‘But you don’t know if he lives? How is this? Did you not stay to find out?’ Harriet was no longer holding Rachel’s hands but gripping them, so tightly that Rachel felt her finger bones grind together.
‘I… I’d been running from him. In the fog… Harriet, I… was frightened! He was so angry, and disordered… I thought he might do me harm, if I were to face him. After he fell, I found my way back down from the hill, and I sent the first men I encountered up to where Mr Alleyn was, to fetch him down. And… then I came here.’
Suddenly, Harriet Sutton released Rachel’s hands and put her own to her mouth, her eyes stretching wide. Her husband took a step forward and put his hand on her shoulder to steady her.
‘He was trying to fetch you back, on rough ground, in frozen weather and at sunset… you led him up there and left him struggling after you – a man made lame by battle? He will freeze, if nothing else!’ said Captain Sutton, with quiet intensity.
‘What? No… I… that wasn’t the way of it, truly! I never meant for him to follow. I didn’t even mean to go up onto the common. I only… fled, and did not think, until I was there. But… but, he is a killer! Don’t you believe me?’
‘I will send for news at once,’ said the captain, leaving the room for a moment.
‘Of course you did not mean to endanger him,’ said Harriet, soothingly. When her husband returned, the two of them shared a long look. ‘But he did say that he killed Alice Beckwith? Did he say those words?’ Harriet asked, softly. She blinked, and tears streaked down her face; she turned to her husband again. ‘Oh, my dear, what if he is dead? Poor Mr Alleyn!’
‘I don’t understand.’ Rachel looked in bewilderment from her friend to the captain and back again. The Suttons seemed to communicate in silence for a moment, and then Harriet gave a tiny nod.
‘We must tell her, my dear,’ she whispered, and the captain looked down at his feet with a frown.
‘Tell me what?’ said Rachel. Captain Sutton let out a pent breath in a rush, his shoulders sagging in defeat.
‘Mr Alleyn did kill a woman, Mrs Weekes. But it was not Alice Beckwith. It was Cassandra’s mother.’
Rachel frowned, still not understanding.
‘Cassandra? Your daughter, Cassandra? What can you mean, Mr Alleyn killed her mother?’
‘Her real mother, Mrs Weekes,’ said Harriet, softly. ‘For it had become clear, a long time before he brought her to us, that my husband and I would not be blessed with children of our own.’
‘Cassandra is another woman’s child? But… whose? Who was she? Why would Jonathan kill her?’
‘I will tell you,’ said the captain. ‘But I must beg you, Mrs Weekes. I must beg you to divulge none of this to anybody, not even to your husband, though I am loath to introduce secrets into a marriage.’
‘Fear not.’ Rachel’s voice was leaden. ‘We have many already.’
‘Nobody but my wife and I and Jonathan Alleyn know this truth. Not even Mr Alleyn’s good lady mother.’
‘I will speak of it to no one.’
‘Then you have my thanks, for that if for little else.’ The captain sank into a chair opposite the two women; hands on his knees, suddenly like a small boy. ‘It happened at Badajoz. After the siege, and the… madness that followed it.’
‘Badajoz?’ The name rang in Rachel’s memory. ‘I have heard of it. Jonathan… that is, Mr Alleyn, spoke of it once. Is that not where his leg was injured? The last battle he fought, before he was forced to come home?’
‘Indeed. I’m surprised to hear he spoke of it. Most of us who were there would prefer to forget it, I think. It was a massacre. A massacre the likes of which I had never seen before, nor ever have since – for which I am profoundly grateful. I will not describe it in detail. Not to ladies.’ The captain broke off and cleared his throat, though it sounded dry and clear. Rachel saw a measure of the same tension around the man’s eyes as when she’d coaxed Jonathan to speak of the war. ‘We paid most heavily for our entry to the city, and… when it was taken…’ He paused, his jaw closing with an audible click of his teeth. ‘When the city was taken, there was a mutiny of sorts. Looting and… violence, towards the defeated soldiers and the city’s residents both. It was indiscriminate and it was… hellish. It was like hell.’
‘My dear, enough. Do not speak on if it pains you,’ said Harriet.
‘Major Alleyn kept his head, though his leg was severely wounded by then, and he made me keep mine. We went into a church to…’ He flicked a troubled glance at his wife. ‘To prevent a desecration. There was a struggle, a fight. I left in pursuit of some of our own men, far the worse for wine. And then, some minutes later Major Alleyn came out, carrying a newborn infant.’
‘Our Cassandra,’ said Harriet, with a tiny smile. She looked at Rachel and took her hand again. ‘He saved her. In the midst of all that.’ Captain Sutton nodded.
‘I never asked what had gone on within. Major Alleyn was doused in blood, not all his own. He was beside himself. He said, over and over, that he had killed her. He had killed her.’
Captain Sutton laced his fingers together, squeezing so hard that the skin blanched. ‘I glanced in and wished I had not. But a woman who must have been the child’s mother was inside, amongst the dead. Major Alleyn would not let go of the babe. He cradled her like she was his own. But of course a soldier can’t keep a child at war. I suggested we find some Spanish woman to take her, but he would not hear of it. He told me that the country was cursed, and that if he left her there she would surely die. And he was probably right. Then he remembered my own dear wife, and our sad state of childlessness.’
‘And he brought her back with him when he came. To give to you,’ said Rachel. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. After Badajoz I did a kind thing… so Jonathan said, one time.
‘Yes.’
‘He said to me… he said to me that he’d tried to make it right. That the last thing he’d done in the war had been a good thing, but that it could not make right what had gone before. He was speaking of this. Of the murder of one innocent, and the saving of another,’ she said.
‘Yes, he must have been,’ said Harriet. The captain stood and paced the hearthrug.
‘You cannot call it murder. Not with Major Alleyn. He was trying to restore order in the men! He was trying to prevent their bestial behaviour… If indeed he killed her, he surely cannot have intended to.’
‘We have never asked him. And now I fear we never shall,’ Harriet murmured.
‘But… but we were speaking of Alice, when he told me he had killed her! We weren’t speaking of the war, we were speaking of Alice…’
‘Cassandra’s mother haunts him constantly. That much I know. She and the war are with him always,’ said Captain Sutton. ‘But perhaps now he is at peace,’ he added, in a hard voice that hit Rachel like a blow.
A long and steady silence fell. The fire seethed gently, and from upstairs came the muffled sound of footsteps – the light, rapid patter of Cassandra’s feet; the more stately tread of the servant. Rachel tried to think back over everything Jonathan had said to her about Alice, and about the war; everything Starling had told her about him, and about her lost sister. She tried with little success to make order of it all, and with more success to maintain her belief in Jonathan’s guilt. She had to still believe it, because the alternative was unthinkable. Have I believed the worst of him? Have I caused the death of an innocent man?
‘But he is a killer,’ she said, almost to herself. Harriet let go of her hand.
‘He is a good man. He saved an innocent life when all around was chaos and death. He gave us the greatest gift a person could give,’ she said passionately.