by Anna Dean
‘A physician?’
‘Yes. You were perhaps unaware that…’ Again there was hesitation and a forcing of himself to go on. ‘That the poor boy does not always enjoy the best of health.’
‘Catherine mentioned to me that he is liable to headaches.’
‘Yes. Quite so,’ he replied. Then, turning to the door with palpable relief, ‘Ah, Colonel Walborough! Good morning. I hope you passed a tolerable night.’
Dido was left to her own thoughts. And chief amongst those thoughts was that Sir Edgar was far from easy in talking about his son. There was something in his manner as he spoke of him: a hesitation, almost a reluctance – as if he disliked naming or acknowledging him.
‘Oh dear! Rose, are you unwell?’ The clear voice echoed across the gloomy back yard, making itself heard above the sounds of rattling pots in the kitchen and the rhythmic squeaking of the pump in the wash-house.
The kitchen maid wiped her mouth on a corner of her apron and reflected that only a lady would ask you such a question when you were so ‘unwell’ the remains of your breakfast were there for the whole world to see, spread all over the cobbles. But, seeing that it was that nice Miss Kent, she managed not only to give a civil, ‘Sorry, miss,’ but even picked up a bucket of fresh water and sluiced away the mess.
‘You had better sit down for a moment.’ Dido seated herself on a low wall, beckoned the girl to sit beside her and studied her face in the dim light that found its way down between the high brick walls.
She was a well-grown, sturdy girl of fifteen or sixteen with a complexion that was usually highly coloured, but at the moment was drained to a mauvish grey. There were dark shadows like bruises beneath her eyes.
‘Have you eaten something that has disagreed with you?’
‘No, no, it ain’t that, miss. I’ve just been…doing a nasty job.’
‘Oh?’ Dido tilted her little head questioningly, then – apparently – received inspiration. ‘Oh, you mean that poor woman they found in the shrubbery yesterday?’
Rose nodded. ‘They sent old Molly Sharpe from the village to…well, to do what had to be done before they could take her away to be buried. But she ain’t so strong as she used to be and she said she needed someone to help – with the lifting and such. So, of course, it had to be me, didn’t it?’
‘Dear, dear, how perfectly dreadful for you.’ Dido felt in her pocket. ‘There now, have a peppermint; it will help stop the sickness.’
‘Thank you, miss.’ Rose took the sweet and sucked gratefully.
Dido’s little round face puckered thoughtfully beneath the edge of her white cap. ‘You say the woman has been taken away to be buried?’
‘Why, yes, miss.’
‘But I understood – that is Sir Edgar spoke yesterday as if she would be taken to the inquest.’
‘But Mr Fallows came this morning to look at her again and when he’d done he said they should bury her.’ Rose sucked harder on her peppermint. ‘She wasn’t fit to be seen.’
‘But now they will not be able to discover who she was.’
‘Nor would they by looking at her, miss. Her face…’ Rose put her hand firmly over her mouth and prayed that her breakfast was all gone and nothing remained with which she might disgrace herself before the lady.
‘I see,’ said Dido. ‘I had not understood that she was injured in the head.’ It was a detail which even the hardy Mrs Harris had failed to discover. But, she thought, it was a shame that Mr Fallows should order immediate burial; there was surely a great deal of information which a body might reveal… If only one could get at it.
‘Was there anything you wanted here, miss?’ asked Rose. ‘Only I’d better be getting on. There’s all the breakfast dishes to be washed and cook’ll be shouting for me.’
‘No, no, you just sit down until you feel a bit better.’ Dido gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘You have had a shock, my dear, and you need to go about things a little slowly this morning – otherwise I don’t expect you will be able to tell cook and all the others everything they want to know.’
‘Everything they want to know,’ the girl repeated with a confused look.
‘Yes, everything they want to know about the dead woman. I expect everyone is wondering about her and, after all, you have actually seen her.’
‘Oh yes, yes, I suppose I have.’
‘And – with you being so upset and everything – I don’t suppose you will be able to remember much at all unless people are kind to you.’
Understanding dawned and Rose gave a lopsided grin that lit up her grey face. ‘No, no maybe I won’t. But…’ The grin dissolved. ‘But the truth is, miss,’ she said sadly, ‘I don’t think I’ve got much to tell, what with her face being all…’
‘Oh, I am sure you have plenty to tell,’ said Dido bracingly. ‘Let me see, what might they want to know? Well, what sort of woman do you suppose she was?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, miss.’
‘Was she a lady?’
‘Oh no!’ came the immediate reply. ‘Not with hands like that!’
‘What were her hands like?’
Rose dropped her eyes. ‘Red, working hands, miss.’
Dido followed the girl’s eyes, which were fixed on her own hands, clasped in her sacking apron: red, cracked and scarred with chilblains. ‘This woman had chilblains on her hands?’ she suggested.
‘Yes,’ said Rose. Then she stopped herself. ‘At least she had old ones. Healed mostly. No new ones.’
‘Now, it was very clever indeed of you to notice that. Very clever indeed. It tells you a lot about her, you see.’
‘Does it, miss?’
‘Why, yes. It means she was a working woman, you see; but one that had perhaps gone up in the world a bit just lately. Got a better job perhaps.’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose it does,’ said Rose, much encouraged.
‘And what of her dress?’
‘Covered in blood it was.’ Her hand flew back to her mouth.
Dido quickly produced another peppermint; Rose took it and sucked noisily.
‘Apart from that,’ said Dido gently when the crisis seemed to have passed, ‘was it a nice dress?’
Rose nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, yes, it was, now you ask. A very nice dimity it was, with a pretty blue stripe.’
‘New?’
Rose was thinking hard now. ‘Yes, I think it was new.’
‘The dress has made you think of something?’
‘Yes. It was when I said that then about it being blue-striped dimity. It made me think because I’d never seen anything like it before and I remember Jenny – that’s one of the housemaids here – I remember her saying she’d seen some lovely blue dimity new in from London in a draper’s shop last month when she had her day off.’
‘That’s very interesting, Rose. Do you remember what shop it was?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know the name of the shop, miss; that was way over by Hopton Cresswell, I should say, because that’s where Jenny’s people live.’
‘Well, well, you have got a lot to tell them all! You can even make a guess that the unfortunate woman lived somewhere near Hopton Cresswell. And I suppose you know roughly how old she was.’
‘Oh no, miss! Because her face—’
‘Yes, yes. I know you could not see her face. But what was her hair like?’
‘Fair, miss,’ said Rose, frowning to remember. ‘Long and yellow and it didn’t curl over much.’
‘Was it thick?’
‘Yes, quite thick.’
‘Were there any grey hairs mixed in with the fair ones?’
‘Oh no.’
‘Well then, she was rather young. On the right side of thirty, I would think.’
‘Oh yes, miss, yes I suppose she was.’
‘And was she fat or thin?’
‘Neither really, miss.’
‘A good figure then?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘There now,’ said Dido, getting to h
er feet, ‘I should think all that is worth a nice little sit down in the housekeeper’s room at least – and perhaps a dish of tea too. Remember, don’t tell them anything unless they are kind to you.’
‘No, miss, thank you, I won’t.’ Rose smiled happily, picked up her skirts and started off across the wet cobbles to the kitchen door. But then she stopped and turned back, biting her lip thoughtfully.
‘Have you remembered something else, Rose?’
‘Yes, miss, it’s that dress I keep thinking about. Funny, it was. But I don’t seem to be so good at making out what things mean like you are.’
‘What was funny about the dress?’
‘It was made really odd. Too much stuff in it. Lots of little tucks, and stuff all folded into the seams. I ain’t never seen a dress like it. Do you think that’s interesting at all? Does it mean something like those other things?’ She peered hopefully at Dido’s frowning face. ‘Well, miss? What do you think?’
‘Oh? Oh no. No, I doubt it is important. I expect it just means that she was a bad dressmaker and a little bit wasteful. And,’ she added brightly, ‘we should not speak ill of the dead, should we? No, I would not bother to tell anyone about that. You have plenty to tell without that. Remember now, a nice rest by the fire and a drink of tea.’
Dido smiled encouragingly and clattered away across the cobbles in her pattens. She went out of the yard, skirted the red-brick wall of the kitchen garden, and came, by a side gate, into the park.
She had left the house with the intention of inspecting the place where the woman had been found and it was only the sight of a covered cart from the village bearing its sad burden away from the stables that had prompted her to make a detour into the kitchen yard, in the hope of learning something there.
But now her mind was full and she walked on in some agitation across the park until she came to a little rise in the ground which afforded a particularly good view of the house and estate. Here there stood the broad stump of a walnut tree – one of the ones which Margaret had pointed out to her in their drive through the park yesterday as having been felled in the ‘Great Storm’. It must have been a remarkably fine tree, for even its broken remains had a kind of melancholy dignity. There was an ornate bench of green wrought iron standing close beside it and Dido sat herself down upon it to think.
Before her the yellowing autumn grass stretched away under a heavy grey sky, each blade thickly beaded with dew. The great trees of the park stood out black against white mist and the squat tower of the family chapel rose up above a dark bank of yews. On her right, a well-trodden path led off along the edge of the ha-ha that bounded the shrubbery, and beyond the shrubbery rose lawns and fountains and all the columned grandeur of the house-front. It was a beautiful, tranquil scene which spoke not only of the master’s wealth, but also of his care that everything around him should be well kept and present a picture of perfection.
Thoughts of guilt and murder seemed out of place amid such tranquillity.
That the dead woman had been young was very bad news indeed. Respectable spinster though she was, Dido understood the ways of the world quite well enough to see that a woman of that class was much more likely to be…acquainted with the son of Sir Edgar Montague if she was young and…not ill-looking. That she should have been rather well dressed and that she should seem to have lately given over menial work was worse still. That telling phrase ‘a kept woman’ would insinuate itself into Dido’s mind in spite of all that she could do to keep it out.
She gazed at a beautiful, intricate mass of spiders’ webs that hung between the iron curls of the bench and she recalled Mr Montague’s words: ‘I must speak with my father.’ ‘He will not like what he hears.’ ‘It is impossible that he and I can remain friends after tonight.’
The words of a young man whose secret amour had been discovered?
But no, Dido would not, could not think that. After all, a woman was dead. This was not simply a matter of a gentleman’s youthful indiscretion (and again the vicarage-raised Dido proved herself more worldly-wise than most people would have suspected) such as had been passed over and covered up in many respectable families. This was a case of murder. By allowing herself to consider that Mr Montague’s strange behaviour and the woman’s death were connected, she seemed to be delivering up Catherine’s beloved, not simply to moral stricture, but to the very hands of the hangman.
Except, she thought guiltily, I am not delivering him up. I am protecting him.
Her last words to Rose had come unbidden to her tongue, surprising her with their fluency and calculation. For she had believed that her role at Belsfield was to uncover the truth, not to obscure it. But she had moved instinctively to conceal the last fact that Rose had unknowingly revealed to her.
The dead woman’s dress had been a puzzle to the scullery maid, coming, as she no doubt did, from a family where women’s clothes were coarse and loose and probably passed around among them as needs changed. But there were others among the servants who would have known precisely what the meaning was of those tucks and folds in the blue dimity gown. The ladies’ maids could certainly have enlightened her.
Dido had herself constructed dresses for her sisters-in-law in just the same way. One did it when the dress would have to be let out as the months progressed – and the time of confinement grew closer.
Dido gazed out across the park and wondered whether anyone else had discovered this truth. Perhaps not, for it did not seem as if the young woman’s figure had been betraying her yet. Perhaps she was the only one to know that the dead woman had been expecting a child.
Chapter Four
…I have told no one about the baby, Eliza. By which, of course, I mean that I have told no one but you. I hope you will excuse these long letters full of my own concerns; but it is such a relief to tell someone what is in my mind and I hesitate to confide in Catherine when everything is suspicion and uncertainty, for I do not wish her to be hurt more than she must be.
Exactly how much she must be hurt is not easy to judge. I am almost certain that it must all end in a broken engagement, no matter what I discover, for that is the course of action which Mr Montague himself desires. Her acquaintance with the young man has been brief and I trust the suffering of her heart will be in proportion. But how much the scandal will injure her reputation is much harder to determine.
Well, the next thing I want to tell you about is the shrubbery.
I went there yesterday, after I had spoken to Rose, and I found it to be as well cared for as everything else about this place. The laurels are as neatly clipped as Sir Edgar’s own side-whiskers. No great branches to collect the rain and be shaken over unsuspecting heads as we used to do when we were children. Here it is all very orderly: gravel paths raked quite clean of weeds, a murmuring of doves and a rich smell of damp earth and leaf-mould. Anyone knowing nothing of what had happened there could pass through without suspecting anything.
However, my eyes were awake to suspicion, so I noticed that beside the summerhouse – which, by the by, is called the hermitage; I do not quite know why, except that Belsfield is rather too grand to have something as common-place as a summerhouse, which every farmer may have these days – well, by the summerhouse, I noticed that there was a patch of gravel which was particularly well raked, and rather wetter than any of the rest. It looked very much as if it had been washed clean. And then, when I stooped down and looked closer, I saw that the water that had been thrown down had washed traces of a red crust onto the large white stones that border the path.
This was, undoubtedly, the place where the woman lay.
Eliza, knowing that, there was something indescribably disquieting about the very ordinariness of the place. I was not quite frightened, but it was oppressive to stand upon that spot and think that this picturesque little grey building, these banks of laurel gleaming with damp, were the last sights upon which a fellow creature’s eyes had rested.
Well, just beside the wet gravel was the door to the
hermitage. I tried the lock, though of course I had not much hope of gaining an entrance. For you know how it is in these grand places: all the keys are jealously guarded by the gardeners and only they are able to go about wherever they like. But, to my very great surprise, the door swung open – letting out a faint smell of damp and dead leaves. There was not much light inside because the shutters were closed, but it was possible to see the usual collection of stools and basketwork chairs that fill such places, a stand with three umbrellas in it, and two forgotten sunhats lying on a small table. The floor was covered in dust and dry, brown leaves.
Nothing of interest, I thought, and I was about to close the door when my eyes became sufficiently accustomed to the dim light to make out footprints in the dust. I looked closer. Yes, some time recently someone – or maybe two people – had come into the summerhouse. I followed the track of the feet and saw that two chairs had been turned slightly towards one another. On the back of one of the chairs a cushion had been balanced and bore still the impression of a resting head.
Well now, Eliza, I did a very clever thing. I sat down in that chair and I tried to rest my own head against the cushion. But I found that it was impossible for me to do so and I was able to calculate that the person who had placed it must be almost a foot taller than I am. Was not that remarkably well done of me?
Indeed, I begin to think that, terrible though this whole business is, it has at least the advantage of allowing full play to my genius, which I have long considered wasted in the contriving of new gowns and roast mutton dinners out of a small income; and if there was such a profession as Solver of Mysteries, I think I should do as well in it as any man. Perhaps I should set myself up in town with a brass plate upon my door: ‘D Kent. Detector of Crimes and Discoverer of Secrets.’ Do you not think I should do good business?
But, rather than cry my own praises, I shall tell you instead of everything that I have been clever enough to deduce.
First of all, there is the question of when this murder took place. Well, about that there can be little doubt; we are all quite certain that it must have occurred while the men were out shooting. It must have happened then, otherwise the single shot would have been heard and remarked upon, if not by people up at the house, then certainly by the men working in the garden.