Imogen Robertson - Circle of Shadows

‘What will happen to the Countess when I am done here, Mr Krall?’

Krall kept his back turned. ‘This afternoon a carriage will stop at a little out-of-the-way place between here and the Countess’s estate near Leuchtenstadt. A lady, apparently taken very ill with fever on the road, will be carried in. The house will be cleared to save the inhabitants from infection. Her private doctor will attend her, but she will die tomorrow evening. The doctor will insist she completes the journey to her estate in a closed coffin, again to avoid infection, and she will be buried at the parish church the next day.’ Crowther nodded and began his work.

It was with great sadness he saw earth in the stomach and throat. Of Kupfel’s strange drug of pacification he could find no sign, and no other sign of violence on the corpse other than the wound on the wrist. There was nothing that would speak to him. He noticed that her nails were very short. He could still smell rosewater on her skin.

‘There is no need to turn round, Krall,’ he said at last. ‘But could you have water fetched please, and fresh linens.’

The waterfall was indeed a pretty place. Michaels had led the priest and Georg up the track, having told them his only clue was the word of a simpleton, but they still came readily enough. The priest of Oberbach was a man of about his own age who said at once he thought it his duty to go with them, and Georg was happy to lend his shovels and his sweat for the price of a drink.

The path to the base of the waterfall was narrow and overgrown. Where it reached the base of the falls it widened out into a flattish space where a small party might watch the waters tumble down in stages, veils of white spume rushing from one stage to the next over granite edges. The banks were thick with bright green moss and bracken beginning to unfold. Spring seemed to be advancing more quickly here.

The priest sat on a flat rock on the edge of the clearing and removed his glasses to polish the spray off them. ‘This used to be a favoured spot for courting couples when I was a child,’ he said, hooking them back over his ears and squinting up the slope to where the head of the falls was lost among the beech and brambles. ‘After the war it became the fashion for the young people to meet more under their parents’ eye and parade around the square. I wonder why that was?’

‘Too many bastards and six-month babies bred in the woods,’ Georg said, yawning. ‘And Gertie, who used to live in the farm by the track before Rebecca, was a bitter woman! No one could walk by without her offering some spiteful comment then running into town to tell everyone who had passed. It became a byword for a girl having a bit of a slip, you know. People used to whisper that she’d been “taken to the falls”.’

‘Oh, I see,’ the priest said, smiling. ‘Look — Herb-Robert! Spring will come, after all.’

Michaels paced the edge of the clearing. ‘She said that she left a wreath on the grave.’

Georg poked at the ground with his shovel. ‘The bank is too steep for burying on the other side. If the girl is here she’s within thirty yards east of this spot. Now the brambles are thick and old, so let’s look for where they ain’t.’

‘Shall I …?’ The priest looked up at them.

‘No, Father,’ Georg said. ‘You take your rest here and look at your flowers. We’ll call you if we find anything.’ Then he added more quietly to Michaels, ‘You know God loves you when He sends you an honest landlord and a blind priest. You sweep to the right, me to the left.’

It took some forty minutes before they found it. Michaels had to work hard to focus his eyes as he worked. He wondered if the villagers had betrayed him, murdered the blacksmith and decided it was safer to blame him for the death than pass it off as accidental. He should have abandoned Mrs Padfield’s sister and simply ridden out until he got back to England. To stay so close to that mean little village on the word of a simpleton and for a stranger … He could have reached the coast and arranged for word to be sent back to Mrs Westerman. What did these deaths mean to any of them? They had enough to spring Clode from prison, and surely that was all that was needed. They could let the court look to its own and head back to where they were wanted. He put his hand to his beard and pulled at it. Not that he had any right now to curse someone for interfering. He had seen that child all bloody and acted because he had a back broad enough, an arm strong enough and all his conviction. Well, Mrs Westerman and Mr Crowther had the learning and the smartness, their way of going about in the world, and they had their convictions too.

He frowned. There was an old trunk fallen a yard or two away, propped up on its own stump and bleached. Something hung on it, a woven circlet of twigs and reeds with the remains of rotted flowers dotted round it, held like a murderer’s body in the cage to decay in public. Behind it lay a rockfall spotted over with bracken and bramble and new saplings struggling for their chance at light with greedy new leaves. There was something wrong in the way the soil lay. He felt a turn of sadness in his stomach and called Georg to his side.

‘What do you think?’

The man came and fiddled with the scarf around his throat. ‘I’ll fetch the shovels.’

As soon as they felt the soil with the blades they nodded at each other. The priest had come with Georg, and was knocking the brambles away from his coat with his Bible. He noticed them pause.

‘What is it? Have you found something?’

‘Not yet, Father,’ Georg said, moving the earth in shallow bites. ‘But we will. The earth here has been dug.’

They worked slowly, and from their first sight of a snap of fabric, got on to their knees and used the shovels as if they were trowels. Michaels had thought to bring the priest along only because he knew it was right to have some sort of authority in the place as they did this work, but now as the patch of fabric became a dress it was a comfort to hear his voice reading quietly from the Book of Psalms. He was very different from the drunkard in Mittelbach. No smell of brandy on him, but a weary sweetness in his manner that Michaels felt as something like a blessing.

Michaels began to work along the dress, loosening the soil until he realised he was not feeling vines now in the earth under his fingertips but human hair. The priest paused. She had been buried face down.

Sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat and muck from his eyes, Georg said, ‘She needs a box to put her in, and we’ll need a few extra hands to manage her back along the way.’ He stood and brushed the soil from his knees. ‘Will you come back with me, Father?’

‘No, no,’ the priest said quietly. ‘I’ll watch with Mr Michaels over this poor soul.’ The dress was a dark blue.

Harriet returned to the palace with a fierce frown drawing her eyebrows together and Graves staggering under the weight of a number of volumes. He placed them carefully on the little writing-table in her room and gingerly stretched his fingers.

‘I hope you made more of that than I did, Mrs Westerman,’ he said.

‘I can hardly say, Graves,’ she said, taking the first volume from the pile and turning the pages. ‘Alchemy again. These drawings are very beautiful, are they not? But they seem to me to be fairy stories for adults. With so many meanings available … it is like some drug for the imagination. Everything has a dozen possible resonances and so a manner of significance to every creature on God’s earth.’

Graves drew a circle on the polished surface of the little walnut side-table next to him. ‘An alchemical emblem of life and balance scrawled on the wall where a woman is murdered.’