Instruments of Darkness (18 page)
Read Instruments of Darkness Online
Authors: Imogen Robertson
Tags: #Historical fiction, #Crime Fiction
A woman’s body was hanging from one of the low beams that ran over their heads. Her face was dark, her tongue forced out between her teeth. Her feet brushed the air only inches above the stone floor, and with a creak of wood and hemp her body still turned slightly in the vague breeze of the evening. The motion brought her face to face with them. Harriet knew that face, distorted as it was. Nurse Bray, one of the staff at Thornleigh who had arrived like a gift from God soon after the illness of Lord Thornleigh; she had cared for him ever since. Harriet turned away a little, keeping Rachel shielded. She squeezed her eyes shut, very hard, and waited for her heartbeat to slow.
‘We must get her down. Is that barrel still sound?’ Crowther’s voice.
There was a hollow hammer of a gentleman’s boot on wood as the barrel was kicked and tried, then a scrape of wood on stone as someone dragged it across the floor.
‘Mr Thornleigh, do you carry a knife?’
There was a pause, the snap of an opening blade, then a horrid sawing of rope. Harriet remembered the sounds of the sick room during battle; under the curses and groans and explosions it seemed one could always hear the rasp of the surgeon’s saw on bone. There was a snap as the rope gave, a grunt of effort from Hugh as he took the weight, and a sigh as he placed the body on the ground.
‘She is dead?’ Hugh’s voice now.
‘Oh, yes.’ Crowther’s dry response.
Harriet opened her eyes. Crowther was kneeling beside the body, Hugh standing to one side.
‘Damn!’
Hugh’s curse echoed in the empty ruin, and like the report of a gun it disturbed the crows roosting in the woods around them. They flew up from their nests with angry shouting echoes. Rachel flinched, then pulled herself free from her sister’s arm. Keeping her eyes carefully averted from where the body lay, she walked straightbacked to the doorway. Harriet turned to watch her speaking to the boy.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jack.’
‘We must stay outside, Jack.’ She put out her hand and the lad fitted his dirty fingers into her black glove and allowed himself to be led out into the fading light.
Harriet leaned her back against the roughly rendered wall and observed Crowther while she calmed herself. He was running his eyes over the body as if he were reading a text. He lifted his hand to move the folds of cloak and rope at the nurse’s neck, and then looked up at Harriet. She understood his meaning.
‘Mr Thornleigh, perhaps you will be so good as to go and fetch your people? This body at any rate is most decidedly your business.’
Hugh shot her an angry look and strode out of the door. As soon as Harriet heard his steps fading outside she moved across the open space and crouched down opposite Crowther. He looked at her.
‘Making him angry certainly made him leave faster. But I’m afraid he’ll walk much more quickly now.’
She smiled up at him briefly in return, then gestured towards the doorway just beyond which Rachel and the boy were waiting, and lifted a finger to her lips. Crowther nodded.
He looked back to the body, and lifted the nurse’s right wrist with a sudden frown. It was deeply bruised where the radial artery was buried under the soft flesh on the underside of the wrist, and spotted with blood under the skin at the sides where the bones of the arm were tied onto the delicate bones of the hand. The body moved easily; she had not been dead longer than a couple of hours. Harriet had removed her gloves and tucked them into her gown, and having seen what he had noticed, took up the nurse’s left hand. Here the bruising was most brutal across the top of the wrist. She lifted it to her eyes, and ran a fingertip over the impressions. She teased something up onto her fingernail then presented it to Crowther. He looked. A fibre. She laid the hand gently down again and stretched her own arms out across the body, crossing them, one on top of the other at the wrist.
‘Rope,’ she mouthed silently.
Crowther felt a coldness swim through his stomach despite the warmth of the evening. He looked closely again at the nurse’s right hand, flexing the dead fingers as an idle man might play with his beloved’s hand on a drawing-room sofa. One fingernail was broken, and three were clogged with skin, and a little blood. He looked up to check Harriet was observing, and understood what she saw. Her jaw was set, and her body was all attention. Crowther laid down the hand, and as if of one mind they looked up to the horribly distorted face.
‘I shall cut away the rope at the neck,’ Crowther said very quietly, and did so, revealing the horrid purple where it had pressed against her throat till she was choked.
He felt with his long fingers for the vertebrae at the back of the neck. They had not broken. She had died from lack of air. It was not a gentle death. Crowther remembered his occasional duties for his professors waiting under the gallows, hoping to claim the body for dissection with the aid of a number of bribes and the assistance of a few men hired to hold back the mob. He had observed both quick and slow deaths from hanging. If the fall did not break the unfortunate’s neck, sometimes their friends would rush under the scaffold and cling onto their legs, pulling down with all their weight, so the final agonies would come as quickly as could be managed. He had seen mothers dragging down their sons’ feet in that way, killing them quickly being the last service they could render to their children. It was the noise that was most unpleasant; the struggle of air gargling uselessly in the closed bowl of the throat, the swish of the legs kicking out like a puppet show, the dance in the air. He wondered if anyone had held the nurse’s legs to shorten her agony.
Harriet, very tenderly, began to feel the back of the nurse’s head. She remembered doing the same for a midshipman of her husband in their last cruise together. The surgeon had just removed the boy’s leg below the knee, but it was the splinter that Harriet found embedded in the back of the skull, and hidden under his thick black hair, that had done for him. Even as the memory bubbled and fell back in her mind she felt a change of texture in the nurse’s scalp, a mass on the back of the skull. She brought up her hand, dirty with blood not yet fully dry, and showed it to Crowther. He too felt the place on the scalp, then ran his hand lightly over the rest of the body, but could find nothing of significance.
He stood and examined the beam above them, the curl of rope over it now looking innocent enough. Harriet stood next to him, trying to clean her hand with her handkerchief. It was too delicate an object for the task. Crowther heard her mild curse, and handed her his own without comment. She worked the stuff off her palm and put her gloves back on, before handing the handkerchief back with a sorry shake of her head. When she spoke, the lowness of her voice made him realise she was still very conscious of the potential listeners outside.
‘I did not notice where the barrel was when we came in.’
He wondered if he should still be surprised that their thoughts tended to travel down the same path in these circumstances.
‘I was trying to recall. Over there.’ He indicated the left-hand wall. ‘And it was on its side, so it could have rolled there when Nurse Bray kicked it away.’
She looked at him with an eyebrow raised.
‘No, Mrs Westerman, I have not gone mad. This woman was murdered. But I am thinking how a jury might twist it into suicide.’
‘Harry?’ It was Rachel just beyond the doorway, trying to find her sister in the gloom without having to see the body. Crowther saw Harriet glance down at her glove quickly and pull it further over her wrist before she responded.
‘Yes, Rachel?’
‘There is something out here. Someone has set a fire and it is still warm. There seems to be something in it . . .’
Before Rachel had a chance to complete the sentence Harriet and Crowther were sweeping by her. She pointed a little way into the wood past the boy Jack, and just off the path that ran in front of the ruined cottage. There was a fresh pile of ash on the bare earth of the floor, containing several charred fragments of wood kindling and the suspicious pale ash of burned paper. Crowther lowered his palm. It was the faintest memory of heat, but it was there. Harriet gently poked at the ash with a thin twig.
‘I can’t see anything written,’ she said.
Crowther poked Hugh’s knife deeper into the ash, and found at its tip a slightly larger scrap that had survived the flames. Both sides were written on; it seemed to be the bottom corner of a sheet of paper.
‘Letters. I am sure of it.’ He pointed to another scrap where the word
Hall
could just be read. Harriet did not respond. She was looking down at his hands with an expression of horror. His glance followed hers. The knife he held was darkly stained. He started.
Hall
could just be read. Harriet did not respond. She was looking down at his hands with an expression of horror. His glance followed hers. The knife he held was darkly stained. He started.
‘Hugh’s?’ she hissed.
He nodded. Rachel called them.
‘Have you found something, Harriet?’
Mrs Westerman stood very quickly, blocking Crowther’s slow examination of the knife from the view of her sister.
‘Letters. But all burned up.’
Jack looked up from the small section of forest floor he had been studying.
‘Nurse Bray was always very pleased to get letters,’ he said.
Harriet felt excitement rise in her throat. She stepped over very carefully to the boy, and knelt beside him.
‘Who was it wrote her letters, Jack?’
The boy looked a little overawed, and glanced up at Rachel. She smiled down at him, and that seemed to make him braver.
‘London. She was very private about them though. Others thought she was a bit stuck up, ’specially after a letter had come. We used to say she wouldn’t see fit to know us for a day or two after a letter came, and she never said what was in them. Rest of the time she was all right, though. Used to buy sugar treats sometimes on her day off, and shared them about easily enough.’ The boy’s lip trembled suddenly. ‘I won’t have to look after His Lordship now, will I? Now she’s dead? I don’t like him.’
Rachel crouched and put an arm round his painfully thin shoulders. ‘Why don’t you like him, Jack?’
The boy looked into her face round-eyed. ‘He makes horrid noises, miss. Like this.’
He moaned suddenly, letting his mouth drop open and his head fall forward and rock from side to side. Harriet recoiled slightly.
They were spared having to answer by the sound of footsteps on the path. Hugh came towards them flanked by two of his outside servants. One carried a horse blanket over his shoulder. Harriet stood up and turned to look at Crowther. He was still standing by the fire with Hugh’s knife in his hand.
Hugh pointed his men into the cottage and approached them. Crowther spoke to him.
‘You hunt, Mr Thornleigh? Much sport recently?’
His voice was very cold. ‘I do. And yes, the sport has been good.’
Crowther held the knife out towards him. Thornleigh stepped forward to take it, and as he gripped hold of the handle, he saw the blade and sucked in his breath.
‘What have you been doing with it? I never leave my knife dirty!’
‘Perhaps,’ Crowther said with dry precision, ‘your mind was on other matters. I have done nothing with the knife other than cut the rope that held Nurse Bray. It is blood on the blade. But I think it likely the blood is a day or two old.’
Hugh turned very white. It made the angry blur of his scar all the more violently red.
‘Some rabbit or hare, probably. I must have forgotten to wipe it.’
Crowther met his eyes. ‘Some innocent creature, I am sure.’
Hugh balled his fists, and Crowther felt himself relaxing his muscles to dodge or take a blow, but Hugh controlled himself.
‘I shall take care of Nurse Bray now. I would thank you to leave my lands.’
Crowther bowed very low. Harriet carefully took her sister’s arm. She could feel it trembling under her own, and turned over her shoulder to look at her neighbour.
‘Your father’s lands, I think, Mr Thornleigh. Do you not only hold them in trust in hopes of your brother’s return?’
Hugh bowed without speaking, and with Crowther following the two sisters began to walk away with dignified calm. Harriet could feel Thornleigh’s angry gaze on them as they went.
‘Harry, does this mean you think that Hugh . . .’ Her sister’s voice was a deep whisper. Harriet squeezed Rachel’s arm close to her body and shushed her.
II.6
T
HEY TURNED INTO Holland Street and the road narrowed. Their footsteps slowed, and Graves was not sure whose reluctance held them back. The streets were very quiet for a Saturday; hawkers were few and called out their wares almost softly. It did not seem healthy or right, but if that was the atmosphere of the street, or the heavy dark Graves carried with him, he could not say. There were enough people looking from their windows, or standing at the doorways, however, for their approach to be noticed.
HEY TURNED INTO Holland Street and the road narrowed. Their footsteps slowed, and Graves was not sure whose reluctance held them back. The streets were very quiet for a Saturday; hawkers were few and called out their wares almost softly. It did not seem healthy or right, but if that was the atmosphere of the street, or the heavy dark Graves carried with him, he could not say. There were enough people looking from their windows, or standing at the doorways, however, for their approach to be noticed.
Apprentices and servants from the houses near Alexander’s own appeared in the doorways as they passed. The cook from the wig-maker came up to them, and pressed a napkin of gingerbread into Susan’s hand, ‘for little Master Adams’. Susan looked at her blank-faced and took the package with a little nod. She had grown up fearing this woman, huge and apparently always covered in flour, ever since she had been caught trying on one of the legal wigs the shop made and sentencing the other children in the street to terrible punishments. She said thank you, and the cook turned away to wipe her eyes on her apron.
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