The key in the lock, p.18
The Key In the Lock, page 18
‘And what about after all this?’ I said. ‘Have you any family?’
Agnes looked down. ‘I’ve an aunt. She had eight of her own, when I was little, so she couldn’t … All grown up now, of course. But she won’t want to know, not while there’s a question of the law.’
I pressed her hand, and she looked at it.
‘They don’t use the short drop, for women, any more,’ she said. ‘Do they?’
I told her to hush. I told her that could never happen, that I would not let it happen.
But she became more and more distressed, pulling up the blanket about her chin, the rope of her plait flung out across the bolster. ‘You’ll take my key when you turn it?’
I promised, if she would take some of what Father had left, and she agreed to that. Her eyelids were dropping, in any case. Whether it was the morning’s inquest, or her exertions at the wash, or the fright she had had, or whether it was some delayed influence of the fire and water which had marked her recent days – whatever it was, she was evidently exhausted, and after the first unsettled flickering of eyelashes, went directly to sleep.
I paused in the passage, wishing to go to Edward, for surely he had known, surely suspected something. And yet, perhaps not – for if he had known, then he must have guessed, too, at what his father had done. And how could he sit at table with him, if that were true? Perhaps, then, he did not know. But I could not tell him while his father was nearby.
I went into William’s room, and took out the key I had found, the key to Tremain’s room. I could not try it now, of course. But poor William. Trying to keep his father safe, to keep Agnes safe.
I could tell Father, when he arrived in the morning. I held the key in my fist. The room was cold. I lay down in my clothes, thinking of Mrs Mason at the King’s Arms, once demonstrating covertly how a key held in the right way might serve a woman for a weapon, when she had none other to hand.
I was late to sleep that night. I heard Agnes get up more than once for the chamber pot, as I lay awake.
William had not been afraid to go to school, but afraid to leave.
Tremain was one matter, I kept thinking of that black shape on the gun room table – so perfect, so silently done. Could Tremain have made it?
William had been afraid to leave, I thought.
Perhaps he never had.
16.
I was woken next morning, Christmas morning, by a knocking at my door, and Father’s voice outside.
‘Ivy? Ivy, my dear?’
I found myself dressed, outside the bedclothes. I had slept long past my usual hour.
‘Father,’ I said, slipping on my shoes. ‘Just a moment.’
He was standing in the passage, holding a tray with a dish of bread and dripping, and a cup of tea. He looked pale, and the tea was slopping as the tray shook.
‘It’s for Miss Draper,’ he said. ‘How is she?’
‘Agitated,’ I said. ‘Up and down to the chamber pot, though her chest seems better.’ I dropped my voice. ‘But I wanted to speak to you, Father –’
‘About Miss Draper?’
‘No. Yes. About William’s death –’
But now I heard feet on the south stairs, and Edward appeared at the end of the passage.
‘Dr Cardew,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. You’re here to speak to Miss Draper?’
I took the tray from Father, and he shook Edward’s hand. I wondered whether Father’s would be cold, sweaty, as it often was when his shakes were bad. But Edward grasped Father’s hand warmly.
‘Let me wake her,’ I said.
I tapped at Agnes’s door, and unlocked it at her answer. She was up and dressed. She sat, and I handed her the tray. Father came in, and I made to shut the door.
But then he said, ‘You might leave us, my dear.’
‘Oh?’ I said.
I looked at Agnes, and she nodded, glancing at Father.
I handed Father the key, and closed the door behind me. Perhaps Agnes would tell him about Tremain.
Edward was standing at the end of the passage.
‘Let us wait downstairs,’ he said.
I nodded, and followed him down the south stairs. I could not speak to him now, not with Tremain in the house, not with Father here. I knew I must wait.
We emerged into the hall and Edward led me through to the dining room, out of the French doors and on to the terrace, as I tried to answer calmly his polite enquiries as to how I had slept.
Outside, it was chilly but bright, the thinnest skim of ice on the pond. In the village, children would be waking up to their oranges and toys, would be being laced into their best things, ready for church.
‘I hope you slept well,’ Edward said again.
I tried to smile, resisted touching his arm. ‘I did.’
‘And that you were not unduly alarmed by that business last night, in the gun room.’
I met his eyes, but he looked only worried.
‘You mustn’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘I hope you were not alarmed.’
He frowned. ‘No. No.’ And then, ‘I am quite certain that there must be a sensible explanation.’
He looked at me, rather desperately, as though I might offer it then and there, but I only bit my lip, and looked away across the ice. We sat quietly like that, until I heard the French doors behind us open.
I turned, and stood up.
‘Father. How did you get on?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘well enough –’ But he was white in the face, and, somehow, as he said it he missed his step, and pitched forwards into the gravel.
By the time we had got him up and into the kitchen, into a chair by the stove, the shaking had abated somewhat, but he still looked dreadfully white. Edward got it out of him that he had come on foot – ‘I didn’t feel up to tacking the horse, my dear,’ Father said, clutching my hand – and so Edward would accept nothing but that he would run down himself to the King’s Arms, to send for their carriage. He had mumbled something, too, about whether a doctor ought to be fetched: but Father pointed out that there was no one to fetch, and that in any case Dr Graves was coming that afternoon, to –
And there he broke off, and Edward paled, himself. Coming to give his second opinion, Father meant. Of the post-mortem.
After Edward had gone, Mrs Bly flapped around Father, while he avoided my eyes.
She was presenting him with his third cup of tea when she said, ‘And so, Doctor, what do you think? Is she mad?’
She asked it not avidly, but fretfully, and a strange look came over her when Father said, ‘Not mad, Mrs Bly. Fragile. But not mad.’
Mrs Bly turned away. I thought then that she would speak to Father about the gun room table, but she did not.
With Father waiting quietly, I could not resist slipping along the passage, to look again in the bright morning light. The gun room door was open, and the table was clean. Quite clean, as though no stain had ever marked it.
I felt the hairs rise on my arms.
Back in the kitchen, Mrs Bly stayed bent over the sink, as I waited with Father, who seemed to have fallen almost into a doze. Mrs Bly must have cleaned the table. But if she thought Agnes mad, why would she have removed the evidence of it? I watched her movements at the sink, quick and nervy, as Father breathed quietly beside me.
After an hour, perhaps, Edward reappeared. ‘Now then, Dr Cardew,’ he said, kindly. ‘I’m sure you won’t object to taking my arm …’
He helped Father up. Already his legs were steadier. When they had gone from the kitchen, I spoke to Mrs Bly.
‘I told you to leave the gun room table,’ I said. ‘For Mr Boscawen.’ Her turned back was frightening me, so I said, ‘Mrs Bly? Look at me.’
At that she swung around. Quite calm, she said, ‘Miss Cardew, I haven’t touched the gun room table.’
I stepped back and back again, up the steps and through the swing door to the hall, where Father and Edward were just reaching the front door. Father climbed easily enough into the carriage, and remembered to press the key for Agnes’s door into my hand. He assured me three times that he would rest when he got home, and then the carriage was going. As it moved across the gravel, Edward touched my arm.
‘Are you well?’ he said.
‘I am.’ I looked at him. ‘I am. But I need to speak to you.’
Tremain was somewhere in the house, but he suspected nothing, and there was a locked door between him and Agnes.
Edward was nodding. ‘I have to make an inventory of the works,’ he said. ‘If you’d be kind enough to assist me.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
We would be alone, and away from the house. Now I would find out whether he knew what his father had been doing. If he lied, I would know it, by his face or his voice. Either Edward must discover a terrible truth about his father, or I must discover one about Edward. It was horrendous, waiting for him to gather his papers, not to know which it would be.
When he was ready, Edward joined me on the terrace, and handed me fresh paper, a clip and a board to rest on, a stub of pencil. I followed him around the pond and through the blast wall, not knowing how to begin.
Edward nodded at my shoes, as we walked down the track. ‘No nails?’
I shook my head. The regulations in the mills were stringent, and deservedly so: almost anything could make a spark.
I said, ‘You didn’t … you didn’t clean the gun room table, did you?’
Edward looked at me. ‘Did I …? No.’
‘No,’ I murmured. I looked at him. ‘Is it for the insurance? This inventory?’
Edward glanced at me, shook his head. ‘Father says they may not pay out. We will need a bank loan. He has been wiring to the bank in Falmouth, but they want to see an inventory of the security.’ The broad daylight showed up the flinching sleeplessness of his eyes.
‘Edward,’ I said, at last.
He stopped. But it was as though he hadn’t heard me. He said, ‘Dr Cardew – your father – that is, I’ll be able to see him, won’t I? Afterwards?’
He meant William.
‘Father will be as careful as he can. But there will be some damage.’
Edward pushed a hand across his face, and walked on. ‘Reverend Green asked me to look in, about the burial,’ he said.
‘Edward.’ He stopped again. We were beside the storage houses for the powder’s separate ingredients: the sulphur, the saltpetre, the charcoal in its pressed barrels.
I swallowed. ‘This might be a shock,’ I said.
He looked at me.
In a rush I said, ‘It was your father, Edward, who set the fire. Who locked the door on William.’
Edward stood quite still for a moment, and then reached out for the door of the charcoal store, sat down rather suddenly on the step. For a moment I felt elation, relief – he had not known. But then I saw his face, in which there was not only shock, but bitter confirmation.
‘You knew?’ I said. ‘You knew, about him and Agnes.’
Edward’s eyes, which had been roaming the floor, met mine, and he gave a quick nod. I could feel myself turning red.
‘And you knew what your father –’
But now Edward shook his head. ‘I hoped it was her,’ Edward said. ‘The fire – after some quarrel perhaps. Before we knew about the locked door, I hoped it was her, and that Will being down was only a horrible chance. But then, after yesterday, I didn’t know what to …’ And at that, his face crumpled, and he reached for me.
I held him as the sobs racked him, there on the step of the charcoal store, until the fit had passed.
His face wet with tears, he said, ‘How did you fathom it?’
I felt in my pocket for Tremain’s door key. ‘In part, because of this. The key to your father’s room.’
Edward took the key, and looked at it.
‘William had hidden it, amongst his things …’ I paused. ‘I suspect William knew. About his grandfather and Agnes.’
Edward’s eyes were filling again, and I put my hand on his arm.
‘He was softer with Will than with me,’ he said. ‘But Will was still frightened of him.’ He looked at me. ‘I never fought back as a child, you know. Father beat me for having mud on my boots, for forgetting to trim a lamp, for leaving the gristle from my meat, and I never struck him back.’
I did not know how to answer him. I wanted to bring up Agnes, but for a moment there was only sadness: his childhood wasted, William’s snuffed out. It was cold on the step. Edward’s hands were cold. He needed time to recover.
I gestured to the blank paper I carried. ‘Shall we do this?’ I said, gently. We would need to decide, precisely what he must say when the inquest reconvened.
We moved through the mills, Edward counting and I noting, and now and then he would stop, and out would pour more. How Tremain had made him recite Shakespeare, and if he fluffed a line, twisted his ears until they bled. How once a puppy had followed him home, and Tremain had drowned it. How he had gone away to school at last, and only known how poor his learning had been when the other boys had laughed at him, for thinking that King Lear was real.
In the carpenter’s shop, a bench, a level, a lathe, I wrote. Lightly used.
Edward was counting some boxes of brass nails. ‘Mrs Bly has always been his creature,’ he said. ‘Do you know she came from the same place as Agnes? St Margaret’s. Before I was born. She’s been at Polneath for thirty-five years.’ He looked at me. ‘Twenty boxes,’ he said, and I wrote it down, and we stepped back into the open air.
‘Do you suppose it was she who made the shape on the gun room table?’ I said. ‘Or your father?’
Edward spread his hands. ‘She does whatever he asks. And if they wanted Agnes to seem mad …’
We were beside the incorporating mills. Outside each mill was a small dry space, pocked with discarded wads of chewing tobacco, where the men could squat and listen to the charge grinding away inside. Edward stood still for a moment, looking away into the grouped buildings amongst the stark, graceful branches of the winter trees. The soft sound of the damping channels, falling as a gentle trickle further along the path.
I glanced at the inventory, almost complete. There was something troubling me about it, but I could not tell what. I tucked it under my arm.
‘I suppose I hoped it was Agnes,’ he said again. ‘I suppose I hoped it was her, but I knew it was not.’
‘From the first, you wished her treated decently.’
He looked at me. ‘So how did you fathom it? Did she confess it to you? About the affair?’
I assumed his mind had turned to the inquest, to how we would prove her innocence.
‘She has told me a little, but even before that … either Agnes set a fire for which she knew she’d be caught, and set out to kill William, whom she loved … or, it was your father who set the fire. And it was not William he intended to kill at all.’
Edward was looking into the trees again. ‘Will was too frightened,’ he said, bleakly. ‘He knew who it was in the passage, who turned the key, and he was too frightened to call out.’
I nodded, though Edward was looking away. As he brought his hand up to his face, I did not speak. But then I asked, I made myself ask, ‘What will you say? At the inquest?’
He turned away, into the expense magazine, and I followed.
‘What do you mean?’ he said, carefully.
‘At the inquest. You’ll need to speak out against him.’
He bit his lip. ‘The scandal alone would ruin the business,’ he said. He was counting the barrels of finished powder.
‘But after what he has done.’
‘There’s not enough proof.’ Edward looked at me. ‘Not against him, nor against Agnes.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
I had followed him into the pressing house; he was running a hand over the blocks of lignum vitae, heavy enough to crush a thumb blunt. I thought of Agnes, up at the house, alone.
‘You can’t mean it.’
He wouldn’t look at me. ‘She won’t be convicted.’
‘But what of her reputation?’ I stopped. ‘Jake Feltham’s reputation?’
He shook his head. ‘Her reputation will be whatever I say it is, Ivy …’ He paused, breathing hard. ‘Miss Draper shall have her character, and that will be the end of it.’ He turned to me. ‘You don’t know the world as I do. No one will have heard of any of this, certainly not beyond Cornwall. She can go somewhere else. Begin again. And so can I.’
I turned away, angry.
‘What would you have?’ he said. ‘The whole village out of work, so that a villain can be called a villain?’ Then, more gently, ‘Is it even what Miss Draper wants, to have it exposed? Would that help her reputation?’
Suddenly I doubted. Whether it was enough, by itself: the paint, William’s little bruised hands, Agnes’s testimony.
Edward was looking up into the canopy, the lattice of branches and sky, as though we were talking about the weather. ‘I’m sorry about Jake, of course,’ he said. ‘So long as the loan is approved, I would like to compensate him.’
I turned away, and though blinded by tears, I saw we were watched from the mill gates. Two of the men who worked mixing up the green charges were standing out in the lane, hands in pockets. Come to look, come to gawp, even when there was nothing to see: it is how people are, after a disaster. One could sense them, half wondering whether to shout ‘Merry Christmas’ or not.
Edward lifted a hand, uncertain.
One took off his hat.
I turned away, back towards the house, and began to walk fast so that he wouldn’t see my face, but it was then that it came to me. The inventory had been perturbing me, all the time we had been talking.
Unwillingly, I stopped. Edward caught up.
‘There’s too much.’ I handed him the paper. ‘There’s too much powder in the separating house,’ I said. There were strict regulations, for how much might be in each of the buildings of the mills.
Edward looked at the list. ‘Eighty pounds,’ he said.
‘A barrel.’
Edward looked through the trees. ‘We could change it on the list,’ he said, studying the inventory. ‘Add it to the tally for the pressing house.’
