Amelia wept and cursed her own conscience.
What good would it do to stay alive if she was out of her mind with horror when they found her— if they ever did? She started screaming again.
Please, somebody, hear me!
* * *
A sound awakened her.
A rat? A ghost?
Amelia screamed again.
Someone yelled back at her. And soon she heard a thud, and then the door opened, and Brenda Rogers's little brother stood there in the doorway, holding a huge flashlight. The beam paused on her face, and he said, "Thank God!" Then it passed over onto the face of the dead man, and the little brother… the young brother-in-law… the grown-up veterinarian… came over to Amelia, collapsed to his knees, dropped his head in her lap, and began to cry.
* * *
"Dan Hale killed sis for the scholarship."
Amelia, Jim, and Sandy were huddled on hay bales in a corner of the barn, while two young black llamas sniffed around their feet and knees. Jim was explaining to Amelia, while he kept an arm wrapped around his pale, sad niece. "Then he threatened Sandy's life. He told Tom that he had to confess to the crime. Dan said that he'd kill Tom's baby girl unless Tom took the rap for him. And Tom was young and scared and didn't know what else to do."
"How'd you find out all this?"
"Tom wrote to me from prison and told me to take care of Sandy for him. And he told me the truth, and also why we couldn't reveal it, not even to my parents. They raised Sandy, and when they died, I asked her to stay on the farm with me. Dan still could have killed her, at any time, and he was very powerful by then."
"You believed him?"
"Oh, yes. I knew them both very well. I knew what they were capable of. I'd never liked or trusted Dan Hale, and I'd always loved Tom." He smiled wryly. "Little brothers know these things. What broke everybody's heart was that Brenda died, and also that we couldn't believe Tom would do that. And yet he claimed steadfastly that he did. If you knew what it did to his parents…" Jim Kopecki closed his mouth and shook his head. After a moment, he continued, "When he told me the truth, I knew it
was
true."
"You saved all those articles—"
"So we wouldn't forget him. I told Sandy the truth, when she was old enough to contain it. I wanted her to be able to love her father."
Amelia reached out to grasp one of the girl's hands.
Over Sandy's bowed head, the adults looked at each other.
Sandy whispered, "I was so excited to meet him. We fixed up a room here, for him to live. He was going to hide out in Spale until the publicity went away, and then we were going to try to sneak him onto the farm and make like he was just a hired hand so he could be with us."
"It might not have worked," Jim admitted.
"Because of Dan Hale?" Amelia asked, and he nodded. She didn't say so, but it sounded to her as if Tom Rogers might have had a miserable existence if he had lived, although at least he would have had the comfort of the love of his daughter and his brother-in-law. What she did say, to Jim, was, "No wonder you hated me."
"Not you. Dan Hale."
"He was using me as bait."
"Yeah."
"If anybody ever found me, they'd say that Tom Rogers had trapped me in the tunnels, probably attacked me, I'd shot him in self-defense, and then killed myself when I found I couldn't get out."
Jim looked horrified at the idea of it. "Amelia, would you have—"
"I don't know. Maybe, eventually. Wouldn't you?"
He thought a moment, then sighed. "Yes."
* * *
Later, when it was just the two of them, she told Jim about how desperately she had wanted to be a vet herself. About her straight A's and about the woman-hating professor who had blamed a stable fire on her.
"Three calves died. The professor had been smoking in there, but he said it was me, and who was I against his word?"
"But now you love being a journalist."
"I hate it!"
He laughed in surprise.
She whispered, "Tell you a secret? I'm a rotten reporter. I hate to hurt people's feelings!"
Impulsively, Jim hugged her, and impulsively she returned it, and suddenly it became an embrace that turned into a kiss, which lasted and lasted and then repeated itself again and again.
Much later, Amelia sighed. "I wonder what I'm going to do for a job now."
"Stay here, of course."
She stared at him, holding her breath.
"Room and board," he said, smiling at her hopefully, "and a small salary, and all the hay you can lift. Do you want to, Amelia?"
She read between the lines, looking into his eyes, and said, "I do."
"I do, too," Dr. James Kopecki told his new stable hand and future wife.
Gillian Linscott
For All the Saints
GILLIAN LINSCOTT'S
story we've chosen for inclusion, "For All the Saints," which first appeared in the anthology
Crimes Through Time III
, was short-listed for the Crime Writer's Association Golden Dagger Award. Her first mystery series was about Birdie Linnet, an ex-cop turned fitness trainer. The scene was contemporary England. The second series, about the wonderfully named Nell Bray, a British suffragist, gives us a look at the London of early in the last century. If you haven't picked up the Bray series yet, you're missing one of the best mystery stylists writing today. Adept at any historical period, from the medieval to the modern day, her voice keeps gaining distinction and poise with each amazing new short story and novel.
For All the Saints
Gillian Linscott
S
aint Catherine was late. Ten o'clock was when Trillow had told her to get there, so as not to waste any of the March morning light. Ella was kneeling to put knobs of coal on the back of the fire in the studio because the saints needed warmth. Trillow had taken the hearth brush and was using it on an old broken-spoked cart wheel he'd borrowed from the coalman and propped up against the
chaise-longue
on the model's dais. Coal dust and flakes of black paint were scattered around it, sheets of screwed up drawing paper and charcoal sticks that had got broken and trodden into the boards.
"Ella, come over here, would you."
She stood up at once. Trillow always talked to her like a brother to a younger sister. There were three of them in the household: Trillow the artist, his friend Ned, the engraver, and Ned's sister Ella. It wasn't a conventional arrangement, but Ned and Ella's mother had died three years ago, when Ella was thirteen, and it had either been move in with Ned and Trillow or go into service among strangers. They'd taken three rooms together in a tall house in Pimlico. Trillow had his studio on the first floor, Ned his print-making room upstairs, next to the kitchen where they ate, and Ella attended to the housekeeping and slept in a cupboard-bed alongside the fire. She was almost entirely happy. There was very little money to spare, but she knew all the saints watched over them. The saints paid the coal bills, kept bread on the table, provided Trillow's sticks of best quality charcoal and Ned's plates of shining copper and cakes of yellow beeswax. She put down the fire tongs and went obediently up to the dais. Trillow signed to her to stand alongside the coal-cart wheel, took her arm and draped it over the rim. She stood ecstatic, not moving a muscle, as he went over to his board and started drawing with quick strokes. Ella knew Saint Catherine had been martyred on a wheel, although she wasn't entirely sure how. When she was much younger she'd imagined her going slowly around and around on the wheel of the grocer's cart, gold hair trailing in the mud, and assumed she'd died from humiliation and dizziness. But the how didn't matter. Saints in Triumph were what Ned and Trillow depicted, like Saint Catherine after martyrdom, radiant in virgin white, one arm resting on the transcended wheel, the other hand holding a palm frond. Children were given them as certificates for regular attendance at Sunday school. It was her dream that Trillow would ask her to model for one of the saints.
A knock on the front door one floor below, the confident knock of somebody who didn't expect to be kept waiting. Trillow sighed with relief and threw down his charcoal.
"Her at last. Go down and let her in, Ella."
On her way out, she glanced at his drawing board. Only a hand on a wheel, that was all. She'd half hoped— more than half hoped— that a miracle would have happened and Trillow would have bestowed sainthood on her. As she went downstairs, the segs of her boots tapping on the uncarpeted boards, she tried to crush down her disappointment. Her face was too angular, body too thin, hair too ordinarily brown to make her a saint. Saints Triumphant had smooth faces, rounded bodies under their white draperies, swathes of black or golden hair.
Saint Catherine was waiting impatiently on the step. She was wearing a black velvet jacket over a skirt of yellow and black tartan, draggled with mud at the hem. A red shawl covered her head and the fringe that frizzed out of it at the front was as gold as fried egg yolk. She pushed past Ella without saying anything and went upstairs trailing a smell behind her. It was a warm, sourish smell, the sort you got when you knelt down to watch the mother cat feeding her kittens on the old blanket in the corner of the kitchen. As soon as Saint Catherine set foot on the landing the door to Trillow's studio opened. She went inside. The door shut.
* * *
"Come along, Kate dear, give a little more."
"Me knee's stiff."
"Rub it then. Ah, that's good. Keep your hand there like that. Don't move."
"Thought you said I could rub it."
"Shhh. Keep still."
"Rub somewhere else if you want."
"Only ten bob extra. Yes, I know."
"So what's ten bob to you?"
"A lot of money. Now try lifting your petticoat up and holding it there on your knee. Knees apart for goodness sake."
"Ten bob's not a lot when you're selling them for five guineas."
"Who says we're selling them for five guineas?"
"Urse knows a man."
"Ursula talks too much. Stop fidgeting."
"Me titties are getting cold. I'll get goose pimples."
"It's not cold in here."
" 'Ow would you know? You've got a jacket on.
"Alright, five minutes' break if you must."
"Something to warm me up?"
"Help yourself. I only hope it puts you in a better mood."
"Ten bob'd put me in a better mood."
"Pity, because you're not getting it. We have a lot of expenses to cover."
"Like bribing policemen to look the other way."
"Just get your drink and sit down."
"Only bribes don't always work, do they? You know Dutch Joe was raided last week? Took all 'is pictures and plates away and 'e's had to do a bunk."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Ten bob."
"I'll have to ask Ned."
* * *
The door of Trillow's studio stayed closed. Ella and Ned lunched in the kitchen off tea, bread and cold mutton. His long hands were flecked with acid burns and a distinctive smell clung to him; of ammonia, linseed oil and resin, overlaid with the strong tobacco he smoked when he wasn't working to drive the chemical fumes out of his lungs. Ned had to sleep in his workroom. Through the winter his thin face had turned yellowish and there was a boil on his neck that wouldn't go away. When Ella had cleared up the lunch things, she went through to his room to help. There was a new batch of copper plates to be prepared, first cleaned with ammonia and whiting, then heated over a burner and spread with a fine film of wax. Ned had taught her the business as if she were a proper apprentice and she did all the preparation work and clearing up.
Ned stood at his big table by the window with a drawing Trillow had made the day before spread out in front of him, copying it onto a waxed copper plate with a sharp engraving tool. Ella left her first plate drying and went over to watch. The picture was of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, a snaking line of them with their palm branches, stretching to infinity in correct perspective. Ursula was tall and stately, with dark hair stretching down nearly to her feet. Ella thought of Trillow's long charcoal strokes drawing it and felt as if her own hair were being stroked into sleekness by his hand. A little shiver went through her.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?"
Ned didn't answer. He'd seemed preoccupied over the past few days. She noticed that he kept passing his hand over his eyes.
"Eyes tired?"
"A little."
"You're working too hard."
She heard him from her cupboard bed next door working late into the night, coughing from the fumes of nitric acid.