The Gordier story had already been printed several times by the time Carey wrote it down, as "John Andrew Gordier" in "Anglo-Norman Legends" and as "Rachel Mauger, a Guernsey Tragedy". According to it, Rachel Mauger, a beautiful girl of a well-off St Martin's family, was engaged to Gordier, a Jerseyman of French descent. He sent word that he would land at La Petite Porte. She went to meet him and he never appeared. A merchant named Gaillard, once her father's clerk, who wanted her himself, had waited behind the rocks, stabbed Gordier twice in the back as he started up the cliff path, pushed the body into a cave with a very small entrance, and taken a locket Gordier had brought for her. Boys later found the body. Rachel's family pressed her to accept Gaillard, who gave her the locket. When Gordier's mother came from Jersey and recognised it, Rachel whispered "clerc" and died. Gaillard blamed a Jewish pedlar called Levi, then killed himself the morning Levi was due in court, leaving a confession.
The second story, told only by old St Martin's people, concerns an émigré who took a house at Le Hurel above Le Vallon during the French Revolution and walked alone every day, always richly dressed. Two or three brothers of bad reputation from near the Varclin followed him into "the narrow lane, overgrown with trees and thorn bushes, which leads to Jerbourg Point", murdered him, and buried him under the stone heaps on the clifftop. They sank his hired boat so it would look as if he had sailed home. Years later his friend Dr Le Harrier saw his distinctive watch in a Paris jeweller's, traced it to Guernsey, and found the brothers drunk and terrified. They confessed and showed where the bones were, which were buried at St Martin's while the whole parish watched. An old man named Pierre Jehan made a short, cutting speech at the graveside, and the brothers died of strokes in prison before their trial. Carey deliberately left out their name.
With two ghosts to choose from, the bay was given up by the sand-eelers until Pierre Thoume of Les Blanches, a devout man and a distant relative of the murderers, decided to find out what the ghost wanted. The other men who had promised to go with him did not turn up, so he went alone at midnight with only his Bible. He came home at dawn looking white and fixed, and told his family: "You must never ask me what has happened, what I have seen, what I have done. I have sworn to keep it a secret." But, he said, they could go to La Petite Porte at any hour and never again hear a scream there. He kept his secret to his deathbed. Carey's informants included his daughter, Mrs Rowswell, and several St Martin's people, and she wrote that "to this day the noises have utterly ceased". La Petite Porte is reached by steep steps from the Jerbourg road.
Comments