A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake Read Free Book Online Page A

tittle-tattling about him behind his back, there would be little I, or the law, could do to stop him. On the other hand this conversation wasn’t idle gossip. It was legally required. I cupped my hand behind my ear to encourage her.

    â€˜Go on, girl.’
    â€˜Oh, it’s just that I don’t think Squire and Mistress were that happy together. This last year he’s not …’
    She considered her choice of words.
    â€˜He’s not gone to her at night as a husband does, or not so as us servants could tell. And people in kitchen said she didn’t like it that he would spend so much time with Mr Woodley studying the plans for these works, or at the public houses in town.’
    â€˜Anything else?’
    â€˜Well, sir, about the public houses, that reminds me. She told me this herself. Squire particularly frightened her once. It seems he’d again been in Preston the night, playing cards maybe, and was riding home early through the woods, just when Mistress was out for her morning ride, going the way she always went. So he waited for her, you see, jumped out from behind a tree, so she said, like he was trying to scare her horse. Then he made a joke of it, said it was teasing. But the mistress she took it serious. To her it was not a joke.’
    â€˜When was this?’
    â€˜Last month, I think. She was sorely frighted, and I was so surprised, because she never told me suchlike before.’
    â€˜What was it about that ride, I wonder, that made your mistress take it again and again? Do you know?’
    Polly shrugged.
    â€˜She enjoyed woods … the trees and that …’
    â€˜Yes, I suppose that was it. Now you said earlier that your mistress did not in general share her secrets with you, even though she did tell you she feared the squire. Which leads me to wonder whom she did confide in. I know it was not Miss Brockletower. Who then were Mrs Brockletower’s friends?’
    Polly’s head was cocked to one side, watching the flames.

    â€˜Don’t know, sir.’
    I allowed a pause while she thought.
    â€˜She just liked riding. She liked horses.’
    â€˜Do you say her only friends were horses, then? Like Gulliver at the end, eh?’
    â€˜I don’t know. Who’s this Gulliver, sir?’
    â€˜Oh well, never mind. What was your mistress’s demeanour, I mean, how did she act when you last saw her? When was that, by the way?’
    â€˜Last night, when I brought her a bowl of broth she’d asked for, in her room.’
    â€˜And how did she seem to you?’
    â€˜She was reading, I think. When I came in she snapped at me. But that’s been her usual way lately, fretting and snapping at us servants. We don’t like it but we must bear it, my father says, or we’ll lose our places.’
    â€˜I see. Well, that will be all, Polly. Thank you.’
    I was not going to get any more out of the girl and indeed the whole interview had thrown into doubt the commonplace belief that a lady is always better known to her maid than to anyone else.
    The next one in was Timothy Shipkin, a gaunt fellow with spiky grey hair and a fierce light in his eyes. I knew him to be a Dissenter, a member of the Heptamerian sect who believe in all sorts of fantastic nonsense deriving from the number seven – the Awakening of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus by the Archangels, the Seven Toes of Satan, and suchlike.
    â€˜Now, Timothy, it was you that found the body?’
    â€˜I did that.’
    â€˜Tell me how.’
    He cleared his throat.
    â€˜It was like this. When Mistress’s horse came back without
her, William Pearson, he sent us out to search. I went into Fulwood because I knew the forest best, and I knew the way Mistress would always ride, because I would see her at times in the woods early mornings. So I just followed, found a few fresh horse droppings, followed on and found her lying by the old hollow oak. Dead. Her throat was cut