by Robin Blake
I told her I was the coroner paying an official visit.
‘We are honoured, then,’ she retorted, spitting into the fire.
‘Are you the only grown person here, Peg?’
‘Others have gone down to river to wash clothes. I mind the childer. I’m no good for the washing.’
She showed me her hands. The joints were knotted and the fingers twisted and crossed this way and that. She gave me a searching look.
‘You think we don’t wash, neither clothes nor bodies. Just because we wear rags and clouted shoes, don’t mean we like to be dirty.’
‘No such thought had occurred to me,’ I assured her hurriedly. ‘No doubt all human creatures will seek to be clean, if they can. Sometimes circumstances lie against them.’
She emitted a cracked wheezing laugh from her ruined mouth, and whacked the side of the cooking pot with the stick.
‘Circumstances? Is that what you call them?’
She put down the stick and from under her shawl drew a clay pipe, snapped off at the stem-end and clearly many times used, but usable still. With a meaningful gesture she tipped the bowl towards me to show its emptiness and I fumbled in a pocket for my tobacco pouch, which I handed to her.
‘Ta, that’s kindly,’ she said, digging a lump of tobacco out with her almost paralysed fingers and stuffing it artlessly into the pipe. ‘So what is this official business of yours? Visitors have been almost as rare as coin since we’ve pitched camp here.’
I took back my pouch and told her why I had come to the Hall. She had of course heard already of the death of Dolores Brockletower. Bending and seizing a stick that protruded from the fire she pressed its smoking end into the pipe. She took a deep draw, closed her eyes and groaned with pleasure as she exhaled.
‘You’ve likely come to smoke us out, eh, Mr Coroner?’ she said with another hoarse laugh. She jabbed the smouldering stick in my direction. ‘If there’s fingers to be pointed, I’m thinking it’ll be at us.’
Her voice was mocking rather than bitter, and there was active wit in it too. If her impoverishment had not been there before my eyes, I might have imagined she had a capacity for refined discrimination.
‘Why do you say so?’
‘We’re poor, we are. We don’t live in houses. So we must have killed that woman, would you not say?’
‘No, not I,’ I hurriedly assured her. ‘I have to convene a court of inquest, and summon witnesses. It is not my part to accuse or find blame. Only the jury can do that.’
‘But it’s us they’ll point at anyhow. This is what I said when my man came up and told us the news earlier on.’
‘Your man?’
‘Tom Piltdown. He’s the ganger. I told him it bodes mischief to us, this death. We’ve gypsied all over the north country, we have, and we’re treated like gypsies too. We are honest people, but settled folk will always call us beggars and sheep-stealers. And my poor boy always gets treated worst.’
‘Who is your boy?’
‘Not so much a boy now. Twenty-five is poor Sol, and a proper Goliath, but he had a knock on the head as a babby, and his mind never grew as prodigious as his body. Folk are not slow to accuse him of any crime that’s on their mind, whether poaching or thieving or laughing at the King. And it’ll be no different this time, I am resigned to it.’
‘Please believe me, I would not jump to any such judgement. As a lawyer I am paid to be impartial. Fair.’
‘Fair? Nothing is fair, only Death himself. He comes soon enough to all, as he’s come to that woman this morning. As I see it, being born is only waking in the night. You bide for a bit and then …’
She spat into the fire again, watched it sizzle like bacon, and added, ‘Then you drop off again.’
‘Oh, come, come! There’s so much more—’
But she cut my pious protestations short with a hoot of scorn.
‘What did you come up here for, Mr Coroner, if not to accuse us of capital murder?’
I looked around the clearing. A dog. A cat. Some chickens. Five children playing ring-a-roses.
‘No, not to accuse. Only to ask if anyone amongst you, anyone in this camp, has information about the matter. Something they have seen or heard, perhaps, even before this morning. Something that might help the inquest.’
‘They haven’t, not that I know of. When the men come in for their meal we shall likely talk. Then we shall hear if there’s anything been seen, or not seen.’
‘You will hold a meeting?’
‘A meeting? Oh my Lord, no! We are not a Dissenters’ chapel. We live close together here, so we talk.’
It was then that I heard the sound, faint at first and snatched by the wind, of female voices singing. I stood up and looked along the continuation of the path by which I had come up. From the camp it went on through the woods, and down towards the bank of the Savage Brook, and I caught sight of a small procession of women returning up it with bundles of laundry balanced on their heads. They were singing some kind of catch-song, picking up the melody one from another in the rhythm of their walking. I gave the woman before me a slight bow.
‘I shall not dally to meet your friends, as I must go back down now. But perhaps I shall return, if I may. Would you be kind enough to acquaint the others of my enquiry?’
She said she would.
Returning to Garlick Hall I asked where I could find Mrs Marsden and was directed through the wet-kitchen to the dry-kitchen, and thence into the servants’ hall. A desultory footman in green baize apron was polishing a bundle of silver spoons and forks at the refectory table. In response to my enquiry, he pointed the way to the housekeeper’s parlour, which stood at the end of a short adjoining passage, and there I found Bethany Marsden sitting by the window at her writing table, wearing gloves, bonnet and cloak. She was composing a list. I showed her my three letters and asked how I might send them.
‘To the Mayor and the bailiff as well as the doctor!’ she exclaimed. ‘Such important correspondence, Mr Cragg. I should be honoured to take them to town myself, if you wish. I’m riding in with the cheese-jagger.’ She glanced through the window to the yard. ‘He is almost ready to leave now.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘that will be most convenient. If you will carry them to my office in Cheapside, my clerk Furzey will send them on. But before you go, may I trouble you please to give orders that any servant who may have testimony for the inquest to come and see me? And I wish to speak with Mrs Brockletower’s maid in any case, and to Timothy Shipkin.’
‘There will be no difficulty there, Mr Cragg. I shall ask Mr Leather, our butler, to marshal the indoor servants, and Pearson to do the same outdoors. I can offer you the use of this room for your interviews, if you like. You are very welcome to it.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Marsden. I shall take that up. But first I must see to the disposition of poor Mrs Brockletower. They’ll be coming in with her at any minute.’
And, a few minutes after she had left me, they were. I had stationed myself at the window of the housekeeper’s room, which gave a good view of the yard’s entrance. The cheese-collector’s cart was preparing to go out through the arch and into the lane, Mrs Marsden sitting up on the box beside the driver. Just at that moment the improvised bier on which the dead woman was returning home, with its straggle of rustic mourners behind, presented itself to come in. There was a brief contretemps before the housekeeper whispered into the drayman’s ear, presumably to tell him that half a ton of cheese did not hold precedence over a freshly murdered corpse. Without further complaint he pulled his vehicle back and allowed the remains of the squire’s wife to be trundled in.
I immediately stepped outside and asked Pearson if there was an empty stable in which to lay the body, which, he said, there was. So I helped Gaffer Thwaite off the back of the cart and sent the rest of them on their way.
‘Did you find anything when you searched?’ I murmured to the gaffer. Thwaite’s toothless mouth opened a hole in his copious whiskers and he shook
his head gravely.
‘Not a thing, Mr Cragg sir. Not a thing, only this.’
He produced a horseshoe from beneath his smock. ‘Where was it?’
‘On ground, under the leaf-mould.’
‘Near the body?’
‘No, no. A dozen yard away.’
I inspected the find. It was worn away from use, but not rusty.
‘Did you find any nails still in the holes? There’s none there now.’
‘No, it were just as you see it.’
‘Well, it doesn’t seem of any significance but perhaps it will bring us good luck in our inquest, Mr Thwaite,’ I said.
Thwaite spat a thick, tobacco-stained gob onto the cobbles.
‘It didn’t bring the mistress owt of that, did it, though it was by when she died?’
I could think of no clinching reply to this so I just thanked him and went back inside. As I stood in the passage, about to push open the kitchen door, a servant-girl appeared at the passage end, coming from the family side of the house and wearing oversleeves and a calico apron.
‘Mr Cragg, is it?’ she asked. ‘I’m Polly, sir. Mrs Pearson, she says I’m to come from my work and see you.’
‘Yes, we must have a talk,’ I said. ‘Come with me, will you?’
And she followed me submissively, through the kitchen and the pantry, to the parlour.
Chapter Four
I PUT THE HORSESHOE on the mantelpiece, poked the fire and flung myself into Mrs Marsden’s wing chair. Polly Milroy I invited to take the chair on the opposite side of the hearth. The whiteness of the girl’s mob cap emphasized the self-conscious flush of her face. I adopted a kindly tone.
‘So, Polly, you are the sister of Jenny, whom I met in the woods this morning?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And in addition you are – or were – Mrs Brockletower’s personal maid.’
‘Yes, sir, I was that.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘What sort of thing would you want to know, sir?’
‘Well, the sort of thing that might help to explain what happened. Why she’s dead.’
Her eyes searched the hearthrug for an answer, but did not find one.
‘For instance,’ I prompted, ‘had she ever told you about anything that happened to her before, while she was out riding? Was there anyone she saw in the woods, maybe?’
She made her eyes wider, suddenly excited.
‘You mean meeting on purpose? Secret meetings with strangers?’
‘That’s not quite what I meant but, very well, were there any secret meetings?’
‘If there was, she wouldn’t have told me.’
‘Were you not privy to your mistress’s secrets? Some personal maids are, so I understand.’
She shook her head.
‘Never, sir. Mistress was very private and serious. Didn’t tell secrets. Didn’t laugh and joke. Now I think of it I don’t know why she was bothered having a lady’s maid at all.’
‘Well, it’s usual, surely.’
‘Yes, but for all the use she made of me she mightn’t have been bothered. She never let me dress or undress her. I put her room in order but the closest I got to herself was when I braided her hair, or brushed it. She was always fretting about that hair. Were the ends split, was it falling out? She was always going on about it falling out.’
‘Oh?’
‘It didn’t grow as thick as she would have liked it. She said it was fretting that did it.’
‘Ah! Worrying. What did she worry about, do you think?’
‘Maybe it was Squire. He … Oh, no. I shouldn’t tell that, should I? Will I not get into trouble?’
‘You must tell what you truthfully know, and I will guarantee it does you no harm.’
For a moment I despised myself saying this. If the squire should choose to punish or dimiss Polly Milroy for tittle-tattling about him behind his back, there would be little I, or the law, could do to stop him. On the other hand this conversation wasn’t idle gossip. It was legally required. I cupped my hand behind my ear to encourage her.
‘Go on, girl.’
‘Oh, it’s just that I don’t think Squire and Mistress were that happy together. This last year he’s not …’
She considered her choice of words.
‘He’s not gone to her at night as a husband does, or not so as us servants could tell. And people in kitchen said she didn’t like it that he would spend so much time with Mr Woodley studying the plans for these works, or at the public houses in town.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, sir, about the public houses, that reminds me. She told me this herself. Squire particularly frightened her once. It seems he’d again been in Preston the night, playing cards maybe, and was riding home early through the woods, just when Mistress was out for her morning ride, going the way she always went. So he waited for her, you see, jumped out from behind a tree, so she said, like he was trying to scare her horse. Then he made a joke of it, said it was teasing. But the mistress she took it serious. To her it was not a joke.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last month, I think. She was sorely frighted, and I was so surprised, because she never told me suchlike before.’
‘What was it about that ride, I wonder, that made your mistress take it again and again? Do you know?’
Polly shrugged.
‘She enjoyed woods … the trees and that …’
‘Yes, I suppose that was it. Now you said earlier that your mistress did not in general share her secrets with you, even though she did tell you she feared the squire. Which leads me to wonder whom she did confide in. I know it was not Miss Brockletower. Who then were Mrs Brockletower’s friends?’
Polly’s head was cocked to one side, watching the flames.
‘Don’t know, sir.’
I allowed a pause while she thought.
‘She just liked riding. She liked horses.’
‘Do you say her only friends were horses, then? Like Gulliver at the end, eh?’
‘I don’t know. Who’s this Gulliver, sir?’
‘Oh well, never mind. What was your mistress’s demeanour, I mean, how did she act when you last saw her? When was that, by the way?’
‘Last night, when I brought her a bowl of broth she’d asked for, in her room.’
‘And how did she seem to you?’
‘She was reading, I think. When I came in she snapped at me. But that’s been her usual way lately, fretting and snapping at us servants. We don’t like it but we must bear it, my father says, or we’ll lose our places.’
‘I see. Well, that will be all, Polly. Thank you.’
I was not going to get any more out of the girl and indeed the whole interview had thrown into doubt the commonplace belief that a lady is always better known to her maid than to anyone else.
The next one in was Timothy Shipkin, a gaunt fellow with spiky grey hair and a fierce light in his eyes. I knew him to be a Dissenter, a member of the Heptamerian sect who believe in all sorts of fantastic nonsense deriving from the number seven – the Awakening of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus by the Archangels, the Seven Toes of Satan, and suchlike.
‘Now, Timothy, it was you that found the body?’
‘I did that.’
‘Tell me how.’
He cleared his throat.
‘It was like this. When Mistress’s horse came back without her, William Pearson, he sent us out to search. I went into Fulwood because I knew the forest best, and I knew the way Mistress would always ride, because I would see her at times in the woods early mornings. So I just followed, found a few fresh horse droppings, followed on and found her lying by the old hollow oak. Dead. Her throat was cut bad.’
‘Indeed it was. I’ve seen it. Did you touch the body? Was she cold?’
‘No, not quite cold she was.’
‘And did you see evidence of any other person in the woods when you were searching, or after you found her? A vagabond perhaps?�
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‘Nobody.’
‘And you found no knife or sharp blade beside the body such as might have given her the throat wound?’
‘I did not.’
‘Or nearby?’
‘I found nothing but her.’
‘And then?’
‘I went back to Hall quick as I could, told what I’d found, then went to my work up Shot’s Hill.’
‘Why did you do that? Why not stay to help?’
‘What help? She was dead. I don’t mind who’s dead, even the King, but there’s always work to finish.’
‘How well did you know your mistress?’
‘Didn’t know her. Didn’t want to. A woman shouldn’t ride astride the horse, but she did. I kept my distance lest I receive direction of the Lord and speak my mind.’
I had heard of this curious thing about Dolores Brockletower’s manner of riding before. She seemed to have scant regard for custom, and less for the reputation of a lady.
I dismissed Shipkin, after telling him he would be called as a witness at the inquest, where I would ask him similar questions to those he had just answered.
William Pearson came in next and I asked him to detail what happened when Mrs Brockletower’s mare arrived home riderless.
‘She came in at the trot, wanting her provender.’
‘By the way, what was she called, the mare?’
‘We called her Molly.’
‘Did Molly seem to have been hard-ridden at any point during the ride?’
‘No, she was not in a sweat.’
‘And she had on her saddle, and other tackle, in good order?’
‘Aye.’
‘Did you notice anything else about the horse?’
‘No. Only the blood.’
‘The blood?’
‘Drops of blood on her neck, in her mane. Mistress’s blood, you can suppose.’
‘What kind of drops? Little ones … big ones?’
He pondered a moment, then said with deliberation, ‘They were like thick gouts.’
‘Are they still there – in the mane, on the neck?’
Pearson’s eyes bulged incredulously. I have commonly seen the look on grooms and ostlers when they are asked (what they consider) ignorant questions about horses.