Instruments of Darkness

5

“What now, Crowther?”

Harriet had been still a long time, her hand resting on the letter in front of her. Crowther lifted his head, and looked at her through half-closed eyes, like a cat summoned by a change in the wind. “I do not know.”

“Can we force the squire to examine Hugh and Wicksteed for scratches from Nurse Bray?”

“It is not conclusive. Anyone can get scratched, anyone can say the skin under the nurse’s nails comes from another source.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“Of course not. That quantity, that vigor. No, Mrs. Bray did damage to her attacker, and he carries those wounds still. On the forearm probably.” He fell silent, and when he looked up again saw Harriet was watching with narrowed eyes.

“What are you considering, Crowther?”

“Where is Nurse Bray’s body?”

“She is in the old icehouse at the Bear and Crown with the village constable watching the door, and Michaels watching him until such time as the inquest is held. What are you planning?”

“Gathering a little further evidence from that good lady.”

“How do you know she was a good lady?” Harriet asked.

“She took good care of her charge. I am extending a professional courtesy.” Crowther then added, “And I wonder if you might make use of our remaining friend at the Hall.”

“Patience, you mean? The maid attacked by Wicksteed?”

“Yes.”

Harriet looked at the ceiling of Sir Stephen’s study, considering. “She seems not entirely stupid, and is keen to impress a new employer, perhaps. I wonder if she has anything she could tell us about how that bottle made its way from the stores to Cartwright’s hands.”

Harriet picked up the anonymous letter again and turned it between her fingers. “By the time we come to an end of this, our households will have doubled.”

Crowther thought of the intelligent eye of Cartwright’s former servant and his promise to her.

“I suspect mine already has.”

“Very well.”

There was a tapping at the door and the young Sir Stephen appeared, searching for their shadows in the gloom and dust.

“Good Lord! How things get themselves into such disorder-and all by themselves! Well? Did you find what you were looking for, Mrs. Westerman?”

Harriet stood and smiled. “Indeed we did, sir. Thank you.” She looked into the wrinkled, glowing face of their host. “We were searching for any observations your father may have made about the death of Sarah Randle.”

Sir Stephen’s face crumpled sadly and he pointed his nose to the ground.

“Poor Sarah. 1739. Summer. Not as warm as this. Sad.”

“Your father mentioned in his notes. .”

“Yes. Found her. Knew her. Used to play together.” He looked up suddenly and grinned. “She liked beetles too!” Then his face fell again.

“I remember when Lord Thornleigh came. Shouted at my father. Foul man.” He cocked his head to one side. “Though I think he saved a footman of his from the noose. Or perhaps he pretended. Failed to hang him. Called it mercy. Juries are funny.”

Harriet bent forward. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t quite. .”

Sir Stephen looked up at her. A little of his own white hair had escaped from under the fringe of his wig. It looked as if the wig had been out collecting thistledown.

“Footman of his, good character, but caught stealing in the London house soon after he was moved down there. They transported him for the full fourteen years. Should have been hanged, really.”

Crowther stretched his fingers and looked at them as if noticing them for the first time.

“Do you remember when this was, Sir Stephen?”

“Two months after Lady Thornleigh died, in 1748. She was very beautiful, but rather sad when I knew her.”

His eyes darted up to Harriet’s face and he blushed a little, though the usual animation and joy of his character seemed to have vanished as soon as Sarah Randle’s name was mentioned, and he had yet to take it up and fit it around his shoulders again.

“Sir Stephen, we should not trouble you any longer,” Harriet said, “but before we take our leave, and though I have not the learning to fully understand, I would love to see some of the beetles too. Mr. Crowther says they are quite remarkable.”

The color and life sprang back into Sir Stephen’s bent form as if a sluice gate had been opened.

“Would you?! Oh, of course! Some have many pretty colors. I have a niece in London who says she would like a silk dress just the color of her favorite. Should you like to see it?”

“Very much,” Harriet said, coming around the table and taking his arm. “And do tell me about your niece.”

Crowther followed, slowly.

Some hours later they were seated in the private parlor of the Bear and Crown. Michaels’s massive frame leaned up in a corner and was largely motionless as they narrated what had passed since they last met. He lifted a pewter mug to his lips and drank it off as they finished.

“I know this Patience a little. Don’t think much of her or her people myself, mind, but I can get a message to her now. She may not be able to leave the house for some days,” he said in a low growl. “She had her free afternoon only a week or two ago. But I may be able to contrive something to bring her here this evening. They say the housekeeper is complaining to all and sundry that she is much misunderstood and is becoming lax about discipline, and Wicksteed spends all his time dancing attendance on the lady.” Harriet and Crowther made no comment. “I can ask about to see if anyone remembers the footman. You have a name?”

“Sir Stephen could not recall,” Harriet said softly.

“As to the other business, Toller is a good man. I can bring him in here for his supper and you can spend some time with the late Mrs. Bray without the squire finding out.”

“What is being said about the squire?” Crowther asked.

Michaels ran his hand through his black beard, pulling on it a little.

“That he intends to hang Hugh and pin his favors to the lady’s mast. Fool!”

He said the last word with enough force to make Crowther raise his eyebrow.

Michaels went on, “He and the lady, and all their sort will wake up one day to find me and Cartwright’s daughter have bought up their mortgages and own the silk they wrap themselves in, and they will never think it possible until they find it has happened.”

“That sounds like revolution, Michaels.” Crowther looked faintly amused.

The man swung his great weight round to face him.

“Progress, I call it, Mr. Crowther. Progress. Now let’s tempt Toller in. My wife will smile at him, and he’ll be docile as a kitten for an hour at least.”

Crowther hesitated at the door to the old icehouse and turned to Harriet with a questioning look. She met his gaze and nodded. He pulled the door open and a rush of cool air spilled over them; it would have been welcome but for the gray high notes of the grave which mixed with it.

Crowther was satisfied. The body had been well placed, and putrefaction was not far advanced. He set down his candle and took flint and strike from his pocket, tapping it till he got flame enough to startle the wick into life. He had to stoop a little under the curve of the wall. It was an intimate space to share with a body three days dead.

Nurse Bray lay on a trestle table in the middle of the round brick building. Harriet remembered the Parthenon in Rome, which she had visited with her husband soon after their marriage. The shape of the country icehouse recalled it to her, however different the dimensions. She could still hear the soft calls of the wood pigeons outside. Michaels had, it seemed, arranged for some of his straw and ice to be brought in to chill the air. She could hear it from time to time crack, delicately echoing, and the slow drip of water fighting to be free of its solid form, and wild again. In this light, and from this distance, Nurse Bray did not seem anything other than at peace, though the unnatural stillness and taste of the air reminded the living woman of the rank dangers and darknesses that so often lie beneath apparent calm. The candle fluttered into life, and the bricks danced with their shadows, looming rather monstrously over the body as Harriet spoke:

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice”

Crowther glanced at her over his shoulder. “You are a devotee of Shakespeare, Mrs. Westerman?”

“I think him the greatest of our poets. Do you not?”

“I know it is fashionable to regard him as such of late. I prefer Pope, myself.”

“That seems appropriate.”

He ignored her, but peered about him, his eyes resting on the blocks of ice hissing under their straw coverings.

“However, I admit your quotation is apt. How came Mrs. Bray to lie here? I thought she was to be taken to the Hall.”

“She was,” Harriet agreed, “but Michaels said that after the inquest he suggested this place to the coroner, and the Thornleigh party seemed happy to have rid of the charge. Hugh was being arrested at the time, of course, and I believe the coroner would have agreed to anything put to him at that moment.”

She watched Crowther’s thin profile, all its hollows and edges painted by the shadows and the dancing flame on the candle. She could see his thoughts were already elsewhere. He turned to her.

“If I were to attack you, how would you defend yourself?”

“I have a technique my husband taught me that can bring down most men, should the need arise. But I think you are asking me to imagine how Nurse Bray defended herself.”

“I am.”

“Very well. It is under the fingernails of the right hand that she has the skin, if I recall correctly.” She turned to face Crowther. “Suppose you were holding me, facing toward you, gripping my wrists. I manage to get my right hand free, and swipe with my nails at your arm, in hopes you will free my left. I would imagine my hand would be shaped like this.” She made a rough claw of her right hand. “The left upper arm would most likely be where I would catch you. . It is only one scenario of course.” Harriet shrugged.

“But I think it is the most likely,” Crowther said. “We have seen no one with scratches to the face. If she were to have her hands free to scratch, it seems unlikely she would scratch her attacker’s bare back rather than run away. There are no fibers under her nails, so it is unlikely she tore through someone’s britches to get to their skin if she had been knocked to the floor.”

Harriet frowned as she replied, “We are presuming that the blow that knocked her to the floor was enough to render her docile as well. And then her hands were tied.”

Crowther handed the candle to her and removed from his pocket a little rosewood box. He opened it and spat into it, only looking up to see Harriet’s surprise as he stirred the resultant mess with his fingertip. He angled the box to show what it contained.

“A contribution to the sciences from the young Michaelses’ nursery. It is a watercolor block. We are to do a little finger-painting.”

Harriet nodded, and found she was glad he had chosen the black rather than the scarlet from the paints available.

They moved toward the body. The nurse’s skin was beginning to show purple in places. Harriet was careful to hold the candle steady. When Crowther lifted the corpse’s right hand, the body sighed with the early stink of corruption, but the light did not waver. He pressed the cold, waxy fingertips into the color, then setting down the box withdrew a piece of writing paper from his pocket. Harriet saw the little picture of a dancing bear feinting at an outsized diadem printed onto it, a little smudged. He held it up on the nurse’s chest. Taking the hand by the wrist, and supporting the palm so the fingers fell into the same, rough claw that Harriet had formed with her own hand, he then dragged it down the length of the sheet. It left four marks, slow trails down the paper, which rustled against the body’s grave clothes. Harriet shivered. Crowther looked at his work and gave a nod, then, spitting on his handkerchief began to wipe the pigment away from the dead fingertips.

“I think,” he said, bending over his work, “that this piece of paper might make it harder for someone to claim the scratches on his arm were the work of an animal.” He paused and looked up at her. “Though perhaps I should prepare a few others for comparison.”

Harriet watched him in the play of the candlelight, his tone so casual, his hands enfolding those of a dead woman.

“Time enough for that if it proves necessary,” she said. “Let us give Michaels the nod that Toller can resume his guard duties and see whether he has managed to conjure Patience from the Hall.”

Crowther laid Nurse Bray’s arm back along the table, and having blown on it a little, folded his paper.

“What did you think of what Michaels said?” Harriet asked. “About buying up the Hall before its owner knew what they were about?”

Crowther straightened his coat, replying, “My old lands are farmed by a former storekeeper who made a fortune in London. That man accumulated as much wealth in twenty years as my family had gathered in hundreds.”

Harriet nodded slowly. “Do you think there will be revolution here?”

Crowther smiled. “I doubt it. Every Englishman still has the stink of civil war in his nose. There was forty-five, of course.” He remembered the panic in the London of his boyhood as Prince Charlie came down the country like a comet, the slaughters and reprisals that followed. “No, I was teasing Michaels when I used the word revolution, but we live now in an age where a man can-indeed, he must-rise by his own talents. That can only be good, I think.”

He held the door open for her and as she paused, startled by the sudden brightness of the day, blew out the candle.