Island of Bones caw-3

by Imogen Robertson

  Harriet knew very well that Crowther’s eyesight was at least as good as her own, but took the paper without demur and studied it. It was a short letter, and reading it, she breathed in sharply.

  After a moment or two Crowther’s voice broke in on her. ‘Mrs Westerman?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It is dated fifteenth May 1750, which places it a few months after your mother’s death, does it not?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Westerman, but if you would be so kind. .’

  Harriet brushed a curl from her cheek and started to read.

  ‘My Lord,

  Much as I do not want to add worry to your grief over the loss of my dear aunt, I cannot, in honour to her memory, see how I can fail to communicate with you a disturbing rumour that has recently reached my ears. Some, who out of love of my aunt have hitherto kept silent have, at her death begun to speak, and powerful suspicions have been raised against you. I speak of ’45. I say the name de Beaufoy. I say that those who once believed themselves betrayed by a trusted servant begin to question their intelligence. I hope you may be able to communicate to me any proofs you may have of your innocence in that matter. I shall undertake that they will reach the interested parties. If not, may I ask you make arrangements for the security of yourself and your home.

  With my sincere regards,

  Robert O’Brien, Killarney House.’

  The birds outside seemed to sense some change in the air and whistled even more stridently than before.

  ‘Who is Robert O’Brien, Crowther?’ Harriet said at last.

  He closed his eyes and put his long fingertips to his forehead. ‘My mother’s nephew through her older brother’s marriage. My mother came from a Catholic family in Ireland.’

  ‘Jacobites?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘It is possible they had such sympathies,’ Crowther replied after a pause. ‘It was O’Brien who provided a family for my sister after my father was murdered. She was sent to Ireland direct from her boarding school.’

  Mr Leathes watched them. Mr Crowther had his fingertips together and was examining them closely. Mrs Westerman was tapping her foot on the Turkish rug.

  ‘So it seems my father had reason to fear, and Lottie was right,’ Crowther said slowly. ‘I wonder why he kept the letter about him?’

  ‘Perhaps he had a thought that if anything did occur. .’ Harriet said, then saw Crowther flinch and hurried on, ‘Our friend in London might well be able to put some flesh on these bones, though we cannot hear from him for several days.’ She looked at the solicitor again, who was trying, not unsuccessfully, to give the impression of having been struck suddenly deaf. ‘Mr Leathes, is there anything you can tell us about Sir William’s affairs in the forties? Or what his behaviour was in the period before his death? You must have records of those times.’

  If Mr Leathes thought it strange this question came from Harriet rather than Crowther himself, he was too well-mannered to show it.

  ‘We do, of course, Mrs Westerman, have in our archives copies of all communications between this office and Silverside from the time Sir William first settled here in my grandfather’s time until the present day. But perhaps, if you wish it, I may take you to a better, living oracle. My father Thomas dealt with Lord Keswick for many years. He retired from practice some ten years ago, but his memory is still sharp.’ Mr Leathes consulted his pocket-watch. ‘If you are at liberty, I should be very glad to invite you to pay a morning call at my home and meet him. The box Mr Dent can take to Silverside, and it will be there for you to examine at your leisure.’

  Crowther actually smiled at the other man. ‘I would be glad to see your father again.’

  ‘He will be happy to see you too, sir. He speaks fondly of you still.’

  Neither gentleman noticed Harriet raise her eyebrows at that.

  IV.2

  Casper was quite confident he could avoid any hireling of Mr Sturgess as long as he chose, but he came the back way into Portinscale and let himself into the yard of Mrs Fowler’s place quietly nevertheless. The Fowler family had always been a weariness to their neighbours. The grandfather of the family had drunk away any reputation the family had had, and they had been a charge on the parish ever since. Casper could remember the grandfather from his youth, a foul-tempered old man who would beg on market days and say he was too sick to work the rest. His wife carried ill humour with her the way other women carried their baskets. Her children she made work the little piece of land they had until they were old enough to dodge her blows and flee. There was always someone in the village soft enough to feed her offspring, but as soon as they had their fill they went back to their wild and vindictive games. A sheep went straying, and the Fowlers would be eating mutton; a trader found his take short or a laker their pocket empty and the Fowlers would be drunk. But they were just smart enough to make sure their crimes were not easily discoverable and their victims without the resources to prosecute. They were loud about their enemies and in their own righteous defence, and continual in their complaints.

  The grandfather had one son who stayed in the village, Isaac — and who was just like himself — then the old devil slunk into his grave. Isaac had found a simple-minded woman to marry, and soon mocked and bullied her into a sullen and bitter drudge. Swithun was their only surviving child, and at nineteen, looked to follow his father and grandfather in his ways, but Casper would have thought both Isaac and Swithun too much a pair of cowards to try and rob him. Petty thieving, certainly, but to attack the cunning-man? Still, it was Swithun who was in the field looking away when Casper passed, his mother who had her eyes all over, and Isaac earned the occasional shilling in the stables of the Royal Oak.

  Casper ducked under the lintel of the back door and walked into the cottage. Swithun’s mother was sat, bent over the fire — Casper could smell rabbit cooking. She twisted round as he entered and her face went from a grin to a flat mask in the moment of seeing him.

  ‘Mother Fowler. Where’s your boy and your husband?’

  The woman rocked back from her pot and wrapped her hands in the brown wool of her skirts. She shook her head. Casper took a solid step forward and she hissed, ‘Don’t know, Casper, swear it.’

  Her eyes flinched all around the room, and her face was red and sweating. Joe stretched his wings and gave a low caw like a pipe drone when the bag is old. Her eyes became wide.

  ‘They didn’t do it! They wouldn’t! They didn’t tell me!’ The last came up almost as a shriek. ‘They’s gone.’

  The black witch was enjoying herself. Fear always fed her and made her loud. She badgered at Casper to hurt the woman, kick the stool out from under her and see her head smack against the cobbles. Mrs Fowler must have seen some of it in Casper’s eyes, for she whimpered again and looked as if she would clamber up the wide chimney if she could.

  ‘Swithun came back first though, didn’t he?’ Casper said in a low growl. ‘Came back, as if he could tend to the pig and do his chores and no bill to pay? Gave you my rabbits to turn to sludge in your pot? And your man shovelling shit in the Royal Oak. Then they ran when they saw me going up to the circle.’

  ‘Their clothes were wet through! They had to come home,’ she yelped. Joe cawed again and she could hardly speak fast enough. ‘I sent them away when I seen youse.’

  ‘Where are they? Give them here.’

  She looked about her as if she thought the devils might come and take her for the fires at once. ‘Who, what, Casper?’

  ‘The clothes, woman!’

  She scuttled away from the fire, keeping so low she was almost on all fours, and snatched up a couple of shirts and two pairs of breeches from the drying rack and thrust them at him.

  Casper turned them slowly in his hands, lifted up the fabric to his face and breathed. Fowler was no better as a laundress than a cook: there were stains on the shirt, fresh on the sleeves.

  He felt a touch on his leg, and looked down to see the woman crouching on the flags at his feet. ‘Don’t hurt him, Casper — not Swithun. Swit
hun’s my only boy. He’ll pay you back, he’ll do penance.’

  The black witch was talking so loud behind his ears he could hardly hear the begging. ‘Kick her, kick her in the belly, you bastard, while she’s there and begging for it.’

  ‘What good has penance ever done you and yours? Time and time over?’ He had to shout over the voice of the black witch. The Fowler woman covered her head with her hands.

  ‘He got in a fight with his da at the Pig, then they said they had to go out. He came back unhappy — he didn’t mean it! Nothing like this, please Casper, he’s my boy, he’s my boy! Don’t curse him!’

  Joe flapped and stamped on Casper’s shoulder and the witch shouted and carolled. Casper couldn’t take the noise of it any more. He threw the clothes to the floor and walked out the way he came with the crying and pleading shaking the air behind him.

  Mr Leathes’ home was only a few minutes’ stroll from his office and seemed just as neat and pleasant as his place of work. A modern villa of comfortable size set back from the road towards Crosthwaite Church, it had high hedges that defended his garden both from the winds of the valley, and the stares of his neighbours. He ushered them in through the wrought-iron gates, then found himself rather hampered in leading them further by the sudden embraces of two young children who came dashing down the path to meet him.

  ‘Yes, Tom, yes, Sally! I am glad to see you both. Now tell me, is your grandpa out reading in the garden?’ Somewhere in the burble of talk, the children confirmed it. ‘Thank you! Now away with you and tell your mother to bring us tea in the summerhouse. We have guests here, you little savages.’

  The children noticed Harriet and Crowther for the first time and became still. They were sturdy-looking children, both of them, with a high colour in their cheeks and matched straw-coloured hair. ‘Go, go,’ their father chided them and they turned to race back into the house. Mr Leathes led his guests towards the side of the house where the garden ran long from neat beds into a little sort of wilderness that crouched below the greater wildness of ever-present Skiddaw. There was indeed a summerhouse there, and in it a man sat reading. He was dressed in dark brown and his shock of white hair looked like snow on a mountain top.

  Harriet watched as the man looked up at them from his book and raised a hand in greeting, then stood and began to walk towards them. His steps were a little slow perhaps, but Harriet had been expecting a decrepit relic of extreme old age, swaddled in blankets and helpless as an infant. This man looked no more than sixty.

  Mr Leathes perhaps noticed her amazement. ‘My father is eighty-five, Mrs Westerman. There is something in the air of this valley that preserves those who love it.’

  Harriet looked between the faces of the old lawyer and Crowther as they came together. She saw her friend smile as he bowed and watched the old man pause, open his eyes wider, then step forward with renewed vigour and his hand outstretched.

  ‘Charles! My Lord! How many years has it been since I saw you last? You were a young man then. I knew of course that you were at Silverside, but did not know if I’d have the pleasure of meeting you.’

  ‘Mr Leathes, I am sure you know exactly how long it is since I and you last had sight of each other,’ Crowther said, and took the lawyer’s hand in his own. It was the first time Harriet had seen Crowther show any sign of warmth to those he had known in his youth. Old Mr Leathes chuckled into his neat cravat.

  ‘It is thirty-two years, three months and some odd days, I believe.’

  Crowther turned to Harriet. ‘Mr Leathes, may I present Harriet Westerman?’

  The old man bent over her hand in courtly style then looked at his son. ‘Are we to have tea, Mark? So these young people may keep their mouths from drying out while I tell them old stories?’ His son nodded. ‘Good, good. But first, my dear. .’ old Leathes continued as he drew Harriet’s arm under his own, ‘let me show you my birds. Lord Keswick must allow me to bore him with my experiments in their rearing and breeding at some other time, but I cannot let you sit down until you have had a chance to tell me how pretty they all are, and hear how charmingly they sing.’

  Other men might have found that such an appeal to Harriet’s presumed female interests would be met with a cool response, but she had decided to be charmed by the old man so let him guide her steps with pleasure.

  The aviary attached to the villa was more extensive than the one at the solicitor’s office. It was built out from the side of the house and half-formed of glass, with a number of walls constructed of a thin brass mesh. The floor was a mix of gravel and turf, studded with low bushes and tree branches. It was the sort of construction that Harriet might have expected to see in the grounds of one of the great country houses; to see it here was astonishing. The old man smiled and patted her hand.

  ‘We must all feed our souls as well as our bodies, I believe, Mrs Westerman. I have spent a great deal of money on these little singers in my years, but never regretted a penny of it.’ He opened a door to his right and led her into the aviary itself, took corn from his pocket and whistled. A gold and red canary fluttered down from the branches above them and settled on his finger. ‘Ah! She is a bold lady, this one. Most of the others are too timid to join me, you see, when there is a stranger by, but this creature’s fear is always outweighed by her curiosity.’

  Without being quite sure what she expected, or hoped for, Harriet removed the glove from her right hand and lifted it close to where the bird perched on Mr Leathes’ finger. It put its head on one side and examined her for a moment, then hopped across onto her finger. She felt its thin claws like pin scratches on her skin; the lowest feathers on its belly brushed her as it puffed itself out and shook itself then trilled at her, holding its beak open as it did so like an opera singer.

  ‘I think she recognises a fellow spirit, Mrs Westerman,’ the lawyer said, then he glanced over his shoulder. ‘Ah! My daughter-in-law is bringing out the tea. I must leave my darlings for now. How is Charles?’ Harriet started at the question and realised Crowther and Mark Leathes had already turned back towards the summerhouse. Alarmed by her movement, the canary retreated onto one of the perches elsewhere in the aviary.

  ‘I have known him three years, Mr Leathes, yet still do not know how to answer the question.’

  The old man laughed very softly. ‘Then I may assume he is not much altered.’

  ‘You knew him as a boy, sir?’

  ‘I did, and a strange and lonely child he was. But he would come and watch my birds with me, and when age or disease took one we would open up the body together. Is it not strange, madam, that here are creatures so unlike us, yet they have lungs to sing with, a heart to Island of Bones drive the blood through themselves and a brain much like our own, though what thoughts they have are a mystery. But then I suppose so are the thoughts of our fellow man.’

  Mrs Leathes left them, pleading her domestic duties as soon as the tea was poured, and taking care to shepherd her children to a more distant part of the garden for their play, returned to the house. In the brief pause while they watched her cross the lawn, the sound of the canaries filled the air. Harriet had seldom heard such a range of song since her time in the Indies. Indeed, the weather reminded her of those regions as well as the birds, since the air was as close as ever, with the sun like a pewter disk through the haze.

  Old Mr Leathes looked between Harriet and Crowther, and having taken a mouthful of tea, produced a long clay pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from his tobacco pouch.

  ‘Perhaps it is the lawyer in me,’ he said as he did so, ‘but I think you have come to make me talk about the past rather than hear about my birds. Now I have heard singing in the village about this body found on Saint Herbert’s Island. Do I assume too much in thinking your visit here is connected?’

  ‘You are correct, sir,’ Crowther replied.

  ‘Then with Mrs Westerman’s permission, I shall light my pipe,’ Leathes said, settling into his chair, ‘for you shall make me talk, and I talk better
with a smoke to cool my lungs.’

  Mrs Westerman’s permission was given and the pipe lit. Harriet could not help noticing the way that old Leathes gave his attention to them, quietly and with the air of a man prepared to wait them out. He wondered if Crowther realised how much he had benefited from his acquaintance with the lawyer.

  ‘I believe my father may have murdered the man we found on Saint Herbert’s Island. I do not know why he might have done so — though we suspect the murdered man might have set the fire at Gutherscale Hall in forty-five. Why he then chose to visit my father the following day is a mystery.’ Old Mr Leathes merely raised his eyebrows and waited for Crowther to continue. His son coughed into his cup, but following his father’s lead, said nothing. ‘I was wondering, sir, if you can remember anything of my father’s concerns in the forties that might guide us.’

  The old man smiled slowly. ‘You have not lost your habit of plain speaking, Charles.’ His voice was kind. ‘Have you been as frank with your sister?’

  Crowther frowned at his cuffs. ‘To a degree. She misunderstood my meaning, however, and only stated that our father had no part in the death of Rupert de Beaufoy. It is possible my father discovered de Beaufoy’s location from the man he killed, then made use of that information.

  The lawyer nodded and sighed. ‘Charles, as you know, I was your father’s adviser in legal matters for many years, but I never believed I was in his confidence. What your sister meant by that remark I cannot say with any certainty, but I suspect you wish me to speculate.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Your father was elevated from baronet to baron in forty-seven. De Beaufoy’s location was betrayed to the government in forty-five.’

  Harriet spoke. ‘Do you think it was Sir William who gave them the information that led to de Beaufoy’s arrest, Mr Leathes? And the title was his reward?’