by Issy Brooke
“My lady!” Ruby pushed through from behind and came to Cordelia’s side, gasping as she saw the prone figure. “Oh my … is that blood? He looks … Oh, look at his head! No!”
Cordelia peered and leaned forward as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The young man lay on his back, his arms up as if he had fallen with his hands in the air. His head was wrenched most awkwardly to one side, and a spreading dark stain issued from the back of his matted head. His eyes were open, and unblinking.
“Oh…” Ruby moaned. She half-turned but there were more people pressing in from outside, and seeing she was trapped, instead she panicked and bolted for the one clear exit that she could see, the door at the back of the room. “I must have water…”
Cordelia didn’t think she’d find a pump out at the back but she let the maid go. She was more concerned with the apparent lack of direction being shown by any of the crowd of neighbours.
“Why did you send for a shoemaker as well as the constable?” she demanded in the most authoritative voice she could; an easy task, of course, and one she had been bred to.
The woman with the red, chapped hands - a laundress, Cordelia decided - blinked in surprise but answered automatically, as she too had been bred to do. “The shoemaker is the constable,” she said. “It is George Bell in these parts. He undertakes the office on a part-time basis.”
“Have you no county police force?”
The woman looked a little blank. “We’re not like fancy towns,” she said. “Not here. It’s not compulsory, is it?” She started to look around at the others, hoping for help.
Cordelia was not going to let things slide. “Well, whatever it is that you have here, a constable is a start but more is needed to be done. The doctor does need to be called.”
“But he’s dead,” the laundress said, setting off a fresh wail of anguish and anger from the seated Mrs Hurrell. “Our doctor is good, I’m sure, but of no use to this one now. He does not re-animate dead flesh!”
“Yes, I can see that, but there are procedures,” Cordelia said. She turned around and there was no need for her to push through the onlookers; the crowd seemed to part as she made her way towards the door. She poked her head out and beckoned a likely-looking boy of around twelve. “You. Do you know the doctor? Doctor Arnall?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Do you want to earn a penny?”
“Yes, please, madam.” His eyes shone.
“You must fetch him directly. This is a matter of life and death. Well, death, at any rate.”
The young lad set off but as he got to the top of the street, he turned to the right to head into town, and Cordelia let loose a bellow that threatened to burst her corset: “Wait, boy!”
He stopped, as did every other person on the street and a passing cart too.
“I have seen him this morning, going the other way,” she shouted, pointing frantically to the left.
“His house lies this way,” the boy called back.
“He is not at his house, then,” she shouted. “Go the other way, and turn left again, to the river.” After a moment of indecision, the boy turned about and set off in the other direction.
Sighing, Cordelia re-entered the cottage. It seemed as if no one had moved, and now a curious silence had descended, provoked by her alarming and unladylike hollering. Everyone stared but as soon as she met their eyes, they dropped their gazes. No one knew who she was but her status was apparent, and it paralysed them with indecision.
“I have sent for the doctor,” she said, rather superfluously. Everyone in town was probably aware of her summons. “Things have to be done, you know. There are declarations to be made, paperwork to be signed, that sort of thing. Who is this man, anyway?”
Feet shuffled and eyes were lowered even further. All she could see was a sea of hair and bald spots. Hats were clutched in front of bodies like shields. Eventually the laundress spoke up. “That there unfortunate is Thomas Bains. He was a lodger here. He had the back room.”
“I see. And is he prone to fights, perhaps? Was there an altercation here?”
Mrs Hurrell started up again, blurting out the words in a staccato burst of phlegm and tears. “This is my house. My house. He was my lodger. Just my lodger. I came home and he was like that, he was. You ain’t no call to make me sit here like this.” She struggled against the laundress’s hand.
“Came home?” Cordelia said. “You were abroad early. Industrious woman…” Or she had been out all night, perhaps.
A man found his voice. “You see! It is a likely tale, is it not! She has no cause to be out from this house. She killed him more like, and now is pretending that she happened upon his body. Look at her!”
“No, no! Why should I kill him?” Mrs Hurrell’s eyes were narrowed now.
“Why should you not?” the man spat back. “I can think of a hundred reasons you would kill him, and one hundred and one is simply for spite. A woman of your past, eh? London ways, that’s what it is! We all know of your London ways. Anyways, ‘tis common knowledge that a lad like that had it coming.”
“Don’t you speak ill of the dead!” a woman called from behind, interrupting Cordelia’s query as to what sort of lad a “lad like that” was, and what “London ways” might be. She had no chance to repeat the question as the people in the room stepped aside to let a new man enter.
“I have been sent for,” said the grey-haired man, looking around with wide pale eyes. “But the boy made no sense. Mrs Hurrell – Oh!” He stepped back. He was wearing a plain working man’s garb of sober brown trousers and a shirt and beige waistcoat, but he must have only just risen, as he still carried his coat upon his arm as if he had left the house in a hurry and dressed upon the journey. She wondered if this was the shoemaker-constable, and judged from the callouses and marks on his hands that he probably was. His waistcoat showed a sharp, deep crease all around his waist where she imagined an apron was habitually tied. He had a nose that looked like it had been pinched with pliers and then drawn out longer.
“Oh!” he repeated again, and looked around with desperation in his eyes. “That is Thomas. What has happened?”
“Surely you are the one to discover that,” the laundress said, a sneer hiding in her voice. “Here is Mrs Hurrell, who claims to have found the body yet she was not raising the alarm until I came in to see her and found her lying by the door, crying and going on, most unseemly like.”
“Oh!” said the shoemaker-constable again. “Oh.” Cordelia was beginning to doubt the man’s wits. Was the office of constable passed around between village simpletons?
Cordelia took charge. She couldn’t bear not to. She was mistress at home, after all. So she would be mistress here. “I have sent for the doctor,” she informed the gibbering shoemaker-constable.
The man glanced at the prone figure, blanched and looked away, licking his lips. “But I fear it might be too late…” he whispered.
Cordelia sighed. “I also believe you now need to inform the coroner,” she said. “As is the standard practice in all cases of unexplained death.”
“Do I? Is it?”
“Yes, you do. Listen, man. I might not be a constable … or, indeed, a shoemaker … but I read a great deal of novels of the more lurid type, and I know the procedure. You must send word to the coroner and probably the sheriff or whoever it is that keeps order in this county.”
“We share a sheriff with Huntingdonshire,” the man said, as if that were a reason to not call upon him.
“Then go and persuade Huntingdonshire to relinquish him for a while,” she snapped back. “Now clear this room, keep Mrs Hurrell here seated, and will someone find a sheet to afford the dead man a little dignity?”
She clapped her hands, and the townsfolk responded.
Chapter Three
By the time the doctor arrived, someone had fetched a rough blanket to drape over the dead man, but Cordelia stepped in to prevent anyone from moving him. The red-faced laundress shot her an openly venomous l
ook when Cordelia ordered her to leave the young man’s limbs as they were, but she did not argue back. A stiff and curious silence fell upon the assembled crowd within the cottage as the shoemaker-constable went outside to dither and panic and organise messengers. She followed, to linger by the door and listen to proceedings.
She was pleased to hear him following her suggestions on who needed to be sent for. She overheard someone say, “That doctor will be out in a field somewhere, his head in the soil and his bottom in the air! I seen him last week, you know. Like dancing, but not natural.”
“Callis-fennis,” someone else said. “All that stretching his bits with no coat on. For shame.”
There was a ripple of laughter, hastily suppressed when the constable said, “Show some respect! A man lies dead within.” Silence fell outside, matching the expectant quiet inside the cottage.
Cordelia was loath to leave the scene. She knew her presence was having a repressive effect on the gawpers, and in that sense she was probably doing some good. She felt, very keenly, that no one ought to be meddling with things until persons of a more knowledgeable sort arrived. She had heard of deaths in London and other places where enterprising souls had sold tickets for people to view the body. She was determined that it should not happen here.
She had tried to make polite conversation while they waited, but no one had much to say beyond “I don’t know, madam” and “Well, he was a young man, so…” and then they would peter out, as if their half-sentence conveyed everything that needed to be said.
She heard the doctor arrive by the flurry of voices and the sound of a horse’s hooves stirring up small stones outside. She could not resist smiling and adopting an air of casual insouciance in reply to his somewhat startled greeting as he dipped inside the cottage and saw her.
“Lady Cornbrook! Good morning. I had not expected to see you here.”
“Of course,” she said, her enigmatic non-answer being her slight revenge at his lack of courtesy when they had met on the road not half an hour before. He hadn’t been home to dress more decently, she noted. His usually bouncy, wavy hair hung in lank locks from below his top hat, almost as if it were wet or soaked with sweat. He swung the hat from his head as he remembered his courtesies.
She nodded, and waved her hand towards the body. “I had them leave him exactly as he fell.”
“Indeed. Well, er, thank you for that,” he said, and paused for a moment. He clutched at his black shoulder bag, and looked around the room, blinking as his eyes adjusted. “Might we have more light in here? Anyone?”
The doctor went forward to the body and knelt down, setting his hat at some distance away so the blood would not encroach on it. The laundress crossed to the windows and pulled aside the yellowing curtains, and someone else lit a lamp which smoked and smelled. Now that the doctor was about his business, people began to crowd in from outside to watch him work. Cordelia looked for the shoemaker-constable but he was standing behind a knot of men, wringing his hands.
“The doctor needs light!” Cordelia announced. “And air! Constable, might you urge these people outside?”
The crowds reluctantly left, more under her direction than that of the constable until only five persons and the dead man remained. The constable stood by the door, trying to look anywhere but at the floor where the doctor was examining the corpse closely.
Mrs Hurrell was still seated, and the laundress had, in an unexpected move of pity, brought her a cup of hot tea. Mrs Hurrell had it clamped in her shaking hands, barely seeming able to take a sip.
Cordelia, unlike the constable, could not tear her eyes from the doctor’s task. She had been staying at Hugo Hawke’s country estate for only a few days, but she had already met the doctor at a dinner that Hugo had held to announce her arrival; he had been seated some distance from her, and appeared not to talk with any great animation to the others around him. She had heard he was married, but on that evening he had arrived unaccompanied. Beardless and in his thirties, with a smooth face and curling dark hair, he was a good looking man but she had yet to see him smile. It didn’t matter. She wanted to like him because he seemed the opposite in his manner and deportment to her late husband.
He knelt with his back to her, now, and had put his jacket to one side. His shirt was damp, clinging to his lean body in a way that suggested very great exertion, as if he had sweated from every pore. That, or he had been caught in a downpour. She realised that she was staring at the outline of his torso with more attention than was seemly, and tore her gaze away, meeting instead the worried eyes of the constable by the door.
“Ought you not come forward and learn about the manner of his death?” Cordelia said. Trying to be kind, she took a step towards the body, to encourage him. “You will find clues as to the perpetrator. It is not so very alarming a sight; come. You will have seen such things before.”
The constable made a strangled noise but he approached, warily. He glanced at the body, at the sticky blood that reflected the weak light of the lamp that had been placed on the floor, and at the doctor whose hands were probing into the back of the skull. The doctor pulled aside a hairy flap of skin, exposing some white bone, and the constable whimpered. He swallowed noisily and she could see that he was no longer focusing. He tipped his head back and stared fixedly at the wall.
Cordelia saw the young man on the floor as a person, but she found she was able to put it to one side as she peered down. She had had a rigorous upbringing which included a great deal of household management skills. Her parents had acknowledged that she was not a great beauty, and had often reminded her that a successful marriage was going to rely on her talents rather than her looks. If she could not assess a well-hung deer or prepare a chicken, then she was likely to be fleeced by her staff. They never intended that she ever cook in her own kitchen - no, a gently-bred Englishwoman was supposed to leave such things to the strange Continentals - but she had to know what occurred there.
Although, in defiance of convention, Cordelia had taken a more practical role in many instances. For many months, the kitchen in her marital home had been a place of refuge that the finer rooms had not offered.
So, looking at the sorry mess, she tuned out the emotion attached to the scene and saw, instead, the mere flesh and bone from which the spirit had fled. “See, there,” she said to the unwilling constable. “He has taken a blow to the left side of his face. I would imagine that it sent him flying backwards. He would have hit his head on the corner of that sideboard. Doctor, what say you? Is the wound on the back of his skull as if he had struck the angle of the wood?”
“It is,” the doctor acknowledged without looking up from his work. He turned the corpse’s head from one side to the other, so that they could better see the reddened mark on the left cheek.
“A left-handed blow,” Cordelia said again, and could not prevent herself looking at Mrs Hurrell as she brought her tea to her lips. The woman’s right hand was shaking and the tea was as much on her skirts as in the cup.
Then she looked back at the doctor, who was making a note in a small book, and he stopped suddenly and turned to glance over his shoulder at her. He put his pen down and turned back to the corpse.
He was left-handed.
Cordelia shook her head, mostly in reproach to herself. No, come now, she thought. I saw him riding away. He has been sweating – or washing himself. He seems an uncommon sort. Oh, that would be rather too neat, would it not?
Chapter Four
The constable was not faring well. She could hear his laboured breathing and when she turned, she saw that he was sheened with sweat and pointing his prominent nose determinedly into the corner of the room as if he might see a confession written upon the peeling wallpaper.
Divining that he needed direction, she stepped back and he followed, automatically. She said, “I am always fascinated by crime and criminals. Why, I take all the London papers so that I might follow the famous trials. I imagine that next, you will be talking to all people p
resent while things are fresh in their minds. Am I right?”
She hoped that she presented herself as a mere dilettante, wanting to learn from a real policeman, but the constable’s face didn’t exactly glow with pride. Mind you, she had to concede that she had been an unsuccessful coquette even when in the blooming rosiness of youth. Where the other girls at her finishing school could persuade any gentleman to do almost anything, she had mostly relied upon challenging them to arm-wrestling matches and poker games. She excelled at both. Neither seemed like a good option at this moment. The constable licked his lips nervously and tipped his head to her in awkward respect.
“I believe that I will, I mean, I should, I shall,” he stammered. “I, my paper, my books, I mean…” He spread his hands wide. “In my haste, I…”