Penny Black

The Post Office, Rowland Hill

Dear Miss Black,

I am pleased to inform you that after due consideration your application for the post of Postmistress at the Rowland Hill Post Office made vacant by the unfortunate demise of Miss Brunhilde Adventure, the previous Postmistress, has been approved. Your official duties will commence on the 13th inst.

The Postmaster General would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the sterling way you stepped into the breach in an unofficial capacity following the embarrassing incident with the cancellation ink, and in appreciation would like to offer you an ex gratia payment equivalent to the salary of Postmistress during that period.

Yours sincerely,
Roy L. Mayall
p.p. The Postmaster General

Penny Black walked into Rowland Hill Post Office and into the lives of the villagers of Rowland Bottom one Saturday morning in May. Old Ben Tandle, the richest of the farmers hereabouts, who had just collected a fistful of ten bob notes from his Post Office Savings Account in preparation for a weekend's drinking at the Shoulder of Mutton, the old inn located just below the King's Head and just up from the Rowland Arms, was actually heard to let out a low whistle when he turned and saw her. Strong, shapely calves filling the finest of silk stockings, thighs that shaped her pencil skirt, a broad hip that could not but inspire awe, and a wasp waist that owed nothing to the manufacturers of corsets could do that to the most stalwart of men. She was carrying a deceptively small crocodile skin suitcase.

When old Ben Tandle had finally got all the sheep out of the Post Office and could no longer be heard lambasting the two dogs for misinterpreting his whistle, Penny Black posed her fateful question. In all innocence, the Postmistress gave her even more fateful reply. Now, it is an absolute certainty that on any other day, Miss Brunhilde Adventure would have directed Penny Black to the King's Head where travellers may sojourn for ten shillings and sixpence a night, including dinner and one of the finest breakfasts this side of the Shoulder of Mutton. However, this day was the anniversary of that fateful day on which Miss Adventure's younger brother had gone for a soldier and had never come back.

By lying about his age, young Wotan Adventure had got himself as far as Omdurman, at which point he reasoned that the truth would have served him better. The point that he was too young to die failed to make any impact with the advancing fuzzy-wuzzy who, being even younger than young Wotan, completely lost his reason and his spear when his point succeeded in making an impact with young Wotan's heart. Legend has it that he left the war then and there to become a devout dervish of great renown and instigator of many revolutions. Of necessity, Wotan Adventure also left the war but remained forever in the Sudan. His belongings, however, were returned to his sister in the little Post Office on Rowland Hill and among them, curiously enough, was the fuzzy-wuzzy's spear, its point pitted and rusted from its brief but close relationship with young Wotan. Miss Brunhilde Adventure had loved her younger brother much more than anyone had known. Except her brother, of course, which is why he lied about his age and went for a soldier. And so she hung the spear, this object that had been closest to her dear brother's heart at the moment of his death, on her bedroom wall where, for every single day of the many years which followed, it was the last thing she saw each night and the first object to greet her eyes each morning. His other belongings she returned to his room which she kept unaltered not so much as a shrine to his memory but in penance as a reminder of the suffocating love that had sent him away to die.

As anyone who has ever mourned for an unnaturally long period will readily acknowledge, there inevitably comes a time when the dead past suddenly wants to unshackle itself from the living present. This day, the anniversary of her brother's Sudan and untimely death, Miss Brunhilde Adventure had awakened to see as if for the first time a narrow shaft of bright May sunlight, reflected from her dressing table mirror, illuminate the intricate tracery of dust and cobweb on the rusted point of the fuzzy-wuzzy's spear. The vision was accompanied by a cold hard voice deep within her which told her that the time at last had come in which her life must change. And so it came to pass, later that same morning, when Penny Black asked at the unflocked Post Office if there were anywhere in the village she might stay for a while, the Postmistress found herself offering the neatly dressed young woman a room.

That same morning, somewhere in the hot Sudan, a mad old dervish began the stately revolutions of his calling which were supposed to channel the blessings of God down through his upraised arm and out through the sweep of his lower arm to the surrounding masses of the faithful. The survivors still speak in hushed tones of the solitary bolt of lightning which shot straight down from the clear blue skies only to be directed in a wide crackling arc across the inflamed crowds.

By Saturday tea-time, the Wotan Adventure Museum had been transformed into the room of a professional lady. Its wardrobe, cupboards and drawers were filled with the full range of silks and frills and flounces, the immoderate contemplation of which has been the downfall of many an otherwise sober and saintly man, and its dressing table heaped with the usual assortment of oils and unguents, paints and powders, common to that half of humankind so aghast at its own appearance in the dressing table mirror that it needs must spend hours attempting disguise. The deceptively small crocodile skin suitcase lay empty and unlocked atop the wardrobe. In the back garden of the Rowland Hill Post Office, at the very pinnacle of Rowland Hill, a large bonfire consumed all but an armful of the very late Wotan Adventure's effects. In Rowland Bottom, old ones looking up from their buttered scones saw the smoking pyre and remembered knee-told tales of beacons signalling invasion. An unseasonable chill crawled through their sluggish veins.

If Miss Brunhilde Adventure found her new lodger less than forthcoming about her (Penny Black's) past she discovered the young woman to be far more than forthcoming about her (Miss Brunhilde Adventure's) feet. Penny Black seemed so eager to help. Within the week, Miss Brunhilde Adventure started wondering how on earth she had ever managed the little house attached to the Post Office on her own. That Penny Black seemed disinclined to talk of her life prior to her arrival at Rowland Hill did not unduly worry the Postmistress for she also kept a dark secret from her own past. It concerned her parents and, had she ever met a psychoanalyst, probably explained the suffocating love which had driven her younger brother, Wotan, on to the point of a fuzzy-wuzzy's spear.

Miss Brunhilde Adventure's parents were Hagen and Ayesha Adventure. Ayesha had been a dancer in the court of the Sultan of Turkey; Hagen, a young subaltern in the British Army serving under Colonel Fitzandstarts of Rowland Manor. The resourceful Hagen had taken Ayesha as his bonus during Fitzandstarts' daring raid that captured the secret formula for Turkish Herbal Smoking Mixture. On leaving the army, Hagen had set up business in the nearby town of Market Stallton as purveyor to the gentry of used postage stamps, worn coinage and dodgy Rembrandts. In recognition of his part in the Turkish Herbal Smoking Mixture Raid, and as reward for his continued silence about the actual contents of the mixture, Colonel Fitzandstarts provided Hagen and his family rent free tenure of a five bedroom cottage on the Rowland Manor estate. The family included Miss Brunhilde Adventure's old grandmother, Alice Adventure, who came to live with her son when she went doolally following the terrible accident with the scythe that had befallen her husband, Alberich Adventure, whilst he was sowing oats with Fanny Tandle, old Ben Tandle's aunt, during haymaking.

The incident about which Miss Brunhilde Adventure never spoke occurred shortly after the cat replaced her grandmother when the old woman died so agonisingly and slowly one night after becoming impaled on the old lilac tree beneath her bedroom window. Although living in the wonderland of her own thoughts, Alice Adventure had a would be lover by the name of Herbert Hover, a self styled rhymer who had penned many a bad verse in her name. Herbert had been hanging around ever since the death of Alberich but had so far failed to impress her with his troth. Then, all in the heat of a single summer night whilst serenading Alice under her bedroom window, under the moon and under the influence of Rowland Manor Herbal Smoking Mixture, Herbert had finally persuaded his love to elope with him to Gretna Green. Unfortunately, he had failed to ensure the presence of the second to top rung of the ladder that he had borrowed from the stackyard of the Tandle farm. On returning from the funeral, the family discovered that an old tom cat had decided to take up residence at the Adventure house. To make up for the lack of one eye, one ear, one leg and half a tail, the cat carried an extraordinary number of fleas. Hagen was all for disposing of the cat in the village pond but his wife, Ayesha, would have none of it. Not only did she insist on keeping the cat but demanded that they call it Nelson because of its missing eye and arm. Hagen, perversely, called it Hardy. Do what they could, however, Hagen and his wife never succeeded in ridding the old tom of its guests; and cat fleas being what they are, the couple and their two children were also never short of an itch to scratch.

Now, it so happened that one day after dinner, as Hagen Adventure was stretched out soporously in his chair, belt, braces and buttons all undone for the sake of his still expanding stomach, a particularly large and voracious cat flea bit the behind of Ayesha. It occurred the moment after she had replaced the dinner plates on the big old Welsh dresser bequeathed to the couple by the luckless Alice. In defence of the dresser, it must be said that, although well constructed in solid oak, it had seen better days before several species of wood boring insects had reduced much of its base to a honeycombed fragility. Still, the shelves were sound enough and as good a place as any to store the heavy crockery common in rural cottages. Had the flea bit even seconds earlier, the outcome might not have been quite so disastrous. Certainly, a plate or two would have been lost but it is a fair bet that Hagen and his wife would gladly have sacrificed them had they known of the sequence of events now about to unfold.

As the flea bit, Ayesha uttered a little Turkish yelp then upped her voluminous skirts and downed her voluminous knickers as she twisted her head round in an attempt to see what flea monster could have caused such pain. The little Turkish yelp woke Hagen from his post prandial snooze and he looked up from under drowsy eyelids to see what the devil was going on. I don't suppose I need to remind you that Turkish dancers are trained from childhood in the art of arousing male passions and that once adept at the practice, there is not the slightest movement they make which does not have at least a minimal such effect. Some movements are more effective than others. The sight of Ayesha wiggling her bare bum whilst looking over her shoulder towards Hagen conveyed to the drowsy and bleary eyed man entirely the wrong message. The sheer animal passion which overcame his drowsiness in an instant propelled him in the following instant from his chair towards the inviting spectacle. In the third instant, gravity propelled his unbelted, unbraced and unbuttoned trousers to his ankles and by the fourth instant, he had tripped and tumbled head first into Ayesha's knickers. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The force of Hagen tumbling into Ayesha's knickers caused her in turn to fall backwards on top of him and the pivotal point of this reactive motion was at the level just above her knees where the leg elastic of the knickers had prevented their further descent. As the greater part of Ayesha's body went backwards, so her lower legs, including her feet, went forwards with precisely the same amount of force as that exerted by the falling twelve stones of her body. And the entirety of that force was concentrated and therefore magnified in the few square inches of hard shoe-leather that made contact with the worm eaten base of the big old Welsh dresser. The dresser gave up the ghost. Although Hagen, blinded by his wife's knickers, saw nothing, Ayesha had just enough time to see the dinner service tumbling about her head and realise what a waste of time it had been doing the washing up before the solid oak struck.

Alerted by the sound of smashing crockery, the young Miss Brunhilde Adventure had flown down the stairs from her room where, in the sweet innocence of childhood, she had been pressing colourful meadow flowers between the pages of an album of rare postage stamps. The sight which greeted her was horrific. Her parents, though barely dressed were fully dressered. The cat, however, had escaped unscathed from the incident. It died peacefully in its sleep the day that Wotan Adventure left home.

The tail of the cat is a story in its own right. When Miss Brunhilde Adventure and her younger brother, Wotan, were orphaned, Colonel Fitzandstarts took it upon himself to care for them at Rowland Manor. The arrangement continued until the girl became of an age when she might assume the responsibility not only for herself but for Wotan. In fact it was Colonel Fitzandstarts pulling quiet strings who got Miss Brunhilde Adventure the job of Postmistress at the new Post Office on Rowland Hill. The cat moved into Rowland Manor and it moved into the Post Office. Apart from that, it did little but eat, sleep and breed fleas. The little that it did other than those three activities was usually quite smelly and on one or other of the beds. Only twice in the entire time that it lived with Miss Brunhilde Adventure did anyone accidentally put a foot on its tail. Since most of the tail was missing and so presented a very small target, this curious fact is not at all surprising. The fact that the two clumsy oafs who did manage to disturb the cat's sleep were the Colonel's footman and the Colonel's tailor is.

Within two weeks of her arrival, Penny Black was not only running the house but had also made herself indispensable in the Post office. And barely a week later, Miss Brunhilde Adventure realised that it was she (Miss Brunhilde Adventure) who was dispensable: Penny Black had taken over in the Post Office. Miss Brunhilde Adventure suddenly found herself with a great deal of time on her hands and no interests on which to use it. Her duties in the Post Office and the upkeep of her little home had been the total of her activities these many years. She was bereft. She took to drink.

Penny Black was most understanding of Miss Brunhilde Adventure's little problem. Cold eyed and hard faced the young woman might be but of the senior woman she was quite solicitous; and to the senior woman she was quietly obliging. As each successive bottle of gin or vodka proved itself insufficient for Miss Brunhilde Adventure's needs, Penny Black would always produce yet one more. Indeed, without Penny Black's ministrations, it is highly unlikely that the old woman could have maintained the steady level of loquacious intoxication over the several weeks it took for her to spill the beans on the lives of all the residents of Rowland Bottom. If any secret is known in a village, it is unquestionably the village Postmistress who knows it. Among the lives laid bare during that time was that of one resident of the little house attached to the Post Office on Rowland Hill.

The alcoholic fog which now drifted through Miss Brunhilde Adventure's days clouded and obscured the subtle changes to her home. It is a moot point whether or not she noticed the delivery of a large oak dresser. Did she stand and admire the painting of a young subaltern in the British Army which one day appeared on the wall? Did she ever accidentally step on the tail of the severely mutilated old tom cat which now slept in a corner of the kitchen? Or sample the Turkish delight from the box on the sideboard? Perhaps she never even gave it a second thought when Penny Black presented her with a small bunch of meadow flowers to press between the pages of her stamp album. She did not comment when photographs and sketches of Wotan were hung on the walls or arranged upon the piano. But with the sinking of each new bottle provided by Penny Black there rose to the surface of her reminiscing mind more and more details of the early life of Miss Brunhilde Adventure and of her younger brother, Wotan. The memories that she recounted during the day were often of the good times, of both joy and contentment, and Penny Black eagerly encouraged her informant to relive the childhood happiness. But in the evenings, when the air turned cold and the sun's reassuring light failed, the ghosts came out to play. In the hissing of the sombre gas light and the minutes preceding unconsciousness, Miss Brunhilde Adventure's story invariably trailed off into descriptions of the horrors that she had experienced in her childhood and the unresolved feelings of guilt which she had repressed these long decades. And invariably, Penny Black was at her shoulder, now playing the Devil's advocate, now playing Job's comforter. Always playing on the sorrowing woman's blackest fears.

In those days, every letter posted in Rowland Bottom had to be hand cancelled at the Post Office and sorted into local and non-local mail. Local mail was put into the sack for delivery and the rest was sent on to the main sorting office in Market Stallton. It was the job of the Postmistress to cancel each and every postage stamp on each and every letter by stamping it with a mark of indelible black ink. It was a task that for several weeks had been performed solely by Penny Black. Then one Wednesday afternoon, when the Post Office was closed, Penny Black led the drunken Postmistress to the sorting desk, opened the ink pad and placed the smooth wooden knob of the stamp in her hand. Next to the pile of unfranked letters she placed a fresh bottle of gin and a glass. Miss Brunhilde Adventure began to stamp the letters. The action should have been entirely automatic after years of practice: inkpad ... letter ... inkpad ... letter ... inkpad .... It wasn't. For some reason that she couldn't quite grasp, the stamp kept missing the inkpad or the letter or both. And even worse was the way in which her stamping hand kept hitting the inkpad and her letter shifting hand kept getting stamped. She stopped, took a long drink from her glass of gin and then looked at her hands. They were both quite black. Indelibly black.

Herbert Hover, who had once fancied Alice Adventure, and Fanny Tandle, the aunt of old Ben Tandle and miraculous survivor of the tragic haymaking event in which Alice's husband, Alberich, succumbed to the swinging of the scythe, were two of the seventeen residents of Rowland Bottom Old Folks Home. The two might have got together occasionally for old times' sake in one of the linen cupboards of the Old Folks Home but for the fact that one was deaf, the other blind, and both were quite senile. It was debatable, therefore, whether these two ever appreciated the weekly wheel-out to the Rowland Bottom village green where they, along with the other fifteen residents, were parked in their high backed wicker Bath chairs along the edge of the village pond. Each Wednesday afternoon, the Old Folks probably failed to see the two swans, cob and pen, as they glided past investigating the possibility of bread. Most failed to hear the raucously arguing mallards and the whistling coots. None noticed the village dogs as they cocked legs at the wheels. It was debatable whether any of the seventeen gained any benefit whatsoever from the practice but that wasn't the point. Wednesday afternoon was Matron's rest afternoon.

The three-legged, one-eared, one-eyed tom cat with no more than half a tail but with an uncountable number of fleas landed squarely on the sorting room table, knocking over the half empty bottle of gin on to the inkpad. The fact that the old cat was quite incapable of getting there under its own volition never entered Miss Brunhilde Adventure's mind. She struck it from the table, spraying the blackened spilt gin everywhere, and collapsed, head in hands, tears streaming from her bloodshot eyes. A few minutes later, when she had stopped sobbing, she sat up, wiped the tears from her face with the palms of her hands and ran her fingers through the grey hair that had been neither washed nor brushed this past week. She emptied what remained of the gin into the glass and drank it. Then, intending to go upstairs and throw herself into bed, she rose and turned towards the door.

The ghost of Wotan Adventure stood in the doorway. Transfixed, Miss Brunhilde Adventure could do no more than stand and watch as her brother opened his red coat to reveal the blood dripping from his chest. As he let the coat fall closed, her gaze turned upwards to his eyes. The accusation that she saw in the cold grey eyes answered that blackest of questions that had troubled her all these years. She knew now for certain that it had been she whom Wotan had blamed for his death. He had come at last to exact his revenge. Mesmerised, she took the object that he offered her and did not recognise it. When he offered his hand, she took it and allowed herself to be led from the sorting room of the Post Office into the hall way of the attached house. There, he stopped her before the full length mirror on the wall by the door and pointed to a framed print that hung next to it. She looked at the print. She had never seen it before. It showed a young British soldier being speared by a wire-haired, black faced, black handed native. Wotan's death-white hand swept her attention from the print to the mirror. It showed a strange figure with an indelibly black face and wild indelibly black hair. The figure was holding a rust tipped spear in its indelibly black hands. Miss Brunhilde Adventure stood before the reflection of her black soul in the mirror and waited.

When the ghost of her long dead brother showed her the print of a massacre, a scene of dead and cowering Europeans with a white infant held aloft on the spear of a black native, and then pointed to the old tom cat busy licking its paws on the floor beside her, the fated woman knew what was required. It surprised her that the cat didn't die. Violent jerks transmitted themselves down the shaft of the spear. The movement felt strangely satisfying. She began to shake the spear. It felt good. The cat's shrieks of pain and anger prompted her to reply in kind. Her shouts soon fell into a rhythm with the thrusting of the spear and she began to dance. Blood splattered her. Oxygen flooded into her lungs. From there to her arteries and to her muscles. She felt strong. Powerful. The fresher air which came in through the opened door drew her outside. She danced in the sun and shouted at the sky. From decades of silent torment she was liberated. When Wotan's ghost pointed down Rowland Hill towards Rowland Bottom, the blooded warrior that had been Miss Brunhilde Adventure knew what the fates demanded of her. Giving voice with an ululation that lifted the rooks from the copse on Tandle's hay meadow, she set off at a jogtrot down the hill, picking up speed with every step.

The dogs on Rowland Bottom village green heard the cry. They didn't bark; they cowered and set off, tails between their legs, for the safety of their cottage gardens. The two swans heard it and drifted away to the far side of the pond. The mallards may have heard it but continued their squabbling. The coots scooted off to wherever coots go when you want to sketch them. The attendants and nurses from the Old Folks Home looked up from their paperbacks and knitting to give each other puzzled and questioning glances. The seventeen Old Folks, dozing in their high backed wicker Bath chairs lined up by the water's edge, probably didn't hear the cry. The Matron of the Old Folks Home certainly didn't as she lay on her bed humming softly and wondering if the twelve bore shotgun propped against her dressing table was loaded. Nor did Colonel Fitzandstarts whose Wednesday afternoon shooting had taken him by way of the Old Folks Home, as it always did, and who, having set down his gun, was at that moment in the process of removing his braces. The old grey heron, who had arrived moments before and was now perched as usual on the old and rusting upturned Silver Cross perambulator in the centre of the village pond, heard the cry but ignored it. She was looking for another fish.

The old grey heron of Rowland Bottom village pond was an observant bird but foolish one. As a young bird, she had overflown the pond every afternoon while commuting between Lake Linmere and the old fish tank at Rowland Abbey. Seeing no suitable place to perch, she had never stopped. Then the perambulator appeared and she took the opportunity to fly down and investigate. Her opportunism was rewarded for within five minutes of standing on the upside down peramulator, she had taken a fish. Her lunch was, in fact, the prize goldfish won by little Barry Carpenter at Market Stallton Fair three years earlier which had escaped when Barry's older brother Harry had pushed the younger lad into the pond on the way home. It was the only fish in the pond but the heron didn't know that. She just assumed that where one fish swam, others did, and so she now spent the better part of each afternoon perched upon the rusting perambulator looking for another fish. Unwarranted assumptions are commonplace in Rowland Bottom. The villagers, if they thought at all about the perambulator, assumed that someone had placed it there to attract the heron. Another erroneous assumption they all made was that Josiah Bittern's wife, flighty Nancy, had taken the baby with her when she ran off with the gypsy.

The indelibly black Fury into which the quiet and respectable Postmistress had metamorphosed took all of two minutes in its charge down Rowland Hill, all the while wailing and whooping like a wounded banshee. Since every wail was echoed by a demonic screech of anger from the spitted cat, just as every spear shaking whoop had its corresponding yowl of pain, it cannot be said that the villagers were not forwarned of the impending attack. A lot can happen in two minutes. Even in Rowland Bottom.

Colonel Fitzandstarts removed his boots, noticing with embarrassment that he had trodden in some particularly repulsive dog mess whilst crossing the village green. Matron took an anticipatory sip of her Madeira and wished that she hadn't laced the sexy Basque bodice quite so tightly. Perched on the old Silver Cross perambulator in the centre of the pond, the old grey heron nearly mistook a floating piece of flimsy rubber for a fish and took a surreptitious glance around to see if anyone had noticed her foolishness. The mallards settled one argument and started another. The swans embarked upon yet one more tedious circuit of the pond. The coots reappeared in full view, looking for all the world as though they hadn't spent the last few minutes exploring a parallel universe. A solitary grebe that had absent mindedly strayed from the bottom of Lake Linmere broke surface, then dived again to avoid the oncoming cob. On the bank, the knitters turned to pearlers, the pearlers turned to knitters, and the readers of romantic fiction turned their pages. Ten little children, dressed as ten little Indians, turned out of one of the cottages and, to the accompaniment of appropriate whoops and wails and yowls and screeches, began killing each other off on the village green. The dogs, reassured by the normality of the Wednesday afternoon, decided to emulate them. And Herbert Hover, in a rare moment of lucidity, or a brief moment of insanity, decided to propose to Fanny Tandle who was seated in the neighbouring Bath chair.

Forewarned the village should have been. It took not the slightest notice. It assumed that this Wednesday afternoon would be like all the other Wednesday afternoons that, week after week, had tediously followed upon Wednesday mornings and tiredly given way to Wednesday evenings. Unwarranted assumptions are commonplace in Rowland Bottom.

The village, then, was not at all prepared for the bloody onslaught that Miss Brunhilde Adventure's deranged mind envisaged as she thundered down the last few yards of Rowland Hill and saw the idyllic summer scene laid out before her. But nor, for that matter, was Miss Brunhilde Adventure, letting out a final whoop as her foot reached the recently scythed grass of the village green, at all prepared for the squashed blotch of particularly repulsive dog mess upon which her foot actually landed. The massive forward momentum built up in the two-minute downhill charge was within seconds converted into an equally massive downward moment from about a yard up as her feet slipped from under her. Her back, which had already been subjected to considerable stresses from the recent unaccustomed exercise, broke. She died. The cat, however, continued its forward motion, becoming detached from the spear at the moment Miss Brunhilde Adventure slipped. So it was that as Herbert Hover rose from his Bath chair with the intention of plighting his troth to Fanny Tandle, an indelibly lucky black cat crossed his path. Being blind, he didn't see it. Fanny Tandle, being deaf, didn't hear his proposal. Nonetheless, she did see him go down on one knee before her and so she agreed anyway. As every old man in Rowland Bottom will tell you, Fanny Tandle never could say no.

The indelibly lucky black cat continued on its trajectory. It was watched right up until the last moment by the old grey heron who, as has been mentioned in passing, was an observant bird but a foolish one. The old grey heron had just enough meat on her to sustain the cat during its recuperation from the spear wound. For the remainder of the summer and throughout the autumn, it dared not move from the rusty old upturned Silver Cross perambulator for fear of drowning. The villagers left it alone. Lazing in the sun, the cat, though black, made a passable substitute for the old grey heron who had also been unremarkably static. If truth be told, a rescued cat would convert the old heron perch into nothing more than an item of discarded rubbish requiring the effort of disposal. No resident of Rowland Bottom has that amount of civic pride. Being indelibly lucky, the cat made a living by snatching the occasional passing mallard. The swans, however much it willed them near, kept well away. One day in winter, the pond froze over and the cat might have walked to freedom had it not died peacefully in its sleep the night before.

When they came to tell her of the tragic accident that had befallen the Postmistress, Penny Black was seated at the dressing table heaped with the usual assortment of oils and unguents, paints and powders, common to that half of humankind so aghast at its own appearance in the dressing table mirror that it needs must spend hours attempting disguise. Later, she would extract from the lower right-hand drawer of that dressing table the last will and testament of Miss Brunhilde Adventure. The document had been witnessed by Mrs Filibuster and Miss Anthropist, neither of whom had thought to question why, a short time previously in the Post Office on Rowland Hill, Penny Black had asked them to sign for non-registered letters. The will left everything to Penny Black.

Miss Brunhilde Adventure was buried the following Tuesday. Although Penny Black was obviously too upset to attend the funeral, she did send a nice wreath. Herbert Hover and Fanny Tandle were married three weeks later on the Saturday but, unless they availed themselves of the facilities of the linen cupboard, the marriage was never consummated for the rules of the Old Folks Home forbade the mingling of the sexes. On the Monday after the wedding, the District Coroner, presiding over the inquest on Miss Adventure, recorded a verdict of accidental death.

Ink Amera

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