She had all but hinted that her family wasn’t happy about the liaison; indeed, we never saw her side of the family. She devoted her energies to us and, until that dreadful night, the person who had her undivided attention, her unending affection, her unconditional love, was me.
But the last time I had seen her there was no sign of that person. When I think back to our final meeting now, what I remember is the suspicion in her eyes, which I realize was contempt. When I killed the man about to kill her, I changed in her eyes. I was no longer the boy who had sat on her knee.
I was a killer.
20 JUNE 1747
En route to London, I re-read an old journal. Why? Some instinct, perhaps. Some subconscious nagging . . . doubt, I suppose.
Whatever it was, when I re-read the entry of 10 December 1735, I all of a sudden knew exactly what I had to do when I reached England.
2–3 JULY 1747
Today was the service, and also . . . well, I shall explain.
After the service, I left Reginald talking to Mr. Simpkin on the steps of the chapel. To me, Mr. Simpkin said that he had some papers I needed to sign. In light of Mother’s death, the finances were mine. With an obsequious smile he said he hoped that I had considered him more than satisfactory in managing the affairs so far. I nodded, smiled, said nothing committal, told them I wanted a little time to myself, and slipped away, seemingly to be alone with my thoughts.
I hoped that the direction of my wanderings looked random as I made my way along the thoroughfare, staying clear of carriage wheels that splashed through mud and manure on the highway, weaving through people thronging the streets: tradesmen in bloodied leather aprons, whores and washerwomen. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t random at all.
One woman in particular was up ahead, like me, making her way through the crowds, alone and, probably, lost in thought. I had seen her at the service, of course. She’d sat with the other staff—Emily, and two or three others I didn’t recognize—on the other side of the chapel, with a handkerchief at her nose. She had looked up and seen me—she must have done—but she made no sign. I wondered, did Betty, one of my old nursemaids, even recognize me?
And now I was following her, keeping a discreet distance behind so she wouldn’t see me if she happened to glance backwards. It was getting dark by the time she reached home, or not home but the household for which she now worked, a grand mansion that loomed in the charcoal sky, not too dissimilar to the one at Queen Anne’s Square. Was she still a nursemaid, I wondered, or had she moved up in the world? Did she wear the uniform of a governess beneath her coat? The street was less crowded than before, and I lingered out of sight across the street, watching as she took a short flight of stone steps down towards the below-stairs quarters and let herself in.
When she was out of sight I crossed the highway and sauntered towards the house, aware of the need to look inconspicuous in case eyes were seeing me from the windows. Once upon a time I was a young boy who had looked from the windows of the house in Queen Anne’s Square, watched passers-by come and go and wondered about their business. Was there a little boy in this household watching me now, wondering who is this man? Where has he come from? Where is he going?
So I wandered along the railings at the front of the mansion and glanced down to see the lit windows of what I assumed were the servants’ quarters, only to be rewarded with the unmistakable silhouette of Betty appearing at the glass and drawing a curtain. I had the information I’d come for.
I returned after midnight, when the drapes at the windows of the mansion were shut, the street was dark and the only lights were those fixed to the occasional passing carriage.
Once again I made my way to the front of the house, and with a quick look left and right scaled the railings and dropped silently down into the gully on the other side. I scuttled along it until I found Betty’s window, where I stopped and very carefully placed my ear to the glass, listening for some moments until I was satisfied that there was no movement from within.
And then, with infinite patience, I applied my fingertips to the bottom of the sash window and lifted, praying it wouldn’t squeak and, when my prayers were answered, letting myself in and closing the window behind me.
In the bed she stirred slightly—at the breath of air from the open window perhaps; some unconscious sensing of my presence? Like a statue I stood and waited for her deep breathing to resume, and felt the air around me settle, my incursion absorbed into the room so that after a few moments it was as though I were a part of it—as though I had always been a part of it, like a ghost.
And then I took out my sword.
It was fitting—ironic, perhaps—that it should have been the sword given to me by my father. These days, I rarely go anywhere without it. Years ago, Reginald asked me when I expected it to taste blood, and it has, of course, many times. And if I was right about Betty, then it would once again.
I sat on the bed and put the blade of the sword close to her throat, then clamped my hand over her mouth.
She woke. Immediately her eyes were wide with terror. Her mouth moved and my palm tickled and vibrated as she tried to scream.
I held her thrashing body still and said nothing, just allowed her eyes to adjust until she could see me, and she must have recognized me. How could she not, when she nursed me for ten years, was like a mother to me? How can she not have recognized Master Haytham?
When she had finished struggling, I whispered, “Hello, Betty,” with my hand still over her mouth. “I have something I need to ask you. To answer you will need to speak. For you to speak I’ll need to take my hand from your mouth and you may be tempted to scream, but if you scream . . .” I applied the tip of the sword to her throat to make my point. And, then, very gently, I lifted my hand from her mouth.
Her eyes were hard, like granite. For a moment I felt myself retreat to childhood and was almost intimidated by the fire and fury there, as though the sight of them triggered a memory of being scolded that I couldn’t help but respond to.
“I should put you over my knee for this, Master Haytham,” she hissed. “How dare you creep into a lady’s room when she sleeps? Did I teach you nothing? Did Edith teach you nothing? Your mother?” Her voice was rising. “Did your father teach you nothing?”
That childhood feeling stayed with me, and I had to reach into myself to find resolve, fighting an urge simply to put away my sword, and say, “Sorry, Nurse Betty,” promise never to do it again, that I would be a good boy from now on.
The thought of my father gave me that resolve.
“It’s true you were like a mother to me once, Betty,” I said to her. “It’s true that what I’m doing is a terrible, unforgivable thing to do. Believe me, I’m not here lightly. But what you’ve done is terrible, and unforgivable, too.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
With my other hand I reached inside my frock coat and retrieved a folded piece of paper, which I held for her to see in the near dark of the room. “You remember Laura, the kitchen maid?”
Cautious, she nodded.
“She sent me a letter,” I went on. “A letter that told me all about your relationship with Digweed. For how long was Father’s gentleman your fancy man, Betty?”
There was no such letter; the piece of paper I held contained nothing more revelatory than the address of my lodgings for the night, and I was relying on the low light to fool her. The truth was that when I’d re-read my old journals I’d been taken back to that moment many, many years ago when I had gone to look for Betty. She had been having her “little lie-in” that cold morning, and when I peered through her keyhole I’d seen a pair of men’s boots in her room. I hadn’t realized at the time because I was too young. I’d seen them with the eyes of a nine-year-old and thought nothing of them. Not then. Not ever since.
Not until reading it afresh, when, like a joke that suddenly makes sense, I had understood: the boots had belonged to her lover. Of course they had. What I was less certain of was t
hat her lover was Digweed. I remember that she used to speak of him with great affection, but then so did everyone; he had fooled us all. But when I left for Europe in the care of Reginald, Digweed had found alternative employment for Betty.
Even so, it was a guess that they were lovers—a considered, educated guess, but risky, with terrible consequences, if I was wrong.
“Do you remember the day you had a little lie-in, Betty?” I asked. “A ‘little lie-in,’ do you remember?”
She nodded warily.
“I came to see where you were,” I continued. “I was cold, you see. And in the passage outside your room—well, I don’t like to admit it, but I knelt and I looked through your keyhole.”
I felt myself colour slightly, despite everything. She’d been staring balefully up at me, but now her eyes went flinty and her lips pursed crossly, almost as though this ancient intrusion were as bad as the current one.
“I didn’t see anything,” I clarified quickly. “Not unless you count you, slumbering in bed, and also a pair of men’s boots that I recognized as belonging to Digweed. Were you having an affair with him, is that it?”
“Oh, Master Haytham,” she whispered, shaking her head and with sad eyes, “what has become of you? What sort of man has that Birch turned you into? That you should be holding a knife to the throat of a lady of my advancing years is bad enough—oh, that’s bad enough. But look at you now, you’re ladling hurt on hurt, accusing me of having an affair, wrecking a marriage. It was no affair. Mr. Digweed had children, that’s true, who were looked after by his sister in Herefordshire, but his wife died many years before he even joined the household. Ours was not an affair the way you’re thinking with your dirty mind. We were in love, and shame on you thinking otherwise. Shame on you.” She shook her head again.
Feeling my hand tighten on the handle of the sword, I squeezed my eyes shut. “No, no, it’s not me who should be made to feel at fault here. You can try and come high-and-mighty with me all you like, but the fact is that you had a . . . relationship of some kind, of whatever kind—it doesn’t matter what kind—with Digweed, and Digweed betrayed us. Without that betrayal my father would be alive. Mother would be alive, and I would not be sitting here with a knife to your throat, so don’t blame me for your current predicament, Betty. Blame him.”
She took a deep breath and composed herself. “He had no choice,” she said at last, “Jack didn’t. Oh, that was his name, by the way: Jack. Did you know that?”
“I’ll read it on his gravestone,” I hissed, “and knowing it makes not a blind bit of difference, because he did have a choice, Betty. Whether it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, I don’t care. He had a choice.”
“No—the man threatened Jack’s children.”
“‘Man’? What man?”
“I don’t know. A man who first spoke to Jack in town.”
“Did you ever see him?”
“No.”
“What did Digweed say about him? Was he from the West Country?”
“Jack said he had the accent sir, yes. Why?”
“When the men kidnapped Jenny, she was screaming about a traitor. Violet from next door heard her, but the following day a man with a West Country accent came to speak to her—to warn her not to tell anyone what she’d heard.”
West Country. Betty had blanched, I saw. “What?” I snapped. “What have I said?”
“It’s Violet, sir,” she gasped. “Not long after you left for Europe—it could even have been the day after—she met her end in a street robbery.”
“They came good on their word,” I said. I looked at her. “Tell me about the man giving Digweed his orders,” I said.
“Nothing. Jack never said anything about him. That he meant business; that if Jack didn’t do as they told him then they would find his children and kill them. They said that if he told the master then they’d find his boys, cut them and kill them slowly, all of that. They told him what they were planning to do to the house, but on my life, Master Haytham, they told him that nobody would be hurt; that it would all happen at the dead of night.”
Something occurred to me. “Why did they even need him?”
She looked perplexed.
“He wasn’t even there on the night of the attack,” I continued. “It wasn’t as if they required help getting in. They took Jenny, killed Father. Why was Digweed needed for that?”
“I don’t know, Master Haytham,” she said. “I really don’t.”
When I looked down at her, it was with a kind of numbness. Before, when I’d been waiting for darkness to fall, anger had been simmering, bubbling within me, the idea of Digweed’s treachery lighting a fire beneath my fury, the idea that Betty had colluded, or even known, adding fuel to it.
I’d wanted her to be innocent. Most of all I’d wanted her dalliance to be with another member of the household. But if it was with Digweed then I wanted her to know nothing about his betrayal. I wanted her to be innocent, for if she was guilty then I had to kill her, because if she could have done something to stop the slaughter of that night and failed to act, then she had to die. That was . . . that was justice. It was cause and effect. Checks and balances. An eye for an eye. And that’s what I believe in. That’s my ideology. A way of negotiating a passage through life that makes sense even when life itself so rarely does. A way of imposing order upon chaos.
But the last thing I wanted to do was kill her.
“Where is he now?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know, Master Haytham.” Her voice quavered with fear. “The last time I heard from him was the morning he disappeared.”
“Who else knew you and he were lovers?”
“Nobody,” she replied. “We were always so careful.”
“Apart from leaving his boots in view.”
“They were moved sharpish.” Her eyes hardened. “And most folk weren’t in the habit of peering through the keyhole.”
There was a pause. “What happens now, Master Haytham?” she said, a catch in her voice.
“I should kill you, Betty,” I said simply, and looking into her eyes I saw the realization dawn on her that I could if I wanted to; that I was capable of doing it.
She whimpered.
I stood. “But I won’t. There’s already been too much death as a result of that night. We will not meet again. For your years of service and nurture I award you your life and leave you with your shame. Good-bye.”
14 JULY 1747
i
After neglecting my journal for almost two weeks I have much to tell and should recap, going right back to the night I visited Betty.
After leaving I’d returned to my lodgings, slept for a few fitful hours, then rose, dressed and took a carriage back to her house. There I bid the driver wait some distance away, close enough to see, but not close enough to draw suspicion, and as he snoozed, grateful for the rest, I sat and gazed out of the window, and waited.
For what? I didn’t know for sure. Yet again I was listening to my instinct.
And yet again it proved correct, for not long after daybreak, Betty appeared.
I dismissed the driver, followed her on foot and, sure enough, she made her way to the General Post Office on Lombard Street, went in, reappeared some minutes later, and then made her way back along the street until she was swallowed up by the crowds.
I watched her go, feeling nothing, not the urge to follow her and slit her throat for her treachery, not even the vestiges of the affection we once had. Just . . . nothing.
Instead I took up position in a doorway and watched the world go by, flicking beggars and street sellers away with my cane as I waited for perhaps an hour until . . .
Yes, there he was—the letter carrier, carrying his bell and case full of mail. I pushed myself out of the doorway and, twirling my cane, followed him, closer and closer until he moved on to a side road where there were fewer pedestrians, and I spotted my chance . . .
Moments later I was kneeling by his bleedi
ng and unconscious body in an alleyway, sorting through the contents of his letter case until I found it—an envelope addressed to “Jack Digweed.” I read it—it said that she loved him, and that I had found out about their relationship; nothing in there I didn’t already know—but it wasn’t the contents of the letter I was interested in so much the destination, and there it was on the front of the envelope, which was bound for the Black Forest, for a small town called St. Peter, not far from Freiburg.
Almost two weeks of journeying later, Reginald and I came within sight of St. Peter in the distance, a cluster of buildings nestled at the bottom of a valley otherwise rich with verdant fields and patches of forest. That was this morning.
ii
We reached it at around noon, dirty and tired from our travels. Trotting slowly through narrow, labyrinthine streets, I saw the upturned faces of the residents, glimpsed either from pathways or turning quickly away from windows, closing doors and drawing curtains. We had death on our minds, and at the time I thought they somehow knew this, or perhaps were easily spooked. What I didn’t know was that we weren’t the first strangers to ride into town that morning. The townspeople were already spooked.
The letter had been addressed care of the St. Peter General Store. We came to a small plaza, with a fountain shaded by chestnut trees, and asked for directions from a nervous townswoman. Others gave us a wide berth as she pointed the way then sidled off, staring at her shoes. Moments later we were tethering our horses outside the store and walking in, only for the sole customer to take a look at us and decide to stock up on provisions another time. Reginald and I exchanged a confused look, then I cast an eye over the store. Tall, wooden shelves lined three sides, stocked with jars and packets tied up with twine, while at the back was a high counter behind which stood the storekeeper, wearing an apron, a wide moustache and a smile that had faded like an exhausted candle on getting a good look at us.
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