by Jane Jakeman
But let me suppose that for some reason Elisabeth Anstruther wanted to kill the Crawshays, father and son: if the governess was guilty, then Marie Crawshay was innocent, and she had no reason to lie in giving her account of events. And she, trembling in the barn with her little son, had apparently heard the shots before Elisabeth Anstruther had arrived in the pony-cart.
Who else might there be? Some discontented worker, some labourer turned off Crawshay land, perhaps? Someone who had been prepared to take the risk of being seen by Marie or the governess? Or perhaps someone more accustomed to firearms — someone like Sir Anderton himself, a good shot and without a nerve in his body? Anderton could well have had some quarrel with the Crawshays, over some such local dispute as land boundaries, perhaps, and stridden out to the farm in a high old rage. He was choleric enough to take a pot-shot at anyone who gainsaid him, though I did not think that cold-blooded murder was his style.
In any case, I remembered, old Anderton was in London.
I was nearly at the outskirts of the little huddle of houses by now. Our village is made of the most primitive elements, out of the very ground it springs from, so it seems. The biggest structure it boasts is the alehouse, which is larger than the tumbledown little church, a miserable Gothic heap. We have no parson — a curate comes over from Callerton on a Sunday to give a service and harangue the rustics.
The houses — if I can dignify them with such an appellation — the houses which ramble along the single village street — a track, merely — are built of mud itself. They are made of unfired clay, or cob, as they say in these parts, manufactured in the most simple fashion. I used to watch it being done, when I was a boy. The mud is trampled down, with some straw admixed, into a semblance of some solidity, and then lumps of this trodden earth are rammed on top of one another to form the walls. A thatched roof, more or less ragged, is raised upon the cob walls: one room downstairs and one aloft suffice for the entire household. Very pretty they can look in summer, those hovels that are whitewashed with a little lime and neatly roofed, but they are best admired from afar, I promise you. There are gentlefolk who praise the picturesque in cottages — and those who sketch them, but always at a distance, I have noted, and sitting upwind of the middens.
“Cool in summer and warm in winter” is said of cob houses — to which might be added “and damp all year round”; those who proclaim the charm of these dwellings seldom live in them, and when they do, can afford plenty of fuel to drive the wet out of the walls, and plenty of thatch on top to keep off the rain. For those who cannot afford such luxuries, the mud houses can dissolve over their very heads — why, there was an old woman who was washed out of her house while still lying in her bed, once when a heavy rainstorm flooded the village. For such houses as survive inclemencies, the weathering gives the local architecture, if we can dignify it with that name, a pleasing, gently rounded appearance; pleasing, that is, if you yourself live safely within walls of brick or stone.
Still, in the half-light of early morning, the dim outlines of the village looked attractive enough, the weathered thatches hunkering down upon the low walls, and dawn was just breaking.
Our eyes deceive us in such a light, and I was at first mistrustful of a form that seemed to be fashioned out of the mist itself: I narrowed my eyes and peered through the greyish light. Yes, that dim outline that I could espy in the distance was indeed a human shape, slipping along behind the hedges, following the dusty track of the coach road that led to the village. The movements were slinking and furtive, for the fellow did not walk along the road like an honest man, but crept about along the scrubby bushes. He was taking care not to be seen from the road, but did not perceive that I, walking along the path that led from Malfine woods to the village, could see him outlined on the horizon against the growing light of day.
Somewhere, in one of the houses, a dog barked, and yelped as it was cuffed. The form crouched down behind the hedgerow.
I stopped in my tracks, stood silently, watching.
The creature behind the hedge waited for a few moments, and then, when the barking of the dog appeared not to have aroused any alarm, moved onwards. The light was better now, and I could see more clearly. The man was limping, dragging one foot painfully behind, yet moving steadily, determinedly. Moving fast. At this distance, I could not make out any of the details of his appearance.
Now the flickering light of a candle appeared in the still-dark window of a cottage at the outskirts of the village, and I could see a figure appear within the room, passing and repassing the casement, and I heard the crying of a child. It was a woman, nursing a fretful baby.
The shape crept closer to this cottage, slowly and carefully, crouching down, and then peered in the window. He seemed to stare as if hypnotised for a few moments; then he slipped past the windowsill to the door and laid his hand upon the latch. There was a long, easy, malevolent deliberation in his actions.
So there was an outsider skulking about the village — a candidate for the role of murderer. An outsider — that would let everyone off the hook: the women at Crawshay’s would be clear of all suspicion, there would be no need for fingerpointing and mistrust among the villagers, and the gypsy, whom Lord Ambrose had quixotically taken it into his scarred and aristocratic head to rescue, could be released.
I quickened my pace towards the distant form, but then, just as I was hastening towards the cottage, he stopped and pulled himself away from the door, and limped off as fast as his crippled limb would allow, as if he were bent on a different track and would not be turned aside for anything else, like an animal that has scented a particular quarry and will hunt it down to the end, ignoring lesser game.
He would not be sidetracked.
Those were the thoughts that came into my mind as I saw the crippled man slip away, a darker shadow against the bright dawn.
CHAPTER 9
Back at Malfine, although it was so early in the day, there was a welcome clatter from the kitchen and smells of bacon and mushrooms were drifting up to the library, where I took breakfast on my return. My appetite, which had been but feeble and unappreciative during the long months of convalescence, seemed to be returning. Belos laid a silver-covered dish in front of me, and I swept off the lid and helped myself to the glistening rashers. Belos was pouring coffee from a silver pot. He insisted on these refinements: I would as soon have breakfasted as I recollected doing in my youth, running into the kitchen, hacking a thick slice of bacon from a joint that hung in the larder, laying it in a heavy copper frying pan, and downing a quart of champagne as I waited impatiently for my rough-and-ready meal to sizzle and crisp, but Belos would never have allowed this unseemly behaviour.
“Belos, have you ever seen a crippled man skulking around the village? Or ever heard talk of one?”
“I don’t recall any such, my lord. Of course, there is old Tyler, Sir Anderton’s former gamekeeper, but he is a complete invalid, I understand, and cannot so much as leave his bed.”
“No, the man I saw this morning — at least, I’m almost certain I saw him, but the light was bad, I grant you — he was lame, but he could move pretty fast, like a young man. D’you think he’s a stranger here?”
“I think he must be, my lord.”
“Then there’s cause for concern, Belos, if we have someone creeping about in these parts.”
What really flashed through my mind, of course, was that the stranger might be implicated in the murders at Crawshay’s farm.
“You are doubtless thinking that this has something to do with the murders, my lord?”
“Damn you, Belos, you’re too quick. This bacon is superb. Afterwards, I think I’ll go over to the farm.”
“You are active this morning, my lord. Shall I have Zaraband saddled and brought round?”
“Yes, but give me some more of those mushrooms first.”
“‘Now good digestion wait on appetite, And health on both!’”
“Where does that come from? I don’t recognise i
t.”
“The Scottish play again, my lord. The banquet scene. I once played Banquo — and his ghost, of course — at the Theatre Royal in Bristol.”
“Hardly a good omen, Belos!”
But I tucked in cheerfully enough.
Afterwards, there was something which made me feel uneasy: the bodies of the Crawshays. They should be in the icehouse by now, but I wanted to check, and to examine them again, to see if there was anything I had missed at the farmhouse. Saving the gypsy had seemed the most important action at the time, but now perhaps was the moment to consider the dead men more carefully. The icehouse was on the way to Crawshay’s farm, if I followed the tracks that led across country.
The wood lay beyond the smooth expanse of lawn which was kept short by the herd of ornamental deer. These were the descendants of a herd which my father had imported for the delight of my mother; the deer were too small and thinlegged to provide decent haunches of venison. My grandfather, greedy old man, had been much against the purchase of these useless creatures, but in the end had ceased his objections, when he had been persuaded to see them as animated hairy lawn-clippers rather than as mere adornments.
At the end of the lawn, a ditch, in which a stream usually ran, kept them from straying too far. There was a little rustic bridge with a willow gateway which prevented them from crossing the water, which had dried up in the heat of this summer.
Zaraband took the dry stream bed in an easy leap and entered the wood. A sweet pine smell reached me. The trees breathed out their scents, even in the cool morning air. There was no sound except the soft thudding of the horse’s hooves, and the occasional crack in the undergrowth, the small flutters and rustlings of creatures frightened from their nests and shelters in the spider’s-web dews of dawn.
The icehouse was in the centre of the wood, but I did not want to take Zaraband close up to it; I remembered her nervous reaction when we had neared Crawshay’s yesterday, and she had scented the foul air with those delicate nostrils. She was not an old battle-horse, hardened to smells of death and decay, and I tethered her to a tree just inside the fringes of the wood.
I had prepared myself, as I neared the icehouse, and pulled from my pocket a linen handkerchief soaked in cologne. I did not care much for the sickly odour of the scent, but at least it masked some of the evidence of mortality that grew more powerful as I neared the icehouse, contaminating the clean morning air.
The icehouse was a mock-Gothic folly. It was topped by all sorts of curious little pinnacles, so that it resembled a tiny castle. There were only narrow slits for windows, very high up and shaded with shingles so as to exclude the sun as much as possible. It had been the fantasy of the architect to make these absurd and useless windows into arrow slits, like those in the towers of Gothic castles.
A huge and thick door, quite suitable for a medieval castle, had been crafted to fit tightly so that no chink of light, which would speed the melting of the ice, would be admitted through the entrance. There was a lock in the door, deemed necessary because ice was, after all, a precious substance, preserved with difficulty and not to be enjoyed by the vulgar, except in winter, when they might have as much as they pleased.
The padlock, which would normally have been rusty, gleamed, hanging on the door jamb. This did not alert me, for it was my thought that Tom, when he arranged for the corpses of the Crawshays to be deposited here, had cleaned and oiled the lock. The key was somewhere on a board in the gun room at Malfine, where it was kept with a load of other such rusty old implements, some with crabbed script on yellowing labels: “Housekeeper’s Closets”; “Pleaching Shed”; “Boot Room”; “Icehouse.” Belos would doubtless have identified the right key and brought it over to the men at the farm.
The door was not locked.
I pushed it inward on its hinges and descended the short flight of steps inside. The building, to a depth of about ten feet, was entirely below ground.
The floor was marble, and it struck cold to my feet.
There was more marble, placed in slabs like low tables, with drains and channels to carry the water away as the great blocks of ice on the slabs slowly dripped away in here.
Instead of the ice, the bodies of Crawshay and his son lay on the slabs, placed there according to my instructions. There was some oozing from the corpses, their fluids draining along the marble channels cut for the melting ice, as if the bodies lay on a purpose-built table for chirurgical dissection.
I stepped into the middle of the floor, my boots treading in a slippery liquid, and looked again at the dead men I had seen in the outhouse at Crawshay’s farm. I did not wish to linger, but I had to do my duty: when the coroner’s jury met, it would have to examine these bodies, and I had to make sure they would be available for the jurymen’s grisly attentions. Stories of the horrors they had witnessed — of the black faces, the bellies swollen with gases — would be retailed in the district with the greatest relish by those same jurors, whose protests of reluctance to perform their traditional task of viewing the bodies of the victims were mitigated by their anxiety to be the centre of attention when the tale was relayed to other turnips, agog for details.
The bodies were intact and ready for the jurors’ inspection, or at least, they were decaying only by natural processes. Sadly for scaremongers, no local witches or werewolves had intervened in picturesque rustic fashion, no hands had been severed to soak in wax and turn into candles, it seemed that no ghoulish souvenir-hunters had clipped off bits of clothing or locks of hair. The two men lay, stretched out on their slabs, as decently as bloody and rotting corpses may.
My bravado ceased.
Old Crawshay’s face seemed to move in the gloom.
Closer, closer, and in the dim light from the door I could see that the maggots were already squirming in his eyes.
Yet there was something I must look at. Something I had not noticed in the farm outhouse, but was now visible in the light from the partly opened door.
Strands of long hair entwined round the horn buttons of the old man’s waistcoat. Long, streaming hair, dabbled with the blood from the wound in his neck.
Bending over the body, repressing my nausea, I pulled four or five of the hairs from the buttons and thrust them into my breeches pocket.
I turned and made for the door, even my hardened stomach beginning to turn, but as I climbed the steps that led out of the icehouse, the door seemed for a moment to fly wide open, and I was blinded by a ray of brilliant sun that shone out into the darkness like a sword.
Something struck me full in the breast, and I fell back down the steps, slipped on the wet marble floor at the bottom, and heard the door above me slam shut with a crash.
Only the faintest chinks of light reached me through the door of the icehouse. I stumbled in the gloom.
After a few minutes, my eyes became accustomed to it and I could dimly make out the shapes of the dead men lying on their marble slabs. I did not care for the thought of slithering about on that slippery floor, and perhaps falling on to their flesh, grown soft and jelly-like with the onset of decay.
My thoughts were like reluctant horses trying to bolt from a fence. I tried to think rationally about what might be happening in that brightly lit morning outside the icehouse.
Could the door have slammed shut by chance? I groped my way to the top of the steps and pushed against it, but it did not give an inch. The door must have been shut by a human agency, then, for someone had also turned the key in the lock. I called and shouted.
A waste of breath.
The roof of the icehouse seemed to ring with my cries, but no one came.
There was no point in exhausting myself with shouting. I had to consider my position.
There was no chance of battering down the door. It was my ill-fortune that the carpenter had been an honest man. Good hard seasoned wood had been carefully fitted into the frame of the door. Even if I could find something — a piece of marble, say — that could be used as a battering-ram, I would be unabl
e to get up any momentum, because I would have to charge up that flight of steps inside the door.
There remained for consideration the windows, high above me, admitting mere slits of light. They were about two feet long and about the width of the palm of the hand. Would it be possible to clamber up and trail something out of them — a piece of my shirt, perhaps, something that would alert any passer-by.
Passer-by? Tush, I said to myself, do you think you are in Piccadilly? There will be no passers-by here, no strollers enjoying the air and the fashions. You are buried in the depths of the countryside and surrounded by wilderness; no bumpkins will come idling round here, you may be sure.
I tried dragging some spare slabs of marble across the floor to form a kind of staircase which stretched treacherously upwards towards the windows, and succeeded only in ripping my hands on jagged edges of marble, and bruising a shin when I fell back to the floor.
Time to think more rationally.
If I had been shut in here accidentally, there was no likelihood that the person responsible would return. Why should they? If they had simply seen the door open, thought that it should have been closed, and slammed it, then they might have no idea that they had condemned a man to imprisonment with the dead. It might have been some well-intentioned turnip, who knew that the bodies had been placed in the icehouse, thought that the door should be secured, and was even now glowing with satisfaction at having performed a small social duty. Why should such a person, entirely ignorant of the consequences of their actions, bother to return?
There was in fact no legitimate reason for anyone to come to the icehouse, not until Jeffries, the coroner, fixed a day for the inquest, and that might be several weeks away. Perhaps not that long: even that old fool must realise what would happen to the cadavers in this heat. But long enough, for one locked in, as I was, with nothing but the bodies of the murdered men.