He immediately paled and his fleshy face went lumpen. ‘Ah,’ he licked his lips, ‘I remember.’
‘The King depends on it.’ This was a big lie, but I reckoned he was a mooning Royalist. Dowling stared at me like I was the Devil himself, but I paid no heed.
‘I have already told him that everything he has asked me to accomplish depends upon your willingness to help him,’ I said officiously. I imagined that I was Keeling’s obnoxious aide. ‘Tell me what happened.’
He looked at me with pleading eyes. ‘There is little to tell. She took her own life, there was no doubt. She wrote a letter to her nanny with whom she was staying, then she walked out to the marshes and jumped into a bog and drowned. She couldn’t swim.’
‘How do you know she jumped in? How do you know that she wasn’t taken to the marsh and thrown into the bog?’
‘She couldn’t have. She left a note with the nanny, I told you. She was seen walking on her own, and she didn’t have a mark on her. She must have jumped in by herself.’ He made a visible effort to keep his hands still, finally sitting on them.
I walked over to the apple tree into whose branches Stow was staring, and leant against it. ‘We’ve spoken to Mrs Johnson, Dr Stow. The note said “Goodbye”, it did not say “Goodbye — I am going to jump in a bog”. That she was seen walking to the marshes on her own doesn’t mean that she didn’t meet somebody. If she couldn’t swim, then all it would have taken is a little push and she would have fallen in and drowned quickly, without marks. How can I convince the King that your verdict was correct, Mr Stow?’
‘We found her there that night with her brown dress blooming upon the surface of the pool like a dead lily. We found her with torches. A crowd of us went, after Beth Johnson told us she was missing. When we fished her out she was white and pale, but her face was peaceful.’ He wrung his hands in unhappy memory. ‘There was no sign that she died unwillingly.’
‘She died on her birthday. A strange day to kill yourself,’ I remarked.
‘Not if the melancholia has a hold. The days on which others expect you to be happiest can be the hardest. She was very depressed while she was here, Mrs Johnson will have told you. There were no marks on her, no sign of a struggle nor a blow. She most certainly jumped of her own accord. That’s the long and the short of it,’ he asserted, his mouth set, lower jaw protruded and lips drawn tight.
I was certain that he was holding something back. Why had he gone so pale upon the mention of Jane Keeling’s name? ‘Mr Stow. If you lie to me, then you lie to the King. That’s treason.’
His lip trembled, but he returned my stare with dislike and stubbornness. He said nothing.
‘So you would not cooperate with the King.’
‘That’s not true! I have told you everything you wanted to know!’
‘Methinks not, Mr Stow. Once I leave, then your options will be much reduced. For if I discover that you have lied to me, then I will have you arrested for treason.’ His eyes goggled and all of his face, except his nose, went white.
‘She was with child,’ he whispered.
‘Who was the father?’ I replied, astonished.
‘I don’t know.’ Stow let out a deep breath and sat drooped, looking at the floor. He looked like a man condemned to hang.
An appalling thought struck me suddenly. I turned quickly to Dowling who similarly looked like someone had inserted a large carrot up his rectum. We were so keen to talk to each other that we had to go. Stow watched us leave out the corner of his eye with an expression of unutterable relief.
‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth spells revenge,’ I whispered to Dowling as we reached the lane.
‘Aye, the same thought occurred to me. Was Anne Giles killed because Jane Keeling was killed?’
We marched quickly. ‘Jane Keeling died with child.’
‘Yet she was simple.’
‘So someone took advantage of her.’
‘And Anne Giles was killed as revenge.’
One daughter for another? A devilish thought; yet it had occurred to us both independently. This would imply that William Ormonde had fathered Keeling’s child, had used her as his own. I looked at Dowling. He looked shocked, hardly able to meet my eye, just looked to the floor with his mouth grim set, breathing noisily through his nose.
‘Are we mad?’ I asked him. For this was a mad place. Perhaps it had affected us.
‘There is a wicked man that hangeth down his head sadly, but inwardly he is full of deceit.’
That did remind me of Ormonde. ‘We must confront him.’
‘Aye,’ Dowling muttered, picking up the pace.
‘Mr Ormonde is not receiving guests, sir.’ The old servant came to meet us again. Better than being ‘not at home’. ‘My master spends his days alone.’
‘Aye, then I expect he will relish the opportunity to converse.’ I nodded and headed off towards the house. We would have walked through walls had we needed to. The servant blinked and trotted after me. I stopped in the hallway. The servant bustled up behind, rubbing his gloved hands together unhappily. ‘My master stays in his study all day.’
‘With so little to do outside his study I am not surprised.’ I set off briskly down the corridor. Pulling at my jacket he kept urging me to stop and wait, but I paid him no heed, reaching the study door in front of him. I knocked loudly. There was silence. I knocked again. This time the door opened after the sound of key turning in lock. Ormonde stood there in the doorway, face red and ruddy, eyes narrow and shiny, grey hair dishevelled and wild. He leant forward from the waist with his hands on his hips. His legs stood firm, but his trunk trembled.
‘Good morning, Mr Ormonde. We are come from London today.’ I put a hand against the door and pushed it gently open. A desk stood in the corner of the room, its chair tucked neatly underneath it, its surface free of objects or documents of any kind. I wondered what he did in here, behind locked doors.
‘I trust you did not make a special trip for I am not in the mood for talking.’ He turned and shuffled back into the room, then sat down in a heavy wooden chair facing away from us so that all we could see was the back of his head. He wore the same coat that he had worn at the funeral, black and old and fraying.
‘You know that they have hung a man for the death of your daughter. A man called Joyce.’
Staring out of the window at empty fields leading to thick woods, he sat slouched. ‘Who was he?’
‘Once a soldier and a landowner. He was struck down on the battlefield. He took an injury so bad that they had to drill holes in his head.’
‘Why do they say he killed Anne?’ The old man steepled his fingers and looked into space.
‘They didn’t.’
‘Then why did they hang him?’ The old man waved a hand impatiently, casting Dowling a quick sideways glance.
‘Because the mob saw him running from the church around the time of the killing, and for Keeling that was enough evidence.’
Mumbling something, he gestured feebly with his right hand, a wrinkled claw that protruded from worn cuffs. I sat on the sill of the window through which he was staring.
‘Why do you think that Keeling took such a personal interest, sir?’
‘He used to be a friend.’
‘No more?’
Slumped in the chair, he hid his face. ‘We lost contact once he moved to London.’
I looked at Dowling, who stood behind Ormonde. He nodded gently. I sighed before telling him what we had discovered. ‘We know that Jane Keeling took her own life ten years ago, on her twentieth birthday, because she was with child. Now another man’s daughter has been killed on her twentieth birthday, her eyes mutilated and her teeth removed, indications of revenge.’ I watched his expressionless dull face. ‘Have we intruded upon some private feud?’
As my words sunk in, his eyes widened, his body jerked in spasm, and a strangled whine escaped his cold blue lips. He stared at me, his tight body twitching, his arm stiff and straight, his hand hovering an inch above his knee. ‘Sit down,’ he whispered at last.