Instruments of Darkness caw-1

by Imogen Robertson

  No one could think of a response to this. If Lady Thornleigh found the silence uncomfortable, she did not show it. She turned her focus to Rachel.

  “Miss Trench, I must thank you for that preparation you sent us. It smells disgusting, you will admit, but the nurse tells me it has eased the inflammations Lord Thornleigh is prone to suffer on his skin.”

  “During my father’s last illness, it gave him some relief,” Rachel said softly.

  Harriet looked at her sister in surprise. Lady Thornleigh noticed it and tilted her head to one side, her eyes wide.

  “Did you not know your sister has turned apothecary, Mrs. Westerman? You will hear soon enough how half of Hartswood is in love with her skin salves.” She turned back to Rachel and raised her hand to wag a finger at her. “Though you should charge a full shilling, dearie-it is a mistake to sell it for only sixpence. People value things according to what they have paid for them. Charge them the shilling and they will tell everyone it is a wonder, for who wants to look a fool spending money on nonsense?”

  After this moment of relative animation, Lady Thornleigh sat back in her chair again, watching Harriet’s continuing surprise with real pleasure. She looked away again to examine the middle distance of the golden air.

  “It is remarkable how little some people know about what is going on in their own house.” A hand lifted to her face and she bit her full lower lip a second, pulling on one dark ringlet. “And it is not even a very big house.”

  Crowther coughed.

  The rituals of serving tea followed. Crowther noticed Harriet seemed a little at a loss in the presence of the earl’s wife. Her introduction of the subject of the body in the woods seemed almost clumsy.

  “Is it not strange, Lady Thornleigh, that Viscount Hardew’s ring was found on the corpse?”

  Lady Thornleigh yawned. Even her hands were exceptionally well made, Crowther thought as she lifted one to her mouth before replying. It was always a matter of proportion; the length of the fingerbones compared with those webbing together to make the palm, the ratio of fat and muscle, and of course, the quality and properties of the skin.

  “No doubt he found it in London, recognized the arms and was coming to the house to see if he could gain a reward from Hugh,” she said with a shrug. “It is what I would have done.”

  Harriet frowned briefly, then struggled on.

  “How strange, also, to have had no news of Viscount Hardew for so long, and now the ring. He left the house before we came to Caveley, I believe. I do not think I have ever heard the detail of the case.”

  “Have you not? Well, I always thought you above such a romance. I suppose we can pass the time telling the story again. It is almost funny when one considers it.”

  Lady Thornleigh paused to reach for one of the dainty cakes provided with her tea, and nibbled at it with her small white teeth. It did not please her, so she replaced it with a little pout of disgust and picked up another from the plate to try instead. It was obviously an improvement as she kept it between her neat white fingers as she continued.

  “Alexander fell in love with one of the family with which he was lodging. Some family in Chiswick with a funny name. Ah yes, Ariston-Grey. Sounds a trifle French to me. Musicians. A widowed father and his whelp. Alexander was mad for music, I am told. The old man died still fiddling away for his family’s entertainment, though I’m sure my husband paid him enough for keeping Alexander all those years, so he can have had no need to spin out tunes to entertain.”

  “Perhaps he did it for the love of the music, Lady Thornleigh,” Rachel suggested.

  “If you say so, Miss Trench.” Lady Thornleigh looked at her a little amazed. “I only ever had to do with music for my profession. No butcher slaughters animals for his own entertainment at the end of a day. Why should a fiddler play?” Rachel had no answer, so Lady Thornleigh continued. “The funny thing is, the lady turned out to be so terribly virtuous he could not have her without marrying her. My husband was fearfully angry. Thought Alexander a ridiculous fool and said if he couldn’t get a girl like that to be friendly without marriage, he was certainly not fit to run the estate, as he would be robbed at every turn. Alexander was a terribly upright sort, by all accounts, so before you could spit he was off out of the house and ready to marry the girl on the little scrap of money the fiddler left, and they’ve neither of them been heard of since.”

  She ate a little more of the cake. “I say funny because of course Lord Thornleigh was thought to be a little daring to marry me, but I think it was Alexander’s priggishness and whining about the virtues of his intended that brought about the breach, more than the rather unequal nature of the match.”

  She wiped the crumbs from her mouth and smiled her catlike smile. “We have so much money that the Thornleigh men could all marry paupers for five generations and it would still be all thoroughbred horses and ices in July.” Her dark eyes drifted over Rachel’s face. “That is, if they really wished to do so.”

  The rest of the visit was nothing but awkward banalities, and an attempt to discuss the weather which made Lady Thornleigh yawn so widely Crowther was afraid she was in danger of dislocating her elegant jaw. Her remarks had been unpleasant enough that he expected Rachel and Harriet to be very angry when they left, but they were oddly forgiving. He was surprised by their generosity.

  “No one would receive her in town, even when Lord Thornleigh was well, for all her talk of scaring duchesses,” Harriet said as the coach set off again.

  Crowther remarked, “But why did she not make more friends when her husband became ill? I would have thought she still had an acquaintance wide enough after a year of marriage that would be eager to spend his money.”

  Rachel turned toward them from the window and smoothed her skirts.

  “She has very little money of her own, as a matter of fact. And she must be resident wherever Lord Thornleigh is, to receive anything at all. The articles of the marriage contract were very strict. When Lord Thornleigh dies she will be guardian of their little boy and have charge of his money, though not much is settled on him direct. He gets everything at the discretion of the new earl-Alexander, if he can be found. Hugh as well has only a little of his own. In her position, I think I would bundle up that horrible clock in a blanket and make a run for London, but she is probably too lazy.”

  Rachel realized that both Crowther and Harriet were looking at her open-mouthed.

  “Mr. Thornleigh told me,” she said, with an air of slight defiance. “And Harry, I did tell you I was making skin salves from Mama’s old recipes. You just weren’t listening.” She pouted a little. “You would have noticed when you did the accounts for the next quarter, for I have made four pounds, as it happens.”

  Harriet was amazed.

  “You have surprised your sister into silence, Miss Trench. An achievement, I think.”

  Rachel met Crowther’s eye and smiled happily. He blinked his hooded eyes at her. “Now, if you are interested in inflammations of the skin, I have some books I can lend to you. Not usually reading I would recommend to females, but if you find it interesting …”

  Rachel looked very pleased. Crowther glanced out of the window for a moment, trying to avoid the cheerfulness in her smile defrosting his own bones too far into softness. He was just in time to see a figure standing under the great portico at the Hall. It was a man, slim, but as far as he could tell from this distance, well formed. It was not Hugh Thornleigh, nor did he have the look of a servant about him. His hair was dark. The man watched their carriage retreat without moving. There was a stillness in his posture that Crowther found oddly disquieting.

  3

  “Make way there for the lady, please. Oi, Joe, move yerself and get a chair for Mrs. Westerman, will you? I said, move yer arse, for the love of God! Pardon me, Mrs. Westerman.”

  The body had been moved from Caveley’s stables to those of the inn during the course of the morning. The fifteen jurors, gathered up by the constable from the customer
s of the Bear and Crown the previous evening, had had an opportunity to tut over it and look narrowly into the dead man’s eyes, and now the jurors, coroner, witnesses and the curious lookers-on were squeezing into the low, rough room in the back of the Bear and Crown.

  Michaels, the landlord, was always insisting he was on the point of presenting a series of musical concerts and private dances there, but Harriet suspected he found it too convenient for the storage of salted pork and potato sacks during the winter to do anything of the sort. However, the polite fiction that renowned musicians were about to take the day’s journey from London to entertain them was maintained throughout the neighborhood, as there was a general agreement that even the rumor enhanced the reputation of the area.

  Michaels was a huge man who had started his life on the London streets, and through his love of horses, luck and a good head for business had found himself in his forties a man of property and owner of a flourishing business. No one knew his first name, or even if he had one; his children, his friends and even his wife never used any other form of address to him. He was to be found every morning among the hubbub of his household-to his own offspring were often added cousins and nephews who were thought to be in need of his generosity and rough love-reading the newspapers and drinking his small beer. It was said that he was often appealed to, to arbitrate disputes in the village, and had been consistently found to be fair and almost unnaturally incorruptible. Some of the villagers were worried that the squire would not approve of this circumventing of his own authority as local Justice, but Harriet had long believed that Bridges and Michaels had an understanding of their own.

  She was glad of his assistance now as Michaels pushed his way through the crowd and set a chair for her near to the table around which the jury were gathered. A fair proportion of the local inhabitants were there, though the county gentry, it seemed, had thought the affair below them, or had not yet heard of it, Harriet thought, looking around her and thinking that the village shops must mostly be closed this afternoon through want of their usual staff, owners and customers. Crowther followed in her wake and took up a position behind her. There were a few murmurs in the crowd as he was recognized, but if he was expecting any hostility he was wrong to do so. A man he thought he might know as the father of his maid grumbled something at him, and he found he was being presented with a chair of his own and a not unfriendly nod.

  He looked about him. On the opposite side of the room-it was arranged a little like a church with the jurors playing the bride, the coroner the groom, and the observers seated or standing the length of the space like family and friends-he noticed Hugh. He was as usual looking somewhat dishevelled and uncomfortable. Crowther noticed he had so placed himself that most of the room would be hidden from him by the blindness in his right eye. On his left, leaning back a little in his chair, was the same lithe figure Crowther had spotted on the steps of Thornleigh Hall. His coloring was very dark and his features marked. He looked a little overdrawn, Crowther thought, to be regarded by most women as truly handsome. His cheekbones were a little too high, his chin rather too pronounced. Probably in his early thirties, so of an age with Mr. Thornleigh, though a great deal better preserved. He reminded him of the slightly satirical drawings of great male actors he had seen in the Illustrated News. Even for a man as controlled in his movements as Crowther, this figure next to Hugh appeared strangely still. Yet his thin lips were moving; he was speaking to his master, and by the bend of his neck, Crowther could see Hugh was listening.

  Crowther gave his companion a look of inquiry. She caught his eye and nodded swiftly. So this was Claver Wicksteed. There was a gloss to him, as if he had been polished. Crowther wondered if his pupils were white in a fawn iris, as if constructed out of thin mother-of-pearl veneer and maple-wood. The man was prettily made, like a flashy piece of furniture for my lady’s chamber, but Crowther doubted the craftsmanship. Hugh’s face was set in a deep frown and he stared at the dusty floor to the side of his crossed ankles.

  Crowther looked behind him and caught the cautious smile and nod of the squire, who was conversing with a couple of middle-aged men Crowther assumed to be farmers. Turning his eyes to the front again, he saw Joshua Cartwright standing unhappily by the window. He spoke to no one, and continuously picked at the lint on his sleeve till Crowther was afraid his cuffs would be bald by the end of the session.

  The coroner looked about him, then stood and shushed the crowd. The appeal for quiet was picked up and carried to the rear doors, where it was reinforced with a growl from Michaels. The air was still: the coroner looked pleased with the effect.

  Evidence was called, and questions asked. Harriet spoke of finding the body on her morning walk, her inspiration to fetch Crowther as well as the squire, and her sending to Hugh-and of Hugh’s resolution that the body was not that of his brother. That gentleman had shifted in his chair a full quarter turn to look at her as she spoke. His expression was still sullen.

  Harriet’s short narrative was received respectfully. The foreman of the jury thanked her on behalf of them all for her actions and courtesy in coming to speak with them. Crowther watched her as she spoke and noted an uncharacteristic shrinking in her demeanor, a tendency to look up at the coroner and foreman from under her long eyelashes, hiding the green flash of her eyes, a mute appeal to the gentlemen to treat her kindly. They responded happily and there was an air of manly solicitude almost palpable in the air when she took her seat again. Only Hugh and Wicksteed did not, it seemed, take a proprietorial delight in looking at her.

  As she sat down, Harriet shot Crowther a look of apology. He found he was impressed by the performance and could see the advantages and cover a little feminine reticence in such a company might give her, but he fancied she hated being anything other than what she naturally was, and pitied her that it was necessary. He wondered if women would ever be able to be themselves if they fell into such tricks, but having never known the dangers to which a frank woman might expose herself, he was disinclined to judge. His ruminations were broken by the sound of the coroner calling his name.

  Crowther was also listened to with respect, though he failed to win any affection from the room. He spoke of the wound, the likely time of the death and his investigations to try the soundness of the body’s lower limbs. He had to be stopped from time to time to convert his naturally Latinate, scholarly language into something more easily digestible to the jury, and when he reported Hugh’s remark that Alexander had had a bad leg due to a youthful injury, he was a little surprised to hear corroborating shouts from some of the men in the room of, “True, true!” and, “He did indeed, since he was seven!” and, “His horse tripped in the warren on Blackamore Hill!” and, in a deep bass from somewhere near the door, “Landed on him!” It was as if the village had agreed to be a chorus to the court, and Crowther had an uncomfortable sense of fellow feeling with the players at Drury Lane.

  It seemed from the tone of questions and responses that the general opinion in the room was that of Lady Thornleigh: that this stranger had come among them looking for a reward for finding the ring and had been destroyed by some business that had followed him from town. Therefore it was not surprising that when the coroner called Joshua Cartwright forward, he did so with the air of a magician summoning a particularly large and impressive rabbit from under his shirt.

  Joshua did have something of a rabbity air when he spoke, and had to be encouraged by the crowd to speak up from time to time. He agreed that the body was that of a man he knew, Carter Brook, whom he had asked on Hugh’s behalf to try and discover any trace of his elder brother, Viscount Hardew.

  The room was amazed, and the whispering rose and fell like a passing shower of rain. Some questions were asked as to Brook’s family and situation, and Joshua shared with the jury, with the room at large at least, that to the best of his knowledge Brook had no family. He then engaged, as if by way of apology for bringing such a character into the neighborhood, to write to Brook’s landlady and let he
r know of what had passed, and inform her that she was free to dispose of the dead man’s belongings and rent the room again. The coroner agreed this was sensible, and offered Cartwright the opportunity to copy down his conclusions at the end of the day’s business, and include any passages he thought fitting in the correspondence.

  The chorus expressed satisfaction in a series of grunts and nods which spread from the observers to the jury and back again, reinforced like the ripples present on a small pond. More and more people were looking, and looking for longer, at the back of Hugh’s head, however, and there was a general sigh of relief when he kicked back his chair and stood up. He addressed himself purely to the coroner, but Crowther could tell by the flushed profile he presented that he was deeply aware of all the other eyes in the room.

  “I wanted to know where my brother was, and assure him, whatever his situation, that I would be glad to know him again.” The room grumbled in an accepting sort of way. “Good, good,” said the bass from the doorway. “There’s our good captain,” said another. The coroner looked seriously at the watchers and they quietened down. Crowther kept his eyes on Hugh, seeing a flick of pain cross his face at hearing his military title spoken aloud.

  “Carter Brook wrote to me, saying he had information to give and that it was convenient for him to deliver it in person. I asked him to bring some proof of my brother, as I have been disappointed by false trails in the past.”

  Whatever Hugh’s misdemeanors, it seemed the village were still disposed to approve of him, as again the anonymous voices in the crowd chorused, “True, true,” and, “Cruel thing, cruel thing to lose a brother.” One thin voice lost among the jackets to the rear piped up. “But a bloody careless thing to lose a son.” Hugh flushed a deeper red, though still did not turn, and Michaels swung his massive head toward the last speaker.