The room was almost bare: he had brought nothing with him from London save for a handful of coins and two vicious blades, the latter of which I had confiscated from him. To compensate for his loss, and to help him pass the time on our journey, I had given him a pencil and a sheaf of paper – he was an excellent draughtsman – and a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. This latter – upon learning it was a fictional voyage – he pronounced ‘a worthless con’, it being ‘made of lies’. But he had placed it neatly on a chair with his sketches, his shoes and stockings tucked under the bed.
‘What do you make of these?’ I handed him the notes.
He read them quickly, unruffled by the content. Then he divided them in half, waving the latest two in his fist. ‘Dangerous.’
I took the papers back. ‘Aislabie believes that Mrs Fairwood is his daughter—’
‘—maid told me.’
‘Whoever wrote this latest note knows about Elizabeth Fairwood’s claim, and the fire on Red Lion Square.’
Sam shrugged. Sometimes I wondered if he were already five steps ahead of me. He was so close-tongued, how could one know for certain?
I flicked the papers. ‘The first two notes were written on old bits of scrap, but this is very fine. I’ll wager the second two match Mr Aislabie’s best paper.’
‘Could’ve been stolen. It’s Aiselby,’ he added.
‘No – the servants call him that. He pronounces it Aizlabee . . .’ I paused, then sifted back through the notes. The first two had spelled his name Aiselby, capturing the Yorkshire pronunciation. The second two had spelled it Aislabie.
Jack Sneaton was from the south, and had corrected my pronunciation to Aizlabee. Aislabie also trusted him to hire all the servants at Studley Hall. That gave him power, and opportunities . . .
Could Sneaton have written the second two notes? He wasn’t pleased by Mrs Fairwood’s presence – that much was quite evident. Did he want to frighten her from the estate? It would have been easy enough for him to steal the linen and the fine paper. He knew the movements of the household, and when it would be safe to move through the grounds. With his broken body, he could not have killed the deer himself or dragged it to the front steps, but he might have an accomplice. We will seek Revenge, the note had promised.
I handed the notes to Sam. ‘See if you can find an example of Sneaton’s lettering. He must write with his left hand, I suppose. Could you compare it with the second two letters? Even if the hand is disguised?’
Sam looked offended, as if I’d asked him whether he knew his alphabet. He had been counterfeiting papers for his father for years. He’d been doing all sorts of terrible things for his father for years. The first time we’d met, he’d led me down a darkened alleyway so I might be robbed at knifepoint. I was still waiting for an apology.
I poured myself a glass of sherry from a decanter on the dressing table. ‘Why did you change our quarters?’
Sam grinned. Opened the window, put his foot on the casement frame—
—and jumped.
I swore, more in surprise than concern. I’d grown used to his acrobatics. I kneeled on the window seat and peered out. He’d jumped into the oak tree and was now sitting on a sturdy branch, bare legs dangling. I peered down at the ground three floors below. There was a path for the carriages, which must lead to the current stables at the back of the house. Beyond the path, a dense cluster of trees. The rain pattered through the leaves.
‘An excellent escape route,’ I said, raising my glass of sherry in approval. ‘If one happens to be a monkey.’ Could I leap the distance? Probably, if the need were pressing. If the house were on fire.
Sam crawled along the branch, swung himself on to the window ledge and back into the room. It looked distinctly perilous and much harder than leaping out. ‘Family’s in the west wing. Won’t hear us. Servants,’ he added, hoicking a thumb upstairs. Turned his thumb upside down, indicating the three floors below. ‘Metcalfe, library, kitchens.’ He crossed the room to the connecting door, toe then heel like a dancer, missing every creaking floorboard. ‘View,’ he called over his shoulder.
The window in his cupboard room looked out on to the servants’ courtyard. An older woman hurried from the laundry with a stack of folded sheets up to her chin, shooing chickens away with her boot. I watched for a minute or two as maids and grooms and footmen ran through the yard, and no one looked up at the window. Sam had found us the ideal quarters; quiet, tucked far away from the Aislabies’ rooms, and offering an excellent vantage point from which to spy on the servants.
Mr Pugh, our carriage driver, sat on a mounting block, smoking a pipe and talking with an older fellow.
‘William Hallow,’ Sam said. ‘Game keeper. Thinks you’re an angel.’
I coughed on my sherry.
‘Hanged. Resurrected.’ Sam watched me from the corner of his black eyes. ‘Touched by God.’
The room fell silent – as it must with Sam standing in it. He never spoke if he could avoid it, kept his words deep in his chest like a miser clutching his coins. And what poor, counterfeit coins they were when he did spend them – a grunt for yes, a strangled sigh for no. In the slums of St Giles, a careless word was as dangerous as a sharpened blade. All his life, he had been taught how to hide in the shadows, to watch and listen and remain invisible. But silence was in his nature too. Sam’s father might be the most powerful gang captain in the city, but one could still talk with him over a bowl of punch.
A few months ago I had agreed to take Sam into my household and teach him the manners of a gentleman. To say that I had failed hardly begins to describe the catastrophe that followed. A violent tangle of events had led to murder and my trip to the gallows. Sam had helped save my life. But he had also killed someone in the process.
I had studied Sam closely on our journey from London and could discern no particular change in him – no apparent guilt or remorse for what he had done. His father was a murderer. He was named for his uncle, Samuel Fleet – a highly accomplished assassin, who’d been known in the Marshalsea as the Devil. Such names were not given lightly. I could not ignore the fact that killing was part of the family trade. Nor that – as far as his parents were concerned – Sam had completed his apprenticeship.
For this reason alone, Kitty and I had agreed to dismiss Sam from our home for ever. I’d had no expectation of seeing him again. And yet when I’d helped him down from his hiding place on the carriage, soaked and shivering, I had known at once that I would bring him with me. My damned curiosity again. It’s what Fleet had first noticed in me, when I’d stepped into the prison yard. ‘Curiosity and a wilful belief that the world is on your side. What an intoxicatingly idiotic combination.’ Indeed.
I stood before the two portraits, studying them closely. Brothers, I thought – dressed in a style from forty years ago, with huge brown wigs cascading over their shoulders. The younger brother was no more than sixteen, with a soft, soulful countenance. The elder was a few years older, somewhat arrogant-
looking. They both reminded me of John Aislabie. They shared the same dark brown eyes and narrow, handsome face. And yet there was something lacking in both portraits. Aislabie was a man of restless vigour. The two brothers seemed languid by comparison, almost lifeless. A failing of the painter, perhaps.
The painting of the younger brother was a little crooked. I reached out and straightened it, noticing a name etched upon the frame. Mallory Aislabie, died 1685. My gaze slid to the older brother. George Aislabie, died 1693. The year Aislabie had inherited the Studley Estate. These were Aislabie’s older brothers, relegated to the east wing while his beloved horses pranced in an endless parade of paintings downstairs.
‘They’re worried about Metcalfe,’ Sam said.
‘The servants?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Why are they worried about him?’
A shrug.
‘Should I be worried about Metcalfe?’
Another shrug.
I remembered the note
I’d taken from the library, covered in Metcalfe’s blotched and frantic scrawl. I pulled it from my jacket to compare it more carefully, but I could see at once that it didn’t match. It was too jagged, and he dipped his quill too often, the ink heavy on the page.
‘We should go downstairs,’ I said. ‘The family will be gathering in the drawing room.’
Sam shrank back, as if I’d just threatened him with a blade. Or a bath.
‘I’ve told them you’re my ward. A gentleman’s son, if you can imagine such a thing. I know it seems unlikely, but we must brazen it out. Everyone will be much too polite to question it.’ I pointed at his shoes and stockings. ‘Come along. The best houses don’t allow you to eat barefoot I’m afraid.’
He frowned. Cards, conversation. Cutlery. ‘When do we hunt for the ledger?’
‘Later. Aislabie thinks I’m here to help him. We must dissemble, a little.’
‘But we’ll leave, once we’ve found it? We’ll go home?’
I hesitated. Home was the Cocked Pistol on Russell Street. A collection of rooms above a disreputable print shop. I couldn’t promise him a bed there, not without Kitty’s consent. ‘We’ll go straight back to London.’
Sam’s face crumpled. I had side-stepped the promise, and he knew it.
‘Put your shoes on,’ I said, touching his arm. ‘And tie up your hair. You look positively savage.’
Chapter Seven
My arrival at Studley Hall had caused a stir in the neighbourhood, and Mr Aislabie was forced to entertain several unexpected guests that evening. Everyone was eager to meet the celebrated Half-Hanged Hawkins – save for the elusive Metcalfe, sequestered in his rooms. A woman of middling years clasped my hand and told me – tears spilling down her cheeks – that I was a miracle, a miracle. I am not sure I ever caught her name, only that she was a neighbour of the Aislabies and had just returned from London herself. ‘I’m afraid I missed your hanging. I’d promised to visit my sister in Greenwich and she is most fastidious about her engagements. Can you forgive me?’
‘This once, madam.’
‘London is a vastly wicked place,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘I miss it dreadfully.’
The vicar of Kirkby Malzeard had ridden several miles on very bad roads to inform me that God had spared my life as a sign of His mercy, and that I must now dedicate myself to His Glory. By coincidence, the church roof at Kirkby was in urgent need of repair. Was it true that I had recently come into a fortune through marriage? I was rescued by Mr Gatteker, the physician, pulling me away by the elbow. He was eager to learn more about the physical effects of my hanging. ‘I hear there are certain spontaneous bodily eruptions, when the rope tightens.’ He leaned closer, and whispered hotly in my ear. ‘Venereal spasms.’
I drew back a pace. ‘How’s your patient, sir?’
‘Tolerable. Haven’t killed him yet.’ Mr Gatteker had been summoned from Ripon to examine Fred’s broken leg. He was a genial fellow of near forty, his eyes small but very bright behind a pair of round spectacles. Unlike most doctors I’d met he appeared to be in excellent health, if a little stretched about the middle. He stole two glasses of wine from a passing tray. ‘Your brother splinted the leg with commendable proficiency.’
I glanced across the drawing room at Sam, back pressed to the wall as if he might like to sink through it. ‘He’s not my brother.’
‘Is he not? You’d best inform him of that disappointing news, sir. He’s been telling the world that you are.’ Gatteker took a deep, contented swig of claret, watching me over the rim. His expression was mild, but searching. ‘Not brothers. But there’s a bond, I think? If that is not too presumptuous of me.’
‘Who is that gentleman, speaking with Mr Aislabie?’ I asked, gesturing towards a slight, straight-backed man dressed in a sky blue coat, the cuffs and pleats in the latest London style. His left hand and arm hung under the coat sleeve, bandaged and bound tightly in a fine muslin sling.
‘Ah, a swift change of subject! I have offended you with my probings. Mrs Gatteker oft complains—’
I cut him off before the inevitable and unwanted jest. ‘His arm is broken?’
‘Fell from his horse. Francis Forster. Decent fellow. Cat-a—strophically dull. Mind you don’t sit with him at supper.’
Mr Gatteker had a carrying voice. Mr Forster, hearing his name bellowed across the room – though thankfully not the proceeding description – came over and introduced himself with a neat bow. He had the look of a man who had spent long months on the Continent, or aboard ship. The sun had bronzed his skin, and his eyes – a vivid blue – shone out from beneath straight brows, burnished to a white gold. It had been another freezing winter in England, and the rest of the gathering looked pale, one might even say dusty, by comparison.
Forster didn’t ask me how it felt to be hanged by the neck in front of one hundred thousand spectators, which by this point in the evening I took to be the height of good manners. I held my pale hand against his. ‘I seem a corpse next to you, sir. Are you in the navy?’ Aislabie had been Treasurer of the Navy for four years.
‘Heavens, no,’ Forster laughed. ‘Though I have been abroad for some years. I have a great passion for architecture.’ He had spent the last three years on a grand tour of Italy, he explained, with two companions. His friends remained abroad, lost in the magnificent, ruined splendour of it all. He had run out of funds over the winter and so sailed home, eager to put his ideas into practice and presumably to find paid work. He had filled countless sketchbooks with his designs, perhaps I might like to see them? I pretended that I would.
‘Then I beg you to visit me tomorrow sir, at Fountains Hall,’ he beamed. ‘Have you viewed the abbey yet?’
‘There is a painting—’
‘No? Splendid – you must permit me to tour it with you. We must pray for good weather. Now: promise me you will set aside at least three hours, sir! One cannot appreciate all the finer details if one rushes through . . .’ He then ruined five perfectly decent minutes of my life talking about flying buttresses. Mr Gatteker, the traitor, drifted away. My eyes flickered across Forster’s face, which was more interesting than his conversation. A brilliant white scar crossed one golden brow, and another cut into his lip. The lines at the edges of his eyes suggested a man of at least five and thirty, but they might have been formed from squinting at the Italian sun. In fact he mentioned later that evening that he was born in 1700, ‘the very cusp of the new century’. It had aged him, that bright sunshine.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your arm,’ I said, leaping into a momentary lull in his monologuing.
Forster winced. ‘Broke the wrist too, would you believe. Damned horse stumbled on the Nottingham road.’ The sling kept his arm high upon his chest, his bandaged thumb and fingers pressed to his heart.
‘Must have been painful.’
‘Screamed like a baby,’ he said, laughing at himself in a likeable way – and I forgave him for his lamentable skills in conversation.
But not enough to sit with him at supper.
We were a smaller gathering in the dining room, our party whittled down to eight for a light meal. It was almost nine when we sat down, but the curtains were left open to the black night. It gave a dramatic backdrop to the room, which was bright with candles, flames mirrored in the silverware. Aislabie and Lady Judith sat at either end of the table, our elegant hosts, exchanging affectionate jests at each other’s expense. Elizabeth Fairwood sat next to her would-be father in her grey gown, training her displeasure upon her plate. Francis Forster took the chair opposite, eager to speak with Aislabie. They fell swiftly into a discussion about the new stables, to the point that Aislabie called for Bagby, ordering him to bring in the plans for closer scrutiny. Lady Judith overruled her husband, her clear voice cutting above the rest. ‘Not at supper, dearest. Poor Mrs Fairwood is drooping with boredom.’
I was seated to her left, Mr Gatteker upon her right. She leaned closer, whispered in my ear. ‘Forster is a tedious fellow.
I’m glad that you are at my side tonight.’ I felt a slim hand on my knee, followed by a gentle squeeze.
Sneaton, placed between Mr Gatteker and Mrs Fairwood, reached for the salted fish, struggling with his damaged hand.
‘If you will permit me, sir,’ Mrs Fairwood offered, bringing the dish closer.
‘Much obliged, madam,’ Sneaton replied.
The exchange was brief and excruciatingly polite. They clearly loathed one another.
‘How quiet you are, Master Fleet,’ Lady Judith scolded Sam, cocooned in silence to my left. ‘I believe you have not spoken one word since we sat down.’
To my surprise, Mrs Fairwood spoke up in his defence. ‘Is that not refreshing, madam? To speak only when one has something pertinent to say?’
Lady Judith was too subtle to acknowledge the insult. ‘Now there is a noble ambition! Though I fear under such instruction, the dining rooms of England would fall silent at a stroke. Tell me, Master Fleet, do you enjoy your stay at Studley Hall?’
I sensed Sam’s consternation at the question, and his horror at being asked anything at all, to feel the eyes of the table swivel upon him. An honest reply would be no, he was not enjoying his stay at Studley, that – in fact – he hated it and wished more than anything to be gone. I had at least taught him enough manners to know that this was not an acceptable response.
‘Yes,’ he lied.
I trod on his toe.
‘Thank you,’ he added, miserable.
Another press of the toe, as if he were a pipe organ.
‘Madam.’ Half yelped.
‘There is much to commend a quiet gentleman,’ Mrs Fairwood announced to the air, dark ringlets shaking with the force of her feeling. ‘It suggests a thoughtful nature. To speak is a common necessity. To listen – a rare virtue.’
A Death at Fountains Abbey Page 8
