The Path of the Wicked (15 page)

We turned along the quarry track, back the way we'd come. No need for caution now in the dark, with everybody's attention elsewhere. Below us some of the men had lanterns and their lights were criss-crossing the fields. The farmyard had so many lanterns lit that the barns and haystacks showed clearly as unscathed silhouettes. They were safe for tonight at any rate. I hoped Barty and his men were safe as well. So far there'd been no sounds of triumph or excitement to suggest that anybody had been shot or captured. Once we'd turned off the quarry track, on to the road leading back to the village, we stopped and reorganized ourselves as best we could, wringing out the wet skirts of our dresses, using our fingers to comb the worst of the leaves and thorns out of our hair. After that, we went on at a more normal pace. I was sure we'd get back before Mr Godwit and Mr Penbrake. It sounded as if the confusion would take a long time to die down and there'd probably be endless arguments about what had gone wrong. Mrs Wood was another matter.

‘She sleeps heavy,' Tabby said, picking up my thoughts. ‘If we take our boots off, we might get up the back stairs. Suzie won't tell on us.'

‘How do you know she sleeps heavily?'

‘Suzie says. And she snores, so we can listen and make sure.'

As so often, Tabby was right. We crept up the back stairs to my room and arranged our outer garments across chairs and washstand to dry. Then Tabby went to her own bed – presumably still on the floor of the maids' room – and I went to sleep. My last waking thought was that Barty Jones owed me now.

I
t was daylight before the gig came rolling home and I heard Mr Godwit treading wearily upstairs. But he was there at the breakfast table, neatly dressed as ever, although hollow-eyed.

‘They didn't come,' he said. ‘Penbrake thinks they must have known we'd be waiting for them.'

He looked as if he needed to spend the morning dozing in his summer house but, as all too often, I had to add to his troubles.

‘I'd like to talk to you after breakfast,' I said. ‘About Jack Picton's other sister.'

He flinched. ‘Oh.'

Mrs Wood came to clear the table, still looking annoyed about the disturbances of the day before. Mr Godwit led the way into the garden and stood staring at the bumblebees rummaging his hollyhocks.

‘You must have known about her,' I said. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘It's a painful and distressing subject to talk about to a young lady.'

‘You hired me as an investigator. You must see that it might be relevant to the charge against Jack Picton.'

‘I don't see that there's any connection between them.'

‘He's keeping something from us; we know that. His friend got me to take a message to him in prison about bringing her back.'

‘I'm afraid that won't happen.'

‘But that must mean he's concerned about her,' I said.

‘He wasn't very concerned when the poor girl was in the workhouse.'

The words came from him suddenly and harshly.

‘Workhouse?'

‘That was how it happened. She absconded from the workhouse with the baby.' He was still staring at the flowers but, I was sure, not seeing them.

‘You're on the workhouse board of guardians,' I said.

‘We didn't know she'd gone, not until too late.'

‘She'd have appeared before you, as a magistrate.'

‘Initially, yes. But of course we had to commit her to the assizes. We had no choice.' He sounded utterly miserable.

‘Tell me about it, whatever you know,' I said.

‘The girl's name is Joanna. The baby was born over a year ago, in the spring of last year. She wouldn't name the father. At first her mother took her in. But it has to be said that Joanna was a wilful girl and of course there was no money to maintain a baby. By the autumn they'd quarrelled so badly that her mother threw Joanna and the baby out. With no other resource, she walked into Cheltenham, carrying the child. I don't know what she expected to find there. Charity perhaps, or she might have had friends who she hoped might take her in. If so, she was disappointed. It was a lot to ask, after all. The result was that Joanna was found with the baby, sleeping in a church porch. The curate took her to the workhouse. When she was admitted, she was asked again to name the father of the child, and again she refused.'

I guessed that she'd have come under some pressure. Men who fathered illegitimate children could be made to support them in the workhouse. The neat, kindly man standing beside me would have been one of the people who questioned Joanna.

‘How old was she?' I said.

‘Eighteen then. Seventeen when the child was born.'

‘So she was taken into the workhouse?'

‘Yes. And I'm sorry to say that from the start she proved difficult. The supervisor several times reported her to the board of guardians for laziness and disobedience. She was quarrelsome too and had to be disciplined for fighting with one of the other women in the laundry room. On the credit side, everybody agrees that she cared for the baby. In fact, some of her problems came from trying to get better treatment for him over the other children. Of course, other mothers resented that.'

He went quiet for so long that I had to prompt him.

‘You said she absconded from the workhouse.'

‘Yes. It seems she just walked out one evening with the baby, before the doors were locked for the night. Somebody should have noticed she was gone, but nobody did. There'd been another quarrel that day and Joanna had been sulky, but that was nothing out of the way. In the morning she and the baby were missed. The other women said they hadn't noticed anything. Good riddance was their attitude. In fact, it might have been the general attitude, except for what happened next.'

‘The baby died.'

‘Yes. The thing to understand was that by then it was November and the weather particularly harsh – rain most days, puddles in the road, water in the ditches, temperatures down to freezing at night. When the guardians heard she'd left, we were sure she wouldn't stay more than one night outside. She'd be found in some doorway, begging to be taken in again. Only that didn't happen. For some reason she decided to leave the town entirely and make for Gloucester.'

A matter of ten miles away.

‘Why there?'

‘Simply because it's the next big town. She hoped to find work there. At least, that's what she told the woman at an inn where she stopped.'

‘She had money to stay at an inn?'

‘No. It was the morning after she left the workhouse. She'd probably spent the night in a barn somewhere. She came to this inn not far out of Cheltenham and knocked on the door, begging for a cup of milk for the baby. The landlord's wife says she was shivering, blue with cold. She was a kind-hearted woman – asked her in to get warm by the kitchen fire and gave her some milk for the baby, bread and tea for herself. Joanna wanted to know if they needed a maid, but they didn't, so after getting warm she moved on with the baby. It must have been slow going, because it was just after daylight the next morning when a carter found her sitting on a bank on the outskirts of Gloucester. Without the baby.'

‘What had happened to it?'

‘She told the carter she'd lost it. She wanted him to take her back along the road to look for it. She was pretty well paralyzed with cold and exhaustion, couldn't walk any further. Of course, the carter couldn't go back because he had his rounds to do, but he gave her a ride into Gloucester and put her in the care of a constable. They took her back to look for the baby. She identified more or less the place where she'd last seen it. She said it was dark, that she'd had to stop and step off the road into some bushes to . . . er . . . adjust her dress . . .'

A call of nature, I guessed, but he was too delicate to say so.

‘So she put the child down on the bank, but she must have come out of the bushes in a different place and couldn't find him again. She went up and down in the dark looking for him and, by her account, shouting for help. But it was on a lonely stretch with no houses and nobody coming by. Then it occurred to her that she needed somebody with a lantern, so she started running and fell and twisted her ankle, didn't even know which direction she was heading. In the end, all she could do was sit down and wait to be found.'

As he told the story, he'd been talking more and more quickly and had to pause for breath.

‘And they found the baby dead?' I said.

He nodded. ‘In a ditch, in about a foot of icy water. She said it was where she'd left him on the bank. She hadn't known there was a ditch.'

‘So he'd rolled down and drowned?'

‘That was the defence case. She had a good young barrister, acting
pro bono publico.
He did what he could.'

‘But the jury didn't believe him? Or her?'

‘No. There was her record and character, you see. The prosecution made the point that if she'd really cared for the child, she'd have stayed where he was safe, in the workhouse. Their case was that she'd wilfully absconded, felt burdened by the child and deliberately drowned him.'

He hadn't looked at me while he was telling the story. He didn't look at me now, bending to pull a groundsel seedling from the border of mignonette. When he had the small weed in his hand, he stood staring down at it, as if puzzled how it had come to be there.

‘But you believed her?' I said. ‘You think it was accidental?'

‘It was out of my hands. It wasn't for me to decide. She was sentenced to death at the Lent assizes.'

His nervous determination to see fair play for Jack Picton was easier to understand now. He'd failed Joanna and dreaded repeating it with her brother.

‘Did you sign the petition to the Queen against hanging her?'

‘Yes. Some people thought I shouldn't, as a magistrate.'

‘Where was Jack Picton in all this? Surely he should have kept his sister out of the workhouse, at least,' I said.

‘Where indeed? This happened just after that dreadful business at Newport and he was hiding himself away somewhere.'

‘So, what was the first he knew about what was happening to his sister?'

‘I don't know for certain. He only reappeared in public after she'd been sentenced.'

‘What did he do then?'

‘To be fair to him, moved heaven and earth – letters, the petition. His Chartist friends marched through Cheltenham. The Smithies father and son had a lot to do with that. There was even talk that young Smithies had a tendresse for Joanna, until she turned into such a wilful girl. The wilder sort were even talking about a raid to snatch her away from the gallows if they tried to hang her.'

‘Did the wilder sort include one Barty Jones by any chance?'

He nodded.

‘And in all this nobody ever knew who the father of the baby was?'

‘No.'

‘Why in the world didn't she say? She was going to be hanged – what worse could anyone do to her?'

‘The child died and it was her fault. What difference did it make who the father was?'

Quite a lot of difference, I thought. In spite of the sunshine and scent of flowers, the cold and dark of that November road had got into my body, and I guessed it wouldn't easily go away. Mr Godwit looked longingly towards his study window. Perhaps the cold had got to him as well and he wanted to take refuge among his books and papers. I wasn't quite ready to let him go.

‘You said her mother took her in at first, after the child was born. So she'd been living away from home until then?'

‘Yes. To be precise, the mother took her in before the birth, once her condition became so obvious that she had to leave her employment.'

‘What employment?'

‘As a maid.'

‘Where?'

‘In a local household.'

It was like trying to drag out a tooth. His shoulders were hunched, his words directed at the mignonette.

‘Which local household?'

At first I thought the wriggle he gave was a physical sign of reluctance to answer. Then I realized that he'd nodded his head down to his right shoulder.

‘Oh dear, not the vicarage,' I said, trying to follow the direction. At least the misunderstanding made him say it in words.

‘No, not the vicarage. The Kembles.'

I stared. ‘Joanna Picton was working for the Kembles?'

A nod.

‘Have I understood this right? She was working as a maid for the Kembles, she became pregnant, she was dismissed when her pregnancy became obvious and everything else followed from that?'

‘Well, yes.'

‘And the obvious connection never occurred to anybody?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Mr Godwit, did you hire a fool?

‘Fool?'

‘Because you seem to think I am one. May we please put delicacy aside? When a female servant becomes pregnant in a household where there's a son, there's a question that everybody asks himself.'

‘I'm quite certain that Rodney Kemble is an entirely moral young man.'

‘His father, then?'

‘Quite out of the question.'

‘What did Jack Picton think? Did he suppose it was quite out of the question?'

‘I don't know or care what Jack Picton thought.'

‘Perhaps you should care. He comes home from somewhere and finds out, if he doesn't know already, that his sister's in prison and sentenced to death. He already hates the Kembles because of his father's accident. What conclusion do you think he'd draw?'

Somehow I must have jolted him into using his brain, or admitting that he possessed one. He looked at me for the first time in the conversation.

‘In that case, why kill the governess? Why not kill Rodney Kemble?' It was a good question and, since I had no answer to it, I let him go.

When the mind is unquiet – and mine was very unquiet – there's no better treatment than watching horses graze. I went to the paddock and leaned on the gate. Rancie was disappointed that I wasn't bringing a carrot as usual but graciously accepted a few handfuls of the longer grass that grew on my side of the gate. The cob stayed in the shade of a tree, recovering from his exertions of the day before. After a while Rancie went to join him. I watched them, lulled by the gentle rasping of their teeth against grass blades.