The Path of the Wicked (31 page)

‘What am I supposed to do here?'

My suggestion that she might help Barbara with her packing received the reception I'd expected.

Amos and I rode back down to the main road, with Mary Marsh's book tucked into my saddle bag.

‘So it wasn't the lass's brother, after all,' Amos said. He sounded glad about it.

‘No. There's not a doubt about Peter's story. He doesn't like Rodney Kemble and he had no notion that he was helping him when he told it. Whatever happened to Joanna Picton after the fair had nothing to do with Rodney Kemble.'

A cart crowded with women had rolled away, downhill to the town gaol. Some of the women would have been drunk, some defiant, one at least physically sick. Around them, all the apparatus of authority – police, church, magistrates. Mary Marsh had come away from her last meeting with Joanna with one word on her mind. Hypocrisy. It had even more force now.

O
nce we were down the hill and on the more level road back into town, I took out the book. Rancie's walking pace was so smooth that there was no difficulty in reading as we went along. It wasn't a letter book like the others, rather a place where she made random notes or drafted things that she'd later write out as fair copies, like the poem for Barbara. I skimmed through, looking for references to Joanna or Jack Picton, but had found none by the time we came to the Paleys' house.

‘Will you be all right on your own?' Amos said. ‘If you wanted to wait, we could ride out together – just in case the brother gets okkerd again.'

‘I don't think he will. We've found his sister for him, after all. You'll be needed back at the farmhouse, seeing the two of them on their ways.'

He nodded. One of the many good things about Amos was that he didn't fuss. We agreed to meet later at the Star. I put the letter book back in my saddlebag as Rancie and I rode through the town, but took it out again when we were on the road back to the village. For the first mile or so, we ambled along and I read without result to what looked like the last jottings in the book, with nothing but blank pages behind. I was closing it to put in my saddlebag when something caught my eye. It started several pages after what had looked like the last entry, which was why I'd almost missed it. It was unmistakably Mary Marsh's hand, though not her usual writing. Normally, even in the jottings, she was neat. This was not neat at all. Two facing pages were seamed with crossings-out, like a badly darned stocking, measled with small ink spots where her pen nib had spluttered from being pressed too hard. Sometimes the words were thickly inked, sometimes so thin that they were scarcely readable, as if she'd grudged the time needed to put pen to inkwell. It was so difficult to read that I brought Rancie to a halt. Then, once I'd made sense of it, we were away at a pace that must have delighted her heart, making for the Kembles' house. The hedges passed in a blur and the rhythm of her hooves kept a drumbeat accompaniment to my anger.

We walked the last mile, to cool Rancie down and for me to get my thoughts in order. The first thing was to deliver the news about Barbara, and it was a relief when Colonel Kemble appeared on the steps so promptly that he must have been watching from a window. I tried to report as factually and unemotionally as I could, like a junior officer with dispatches, repeating word for word what Peter Paley had said. He responded in kind, nodding quickly now and then, giving nothing away by his expression. When I'd finished, he said: ‘Well, we'd better go and fetch her, hadn't we?'

He was speaking to his son as well as to me, because by then Rodney was standing in the hallway behind him.

‘I'll go,' Rodney said. ‘I'll take the brougham.' He was trying to seem as much in control as his father, but less successfully.

The colonel nodded. If Barbara could be brought home without attracting too much attention, then the damage might be limited. Some story might be concocted that she'd gone to stay with friends and a message telling her father had been unaccountably lost. Nobody would believe it, but the decencies would be preserved. If that was in the colonel's mind, he gave no sign of it. He even remembered to thank me and ask if I'd care to come in.

‘I think I should go with the brougham,' I said. ‘Barbara might like to have another woman there.'

He nodded again. By now Rodney had disappeared, presumably for the stable block by way of a back door. I rode Rancie in the same direction, rein loose and at a walk. The stable yard was in confusion. The horse that drew the brougham was out at pasture and a groom had been sent running for it. Another groom and a boy were dragging the brougham out of the carriage house, with Rodney looking on impatiently. I slid off Rancie and walked over to him, leading her.

‘I need to talk to you,' I said. ‘About Mary Marsh.'

He turned, looking furious. ‘Not now.'

‘It won't wait. I have a letter to you from her.'

‘A letter?'

It unbalanced him. There was more fear than anger in his face now.

‘Her last letter.'

‘Where did you get it?'

I opened the saddlebag and gave him her book, open at the right pages. He glanced from it to me, seeming reluctant to look at it. Then he looked down at last and read, standing as still as the mounting block beside us.

‘It's not addressed to me,' he said at last, sounding dazed.

‘Not by name, no. But who else could it be?'

He nodded.

By now the groom was back with the horse, but it had been rolling and its flanks were clotted with dried mud. One man started on it with the dandy brush while another picked out its hooves.

‘It will take them a while,' I said. ‘Is there somewhere else we can talk?'

He led the way into an empty loose box. Since there was nobody free to hold Rancie, we both followed him. He leaned against the hay manger and read the letter again, squinting in the dim light.

‘I never saw it. Not until now,' he said.

‘No. She didn't send it. You can see what an effort it was for her to write the draft. In the end she decided it would do no good.'

The reasons for that decision were in the letter that she'd never sent. She wrote that she'd asked him for help once before and he'd felt unable to give it. She'd been angry and she was sorry for that. It was as painful for her as it must be for him to revisit something that had hurt them both so deeply, and it was only under the harshest necessity that she did so now.

‘It is to you, isn't it?' I said.

His reluctant nod confirmed it. ‘She didn't send it because she thought I wouldn't help her,' he said.

His voice was as flat and level as a slab on a grave. I could have recited by heart the passage in her letter which he was probably rereading now:

There are two things which I must tell you now. The first is that your caution when I first spoke to you on this subject – a caution which I so much derided at the time – has been proved right. The gentleman I named to you then is entirely innocent of the cruelty of which I accused him. I now know
for certain
the father of Joanna's child. I had it from her own lips. She never spoke until the last because he had convinced her that her only hope of rescue lay in keeping silent. When she discovered that he'd never intended help at all, she broke that silence. The second thing I must tell you is his name. He thinks the respect in which he is held and his high place in the community protects him from exposure. I am determined to prove him wrong. I know that I have forfeited any personal claim on your help in this by my previous hastiness and my unkindness to you. So what I may not ask you for my sake, I can only ask in the name of justice.

He looked up at me. Something had changed in his eyes.

‘So she accused him to his face and he killed her?' he said.

‘Yes.'

I waited. Rancie nuzzled at my shoulder. The voices and shifting hooves from the yard seemed to be coming from another world. I thought: ‘Suppose she had sent it, what would you have done?' I wouldn't ask him.

‘So what are we going to do?' he said.

I told him the outlines of what I was planning. He asked if I needed him to be there. I said no, but afterwards there would be a time when he'd need to speak out, in court even. He nodded, accepting it. At some point he closed the book and handed it back to me. The head groom came and looked over the door.

‘Brougham ready when you are, Mr Kemble.'

Rodney was all activity, arranging for a groom to come and look after Rancie, springing on to the driving seat of the brougham.

‘Are you coming with me, Miss Lane?'

When I said yes, one groom opened the door and another helped me in, though I didn't need it. No question of riding beside Mr Kemble in the driving seat. To his credit, he drove well into town and through it, though fast. I had to lean out of the window to direct him to the old farmhouse. When we got there, I jumped out as soon as the wheels stopped turning and went inside to warn Barbara that we were there. The reunion between brother and sister was witnessed by me inside the room and Tabby listening at the door. Amos was keeping Peter Paley company in the garden, since his last meeting with Rodney Kemble had not been on cordial terms. Rodney and Barbara were as formal as a pair of ambassadors sealing an uneasy truce.

‘I'm taking you home,' he said.

‘For now,' she said.

As arranged, Peter Paley limped in from the garden, leaning heavily on his ash stick.

‘Hello, Kemble,' he said, not very hopefully.

Rodney ignored him and spoke to his sister.

‘Have you got your things?'

‘It's only for a few weeks,' Barbara informed her brother. ‘Peter and I are going to be married very soon.'

‘Are you coming back with us, Miss Lane?' Rodney said to me.

Barbara ran to me and took my hand. ‘Do, please.'

So we all went back together, Barbara and me inside, her trunk strapped on the back and Tabby sitting on the trunk. When we drew up outside the Kembles' house, Barbara clung to me, wanting me to go in with her and face her father. When I told her he wouldn't want a stranger there, she accepted it, rearranged her hair and bonnet and went up the steps and inside with the air of a young aristocrat going to the guillotine. Tabby and I stayed on board until we reached the stable yard and Rodney got down. He still had the look of a man picked up by a whirlwind and set down again.

‘You'll tell me what happens?' he said.

I promised. Rancie was well rested by now and Tabby rode behind me the short distance back to Mr Godwit's house. It was almost dinner time, so I washed, changed, ate steak and kidney pie and raspberries and cream, discussed his theories about the migrations of birds. It was only fair to give him one calm hour, because after dinner I was going to do something that would shatter his peace more thoroughly than anything that had gone before. He'd introduced himself to me as a coward. Now I was going to ask him to be a hero.

T
he start of the assizes is like some pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, with people converging from all directions on a cathedral city. The two judges – on a circuit of the shires to try cases too serious for the local magistrates – had started from Oxford and travelled westwards over the Cotswolds, into Wales and back to Gloucester, with their entourage of clerks, chaplain, valets and servants. From various points in the county, the high sheriff and his party, senior officers of the constabulary, mayors, magistrates and beadles shook mothballs out of their ceremonial robes, burnished maces and chains of office and came to the city to welcome the judges. The reasons for all this pageantry – ninety-three reasons – did not have so far to travel. They were where they'd been for weeks or months past, in the prison between the cathedral and the river, waiting for their few hours at the assizes. Our part in the pilgrimage was small and nervous. Even at the best of times, a journey away from home to stay overnight was a serious undertaking for Mr Godwit. As it was, with the burden he now carried and his apprehension about what he had to do at the journey's end, he delayed our start by an hour or more.

The judges were to make their formal entrance to the city on Saturday evening, and Mr Godwit was obliged to be there with his fellow magistrates in good time for their arrival. Well after midday on Saturday, the gig was still waiting outside his house, with the cob in the shafts and the driver in his seat. Three or four times Mr Godwit had put his foot on the step to get in but then remembered something important he must tell his housekeeper or gardener. After issuing detailed instructions on the spaniel's supper, he caught my eye.

‘We should be going, I suppose.'

If I'd been a gaoler escorting him to the dock, the look he gave me would have been much the same. I said I'd meet him at the hotel in Gloucester and went over to where Rancie was waiting in the shade of a tree. By now Tabby was well gone. I'd sent her down to Cheltenham straight after breakfast, to deliver a note to Amos at the Star. I hoped she'd still find him there, even though I hadn't kept my appointment with him the day before. The note said simply that there had been developments in the case and I needed to talk to him. Tabby was to wait, and I'd be with them as soon as I could. For the last hour I'd been almost mad with impatience, but I had to make sure that Mr Godwit was launched on his journey with no chance of retreat.

Once the gig had rolled out of the gate and into the road, it was an easy matter to pass it and we made the journey to town in about half the time Mr Godwit would take. As I hoped, Amos and Tabby were waiting in the yard at the Star. They were both drinking beer. Tabby preferred gin and hot water but would make do with what was offered. I dismounted and, while Rancie drank at the trough, I told Amos how things stood and what I proposed to do about them.