“Well, there’s no help for it. The law is plain.”
“The law is plain, but our course may vary and achieve the ends of justice after all,” Joan said. “What if we follow Moll’s advice?”
“What?” Matthew said incredulously. “Say nothing?”
“For the present, at least. Until evidence of both this and Sir John’s murder is brought to light.”
Matthew went over to the bed and sat down; his face took on
the expression it had when he was deep in some perplexing problem. Joan understood her husbands dilemma. A man of rigorous probity, zealous to a fault for law and order, he could not easily depart from the prescribed path, and particularly one first recommended by someone he disliked.
"Its not, after all, as though her murderer will go unlooked to,” Joan reasoned. "You are the Queens agent by her express command. It is only the outward trappings of official inquiry that will be postponed. You, as Queens officer, will investigate secretly—and with such subterfuge, we'll not alarm the castle or put to flight our suspects at the very time we need them close at hand.” "And to those who know the truth—the Fludds and Edward Bastian—we will seem to have acted only out of policy.”
"A more subtle policy than they suppose,” she added, putting the capstone on her argument. "And there'll be no meddlesome local constables to muddy the waters.”
Matthew thought some more. He stood and paced the chamber a few times, glanced toward the wardrobe, and shook his head. Then he stopped and looked at Joan.
"So be it,” he said. "We'll go find the Fludds and tell them we have decided to follow their counsel. Then we'll see to the burial of Aileen Mogaill in some private place until time and circumstances make the cause of these horrors plain. Meanwhile the other servants can continue to believe the girl fled. If Moll speaks true, the fiction will be readily credited.”
"All well and good,” Joan said, smiling faintly, although her headache had returned with a vengeance. "As for this chamber, I'll not spend the night here, nor in the tower, either, but in the new house if I must lie all night upon the floor, which I would fain do soon. I am weary and sick of heart, and my head pounds to let the poor brain free.”
"You do look ill,” Matthew said with sudden concern. "I'll lead you to other quarters, then Edward and I will see to the poor wench that's dead. She'll have a decent grave, with pious words said above it, though no priest nor public mourning. Meanwhile I pray this sickness of yours has no more grievous cause than horror at finding Aileen Mogaill's body and exhaustion from the long journey.”
Next morning, the rain fell remorselessly, and Molls grief passed the understanding of her husband, who stood slightly behind her, a supportive hand on her elbow. He knew she could think only of the dead cat, the worthy Nebuchadnezzar, while he tried vainly to think of everything but the human remains in the wardrobe. They both looked down at the cat, stiff in its little shroud of dirty cloth. Edward had brought the body round early to the lodge. The hostler looked grief-striken too, although for cat, maid, or both, Cuth Fludd couldn't tell.
“A poor, innocent creature, Nebuchadnezzar was," Moll said, sobbing softly. “Would to God I had an account of his end."
“Well," said Cuth in an effort to console his wife, “maybe the eat died of apoplexy. He was very old."
Moll turned slowly, wiped a tear from her red cheeks, and regarded her husband with contempt. “Just died? Of old age? Apoplexy, say you? Why, you old fool, he was in his prime."
Moll knelt down slowly, as she might have done before a religious relie, and examined the body, tenderly touching the fur, stroking the animal’s side. Then she gasped and said: “No Challoner ghost did this. Look here, he’s been strangled, strangled dead!"
Both Cuth and Edward joined in the inspection and were forced to confirm Moll’s finding. The eat had been strangled, no doubt about it.
Moll rose and began propounding several theories of the murder with a completeness of thought suggesting she had already been considering such a possibility: that Aileen Mogaill was the perpetrator, or one of the other servants, taking their resentment of her, Moll, out on a poor dumb animal. Or perhaps it was the blackguard Irishman who had treated her with such rudeness. Finally, Molls speculations brought her to Joan Stock as a culprit.
‘Til warrant the Stock woman killed him,” she said. “Out of pure spite.”
Edward said he thought that unlikely. He said the cat had obviously been dead for several days, if stench were any clue. Certainly that should exclude Joan Stock and her husband from Molls list of suspects.
But Moll made a face to suggest that any effort to absolve the newcomers of responsibility was unwelcome. Terrible in her new spirit of vengeance, she said, “I hate them both, and more particularly the woman. Come, Cuth. Help me bury our darling as befits his character as a good cat. And damned be she who strangled him.”
Cuth began to scoop up the cat but Moll said, “Not in that filthy rag, you dolt! Fetch clean linen from the sideboard and bring it straightway.”
Cuth went to do as he was ordered and Edward said, “Fm truly sorry I brought your cat to you, Moll. I should have buried it myself. ”
“No,” Moll said. “You did the right thing. The decent thing. When ones beloved is taken by violence as in this case, it must be known. How else can justice be served? Fm only a bitter woman— made more bitter still by life’s misfortunes. But even I know that. No, murder will out, or so they say.”
All this Moll declared with great dignity, tears streaming down her cheeks and her fist clutched to her bosom in a gesture of determination. Cuth reappeared. He was carrying a piece of cloth of appropriate quality. Moll inspected it and said it would serve; she handed it to Edward, who placed the cat upon it and wrapped it up again.
The three of them stepped out into the rain and walked toward the woods. The trees provided some shelter from the drizzle. Edward found a suitable spot for the burial in a little clearing where
the earth was soft. Having no shovel, he dug the grave with his hands, raking up the moist earth with his fingers. He took the body from Moll, who had carried it to the burial place, and gently laid it into the hole.
The grave Edward had dug was not quite deep enough and he had to dig it deeper. Then the fit was perfect. Edward covered the body while above him Moll said, “May she howl in hell a thousand nights who did this.”
The curse was the cat’s epitaph.
After the burial Moll went off to the castle kitchen to find some sweet to console her grief, while Cuth returned to the lodge and stoked the fire to dry his bones. He had got drenched there in the woods, bound as he had been to observe decorum at Nebuchadnezzar’s funeral, but the worse was the image of cruel murder and mayhem the cat’s burial had brought to his mind. Somewhere in the same woods Aileen Mogaill was buried. Cuth was thankful he had been given no part in that gruesome interment.
He drew his stool up toward the flames. How good the heat felt. Wet weather was not good for his old body, nor was his recent change in habitations. He was used to his quarters in the new house, having dwelt there a score of years or more in perfect felicity (his relationship with Moll was another matter altogether). The lodge was not only tumbledown, but the suffering he endured from aches in his joints and the hacking cough the proximity of water aggravated was almost as painful a cross as the humiliation of his forced retirement.
Feeling better now, he thought of Nebuchadnezzar—this time without an accompanying image of Aileen Mogaill. Cuth had always hated the cat, hated its outlandish, heathen name, given it by Moll from the days of her religious phase, the only remnant of which now was her virulent anti-papistry. She had heard the name Nebuchadnezzar in a sermon, liked it, and was wont to explain the name was that of one of the Twelve Apostles of Our Lord. A very pious cat.
But the truth was that Cuth had strangled it himself. He had stumbled out of bed the first night in the lodge, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings. In desperate need of the c
hamber pot, he had stepped on the creature’s tail, heard a snarl, felt a painful
retaliatory nip into the thin flesh of his ankle. With a dexterity that amazed him in recalling it, Cuth had reached down, seized his assailant by the scruff of the neck, and dispatched it without a thought of the consequence. The miracle was that his wife had not been awakened by the sounds of combat.
By morning light he realized what he had done. Feeling no remorse, only regret that he should now have to dispose of the evidence of his wrongdoing, he pulled the limp body from beneath the bed and stole out of the lodge, intending a hasty burial somewhere in the woods. It was only after he had covered the body with a thin layer of dirt and old leaves and had returned to the lodge that he realized what an opportunity lay before him. So the day before the arrival of the new steward and housekeeper, he had exhumed Nebuchadnezzar from his shallow grave and concealed him in the wardrobe. He knew that his wife had finished her work there. It was all she spoke of—how she hated the Keep and how she wished the Stocks what joy they’d find there. Soon, Cuth knew, the cat would be all maggoty and reeking—and a fine welcome he should give the interlopers.
That Moll now held the Stocks responsible for the cats murder was a measure of luck he had not bargained for.
Nor, for that matter, the terrible thing that had happened to the girl, the very thought of which caused such a turbulence in his gut that he wished to heaven his wife were present to distract him from it. When he had taken the cat to the wardrobe, the wardrobe had been empty. Of that he could swear upon a dozen Bibles if he was required. The murder of Aileen Mogaill must have been done thereafter, he supposed—in the dead of night. And by some old Challoner offended by the girls solitary trespass. Was not the beheading of the victim clear evidence of a malign spirit?
Cuth knew all the old stories of the castle—and he believed a goodly share of them as much as he believed in the existence of God, witches, devils, and other supernatural forces in his world.
But what Cuth could not fathom was this: surely Aileen Mogaill had not been the first servant to wander into the Black Keep alone. Why this sudden fury of a ghost content for all the years of Cuth’s service to claim no more than a rumored existence?
He was still pondering these perplexing matters an hour later when a knocking snatched him from his meditations. At first he
thought it was his wife, kicking at the door because her arms would be full. He responded accordingly—with great haste, to open before she began a clamorous complaint.
But it was not Moll. It was Edward, standing there in the rain with as little concern for the drizzle as if it had been the sunniest day in July.
Cuth asked Edward what he wanted.
“Only a little talk with you, friend. A privy talk, if you please.”
“A privy talk?” Cuth replied, eyeing the hostler suspiciously and feeling greatly bereft of his wife’s presence. “About what?”
“Your good wife’s cat, that’s what,” Edward said, coming inside without invitation.
Cuth knew something was wrong, and he found himself trembling a little. He shut the door against the rain and turned toward his uninvited guest, waiting to hear what Edward’s visit was all about.
“I’ve been thinking, thinking of murder,” Edward said slowly.
Cuth thought he meant Aileen Mogaill and said, “Why, the ghost did it, killed the girl and the cat as well. Or it was that Stock woman who killed the cat, as my wife supposes.”
Edward laughed mirthlessly, his face taut. “I know nothing of ghosts. When I see one, I’ll believe it, not before. I did take a close look at your wife’s cat, though. I found pieces of dirt in its fur, yea, in the nostrils. Your wife’s inspection of her darling wasn’t very thorough.”
“Whereby you conclude what?”
“Why, someone killed the cat, buried him, and then dug him up again—carried him to the Black Keep as an afterthought. The cat was stone cold before the Stocks arrived, before Aileen Mogaill was dead. Any fool can see that. Besides, why would they have killed the cat and left him to rot in their own wardrobe? I doubt neither knew the cat was Moll’s. But someone hated the Stocks, hated them before setting eyes on them, and that was Moll—and you.”
“You’re not saying my wife killed her own cat?” Cuth exclaimed, as much amused as astonished at the accusation.
“Of course not,” Edward said. “Moll would never hurt a hair of that cat. But the case is not the same with you. You’d strangle the
cat soon enough because you could never abide the thing and then conceal it in the wardrobe to annoy the Stocks—and perhaps even make them look guilty/’
“So you reason,” Cuth responded with ineffectual sarcasm after he had paused for a moment to take in all that Edward had said. His trembling was worse now; it had begun to affect his voice, and Cuth was sure Edward could detect it as well. He would have demanded that the hostler leave his premises had he not been driven with such a desire to know what Edward intended to do with his terrible knowledge.
“Your wife will reason likewise when I lay out the facts,” the hostler continued with easy assurance. “It’ll be as plain as your scabby nose. When she finds out it was you who deprived her of her darling, it’ll go hard with you.”
“You can tell her what you please. She’ll believe me.” Cuth said, wishing it were true but already feeling his fate cast.
Edward laughed. “There’s more, you know.”
“More?”
“Maybe if you strangled the cat, you dispatched Aileen thereafter. Now there’s something for a curious man to ponder, for I would as soon believe you did the deed as believe in some moldy ghost fetched forth from old servants’ tales.”
“Killed the girl!” Cuth explained, really alarmed now. “Why, I never did such a thing.” He felt the blood drain from his face and his whole body quiver as though he had been struck with the palsy. “I confess I strangled the cat. I confess it, but before God, I had not jot or tittle to do with Aileen Mogaill, not since she came to Thorncombe. I never so much as looked her way.”
Transfixed between insult and terror, Cuth felt hot tears run down his cheeks, and he was ashamed to weep before his accuser. Edward looked on, a grim smile on his lips and a skeptical expression in his eyes.
“Will you say aught to my wife about the cat?” Cuth brought himself to ask, having decided he had no alternative but to throw himself upon the hostler’s mercy.
For a few moments Edward made no response, fie looked as though he were trying to make up his mind, weighing the advantages of silence against those of revelation. Finally, he said,
“Maybe yes, maybe no. The same goes for my suspicions about you and Aileen Mogaill.”
'‘For Christ’s sake, man—”
“Make no appeals to Christ, you whited sepulcher,” Edward said, all smiles gone. “You are a self-confessed liar, for you looked upon two corpses and played a mighty hypocrite agog at your own villainy. So it will be thought since you killed the one creature, you probably killed the other too.”
“Not if you say nothing,” Cuth pleaded, his pride totally gone now.
“Not if I say nothing,” answered Edward, suddenly friendly again.
“Oh, what must I do?” Cuth begged.
That same morning, Matthews worst fears about Joans symptoms were confirmed. It was now plain that she had been stricken with a fever, ague. God knew what—aggravated to the quick by the ordeal of travel, the discovery of a dead woman in her wardrobe, and the commencement of the steady drizzle that seemed to permeate the stone walls of the castle and make all within damp, soggy, and joyless. Joan burned and shivered by turns, like a lover in an old sonnet, while Matthew, concerned that no physician was available to bleed, purge, or pronounce upon his wife’s urine, resorted to the few remedies he had learned at home—herbs, compresses, and earnest prayers for Joan’s delivery from evil.
Joan was bedridden for three days, convalescing for another, sleeping upon rushes in the parlo
r of the new house where she and Matthew had established a temporary hospital. During this time Matthew played a good nurse, for he dared not trust Joan’s health or safety to another soul, given the evidence of homicidal madness in the castle. Was there anyone beyond suspicion?
Their investigation of Sir John’s and Aileen Mogaill’s murders was postponed, therefore, and even the normal course of their respective duties as housekeeper and steward suffered a necessary neglect, waiting upon Joan’s recovery.
But recover she did, even in the absence of a physician and his
leeches, and Matthew took the first dry day thereafter to ride into Buxton, where he contrived to converse with the foreman of the coroner’s jury that had sat in Sir John’s case. The foreman, a lanky, talkative fellow named Broomfield, revealed that the verdict of death by misadventure had been reached for want of compelling evidence to the contrary. Matthew also learned that the suspicion that Sir John had been murdered was widespread. Matthew only needed to identify himself as the new steward of Thorncombe and he was deluged by volunteered information and gossip, local legends, and petty slanders. It was difficult for him to discern which was which, but he left town with the impression that, if but half of what he had heard was true, Thorncombe was a very sinister place indeed.
The evening of the same day he spent a good six to eight hours poring over the former steward’s ledgers—not that he supposed he would discover in their yellowed, dog-eared pages evidence of Sir John’s murder, but because it was the thing a new steward was expected to do and he wanted to be perfect in his guise. Besides, as a merchant he was full of natural curiosity as to the estate’s income and expenditures.
For all his faults, Cuth had been a meticulous record-keeper, or so Matthew inferred from the ledgers. The whole sad story was there: a tale of declining income offset by a reduction in servants, the sale of livestock, the pawn of plate and furnishings, and then, too, sudden and unexplained infusions of capital from unidentified sources. Matthew took careful note of all these details, although as yet they formed no meaningful pattern nor any clear relation to Sir John’s death. For one thing, the ledgers did not give evidence of who, despite his heir, of course, might have benefited from the murder.
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