‘Well, the little kitchen maid who died at Reiver’s Rest,’ I began.
‘Was no kitchen maid, for a start,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘That’s the first thing.’
Hallelujah! At last, for the first time in all these months, there was someone else besides Alec and me who was willing to say so.
‘I worked that out,’ I said. ‘She was Mrs Duffy’s daughter. But anything you can tell me from having seen her will be invaluable. Next, I think she was murdered, and here is where I very much hope you can back me up, because I have no proof of it at all, beyond my conviction.’
‘That’s not so easy,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘She’d tumbled down, the poor lass, no mistaking that. But whether she fell or was pushed, how would you know? How could you say?’
‘You don’t think she jumped then?’
‘Made away with herself? Is that what they told you?’
‘They told me as big a heap of nonsense as they told everyone else. But it was one of the possibilities. She was trying to miscarry the baby, you know, and she jumped too far. Isn’t that what they told you?’
Her hands stilled for the first time and rested amongst the leaves.
‘What?’ I said. She shook her head at me.
‘That wee lass couldn’t have been trying to get rid of a baby,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘There was nothing there to get rid of.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked and she bridled.
‘I’ve brought enough into the world to know,’ she said. ‘Aye, and seen to it that plenty never arrive.’
‘But I know she was pregnant,’ I said. ‘The doctor told me.’
She snorted.
‘The doctor! What did he tell you?’
‘He said it was as easy for him to tell if a girl was – I can’t remember the expression he used exactly – but as easy for him as for me to tell a man from a woman. And “tell-tale marks of pregnancy”. I know he said that.’
‘Aye, she had the tell-tale marks of pregnancy all right,’ said Nettle Jennie, and she watched me, laughing at my irritation with her air of mystery. Something was ringing bells, right at the back of my mind. I squinted up at the cloudy green and brown patchwork of her home-made window and remembered sitting in another church, looking at stained glass, listening to the minister. Man that is born of woman, he had said, reminding me of Alec stuttering while he tried to say ‘with child’. And suddenly I had it. Suddenly I could remember precisely the words that Dr Milne had used. Those ‘tell-tale marks’ had said to the doctor – and should have said to me – not that the girl was pregnant when she died but that sometime in her past she had borne a child.
Cara had had a baby. For, of course, there are no clear marks of being newly pregnant beyond the obvious change in one’s outline. On the other hand I very vividly remembered how cheated I felt after the first time (no one having even hinted at it) to find that I had changed quite markedly and, it appeared, permanently. Even when the baby was safely in the nursery wing with Nanny and there were several shut doors between him and me I could not lie in my bath and pretend it had not happened, not unless the water were very heavily dosed with bubbles and those horrid marks, looking like little pink anchovies draped all over my bosom and stomach, were deeply submerged. This then was what Cara dreaded Alec seeing on their wedding night.
‘But why would Dr Milne be so sure she was pregnant again?’ I said at last.
‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘That’s all he would have seen. The doctor.’ This accorded perfectly with what I knew of Dr Milne.
‘Could you tell from looking at her how long ago it was?’ I asked.
Nettle Jennie shrugged.
‘Three, mebbes, four years. Something like that. Now, I’m not being rude, but can I ask you just to step into my garden while I do something here. These are my grandmother’s recipes and there’s no one knows them but me.’
What an old fraud, I thought, as I hurried out. Grandmother’s recipes, indeed. As if I cared what she did with her vegetation. But I was grateful for the chance to think.
All kinds of things began to drop into place. Lena must have known about this baby; she must have been instrumental in bundling Cara away to have it quietly somewhere. And this must be the hold she had over her daughter. Yes! This must have been the power she wielded to make Cara take the diamonds to be sold. I wondered whether her father knew about it. Not, I rather thought. Whether Clemence knew? Not, again. Lena always prided herself so on protecting Clemence from the sordid things in life. This would have been top of the list of things to protect her from. So Lena must have handled it all. Perhaps she had got a little cottage all on its own somewhere, just as she had the next time she had something to do that better had not be seen. With a rush of certainty, I thought of the pictures of Cara, beaming and golden – glowing, as they say – against the setting of some unknown cottage somewhere. A cottage Lena had tried to copy at Kirkandrews years later. I thought of Sha-sha McIntosh telling me about the crêpe-de-Chine dress ‘fearfully baggy’ from countless ages ago. Four years would be countless ages for one so young, I was sure. But who was Cara smiling at in those beautiful pictures? Not her mother, certainly. Her lover? Had her mother allowed him to visit her? I could not see Lena letting this happen for the sake of love’s young dream. But she might, I supposed, if it gave her a hold over the boy as well as the girl, whoever he was.
This much I was sure of. Cara’s secret was this baby from years ago. And this was what she had to tell Alec. Now I could see why none of the other options would help her. Postponing the wedding could not get rid of those dark rings and pale stripes. Seducing Alec would only bring discovery sooner. And this was what Lena found out that night at the cottage, what drove her to fury. But wait. That could not be. Had I not just worked out for myself that Lena must have known all along? She could not have managed Cara’s confinement and have been shocked into madness by its sudden discovery. Here were echoes again of that feeling that Lena was split down the middle. Could she be? Could her rigid respectability, her obsession with keeping the vulgar at bay, have led her to that special kind of forgetting that Austrian doctors tell us of?
Nettle Jennie was at my elbow suddenly, holding out a glass of some pale cloudy liquid. It might have been lemonade, I suppose, but I declined.
‘Like I’m saying,’ she began, ‘I don’t meet trouble halfway. I stay out of things, but this time… I don’t know.’ She drifted into silence for a while and then began again. ‘That was her own lassie? That was her own wee lassie she did that to? I might could come to the police with you, if you thought it would help put her away.’
‘But you said you weren’t sure it was murder,’ I said, puzzled.
‘Not that,’ she said. ‘I mean what she did after.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘What did she do to her… after?’ I was not sure that I wanted to hear this.
‘There was some things could not be helped,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘Her feet, like, were soft and there was nothing could be done about that, but she ground dirt into them, split the nails and dirtied them. She scrubbed her wee fingernails away to nothing, but she couldn’t put calluses where no work had put them. She rough chopped her hair at the ends and greasied it up, bit of dirt, but I could tell it was good healthy hair underneath it all, even combed all up the wrong way into rats’ tails.