His eyes darted up to Harriet’s face and he blushed a little, though the usual animation and joy of his character seemed to have vanished as soon as Sarah Randle’s name was mentioned, and he had yet to take it up and fit it around his shoulders again.
“Sir Stephen, we should not trouble you any longer,” Harriet said, “but before we take our leave, and though I have not the learning to fully understand, I would love to see some of the beetles too. Mr. Crowther says they are quite remarkable.”
The color and life sprang back into Sir Stephen’s bent form as if a sluice gate had been opened.
“Would you?! Oh, of course! Some have many pretty colors. I have a niece in London who says she would like a silk dress just the color of her favorite. Should you like to see it?”
“Very much,” Harriet said, coming around the table and taking his arm. “And do tell me about your niece.”
Crowther followed, slowly.
Some hours later they were seated in the private parlor of the Bear and Crown. Michaels’s massive frame leaned up in a corner and was largely motionless as they narrated what had passed since they last met. He lifted a pewter mug to his lips and drank it off as they finished.
“I know this Patience a little. Don’t think much of her or her people myself, mind, but I can get a message to her now. She may not be able to leave the house for some days,” he said in a low growl. “She had her free afternoon only a week or two ago. But I may be able to contrive something to bring her here this evening. They say the housekeeper is complaining to all and sundry that she is much misunderstood and is becoming lax about discipline, and Wicksteed spends all his time dancing attendance on the lady.” Harriet and Crowther made no comment. “I can ask about to see if anyone remembers the footman. You have a name?”
“Sir Stephen could not recall,” Harriet said softly.
“As to the other business, Toller is a good man. I can bring him in here for his supper and you can spend some time with the late Mrs. Bray without the squire finding out.”
“What is being said about the squire?” Crowther asked.
Michaels ran his hand through his black beard, pulling on it a little.
“That he intends to hang Hugh and pin his favors to the lady’s mast. Fool!”
He said the last word with enough force to make Crowther raise his eyebrow.
Michaels went on, “He and the lady, and all their sort will wake up one day to find me and Cartwright’s daughter have bought up their mortgages and own the silk they wrap themselves in, and they will never think it possible until they find it has happened.”
“That sounds like revolution, Michaels.” Crowther looked faintly amused.
The man swung his great weight round to face him.
“Progress, I call it, Mr. Crowther. Progress. Now let’s tempt Toller in. My wife will smile at him, and he’ll be docile as a kitten for an hour at least.”
Crowther hesitated at the door to the old icehouse and turned to Harriet with a questioning look. She met his gaze and nodded. He pulled the door open and a rush of cool air spilled over them; it would have been welcome but for the gray high notes of the grave which mixed with it.
Crowther was satisfied. The body had been well placed, and putrefaction was not far advanced. He set down his candle and took flint and strike from his pocket, tapping it till he got flame enough to startle the wick into life. He had to stoop a little under the curve of the wall. It was an intimate space to share with a body three days dead.
Nurse Bray lay on a trestle table in the middle of the round brick building. Harriet remembered the Parthenon in Rome, which she had visited with her husband soon after their marriage. The shape of the country icehouse recalled it to her, however different the dimensions. She could still hear the soft calls of the wood pigeons outside. Michaels had, it seemed, arranged for some of his straw and ice to be brought in to chill the air. She could hear it from time to time crack, delicately echoing, and the slow drip of water fighting to be free of its solid form, and wild again. In this light, and from this distance, Nurse Bray did not seem anything other than at peace, though the unnatural stillness and taste of the air reminded the living woman of the rank dangers and darknesses that so often lie beneath apparent calm. The candle fluttered into life, and the bricks danced with their shadows, looming rather monstrously over the body as Harriet spoke:
“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice”
Crowther glanced at her over his shoulder. “You are a devotee of Shakespeare, Mrs. Westerman?”
“I think him the greatest of our poets. Do you not?”
“I know it is fashionable to regard him as such of late. I prefer Pope, myself.”
“That seems appropriate.”
He ignored her, but peered about him, his eyes resting on the blocks of ice hissing under their straw coverings.
“However, I admit your quotation is apt. How came Mrs. Bray to lie here? I thought she was to be taken to the Hall.”
“She was,” Harriet agreed, “but Michaels said that after the inquest he suggested this place to the coroner, and the Thornleigh party seemed happy to have rid of the charge. Hugh was being arrested at the time, of course, and I believe the coroner would have agreed to anything put to him at that moment.”
She watched Crowther’s thin profile, all its hollows and edges painted by the shadows and the dancing flame on the candle. She could see his thoughts were already elsewhere. He turned to her.
“If I were to attack you, how would you defend yourself?”
“I have a technique my husband taught me that can bring down most men, should the need arise. But I think you are asking me to imagine how Nurse Bray defended herself.”
“I am.”
“Very well. It is under the fingernails of the right hand that she has the skin, if I recall correctly.” She turned to face Crowther. “Suppose you were holding me, facing toward you, gripping my wrists. I manage to get my right hand free, and swipe with my nails at your arm, in hopes you will free my left. I would imagine my hand would be shaped like this.” She made a rough claw of her right hand. “The left upper arm would most likely be where I would catch you. . It is only one scenario of course.” Harriet shrugged.
“But I think it is the most likely,” Crowther said. “We have seen no one with scratches to the face. If she were to have her hands free to scratch, it seems unlikely she would scratch her attacker’s bare back rather than run away. There are no fibers under her nails, so it is unlikely she tore through someone’s britches to get to their skin if she had been knocked to the floor.”
Harriet frowned as she replied, “We are presuming that the blow that knocked her to the floor was enough to render her docile as well. And then her hands were tied.”
Crowther handed the candle to her and removed from his pocket a little rosewood box. He opened it and spat into it, only looking up to see Harriet’s surprise as he stirred the resultant mess with his fingertip. He angled the box to show what it contained.
“A contribution to the sciences from the young Michaelses’ nursery. It is a watercolor block. We are to do a little finger-painting.”
Harriet nodded, and found she was glad he had chosen the black rather than the scarlet from the paints available.
They moved toward the body. The nurse’s skin was beginning to show purple in places. Harriet was careful to hold the candle steady. When Crowther lifted the corpse’s right hand, the body sighed with the early stink of corruption, but the light did not waver. He pressed the cold, waxy fingertips into the color, then setting down the box withdrew a piece of writing paper from his pocket. Harriet saw the little picture of a dancing bear feinting at an outsized diadem printed onto it, a little smudged. He held it up on the nurse’s chest. Taking the hand by the wrist, and supporting the palm so the fingers fell into the same, rough claw that Harriet had formed with her own hand, he then dragged it down the length of the sheet. It left four marks, slow trails down the paper, which rustled against the body’s grave clothes. Harriet shivered. Crowther looked at his work and gave a nod, then, spitting on his handkerchief began to wipe the pigment away from the dead fingertips.