Today the minister preached on the text of Ezra, Chapter One.
It was proclaimed that Miss Helen Lyall, of St. Cuthbert’s Parish, Edinburgh, and Mr. Hugh Fairlie, of this parish, are to be married in St. Cuthbert’s Parish on the eleventh of next month. Proclaimed for the first time.
Considering that a pauper woman, found by the kirkyard on Friday morning, died in the Manse yesterday afternoon, the Session decided if she is not known to any enquirers she will be buried at the expense of the parish, and her goods rouped to help with the expense. Her death is to be reported to the Sheriff at Cupar as there was a knife wound to her body. Enquiries are to be made in the neighbouring parishes to see if she is missed by any.
The dispute concerning the Manse building is to be heard before the Court of Session in Edinburgh in the autumn of this year.
Compeared Mr. John Wilson and Ann James, his wife, accused of antenuptial fornication. They admitted the charge and submitted themselves to discipline. They were admonished and told to compear again at the next Session meeting.
The poors’ funds were counted and distributed.
Closed with prayer,
Ninian Jack
Session Clerk.
Chapter Two
I
Blair, with his hands firmly clutching his claret-coloured knees, peered closely at what the two gardeners had done with the asparagus bed that had appeared since his last visit, his wig beginning to slide dangerously low on his forehead. There was a smudge of mud on his nose, and a trail of clay down each side of his coat, where his hands had searched for his pockets. The older gardener, finding in his master’s guest a receptive audience, explained what they had done.
‘Ye spread the roots out well like this, ye ken, sir?’ He fanned the white threads as he stood knee-deep in the patch they had filled with well-rotted horse dung. It had been there since autumn, and smelled sweet and strawy. ‘Now you see these we’ve put in are last year’s heads. We put them in an elbow’s length apart – show the gentleman, Ecky, aye.’ The younger gardener, torn between trying to look expert and trying not to overbalance in the deep soft bed, leaned down to measure the distance between two heads in the dung and looked up for approval. ‘Aye, that’s fine, Ecky, you just carry on, lad.’ He drew himself out of the bed leg by leg, with care, to stand on the gravel path, while Ecky carefully cut a few of the pale green heads to add to the pile in his basket. ‘This is a fine sunny patch on a good day, as you see, sir, and it draws them out just lovely. That and the seawater we bring up from the coast.’
Blair nodded slowly, straightening. The sun reflected off the wall in the kitchen gardens and he wrinkled his face against its warmth, gathering his loose lips up into a smile. There were others in the beds around him, weeding, inspecting for insects and slugs, clipping the box hedges to release a potent scent. Bee skeps were set into the deep walls for shelter and warmth, and the bees themselves were busy in the pea flowers.
As if he himself had sucked enough from this particular blossom, Blair thanked the gardener and wandered off haphazardly along the paths until, as if by accident, he found himself in flower gardens, a claret and green bumblebee with a crooked wig. The formal beds were outlined with aromatic box, and irises exclaimed about a square pond. Cushions of plantain lilies were sprinkled with the bright blue of flowers like forget-me-nots. Wallflowers and gillyflowers, petals damp in the sunlight, drew him with ribbons of scent to bury his nose in their blossoms and emerge, dew-dropped and glistening, afraid to breathe out and lose the perfume. He paused in the glow of the laburnum walk, the sprinkled gravel reflecting the flowers above like a river of saffron in a tunnel of light. Each blossom was different, he saw, each tiny floret with its own unique pattern of tinier veins, dark against gold, folding secretly around its own heart. Each stem, a pale green perfect curve, held its floret with tremendous strength, and only when he lifted it with his giant hand to bring it closer to his titanic face did it suddenly seem delicate again. A greenfly paused, plump and uncertain, on the stem, and pondered its path with yellow legs.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ said an amused voice behind him, catapulting him, ears humming, back to his ordinary-sized world. He blinked and saw Murray in the golden tunnel with him, sober and shocking in black. Blair raised his eyebrows.
‘My dear Charles, you look very formal.’
Murray glanced down at his black waistcoat and felt unsure of himself. It seemed an odd way to impress a mentor with one’s kindness.
‘It seemed appropriate. The minister sent to ask if I would go to the manse and look at the body of that poor woman, to see if it is anyone we know here.’ He shrugged. ‘She may have been coming to the house, or leaving it. Anyway, I came to ask if you would care to accompany me.’
‘Oh, certainly, certainly,’ said Blair with enthusiasm. He looked about him as if suspecting spies in the laburnum walk, then quickly snatched off his hat and wig and shook the wig out, scattering dewdrops and laburnum petals and doubtless some confused greenflies. He flipped the wig smartly back over his bristly scalp and drew himself up almost straight. ‘There! Ready when you are!’
II
As usual when walking, they avoided the main road and took the path over the hill that Robbins had followed the previous Friday. It was Monday now, and the mysterious corpse was due for burial, but the minister was evidently making a last effort to identify her. Blair and Murray approached the manse along the path, and Blair pointed out where Mrs. Helliwell had found both the woman and her pack. Murray stopped and looked back the way he had come, removing his hat slowly to help him think. The air was full of the scent of ramsons: the little wood was full of them.
‘She could have come here from the house, or from Cullessie and Mrs. Kirk, or from Hill of Letho farm and Melville. Assuming, that is, that she was heading towards the village.’
‘If she had simply died of cold, then one would assume it,’ said Blair thoughtfully. ‘She would not have passed the manse without begging for charity, and would indeed have received it. But of course, if as the rumour says she did not - or at least did not wholly, that is, for it might well have contributed to the final result – die of cold but of a knife wound, I find it hard to say with any certainty which way she might have been travelling, particularly as she must have moved away from her pack.’ Murray disentangled the speech into clear parallel lines in his mind. They had only heard of the woman’s death that morning. Robbins, paler even than usual but perhaps tired after his journey still, had brought them news of the knife wound before breakfast, having had it from Mrs. Chambers the housekeeper who had it from the maid Jennet who had it from the girls from the village who came to do the laundry, and one of them was sister to Baird, one of the elders of the Kirk. There was occasionally something rather frightening about the way news spread in Letho, as if it were alive and independently mobile.
Despite the open front door and the sunshine streaming in through the windows on the east side of the house, there was a residual odour of damp and decay in the manse. The house had been built around an ambitiously broad hallway, for its day, some two hundred years ago. Unfortunately the gallery to which the stairs led in the grandiose plan was supported by an inadequate beam, which was both sagging and warping. The beam was now held up by a less than perfectly trimmed apple tree trunk salvaged from the manse orchard and set up on a number of half-worked stones, but the construction did not seem enough to stop the cracks creeping across and down the walls around the hall. A mirror which had been hung from a nail the last time Murray had noticed it was now propped on the hall table, the nail hanging crookedly from the course of a new crack. There was a black cloth over the mirror, a token of mourning for the unknown guest upstairs, and the maid who showed them to the dead room was also in black. Following her across the undulating gallery reminded Murray of crossing the Forth at Queensferry at Easter. Blair walked before him with legs as wide as a sailor’s.
Mrs. Helliwell was attending the dead room
, accompanied by one of her young daughters. The room faced east, but the curtains were drawn and more black cloth had been draped, over a small dressing table mirror and across the high bed. Mrs. Helliwell wore a black gown, a little shiny on the sleeves. She rose quickly as they entered, and smiled apologetically with her curtsey.
‘It is good of you to come, Mr. Murray, and you, too, Mr. Blair. Anna, run and fetch some tea and shortbread for the gentlemen.’ Anna, eight and solemn, went out. ‘This is poor Anna’s room,’ Mrs. Helliwell explained as she gestured Blair and Murray to seats brought in for the wake, ‘but this is where we brought the poor woman when she was alive, and it seemed easier and kinder to lay her out here, too. It is hard to know quite what to do when it is a stranger: any that have come to pay their respects have come more out of curiosity than anything else, and small blame to them, a pauper and a stranger is scarcely welcome alive, and less so dead.’
‘It must be very difficult,’ Murray agreed, thinking back two years to the crowded ritual surrounding the death of his own father. Blair jiggled in his seat.
‘And there is no clue to her identity?’ he asked.
‘Hardly anything, Mr. Blair.’ She shrugged sadly. ‘I searched through the pack that we found, and it was in a dreadful mess, but it held only some clothing and a very little money, and the end of a loaf of bread. I do not know whether to be pleased or not about the bread. It would have so pained me to think of her starving to death on our very doorstep, but then, the knife wound makes the whole business so much worse, so incomprehensible.’
‘There was no knife?’ asked Murray, curiously.
‘None, either in the wound or out of it,’ said the minister’s wife. ‘Yet it makes me wonder a little that she should not have had at least a blunt knife in her pack, for the bread was cut, and not chewed or torn.’ She frowned in recollection.
‘Perhaps it had been given to her thus and she had not yet begun to eat it,’ Murray suggested. He saw Blair regarding Mrs. Helliwell with appreciation.
‘Did you notice anything else unusual about her pack, ma’am?’
Mrs. Helliwell was puzzled at the question, but gave her reply some consideration.
‘No, nothing else that seemed to me to be missing. But it was a little odd, I thought, that the pack should be so untidy. It was as if everything had been thrust in in a great hurry. The bread was amongst her clothing, and not wrapped in its paper, though the paper was there. And yet I think, you know, that she was a person of neat habits, for the two gowns she had had been cared for and mended well.’
‘Perhaps she was used to having a maid,’ Blair pondered. Murray found himself contemplating several possibilities.
‘Strange that you should say that, Mr. Blair, for I had put it another way about. Her gowns are of good enough quality – indeed, the one in her pack was quite fine, and a very pretty sprigged cotton. But their fashion is not this year’s. They seem to be, I should say, four or five years old – not that I see that much of society and fashion, except when we go up to Edinburgh for the General Assembly! But I remember Miss George, who is always so smart, had one like it a few summers ago. I wondered if our poor woman were perhaps a ladies’ maid herself, and had been given her lady’s cast-off gowns.’
Blair’s eyes widened wonderfully, wrinkled forehead rippling up to his wig.
‘That is very revealing, I must say! Extremely perceptive, ma’am, if I may say so!’
Mrs. Helliwell, flushing slightly in the dim room, made a face which said very clearly he was talking nonsense.
‘There was one other thing,’ she said quickly. Blair scowled, and Murray could tell that he was faintly disappointed that his genuine appreciation had been taken as a gallantry. Mrs. Helliwell was looking at the floor, and missed his expression. ‘You asked if there was anything that would help to identify her, and there was, but it was not in her pack. She had a chain about her neck with a little locket on it – I cannot show it you, for the elders have all her belongings except the nightgown you see her in now. But there was an initial on it. I did not study it closely, for I was simply removing it from the doctor’s way when he came to tend to her. But the letter, I believe, was an R. Or perhaps a K: it was an elaborate italic, and difficult to distinguish at a mere glance.’
‘An R or a K?’ Murray repeated, thinking.
‘Where on earth is that girl with your tea?’ said Mrs. Helliwell suddenly. ‘Excuse me, I must see ...’ The gentlemen rose politely, and once left alone and standing in the room, Murray turned to Blair and said,
‘I suppose we had better see if she is someone of our acquaintance.’
‘After you, dear boy. I have seen her already, though briefly.’ Blair made a little bow and Murray, with a wry smile, stepped over to the bed. Blair followed, and by the light of the candle Murray had picked up from the night table, they examined the woman’s pale face.
She could have been no more than twenty-five. Her hair, tenderly brushed out by a stranger’s hand, lay like white-gold on the pillow and caught the light in fine lines like wire, like silk. Her skin in death was hardly weathered, almost the white of the ruffles of her linen nightdress, arranged modestly around her throat with a stranger’s gentleness. The outline of her body under the cloth showed her to be small, delicately made with no natural fortification against the injuries of hunger and cold. Black cloth was drawn up to her waist over the white sheets, and against it her fingers lay like strands from the ruffles at her cuffs. Murray, with reverence, touched the hand nearest him and picked it up, turning it gently. The fingers were soft, the nails neat – not exactly the hands of a gentlewoman, for there was some hint of use to them, but certainly not the hands of a born beggarwoman, either. Murray frowned, and set the cold hand back in its place.
‘Poor lady,’ he said softly. ‘I had not expected such – an appearance.’
‘She did not deserve such a death,’ said Blair, ‘nor such a burial as she will have, amongst strangers.’
Murray was on the point of turning away, meaning to draw Blair with him, when they heard steps on the undulating gallery and the minister, Mr. Helliwell, entered. He greeted his guests with subdued pleasure.
‘And do you know her?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Not at all, I fear,’ said Murray. ‘But perhaps she was seen at Cullessie? Or at Hill of Letho?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ sighed Mr. Helliwell. ‘Melville has been here – briefly – already today, and Mrs. Kirk’s manservant, and your man Daniel, and even the Sheriff’s officer from Cupar, but she was known to none of them.’
‘Could the doctor tell you nothing about her?’ asked Blair, discreetly. Mr. Helliwell glanced at the door, then at the dead woman, and cleared his throat quietly.
‘Ah, yes, a little. He and Lizzie Fenwick were here an hour – he felt he had to call a midwife in, just in case – and they found little. They said that they could find no evidence that she had had a child, but she was – as a married woman is,’ he finished awkwardly.
‘Yet she wears no ring.’ Murray looked again at the white hands.
‘And the wound?’ asked Blair.
‘Made, he said, with a very sharp blade, quite narrow and long. It would have entered easily between the ribs, and found her heart. It was no unusual blade, he concluded, anyway.’
‘And how long would she have survived such a wound?’ asked Blair. The minister looked blank.
‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘It did not occur to me to ask.’
‘Has the Sheriff’s officer gone back to Cupar?’ was Blair’s next question.
‘I believe he is to stay for the funeral this afternoon, and go back tomorrow,’ Mr. Helliwell said. ‘He will be at the inn, I should imagine.’
The gallery creaked again, and Mrs. Helliwell appeared with a maid and the tea, and they all sat down to partake of the funeral shortbread.
III
As Blair and Murray left the manse some time later, they found little Anna perched on the front garde
n wall, kicking her legs against the rough sandstone, with a stubborn look on her face.
‘Ah! We wondered where you’d gone,’ said Murray cheerfully. Anna’s determined expression deepened.
‘It’s a gey uncanny thing to have a dead lassie in your ain bed,’ she explained solemnly. ‘And it’s a bonny day.’
‘I can’t argue with you,’ Murray admitted, ‘on either count.’
Blair eased his back, grown stiff in the damp house, and said,
‘I have a fancy to stretch my legs a little further, Charles. Perhaps as far as the inn, to see this Sheriff’s officer from Cupar.’
‘I shall come with you, if you like,’ said Murray. ‘I should be interested to know what his conclusions are. After all, if there is some person going about stabbing young women on my land, I should like very much to have him caught and stopped.’ He said it lightly, but he was already feeling the weight of the old responsibility: a woman dead and not deserving it, and on his own land, to boot. ‘Besides, as you say, the lady herself – if she was a lady –’ he felt a faint flush of guilt at this, for before he had seen her he had never even contemplated that she might have been a lady, ‘deserves better than she has met with. Mr. Jack, good day to you, sir.’ He removed his hat to the Session Clerk, who likewise saluted them in return.
‘Mr. Murray, sir.’ Mr. Jack was a skilled craftsman, for a little village like Letho, and was much in demand for keeping in repair such clocks and watches as were in the neighbourhood, including the church clock and the farmyard and garden clocks at Letho. His, too, were the mysteries of locks and keys and other mechanical contrivances, and of a certain number of rare toys that made his grandchildren, despite his grim aspect, the envy of all at the village school. His literacy, combined with his seniority, made him Session Clerk: Kenny, the schoolmaster, though an elder, had only been in the village a matter of four years.
An Abandoned Woman (Murray of Letho Book 4) Page 4
