Tom had left Helen at her godfather’s house. Selby had pressed him to stay for supper but Tom was tired and, besides, he sensed that the Canon was looking forward to having his god-daughter to himself. He and Helen were to meet the next morning. So Tom enjoyed a good supper at The Side of Beef and retired early to his room. After the excitements of the previous day and the restless night he’d spent at Fisherton Gaol, he slept well, surprisingly.
As for the others involved in this case, those in Felix Slater’s circle of family and acquaintances, how did they sleep on this second night after the murder?
Henry Cathcart, as usual, went to visit Constance in her sick room during the evening. He might have been distracted but she scarcely noticed. She had spent much of the day poring over the news of the terrible murder with Grace, who read and reread the front page of the Gazette to her invalid patient. Constance’s normally pallid complexion was flushed, more from the excitement of the murder than the stuffiness of the room. Her large dark eyes were wider than ever. She was too caught up in the drama and outrage over the death of a cleric to make any disparaging comment about Amelia Slater. She was more lively than Henry had seen her for a long time.
Cathcart did not reveal to his wife that he had actually been on the scene when the police arrived at Venn House. If that news had come to light — it might have done, you never knew, Salisbury was not a large town and gossip was rife — then he was ready with a story. A story which was half true: that he had gone to the Canon’s residence on the night of the murder so as to return to Amelia Slater some designs and catalogues which they had been discussing. But the subject didn’t come up. Constance was more concerned about their safety, or rather her safety, with a madman on the loose. Henry did his best to reassure her. He would personally make sure the doors and windows in the house were fast before going to bed. And Grace slept in the next room, didn’t she?
Then he withdrew to his own bedroom. He could not help thinking of Felix Slater’s death nor of the fact that Amelia was now a widow. By coincidence, the pair of them had been looking at pictures of mourning outfits very recently. What was it Amelia had said? (But he didn’t have to struggle to remember, her words were imprinted on his brain.) Every woman dreams of how she will look as a widow, Henry. How had Henry Cathcart interpreted Amelia’s remark? Had he asked himself whether Amelia meant a ‘dream’in the sense of an idle fantasy or speculation, or a ‘dream’ in the sense of longing?
Amelia Slater really was dreaming. She saw her husband slumped forward over his desk, the spear-head protruding from the back of his neck. She groaned and moved uneasily in her sleep. The doctor had given her something to soothe her nerves and something else to help her sleep. But she could not escape her dreams, which swirled with light and ghastly colour. In the dream, her husband’s study was illuminated not by gaslight but by the unforgiving glare of day. The blood from his wound flowed across the surface of the desk, soaking into papers and blotters, running down the sides and pooling on the carpet. Trying to keep clear of the blood, Amelia reached out to finger the sharp flint. Her fingers touched the makeshift weapon. For an instant, she was undecided whether to pluck it out or even to push it further in so as to seal up the wound. But the flint-head was fixed deep, the damage was already done.
There was no going back. And there was no more time either. The blood was lapping at her shoes and then at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing a dark fabric — crape, bombazine, she couldn’t remember — and the blood did not show at first. But she felt the added weight of it dragging her down as if she was wading in water. She must escape before she was pulled under by the tide of blood. She turned towards the door. Before she could reach it, the door opened. She wanted to shout out a warning to whoever was coming in, that they should beware of what they might see, beware of the taint of blood. But it was too late. A figure stood just outside the doorway. To her surprise she recognized the outline of Walter. She could not make out his expression, could not see whether he was angry or sad or happy at the scene in front of him.
There were other individuals in Venn House too. The maids Bessie and Mary, for example, and Eaves the gardener (although he did not sleep inside the house but in a little store-house where his tools and other gardening equipment were kept). But as for how they slept and whether they suffered from bad dreams, as for what they thought and felt about the murder of their employer, Canon Felix Slater, none of these things is really any of our concern. They were only servants, after all.
Walter Slater was sleeping as uneasily as Amelia. He was not in his comfortable bedroom in Venn House. He had not slept there on the night of the murder and he was not sleeping there now. Instead, Walter had retreated to his church, St Luke’s. He was in the belltower. He had made himself a kind of nest out of old vestments and pieces of curtain and he was curled up in a corner of the ringing room, which was reached by a spiral staircase running up from the corner of the transept. It was a comfortless spot. The loops of the bellropes dangled down like so many nooses. The room was cold despite having only slit windows. But it was a place where Walter Slater knew he should not be disturbed at least until the Sunday morning. There was a creaking door at the bottom of the spiral stairs, so Walter would be alerted if anyone was coming up to the ringing room. No one knew he was sleeping in the church. Walter had managed to carry on with his usual duties during the day following the murder of Felix, and anyone observing his battered, unshaven look and his crumpled clothes would have attributed them to the shock of what had occurred at Venn House. Walter might have been capable of attending to his work during the day but he could not face sleeping under the dead man’s roof.
Percy Slater had now returned to Northwood House. He had remained in Salisbury on the night of his brother’s murder, staying in Venn House. Percy had stayed not so much because there was anything he could do — had he been so minded — in terms of comforting the widow or consoling others in the household or helping in any investigation, but because the fog was too thick to allow him and his driver Fawkes to get back to Downton. Now he was back and sitting in the smoking room where he had greeted Tom Ansell a couple of days earlier. It was nearly midnight, the fireplace was full of ash, the bottle in front of him all but empty, and the house cold and clammy. The rest of his establishment — if it wasn’t absurd call two people, Fawkes and Nan, an establishment — had long since retired for the night. Percy knew that he too would have to stir himself sooner or later and plod along the flagged passageway to his room. But he did not shift from the armchair by the dead fire.
Instead, he thought of his late brother. He had never liked Felix, regarding him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. He asked himself what he felt now that the holy Felix was no more. The answer was, he did not feel a great deal. There was no point in pretending to a piety that didn’t exist in him. He was, however, sorry about Walter. Not so much that Walter should have, like him, been so violently bereaved, but that he had gone to see the young man on the afternoon before Felix’s death. The visit had been the result of an impulse, a disastrous impulse. He recalled the look of shock on Walter’s face after they’d had their quiet chat in the gloom of the cathedral, the way Walter had gripped his knee as if he could not believe the other’s words, the way that Walter had sprung to his feet and rushed off into the gloom of the aisle. Percy hadn’t seen him again, or rather he had had only a brief glimpse of him when they were all crowding about the porch of Venn House, watching the lawyer fellow being taken away by the police. Walter had not looked well but sick and pale. Hardly surprising. Percy supposed that none of them looked any different.