THE RUMOR THAT STARTED all the trouble sixteen years ago came from a servant girl who worked in the home of Reverend Patrick Ive, the young vicar of Great Holling, and his wife, Frances. Having said that, the servant was not solely or even mainly responsible for the tragedy that resulted. She told a spiteful lie, but she told it to one person only and had no part in spreading it more widely throughout the village. Indeed, once the unpleasantness began, she withdrew almost completely and was scarcely seen. Some speculated that she was ashamed, as she should have been, of what she had set in motion. Later, she regretted her part in the affair and did her best to make amends, though by then it was too late.

Of course, she was wicked to tell a lie of such magnitude even to one person. Perhaps she was frustrated after a particularly hard day’s work at the vicarage, or it could be that, as a servant with ideas above her station, she resented the Ives. Maybe she wished to perk up her dreary life with a little malicious gossip and was naïve enough to imagine that no serious harm would be done.

Unfortunately, the person she chose as audience for her heinous lie was Harriet Sippel. Again, maybe her choice was easy to understand. Harriet, embittered and vindictive as she was since the death of her husband, could be relied upon to receive the lie with great excitement and to believe it, because, of course, she would want it to be true. Someone in the village was doing something gravely wrong, and, even worse (or, from Harriet’s point of view, even better) that someone was the vicar! How her eyes must have flashed with glee! Yes, Harriet was the perfect audience for the servant girl’s slanderous story, and no doubt that was why she was chosen.

The servant told Harriet Sippel that Patrick Ive was a swindler of the most cruel and sacrilegious kind: he was, she claimed, luring villagers to the vicarage late at night whenever his wife Frances was elsewhere helping parishioners, as she often was, and taking their money in exchange for passing on communications from their deceased loved ones—messages from the afterlife that these departed souls had entrusted to him, Patrick Ive, to deliver.

Harriet Sippel told anybody who would listen that Patrick was practicing his charlatan trickery upon several villagers, but this might have been her attempt to enlarge his wrongdoing in order to make a more shocking story. The servant girl insisted later that she had only ever mentioned one name to Harriet: that of Nancy Ducane.