Island of Bones caw-3

by Imogen Robertson

  ‘Mrs Westerman, a cunning-man with your son. .’

  Harriet smiled at him. ‘Get back on your horse, Mr Sturgess. My husband was once cured by a witch-doctor on one of the Polynesia Islands. He would have the greatest respect for Casper Grace.’

  Mr Sturgess still managed to retain some of his air of outraged righteousness, but he did as he was ordered and climbed back onto his mount, then with a savage pull at the animal’s mouth, turned it out onto the road again.

  ‘Was that true, Mrs Westerman?’ Crowther murmured as they watched him retreat.

  ‘About James? No, though it happened to a friend of his. No, Crowther, I am afraid James would be as shocked as Mr Sturgess that I did not know what Stephen was about. But he was my husband; that would be his right. Mr Sturgess does not have it. I shall speak to Stephen later.’

  Crowther offered her his arm and she took it, telling him, ‘I notice Mr Sturgess had no interest in finding Miss Hurst.’

  ‘He has his suspect, he has no need for the girl. Let us find her ourselves.’

  The ladies were among the shade in the walks behind the church itself, hoping to find some relief from the heat. In the heavy stillness of the air it was difficult to imagine the sudden shout of rain the previous evening. Harriet saw the two women arm-in-arm and paused, and with that strange instinct humans have of sensing when they are watched, the women turned and waited for them to approach. Harriet expected to see some sign of either dread or hope on Miss Hurst’s face when she noticed them. She gave no mark of either, however; it was Miss Scales whose ruined face flitted with hope or concern.

  ‘Miss Hurst,’ Harriet said as she reached them. ‘This morning a man called Casper Grace brought a body to Silverside from the hills. Mr von Bolsenheim recognised it as that of your father. He is dead, I am afraid.’

  The girl lowered her head and sighed, murmuring something in her own tongue that Harriet could not catch.

  ‘Some accident?’ Miss Scales said, clinging tightly onto her companion’s arm.

  ‘That seems unlikely,’ Crowther replied.

  Miss Hurst looked up quickly. ‘When?’

  Crowther rested his cane on the ground between them. ‘Some time yesterday before the storm, I believe.’

  Miss Hurst watched Crowther for a moment, then said precisely, ‘Thank you, Mr Crowther. I also thank you for your actions this morning. You have been kind to a stranger. Heaven sees what you do.’ She turned to Miss Scales who was trembling on her arm. ‘I should like to return to my lodgings now, Miss Scales.’

  ‘My dear, there is no question of you returning to the Oak. You shall stay at the vicarage with my father and myself as our guest. But what are you saying, my lord? That Mr Hurst was attacked? Can there be some doubt, some mistake?’

  ‘I am afraid there is no mistake, Miss Scales.’

  ‘Oh, how very terrible. How shall we manage?’

  For a moment Harriet thought that Miss Hurst was going to refuse the invitation to the vicarage, but as Miss Scales pulled a little on her arm, she yielded. Miss Scales looked very distressed, and Harriet thought she saw the younger woman pat her arm. They turned towards the back way to the vicarage. Harriet watched them go with a confused frown.

  ‘Miss Hurst seemed a great deal more distressed this morning when her father was only missing,’ she said. ‘Is it some trick of the national character? No screaming, no fainting, no tears. I have never seen such news being taken in a like manner. Shall we follow on, Crowther? I feel a great curiosity to know more of her father. What did she say?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Harriet turned towards him and saw he was looking at a granite monument before which Miss Scales and Miss Hurst had been standing. She followed his gaze and read the engraving. Julia Penhaligon, wife of William Penhaligon, Baron Keswick, died 5th January 1750 aged 41 years.

  ‘Your mother’s grave. I am sorry, Crowther.’

  He looked at her down his long nose. ‘Why, Mrs Westerman? I do not think she hears us.’ He sighed then continued a little more easily, ‘I think we must speak to the Fraulein. I thought she looked worried rather than grieved. As to what she said, she spoke in her own language but I recognise the quotation. It was a favourite of one of my tutors in Wittenberg, from the Book of Isaiah: For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord.’

  Harriet’s eyes lifted to the stirring leaves above them. ‘What might she have had in mind at that, do you suppose?’

  ‘I cannot say, only that the professor of whom I spoke used the phrase to remind us that God’s works were not readily understandable by men.’

  ‘So perhaps she finds God’s hand in this. .’

  Crowther looked weary. ‘There are those, Mrs Westerman, eager to see God in everything that passes before them. I look at that wound and I see a man with a weapon in his hand and nothing holy in his mind. Shall we follow them?’

  Harriet did not move. ‘Let us give them a few moments. Perhaps you might look instead at the letter from Jocasta.’

  She saw Crowther frown and hurried on. ‘I wrote to her before I left Caveley and asked her to tell me what she remembered of her time here.’ She flushed faintly. ‘I did not mention it till now, as I did not know how those events might be related to the body on Saint Herbert’s Island, and I had no wish to speak of them until I thought they might be of significance.’

  Crowther said coldly, ‘Mrs Bligh claims she saw a man who was not my brother standing over my father’s body and that he wore a green coat. I also told you I believe that she simply saw the first discoverer of the murder.’

  ‘But she did not recognise the man! Who was it that first discovered Lord Keswick?’

  Crowther was silent for a moment. ‘As I recall, it was the coachman from Silverside.’

  ‘She would know him, surely. She must have seen him every day in the village. Had he been in service with your family long?’

  ‘Yes, but seeing a body might confuse any person. Certainly a young girl. Often people are wrong about what they have seen. I do not understand what you mean to accomplish by having me hear her account again.’

  ‘Please just let me read it, Crowther.’

  He moved sharply away from her. ‘Mrs Westerman, my brother confessed! Confessed in front of the servants and the Vicar of Crosthwaite in his room at Silverside within an hour of the body being discovered. He came suddenly from London with his debts pursuing him. He had assaulted one of his most pressing creditors in the street only days before. He arranged to see my father and within hours Lord Keswick was dead. My brother was found weeping in his room with a knife in his hands, and only the actions of the servants prevented him ending his own life on the spot! He slashed Mrs Tyers’s face when she attempted to disarm him. Are those the actions of an innocent man? Your perversity is remarkable. The whole world knows my brother murdered his father, so you must believe he did not. Whatever the crimes of my father, he did not murder himself. And what has any of this to do with the body on Saint Herbert’s Island? Explain that to me! You are spinning fictions out of the air and trying to build roads between them!’

  Harriet kept her eyes lowered while he spoke. She heard his breathing, and looked up to see him with his back to her, his head lowered and staring across the churchyard into the meadows between Derwent Water and Bassenthwaite. ‘Crowther,’ she said very quietly, ‘let me speak.’ He did not move, so wetting her lips she smoothed out the paper in her hand and began to read.

  Dear Mrs Westerman,

  I am well thank you as is Sam, who asks to be remembered to you. We continue just as we were though Boyo does not like the heat of the season. Morgan found me with your note yesterday evening and read it to me. I had the night to think on it and so now will answer you. You ask me to tell you everything I remember about the death of Lord Keswick, and so I shall, though I don’t think Mr Crowther will want to hear it again. Thinking on it seems to stir up all his devils, and he spends half his energy trying to sit
on them. Maybe you will have better luck than I at getting him to face them and knock them down.

  Harriet glanced up at Crowther’s profile. He remained entirely still, but she could see he was listening. She found her place in the letter again and continued:

  I was just thirteen when the Baron died and living with my aunt in Portinscale. She was a hard woman, and not over fond of me so I kept away from her and spent all the hours I could out wandering and listening to the winds talking. On the day Lord Keswick died it was foul enough weather to keep most folks in, so I was surprised to see a gentleman at the edge of the woods. I was on the far side of the field by the lake, some twenty yards away, but I’ll answer for it: there was a man there in a dark green coat. It was the colour made me curious. I thought it might be one of the new footmen the Baron had just lately hired, because he was a burly type like them, but they all wore red like soldiers do, not green. I was told later I might have seen Mr Adair, because he wore green that day, but he was as thin and tall a man as Mr Crowther is now. The magistrate wanted me to say about the man in the green coat that it was Mr Adair, but when I swore it wasn’t, he told me I was a stupid girl. They all thought me stupid since I could never get my eyes round written words. Then he called me a liar and said so to my aunt too. I ran away a while after. But they couldn’t shake that picture from my head. There was a big man in a green coat bent over a man on the ground. I couldn’t see it was Lord Keswick then, but I saw there was something evil in it and let out a yelp. The big man turned round, but I don’t reckon he saw me. I dressed in brown and grey like all the village in them days, so I’d disappear into the woods like water into a stream, but I was scared so I ran away and hid up on Catbells till the cold drove me home.

  If you chance to meet with my brother Casper Grace while you are at Silverside, can I ask you for the friendship we have, to give him my greetings and tell him I am well, and if he is in want I would think it most kind if you would put a guinea in his hand from his fond sister who thinks of him still, and I shall certainly send it back to you as soon as you wish it, for I am busy and have it to give. Any note you might send me to tell me how he goes will be held and looked for here at the chophouse in St Martin’s Lane if you put my name on it, and thankfully received by your respectful servant, and Mr Crowther’s too, of course,

  Jocasta Bligh

  Written by Thomas Ripley as Mrs Bligh spoke it on this day 9 July 1783 and despatched with his best wishes the same day.

  Crowther had not moved at all, and still looking into the distance said in a dull and tired voice, ‘It is just as she described it to myself, Mrs Westerman. I am at a loss to understand why you find the narrative so significant, though it reminds us we must write and tell her of what has befallen her brother today. If Mr Sturgess captures Casper and takes him to Carlisle, he will have need of friends.’

  ‘That will be a pleasant letter to write. “Dear Jocasta, your brother is considered a madman and hunted through the fells for murder by the local magistrate”.’ Harriet bit her lip and said more gently, ‘There is one thing here though, Crowther, that you have not spoken of to me before. Who are these “burly footmen” your father had lately hired?’

  Crowther looked round at her, abandoning for the first time the view over the fields. ‘I cannot say. Mrs Tyers did mention when I arrived that some of the casual servants had been given a month’s wages in lieu of notice. My father became somewhat eccentric after my mother’s death, withdrew from local society, and his former friends tell me they were turned away at the door.’

  ‘Crowther, do you see yet what I am trying to suggest? A man refuses company and hires new servants notable for their size. Do you think that after your mother’s death, Lord Keswick might have become aware of some threat on his life, and this withdrawal from society, the presence of these men, might have been an attempt to protect himself? Do you think he feared Adair?’

  Crowther shook his head. ‘No. Adair he loved. He was angry with him over his debts, over his debauchery with his friends, but I never saw him go in fear of him.’

  ‘It seems to me he feared something in those months before his death, Crowther. You thought that Adair was responsible for the skeleton on the island. Now the point that came from your father’s swordstick and the letter of Mrs Tyers about the stranger with the snuffbox seem to suggest that your father might have been guilty of that murder. What if Adair were innocent of patricide? What if your father were killed by someone who knew he was responsible for the death of the Jacobite on the island?’

  ‘And the betrayal of Rupert de Beaufoy.’

  Harriet remained very still. Crowther had told her he had attended his brother’s trial and execution. She knew he had always considered his guilt beyond doubt, but wondered if that faith in his brother’s venality had begun to be questioned. To give up a certainty, even when it is a cruel one, is painful. We do not know how firmly we have bound our truths into our lives till we try and rip one free.

  ‘You are a remarkable woman, Mrs Westerman, to talk to a man of such things as you stand on his mother’s grave.’

  Harriet met the coldness of his eyes steadily. ‘You said, Crowther, that she did not hear us.’

  For a moment she was afraid she had made him very angry, then he sighed. ‘So I did. Very well. I think we must go our separate ways this afternoon, after all. Today’s events need your attention. Those of some years ago are still demanding mine. I shall look over Jocasta’s letter again, then visit Lottie Tyers and ask her to explain her note. After that a visit to the museum, I think. We shall meet back at Silverside and pick over whatever, if anything, we have learned.’

  Harriet felt the relief touch her skin like a breeze. ‘You go to see Mr Askew?’

  Crowther smoothed the silver ball at the head of his cane with his right hand. ‘You are right in one way I fear, Mrs Westerman, you and Jocasta. I must continue the battle with the old demons, having begun, and that means discovering more of my own history. For a little while I shall make Mr Askew the Virgil to my Dante.’

  The thought of Mr Askew in the habit of an Ancient Roman made Harriet grin, as she was sure was the intention. She began to follow the other ladies slowly out of the graveyard, then before she had reached the angle of the church, she turned round again. Crowther had leaned his cane against his mother’s headstone, and rested his elbow on the same. He was reading Jocasta’s letter again. Harriet continued on her way.

  III.7

  ‘Ham, I am to pay a visit at the vicarage before we return to Silverside,’ Harriet said. ‘I shall take the path, but will you come and find me there?’

  She was distracted from his answer by the sight of a portly gentleman lumbering along the road from Keswick towards them. He was waving something in his hand.

  ‘Who is that gentleman, Ham? Do you think he wishes to speak to me?’

  Ham glanced up the road and nodded. ‘That’s Postlethwaite, madam. Landlord of the Royal Oak. Looks like he does.’

  She stepped away from the carriage and walked a few steps to meet him. He was rather red in the face and puffing in the heat. He did not have the figure of a man used to stirring much outside his own house, and though he raised his hand towards her, at first he had only breath to bow and touch his forehead with a rather stained-looking handkerchief.

  ‘Apologies, madam,’ he wheezed after a minute or so. ‘A man must fight to get air into his lungs in this weather. The news of Mr Hurst has charged about the village like a mad bull. Are you looking into the matter? I hear Mr Sturgess is after Casper. I thought perhaps I should go to him, but I have heard such things about you and Mr Crowther, and Walter my pot boy said he saw the carriage here. .’ He ran out of his store of breath at this point and was forced to break off to replenish it.

  ‘Indeed, sir, I understand you are the landlord of the Royal Oak?’

  ‘I am, I am. Might I have a moment of your time? I did not know who best to consult. Mr Sturgess walks the other way every time I see him anyw
ay, in case I might ask him to settle his account, though truth be told, as long as he holds the rights to license my house, he has no fear of me. Might we just sit down a moment, madam? I walked faster than I should have done. .’

  Harriet accompanied him to a little bench by the church gate that offered some shade and let him recover himself; however, before he had breath quite enough to speak again, he pulled from under his arm a folded newspaper and put it into her hands, then jabbed at an advertisement in the middle of the page with a fat finger. Harriet began to read.

  To Herr Hurst, thought to be travelling in the Northern Counties. Our attempts to contact you in Cockermouth having come to naught, we wish to let it be known the information mentioned is indeed of great interest and humbly request you communicate with us again. Please apply to the firm of Hudson amp; White in Church Street, Cockermouth, who have power to act for us in this matter. Your grateful friend.

  Harriet shook her head. ‘This is today’s paper, Mr Postlethwaite! What on earth can this mean?’

  ‘Just what I thought myself. “Postlethwaite, what can this mean?”’ He dabbed his forehead. ‘Then I thought, “Whatever it means, it means something, that’s certain”, and then Walter came in and said his piece, so I thought, “Well, maybe that’s where I should go then”, and set off while I still had my coat half-on, and have trotted all the way for fear of missing you.’

  ‘I am happy indeed that you did, Mr Postlethwaite.’

  The landlord spread his fingers over his knees and wagged them. ‘I am glad, I am glad. It was no accident then? Oh, it’s a tragedy for our little town! Skeletons are interesting — attractions, even, if it’s a good story — but fresh bodies? Of a travelling man? Who will come look at our hills if they think they might end up buried between them. .’