The Path of the Wicked

by Caro Peacock

  ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow.’

  I watched until they were out of sight along the road, not trying to hold back the tears any more.

  ELEVEN

  Tabby arrived soon afterwards with a welcome distraction.

  ‘She’s at her mother’s now, only she can’t stay long because she’s got to be back to serve lunch.’

  The Kembles’ maid – Maggie by name – was allowed a few hours’ leave now and then to visit her mother in the village. According to Tabby, the timing of that leave was unpredictable and it might be weeks before we had another chance to speak to the girl away from her employers. I collected bonnet and sketch pad from upstairs and we hurried to a line of rickety-looking cottages not far from the church. A stream ran past them with a stone slab across it by way of a bridge. On our side of it, a big black and white sow rootled with her snout in the grass. The church clock showed half past eleven. I hoped we hadn’t missed Maggie, but Tabby glimpsed a white bonnet through the cottage window and said she was still inside.

  ‘I was keeping a lookout and saw her when she came. I said there was a lady who wanted a word with her on the way back, not mentioning your name.’

  ‘Was she surprised?’

  ‘Didn’t seem to be. Perhaps she thinks you’re looking for a maid.’

  I took off my glove and scratched the sow’s neck. Ten minutes later the cottage door opened and a girl in a maid’s black dress and white apron came across the bridge, carrying an empty basket. She was about fifteen years old, small and plump, neat as a beetle. Tabby did the introductions, after a fashion.

  ‘This is the lady I told you about. We’ll walk back with you.’

  Maggie didn’t seem put-out that she had no choice in the matter. I walked beside her on a footpath that ran past the church to the road. Tabby fell in behind us, but near enough to listen.

  ‘I understand you work for Mr Kemble,’ I said.

  ‘For Miss Barbara, mostly. I was the parlourmaid, but now she’s grown-up I’m her lady’s maid.’ Justifiable pride in her voice for having taken a step up the servants’ ladder. Then she added, less happily: ‘I still have to do cleaning, though.’

  A hint there, perhaps, that she was open to offers. I didn’t want to take advantage of her.

  ‘I’m not looking for a maid,’ I said. ‘What I’m looking for is some information.’

  That puzzled her. She went on walking, biting her lip.

  ‘What about?’ she said at last.

  ‘Mary Marsh.’

  ‘Oh.’

  We turned off the footpath and on to the road. She glanced up at the church clock and started walking faster.

  ‘I’m supposed to be back by half past twelve.’

  ‘And about Joanna Picton,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, her.’

  When I’d mentioned Mary Marsh, she’d sounded wary. In the case of Joanna, her voice was openly contemptuous.

  ‘You didn’t like her?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t have much to do with her. She was taken on as scullery-maid and she wasn’t even any good at that.’

  ‘A living-in scullery-maid?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you lived under the same roof. You must have seen something of her.’

  ‘No more than I could help. They should have hanged her, not just sent her away – drowning the poor little mite like that.’

  ‘I gather the Kembles dismissed her when they found she was pregnant.’

  ‘Not before time. We all knew.’

  ‘That she was pregnant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did anybody know who the father was?’

  ‘Could have been anybody, the way she went on.’

  Her voice and the expression on her face made her seem twice her age.

  ‘Was there any gossip about her and anybody in the household?’

  She stopped and glared at me.

  ‘Her! None of the men would have touched her with a dish clout.’

  She started walking again, faster. It was clear from her voice that she was talking about the male household servants. If it had entered her head that gossip might have involved a member of the family, she was disguising it very well.

  ‘So she had men friends?’ I said.

  ‘Must have had, to get the way she was.’

  ‘But nobody in particular?’

  ‘She wasn’t particular.’

  ‘How can you be so sure about that? You say there was nobody inside the household, and I don’t suppose she had much chance to get out.’

  For a scullery-maid, perhaps one Saturday a month if she was lucky.

  ‘She got out when it suited her,’ Maggie said. ‘She was lucky she wasn’t sacked before, ’specially when she sneaked off to the races that time.’

  ‘Races?’

  ‘There’s a fair on when the races are. She’d made up her mind she was going to the fair, so off she went and came back drunk and her clothes all over the place.’

  Jack Picton had told me to ask people about what happened at the race fair. But he’d said that in relation to Mary Marsh’s death, not anything to do with his sister.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘July, two years ago. She should have been sacked then, but it was when Mrs Kemble was ill, so everything was upside down.’

  The roofs of the Kemble’s house were in sight now. It was clear that if anybody from the household had been responsible for Joanna’s condition, I shouldn’t find it out from Maggie. In the little time left, I tried a different approach.

  ‘Do you like working with the Kembles?’

  ‘It’s the only place I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t mind going somewhere livelier. I’m hoping when Miss Barbara gets married and moves away, she’ll take me with her.’

  ‘Is she going to be married soon?’

  ‘I expect so. She’s eighteen and she’s been engaged once already, only that was broken off.’

  ‘She was angry about that, wasn’t she?’

  Angry enough to throw things at her maid, but Maggie didn’t mention that.

  ‘Terrible arguments they had about it, Mr Rodney and her. Colonel Kemble threatened to send her away if they didn’t stop it,’ she said.

  ‘So it was her brother she blamed for breaking off the engagement?’

  ‘Her father sided with her brother, but yes, it was him mostly.’

  ‘And now Peter Paley’s disappeared.’

  ‘Yes. I think he went off to kill himself because of being heartbroken.’

  Cheery little soul, she was. I felt like saying that from what I’d heard of young Paley, he was more purse-broken than heartbroken.

  ‘Miss Barbara’s having a sad time,’ I said. ‘Her mother’s dead, her engagement’s ended, the man who was her fiancé disappears and her governess is murdered.’

  Maggie gave a merely conventional nod to that.

  ‘Did you see much of Mary Marsh?’ I said.

  ‘Not much. She didn’t take her meals with the servants. Most of the time when Miss Barbara didn’t need her, she’d be up in her room reading and writing or going out for walks. That’s what she pretended, anyway.’

  ‘Didn’t you like her?’

  ‘She was a sly one. Pretending to be so quiet and ladylike, when all the time she was—’ She stopped suddenly.

  ‘She was what?’ I said.

  Maggie’s cheeks had flushed, her lips set in a pout like a sparrow’s beak. A struggle was going on between love of gossip and discretion.

  ‘You mean seeing Jack Picton?’ I prompted.

  She nodded.

  ‘Were you the one who saw them together in the woods?’ I said.

  ‘No. That was Abby, the downstairs maid.’

  ‘When did she see them?’

  ‘A few weeks before he killed her. May, it would have been.’

  ‘You’re sure he killed her?’

  ‘Of course he did. It was bound to happen, wasn’t it, her go
ing on like that?’

  Maggie set her lips again and walked faster. Before I could ask any more questions, we came to a lane that turned out to be the servants’ way in to the Kemble house. She turned down it without a goodbye, saying she’d better hurry.

  Tabby glanced at me.

  ‘Do we go after her?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I doubt if there’s anything else she can tell us.’

  ‘What was all that about the race fair?’

  Until then I hadn’t told Tabby about Joanna because the story was almost too dismal to bear repeating. I told it now as we walked along the road. She listened, head bent and without reaction.

  ‘The dates fit,’ I said. ‘Joanna Picton’s baby was born in the spring of last year. April, say. That would be nine months after the race fair.’

  ‘Doesn’t get you any nearer knowing who the father was,’ Tabby said. ‘Maggie thought it could be anyone.’

  ‘Maggie’s a malicious little baggage. Of course she’d think the worst of poor Joanna.’

  ‘Poor Joanna?’

  ‘Yes. Whatever she’d done, she didn’t deserve what happened.’

  Tabby didn’t comment, but then she’d only heard Maggie’s hostile account. Joanna was a bad servant, a girl without morals, wilful and wild. It went with her reported conduct in the workhouse: lazy, sullen and quarrelsome. The rest of the story from Mr Godwit hadn’t been so very different, but there’d been touches there of a girl who wasn’t entirely bad. She’d been protective of her baby, misguidedly loyal to the man who’d fathered him in refusing to name him, as misguidedly brave in walking to look for work with a baby in her arms on a winter’s night.

  ‘In any case, she can’t have had many opportunities,’ I said. ‘A scullery-maid works morning till night, and if she’d run off without permission as often as Maggie implied, she’d have been dismissed very smartly. All we know is that she went to the race fair two years ago and came back drunk.’

  Joanna, longing for an escape from kitchen drudgery, thinking why shouldn’t she have her day at the fair like anybody else? Sneaking out of the house in the early morning in whatever poor bit of finery she possessed – a bonnet or a ribbon, say – and walking miles and miles to the racecourse. Joanna, excited at the fair but with no money, happy to accept drinks from young men who saw a servant-girl in her best bonnet as fair game. Joanna returning, drunk and distressed, her clothes all over the place.

  ‘I’m certain it was at the fair,’ I said.

  Tabby said nothing. There wasn’t much to say, because it got us no further. Half the men in the county would have been at the races and the fair: farmhands and sporting gentlemen, hucksters and gamblers, aristocrats and jockeys. If I was right, any one of them could have fathered the child that died in a ditch.

  ‘You realize that Maggie’s done away with one of our theories,’ I said. ‘It was in our minds that Rodney Kemble might be the father. If there’d been any gossip in that direction, Maggie would have known it.’

  ‘But she might not have passed it on,’ Tabby said, reluctant to let go. ‘Especially if it had been made worth her while not to.’

  Thinking about Joanna and also Amos, I was preoccupied as we walked along. Tabby sensed that and didn’t ask her question until we were about half a mile beyond the lane where Maggie had left us.

  ‘So, where are we going now?’

  ‘To ask the Kembles’ butler for permission to sketch on their property.’

  We were in sight of the stone pillars at the main entrance. The tall iron gates were shut, but a smaller gate at the side let us in to the drive. As an object for sketching, Colonel Kemble’s property was not inspiring. The house was comfortable rather than grand, three storeys high and built no more than a generation ago from local limestone. The drive was shorter than the grand gateway might have suggested, with six young oak trees staked on either side of it like recruits for military inspection, sheep grazing round them. Behind the house, trim meadows dipped into a wooded valley and up again. One of the meadows had a line of birch-brush fences, for training horses. A stable block to the right was large in proportion to the main house. Nobody was visible at the windows as we walked up the drive. It was lunchtime, with family and servants occupied. I asked Tabby to wait on the gravel sweep at the bottom of the front steps, holding my sketching things prominently, while I went up and knocked on the front door. It was some time before the butler appeared, looking harassed. Callers at mealtimes were a nuisance. I apologized, introduced myself and said I was staying with Mr Godwit.

  ‘I’m interested in drawing some of the best local views to take home with me. I’d be very grateful if Colonel Kemble would give me permission to sketch in his parkland.’

  ‘Parkland’ was overstating it, but there was no harm in flattery. The butler’s eyes had gone at once to the gravel sweep and registered that there was no carriage there, not so much as a gig – only Tabby clasping the sketchpad like a weapon. The best I could hope for was a verdict of genteel eccentricity. He replied, without enthusiasm, that permission would almost certainly be given, if I would kindly leave my card. I handed him two.

  ‘I wonder if you would give the other card to Miss Kemble. I really should have called on her by now, and I believe that she has an interest in sketching as well.’

  All I knew was that she’d attended, with no notable enthusiasm, a class on painting butterflies, but any well-brought-up girl sketches.

  ‘I’ll come back this afternoon, if I may,’ I said.

  The butler nodded and closed the door.

  ‘So it’s the daughter we want?’ said Tabby as we walked up the drive. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we still know next to nothing about Mary Marsh.’

  I had no notion how Barbara Kemble had felt about her governess, but she must have spent more time with her than anybody else. I’d wandered a long way from the question of who killed Mary Marsh and it was time to come back to her.

  Mr Godwit still looked worn and tired at lunch. We kept to his rule of not discussing the case at mealtimes, or at least he thought we did, because I turned the conversation to the race fairs again, particularly to the troubles of two years ago.

  ‘It’s not so much the races themselves; it’s all the things they attract – gambling booths of all kinds, hazard, whist, dice, roly-poly wheels. Then there are the beer and gin tents and other things I shouldn’t mention to you. It all gets the races a bad name. You heard a group of townspeople burned down the grandstand some years ago?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. It seems rather an extreme reaction.’

  ‘Reverend Close had been preaching some very powerful sermons against the races.’

  That man again. I tried to keep my tone light.

  ‘What was so much worse than usual about the race fair two years ago?’

  ‘As you know, I wasn’t there so I can’t say for certain. I’m not sure it was so very much worse in itself, but Reverend Close had been on the subject again. He persuaded Penbrake that the magistrates should attend along with the police, to see for themselves.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Quite a large number of arrests were made. In fact, I gather there was something like a riot.’

  Something like a riot? A drunken mob with the constables trying to make arrests, under the eyes of the magistrates. Caught up in it, head fuddled with gin, a scullery-maid on a truant day out. Joanna Picton might have counted herself lucky to escape without being arrested that day, but she’d been the unluckiest of them all.

  I told Tabby about it as we were walking back to the Kembles’ house. She said it didn’t tell us anything we hadn’t guessed already, which I had to admit was true.

  This time we were carrying full sketching paraphernalia – an easel and folding chair borrowed from Mr Godwit’s study and my parasol. When I knocked on the door, the butler conveyed to me the colonel’s kind permission to sketch wherever I wanted, with the addition that the view of the house was considered more imposi
ng from the other side. I took the hint, not because the house looked very much better but because the other side had a summer house with a tea table outside, overlooked by a terrace and large windows of what was probably a sitting room. We set up my sketching things in the shade of a big cedar much older than the house and I began work with my pencil while Tabby kept an eye on the windows. Although Barbara was our target, I wondered what to do if her brother Rodney appeared instead. He’d recognize me from our strange meeting in the woods, but might have his own reasons for not wanting to talk about it. If he did, I could pretend to have been reconnoitering places to sketch. Unconvincing, in a nettle-choked glade at dusk, but he could hardly call me a liar. I was hoping that the problem wouldn’t arise. The menfolk – father and son – should surely be out supervising things on the estate or in the stables.

  I had the outline of the house sketched in when Tabby reported a sighting.

  ‘Somebody in the right-hand big window.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Woman. I think it’s her. Light brown hair.’

  ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘Just sitting there, looking out. Now she’s gone.’

  To get her parasol, I hoped. I was relying on the fact that life in the country can be uneventful, especially for a fashionable young lady of eighteen with a quick temper. The arrival of a sketching woman on the lawn would be far from exciting, but probably better than nothing. A few minutes later the door to the terrace opened and out came a pink parasol, followed by a girl in a pink and white print dress. She took her time, lingering on the terrace and pretending not to see us, drifting down the steps and halfway across the lawn before letting her eyes move in our direction. An amateur actress making an entrance would have moved like that. She was young, pretty and practising on anybody. When she came closer, I stood up, introduced myself and asked her to thank her father for permission to sketch.