Hidden in the Heart (21 page)

John gave a slight cough, preparing a lengthy speech, but was forestalled by Lydia.

‘If the man in the bed, whom everyone thought was Sir Hector, is really Mr Cole,’ she said slowly, her eyes fixed on her betrothed, ‘then I suppose we may assume that the man we thought was Mr Cole, was actually Sir Hector?’

Camilla Denton gasped. ‘But that means that Sir Hector is….’

‘Dead.’ John finished the thought which she dare not voice. ‘I am afraid that you are correct.’

‘I swear before God that we didn’t kill him!’ Cole cried out from his recumbent position.

‘No?’ John was not convinced. ‘In that case, why were you so eager to disguise his death? Why disfigure and burn his corpse beyond recognition?’

‘Do you recall, John,’ Lydia asked him, ‘how we wondered, if the murderer meant to hide the identity of his victim, why he left the watch with the body?’

‘Of course now it is easy to understand why,’ John responded.

‘Cole wanted us to identify the body as his own.’

‘Several people had observed the unusual watch.’ John nodded in the direction of the Frenchman. ‘Monsieur d’Almain and more than one person at the Golden Cockerel among them.’

‘But how did you know this?’ Lydia asked him the question which was on everyone’s mind.

He smiled. ‘It was you and your father who provided the inspiration, my love.’

‘My father and I?’ She was mystified.

‘Yes.’ He paused, moving to stand beside the prominent fireplace like an actor mounting the stage. The other occupants of the room watched his performance in mute fascination. In addition to the party which had accompanied him, the servants were huddled together in a far corner, perhaps more horrified and confused than anyone.

‘What could we possibly have said which provided the clue?’ Lydia wondered aloud.

‘You were speaking of your sister’s probable betrothal,’ he reminded her. ‘You mentioned that a man of sixty was a far cry from a lover of twenty - or words to that effect.’

Lydia remembered now. It had all been a jest, something quite trivial, but in that moment John had realized that a man of more than ninety was very different also from one of fifty. Suddenly the words of poor Kate made perfect sense.

‘ “It wasn’t his hands,”’ Lydia repeated slowly.

‘Precisely.’ John cleared his throat once more. ‘When you prodded her memory, the maid recalled that the hand which reached across to snuff out the candle that day was far too youthful to be the withered hand of Sir Hector. Unfortunately, she blurted out the truth in the presence of the valet - which sealed her fate, I’m afraid.’

All eyes turned toward Mr Tweedy, who was standing pale and round-eyed.

‘I never laid a hand on Kate Eccles!’ he cried defensively.

‘No,’ John agreed. ‘But you could not resist relating what you had heard to someone else: someone who had no hesitation in killing an innocent young girl in order to further their own ends.’

The assembled company was mesmerized. They were like sailors, reeling in a storm-tossed sea, pitched from one side of the vessel to another. First their attention had been all on Mr Cole; then they were directed toward Mr Tweedy. Now there seemed to be a third party, hitherto unsuspected, and they knew not which way to look.

‘What foolishness is this?’ John’s father demanded. ‘How many murderers do we have here?’

Everyone’s gaze returned to John, who leaned nonchalantly against the mantel, as cool and unruffled as ever. However, he did not answer his father’s question directly.

‘I think,’ he said calmly, ‘that we must go back to the beginning.’

* * * *

The beginning, it seemed, was Sir Hector’s treasure. However, when John mentioned this, he was met with almost universal derision.

‘That old wives’ fable!’ his father scoffed.

‘Some may consider it so,’ John said, accepting the scepticism of his elders. ‘But it was Lydia who suggested that we should, perhaps, take the tale seriously.’

‘Forgive me, my boy,’ Mr Savidge snorted, ‘but I’m damned if I’ll pay attention to the wild imaginings of a chit of a girl - even if she is to marry my son!’

‘Forgive me, sir,’ John said with a frown, ‘but if Lydia could imagine the tale to be true, why should not someone else do the same? And what,’ he continued, ‘if that someone decided to act upon his belief - mistaken though it might be?’

‘Still sounds like nonsense to me,’ the older man muttered, unconvinced.

‘It was the treasure you were after, was it not, Mrs Chalfont?’ John challenged the woman, who stood silently listening.

‘Nobody ever believed that old story,’ she said now, in perfect command of her emotions.

‘Come, come,’ John chided gently. ‘It is useless to dissemble at this juncture, you know. If I had any real wit, I would have wondered why, if Sir Hector was so ill, you never summoned Dr Humblebly to him. But perhaps you can explain why you placed Mr Cole here in Sir Hector’s bed and passed him off as your master all these weeks?’

‘Tell him, Martha,’ Mr Tweedy interjected unexpectedly. ‘Tell him the truth.’

‘Be quiet, you fool!’ the housekeeper hissed at him.

‘What did she tell you, Tweedy?’ the elder Savidge turned on the valet.

Mr Tweedy, forced into further speech, was temporarily rendered speechless. Perhaps he was afraid of what he might reveal. Whatever the cause, he caught his lips between his teeth before continuing.

‘She told me that Sir Hector had passed away one night,’ he began.

‘You don’t have to tell these men anything, Silbert!’ Mrs Chalfont cried, attempting to stop his tongue.

‘The hell he doesn’t!’ Mr Savidge roared at her. He then turned back to the valet. ‘You’d better speak willingly now, sir, or by God I’ll squeeze the truth out of your lying throat with my own hands.’

Mr Tweedy cowered before his wrath, but John addressed him with more sense and less passion.

‘My father will not harm you, Mr Tweedy,’ he said. ‘We do not need another murder in Diddlington.’

‘She said she had this man here - Mr Cole - pretend to be Sir Hector for a few weeks, to try to arrange things before the new heir sold the estate from under us and we were all turned out without a reference!’

All of this tumbled from his lips in an almost incoherent rush of words, then stopped abruptly.

‘And you believed that Banbury story!’ Mr Savidge was almost more angry at this than at anything else he had heard so far that day.

‘Why would she lie to me?’ Mr Tweedy asked almost piteously. ‘I - we - I thought she cared for me.’

‘Paperskull,’ Mr Savidge said with a snort of supreme contempt.

‘But she did lie to you, sir.’ John shook his head. ‘It is a particularly bad habit of hers, I believe. In this instance, it was not a very good lie, but I am sure she knew how much you cared for her, and that you would be disinclined to doubt anything she said.’

‘But this still does not explain how Mr Cole became involved,’ Aunt Camilla complained, very sensibly.

‘I do not know the precise connection between Mr Cole and Mrs Chalfont—’ John said.

‘I do!’ Lydia broke in upon his speech, creating her own minor sensation.

‘You do?’ John was more curious than surprised.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I only just remembered it. When we were on the stage that day, I overheard Mr Cole telling the gentleman beside him that his sister had been an actress. He was about to speak her name when the guard blew the yard of tin. I caught only the beginning. He said she was “Mrs Cha—”’

‘Very careless of him,’ d’Almain commented.

‘No doubt he never thought that a girl would be any threat to him,’ Lydia said without rancor. ‘He did not even know that I was travelling to Diddlington, after all, and probably never imagined that I was paying any attention to what he said.’

The man on the sofa muttered something which sounded suspiciously like ‘Hellborn witch.’ However, nobody paid any heed to him, and John once more took up his own version of the tale. He surmised that Mrs Chalfont, after working at Bellefleur for some years, had written to her brother of Sir Hector’s treasure. Mr Cole had seized upon the story as a possible means to easy wealth and had come down to Diddlington to see how it might be acquired.

‘Why they killed the one person who could tell them where the treasure might be, I do not know,’ he admitted.

‘We never killed him, I tell you,’ Mr Cole said with another loud groan. ‘He just ... died.’

‘Harold!’ his sister sought vainly to stifle what came perilously near to a confession.

‘If you will assist us, sir,’ John told the man on the sofa, ‘I will do all that I can to see that you are transported, rather than hanged. I cannot promise the same clemency to your confederate.’

This seemed to be encouragement enough for the injured man. He probably felt that his sister was perfectly able to take care of herself. If not, and one of them had to be hanged, he certainly would prefer that it not be himself.

‘We never meant him harm,’ Mr Cole managed to state with considerable fortitude, considering his pain-wracked condition. ‘We got him alone in his bedchamber, as planned, and tried to bully him into telling us where his treasure was hid.’

‘A masterful plan,’ John commented ironically.

‘A waste of time,’ Mr Cole confessed. ‘We never got nothing out of him but Bible verses about laying up treasure in Heaven, and hiding the Word in your heart.’

‘Of course!’

To everyone’s consternation, this rather loud outburst escaped from the lips of Camilla Denton.

‘What is it, Aunt?’ Lydia asked her.

‘I have just remembered ... something,’ Camilla said, somewhat breathlessly.

‘Whatever it is,’ Thomas Savidge snapped irritably, I’m sure it can wait until we hear more from Mr Cole here.’

‘O-of course,’ Camilla stammered, reddening.

‘Well, we had been at it for near an hour,’ the malefactor resumed his narration, ‘when the old man suddenly clutched at his arm, keeled over in a faint and died on us.’

‘Heart couldn’t take it, I suppose.’ Mr Savidge shook his head sadly. ‘At his age....’

‘Just so,’ his son cut in on his speculation, then turned to Mr Cole. ‘And you decided to do what you could to hide the fact that he was dead. You disfigured the body....’

‘Martha said it would look like it was connected with that other murder in the woods a couple of years ago,’ Mr Cole supplied helpfully. ‘Said it would direct suspicion away from Bellefleur and lead them all on a wild-goose chase.’

‘And so it was.’ John bowed slightly toward Mrs Chalfont. You are a clever woman, ma’am. Unfortunately, you did not count on there being another clever woman in Diddlington: namely Miss Lydia Bramwell.’

‘I cannot take the credit for this,’ Lydia protested.

‘But for your persistence,’ John reminded her, refusing to accept her modesty, ‘I might not have found out about the smugglers, and realized that the two deaths were not necessarily connected. It might have ended with no more than Monsieur d’Almain being suspected, but nothing resolved.’

‘But somebody would eventually have discovered that Sir Hector was not at Bellefleur,’ Lydia pointed out.

‘Oh,’ John waved a hand, dismissing this objection, ‘I have no doubt that eventually Mrs Chalfont would simply have disappeared, along with “Sir Hector”. It would have been a great mystery, of course, but few would have suspected the truth.’

‘But what of the treasure?’ Lydia demanded.

‘It may well be that there is no treasure.’ John shrugged. ‘Certainly these two have not discovered it.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’

‘Because if they had done so they would not still be here.’

‘But there is a treasure!’ Aunt Camilla stepped forward boldly. ‘I am sure of it. And, what’s more, I believe it to be in this very room!’

There was no doubt that Camilla Denton had caught the attention of everyone present with this startling declaration. Had an artist been able to capture the scene on canvas, it would have been a dramatic moment indeed, with Camilla at the centre of a ring effaces wearing almost every possible variation of shock, surprise and disbelief.

‘My dear aunt,’ Lydia was the first to voice the question on everyone’s mind, ‘what can you mean?’

‘I told you I had remembered something,’ the older woman said, with a sideways glance of reproof at John’s father. ‘It was when Mr Cole was recounting Sir Hector’s words to him. I recalled where I had heard the expression before: “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.”’

‘It sounds like something from the Old Testament,’ John said slowly. ‘But I do not see what it has to do with Sir Hector’s treasure.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Aunt Camilla admitted, which did not raise the confidence of her listeners regarding her intellectual abilities. ‘But I think it is curious that the vicar recently preached a sermon in connection with that very verse, and I am certain that it is the eleventh verse of the hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm!’

This pronouncement was made with an air of triumph which was lost on the assembly. They seemed quite unaware of any significance in the fact, until Lydia let out a cry and dashed over to the fireplace where John still stood looking around at the others.

‘Look!’ she cried, pointing to the carved heart which had attracted her attention on their previous visit. With her finger, she traced the carved letters and numbers beneath

‘ “Thy word have I hid in mine heart ...”’ John began. ‘Hid in mine heart ... Great God!’

Catching his breath, John reached up above the mantel and ran his fingers over the elaborate carving, feeling carefully along the edges. The others looked on in wonder, not knowing what to expect. John raised both hands, moving them feverishly across the stone.

‘Aha!’ he shouted suddenly and, to their amazement, lifted the great heart quite off the wall above the mantel. Immediately everyone perceived a hole in the wall behind the carving.

‘The treasure!’ Mr Cole almost wailed in anguish as someone else discovered that for which he had searched so long.

John laid the stone heart on the floor beside him and reached up into the opening. Very carefully he pulled out an object which the others craned their necks in order to see. However, when he turned about to face them, all that they saw was a plain brass box. The outside was certainly unimpressive, with no carving nor any valuable inlay to proclaim its worth. Perhaps what was inside was more worth looking at, they surmised.