Lydia turned on the hot tap and picked up the flannel. “Rebecca?”
“Yes, madam?”
“I went to the little barn.” She watched the maid’s face in the mirror. “The one you can see from the lane. Where Amy Narton died.”
Rebecca’s face remained blank and faintly disapproving, the face of a well-trained servant.
“I didn’t fall over,” Lydia went on, turning off the tap. “Someone shut me in. They wedged the door closed with a bit of piping. That’s how I ruined the gloves, by picking up a brick and hammering on the door.”
“Oh, madam,” Rebecca said. “Shall I ask Mr. Gladwyn to call the police?”
“That depends. I think I know who did it, you see.” Lydia rubbed at a smear of mud that had unaccountably appeared on her cheek. “There was a fresh footprint in the mud underneath where the piping was lying. Someone with small feet. A child, probably.” She rinsed the flannel and wrung it out. “So that means it was almost certainly Robbie.”
The color slipped away from Rebecca’s face. But most of all Lydia noticed her eyes, the way they moved to and fro, looking for something that couldn’t be found. It was a miserable business, bullying someone, which was what this came down to.
“What-what do you know about Robbie, madam? You do mean my nephew?”
“Yes. I know that you’re fond of him. And I know that the barn is a special place because no one else normally goes there, even Mr. Serridge. Perhaps especially Mr. Serridge.”
“Did Mrs. Alforde tell you, madam?”
“Not about Robbie. Mr. Wentwood did. As it happens, he’s a friend of mine.”
Rebecca let out her breath but said nothing.
Lydia picked up the towel and turned to face her. “It’s all right. I don’t want to make life difficult for Robbie. Or for you. But I thought you should know what happened. And there’s something else: Mr. Serridge said the barn was dangerous. He’s going to have it pulled down.”
“I’m so sorry, madam. I just don’t know what to say. If Mr. Gladwyn hears that-”
“There’s no reason why he should,” Lydia interrupted.
“You see, he’s so funny about that barn and the skulls. Robbie, I mean. They’re…they’re special.”
“His private Golgotha?”
For the first time Rebecca smiled, as one woman to another. “Yes. Mr. Wentwood told you about that.”
Lydia turned back to the basin and buried her face in the flannel again. Afterward she said, “You’d better warn Robbie. He’ll want to move his skulls.”
“There’s no harm in them,” Rebecca said, as though Lydia had said something quite different. “It’s just that they’re like toys to him. Or even friends. He was that upset when one of them went. I don’t know what he’d do if they all did.”
“When he lost the goat’s skull?”
The maid nodded. “He thinks it was old Narton.”
“Hold on.” Lydia dried her face again and sat down at the dressing table. “Sergeant Narton? When?”
“I’m not sure. Robbie’s not very good with time. Must have been only a few days before he died.”
“Are you sure he meant Narton?”
“Yes. He saw him coming out early one morning. He didn’t dare go up to him. Narton hit him once.”
Lydia picked up the hairbrush. “Robbie told you all this?”
The maid hovered at Lydia’s shoulder. “He can speak more than you’d think, madam. It’s just that he doesn’t like doing it with strangers and it takes a bit of practice to understand what he’s saying.” She bent closer. “Are you really not going to do anything?”
“About Robbie this afternoon? Of course not.” For a moment she thought the maid was about to burst into tears. “It didn’t matter.”
“Thank you. He was a bit funny today, you know, a bit over-wrought. That must have been why he shut you in. He probably thought you were after the other skulls.”
It occurred to Lydia that at no point had Rebecca questioned Lydia’s accusation: she had assumed that it was perfectly likely, even probable, that Robbie had shut her in the barn.
“I’ll take the coat down to the kitchen, shall I, and dry it by the fire. That mud will soon brush off.”
“Thank you. Tell me, what was she like? Miss Penhow, I mean.”
“I called her Mrs. Serridge, of course. She was all right, quite a nice little thing. I was only with her for a week or two, but we got on fine. She gave herself airs sometimes but there was no harm in it. And you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She was so unhappy.”
“Was that obvious?”
Rebecca nodded. “She wanted to follow him around like a spaniel but he wasn’t having any of it. She spent a lot of time crying. Or sulking, or trying to coax him round. She thought-she thought she was, well, attractive to him. That she could win him round that way. But then she found she couldn’t.”
“Was she pretty?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She could make herself look well enough. She needed an hour in the morning to get ready. I used to help her sometimes, and she was so fussy. But she dressed quite well, I’ll say that for her. And she wasn’t bad-looking, either, not when she had her teeth in and she’d had her hair tinted. She was a lady who needed her rouge and powder. Even so, you could see just by looking at them together that he was a good ten or fifteen years younger. And then if you saw her when she wasn’t ready for company, you saw how old she really was. I dare say she felt younger than she was.”
“We all feel that.”
“Anyone with half an eye could see it was pointless.”
“What do you mean?”
Rebecca drew herself up and stood primly, her hands clasped together in front of her. “He likes the younger ones, madam. Girls.”
Lydia stood up, leaving the towel draped on the end of the bed and the flannel on the edge of the basin. Rebecca folded the coat neatly over her arm and opened the door. It was odd, Lydia thought, and rather unsettling, how quickly one became used to servants again. Or rather to not noticing all the little things they did for you.
“Rebecca? I found something else in the barn.”
The maid stopped, her hand on the door handle and her face anxious.
“Nothing to worry about. Something on the ledge with the skulls, right at the end in the corner. An old cigar box. Do you know anything about it?”
“It was Mrs. Serridge’s-Miss Penhow’s, I mean. I remember Robbie showing it to me.”
Lydia blinked. “She smoked cigars?”
Rebecca’s face creased into a grin. “Oh no, madam. It must have been Mr. Serridge’s once, I suppose. She used it for her diary. She was always writing in it.”
“Why on earth did she keep it there?”
“Maybe so it wasn’t obvious if Mr. Serridge went looking for it. I caught him looking through her writing desk once when she was having a bath.”
“It can’t have been very big.”
“It wasn’t. Just a little green book with hard covers.”
That explained the pencil. Lydia said, “Do you know what happened to it?”
“Not seen hide nor hair of it since I left the farm. He’ll have got his hands on it after she went, if she didn’t take it with her.”
Lydia nodded to Rebecca to open the door. As they crossed the landing and went downstairs, normality reasserted itself, and the maid, one step behind Lydia, kept her head modestly lowered and her hands clasped round the coat. The distance between them seemed ridiculous, given the nature of the conversation they had just had in the bedroom.
In the hall, Lydia turned to Rebecca and said in a low voice, partly because things had changed between them and partly because she wanted to show that she had no desire for them to return to their old formal footing, “You’ll have to find another Golgotha, I suppose.”