by Caro Peacock
‘What time on Sunday?’
‘He came and had his tea with us. Eggs mostly, it was, and a bit of mutton I’d managed to scrounge for him, but he said it was still better than what they gave him up at the hall. He sent me across to the Farriers with the jug for some beer, gave me the money for it, too. We had a good time.’
She smiled at the memory of it, but her eyes were glazed with tears.
‘Then I suppose he had to go back to the hall?’ I said.
I remembered that Mr Whiteley had seen him by the old dairy just after eight o’clock, around the servants’ supper time. I supposed that having filled his stomach with eggs and mutton, he wouldn’t have needed to eat with the rest of them.
Violet’s smile faded. She looked down at the table.
‘I thought he didn’t have to. I thought we were tucked in for the night, all cosy. I said, “What do you want to be going back there for at this time of night?”’
‘Night?’
‘When he got out of bed and started putting his trousers on, I thought it must be morning already, then I heard the church clock striking eleven.’
‘Did he say why he was going?’
‘He said there was something he had to do and he’d see me in the morning. Then he put on his trousers and his shoes and went. That was the last I ever saw of him.’
She was crying in earnest now, tears dripping on to the table. I spoke as gently as I could.
‘And that was eleven o’clock on Sunday night?’
She nodded.
‘He’d had his tea with you. Did he go away after that and come back later?’
‘No, he was with me all evening. It was the longest time we’d had together since…’
She glanced across at the baby.
‘Did he talk much about things at the hall?’
‘Not much, no. But you could tell he wasn’t happy there.’
‘You said the other servants didn’t like him. Was there one in particular he thought of as an enemy?’
She thought about it.
‘Not in particular, no.’
‘And he didn’t give you the idea that he was in danger in any way?’
‘Of course not. Why should he?’
‘Did he say anything about the suit of armour?’
‘He mentioned they were having to pack up an old suit of armour and send it to London for Master Miles, that’s all.’
‘And he didn’t say any more about whatever it was he had to do when he left you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘He never liked a lot of questions.’
The baby started whimpering. Violet went over to the cradle and scooped it up, rocking it in her arms and murmuring to it. There was a new moist patch broadening on the bodice of her dress. I caught Tabby’s eye. Time to go. We stood up and I said we’d see ourselves out.
‘But he was up to some sort of mischief.’
She said it as much to the bundled baby as to us.
‘Mischief?’
‘He liked a joke–they both did, him and his lordship, that’s why Handy suited him so well. Why he didn’t stay with me that night, he was up to something.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘He didn’t have to say so. I knew him.’
‘And he didn’t say what it was?’
‘No. I thought it might be some way of paying out them at the hall for not being friendly to him. I thought tomorrow he’d come and tell me whatever it was and we’d have a laugh about it. Only he didn’t.’
Her eyes were on the baby. We went out the back door, paused to prevent the toddler putting a worm in its mouth, closed the gate behind us. An old man was watching from the street, leaning on a stick, and I guessed the whole village would soon know about Violet’s visitors. We were halfway back to the cottage before Tabby said, ‘We forgot the eggs.’
‘So we did.’
‘And you left all that money.’
‘Never mind.’
We walked in silence for a while, Tabby deep in thought.
‘Are you trying to find out who killed him then?’
‘Yes.’
No point in denying it, to her or to myself.
‘Did her ladyship do it?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Well, she didn’t like him, did she?’
‘Not liking somebody doesn’t mean you want to kill him. I don’t suppose I’d have liked him myself.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look at the way he treated that poor woman. A few days a year with her, two children and a couple of cheap souvenirs. Why in the world did she stand for it?’
‘Well, he must have suited her, and they had a laugh together,’ Tabby said. ‘And he did give her the money for the beer.’
Simply, she didn’t expect men to behave any better. But she’d taken us to the nub of the matter: why Lady Brinkburn literally couldn’t stand the sight of Handy. Dislike of anyone connected with her husband surely wasn’t enough to account for such a strong reaction.
‘Do you want me to try and find out?’ Tabby said, as if offering to run an errand.
‘Who killed Handy? No, most certainly not.’
Goodness knows what she’d do if let loose. At least I could divert her energies on to one of the things that had come into my mind since reading the journal.
‘More than twenty years ago, Lady Brinkburn had a lady’s maid called Suzy. She’d probably be in her forties or even fifties by now. Most people in the village will know somebody who works at the hall. You might try to find out if Suzy’s still working there, or what became of her.’
It was clear from the journal that Lady Brinkburn and her maid had been on good terms. With nobody else to confide in, she might have talked to Suzy on the journey home about whatever calamity had happened by Lake Como.
‘Nothing else?’
Tabby sounded disappointed.
‘Definitely nothing else.’
I left Tabby at the top of the track to the cottage, with instructions to start preparing our supper, and walked into town to check at the mail office. There was nothing for me, but Matcham’s coach from London to Reading had just pulled in to the yard of the Bear to change horses. A servant from the inn came out with a tankard of beer for the driver. He downed it in two gulps and handed back the tankard for a refill.
‘And you might give this to the landlord while you’re in there,’ he said, producing a note from his pocket. ‘To be sent on next time anything’s going out to Brinkburn Hall.’
‘Excuse me, but is it addressed to a Miss Lane?’ I said.
The two men spun round and noticed me.
‘Well, so it is,’ the coachman said. ‘Was you waiting for it?’
Trust Amos. If it had come by the mail coach, I’d have had to pay for it. He preferred his own network. I thanked the coachman and unfolded the paper. Amos’s communications never took much reading.
Has anything been seen down there of
Mr Stephen? Neether hide nor hair of him up here since what happened.
Yrs ruspectfully
A. Legge
His writing style might be more terse than Celia’s but the message was much the same: Stephen Brinkburn’s absence from his normal haunts had been noted. What was more, if I understood what happened aright, he hadn’t been seen since Handy’s body was discovered.
I walked back to the cottage and found Tabby on the river bank, throwing bread-crusts to ducks.
‘Tabby, I have to go up to London in the morning. I shan’t be away long, I hope.’
I’d been coming to that decision even before I read the note from Amos. I needed another talk with Mr Lomax, whether he liked it or not.
‘I’ll come with you then.’
‘No, I’d like you to stay down here.’
Her face fell, but I didn’t need a companion.
‘I suppose you won’t want to stay in the cottage on your own,’ I said.
‘Nah.’
/>
‘When Mrs Todd comes tomorrow, ask if you can stay with her until I come back. I’ll leave some money on the table.’
‘Give me more chance to ask her things, won’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it will.’
There was no point trying to stop her. I sent her up to bed with a stub of candle, then packed a few necessities into my bag. I’d planned to walk back to the Bear in the morning and take the first stagecoach for London, but it struck me that there was another way now, and I should try it. By six o’clock next morning, with some apprehension, I was following the railway line back from the new bridge in the direction, I hoped, of the North Star.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The service for London started on the Buckinghamshire side of the river from an inn called the Dumb Bell. To that extent, at least, it was not so different from the stagecoaches, except instead of dozens of horses there was only the one great beast standing on the iron tracks, fuming gently through its funnel and smelling of coal, with a hint of sulphur. At least six men were ministering to it with oil cans and polishing rags so that the shine on it was like the hindquarters of a thorough-bred. Through the noise of the steam hissing and coal being shovelled, they told me the service for Paddington would be leaving in half an hour and directed me to the inn to buy my ticket. There was a choice of first, second or third class. Since it was Mr Lomax’s money and I was in a bad humour with him, I chose first and was glad of my decision when I saw that the third-class accommodation was no more than open trucks. The first-class carriages were much like any horse-drawn vehicle, only mounted on iron wheels. By the time a man walked along the tracks clanging a bell and shouting to everybody to get on board, there were about a dozen other passengers waiting, all of them men. I shared a carriage with a middle-aged gentleman who seemed already so well accustomed to railway travel that, after a civil good morning to me, he opened a newspaper and stayed immersed in it for most of the journey.
When we started, with a clang and a jerk, I managed not to cry out. Clouds of steam billowed past the window, so that at first the sensation was of clanking through a thick fog. Then, as we gathered speed, the steam cleared and we were rushing between green fields under a blue sky so fast that it felt as if our great puffing and clanking beast had unfurled dragon’s wings. Once I’d recovered from the surprise of it, I tried to take cooler note of how the trees and gates were flashing past, and decided that we were going about as fast as a good horse could gallop. A very good horse, like my Rancie. If I’d been alongside the North Star on Rancie, jumping hedges and ditches, we might just have kept pace with her, for a mile or so. There was the difference. Even the best of horses couldn’t have kept up that pace for long, but the tireless locomotive did it for mile after mile. The sensation was so thrilling that I resented it when we had to slow down and stop at stations, but the other passengers seemed to regard it as an opportunity for socialising, putting their heads out of windows to shout to passengers in other carriages, or even getting down and walking along the tracks for a chat.
In spite of the stops, we reached Paddington in just over an hour, about a third of the time even a fast mail coach would have taken. By then, a thought had struck me: with this dragon to carry him, a man could almost be in two places at once.
I walked from Paddington to Lancaster Gate and across Hyde Park in the sunshine, stopping at a water fountain to dip my handkerchief and wipe smuts from my face. I was aware that my clothes smelled of smoke and I’d need to go home to change before visiting a lawyer’s chambers.
‘Are you back for good or just visiting?’ Mrs Martley said.
‘Just visiting.’
I changed into my rose print with the tucked bodice and took a cab to Lincoln’s Inn. The clerk looked up, startled, when I knocked at the door of Mr Lomax’s outer office and walked straight in.
‘Mr Lomax is in court.’
‘When will he be back?’
The clerk ran his tongue over his lips.
‘I’m not sure. Probably not for some hours.’
‘I’ll come back this afternoon, then.’
‘Mr Lomax has an engagement out of town this afternoon.’
I didn’t believe him. Mr Lomax was probably sitting in the inner office, only yards distant. He probably had few female callers, and it would be easy enough to describe me and instruct the clerk to turn me away. But if that was the case, who had warned him that I might come asking awkward questions?
‘When Mr Lomax does return, will you please let him know that Miss Lane needs to speak to him urgently,’ I said, speaking loudly enough to be heard on the other side of the door. ‘A message will find me at this address.’
I took a pen from the clerk’s inkstand and scrawled my address on a spare scrap of paper. The clerk picked it up gingerly as if he expected it to burn his fingers. I stamped down the stairs and took a cab to the Bayswater Road.
At the livery stables, I drew the second blank of the morning. The owner informed me cheerfully that Amos Legge was out at the Eyre Arms with the jousting gentlemen. He had good reason to be cheerful because the tournament craze, and Amos’s expertise, were bringing plenty of custom to the stables. I asked him to have Rancie tacked up for me and took to the saddle as I was, in my rose print and town shoes, rather than face another trudge home to change. As I rode out of the yard, the owner told me I should get to the Eyre Arms in nice time to see the fun.
‘They’re calling it the Day of the Fair Ladies,’ he said. ‘All the ladies were annoyed because of the gentlemen spending so much time jousting, so the gentlemen have had to set up something to pacify them.’
This didn’t improve my mood. I needed to talk to Amos and it sounded as if he’d have his hands full. Sure enough, the congestion of carriages as we came near the Eyre Arms showed that this was a full-blown fashionable occasion. At least Rancie’s suppleness and obedience meant we were able to weave in between them, past landaus and barouches so full of ladies in bright silks and muslins that they looked like huge flower baskets on wheels. Occasionally somebody I knew by sight would call out to me from a carriage, but I simply acknowledged them with a wave and rode on. At the top of the line, carriages were queuing to turn in to the inn yard. The spectators’ stand on the roof was crowded with people and a dozen knights on horseback were waiting by the pavilion at the end of the lists. An extra platform under a white-and-gold canopy had been added at ground level, exclusively populated by ladies. I recognised several society beauties, among them Stephen’s fiancée, Rosa Fitzwilliam, in white silk with gold embroidery that just happened to match the canopy.
The ladies were chatting to each other in that studiedly casual way of people who know they’re being watched, leaning their sleek heads on slender white necks towards each other and back again. They reminded me of swans on the Thames. As I watched, the heads turned to one of the knights, riding helmetless towards their platform. He stopped in front of it, dismounted, went down awkwardly on one armoured knee and said something to one of the ladies. She pretended surprise and reluctance, then untied a pink ribbon from the bodice of her dress and handed it to him. (It struck me that it came undone so easily that the request couldn’t have been much of a surprise.) Amid ‘aaahs’ and a pattering of applause the knight pressed the ribbon to his lips, remounted his horse and cantered back to his friends. I noticed that many of them had similar ribbons of various colours hitched to parts of their armour. Rosa Fitzwilliam still had a prominent bow of white and gold ribbon against her creamy shoulder.
I saw a groom, Joe, from the livery stables and rode over to ask him where Amos was. He grinned and nodded towards the stable block.
‘Hiding hisself. Not easy when you’re the height he is.’
‘Hiding?’
I’d never seen Amos scared of man or beast. Before I could ask Joe to explain, he was swept aside by one of the knights.
‘Miss Lane, I’m glad you’re here. Why aren’t you on the dais with the other beauties?’
It was Miles Brinkburn, his voice as cheerful and smile as wide as the first time I’d met him, a world away from the depressed man at the inquest. His head was bare, the rest of him encased in the hired armour from Pratt’s.
‘I’m looking for Amos Legge,’ I said.
He disregarded it.
‘Miss Fitzwilliam doesn’t seem happy,’ he said.
Indeed, the smile on Rosa’s lovely face was growing strained. Another knight had just claimed a silk scarf from the lady next to her and the Marshal of the Lists was mounting his horse.
‘Why not?’
‘My brother’s leaving it late to make his entrance. Squeezing the last drop of drama from it, I suppose.’
A harshness in his voice and a twist to his mouth showed that this was more than casual chat.
‘Drama?’
‘Riding up in Sir Gilbert’s armour.’
‘But I thought that was in Pratt’s workshop,’ I said.
‘So it was, until yesterday afternoon. You mean you haven’t heard?’
‘I’ve been out of town.’
‘I was supposed to be wearing it today. Pratt was making the alterations. All it needed was a few finishing touches.’
I noted that if Miles had felt any delicacy about wearing the armour after Handy’s death, it had only lasted for a day or two.
‘So what happened?’
‘Day before yesterday, middle of the afternoon, somebody turns up at Pratt’s and shows them a note saying he’s authorised to collect the armour. Pratt himself is out of the shop, up here, and his damn-fool–excuse me–his assistant lets him cart it away, no questions asked. My dear brother, needless to say.’
‘But I thought your brother was…away.’
I’d hesitated, about to say ‘missing’. He noticed it.
‘Gone away to sulk, you mean? I don’t mean it was Stephen in person turning up with a wagon to collect it. It must have been somebody acting on his authority.’
‘So your brother still hasn’t been seen?’