The Coroner's Daughter

by Andrew Hughes

  I lit a candle from the embers, and left the room. Down below, there were no lights in the dining room, no sign of Miss Pike. She had probably retired for the evening. I followed the narrow passages that led to the equatorial room. The light from my candle was lost in the curve of the spiral staircase, and I could only see a few steps at a time. At the top, the door to Professor Reeves’s workroom stood open. I knocked but there was no answer. A low fire burned in the hearth, but there was no other light, and all I could hear was the rain resounding in the dome overhead. Through the four compass-point windows I could see the lines of the landscape in the last of the gloaming. From here, the professor could look down upon the foothills of Dublin and the roads leading to Saggart, and on the other side the dark Wicklow mountains huddled beneath the clouds. On a desk near the fireplace, a wooden box sat on the leather inlay. I brought the candle close and saw a brass plaque on the lid: ‘Givens Gunsmiths’. Inside, the box was empty. From the size and contours of the red baize mounts, it had held two pistols. Both were missing. Reeves had said that he kept one in the armrest of his coach, but I remembered the two pistols lying on the muddy carriage floor: one of them Reeves’s, the other retrieved from Devlin’s body. Both looked exactly the same.

  I went downstairs again, and turned into the passage that led away from the living quarters, to the arched door with the callipers engraved in the capstone. At the gathering, I had thought the room belonged to James Caulfeild, but I believed Miss Pike when she said that he never stayed at the observatory. No hint of light came from the keyhole, so I pushed the door open without knocking.

  Cold cinders lay in the hearth, and a fire-iron leaned against the black metal hood. The cloth that had covered the birdcage lay in a heap on the floor, and the canary sat on its perch, barely moving. In the corner, the bed was unmade, its sheets in a tangle, and the pillowcase stained yellow. Someone had stayed here recently. Not the housekeeper or any other maid. It was a man’s room, perhaps the professor’s coachman, but the bookcases by the wall and paraphernalia on the desk made me doubt that. I looked in one of the wardrobes. A few jackets were hanging from a pole, their fabrics faded and rumpled and a few years out of date – clothes that James would never wear.

  I opened a drawer in the desk: just a pile of papers and a magnifying glass. Near the top, I saw the sheet with the odd message repeated: In this Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. It was not Mr Caulfeild’s handwriting as I had assumed before, but rather an attempt to mimic it. The drawer beneath held the trappings of a clockmaker: tiny screws and gears that rattled in their cubbies, fine tools and tweezers. In the third drawer, I could see little except the head of a flower. It was thick and solid, and I held it against the light. Folds of brown leather had been sewn together to make a rosette, exactly like the one that had been missing from Edith’s shoe. I looked at the bed again. This was where her killer lived.

  The canary opened its wings and flitted about the cage, and I turned around. Professor Reeves was standing in the doorway. How long he had been there I couldn’t tell. The light from my candle barely reached him, and his face looked pale against his dark suit. I backed further into the room. It was narrow and cluttered, and my leg touched the corner of the bed. His eyes drifted across the fireplace, the wardrobe and desk, and finally he fixed on the rosette in my hand.

  He didn’t say a word as he stepped into the room, a pistol held low by his side. At first he moved towards me, but he stopped at the desk, brushing the top with his fingertips as if checking for dust.

  ‘You knew, professor,’ I said. ‘You knew that he was here all along.’ Others had been speaking to me about Devlin, I just hadn’t realized: the protégé, the reckless young man expelled from Trinity and taken in at the observatory. ‘Your former assistant never left you.’

  He glanced at me briefly, and then nudged some of the papers with the muzzle of his gun. The hammer was already drawn back, and the metal sounded heavy as it scraped over the wood.

  ‘What about James Caulfeild?’

  Reeves found a sheet of scrawled mathematical equations, and he scrutinized it for a few seconds before setting it aside. He spoke quietly, as if to himself. ‘That idler and dilettante? He was only here as a favour to his father. Though we found a use for him in the end.’

  I looked at the rosette in my palm. Edith thought she was meeting James that night, I was sure of it. She had rejected Darby, and would not have risked all to leave her house for anyone else. But why did she think that James was waiting? ‘Devlin was the one that brought her messages, wasn’t he? Enough that Edith could sketch his eye from memory so perfectly. That was why he practised James’s handwriting. You tricked her, and on the night, she stepped into Mr Devlin’s carriage without a backward glance.’

  The professor smiled. Lines of shadow shifted about his face. ‘I had a feeling that you would comprehend.’

  I pictured Edith on that midnight journey, her face flushed with excitement and perhaps a little anxiety, her fingers clasped together, her hood raised. How her heart must have dropped when she realized that Devlin had deceived her, the fear and confusion, the terror when he turned on her, covered her mouth and brought her to the reservoir. She must have felt so helpless and degraded, so utterly alone.

  I did not speak, but as Professor Reeves regarded me, his smile faded. He said, ‘It was not an easy decision. We knew that for the most part Miss Gould was innocent.’

  ‘She was entirely innocent.’

  ‘She was a member of the Brethren.’

  ‘Only because of her parents.’

  ‘Come, Miss Lawless. She was free to choose her path in life, just as you have chosen yours.’

  ‘That is not the case.’ Perhaps a young man had leeway to defy his parents; a young woman had none. Edith believed that she was forsaking all she had ever known by stepping into that carriage. ‘And what of Miss Casey? She did not choose to be deserted and cast out.’

  ‘I agree entirely,’ Reeves said. ‘I only wished to expose her mistreatment.’

  ‘By having her killed?’

  His brow creased in irritation. ‘She was due to hang anyway. Why not make her death count for something? I was naive enough to think the scandal might splinter their congregation.’ He passed the pistol from one hand to the other, as if bothered by its weight, and he pointed it at me briefly. ‘It was your father who helped conceal her murder, under some duress perhaps. And yet you claimed that we had no need to fear the Brethren’s influence.’

  He inserted a finger in his fob pocket, and rummaged about as if scratching an itch. He withdrew Devlin’s glass eye and tossed it on the table. It landed with a clack, and rolled on to its flat side so the iris stared at the ceiling. I patted my own empty pocket. Miss Pike must have found it when cleaning my dress.

  ‘He arrived back here last night, drenched and angry. It was the one thing he said about you, Miss Lawless: you could always be found in places that you were not supposed to be.’ Reeves opened his arms to gesture at the room, as if to say the same was true again. ‘Something had to be done, he said. You could not be reasoned with. He kept pushing the idea of the carriage accident again and again. But I told him. I said your contempt for Darby and the Brethren might rival our own, that you could be convinced to remain silent for the sake of the city, for the sake of progress.’

  ‘It appears that he was not persuaded.’

  ‘When Devlin set his mind on something, I could do little to stop him. But I knew this time he was wrong. Why had we gone to all this trouble to rid ourselves of the Brethren if not for people like you, Miss Lawless?’

  He looked at the gun in his hand, and reached towards the hammer, I thought at first to ease it down, but all he did was ensure that it was cocked fully.

  ‘I could not rest,’ he said. ‘I went out hoping that it wasn’t too late. I found the branch on the roadside, the muddy carriage tracks. Then the gunshot rang out, and there you were, struggling at the edge of the gorge. I ha
d to choose. Devlin had been loyal and ever willing, but with Darby dead, he had served his purpose.’ He regarded me critically. ‘I hope that I shall not regret my decision.’

  Wax dripped down the side of my candle and ran over my thumb. I felt a slight sting before it cooled and congealed. The candle was the only light in the room, and Reeves would only have one shot. If he missed, the pistol would be an encumbrance more than anything. He would have to miss, though.

  ‘What do you wish from me? A promise that I will remain silent?’

  ‘More than that. You can promise anything now; but what about when you and Mr Weir are home and safe in the parlour with your father? You cannot merely humour me. You must believe that what I did was right.’

  I held his eye. He did not waver or look away, and seemed entirely in earnest.

  ‘And how would you test my faith?’

  ‘I suppose that is the dilemma.’

  A gust rattled in the chimney-box, and some of the cinders shifted. The canary took flight in its cage once more, its wings fluttering against the wire. I gripped the rosette from Edith’s shoe, squeezing it in my hand.

  He said, ‘Well?’

  ‘You are not rational, Professor Reeves.’

  He blinked once. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You are wicked. Your reasoning has made you callous and deceitful. You are worse than any Brethren member, certainly more dangerous. Did you really expect me to remain silent about what you have done? Whatever happens here, you will be found out. You will be captured and punished. It would have been better for you to leave me on the road, for I will not help you now.’

  The professor stood still as he listened. He didn’t sigh or twitch his hands. When I was finished, he began to nod.

  ‘Do you know the most important difference between men and women of science, Miss Lawless, and men and women of faith?’

  He raised the pistol, and levelled it at my head.

  ‘A man of science can admit when he has blundered.’

  I crouched down and threw the candle. The flame dragged and guttered in the air, and Reeves used his pistol to bat it against the wall. The candle was extinguished, except for the red glow of the wick, and the room was plunged into darkness. Reeves didn’t fire, and I was reluctant to barge past, for he couldn’t fail to hit me at such close quarters. I could not discern his outline, and since he had been watching me hold the candle, I hoped his vision was even worse. There was no sound of footsteps. He was not marching through the room to seek me out, so I stayed perfectly still, afraid that any noise might draw his fire. A pillow jutted over the edge of the bed. I picked it up and tossed it against the opposite wall. It landed and tumbled with soft thuds, but Reeves did not react.

  ‘Do you think that you have left the world a better place than you found it, Miss Lawless?’ he said. ‘In the end, is that all one can hope for?’

  His voice had not come from where I expected. It seemed closer to the door, as if he planned to cut off any escape.

  ‘Do you remember when we spoke of the age of the earth? Those aeons of time that existed before you were born? You are certain they were real, aren’t you? Even though you have no sense of them, no memory or experience.’ I heard the floorboards creak, and I slid towards the bottom of the bed. ‘What is there to fear, then, if that oblivion is all that awaits you?’

  I felt beneath the bed for anything. A slat of wood, even a chamber pot.

  ‘I can see the outline of the window,’ he said. ‘And the corner of the bed. But do not worry about the darkness, Abigail. I cannot miss from here.’

  The muzzle flash lit the room for a quarter-second, and a pale image hung in the blackness like the projection of a camera obscura. The professor was closer than I imagined. He loomed above me with his elbow bent and his eyes scrunched shut, the gun pointed at his own temple. I covered my face and turned my head, but still saw his white grimace against my eyelids. The sound of the gunshot was followed by his collapse, and the clatter of the pistol on the floorboards.

  17

  The workman in Rutland Park let down the handles of his barrow, wiped his brow, and lifted his face towards the sun. He went from tree to tree, picking out lamps made of hooped wood and coloured paper, and hanging them from the lowest branches. Above him, the dry, lingering mist had been scattered into twirling trails of pink and lilac, as if dispersed by a great wind, and people basked in the first days of an Indian summer. Clarissa entered by the eastern gate, and came to join me on the bench. She wore a muslin gown of light yellow, the sleeves rather short, and the neck low cut.

  When she sat beside me, I said, Are you not a little chilly?’ Though the day was bright, it was mid-September, and still quite cool.

  ‘I have been waiting to wear this dress since the start of summer, and may not get another chance,’ she said. ‘I am determined to be warm.’

  She suggested that we stroll around the park, and held my arm a little tighter than usual.

  ‘Where is Mr Weir today?’ she said.

  ‘He is at home packing. His ship leaves for Liverpool this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh dear. Shall you miss him terribly?’

  ‘Hush,’ I said, pushing my elbow against hers.

  An elderly couple passed us by. We skirted the shrubbery to make room on the path. The gentleman doffed his hat to us with a smile, but his wife fixed on me with narrow eyes and pulled on his arm in reproach. He replaced his hat, unsure of his transgression, and they carried on. Clarissa made certain to meet the woman’s gaze with her shoulders straight and chin held high. Once they had gone a few steps, she leaned towards me, and said, ‘You have scandalized the whole city, Abby. It is quite delicious.’

  Weeks had passed since Ewan and I returned from the observatory. We had recovered fully, and Father and I had moved through stages of relief and recrimination, tears and contrition, embraces and assurances. On the night that Reeves died, I had stayed with Ewan until morning, waiting for the magistrate to arrive. We had feared that Miss Pike or the coachman might have turned against us, but they were both in shock, and we had travelled back to Dublin the following day. The Wicklow coroner and I became well acquainted. I was summoned to three inquests in quick succession, with much of my testimony printed in the Dublin papers, and at home Clarissa had pestered me for every grisly detail.

  We turned through a copse of trees and out into the central lawns. Children played in the sun, boys in their shirtsleeves and girls making the hems of their petticoats grubby. More workmen could be seen here and there painting railings, or festooning branches. The Sunday Evening Promenade had been reinstated, and everyone was anxious to take advantage of the change in weather. Clarissa in particular. It was pleasant to hear her talk of small things, of dressmakers and hairdressers and the intrigues of her companions. As we walked, a toddler crossed the path before us, the strings of her bonnet undone, and some gravel clutched in her hands. It was young Lucia Nesham, and I watched her move towards a bench where the maid Martha was sitting with her mistress. Darby’s sister-in-law was no longer dressed in the garb of the Brethren. She wore an olive green walking-gown, the cuffs and neckline trimmed with white lace. Lucia dropped the gravel into a small pile that she was making, and turned about to fetch some more.

  I asked Clarissa to wait, and I went to stand before them. Martha saw my approach, but Mrs Nesham only lifted her head when my shadow fell across the bench. She looked up at me, raising her hand to shield her eyes.

  I said, ‘May I speak with you?’

  She told Martha to check on Lucia, and I took the maid’s seat. I had forgotten how young Mrs Nesham was, only a few years older than Clarissa and me. The austere cloaks had made her appear older.

  ‘I am sorry for what happened to Mr Darby,’ I said.

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘How have his followers taken the news?’

  She ran her finger along the wrought-iron armrest. ‘They no longer meet in my house, so I am not sure what they intend to do. Mr Nesham
and I may return to Reverend Egan’s congregation.’

  ‘I am sure he would be glad.’

  She noticed Clarissa standing on the path and watched her for a moment. A young boy had offered her a flower, and Clara bent down to cup his cheek.

  ‘I never saw the house in which my sister lived,’ Mrs Nesham said.

  That was all, but I assumed she wanted to know my impressions of it.

  ‘It was rather remote and run-down,’ I said.

  She pursed her lips and looked away.

  ‘But only when I saw it. I am sure that it was once a cosy home.’

  ‘Was there a garden?’

  ‘Yes. Quite wild now. It overlooked a valley in the mountains. Actually, it was rather beautiful.’

  A lock of dark hair came loose beneath her bonnet, and fell across her eyes. It fluttered gently in the breeze.

  ‘How did you know Mr Devlin?’ I said.

  Her head remained still, and she slowly blinked. ‘Only as an imposter in the church.’

  ‘When Mr Darby asked Devlin who had sent him to Manor Kilbride, he said an odd thing. He said, “Catherine Shaw sent me, and Emilie, and Edith.” Why do you think that he would mention your sister’s name?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Then Darby wanted to know how I had tracked him down. He said, “Only my sister-in-law knows I’m here. And you would be the last person she would tell.”’

  She pushed the strand of hair beneath her bonnet. ‘Yes, he told me where he intended to hide. What of it?’

  ‘Did you tell Devlin?’

  She took a long breath, as if about to speak, but then remained silent.

  ‘But what I wonder most of all,’ I said, ‘is how Devlin got hold of the hook that he placed in Edith’s hand? How was it removed from Mr Darby’s coat, and another sewn in its place without his knowledge? Only someone in your household could have arranged that.’