Death at Gallows Green (27 page)

Grim-faced, Edward stepped across the kitchen to the door, where Charles stood waiting, his shoulders sodden with wet. “Come on,” he said, low.

“To Tod's?”

“If Bradley isn't going after the blighter,” Edward said between his teeth, “we will.” He led the way diagonally across the soggy turf of the village green, skirting muddy puddles. A pair of sheep tethered on the new grass shied as he and Charles splashed toward the smithy, which sat back from the dirty lane under a wooden sign-board painted with a pair of iron tongs and an anvil. Wilkins, the grey-haired, leather-aproned smith, was standing just outside his shed, the sleeves of his sacking shirt rolled to the elbows, feet wide apart, muscular arms akimbo. He was a massive man, well over six feet, heavy and bull-necked. Behind him, an apprentice was pumping an enormous bellows. The forge was roaring and the fire blazing, a bright sight on a dark and chilly day.

“Any sign o' th' child?” Wilkins called in a voice like a rusty file.

“Not yet.” Edward came up to the smith. “We're looking for Russell Tod. He rents from you, does he not?”

“ 'Ee does that,” Wilkins said with a nod of his grizzled head. “The lit‘le cottage at th' foot o' th' garden. But if ye'r wantin' t' see Tod, ye'll be disappointed. He's not t' 'ome. Went out early this mornin' and an't been back.”

“Was Tommy Brock with him?” Charles asked. Behind the smith, the apprentice, a pocked, narrow-shouldered lad of twelve or so, left off the bellows, prodded the fire, and stood listening.

The smith scratched his grey mustache, trimmed short against the possibility of sparks. “Brock?” He squinted, considering. “Don't b‘lieve I know 'im. Tod went alone, anyways. I saw ‘im ride away. Near nine this mornin', 'twas.”

“What about last night?” Edward asked. “Was he at home?”

Wilkins's snort was petulant. “A man ‘ires a cottage, not a keeper. Wot business o' mine is it whether he's t' 'ome or away?”

Edward could feel his patience fraying. “A child is missing,” he said. His voice hardened as he thought of Agnes's daughter in the hands of her husband's killer. “We have reason to suspect that Tod's involved. Was he at home last night?”

Wilkins's look was somber. “Wudn't know,” he said. “'Ee cud o' bin 'ome, ‘ee cud o' bin gone, f'r all o' me.” His gold tooth glinted. “But th' girl, that's another matter,'tis. She was ‘ere yesterd'y afternoon, lookin' out 'er duck, an' 'er dog was ‘ere this mornin', lookin' out 'er.”

“The dog?”

“Th' girl's collie dog. Th' boy took ‘im 'ome an' tied 'im up proper, behind th' shed.” He sighed. “I'd be searchin' fer th' girl too, pore thing, 'f I din't ‘ave a job t' be done by nightfall.”

The apprentice, wearing a black-wool cap, ragged breeches, and a shirt with no sleeves, came forward out of the gloom of the smithy. “Ye‘r askin' 'bout Mr. Tod?”

Edward looked down on him. He was too frail to be a smith's apprentice, with those broomstraw arms and delicate hands. But hamlet boys counted themselves lucky not to be in the fields. Likely this one preferred the deafening roar of the forge and the ring of the hammer to the back-breaking labour of ploughing and harvesting. And likely those wrists would thicken in the next year or two.

“I am.” He added, in a more kindly tone, “Do you know something that might help us find the girl?”

“Not th' girl, no,” the apprentice said, and wiped his nose on his sleeves. “But I know that Mr. Tod was gone las' night, f'r a while, leastways.” He jerked his thumb upward. “I sleeps in th' loft above th' forge on chill nights. I was there last night. I saw summat—a lantern, an' Tod, an' sev'ral men.”

“Did they have a wagon?” Charles asked eagerly.

The apprentice shrugged. “All I know is, ‘ee went away, an' 'ee come agin a while arter, an' then I went asleep.”

“Thank you,” Edward said, thinking how easy it was for deeds to be done at night, when the countryside was dark and decent folk were snoring in their beds. He turned back to the smith. “We'll be taking a look around the cottage.”

“Ye'r the constable,” the smith said.

A low hedge of elder separated the cottage from the neat garden with its rows of lettuces and cabbages and carefully-mounded potatoes. The roar of the forge could not be heard here, and there was no other sound except for the gossipy chatter of rooks in a nearby large elm and the irritated hoot of an owl awakened from its daytime slumbers.

Edward paused to peer first into one low casement window, then another. There were only two rooms, but they were neat and relatively clean, and the flagged floor was covered with a nearly-new coconut mat. A hearth opened to both of the rooms, of such size that several sides of bacon might be smoked in the chimney at once. An oak table stood in one room, a narrow bed in the other, a chair and in each a small wooden dresser. Beside the bed stood a washstand with a basin; on the wall over it a shaving glass, on the floor beneath it a boot rack and boot jack. The bedclothes were flung aside as if Tod had risen hastily and flown.

“Nothing here, looks like,” Edward said. What had he expected to find? A clue to Betsy's whereabouts? A trail of white duck feathers? Desperation seized him, and he sagged against the wall. “Where
can
she be?”

“Anywhere,” Charles said flatly. He gestured toward a small lean-to shed behind the cottage, so overgrown with creeper that the windows, if there were any, were completely covered. “There, perhaps.”

They went toward the shed, against one side of which was piled a heap of sodden coal. An empty coal scuttle stood nearby, and a stack of faggots had tumbled onto the ground and were wet through. The shed door was built of panels of sturdy oak with a hasp and padlock. Edward tried it, but it was locked fast. He picked up a rusty spade and was about to break it open when he heard a loud shout. He turned. It was the apprentice, rounding the corner at a run, waving his wool cap like a black flag.

“They found 'er shirt,” the boy cried. “In the river, where the willows grow aslant! They say she's drownded!”

Edward gave one loud, heart-stricken groan, and his blood froze in his veins.

Charles put out his hand. “Ned,” he said gruffly, and with deep sympathy.

“It's my fault, Charlie.” Edward was filled with a whirling misery that sucked all the breath, all the strength out of him. “I might have prevented this. If only I had gone to Agnes last night, after you told me what Betsy saw—if only I had cautioned her that there was danger.” He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the shed, giving himself up to the anguish. “My fault, my fault.” The words of the Prayer Book were like a litany in his mind.
I have left undone those things which I ought to have done. And I have done those things which I ought not to have done; And there is no health in me.
He began to weep, great wrenching sobs, for the child who was lost, and the dead father, and the living mother, and himself
. No health in me, no health in any of us, no health in the world.

Charles gripped his shoulder. “It is the fault of those who did it,” he said fiercely. “If Tod had anything to do with this, he will pay, Ned. We will find him and
make
him pay!”

That was cold comfort, Edward knew, when he could pull himself above the black whirlpool that spun in his gut. But it was all he had to offer Agnes.

K
ate and Bea were weary and somber when they climbed into the carriage and started back to Bishop's Keep late that evening. The Oliver cottage had filled with women after the awful news arrived from the river. They brought food and the softly murmured comfort of those who keep daily company with birth and death, joy and bereavement. Edward had returned for a little while, drawn and stoop-shouldered and with nothing at all to say, but he and Sir Charles had left when summoned by a message from Constable Bradley at Manningtree. As they went, Vicar Talbot, a close friend of Kate's, arrived to sit by the fire and read aloud from Psalms and the Book of Job and the Prayer Book: ancient, measured words that seemed to bring dignity to death and enfold them all within a sense of larger purpose.

But it was an illusory seeming, Kate thought bitterly, a magician's trick to ease a mother's pain, to explain the inexplicable. Whatever words the vicar might summon, no purpose could be served by a child's death—especially if, as she suspected, that child had been killed by those who feared that she might name them as her father's murderers.

But Agnes did not know what Kate knew, or guessed. Agnes grieved a daughter who was accidentally drowned while searching for her duck. The vicar's presence appeared to bring the mother some small comfort, and her sobbing lessened as the old man read on, until at last she fell asleep in her chair, worn out by grief upon grief.

There was nothing more to be done. Agnes was surrounded by women who cared, who had lived through their own terrible losses, as she would. The river was being dragged by men who had dragged it before, on other sad occasions. And because the site of the drowning had occurred in the short stretch between the lock at Flatford and the lowest lock near the mouth of the estuary, they held out hope of finding the body.

“They allus turn up,” Mrs. Wilkins told Kate, as she and Bea went out to the carriage. “Th' Sawyer lad fell int' th' millpond three year a-gone. 'Ee ‘twas two days under th' water, but ‘ee turned up.” She became confidential. “They float, y'know, even if they be tangled in weed. The belly arter a while bloats, and they won't be kep' down.”

Kate said a hasty good-bye, fearing that the grisly details of drowning would be too much for Bea on the heels of such a dreadful, wearying day. But Bea was only sad, and thoughtful.

“It's queer, you know,” she remarked, as Pocket climbed up to his seat and chirruped to the horses, “about the owl.”

Kate arranged her skirts and settled into the seat. “The owl?”

“Betsy's owl,” Bea said. “Mr. Browne. He lives in the shed. There's a ring that clips around his leg, fixed to a chain on his perch. I went to release him, not wanting him to go hungry if Agnes did not think to feed him. But he was gone.”

“I shouldn't think that's unusual,” Kate said. “Perhaps Betsy let him loose yesterday.”

“Perhaps,” Bea said thoughtfully. “But Betsy's gauntlet was missing as well.”

“Her gauntlet?”

“A leather glove made by her father. She wore it on her arm so that the owl could perch there, like a medieval falcon, when she took him hunting. She was quite proud of it.”

Kate frowned. “And it's gone?”

Bea nodded. “I wonder,” she said. She fell uncomfortably. silent. “Perhaps it was—” She looked at Kate, doubtful. There was a worried crease between her eyes. “You don't suppose—”

“I can't suppose anything,” Kate said crossly, “until you finish one of your sentences and I know what we're talking about.”

Bea looked out the window into the grey twilight of the late afternoon. “We told Agnes last night that we intended to go ratting. ‘Miss Ardleigh and I are going ratting,' I said. That's the reason we gave for wanting to take the dog.”

“Well, yes, I suppose that's what we
said
,” Kate replied, “but it was only a manner of speaking. I really fail to see . . .” She paused, thought. “Do you think Betsy might have overheard the conversation?”

“If she did,” Bea said, “she could have decided to go herself, and take her owl.”

“But it was dark,” Kate objected, “and drizzly.”

“Dark and drizzly didn't deter us, did it? And I doubt that it would have deterred Betsy, either. She is . . . was a daring child, more boy than girl, don't you think?” Bea sighed. “And fortunate to be encouraged in her daring by her father, when so many girls are sentenced to the mother's tender mercies. Afternoons in the parlour are hideously boring. One quite envies Betsy, actually.”

Kate heard in Bea's words her unframed wish for greater freedom. Then she frowned. “I wonder,” she said, “if Betsy would indeed have followed us.”

“I think it quite possible,” Bea said. “Should we not go—”

Kate did not require Bea to finish that sentence. She leaned forward and signaled Pocket with a tap. When he ducked down and slid open the window, she said, “We'll go home by way of the old stone church, Pocket, and up the lane toward Highfields barn.”

So that was how Kate and Bea happened to come once more to the barn, this time in full daylight, and to find Betsy's leather gauntlet discarded beside a stone wall. And one child's boot, and a gunnybag with two dead rats and a long-tailed mole, and signs in the muddy earth of a fierce scuffle.

It was small comfort to know what had happened, but there could no longer be any doubt. Betsy had not gone into the river by accident.

W
hen they arrived at Bishop's Keep, Kate immediately sat down and wrote a note to Sir Charles and another to Edward. She posted Pocket in one direction and Ben, the newly-hired gardener, in the other. Both returned three quarters of an hour later with the news that neither man was at home, and that the notes had been left. This word came just as Kate and Bea were sitting down to a late supper served by Mudd and a subdued Amelia. Both of them were acquainted with Agnes Oliver.