The Nebuly Coat (1903) by J. Meade Falkner

Readers unfamiliar with The Nebuly Coat may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.

"....the blameless herb nepenthe might anywhere be found growing by the wayside."

The Nebuly Coat (1903) by J. Meade Falkner is a superb novel of suspense, sudden death, and inheritance. Secrets and their contexts are at its heart. 

Anyone interested in ‘cathedraly’ antiquarianism, heraldry, and murder will find in this novel an excellent reason to skip at least one day of work. The climax is brief and brutal, the last lines a breathtaking slingshot of emotion.

The novel takes place in the town of Cullerne, in and around the history, structure, and personalities involved with its dilapidated cathedral, Cullerne Minster. 

A firm of London architects send in a promising clerk to oversee the minor repairs the cathedral. Mr. Westray is our point of view character, interacting with a panoply of high and low characters in his rooming house and in the cathedral.

Landlady Miss Joliffe and her daughter Anastasia, desperate to present a genteel, refined, and decorous face to the world, are facing slow extinction from debt and abject levels of poverty. The way they are forced to interact with hypocritical lodgers and family members is infuriating as they labor every day to disguise their plight.

Falkner presents Cullerne starkly and brutally in all its stultifying, straightjacketing, maddening middle class social strictures. His ability to call forth reader anger and horror in these moments is masterful.

*   *   *

Westray befriends another poverty-stricken lodger of Miss Joliffe, cathedral organist Mr. Sharnall.

Sharnall is a bitter drinker, surviving on a dwindling stipend and laboring to make the minster’s instrument perform.

   It was a great place for dust, the organ–loft—dust that fell, and dust that rose; dust of wormy wood, dust of crumbling leather, dust of tattered mothy curtains that were dropping to pieces, dust of primeval green baize; but Mr Sharnall had breathed the dust for forty years, and felt more at home in that place than anywhere else. If it was Crusoe's island, he was Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed.

"Here, you can take this key," he said one day to Westray; "it unlocks the staircase–door; but either tell me when to expect you, or make a noise as you come up the steps. I don't like being startled. Be sure you push the door to after you; it fastens itself. I am always particular about keeping the door locked, otherwise one doesn't know what stranger may take it into his head to walk up. I can't bear being startled." And he glanced behind him with a strange look in his eyes....

Mr. Sharnall had previously befriended Miss Joliffe's ne'er-do-well brother, a man obsessed with identifying the rightful heir to the local magnate, whose title is Lord Blandamer. (The Blandamer coat of arms, featuring the nebuly design, gives Falkner his title). After Mr. Joliffe’s death, Sharnall has attempted to solve the mystery, but the solution rests on finding a missing clue. 

Sharnall senses his quest may be doomed to more than simple failure. Even though the newly appointed bishop turns out to be an old Oxford friend who wants to support him and convince him to stop drinking, Sharnall’s anxieties mount.

     The stimulus that the Bishop's letter had brought Mr Sharnall soon wore off. He was a man of moods, and in his nervous temperament depression walked close at the heels of exaltation. Westray felt sure in those days that followed that his friend was drinking to excess, and feared something more serious than a mere nervous breakdown, from the agitation and strangeness that he could not fail to observe in the organist's manner.

     The door of the architect's room opened one night, as he sat late over his work, and Mr Sharnall entered. His face was pale, and there was a startled, wide–open look in his eyes that Westray did not like.

     "I wish you would come down to my room for a minute," the organist said; "I want to change the place of my piano, and can't move it by myself."

    "Isn't it rather late to–night?" Westray said, pulling at his watch, while the deep and slow melodious chimes of Saint Sepulchre told the dreaming town and the silent sea–marshes that it lacked but a quarter of an hour to midnight.       

     "Wouldn't it be better to do it to–morrow morning?"

     "Couldn't you come down to–night?" the organist asked; "it wouldn't take you a minute."

Westray caught the disappointment in the tone.

     "Very well," he said, putting his drawing–board aside. "I've worked at this quite long enough; let us shift your piano."

     They went down to the ground–floor.

     "I want to turn the piano right–about–face," the organist said, "with its back to the room and the keyboard to the wall—the keyboard quite close to the wall, with just room for me to sit."

     "It seems a curious arrangement," Westray BB criticised; "is it better acoustically?"

     "Oh, I don't know; but, if I want to rest a bit, I can put my back against the wall, you see."

The change was soon accomplished, and they sat down for a moment before the fire.

     "You keep a good fire," Westray said, "considering it is bed–time." And, indeed, the coals were piled high, and burning fiercely.

     The organist gave them a poke, and looked round as if to make sure that they were alone.

     "You'll think me a fool," he said; "and I am. You'll think I've been drinking, and I have. You'll think I'm drunk, but I'm not. Listen to me: I'm not drunk; I'm only a coward. Do you remember the very first night you and I walked home to this house together? Do you remember the darkness and the driving rain, and how scared I was when we passed the Old Bonding–house? Well, it was beginning then, but it's much worse now. I had a horrible idea even then that there was something always following me—following me close. I didn't know what it was—I only knew there was something close behind me."

     His manner and appearance alarmed Westray. The organist's face was very pale, and a curious raising of the eyelids, which showed the whites of the eyes above the pupils, gave him the staring appearance of one confronted suddenly with some ghastly spectacle. Westray remembered that the hallucination of pursuant enemies is one of the most common symptoms of incipient madness, and put his hand gently on the organist's arm.

     "Don't excite yourself," he said; "this is all nonsense. Don't get excited so late at night."

Mr Sharnall brushed the hand aside.

     "I only used to have that feeling when I was out of doors, but now I have it often indoors—even in this very room. Before I never knew what it was following me—I only knew it was something. But now I know what it is: it is a man—a man with a hammer. Don't laugh. You don't want to laugh; you only laugh because you think it will quiet me, but it won't. I think it is a man with a hammer. I have never seen his face yet, but I shall some day. Only I know it is an evil face—not hideous, like pictures of devils or anything of that kind, but worse—a dreadful, disguised face, looking all right, but wearing a mask. He walks constantly behind me, and I feel every moment that the hammer may brain me."

     "Come, come!" Westray said in what is commonly supposed to be a soothing tone, "let us change this subject, or go to bed. I wonder how you will find the new position of your piano answer."

The organist smiled.

     "Do you know why I really put it like that?" he said.      

     "It is because I am such a coward. I like to have my back against the wall, and then I know there can be no one behind me. There are many nights, when it gets late, that it is only with a great effort I can sit here. I grow so nervous that I should go to bed at once, only I say to myself, `Nick'— that's what they used to call me at home, you know, when I was a boy—`Nick, you're not going to be beat; you're not going to be scared out of your own room by ghosts, surely.' And then I sit tight, and play on, but very often don't think much of what I'm playing. It is a sad state for a man to get into, is it not?" And Westray could not traverse the statement.

The tenderness of the friendship of Westray and Sharnall is a high-point of The Nebuly Coat. So too is the final interview between Westray and the new Lord Baldamer.

*   *   *

Falkner masterfully layers scenes of dread with scenes of pathos and black-humored social commentary. As Mr. Westray comes to the verge of solving the mysteries and crimes besetting Cullerne, his tyro's case of nerves is swiftly transmitted to the reader.

The Nebuly Coat is a rewarding read, equal to the excitement of Moonfleet (1898) and the historical horrors of The Lost Stradivarius (1895). All three novels are available free online here, and I recommend them without reservation.

Jay

21 February 2024