by Jane Jakeman
“Search where you please, my lord.”
She waved her hand around the room.
Again, I felt a current of sexuality, emanating from the traces of her body, her physicality, in this, her private room, as well as from her slanting yellow-grey eyes and her thin figure clad in sleek velvet. Disturbed, I looked around the room.
On the dressing table were plain silver-backed brushes and tortoiseshell combs in silver mounts. They bore no monograms, and were not new, but were made with an expensive simplicity, displaying that fine elegance of which the best silversmiths had been capable. And there was a fine calfskin dressing case: no doubt that would contain the usual array of crystal bottles for smelling salts and perfume and little silver implements for the nails.
She crossed the room towards me and opened the case. All lay innocently before me, each object nestling against the lining of blue velvet.
“I have no secrets, Lord Ambrose.”
“On the contrary, madam, I believe you have many. But not in this room.”
We stared at each other for a few moments. She read something in my eyes — was it something that I knew, or something I merely suspected? Her gaze seemed to ask.
She turned swiftly to one side, and flung open the door of a closet. “Pray search all you wish, my lord.”
She ran her hand along the row of dresses, in a gesture of tantalising intimacy, as if she were showing me her private self. The clothes swung gently as she brushed them with her hand, and irresistibly the vision I had imagined beside the stream came to my mind, of her full white breasts naked under the velvet of her riding habit. I breathed in a scent, not light and floral like Marie’s. Something deeper and heavier, with a muskiness, an animal note.
The clothes were all plain, in dark colours, suited to the role of governess: plum, dove grey. High-necked, of fine-woven wools and close-clipped velvet. Heavy, sombre: her body would be hot beneath them in summer, and for some reason this did not disgust me, as it normally would have done, but the thought of her scents and her moisture attracted me like a flash of fire across the room.
“I know I am only a governess, but I am surely entitled to some privacy,” she said abruptly, although she herself had willingly shown me the dressing case and the closet.
“I have no wish to distress you, madam.”
“But you are too bold, sir, with my few possessions. You wish to go through my things as if I were some common thief?”
Even knowing what I then knew about her, what I had learnt in the interval since we last met, I admired her. She had a boldness I had not encountered in my dealings with women in England before. Of course, I had not been alone in a room with a woman for a long time — since before I got my wounds, and that was in another country. But from what I remembered of Englishwomen, they were either genteel or skittish, either coy or coarse. This woman had an independence as well as the certainty of sexuality promised by her long limbs, her bold eyes.
“Please leave me alone.”
She said it suddenly, as if she had read my thoughts. She went on:
“I cannot leave Crawshay’s soon enough, I assure you.”
“That, at any rate, is doubtless the truth. You might be discovered for what you are.”
“What do you mean by that remark?”
Suddenly there was a voice from the doorway.
“Yes, Lord Ambrose, what do you mean? Is Miss Anstruther not what she appears to be? I should not be in the slightest surprised, I assure you.”
Marie Crawshay had appeared at the door, her face pale and her hands twisting together as she stared with animosity at the governess.
“Do tell us what you mean, my lord,” she continued, and there was a ferocity in her voice. “I should long to hear it — in fact, I believe that as mistress of this house, I am entitled to hear it. Who are you, woman? What creature has been near my child?”
For the first time, I saw Marie in a quite different light; as a tigress faced with a threat to her cub. Her eyes were glittering as Elisabeth Anstruther faced her across the room. Through the window, I had a glimpse of the outside world: dark golden corn and clear blue sky, a world mercifully empty of the passions and conflicts which filled this little space beneath old Crawshay’s roof.
But as the governess opened her mouth to speak, there came a shout from downstairs — a rough countryman’s voice, calling urgently for me.
“My lord Ambrose? Please you to come, my lord?”
It was Seliman Day, the gypsy’s principal tormentor. He jerked his head in the direction of the fields and started off, wiping his ginger scrap of moustache with the back of his hand.
CHAPTER 17
Wayland’s Mound had never been ploughed. It was always left untouched, a long grassy knoll, with a few bushes growing scrubbily on the top of it. They were thorn bushes that formed an interlaced thicket at the very top of the mound.
There were many stories about this place in the district, some of which I recollected from my childhood, hearing them from maids whispering round the fire in the evenings, or from an old groom in the stables, too old to be of much use, but kept on for his knowledge of country cures for every ill that affects horse-flesh. I remembered his face now, as brown and wrinkled as a withered horse-chestnut. There were not many occupations on a winter’s evening in the depths of the countryside, and scaring one another with stories about Wayland’s Mound had been a way the locals could pass the time. There were dead men inside the mound, buried there after a battle. There was a giant buried in there, and sometimes he sat up and poked his head up out of the top of the mound, in the middle of the thorn bushes, and his great black eyes stared at you. He sang about his battles and if you heard him, you dropped dead. If you saw him, you dropped dead. There was a man from the village — why, my groom’s grandfather knew him — who had been led there and offered gold by a fairy woman. He had plunged into the thicket after the cup of gold which she held out to him, and the thorns had torn his eyes out. Then he dropped dead.
The local people never went there after dusk. Hardly ever during the day, come to that.
Old Crawshay had jeered at these tales, I believe, and had sworn to have the mound levelled one day and be done with it, but somehow the project was never carried out. The labour and expense would have been enormous, and would not have been repaid by the small amount of extra land which would have been reclaimed for the plough, and so, year after year, the great plough-horses passed around it, and, year after year, the harvesters parted around its lower slopes as it stood up like an island in a sea of grain.
I myself had thought there might be some sort of burial inside, a burial not of giants, but of some poor old man-sized bones, something that had once been a human being, now harmless and unfrightening, to me at least, in death. The dead do not walk, do not sing. They have no powers over us.
Except in our dreams. There, they do have power, I’ll grant you that.
Flies buzzed over the thicket in a dark cloud. Already, the face was beginning to swell and stain with the blotches of decay. The flies had alerted the searchers in the first place, the dark droning mass over the dry thorns. Soft slapping noises filled the air as we continually flapped our hands at the insects that rose, circled, settled again on our hands and faces. Someone had got a branch and was sweeping the flies from Tom’s face, but they were settling again almost as soon as they were disturbed.
Tom wore a shirt and britches, torn and dirty. I knelt down by the blond head and gently touched it; it lolled to one side and a dark stream of liquid gushed from the nostrils and out over one cheek.
I heard a disturbance amongst the men who stood around me where I knelt beside the dead man, and saw that Seliman Day had broken out of the group and was standing with his back towards us, heaving, and the sounds of retching came through the fly-filled air. For all their brave talk, these were men who had never seen this kind of ugly death, this evidence of decay. I had, many times. I had seen it first when I was sixteen years of age,
and then I had sickened and stumbled. Never since.
I knew the trick of it; to concentrate on this as if it were a piece of meat, to think of this human being as a complete stranger, as a thing, a mere lump of unfeeling substance, something I had never known in its warm and faithful life. I had not thought I should again feel this anger and sadness at the sight of death, and it was a new sensation, something creeping up in me like the sap in a drought-stricken vine. Tom, who had served me, was dead, and I was grieved, and that was the truth of the matter.
There was a puzzle here that must be solved. I tried to forget the sensations that washed over me and concentrated on facts, on the rough cream fabric of the shirt, and on the wounds beneath it. I saw three stab wounds, of about an inch across, and placed with a devilish accuracy, below the ribs on the left, so that the knife had struck upwards to the heart. Thick trails of blood had flowed from therein and stained the shirt. There were numerous small rents, ragged ones, some with thorns caught in them. The little cuts and tears made by thorns in the flesh beneath the shirt had not bled; dead men do not bleed. That is when the torturers give up, when they are no longer drawing blood. You cannot deceive them, cannot get a respite by fainting. As long as you are still bleeding, you are alive. When the blood stops flowing, they know they will get no more out of the victim, neither blood nor words, nor anything in this world ever again.
Tom had been dragged through the thicket after death; so much was clear from the scratches on his body.
I pulled the shirt together over the chest, and some objects flew out of a fold. Groping about curiously in the dry grass where they had fallen, I picked them up, small, heavy metal things. I felt roundabout with my fingertips and retrieved about half a dozen of them. For a moment I thought they were lead shot, but then I realised the shape was wrong. These were flat, disc-shaped, blackened, and some were misshapen. Some had fragments of scorched cloth adhering to them.
I put them in my waistcoat pocket, laid my kerchief carefully over Tom’s face, got to my knees and brushed off the twigs and debris that had clung to my breeches.
“We’ll carry him decently down. Go and fetch some planks or a trestle from the farm and then take him to the village. Wait — when you get to the farm, fetch the clean shirt from behind the door of his room and put it on him. And stop when you get to the stream and wash his face. Before his mother sees it.”
They went off, crashing through the bushes and down the dusty little hillside, and I continued to contemplate possibilities, and impossibilities, for these were just as significant in trying to identify the murderer. Or murderers.
It would have been impossible for a woman alone to have brought the body here, up the steep slope of Wayland’s Mound and through the thorns. Could two women have done it? It was just possible. Certainly a woman could have inflicted those wounds — of that there was no doubt. A sharp knife, at the right angle — in such a case, there was often little strength required. In fact, the victim often provided the force needed by lunging towards his attacker and impaling himself on the instrument of his death. I knew this, for I had been trained in this kind of combat, in silent, secret killing that needed cunning and cruelty, that demanded a cool mind and calculation, not crude physical strength. Take your enemy by surprise, attack him in cold blood, let him rush on to you, use his own strength against him — all these things I knew about, and by these means a great hulking strong man such as Tom Granby could have been felled
by a woman. It was possible. I had known a woman in Greece who killed men, taking them by stealth.
The sound of men’s rough voices broke through my thoughts, and the farm hands appeared, carrying a makeshift stretcher made from canvas lashed on to poles. They bore Tom carefully down the hill, trying to keep the dead face from being scratched by overhanging branches. They were surprisingly gentle with him, struggling with awkward balance to prevent the body from rolling off the canvas. I stayed for a few minutes more, looking at the lie of the land.
It would not have taken any great strength to kill Tom, supposing cunning had been used, but to get his body here? One person, one woman, could perhaps have got the body over the saddle of a horse, and led the horse under cover of darkness to the mound, and then up as far as the thorn thicket. To have dragged him through the bushes and hide him out of sight deep in the thickets would have needed a lot of strength — more than one person, almost certainly.
I thought of a quiet mare I had seen in the stable at Crawshay’s, a sturdy country animal, so unlike that nervous equine aristocrat, my Zaraband, and imagined her shifting restlessly in the moonlight as a burden was dragged over her back, and a familiar hand calmed her and led her over the cobbled yard and out towards the open fields.
It was intelligently thought out. The murderer might well be right in thinking that it would be a long time before the body was found: after all, Wayland’s Mound had a bad reputation locally, and the villagers stayed away from it. Safe from inquisitive children, safe from courting couples in search of a little privacy. An excellent hiding place, revealed only by careful and deliberate search — that, and the buzzing cloud of flies that droned above the thickets where the body lay hidden. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, claiming nourishment for his children.
Two women, working together, could have done it, if they could get the pony out of its stable and bring it to the mound. From then on, it would have been a bit of a struggle, but there would have been no haste if it had been done at night. They would in the end have managed to get up the slope with their burden.
I walked round the mound and saw on one side where branches had been broken off and a rough trail had been beaten towards the top. Easy enough, if one was prepared to hack a way through to the centre and then drag the body after. Easy if there were two?
Tom had been killed by knife wounds. Did that mean that he had not been murdered by the same hand that had killed the Crawshays — the hand that had fired the pistols in the farmhouse? Was the killer of Tom not the killer also of the Crawshays, old Gideon and his son Edmund?
Was a knife a woman’s weapon, and the pistols that had killed the Crawshays more likely to have been used by a man? Or was it simply a matter of convenience? The same hand responsible for all three deaths, but finding the pistols ready to hand on one occasion and the knife on the next?
Some sharp knife, well honed by a careful housewife on the whetstone in a farmhouse kitchen, perhaps for cutting through sides of meat, for slicing the huge hams cured in smoke? A thin knife, that would slide into the flesh, long enough to reach the heart.
Suddenly, I knew what the scraps of metal were — the little discs that had fallen from Tom’s pocket. I knew, and it was as if the tumblers of a lock clicked into place all at once.
They were the metal buttons from a woman’s dress, buttons that would be covered with the same material as the garment. Those were the silvery splashes I had seen in the stove at the farm: the melted remains of such buttons, and they came from the same dress as the shreds of material in the ashes, blackened but still with a recognisable pattern, the fragments of a woman’s dress.
A woman had killed Tom. I was sure of it.
I was conscious of something that was a strange sensation — something I had forgotten the feeling of, had buried somewhere many years ago, before the killings and the betrayals and the cries for liberty. It was anger, a slow-burning anger; I was angry for Tom, wanted to revenge him. Feelings that had been crushed out for many years were slowly reviving, like seeds in a desert that can lie in the sand for twenty years or more, and then put out shoots in the event of a freak rainstorm that soaks through the dried husks. This murder of an obscure farm hand, in a remote corner of England, stirred me into life; not just the death of this simple man, but the calculating cruelty with which it had been carried out.
I recalled the delay between the pistol shots of which the gypsy had spoken, that pause as he crossed a field on the way to the farmhouse. A pause of some five or ten minutes.
Did that imply that there had been two murderers, acting in separate sequence?
Or had the two women — Marie and the governess — had they operated together? Was their apparent mutual dislike merely an act to deceive outsiders — a show put on by two clever actresses? Or was their mutual hatred real enough, and their cooperation in a murder perhaps the uneasy truce of two enforced allies?
If Tom had been their victim, had that been true of old man Crawshay and his son?
Marie might have had a reason for killing the old man, but not her husband, who she would have hoped to inherit the farm.
The governess might have had some reason for killing Edmund, but the old man was surely her benefactor. She was employed on his insistence, after all.
The double death still made no sense, and Toms demise did not supply any information that would solve the conundrum.
It did make it unlikely that the gypsy was the killer of the Crawshays. The three murders must be connected in some way — and the gypsy was safely locked up in gaol at some forty miles’ distance. Had Marie lied in her version of events? But she had not claimed actually to have witnessed the murder, merely to have found the gypsy with the bodies of the murdered men. It might be that her interpretation of what she had seen was motivated by prejudice against the gypsy.
From where I stood, I could see the men trudging away towards the village with their burden. A veil of dust hung in the air, raised by the passage of Toms rough and ready cortege.
I mounted Zaraband. We caught up with the men, as the sad little procession came to the village. I kept the mare in check behind them, watching as the men moved into the single street, with its huddle of houses. Then I walked her along, and dismounted. One of their number knocked at the door of a house which was somewhat larger and in better repair than most. There was no answer straight away in response to the knock, and he held the door open for his fellow pall-bearers, who entered with their inert burden, slowly, carefully manoeuvring it across the threshold.
