‘Amorette and I had been eating fruit; some of the previous autumn’s apples taken out of winter store. There was a knife, lying on the plate along with the cores and peel. Before I realized what was happening, Isabella had seized it and was attacking her mother in a frenzy. My wife was fending her off as best she could and calling to me for help. I tried to drag Isabella away, but she was like a woman possessed, lending her the strength of ten. Within seconds, I was bleeding from a cut to my hand.’
‘So you hit her with something. Something heavy,’ I said, as once again Jonathan Linkinhorne paused.
‘Yes.’ The monosyllable fell flatly between us, heavy as lead, before he went on, ‘There was a pewter vase in a niche in the wall. I hit my daughter over the back of her head with it.’ Tears welled up suddenly in his eyes, furrowing his cheeks; great sobs racked him, the more shocking and poignant because they were silent. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ he rasped after a moment, ‘just to stop her killing Amorette. She fell where she stood, but when we turned her over, to pick her up, we found Isabella was dead.’
The voice faded and became suspended, and the old man’s chest heaved as though he could barely breathe.
‘I’ll call the Infirmarer,’ I said anxiously, getting to my feet.
‘No!’ Jonathan gasped, reaching up and plucking at my sleeve. ‘I’ll be all right in a moment or two. I’ll tell you the rest. It will be a relief to unburden my conscience after all these years.’
So I sat down again on the edge of the mattress and waited for the spasm to pass. When it had I asked, ‘Did none of the servants hear anything of this quarrel?’
He shook his head. ‘They had all gone home. The only two who might have done were both out of the house. Emilia Virgoe, Isabella’s old nurse, and her maid, Jane Honeychurch, were both absent that day. I forget why.’
‘Mistress Virgoe told me that she was staying with her sick sister in Bristol. You had given her leave of absence to do so. As for Jane Honeychurch — Goody Purefoy as she is now — she said …’ My voice tailed off as memory came flooding back and I recollected exactly what it was that Jane Purefoy had said.
The old reprobate on the bed gazed limpidly back at me, but a tic suddenly appeared in one of his cheeks. ‘What did she say?’ But the question was tentative.
‘That she had gone into Bristol to visit her foster mother. That your wife, who was visiting a friend there, had taken her in the covered waggon. That Mistress Linkinhorne also brought her home again, after dark. That, by then, Isabella had already disappeared.’ During the ensuing silence, Jonathan Linkinhorne and I stared each other out, but his gaze was the first to drop. I went on remorselessly, ‘Isabella didn’t attack your wife, did she? She had done so once, but not on that occasion. Suppose now you tell me what really happened.’
I thought, by the way he compressed his lips, that he would refuse to say anything more. There was, after all, nothing I could do to force him to speak. He was a sick old man and there were no witnesses to the conversation we had just had. But in the end I think, as he had said, the need to unburden himself was genuine. Reluctantly, he abandoned his former story.
‘All right,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t kill Isabella. She wasn’t attacking my wife. As you’ve discovered, Amorette wasn’t even there. But my cousin was.’
‘You mean Sister Walburga?’ I interrupted.
Jonathan nodded. ‘Yes, Jeanette. She’d entered the Magdalen nunnery as a postulant some few days before and had come to take formal leave of me. It isn’t a retired order, but she knew that we wouldn’t see much of one another in future, and she wanted my blessing. My approval, I suppose, of what she was doing; of the step she had taken. And it was while she was with me that Isabella came home.’ He heaved himself up a little in the bed. ‘What I told you just now wasn’t altogether a lie. Parts of it were true. But it was Jeanette and I who were in the solar when Isabella came in after changing her gown. I did ask Isabella where she’d been and she did fly into a rage, but it was me she attacked with the fruit knife …’ His voice became suspended.
‘And it was Sister Walburga who hit her with the vase,’ I finished for him.
‘Yes. I didn’t want to implicate her unless I had to.’
‘So what did you do when you realized that your daughter was dead?’ I asked, although I could guess at least part of the answer.
‘It was getting dark. I had promised Jeanette some vegetables to take back with her for the nuns, and they’d been dug up earlier by one of the men before he went home, and loaded into the cart we used for market. She said I must help her put Isabella’s body into the cart as well, and drive back with her to the nunnery. It’s outside the city walls, like this place, so curfew didn’t matter. She said a grave had been dug in the nuns’ graveyard for one of the Sisters who was very sick and had been expected to die, but who, in my cousin’s opinion, was more likely to recover. I asked what would happen if she didn’t, but Jeanette said it was a chance we had to take. And if she did get better, my cousin said it would be an easy enough matter to plant the idea of a miracle in the minds of the other two nuns.’
‘Which she successfully did, according to Sister Apollonia,’ I said. ‘But go on.’
My companion shifted restlessly. ‘There’s not much more to tell. We had the house to ourselves: the hands we employed, the two girls and the men, all had homes in the village. We couldn’t afford to feed them more than their dinners. Only Emilia and Jane Honeychurch lived with us. So we put Isabella’s body in the cart, I drove it to the graveyard, we buried Isabella in the vacant grave, I left Jeanette at the nunnery door, together with the sack of vegetables, and returned here. I turned Isabella’s horse loose and lived in dread for the next few days that it would make its way back again. But it never did. It was a valuable animal and someone no doubt found it wandering and thought his luck was in.’
‘Your wife?’ I queried. ‘Did you tell her the truth?’
‘Oh, yes. I had to.’ The rheumy eyes clouded over. ‘It hit her hard, but in the end, she agreed that we had to protect Jeanette because she had only been protecting me. We made a pretence of searching for Isabella, but of course we knew we would never find her. We knew where she was all the time. But the knowledge was too much for Amorette to bear. The following year she drowned herself in the Avon. Of course, most people thought it was an accident, and there was no proof to the contrary. Even I couldn’t swear it was suicide, although naturally I had my doubts …’
‘You told me, when we spoke before, that you sent that day to Emilia Virgoe’s cottage to ask if Isabella were there, yet you knew she wasn’t at home.’
‘God’s fingernails, man!’ Jonathan thumped his coverlet in exasperation. ‘As far as I knew then, what I told you didn’t matter. I didn’t think you were going to ferret out the truth and disturb my peace.’ He began to breathe heavily again. ‘And you can’t be sure that what I’ve told you now is really the truth, can you?’ He gave a wheezing laugh that stuck in his throat and threatened to choke him.
He was right, of course. He had told me two different stories within a very short space of time, adapting the second to fit the information I had gathered for myself.
Jonathan gave a throaty chuckle which rapidly degenerated into a spasm of coughing. When, finally, he could speak, he wheezed, ‘Jeanette, if you question her, will deny everything.’ I wondered how he knew that. ‘And then you won’t know who to believe, now will you?’