“I will find her, I will,” she said, over and over again as she paced about the hunting room.
But she had not the least idea how to go about it.
27: Saturday Night And Sunday Morning
Annie seethed with rage. To know the identity of her husband’s killer and yet to be disbelieved on such a point! To be told, as if she were a child, that she could not understand the consequences of her actions! It was insulting and offensive. She was not sure that she could forgive Sir Leonard. Even if she could prove Adam’s innocence and set him free, no amount of apology could recompense him for his days and nights shut up in Salisbury gaol.
She sent Sheffield scurrying about to locate Mr Willerton-Forbes and Captain Edgerton. The captain was the first to appear. A brief summary of events was enough to send him hurrying away to the stables for a horse, bound on a fast ride downstream to look for the boat and the place where the murderess had come ashore. Mr Willerton-Forbes arrived next, and then Benedict, then Edwin and Jerome, and finally Judith, rather flushed and breathing rapidly, as if she had been running. For each new arrival, Annie repeated her story until she knew every detail by heart. No one told her she was imagining things or making it up.
“Will Adam come home now?” Jerome said, with the straightforwardness of his twelve years.
“Not yet,” Mr Willerton-Forbes said gently. “He must be brought before the magistrate on Monday, and unless we can find good evidence of this woman by then, I fear your brother will be sent to the Assizes. But then we will have some time to find her, and when we do, your brother will be released.”
Jerome nodded. “Good. What is for dinner tonight?”
“Oh… dinner…” Annie glanced at the clock. It wanted but twenty minutes to five. “I did not hear the dressing bell. Shall we wait for the captain, Mr Willerton-Forbes?”
The lawyer laughed. “When Michael is chasing clues, he forgets what day it is, never mind what hour. If we wait, we might not eat until midnight and we cannot distress the estimable Mrs Hewitt so. A good cook is an invaluable treasure.”
“If it is turkey, I shall save him a leg,” Jerome said solemnly. “He likes the dark meat best.”
“That is very thoughtful of you, Master Jerome,” Mr Willerton-Forbes said gravely.
The advantage of having only one course for dinner, Annie found, was that the servants could be dismissed immediately, leaving the company to discuss Annie’s strange encounter to their heart’s content. At first she said nothing, as the lawyer and Adam’s three brothers aired their own thoughts on the tale. Mr Willerton-Forbes was confident that the woman could be found.
“It will take time, but it can be done.”
“But how, sir?” Benedict said. “We have no name, no direction… not even a county! She could be anywhere in England.”
“I think not. Consider what we know — that she met Mr Rupert Huntly during the course of his work as an attorney, which was in Grantham. He made a will for an elderly woman she was nursing. Later, the will was contested, which would have been widely reported. So, all we need to do is to ask the senior partner at the firm of attorneys where Mr Huntly plied his trade. They will certainly remember the case, and we will have a name for this woman.”
“But that will not tell us where she is now,” Benedict said.
“Indeed it will not, and if, as Mrs Huntly said, her present position was one which Mr Huntly found for her, it is possible that his fellow attorneys knew nothing of it. But we will pursue that course as far as we can. Once we have a name, and with Mrs Huntly’s excellent description, we may be able to ask more directly. The will wherein she came by her house would have been a matter of public record, and it must be somewhere not too far from Grantham. We will find her, of that I am very confident. She made a mistake by coming here, that much is certain.” The lawyer turned to Annie. “You are very quiet, Mrs Huntly. Do you have anything to add to our deliberations?”
“On where she is? No, nothing, for I agree with all your conclusions. However, I have been pondering how she contrived her visit today.”
“She arrived by boat, presumably?” Mr Willerton-Forbes said. “Since she departed by that means, it is logical that she arrived thus also.”
“Oh yes, but from which direction? And where did the boat come from?”
Mr Willerton-Forbes opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again with a frown. “It was not her boat, you mean? No, of course it was not, and it seems unlikely that she hired it legitimately from someone who might well remember such an unusual customer.”
“I do not see her stealing it herself, either,” Annie said. “Nor could she have rowed it any distance. She was tiny! She only came up to my shoulder, and the current is strong. I believe she must have had an accomplice, and then there is the question of how she got here from wherever she lives. By the stage? Again, she is too memorable. A pretty young woman in red velvet and a very fetching cap would be remembered by every man she passed.”
“She could have been in disguise,” Jerome said eagerly. “Wearing male clothing, she would pass for a boy.”
“Then she must have carried her own clothes in a bag of some sort, and abandoned the others somewhere, for I saw nothing in the boat with her,” Annie said.
“We will look for them,” Mr Willerton-Forbes said, “and also for someone missing a boat.”
“Oh!” Judith said. “The Turners’ boat went missing a few weeks ago, and turned up caught in the shallows just beyond the Durran House bridge. They have the farm just beyond Wickstead, and they keep a small boat for fishing. Not that they use it often, so they had no idea how long it had been missing. Perhaps that was how this woman murdered Rupert — steal the boat, float downstream to the right point, tie up and do… what she set out to do, then use the boat to escape. And perhaps she did exactly the same today.”
Captain Edgerton returned just then, his face alight with excitement.
“Did you find her?” Jerome cried.
The captain looked a little crestfallen. “The lady in red? Unfortunately not, but I did find much of interest, which I shall tell you all about as soon as I have changed.”
“We do not mind your informality, Captain,” Annie said with a smile. “Please join us at once. Jerome has preserved the best of each dish for you. Everything is keeping warm on the burners on the sideboard.”
With Jerome’s enthusiastic help, the captain heaped his plate with food, but when he sat down, he took only a sip or two of wine before imparting his news.
“I have found the place where she came ashore,” he said. “Just down at the Durran House bridge the river widens and the current is more moderate. There is a small jetty in a little bay — the ideal place for her to abandon the boat. Just beside it is a sheltered lane hidden from the road by trees, and I found evidence there of a wheeled vehicle and two horses, which had stood for some time.”
“What sort of wheeled vehicle, Michael?”
The captain’s hunger drew him to his plate for a while, and the company waited impatiently for his answer.
“Mm, excellent pheasant. My compliments to Mrs Hewitt, and my thanks to you, Master Jerome.” He executed a little bow. “As to the vehicle, my guess would be a small carriage. Four wheels, I think, rather than two. There were two sets of boot prints around the area — a coachman and groom, perhaps.”
“So they waited there for our mysterious lady, who floated down the river to meet them and was carried away to safety,” Mr Willerton-Forbes said musingly. “And so the boat was tied up there?”
“No, there was no boat. I suspect that after she had disembarked, she untied it and let it drift on downstream,” Captain Edgerton said.
“Then it would end up in the shallows as the Turners’ boat was,” Benedict said. “It would be set down to mishap — the securing rope badly tied, say, and no one any the wiser. But where did the carriage come from? A hired chaise?”
“That would be too risky,” Annie said. “She is too distinctive
a person not to be noticed, and it would not just be a coachman and groom — there would be the innkeeper, the ostler, any passing customers. A coaching inn is a busy place, not conducive to clandestine arrangements. No, I think it was her own carriage and her own loyal servants.”
“They would need more than loyalty to be party to a murder,” Captain Edgerton said. “It would take a lot of money to bribe even the most loyal of servants to turn a blind eye to that.”
“They would not necessarily know,” Annie said. “Let us suppose that they live near Grantham, and that all they were required to do was to drop their mistress off and then collect her later — perhaps days later, if she was sleeping in the boat house. Once they had all returned to Grantham, a murder in Wiltshire would not necessarily trigger any warning bells.”
“It was reported in all the newspapers,” Benedict said.
“They might not be able to read,” Jerome said. “Lots of servants cannot read or write.”
“And if the house is isolated, they might not hear any news,” Annie said. “What I cannot understand, though, is why she came here again and told me all about herself. She has surely given us enough information to find her. All she had to do was to stay away and we should never have suspected her existence. What could induce her to take such a risk?”
Mr Willerton-Forbes smiled. “Now that, my dear Mrs Huntly, is a very easy question to answer. She wanted to see you, to meet you face to face and talk to you.”
“She must have seen me sometimes when she was watching the house in preparation for her dreadful deed.”
“In the distance, and wearing a bonnet, no doubt, and that was not enough for her. She was a spurned woman, so burning up with jealousy that she killed the man who had betrayed her. Yet even that could not extinguish the flames entirely. She needed to see you, to be close enough to touch you and talk to you. She needed to understand your superiority, and why he chose you above her.”
“Then I must have been a sad disappointment to her. She is far prettier than I ever was, and livelier, too. I am very dull by comparison and have no claim to superiority.”
“On the contrary, my dear lady,” Mr Willerton-Forbes said. “You are a respectable, God-fearing, virtuous woman, worthy to be the wife of a gentleman, and she was not.”
To Annie, that still sounded terribly dull. Not that she would ever have wanted to be a mistress or a swindler of elderly rich gentlefolk or a murderer, but her whole life had been confined to Guildford and now Willow Place. Apart from an annual visit to London with Uncle Tom for his supplies, a brief stay with Lavinia shortly after her marriage and her own honeymoon in Bath, she had never travelled or seen anything of the world. Nor had she made any mark on it, such that people would remember her. She had created nothing and destroyed nothing. Her name would never be talked about in tap rooms or read about in the newspapers. She was neither famous nor infamous, and when she died, only those few who had known her would remember her face and her deeds.
“We must all be thankful that this woman had no ill intent towards you,” Captain Edgerton said. “I blame myself for offering you such inadequate protection that she was able to enter these grounds unseen.”
“You could not watch the whole river,” Annie said gently.
“No, but I should have been with you. The gardener’s boy is not capable of defending you.”
“No one could possibly defend me against her. If she had wanted to kill me, she could have done so a dozen times over. She means me no harm.”
“Not today, perhaps, but she may yet change her mind on that,” the captain said grimly. “I must urge you to stay within doors until this woman is safely locked up, Mrs Huntly.”
“But—”
“If not for your own sake, then for that of your child.”
Her child… that was one legacy she would leave behind her, God willing. Yes, for the sake of her child, she could accept some privation. If she made no other mark on the world, that would be a gift to posterity as great as any other.
~~~~~
The next day was Sunday, yet Captain Edgerton was up at first light, eager to continue his investigations. Annie spent an hour updating her record of everything related to the murder. She had a great deal to add, with all that had befallen her the previous day. She made sure to detail everything, from Davy’s offer to accompany her to Sir Leonard’s rejection of her story. She wrote down as much as she could recall of the actual words the woman had used. One phrase caught her eye — ‘You’re taller than I’d expected,’ she had said. Yet she must surely have seen Annie as she watched the household and plotted her vile deed.
It was odd, but there was no time to consider the matter then, for there was church to be considered. Annie had decided that she would heed the captain’s cautions and stay at home with her mother. The three Huntly boys, Cecilia and her husband, and most of the servants had already left on foot, and Annie waited in the great hall with Judith, her daughters and Mr Willerton-Forbes for the carriage to come round when Captain Edgerton returned.
“There are signs of recent occupation in the boat house,” the captain said triumphantly. “There are new candles since I last checked, and an empty wine bottle. It seems our anonymous murderer spent at least one night there before meeting you yesterday, Mrs Huntly. I have not yet located the boat she used, but that is my next objective.”
“It is the Sabbath, Captain,” Annie said gently. “Perhaps this could wait until tomorrow?”
“Oh… the better the day, the better the deed, as my Colonel used to say whenever anyone protested at a Sunday commission. However, if you will give me five minutes to don a clean pair of boots, I will be respectable enough for Wickstead parish church, and perhaps after the service there may be an opportunity to talk to Mr Turner and enquire if he has mislaid his boat again lately.”
His enthusiasm made Annie smile ruefully. She saw them away in the carriage, then went upstairs to her mother’s room. She was dressed and sitting in a chair, a soft smile on her face, as if she were lost in a pleasant dream. And perhaps she was… Annie hoped she was.
“Good morning, Mama. How are you today? You will be pleased to hear that the sun is shining, although the wind is easterly and it is not terribly warm. I believe it is shifting direction, so we may have rain later.”
Her mother sat, unresponsive, her hands unnaturally still. Annie could not remember a time when her mother’s hands had been immobile. She was always sewing, or clutching a handkerchief. If they went out, it would be her reticule she clutched, the fingers working constantly. Such stillness was more disturbing than anything else.
Annie pulled up a chair and took her mother’s hand in hers. Stroking it gently, she said, “Oh, Mama… please come back to me… I need you…” Her voice wobbled dangerously. Whatever would she do without her mother to help her? Who else would support her so unreservedly? Who else remembered Papa and the life they had once had?
For an instant she felt utterly adrift. Rupert had torn her away from her family, and she had not yet had time to put down new roots in Wiltshire. She barely knew her neighbours and Judith… she had had hopes of Judith, but somehow their promising start had not grown into friendship. Rupert had come between them initially, and she knew now that Judith had her own plans, her own new life with John Ransome.
And then there was Adam. Her heart ached for him, for his lightness of spirit that could always make her smile, and his gentle kisses. Whether that was love or loneliness, she could not say, but something about him drew her powerfully. Or perhaps it was that he was part of a large happy family, and she yearned to be a part of it too.
She felt her spirits lowering with every moment. Taking a deep breath, she said briskly, “It is Sunday, Mama. Should you like to read through the service? Where is your Prayer Book? Here it is, right beside you. Shall I begin? ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us: But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cle
anse us from all unrighteousness. Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us, in sundry places, to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness…’”
The familiar words washed over her, filling her with peace. Mrs Dresden might be unmoved, but Annie could not be. She recited, almost from memory, although turning the pages of the Prayer Book at the proper times. Eventually she came to the place where the sermon should be.
“What shall I do, Mama? Would you care for a sermon?”
She moved to the small table where several books were piled up neatly, but none were suitable. Then she thought to check the small cabinet next to the bed. There, beside the Bible, lay a book she recognised at once — her father’s sermons. After his death, when they had moved to Uncle Tom’s house, her mother had read and reread the treasured pages so many times that Uncle Tom had had them properly bound for her. Here were all Papa’s sermons, written in his own neat hand. Nothing could be more appropriate.
She sat down again beside her mother and began to read.
‘Nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. John 16:7. The saints of God may very justly reckon their losses among their greatest gains. The adversities of believers minister much to their prosperity. Although we know this, yet through the infirmity of the flesh we tremble at soul-enriching afflictions…’
Almost she could hear her father’s voice as she read the words, could see him standing in the pulpit, hands gesturing as he spoke, could see his clear, dark eyes — eyes so like her own — gazing benignly down at his rapt congregation. He was such an excellent preacher, a clergyman with a true calling to the church and not one for whom it was only a scheme for advancement. For a moment, wretchedness filled her heart. If only he had not died so soon! If only they had not been forced from their home! If only… if only…
The Apothecary (Silver Linings Mysteries Book 3) Page 27
