“But now, at last, you can escape,” I said. “Have you set a date for your wedding?”
She stared at me. “Surely William told you? I think it’s best we don’t even speak of an engagement until after I’m of age, and can leave here.”
“You believe your guardian doesn’t wish you to marry?”
She gave a short, humourless laugh. “Oh, I believe he would like to see me married! A wife and a widow in the same day would please him very much!”
There was no point in beating about the bush. “Do you think he killed Mr Adcocks?”
She did not flinch. “No. Despite his fascination with the subject, Mr Harcourt is no murderer.”
“Do you suspect someone else?”
She did not reply. I thought I saw something cornered and furtive in her look. “Miss Bellamy,” I said gently, “however painful this is, we can’t help unless you tell me what it is you suspect, or fear, no matter how slight or strange. Were you there, did you see anything, when Mr Adcocks was attacked?”
She shook her head. “I bade him goodnight and went up to my room. I thought he was safe…”
“And your guardian?”
“He was shut up in his room, as usual.”
I looked towards the house, but the ground floor was shielded from my view by shrubs and foliage. “Is there another exit? From his room?”
“No. And I would not have missed the sounds if he’d left the house.”
“Who murdered Mr Adcocks?” I asked suddenly.
“No one.”
“And yet he is dead.”
“He was killed by a powerful blow to his head. The blow came from a walking stick. Can it be called murder, is it even a crime, without human intervention?”
I had seen objects levitate, hover, move about, even shoot through the air as if hurled with great force, although no one was near. Usually there was trickery involved; but not always. I had seen what I believed to be the effect of mind over matter, and also witnessed what was called poltergeist – the German for “noisy spirit” – activity. Yet I was deeply suspicious of everything attributed to the action of “spirits”. I had yet to encounter anything that was not better explained by the power of the human mind.
“What are you saying?” I asked her gently. “You believe that the stick, an inanimate object, moved, and killed a man, of its own volition?” Yet even as I asked, the memory of the malignant power I had sensed in that very stick, only a few minutes earlier, made me much less certain that I was right to imply the impossibility of such a thing.
“Have you ever heard of a deodand?”
“I’m not familiar with the word.”
“It’s a term from old English law: deo, to God, dandum, that which must be given. It referred to any possession which was the immediate cause of a person’s accidental death. The object was then forfeit to the Crown, to be put to some pious use.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and she smiled. “That walking stick was a deodand. Not officially; it’s hardly that old. But it was the proximate cause of death to a young man almost seventy years ago – so my guardian told me.
“And the unpleasant stone gargoyle beside the stair? It fell off the tower where it had been placed many centuries before, and killed a mother and child.
“My guardian collects such things, along with his morbid keepsakes from actual murders.
“He gave Archie that stick, knowing what it was, and suspecting what it would do.” She stopped and passed a hand across her brow. “What am I saying? Of course he didn’t suspect. Why should he? None of them had ever hurt him, or me. Not even when I was a child who played with whatever took my fancy – he wouldn’t let me touch anything dangerous, of course, nothing sharp or breakable. I whispered secrets in the gargoyle’s ear, even used to kiss it, and it was that gargoyle-” She stopped, her hand to her mouth.
I waited for her to go on.
“It was in the wrong place, too near the stair. I thought perhaps, when the maid washed the floor, she’d pushed it out, but she insisted she never did. Yet it was not where it usually was, and that’s why Archie stumbled against it, and wrenched his ankle.
“It happened again, just a few days ago, to Will. He fell over it, and if I hadn’t caught him, he might have struck his head, might have been killed, just like Archie!”
“Someone moved it,” I said, trying to inject a note of reason. “If not the maid, then your guardian, or a mysterious stranger. And if Mr Randall’s stumble had resulted in a serious injury, even death, that would have been an accident; no one could possibly call it murder, even if someone moved the gargoyle.
“But that stick… I really can’t imagine that a stick, in Mr Adcocks’s possession, could have caused his death without the intervention of another person. If you think your guardian was controlling it, willing it to strike-”
“No! Why would he do that? Even if he had the ability, why would he want to kill my fiancé when he was looking forward to seeing how I would cause his death?”
She had gone white except for two hectic splashes of red in her cheeks. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course not. Because you don’t understand that I, too, am a deodand. I am the gem of his collection. My early history explains why he took me in. I killed my entire family before I was two years of age.”
I gripped her hands. “Miss Bellamy-”
“I am utterly sane,” she said calmly. “I am not hysterical. These are the facts. Being born, I brought about the death of my mother.”
“That’s hardly-”
“Unique? I know. Listen. Nine months later, my father was taking his motherless children on holiday when we were involved in a railway accident. In the crash, my brother, a child of two, was thrown to the floor, as was I. I landed directly on top of him, a fact which may have saved me from injury, but caused his death. I have never known whether he died of suffocation, or if my weight broke his neck.”
“No one could call that your fault,” I said, trying not to dwell on the image.
“I know that,” she said, pulling her hands away. “Believe me, I am not such a fool as to think it was anything other than extremely bad luck. I have had many years to come to terms with my past. I do not require your pity. I tell you this only so you may understand Mr Harcourt’s interest in me.
“My father was injured in the accident. Some months later he was still in an invalid chair, needing a nurse to help him in and out and wheel him about. We’d gone out for a walk- When I say ‘we’, I mean my father in his chair pushed by his nurse, a young man, and I in my pram, pushed by mine, a pretty young woman. We stopped at a local beauty spot to admire the view. My nurse put me down on a blanket on the grass, near to my father, who was dozing in the sun, and then I suppose they must have stopped paying much attention to anything but each other as they fell to flirting. I hadn’t yet learned to walk, but I was getting better at standing up, and as I hauled myself to my feet, using my father’s chair as support, somehow I must have let off the brake – maybe the nurse hadn’t properly set it – and as he rolled away, I just watched him go, picking up speed, until I saw the chair carrying my last living relative go over the edge of the cliff, and bear him to his death on the rocks below.”
I made no further effort to comfort her, unable to find the words. “So Mr Harcourt considers you as some sort of loaded weapon in his possession? Ready to go off when you are loved?”