by Jane Jakeman
“Yes, my lord, but … Miss Anstruther — is she not rather a strange person? Might she not be connected in some way with the events that have occurred hereabouts?”
I was silent for a minute. I did not want to take Belos into my confidence as yet — at least, not until I had confronted Elisabeth Anstruther with what I had discovered in France, and given her a chance to explain herself. Was I prejudiced against her because of her unusual eyes, those yellow eyes which, as she had learned in her childhood, sometimes caused mistrust? I am a rational man; I set my prejudices aside. Or so I like to believe.
“She must indeed have been in a very nervous state of mind when she left here, Belos, but it was entirely natural — after all, it was just after the bodies of the Crawshay men had been found. An excess of sensibility, some young ladies would call such a nervous condition, and quite understandable in the circumstances, was it not? After all, she had been through a most frightful experience. A woman who has just seen two murdered men lying in the dining room is hardly likely to be of the most cheerful disposition.”
“Yes, my lord. But still, I think somehow that she fears some discovery. I beg you to take care.”
In Greece, Belos had saved my life. He had acted instinctively then.
“Well, I give you my word on one thing, Belos. I’ll come to no harm — I assure you, I am in no danger. But this business of Tom’s disappearance — that does bother me, I confess. I doubt whether they’ve made a proper search there. I’ll call in at the village on my way to Crawshay’s and get them to organise a search party — at least, in so far as those clodhoppers can organise anything. And some of the Crawshay farm hands can come on the search as well. I’ll send you word if I need anyone from here. But I tell you one thing — they’ll find Tom, even if they have to crawl over every blade of grass on their hands and knees.”
I turned Zaraband away and rode towards the farm, preoccupied on the way with what I had learnt in my absence from Malfine. Elisabeth Anstruther, I knew now, had lied to me — or had not told me the full truth. She had concealed much in that document which had purported to be a frank account of what had happened since she had come to Crawshay’s. Oh, she had told the truth about the atmosphere at the farmhouse, I did not doubt that. And she had told the truth about the quantity of blood around the murder victims. But she had not told me the truth about herself.
But was it for a sinister purpose, or for some simple human reason, something that had no bearing on the murders, that she had kept things hidden from me?
I was intrigued by her, I confess it. I had not met a woman who puzzled me, not for many a long year.
It was almost dusk. The two women were in the parlour, the yellow light of an oil lamp casting sharp shadows over the low-ceilinged room. There was a deep tension between them — that much was obvious. The governess was turned away with her face to the window and Marie was staring at her as I entered the room, with such concentration that I think she scarcely noticed my entrance for a few moments. Then she swung towards me.
“My lord, it is so good of you to come! We are helpless here, the two of us, and Tom is still not to be found!”
She seemed much more composed than when I had seen her on the previous occasion, yet there was still a shrill note of tension underneath her speech. I saw the other woman turn towards me also, but the room was so gloomy that I could not make out her expression. She could not have guessed what my errand had been that had taken me away from Malfine for the last few days, nor in what way it had concerned her, yet I fancied there was something apprehensive in the way she greeted me with a few commonplace polite words. In this room, the most ordinary phrases seemed to take on underlying meanings, nods of the head seemed to indicate intensities only guessed at by an outsider. The governess’s slight curtsey in my direction seemed almost a challenge to politeness, rather than an accession to social convention, so stiffly did she hold her back upright as she bobbed down.
The child was sleeping on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket. As I entered, he awoke, and uttered a little cry, and the governess crossed the room in response and would have bent down to tend him, but Marie thrust her out of the way with a strength that I had not supposed her to possess.
“Don’t touch him!”
Elisabeth Anstruther started back as though she had been stung by some venomous creature.
I was surprised as to the hostility displayed by Marie towards Elisabeth, yet I had theories to account for it, not the least of which was that many entangled emotions lurked beneath the surface of the atmosphere in that dark farmhouse parlour.
The governess gave me a long look, I would have said a pleading look, with a kind of nakedness in it, and the moment beside the stream when she had put her hand on my shoulder came into my mind. I felt her long fingers again, as if they touched my flesh now, as if they burned, this very moment. Involuntarily, I looked down at her hand, and it was as if the movement broke a spell.
She turned, swept a curtsey with her silk skirt rustling in the silence, and left the room.
The child crossed to the window seat and began to play with a carved wooden horse. He seemed to have sunk into a world of his own and had barely noticed Elisabeth Anstruther’s movement out of the door of the room.
“You look hollow about the eyes, madam. Are you not sleeping well of nights?”
“I cannot sleep much,” Marie said, shortly.
“Would you not like a companion? Perhaps Miss Anstruther should share your room? That should provide companionship, a little society if you are wakeful at nights.”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I keep my own room — with my son.”
You lock your door and keep the governess out, thought I. Does instinct tell you to do that, Marie? Is it a natural inclination to protect your child? Or do you have some particular reason to be fearful?
Perhaps it was Marie’s imagination that kept her awake. A woman who has suffered as she had done must have some terrible fantasies, dreams that would horrify the strongest of minds.
I thought of the stinking corpses I had seen in the outhouse that stood a mere twenty yards away. Only a few flimsy walls between Marie and the bloody husks of her men. Until I had them taken away and laid elsewhere. What terrors might you have imagined, Marie, lying in your bed in this house?
Or do you share my knowledge? My new-found knowledge?
CHAPTER 16
Marie wore a fresh cotton gown, as she had done when I first saw her, clean and uncrumpled. As usual, a faint scent of lilac came from her.
“I called in at the village to make some arrangements, Mistress Crawshay.”
“No one has heard anything of Tom Granby for two days now. I have had the farm hands out looking for him, and sent word to his mother, but he has not returned home to her.”
“I have given orders for a search. Some men from the village will come and we will cover the ground everywhere. I am sure you will have done everything that was in your power, but there may be places that have been overlooked.”
“You fear something — something bad — has happened to him.”
I was touched by her awkward, almost homely, way of putting it. But was she as simple as she seemed, for all the lilac perfume and the country ways, the “something bad” said innocently like a child?
“You will have no objection to a thorough search, Mistress Crawshay? Of the house, as well as the grounds and the farmland?”
“No, indeed, sir, of course I have no objection. But is it really necessary, do you think? I have already made them look in every possible place … and why should the house be searched? He cannot be here … Of course, no harm — let us hope no harm — may have come to him at all. So why do we need to hunt for him as if he were a wounded bird? After all, he is a grown man, quite well able to take care of himself.”
“I assure you, Tom would not run away like a thief in the night.”
“Oh, no, my lord, I did not mean to imply any such thing.”
; But you did, Marie, I thought. You did.
That’s exactly what you were hinting at. That Tom had run off like a thief in the night. That he deserted his post. That he was wenching, or drinking country cider, or … I recalled the creature that the groom claimed to have seen from the upper window of Malfine during the previous night. No, that could not have been Tom; he had described a figure that was hobbling, limping, crippled in some way. I had my own theories as to that.
For the first time, a hint of dislike of Marie Crawshay entered my mind. Hitherto, I had merely been concerned for her safety. Now the feeling was more complex.
I continued aloud with the details of the search, as I had outlined them to the men in the village on my way to Crawshay’s.
“I have told off two men to each field, and they are to search the hedgerows and coverts. And the ditches. And the woods. Those will take some time, of course, but the job will be done thoroughly. In the meantime, you will allow me to look around the house?”
“But I have already had it searched from top to bottom, from attics to cellars, and there is no trace of the man here, I assure you.”
Perhaps she was subtler than I thought. She did not say anything that would directly discredit Tom. Perhaps a poisonous hint might come later: “Of course, there was a girl down in the village … I am afraid I have to tell you, my lord, that there is some silver missing along with Tom Granby … ”
Why did I distrust her, the innocent widow, and not the governess with the strange eyes, of whom I now knew something that should make me watch her like a hawk, watch for every turn in her face, every expression that flitted across those yellow-grey eyes?
Perhaps I had misjudged Marie, perhaps she was not one, after all, to blacken a man’s character when there was every chance that he might be as cold as the Crawshays in their coffins.
As we were talking, we had moved towards the window, and I could see her face clearly — a sweet and delicate face, open, one would say.
Looking out of the window now, Marie gave a start.
“I see there are men in the fields now, Lord Ambrose. Are they your searchers?”
I followed her gaze and saw two heads in the distance, bending onwards as they moved through a field of stooks and stubble.
“Are all your crops harvested, Mistress Crawshay? It will make matters much quicker if that is the case.”
“No, only the long field stretching away down here. It is the most sheltered of all our land. The crops here always ripen first.”
“Allow me to look about the house. I know you have searched already, but there may be some small thing overlooked that would perhaps tell us what has happened here. In the unharvested fields, the search will be long and tedious.”
“You may look where you will, my lord. I have nothing that needs to be hidden.”
I stepped out into the passage beyond the parlour door.
I had not previously explored the upper regions. Moving silently through the farmhouse, I thought I heard in the distance once or twice a child’s voice, and then it called or sang some scrap of tune, and was silent again. Otherwise the silence was heavy and complete, broken only by the sound of my footsteps on the oak treads of the stair, the dry old timber creaking from time to time as I ascended. The heat seemed stifling, trapped within the house, at the top of the stairs, where I paused on the landing. Like most old houses, this was a rabbit warren, gradually partitioned and added to over the centuries, each generation forgetting the purposes of the previous one, so that store rooms, passages, bedrooms wound in and out, and little flights of rickety stairs led up here and down there. The farmhouse was not large, was indeed a poky place, of no consequence compared with a mansion such as Malfine, but it was so old that it was an elaborate maze of little rooms and closets. Door after door I opened, and then looked in at dusty emptiness, at trackless clouds of fluff and little heaps of soft rot or sawdust across the bare timbers of a deserted floor, and pulled close shut again with a soft click.
I stumbled up one little flight of steps to find myself in an apple loft under the eaves, the sweet, musty smell filling the air. In a few rooms, sheets were spread over the old furniture; in one such I picked up dried sprays of lavender that crumbled into powder in my hand.
In these rooms thick motes of dust danced in the rays of sunlight. Old, innocent, undisturbed. Like my mother’s rooms at Malfine, shut up and silent. In fact, as the owner of Malfine, it might be said I was an expert, a connoisseur, of the empty room. I knew when there had been a recent presence, and when there had not.
Of the rooms that were still in use, old Crawshay’s was obvious enough: the master bedroom, full of great pieces of black furniture that must have been there for generations, that might have been placed there when the house was built, in the era of that splendid and black-toothed Queen Elizabeth. With a “z,” unlike Miss Anstruther’s “Elisabeth.”
I looked around old Crawshay’s place of repose — such repose as the ageing goat had enjoyed, and it was probably sound enough, for there had never been any sign that the old devil regretted any of his indulgences.
The black oak furniture was carved with Biblical scenes: an awkward half-naked Adam and Eve with bulky rustic fig leaves, a ship. There were figures in baggy hose and hooped skirts, trees with squat apples, serpents, fat dolphins that might do duty as whales. A huge carved oak bedstead. The curtains that had once hung round it had been taken down. Perhaps they were stored away in summer, perhaps they had simply fallen to bits and been dispensed with altogether. There was a big armchair in worn figured velvet brocade, the arms frayed and greasy, and on it lay a cushion of that old-fashioned embroidery our English maidservants had called stump-work, the little figures of some garden scene standing out, padded to raise them from the background, like some tiny creatures in a toy theatre. Their gilt trimmings had lost all their brightness and the greens and reds of the garden had all faded to the same shade of dusty brown.
It was a large room, yet the effect was cramped. I could not stand upright in it. Crawshay must have had to stoop also. He had been a tall man, probably of my own height.
There were candlesticks, a washstand, but nothing that spoke of the dead man. Nothing that might have been chosen by him, especially for use with his own living hands. There was a plain round shaving mirror, a long leather strop, brushes and accoutrements, including a cut-throat razor folded away and clean in its shagreen case, as I found when I took it out and examined it.
The dust seemed to thicken in my throat. With relief, I entered a little room next to old Crawshay’s. A plain little room, with bare boards, a hard truckle bed and a night table. This was where Tom had slept. He had not been given the master’s bed to sleep in, but an old servant’s room nearby, within call should he be needed. Not that there had been any master to call when Tom slept on his hard and narrow bed, for the owner of this domain had been silenced and the throat in which that voice had sounded was now rotting flesh.
On the table were a candle stub and a tinder box. I could see no candlestick, but there were drips of wax on the bedhead: perhaps Tom had stuck the candle to the bedpost, as was the dangerous old country habit. Everything here was plain, anonymous, speaking of nothing, open in the whitewashed room, holding no secrets. Behind the door was a shirt on a hook. Plain, undyed linen. The stitching fine for a countryman’s garment, with tiny white threads and rucks. Tom’s mother had sewn it with a skill fit for gentlemen’s linen, in spite of the coarse cloth which was all she could afford.
Tom might come back at any moment. His presence was strong, even in this bare cupboard that had served him for but a few days. He might walk into this room, tear off his shirt, throw his linen down on this horsehair mattress. Wash his big body here, stripped, sweating in the heat. Then reach for the clean shirt behind the door, pull it over his head. It was possible. Just possible. He might come back.
But I thought he would not.
I left the little room abruptly.
The other tw
o occupied rooms were very much as I might have expected, except that in Marie’s chamber there was no trace of her husband’s garments or male accoutrements, such as shaving tackle. It had all been cleared away already. Marie was evidently not a woman to make shrines to the dead.
In this room, there was a little cot next to the great feather bed in which Marie slept. A painted wooden horse lay under the cot. Perhaps a trifle babyish? I tried to recall my own childhood. What toys had I, and when?
I opened closet doors, upon sprigged summer dresses, pretty but not elaborate. There were empty spaces, where perhaps Edmund’s garments had lately hung. Had she packed her husband’s clothes away? There was a charming little closet of rosewood, lined with green silk. Empty — no, not quite. At the bottom lay a small box with a clasp, though the owner had not troubled to lock it. Inside was a small bottle filled with a dark fluid and with a rough parchment label tied round the neck. Laudanum.
It was concealed from immediate discovery, but not really hidden. There was no reason for it to be locked away; after all, the drug was perfectly legal, although the newspapers daily chronicled those who had put an end to their sufferings with it, and those who had become slaves to its addiction.
A trunk at the end of the bed, and here were Edmund Crawshay’s personal possessions, his shirts, breeches, a heavy cloak. Put away, the action of a careful housewife; put away, so soon after his death.
At the end of the passage was another room. I tapped on the door, and heard Elisabeth Anstruther’s voice, low and clear, bidding me enter. This was strikingly different from the other bedrooms in the farmhouse: I could feel it as soon as I opened the door. The governess had succeeded in imposing her personality on it in a remarkably short space of time. New curtains of floral prints hung at the windows and a spread of heavy lace covered the bed. There was a deep window seat and the window looked out over a panorama of fields to a distant clump of trees. It was a place to sit and breathe in the atmosphere of the English countryside, and that was exactly what the governess appeared to be doing, for she was gazing out over the landscape, turning her head towards me as I entered. I begged her forgiveness for disturbing her.