The Murder of Mary Russell (19 page)

C
larissa did not know how long she remained on the floor with her father before a hand pulled her back, urged her up, eased her into a chair, put a tin mug in her hand.

Brandy, this time. Body temperature. Samuel had gone quiet. Billy's eyes, peering at her over the baby's head, were wide with shock. Young Mr Holmes took a deep swig from his pocket flask, then picked up the gamekeeper's gun, laying it gingerly in the table's drawer, pushing it firmly shut. He then retrieved Clarissa's smaller weapon and placed that behind the run-down clock on the mantelpiece.

He swiped his hand hard across the front of his coat, then took the Tartan rug from the chair, draping it over the body of James Hudson. He pulled a stool from under the table, and dropped onto it like a puppet with cut strings.

“Billy,” he said, his voice oddly hoarse, “if the child is sleeping, set him down and add a log to the fire. Then look around and see if you can find any bandages. Clean rags will do.”

Clarissa lifted her head to make bitter protest, that her father was beyond need of bandages—then saw his arm. “You're hurt.”

“I was prepared for his final declaration before he fired, but I didn't move quite fast enough.”

“My father is a good shot.”
Was
.

Billy returned with a wooden box containing a variety of medicaments, implements, and bandages, suitable for a man who made a living in the out of doors. He laid it on the table before Mr Holmes, who then asked the boy to take a pan out to the pump for water. Face rigid with pain, he shed his coat and jacket to the floor. His left shirt-sleeve was crimson down to the cuff.

Using a pair of scissors from the wooden box, he chewed at the bloodied sleeve, ripping the last portions of it free, then sat at the table with the pan of water. The fire crackled, water splashed, and the wound came into view: long but shallow, avoiding the meat of his arm entirely. If he'd moved a split second faster, the only hole would be in his overcoat. Had he been any slower…

The bloody swath was precisely the level of his heart.

The young man winced at the bite of iodine, then attempted to get the bandage wrapping started. At his third try, Clarissa rose, to take the roll from his hand, circling it round and round his surprisingly muscular upper arm. When she had tied it off, she carried the pan and lantern outside, finding the pump under a roof around one side of the cottage. She hung the lantern from a hook, and got to work on her father's blood.

She scrubbed at her bloodstained hands until they were numb, then reached to unfasten the tiny buttons down the front of her bodice. Since Samuel's birth, she had done this a dozen or more times a day, but tonight these were endless, tiny, impossible—and revoltingly sticky. Her hands wanted to seize the neckline and rip. She was weeping with frustration before the last button gave way and she could fight free of the clammy, stained garment. She let it fall—it was that, or fling it away into the dark for the rain to purge of stains—and stood, head down, fighting for control.

It was the thought of Billy that brought her back: left in the cottage with an infant, a corpse, and a wounded stranger. Billy needed her. She forced herself to bend over the pump and work methodical fingers down the bodice's front and left sleeve, where the worst of it lay. The fabric was dark: once the actual…substance was gone, only she would see the stains.

That was not the case with what lay beneath. The white cotton of her corset cover bore vivid stains. Fortunately, its buttons were few and larger, its fabric light enough to scrub mostly clean. The corset itself was another matter—and as for the chemise beneath…

Strip down to her drawers, out here in the gamekeeper's yard? Clarissa shook her head. If she ever made it back to London, she would burn the lot of it; in the meantime, her skin would just have to crawl.

She blotted the chest of the chemise as best she could, along with the top of the corset—it was a short nursing corset, so only its upper edges had caught the blood. Pulling the sodden cotton back over it turned her shivers to shudders, and she looked with loathing at the bodice: too heavy to wring out, so wet that putting it on would leave her skirts damp to the knees.
I'll catch pneumonia
. She looked at her bare arms.
I'd show more skin in an evening dress.
The lad would just have to blush and be damned.

The young man's eyes came up at her entrance, only to fall rapidly to the side. “Sorry,” she said. “It needs to dry in front of the fire.” She covered herself with the shawl, then arranged the bodice over a stool before the fire, hoping the wood did not spit too many sparks onto it.

“The boys are upstairs?” she asked.

“I suggested it.”

Climbing the ladder-like stairs in long skirts required all the concentration she could summon. At the top, she found the boys asleep on a bed beneath sloping eaves. Billy was curled on his side under a thick blanket; the top of Samuel's scalp showed within the older boy's arms.

She pulled the shawl around her, leaning against the door jamb. Two boys softly breathing; the crackle of fire from below.
Papa should have had a son, instead of me. A son would have understood him, gone with him. A son would not have
—

She drew a ragged breath. Why in
hell
had that boy downstairs risked his life for a child he barely knew? Her father had not hesitated to pull the trigger. Would he have done so if Billy were still in the doorway? Clarissa's inner eye kept seeing that black expanse of overcoat, covering the boy like a shield.

She pushed off from the door frame and went to tug the covers a little farther over Billy's shoulders, then took her ancient bones down the ladder. The kettle was now bubbling over the flame. She walked warily towards the tin food-safe, bracing for the sight of her father's body, but he was not there. Only the burn-spotted little carpet lay on the spot where James Hudson had died.

The gamekeeper's pantry contained a packet of tea, two kinds of stale biscuits, and—luxury item, pushed to the back—a tin of condensed milk. What had happened to the man whose provisions these were? Had Beddoes fired him before taking off for Portsmouth? Given the man a holiday? In any event, she was grateful beyond words that he'd left his tea behind.

She put a steaming mug on the three-legged stool beside Mr Holmes, and lowered herself into the chair across from him. He eyed the drink for a moment, then picked it up, took a formal swallow, and laid it down again.

“It wasn't murder, you know,” she said. “Your friend's father.”

“Blackmail is despicable.”

“But it's not murder. My father would not have hanged for it.”

“He should have done,” the lad snarled.

Another night, Clarissa might have laughed at the perennial complaint of youth at the unfairness of life. “Wanting a thing doesn't make it so. He'd have died in prison, or in Australia, but not from a noose.”

The thin face worked; he looked away.

“It's personal, isn't it?” she realised abruptly. “You know someone, or knew them. Someone whose life was ruined by blackmail.”

A year or two older, and he wouldn't have replied, but he was still boy enough to crave understanding. “My mother. When I was eleven.”

“She—” Clarissa caught herself. The lad's marked distaste for guns might have nothing to do with someone blackmailing his mother. And really, she did not wish to know.

But why did she persist in thinking of him as a lad? He could not be that much younger than she, no more than five or six years. Truth to tell, he looked less like a boy today than a young man in ill-fitting clothes. Perhaps that was an effect of the stubble.

She pushed away these random thoughts. “What happens now?”

“Perhaps you should tell me that.”

His tone of voice had not been that of a boy asking an adult for instruction. “I'm sorry?” she asked.

“Miss Hudson, with your father dead, do you intend to finish his work? Go to Portsmouth and see what you can shake out of this Beddoes fellow?”

The brutal accusation was like a slap. “Shake out—oh. You heard the conversation? Before you walked in?”

“Enough of it.”

“I was not—I had no…Look, Mr Holmes: agreeing with my father was the only way to be rid of him. I had no intention to join him, either in his plans or in his return to Australia. All I wanted was to get back to London for Billy. After that, well, any place where Papa wasn't.”

“You did not plan to blackmail Beddoes—or shoot him outright for whatever he's fled with?”

“For pity's sake, Mr Holmes, I'm not a—”

But before the word could leave her mouth, her hand rose to cover it.

“A killer? It would appear that is precisely what you are, Miss Hudson. A thief, a cheat, and now a murderess.”

“But, Papa…He'd have killed you!”

“And instead, you killed him.”

How had she ever thought those grey eyes young?

Clarissa sat against the slimy chair-back. Even in the early weeks with Samuel, she had not felt this tired, this empty. Not since…since her mother had died.

After a long time, she spoke. “Very well. I will do whatever you want. Go with you, talk to the police, tell them everything. All I ask is a promise from you. If they hang me, you'll see that Billy and Samuel don't end up in the workhouse.”

She stood without waiting for his response, and climbed up to join the boys on the gamekeeper's bed. She woke twice during the night to feed Samuel. Both times the smell of a pipe drifted up from below, an unexpectedly mature odour—and oddly comforting, considering that it came from her judge and jury, guarding the exit. When she woke for the third time, a tiny pale rectangle in the darkness, an unnoticed window, heralded the approach of dawn.

The air smelt of coffee instead of tobacco. And she heard a noise—from
outside
.

She pushed upright, cold dread washing away the sleep. So, Mr Holmes had sent for the police. Either that or servants had come from the house to investigate the smoke. Against her wrist, she could feel Samuel's tiny ribs pulling air in and out, in and out as she awaited the tramp of boots and loud voices demanding a murderess. Instead, the noise continued. There was a rhythm to it, with the occasional pause. Almost as if…

She eased out of bed, tip-toeing over to the window, but could see only trees. She looked uncertainly at the sleeping boys, and wiped sweaty palms against her skirts.

The creaks of her descent down the ladder did not wake the sleepers. The ground floor was empty, but for a valise on the long table. Her bodice had been shifted during the night, and was nearly dry. She buttoned it on, then straightened her hair-pins as best she could before pulling on her cloak. Outside, she followed the noise through morning mists to the woods behind the house.

The young man had stripped down to his vest. The lower half of him was enveloped in a pair of filthy brown trousers that could only have come from the gamekeeper's store, its waist held up by a length of twine. He stood past his knees in a rectangular hole that was slightly shorter, but a little wider, than he. A rising mound of dirt stood to one side.

He glanced up as he rested the spade against the side wall and reached for a hatchet. When he had parted a root with it, he resumed the spade. After a moment, Clarissa went back into the house, returning with a pot of coffee, a plate of hard biscuits, and the apple she'd been saving for her breakfast. He stopped digging then, to sit on the edge of the grave with an ill-stifled groan. The bandage on his arm dripped scarlet.

Clarissa took a pair of heavy gloves from under her arm, spotted the night before on a shelf near the pump. She tied up her skirts with a length of the same twine he had found, and shoved her hands into the stiff gloves. Mr Holmes swung his legs heavily out of the way, and Clarissa hopped down into the hole to take up the spade.