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Susan came back, silently leaving a bowl of steaming water on the table, with a clean cloth. Eliza pictured Mrs Furniss dampening the cloth, the tenderness on her face as she’d sponged his skin. (She’d seen it then, but was too naïve to trust her own eyes.) She managed to stop him pacing and pin him against the wall long enough to clean the worst of the dried blood from his forehead and down his cheek. He flinched as she pressed around his jaw, and let out a jagged cry as she applied the cloth to the curve of his neck. Pulling his bloodstained shirt open, she sucked in a breath.
You didn’t have to be a nurse to know that the hard lump pushing the bruised skin upwards shouldn’t be there. She couldn’t be sure what that bone was called, but she was one hundred per cent certain that whatever its name was it was supposed to be straight.
‘It’s all right…’ she soothed, and she wondered if he could hear the ache of longing in her voice. ‘It’s broken, but you’ll live…’
‘Not if Henderson comes down.’ He spoke through gritted teeth, his eyes swivelling desperately to the door. ‘Look, I just need to see Kate—’
Abigail’s footsteps rang along the corridor. Jem started forward as she appeared in the doorway, shaking her head.
‘If she won’t come down, I understand—’ His voice was raw and desperate. ‘But please—tell her I—’
‘It’s not that.’ Abigail sounded almost afraid. ‘She’s not there.’
Afterwards Eliza remembered it as if it happened with no sound.
Jem moving past her, brushing her hand away as she tried to stop him. The urgency coming off him, like a physical force. She and Abigail following him out into the corridor. They were a few steps behind him as he ran to the housekeeper’s parlour, so she didn’t see him knock, or watch him go in.
They only saw him come out again, stumbling, his face milk-white, his hands held out to stop them going further.
And she wished that she’d let him.
That she hadn’t seen Henderson, slumped in Mrs Furniss’s little velvet armchair, which wasn’t pale blue anymore, but crimson. Like his shirt, and his hand hanging down, and his dripping fingers.
Crimson, like Mrs Furniss’s chatelaine, lying on the floor beside him in a coil of chains.
Like the scissors, with their sticky blades open.
Chapter 33
A fug of steamy warmth clouded the tea shop windows, obscuring the street outside. After Derbyshire, London seemed oddly warm—there was no sign of any recent snow—and after Coldwell the Lyons Corner House on Tottenham Court Road felt stifling. Kate had unbuttoned her coat but stopped short of taking her gloves off. A woman alone, she felt conspicuous enough as it was.
She sipped her tea and looked without enthusiasm at the dry slice of Madeira cake she had ordered. She had got off the train at St Pancras a little over an hour ago and felt as dazed and disorientated as if she’d landed on some distant foreign shore. It was impossible to comprehend that at the same hour yesterday she’d been making preparations for the servants’ ball, moving through the rooms that had been her world for almost ten years, with no inkling that before the day was over she would have left them forever.
But she couldn’t allow herself to think of Coldwell, or of Jem. Not now. (An emotional unravelling would draw even more attention than removing her gloves.) She was a servant, skilled at hiding her feelings. Numbly she unfolded the copy of the Evening Standard she had bought outside the underground station and pushed aside the unappetizing Madeira cake to make room for it on the table.
The advertisements for employment and accommodation were near the back, but as she went to turn the page a small front headline snagged her attention, one familiar word leaping out as if it had been written in six-inch scarlet letters.
MURDER AT COLDWELL HALL
At the next table the two elderly ladies stopped their conversation and looked round, eyes stretched with alarm at the gasp she made.
‘My dear, are you quite well?’
She nodded, unable to find her voice. Folding the newspaper and picking up Lady Hyde’s valise, she left the tea and cake and a scattering of coins on the table as she blundered clumsily to the door, to gulp the cool outside air.
It was an hour later, as the train she had hastily boarded slid past the goods yards and engine sheds of Victoria Station and began to gather pace, that she pulled out the paper and read the story properly.
Mr Frederick Henderson, valet to Sir Randolph Hyde, Fifth Baronet Bradfield of Coldwell Hall, Derbyshire, was discovered by household staff in the housekeeper’s parlour in the early hours of Wednesday, December 27th, having suffered a single stab wound to the neck. The instrument of his misfortune was a pair of sewing scissors, attached to the housekeeper’s chatelaine. The housekeeper herself, a Mrs Kate Furniss, had fled the house and remains at large. She is described as being of slim build, with dark hair and of refined appearance, aged approximately thirty years, and is wanted by the police for an interview.
The train plunged into a tunnel. In the carriage window the ghost of Mrs Kate Furniss stared back at her for a second, all hollows and shadows. And then the train emerged again, into the light of the dreary December afternoon, and she disappeared.
I don’t remember much about it.
The police came, and Dr Seymour. I don’t know who sent for them—Goddard, I suppose. The doctor must have given me something to knock me out, though I would never have agreed to it if I’d known. I was desperate to find you. I woke up in the cottage hospital at Hatherford with my arm strapped across my chest—a broken collarbone and a fractured jaw, they said.
I was there for a week, paid for by Hyde, so I missed what went on at Coldwell, but Eliza came to visit and told me that the police had spoken to the musicians. They all remarked that you were tense and mostly silent in the motorcar, as if in shock or distress. You wanted to get to the station, even though there were no trains that night. And of course, you left Coldwell with no word to Goddard or Lady Hyde and no forwarding address for your sick mother, no instructions for the running of the household in your absence. The evidence was stacking up, and it all seemed to point to one conclusion.
Except everyone at Coldwell knew it wasn’t the truth.