The Nine Tailors

When the brothers realize that the police have heard them and that both are innocent, they give an honest account of what happened. Will tells his tale first. On December 30, he saw a light on in the church. When he investigated, he found Deacon climbing a ladder. He’d left a revolver nearby. Not realizing that Deacon was after the emeralds, Will assumed he had returned to the village to start trouble. Seizing the gun, Will forced Deacon to come down. He was about to call the police when Deacon pointed out that the whole village would know that Mary is a bigamist if he were seen alive. So, the two men come to terms. Will tied Deacon up and marched him to the belfry. He promised to feed the man and smuggle him aboard a cargo ship out of the country in exchange for 200 pounds. However, on December 31, returning from the bank with the money, Will caught a fever and fell into a delirium. He made his brother promise to take care of the man in the tower.

Not knowing the whole story, Jim went into the belfry on January 2 and found Deacon dead. A look of horror was on the dead man’s face, and it appeared as if he struggled to escape his ropes, but no cause of death was found. Jim recognized a scar on the dead man’s wrist and realized this is Deacon. Fearing that Will killed the man, Jim concealed the body behind some boards. He knew that Lady Thorpe’s funeral would be held on January 4, so he returned the evening after the interment to dispose of Deacon.

Jim found the body where he hid it, but the bells frightened him. He says, “I never have liked the sound of bells. There’s something—you’d think they were alive, sometimes, and could talk. When I was a boy, I read a story in an old magazine about a bell that called out after a murderer” (360). Shaking off his dread, Jim hauled Deacon’s body down to the cemetery and placed it in Lady Thorpe’s grave. Before burying him, Jim smashed Deacon’s face with a shovel and cut off his hands to prevent identification. Then, he cleaned up all the evidence and left town.

Blundell concludes that he doesn’t have enough evidence to convict either Thoday brother of murder and drop the matter. Wimsey leaves the village and forgets the matter as the months pass. Much to his delight, Hilary invites him to spend Christmas with her at Red House. Uncle Edward has been unsuccessful in renting it out. She says, “He had done his best to let it, but the number of persons desirous of tenanting a large house in ill-repair, situated in a howling desert and encumbered with a dilapidated and heavily mortgaged property, was not very large” (370).

During the holiday visit, Wimsey settles Hilary’s future educational plans over her uncle’s objections. Although Uncle Edward is her guardian, Wimsey holds the estate’s purse strings. After some arm-twisting, a grudging Uncle Edward agrees to let her go to Oxford.

On Boxing Day, Wimsey calls on some friends in a nearby town and spends the night there. As he and Bunter make their return to the village, they cross one of the drainage canals and notice that the water is rising dangerously high. The entire region of the fens is low-lying, and a series of sluice gates, drainage ditches, and canals control the water level. A recent engineering project has supposedly fixed the problem of potential flooding. However, the monsoonal rains during the holidays are overflowing all the embankments.

A work crew tells Wimsey that he must warn the villagers to leave their homes. The whole region could be underwater in a matter of hours. When Wimsey delivers the news, Venables organizes an evacuation. Most villagers come to the church, which can hold 1,000 people. Wimsey is enlisted to drive to nearby towns and alert them to the danger. When he goes to the sluice gates to tell the workers to flee for their lives, he sees the embankment give way, and two men are dragged beneath the current. One of them is Will.

Wimsey returns to the village and gives the sad news to Venables. He can’t bear to tell Mary himself. By now, the church bells are ringing a continuous warning. Unable to listen to the sound of Mary’s cries when she hears of her husband’s death, Wimsey climbs up the tower, past the ringing chamber where the ringers are hard at work, and up to the belfry. When he gets to the top of the ladder, he is overwhelmed by the noise: “This unendurable shrill clangour was a raving madness, an assault of devils. He could move neither forward nor backwards, though his failing wits urged him, ‘I must get out—I must get out of this’” (389-90). Fighting panic and dizziness, Wimsey climbs up to the roof to escape the sound. Beneath him, he can see the surrounding countryside submerged underwater.

It takes 14 days for the flooding to subside, and the villagers now face the unpleasant task of cleaning up. Once Will’s body is recovered, the village holds a funeral. Afterward, Wimsey tells Blundell and Venables that Will must have felt guilty for his role in killing Deacon.

His listeners are confused by this statement and even more confused when Wimsey adds, “The murderers of Geoffrey Deacon are hanged already, and a good deal higher than Haman […] Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul” (396). He explains that everyone had a hand in killing Deacon because the New Year’s Eve change-ringing concert caused his death.

Wimsey says, “I believe it is at St. Paul’s Cathedral that it is said to be death to enter the bell-chamber when a peal is being rung. But I know that if I had stayed ten minutes in the tower that night when they rang the alarm, I should have been dead, too” (396).

In contrast, Deacon was forced to endure nine hours of bell ringing from which he couldn’t escape. The cacophony eventually killed him. Venables talks about legends that say that bells cannot abide evil. The curate believes that God’s justice was done, and Blundell agrees. He concludes that Will inadvertently killed Deacon and then paid with his own life. As far as the police are concerned, the case is closed.