Even so, I could hardly have supposed that Dudley would put down in black ink and his own handwriting detailed instructions for doing away with Amy or helping Verney to do so. However, if the letter did belong to Forster, there might be something, I thought: an oblique reference, perhaps, a cryptic phrase which would have meaning for a partly informed person such as myself; some revealing slip . . .
I read the letter through and then sat down on the bed, holding it in my hand, shattered. Some revealing slip. Oh yes, indeed, but what it had revealed was not at all what I expected. Quite the reverse.
The letter was most certainly the property of Thomas Blount. In fact, it was the missive containing the strict instructions which Blount had mentioned, to arrange an inquest and find out the truth.
It was most unpleasant reading. It made me hate Dudley more passionately than ever. All right, Amy had had her limitations. She had had some native shrewdness, but little education and her health was poor. However, she had been good, and she was beautiful when Dudley married her, and if he had let her, I think she would have loved him truly always. She deserved better of him than this. I looked at the first paragraph again.
Cousin Blount—immediately upon your departing from me, there came to me Bowes, by whom I do understand that my wife is dead and, as he saith, by a fall from a pair of stairs. Little other understanding can I have of him. The greatness and the suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me, until I do hear from you how the matter standeth or how this evil should light upon me, considering what the malicious world will bruit, as I can take no rest . . . I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use, but one, which is the very plain truth to be known . . .
“My wife.” Just “my wife.” Not Amy and certainly not poor Amy. No anxious hope that she might at least have died quickly and not lain helpless for a long time first. No hint of grief. I remembered how when he first asked me to come to Cumnor, he had spoken of Amy with underlying exasperation, and said that their marriage hadn’t prospered. Very well, they were estranged, but couldn’t he, I said to myself furiously, just have pretended that he felt sorry for her? Even if you had quarrelled with someone, or become bored by them, wouldn’t you still be distressed to learn that they had suffered a fatal accident when they were ill and alone? In all decency he should at least have put up a pretence!
Instead, his sole reference to “misfortune” read as though he considered the misfortune to be his, because he was afraid that people would say he had arranged it. Considering what the malicious world will bruit . . . the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use . . .
The subsequent paragraphs were no better. The grammar was confused and hasty, as though he had dashed it off in a panic. He wanted the “discreetest and most substantial men” for the jury, “no light or slight persons,” and he wanted things to proceed in every respect “by order and law.” The manner of Amy’s death “marvellously troubled” him; he asked whether Blount thought it happened “by evil chance or villainy.” He had sent for various friends and relatives of Amy’s to watch over the inquest proceedings—true enough, since her half-brothers had been there. It was perhaps Dudley rather than Blount who had summoned them.
The letter breathed fear for his reputation, and behind and beyond that, I smelt fear for his career and even for his neck. These were the words of a man taken by surprise, and too horrified even to counterfeit suitable feelings about his own wife. I looked through the disagreeable missive again. Amy’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere at all. In the second paragraph, there was an impersonal recommendation that “the body be viewed and searched.” “The body.” Just “the body.” Not Amy, not a woman he had been married to for ten years, not someone to whom he had once made love.
If he had arranged her death, the news of it would not have frightened him into near-incoherence, and one might reasonably suppose that a husband who has just done away with his wife and wishes to cover his traces would put down a few conventional phrases of regret for her passing.
However, he was too upset to think of anything beyond the harm that scandal could do. Harm to him, that was. Elizabeth’s reputation didn’t mean much more to him than Amy’s neck, judging from what I had just read.
Dudley was innocent. The very self-centredness of the letter proved that, dealing a backhanded blow to all my suspicions. He had not sent Verney or anyone else to murder his wife. If Verney and Holme had been here that day, they had come for some other reason, probably quite harmless. Probably, they didn’t know that anyone had seen them, and were now keeping quiet for fear of drawing suspicion on themselves and Dudley.
Amy had died by accident or else flung herself downstairs, trusting that the fall would kill her, and it had obliged. I need never have written to Cecil in that panicky fashion, need never have sent John to London.
I folded Dudley’s letter again and went to give it to Forster, to send to Blount in London.
If I hadn’t written to Cecil, if I hadn’t sent John to London, he would still have been alive.
• • •
The funeral for Lady Dudley, held in the Church of Our Lady in Oxford on 22 September, was all pomp and ceremony, the church hung with black cloth, and a long, slow procession with a choir solemnly singing as they came, and the coffin itself borne by eight tall yeomen.
John had had no family at hand. His burial two days later beside the small grey church of St. Anne’s had been very quiet. There were yew trees along the fence at one side of the graveyard, but the path through the middle was bordered with cherry trees. John lay near to one, and I was glad to think of the blossom tossing above his resting place in springtime and blowing down to make a coverlet of petals when their hour was gone.
We had brought him flowers; sprays of late roses, for summer was dying. We tied the horses to a tree outside the churchyard and we all went in together, Dale, Brockley and myself, to put the offering on the newly heaped mound.
I was riding Bay Star, and had used some of Dudley’s gratuity to buy a packhorse and a cob, a sturdy fleabitten grey, for Brockley. For Dale, I had somewhat high-handedly borrowed the wretched white gelding. At least she wasn’t likely to fall off it.
Dale said, “Perhaps you’d like to be alone here for a bit, ma’am. You knew him longer than we did.”
I nodded, and they withdrew to wait in the road with the horses. I stayed where I was, kneeling in the grass. When they were out of earshot, I spoke to John.
“John, I’m so sorry. Wherever you are, please forgive me. It need not have happened. I was wrong, foolish, imagining things. I lost my head and sent you off on a stupid errand and now you’re dead and I can’t even do anything to bring your murderers to justice. I can’t scour the forests for a robber with red hair, and perhaps a bald associate! I would if I could. Please, please forgive me.”
I was being a fool all over again. John, if he was anywhere, was in the hands of God, and what lay in the ground beside me was only his cast-off clay. He couldn’t hear me and nowadays it was not the thing to pray to the dead, or for them, either. That was Popish. I was too unhappy to be bothered with labels, though. I clasped my hands and closed my eyes and said a paternoster for John and asked God to look after him.
Then I rose and rejoined the others. “To the Cockspur,” I said. “We’ll have dinner there and set out for Sussex in the morning.”
• • •
We found the inn humming. A noisy family party, apparently on their way home from a wedding, and encumbered with two elderly ladies, one young pregnant one, two horse-litters and three very drunk gentlemen, had just arrived and seemed to have taken over every corner. The dogs were barking excitedly; the stableyard cats had taken refuge on the roof of the hayloft to get away from the shouting and singing and the trampling hoofs and we could hardly get into the yard for the crowd of people and animals and equipages.
“You’ve picked a bad time,” said Dexter candidly, pushing his way between the two litters to reach
us. “I’ve already got the house full, with a couple of merchants and their wives, and a travelling packman and an archdeacon with his chaplain, and the stabling’s stuffed full of horses and grooms. Mistress Blanchard, can you and your woman make do with the little attic place where we put your man Wilton? It’s all that’s left. I daresay we can get Brockley here into the hayloft if we use a shoehorn. The horses must go into the meadow. There’ll be supper enough if mutton suits you. I sent to the farm up the road and bought a sheep and got them to kill it. I just hope no one else arrives because I hate turning business away, but . . . ”
“The attic will do very well,” I said, “and we can certainly turn the horses out for the night. We’re too tired to ride any further if we can avoid it.”
“Bay Star can’t stay out,” said Brockley firmly. “She’s too fine bred and it’s going to rain.”
“See my ostler,” said the harassed Dexter, as someone called his name in peremptory tones. “He’ll maybe get somebody else to put their horse in the meadow. Excuse me . . . ”
The ostler appeared, at an unhurried pace. He was a thin, brown, weathered man who never seemed to be in a rush, even in the midst of chaos like this. He recognised us, greeted us by name, gave Dale a hand down from her saddle and patted Bay Star. He also agreed with Brockley’s opinion about her.
“We’ll find a corner inside for your pretty little mare, Mrs. Blanchard. Your man’s right. The night’s going to be wet and chilly and she’s got Arabian blood, I fancy. They always feel the cold. I was sorry about Mr. Wilton, madam. It’s a thousand pities he wasn’t taking the same road as the gentlemen he was with when he came here. They’d have been protection for him. Now, one of them had a half-Arabian, a very handsome beast.”
He ran Bay Star’s stirrups up and ducked his head under her saddle flap to undo the girth. “Beautiful head it had,” he said, stepping back and tossing the girth over the saddle before lifting the saddle right off. “Skin so fine you could see every vein on its face, and very striking colouring. You get that sometimes with Arabian blood. This one was piebald.”
There was a click inside my head, like a key going home in a lock. For three seconds, three heartbeats, I stood still, absorbing what he had just said, and wondering. Then I heard myself ask, oh, so very casually, “Really? That sounds familiar somehow. I wonder if they were people my husband used to know?”
“I never heard their names, madam.”
“I can’t recall the names either,” I said, still very casually, “but did one of them have red hair?”
“Red hair? Yes, in a manner of speaking. Not fire-red, but ginger, yes, one of those gentlemen was ginger.”
The world turned upside down.
• • •
There was no parlour vacant but I called Brockley up to the attic where Dale and I were to sleep and told them what I meant to do. I expected them to say I was insane, and they did. Brockley indeed interrupted me quite brusquely before I had finished explaining.
“Madam, the inquest on Mr. Wilton brought in a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. There’s been a hue and cry out for a band of robbers, possibly including a red-haired man and a bald one, but no one’s been found. How can we hope to trace them? In any case, you shouldn’t try. Such things are not a lady’s business.”
“That’s quite right, ma’am. Madness I call it, though I’m sorry to be disrespectful and I know I’m speaking out of turn. And what about your little girl in Sussex? And Mr. Wilton’s sister?”
And Matthew, I thought. And Matthew.
“I know,” I said, “and in due course, Dale, Sussex is where we’ll go. Of course it’s important! But so is this. Brockley, please listen and this time let me finish! The whole point is that I don’t think John was killed by robbers. I think he was killed by that party of gentlemen he was with. I think that last word he tried to whisper could have been ‘piebald’ instead of just ‘bald.’ Neither of us could hear it properly. Now I learn that one of those men was ginger haired and another had a striking piebald horse. It’s suggestive, you must admit.”
“I admit nothing of the kind, madam. He was delirious, near death. He could have said anything. If what Mr. Dexter said is right, he parted from his companions before he was killed. I understood Dexter to say that a ditcher saw Mr. Wilton go by on his own. Respectable gentlemen, the kind of folk who ride blood horses, don’t murder for money along the highway.”
“Brockley, I haven’t the faintest idea how or why they did it. Perhaps they’re a new kind of robber band, who’ve taken to going about looking respectable so as to tempt unwary travellers to trust them. John was carrying quite a full purse. I know it sounds unlikely. I know I’d be wasting my time if I went to the Sheriff of Berkshire or anyone else with such a story. They’d say what you have just said: that John was delirious. I intend to find out who those so-called gentlemen were, all the same. Are you coming with me or do I go without you?”
“I’ll take your orders, madam, naturally. Someone,” said Brockley pointedly, “must guard you, for your own sake.”
“And Dale, what about you?”
“Of course I’ll go where you go, ma’am, but I just don’t understand why.” Poor Dale had found our long ride very tiring indeed. I didn’t know how old she was, but at a guess, she was in her forties and she had always worked hard. For once, I could sympathise with her aggrieved air. I spoke gently.
“We’re not setting out tonight, anyway. If you sleep soundly, Dale, you’ll feel better in the morning. As for why—there are things I can’t altogether explain. You will have to trust me, both of you.”
Dudley was innocent, although I hadn’t thought so when I let myself be turned back to Abingdon Fair. The small cold voice inside me had said that I could not save Amy and must not even seek justice for her, because the good of the realm came first, and I had listened.
In the same circumstances I would do the same again, and it had made no difference anyway, but the guilt would be with me always. The least I could do was to seek justice for John, who had also died by violence, because of my mistaken belief that Dudley was a murderer. For John, I would become a huntress, implacable as Artemis herself.
“The first thing I need to do,” I said, “is find the exact place where John was found, and look at it. Maybe that will tell us how they managed it. Brockley, please go and find Dexter and give him my compliments, and say that although I understand how busy he is, I desperately need five minutes of his time.”
12
The Cold Scent
Dexter was hurried and impatient and clearly growing tired of being inconvenienced by John Wilton and those connected with him. He couldn’t conceive why I should want an exact description of the place where John was found, and came very near to saying that he didn’t have time to supply one. I exerted myself to be charming and apologetic, however, and in the end he provided short, brusque directions. I didn’t ask him to take us there next day, because judging by his irritated air, I would ask in vain. I thanked him graciously and left it there, and hoped we’d find the place without him.
We set off early, through a damp grey morning. The land in this part of England is all rolling hills and broad, shallow vales. Much of it is wooded, but there are farms in plenty, too, with cornfields and hay meadows and patches of open heath where sheep and cattle graze. The road onwards from the Cockspur went past the church and roughly south-east, through woods and fields, for a mile or so, and then forked.
To the left, the way turned north, and according to Dexter it led to one of the main northbound highways. To the right, the road took a long curve round a heathland of wiry grass with a few spinneys and some clumps of gorse. The curve, which at the beginning almost bent the road back westwards, probably followed some old land boundary, but eventually it settled again into a south-easterly direction, which would ultimately lead to the Thames and Windsor. John had been found to the left of the road, under a gorse clump, just at the end of the long curve. Dexter
’s instructions had been concise enough, and the place was easy to find. We couldn’t pinpoint the precise gorse clump where the dog had found him, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“So. What next?” said Brockley.
What next indeed? The implacable huntress was feeling a good deal less implacable this morning. Low clouds scudded overhead, borne on a chilly wind, and rain spattered. My spirits were as joyless as the sky. What was I doing here?
It was three weeks since John had been discovered, mortally hurt, under one of these bushes. What had I hoped to find? Had I thought the tracks of his assailants would still be here, and even if they were, how would a few footprints, or hoofprints, guide me to a party of dubious gentlemen who had ridden away all that time ago and very likely split up since then? Did I think one of them might have been careless enough to drop a dagger with a family crest engraved into the handle, or a prayerbook with his name inside, and left it here for me to pick up?
“Madam. Whoever did it was in ambush here, waiting for an unwary traveller,” Brockley said. “It’s a lonely enough place and they could have been hidden in those trees over there.” He pointed to a little spinney about thirty yards off. “I don’t see how his assailants could have been the companions he left back at the fork. How did they get here ahead of him?”
He was right, of course. I had been foolish.
And then I saw.
I at once realised that I didn’t want to see it; that a large part of me would have been relieved to find no clues and to give up the whole enterprise. However, it was there: a path, faint, overhung by bushes and trailing grass, but a path all the same. It joined the road a little to our left, and led off across the heath, going roughly north-eastwards. I pointed to it, saying, “I want to see where that goes.”
They humoured me, like the attendants of a lunatic. We rode along the little track, and before long I saw that my guess had been right. That unobtrusive path cut across the heath, joining the two ends of the curve on the road, as a bowstring joins the two ends of a bow. It rejoined the road, in fact, at the fork, making a narrow central prong, almost invisible because of the bushes and the grass.
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