting luggage in the goods room. He did not get on too good there either, nothing much seemed to suit him and he resented the gruntwork. Miss Keyse freed him from that labor and arranged for him to start at Colonel Brownlow’s as a house servant. The Brownlows were established high society from a Scottish noble family. The Colonel was a retired commander of militia. He kept a fancy household with a Cuban wife, French butler and Swiss maids in a big villa called Ridgehill in the Warberries, a twenty minute walk from Babbacombe. Within a few months Lee soon betrayed all the trust laid in him. He was caught stealing from the Brownlows’ and sentenced to six months hard labor in Exeter Prison.

  Five years after Lee had first come to Babbacombe, Miss Keyse’s door was opening once again but Lee didn’t act too grateful about it. He was coming on to nineteen years old, just out of jail and all hung up about how life had treated him. There are no photos of him as a kid but we do see him as he was at about this time in a cabinet photo that survives. He stands square on to the camera, wearing a servant’s linen jacket with a white necktie thing which I believe is called a ‘stock’. One arm is nonchalantly leaning on a stage prop lintel. You can see how big his hands were. Too much testosterone gives a guy a rounded face, a round-faced man is an aggressive man. Lee’s face was shaped like a beet. He had a tip nose and fleshy protuberant lips that seemed fixed in a scornful smirk. It was those pale eyes that made folks remember him though. How they bored out at you under the shadow of the derby hat he always wore. They were gun sight eyes and you’d better watch out if they ended up focusing on you.

  Spool two is one of the longest of the recordings. On it, you can hear Lee’s voice as he cranked out his story covering all those eleven months from January to the murder month of November 1884. He probably recorded it in one or two sittings. You can usually hear an audible feedback clack on those Webster machines when the record lever is switched and I could only count two of those on the whole reel. I’ve split them up into sections to ease the story as sometimes he tracked back and forward.

  Lee’s recordings of this time period start after Miss Keyse had written a letter to the Reverend Pitkin, chaplain of Exeter Prison where Lee was locked up. You could say that the letter created a chain of events that led in one way and another to a killing. On the face of it Miss Keyse had written to Pitkin asking how Lee had acted in the county jail but in reality she had obviously already made up her own mind to h
ave him back in her home. She stated in the letter, “He will live in the house and sleep as before in the pantry.” It seems that she was set on him joining her at the Glen once more despite all that had happened at Colonel Brownlow’s in the previous year. It was a hell of a thing in that age for a woman of breeding and with a position to keep in society to so concern herself with someone like Lee. He had come from nothing and he was a jailbird. Perhaps she wanted to reform him or maybe there were other motives there. Whatever her reasons, it was mighty risky for her to want him back because he had already shown that he could not be trusted. Still, she set it in motion and the wheel turned. All behavior has its consequences, some more scary than others.

  I’ve got a picture in my mind of the Glen and the bay community on that New Year’s Day of Miss Keyse’s letter. I’ve built it up from all the reading I’ve done and there’s been some personal experience but I’ll tell you about that later. The place was keeping its calm like a pond before a stone gets hefted into it. Work at Gasking’s boatyard had likely been suspended for the day but the Cary Arms pub was open as usual. Fishermen sat outside of their cottages and tinkered with their nets down by the beach. A few townsfolk strolled on the Downs and on Walls Hill which overlooked the spot. In the Glen, Miss Keyse probably sat writing her diary at her lamp-lit desk. The place was always dark in winter and the rooms were shadowy even at noon. The household was very different from that of three years before. Millie had gone to be a servant in Newton Abbot, a nearby town. She was a sickly girl and maybe needed to be nearer home. Lizzie Harris was now the cook, she was Lee’s half-sister by his mother’s unwanted teenage pregnancy. She had come to the Glen that year. She looked just like Lee. She had the same stone-shaped face, pursed mouth, tilted nose and chiseling blue eyes.

  Eliza and Jane Neck were still shuffling about the house. They had been servants to the Keyse family for forty years and more. It was hard to tell the sisters apart. They probably whispered to each other that the old woman must have gone crazy-mad. That boy would surely go to bad again and they were too old to be dealing with his yardbird ways. Well, that’s what I imagined. I need to be careful though. I owe it to Lee as much as to myself at least to get things right. I wouldn’t want to get him pissed with me either. The truth, it does matter doesn’t it? After all it’s the only thing that will set you free in the end. So, if I am forced to imagine stuff in between the gaps in Lee’s recordings—I’m only drawing it out from the known facts. I’m going to call it. You have my word on that. I intend to be straight with you, guys. That’s a promise.

  Spool Two

  Promise and Temptation

  Babbacombe Bay January 1884

  —Strange coming back to that place at nineteen.

  Doctor Kaiser: To Torquay?

  —To the Missis’ place, The Glen, down by the beach on Babbicam Bay. Just round from Torquay. Going back there knocked the spirit out of me, I can say. I’m sure it was wisht. Don’t suppose you knows what ‘wisht’ means? Well, if you hung about there long enough you’d have found out. It means there’s a curse on it. The dark made you keep your head down and the shadows swung around your lamp. There was always something cramped about the place. It was truly a maze and with ugly secrets round each corner. As I remember it, it was filled up with the smell of camphor and Alexandria oil on account of all the lamps and candles that burned day and night.

  Something about the place had gone down since I was last there. It seemed that the Missis had stopped spending money: some things were obviously patched and not replaced, and the thatch had also begun to drip here and there. My little pantry room looked much the same though, with the same pull-down bed and rows of cupboard drawers above me and cans of lamp oil ranked at the foot of the bed. I was thankful there was nothing showing of the crooked Sam Bartlet who’d camped there the previous years. The first thing I did was slip Granfer’s hammer under the pillow.

  The sea was churning away a few paces from the pantry door. At night its cold fingers would come in under that door. I had a bad feeling at coming back. It seemed narrower even than my cell at Exeter.

  Lizzie would make me tea and vittals but she was in no way like dear Millie who alles looked after me. Lizzie was quite a different character, though she seemed like family. She had the same look as all of us. Maybe she was made special hard on account of her birth. Millie had only told me the truth of it a year or so before.

  Doctor Kaiser: What do you mean by “her birth”?

  —Ma had been taken with child when she was young and in service to a rich farmer called Esterbrook over at Widdecombe. She left in disgrace and gave birth to Lizzie. Ma married Pa a few years later but he would not have the little girl. She was raised by our kin at Pepperden Farm at Kingsteington. It was a rough place to grow up in, near to the race ground where the horse dealers hung about. Pa would not speak of her but Ma sometimes took us to visit when I was small. I remember her as a quiet, staring girl.

  Lizzie had grown to be an ’andsum maid with a free and easy air. She took to joking and a-jesting with me. She told me we were a family of servants begat from masters and warned me to mind how I spoke to folk. She didn’t seem like a sister. A sparky maid, I thought, there to be tamed. I liked the way she moved, a nice shape and full under the grey cook’s dress. I like a girl who had something to jig around with—poor Millie was so reed-thin. I started grabbing at her. I were a hot young dog you see. You can look at me like that, doc. But that was how we was in the villages. Brother belonged to sister often enough and ’tother way round.

  Lizzie gave me a warning look after I had tried it on with her but didn’t move away. She told me I had bravish wandering hands and she had enough of those on at her already. She told me to mind how I behaved.

  She also told me what I did not know, that Ma had come down to Babbicam to beg Miss Keyse to take me back. So Millie didn’t want me to go ruining everything. She warned me the Necks didn’t like me, especially that old crow Eliza. Eliza had tried to persuade the Missis against me but the Missis would not have it. Lizzie couldn’t work out why Miss Keyse liked me so something marv’lous. I knew though, or so I thought in my unformed mind. I did not want to brood overlong on how folks took to me anyway. I didn’t like to think on that empty hole inside. Better by far to roll on and take what life gave. I wanted to throw off all memory of that cold cell at Exeter, and the naval barracks there. I was going to forge on and take what was due to me.

  Doctor Kaiser: Did you find it hard to fit back in to being a servant?

  —Nay, I soon went back to my old ways. Hiding out in the servant’s privy up some stone steps on the edge of the cliff woods. The paper on its hook used to rustle in the draught from the sea and there was always a dripping sound from the rocks behind. I liked to sit in there and imagine Lizzie pulling up her shift. Woodlice and all sorts of crawlers used to stir about my feet. ‘Chuggy pegs’, we called them at school, although Granfer called them ‘rabberdasters’. It seemed there were several names for every living thing in Deb’m talk. I wanted to give up speaking like that though, it smacked of the fields. Funny how it comes back now. I used to peer through a knothole in the privy door to keep an eye on the doings at the Glen. I could pass all morning spying out from there, awaiting Lizzie to come out where I could surprise her and be away from the sharp little eyes of the Necks.

  Doctor Kaiser: And your employer, this Miss Keyse?

  —My first interview with the Missis was ticklish. One of the Necks told me to report to her dreckly in the drawing room. It was the best room in the house. Full of those stuffed birds pinned to wax flowers. They were all along the cabinets. There was the odd bit of silver and that, oh, and a nice gold clock. I used to love that clock. The room was a chill place with no fire in the grate—the old lady had forbidden fires in the day, the crabby nip-cheese. The Missis had her back to me at her desk. The Necks stood along one wall and kept watch. The Missis turned and told me to come nearer. She had a thin scratchy voice that could jump up to
a scream. She was still all wrapped in that black bombazine stuff, you could hear it rustling at night. She caught me in a crimping stare and kept calling for me to come closer but I really didn’t like to. She was a plain old thing with a beaky nose. I had to listen to a long speech about her disappointment over the Brownlow business. She said she did not want to add to my punishment. But really she did punish with her crabby words.

  The Missis went on about going forward into the light and helping me find the character that I had lost.

  Doctor Kaiser: Character? What is that?

  —That’s like a good reference for your conduct. She also told me she could not pay me much and I would have to be steady and keep in of an evening. She made me promise that and much else. I promised away but in my heart all I promised was that I’d survive her. She told me that if I proved myself she’d help me get to the colonies or some other fresh start in life. I wanted to ask her just ezzackally how I’d get my character but I decided to keep my trap shut. It’ll keep, I thought. Prison gave you that. A fellow can wait on for a while. Best not bark too loudly but dog would have his day.