“So they were, all as were meant to be there. This mare was never in his stables. He kept her in his estate manager’s stable half a mile from the house and his wife never knew she existed.”
There could only be one reason for that.
“You’re telling me that Sir Percy kept a petite amie in the town here and used the mare to visit her?”
No need, with Harry, to pretend to be shocked. He lives by the morals of the reign before Her Majesty’s, if he can be credited with any at all.
“Tuesday and Thursday nights,” was all he said. Sir Percy’s body had been found early on Wednesday morning.
“Didn’t any of this come out at the inquest?”
“Wouldn’t have been decent, would it, with his body lying cold and his poor wife sitting there hearing it. I reckon half the jury knew about it and probably the coroner as well for that matter, but nobody was going to say so.”
“But it was relevant, wasn’t it? Sir Percy has dinner with his wife. Some time after that he walks to his estate manager’s house, collects the mare, and starts riding into town. Either on the way there or on the way back he is diverted, for no good reason, onto an island in his lake along with an Arab stallion from God knows where that doesn’t like crossing water. His mare, meanwhile, somehow finds her way back to your livery stables and ties herself neatly to a hitching ring. Isn’t that a sequence a coroner should know about?”
“Put that way, I’m not saying you’re wrong, Mr Ludlow, but I still don’t see what good it would do.”
“This woman he visited – do you know her?”
“Name of Lucy Dester. House with the green door, opposite the baker’s.”
I stood making up my mind, staring at the back view of the cobby mare. Aware of eyes on her, she twitched her tail, shifted her hind legs.
“Looks a touch short-tempered.”
“Not her. Quiet as a cushion, only she’s in season at the moment. Anyway, if you’re set on finding out what happened, you’ve seen both of them that matter now.”
He meant both horses in the case-horses being more important to Harry than people. He said just one thing more before we parted at the gate.
“Now don’t you go making her miserable. She’s a decent enough party in her own way.”
There was a man in bloodstained clothes hammering at Lucy Dester’s green front door. He looked as if he’d been there for some time, and a small crowd had gathered. I asked a loitering boy who the bloodstained man was and gathered he was the local butcher. I loitered with the rest of the crowd and when, after a few more minutes of beating, the door opened a crack I was able to get a glimpse of the person inside. At risk of being ungallant, she struck me as being ten years too old and a couple of stone too heavy to qualify as any sort of nymph. Her voice, when she told the butcher to go about his business, was not refined. He thrust a solidly booted foot into the door crack and pulled a paper from his pocket.
“Two pounds, three shillings, and fourpence halfpenny.”
That was the burden of his song, several times repeated. Mrs Dester owed him two pounds, three shillings, and fourpence halfpenny, and he wouldn’t budge from her doorstep until he got it. I fumbled in my pocket, approached the door.
“This is most uncivil behaviour to a lady. Now take your money and be off with you.”
He stared open-mouthed at me, then at the coins in his hand, and withdrew muttering. The crack in the doorway opened a little wider and I stepped inside. There were broken expressions of gratitude, explanations about money orders not arriving. I found myself sitting opposite her in a neat parlour, sipping a glass of Madeira.
“I kept it for him,” she said. “He always enjoyed his Madeira.”
There was no need to ask to whom she was referring. She’d taken me for a friend of his who knew about the relations between them and had come to offer sympathy. She was not an unpleasing woman in either person or conversation, with quantities of lustrous black hair, pink rounded cheeks, and a warmth of manner that compensated for her lack of refinement. She had been, by her account, employed as an actress in London until Sir Percy set her up in a small establishment in town. When he decided to spend more time on his estate, he moved her to the present lodgings.
“And last Tuesday night…?”
She sighed deeply. “There was a nice cold collation laid out for him, ham and fowl, and his claret decanted all ready. He never came.”
“Did you think something had happened to him?”
“Not that, oh no. Unexpected guests, I thought, or business that had kept him at home. Nothing like what happened.”
“When did you know?”
“It was all round the town. I went out to buy some ribbons for my bonnet and that b- I mean a customer at the haberdashers said she supposed I’d heard about the accident.” Two plump tears trembled on her cheeks, ran down.
“I haven’t put a foot outside since, and it’s been nothing but people at the door with bills, bills, bills. When he was alive, you see, they all knew he’d meet them, but now he’s gone they don’t have any pity and there’s not so much money in the house as a third-class fare back to London.”
She bent her head and wept in earnest. I tried to comfort her, although there was very little I could do or say. She looked up at last, eyes brimming with tears.
“I was fond of him, you know. I really was fond of him.”
Before I left I asked if she knew anybody who owned a white Arab stallion. No more than the man in the moon, she said.
I borrowed a hack from Harry and spent the rest of the afternoon riding out to Sir Percy’s estate to look at the island, to no effect whatsoever. When I got back to the livery stables we had supper, chops and eggs cooked on the old stove in Harry’s den next to the saddle room. It seemed that my rescue of Lucy Dester from the butcher was the talk of the town and he made a few heavy-hooved jokes on the theme.
“You’re right, though, she seems a decent enough woman in her way, and she has nothing to gain from his death – quite the reverse.”
We’d already agreed that I should stay the night in the hayloft, and we were sorting out horse rugs when there was a knocking at the yard gate. Harry’s head came up.
“Who the devil is it at this hour?”
It was past ten o’clock, deep dusk, with no sound but the horses munching hay in their boxes. The big double gates to the yard were bolted, but there was a smaller door cut into them. Harry unlatched it and we both looked out. At first there was nothing to see, then a figure stepped out of the shadows and in at the door as quickly as a bat flying. It came in a swish of silk, black garments fluttering.
“I want to buy a horse.”
It was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s. There was a desperate determination in the way she spoke and moved. She had a black bonnet covering her hair, framing a small face as pale as a frost-struck white rose. Her sudden arrival and the unlikeliness of her words left me speechless, although she’d addressed them to me. But Harry, by nature and calling, couldn’t help responding to an opening like that, whether it came from man, woman, or hobgoblin.
“What kind of a horse, ma’am?”
“The white Arab.”
I was on the point of explaining that he wasn’t ours to sell when Harry nudged my arm and drew me to one side. He whispered in my ear, “The widow.” Then, back to her: “He’s not a lady’s horse, ma’am.”
“I don’t care about that. What’s your price?”
If you listened very hard you could hear the tremor in her voice, like a high note on a violin, but to look at her she was snow and steel.
“Fifty guineas, ma’am.”
A black-gloved hand came out of her draperies, holding a small pouch.
“Count them out.”
Harry counted them on the edge of the mounting block, the coins gleaming in the last of the light, and gave the diminished pouch back to her.