“When that boy is coming back, there will be a murder done,” she pronounced, her tears beginning anew.
I could only believe that it hadn’t been done already.
“The coffin is made, Miss, and Matthew is digging the grave, though I never knew a body to go so slow about a thing. I swear he —”
“Did the boxes go this afternoon, Mary? They need to be at the house in Paris when we arrive.”
“Yes, Miss, two wagonloads. And didn’t young Tom fuss about loading them, too? And he says there was a man up on the hill, Miss, away by the tunnel, watching the boxes go in —”
“Did you get the striped cups?”
“Of course I was getting them! What do you take me for, Miss? I swear the last —”
“Here, Mary,” I said, shoving a wad of dark cloth quickly into her hands. “Press the lace on my black veil, would you?”
She went out the door, still muttering and shaking her head. I sank down onto a stool, head aching, looking at bits of torn paper and odd pins, the flotsam that was all that remained of my life in my grandmother’s room. Now only my steamer trunk was left, ready for filling. Mary dealt with the pain of parting in words, but I needed quiet to let my own feelings writhe and fester. I picked up the silver swan from my dressing table, the gift Lane had made for me, its delicate wings uplifted. “I can feel it trying to fly,” I had told him, gazing at the swan balanced on my palm. “You would like to fly, I think,” the low voice had replied. “That is why it’s yours.” Now I did not wish to fly. I wanted nothing more than to stay at home.
The heavy knot in my middle pulled painfully tight, the silver swan warming to the heat of my hand. There were twenty-three hours until Mr. Wickersham came.
5
The family cemetery was on a rise beyond the upper end of Stranwyne, surrounded by a crumbling stone wall with a wrought-iron railing rusting along its top. I did not come here often. Leaning slabs of weather-washed stone rose irregularly from the ground, while in some places nothing but a rectangular depression in the grass marked the resting place of an ancestor. The monument to my grandmother, Marianna Louise Tulman, rose tall near one corner of the enclosure, but I felt no real affinity with a granite obelisk, or even the ground that held my grandmother’s bones. It was her room, her furniture, her clothes — the things of her life — that made her real to me, and today I was leaving them. The wind on the high ground whipped violently, as if it had taken a fancy to steal my black veil, and the trogwynd sang low, a lament to my uncle. I put up a gloved hand and held on to my bonnet.
“… we commit his body to the ground …” said Parson Lowe.
Mrs. Cooper cried noisily beside me, and I took her hand in my free one, wishing for comfort as much as I wanted to give it.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes …”
I met Mary’s eyes over the hole in the ground. She was crying as well, though for different reasons, I knew, than Mrs. Cooper, and I was suddenly struck by the sight of her. She was the same Mary as always: large-eyed, freckled, with her upturned nose and wide mouth capable of speech in speeds and quantities that one could scarcely credit. And yet, in that sober dark dress with the fitted bodice, and with her hair tamed and twisted into a knot beneath her bonnet, she was not the gawking girl I had met when I first came to Stranwyne. She was, most assuredly, a young woman, one who would expertly assist in my most wild of schemes, and even, evidently, wield a hammer for my sake.
The parson nodded and the coffin hit the bottom of the grave hole with a hateful thump. The lowering ropes were pulled free, and Matthew, young Tom, and two other men from the village stepped up, hats or caps popping back onto their heads, shovels in their hands. The dirt hit Uncle Tully’s coffin with dry, grating rasps, like when we’d buried John George the day before, like when Lane had buried Davy. The wind keened.
I looked away from the coffin, past Mary and down the slope to Stranwyne Keep, the jumble of brown stone and chimneys and roof tiles that was my home. And then I saw the carriage, just emerging from the tunnel through the moor hills, making its way at high and silent speed around the circular drive, the trogwynd snatching away the sound of its wheels. I turned my face back to the shovelers.
“Faster, please,” I said crisply, causing both Mrs. Cooper and Parson Lowe to look at me and frown. But the effort to fill my uncle’s grave was quickened. I saw Mary staring down the slope, her lips pressing tight.
Mr. Wickersham had arrived. Three hours and forty-two minutes early.
And he was in the drawing room when I entered it, his scribbling man perched on the settee, an ink pot and spare nibs spread out on the table. I gave them both a small curtsy. I had slept perhaps four of the past forty-eight hours, and my body felt the loss like a missing limb. But I smiled, laid the veiled bonnet carefully on the table, and prepared to do battle from the edge of a damask chair.
“Do sit, Mr. Wickersham. I’m so glad you did not stand on formality, and just let yourself in.”
He did not sit. “Where is your uncle, Miss Tulman?”
“I … we …” My eyes filled, wetting my lashes. Tears were so close to the surface these days that they were extraordinarily easy to summon. “Have you had no letter, Mr. Wickersham? Mr. Babcock assured me that he would —”
“Yes, yes. I got the bloody letter. Caught me in Milton only just this morning.” I thought I heard him grit his teeth. “I was not aware that your uncle suffered from any ‘ailment of the heart.’”
“I’m afraid we were not aware of it either, Mr. Wickersham,” I replied.
Mr. Wickersham thrust his hands in his pockets, blustering about the room while the inevitable pen scratched, cursing circumstance and lack of luck beneath his breath. My eyes narrowed.
“Your compassion and concern during this difficult time are truly admirable, Mr. Wickersham. I am very much comforted.”
He stopped his pacing to look at me, my loss of temper somehow making his own relax. He smiled and sat down abruptly.
“Where is the body, Miss Tulman?”
“My uncle was laid to rest just a short time ago. Beside his mother.”
“Quick work,” he commented.
“It was not … convenient to wait longer. We have no undertaker here.”
There was a small silence. “This will be a disappointment for Her Majesty’s government,” Mr. Wickersham continued. “The loss of Frederick Tulman is rather a blow to our plans. A sad loss for our plans.” He leaned back in his chair, still grinning at me, a posture that was nothing like that of a gentleman. “Of course, you do understand, Miss Tulman, that you will still be required to accompany me to London.”