Circle of Shadows caw-4

by Imogen Robertson

  ‘Shock, I’d imagine. Guilt.’ The Chancellor’s words came from his mouth spiked and white-hot.

  ‘Perhaps. He says a masked man led him to the room. That he felt dizzy.’

  ‘Not terribly convincing,’ the Chancellor said, turning away again.

  The moon was young, a fat sickle, but there were still torches guttering here and there along the main thoroughfare, giving light to the street and casting monstrous shadows up the walls. Chancellor Swann was a shadow himself, dressed, as always, in black. It was not surprising the people suspected him of being a Jesuit. Marshal of the Court, President of the Court of the Exchequer and of the Court of Chancery and the Consistorial Court, the thin dry voice in the Duke’s ear.

  Only a few hours ago Krall had watched the Fool’s Parade from the balcony of the Town Hall. At its head a figure on stilts, all in black, had led a man on a leash dressed in a peasant’s mockery of royal finery complete with a huge straw wig. The man had danced in and out of the crowd, yapping at the girls and throwing showers of coloured confetti over their heads, then clutching at the collar round his throat when he was yanked back at intervals to the side of the stilt-walker. He thought the Duke would probably have laughed at the spectacle, but that Swann himself would not have been amused.

  He had got here damn quick. Krall calculated. His first message would have taken at least an hour to reach Ulrichsberg, even if the rider rode hard. He imagined the messenger, dirty with the road, being shown into Swann’s study, handing over Krall’s message amongst all those gilt flourishes and polished floors. Swann must have been on the road back to Oberbach in minutes. Yet, as always, he exhibited this icy control. Krall thought of what the Chancellor was managing as the wedding of their sovereign approached. Paper mountains of procedure, a squeezing of the last ducats out of the Maulberg Treasury. A series of feasts and celebrations, royal hunts, balls, and contracts the length of the good Bible itself. There would be a hundred visiting dignitaries coming to peer at Maulberg and her sovereign, assessing her strengths and weaknesses. And now this, a much-valued member of the court, murdered by an Englishman. Perhaps it was no surprise after all that he had ridden hard.

  ‘Lady Martesen was a friend of mine.’ The statement surprised Krall. He had never thought of Swann as a man to have friends. ‘Her loss is … grievous.’

  The Chancellor was watching the last of the Feast of Fools revellers stumble and weave along the road, singing as they went. Their costumes were half-undone and most had thrust their masks up off their faces or trailed them from their befuddled fingers. Witches and demons with their thick red papier-mache tongues hanging out, and strange birdmen, still flocking together and singing some inventive obscenity in surprisingly neat harmony. They shed feathers from their backs as they slapped one another across the shoulders.

  ‘No witnesses, Herr District Officer?’

  Krall shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He paused. ‘The room was fastened from the inside, though the key was not in the lock but on the floor nearby. Nobody saw this man Mr Clode says led him to the room, though no one saw him cross alone either. Not for certain.’

  Krall found the Chancellor looking at him, his eyes narrowed. ‘There must have been fifty men in that type of motley tonight, Your Excellency,’ he added.

  ‘Have you anything useful to tell me, Krall?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘When the parade was done, Colonel Padfield and his wife went to the Council Chambers with Mr and Mrs Clode for the Mayor’s Ball. According to Colonel Padfield, Mr Clode appeared drunk. The Colonel took him outside to avoid a scene and went to fetch water. When he returned, Mr Clode was missing. Some half an hour later, during the search, he heard sounds from the haberdashers shop and broke down the door.’

  ‘Why did the Colonel think to look there?’

  ‘His party had hired the back room of the shop to change into their costumes.’ Swann nodded and waved a hand. Krall continued. ‘No one can swear to seeing Lady Martesen after the parade. It seems she never entered the rooms where the ball was held.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Do you know, Krall, that Mr Daniel Clode is closely connected with the Earl of Sussex?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Lord Sussex holds a number of bonds issued by the Maulberg Treasury that are due to be renewed or paid off before mid-summer.’

  Krall frowned. The Duke’s love of opera and show was expensive, and he knew the state owed money to half of Europe. Murder was murder, but how righteous could Maulberg afford to be? Could an English Earl render them bankrupt?

  ‘Awkward.’

  ‘Indeed. We were to start negotiations this week. A British citizen, a well-connected British citizen — we must hope his mind will clear and then he will offer a full confession. We cannot execute him with less. And to torture him might be politically unwise.’

  ‘The Duke outlawed torture three years ago.’

  ‘He sometimes speaks regretfully of that but, as I say, we cannot do it in any case, even if the ban were repealed. The English would paint us as barbarians, and then they would immediately present the bonds to the Treasury. If that were to happen before the Duke’s wedding … Make your enquiries carefully, Herr District Officer.’

  ‘What do you wish doing with him, Your Excellency?’

  ‘Castle Grenzhow, I think.’

  Krall turned to go, but something was pulling and twitching in the back of his mind, making him pause. Sussex. Krall read the English papers every month. It kept his knowledge of that language turning in his mind even if he seldom spoke it, and reminded him of the years he had spent in London in his youth. The unruly people, their outspoken press, the way they went charging out from their cold little island and swaggered about the world. He remembered now reading of the scandal of the Earl of Sussex. A young boy, Jonathan Adams, the heir to that great estate, and his older sister Susan, rescued from danger by a woman and a recluse with a taste for anatomy. The papers had told and retold the story for weeks, and each new element of the story made it grow ever more unlikely until the point came when it was so unbelievable, it could only have been true.

  ‘Is Mr Clode acquainted with Mrs Westerman and Mr Crowther then, Chancellor?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it likely Sussex will ask them to come and plead his case?’

  ‘I cannot imagine anything will be able to keep them away.’ Swann stroked one thin eyebrow with the leather forefinger of his glove. ‘Mrs Clode, who was enjoying her first few months of married life in travel until you arrested her husband for murder, is the younger sister of Harriet Westerman.’

  Krall digested the news in silence, and his mind filled with the image of wheels churning up the roads across Europe. How long would it take a woman, determined and rich, to reach them?

  ‘Be thorough,’ Swann continued, ‘and take a room at court. We will be seeing a great deal of each other over the weeks to come.’

  ‘Your Excellency,’ Krall said and bowed, bringing his heels together.

  Swann raised his hand and, as if he had conjured it out of nowhere, one of the neat fast vehicles the court officials used to travel about Maulberg emerged from the darkness of the street opposite. So polished was it, a deep black, that it seemed to catch the torchlight and hold it. All this show. A court built on paper, bills, bonds, promissory notes, contracts of marriage. The Palace of Ulrichsberg was a splendid lie. The modest Town Hall of Oberbach a more solid structure.

  Krall watched as Swann climbed in and the coachman drove his horses into a swift trot, then he crossed the square to the haberdasher’s shop. He nodded to the guards and went inside, closing the door behind him. Lady Martesen was waiting for him, her eyes open, her arms outstretched, her long white dress washing around her like moonlight. Her fingers seemed to be pointing to the pool of the Englishman’s blood as it soaked into the wooden floor.

  I.2

  15 March 1784, Caveley, Hartswood, Sussex, England

  Harriet Westerman was in the garden with her four-ye
ar-old daughter the morning the news came. They were hand-in-hand, examining the flower-beds for the first signs of snowdrops, some promise that the vicious grip of the winter was loosening. The soil still looked stunned with cold, but the air was warming. Anne was singing her mother nursery rhymes, and when Harriet glanced towards the house she could see the shadows of her son and his tutor at study in the library. She was aware of her good fortune. On her desk in the salon there were letters waiting for her and her accounts books. She knew she would be able to read both with pleasure.

  Then came the crunch and rattle of hooves on the gravel driveway. They came at a fast trot, and Harriet turned from her daughter. She saw a liveried messenger, straight in the saddle, his coat splashed high with the drek of the road. He had been travelling fast. The laugh died in Harriet’s throat. She remembered the moment the news arrived of her late husband’s injury at sea, and seemed to be caught in that moment again. Anne tugged on her fingers but Harriet did not move. A minute passed, then she heard the kitchen door open and Mrs Heathcote, her housekeeper, emerged from the walled garden behind the house and began to jog across the lawn towards her, the letter in her hand. Don’t come so fast, Harriet found herself thinking. Give me a moment more of not knowing.

  ‘Mama! You are hurting my fingers!’

  She released her and looked down. Her daughter had Rachel’s colouring, her hair the colour of old brass rather than Harriet’s fierce copper. ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said quietly, then put her hand out to take the letter from her housekeeper. Mrs Heathcote bent down to gather up the child.

  ‘Come, my lovely. Cook wants your help and Mama has a letter to read.’

  ‘Let her read it later — why is it a now letter? I haven’t finished singing.’

  Mrs Heathcote bundled the little girl into the kitchen, then returned to hover round the garden door. She heard Harriet cry out, and saw her sit suddenly on the cold ground as if her legs had given way.

  Mrs Heathcote marched back into the house.

  ‘William! Get to Mr Graves. Tell him bad news come to Caveley. Mr Heathcote, if you could go deliver the same to Mr Crowther. Your hat’s on the hook, man. Quick, quick. Dido, a word to Mr Quince, if you please.’

  ‘What on earth is happening, Mrs Heathcote?’ the cook asked, floury and blinking. Little Anne sat on the floor at her feet, oblivious to everything when there was cake mixture to be cleaned out from the bowl.

  ‘No notion, Mrs Brooks. But if Mrs Westerman’s taken like that, it’s something serious, that’s all I know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll tend to my mistress.’

  After the trials, scandals and losses of the previous years, Harriet Westerman had been trying to live quietly. There would come a time when her children would need to be launched on the world, but she thought before then to have some peace, to let people forget her. In Keswick the previous summer she had shot and killed a man. She was satisfied she had been justified, but she had seen that yank against the trigger as some finale to her adventures in blood. Scandal had flared, and slowly fallen away. She had decided to concentrate her mind on domestic concerns.

  Her friend Mr Owen Graves had married Miss Verity Chase in November of 1783, and had removed her from London to Thornleigh Hall in Sussex, the home of his ward, the Earl of Sussex. Lord Sussex was now ten years old, his sister thirteen, their uncle almost eight. This strange group of aristocratic orphans the new Mrs Graves had taken to herself, and they loved her for it. Marriage had lessened Owen’s burdens and made him happy.

  Miss Rachel Trench, Harriet’s younger sister, married Daniel Clode in early December, and soon afterwards, the newly-weds had left Hartswood for some months abroad. Rachel and Daniel Clode had intended to spend most of the year on the continent. Neither had yet enjoyed the opportunity to travel, but it was not in their nature to do so only for pleasure. Daniel Clode was Graves’s right hand in the administration of the estates of the Earl of Sussex, and Lord Sussex’s financial interests spread beyond the borders of Great Britain and onto the continent like ivy, even while he skated on the frozen lake behind his ancestral home and played soldiers with Harriet’s son, Stephen. Clode justified his trip with the thought that he could establish some sort of contact with Lord Sussex’s debtors and partners on his way, and so the path they intended to take across Europe was paved with money and interest. It should have made for a smooth passage.

  Once these celebrations were complete, the winter had proved a rather lonely time for Harriet. Her friends at Thornleigh Hall called often, but she saw little of Mr Gabriel Crowther. He always had been reclusive and was quite rich enough to never leave his house. She told herself it was winter, and therefore his preferred season for his anatomical studies. The cold meant he could work without the smell of corruption crawling through the house, upsetting the servants. She also told herself that the bullet wound he had received in his shoulder in the summer was still troubling him, making the short ride to her house uncomfortable. Then she would read, in one of the newspapers her housekeeper had failed to hide, the continuing speculations about their adventures in the Lake Country, consider how much she had learned about Crowther’s family, his childhood, and wonder as she stared out over her frost-covered lawns if he was avoiding her company, whether seeing her reminded him of the gothic horrors of his history. He was already over fifty when they first met and had grown comfortable in his isolation from society. She asked herself if he was trying to become what he had been before they met in 1780, a closeted eccentric, cut off from human society, working his knives by candlelight and content only in the company of the dead. Yet during their time in the Lakes they had met his nephew, Felix. Crowther was making the boy, his heir, a generous allowance and heard regularly from him. He had also taken into his care Felix’s wife and child. Harriet herself was godmother to the infant. He could not retreat entirely from the world now. Harriet would sigh, and return to the estate papers on her desk.

  Her household still recognised Crowther as part of the larger family of Caveley, however. It was never questioned that on seeing Harriet in distress, they would send for Mr Crowther at once. Their faith was justified. Whatever Crowther’s involvement with his work, or reluctance to stir from his house, he was in the Long Salon at Caveley within half an hour of the messenger stirring the gravel on the driveway. He had been afraid on seeing her servant’s pale face, and ridden at a pace that would have impressed even in a far younger man, but as he rode he did not speculate, only concentrated on the speed he could draw from his horse. Mrs Heathcote had the door open for him before he had dismounted. He handed her his hat, and following her nod, walked into the Long Salon unannounced. Harriet was seated on the settee, her back straight. She was not ill, it seemed. He felt his relief, took the letter she held out towards him and retreated to one of the armchairs. It was only then he became aware that his heart was thudding at a startling rate and a blossom of pain opened out through his shoulder. He put his fingertips to his forehead and tried to read.

  At first he could hardly make it out, an hysterical outpouring of fear, an assertion of Daniel’s innocence, a sudden conviction that the terrible misunderstanding would be speedily cleared up. He would have struggled to make any sense of it at all, but there was another, longer letter attached from a Colonel Padfield. The Colonel appeared to be an Englishman, employed in Maulberg and resident there some two years. This letter was a great deal clearer, but in its way more worrying. It gave a short account of the facts of the case against Clode, the seriousness of the situation and a simple statement that Mr and Mrs Clode were in need of support from their friends in England. Crowther only had time to read it twice, carefully, before Mr and Mrs Graves arrived from Thornleigh Hall and he put it into their hands. Mrs Heathcote served coffee, and he noticed that her eyes were red. Stephen could be heard in the hallway demanding information, and his tutor sharply insisting he return to his lessons. At last Verity Graves spoke.

  ‘You will go, Owen, at once, of course.’

 
Graves nodded. ‘Thank you, my dear. Though I hate to leave you with so much business to conduct.’

  ‘Mrs Service already has the Hall running like clockwork,’ his wife answered briskly. ‘I shall ask my father and mother to make a long visit while you are away. You trust Papa to advise me?’

  ‘No one better than Mr Chase.’

  ‘His poor parents!’ Verity turned to her hostess. ‘Harriet, would you like me to carry this news to Pulborough?’

  Harriet started. ‘Oh, yes! His father and mother … I had forgotten. Thank you, Verity.’

  ‘I shall tell them Graves leaves at once, and …?’

  ‘I shall come with you, Graves,’ Harriet said, then looked at Crowther. ‘Gabriel?’ He only nodded. ‘Thank you.’ He watched her as she covered her mouth with the back of her hand, staring at the carpet, her eyes slightly wide. He wished they were alone, then he could tell her to stop trying to think of everything at once. He did not find the company of Mr and Mrs Graves overly trying, which in the general scheme of humanity made them part of a particular and privileged group, but he could not speak to Harriet as frankly as he would wish in front of them. ‘Should I go and see them too?’ Harriet said. ‘Clode’s parents?’

  Verity put out her hand and took Harriet’s. ‘I shall take the news to them. They will be relieved and grateful you are all going to his aid and will not want you to waste time calling on them. Leave this to me, Harriet.’ Crowther thought, not for the first time, that Graves had chosen very well.

  The company parted and returned to their households to share the news, or what parts of it they felt they must, and make their preparations for an uncertain journey. Crowther’s housekeeper received her instructions calmly and began her work. He retreated to his study, a generously-sized space which had served as the dining room of the house when it had more sociable occupants, and wondered what he could save from the work he was now forced to abandon. There was no time to take the steps necessary to preserve the samples he had been studying, and it would be difficult to replace them. Still, it could not be helped. Mrs Westerman had asked him to go, and go he would.