But he was regarding her with such tenderness, and he had never looked so well as he did now, his usual dignity all put aside, his brow furrowed, his eyes so anxious.
Her heart had won the day. She had granted the favour. When the gaming debts of his dissolute son were at last paid – when he had a home to offer a wife – Mr Lomax was authorised to apply to her again.
Of course, she remained determined against accepting. She instinctively shrank from that image which her lively imagination readily supplied – of esteem and affection all sunk into marital discord and resentment …
However, there was another image of the future which had lately begun to haunt her: an image of a lonely old maid shivering perpetually in Margaret’s attic – and that was sufficient to touch even Dido’s cheerful mind with despair.
Chapter Eleven
… Well, Eliza, I have very wisely determined to give myself no more pain by worrying over this visit of Mr Lomax. The resolution is, I think, a great proof of my strength of character. Though the keeping of it may prove my weakness …
But I shall write no more upon the subject – except to remind you of your promised secrecy – which you must be particularly careful to preserve if you should happen to see our cousin, Flora, while you are in town looking after Charles. I would not for the world have any of my acquaintance know of Mr Lomax’s offer, for I do not think there is one among them – excepting, of course, your dear self – who could resist advising me upon the subject. And that would be insufferable.
I certainly have more than enough carrying on here to distract me. And I hope, instead of pining, to prove myself worthy of my resolution by being useful to poor Mrs Harman-Foote. For the more I look about me, Eliza, the more certain I become that a very great injustice has been done: that Miss Fenn is innocent of the dreadful calumny which is charged against her and has been cast out into that terrible grave for no reason.
I must tell you about the drained pool.
I went to look at it yesterday, you see, and it provided a great deal more interest than one could reasonably expect from a muddy depression in the ground.
It was a bleak enough sight! Indeed there seemed to be a kind of gloom hanging over everything yesterday. Though it pains me to admit it, Margaret was right in supposing it would be rather dark before I reached the abbey. The sun was low in the sky. It was cold and still and damp, with the smoke from the house chimneys hanging low and sullen, and the grounds deserted, except for two men up on the lawns lopping branches from the fallen trees.
There was a sad, winter smell about the place: smoke and freshly cut wood, mud and bruised grass. When I first descended the steps in the bank and looked down into the pool it seemed unpromising. But there is this to be said for the business of mystery-solving: it can enhance the dullest scene with the thrill of discovery. For here was only an expanse of gently sloping mud, with a sort of large puddle collecting at its centre and its edges dry and cracking, except for the great wet hole – a yard or two from the bank and all trodden round with boot prints – which showed where the remains had been dug out.
And yet, there were two great points of interest. Can you discern them from my description? I charge you not to read on until you have tried to find them out …
Well, did you notice, first of all, that I said there was water collecting in the centre of the pool?
As yet it is no more than an inch or two deep, but it alerted me and, when I looked to the end of the lake, I saw that the dam is repaired. The pool is being refilled! Soon the place in which Miss Fenn lay will be lost once more beneath the water – and all its secrets sunk with it!
Do you not think that this has a very suspicious appearance? Why has the plan to redirect the stream been changed? Does it not seem as though someone is anxious to have the place, and any information it can offer up, concealed? Who, I wonder, has decided it should be done? Was Mr Harman-Foote giving orders to effect it when I passed him and Mr Coulson on my way to dinner yesterday?
All this, Eliza, is puzzling enough, but … I wonder whether you have yet noticed the other strange detail in my description: the fact that the place where the bones were discovered is no more than a yard or two from the bank?
Now, I am sure that this is of the very greatest significance.
For, as Mr Wishart observed, the sides of the pool slope very gradually indeed. And, though I am inclined to agree with him that this renders an accidental falling-in unlikely, I cannot agree that, in this case, a suicide is more probable.
I shall tell you what I did. I took up a stick from the bank: as long and straight a one as I could find. And, putting one end of it against the place where mud ends and grass begins – the place which marks the margin of the old pool and the level of its water – I held it out towards the hole. By this means I was able roughly to calculate the depth of water in which Miss Fenn lay.
It was, I am sure, no more than three feet!
And so you see, even allowing for her sinking six inches or so into the mud of the lake-bottom, she cannot have been beyond her depth in that place. The water would not have reached to her shoulders – unless she was remarkably small of stature. And I have certainly never heard her described so.
I confess that this observation threw me into a very melancholy train of thought.
I stood upon that muddy bank in the gathering gloom, with no company but the ringing of axes echoing back from the house-front, and I imagined coming there in a state of utter despair and loneliness. I imagined walking down into the green, weedy water with the intention of extinguishing life, of ending for ever worry and pain. I declare that I could almost feel the chill of the water rising against my shrinking flesh, the soft silt sucking at my feet as I surrendered up misery, loneliness and humiliation …
You are perhaps wondering, Eliza, why I should distress myself – and you – with such terrible thoughts. But there is a purpose. You see, it is all but impossible to imagine lying down to die in the water. I am sure, that if one had made up one’s mind to self-destruction, and had the determination to carry out the intention, the only way to accomplish it would be to walk on until the water became so deep it was impossible to save oneself. In short, I believe that, while the continuation of life remained possible, the body would insensibly struggle for it, even though the heart and brain were determined upon destruction.
A woman bent upon suicide would have no choice but to walk out into the deep water at the very centre of the lake – and that is where her remains would be found.
Well, this conclusion was as grim as the thoughts which had brought me to it, and you may imagine how I began to shiver in the gathering dusk. For it would seem that I am being forced to agree with Anne Harman-Foote’s opinion and declare, with her, that it is impossible for Elinor Fenn to have taken her own life. And little by little, I am being brought to contemplate the alternative: murder …