"I wish I could have done more," Kate said.
"Ye did what ye culd." She squinted at Kate, considering. " 'Tis true yer uncle's a copper?"
"Yes," Kate said.
"Ah," Cook said thoughtfully. She seemed about to say something else, but instead grasped the stairway door and opened it so Kate could go through. ' 'Well, ring if yer wants anythin' else."
"I shall," Kate said. "Thank you."
The apprehension did not leave Kate as she carried her tray upstairs to her room; rather, it was magnified by the recollection of Jenny's lover, vowing to right Harriet's wrong. All considerations of morality and ethics aside, Aunt Jaggers was inviting trouble when she mistreated the servants. It was not unheard of for them to take revenge, for the person who felt entrapped and powerless to turn to crime. There was the Belgian maid who strangled her elderly employer. And the Irish maid-of-all-work who was hanged at Newgate for bludgeoning her employer, hacking her body into pieces, andKate shook herself. She couldn't dismiss the fears that menaced her. They were legitimate, for the wrongs Jenny and Harriet had suffered were real wrongs, just as the Belgian maid and Kate Webster were real murderers, and not merely characters in Beryl Bardwell's sensational thrillers. But she couldn't give way to her apprehension, for if she did, she would have to ask herself what would happen to her, caught as she was in the web of her aunt's malice.
Kate carried her tray into her room, lighted the fire, and sat down to eat, grateful for the silence and the opportunity to be alone. When she was finished, she pulled off her shoes and took out the manuscript of "The Conspiracy of the Golden Scarab." If she expected to meet her deadline, she had to work-regardless of what storms might be brewing around her.
She scribbled furiously for several hours, pausing only to refill her teacup and mend the fire. When she finally laid down her pen and gulped the last of the cold tea, her draft of the next chapter-set in an English country manor and featuring characters that greatly resembled Sir Charles Sheridan and Bradford and Eleanor Marsden-was done. It was a trifle short on sensation, she thought critically, but it was satisfy-ingly full of the realistic details her readers loved. Perhaps she could devise*a startling plot twist-a death or some other disaster-involving the medium, whose character was beginning to seem to Kate more and more ambiguous. She still had the notes she had scribbled after her visit to Mrs. Farns-worth's. She might even work Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle into the plot-suitably disguised, of course.
And the Irish maid who had been hanged at Newgate for bludgeoning her mistress.
32
But answer came mere none.
It was raining in a drizzly, halfhearted fashion when Charles got back on his horse after leaving Mrs. Farnsworth's house on Keenan Street. If the lady had any answers, she had not imparted them to him. But perhaps there was another way to get to the bottom of the affair. He rode toward the village of Dedham, three miles to the north of Marsden Manor, along the River Stour.
Charles remembered Dedham quite well from the days of his youth. It was a market town for the hamlet of East Berg-holt, where he had spent summers that he still recalled with joy and wonder, visiting his grandparents and wandering the wooded hills and sweet, shallow vales. Dedham lay on the south side of the river, whose lush green banks sloped into deep water, verges fringed with willow and hawthorn and populated by choirs of songbirds. Barges moved slowly westward on the river from the harbor at Manningtree, through locks at Flatford and Dedham and Stratford St. Mary.
Dedham's High Street ran east and west along one side of a small square. On the northeast corner stood The Marlbor-ough Head, a half-timbered building of respectable vintage that had served as a wool market in the fifteenth century, an apothecary in the seventeenth century, and finally, after 1704
and the Battle of Blenheim, as an inn, named for the first Duke of Marlborough. It had from time to time offered the young Charles a place to warm himself and eat a hot pork pie while waiting for his grandfather to complete his business. Across High Street stood the brick Grammar School, a fine Georgian building with a calm facade and stately demeanor. And on the corner opposite stood the pride of the village, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, its tower foursquare and of commanding height, founded on the wealth of the woolen industry and raised before King Henry's bold interference in the divine order of things. The walls were faced with stone from Caen and local knapped flint had been used to construct the tower. The buttresses were outlined heavily by large quoins of dressed stone, and in the plinth of the tower was an arrangement of quatrefoiled shields, alternating with crowns. It was altogether an impressive church, the comer-stone of village life.
The vicarage was much less picturesquely impressive, designed not to celebrate the spirit but to answer the needs of the body for shelter and comfort. It stood beside the church, a solid, tidy brick residence with a slate roof, a respectable number of chimney pots, and green shutters. A carriage waited in the street, the mackintoshed driver hunched over his reins, clearly unhappy about the wet. As Charles rode up, a woman in a fur hat came out of the front door, her mouth set, her face marked by evident distress. She climbed into the carriage and drove off.
In the front halfway, Charles's damp coat was taken by the solicitous housekeeper and he was shown into a small, dark parlor warmed by a brisk fire. A few moments later, Vicar Talbot appeared, a troubled look on his lined face and his lion's mane of white hair disheveled, as if his pastoral shoulders still bore the burden left behind by his just-departed parishioner. The vicar was followed by the housekeeper with the tea tray, and the next few moments were spent in the business of pouring and passing. By the time Charles was settled in his overstuffed chair by the fire, teacup and muffin plate on the table beside, the vicar's ruffled hair and troubled expression seemed somewhat soothed.
"Well, Sir Charles," he said, relaxing into his chintz chair opposite. "What brings you out on such a dismal day?"
"A question or two," Charles said, "concerning the man whose body was found in the Colchester digs."
The vicar raised an eyebrow. "Ah, yes," he said, filling his pipe with tobacco. "And what has been discovered thus far about the unfortunate gentleman?"
"Very little," Charles admitted. "We have a nationality- French-and a name-Monsieur Armand-although whether either are precisely correct is difficult to say."
"We?" the vicar asked. "That is, you and-"
"The police, of course," Charles said. "Inspector Wain-wright refuses to bring the Yard into a matter that clearly requires more resources than he has. I am doing what I can, which I fear is deuced little."
"To be sure," the vicar replied. He sipped his tea. "Nothing else has been discovered?"
"The carriage he hired, in which I found a fingerprint. Unfortunately, the victim has already been buried, so I cannot discover whether it is his fingerprint or belongs to someone else. If a suspect is found, I shall certainly attempt to take his prints and look for a match. And something else," he added casually. "A bit of feather. Pavo christatm."
The vicar glanced up sharply, then went back to his pipe. Watching, Charles thought he saw an intensification of the troubled look the old man had worn when he came in the room. ' 'Found the carriage, did you?'' he remarked, propping his feet on the chintz-covered stool in front of him. "That took a bit of luck." He smiled. "Or deft detecting."
Charles nodded. "The peacock feather, I have been told, is the insignia of the Order of the Golden Dawn."