Imogen Robertson - Instruments of Darkness

Graves drank from his coffee and waited. He had never seen Mr. Chase look so uncomfortable. He kept pulling his waistcoat straight over his generous belly till Graves worried about the strain on his well-stitched buttonholes.

“Alexander did not only desert his family over love of his wife.” Graves stayed very still. Mr. Chase glanced up at him, then back to his waistcoat, turning one bone button back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “He suspected his father of something. A crime-a bad one. Something that disgusted him, at any rate. His mother died, you know, when he was just a scrap of a lad.”

Mr. Chase abandoned the button and began to draw furiously on his pipe, as if he wished to disappear behind its cloud. His eyes darted back to Graves’s brown eyes and away again.

“Can you tell me no more?” Graves looked hard at him.

Mr. Chase hunched his shoulders and looked fixedly over Graves’s shoulder.

“No. He was drunk when he told me that much. There was mention of a locket. Some tin locket.”

“Alexander was drunk ?”

“He had his slips, like any man-though I never saw him touch a drop of anything stronger than punch after the children were born. It was hard for him, starting out though, and for Elizabeth. Not a life he was used to. But whatever pride he had, he set it down and set to. The first plates he made, he made a hash of, lost some pounds on it and it hit him hard that night. But I went to see him the following day and he was back at his work. He grew to love it in the end.”

Graves let himself fall back slightly against the dark wood of his little bench.

“I see. But can you really tell me nothing more than this?”

“It may be nothing. Or nonsense.”

“If you thought it all nonsense,” Graves said, “I don’t think you would have told me.”

Mr. Chase gave a reluctant smile. “Maybe. I think I am just adding my warning to Susan’s, to deal carefully with the Hall. Alexander had good reasons for staying clear, and we must be circumspect and watch over the children.”

Graves had just opened his mouth to ask something further when the door swung open. A lad in a dirty greatcoat three growths too large for him, his face streaked with soot and sweat, held it wide and yelled into the room. The blue cockade in his hat hung forward like a drunken devil urging him on.

“The mob are up and working! Look to your business, gentlemen! Down with popery!”

Several men stood. Mr. Landers crossed himself and shouldered his way out of the door. There was a general bustle as bills and coats were gathered. Mr. Chase looked grim.

“Come on, lad. Let us see what is afoot.”

The back room of the Bear and Crown was crowded again, and although the populace of Hartswood had brought in the smells and tastes of high summer on their clothes and skin, the mood was dark. The room buzzed with low threat and fear. News passed from mouth to mouth, whispered, urgent; men and women bent their heads together and pulled apart, paler. Harriet found herself looking swiftly about the place as she entered like an animal looking for escape routes and hiding places.

The coroner was not yet in his chair, but sat in the furthest corner of the room. Towering over him, his hand on his elbow, his heavy face a little flushed, was the squire. The coroner looked up at him, and Harriet was reminded of a pet rabbit she had had as a girl, who, if anyone other than her mistress approached the cage, would cringe back, her ears flat, eyes wide, nose twitching. A fox had got her in the end. The jury shuffled in the opposite corner like a threatened flock, pulling themselves inward, looking at their boots.

Crowther set down chairs and Rachel and Harriet took their places beside him. The presence of the vicar had prevented any sort of conversation between them. Harriet had murmured something to him of her visit to Wicksteed and received nothing more than a nod. Her own speaking looks of inquiry met with no better-simply a frown and a wave of the hand. Rachel had hold of the young lad, Jack, who had found Nurse Bray’s body, and was trying to talk to him, but Harriet could tell that her sister’s thoughts were wandering. The boy had to tell her twice what his favorite duties were in the Thornleigh household. He had arrived walking by Hugh, or rather a little behind him, but when he noticed Rachel in the crowd he had made straight for her and taken her hand. Thornleigh had merely greeted them and turned away.

The squire released the coroner and swung his eyes across the room. He offered a stiff nod to the party from Caveley Park, and seemed almost on the point of approaching them when the vicar slid softly to his side. The squire bent his head to listen, then shot a look of alarm across at them and to where Hannah stood by Michaels’s massive bulk and his slim wife at the back of the room. Without taking his eyes off the conversation Crowther leaned over slightly to Mrs. Westerman and spoke to her, barely opening his lips.

“The squire fears we are in danger of hanging Mr. Thornleigh, and would rather we did not.” He saw Harriet stiffen slightly. “He may challenge what we have to say, Mrs. Westerman. Are you sure you should be here?”

Harriet looked about her. The faces of her neighbors were uncertain and strained. There was no one in the room who did not know about Joshua, and none, she suspected, that did not know of the experiment with Michaels’s dog. The inquest might just have the name of Madeleine Bray on the docket at the moment, but the room was alive with a doubly murderous fear.

“We will stay. But where is Alexander?”

Crowther blinked slowly. “I have the name of the street in London, but Mrs. Westerman, I must tell you, the squire knows something of me that you do not. .”

She turned and looked at him sharply, but before he could continue, the coroner took his place and cleared his throat.

“We are gathered here to inquire into the death of Miss Madeleine Bray who, it seems, hanged herself in the old cottage on the edge of the Thornleigh woods this Saturday just past …”

There was a general drawing in of breath, and a groan from the back of the room.

“Murdered, man! Hung ’ersel, indeed.”

Harriet glanced at Michaels, who had moved up alongside them and was staring with steady attention at the coroner. Another voice growled from the window, “And Joshua murdered too only yesterday-or are we calling that an accident?”

The crowd murmured agreement. The coroner’s eyes flicked around the room, and he licked his lips. The squire raised his voice.

“There is evidence that that death too was accidental,” he said, and the crowd grumbled, “but I must have quiet, please. Gentlemen-and ladies,” he added with a nod toward Harriet and Rachel, then shuffling his papers he continued with a sniff, “Sorry to see you here again, Mrs. Westerman.”

Harriet flushed a little, but remained looking straight ahead of her. The coroner cleared his throat again, his eyes spun about in his head, and Harriet imagined what he would look like if she pulled off his wig and stamped on it. The image gave her a grim satisfaction, though she was careful not to smile.

“But we are here to discuss only the death of Nurse Bray, if you please,” the coroner continued primly. “Now the jury have viewed the body in the chapel at Thornleigh Hall.” Crowther turned pointedly in his chair to look at where the squire was standing, as immobile as Michaels on the other wall. He met his eye steadily. The coroner hurried on: “And we saw there no evidence of anything suspicious.”

Crowther stood up. “Nonsense!”

The crowd began to whisper. The coroner fluttered his hands in the air.

“Mr. Crowther, please be seated! This is a court of law.”