“I believe Sir Alfred saw to the education of his children himself. Lady Allenby schooled the girls, while Sir Alfred taught his son.”
“Surely not Egyptology,” I said, thinking aloud. “I do not remember hearing that Sir Alfred was interested in such a subject.”
“He wasn’t interested in anything tha’ could not make him money,” Mrs. Earnshaw put in bitterly.
“I believe,” said Miss Earnshaw, drawing attention away from her agitated parent, “that Sir Alfred’s interest in Egyptology was a passing one, the sort of thing he toyed with for a season or so. He had many such interests—Roman ruins, the history of the Popes, that sort of thing. Sir Redwall’s interest went much further and he continued his studies independently.”
“How interesting,” I said, noticing that Mrs. Earnshaw had taken another biscuit onto her plate. She had not eaten it, but was crumbling it slowly to bits.
“Julia,” Portia said, nodding toward the shepherdess clock standing upon the mantel, “it is quite late. We shall be very tardy getting back to Grimsgrave.”
“How silly of me. We have far overstayed ourselves, but the company and the refreshments were so delightful,” I said, smiling at Mrs. Earnshaw. She returned my smile, but I fancied she was not sorry to see us go. We gathered our things and bade her farewell, and she was careful not to invite us to return. I wanted to speak privately to Jerusha, but we had lingered as long as we dared, and I wondered if there would be some pretence I could manufacture to bring her with us to Grimsgrave.
Deborah ushered us out of the cosy sitting room and down the stairs, chattering all the while. We thanked her for her hospitality, and when we had reached the bottom of the stairs, I realised Jerusha Earnshaw had followed us.
“May I walk with you as far as the path to Grimsgrave?” she asked, reaching for her hat.
“Of course,” I told her, immensely relieved that I had not had need to fabricate a reason to invite her along. We waved to Deborah and started down the village street. Dusk had fallen and the windows of the shops were shuttered and dark, while the windows of the houses were bathed in warm yellow light.
“It is late,” I told Portia. “At least the moon is rising.”
Just ahead of us, the moon hung low on the horizon, round and white as a pearl. The gravestones of St. Agnes’ churchyard were silhouetted against it like a picture from a child’s book of spooky tales.
“I do hope you won’t think too harshly of Mam,” Miss Earnshaw began, coming straight to the point.
“Why on earth should we think badly of her?” Portia asked.
“Because she lies so,” Miss Earnshaw said with no trace of embarrassment. “She likes to pretend that Deborah and I are legitimate, but of course we are not. We are Sir Alfred Allenby’s bastards, and everyone in the village knows it.”
I stumbled over a cobblestone, catching myself quickly.
Miss Earnshaw was looking at me with cool, smiling detachment. “Are you quite all right, Lady Julia?”
“Quite, thank you,” I returned crisply. “But I confess I am rather impressed with your briskness. Most people would not find it so easy to come to terms with their illegitimacy.”
Miss Earnshaw shrugged. “It is of no consequence to me. The crime is not mine. It is Mam’s and Sir Alfred’s. Why should Deborah and I be any less worthwhile simply because our parents chose to conceive us out of wedlock?”
“You are a very modern thinker,” Portia put in, admiringly.
“It is simple common sense,” Miss Earnshaw rejoined. “A person ought not to be held accountable for any errors made by others. My parents may have committed double adultery, but their transgressions have nothing to do with me.”
“Mrs. Earnshaw did allude to Sir Alfred being less than gallant in his conduct with women,” I offered. “Perhaps your mother’s crime was only in catching the eye of an untrustworthy man.”
Miss Earnshaw’s expression warmed to amusement. “I think not, Lady Julia. Did you not notice the carnelian brooch at her throat? It was a love trinket from Sir Alfred when Deborah and I were born. She never takes it off. If he had forced her, do you think she would still remember him so warmly? Nay, he was a rogue, but he was a handsome one, golden-haired and strong. The man who raised us, Richard Earnshaw—Amos’ father—was a miner, small and dark. His mother’s people had come from Wales, and he had the look of them. Deborah and I are cuckoos in the nest to be sure.”
We walked along in silence for a moment, and I was struck by this woman’s self-possession. She had been born into circumstances more unlike my own than any I could imagine, and yet she was poised as a duchess.
“Did Sir Alfred ever help with your education? With maintenance?”
Miss Earnshaw shrugged. “He died the year after we were born. He left us a small sum of money. Deborah used hers to help our half brother, Amos, buy the inn. I used mine to go to school. I wanted out of this village, away from the clacking tongues, the whispers behind our backs.”
She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I always forget what it is like, how small, how dark, how closed. And then I come back, and it quite takes my breath away. I will come until Mam dies, and then I will not come again,” she said with an air of finality.
A sudden thought struck me and I turned to her. “This Richard Earnshaw, he was a miner?”
A slow smile ripened on her lips. She knew precisely where I was leading with my question. “Yes. And he was killed when the mine collapsed. It was ten years after Sir Alfred died. Deborah and I were only eleven. It was a terrible blow. He never once treated us as though we were less than his own. He sang us songs of the Welsh hills and taught us to stand proudly, even when the gossips in the village were whispering our names.”
“It must have been a tremendous loss to your family when he died,” Portia put in.
“It was. Mam had the keeping of us, so she did anything she could to feed and clothe us. She went into service at Grimsgrave Hall as a chambermaid.”
I stared at her. It was difficult to read her features through the deepening gloom. “That must have been a trifle awkward, with your mother working for Lady Allenby.”
“Oh, I think it must have been why she was employed in the first place. Lady Allenby is a God-fearing woman. She would not let her husband’s children starve, even if they were the fruits of sin.”
I said nothing, but I wondered if Miss Earnshaw would be quite so quick to praise Lady Allenby if she knew what horrors she was capable of.
“Sir Alfred must have been rather young when he died,” Portia put in suddenly.
“Just over forty,” Miss Earnshaw corrected. “Not young, but not long past his prime.”
“Was it sudden?” I do not know what prompted Portia’s questions, but I was suddenly interested in the answers.
“Yes, rather. There was actually quite a bit of talk at the time. The villagers said he was cursed to death.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Cursed?” I said, my voice barely audible.
“Yes. He was the local magistrate, as befitted his position as the largest landowner. He had bound over a Gypsy woman for trial, and when he did so, she cursed him. He was dead within a fortnight. It was all anyone could talk about for months. She cursed the chemist as well, and he died several months later, of fear, some said.”
“What became of the Gypsy woman?” Portia asked.
Miss Earnshaw shrugged again. “She died as well, as soon as she delivered her curse. Never even made it to the trial, poor thing. Pity, she might well have been set free.”
“Curious,” Portia offered. “One would think the death of the Gypsy woman would have lifted the curse.”
We had reached the path then that struck off toward Grimsgrave Hall. I put out my hand.
“It has been a pleasure, Miss Earnshaw,” I said, my mind galloping ahead. “If you have a mind to call at Grimsgrave while we are visiting, we should so enjoy meeting you again.”
Miss Earnshaw shook my hand sob
erly and gave a little shake of her head. “I think not, Lady Julia. I do not believe I would be comfortable in my father’s house knowing that, but for a few words said in church and a bit of paper, it might have been my home.”
“You do know that Lady Allenby is no longer in residence?” I asked, delicately skirting the issue of why.
Miss Earnshaw’s expression did not vary. “Yes. It was a nine days’ wonder when she left in the company of two nuns from Ireland. For a rest cure for her rheumatism, it seems. Folk said that one of the nuns looked very like her eldest daughter, Wilfreda, who eloped with a painter many years past.”
“That is not the truth of it,” I protested, but Miss Earnshaw merely smiled.
“This is Lesser Howlett, Lady Julia. The truth does not matter half so much as what people think is the truth.”
“I quite understand,” I said, inclining my head.
Portia made her goodbyes and we left Jerusha Earnshaw there, standing at the moor gate, smiling into the darkness.
THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
—William Shakespeare
King Lear
Portia and I made our way back to Grimsgrave Hall, chattering most of the journey.
“I cannot believe Mrs. Earnshaw,” Portia began once we were out of earshot of the woman’s daughter. “So righteous and godly, and all the while, she’s borne a pair of illegitimate daughters to Sir Alfred Allenby for all the world to see.”
“She did not have much choice about the world seeing once they were born,” I pointed out. “They are tall and blond with blue eyes. Anyone would have known them for Sir Alfred’s daughters. I knew there was something familiar about Deborah, but I did not realise until just today it is because she is so very like Ailith Allenby.”
“But more to the point, we now have proof the Allenbys run to twins.”
I nodded. “Yes. Twin babies with blond hair, walled up in Grimsgrave Hall. There seems little room to doubt those children are Allenbys. The question remains, who is the father?”
“Godwin or Redwall,” Portia said promptly. “And I shall plump for Godwin. He has an earthy sort of character. He’s robust and always slightly flushed, as if he had just come from rogering the milkmaid in the haymow.”
I gave her a little push. “There are no milkmaids at Grimsgrave. But I know what you mean. He is indeed earthy. From the impressions I have been given, Redwall seems an altogether different character. Studious, scholarly, more interested in his cold-blooded experiments than seducing the village maids.”
“Besides which we have heard nothing of intemperate habits,” Portia observed. “One teatime’s conversation and we know that his father was a rogue. Wouldn’t we have heard at least a whisper of scandal about Redwall if he’d been making free with the local maidens?”
“Just think of it,” I said slowly. “Redwall embalming children that were actually related to him. Even if they were Godwin’s, they would still be a sort of cousin.”
“How perfectly disgusting you are, Julia. It is frightful to think of Redwall embalming children of any variety, let alone family.”
I stopped and put a hand to her sleeve. “So, let us work from the likeliest hypothesis—Godwin Allenby fathered a pair of bastard twins upon some hapless girl, and then gave them to his own cousin to experiment upon.”
We walked in silence awhile, each of us pondering the same thing, I think. Godwin was a likeable fellow, and it was oddly painful to think him capable of such callous behaviour to his own children.
“Perhaps they were born dead,” Portia put in hopefully. “Without a proper postmortem, there is no way of determining what really happened. You said Brisbane believes they were not killed by violence, and I want to believe it, too. Oh, Julia, the other possibility does not bear thinking about.”
“He is a farmer,” I said slowly. “Think how many times he must have laid a killing hand to a struggling lamb or a starveling calf. He would view it as a necessity, no different than culling the weakest of the litter if the children had no prospects of a good life.”
“But why should they have no prospects?” Portia demanded. “If he lay with a village girl and got her with child, why should he not marry her? He is not so far above the local folk as all that.”
“Isn’t he? He is still an Allenby. Think of them, Portia. All of them, nursed on that overweening pride, not of the normal variety, but the mad sort. They’ve got their obsessions and their delusions, and they think they are so far above everyone else because their grandfather forty times over was a Saxon king. Do you honestly believe Lady Allenby would have sat idly by while Godwin married an unlettered farmer’s daughter? And who else is likely to have fallen victim to his seductions? Jerusha Earnshaw is, as far as I can see, the only properly educated young lady in the entire village and she fled it as soon as possible. If the Allenbys wished to preserve the exclusivity of their blood, they would never have permitted Godwin to commingle his with the local folk.”
“I suppose you are right,” Portia said finally. “But what if the mother died in childbed? The birthing of twins can be difficult, particularly if it was her first pregnancy. If she died, her family would want the scandal quieted down, wouldn’t they? And it would suit the Allenbys as well. Pay the girl’s family a suitable sum to keep their silence and then dispose of the children themselves.”
“Is it possible to keep such secrets in a village?” I wondered aloud. “We always knew everything that happened in Blessingstoke,” I reminded her. “That is why we never dared misbehave in the village. The news would have reached Father before we’d even returned home.”
Portia stumbled over a stone in the fitful moonlight and cursed. “Perhaps it isn’t likely,” she conceded. “But it is possible. And we’ve no theory as plausible as that one.”
“I suppose. I still think if villagers were involved, there would be talk of it. You know the old saying, three can keep a secret if two are dead.”
Portia stopped suddenly and turned to face me, her complexion pale as the moonlight that shone upon it.
“What did you make of that tale Jerusha Earnshaw told us about Sir Alfred, dying by a Gypsy woman’s curse?”
I kept walking, schooling my expression to serenity. “I think it proves my point about village gossip. They tell the most outlandish stories. I have no doubt that one in particular was embellished and embroidered in the retelling until it hardly resembles the truth anymore.”
Portia hurried to keep pace with me. “I don’t know. Jerusha Earnshaw struck me as an extremely sensible woman. I cannot imagine she would believe it if it were a faery story.”
“Did she say she believed it?” I asked lightly. “I thought she was just repeating village tattle. Besides, she was a year old when Sir Alfred died, by her own admission. She would have hardly been in a position to know these things for herself.”
“I suppose,” Portia said at length. We topped a rise just then, and the moor stretched out ahead of us, silvery-white and rustling, like a wide ghostly sea. In the distance lay Grimsgrave Hall, black and hulking as a ship adrift on moonlit waves.
“It is horrible,” Portia said. “And I do not know why it should be. It is actually quite a pretty house in broad daylight. But under that moon…”
“It is sinister,” I agreed, steeling myself to return to it. Lady Allenby was gone, the danger to Brisbane was past. And yet knowing what Godwin had likely done to his own children made me reluctant to stay there. I wondered what it would take for Brisbane to return to London and leave this place to its ghosts.
“Tuppence for your thoughts,” Portia said at last.
I shook my head slowly. “I was just thinking of Brisbane, and why he feels compelled to stay here. It reminded me of something Father once told me when Bellmont was being difficult, just after I was widowed. He said Bellmont was turning forty, and it was a hard age for a man because that is the age when he looks at his life and r
ealises whatever he is is all he will ever be.”
“Why did you connect that thought with Brisbane?”
“He will be forty this year,” I told her, arching my brow significantly. “Perhaps he has something to prove to himself.” Or others, I thought privately.
“Speaking of Bellmont, I saw him in London,” Portia said. “His family were just preparing to leave for an extended visit to the Duke of Driffield’s country seat. Nothing formal has been announced between Driffield’s girl and our nephew, Orlando, but matters are quite far advanced. Bellmont cherishes hopes that this visit will seal the match. Parliament is sitting, of course, so Bellmont could not accompany them, but he means to come up when he can,” she finished.
I stared at her. “Driffield. His seat is in Yorkshire, in the East Riding. Do you mean to tell me—”
“Yes, dearest.” She patted my hand. “Bellmont will be in Yorkshire very soon. And he means to call upon us here whilst he is in the north.”
I let loose a stream of colourful language I had learned from my brother Benedick.
“You have conjugated that particular word most incorrectly, but I quite agree,” Portia told me. “If it is any consolation to you, I propose we put him in Lady Allenby’s bedchamber for the duration of his stay. I will be quite happy to share with you again, and he can spend his nights being stared awake by a bleeding Jesus.”
“I can think of no one more deserving,” I said sharply. This was a new worry I did not need. Bellmont’s presence at Grimsgrave would effectively end my involvement in the many mysteries I was ravelling out. He capitulated often enough when Father exerted his influence, but we were far from London, and if Brisbane wanted me gone, Bellmont was entirely capable of packing me off. There was no hope for it, I decided, lengthening my stride and taking in great lungsful of fresh moor wind. If I wanted to solve the mysteries that swirled around Grimsgrave Hall, I would have to do it myself, and before Bellmont came. There was no time to waste.
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