The Path of the Wicked (30 page)

‘So you think he killed the governess. What are you going to do about it?'

‘I don't know. In all honesty, I just don't know. When I asked him to meet me where she died, I hoped I might jolt him into admitting it.'

‘Not likely, was it?'

‘What else was I to do? The trial's three days away. There's no hope of getting convincing evidence in that time.'

‘Even if you could, would you want to hang the poor lass's brother?'

Clearly, Barbara had been working her charms on this newly susceptible Amos. The misfortune of Joanna Picton and the bravery of Mary Marsh weren't as stark in his mind as in mine.

‘If I could only get him to admit to fathering Joanna's child, it might be something,' I said. ‘At least we might be able to stop Picton damaging his case in court even more by naming the wrong man.'

I could see from Amos's expression that he thought it was a faint hope, and he was right. His mind was still on the eloping couple. We'd agreed that we should go straight up to the farmhouse and talk sense to them. It was up a track just past the beer house where Amos had collected the trunk, so we turned on to the road out of town.

‘Whatever they decide to do, I want a chance to talk to Peter Paley,' I said. ‘He was right at the centre of what happened at the fair. He might have some idea of what became of Joanna after she was arrested. He has no reason to like Rodney Kemble. If he'd seen him taking Joanna off on her own, he'd surely say so.'

‘He hasn't up to now.'

‘Because nobody's asked him up to now. Nobody in all this has cared enough about Joanna to worry, except Mary Marsh.'

‘She'll be nearly there by now,' Amos said. ‘Three months, it takes them.' I glanced at him, surprised he should know. Three months to Van Diemen's Land. ‘I've heard some people do all right there.' He was looking between the ears of the skewbald cob as he spoke. ‘New country, good climate. She might even find somebody and marry.'

He was trying to console me and, by implication, telling me to stop worrying about something I could do nothing to alter. It was good advice. I might have no choice but to take it.

We said nothing else until we came within sight of the farmhouse, a tumbledown place in a dip, with a wavering line of smoke rising from the chimney.

Amos slid off the cob and helped Tabby and me down.

‘I'd best go in first and warn them they've got visitors.'

We gave him a few minutes and followed. Peter Paley was on a bed by the wall. The bedstead was carved oak and might have been handsome a hundred years ago, before the woodworm got to it. The man lying on it, propped up on one elbow against a rough pillow, might have been handsome more recently. He had the same square head and dark hair as his father, but his hair was dull and dusty, his skin tightly stretched over the bones with a greyish look. Weeks of confinement indoors and a diet of oatmeal and turnips do nothing for a person's complexion. He'd been shaved quite recently – by Amos perhaps – but bristles were beginning to show. Somebody had managed to find him a shirt that was still reasonably clean and a pair of old loose trousers, slit up to the knee on the left leg to accommodate the splint. He made some effort to stand up when I came in, reaching for an ash stick propped beside the bed.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘How is your leg?'

I hadn't intended to show any sympathy, but he looked so thin and apprehensive. I guessed Amos had told him who I was, so he'd know about my connection with Barbara.

‘Mending, I think. But I suppose I'll always walk with a limp now.'

I think he was trying to be stoic, but he sounded like a regretful boy, aware for the first time in his life that some things went wrong that could never be put right.

‘Where's Miss Kemble?' I said.

‘Upstairs.'

‘She bolted up there when she knew you were here,' Amos said. He'd stoked up the fire and was bending to tidy the grate. ‘I don't think she wants to face you.'

‘I'll go up to her later,' I said. ‘I want to talk to Mr Paley first.'

‘Miss Lane, will you please do something for me?' Peter Paley said. He spoke urgently, like a man galloping too fast at a fence. ‘Will you go to Barbara's father and tell him that he has nothing to reproach her for? She is still exactly the virtuous and dutiful daughter that she was when she left his house.'

He must have spent the last few minutes working out a delicate way to put it.

‘We'll discuss all that later,' I said. ‘There are some things I want to ask you first.'

Peter Paley subsided back on the bed. Amos glanced at me and the open door, asking if I wanted him to leave us alone. I shook my head. Tabby would be listening outside, in any case. There was a rough stool by the wall. I pulled it up and sat beside the bed.

‘I'd like you to think back two years,' I said. ‘To the Cheltenham race fair the year before last.'

His face twisted and he groaned, possibly from pain in his leg because he'd moved sharply. ‘Not that again. It's poisonous gossip from people who hate my father and me.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘I've spoken to your father. He's quite certain you did not father Joanna Picton's child.'

His mouth opened and he looked up at the ceiling, panic-stricken, though I was speaking quite softly.

‘You haven't discussed all that with Barbara, then?' I said.

‘She knows there have been unjust rumours. She believes in me.'

‘All the same, she might not like to hear you were kissing and playing forfeits with a drunk scullery-maid.'

He glanced at Amos's back, as if appealing man to man for help, but Amos was busy with brush and pan.

‘I was much younger then. There were a lot of us. It wasn't only me.'

I took pity on him. ‘It's not that I want to talk about. It's what happened afterwards.'

‘Squaring up to Kemble, you mean?'

‘That for a start. Why?'

‘It . . . it was about the girl. He got the wrong idea. I should have tried to explain, I suppose, but the others were cheering me on and before I knew it . . . well, you can't back down, can you?'

‘But you didn't fight.'

‘We didn't get the chance. Police, magistrates and clergymen all over the place.'

‘And Joanna Picton was arrested.'

‘That wasn't my fault. They rounded up everybody who couldn't run fast enough.'

‘But you could run fast enough. So, I suppose, could Rodney Kemble. He wasn't arrested either.'

He smiled for the first time. The smile had a touch of malice in it. I waited till it faded, knowing the next answer might go a long way towards proving my theory.

‘Did you happen to notice which way Rodney Kemble went?'

This time he actually laughed. ‘Did I notice? We all noticed. Back to his daddy, fast as a ferret down a rabbit hole.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘After we'd all got back together and found none of us had been picked up, some of them were egging me on to find Kemble and have the fight elsewhere. There were quite a few bets riding on it. All for me to win, of course; it was just a question of what round I floored him in. Only he didn't wait. We spotted him at the bottom of the hill, riding at a good canter for home.'

Confidence had come back in his voice as he was telling the story, making him the swaggering boy again.

‘You're sure it was him?'

‘Certain. He was riding a showy grey you'd spot three fields away, and in his shirtsleeves because he'd taken off his jacket when he thought he was going to fight me and he'd not stopped to pick it up again. He must have lit off the first instant he got a whiff of Holy Fanny and the rest. We hallooed after him, but he was too far away to hear.'

‘And the women and the others who'd been arrested, where were they at the time?' I said.

He had to think about that, puzzled as to why I should want to know. ‘They'd got them herded into two carts by then – men in one, women in the other. Then they rolled away downhill into town. I remember somebody saying there'd never be room in the lock-up for the lot of them.'

‘Was Joanna in the women's cart when it went away?'

‘Yes. She . . . she was being sick over the side. Some of the other women were laughing at her.'

Perhaps there was the slightest hint of shame in the way he said it, or more likely I imagined it because I wanted it to be there. The man who'd kissed and laughed with her wanted nothing more to do with her. Her employer's son had ridden off and left her as soon as his blood cooled and he realized he'd made a fool of himself in public. To be honest, though, my sorrow at that moment was less for Joanna than for the collapse of my theory. Rodney Kemble had not rescued Joanna from arrest and then brutally claimed his reward. She was in the cart under police guard when it rolled away. Some hours later she'd arrived back at her place of work, exhausted and distressed. In the last few minutes before she began her journey to the other side of the world, she'd told one person what had happened in those hours, and that person was dead.

I probably sat there, saying nothing, for some time, because Amos broke the silence.

‘Are you thinking of going upstairs and seeing the lass?'

I climbed a flight of stairs so steep that it was more like a ladder and pushed open the one door leading off the landing. The room inside was so steeply triangular that it was just possible to stand upright on one side of it, and the opposite side had space for a window no more than eighteen inches high. It had so many timbers that it was like being on board a ship. Within it, Barbara had made a kind of disorderly cave of the things from her trunk, with dresses in a rainbow of colours hanging from nails in the walls, shawls heaped on the low pallet bed. A bonnet was tied round one beam by its green ribbons. A range of cut-glass jars and small silver containers, including the toilet water flask, ran along the top of another beam. The contrast between the things Barbara had thought she'd need on her elopement and the place where they'd ended up was pitiful. She sat on the bed, face pale among all the colours, looking at me with an expression halfway between defiance and tears. I waited for her to speak.

‘Is my father very angry?'

‘What do you think?'

‘I had no choice. They shouldn't have tried to keep me away from Peter.'

‘So, what do you intend to do now?' I said.

Her mouth opened but she said nothing. She hadn't expected the question. She hadn't thought beyond her great romantic decision to all the lesser ones that would follow. There were round red marks on her arms that looked like flea bites. She started scratching, looked at me and then let her hand drop.

‘Do?' she said at last.

‘Are you planning to set up house here?'

The look she gave me was answer enough.

‘Well, then?' I said.

‘Are you going to tell my father where I am?' From her voice, she more than half wanted that. When I nodded, the look on her face was first relief, then apprehension.

‘It's only fair to him,' I said. ‘He's at least as much worried as angry.'

‘What about Peter?'

‘He'll have to go back to his father, too. Apart from anything else, he needs a doctor.'

‘They can't keep us apart. We love each other.'

She looked me in the eye. It had been a simple statement, with none of the drama or attitudinizing I'd have expected from her. For once she wasn't concerned with the impression she was making.

‘Yes, I believe you do,' I said.

If love had survived seeing Peter as he looked now, and three or four days without a maid, warm water and a looking glass, then it was more than a passing fancy.

‘My father must accept that we're engaged or I'm not going back. You'll tell him?'

‘I'll tell him.'

I didn't add that there'd be no choice about it. After what had happened, she'd have been forced to marry Peter even if they fought like Kilkenny cats all the way to the altar.

I suggested that we should join the others. As I was turning towards the stairs, I noticed a book on the beam, among the toiletries. I looked more closely, curious to know what Barbara had chosen to bring with her. No visible title, but something familiar about it. It took me some moments to realize that it was similar to the letter books I'd found in Mary Marsh's desk. I picked it up and opened it. There were no letters pasted inside, but pages covered with Mary's handwriting and some rough sketches. Barbara's eyes were on it when I looked up.

‘She wouldn't have minded. She wrote it for me.' She stood up, took the book from me and opened it. ‘There. Read it if you want to.'

It was a poem, spread across a double page, headed ‘On a Young Lady's Engagement to be Married' – a clever epithalamium in the Elizabethan style, witty and tender, butterflies and swallows sketched in the margins.

‘She wrote it for me when Peter and I were first engaged,' Barbara said. ‘She copied it out on a scroll tied with pink and white ribbons. I wanted to bring it with me, but in the hurry of packing I couldn't find it. I knew she always kept a copy of things, so I went and took the book from her room. She'd have wanted me to have it.'

‘May I borrow this, please?' I said.

Barbara was torn. She wanted to please me, but the poem was clearly precious to her.

‘I'll be very careful of it,' I promised.

She nodded reluctantly.

We went downstairs and she sat by Peter's bed as if he needed protecting. He took her hand and smiled at her, trying to be reassuring. When I said that Barbara's father must be told, he accepted it without question. Amos had probably been saying much the same to him while we were upstairs. It was settled that I should ride Rancie to the Kembles with the news. Amos would come with me as far as the Paleys' house with a similar message for Peter's father. We anticipated that both parties would come and collect their elopers as soon as horses could be harnessed. Tabby would stay at the farmhouse with them until we came back, an arrangement that didn't please her at all.