Death at Bishop's Keep (15 page)

Aunt Sabrina laughed. “The Girls' Friendly Society,” she told Kate, “is an association of young women in service. Its annual tea is arranged by the vicar and sponsored by several of the ladies of the parish. Many of our girls are away from home for the first time, you see, and—”

“And at loose ends,” Aunt Jaggers put in. “They should do better to stay in their places and work, rather than gallivanting about, footloose, in gowns and gloves.”

Teasing forgotten, Kate spoke up in protest. “But surely the servants are permitted to do as they like with their half days, Aunt.”

“I hardly imagine, Niece,” Aunt Jaggers remarked icily, “that you are sufficiently acquainted with the servant class to have formed a valid opinion.”

Kate bit her tongue. Aunt Sabrina moved in her chair but said nothing. The uncomfortable silence was broken by Mudd's murmured direction to Amelia to replenish the tray of tea cakes.

Across from Kate, Sir Charles sipped his tea. His glance met hers over the rim of the cup, and she was startled to find it appreciative. He put down his cup and inquired, “Are you enjoying the autumn countryside, Miss Ardleigh? I can recommend the mill and the locks at Flatford, on the Stour. It is not a long walk from here, and quite picturesque.”

“I'm afraid I have been much too busy with my work to gallivant about the countryside,” Kate said. She glanced at Aunt Jaggers. The devil spoke. “With or without gloves.”

Aunt Jaggers snorted. Aunt Sabrina looked distressed. “How inconsiderate of me, Kathryn,” she said. “Really, you
must
take some time off, if only to see the ruins. You are working much too hard.”

Eleanor's cup rattled. “Working?” she asked, staring at Kate. “Why, Kathryn, whatever are you
doing?”

“I have come to Bishop's Keep to serve as my aunt's secretary,” Kate said. She displayed her inky cuff ruefully. “As you see, it can be quite a messy business.”

Eleanor's cornflower-blue eyes widened. “Your aunt's ...
secretary?
But I thought you were ... I mean, I had hoped we could be ...”

Kate lifted her chin. Eleanor's voice trailed off before she finished her sentence, but her meaning was clear. She had thought that Kate was a member of the leisure class, just as she was, and that therefore they could be friends. Kate felt a sharp disappointment. But she should not blame Eleanor, who could hardly help being brought up to despise honest work, and to think of it as something done only by her inferiors. She was the one who was at fault. She should never have allowed Eleanor to think that she was something other than what she was.

“I'm sorry if I deceived you, Eleanor,” she said quietly. “I did not come to Bishop's Keep to be a lady of leisure.” She hesitated, hoping that there might still be a chance for a friendship. “But if you were about to suggest that we go for a walk or a short drive some afternoon, I am sure that Aunt Sabrina would be glad to let me take an hour.”

“Certainly,” Aunt Sabrina said warmly. “I am only sorry I did not think to suggest it myself. I—”

“Excuse me, mum.” The door had opened to admit Amelia, hesitant, and without the tea cakes. “There's someone t'see yer, mum, but I misdoubt that—”

“Stop blathering and show them in,” Aunt Jaggers snapped.

Amelia frowned uncertainly. “But he's a constable, mum.”

Aunt Jaggers's face grew dark. “Then send him to the kitchen.”

Aunt Sabrina intervened. “Did he say what his errand was, Amelia?”

Amelia's head bobbed. “He said 'twas news, mum. Important news.”

“Then show him in, please,” Aunt Sabrina said.

In a moment Amelia reappeared. With her was a portly man, balding, with a pockmarked face. His navy serge uniform was grimy, his boots sheened with dust. He held a tall hat under one arm and a newspaper-wrapped parcel under the other. He looked uncertainly from one person to the other, as if unsure whom to address.

Aunt Sabrina relieved him of his uncertainty. “Good day, sir,” she said. “I believe you have news, Constable—”

“Clay, mum,” the man said, stepping forward. “From Chelmsford.” Kate recognized the name of a town that the train had passed through, about thirty miles from London. “I'm some sorry t‘intrude, mum, but I've brought somethin' t'was left f‘r yer. I was on me way t' Dedham, y'see, an' thought it best t' bring it t'yer, rather than send it by post, seein' what it was.”

“Something left for me?” Aunt Sabrina frowned. “How odd. I know no one in Chelmsford.”

The constable shifted his bulk. “T‘be sure, mum,” he mumbled. “But happen that th' girl bin an' died yesternight 'n th' workhouse, y'see, an' she left—”

“The girl?” Aunt Sabrina spoke sharply. “What girl?”

The constable frowned. He managed to secure his hat under the same arm that held the parcel, and fished in his pocket, pulling out a soiled scrap of paper. “Name o' Jenny, 'twere,” he said, reading from it. “Jenny Blyly.”

Suddenly there was a piercing shriek, the cry of a soul in torment. All eyes in the room went to Amelia.

“Not Jenny!” she cried. “Dear God, not Jenny!”

 

Cook stood in the kitchen, staring down at the opened parcel on the table. “An' how'd she die?” she asked, her voice a brittle thread.

The constable lifted the mug of hot tea Nettie had given him. “In th' workhouse,” he said. He looked up. “Th' babe died afore her.”

Amelia's muffled sobbing could be heard from the corner by the fire. Harriet was huddled beside her knee, trying to comfort her. Pocket stood an uneasy distance away, his face working. Mudd sat at the other end of the table, head bowed.

Cook lifted the ragged dress from the table. That and the green knitted shawl and the worn shoes were all that was in the parcel. “Nothin' else?” she asked the constable. “I'm her aunt. I'm who has t' tell her pore mother how she ended.”

He countered her question with one of his own. “D'you know some un called Tom Potter?”

Amelia's sobbing grew louder. “I do,” Cook said shortly. “Why?”

“T‘was a note fer him in th' pocket o' th' dress,” the constable said. He fished in his trousers. “Here 'tis.”

Cook took the crumpled bit of paper from his hand. “I'll see't he gits it,” she said.

The constable had been gone several minutes before Cook roused herself to smooth out the note. She went to the lamp and held it up so that the poorly penciled script was illuminated by the golden light. Finally, she turned and spoke into the silence.

“Nettie,” she said, “fetch me shawl. I've an errand.”

Nettie's mouth made a round O. “But there's the dinner!” she said. “Mrs. Jaggers'll—”

“Jaggers kin go t' bloody hell,” Cook said fiercely. “That's where the Lord sends the murderers of pore babes and young girls!”

Mudd lifted his head and spoke. “An' if th' Lord don't dispatch 'er quick,” he said through clenched teeth, “I will.”

From the doorway, there was a stifled gasp. Cook looked up to see the startled face of the young Miss Ardleigh.

 

Aunt Sabrina was not eager to talk about what had happened, but Kate managed to wring a little information out of her that evening, after they finished the cold supper that Nettie and Harriet scraped together in the unexplained absence of Cook. Jenny Blyly, barely nineteen, had been Amelia's predecessor. She had disappeared six months before under circumstances that Aunt Sabrina would not divulge but which seemed to involve Aunt Jaggers. In fact, having heard what she had in the kitchen, it was clear to Kate that the servants blamed Aunt Jaggers for Jenny's disappearance and her death.

But even though Aunt Sabrina would not discuss the details of Jenny's story, its sad outline was not hard for Kate to reconstruct. The girl must have become pregnant. Aunt Jaggers, discovering the fact, would have heaped recriminations on her head and discharged her on the spot, with no hope of a character. Penniless, despairing, she had found her way to the Chelmsford workhouse, where her newborn baby had died and she shortly after.

Jenny's tale was the stuff of Beryl Bardwell's novels, and under other circumstances, Kate might have pursued the details with a writer's interested curiosity. But echoing in her mind was Amelia's tortured cry and Cook's impassioned consignment of Aunt Jaggers to hell. And when she saw Mudd the next morning, face impassive, eyes hooded, arranging the creamed eggs and kidney on the breakfast sideboard, Kate remembered his ominous threat with a shiver of cold foreboding. She was too practical for presentiment, but even she could not escape the certainty that something dreadful was going to happen at Bishop's Keep.

“The reputation of Scotland Yard was unfortunately sullied by corruption during the latter eighteen-hundreds. One day the superintendent met a stranger who resembled a former Yard official. ‘Were you not on our staff?' he inquired. To which the stranger replied, ‘No, thank God, I have never sunk that low.' ”

—GEORGE DAINSBURY Police in Great Britain

 

 

 

O
n the day following his call with Eleanor at Bishop's Keep, Charles was once again taking photographs at the dig. It was interesting, and he enjoyed chatting with Fairfax, who was a curmudgeonly old fogey but for all that, a dedicated archaeologist. After Kathryn Ardleigh's unauthorized incursion, he had instituted an entire set of new regulations that constrained horses, police, and women from straying onto the site of the dig.

Kathryn Ardleigh. Charles could not think of her without smiling, remembering the sight of her in the doorway of Sir Archibald's field tent, neatly garbed in what the dress reformers called “rational attire,” a divided skirt actually suited to freedom of movement. And the next day, appearing in front of callers in a rumpled shirtwaist and inky cuffs. Of course, as a man, Charles did not know much about women's costumes. But he knew what he liked: dress with a practical bent. He admitted to thinking that the bustle (before it went out of fashion a few years before) was the most absurd appendage a woman might strap onto her derriere, and the corset almost as ridiculous. He had the suspicion that Kathryn Ardleigh would be loath to wear either, especially if she spent much of her time, as it seemed she did, at secretarial labors. It appeared that she was a woman who resisted the dictates of fashion and made up her own mind about the way she dressed. He wondered if this unconventionality reflected her general outlook on life, and he hoped she had not been too deeply offended by Fairfax's misogynistic tirade.

In addition to photographing the dig, Charles also called from time to time at the police station in the center of town. There, he began to perceive that Inspector Wainwright, while an intelligent and dedicated policeman, was handicapped by a lack of trained assistants. Battle, Trabb, and two other inexperienced PCs were the whole of the force in his ward, and their efforts were chiefly dedicated to patrolling the streets, dealing with rowdy soldiers from the nearby army barracks, and directing carriage traffic. As a result, any investigation was necessarily limited to accumulating basic facts from cursory examination or direct interview. Given this situation, Charles thought, any criminal who found himself in the Colchester jail probably got there through his own criminal stupidity or through sheer bad luck. His suspicion was confirmed by the paucity of evidence offered at the coroner's inquest, which returned a verdict of unlawful killing by person or persons unknown.

So it was that after several unsatisfying discussions with the pessimistic Inspector Wainwright, Charles concluded that, if it were left to the Colchester constabulary, the unfortunate victim's identity would never be known. And without that, the murderer's identity would remain undiscovered. True, PC Trabb had been sent round with the photos of the dead man to the stationmaster, the cabbies, and all the inns, but his circuit was to no avail. No one would admit to recognizing the dead man. And while the Colchester Exchange regaled its readers with the lurid details of the killing and pleaded for information from the public, no informants came forward. Sensing that Wainwright had arrived at a dead end, Charles tentatively advanced the suggestion that perhaps this was a case for the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police—Scotland Yard.

Inspector Wainwright bridled. “The Defective Department?” he snorted. Charles recognized the reference to an infamous
Punch
cartoon of a few years before that had expressed the commonly held view that the CID was at bottom corrupt, as well as incompetent. “Had the Yard in on a killin' three years ago,” Wainwright added gloomily. “Didn't come up with a bloody thing. Waste of time. Won't do it unless I'm ordered to.”

Charles was sympathetic to the inspector's dilemma, but that did not take them any farther toward solving the crime. Concluding that the floundering Wainwright was not going to ask for a helping hand, he determined on his own private course of action. So the next morning, instead of driving as usual directly to the dig, he took copies of his photographs and began to retrace the steps of PC Trabb, going first to the railway station, where he hoped to meet someone who remembered the dead gentleman.

“Nope, never seen ‘im,” was the stationmaster's reply to the question Charles asked when he presented the full-face image of the deceased through the painted metal of the grille window. “When'd yer say 'e come?”

When Charles mentioned the date, the stationmaster cocked his head. “Well, I never seen ‘im,” was his reply. He leaned his elbows on the wooden counter and adjusted his green eyeshade. “But that's 'cause I wudn't at work that partic‘lar day, which I'd've cert‘nly said t' the PC if he'd had th' wit t' ask. Goods wagon rolled over me foot an' laid me up proper. 'Twas Jarrett wot was here in me place.” He turned and raised his voice over the hiss and clatter of the departing train. “Fetch Jarrett.”