Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’

‘I’m sure Stillingfleet knew, but he’s not saying. Loyalty to the family. It was only a servant involved, I know, but this was an isolated community where a scandal would have torn through the county, and don’t forget that most people up here were still rigidly puritan in their outlook. William would have had a bad time of it if it had come out.’

‘At any rate, there was no Christian burial for Jayne’s child, no baptism even, and this would have been a horrifying thing for the mother. The child would have been condemned to eternal perdition.’

‘And this is when the nightly wailing starts?’

‘Yes. But Stillingfleet knows what to do. He makes a little coffin. He places the body inside with a copy of the words from the family motto…’

‘Wait a minute, though – it’s not quite the right wording, is it? Look at the third word. The motto is Deus tute me spectas. It should say “me”. “Thou, Lord, see’st me”, but this says “eum”. “Him”. God sees him. Who?’

‘I thought it might mean “God watch over him” – the child, that is.’

‘No. Spectas. It doesn’t mean look out for in the sense of watching over, it means see, look at.’

‘Well, I think this is as close as he dares get to an identification, a direct link with the Eastons. And one night, as the staircase is nearly finished, he fixes it up under a floorboard, replaces the floorboard, and says a burial service over it. It was the best he could do.’

‘Any more from the diary?’

‘Only this, but significantly – “Under the hand of God, I pray, I finish my work, and, all praise to Him, a quiet night at last.’“

We sat for a moment in silence. ‘I bet that was it, or something very like that,’ I said. ‘All quiet until I came along with a nail bar. What do we do now?’

‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ said Diana. ‘Look, Johnny is still here working on the stairs…do you think we could just put it back again? Say a few words, perhaps?’

‘Yes, I’m sure we could do that,’ I said.

We laid it back in its place and Johnny tapped nails back into position through the rim the thoughtful Hugo Stillingfleet had left for this purpose. The new nails sank in easily. We stood back and looked at each other uncertainly.

‘May he rest in peace and light perpetual shine upon him,’ said Diana quietly and clearly.

But something was worrying me. We had worked out a solution of sorts to an intriguing puzzle, but I hadn’t heard that satisfying click as the last piece of the jigsaw falls into place. We had heard the truth, I was sure, from Stillingfleet, but had we heard the whole truth? I didn’t think so.

I went to look again at the Easton portraits. I remembered Nicholas had said he would like to interrogate them. Well, why not? I thought I knew the right questions to ask, and I thought Peter Lely and his unknown pupil had given their subjects a voice which could still be heard over the years. I had released something which had lain dormant but only just contained through the years, and now I believed it was calling out for resolution and justice. The Norfolk police weren’t interested in knowing who had committed infanticide and possibly a second murder all those years ago, but I was.

I managed to evade the hypnotic stare of Wicked William and concentrated first on the sunny opulence of the wedding portrait. Robert and Mary Even the names were reassuringly solid. Following the painter’s clues, I knew that this couple had married in the autumn; their betrothal, according to Stillingfleet, had been in the summer of 1662, and presumably Robert had been pursuing this heiress during the previous London season. At the very time Jayne Marston had been sent away to the country. Had he known the sorry story of his sister Comfort’s maid? It was a family with a reputation for large-heartedness in its dealings with its retainers. Yes, he would have known. He would have been concerned. But concerned, perhaps, for another reason.

Mary’s fortune had saved the family and guaranteed his position in society. Robert would not have welcomed any breath of scandal to do with the family his golden goose was about to marry into. ‘Of Quaker stock,’ Nicholas had said. I looked again at the heart-shaped face, framed by wispy golden tendrils, the modest dress, the tightly pursed lips, and I wondered about Mary.

‘Was it to avoid offending you?’ I murmured, ‘That Jayne and her child were done away with? Too inconvenient, too vocal. A servant, yes, but so intertwined with the family she had forgotten her place and was making herself a nuisance? Would it have ruined Robert’s schemes if you’d discovered that his brother had seduced a family maid?’

I couldn’t believe that.

‘And why did you flee?’ I asked, turning at last to William, ‘Why didn’t you just tough it out?’ An earldom, the king’s supporters back in power again – the future looked good for William Easton. What was he fleeing? Not a family scandal – there must have been something more.

The dark eyes taunted, enticed, seduced. I speculated again about the identity of the unknown painter and was struck by a devastating thought. A thought so obvious and yet so shocking I groped my way to a Chippendale chair and, against all the house rules, sat down on it. The painter’s message now screamed out at me. How could I not have seen it before?

I heard Nicholas leaving the library and called out to him.

‘Ellie? You OK?’ He hurried to join me.

‘We’ve got it all wrong, Nicholas!’ I said. ‘Come and have a look again at Wicked William. He’s been wrongly accused! It couldn’t have been him!’

I positioned Nicholas in front of the portrait. ‘Now, imagine you’re the painter. And that, of course, in the sixteen sixties, means you’re a man. The sitter is reacting to you. What do you see?’

‘Oh my God!’ said Nicholas. ‘I see it! And to think that all these years women have been averting their eyes thinking he was trying to seduce them. He wasn’t at all, was he?’

‘No. I’m not sure they had a word for it in Cavalier England, but this chap was gay and proud of it, as you’d say.’

‘I’m certain they didn’t have a word for it in north Norfolk! And it was a capital offence at the time. “Death without mercy”, according to the Articles passed by Parliament in sixteen sixty-one. He could, technically, have been executed if discovered.’

‘What if he were discovered?’ I speculated. ‘Caught in flagrante with a handsome young painter, let’s say?’

‘He’d have had to flee to somewhere more worldly – to France…to Italy… Poor old Stillingfleet, holding all this together! But this is just guesswork, Ellie.’

‘Oh yes. But look at his hand, Nick! Do you see the flower he’s holding?’

Nicholas peered at the tiny purple face.

‘Always assumed it was a violet, but it’s not, you know! It’s heartsease. Common little English flower. It’s got a lot of names – love-lies-bleeding, love-in-idleness, la pensée in French, wild pansy.’

‘Exactly! Pansy! A badge. The seventeenth-century equivalent of a pink ribbon. That’s what you’d call flaunting it! So how likely is it that he’d be spending time in London undoing a lady’s maid? Possible, I suppose – but I can’t see it! No. I think we’ve got to look elsewhere for the father of that little scrap in the coffin.’

Our eyes turned on Robert’s handsome countenance. I waved a hand at his line of progeny. ‘It’s pretty obvious in which direction his preferences lay!’ I said with more than a touch of bitterness. ‘And he had such a lot to lose if his puritan bride-to-be were to catch him with his hand up a maid’s skirt! Mary doesn’t look the understanding kind to me!’