“If you know of a single man in Alton or Chawton courageous enough to undertake the labour of painting this deathroom, I beg you will send him to us directly,” I retorted. “Not even Mr. Prowting can discover a person of the serving class willing to enter the cottage. Like all ill-gotten gains, it is tacitly understood to be cursed.”
“I shall have to speak to young Baigent’s father. The boy ought to be horse-whipped.”
“So ought Neddie. I shall whip him myself, for having ignored the claims of Widow Seward and Jack Hinton alike.”
The lanthorn, swinging in Henry’s hand, threw wild shadows against the ceiling and walls; I tried not to find in the flickering shapes the humped menace of rats.
“Munro was interested, you say, in any disturbance — or the stain of dried water?” Henry asked.
“—Tho’ Mr. Prowting insisted he saw neither.”
“Then he did not observe the ground closely,” my brother objected. He held the lanthorn perhaps a foot above the dirt floor and moved it in an arcing sweep over the surface. “Look, Jane. Faint footprints, and a poor effort at scrubbing them out.”
He was correct, as Henry must always be: in the stronger light of the burning oil, I could discern what a candle flame had not revealed: The impressions of a boot in the dirt, near the corner of the room where Shafto French had lain. They were partial and indistinct, and ought to have been obliterated by the careless feet of Mr. Prowting and myself, not to mention those who had removed Shafto French’s body. I gathered my skirt in both hands and crouched down, the better to observe them. The mark of a right heel, broad and flat; and two impressions of a boot toe.
“Henry,” I murmured as I studied them, “do these appear to be the marks of a labourer’s shoe?”
“They do not,” he replied grimly, “tho’ I should certainly believe them a man’s. There are no impressions of hobnails, as one would expect from a heavy working boot, and look, Jane—
the leather sole was so fine as to leave an imprint in one place of the fellow’s left toe. I should judge these marks to have been left by a good pair of leather boots such as... ”
“... a gentleman should wear.”
We looked at each other, both of us frowning.
“Could they be Prowting’s?” Henry demanded.
“Perhaps. But I imagine Mr. Prowting’s impression might be found here, at the foot of the stairs” — I motioned for my brother’s lanthorn — “where he stood an instant with the full weight of the chest in his arms. Observe how distinctly the marks are left, Henry.”
“And of an entirely different size,” he added. “There is another set of those marks beneath the hatch, where Prowting stood to unbar the doors.”
“We must invite our neighbour the magistrate to test his footwear in this room, and I myself shall sketch the remaining impressions,” I said soberly. “We ought not to delay. Mr. Prowting may have an idea of Shafto French’s enemies among the gentry of Chawton.”
“Then why did he not offer them at the inquest, Jane?”
A slight sound from the cellar stairs drew my head around, and forestalled my answer.
“Mamma? Is that you?” I called upwards.
A woman’s face swam in the darkness at the head of the stairs: white, frightened, with large clear eyes and a trembling lip. A knot of red-gold hair crowned the whole.
“It is Mrs. French, is it not?” I said in surprise. “How may I help you, my dear?”
She stood in silence at the foot of the stairs, glancing about the ugly stone walls and the scuffed dirt of the floor. Henry had bowed to the woman and murmured a word of sympathy; but he did not tarry in his errand to Prowtings. I could hear his heavy tread even now above our heads, making for the front door.
“The lady said as I might come down,” Jemima French muttered, “and should be in no one’s way. I had to see this place, if you understand me, ma’am. I had to see where my Shafto died.”
I might have told her he could have met his end in any horse trough between the Crown Inn and Chawton; but I did not like to seem so unfeeling. I considered of this girl — for, indeed, she was little older than Ann or Catherine Prowting — lying alone in her bed with the little ones breathing softly beside her, and seeing in memory again and again the ravaged face of her husband. They had asked her to view the body and name it for Shafto French. Had she gone alone to that interview with the surgeon, Mr. Curtis?
“It is dark down here, in’it?” she murmured, tho’ Henry had left us the lanthorn. “You will tell me where he lay?”
I nodded assent, and pointed towards the corner of the room. “Just there. I must ask you not to touch the place. There are marks we should like the magistrate to observe.”
Her eyes were once again wide with horror, as though she imagined the trail of a convulsive fit, or perhaps the traffic of a legion of rodents emanating from the walls. “What marks?”
Caution, and a knowledge of the habits of country folk — of the impossibility of any fact remaining private — made me deliberately chary. “The marks of your husband’s form, of course. Shall I carry you upstairs, my dear, and fix you a cup of tea?”
“I should’ve known,” she said dully, “when he didn’t come back. A bit o’ light-skirt, I thought it was — Shafto always having been a man for a doxy. It was pride, ma’am, as prevented me speaking; but pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall, as my mother used to say, being a great one for quoting Proverbs.”
“Had you any reason to think your husband at risk of injury, Mrs. French?”
She stared at me fixedly; but it was not a look of incomprehension — of indecision, rather, as tho’ she could not determine to trust me.
“Had he an enemy?” I persisted. “Some person you knew of, who wished him ill — or who might perhaps profit from his death?”
A slow flush o’erspread her features, and her gaze fell. “No, ma’am. Nobody could want my man dead.”
“But someone clearly did. The coroner is convinced your husband did not meet his death by chance.”
She turned her head restlessly. “He’d been talking wild for days, about the blunt he was going to have off some’un as was plump in the pocket; blood money, he called it, as’d set us up forever. Silk gowns, Jemima my girl, he said, and no worrying about wood for the fire when the cold winds blow. ”
“Was he often given to publishing hopes of that kind, when he had lately been paid for work?” I enquired with an unstudied air. She shook her head. “It was a rare struggle for us to make one end meet the other, ma’am, and how I am to manage now I cannot think.”
“Have you any family?”
“A brother, with a good number of his own to feed. But I can ply a needle, ma’am, and may find piecework at the linendraper’s. I have worked all my life, and am not afraid of it.”
I preserved a tactful silence. Between the demands of war and the limits to commerce we suffer at the hands of Napoleon, times are very hard in this country. I myself have felt the pinch of articles too dear for my purse, and I had not Mrs. French’s encumbrances.
“You have no further expectation of these funds your husband spoke of? — He gave you no hint of the person from whom he expected his money?”
“Not a word, ma’am. And who should it be, when all is said?
I’ve known Shafto’s mates since we were all little ’uns together, running through Robin Hood Butts of a spring morn.[10] None of our kind of folk would come into a treasure; and none owed him money. ’Twas too often t’other way round. My man had no head for business, ma’am.”
“And yet — Bertie Philmore asserted that when he parted from your husband, Mr. French was intending to meet with a man. You have no notion of who this man might be?”
“His murderer,” she rejoined in a voice creased with misery.
10
Robin Hood Butts was an area of open land between Chawton and Alton that served as the site of Alton’s April Fair.