That evening, Hester takes the leather bag from the library and walks it all the way to The Bluecoat School. She can think of nowhere else that might be safer, less likely to be searched. Because Professor Palmer has a sharp eye and a puzzled, suspicious expression, and when he came to The Rectory to question the household, she caught those sharp eyes of his roaming the corners of the room. Hunting, hunting. When she spoke to him, her own words rang with dishonesty even when she spoke the truth. Because she was full of lies, full of deception. She felt it oozing from her every pore. The bag cannot stay in the house, and it is too big to put into the stove, to burn as she had the towel. Besides, the binoculars would not burn. There is no way to destroy them. And Hester also feels that she shouldn’t destroy any of it. Just in case… in case some situation arose – something she has not thought of, since her thoughts are so mixed and bewildered – and the contents of the bag were needed. The Bluecoat School is never locked, and as she walks to her customary position at the head of the class the loose floor-boards shift and rock beneath her feet, and she falls to her knees, scrabbling at them with her fingernails, weeping with relief as this hiding place presents itself to her.
The inquest lasts three days, and through it all Robin Durrant says nothing. George speaks to the coroner and jury and tells them how Cat had been planning to run away with him, and how she had loved him, and how whatever the reason she had been in the meadows that morning, it had not been to keep a lover’s tryst with Robin Durrant, as the police were suggesting. He is adamant about this, he insists it; but only Hester knows that he is right and not merely blinded by love. She stares at him as he stands and weeps, unashamedly and uncontrollably, and she feels her heart breaking for him. The words hover in her mouth, but will not be spoken. I know why she was there! I know what Robin Durrant was doing! But she cannot speak. She cannot speak to anybody. As surely as if a spell has been cast to hold her tongue, it stays still and silent in her mouth. Numb and deadened, like the rest of her. He is handsome, this man of Cat’s. He looks strong and honest. He speaks about Cat with such passion and love that Hester feels a stab of misplaced envy. What a joy it must have been, to plan an elopement with a man like George Hobson. But Cat’s plans had been interrupted. Horribly, irreversibly interrupted. She must be furious, Hester thinks. She shuts her eyes, gripped by the thought. Wherever Cat is now, she must be furious.
When Cat’s character is defamed, Mrs Bell demands to speak, and stands up for the girl. She, too, denies that Cat was involved with Robin Durrant in any way, and hints that the theosophist must have coerced her out of her room somehow, must have found some way to unlock her door and force her out into the meadows, since she herself had locked the girl safely in the night before. When she cannot give a rational explanation of this, glances are exchanged and notes taken, and it is assumed that the housekeeper feels guilty about forgetting to lock the door and is trying to cover her mistake. Hester hears all this, and stays silent. She thinks of the skeleton key that she gave to Cat, and she stays silent. She forgets to blink for long, long minutes, until her eyes itch and sting.
Barrett Anders, the dairy man, testifies that he had been coming south in his milk cart, along the lane from the London Road, to make his deliveries in the village, and as he’d neared the bridge he’d seen Robin Durrant crossing the meadow towards the canal with the girl in his arms, all broken and dead, and that he’d knocked the killer down while George Hobson, who had come along the towpath, leapt into the water to pull the girl out, even though she was clearly dead and nothing could be done to help her. Hester tries to shut her mind to it, to the unbearable pain George must have felt, seeing Cat that way. Cat, with scarlet water streaming from her black hair, her thin limbs limp, her little hawk’s face a ruin. The images strike her like lashes of a whip. ‘Minutes too late to save her, I was,’ George moans, his face ravaged, twisted with grief. ‘Only minutes.’ Robin Durrant is charged with wilful murder and committed for trial at the next Berkshire assizes. He does not react to the verdict. He does not react to anything.
The Sunday after Cat’s death, the Reverend Albert Canning gives his sermon as usual, to a packed church that hums with suppressed excitement; illicit, disrespectful excitement that the congregation can’t help feeling or showing. They’ve come to see the Cannings, who have housed a murderer all summer long; whose maid has been smashed to death with a rock; who are at the centre of the biggest scandal the parish has ever known. Hester sits in the front row, where she always sits, her back stiff, her skin burning. The tide of whispers rises, laps the nape of her neck, threatens to close over her head. Albert does not mention Cat in his sermon. Hester listens in dismay, as he does not. He repeats a sermon he gave only three or four weeks before, on the subject of material wealth, staring at the back of the church as though his thoughts are a million miles away; the words bitten off and falling from his mouth like chunks of wood. Solid and dry and dead. As if he no longer believes a single one of them. At home, he sits in the parlour and never asks about his journal, or the leather bag, or his binoculars. He never asks about any of it, and Hester never speaks up. Her Albert has gone, and in his place is this sleeper, this man of ice, this shadowy person who barely speaks and barely eats and only goes out on church business; in his place is a man she doesn’t know at all – a shell, a liar. She watches him with a heart full of dread, frightened of him, and of what she has done to protect him. The man is a changeling, he is a stranger. And perhaps, perhaps, he is a killer.
Wednesday, October 15th, 1911
Dear sir,
Why don’t you reply to my letters? I don’t know who else to talk to and I must get out some of my thoughts or I will run mad. I used to write to my sister, and there were no secrets between us two, but now I have things I can’t write, even to her; and so I must write them to you. Why do you not speak out? If what I think is true, why do you stay silent? Perhaps I know the reason. To keep your own secret – that of the elemental, and of the photographs you published. To keep your name and this place in history that you have carved for yourself, at whatever cost. But it is a sorry world we live in if the infamy caused by a lie should be greater than that of a murder. Do you really think you have chosen the lesser crime of the two to be guilty of?