Crowther looked to where she indicated. A handsome, long-faced man in ermine was shown ignoring the angel and his flaming sword just above him. While piously lifting his hands to the Christ Child, Lord Thornleigh was also glancing backward toward the torments of the damned, if not with pleasure, then at least with complacency. The impression it made on Crowther was unpleasant.
At that moment, the maid obviously felt they had paused long enough.
“This way, madam.” As they followed her up the stairs, Crowther idly counted the liveried footmen standing to attention among the more valuable artworks they passed, but grew bored after reaching five and quickened his pace to keep up with the ladies.
The drawing room into which they were shown was an assault on the eye such that Crowther was afraid it might permanently damage his sight. The room was gold—exclusively, overpoweringly. The wallpaper was of golden fleurs-de-lis embossed in velvet on a paler background; the curtains were looped and spun with heavy golden brocade; each chairback, carved into a profusion of cherubs, clouds and cornucopia, was gold; the portraits on the walls were lapped with heavy golden frames; the mantelpiece over the empty grate was studded with gold trinkets, with, in its center, a clock perhaps two feet high where robust golden shepherds and shepherdesses on golden hills prepared to ring the quarters on golden bells with little golden hammers.
The woman in the room stood among all this splendor like a single lily on a gem-encrusted altar. She was about Harriet’s age and a little taller. When they entered, she was leaning among the curtains by one of the long windows that gave out over the front of the house. She turned as the maid announced them and looked at them for a long moment without speaking. Now this, Crowther thought to himself, is beauty.
Lady Thornleigh was dark haired, with wide eyes and a full mouth, and the outline of her body, showing under the tight formal lacings of her gown, suggested a form to be worshipped. She was the model every artist would want for the Magdalene. A sensuality flowed from her that overpowered even the stench of gold.
Crowther felt his mouth become a little dry, and wondered if Lady Thornleigh always greeted her visitors standing, and began each visit with this moment of silence, so they could admire and adjust to her presence among them.
“What an age you’ve been coming upstairs, Mrs. Westerman. I am sure I saw you step out of your carriage ten minutes ago.”
Harriet moved forward into the room. “We could not help pausing to let Mr. Crowther see the paintings, my lady.”
“Ugh!” Lady Thornleigh gave a shudder. “Horrid things, all that blood one has to see going downstairs every day. I wished for them to be taken down, but my son, Hugh, will have none of it. He calls it our heritage. Some heritage—I would prefer something rather more cheerful. I take my coffee in the upper salon now so I can avoid seeing them before breakfast.” She turned to look at Crowther. Her fine eyes ran him over and he felt as naked and helpless as a punished child.
“Lady Thornleigh, may I present Mr. Gabriel Crowther?” Harriet said. “He has been living in the Laraby House in the village.”
Crowther bowed, and Lady Thornleigh offered him a slight curtsy. Her movements were perfectly graceful, yet made with the minimum of effort. Crowther remembered her former profession was as a dancer. He wished he could have seen her perform.
“Yes, I recognize you. We sent our compliments when you arrived in the village.”
“I have been a slave to my studies, Lady Thornleigh.”
She looked at him again for a long moment, her smile mocking. The word “slave” seemed to please her. She broke the moment with a sweep of her skirts.
“Well, let us sit down then. Miss Trench, always a pleasure, I’m sure.”
When Lady Thornleigh bothered with the ordinary civilities, she did so with such ill-disguised boredom, Crowther almost laughed. As they sat she leaned back her beautiful head and shouted for her footman at the same volume as a street seller advertises her mackerel.
“Duncan!” The gold door opened again and a footman leaned in his elaborately powdered and wigged head.
“Tea.” The head nodded and withdrew. Lady Thornleigh stared at them again for a moment. “Mr. Crowther, do you like my drawing room? The earl had it done for me by way of compliment when we married. He said it suited me. I took it as a great kindness before, but now I wonder if he was being funny.”
She yawned a little behind her hand. All Crowther could think of was a cat. The nature of the smile that hung on her red lips made him hope he was never the bird she chose for sport. He bowed a little. Harriet settled her skirts.
“I hope Lord Thornleigh continues comfortably, my lady?”
My lady leaned back her head to admire the golden ceiling as she replied, “Oh, just the same. It is so dull—one marries a man for his wits then he loses them.” She looked at each of them in turn with a slow blink. “He was entertaining company before I married him, you know. He always had the cleverest things to say about his friends and neighbors. What a shame he never met the ladies of Caveley Park before he fell ill.” Lady Thornleigh let this thought sit in the air a moment, then shifted her gaze toward Crowther. “We were in London at first, you know. He used to promenade with me in the London parks, and all the dowager duchesses would try to run away. He could make them be civil, of course. Everyone was frightened of him then. Now people just pity him.”
No one could think of a response to this. If Lady Thornleigh found the silence uncomfortable, she did not show it. She turned her focus to Rachel.
“Miss Trench, I must thank you for that preparation you sent us. It smells disgusting, you will admit, but the nurse tells me it has eased the inflammations Lord Thornleigh is prone to suffer on his skin.”
“During my father’s last illness, it gave him some relief,” Rachel said softly.
Harriet looked at her sister in surprise. Lady Thornleigh noticed it and tilted her head to one side, her eyes wide.
“Did you not know your sister has turned apothecary, Mrs. Westerman? You will hear soon enough how half of Hartswood is in love with her skin salves.” She turned back to Rachel and raised her hand to wag a finger at her. “Though you should charge a full shilling, dearie—it is a mistake to sell it for only sixpence. People value things according to what they have paid for them. Charge them the shilling and they will tell everyone it is a wonder, for who wants to look a fool spending money on nonsense?”
After this moment of relative animation, Lady Thornleigh sat back in her chair again, watching Harriet’s continuing surprise with real pleasure. She looked away again to examine the middle distance of the golden air.
“It is remarkable how little some people know about what is going on in their own house.” A hand lifted to her face and she bit her full lower lip a second, pulling on one dark ringlet. “And it is not even a very big house.”
Crowther coughed.
The rituals of serving tea followed. Crowther noticed Harriet seemed a little at a loss in the presence of the earl’s wife. Her introduction of the subject of the body in the woods seemed almost clumsy.
“Is it not strange, Lady Thornleigh, that Viscount Hardew’s ring was found on the corpse?”
Lady Thornleigh yawned. Even her hands were exceptionally well made, Crowther thought as she lifted one to her mouth before replying. It was always a matter of proportion; the length of the fingerbones compared with those webbing together to make the palm, the ratio of fat and muscle, and of course, the quality and properties of the skin.
“No doubt he found it in London, recognized the arms and was coming to the house to see if he could gain a reward from Hugh,” she said with a shrug. “It is what I would have done.”
Harriet frowned briefly, then struggled on.
“How strange, also, to have had no news of Viscount Hardew for so long, and now the ring. He left the house before we came to Caveley, I believe. I do not think I have ever heard the detail of the case.”
“Have you not? Well, I alway
s thought you above such a romance. I suppose we can pass the time telling the story again. It is almost funny when one considers it.”
Lady Thornleigh paused to reach for one of the dainty cakes provided with her tea, and nibbled at it with her small white teeth. It did not please her, so she replaced it with a little pout of disgust and picked up another from the plate to try instead. It was obviously an improvement as she kept it between her neat white fingers as she continued.
“Alexander fell in love with one of the family with which he was lodging. Some family in Chiswick with a funny name. Ah yes, Ariston-Grey. Sounds a trifle French to me. Musicians. A widowed father and his whelp. Alexander was mad for music, I am told. The old man died still fiddling away for his family’s entertainment, though I’m sure my husband paid him enough for keeping Alexander all those years, so he can have had no need to spin out tunes to entertain.”
“Perhaps he did it for the love of the music, Lady Thornleigh,” Rachel suggested.
“If you say so, Miss Trench.” Lady Thornleigh looked at her a little amazed. “I only ever had to do with music for my profession. No butcher slaughters animals for his own entertainment at the end of a day. Why should a fiddler play?” Rachel had no answer, so Lady Thornleigh continued. “The funny thing is, the lady turned out to be so terribly virtuous he could not have her without marrying her. My husband was fearfully angry. Thought Alexander a ridiculous fool and said if he couldn’t get a girl like that to be friendly without marriage, he was certainly not fit to run the estate, as he would be robbed at every turn. Alexander was a terribly upright sort, by all accounts, so before you could spit he was off out of the house and ready to marry the girl on the little scrap of money the fiddler left, and they’ve neither of them been heard of since.”
She ate a little more of the cake. “I say funny because of course Lord Thornleigh was thought to be a little daring to marry me, but I think it was Alexander’s priggishness and whining about the virtues of his intended that brought about the breach, more than the rather unequal nature of the match.”
She wiped the crumbs from her mouth and smiled her catlike smile. “We have so much money that the Thornleigh men could all marry paupers for five generations and it would still be all thoroughbred horses and ices in July.” Her dark eyes drifted over Rachel’s face. “That is, if they really wished to do so.”
The rest of the visit was nothing but awkward banalities, and an attempt to discuss the weather which made Lady Thornleigh yawn so widely Crowther was afraid she was in danger of dislocating her elegant jaw. Her remarks had been unpleasant enough that he expected Rachel and Harriet to be very angry when they left, but they were oddly forgiving. He was surprised by their generosity.
“No one would receive her in town, even when Lord Thornleigh was well, for all her talk of scaring duchesses,” Harriet said as the coach set off again.
Crowther remarked, “But why did she not make more friends when her husband became ill? I would have thought she still had an acquaintance wide enough after a year of marriage that would be eager to spend his money.”
Rachel turned toward them from the window and smoothed her skirts.
“She has very little money of her own, as a matter of fact. And she must be resident wherever Lord Thornleigh is, to receive anything at all. The articles of the marriage contract were very strict. When Lord Thornleigh dies she will be guardian of their little boy and have charge of his money, though not much is settled on him direct. He gets everything at the discretion of the new earl—Alexander, if he can be found. Hugh as well has only a little of his own. In her position, I think I would bundle up that horrible clock in a blanket and make a run for London, but she is probably too lazy.”
Rachel realized that both Crowther and Harriet were looking at her open-mouthed.
“Mr. Thornleigh told me,” she said, with an air of slight defiance. “And Harry, I did tell you I was making skin salves from Mama’s old recipes. You just weren’t listening.” She pouted a little. “You would have noticed when you did the accounts for the next quarter, for I have made four pounds, as it happens.”
Harriet was amazed.
“You have surprised your sister into silence, Miss Trench. An achievement, I think.”
Rachel met Crowther’s eye and smiled happily. He blinked his hooded eyes at her. “Now, if you are interested in inflammations of the skin, I have some books I can lend to you. Not usually reading I would recommend to females, but if you find it interesting ...”
Rachel looked very pleased. Crowther glanced out of the window for a moment, trying to avoid the cheerfulness in her smile defrosting his own bones too far into softness. He was just in time to see a figure standing under the great portico at the Hall. It was a man, slim, but as far as he could tell from this distance, well formed. It was not Hugh Thornleigh, nor did he have the look of a servant about him. His hair was dark. The man watched their carriage retreat without moving. There was a stillness in his posture that Crowther found oddly disquieting.
3
“Make way there for the lady, please. Oi, Joe, move yerself and get a chair for Mrs. Westerman, will you? I said, move yer arse, for the love of God! Pardon me, Mrs. Westerman.”
The body had been moved from Caveley’s stables to those of the inn during the course of the morning. The fifteen jurors, gathered up by the constable from the customers of the Bear and Crown the previous evening, had had an opportunity to tut over it and look narrowly into the dead man’s eyes, and now the jurors, coroner, witnesses and the curious lookers-on were squeezing into the low, rough room in the back of the Bear and Crown.
Michaels, the landlord, was always insisting he was on the point of presenting a series of musical concerts and private dances there, but Harriet suspected he found it too convenient for the storage of salted pork and potato sacks during the winter to do anything of the sort. However, the polite fiction that renowned musicians were about to take the day’s journey from London to entertain them was maintained throughout the neighborhood, as there was a general agreement that even the rumor enhanced the reputation of the area.
Michaels was a huge man who had started his life on the London streets, and through his love of horses, luck and a good head for business had found himself in his forties a man of property and owner of a flourishing business. No one knew his first name, or even if he had one; his children, his friends and even his wife never used any other form of address to him. He was to be found every morning among the hubbub of his household—to his own offspring were often added cousins and nephews who were thought to be in need of his generosity and rough love—reading the newspapers and drinking his small beer. It was said that he was often appealed to, to arbitrate disputes in the village, and had been consistently found to be fair and almost unnaturally incorruptible. Some of the villagers were worried that the squire would not approve of this circumventing of his own authority as local Justice, but Harriet had long believed that Bridges and Michaels had an understanding of their own.
She was glad of his assistance now as Michaels pushed his way through the crowd and set a chair for her near to the table around which the jury were gathered. A fair proportion of the local inhabitants were there, though the county gentry, it seemed, had thought the affair below them, or had not yet heard of it, Harriet thought, looking around her and thinking that the village shops must mostly be closed this afternoon through want of their usual staff, owners and customers. Crowther followed in her wake and took up a position behind her. There were a few murmurs in the crowd as he was recognized, but if he was expecting any hostility he was wrong to do so. A man he thought he might know as the father of his maid grumbled something at him, and he found he was being presented with a chair of his own and a not unfriendly nod.
He looked about him. On the opposite side of the room—it was arranged a little like a church with the jurors playing the bride, the coroner the groom, and the observers seated or standing the length of the space like family and frie
nds—he noticed Hugh. He was as usual looking somewhat dishevelled and uncomfortable. Crowther noticed he had so placed himself that most of the room would be hidden from him by the blindness in his right eye. On his left, leaning back a little in his chair, was the same lithe figure Crowther had spotted on the steps of Thornleigh Hall. His coloring was very dark and his features marked. He looked a little overdrawn, Crowther thought, to be regarded by most women as truly handsome. His cheekbones were a little too high, his chin rather too pronounced. Probably in his early thirties, so of an age with Mr. Thornleigh, though a great deal better preserved. He reminded him of the slightly satirical drawings of great male actors he had seen in the Illustrated News. Even for a man as controlled in his movements as Crowther, this figure next to Hugh appeared strangely still. Yet his thin lips were moving; he was speaking to his master, and by the bend of his neck, Crowther could see Hugh was listening.
Crowther gave his companion a look of inquiry. She caught his eye and nodded swiftly. So this was Claver Wicksteed. There was a gloss to him, as if he had been polished. Crowther wondered if his pupils were white in a fawn iris, as if constructed out of thin mother-of-pearl veneer and maple-wood. The man was prettily made, like a flashy piece of furniture for my lady’s chamber, but Crowther doubted the craftsmanship. Hugh’s face was set in a deep frown and he stared at the dusty floor to the side of his crossed ankles.
Crowther looked behind him and caught the cautious smile and nod of the squire, who was conversing with a couple of middle-aged men Crowther assumed to be farmers. Turning his eyes to the front again, he saw Joshua Cartwright standing unhappily by the window. He spoke to no one, and continuously picked at the lint on his sleeve till Crowther was afraid his cuffs would be bald by the end of the session.
The coroner looked about him, then stood and shushed the crowd. The appeal for quiet was picked up and carried to the rear doors, where it was reinforced with a growl from Michaels. The air was still: the coroner looked pleased with the effect.
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