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‘I’ve come from Coldwell,’ Jem said. ‘I work there. I want to report something that happened a while ago—nine years. A boy went missing.’ He hardened his tone. ‘I believe he was killed.’
Constable Hollinshead’s eyebrows climbed up his smooth, pink forehead. Keeping his eyes downcast, he shut the pamphlet he’d been reading (a seed catalogue; that colourful garden obviously didn’t take care of itself) and lined up the pencil and fountain pen at the edge of the blotter. His movements were precise and unhurried.
‘Is that so?’ He folded his arms and looked at Jem thoughtfully across the desk. ‘A murder investigation, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case, lad, you’d better sit down.’
Chapter 23
By half past four the day’s gloom had thickened into dusk. In the hour when she would usually have been sitting in the housekeeper’s parlour catching up on mending, Kate made her way slowly upstairs to take fresh towels to Lady Hyde’s rooms.
It was a job she could have given to one of the girls, but they were in the stillroom, where the stove was warm, the lamp burned cheerfully, and the smell of proving bread ripened the air. Kate was glad to find something to do upstairs, in a part of the house where Frederick Henderson had no business.
He and Sir Randolph had been back for two hours at the most, but already she was wondering how she would bear it. He had claimed the housekeeper’s parlour with the same entitlement as he had tried to claim her that night in the gamekeeper’s cottage. The same casual assumption that what was there was his, to take and use.
He made sure that she was never able to forget that. Even when he wasn’t in the parlour, he left his stamp on the room. She couldn’t go in there without finding his coat thrown over the back of her chair, a coffee cup and a plate of crumbs left on her desk. The smell of him. Hair oil. Meat. Sweat. It made her stomach rise.
Lady Hyde’s room smelled comfortingly feminine, of Floris soap and rose potpourri. Kate took the towels through to the bathroom and went to the window to lower the blinds. She paused briefly beside the bath, resting her fingers against the cold enamel and remembering… silken water, her body warm and loose and thrumming. The way Jem had made everything seem simple and possible, quietly pushing back the boundaries that had narrowed her world, loosening her laces so she could breathe. The way he had brought her briefly to life.
Like a dragonfly. A short spell in the sunlight before the darkness closed in.
At the window she looked out over the parkland, raking the winter twilight for the shape of him or the glow of his cigarette as he walked. But the gloom was unbroken, and the church on the hill had already been swallowed by the encroaching night. And anyway, it was no business of hers where he was or when he would be back. Whether he was all right.
She left Lady Hyde’s room and went back along the dimly lit corridor. Her footsteps slowed as she came to the bedroom he had pulled her into on that sweet autumn afternoon. She watched her hand reach out, as if to touch the brass handle.
But she withdrew it, leaving the room closed up, its stillness and shrouded furniture and memories undisturbed.
The night smelled of sheep and sodden earth, with an iron tang of frost. The cold stung inside Jem’s nose and made his eyes water, though he didn’t particularly notice. The track was uneven and difficult to walk in the dark, even if he’d been sober. Which he wasn’t.
He very much wasn’t.
He had no idea what time it was but suspected he would find the back door locked when he reached the house. Goddard barely emerged from his room these days, but even he was likely to notice a footman coming in drunk, and after the curfew. For one misdemeanour he might get away with a reprimand and docked wages, but two…
He swore softly and walked faster.
It was probably time to leave anyway. At least now he knew the circumstances of his brother’s disappearance, though he might never discover exactly what had happened after Mullins had parted company from Jack that night. Constable Hollinshead certainly had no interest in finding out.
‘I remember the incident, as it happens…’ the policeman had said with mild curiosity, leaning back and folding his arms across his straining shirtfront. ‘I was stationed at Glossop at the time. Sergeant Timmis put a call out for men to go over and help with the search. Quite a team of us, there was… Weather was bloody awful—about this time of year, as I recall.’
Jem had listened with his jaws clamped tightly shut against a rising tide of frustration at the man’s casual indifference. He might have been leaning against the bar in the White Hart, relaying an amusing anecdote about a lost dog over a pint of ale.
‘We had a good look, of course…’ Hollinshead had stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Big place, Coldwell, as you know. We combed the woods and checked all the outbuildings, but no sign of the lad. Someone found a length of red silk, which it turned out had been wrapped around his head in the manner of a turban. The gentlemen had been enjoying an Indian banquet, you see, in homage to an ancestor of Mr Hyde’s, and the young man had been dressed up in the costume of an Indian servant boy. So, the silk was found, but not the jewel it was fastened with, which, it turned out, was a very ancient and valuable emerald, fashioned to look like a tiger’s eye, brought back from India by a previous Baronet Bradfield. The clothes the lad was wearing when he’d arrived the day before were gone as well, while the Indian get-up he’d worn to serve at dinner was left in their place…’
With that, the policeman had opened his large hands, as if presenting the shining truth. ‘So, there we are. It’s true the lad was never found, but that’s because Mr Hyde and Sir Henry were good enough not to press charges. Information was circulated to jewellers’ shops, but likely he would have sold the gem in an alehouse somewhere for a fraction of its worth. Most servants are honest—I’m sure you are yourself—but there’s always a few bad apples who’ll take advantage. I hope that puts your mind at rest…’
It had not.
Jem’s mind had been very far from at rest as he stumbled out into the street again. It churned and seethed and swarmed with dark thoughts. With the rest of his day off ahead of him, he only knew that he wasn’t going back to Coldwell before he had to, and so had walked, away from Howden Bridge on the road to Hatherford, where he had wandered from one public house to another, finding a seat in the farthest corners, speaking little, drinking a lot.
When he emerged, blinking, from the warm beer fug of the town’s least salubrious alehouse, he was surprised to discover that it was dark and a watery moon was spinning above the rooftops, bouncing between chimney pots. He had hitched a lift on a farmer’s cart as far as Howden Bridge and had fallen into a jolting, uncomfortable doze propped up against the milk churns until he was prodded awake at the crossroads.
The effects of the beer were wearing off now, and the cold air brought a certain clarity to his senses. Since he had left the police house his thoughts had been in a dark spiral, sucked down and inwards by the force of his bitterness. For the first few pints of ale, Hyde and Henderson had been at the forefront of his mind, the centre of the vortex; but as the afternoon wore on, hatred had burned down into maudlin sorrow and he had found himself thinking of Jack, swiping away tears with his shirtsleeve as he sifted through his memories of the boy that everyone else seemed determined to pretend had never existed.
But now, lurching over the rough ground and jolted back towards relative sobriety, he could think only of Kate. He passed Black Tor, a silhouette against the pewter night with ghost sheep huddled beneath it, and felt himself falling helplessly back through time to the day of the fair.
The cold stung his lungs. He tipped his head up to the stars and felt despair scour his insides. He remembered how she’d looked that day, her blouse sticking to her wet skin, her hair slipping from its pins. And how guarded she’d been, how spiky, and how unexpectedly protective it had made him feel. As well as other, less noble, things.