Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

There was a sudden sharp turn which almost made her stumble — and there was light. It was a weak, hazy sort of light, but it seeped around the edge of the tunnel, like a silver lining on a thundercloud. She managed to get up onto her feet and shuffled towards it. Maybe they had only wanted to keep her out of the way for a day. She knew what sort of place this was now. A child had been lost in one of the ancient mines when she was an infant, and after that the townspeople had arranged for all the tunnels to be boarded up. Her own father had blocked up many of them. She must be behind one of those barriers. They had carried her through, then, no doubt, just propped it up again, knowing she’d free herself when she came to. Maybe they hadn’t even been beating on Casper after all. With the dark and the rain, how could she be sure? It had been nothing, a lark gone a bit far. As she got nearer to the light she felt a laugh bubble up inside her, and she was ready to shake her head at Swithun and box his ears and tell him all was forgiven. She reached the barrier and kicked at a likely-looking space near the base, expecting it to fall back and show her the sky and the hills and all the light. It did not move. She kicked harder, then again and again. It would not give. The laugh left her.

‘Damn you, let me out!’ she yelled at the wood. Then something caught her eye and she looked up to where the boards rested against the joists that framed the entrance to the mine. It was the end of a nail, clean and sharp. There were others. Fresh, rust-free. She dropped to her knees, trying to fight back down the panic that rose in her, but she could not. The rope cut into the flesh of her wrists. She remembered something from those first hours of pain and half-understood darkness. The sound of hammers. She wrapped her arms around her knees and tried to stop herself trembling.

The bell rang so brightly as Harriet and Crowther entered that the clerk, high and hunched on a stool by a desk in the shadows, almost fell from his perch and dropped his pen across his page. Crowther waited for him to recover himself as he looked about the room. It had not changed in its essentials since he visited it last some thirty years before. A dark wood floor, panelled walls and a smell of ink and dust in the air. It was here he had made the arrangements for the disposal of the estate and maintenance of his sister. Throughout his subsequent travels on the continent he had felt no need to change his representation, and it was through this office that he had heard of his sister’s marriage, the birth of her son and her separation. The oak panelling had absorbed it all.

There were a number of etchings hung about the walls, discreet and inoffensive as the firm which had handled his affairs for so long. Under them, along one wall was a long ottoman, upholstered in green leather, where a client might wait for the portals of the law to be opened to him. It was an impressive office for a solicitor in such a small and out-of-the-way place. Crowther supposed that the dealings with Silverside over the years had enriched it considerably, and his own fortune, ignored by himself, probably gave them business enough to employ a boy and an upholsterer.

The clerk had managed to recover his pen and his composure, and made a little bobbing bow. He was probably still well under twenty, and had the air of a boy caught out playing in his father’s office.

‘Mr Crowther, my lord? I am Dent, sir. Would you be wishing to see Mr Mark Leathes, sir? Let me just slip in and say you are here, and he will be with you directly.’ The youth paused and flushed, feeling perhaps he had mismanaged his speech. Then, deciding too much in way of respectful address was better than too little, he added an extra ‘sir’, looking at his shoes.

Crowther recognised the name. At some point the signatures that appeared on his business correspondence had changed from Thomas Leathes to Mark Leathes. He had been a little sorry that the old gentleman was not handling his concerns any longer and had turned away from his knives long enough to write and express his thanks for many years of service before putting the matter from his mind. His affairs continued to be managed efficiently, and the new Mr Leathes did not trouble him with too much correspondence.

Crowther agreed that he and Mrs Westerman would be glad of a moment of Mr Leathes’ time, and the lad was about to escape into the inner offices, when he turned and with another blush asked if either himself or Mrs Westerman were in need of any refreshment. Harriet smiled at him, and Crowther was surprised, as he often was, at how wide and open her smile could be. He wondered if her frank good humour was as genuine as it had been when he first met her. Perhaps. Just as he remained in his fifties the awkward, bookish boy he had once been, perhaps she too was still at her core the open-hearted, if wilful girl who had first made her husband love her by listening to his tales of adventure on the seas with that same delighted grin.

‘We have no need of anything at the moment, Mr Dent,’ she said, then as the boy slipped into the shadows, she turned from the engravings, saying, ‘Would it not be a delight, Crowther, to arrive in the offices of a lawyer and find his walls decorated with great oils of the Muses decked out in pink drapery?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Diverting perhaps, though I would not wish to trust such a lawyer with my business.’

She laughed softly, continuing to admire, or at least scrutinise, an engraving of The Royal Courts of London . ‘Because of the extravagance of the oils, or their subject?’

‘Both. Though I am glad to see these here, and they are not typical of a lawyer’s office, I think.’

She crossed to look at the engravings by which Crowther stood. They seemed to be technical drawings of various machines. Harriet saw in them a confusion of gears and wheels. They were pleasant enough compositions, but she could understand little of them.

‘The gentleman here has regularly invested my money in a number of manufacturing schemes in the northern counties. From their accounts he seems to have done so wisely. Indeed, I sometimes fear my money has managed to do more to grow the stock of knowledge and expertise in this country than I have done myself.’

‘Are you fearfully rich, Crowther?’

‘Fearfully. Quite rich enough to make murdering me for my money seem a risk worth taking.’

Harriet recalled what she had been told of Crowther’s interview with Felix that morning and grimaced. She would never succeed in puzzling out Crowther’s character. The thought of his nephew trying to murder him for his fortune seemed to have rather amused him.

The young Dent slid back into the room and behind his desk again, and Crowther noticed him glance at Harriet as he did so. He had taken the opportunity to smooth his hair. He was followed out in a very few moments by his master, a gentleman of roughly Harriet’s age with a long face and bags under his eyes, very respectably turned out and with an air of intelligent good humour. He was glad to welcome them and led them back into his own office with the minimum of chatter. Harriet wondered if he had learned enough of Crowther through their business correspondence to know this was by far the best way to deal with him.

He showed them into an office with a large window on one side that overlooked a neat flower-garden behind the house. Harriet had noticed on entering the offices of professional men in general, that if their rooms offered such a view they usually set their desks so they had their back to it, as if underlining their own seriousness with their refusal to enjoy such frippery things as the open air. Mr Leathes, however, had set up his desk the other way, at right angles to the window, so that, as he worked on his papers he might look up from time to time and watch the seasons change. Harriet was ready to like him for that, but before she could take her seat she was distracted by a fluttering in the garden, and going to the glass, saw that part of the little lawn was taken up with an aviary. She tilted her head to listen and realised that the air which struggled warmly through the open window was freshened with birdsong.