Heartstone

'Where do you think Emma will go?' Barak asked.

'My guess is Portsmouth, to try and enlist. I think, God help me, she may seek to end all this in a blaze of glory.'

'Did she kill Abigail?'

I shook my head. 'I think today was the first time she lost control. No, that was someone else.'

He said, 'If I hadn't raised my voice—'

We looked up at the sound of footsteps. Fulstowe approached us, pure hatred in his eyes. 'Master Hobbey would speak with you.'

I nodded assent. 'Come, Barak.' I wanted a witness to this.

We followed the steward to Hobbey's study. Hobbey sat slumped at his desk, his thin face grey, staring unseeingly at the hourglass. Dyrick sat in a chair next to him. Fulstowe stood by the window, watching, as Dyrick said to me, 'Master Hobbey wishes to talk to you. Know it is against my advice—'

'Your advice,' Hobbey said quietly. 'Where has that brought me? Since that first day you told me the children's wardship was worth paying for.' He looked at me; his eyes were sunk deep in his skull. 'David will live. The barber-surgeon has taken the arrow out. But he thinks David's spine is injured. He cannot move his legs properly. We must get a physician.' His voice broke for a moment. 'My poor boy, what a hard path I gave him to tread in this world. Harder than he could bear.' He looked at me. 'You are not my nemesis, Master Shardlake. I have been my own. I caused the destruction of my family.' He closed his eyes. 'Vincent says you know what we did.'

'Yes,' I answered gently. 'I realized only this morning.'

'We have told everyone there was an accident at the butts, that Hugh was frightened by what happened and has run away. I think they believed us.' He paused. 'Unless you tell them something different.'

I said, 'It was David who shot at Barak and me that day, wasn't it? I think he was even following me the night I arrived.'

He answered quietly, 'I think so.'

'And who killed his mother?'

Hobbey bowed his head. Dyrick raised a hand. 'Nicholas—'

Hobbey looked up again. 'I feared so from the start. David—he had come to see everyone as his enemy; except me, and Emma, whom he—whom he loved. He said to me more than once that if anyone tried to expose us he would shoot them dead.' He added sombrely, 'I think perhaps he did mean to shoot you in the woods that day, but missed. He was never as good a shot as Emma.'

'Jesu,' Barak said.

'That was why I let Fulstowe and Vincent persuade me to try and get Ettis convicted. David's mind—' He shook his head. 'But now it is all over.' He looked at the hourglass with a sad, broken smile. 'The sand has run out, as I have feared it would for so long.'

'Did you make Emma assume her brother's identity because the law allows a girl to come into her lands much sooner than a boy?'

'Six years ago, when I bought this house, I was a prosperous merchant, a risen man.' He spoke the words bitterly. 'But then the French and Spanish put their embargo on English trade. I invested too much at the wrong time, and faced ruin. When Hugh and Emma's parents died, I saw the opportunity to make profit from Hugh's woods. Eighty pounds a year's profits for eight years, that was what I needed to repay the bond with my creditors. Getting Hugh and Emma's wardship was the only way out I could see. I was advised by friends to see Vincent.'

I turned to Dyrick. 'So you were part of the plan to steal the children's assets from the start.'

'Many people do it,' Dyrick said impatiently. 'And it kept Master Hobbey and his family from penury. And gave the children, who had nobody else, a home.'

'And David a potential wife. Whether Emma wanted him or not.'

Hobbey said, 'We hoped Emma would come to love David in time. Abigail said she would have made a steady, sober wife for him, which he needed. She was right.'

'What of her needs?' I asked in sudden anger. 'That orphaned child?'

'Listen,' Dyrick said. 'Never mind the moralizing, much as you love it. The point is, what is going to happen now?'

Hobbey said, 'Yes. To Emma? And David?'

'First I need to know it all,' I answered. 'Everything. What happened, who was involved. So, Dyrick got you the children's wardship and you tried to cajole Emma into marrying David. I imagine Hugh and Michael Calfhill both counselled her to resist.'

'Yes, they did.'

'But then something went badly wrong, didn't it? Hugh died. His lands passed to Emma. Who, unless she married David, would inherit at fourteen, not twenty-one.'

Hobbey said, 'We were in a panic, we thought we would go bankrupt. After Hugh died we begged and pleaded with Emma to marry David, but she refused utterly. She said she would go to the Court of Wards and say David was not a suitable husband because of his falling sickness. Though we knew she could hardly do that alone.' Hobbey bowed his head. 'And then—then my wife had the idea of substituting Emma for Hugh.'

'And Emma agreed?'

'She agreed readily, perhaps too readily. I still do not understand why she disliked my son so much, but—she did. In fact it was David that Abigail and I needed to persuade to accept our plans.'

'And then you got rid of Michael Calfhill and moved down here. Where no one had ever seen the children.'

'Yes. It was only then that we realized that we were all trapped. Me, David, Abigail and Emma. If the truth came out we could have been in deep trouble. The only other who knew was Fulstowe.' Hobbey looked at his steward. 'He was always so good at organizing things, anticipating difficulties. And Emma—she retreated into herself, into books and archery.'

'Which she had already practised with Michael.'

'Yes. And the other tutors. We never let one stay too long. It was easy enough to deceive them at first, but it grew harder as Emma grew older. We—we became frightened of her. She never let us know what was happening in her mind. She impersonated her brother so well—sometimes I found myself thinking of her as Hugh for days at a time, somehow it eased my mind. Abigail never did—if I accidentally referred to Emma as Hugh in her presence she would shout and rail at me. But she was utterly terrified of exposure. And at the time you came there were only three years left till Emma could go to court as Hugh and claim her lands. I do not know what would have happened then.' Nor did I, I thought. Emma had truly made herself unreachable.

Hobbey continued: 'As the years passed the deception was a toll on us all. But especially on Abigail. She was the one who had to counsel Emma how to deal with the monthly woman's curse, cut and sew padding for her breasts. That only seemed to make Emma hate her, and—and somehow we all came to blame Abigail because it had been her idea. Especially David. It was not fair, it had all been done to pay my debts. But even I came to blame her. My poor wife.'

'And then Michael Calfhill returned.'

Hobbey flinched. 'He realized at once that Hugh was really Emma. The moles on her face were enough. He threatened to expose us. But Emma did not want him to.' He looked at Dyrick. 'And you had found out something about Michael, hadn't you, when he was encouraging Emma to refuse to marry David.'

'You suspected it yourself,' Dyrick answered sharply. 'You asked me to see what I could find.'

Hobbey dropped his gaze. He said, 'Someone in London told me Michael was said to have had an—improper—relationship with another student at Cambridge. And Vincent discovered there had been others.'

'So after he came this year you threatened him with exposure?'

'Yes. I got Vincent to visit him. God forgive me.'

'Sodomy is a hanging offence,' Dyrick snapped. 'I told Calfhill I would tell the world what he was if he lodged a complaint at Wards. How was I to know he would kill himself?'