His tone of voice had not been that of a boy asking an adult for instruction. “I’m sorry?” she asked.
“Miss Hudson, with your father dead, do you intend to finish his work? Go to Portsmouth and see what you can shake out of this Beddoes fellow?”
The brutal accusation was like a slap. “Shake out—oh. You heard the conversation? Before you walked in?”
“Enough of it.”
“I was not—I had no…Look, Mr Holmes: agreeing with my father was the only way to be rid of him. I had no intention to join him, either in his plans or in his return to Australia. All I wanted was to get back to London for Billy. After that, well, any place where Papa wasn’t.”
“You did not plan to blackmail Beddoes—or shoot him outright for whatever he’s fled with?”
“For pity’s sake, Mr Holmes, I’m not a—”
But before the word could leave her mouth, her hand rose to cover it.
“A killer? It would appear that is precisely what you are, Miss Hudson. A thief, a cheat, and now a murderess.”
“But, Papa…He’d have killed you!”
“And instead, you killed him.”
How had she ever thought those grey eyes young?
Clarissa sat against the slimy chair-back. Even in the early weeks with Samuel, she had not felt this tired, this empty. Not since…since her mother had died.
After a long time, she spoke. “Very well. I will do whatever you want. Go with you, talk to the police, tell them everything. All I ask is a promise from you. If they hang me, you’ll see that Billy and Samuel don’t end up in the workhouse.”
She stood without waiting for his response, and climbed up to join the boys on the gamekeeper’s bed. She woke twice during the night to feed Samuel. Both times the smell of a pipe drifted up from below, an unexpectedly mature odour—and oddly comforting, considering that it came from her judge and jury, guarding the exit. When she woke for the third time, a tiny pale rectangle in the darkness, an unnoticed window, heralded the approach of dawn.
The air smelt of coffee instead of tobacco. And she heard a noise—from outside.
She pushed upright, cold dread washing away the sleep. So, Mr Holmes had sent for the police. Either that or servants had come from the house to investigate the smoke. Against her wrist, she could feel Samuel’s tiny ribs pulling air in and out, in and out as she awaited the tramp of boots and loud voices demanding a murderess. Instead, the noise continued. There was a rhythm to it, with the occasional pause. Almost as if…
She eased out of bed, tip-toeing over to the window, but could see only trees. She looked uncertainly at the sleeping boys, and wiped sweaty palms against her skirts.
The creaks of her descent down the ladder did not wake the sleepers. The ground floor was empty, but for a valise on the long table. Her bodice had been shifted during the night, and was nearly dry. She buttoned it on, then straightened her hair-pins as best she could before pulling on her cloak. Outside, she followed the noise through morning mists to the woods behind the house.
The young man had stripped down to his vest. The lower half of him was enveloped in a pair of filthy brown trousers that could only have come from the gamekeeper’s store, its waist held up by a length of twine. He stood past his knees in a rectangular hole that was slightly shorter, but a little wider, than he. A rising mound of dirt stood to one side.
He glanced up as he rested the spade against the side wall and reached for a hatchet. When he had parted a root with it, he resumed the spade. After a moment, Clarissa went back into the house, returning with a pot of coffee, a plate of hard biscuits, and the apple she’d been saving for her breakfast. He stopped digging then, to sit on the edge of the grave with an ill-stifled groan. The bandage on his arm dripped scarlet.
Clarissa took a pair of heavy gloves from under her arm, spotted the night before on a shelf near the pump. She tied up her skirts with a length of the same twine he had found, and shoved her hands into the stiff gloves. Mr Holmes swung his legs heavily out of the way, and Clarissa hopped down into the hole to take up the spade.
The gloves softened; the hole deepened. Not a word was spoken.
After an hour, shoulders burning and stomach clenched with hunger, Clarissa heard a thin wail from the house. She crawled from the hole and staggered off.
The sound of the spade resumed before she rounded the side of the cottage.
She fed Samuel, found something to fill Billy’s stomach, and was pushing a few tasteless biscuits into her own protesting maw when Mr Holmes came in. He was wearing his own trousers now, his hands and face more or less clean.
“There’s hot water in the kettle,” she told him, “if you can find a razor. I’ve let the fire go out. My…my father seemed to think there might be people about.”
“I’ll shave after. Billy, take the baby upstairs, would you please?”
Without argument, the boy scrambled up the ladder, Samuel under his arm like a football. When he was out of hearing, Mr Holmes indicated the valise on the table. “Do you wish to keep any of that?” he asked. “I burned his passport, and two or three garments that had laundry-marks. What’s left will not identify him.”
The valise was an expensive leather case with the initials HWT: Trevor, no doubt. Beside it lay the paltry remains of a life ill-spent: some coins, an empty note-case, a used train ticket from London, a folding knife, and a cabinet photograph of her mother so worn that, if she hadn’t owned one of her own, she would not have recognised the subject. She picked up the tangle of green thread her father had been knotting just before his death, a small version of Alicia’s—of her—childhood dolly, this one barely two inches tall. One leg was incomplete, its threads wrapped around the body.
“What is that thing?” Mr Holmes asked.
“My father was a sailor. He made objects out of string. Instead of smoking, I suppose.” She dropped the partially-completed doll on top of the other things. “No, there’s nothing here I want.”
Mr Holmes removed his jacket, gathered up the things, and went out of the door. Clarissa followed.
James Hudson lay on the ground just beyond the front steps, wrapped in the thick Tartan blanket. Beside him stood a sturdy wheelbarrow. Mr Holmes dropped to his heels and distributed the handful of possessions back inside the dead man’s pockets. He replaced the rug over the man’s head and torso, then stepped around and started to slide his hands beneath the dead man’s shoulders.
He froze, his face looking alarmed until his mind found an explanation for the sensations. “Rigor mortis,” he muttered. He looked up at her. Clarissa bent to grasp her father’s ankles, and in unison, they swung the dead man into the barrow. Mr Holmes put the stolen valise on top.
Fresh blood welled into the wrapping on his arm.
Within half an hour, James Hudson was in his grave. Another ten minutes, and the excess soil had disappeared into the woods, replaced by a natural litter of leaves, twigs, and a convenient fallen branch.
By tomorrow, the difference would be hard to see. In a week, the site would be invisible.
They stood, held there by a vague sense of incompleteness.
In the end, Clarissa spoke. “He tried to be a good father,” she said. “He taught me…a great deal.”
She waited, but if she expected Mr Holmes to summon a eulogy, she was disappointed. Instead, he looked critically at the ground, then up at the surrounding trees whose roots they had savaged. “The smiling countryside,” he said bitterly. “Its potential for sin has always filled me with horror. Now I have added to its lonely secrets.”
Back in the house, she pushed Mr Holmes into the chair. She made coffee with the still-warm water, and while he mechanically conveyed food and drink to his mouth with his good hand, she attended to his arm. When the bandages were tied off and his jacket drawn over his missing shirt-sleeve, she opened the gamekeeper’s pot of salve, rubbing it into the angry, dirt-caked blisters that were rising all over his soft palms.
This, at last, m
ade him uncomfortable—not from pain, she thought, but from the intimacy of touch. He pulled his hand away, under the excuse of reaching for the plate.
“What will you do with me?” she asked.
He frowned at the biscuit. “What family have you?”
“A sister, in Australia. And there may be family still in Scotland, but after my aunt died, I doubt any of them would acknowledge me.”
“Friends?”
“None that I would wish to burden.”
He nodded, then rose.
“I will shave now, then we must set off for the station. We can leave our débris in the woods,” he said, gesturing at the bloodstained dressings and empty tins. “It will quickly disappear. You clean the dishes and get the boys ready.”
“I don’t think I can get rid of…” Clarissa gestured at the place her father had died. The stain was not large, and Mr Holmes had wiped much of it away when he dragged the body outside, but still, even a scrub-brush would not conquer it entirely.
“This is a gamekeeper’s home,” he pointed out. “Who is to say what manner of work he got up to inside?” So saying, he spilled the dregs of his coffee on the floor, rubbing vigorously with a bit more of the bandage (using, she was relieved to see, his good arm). When he was finished, he swept some ashes back and forth across the boards. At the end, it looked no worse, and no fresher, than any of the floor’s other marks.
Watching his slim figure bent over the stain, Clarissa reflected on how easy it would be to knock him out and take the boys—or indeed, to use her little pistol to lock him in the gamekeeper’s shed.
At that reminder, she retrieved her gun from where the young man had left it, and went to do his bidding.
They made it to London that same day. Afterwards, Clarissa could recall few details from the journey. She was cold, she remembered that, although she could not have said whether from the temperature of the compartment or from her own inner thermometer. She sat stunned most of the way, rousing only to feed Samuel and, occasionally, to put her arms around Billy. Once, while waiting for one train or another, she realised that her silk-hatted guard was missing. She had started to wonder if this was some kind of a test when he returned…from the direction of a telegraph office. Nausea joined the clamminess of her skin, but in truth, there was little she could do.
The long, silent train journey was shattered by the chaos of Waterloo, but young Mr Holmes seemed quite familiar with the challenge, and in a brief time he was handing her into a growler. The driver objected to their destination, but since they were already in, there was little he could do but slap the horse into motion.
Two other things she remembered from that evening—or, thought she did. The first was fairly definite, a picture of Mr Holmes jerking Billy back inside the cab, to keep the boy from losing his head at the close passage of a brewer’s wagon. The second she was not so sure about: could that young man have actually put her into bed, removing her outer garments and shoes? Or was that fuzzy memory merely part of the dreams that haunted her that night?
She started awake a dozen times at the report of the small pistol, only to find a silent room with two sleeping boys. At some point, Billy crept into her bed. She slowly warmed, and slept at last.
She woke the next morning, first to the thought of that telegraph office, then to the question of mourning. To dress in normal clothes, as if nothing had happened, was unthinkable—yet to acknowledge this particular death was impossible. She could not even write to Alicia without also telling how their father had died. Slowly, she rose, and dressed, waiting all the while for a fist on her door.
It rained. Billy raised no great objection at being kept at his books, although Samuel complained at the lack of movement. Clarissa fidgeted the day away, snapping at Billy, exclaiming at yet another dirty diaper, ready to bite someone. The police would arrive, or that young man would: either way, the end would present itself with a rap on the door.
By evening, she had exhausted both her expectations and herself. She lay awake most of the night, waiting for the pounding fist.
At ten o’clock the next morning, with dull yellow fog pressing against the glass, the knock came. But only a knock. And only Mr Holmes.
It was, however, a new Mr Holmes. He had shed the protruding shirt cuffs and handed-down hat for a superbly tailored set of clothing, head to foot. When he took off the silk hat (one that did not ride down on his ears) to duck inside, she could see he’d had his hair properly trimmed, too.
Well, well.
She was not altogether surprised when he gave Billy a coin and told him to take the baby off for a time, perhaps an hour. The door closed. Her visitor looked in vain for a hat-stand, then deposited his top-hat and overcoat on Billy’s little table, his movements betraying discomfort, but no worse, in his injured arm. He ran a hand over his hair before turning to face her.
She’d had days, now, to think about this moment. The lad would want something from her, and although Clarissa Hudson had never given away more than a kiss or two in the course of a Cheat, this was a different situation altogether. She was in his debt, for actions both past and future, and had little to repay him with apart from herself.
And in any event, it might be an interesting experience.
She stretched out a hand to his pristine new lapel—only to cringe away as he seized her wrist and twisted hard. Mewling in pain, she retreated, backing obediently until her skirt touched the chair before the fire. Just as she was sinking down, at the instant when pain was joined by fear—Oh my God, he’s one of those men who like to—he let her go.
She cradled her injured arm, blinking up at his steely expression. “That hurt!”
“I am sorry, Miss Hudson. I needed you to understand that certain acts will not occur between us. Not now. Not ever.”
She felt remarkably small. And dirty.
He pulled over Billy’s stool to sit, his knees brushing her skirt. Even though it put his head slightly below hers, there was no doubt in her mind who was in charge here.
“You killed your father. Yes,” he interrupted her protest, “you were attempting to save my life at the time, but the fact remains that you killed him, with your own gun. My testimony would see you hanged.”
A black-draped judge pronouncing sentence could sound no more final. Clarissa gave a tiny nod.
“Even short of that, my testimony alone, with no word at all from your many victims, would see you imprisoned for a list of previous crimes. I believe you will agree that I hold your future, as well as those of your son and William Mudd, in my hands.”
She began to tremble: what horror, what blithely unanticipated monstrosity was this person about to inflict upon her? Whatever it might be, she was without recourse: she was a mother now, banned even the escape of self-murder. As the lad went on, the bleakness of her situation made her wish for even the temporary retreat of a swoon: this creature promised to be a far worse taskmaster than The Bishop, whose only interest was money.
“I believe that putting you in prison would be a waste,” he was saying. “Just as I have begun to suspect that there are certain crimes the law cannot touch without creating even greater havoc. Such a one is yours. Traditional punishment for you, Miss Hudson, would turn one child into a confirmed criminal and the other into a workhouse boy, farmed out to those who would starve and beat him to an early death. I have spent today, while waiting for my tailor to rid me of the cuffs that have so distracted you, meditating on how best to make use of your talents.”
He paused, his eyes going to the window. He muttered something under his breath—it sounded like, And of my own. Then he rose to fetch a tobacco pouch from his overcoat. He filled the pipe, wandering over to examine the street below, while Clarissa dug her finger-nails into her palms to keep from screaming at him.
The oblivious young man put out his left forefinger to swipe down her window, then looked at the flesh. She could have told him there would be no stain: coal smoke or no, Clarissa Hudson kept her view of the w
orld unimpeded.
“What, I was forced to ask, would be served by perpetuating this circle of misery and violence? How would the traditional forms of punishment repay the fear engendered on a blackmailer’s victims? Was there another form of service that might suffice?”
He was now speaking to his pipe, or to himself: certainly not to her. His musings were an agony, but she did not break in, feeling that to do so would be to push him from a path whose direction he was feeling his way along, half-blind.
“Many things would have to change,” he muttered. “University, for one.”
University?
“But does one need all that…that lumber? Life is so brief, so appallingly brief, and other minds so inadequate. Might it not be best to make a break of it now, and start furnishing the storage rooms with what I might actually need, rather than continue to collect the detritus of the academic world? And if that be the case, does this situation bring opportunity, or ambush? If the former, I cannot afford to turn my back on it. But if the latter…”
Clarissa was startled to find his eyes on her, that cold grey gaze drilling into her very soul. “If one eliminates the impossible, then whatever remains must be the way forward. And the only way to prove an hypothesis is through experiment. Miss Hudson, I believe you have considerable talents as an actress?”
She was confused, more by the abrupt shift in address than by the question itself. “I, no—well, I suppose…”
He made an impatient gesture. “I have watched you at work. You are extremely clever. But it appears to me the element of the task you most relish is not the actual thieving, but the change of nature that it requires. For example, in the zoological gardens I watched you pass before a trio of nursemaids with their charges, and you might have been one of them, dull and bored. Thirty feet further on you walked in front of two young men with their legs outstretched on the grass, and without so much as a glance in their direction, you changed, becoming not only attractive and flirtatious, but a person of their own class. Further on, when you came under the purview of a disapproving older married pair, your steps grew heavy, your shoulders slumped, giving the impression that you, at least, understood the burden of life. Have you ever been on the stage?”
The Murder of Mary Russell Page 17
