One exception is to be found at the _Ostrich_ at Colnbrook, a beautiful old Elizabethan coaching inn, retaining near the middle of its long half-timbered and gabled front, above the yard gate, the platform by which “the quality” embarked on the coach. It is an ideal place for a ghost to take sanctuary, with many corridors and low-ceilinged chambers, all lined through with carved chestnut panelling and twisted pilasters. There is a Queen’s room, said to have been used by Queen Elizabeth while awaiting the repair of her coach which had lost a wheel crossing the ford. Over the mantelpiece is her coat of arms. But chiefest of all is the Blue Chamber, sacred to the memory of Dick Turpin. This ubiquitous villain, so tradition states, once leaped from the first floor window and escaped into the street when pressed by the authorities.[15]
The ghost is also associated with the Blue Chamber. His name in the flesh was Thomas Cole, and his story is told in a very rare work of Jacobean date, published by Thowe, of Reading.
Once upon a time in the reign of Henry I, the _Ostrich_ was already a flourishing inn kept by a man and his wife who were secretly robbers and murderers. When a guest of substance came along and was considered a suitable victim, the husband would remark aloud: “Wife, I know of a fat pig if you want one!” and she would answer, “Well, put him into the pigsty till to-morrow.” Then the visitor was put into the Blue Chamber above the kitchen. Underneath the bed there was a trap-door, so arranged that by pulling out two iron pins in the kitchen below the whole fell down, and plunged the unfortunate man into an immense iron brewing-vat filled with boiling water. The dead body was then thrown into the Colne which flows just behind the house. If other travellers asked for the murdered man in the morning, they were told that he had saddled his horse and ridden away before dawn. As a matter of fact, the horse had been saddled and taken away to a barn, some distance off, where the innkeeper cropped and branded it in such a manner that recognition was impossible.
Thomas Cole was a Reading clothier, rich and thrifty. He was in the habit of riding to London, and sleeping at the _Ostrich_ on his return journey, when he usually carried a considerable sum of money, the proceeds of his sales. For a long time Cole had been marked out for the cauldron as he usually travelled alone. After the manner of most sixteenth-century legends--Arden of Faversham, for example--the murderers were on several occasions balked of their prey at the last moment when the guest had been shown into the Blue Chamber. Once it was his friends, Gray of Gloucester and William of Worcester, who also traded with cloth in London, and arrived unexpectedly late at night. Another time a tavern dispute kept the house in commotion; a third time a rumour came that his friend Thomas à Beckett’s house in Chepe was on fire, and he returned to town. On another visit he was so ill that a nurse must needs watch by his bedside.