Jane and the Stillroom Maid (23 page)

“You think it was
he
who urged the maid to wear Charles Danforth’s clothes,” Lord Harold remarked.

“Provided it was he who procured the gunman. Only in Charles Danforth’s pantaloons could Tess Arnold be killed by Charles Danforth’s enemy. Moreover, local suspicion has turned swiftly on Danforth himself, in no small part because of the maid’s clothes.”

“You believe that Andrew intended his brother, Charles, to wear a noose, so that Andrew might come into his inheritance with the same stroke that rid him of the maid.”

“Charles Danforth has been a most inconvenient figure for the better part of Andrew’s life. But for Charles, he might have inherited all his fond parents intended for him.”

“And but for Tess—he might have had Lady Harriot.”

“—Or so he may be suspected of fearing.”

Lord Harold considered all this in silence, his gaze fixed upon the limestone crag a hundred yards distant.

“And that,” I told him quietly, “is where the poor wretch died.”

T
HE SCATTERED STONES WERE STILL SPLASHED WITH
dried blood, but the birds had departed, and the stench was nearly gone. Lord Harold doubled his elegant frame, his hands upon his knees, and narrowly surveyed the earth about the maidservant’s place of sacrifice.

“Your theory, Jane—excellent though it is—does not explain the mutilation,” he observed.

“No more it does,” I replied serenely. “I was so kind as to leave you matter for thought, my lord. You must have something to engage your restless understanding.”

He smiled crookedly and stood up. “Let us throw blame upon the long-suffering Freemasons,” he suggested, “and be satisfied. I can observe nothing on the ground, Jane—the earth hereabouts is too trampled.”

“But surely you are sportsman enough to study the surrounding landscape, and determine where her killer was fixed?”

“The lead ball found its mark in the center of her forehead, I think you said.”

Unbidden, the memory of that visage—so untroubled in the sleep of Death, the ragged hole of the wound so incongruous above the fair curls—rose like a spectre in my mind. I said with difficulty, “A remarkable shot.”

“Too remarkable by half. Were there scorings in the dust, suggestive of the body’s having been dragged?”

“—As though she were struck by the ball elsewhere, and brought here to the base of the rock for … anatomisation?”

“If that is the case”—he scrabbled swiftly back along the path we had already traversed, then forward again some distance, along the way Tess Arnold might have come—“there would be blood spilled where she first fell.”

We cast about, eyes narrowed, for the space of several
moments. The sun beat down fiercely, and not a breath of air stirred; the sound of a bird’s strident call brought a prickling of gooseflesh along my arm.

“Ah ha!”

Lord Harold was crouching in a patch of crushed bracken perhaps fifteen yards from where I stood. I hastened to join him.

“The ball hit her here, Jane, and she fell heavily across that rock.” He pointed to a crimson smear on a broad, dimpled boulder. “She must have lain dead some time—observe how much blood has soaked into the earth. It would naturally be disguised by the grasses”—he poked at them with his ebony walking stick, and revealed a broad brown stain—“and Sir James would hardly think to look for it; it cannot really concern him where the maid fell.”

“I doubt he has even visited this place.”

“But who moved her—and why did he carve up her corpse so brutally?”

I’d hoped the witch had died in agony
.

The Marquess of Harrington—the Duke’s unhappy young heir—had nothing to do with Andrew Danforth’s ambitions. How, then, was he concerned with Tess Arnold?

“For the ball to find her so precisely,” Lord Harold observed, “she cannot have been moving along the path, as we had surmised. She must have been standing still, just here—”

“Waiting for someone. By previous arrangement.”

He looked up at me from his position on the ground, the grey eyes intent. “Yes. We must assume that she was summoned here, Jane. So much for the theory of the maid’s dismissal.”

“Do you believe it a fabrication? Put forth by Mrs. Haskell to protect her employer?”

Lord Harold shook his head. “No. I credit the notion of the maid’s disgrace. Certainly her sister knew of it, and resented the result. We may adjudge Mrs.
Haskell’s heartlessness a mere coincidence with whatever drew Tess here.”

“A coincidence Andrew Danforth may have seized. With Tess Arnold in disgrace—impecunious, thrown off by her employer—he may have thought her too dangerous for keeping.”

“Blackmail, again.”

“She would know the way to Lady Harriot’s door as readily as anyone in Bakewell.”

Frowning, Lord Harold gazed over my head. “We must assume that the maid’s murderer was in position anywhere within a radius of perhaps twenty-five feet, Jane. No shot in the dark could be so accurate at a greater remove. Let us pace off the distance, and cover the ground within that circle, in the hope of discovering some token of the killer.”

I had grown quite hot despite the broad brim of my leghorn straw, and the delicate protection of a sunshade; and toiling through the parched grasses, which stood so high as my knees, was not the easiest of tasks; but it was for this I had brought Lord Harold out into the hills, and I was not about to deny the consequences of my own ardour. Sunshade raised firmly above my head, I measured the distance of twenty-five feet, and proceeded in the direction opposite to his lordship’s.

I had not gone more than seven paces towards Penfolds Hall, when I came upon a tumble of gritstone boulders—the sort of a perfection for fashioning the stone walls so prevalent in the district—and bent down to study the surrounding ground. To the rear of the pile—which, I may add, was admirably suited to the steadying of a gun—the grasses were heavily matted, as though someone of considerable weight had settled there for a time. I condescended so far as to sit myself down in a similar position, and called to Lord Harold.

He could not at first discern me for the rocks. And in his confusion as he looked for my form, I learned all I needed to know. Under the shifting light of a half-moon, Tess Arnold might have stood securely before her killer, while the sights of his gun were levelled upon her head.

29 August 1806, cont.
∼

W
E THOROUGHLY SEARCHED THE GROUND SURROUNDING
the pile of rock, but discovered nothing more than a considerable amount of matted grass, a few broken stems of late daisies, and the evidence of a large stone’s having been dislodged. This last article Lord Harold examined on every side, even withdrawing a quizzing glass from his waistcoat pocket to scrutinise the surface more intently. At length he was satisfied.

“Observe, Jane,” he said, with a gesture towards a dark speckling on the rock indistinguishable to my eye from the usual grey mottling of gritstone. “Grains of black powder from the firing of a fowling piece. We must look for the wad to have been expelled somewhere between this spot and the place where the maid fell.”

I had often watched the gentlemen shoot at Godmersham, my brother Edward’s principal estate in Kent. A party of servants was required for the endeavour—first and foremost the gamekeeper and his beaters, who flushed the birds from the fields; and then the men consigned to loading the guns, with their
horns of powder, their pouches of shot, their squares of clean rag cotton. It was an elaborate business, the bagging of a dozen brace; and the gentlemen achieved a sort of poetic power, lifting their barrels to follow the flight of the bird, while the gamekeeper’s fellows stumbled with bent backs through the chill air and bracken. I saw in memory my brother James—puffed-up, important, somewhat silly James—raffishly elegant in his long hunting coat of drab; and admirable in his silence. A report, the jerk of his shoulder, the puff of smoke at the gun’s mouth—

“And here it is, Jane,” Lord Harold said softly. “The usual bit of cotton, soiled with powder and oil. It tells us nothing of our sportsman, unfortunately, but that he was
here
.”

He drew a handkerchief from his coat and wrapped the spent wad carefully in its depths. Then he gazed swiftly around, eyes creased against the sun. “There. That oak. Come, Jane.”

I followed him through the dried grass and tumbled stones until we had reached the shade of the tree; but relief from sunstroke should never be Lord Harold’s object. He crouched down and studied the ground at the trunk’s foot, much as he had done near the cairn of stones.

“Hoofprints,” he muttered. “I expected as much. Fairly-worn shoes, and slightly sunk into the earth, despite the dryness all around—the rider was no stripling. The horse stands fourteen hands and is slightly lame in the off hind. That tells us something, at least. The murderer did not come by foot.”

He threw me an appraising look. “Are you the sort of lady who carries a sketchbook about you, Jane, and hastens to cry admiration at every picturesque?”

“You mistake me for my sister, sir.”

“A great pity. Had you adhered to the usual female type, we might usefully have recorded the disposition
of the body as it fell, the place where the powder marked the stone, and the trajectory of the spent wad.”

“To what purpose, my lord?”

“The catching of Mr. Hemming in a lie. For if your theory is correct, my dear Jane, he will describe an entirely different location for each of these events. And I imagine he neglected to mention a horse.”

“So he did, indeed! And thus we may prove him never to have approached the scene at all!” I cried. “Admirable.”

“I see you reserve your enthusiasm for matters of duplicity,” Lord Harold said briskly. “Very well. What subterfuge remains for our undertaking?”

“A social call, I believe. To Penfolds Hall.”

“But the Danforths are as yet at Chatsworth—and shall be fixed there, so long as the mood of the countryside remains uncertain.”

“Exactly. And being unaware of that circumstance, we shall be thrown upon the offices of Mrs. Haskell and Mr. Wickham. You appear admirably suited to the management of the former, while I shall attempt to disarm the latter. Everything on your side, of the power of command; and on mine, the blush of a single young woman uncertain of her reception. We cannot admit of failure.”

Lord Harold readily agreed, but would have it that we should return along the path already traversed, in order to retrieve the hired curricle and horses turned out to grass behind the miller’s cottage. I demurred, with a view to walking the path Tess Arnold had taken from Penfolds Hall on the night of her death. His lordship comprehended the utility of such an attempt, but could not abandon the hired equipage; neither did he wish to abandon
me
. I assured him I should do perfectly well in solitude, as I was often given to rambling alone about the countryside; he protested that in the present air of violence, solitude was most unsafe, and offered to
traverse the ground in my stead. I observed that it was foolhardy in the extreme for us to exchange places; being a far better walker than a driver of a team, I should more readily come to grief in handling the equipage than in enduring another mile through the fields. I had no intention, moreover, of passing a tedious hour in the company of the miller’s wife, while Lord Harold covered the distance and returned to the Dale. And so we ended as we often did: with a mutual respect for our several abilities, and the determination to leave one another in peace. Not for Lord Harold the expansion of his own self-importance, by a commensurate diminution of
mine
.