Death at Blenheim Palace (27 page)

Ruth, a plain-faced young girl with thick brown hair, lit a second candle from the first and pointed to a trunk in the corner. “It’s the blue wool I’d like, sir,” she said eagerly. “The one with the blue and black braid. It’s for my sister, y’see. She’s gettin’ married, sir, and she’ll be ever so glad to have it.”

Somewhat mystified, Charles said, “A dress, is it? You’ll have to speak to Mrs. Raleigh about that, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, sir,” Ruth said, quite clearly disappointed. “I thought you was going to give me—”

“No,” Charles said firmly, “Whatever it is, it’s not mine to give. Thank you, Ruth. You can go back to your work now.”

With a resigned curtsey, Ruth departed, taking one of the candles to light her way down the stairs. In the flickering light of the remaining candle, Charles surveyed the small, bare room, which was scarcely larger than a cubicle. It contained little furniture, only a broken chair, a small chest of drawers on which sat a badly chipped china pitcher and basin, and an iron cot covered with a thin straw mattress scarcely wide enough for one, let alone two. An uncurtained casement window was set into the stone outer wall, overlooking a landscape palely illuminated by a quarter moon. Streaks of occasional lightning split the night sky, and thunder rumbled not far away.

Charles placed the candle on the floor beside the cheap cardboard trunk, knelt down, and raised the lid. The inside smelt strongly of camphor. He took out a rolled-up cloak, a skirt and white blouse and some undergarments, and the blue wool dress that Ruth had wanted, carefully folded with camphor balls in tissue paper. There was also a pair of rough boots badly in need of new heels, a slim volume of
The Young Girl’s
Guide to Domestic Service
and a copy of
Self-Help,
by Samuel Smiles, its pages dog-eared and pencil-marked. Charles riffled through it, noting that the sentence, “Heaven helps those who help themselves,” reoccured and was underlined in several places. As well, there was a small enamel box containing an assortment of buttons and pins, a spool of white thread with a needle stuck in it, a short length of narrow black velvet ribbon, a chipped ceramic dish bearing colored pictures of the King and Queen, and a silver-colored hair ornament. A worn leather purse contained two half-crowns and several shillings. And that was all.

Charles frowned and picked up the candle, holding it so that the light fell into the empty trunk. He ran the flat of his hand across the inside of the lid and the bottom of the trunk and on each of its four sides, inspecting the glued-on wallpaper lining. On the left side, his fingers felt a ridge, and on closer inspection, he saw that the paper lining had been carefully pulled back at the top, creating a kind of pocket into which an envelope had been slipped.

There was nothing written on the outside of the tan-colored envelope, and it was unsealed. Inside, there were three folded pieces of paper. One appeared to be a character reference, signed by someone identified as the housekeeper at Carleton House, Manchester, and bearing a date of approximately two years previous.

Another was a short article clipped from a newspaper, headlined “Crime Mastermind at Work.” A certain Richard Turner, Scotland Yard detective, was quoted as saying that several recent thefts appeared to have been carried out by the same organization and masterminded by a man whose identity remained a mystery but whom the criminal element and those who made their livings by breaking the law respectfully (if somewhat jocularly) styled as “Mr. Napoleon.”

The third was a small, smudged snapshot of a gentleman in a top hat and evening dress, emerging from a carriage. He had been caught by the camera in a full-face view, looking up, but the image was badly out of focus. On the back was penciled, in a labored script, the words
Jermyn Street
.

For a moment, Charles studied the photograph, following in his mind the sequence of events that might have brought it into Kitty’s possession, imagining the uses she might have put it to, or intended to put it to. If this was what he thought it might be, it was a dangerous weapon—but perhaps more dangerous to the one who held it than to the one against whom it was meant to be used. Dangerous enough to spell death? he wondered. Yes, on balance, he thought so. Blackmail was not a game to be played by the untutored or the unwary.

He looked at the photograph again, feeling as if there were something familiar about the figure. But when he could not think what it was, he returned it to the envelope and slipped the envelope into his pocket. He then replaced the clothing and other belongings and got to his feet.

He stood for a moment over the open trunk, regarding its meager contents, feeling the pathos of this small, sad collection of items, mute testimony—perhaps the only testimony there would ever be—to its owner’s personality, to her uniqueness and individuality. He had no evidence that the girl was dead, but he felt in his heart that she was. Whoever Kitty had been or hoped to be, it was all here in front of him, and there was woefully little of it.

Charles had closed the trunk and straightened up when something else occurred to him. He set down the candle, lifted the trunk lid again, and took out the blue wool dress, still folded in tissue. He laid it carefully on Ruth’s narrow cot, took a gold sovereign out of his pocket, and slipped it under a fold of the braid-trimmed bodice.

Then he descended the stair. He had one more search to make that evening: He was going to Gladys Deacon’s room to have a look at her diary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

 
A Victorian Poacher:
James Hawker’s Journal
edited by Garth Christian

 
 
 
Badger had been on the Blenheim lake, man and boy, for nearly seventy years. His father had maintained the Blenheim Fishery before him, and his grandfather and his great-grandfather before that, so that Blenheim’s lake was not only a family occupation, it ran in Badger’s blood.

The great, sinuous lake, which occupied an area of some hundred and fifty acres, had not always been there, of course. Before there was a lake, there had been only the pretty little river, the shallow, rippling River Glyme, meandering lazily between steep, wooded banks through Rosamund’s Meadow, where sheep were put to graze under the frowning brow of old Henry’s stone castle on the brink above.

That had been a great many years ago, centuries, even, but a pen-and-ink drawing of the drowned river, its meadows and cliffs and the looming castle, hung on the wall in Badger’s cottage. The drawing had been done in a rare moment of idleness by Badger’s great-great-grandfather, who had an artist’s eye and had left a yellowed portfolio of other sketches in mute and moving testimony to a forgotten past: the ancient buildings of Old Woodstock; a race meeting on the Four-Mile Course on the high ground north of the old king’s palace; and the palace itself, where the great Queen Elizabeth, then a princess and a threat to her Popish sister Mary, had been imprisoned in the gate house, which had been reduced to a ruin of rubble-stones by the later bombardments of the Civil War.

Even as a child, Badger had loved his great-great-grandfather’s drawings, and especially that of the river, for it was the only extant trace, it seemed to him, of a dim and ancient time, before powerful men laid their hands heavily upon the land, changing it and all of its creatures—a time before the Royal Park swallowed the village commons, before the Marlborough dukes and other large landowners did all they could to deprive free men of their freedoms, oppress the tenants, and strip the land of all that belonged of right to the people. Badger was no Radical, but he had heard that half of all England was owned by only a hundred and fifty families, and he agreed with Joseph Chamberlain, who described the gentry as an idle and parasitic class who toiled not, neither did they spin.

The green valley of the Glyme was gone now, and Rosamund’s Meadow and the steep hills and even the old castle, for during the time of Badger’s great-grandfather, the river had been dammed, submerging itself and its environs. It was the celebrated landscape architect, Capability Brown, who had achieved this feat, having been commissioned by the fourth Duke of Marlborough. The Duke (the same duke who collected the famous Marlborough Gemstones) had charged him with transforming the stark Blenheim woods, streams, and meadows into something greater and more impressive than the sum of their disparate parts. Brown had dammed the river and created the lake, a spectacular feature that captured the attention and the admiration of all who saw it. That had taken place over a hundred years ago, and now only a few remembered all the smaller beauties that had been sacrificed to achieve the larger.

Badger’s small stone cottage—the Fishery Cottage, where four generations of his family had lived—was located at the upper end of the lake. This area was called the Queen Pool, and being fairly shallow, with expanses of bullrush and bur-reed along the shores, was always busy with water birds: ducks and grebes and geese, as well as teal and wigeons and wintering cormorants. And of course, the dukes had always kept swans, which swam in elegant majesty the length and breadth of the lake.

But below the Grand Bridge, the water became much deeper, for the little Glyme had been edged there with tall cliffs. This was the part of the lake in which Badger was most interested—professionally interested, that is, for it was his duty to ensure a continued supply of fish by restocking, when he judged it necessary. It was also his duty, each day, to provide sufficient fresh fish for the Duke’s table, which he did by setting nets and dead lines, and spending several pleasant hours a day with a fishing pole.

Depending on the time of year and Badger’s luck, the Duke might dine on tench, rudd, roach, perch, or (His Grace’s favorite) pike. Badger, who was past seventy, had fished for five dukes: three Georges, a John, and this latter-day Charles—Sunny, to his family. All the dukes, to Badger’s mind, had been bad ’uns, which he attributed to their living in that monstrous palace and having more money in their pockets than mortal man ought, so that they felt little compassion for the plight of ordin’ry folk. And while they might consider themselves grand sportsmen, they were not sportsmen at all, in Badger’s scornful view, for they had no idea of the habits of fish, fowl, or game, and shot at (and often missed) only what was driven up before them.

But the present Duke, the ninth, was the worst, and Badger’s animosity toward him had grown deeper and darker with each passing year. The man cared only for the palace and the Park, and took no thought for people. He was, Badger thought, a very cold fish. This was proved by the fact that the Fishery Cottage had seen not one bit of repair since the early days of the eighth Duke, and the cottages of the Farm’s laborers were in an equally dilapidated state. And while the Duke’s pheasants fed on bread and hard-boiled eggs and nested in clean, sweet-smelling straw, the cottagers lived with empty larders and leaking roofs. Moreover, the Duke was not friendly to the village, and kept the Duchess—the richest woman in the world, as everyone knew—from doing anything more than making the usual courtesy calls on the sick.

It was no wonder, then, that the entire countryside shared Badger’s view that the ninth Duke was a hateful and mean-spirited man. And no wonder that this view fostered another: that, as the Duke treated them meanly, so meanly should he be treated in return.

And this explained why only some of the fish Badger took found their way to the Duke’s table, the remainder going instead to the tables of the poor in Woodstock, where the bread from the Blenheim kitchen also went. And why he had taken to fishing once or twice a week at night, and laying a half-dozen extra dead lines for pike in the deepest and coldest part of the lake, and setting another trammel net, some twenty yards long and six feet wide, not far from the sluicegate in the dam. All this required restocking the lake rather more frequently than one unaware of these activities might have supposed necessary, but the Duke didn’t notice.

It was mostly at night that Badger tended the dead lines and net, especially when the moon was the palest sliver or was beclouded and gave a fitful light, when the quiet lake was a sheet of beaten silver and there was only the call of the owl and the night jar to break the silence, and the soft plashing of the lines as he took them up, unhooked his catch, rebaited with small live fish, and dropped them down again.

Tonight, Badger had taken his mackintosh with him, for the storm that had been gathering since late afternoon seemed about to break. It was past ten and gone full dark, and the freshening breeze brought with it the smell of rain. Honest folk were all abed, except, of course, for the Duke and his guests in the palace, where lights were showing in the windows of the east wing.

But then, Badger knew, they weren’t honest, not a one of ’em above taking what didn’t belong to them. Like the lady he had caught that morning prowling in his boathouse, obviously looking for whatever she could steal. Or the girl who rowed his yellow boat across the lake and let it go adrift, so that it fetched up against the dam, where he had to go and retrieve it. Or the other, who . . .

He grinned and lit one of the Duke’s cigarettes. O’course, he’d been paid for that, and well enough to keep his mouth shut.

Other folk who, like Badger, were no more honest than they had to be, might also be abroad, for there was a brisk local trade in the Duke’s hares and rabbits and squirrels and even an occasional deer, as well as the Duke’s hen pheasants and their tasty eggs, in season. And while His Grace’s keepers should have been out on armed patrol, preserving His Grace’s peace, they generally preferred to stay (with the other honest folk) quietly in their beds and let those others own the night. Without the bounty of the Duke’s Park, Woodstock’s poor would have been much hungrier. There was an irony here that did not escape Badger.