Lady Anne 03 - Curse of the Gypsy

by Donna Lea Simpson

  It was the same old story, Anne thought sadly. Perhaps Tilly Landers could have phrased it better, but she did not want to be with him. Society might disagree, but Anne believed that was her right, to refuse marriage even when society condemned her for it. Spottiswode did not see it that way. Tilly had made love with him and she was pregnant with his child. She was his and should not be turning him away.

  His voice cracking, Spottiswode said he hit Tilly and she fell. He leaped upon her and squeezed her neck, saying she would not turn him aside. The child was his and so everyone would know. “I wanted ’er to say yers, t’marry me. She just laid there after ’at, still an’ quiet, loike,” the man said, tears streaming down his grimy face. “I dint mean t’kill ’er. I loved ’er.”

  He could not tell them if she died from hitting her head on the cobbles or if he strangled her to death, but she was dead. He picked her up and carried her to his room, laid her on his bed, then sat on the floor and cried for hours. He didn’t know what to do. But in his confusion he thought of one man who might have an answer. Mr. Grover had been kind to him a time or two, and had even hired him for odd jobs. He would know what Willy should do.

  “He’s lying!” Grover protested.

  “Shut up,” Darkefell said.

  Spottiswode went to him and confessed his misdeed. Any other man would have taken him directly to the magistrate, Anne thought, staring at Grover, who was shaking his head through it all, very much the poor, maligned soul who was innocent of all the terrible deeds of which he was accused.

  But Spottiswode told his story with stuttering conviction. Grover said he must get rid of the body, somewhere remote. He said he would loan Willy a cart and horse, as long as Spottiswode followed his specifications exactly. Everyone knew of the cave up at Staungill Force. Grover said that Spottiswode must take Tilly up and throw her into the pool below. That way folks would think she had committed suicide in shame for becoming pregnant.

  Though Willy had not had the heart to throw her stiffening dead body from the top of the falls, he had laid her by the edge of the pool. There was silence in the room when the fellow was done telling his grim story, but it was broken by Grover’s bluster.

  “You cannot take this word of this drunken rambler! I know nothing of this,” Grover roared.

  “Should we rather take the word of another murderer?” Anne said. “What makes you any different from him? You killed Cecilia Wainwright and attempted to point the finger of blame at the marquess. That was the whole reason behind convincing Willy to put Tilly’s body up at Staungill Force, wasn’t it? You saw a way to turn the blame to the marquess. Even if no one believed your foul anonymous letter, it would still tarnish the family’s reputation.”

  “Liars, liars!” Grover cried, bolting from his chair.

  “Sit, or I’ll make you!” Darkefell exclaimed, standing.

  Grover sat.

  “Spottiswode,” the marquess said sternly, “what about that letter claiming I was seen with Tilly Landers at the Force? Did you know anything about it?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know, milord.”

  Darkefell turned to the magistrate. “Pomfroy, think back; you publicly asked for the writer of the letter to come forward and tell what they saw. The letter was well written by someone literate. So why did the witness never come forward? The letter was a damned lie from beginning to end. I was never there, nor was Julius. My brother was afraid I was being trapped, so he lied about being with Tilly that day.”

  “Here, Spottiswode, why did you not come forward with this before?” Pomfroy asked. “Why now?”

  The man, his tears dry but the trails through the grime on his face still streaking his cheeks, said, “I ain’t drunk now. T’lady,” he said, waving his grimy hand at Anne, “and t’markwis, they wouldna let me be hanged fer sompin I dint do, and I never killed the udder young lady.” He looked directly into Anne’s eyes and said, “I couldna let anyone else suffer fer me killin’ poor Tilly. T’was me.”

  Grover, sunk in a weary slumped muddle in his chair, said nothing, finally silenced by exhaustion, perhaps, or the futility of protest. With more questioning they eventually learned that Spottiswode slipped further and further into his alcoholic haze, aided by copious bottles of wine from Grover, along with cheap gin bought with whatever he could scrounge. He lost track of the days and weeks and his memory became foggy. When reports of Cecilia Wainwright’s body being found filtered into town, he was thrown back a year or more to Tilly’s dead body in his arms and he began to think the two crimes were one and confessed.

  It was only the marquess and “the clever lady” who had seen that he could not possibly have done it. And it was only lately with no more alcohol, nor money to buy any, he had begun to dry out. With that clarity came the vivid memories of poor Tilly’s throat in his hands and the night he had placed her body in the woods near the pool below the Force.

  They all sat silent in the cold and cavernous drawing room.

  “You’ve ruined me,” Grover cried. “Ruined!” He was gasping like a netted fish, his red face becoming pale and drenched with sweat. “You,” he said, pointing at Spottiswode, his finger shaking like an orchestra leader’s bow. “And you,” he gasped to Darkefell, “you and that black monster of yours … I hope you rot eternally in hellfire for driving my son away from me!”

  “I did not drive your son away, Grover,” Darkefell said, his hands clenched into fists. “You did it yourself. Theo’s a good man, better than his father.”

  Grover roared in impotent rage. Darkefell stood and stalked toward him while Pomfroy nervously looked on and Anne watched in fascination, the marquess’s honest anger blazing white-hot.

  “You were willing to use anything and anyone to destroy me, even that silly girl, Lily Jenkins, and her jealousy of Fanny Allengate. Did you even …” Darkefell trailed off, standing stock-still, his mouth open.

  Anne swiftly saw what he was thinking and her imagination took flight from there. “Oh! Darkefell, yes!” She leaped to her feet and went to the marquess’s side, wrapping her fingers around his arm. “Grover,” she cried, staring down at him, “you killed that poor girl, Fanny Allengate, didn’t you? You lured her up to the waterfall … how?” She thought a moment. “Maybe a letter, claiming to be the marquess and wishing to meet her there. And then … did you push her off? Oh, how terrible!” She turned her face into the marquess’s arm. “That poor fanciful girl!” she said, her voice muffled.

  Darkefell put his free hand up to her hair and caressed her neck. “He’ll pay for it all.”

  “She … I …” Grover started up from his chair, clutching at his chest. He toppled sideways to the floor with a thud. “Let me go,” he gasped, writhing. “Let me go or I’ll tell all … tell … about …”

  Anne had turned back at Grover’s words and watched, wondering what he had to say, but he still clutched his chest. “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

  “He’s dramatizing himself,” Darkefell said, eyeing him. “He always was good at amateur theatrics.”

  “I don’t think so, Tony,” Anne said, alarmed.

  Grover grunted, trying to rise again. “Tell … I’ll tell about your mother … Sophie …” He clutched at his chest again, his eyes rolling back in his head as he collapsed to the floor.

  Darkefell shook loose from Anne and dashed to him. “Water, get water!” he exclaimed. He knelt over Grover as the magistrate rang for a servant and babbled an order for water. Darkefell loosened Grover’s neckcloth and slapped his face, trying to revive him. Pomfroy had the presence of mind to dash over to his tantalus, unlock it and grab a bottle of brandy. He poured some into a cup, the glass chattering against the bottle neck as Anne joined Darkefell on the floor. She took the glass from the magistrate and tried to dribble some into Grover’s throat.

  “Send someone for the doctor,” Darkefell said over his shoulder.

  But Sir Trevor simply stood, watching, and didn’t move.

  “What is wrong wit
h you, man!” Darkefell said, staring at the magistrate over his shoulder. “Send someone for the doctor!”

  Sir Trevor, an awful look on his gaunt face, shook his head and said, his tone funereal, “No, my lord. The hand of God has smote him down for his terrible deeds.”

  Spottiswode’s weeping punctuated the death sentence and the cold room echoed like a court. After all that had occurred, Hiram Grover died, an apoplectic fit taking him to judgment more surely than any tumbrel carrying him to the gallows.

  Twenty-three

  Darkefell glanced over at Anne as they headed out of Hornethwaite a few hours later, the gig moving smartly along the hard-packed road. There had been much to do, of course, after such an excruciating scene. Spottiswode, guilty by his own admission of the death of Tilly Landers, had been committed to a cell beneath the guildhall. Hiram Grover’s body would, Darkefell decided, for Theo Grover’s sake, lie awaiting burial at their former home near Ivy Lodge.

  Pomfroy agreed that it seemed quite likely that Grover had killed Fanny Allengate, too, though her death had long been thought to be suicide. Her brother had never thought it possible that a girl as religious as Fanny would have done such a deed as kill herself; when Anne and Darkefell went to Richard Allengate’s law office and told him what they now believed, he had wept, but they were tears of relief that others now believed his sister innocent of suicide.

  It seemed impossible to Darkefell that in a few short hours so much had been finally settled, and yet the June day was still bright and gleaming around them, the sky a celestial blue after the gloom of the brief morning shower.

  “It was too much for the man’s heart, no doubt,” Anne said, referring to Grover. The death scene was, she said, imprinted on her mind and heart as an example of a man’s sins coming home to him and executing him. “The journey Grover has made in the past months, being brought back to Hornethwaite in ropes, then being confronted with his ream of misdeeds and awful actions: it was all too much. I always did think him choleric, though he was so deliberately calm most of the time. The calm of a madman, as it turns out.”

  “You don’t subscribe to Pomfroy’s ‘hand of God’ theory?”

  “I think God is both more subtle and more inclined to allow us to administer our own earthly justice first, before taking His dreadful revenge. But I do think this was justice.” Her voice was hollow and her face pale. Never a beautiful woman, the shock and inevitable grief at such a terrible day had left her looking gaunt and frayed, her nerves worn to a nub.

  And yet her eyes, the gray irises misty with sadness, were lovely to behold. Darkefell pulled the carriage to a halt in the long afternoon shadows of a wooded copse beside the highway and took her into his arms. Pulling her close, he murmured into her hair, “Anne, it is well. Think what a trial would have done. Now I can tell Theo that his father died of natural causes.”

  She sagged against him. “Oh, Darkefell, thank you,” she gasped, tightening her arms around his neck. “You’re so right. Thank you.” She pulled away from him and gazed up at him, her gray eyes now shining with gratitude. “In remembering the living, who suffer still, I’ve seen how this is truly a blessing. Theophilus Grover will not suffer the shame of his father being hanged for a murder.”

  He kissed her gently but did not push his passion upon her. “I’m sorry I was boorish toward you yesterday, Anne, truly. Where I feel love, I am passionately attached. When I feel anger, I am likely to be brutal. But I will never use my fists on anyone who doesn’t deserve a beating. Some men will only respond to violence.”

  “How … how do you feel when you are fighting like that?” she asked.

  He shrugged, but honesty was all he could offer. “I feel life coursing through me, in my veins, in my fists. All my thoughts are focused on one end, beating my opponent.”

  “And when you make love to me? How do you feel then?”

  He met her gaze and touched her cheek. “Anne, I feel … I feel life coursing through me, and all my focus is on one end, giving you pleasure, loving you wholly, with my body and my soul.”

  Anne was silent. She turned her face away, too exhausted to speak, he supposed.

  “What do you think Grover meant, as he lay dying, about your mother?” she asked. “Why did he name her at the end?”

  “I can’t imagine,” he murmured. “One more attempt to confuse matters, perhaps? He had her fooled for so long. She must have thought he was a true family friend and innocent, beyond what she knew of his part in the deaths of those poor slaves.”

  “Darkefell,” Anne said, her tone hesitant.

  “Yes?”

  She looked up into his eyes and held his gaze, her pale, ravaged face clothed in an expression of sweet sadness. “Your mother … if she is unkind to Osei, please tell him that it is because she is aware how much he has suffered. It horrifies her deeply. She cannot bear to think of it, and every time she sees him, it’s a vivid reminder.”

  “I did not know you were so far into my mother’s confidence that she would admit something like that.” He clicked to the horses and they set off again.

  “We had time to talk, on the last miles of the journey back to Darkefell.”

  “And she told you about her treatment of Osei?”

  “Among other things. I asked her openly about Osei, because I’ve never understood her resentment toward him. But I understand a little better now. She feels things deeply … too deeply for her peace.”

  A welling of gratitude for the remarkable woman at his side welled up in him. “You are truly remarkable, Anne,” he said, his voice guttural with emotion.

  “No, Tony, not remarkable. But I do try to understand people.”

  “You have a unique gift at that. That’s why people turn to you in times of trouble.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I have no doubt. I think there are many people who will remember you forever with gratitude, even if they only knew you a brief time. You affect people that way, my dearest Anne.”

  She looked startled when he glanced over at her, and was silent for the rest of the ride back to Ivy Lodge. He sent Anne upstairs with a stern order that Mary was not to allow her to leave her room until she had eaten, bathed, and rested.

  He had much to do, but his first order of business was to tell his mother, Julius, and John what had transpired. He called them together in the drawing room on the third floor and waited until they were settled, then related from the beginning, when Spottiswode confessed to killing Tilly Landers. Julius let out a loud shout of joy, and his mother dropped her head.

  She murmured, “Thank God that nightmare is over.”

  Darkefell went on, first relating his and Anne’s surmise that Grover was guilty of the murder of Fanny Allengate as well as Cecilia Wainwright. “But I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” he finished.

  “Of course we will,” said Julius, with his usual brash confidence. “You and I together can convince that smug bastard to tell the truth.”

  “No, we may never know for sure,” Darkefell repeated, letting his glance drift over each member of his family.

  His mother stared at him, her expression oddly knowing. “Is he … ?”

  Nodding, Darkefell said, “He took some kind of fit or an attack of the heart, and died.” The expression on his mother’s face flashed several different emotions, but the predominant one was of relief. He had been afraid she would be angry, for he had never understood some things she had said over the months, some times when she had defended him, almost grudgingly, it seemed.

  He considered asking her why Grover would name her in his dying breath, but decided against it. There was something there, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was. Cowardly, perhaps, but she had been through much in her life, suffering odd periods of lethargy and sadness. He would not give her distress in this moment of peace. If there was more to the story, perhaps leaving her alone would bring it out more quickly than badgering her. Or maybe—and this was an odd thought—s
he would tell Anne.

  Standing and stretching the kinks out of his muscles, he said, “And so that will be an end to it. Spottiswode will be tried for the murder of Tilly Landers, or his confession will avoid a trial, rather. He will be hanged, likely.”

  Julius leaped to his feet and clapped Darkefell on the shoulder. “Now we can go ahead with our lives! Hurrah! Let’s celebrate. We can invite all the good folks of Hornethwaite to dinner and dancing.”

  “I don’t think that will be suitable, Julius,” their mother said. “This is tragedy, not comedy. Three young girls dead, Hiram a murderer, another man going to the gallows. Not a time for a party.”

  “Yes, well, perhaps we’ll have another reason to celebrate, eh, Tony?” Julius said, with a twinkle in his dark eyes. “If a certain lady replies to an interesting question in the affirmative?”

  “Shut up, Julius.”

  John said, his tone sententious, “I am only glad that Mr. Grover will not suffer the indignity of a trial.”

  “He should have suffered more, after what he did!” Darkefell growled. “I am more relieved that his son will not suffer for having a hanged man as father. It has been a very long day and I have much to do at the castle. I’ll see you all tomorrow morning.” He stepped over to his mother, drew her aside, and said softly. “Thank you for talking to Lady Anne, Mother. She is grateful that you softened a little toward her on your journey.”

  She looked up at him with an odd expression. “Did she tell you of what we spoke?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Ah. For if you knew all, you might have reason to think I am more the one who owes gratitude to her.” She stood and glided from the room. “Good night, Tony,” she said over her shoulder.

  Anne slept through much of the next twenty-four hours, shaken and weary with the scene she had witnessed. She had seen a man die. It replayed in her head over and over, like a dream one could not shake the next day, Pomfroy’s words like a dirge, repeating over and over: The hand of God has smote him down.