Dark Waters (37 page)

Furzey was still not returned from his errand. I looked out of the window and my eye fell upon young Barty, just a few yards away. To earn a farthing he was shifting crates of chickens in the market. I went out to him in the hope he might have heard something about Maggie Satterthwaite's whereabouts. To my surprise, at the very mention of her, he took fright and tried to run away, but immediately stumbled over a chicken coop, and I was able to reach him and grab him by the ear. Enduring his squeals and curses as inflexibly as a press-gang sergeant, I led him back to the office.

Inside, I let go of his ear and told him to sit down on Furzey's writing stool. He did so, rubbing his ear, squirming in his seat, and avoiding my eyes.

‘Barty!' I said sharply. ‘Why did you run away from me? Have I ever harmed you? You know something about this matter – what is it? You must tell me or it will go hard with you.'

Barty looked at me at last, but defiantly.

‘I don't care about me, so long as she's safe away and not hung.'

‘I understand you want to protect her. Then tell me what you know.'

But he kept his mouth obstinately clamped shut.

‘Listen, my lad,' I said, ‘if it helps you to speak out, I am not sure in my own mind that Maggie is a murderess. It is Burgess Grimshaw who wants her prosecuted, and we all know he hates her for besting his niece in the May Queen election. I will make it my business to help her in the best way I can, by finding the real killer. Meantime, the very worst thing is for her to run, to be a fugitive, with a price on her. She will be caught and, because she ran, she will be found guilty. Do you understand?'

Tears welled up in Barty's eyes.

‘I did it so she wouldn't be hung.'

‘Did what?'

‘I went to constable's house, sir, and found where she lay and climbed up and opened her window. She climbed out.'

‘When?'

‘Darkest time of night, sir.'

‘Where did she go?'

Two glittery runnels were crawling, like snail trails, down his grimy cheeks.

‘To her man. She's got a man, but she told me not to follow.'

‘But you did follow, didn't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘And found out who this man is?'

‘Yes.'

‘What is his name?'

Barty looked down at the ground and said something in so low a voice that I did not catch it.

‘Barty!' I said. ‘Speak up. Who is Maggie's young man?'

The moment's silence that followed was broken by a peal on the brass bell that hung outside the street door. It was immediately followed by the opening of the door itself, and the entry of a young man of somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years.

‘Mr Cragg?' he said, in a peculiarly shrill voice. ‘We have met only briefly but, in case you forget, I am Jotham Allcroft. I would like a word, if you please.'

I looked at Barty, hesitating. The boy was in turn staring at young Allcroft as at someone who had saved him.

To erase this impression I reached for his arm and propelled him towards the door into the house, saying over my shoulder, ‘Will you excuse us for half a minute? Come on, my lad. I haven't finished with you.'

Marching Barty into the kitchen I asked Matty to give him milk and some food and keep an eye on him, then doubled back to the office. Jotham Allcroft was standing where I had left him, with his hat in his hand.

‘Mr Allcroft. Come through to my private office and take a seat. This has been a sad business about your father.'

We took our seats on either side of my desk, and I asked him what I could do for him.

‘Well, here it is,' he piped. He kept his round, popping eyes fixed on me with unsettling intensity. ‘There are stories going around which stem from the poisoning verdict by your inquest. I am concerned about these stories and I wish you to put a stop to them.'

‘In what way?'

‘They are slander, against me and my family.'

‘In what way?'

‘In the way of saying that Isaac Satterthwaite the rat catcher murdered my father for his politics and that he must therefore have been killed in revenge. Folk are saying I shot him. Me.'

He jabbed his thumb emphatically into his chest.

‘You are consulting me professionally, Mr Allcroft? Is it that you wish to bring an action for slander?'

‘No, sir. You mistake me. I know better than to go to law in this land.'

I looked him up and down. He had a fleshy, globular head, a face smooth as an infant and a bodily frame that was narrow about the shoulders and big arsed, giving him a pear-shaped appearance. His clothing was sobriety itself – a black coat and breeches, plain linen collar and a round-crowned, wide-brimmed black hat.

‘Well, such talk is very regrettable,' I said. ‘But there are no secrets in this town, I am afraid. Speculative talk cannot be curbed.'

‘But the Psalm says it must.
Let not an evil speaker be established on earth!
'

‘But it is mere tittle-tattle. No sensible person will listen to it.'

‘Slander is slander, Mr Cragg.'

‘Well, such talk does not come from me, or my family. It may – and I say only may – emanate from a member of the inquest jury, or the public attending the hearing into your father's death.'

In fact, it almost certainly was from the jury. Juries are impossible to silence. They may have returned an uncertain verdict but they will have debated the possibilities of guilt and blame, and will no doubt have talked about them in the tavern afterwards. Allcroft was not a fool: he knew this. He took one hand off his hat and pointed at me while thrusting his chin upwards.

‘I tell you, put a stop to the slander yourself for I hold you and your godless jurors responsible.'

‘Mr Allcroft, this talk is easily refuted. Even if the rat catcher did kill your father, which I doubt, it does not follow that you must have killed the rat catcher.'

‘And indeed I did not kill him. But people keep saying I did. They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent – adders' tongues are under their lips, Mr Cragg. You must contradict them.'

I took a deep breath. The man's clothing was highly suggestive but the words he was using were definitive.

‘I wonder if you would have had any reason or desire to revenge your father. You and he had seriously quarrelled, had you not?'

‘Yes, we had.'

‘And it was about religion.'

He grimaced.

‘About that, and about everything. His politics were detestable. His religion was that of the Whore of Babylon.'

‘And what is your religion, may I ask?'

‘I make no secret of it. I am a member of the Society of Friends. We believe in peace. That is why I could never have used a gun, even if I had wanted revenge.'

‘Yet you were a soldier, you knew how to.'

He sighed, closed his eyes as if to summon patience in the face of stupidity.

‘This is the mistake everybody makes. I was a clerk in the pay division, Mr Cragg. I can, if I must, distinguish one end of a musket from the other, but it is all I know about that vile engine.'

‘I believe you.'

This came out spontaneously and it was true. I had difficulty imagining a figure less like a fusilier than the one sitting before me.

‘Is this why you left the army? You became a Quaker?'

‘I received the Inward Light, yes, and of course then I could no longer stay.'

I rose from my chair and with a gesture of the arm invited him to do the same which, automatically, he did.

‘Well, I can do this for you,' I said. ‘I'll write to the jurors and warn them not to speak publicly of any of the jury's discussions and suspicions, beyond those expressed in their collective verdict. That, as you know, was murder but with no name whatsoever mentioned. Will that satisfy you?'

By now I had manoeuvred him into the outer office, and towards the door, using a method I had mastered with clients over the years: half leading and half ushering.

Young Allcroft hesitated. He was not calculating whether I was trustworthy in general – I doubted he would ever think that – but only whether I would keep my word in this instance. All at once he decided I had nothing to lose by doing so. He proffered a cautious hand.

‘That will be acceptable. Would you be kind enough to send me a copy of the letter?'

We shook hands and I opened the door for Friend Allcroft to leave.

Chapter Twenty-five

L
UKE
F
IDELIS WAS
coming in just as young Allcroft was going out, and they almost bumped.

‘Who was that little puritan duck waddling out?' Luke asked moments later as he crossed into the inner office and threw himself into my desk chair. ‘I've seen him about town but never heard his name.'

‘That was Jotham Allcroft. You are sitting in my chair, Luke.'

‘Oh, very sorry.'

We exchanged places.

‘Well, I'm surprised,' Luke said. ‘Was that really the fearless fusilier, our possible sharpshooter? You wouldn't have thought it possible.'

‘It wasn't possible. He was a pay clerk, Luke. He soldiered with the pen, not the sword.'

Luke gave a shout of laughter.

‘The abacus, not the arquebus. Wonderful!'

‘What's more he's a devout Quaker. And he and his father had quarrelled irreparably, so he says. I don't think, despite what his mother foolishly thinks, that he regrets his father's death at all.'

‘Which, if we put all those beads in a row, makes it far from likely that he shot Satterthwaite, or that he even wanted to. And we're forced back yet again to consider the case of the mysterious Hamilton Peters.'

‘Whom we must find. Are you free to ride out to the old windmill? I think that is the only ploy left to us.'

Luke leapt to his feet and said he'd fetch his horse. I thought of sending for Barty to get mine, when I remembered that he was already under my roof, waiting to tell me the name of Maggie Satterthwaite's swain. I went through to the kitchen to complete my interrogation and found only Matty there.

‘He's gone, sir! He gave me the slip. I'm stronger than him but he's quicker. He had a glass of milk quietly enough at the table there and I had just turned my back to cut him some cheese when he was into the backyard and over the fence before I could blink.'

I immediately went through to Elizabeth in the parlour. When I gave her the news about Maggie she grasped the seriousness of the situation at once.

‘If she runs, it will condemn her, Titus, whether she is innocent or not. We must find her, and that means first finding Barty and wringing out of him the name of the wretched man she has gone to. Leave that part to me. You must set about discovering the truth about John Allcroft's death, and don't you dare to come home until you have done so!'

She pushed me in the chest and I shook my head in bewilderment at her impetuosity. As if producing this villain was a simple trick I could perform, like Mr Thomas Shackleberry palming his cards.

*   *   *

While Matty went to the livery stable for my cob, I returned to the office and jotted a note for Furzey, to read whenever he chose to return, about the letters I had promised Jotham Allcroft I would write.

I instructed Furzey to write the letters and send them out, one to each of the jurymen in the Allcroft inquest. All must use the same wording, I emphasized. They must warn the men not to speak openly about the jury's private deliberations. I added something by way of explanation:

There has been slander against Jotham Allcroft in the inns and coffee houses, falsely saying he has taken revenge against Mr Satterthwaite. To stop this there must be
no
mention made of the Whigs' having plotted Allcroft's murder.

I wrote the note hurriedly, not as a lawyer would, but carelessly like an ordinary letter writer. I quickly placed it on Furzey's writing table and returned to the matter immediately at hand. I took another sheet of paper and quickly wrote out a summons for Hamilton Peters to appear as a witness at the inquest – further particulars to be notified later – into the death of Isaac Satterthwaite. Just as I was dripping the sealing wax, Matty put her head in at the door to say the horse was ready, and Dr Fidelis was waiting. I pressed the seal down, and slid the paper into my pocket. Then I locked up the office and mounted my horse.

*   *   *

Passing the Moot Hall we saw a knot of men gathered at the foot of the steps, being addressed by Oswald Mallender. He had a paper in his hand, from which he was reading in a loud and officious manner. Judging by the staffs in their hands I guessed they were deputies recruited by Mallender to form a hue and cry after Maggie Satterthwaite.

Riding at a trot it would take us about twenty-five minutes to reach the windmill. On the way I told Fidelis how and why the corporation had arrested Maggie, and about my surprising discovery of Barty's role in her escape. Fidelis was not interested in Barty, but he was in Maggie.

‘Grimshaw has got it woefully, and hopelessly, wrong. She is not the killer of Allcroft. If she did anything at all to contribute to his death, it was unwittingly. There was simply no reason for her to kill him.'

But was there? I thought to myself. I remembered her words to Elizabeth, that all the men try their luck with her. She was Allcroft's chambermaid. Had he tried his luck? Had he even gone further than try, in the secrecy of that room? And in spite of all the assurance with which I had pronounced her innocent, I thought, yes, a woman might kill after being insulted like that. And, as coroners find again and again, a woman's weapon of choice is often poison. I said all this to Fidelis.

‘Yes, of course, women do resort to poison,' he agreed. ‘But I would guess only for certain crimes. What do you think? Poison is useful to a woman in any slow killing that she wants to look natural – infanticide for the burial insurance, the slow death of an oppressive parent or of a husband to get his money, that sort of thing. But here we're imagining – if I am not mistaken – a young girl who has suffered an insult. Her idea of vengeance will not be a quiet, stealthy death, but a public slaying. Of course she may cover her deed up, and deny her guilt. But in her heart she wants the world to know her victim has been killed deliberately for his sins. In such a case she stabs him or knocks him on the head, wouldn't you say?'