I found your bag, which was brought back to the house. I found what was in it, and Albert’s binoculars. I know your secret. The secret you will go to gaol to protect. Are you willing to die for it? They might hang you! And what use is your reputation as a theosophist when you have lost all standing as a man? Will your precious Society still have you, when you are a convicted killer? I think not. I think not. So why persist in this silence? What good does it do you? The date of your trial approaches. There isn’t much time. If you are hanged, what then? Is that what you wish – do you think that even if your life ends now, your name will live on for ever? That you will always be the theosophist who captured proof of the existence of elementals? I tell you now, it is not worth it. Already there are some who denounce your work, and the pictures you took, and their numbers will grow. You will be forgotten, as will your work. Speak out, and there is time to start again! Your father would rather have a failed theosophist or even a fraudster for a son than a murderer; I am utterly convinced of it.
At one point I thought you noble, I thought you sacrificed yourself for Albert. But this was a foolish thing to think. Why would you? Everything you did was for yourself, from the moment you arrived at my home, and turned it upside down. Oh, why did you come at all! How I wish that you hadn’t, and that still Cat lived, even if she had run off with her George. She was my cousin, did you know that? She wrote it to me in a letter, which she meant for me to find once she had made her escape. Perhaps a while ago I would not have believed that my uncle would sire a child with one of his servants, and then place that child in my household without ever telling me. Now I think there is nothing men will not do, should it suit them. There is nothing they will not do.
I believe I am with child. The symptoms are becoming harder and harder to deny. I thought I should tell you, though I have no idea what you will make of this news. If it will have any effect on you at all. I myself am quite destroyed by confusion and joy and doubt. Joy – how can there be any joy in this house any more? Ever again? Joy or laughter or merriment. All I wanted was a child, and now I come to see how true the adage that we should be careful what we wish for. Albert is like a ghost. He chills the room. He chills me. My own husband. I have not told him about the baby. How can I? Though soon enough he’ll see it. What then? Will I be beaten out of existence too? Will that be the end of me? This cannot go on – we cannot go on like this. Something must change. The truth must come out. I can’t carry this burden on my own; it’s too much for me. I can feel myself breaking with the strain of it, day by day. I have hidden all the things I found, that evil morning. They remain, and they tell their own story. The truth is waiting for you to speak out, Mr Durrant. If you do, I will help you. I swear it. I will tell them of my part in this, and Albert’s, and I will take my due. Perhaps they would be merciful to me, knowing that I acted out of fear, and love for my husband. Perhaps not. Oh, but what then of our child? What would become of him? I do not know what to do. Help me.
Hester Canning
14
2011
Leah spent a week reading the police files on the Cat Morley case, and searching the papers later in 1911 for details of Robin Durrant’s trial. She stared at the photograph of him that appeared each time the story was reported; at the elegantly curved top lip that she remembered from the dead soldier, so many miles away in Belgium. It was unsettling to recognise that the two faces, living and dead, were one. He was found guilty of wilful murder; the conclusion that it had been a crime of passion, since Cat’s reputation was not good and she was found wearing only her slip. As such, the jury recommended mercy and he was sentenced to life imprisonment rather than hanging. Only one man seemed to have had any doubts in what was otherwise treated as an open and shut case. The Home Office’s man, Professor Palmer, noted that there was much less blood staining on Cat’s slip than he would have expected had she been wearing only that when she was attacked and killed; and that if their meeting had been a passionate one, a tryst gone awry, then he found it strange that she had arranged to meet her other lover, George Hobson, and to elope with him that same morning. And also that she had removed her dress carefully, and folded it up neatly. Hardly the actions of a couple in the throes of passion. There were also the fragments of glass in the girl’s face, which never were accounted for.
Added into the file, like an afterthought, was an extra statement from Mrs Sophie Bell, the cook and housekeeper at The Rectory. Made several weeks after the inquest and shortly before Robin Durrant’s trial, Mrs Bell stated that she had found a bloodied towel in the kitchen at The Rectory on the morning of the murder, and that it had subsequently disappeared. Asked why she hadn’t reported this before, the woman said she had been too shocked and upset at the time, and had forgotten all about it until later on. She also stated that the vicar and his wife had been most peculiar, and much changed since the killing; although she stressed that they had always been good and kind employers, and that the alteration in them might be purely ascribable to shock. There was a memo from Professor Palmer, suggesting that the statement be included in the trial evidence, and that further investigation be made into The Rectory and its occupants, but this recommendation was not acted upon.
Reading the files, Leah felt a tremendous sense of urgency. She knew where the glass in Cat’s face had come from – from the murder weapon, Albert Canning’s binoculars. She knew that the reason there hadn’t been much blood on Cat’s slip was because she’d been dressed as an elemental when she was killed. And she knew why the vicar, whose journal reflected a man rapidly losing his grip on reality, would have lashed out at the girl. He had been duped, surely and completely. Finding this out must have rocked him to his very core, and tipped him over the edge of reason. She knew why Hester Canning, desperate at first to stop any suspicion falling on her husband, had hidden the evidence she’d found at The Rectory on the day of the murder; and why thereafter, as she came to suspect her husband, she had been tortured by guilt and fear. Leah felt like running to somebody in authority with what she knew; telling the police, the press, anybody. As if she could change these events, a hundred years later. As if the real killer could be brought to justice, and Hester not forced to live out her shadowed life with him.
The newspapers, by the time of the trial, had managed to find photographs to go with the story. They printed the Cannings’ wedding portrait, taken in 1909. The couple stared serenely from the page, two pairs of pale eyes in soft young faces, the irises so clear that even in black and white, it was obvious that they must have been light blue or green. Hester was smiling slightly, glowing with contentment. The vicar, who was wed in his clerical dress, had an air of mild anxiety and no smile on his lips. Leah stared at the woman’s face with a feeling of recognition. And there was a picture of Cat Morley, the murdered housemaid, whose role as the elemental was never publicly discussed, even if there had been those with suspicions at the time. It was a poor shot, taken from a distance at the Cold Ash Holt fête for the coronation in June, 1911. An array of finely dressed ladies, including Hester Canning, had paused in their revelry to have their picture taken. Bunting and parasols, tea tables laid with bright white cloths and three-tiered cake stands. And, behind them, a short, slight girl in a grey dress, with a clean apron tied tightly around her and a soft cotton cap on her head. She was holding a silver teapot, as if paused in the act of filling the china cups laid out in front of her. It was not a good picture, and too distant for her face to be clear. Short locks of black hair came out from under her cap, and her face was set in a scowl which might have been down to the bright sunlight, but might not. Dark brows drawn down in a thin, angular face. The elemental, Leah thought, with a pang of anguish for the girl.