Hugh became conscious of their presence and turned. They exchanged bows.
“I came to see Brook buried,” he told them. “Thought someone should, and Cartwright wouldn’t. Not very happy to be associated with such types as it is. Then I saw you, and thought I wouldn’t bother. It was good of you to go. Like you. Well. Good evening.”
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that these words were meant for Rachel, but all maintained the polite pretense that the remarks were general. Harriet cleared her throat as if to begin speaking, though she had no idea at that moment what could be said, when she was saved by a shout from the rising slope behind them on the edge of the park of Thornleigh Hall. A boy was running down the slope toward them, his rough jacket flying out behind him and his feet slipping over the long grass.
“Mr. Thornleigh, Mr. Thornleigh, come quick, sir!”
“What is it?”
The boy tumbled to a halt beside them. He was very pale.
“Nurse Bray! In the witch’s cottage.”
He turned and ran back the way he had come. Crowther looked at Harriet. She was already picking up her skirts to set off after the boy. She said tersely, “It’s an old keeper’s cottage on the edge of the wood.”
She began to head up the slope, Crowther, Rachel and Hugh all following. Behind the trees at the top of the rise Crowther got his first sight of the broken-up little house. It was indeed suitable for witches, if your imagination were that way inclined. Its walls and ceiling were punctured and cloaked by trees, and its remaining stonework covered in ivy. The wide door was ajar, hanging with horrible determination by the last of its hinges. The party by a common consent came to a halt in the lee of the wall. The little boy pointed in through the doorway, the whiteness of his skin making the dirt on his face stand out. He looked like a sentimental allegory of the pastoral and picturesque. They stepped forward, Hugh leading the way, their eyes struggling to make sense of the patterns of light and dark in the interior. Rachel suddenly screamed and turned into Harriet’s arms. The latter held her, looking past her sister’s buried head into the depths with wide eyes. The two men paused as if caught by the withdrawing motion of a great wave.
A woman’s body was hanging from one of the low beams that ran over their heads. Her face was dark, her tongue forced out between her teeth. Her feet brushed the air only inches above the stone floor, and with a creak of wood and hemp her body still turned slightly in the vague breeze of the evening. The motion brought her face to face with them. Harriet knew that face, distorted as it was. Nurse Bray, one of the staff at Thornleigh who had arrived like a gift from God soon after the illness of Lord Thornleigh; she had cared for him ever since. Harriet turned away a little, keeping Rachel shielded. She squeezed her eyes shut, very hard, and waited for her heartbeat to slow.
“We must get her down. Is that barrel still sound?” Crowther’s voice.
There was a hollow hammer of a gentleman’s boot on wood as the barrel was kicked and tried, then a scrape of wood on stone as someone dragged it across the floor.
“Mr. Thornleigh, do you carry a knife?”
There was a pause, the snap of an opening blade, then a horrid sawing of rope. Harriet remembered the sounds of the sick room during battle; under the curses and groans and explosions it seemed one could always hear the rasp of the surgeon’s saw on bone. There was a snap as the rope gave, a grunt of effort from Hugh as he took the weight, and a sigh as he placed the body on the ground.
“She is dead?” Hugh’s voice now.
“Oh, yes.” Crowther’s dry response.
Harriet opened her eyes. Crowther was kneeling beside the body, Hugh standing to one side.
“Damn!”
Hugh’s curse echoed in the empty ruin, and like the report of a gun it disturbed the crows roosting in the woods around them. They flew up from their nests with angry shouting echoes. Rachel flinched, then pulled herself free from her sister’s arm. Keeping her eyes carefully averted from where the body lay, she walked straightbacked to the doorway. Harriet turned to watch her speaking to the boy.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“We must stay outside, Jack.” She put out her hand and the lad fitted his dirty fingers into her black glove and allowed himself to be led out into the fading light.
Harriet leaned her back against the roughly rendered wall and observed Crowther while she calmed herself. He was running his eyes over the body as if he were reading a text. He lifted his hand to move the folds of cloak and rope at the nurse’s neck, and then looked up at Harriet. She understood his meaning.
“Mr. Thornleigh, perhaps you will be so good as to go and fetch your people? This body at any rate is most decidedly your business.”
Hugh shot her an angry look and strode out of the door.
As soon as Harriet heard his steps fading outside she moved across the open space and crouched down opposite Crowther. He looked at her.
“Making him angry certainly made him leave faster. But I’m afraid he’ll walk much more quickly now.”
She smiled up at him briefly in return, then gestured toward the doorway just beyond which Rachel and the boy were waiting, and lifted a finger to her lips. Crowther nodded.
He looked back to the body, and lifted the nurse’s right wrist with a sudden frown. It was deeply bruised where the radial artery was buried under the soft flesh on the underside of the wrist, and spotted with blood under the skin at the sides where the bones of the arm were tied onto the delicate bones of the hand. The body moved easily; she had not been dead longer than a couple of hours. Harriet had removed her gloves and tucked them into her gown, and having seen what he had noticed, took up the nurse’s left hand. Here the bruising was most brutal across the top of the wrist. She lifted it to her eyes, and ran a fingertip over the impressions. She teased something up onto her fingernail then presented it to Crowther. He looked. A fiber. She laid the hand gently down again and stretched her own arms out across the body, crossing them, one on top of the other at the wrist.
“Rope,” she mouthed silently.
Crowther felt a coldness swim through his stomach despite the warmth of the evening. He looked closely again at the nurse’s right hand, flexing the dead fingers as an idle man might play with his beloved’s hand on a drawing-room sofa. One fingernail was broken, and three were clogged with skin, and a little blood. He looked up to check Harriet was observing, and understood what she saw. Her jaw was set, and her body was all attention. Crowther laid down the hand, and as if of one mind they looked up to the horribly distorted face.
“I shall cut away the rope at the neck,” Crowther said very quietly, and did so, revealing the horrid purple where it had pressed against her throat till she was choked.
He felt with his long fingers for the vertebrae at the back of the neck. They had not broken. She had died from lack of air. It was not a gentle death. Crowther remembered his occasional duties for his professors waiting under the gallows, hoping to claim the body for dissection with the aid of a number of bribes and the assistance of a few men hired to hold back the mob. He had observed both quick and slow deaths from hanging. If the fall did not break the unfortunate’s neck, sometimes their friends would rush under the scaffold and cling onto their legs, pulling down with all their weight, so the final agonies would come as quickly as could be managed. He had seen mothers dragging down their sons’ feet in that way, killing them quickly being the last service they could render to their children. It was the noise that was most unpleasant; the struggle of air gargling uselessly in the closed bowl of the throat, the swish of the legs kicking out like a puppet show, the dance in the air. He wondered if anyone had held the nurse’s legs to shorten her agony.