Secret Letters (19 page)

Lord Hartfield had arrived. Peter Cartwright sprang to his feet and slipped into view, an index finger to his lips “Your Lordship,” he hissed. “We have been expecting you. Do not make a sound, I beg of you.”

The earl heaved an exasperated sigh and shuffled over to our hiding place. “What is the meaning of this?” he rumbled at us. “Why have you called me out here in the dead of night, with this absurd little note?” He held up a slip of paper as he spoke. “Where is Mr. Porter? Why did you instruct me to tell no one about this meeting?” He glanced at me and frowned. “And why is the kitchen maid here?”

“Please Your Lordship, everything will be clear in moments. But now I must ask you to remain quiet.” Cartwright put a heavy hand upon the earl’s shoulder, and the man sank down beside us, sputtering into irritable silence.

And then the real wait began. No more false alarms, no more guessing; I knew that the next person who stepped into the graveyard would be the real criminal, the man whom we were seeking. We were moments from the end.

And then we heard him, a hesitant scraping sound, the creak of the iron gate, and finally the sound of metal hitting dirt. He was digging, grunting with the effort as the shovel bore through rocky earth, sighing as the clods flew loose and landed at our feet. Then he gave a sudden cry of triumph, and I heard a ripping sound and the grinding noise of something heavy being dragged across the ground.

I leaned forward to try to get a better look, but Cartwright pulled me back. He was too late, for I had already seen what lay upon the ground. A thick cloth bag, partially decayed and covered in black soil, had been pulled from a freshly uncovered grave. The seam had burst and the fabric had fallen to the side. Lying there before us was the waxy remainder of a corpse, its skull grinning and twisted upward to the sky, its arms thrown open as if welcoming the moon.

And standing over the unearthed skeleton, a spade clutched in one clenched fist, was Lord Victor, only son and heir of Lord and Lady Hartfield.

For a moment we were paralyzed; no one breathed or moved as we watched the young lord stretch his arms and wipe his brow. Then the earl gave a hoarse cry of disbelief and leapt forward, crashing toward his son like a wounded bull, grabbing at his clothing, and bellowing his name again and again with building anguish.

“What have you done, what have you done to her?” he screamed, and pushed his cowering son against the iron railing. The man’s strength was terrifying in his grief, and the son gasped and crumpled under his father’s weight. Cartwright had rushed over to the wailing father and was struggling to restrain him as the constables tried to seize the frantic nobleman by the arms. I realized suddenly that the earl believed that this was his daughter on the ground, that he was looking at his child’s corpse. He was raining blows upon Lord Victor now, oblivious to our cries or to the huddled, bleeding body of his son.

“It’s not her!” I cried, grasping him by the wrist. “Lord Hartfield, listen to me! It isn’t her. Your daughter is alive!”

He tossed me to the ground and wailed his fury, and for a moment I thought he had not heard me. But then he froze, his fists still clenched, and I saw the rage drain from his face. His strength now suddenly abandoned him, and he slumped weakly into the policemen’s arms. “Not my daughter?” he gasped.

“Your Lordship, it is a man’s body, not a woman’s.”

Cartwright had fallen back, breathing heavily. He leaned briefly over the corpse and then covered it with his coat. “This man’s been dead for about five years, judging by the stage of dry decay.”

“And Rose?”

“She is alive and recovering now. Mr. Porter is with her.”

The heavy constable laid a hand upon Lord Victor’s shoulder. “You are hereby under arrest, sir, for the murder of—” He paused here and looked uncertain.

The young lord lifted a swollen face and spit out a clot of blood. “Oh, pray continue, officer,” he sneered.

“For the murder of your father.”
My accusation echoed through the graveyard.

The earl let out a strangled cry and glared at me. “What exactly are you talking about?” he shouted.

James had moved to stand beside his former master, and slowly plucked a letter from his pocket. There was a hard gleam of triumph in his eyes, and he paused for a moment as if savoring the victory. “For the murder of
our
father,” he declared solemnly as Lord Victor paled and dropped heavily to his knees.
“My dearest brother.”

There was a deadly confidence in the valet’s tone, a determination in his eyes that would not allow a challenge. We were all silent before his charge; no one dared to say a word. Even the earl was quiet, his lips parted in mute dismay, as if a hidden doubt had suddenly come to life before him.

Lord Victor lifted his head and glared at his accuser. “How long have you known?”

“Longer than I have known you,” James told him. “Why do you think I applied for the post in the first place? To press your socks? No, I have been planning this for many months, ever since I understood why my father had disappeared. He was a threat to only one man. And that man was his son.”

James turned to us. “When my mother died last year, I learned the truth about my family. I found two letters that my father had carefully concealed beneath a loose floorboard in the cellar. They were both written in code, but I was able to decipher only one of them, because the key to the second note was no longer in the house. The first letter was addressed to my father and was written by Lady Gwendolyn Lennox, Lord Victor’s mother. It was not an easy code to decipher, for I did not know which book they’d used. It turned out, in the end, to be drawn from a copy of
Oliver Twist
. The first symbol signified the page, the second, the line number, the third the actual word. For words and names that they could not find in the text, they used the first letter of the word and marked the symbol with a dash.

“‘My Dearest Mark,’ she had written, ‘by now you understand why we can no longer see each other. It is becoming obvious that he is your son, and my husband cannot know. Our son’s future is in your hands. If you truly love me you will stay away from us. Yours, Gwen.’

“I knew now that I had a half-brother,” James continued, “a nobleman who lived just miles from my home, and whom my father had actually befriended before he vanished. I also knew that my brother would lose everything if this letter and his real paternity came to light. But was it possible that Lord Victor was connected to my father’s disappearance?

“The answer lay in the second coded letter, which I could not read. I knew that Lord Victor had written it, because he had signed his initials on the bottom. I thought it was interesting that my father had told his son about this code, which he had used so many years ago to communicate with Lord Victor’s mother. I knew he must have also told him of their relationship—and so had sealed his own fate. But how could I prove it? The set of books that the two men had used were different, so I could not decipher the second letter. I had to find out what it said. With the help of some connections, I obtained a post at Hartfield as my own brother’s valet. And I watched him, and late at night I combed through the library in hopes of discovering the key to my second note. Finally last week I found it. They had used two copies of the same Bible, but I realized, to my frustration, that my father’s copy had been buried with my mother when she died. The letter was from Lord Victor to Mark Fellows, a simple request to meet in the cemetery behind the church the very night of my father’s disappearance. I now had proof. But would it hold up in a court of law? I did not have a body, and at any rate I was not fond of the authorities, for reasons of my own. And the more I became acquainted with the family, the more I doubted that they would ever turn against their beloved son. It was so unjust, it drove me mad. This selfish murderer was worshipped by everyone; even his stepmother preferred him to her own daughter. Why would they believe me and my wild accusations? I decided I couldn’t trust anyone’s judgment but my own.
I
would be his downfall and exact my own revenge.

“My plans did not work out exactly as I had hoped, as you all can see. A week ago I caught one of the servant girls looking through my belongings. It was crucial that no one see the letter from Lord Victor’s mother, for I had scrawled the translation on the back. Besides, if I was to use it against my master, I would have to hide it somewhere secret and secure. So I decided to bury the letter until I was ready to make use of it. That is when my real troubles began. Lady Rose observed me digging from her window, and when I had gone she unearthed the little box and read the note. What she did next, I admit I do not understand.”

But I understood. “It meant everything to her, Lord Hartfield,” I told the unhappy nobleman. “All her life she had been second to her brother. And she resented him for it, resented him for his charm, his easy manners, his scorn for her. Now she realized she was your only child, and the knowledge thrilled her. Her mistake was that she told her brother of her plans. In her triumph, she boasted that she knew his secret and told him that she would speak with you when you returned from London. At the time, she only knew that her brother was not the legitimate heir; she had no knowledge of Mark Fellows’s murder because James had only buried the first letter and its translation.”

Cartwright gave me a brief nod of approval, and I continued. “Lord Victor was now frantic. He had to silence his sister, but more importantly, he had to destroy her evidence. At the time, he had no idea that the letter had come from James and believed that eliminating Lady Rose was his only recourse. After the girl was asleep, her brother drugged her with chloroform and carried her quickly down the steps and out the front door. He was the only one who could risk taking her through the house, for, if he were caught, he could simply claim that she had fallen ill and that he was assisting her. Ellison, one of the tenant farmers, was offered a handsome sum to convey her to a vacant house at the border of Sheffield Green, which was to become her prison while her brother searched her room. Lord Victor packed a bag of her clothing and placed it in his room, then returned to his sister’s bedroom, locked it from the inside with her keys, and left by way of the window, to complete the impression that she had left alone and by that route. He overlooked the rather obvious fact that his sister would have had to be a professional acrobat to complete her escape without leaving a single footprint in the wet mud outside her window. The twenty-pound bag that she was supposed to have carried down the tree made the scenario even more impossible. The following day Lord Victor returned and searched her bedroom. He was very thorough; he even cut open and looked in the featherbed stuffing for the concealed letter, though he rather overdid his part when he removed and burned all of Lady Rose’s correspondence. In his anxiety that no hint of his secret should remain behind, he hastily gathered up every scrap of paper in the room and disposed of it. Then, in desperation, he tried to coax a confession out of his sister, ordering Ellison to withhold food until she told him everything. But she wouldn’t do it, so Ellison kept her in a drugged sleep while her brother decided what to do with her.

“Lord Victor tried to mislead us in the beginning, and his lie initially led us to another explanation,” I continued. “The girl may have had an accomplice who took her bag down for her and left those marks beneath the tree. Lord Victor himself suggested the identity of this gentleman when he told Mr. Cartwright of the meeting which he had supposedly witnessed between his sister and a mysterious tall suitor. But that little story about his sister’s secret meetings rang false to me when I considered that Lord Victor was the
only one
who had witnessed the event. There was also a clue from the very beginning of the case, which pointed us in the right direction. Why did Lord Victor not send up a servant to call his sister when she did not come down for breakfast the morning of her disappearance? That would have been a task for her lady’s maid; there was no reason for her mother to look in on her. But Lord Victor knew that the door would be locked, and he acted on the knowledge without realizing it. Another lie that he arranged was the note which he forced his sister to write, informing her parents of her elopement. If you had studied it carefully, Your Lordship, instead of burning it as he had directed, you would have seen that your daughter had cried for help within the message.”

The earl had lifted a tear-stained face to me, and he shook his head sadly at my last statement. “I didn’t burn it,” he murmured. “My son threw it into the fire after I left the room.”

I nodded and looked over at Lord Victor. “I am certain that your son had no intention of ever setting his sister free,” I continued. “Once he had found the letter she had hidden, he planned to make certain that she was never found.”

“But I suspected that my stolen letter and the girl’s disappearance were connected,” James put in. “I was just not certain what had happened to her. So I left a message for my master on the mantelpiece, in a code which only he could read. It said ‘I will confess.’ I saw it terrified him, for he could not imagine how she could have sent the message. But that night, after the dinner party, he sped off to the village to make certain that she was still secure. I saw him slip a revolver into his pocket before he left, and I followed him to the house to see what he would do. I was worried that he planned to harm her, and I was on the point of rushing into the cottage after him when he emerged again and headed back to the estate. I did not dare act upon the knowledge yet, for I was not certain that I was right, and I did not want to confront Lord Victor if I was wrong. I decided to return the following day when it was light and have a better look around. But this afternoon when I returned, I found that I was not the only one who had discovered her.”

Cartwright smiled and raised his eyebrows. “But, of course, if we had not been there, the story would still have had a happy ending, because I assume you intended to return the girl unharmed and forget the fact that she had taken your precious letter.”