Death of a Radical (30 page)

“Perhaps you're waiting for Farr to contact you?” suggested Jarrett.

“Time I went,” Dickon announced, making for the door. With his massive bulk, stopping him hardly seemed an option.

“What of Lem?” Jarrett's question turned him back. “This stranger—I want to know who he is.”

“You and me both,” said Dickon. “I want this meddler more than you, Mr. Jarrett.” He stared stone-faced at the duke's agent a moment. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “You come find me after sundown. May be I'll have news.”

“Where?” Jarrett called after him as the young giant moved off into the winter light.

“Powcher's Lane,” came the reply and he was gone.

“Everyone knows the Watsons in Powcher's Lane,” said Duffin.

“The alley down by Bedford's stable yard?”

“That's it.” The poacher watched as Jarrett threaded a bridle over Walcheren's head and fetched his saddle. “What now?” he asked.

“If anyone can nose Farr out, you can, Ezekial. Will you go to town?”

The poacher tossed his head. “And what will you do?”

Jarrett tightened the girth and swung into the saddle. “I have a visit to make—meet you at the Queen's Head. Five o'clock? I'll buy you a drink.”

“Men are all at t'fair.” Old Mrs. Anders advanced toward him in a sort of crab-wise shuffle, cradling at her waist gnarled hands twisted into hooks. Her eyes, under her smart starched cap, were sharp and her expression cheerful. “Come in, come in, Mr. Jarrett. 'Tis an honor to have a visit from the duke's man. I'm a prisoner to me joints and company's a rare pleasure this time of year. Sue! Fetch tea,” she called out to a servant girl hovering in the background. “Best cups, mind! My granddaughter, Mary-Anne, Mr. Jarrett. Ooff!” The old lady dropped herself into a chair, expelling a little puff of dust from the patchwork cushions.

“Miss Anders,” Jarrett acknowledged with a half-bow. Sitting before him was the girl with the milkmaid charms and the wayward handkerchief he had spotted at the fair. Mary-Anne Anders had rosy cheeks, a sturdy white neck and the placid demeanor of a cow. She held the obligatory piece of sewing in her hands. Her thick
fingers were surprisingly neat and delicate in their movements. The old lady beamed at him from her chair.

“This is a comfortable room,” he remarked, looking about. “A good size, without being so large as to be drafty.” Had Miss Henrietta Lonsdale seen him at that moment, she would have been astonished by Mr. Jarrett's cozy impersonation of a gossip. It was a woman's room, crowded with mementoes—carved spoons and painted boxes, and pressed flowers in frames. Against one wall a table was arranged with dried grasses flanking a crudely colored picture draped in black. The image was of a broad-faced young man with an uncertain mouth and one eye larger than the other.

“Our John. Her brother.” Old Mrs. Anders jerked her head toward her granddaughter. “The good Lord took him from us near three years ago now.” The echo of her loss was so poignant Mr. Jarrett found himself embarrassed. Mary-Anne sewed on as if she heard nothing.

“A great sadness,” he murmured.

“Lord's will be done.” The clock ticked and dust motes danced in the sunlight. The door creaked and to his relief the serving girl appeared with tea. Mr. Jarrett was grateful for the prop. He and the old lady smiled and nodded at one another over their cups, he marveling privately at the dexterity of her tortured hands.

“You do not attend the fairs today, Miss Anders?” he asked. The girl raised her head. He fancied her expression was wistful. It was mirrored on the bulbous face of a hideous pottery cherub that peeped over her left
shoulder from a shelf. He recognized the offending object at once. It was one of the fairings for sale on the stall just by the spot where he had observed her encounter with Jonas Farr.

“I saw you in town on opening day, I think.” He nodded toward the fairing, remembering how the farmer's daughter had simpered as the young man returned her handkerchief. “I see your memento. A token from a gentleman admirer, perhaps?”

His teasing remark elicited a strange response. Mary-Anne Anders stared. Her eyes were of a limpid, washed-out blue that suggested thoughts rarely clouded the possessor's mind. It was almost as if she ruminated. Her grandmamma, on the other hand, fell into a fit of coughing. Mary-Anne leapt up and went to bend over the old lady, mumbling soothing noises. He averted his eyes so that they might be private. Miss Anders's sewing lay face up on the seat she had vacated. A mop of vivid sky-blue petals sang out amid a ghostly penciled pattern of flowers twined in a harvest sheaf. Old Mrs. Anders regained her composure and Mary-Anne resumed her place.

“Perhaps not a gentleman admirer in the strict sense,” Jarrett amended meditatively, continuing as if there had been no interruption, “but gentlemanly in spirit, I dare say. I saw you together at the fair,” he explained. Miss Anders threw a wary look at her chaperone. It occurred to him belatedly that perhaps she was fearful of speaking of her mysterious admirer before her grandmother. But
then, if Old Mrs. Anders rarely left the house, how could she be ignorant of his visits?

“
He
spoke to you at the fair?” demanded the old lady.

“Not
him,”
responded her granddaughter. The tone of this exchange perplexed him. Old Mrs. Anders did not sound angry or even displeased. The pair seemed mutually astonished, if anything. Jarrett forged on.

“It was when you dropped your handkerchief. I saw him pick it up,” he confided to Miss Anders apologetically, adding a flirtatious half-smile. In the past young ladies had been known to melt and become quite giddy when Mr. Jarrett deployed his charm. Miss Anders, however, goggled at him as if he were speaking Chinese. Her eyebrows drew together.

“He picked it up,” she repeated slowly.

“Miss Lippett's man, Jonas Farr; he returned your handkerchief to you,” he said. Miss Anders went rigid.

“Miss Josephine's serving man?” she exclaimed, outraged. “What can you mean?”

“A serving man! The very thought!” hooted the old woman. “Mary-Anne Anders knows her due better than that! I should think so!” An improper noise broke from the old woman's mouth. He looked at her astonished. She had chuckled. Miss Anders was sitting bolt upright in her chair, her expression affronted.

“I take that unkindly, Mr. Jarrett,” she told him roundly. “What have I done that you should suggest such a thing? I am always perfectly proper and refined.”

*

He looked back at the Anderses' farm, puzzling over the scene he had just witnessed. The girl's repudiation of Jonas Farr had seemed sincere. He would have wagered his horse that Miss Anders lacked the wit to counterfeit such a performance. Could Farr have been courting her in disguise? He should have liked to have asked her directly about her mysterious visitor, but Miss Anders had fallen into such a sulk at his supposed insult, he had been forced to give up the visit and take his leave. The smoke curling up from the farmhouse chimneys hung in insubstantial twists in the chill air. Had he learned anything to the purpose?

The low winter sun declared the hour advancing into the afternoon. He thought fondly of Mrs. Martin's pie and of his interrupted breakfast. There was time for a decent meal before he set out again to meet Duffin. Walcheren was just stepping through the gates of the Old Manor when young Matt ran up wearing mittens and a thick woolen scarf.

“I was coming to find you, sir,” he called out. He held up a sealed paper. “This was brought for you. Man said it were urgent.”

“How long ago?”

“No more than forty minutes. 'Would have set out earlier but none of us knew which direction you took, then, Mr. Tiplady, he said to try town.”

Jarrett did not recognize the device pressed into the wax—an elaborate affair like an Irish knot. He broke the seal and unfolded a single sheet of thick, smooth writing
paper. There was no greeting, just two lines executed in a precise black hand with forceful downstrokes:
Be at the split beech, a hundred yards up stream from the old ford, town-side, 3 o'clock, today. S.

Strickland worked fast. Jarrett consulted his pocket-watch and turned Walcheren about with a sigh. His stomach would have to wait.

“When are we to expect you, sir? Cook, you know …” Matt called after him. Jarrett thought fleetingly of the excellent Mrs. Martin waiting in her kitchen with the makings of another spoiled dinner. He turned back in his saddle with a regretful grimace.

“My apologies to cook. Tell her she has my full permission to curse me. I'll find dinner in town. If I'm required, send word to the Queen's Head.”

Winter was retreating, the bright, frozen light dissolving toward drear gray. At the edge of the wood giant moth holes of dark earth punctured the blanket of white. He had no difficulty following Strickland's directions to the split beech. As a clandestine meeting place, it was well chosen. In five minutes, a man could be lost among the crowded lower town, but with the rush of the swollen river to one side and the steep woods hiding the town above, it was an isolated, secret spot. The split beech stood on rising ground a few yards back from a small clearing where three paths met.

He was on edge, all his senses alert. Would he recognize the man he had come to meet? He would be disguised
no doubt—a hat pulled down low and an all-concealing cloak at least. But there were identifying marks that were difficult to conceal: voice, intonation, build and posture, especially if you could catch sight of your man on the move. And if you could but glimpse an ungloved hand or the shape of an ear—they were as good as a portrait. His promise to Strickland, he told himself, did not preclude him from using his senses.

Somewhere up above the barrier of trees, the church clock struck three. He heard the protesting cry of a rook and looked up. A figure had appeared on the rise above him, enveloped, as anticipated, in a cloak. There was a flour bag over the head. Eyeholes had been cut in the hessian and a slash gaped in the region of the mouth. He had once had an encounter on the road to Arruda with a band of Portuguese partisans who disguised themselves with sacks like that. Theirs had been stained with blood.

He made his way between the spindly, close-pressed trees under the gaze of the silent watcher. The wood had grown up on a thin layer of soil overlying fissured rock. The steeply rising ground was run through with trenches, disguised under thick vegetation, and unexpected stony outcrops. He came to a fallen tree. The figure was standing maybe ten feet away across a gully.

“Close enough!” the voice was an amplified whisper. A man's voice, deliberately distorted. Jarrett scanned the broken ground between them. There was no immediate way across. The gully was dense with undergrowth and
too wide to jump. The eyes were no more than glints of light in a pair of black holes. Through the slitted fabric he saw the pale lips move, bare and pink against fairish skin.

“Captain Jarrett. Heard of you. You've a reputation.” So he's interested in me, Jarrett thought. If I have met him before in recent days, I missed any hint of that. “Foreign service. You'll have stories to tell.” The tone was an uncertain mix of truculence and grudging respect.

“Maybe another time,” responded Jarrett briskly. “You know why I asked for this meeting?”

“Young gentleman's accident.”

“It was no accident,” Jarrett replied. Moisture dripped from the black trees.

“A Yorkshireman—call him Jonas Farr,” the voice started up again. “Taken up with a group of weavers—a song club.”

“That's old news.”

“Farr comes from a line of troublemakers,” said the harsh whisper. “Prominent in a clandestine society in Dewsbury.” It was hard work disguising one's voice. The longer you talked, the more words you used, the better the chance you gave the listener of latching on to the real voice behind the mask.
Clandestine,
Jarrett noted. He shifted his position and sharpened his ears.

“You have evidence of insurgency?” he queried a touch impatiently.

“In Dewsbury. Raising money and support of strikers; printing and distribution of unstamped material,” listed the voice monotonously.

“The intent?”

“Riot and disorder.”

“And you have clear evidence of Farr's involvement? Enough to convict in a court of law?”

“I just write the report.” Something personal had slipped into the intonation there—a spark that just failed to ignite.

“What do you believe to be Farr's purpose in Woolbridge?”

“Recruit weavers.”

“For what?”

“Plot.”

“A plot? What kind of plot?”

“Sabotage.”

“Of what? There are no machines in Woolbridge.”

“Not yet.”

The fellow was well disciplined with his monotone brevity and immobility. He stood so still he might have been a scarecrow on a pole rather than a man.

“What do you know of the night Mr. Adley died? Where were you?”

“Called away.”

“So you have no information about that night?”

“Farr went astray.”

“What do you mean?”

“Song club had a meeting on Quarry Fell near where the young gentleman was found. Farr was expected but never came.”

“You say he was expected? I heard he had a girl.”

“A girl!” A touch of emotion tainted the contrived anonymity of the voice. “Farr had a meeting at a hut on the fell not far from where the body was found.”

“Who was he meeting?”

“A recruit—but Farr never got there neither.” Jarrett thought of the barren moor where he had found Grub. So much traffic for a cold winter's night.

“How do you know all this?” asked Jarrett. It occurred to him that Strickland's man himself might have been playing the recruit in question.