A Corpse in Shining Armour (17 page)

‘Went first thing yesterday. He told the landlord he’d be coming back as soon as he got another day off. He likes it here.’

‘Oh, he does, does he?’

I wondered what news Constable Bevan was carrying back to the coroner.

‘Ever such a nice man,’ Mrs Todd went on, unwinding the scarf that she’d worn like a turban over her hair. ‘He wanted to know
all about the village and the hall and Lady Brinkburn and so on.’

‘Polly says he spent a lot of time talking to Violet,’ Tabby put in, with a sideways glance at me.

Mrs Todd’s expression changed. She crammed the scarf violently into the pocket of her apron.

‘Goodness knows why he bothered talking to her. I suppose she was leading him on as usual.’

‘Leading him on?’ I said.

Mrs Todd looked at Tabby, as if questioning whether she could speak freely in front of me, and got a nod.

‘Anything in trousers. Now she’s lost one man–not that she had much of him in the first place–she’s looking round for
the next.’

Eventually she went away up the path, promising to be back in the morning.

‘Well, are we going to get the eggs?’ Tabby said.

‘Not before you’ve made a pot of tea. My throat’s parched.’

‘Polly says she saw you walking up to the hall. Have you been calling on the lady again?’

‘Yes. Go and fill the kettle.’

She fidgeted all through our lunch of bread and cheese and wasn’t happy until we were walking up the path to the village together.
She walked well, at a good swinging pace that matched my own, our skirts tucked up out of the dust. I had to remind her to
pull hers down again at the edge of the wood, or she’d have shown her lower legs to the world like the girls in the hayfield.

Violet was out in her front garden, a space of scuffed earth and vigorous weeds, mostly thistles and Good King Henry. Hens
scratched in the bare patches. She looked at me suspiciously, narrowing her eyes against the sun.

She was no more than five foot tall and thin as a stick of kindling, sharp cheekbones pushing at the skin of her pale face.
Hair that might have been an attractive chestnut brown when clean was scraped into an untidy knot at the nape of a neck that
hadn’t seen soap for a while. She wore a grey cotton dress, stained at bodice and shoulder, and the milky whiff of infant
clung round her. At the open door of the cottage a child of three years old or so crouched in the dirt, playing a game with
pebbles.

‘We want some eggs,’ Tabby told her.

Violet stayed where she was, still staring at me. I introduced myself, explaining that we were staying in the cottage by the
river. It seemed to take a while for the information to reach her brain.

‘There’s not many. They haven’t been laying on account of the heat,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t matter, just what you can let us have.’

She led the way along the side of the cottage, passing the child without looking at it, to a shed leaning unsteadily against
the back wall. Her bare feet were narrow and high arched, seeming more elegant than the rest of her. Inside the shed, five
eggs nestled on soiled straw in a cracked bowl.

‘They’ll do very well,’ I said. ‘But that won’t leave any for you.’

‘Don’t matter.’

I took a shilling from my pocket and laid it on the shelf beside the eggs. It was at least twice as much as they were worth.
I signed to Tabby to pick up the eggs. She looked at me.

‘We haven’t got nothing to put them in.’

I sighed, and produced another shilling.

‘Then we’ll have to buy the bowl as well.’

It wasn’t worth a halfpenny and yet, surprisingly, Violet hesitated.

‘It was a good bowl until it got cracked. It’s one he gave me.’

I moved it into the light from the cobwebbed window space. Under the grime it was fine porcelain, delicately patterned.

‘Mr Handy gave it to you?’

She nodded.

‘Could we talk about him, do you think?’ I said.

‘What’s he to you?’

‘I was there when they found his body.’

She said nothing, but flinched and drew in her breath as if I’d punched her in the stomach. I hadn’t intended brutality, but
her question was a fair one and didn’t deserve a lie.

‘I never knew him alive,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for what happened.’

‘He wasn’t a bad man,’ she said, as if begging a reprieve for his reputation, if not for him.

‘I’m sure he wasn’t.’

‘Is it true they stuffed him in a packing case and had him sent to London?’

‘I’m afraid it was. Who told you about it?’

I decided not to ask who ‘they’ were at this point.

‘Janet, she works up at the hall, in the kitchens. She came running down here, full of it, how Mr Whiteley had had to go up
to London in a hurry because of him being dead. She made sure I knew about it, little cow. “Well, thank you very much for
telling me,” I said. I wasn’t going to let her see me crying.’

But she was near to tears now.

‘Do you think we might sit down?’ I said.

She led the way through the back door, into a kitchen-cum-living room that took up the whole ground floor of the cottage.
A baby slept in a wooden cradle by the window, wrapped in a reasonably clean blanket. A heavy oak table took up most of the
floorspace, with three roughly made chairs drawn up to it. Apart from that, the only items of furniture were a dresser with
a few cheap plates and oddments, and a rocking chair with one broken rocker. Flies circled in the shaft of sunlight coming
through the front window. Violet sat at the table and signed to me to take the chair opposite. Tabby perched carefully on
the broken rocking chair.

‘Had you known Mr Handy long?’ I said.

‘On and off, four or five years.’

After that first question of hers, she seemed to take it for granted that I had a right to ask anything I wanted.

‘On and off?’

‘He came when he could, only he wasn’t here very often. That’s what none of them here allow for, you see.’

‘Away with Lord Brinkburn?’

‘Yes. Italy, mostly, and France. Up in Newcastle sometimes. All over.’ She stood up, went to the dresser and came back with
two things clutched in her hands. ‘He always brought me back something, like these.’

She put them carefully on the table: a carved wooden bear of the sort they make in Switzerland, and a bracelet of red glass
Venetian beads. When I picked up the bracelet the beads caught the sunlight and threw scatterings of light like blood drops
round the walls.

‘It’s pretty,’ I said.

‘Yes, he was always thinking of me, see, whatever they said.’

‘How long had he been working for Lord Brinkburn?’

‘All his life, since he was a boy of ten. His family were coal miners, up north where Lord Brinkburn’s family comes from.
His lordship picked him out for a bright lad and took him into service, then later he made him his vally. Handy by name and
Handy by nature, his lordship said.’

‘And Handy travelled abroad with him?’

‘All the time.’

‘But…’

I looked at the baby in the cradle, the bear and bracelet on the table.

‘But when did you…did he…?’

Tabby rescued me.

‘Are they his children?’

‘Yes.’

‘From when he came back here?’

‘Yes. Every year, Lord Brinkburn would come here for a week or ten days to go over the estate accounts with Mr Whiteley. Sometimes
it was nearly two weeks at a time.’

She was smiling at the thought of it. I felt like crying at the desperate patience of some women.

‘So Handy never worked at the hall until now?’ I said.

‘Only for his lordship when he was there, and for these last few weeks, after they put him in the madhouse. Handy was the
man who had to take him there–not his wife or his sons. Handy was the only one he’d have near him.’

‘So once Handy had left him in the asylum, he came here?’

‘That’s what Lord Brinkburn told him he should do. When they were still in Italy, he could feel his mind going. So he gave
Handy a letter to give to Whiteley if anything happened to him. Handy read it out to me three or four times, so I know by
heart what it said.
Handy has been my most faithful servant. He is to be given suitable employment at Brinkburn Hall as long as it suits him.
He signed it and sealed it with his ring, all legal.’

I hazarded a guess.

‘I suppose Mr Whiteley wasn’t too pleased about that.’

She laughed.

‘Handy said he looked like he’d been butted by a bull in the backside. But he couldn’t do nothing about it.’

‘So after all the travelling, Handy settled at Brinkburn Hall. How long ago was that?’

‘Nearly two months. Only I wouldn’t say
settled
. The last time I saw him, he told me he was so fed up with them all that he was thinking of moving on. He’d have done it
already, he said, only he was waiting for some money.’

‘Weren’t his wages paid, then?’

‘It wasn’t wages he was talking about. A tidy sum of money, he said.’

‘Do you think he expected to be left something when Lord Brinkburn died?’

She shrugged. I asked where Handy had been thinking of moving.

‘Back up north, where he came from. He’d have sent for us when he got himself settled, I know that.’

But she sounded far from sure of it.

‘Why was he fed up at the hall?’

‘The other servants didn’t like him. Jealousy, it was, because of him having travelled and knowing more about everything than
they did. They’d do little things to spite him, like the cook giving him the piece of meat with all the gristle. And they
were making him work too hard. “I’m being asked to do too much,” he kept saying to me. “It’s not fair on a man.”’

‘And he didn’t get on well with Lady Brinkburn?’

‘She couldn’t abide him. She gave orders that he wasn’t even to come within sight of her, only he took to popping out of hedges
and round corners now and then, just to show her. It was his lordship he’d worked for, not her.’

I was forming a poor opinion of Handy, but tried not to let her see it.

‘Have you any idea why she disliked him so much?’

She shrugged.

‘The way she felt about her husband, anybody he liked, she didn’t.’

‘Surely there must have been more to it than that. She wouldn’t have the churchyard wall moved just because she didn’t like
him.’

‘Sheer spite, that’s all,’ Violet said.

Clearly there was no progress to be made in that direction. I tried another tack.

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

She looked down at the table.

‘On the Sunday.’

By Monday morning, Handy had been dead and in a crate on his way to London. Hardly the moving on he’d have expected.

‘What time on Sunday?’

‘He came and had his tea with us. Eggs mostly, it was, and a bit of mutton I’d managed to scrounge for him, but he said it
was still better than what they gave him up at the hall. He sent me across to the Farriers with the jug for some beer, gave
me the money for it, too. We had a good time.’

She smiled at the memory of it, but her eyes were glazed with tears.

‘Then I suppose he had to go back to the hall?’ I said.

I remembered that Mr Whiteley had seen him by the old dairy just after eight o’clock, around the servants’ supper time. I
supposed that having filled his stomach with eggs and mutton, he wouldn’t have needed to eat with the rest of them.

Violet’s smile faded. She looked down at the table.

‘I thought he didn’t have to. I thought we were tucked in for the night, all cosy. I said, “What do you want to be going back
there for at this time of night?”’

‘Night?’

‘When he got out of bed and started putting his trousers on, I thought it must be morning already, then I heard the church
clock striking eleven.’

‘Did he say why he was going?’

‘He said there was something he had to do and he’d see me in the morning. Then he put on his trousers and his shoes and went.
That was the last I ever saw of him.’

She was crying in earnest now, tears dripping on to the table. I spoke as gently as I could.

‘And that was eleven o’clock on Sunday night?’

She nodded.

‘He’d had his tea with you. Did he go away after that and come back later?’

‘No, he was with me all evening. It was the longest time we’d had together since…’

She glanced across at the baby.

‘Did he talk much about things at the hall?’

‘Not much, no. But you could tell he wasn’t happy there.’

‘You said the other servants didn’t like him. Was there one in particular he thought of as an enemy?’

She thought about it.

‘Not in particular, no.’

‘And he didn’t give you the idea that he was in danger in any way?’

‘Of course not. Why should he?’

‘Did he say anything about the suit of armour?’

‘He mentioned they were having to pack up an old suit of armour and send it to London for Master Miles, that’s all.’

‘And he didn’t say any more about whatever it was he had to do when he left you?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘He never liked a lot of questions.’

The baby started whimpering. Violet went over to the cradle and scooped it up, rocking it in her arms and murmuring to it.
There was a new moist patch broadening on the bodice of her dress. I caught Tabby’s eye. Time to go. We stood up and I said
we’d see ourselves out.

‘But he was up to some sort of mischief.’

She said it as much to the bundled baby as to us.

‘Mischief?’

‘He liked a joke–they both did, him and his lordship, that’s why Handy suited him so well. Why he didn’t stay with me that
night, he was up to something.’

‘Did he say so?’

‘He didn’t have to say so. I knew him.’

‘And he didn’t say what it was?’

‘No. I thought it might be some way of paying out them at the hall for not being friendly to him. I thought tomorrow he’d
come and tell me whatever it was and we’d have a laugh about it. Only he didn’t.’

Her eyes were on the baby. We went out the back door, paused to prevent the toddler putting a worm in its mouth, closed the
gate behind us. An old man was watching from the street, leaning on a stick, and I guessed the whole village would soon know
about Violet’s visitors. We were halfway back to the cottage before Tabby said, ‘We forgot the eggs.’