The Ladder Dancer (32 page)

Her hand went out to lightly touch the workbox. ‘The scissors,’ she whispered. ‘I found them in her box when I was trying to match the silks. They were sticky, with— with—’

‘Blood?’

She nodded. ‘But what could I do? How could I tell anyone? Who would believe me?’

‘And Cuthbert Ridley,’ I said. ‘Did she attack him too?’

‘He tried to blackmail her,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘But she had no money of her own – what woman does?’

I thought of Esther.

‘She asked me if I could help but I’ve nothing but a few poor jewels.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘We couldn’t raise the money he was asking for.’

‘So she had to be rid of him,’ I said. ‘The scissors again, I suppose.’

‘Indeed,’ she said earnestly. Her fingers gripped my arm convulsively. ‘You mustn’t think her conscience is not pricking her, for you can see it is. That’s why she’s so ill.’ Tears ran down her cheeks; she opened the workbox, hunted through the disorder Kate had left, pulled out a scrap of lace and dabbed it to her eyes. ‘She’s sinking, Mr Patterson, I fear she’s sinking. She’s filled with horror for what she’s done!’

She twisted the lace. ‘I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, could I? I mean, it’s not going to stop, is it?’

‘No,’ I said gently.

The door opened and Esther came in with Kate close behind. Mrs Annabella looked up, said faintly, ‘Oh, oh!’ and plied the handkerchief again.

‘How is Mrs Jenison?’ I asked. There was an unpleasant interview to be had and I wasn’t looking forward to it. But better now than later.

‘She is not at all well, Charles,’ Esther said. She cast a glance at Mrs Annabella, plainly moderated what she’d been about to say. ‘I understand her husband is still with the churchwardens at All Hallows. I really think he ought to be sent for.’

‘No, no!’ Mrs Annabella protested. ‘He must not know!’

‘We have no choice,’ Esther said firmly. ‘Will you send a servant for him, Charles?’

I called for a servant and sent him off.

‘She wants to talk to you,’ Esther said, when the servant had departed.

‘Oh no,’ Mrs Annabella said earnestly. ‘She’s in her bed! That would not be proper at all!’

‘She is very insistent.’

Mrs Annabella tried to protest again but I patted her hand; it was still ice-cold. ‘Better to deal with this now.’

I summoned a footman, asked him to bring wine for Mrs Annabella. Under cover of her half-hearted protests and his murmured enquiries, I whispered to Kate, ‘Go to the kitchens and see if you can find out if they’ve lost any scissors recently.’

Grinning, she dashed off towards the servants’ quarters.

We left Mrs Annabella encouraging the footman to pour ‘just a little more’ and went into the hall.

‘Charles,’ Esther said uneasily, ‘what is going on?’

I considered. ‘A great deal of self-delusion.’

She sighed. ‘I do dislike it when you are enigmatic!’

I ushered her ahead of me up the stairs. The wooden banister was as cold as Mrs Annabella’s hand. ‘Did it ever seem to you that Nightingale singled out any woman for attention?’

‘Yes,’ she retorted. ‘Every single one of them.’

‘Did you ever think any of them regarded it as more than harmless flirting?’

She considered, pausing at the top of the stairs with her hand on the banister. ‘Well, the married women were all too sensible to make much of it, of course. The young girls swooned a great deal and I think a few of them took it very seriously indeed. Charles—’ She frowned at me. ‘The one person who took exception to it was Philip Ord.’

‘No,’ I corrected her. ‘He was the one person who took
visible
exception to it.’

Rugs were thick underfoot, muffling our steps as we walked through a small dressing room, done out charmingly in the newest wallpaper. At the far end, Esther scratched on a closed door and – signalling to me to stay where I was – went in. I heard a murmur of voices, then Esther came out again and nodded to me.

When I went in, Mrs Jenison was sitting up in bed, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders and her grey hair pulled back into a long braid. Her face was white but she looked up at me with something astonishingly close to peacefulness.

‘You know, don’t you?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I know.’

Forty-Three

Justice must be dispensed as the law demands.

[
A Gentleman’s Companion
, February 1730]

As we walked back down the stairs, Esther silent beside me, Kate came running up. ‘Lost a pair of scissors Thursday evening!’ she said in a disastrously loud voice. ‘Big things. Sharp.’

I heard a noise in the drawing room. I pushed past Kate, past a startled footman. Behind me, I heard Esther say, ‘Stay here, Kate.’ I ran into the drawing room.

It was empty.

The far door stood ajar, the feathers of the decoration still quivering; one had snapped and drooped askew. I edged round the furniture, moving back towards the wall so I could see through the half-open door into the room beyond.

‘Mrs Annabella,’ I called. ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you.’

All I could see in the next room were a few chairs, the edge of a painting, a spray of purple flowers in a vase. No sound. I was seized with a fear that Mrs Annabella was running out into the next room, and the next, making her way round to the back of the house perhaps, to the servants’ quarters and escaping from there. I dashed for the door, ran through it—

At the last moment, something saved me: a glimpse of movement, a flash of light. I ducked, flung up a protective arm and felt the sharp burn of pain. I jerked away. A scratch on the back of my hand oozed blood.

We stared at each other. Mrs Annabella had of course concealed herself behind the door. She clutched the little scissors, staring at me wildly. Two spots of bright red marked her pale cheeks. She was breathing heavily; she edged sideways, keeping a winged armchair between us.

‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I know.’ The spectre of Mrs Jenison’s face rose up before me, weeping with joy at her release from the secret she’d been nursing. ‘I know how it happened,’ I said. ‘Mrs Jenison has told me everything.’

She glared, but there was something else there too – a touch of pride, perhaps.

‘It happened exactly as you told me,’ I said. ‘The assignations, the meetings, the creeping in and out of the house by the servants’ door, the confrontation between you and your sister-in-law on the stairs. Except it was not your sister-in-law who came in late but you. You were the one who idolized Nightingale and met him secretly.’ I couldn’t imagine Nightingale carrying his dalliance with Mrs Annabella as far as the bedroom but as far as extravagant promises – yes.

‘She’s lying,’ she said, with a fine effort at unconcern.

I shook my head. ‘I already knew you were the liar. The workbox is yours, not hers.’

‘It is not!’ she said with well-assumed indignation. ‘I told you it was hers the other day.’

‘I admire your foresight,’ I said. ‘You were confronted by Mrs Jenison when you came back in those two nights in succession – the night you attacked Nightingale and the night you stole his watch. You knew she suspected you, so you laid a little trap, just in case. The scissors are the ones you used to stab Cuthbert Ridley with, aren’t they? No wonder he wasn’t severely injured – those scissors are too small to do much damage. You put the scissors in a box of your own and then told everyone the box belonged to your sister-in-law.’

Mrs Annabella maintained a dignified demeanour. ‘You’re wrong. It
is
her box.’

I curbed my anger. I’d just seen the pain and distress Mrs Annabella’s actions had caused her sister-in-law and I was not in a forgiving mood. ‘It was not a particularly good plan,’ I pointed out. ‘Mr Jenison, I daresay, would not know anything about such feminine trifles, but I rather think the servants would correctly identify the box as yours. And you’d already tried to deflect suspicion from yourself by pretending you thought Nightingale had been shot, not stabbed. Oh, and by inventing a fictitious aggressive man on the coach. Unfortunately for you, I was there when the coach came in – the only men on it were Nightingale and a boy of no more than sixteen.’

She stuck to her point. ‘It
is
her box.’

‘Then why was your clean handkerchief in it?’

She pushed past a chair, headed towards the far side of the room. There was another door there; I didn’t know the layout of the house but it must surely lead towards the back. We sidled round on either side of the room, keeping the chairs, the little tables, the bowls of dried rose petals, the flaunting late summer blooms, between us. Esther came to the door into the drawing room, looking on with a frown. I saw Mrs Annabella glance at her and realize one escape route was now cut off, her face set in an obstinate, mulish look.

‘I know you’re being blackmailed by Ridley,’ I said, trying to distract her and somehow give myself an advantage. ‘He was waiting outside the Fleece for Nightingale and saw what happened. And being one to seize any opportunity to make money, he carried the scissors off and threatened to reveal the truth if you didn’t pay him. You shouldn’t have left the scissors in the body.’

‘I had to,’ she said, obviously irritated by this. ‘I couldn’t pull them out.’

I winced, imagining the scene.

‘And the watch?’ Esther advanced a few steps into the room. ‘Did you take that too?’

I remembered Mrs Annabella fussing over Nightingale’s room, making sure she knew where it was, making sure he wasn’t moved. And hadn’t she said she’d once got lost in the Fleece and ended up in the kitchens? She’d know where to find Nightingale.

‘Of course I took the watch! As a memento of our love.’ She looked momentarily wistful. ‘It was so romantic. Such a fine man – and he wanted
me
! We were going to marry.’ She turned a glowing face on Esther. ‘If
you
could marry a penniless tradesman, why could I not marry Richard? He had noble relations, you know – baronets and viscounts in Hertfordshire.’ She drifted off into a pleasant haze. ‘It would have been so delightful. Marriage – at last . . .’

While she was distracted, I slipped round the edge of the room, hoping to reach the far door and cut off her exit. But I was grimacing all the while over her illusions. She’d no idea of the realities of marriage; romantic longing blurred her view of the real world. As perhaps it had blurred mine. I’d concentrated so much on the reaction of Society to our marriage, and the obstacles that lay outside our relationship, beyond our control, that I’d never envisaged those obstacles within. I’d imagined that if the outside world could be satisfied then all would be well, when in fact the biggest obstacle to our happiness was me, and my stupid stubborn pride over money.

Esther shifted further into the room, stood with her hands on the back of a small sofa, engaging Mrs Annabella in conversation to keep her attention. ‘Why did you not take the watch when you first attacked Mr Nightingale in the alley?’

‘I didn’t think of it then,’ Mrs Annabella admitted. ‘It was only later, when I remembered the delightful times we’d had. If only circumstances had been different,’ she said passionately. ‘If only he could have brought himself to defy Society and reveal our love!’

I eased around a last small table; the door was within reach. And Esther was still between Mrs Annabella and the drawing room, using the sofa to keep well clear of those silly little scissors. Now, if I could only summon a burly footman or two . . .

‘What about the poor boy you hit over the head?’ Esther asked.

Mrs Annabella looked disconcerted as if she didn’t quite remember Joseph. ‘I did so want to see Richard. A last fond look. And everyone was so busy, I knew they’d not see me. Though,’ she added, vexed, ‘I did tear my petticoats climbing out of the window. I’m not as young as I once was, you know, and I was a little clumsy. Most annoying.’ She giggled. ‘But it was so exciting!’

I began to think she wasn’t in her right senses.

‘Why did you not attack him again?’ Esther prompted. ‘One more stab and he would have been dead.’

‘I couldn’t!’ Mrs Annabella was shocked. ‘He wouldn’t have been able to defend himself! I gave him a chance, you know,’ she added earnestly. ‘In the alley, I pleaded with him to come back to me. But he just laughed. He stood there with blood dripping from his shoulder and laughed at me! He said
you know you can’t do it, little Annabella
– that’s what he always called me.
Little Annabella –
no one else ever called me that—’

I reached the far door and clicked it quietly closed. Cutting off every avenue of escape.

‘
Why should you want to hurt me?
he said.
Why should you want to destroy our love?
’ Mrs Annabella said indignantly, ‘It was not
me
who destroyed our love! It was
him
. At that concert, I saw him for what he was – a philanderer, making up to every woman there. And he snubbed me!’ Her face wrinkled in fury. ‘He cut me off in the middle of a sentence and went off to be ingratiating to that odious little Mrs Ord! And
she’s
no better than she should be!’

I began to realize that Nightingale’s objectionable behaviour at that concert had not been on account of Philip Ord or the clash over Kate. He’d been frightened of what Mrs Annabella might let slip. He’d lived with that hanging over him throughout his entire stay in the town. And it had acted upon an uncertain temper and caused disaster.

Mrs Annabella looked smug, touched again with that odd glow of pride. ‘I’ve never had the chance to do anything before, you know. Everyone else has such exciting lives and for once I’d made up my mind to do something and I
did
do it. I’d been wronged. He tricked me, promised me marriage and then deserted me. And I defended my honour!’

I must have made a noise at this. Mrs Annabella’s head snapped round; she stared at me on guard at the door.