Murder at Mansfield Park (29 page)

As the dawn rose behind Sir Thomas’s woods, the two women began to fancy there was some slight improvement in the girl’s pulse: they waited, watched, and examined it again and again, and when the first rays of sunlight revealed a lightening of the venous darkness that had flooded her face, they dared at last to hope that she might be out of danger. Even Mr Phillips acknowledged a temporary revival, and ventured to give encouraging assurances, but Maddox was not so sanguine; he had seen this flattering symptom before, and knew that all too often it proved to be but the harbinger of a final and more fatal crisis; he did his best to keep the women from indulging the expectation of an amendment that might never come, but he could not dissuade them. Within the hour the girl’s breathing began to slow, until there was a considerable interval between the successive inspirations, and a cold sweat had broken out over her body; and then the pulse that had shewn such a decided improvement began to diminish gradually in fullness and strength. Mrs Baddeley could not be shaken from the hopes that had been so cruelly raised, but Maddox knew that they had laboured in vain, and he saw that Mary Crawford knew it too.

Julia Bertram died at exactly fifteen minutes after five o’clock, as by her watch on the table.

Mrs Baddeley burst at once into a torrent of grief, kissing the girl’s hands, and raising them to her own face, and sighing as if her heart would burst. ‘I never thought to see her depart this world before me—I used to dance her on my knee when she was a tiny child, and I thought one day I would do the same with her own babes, when she became a wife. But that will never be. Oh my sweet, sweet lady!’ she sobbed, murmuring some other words, which her tears made inarticulate. And then, as if recollecting herself, ‘Forgive me, sir. I am quite overcome, as you would be yourself if you had known the poor dear young lady as I did, and as Miss Crawford did. And after all the other terrible things to have befallen this family—what will her ladyship and Mr Bertram have to say? And poor Sir Thomas, when he returns?’

‘As to that, I will answer,’ said Maddox gently, raising her to her feet. ‘You would do best to take some rest and endeavour to restore your enfeebled spirits. I will have them send up chocolate and some thing nourishing to eat, but I charge you to speak to no-one—not even your husband— of what has occurred here this night, and remain in your room until I send for you.’

Mr Phillips was not long in following the housekeeper from the room, and as he prepared to depart, Maddox laid upon him the same injunction with which he had dismissed Mrs Baddeley.

‘You will appreciate that I must demand absolute secrecy as to the true cause of this piteous event. As far as the family are concerned, for the moment, this was merely the sad culmination of many weeks of previous indisposition.When the time is right, and only then, I will divulge the truth.You know, as well as I do, Mr Phillips, that the contamination of that cordial was calculated and deliberate, and that being so, I now have another murder to resolve at Mansfield Park, and by the same hand as the first. I must condition for the broadest possible freedom of movement and decision if I am to find the man responsible, and bring him to justice. I trust we understand one another?’

Mr Phillips nodded, and with a curt bow, took his leave. Maddox turned to Mary Crawford, who was sitting silently in the window-seat.

‘And you, Miss Crawford? Do you agree to the same terms?’

She said nothing, and fixed her eyes instead on the sunlight now streaming across the lawns, and touching the woods with gold. It occurred to him that the repugnance he had seen in her countenance the evening before, when he had first entered the room, and which had vanished in the face of the far more pressing need to sink their differences for the sake of her friend, had now returned with renewed vigour. There was some thing else, too, beyond her immediate and understandable anguish, to which he could not yet put a name; but whatever had occasioned it, there were questions he would have to ask, and they could not wait.

‘I need to speak to you, Miss Crawford, and in private, but perhaps it would be best if we were both to take some repose and refreshment. With your permission, I will call at the parsonage this afternoon.’

And with that, he was gone.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was as much as Mary could do to summon the strength to walk back across the park to the parsonage. The ordeals of a day and night passed in such exertion were nothing to her grief and exhaustion of mind; her limbs were trembling, and she was faint and giddy from a want of proper rest and food. It was too early to expect her sister or Dr Grant to be up, and she was glad to be spared the necessity of lengthy explanations, in which she would be obliged to conceal as much as she revealed, trusting that the Mansfield gossips would supply her sister with the sober facts of the case as well as she could do. But if she wished to avoid society in general, she most earnestly sought the company of her brother. He alone would understand some thing of what she was suffering, and he alone would have the words with which to console her; but a search of the house revealed only that his bed was empty, and his horse gone.

She asked the cook for a dish of tea, and made her way slowly to the privacy of her own room, where she finally gave way to a violent outburst of tears. It was some time before this excess of suffering had spent itself, and even longer before she could trust herself to appear before the Grants in a tolerable ease of mind, so she sent word that she was indisposed and lying down. And lie down she did, though with such a head-ache as precluded all hope of sleep. Never had she wanted the bliss of oblivion more, and never had she more need of it; she knew her impending interview with Charles Maddox would tax all her reserves of watchfulness and caution, and yet she could not quiet her thoughts. Between the horror of Julia Bertram’s senseless and untimely death, and her own unconscious part in it, and the words she had heard from the girl’s own lips, only hours before she died, she could not tell if her heart were more oppressed by sorrow, guilt, fear, or foreboding.

When Maddox arrived shortly after three o’clock, she was sitting in the shrubbery. He saw at once the paleness of her face, and the slight tremor in her hands, and guessed some thing of what she had been suffering in the hours since dawn. He pitied her, but he could not afford to shew it; she, by contrast, could think of him only in the guise of a man prepared to resort to torture, to intimidate an innocent servant. He would have taken her hand, had she offered it, but she remained seated, and would not catch his eye. He said nothing immediately, but took a seat on the bench beside her.

‘I see we do not meet as friends, Miss Crawford. I am at a loss to know how I have so far forfeited your good opinion.’

‘You have only to search your own conscience, Mr Maddox.’

‘Even so, I would prefer to hear it from you.’

‘Really, sir,’ she said angrily, turning to face him, ‘do you have no recollection at all of the atrocious way you behaved towards Kitty Jeffries? Setting your brute of an assistant upon her like a dog?’

He sat silent for a moment, and it occurred to her that he had supposed her ignorant of the incident, and was even now debating how best to excuse it. She had never seen him frown before, and she was struck by how much it served to alter his face, as the scar above his eye deepened, and cast shadows along the strong lines of his chin and jaw, sharpening them to an edge. She had known him to be a formidable adversary; now, for the first time, she saw him without the mask of geniality or politeness. It may, perhaps, have been due to her extreme weariness, but she felt the power of his presence as she had never done before; she had been used to condemning him as arrogant and domineering, but now, sitting by him in such close proximity, and after such an experience endured together, she found herself affected in a way that was wholly new to her.

‘It was—necessary,’ he said at length. ‘Regrettable, but necessary. The girl will take no lasting harm, and I fancy her mistress is already remembering me in her nightly prayers.’

Mary gathered her wits, and called to mind why she had been so displeased with him. ‘Lest you have already forgotten, Mr Maddox, Miss Bertram has this very morning lost her beloved sister.’

‘My apologies, Miss Crawford, I am properly reprimanded. We are both of us, I suspect, somewhat fatigued. I meant merely to say that Miss Bertram is far from sharing your resentment. She does not approve of the method, any more than you do, but it has been the means of exonerating her from all suspicion, and relieving her mind from an intolerable burden. I see from your expression that you do not know the story. I will be brief.At a certain point during your pleasant little party to Compton, Maria Bertram told her cousin that she wished her dead. She did not know, then, that her sister had overheard these words, and when Mrs Crawford’s body was found, Maria was seized with panic, fearing she would be suspected if the story became known. Her fears were all the greater because she had suffered a nose-bleed while at Compton, and had blood on her dress.’

‘I remember,’ said Mary, slowly. ‘On the journey home she held her shawl close round her shoulders, even though the night was warm.’

Maddox nodded. ‘Thank you for your corroboration, Miss Crawford. This same incident also accounts for Miss Bertram’s inordinate reluctance to consent to a search of her chamber—she knew my men would find that gown, and—’

‘—she would not be able to prove the blood was her own.’

‘Quite so. She bribed her maid to keep her silence. Had she trusted me from the start, I would not have been forced to such disagreeable measures.’

‘Can you blame her, Mr Maddox? Your methods and demeanour hardly inspire confidence.’

He inclined his head. ‘You may be right; I do not court popularity. But whatever the rights and wrongs of my means, the end is always the same: the truth. I know now that Maria Bertram did not kill her cousin, just as I know she did not kill her sister. Julia Bertram did not die because she heard or saw some thing at Compton, but because she heard or saw some thing at
Mansfield Park
, on the day of Mrs Crawford’s death. Some thing or
someone.
’

Maddox saw his companion grow yet paler at these words, but he said nothing. Many things might have provoked such a reaction, particularly in her current nervous state; nonetheless, he still felt sure that this young woman had a part to play in elucidating this crime, even if she would neither help nor trust him in his own efforts to do so.

They sat for a while in silence, a silence that was merely accidental on her part, but had been calculated with some exactness on his. It interested him to try whether she, a mere woman, could bear the oppression of silence longer than her brother, and his respect for her only increased when it became clear that, although there must be questions she wished to ask him, she could hold her tongue longer than many a vice-bitten London felon he had known. He stored away the insight for future perusal, shrewd enough to know that such a degree of self-composure was not only rare, but, at least in one respect, a rather ambivalent quality in any person caught up in the investigation of such a crime. At length, he spoke again. ‘I do not need to ask you if you saw someone tamper with the cordial. If you had, I am sure you would have informed me already. And if you had tampered with it yourself, you are hardly likely to confess it to me now.’

She looked at him briefly, then resumed her contemplation of Dr Grant’s garden. ‘I will not dignify that remark by addressing it. Anyone in the house might have entered that room without arousing suspicion. Nor was it a crime that required undue premeditation. There was a vial of laudanum among the other medicines. It would have been the work of a moment to pour the contents into the cordial.’

‘I see that you have given the matter some thought, Miss Crawford.Your ratiocination is admirable.’

‘I deserve no compliments, Mr Maddox,’ she said, tears filling her eyes. ‘I will never forgive myself for not perceiving it sooner. The odour was palpable.
You
recognised it at once.’

‘
I
was looking for it; you, on the other hand, had no reason to suspect it. You were fatigued with watching, and anxious for your friend. Do not blame yourself.’

‘That is easily said, sir.’

‘Quite so.’ There was a pause, then he continued, ‘Given how closely you have examined the question, Miss Crawford, I am sure it has occurred to you to wonder when, exactly, the lethal dose could have been added to the cordial. Judging by the quantity remaining, it must have been but lately opened?’

‘I gave the first dose from it myself, yesterday afternoon.’

He saw the look on her face as she spoke, and when he resumed it was in a gentler tone. ‘I had presumed as much. In my experience, it would have been a matter of some hours only before the symptoms became unmistakable. And the bottle itself was not sealed?’

‘No. None of them are. I dare say Mr Gilbert does not consider it necessary. It was only a cordial, after all.’

‘
Was
, yes. Quite so.’

She looked at him for a moment, but said nothing. Maddox sat back in his seat. ‘We have made some progress, but not, as yet, advanced very far. As you yourself said, Miss Crawford, anyone in the house might have committed this crime; moreover, the same reasoning appertains to anyone who has entered the house since the bottle was left there.’

She turned to him quickly, then looked away. Maddox continued, ‘I have had word from Gilbert. He says he left that bottle by Miss Julia’s bed two afternoons ago. He left it there, indeed, only a few short hours before Mr Crawford returned from his long absence, and hastened to pay his visit to the Park.’

‘Oh, you need not concern yourself about my brother, Mr Maddox. He did not remain in the house long enough, and was certainly
not
alone.’ She smiled, but it seemed to Maddox that she was struggling to maintain a corresponding lightness of tone, an effort somewhat belied by the slight flush to her cheek.