Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery)

by Jane Jakeman

  A twig snapped under Zaraband’s hooves and the group turned in my direction, and then froze like a picture.

  The two boys moved back, but the men refused to give ground. They were aroused now. The man bending over the woman straightened up but made no effort to disguise his lust, nor even to pull his britches up over his thrusting flesh. His face was red, sweating, angry.

  “It’s the gypsy’s whore. We’re giving her what she deserves, that’s all,” he said, defiantly.

  I dismounted and moved towards them. The men must have read something in my face, for although no word was spoken, one of them broke away and ran stumbling down the hill.

  But the man whose pleasure had been interrupted moved threateningly towards me. A dog will fight for its lusts.

  “Want her yourself, my lord? Like them dirty, do you? Take a good look at this then.”

  He jerked his hairy naked groin obscenely, openly. “You can have her after I’ve been through her.”

  I advanced towards him and he released his victim and hurled himself at me, his fists flying blindly.

  Then he stopped short, looking down at the dark steel barrel held before his chest.

  I smiled, thrust my face into his, and spoke with slow, careful contempt.

  “One more step and I’ll put a bullet through you.”

  The man had one last try at pleading.

  “She’s trash, my lord. Why can’t us have her? She’s not too dirty for the likes of us.”

  “I’ll see you all dead first. And you know it, don’t you? You know my reputation in these parts. I got these scars upon my face from killing better men than you.”

  The others began to back away down the hill.

  The man hesitated. He began to pull his clothing over himself.

  Suddenly, they broke. They turned and ran, stumbling into the wheat in their fear.

  The woman was sitting up and trying to cover herself. The child, a girl I now realised, rushed fiercely in front of her mother, little teeth snarling like a young animal.

  The woman said something to the child, who stood still, but the tension did not leave the small body, and she stared defiantly up at me as I spoke, carefully, simply, as one might to a frightened animal, trying to reassure it with the sound of the voice rather than the words.

  “I won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be frightened of now. They’ve all gone.”

  The woman answered me in English, thickly accented.

  “They’ll be back. They’ll never leave us alone now. I might as well cut my throat and the child’s too, and have done with it. They would have had the child as well, if you hadn’t come along. We’re just sport to them. Vermin, they call us. Mi Dovvel opral clik tuley opre mande! My God above, look down on me!”

  The gypsy’s woman was handsome enough under the dirt and rags. Her eyes were dark and long-lashed, set in thin, slanting cheekbones. There was a dreadful air of resignation about her, a weary quietness, like an ill-treated animal, for whom one beating is scarcely over when the next begins.

  She bowed her head and I had trouble following her words as she continued.

  “They smashed up the caravan and set fire to it. They’d have burned us alive if we’d been inside it. We’ve no home, no man, kek keir vardo, kek guero. They’ll get us the next time.”

  “Have you no one you could go to? Is there nowhere you could find protection?”

  “We’ve blood kin camped near Callerton, for they’ve come to sell their ponies at the Callerton fair. The Lees — they’d take us in. But we’ll never get to them. Them men — they’ll come for us again as soon as you’ve gone.”

  I did not doubt her. They would be back, hunting these terrified hares through the darkening countryside.

  “I’ll get you to Callerton. We’ll go to the caravan first.”

  The child led the way, back along a track towards the farm. Near Quillan’s Field, about half a mile from the little hill where I had found the woman and her chavali, as the man had called the child, there was a clump of trees, and just beyond the trees we came to the caravan. Charred splinters of brightly painted wood lay all around the clearing. The caravan was smashed to pieces: it looked as if the attackers had taken an axe to it. The contents, mostly unrecognisable, were strewn all around, ripped and smashed.

  The woman sat on her haunches as she surveyed the debris of her home and moaned softly, rocking to and fro. “Bengako tan!” she murmured. “Bengako tan!”

  A hellish place.

  For some, hell was on a distant Grecian shore. For others, it was here: in the middle of the pleasant English countryside.

  The child spoke, standing in the wreckage.

  “We tried to run away when they come, mister. We run in the field yonder and lay in the wheat. But they found us. They done chased us out.”

  I could visualise it — a gang of men from the village bursting into the clearing and setting about them, the woman and her child bolting into the wheat, their pursuers tracking them without difficulty through the trail trampled in the crops. They had been driven out on to the grassy slopes of the little hill, brown and scorched by the long summer, like small animals running from the harvesters. And then there was nowhere else to run.

  The woman was calmer now. She looked up at me.

  “There’s none hereabouts but hates us now. Most of them would do any filthy thing they can think of. We are mullo mas.”

  Mullo mas. Dead flesh. Carrion.

  It was true, I knew it from the desolation in front of me. This had been a deliberate, determined attack. News of the murder had spread through the whole district and the countryside would now be roused against all gypsies. The man suspected of the murders could not be touched — I had him safely locked up in the cellars of Malfine, had snatched him from the mob at Crawshay’s. But his woman and his child were unprotected and would be easy prey.

  Undoubtedly, the best course would be to take them to Callerton, where I knew the gypsies were encamped in sufficiently large numbers to deal with any attacks the locals might mount against them. If I left the woman and her child here, they would not last long.

  “Find something to cover your mother,” I said to the girl, for the woman was still clutching torn rags round herself. “And then see if there’s anything left here worth the taking. I’ll get you to Callerton.”

  I looked round the clearing. There might be a few pathetic possessions that could be salvaged.

  Unexpectedly, the bony old horse that had pulled the caravan loomed up, quietly cropping grass beyond the trees. His frayed tethering rope trailed behind him — he must have managed to bolt from the attackers, breaking the old rope in the process. He seemed unexcited by his freedom, and stood obediently still when the child ran over and caught his halter.

  The girl found an old skirt and a piece of linen with which the woman managed to cover herself. She rose and began to help the child pick over the rubbish, holding up a shard of china here, a torn blanket there. Eventually they tied up some old coverlets and a tin pan and a kettle. Nothing else seemed to have been left unscathed.

  I was surprised when I saw them piling all the rubbish into a heap on the broken shell of the caravan. The woman saw the expression on my face.

  “The Lees’ll come back with me,” she said. “They’ll come back and we’ll burn the rest. All this. On the day they hang him. He did not kill them, lord. My man did not kill them at Crawshay’s farm. But they must have someone to hang for it. They’ll hang him.”

  I was silent. Without another word, the woman loaded the old horse with their bundle. I lifted the child up before me on Zaraband, and the woman climbed up on the horse, and the little procession set slowly off.

  The way was at first uneventful, but we had to pass through the village, and I felt the thin body of the child stiffen with fear as we approached.

  A small boy came running out of one of the cottages, staring at us with round eyes, then bolted back inside, shouting for his mother.

&n
bsp; “Mam, Mam, it’s the gypsy-woman. Where’s he taking her?”

  A woman appeared at the door of the cottage. She stared at us malevolently. “Leave them to us, my lord,” she called up to me, made bold by hatred. She bent down, and the next thing I knew was a clod of earth flying through the air. It struck the gypsy-woman full on the chest. She did not flinch, but held her head high and stared straight ahead. The child, too, looked up defiantly, though I could feel the terror which gripped her small body.

  “Don’t be afraid!” I whispered. “Look straight ahead.”

  By twos and threes the villagers were coming out of their doors until there was an ugly little crowd. They recognised me, but their mood was threatening enough to challenge my authority as Zaraband picked her way through. A voice called out, “My lord, we’ll have her!” and another answered, “We’ll hang them now!” The crowd closed up in front of us, barring the muddy track that passed as the main street of the village. I hoped it would not be necessary to draw my pistol. I urged Zaraband forward and she stepped out, gently pushing her way through. The people looked angry and sullen, but still they dared not offer me violence. One of the bolder spirits laid his hands on the mare’s bridle, but he stepped back as he looked up into my scarred face. Strange, how my healed wounds can serve me now: the scars of them terrify these peasants.

  I saw one of the men at the back lowering a pitchfork to the ground. The angry buzz of voices fell silent and the crowd parted to let us through. We passed down the dusty track between the cottages in silence. I heard one last voice, a woman’s, as we passed:

  “The devil’s looking after his own!”

  It took about two hours to reach Callerton. We travelled slowly, holding Zaraband in check so that the gypsy’s old horse could keep up.

  As we drew near the town, the woman indicated a track that led off the road towards some woods. “That’s where they be camped, my lord.”

  We turned off the road and made for the woods. The sun was going down, but the day still held some heat. The child was asleep now; her hair was none of the cleanest and a cloud of insects danced around her head as we rode along in the orange light of the setting sun, which was now outlined against the blackness of the trees.

  The man who appeared in front of the mare seemed to have sprung out of the ground. He had a scarf wrapped round the lower part of his face and a wickedly curved knife gleamed at his belt. Suddenly, I realised we were surrounded by half a dozen men, moving as silently as cats. The man in front of me leaped up at the mare and pulled her to a halt. I reached for my pistol, but before I could draw it, the man fell back as the gypsy-woman shouted something. She slid down from the horse and began to talk urgently, in their Romany tongue, occasionally gesturing towards me. The man in front of the mare reached out his arms for the child, who had started awake, and now fell sleepily down into his care. The light was dying fast now.

  The woman broke off their talk and came towards me.

  “Raia, lord, these are my kin. Paracrou tute, I thank you, and for my child also.”

  The mare was receiving admiring if not downright covetous looks from some of the men, and I heard the word “gry, gry,” “the horse, the horse,” repeated over and again. They might be friendly for the moment, but that did not stop me from feeling that the greater the distance I put between us, the safer I should be.

  I started to turn Zaraband’s head towards the road, and was moving away when there was a commotion behind me and the gypsy-woman came running after.

  “Lord, we owe you a gift.”

  I had to bend over her to hear what she was saying, for her accent made it difficult to understand, though her words were almost formal, as if in some tradition of her own.

  “There is something I will tell you,” she was saying. “That is my gift.

  “The woman at the farm. Be wary of her, lord. And tell your servant to be wary of her also.”

  She reached up and grasped my sleeve, and looked up into my eyes.

  “Raia, you are a searcher, a jinney mengro, that I can see. I will help you in your search. I will help the hawk in his hunting, but you must listen carefully. Listen.”

  I bent down and she muttered something. She had to repeat it several times before I understood that it was the name of a place.

  Then she added a few more words, so that I knew why it was something important that she had told me. Something of value: knowledge, a real gift, in return for the protection I had given.

  By now, it was dark, and I turned for home.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was an oppressive, sticky night, yet not completely dark: it was still the light-grey night of northern summers. I woke near dawn and could not return to sleep, thinking over what the gypsies had told me, the man and the woman both. Finally, I arose from my bed, sluiced myself with cool water, took a pull of brandy, and still sleep evaded me, and all because I was engaged by this absurd rustic puzzle that chance had put in my way. A thousand times I tried to put it out of my mind. Why should I take any responsibility for the affairs of these country folk? Yet it was an intriguing problem. If the gypsy was innocent of the killings at Crawshay’s, who was guilty?

  I pulled on a shirt and breeches, descended from my bedroom, crossed the silent hall and stepped out from the portico of Malfine into the thinning night; if I could not sleep I might as well get up and exercise my limbs, pace through the woods to aid my thoughts.

  What if the gypsy had not committed the murders? Who were possible candidates for the role of murderer? Or murderess. There were the two women, Marie Crawshay and Elisabeth Anstruther.

  At this point, old Sir Anderton would have cried out in horror. “Suspect a woman! Believe a simple farmers wife or a ladylike governess capable of murder! The idea is monstrous!”

  Not monstrous to one who has seen something of the world, nor impossible to a mistrustful cynic whose faith in his fellow man — and woman — has long been shattered. Let us look firmly, fairly and squarely at the possibilities, I said to myself.

  I thought about the weapons, those old pistols, and pictured them in the hands of their original owner, some elegant marksman, perhaps, who stood in the mists of some early morning, aiming at his opponent … They were duelling pistols, of course …

  A duel: was it possible … ? Had the old man and his son engaged in some bizarre contest and shot each other in a duel of some rustic sort?

  But they had not been facing directly opposite each other when they died, and furthermore, even if it were to be supposed that the Crawshays, father and son, had somehow quarrelled so bitterly that they were prepared to kill each other, from what I knew of the character of the old man, he would have laughed at any such gentlemanly notion as duelling. More likely, he would have felled his son with his fist, or else he might have brandished some bucolic implement that lay ready to hand, a scrattern or a dibbler or some such I-know-not-what.

  I was striding past the lake now; early-morning mists were rising from its surface. An irrelevant thought intruded: there was something missing from my excursions in the grounds of Malfine. I must get a dog to accompany me on my walks, a greyhound perhaps, who could also keep up at Zaraband’s heels, a silent shadow to flit behind us through the woods. My last hound, my famously faithful Silver-jacket, died in Greece.

  The Crawshay murders were a distraction from my memories.

  Marie Crawshay could have committed the killings, physically. It would have taken no bodily strength to do so, though the murderer would have needed nerves of steel to kill the two men at virtually point-blank range. Crawshay had been shot full in the front of the throat, so his killer must have been looking straight at him. I tried to imagine the frail and delicate woman I had seen in the farmhouse parlour facing up to the explosive and bullying old man, firing a pistol directly at him and then turning and shooting her own husband in the face, through the jaw. Did Marie have the will and strength of mind to carry all that out? She seemed feverish with laudanum: if she were a habitual u
ser of the drug, unstable and excitable as it usually rendered its addicts, she would surely not have the determination to execute the murders. And she would have to be a most plausible liar, to tell me that circumstantially detailed tale of how she had stood in the barn and heard the shots that killed the Crawshays.

  But weighing most deeply against the possibility that Marie was a murderess was the apparent absence of any motivation for a double killing. The old man — yes, perhaps if there had been quarrels, if she hoped Edmund would inherit the farm, yes she might have killed old Crawshay. But why, in that case, would she have murdered her own husband, the pliable-sounding Edmund, who would be the heir to everything?

  And if Marie had some motive for killing one or the other of the men, she would have had plenty of other chances. It was absurd that she should fire on the men when they were together, when she had ample opportunities for finding her victim alone. Together, the Crawshays presented a formidable problem to an attacker, for whichever was first struck down, the other would turn on the murderer, and presumably even Edmund was capable of fighting for his life. Of course, they could have been killed with simultaneous shots, but they had been seated at different sides of the table when death had struck them, so that it would have been an extraordinarily difficult feat of marksmanship to bring them down together, killing both instantaneously. To kill them both in the same moment, the murderer would have had to have a pistol in either hand, and aim and fire both weapons in virtually one second. A farmers wife would know how to fire a gun, but she was unlikely to be a skilled and deadly shot.

  The same surely applied to the governess. I walked on through the woods, pondering this possibility, and now I could see the houses of the village looming up like haystacks in the distance.

  Again, it was possible that Elisabeth Anstruther could have committed the crimes. I had known little of her before my visit to Crawshay’s, and had learned little since. Certainly, I would judge that she had the nerve to carry out the murders, for she had seemed composed and controlled enough. But again, there was the problem of a cause: why should she kill the Crawshays when they were her employers and benefactors?