Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery)

by Jane Jakeman

  I was their third child. The first two were boys. I was conscious from a very early age that my mother thought me rather peculiar-looking: she never ceased to comment on one particular feature in my face.

  “La, but the child has such strange eyes!” she would say as I sat on her lap or ran across the nursery floor. “They are the eyes of a changeling, I do protest! No one in either of our families has eyes of this curious colour — why, whether they are yellow or grey or both at once one cannot tell — they vary with every changing of the light!”

  My father’s family had respectable blue eyes. My mothers were brown, pretty, round, open.

  Once I heard her saying to our nurse, when she did not think I was near, but I was in the dressing closet just out of her bedroom, and could hear their conversation quite plainly:

  “I do believe that she has yellow eyes like old Anstruther — my husband’s grandfather, that is. He was an old rogue, you know!”

  So I knew at an early age that some persons might think me untrustworthy merely by reason of the colour of my eyes, yet I beg you to accept that I am a truthful creature and do not deceive you now.

  Well, my childhood was uneventful, Lord Ambrose, save that I had a few pleasures which perhaps a child in another city might not have enjoyed. I had a marmoset for a pet, bought from a sailor. It had a jacket of red flannel, with tiny gold buttons, and I loved its little wrinkled face most faithfully and cried dreadfully when it died one raw winter, its breath wheezing in tiny coughs, for it could not withstand the harsh climate to which it had been brought.

  In the mornings, my nurse would take me for a morning walk, and we would make our way sometimes down on to the quays, where we were partly frightened and partly thrilled at the shouts and sounds and the strange tongues, and the yells and laughter of the sailors. My father put a stop to this, and ordained safe and orderly strolls upon the Downs, but I had already become fascinated with what I had seen on the quays: with the spices and silks unloaded for sale, with the parakeets in cages offered for sale in the streets.

  I had a gown of French lace at my christening in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, more fashionable than the cathedral, though I cannot say I took much note of the lace at such a tender age. My father had acquired a French representative, a man whose opinion he valued and whose friendship he wished to keep. So when it came to the christening of the first Anstruther daughter, my father asked his French friend’s wife to stand godmother to his child, and, as her family were Huguenots who had clung to their faith through many centuries of persecution, there were no religious objections. Madame presented me with the gown of French lace. I was named after my grandmother, that is, my father’s mother, but my name was spelt in the French way, Elisabeth, and I was given the second name of Madeleine because it was the name of my French godmother.

  Madame Madeleine, as I called her, was genuinely fond of her protégée, although the relationship had originally been dictated by the men of the two families concerned in order to make secure their business ties. I spent many summers in France, in Bordeaux, at the home of Madame Madeleine, and in their country château, and I learned to speak the language well. And I learned also one or two things about garments that English women do not know — that it is better to have as fine a quality of material as possible, even if the dress is of the simplest, and that it must be cut and sewn perfectly, no matter how ordinary the occasion when it is worn. These are matters that in England are understood only by your gentlemen’s tailors, for English women are all frills and furbelows — with nothing of what Madame Madeleine would have considered style at all!

  However, my lord, I am digressing from this history, with which I venture to trouble you. I learned a few things which have enabled me to earn my living, that is what I chiefly wish to say. As well as French, I picked up a fair amount of geography, for my father had a globe which he would turn to point out the places that the wine merchants spoke of. Angoulême, Rheims, and further afield, Lisbon, Jamaica, Madeira, the Bay of Biscay. Monemvasia, where Malmsey wine came from. Ratafia, the sweet wine we sipped with tiny macaroon biscuits.

  So I have the accomplishments of a lady, and a few more besides. Gradually, we spent more and more time in France. My mother had rheumatism (sometimes as the mists crept up the Avon, and she sat in her boudoir in the Bristol house, the pain of her aching joints creasing her pretty face, I thought of my poor little marmoset) and she felt the climate in France was better for her. My brothers loved the riding and hunting in the great forests that were stocked with boar and deer. Our family eventually rented a house in France and spent most of the year there, though when the boys were of school age they were sent to study in England, and my father had to make frequent visits to Bristol for business reasons.

  There was a tendency, one which is always apparent in any group of exiles, for the little community of English families in the Bordeaux district to cohere, clinging together as if to form a mutual defence against the outside world. And of this community my own family formed a respected though occasional part. They were invited to the dinners, to the hare-coursing, to the balls and the sketching parties that made up the amusements of their fellow countrymen.

  And out of this arose that folly which entrapped me, a madness which seized me and which I have regretted ever since. That madness is the reason for my appearance here, stranded in the English countryside, in the home of the Crawshays. But it has nothing to do with the matter immediately in hand, which is the murder of the Crawshays, father and son, and I will spare you the story of a very foolish young woman. Sufficient to say that old Crawshay found me in a desperate situation; I had little choice but to accept his offer, to go as governess to his grandson. He believed I was quite alone, that I had no family living. In a sense, that was true.

  Just as, in a way, the rumours of the country folk, that Crawshay bought me at the fair, these are true also, for I had no choice but to go with him, if I was not to starve. I sold myself into servitude for food and a roof over my head.

  Edmund and Marie Crawshay asked no awkward questions. Picture the scene. The old man has been away at the fair. They know his caprice, what a drunkard he is, how he will indulge any whim when he wants to, if he wants to. He has announced he will get some respectable servant who can read and write to help Marie in the house. Marie will teach the boy his manners and his letters, until he is of age to go away to school.

  This was already discussed and decided between them, as little Edmund grew out of the baby stage of existence.

  “I must have a servant,” she told him. “I cannot do all the work here and teach the child at the same time. He is beginning to run wild like a little savage and it is not right that he should learn nothing.”

  “I’ll have no servants living in the house here! They’re nothing but a pack of thieves and troublemakers — servants, indeed!” said Crawshay, as she had known he would.

  “He is your grandson!” Marie riposted. “How is he to be brought up? Like the calves and piglets, I suppose. Like an animal!”

  Crawshay would have been holding a glass of brandy in his hand. His dirty boots, stinking of the farmyard midden, staying quarrelsome on his feet until he fell, stupefied, over his bed.

  “The child’s well enough!” he growled.

  “He can’t grow up like this. You know that well enough. He’s entitled to something.”

  Crawshay damned the expense, and he damned the nuisance, but he must have known that Marie was right. Somewhere in his malicious old brain, he knew that he could not let his grandson fall into the condition of an illiterate labourer. As Marie had calculated, the old man still possessed some vestiges of family pride. Some schooling the boy must have, some traces of education. The remains of the gentleman’s schooling he had received still hung around Crawshay himself like a ghostly coat of tattered velvet, dirty and dissolute as he was. The boy was his own flesh and blood and entitled to take his place in the world. The Crawshays might be mere farmers, but still
, they were masters of servants, not servile themselves.

  Marie’s victory was not total. Crawshay made one condition and she had to give way to it.

  “I’ll pick her myself. I’ll have no servant under my roof who’s not of my own choosing.”

  He chose me.

  CHAPTER 13

  My lord, I ask you to do as I have done, and to picture the scene in the farmhouse just before my arrival. What will the old man bring home? Will he have hired some draggle-tailed maidservant, dirty and drunk as her master? Will he have closed at a shrewd price for the Crawshay cattle and then squandered it with the women in the barn behind the Badger’s Head the lowest drinking den in Callerton, which was old Crawshay’s preferred venue of celebration?

  At last, Edmund and Marie Crawshay hear the sound of the pony and trap. The stable door creaks as the old mare is shut in for the night. Then comes the light of the lantern crossing the yard. The parlour door opens, and Crawshay pushes me into the room, where I am blinking in the lamplight, and Edmund and Marie can scarce believe their eyes. Crawshay cackles.

  “I found you a governess. A proper governess.”

  He is delighted with himself, in high good humour, pleased with his amazing nose for a bargain, with his capacity to astonish his family. Marie has never seen him in such good spirits.

  It was too late at night for questions. I was given the room intended for a maid, with a high and narrow little iron bed, a pitcher, a washstand and a hook behind the door for hanging my dress. Nothing more had been considered necessary. Later, the old man told Marie to give me one of the principal bedrooms. It annoyed her, as he no doubt intended it should.

  Old Crawshay would only laugh when people tried to find out how he had come by his “bargain governess.” That was a secret between him and me, and, astonishingly, it remained a secret. He kept silent, not out of any respect or sensitivity towards my feelings, but because he loved to tease and puzzle, and the whole thing gave him a new lease on life, keeping people guessing. And so they created their own story about me, the tale that he had actually bought me at the fair. In a way, it is true; I had to sell my labour, like any servant, for food on my plate and a roof over my head. I went with Crawshay because there was nowhere else to go, just as if he had indeed bought me. Where there is no choice but to starve, is there any choice at all? That was my opinion then, and that was why I agreed to go with the old man to this remote farmhouse in a district where I knew not a single soul, and I beg you, my lord, not to think too badly of my motives.

  As for Edmund and Marie, I do not think they really cared where the governess had come from, and indeed, my lord, I do assure you it has nothing to do with the terrible events which have occurred at the farm. My past life is my past life, and let us say no more about it.

  Sufficient to say, I stayed. And I witnessed the comings and goings of the gypsies — of the man who now lies in the dungeons deep underground beneath your mansion of Malfine.

  I did not understand why the gypsy and his woman were allowed by Crawshay to draw their caravan, pulled by a horse with ribs sticking out like the staves of a broken barrel, into one of his fields. I would have expected him to drive off the newcomers with blows and curses. But I did not know then the old man’s terrible perversity of temperament. The gypsies were allowed to stay on his land, not through any touch of kindness in the old man’s breast, but because they irritated his neighbours out of their skins. They were, I suspect, in the same position as I found myself at the farm: favoured by Crawshay in order to annoy others. The gypsies thieved from the village? So much the better, so long as they did not thieve from Crawshay’s farm (and they did not — as far as I know, they never took so much as a straw from their benefactor). They poached from the squire? All to the good, as far as Crawshay was concerned — as long as they did not snare a single rabbit on Crawshay land. The villagers might complain, the gentry fume — the more they did so, the better Crawshay liked his unorthodox tenants.

  The man from the gypsy caravan was given work in the fields during the harvest. He began to call at the farmhouse every day, as the light faded and the farm hands left the fields.

  I watched Marie in her kitchen the first day the gypsy came. He stopped and looked at her through the doorway, hesitating like a dog on the threshold. He was covered in a fine dust; sweat still stood on his head and neck and there was an earthy smell that drifted in with him, not unpleasant, somehow, not a dirty smell at all, just — animal.

  “Are you thirsty?” asked Marie, and he nodded. She went to the pump over the stone sink, but then Crawshay came in and saw what she was doing.

  “Give him milk,” he said.

  So Marie fetched the pitcher. The gypsy drank, tipping his head right back and pouring the milk into his throat, like a white stream. And every day after that he would stop at the kitchen door and Marie gave him a pitcher of milk or cider. She always watched him while he drank; when he had finished he wiped his mouth delicately.

  I do not know why old Crawshay favoured him in this particular way: there was some game he was playing with the gypsy and Marie, I have no doubt of it. All this summer, the farmhouse was a house filled with watchers: Marie looking at the gypsy as he tipped the pitcher to his lips and drank, and Crawshay watching the both of them from the passage door, as if he had some purpose of his own, as if they were flies already caught and struggling in a web.

  But perhaps they resisted his toils, perhaps they were not puppets after all, Marie, Edmund, the gypsy. I believe that I, too, was at one time one of his puppets, and that he desired to make me dance to his tune. It would be true to say, my lord, that we all hated him; we would all, Edmund, Marie, myself, have cheerfully seen him dead; any of us might have killed him. And not only at the farm — I’m sure there were many in these parts who had cause to hate the old man, for he was a violent and contemptuous creature, forever making enemies, there’s no doubt about it. But as for poor harmless Edmund, why, I know that I myself did not kill him, and I cannot think why Marie should have become the murderess of her devoted husband, nor of anyone else who ever bore a grudge against him, so that lends colour to the villagers’ supposition that they, Edmund and his father, were indeed done to death by the gypsy.

  Nevertheless, I observed the pattern of life at Crawshay’s this last month, during the harvest. So you see, what I wish to say is this — that I do not believe the gypsy would have killed old Crawshay. Why should he? Crawshay was his only benefactor. No one else in the district would even have allowed him to settle his caravan on their land. They say the man killed the Crawshays, both of them, in order to steal the watch and a few guineas from the old man — but, as I say, in their dealings with Crawshays, the gypsy and his wife never touched a thing that was not freely given to them.

  So when I returned to the farm yesterday after I had been to the town of Callerton, and heard Marie screaming in the house as the pony and cart entered the yard, it did not cross my mind that the gypsy had been involved in anything.

  I could not make out what Marie was saying at first — something about the pistols and the old man. I ran into the house and saw them there, slumped around the table, the blood pouring out.

  It was an appalling sight. There was blood and brains spattered all round them, and splinters of bone and teeth near Edmund, whose jaw was almost carried away by a bullet. I saw immediately that Edmund could have no life left in him. But I could not believe the old man was dead — it was as if a monster had been slain there, in an English farmhouse. I was still wary of him, you see, as if I feared he might come to life at any moment, might spring up and laugh or yell at me. But I forced myself to go around the table. He did not move: I crept closer till I was beside him. His head was hanging down: after a few minutes, seeing there was no movement at all, I touched the side of his cheek. Still no movement. Then I bent towards him and raised his head up and I saw then the terrible wound in his throat and the blood gushing all down his breast. Somehow, his head flopped towards me a
nd I stumbled and fell over towards him — it was at that moment, as I struggled to regain my balance, that I got a great smear of the old man’s blood across the front of my gown. I saw you observing that, my lord, when you came to Crawshay’s yesterday, for one need be with you only two or three minutes to know your eyes are as sharp as a bird of prey — you are like a hawk on a perch as you sit in a room and look at a person.

  There was something more — something that horrified me and made me panic and run out of the room, for my hair became entangled with him, with the buttons on his jacket I think, and he seemed to be pulling me down towards him, dead and bleeding as he was.

  I tore myself away from him, my hair coming down as I did so, and I felt the pain as some strands that had caught up were torn out as I pulled away, but I cared not, for my only thought was to get away from that dreadful hold that the old creature seemed to have even in death. I ran out into the yard, where the mare still stood, and drove to the village as if the hounds of hell were behind me. I roused them to the alert, and those that were not at work in the fields came back to the farm with me; by then, Marie had calmed a little for she had taken some laudanum and it had a quietening effect upon her. She told her story to the men who came with me, and they were vehemently roused up and determined the gypsy was guilty. Some of them set off towards the clearing where his caravan is encamped, to find him, as I understand, with a bundle of linen containing those things taken from old Crawshay’s body, which was interpreted as certain proof of his guilt. And then I watched from a window as they dragged him to the cart, and was horrified when I divined their purpose in tying him to the wheel. Marie would not watch. She said she cared not what they did, she must look after her child, and she sat with little Edmund, shielding him from the sounds that were coming from the yard where they had the cart set up.