Anatomy of Murder (26 page)
‘Mademoiselle Marin told you? Of course, why should she not. She was seeking an old friend of her singing teacher in Paris at his request. But how could that be part of your investigation into the death of Fitzraven?’ Crowther did not trouble himself to reply. ‘Very well. I have made no progress. I wrote a number of letters and visited some physicians who had rooms in the area of Mr Leacroft’s last address.’ Bywater halted suddenly. ‘Is Mademoiselle Marin displeased with me in some way? I did not think she attached great importance to this man . . .’
Crowther lifted his cane to his eye-level and blew from it some piece of dust only visible to himself before replying.
‘No great importance? Indeed. Perhaps Mrs Westerman and I will have greater success. We are recruited now to hunt out mad singers as well as murderers.’ He made as if to leave, then turned back to the young man, who was looking very pale. Crowther wondered if the extreme emotions Mr Bywater appeared to be labouring under were an example of the workings of an artistic temperament. If so, he was happy not to share it, since it seemed to be exhausting. ‘I am glad, Mr Bywater, that you showed me this piece. It reminds me that what is perceived as a single creation might sometimes be the work of several hands. We have assumed that the person who put Fitzraven in the water was the same being who killed him. Perhaps that was not so, and yet another owns the enterprise that conspired to remove the man.’
Bywate looked at his feet and said sulkily, ‘I have heard of you as a man of science, yet you display a fertile imagination.’
Crowther rolled the head of his cane between his fingers. ‘Natural philosophy demands both the rigour of detailed, dull work, and the occasional flight of fancy. It is not unlike music in that way, I believe. At times your work is to stitch together the achievements of other men and lay down chords for the likes of Manzerotti to leap off and fly from, and at times you show signs of great inspiration yourself, such as in the already famous duet. It would be a depressing sort of hack-work, would it not, without those moments of blessed guidance?’
Bywater did not reply, and after observing him a few moments Crowther turned to leave Montagu House once more. The composer remained with his palm pressed to the glass of the cabinet that contained the Androkidias vase; it seemed he was trying to draw something from that ancient object into himself. Crowther would have said he had no use for talismans of that kind, but as the thought glanced over his mind he caught sight of his hand on the silver ball of his father’s cane, and was forced to smile.
Harriet had time before Crowther returned from the British Museum to write to Dr Trevelyan with an enquiry after Theophilius Leacroft. She sent her affection to her husband at the same time and managed to write some civil replies to a number of James’s friends. Their regrets and good wishes came from all over the globe as the ripple of news – Captain Westerman’s great success, then grievous injury – unfurled through letter and word of mouth through the Service and striking at the edges of empire and exploration, began to flow back to Caveley and on to London in the form of these letters, travel-stained and smelling of salt and wood. They made the room in which she found herself seem very small.
There was a knock at the door and Rachel slipped into the room.
‘Harriet? I am not disturbing you?’
Harriet shook her head and pointed to the bed, where Rachel seated herself while the last line of the latest letter was formed.
‘What can I do for you, my love?’ she said a little absently as she blotted her sheet and began to fold it.
‘Harry, I have seen Miss Chase.’
Harriet swung round to face her sister. ‘What? Verity has been here? Why was she not announced? I have not seen her since we came to London.’
‘She came in the back way – we talked in the kitchen.’
‘Lord, I hope her father does not know. He thinks his daughter a princess. If he thought she were paying visits through the kitchen he would blow out the windows of his house with his huffing.’
‘Harriet!’ Rachel said very sharply. ‘Why must you always make fun?’ Mrs Westerman was startled into silence and looked at her sister, who was twisting her hands together in her lap, an angry flush of red on hercheeks. ‘Do you think of nothing but yourself? You do realise, I hope, that the living have their problems and puzzles and difficulties to deal with, as much as the dead.’
Confused, and a little cold in her stomach, Harriet began to say, ‘Dear girl, has Mr Clode—’
‘There – you see? You must always think yourself one step in front of us. It is not a puzzle and I have nothing to say of Mr Clode. You are
not
my pattern in that way!’
not
my pattern in that way!’
‘Rachel, I . . .’ Harriet rocked back in her chair, letting her hand fall to her side.
‘Miss Chase came to talk to me because she feared Graves no longer thought of her as he once did. There seemed to be an understanding between them, but with the sudden elevation in his fortunes, his hatred of living on Lord Thornleigh’s money . . . I came for your opinion on a matter she wanted to ask about.’
‘I am sorry, Rachel.’
‘It is so like you to assume! You are unfair! Mr Clode is a man I much admire, but there is no understanding between
us.
Honestly, Harry, do you think he is the kind of man who would approach me, behind your back and with James in such a way?’
us.
Honestly, Harry, do you think he is the kind of man who would approach me, behind your back and with James in such a way?’
‘Rachel . . .’
‘Though he will most likely never wish to be in company with me again now, when he hears of . . . He is a country lawyer, his reputation must be his fortune. How could he be respected with a sister-in-law who likes nothing better than chasing corpses into the gutters of London and offending every person of rank she approaches? All the time while her husband is sick and she chases after cheap scandal in a borrowed carriage!’
Harriet’s movements became very precise, and while her sister found her handkerchief and wiped it angrily across her eyes, sealed up the letter she had been writing with infinite care.
‘I am sorry if my behaviour offends you, Rachel, or Mr Clode,’ she said very quietly. ‘But I shall not alter it.’
Rachel’s voice had grown more steady, but her tone was still insistent. ‘He has said nothing, how could he know? But if he did! Oh Harriet, if not for me, will you not think of your daughter? What of baby Anne? James is no longer able to grant you respectability and force people to think well of you.’
‘Graves, I think, accepts what I must do.’
‘Graves is an oddity in society, Harriet. He is tolerated because he controls the patronage of the Earl of Sussex’s estate. And he is a man.’ Harriet flinched. Rachel closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them again to look at her sister. Her green irises were ringed in gold: Harriet had forgotten that. Her tone when she spoke again was bitter and loaded with sorrow. Harriet had never heard it in her sister’s voice before. ‘Tell me, who will marry the sister or daughter of the notorious Mrs Westerman?’
Harriet felt a cold white rage begin to build under her skin.
‘Any man that wants her twenty thousand pounds will take Anne, Rachel. Just as Clode will swallow my behaviour for your ten! The papers were drawn up before my husband became an imbecile. Your money is quite safe.’
Rachel went very white as if she had been struck, then drew a shuddering breath. Harriet found herself thinking of Marin’s appeal to Manzerotti in the ‘Yellow Rose’.
‘You married for love, a respectable man. Yet you say you will give your daughter to some man who cares nothing for her reputation but wants only her money? How could any woman be happy with a man who took her on such terms? Listen to yourself, Harriet! Last summer your enemies threatened to make you an outcast and they failed. Yet in investigating another killing now you seem intent on doing their work for them. James has made his family rich, but we are not Earls or Barons. What is allowed to them, will be marked against us. Already people talk. Are your children to be blighted before they come out of the schoolroom?’
‘Blighted?’ Harriet raised an eyebrow and looked into her sister’s face. She was still so young. Her face was all velvet. Her lips trembled and she held her handkerchief clasped at her chest, a pattern of feminine distress. Harriet turned back to her desk and took up her pen again. ‘Thank you, Rachel. I think you can have nothing further to say at the moment. I shall see you at dinner.’
Rachel stood and held out her hand. ‘Harry, I only say these things because I love—’
Harriet held up her hand sharply, keeping her eyes fixed and unseeing on the new page in front of her.
‘Do not say it, Rachel. Leave.’
She heard the tap of her sister’s slippers on the Earl of Sussex’s floorboards and the click as his finely fitted door closed behind her. Mrs Westerman lowered her hand, but made no further movement for some time.
IV.5
J
OCASTA ARRIVED AT the hedgerow at a smar
t pace, picked up Boyo by the scruff of his neck and dropped him into Sam’s arms. ‘Did he find something, Mrs B?’ And when Jocasta frowned at him: ‘Mrs Bligh, I mean to say . . . ma’am.’
OCASTA ARRIVED AT the hedgerow at a smar
t pace, picked up Boyo by the scruff of his neck and dropped him into Sam’s arms. ‘Did he find something, Mrs B?’ And when Jocasta frowned at him: ‘Mrs Bligh, I mean to say . . . ma’am.’
She looked back into the grass without replying. The way was scattered with odds from the kiln behind them. The fires must have been burning there for fifty years, and it had had the time needed to throw its offcuts around. When the man who owned this field now turned them up with his plough, or the boy walking in front to guard his blades found any, they were picked up and chucked to the edges – thickened and twisted slices of unglazed slate, half-bricks. She took a step or two from the path and reached down to where Boyo had been snuffling. There was a little pile of stones here; not so raggedy and fallen-about-looking as the others, and whereas between all the other little heaps and falls, grasses had stuck their heads Bligh, Ind fallen back, no living thing had been given time to crawl up among these.
Jocasta lifted the topmost piece and put it aside, then pushed away one or two from the edge. The bitter and sick taste crawled into her mouth.
‘What is it, Mrs Bligh?’ She felt the lad come up and look over her shoulder. ‘Oh. I see it.’ His shadow slunk away again.
Under the top slate sat a half-brick, with a jam of red on it and a little swirl of hair. The ends not caught up in the blackening slick gleamed guinea gold in the last of the daylight. Jocasta carefully placed the slate back on the pile, and looking about her added a couple more, then sat down on the stile and stared back the way they’d come.
Sam tucked Boyo through the hedgerow beside her, so he could gad about without snuffling at the little stone tent she’d made.
‘Fools,’ Jocasta said at last. ‘If they’d left that rock lying in the path, I might have said, “Jocasta, old girl, the cards are taking you scrambling”.’ She patted the stile beside her. ‘Might have thought, the girl could have stepped up here and fallen off and knocked her head on one of these stones. Easy enough to do. Might have thought all those lies in the cards were just chatter and they were no more than mocking me with an accident to come. But no. Those two hid the stone – and that means they are as guilty as the serpent himself.’
Sam put his head on one side. ‘But you’ve got them now, haven’t you? I mean, if you bring the Constable out here or take him the brick . . .’
‘It’s the placing that tells the story, lad. They can say I did that if we don’t know the whys as well as the ways. Let it bide there. If we have a fuller story, then they’ll see it with our eyes. We’ve time.’
Sam kicked at a bit of stone on the other side of the path. ‘But why are you looking so sudden sad now, Mrs Bligh? You knew they did her in yesterday. You called them murderers to their faces, I heard you do it.’
Jocasta leaned back, watched the sun turning the clouds purple and pink and sighed. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you, lad, that being right leads to being content. Most of the time in my experience it leads just the other way.’
It was some time later that there was another knock at her door and Harriet jumped. She half-expected to see Rachel come back into the room, but it was Lady Thornleigh who stepped in.
‘You and Rachel had a fight,’ she said without preamble, and hopped up onto the bed.
‘Yes, we did, my Lady. Did she send you to plead for her?’
Lady Thornleigh dropped back onto Harriet’s blankets and plucked at her skirts. ‘Pah! Of course not. There was shouting, then she ran out of here crying. Was she telling you you should be more ladylike?’
Harriet twisted round in her chair to find Lady Thornleigh’s clear blue eyes peering at her from the heap of cushions. ‘She was, in her way. How did you guess such a thing?’
‘When Graves or Mrs Service are angry with me, that is usually the cause.’
Harriet smiled. ‘They are right, Susan. Do not follow my way.’
Lady Susan turned onto her front and sighed loudly. ‘But if you had been ladylike last year I might be dead now. And Jonathan. And Graves too, most likely. Isn’t that so?’
It was a fair remark, and Harriet paused before answering. ‘Perhaps. But Rachel tells me I must think of baby Anne now.’
Lady Thornleigh crossed her ankles and scratched at her side, complicated manoeuvres that dislodged her slippers from her stockinged feet.
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