Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

‘You have it?’ Stephen nodded and patted his waistband. ‘Good lad.’

‘You have not found her.’

Casper suddenly picked up the kettle from its place by the fire and threw it with all his strength across the camp. It clattered loudly against the rocks on the far side of the clearing. Joe fluttered up and cawed. Stephen remained very still. ‘Nowhere! Nowhere! I know every mine dug on these hills since Queen Bess! Every nook and cranny of them! I’ve hammered and yelled at every seal to the mines. Any that are open I have crawled through like a rat and nothing! Nothing! And the nails on the barriers rusted and old each one. Where is she?’ He dropped onto one of the stone benches and put his head in his hands. ‘I lose hope, boy. Three days, and she is gone as a ghost! His clothes smelled of earth, deep earth. But nothing, nothing and nothing. They must have drowned her. Poor Agnes, poor clever Agnes.’

Stephen sat down next to him and put his thin arm across his shoulders. Casper turned towards him, and Stephen felt his forehead rest on his shoulder for a second. He smelled of air and sweat and tobacco.

‘Can you use the Luck to find her?’ He drew the case out of his waistband with his free hand and placed it on Casper’s knee. ‘Is there not some magic?’

Casper wiped his face on his sleeve. ‘Nay, youngling. If the Luck wishes her found, it will find its own way to do it. It guides and protects and punishes in its own way, not by simple men like me mumbling over it.’ As he spoke he took the case in his hands and held it lovingly. ‘I hope it may. Perhaps it tests us.’ He was stroking the leather of the case. ‘My da made this for it a long time ago now. The pox came in fifty-four, and everyone was so afraid. It is a foul way to die. They say it strikes those who fear it most, like a devil. The skin breaks and bleeds and people go wild and desperate in their pain, spitting and screaming till they are not man or woman or child, but some lost demon.’ Stephen shuddered. ‘My da did his duty. He covered the Luck and each night took it to every house where the pox was burning some poor soul. You ever seen it?’

Stephen shook his head.

‘Pray you don’t. Fever first, and cramps. Then they’d take to their beds and the pustules would come. Fat and seeping and the stink of them. . they make you rot before you die, and so many their own mother wouldn’t know them. The things they’d call out.’

‘Did the Luck help?’ Stephen said quietly.

‘It calmed them, and calmed their people. We thought it had passed. Then my dad fell, getting from his bed in the Black Pig. I put it under his pillow, but he went hard anyway. Whatever sin he ever did, he paid for it then.’ He turned and spat onto the ground, then handed the leather pouch back to Stephen. ‘You take it, boy. It’s safer with you for now — the magistrate might get me yet. Gentry you may be, but for now you are Luck-keeper of this place.’

Stephen nodded and placed it back in his belt. ‘There’s something else.’

‘What, lad?’

‘That man from Portinscale, the young one?’

‘Swithun Fowler? Have you seen him scuttling about? What of him?’ Casper’s eyes had become bright and seeing again.

‘I saw him as I was coming out from the Black Pig last night. He was leaving his mother’s cottage and heading north. There was something strange about his arm. The sleeve was torn, and I think I saw blood on it. Looked like it was hurting him. It wasn’t when we saw him the morning after you got beaten.’

‘Was it now? North. . is he hiding in Thornthwaite? We’ve visited all the old holes there, but I didn’t have an eye out for a camp. Thought they’d have fled further by now. What holds them?’ Casper reached down to where Joe was hopping and pecking at his feet. Stephen could feel the excitement in the man’s bones. The jackdaw stepped daintily onto his forefinger and allowed himself to be lifted up. ‘Arm hurt, hey? It wasn’t us that did that, was it? What do we say to that, Joe?’

‘Good, good!’

Harriet heard a knock at the museum’s front door, then the sound of Stella greeting Ham. She stepped back briskly from the office into the main room. Even with her injured ankle Stella had made a fine job of clearing the space, and Harriet said so. The girl smiled.

‘Thought I’d never heal, madam. But it’s taking my weight better and better now.’ The museum looked as if it could be reopened within the hour, were it not for the body of the owner with his bruised and broken neck lying in the other room. Ham was looking flustered.

‘Ham, you have been sent to us again! Is all well at Silverside?’

‘Yes, Mrs Westerman, or I don’t rightly know. Seems there might have been words between Mrs Briggs and the Vizegrafin, not my place to say, of course!’ he added quickly, as if he had just admitted to the murder of Mr Askew himself.

Harriet smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry, Ham. But do you have some message for us?’

He looked startled again. ‘Yes, madam, just that Mrs Briggs asked if it might be possible to see you at once.’

Harriet frowned. ‘Mr Crowther and myself, Ham?’

‘She just said your name, madam. She was right fretted to have missed you at breakfast and has been darting back and forth to the window looking for you ever since. Worse since we heard about poor Mr Askew, then that lawyer came and went looking white.’

‘Hudson. White is the partner,’ Harriet said a little distractedly. The last thing she had any time for at this moment was a quarrel between the women at Silverside. She and Crowther had hardly been given a chance to speak to one another. Then she thought of the unanswered summons of Mr Askew and sighed. ‘One moment, Ham.’

She opened the door into the office once more. Crowther was still examining the wounds on Mr Askew’s hand. ‘You’re going,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question.

‘I am. Will you join me?’

He shook his head without looking at her. ‘No, I shall spend a little more time here, then perhaps ask that man to break the door down into Mr Askew’s apartments. I shall join you at Silverside later.’

The door closed and he was alone.

Mrs Briggs might have been keeping a close watch, but it was Felix who first appeared as Ham brought the carriage to a halt on the gravel path outside the house.

‘Mrs Westerman!’ he said, handing her down. ‘I went to the vicarage to see Sophia, but I was not allowed into the house. Miss Scales said she would not see me.’ He made his eyes wide and pleading. ‘She said she was not seeing anyone, but that was not true! Mr Postlethwaite was allowed to pay his respects, and Mr Sturgess. It is only myself she will not see.’

‘Does that surprise you, Felix?’ Harriet said rather impatiently and tried to move past him, but he laid his hand on her arm.

‘She wanted to see me before,’ he said, his grip tightening. Harriet looked at him — a child, she thought. That poor girl has married a spoiled child with an ugly temper, and now she will be saddled with him till he drinks himself to death or a boar catches up with him. Or a murder of crows. Perhaps it would have been better if the marriage had been kept secret; at least then Miss Hurst might have had the chance to make another choice.

‘She wanted to see you when her father went missing; she hoped to see you, no doubt, when her father was found murdered. Perhaps she thinks your visit unforgivably late.’

‘But she is my wife!’

‘She was your wife then too, Felix. And your wife when you left her with that monstrous father of hers and ran away to England with your mother.’ He turned pale, as if she had struck him, but did not release her arm. ‘Now let me go.’