The Path of the Wicked (24 page)

The second door on the left was ajar. I gave a single knock and walked straight in. Maggie might have been sitting on the pink brocade chair by the window because when I walked in she was standing beside it, looking startled.

‘Have they found her?' Then she added quickly: ‘Ma'am.'

Hard to tell from her voice and expression if the thought that Barbara might have been found alarmed her. Certainly, there was no particular sign on her face of grief or even a sleepless night. Clothes were strewn round the room – a couple of cotton and muslin dresses and an embroidered nightdress on the bed, a bonnet and a straw sunhat on the stool in front of the dressing table, a velvet cloak over a chair. Maggie's own white frilled cap was sitting on the dressing table among scent bottles and various pots. Had she taken it off to try on her employer's hats? Hardly appropriate in the circumstances. When she saw my eyes on it, she blushed, grabbed it and pinned it deftly back in place.

‘So, you've been asked to see if any of Miss Kemble's clothes are missing,' I said.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

She grabbed the excuse promptly, but I doubted it was true. Even if the colonel was facing the possibility of elopement in his own mind, he wouldn't risk having it discussed among the servants.

‘Colonel Kemble has asked me to help you,' I said.

Only a slight stretching of the truth, I thought. Maggie looked far from overjoyed at the idea, but couldn't object.

‘Have you found anything missing so far?'

‘No, ma'am, apart from what she was wearing when she went.'

The door of a big wardrobe was standing open. I walked over and looked at the dozen or more costumes hanging neatly from hooks, the shelves piled with silk and linen undergarments, the tidy row of shoes and pumps.

‘It must be hard to tell what's gone and what hasn't, Miss Kemble having so many clothes.'

‘Nearly impossible, ma'am.'

Another hasty snatch at an excuse, and a mistake by Maggie. A lady may lose count of her own clothes, but a lady's maid doesn't. It's her pride and skill to know every stitch, hook and seam. Nobody had suggested that Maggie was a bad maid in that respect; she wouldn't have lasted long with Barbara if she had been. All the time I was looking for evidence of a small trunk or large bag that Maggie might be packing. I picked up a green satin pump and dropped it, as an excuse to bend and look under the bed. Nothing. Maggie was making a great business of folding up one of the dresses.

I went over to the chest of drawers and pulled out one drawer after another. Stockings and garters, spare lengths of lace and ribbons, linen handkerchiefs worked with Barbara's initials. All the drawers seemed pretty full. The dressing table had two small drawers at the sides. One of them was empty; the other held a small pot of lip rouge, half used. Her father wouldn't have approved, which was probably why it wasn't with the other pots and bottles on top of the dressing table. They were pretty thickly clustered, but where Maggie's cap had rested was a white circle, about the diameter of a coffee cup, standing out against the dark varnish of the dressing-table surface.

‘What a pity,' I said. Maggie came over to see what I was talking about. ‘It can easily happen if you're not careful,' I said. ‘You have a favourite flask for your toilet water; then, when you're refilling it, some of the toilet water runs down the outside and makes a mark.'

She stared as if seeing for the first time. She must know very well that none of the bottles on the dressing table was the right size and shape to have made that mark. Therefore, Barbara's favourite flask of toilet water was somewhere else, along with the manicure set and chamois buffing pad that she would surely have kept in the now empty dressing-table drawer. Either mistress or maid had packed carefully, but the trunk or bag had already gone. Any hope of knowing where would rely on Tabby's efforts.

I suppose I could have bullied Maggie into saying something, perhaps with a threat of telling the colonel. But he'd have gone by now and it might be best to leave Maggie unsettled and see what she did next. I was about to go and give Tabby fresh instructions when I realized I was missing an opportunity. Here I was, on the bedroom floor of the house where Mary Marsh had lived, with freedom to go pretty well where I pleased.

‘Was Mary Marsh's room on this floor?' I said.

Maggie was so relieved to face a question on something else that she didn't hesitate.

‘Yes. At the end, facing the other way on.'

I told her I might be back later, to keep her anxious, and walked to the end of a corridor and a door at a right angle to the others. It opened on to a small but comfortable room, looking towards the stable block. The rug, desk and two armchairs were rather worn, as if they'd migrated there from more important rooms, but, by the standards of many governesses, Mary Marsh had been comfortably housed. The bed had been stripped of its linen and pillows, with just a coverlet over it, but apart from that it looked as if nothing much would have changed since Mary last walked out of the room. It only needed a second glance to see that the books in the bookcase were her own. This wasn't the usual tidy and unread assembly that you find in the guest rooms of country houses, but rather the mixed, sometimes tattered collection of a woman who loved reading. Some were novels, both in French and English, others poetry, history, geography, geology, natural history, showing a lively and wide-ranging mind, well beyond the demands of her work. The fact that they were still there, a month after Mary's death, showed how alone she'd been, with no family or friends to come and claim her possessions.

If her books were still there, perhaps her other things were as well. I looked into the corridor to make sure that nobody was near, closed the door and started searching. The chest of drawers was empty, but a small leather-covered trunk beside it, marked M.M. in faint white paint, was unlocked and full of her clothes, neatly folded. The housekeeper had probably done that after her death. I sorted through it layer by layer, looking for anything that might link her to Joanna Picton or her brother. Nothing – no old newspapers, not a scrap of writing. I replaced the clothes and went across to her desk, still unlocked. When I opened the flap, the reality of her was so intense that I half expected her to walk into the room and ask what I was doing. It had a cheerful untidiness, showing it had been much used, but with an underlying sense of order. The large central compartment held her watercolour box, with most of the paints worn down, several pencils and charcoal sticks and a small sketch pad of good-quality paper. I sat at the desk and looked through it – more butterflies; various flowers, carefully labelled with English and Latin names; a few attempts at birds, spirited but less successful. No people at all, with just one exception and that was only a back view of a man on a horse.

That was one of the last sketches, near the few blank pages at the end of the book. It was done in quick charcoal strokes, less neat and careful than most of the sketches, but with force and feeling. He looked like a young man, tall and firm in the saddle, but there was somehow a loneliness about the way he and his horse were standing there against a background of trees, his shoulders down, head slumped forward. The horseman was sad and the artist was sorry for him. I got up and took the sketch over to the window. As I'd thought, there were those very same trees to the left of the arch into the stable yard. She'd caught the twists of the oak trunk in a few clever strokes, sketching the scene from her window. I was sure the man on the horse was Rodney Kemble. He'd loved her and the sketch proved that she, once at least, had had feelings for him. Whatever had driven them apart must have mattered very much to her.

I went back to the desk and replaced the sketchbook. The left-hand compartment contained her professional work, plans of lessons for Barbara going back several years. Mary had been conscientious, marking up calendars with each day divided into periods of study: French, divinity, drawing, use of globes, Shakespeare, fractions and long division, piano practice. I only hoped Barbara had benefited from it all. There was no work calendar for the present year, Barbara having graduated from the schoolroom. The right-hand compartment, the most disorderly, contained her correspondence. Like many people who enjoyed writing, Mary had kept letter books, with letters she'd received pasted inside and copies of her replies so that she could look back on a complete correspondence. There were three of them, in plump exercise books with varnished cloth covers. I riffled through them. Many of the letters were exchanges with a woman who was also a governess. She seemed to be younger than Mary, or newly entered on her profession, because Mary was giving her sound practical advice, with good humour and occasional gentle mockery of their charges. Not a word to the purpose, though. Not a hint about the young man of the house being in love with her, or a handsome outlaw, or a scullery-maid who might hang.

Only one letter had something that might touch on it. Her correspondent had complained about how spoiled her pupils were, not charitable or grateful for their luck in being rich. Mary had replied:

Oh, how well I understand you. Thank goodness I do not have your trials, my girl being kind enough at heart, but there are times when I sit by the fire, playing whist with the colonel, and think of the poor wretches on the road outside who could be called from death back to life by even five minutes of the comforts I take for granted, and it's all I can do not to overturn the table and run out and look for them. Or so I flatter myself, as I suppose we all do, being creatures so very tenacious of our comforts.

I checked the date, the December of the previous year, soon after the arrest of Joanna Picton. It was surely the baby's death that Mary had been picturing, and wondering how much of her own precarious comfort she might risk to help Joanna.

Apart from the letter books, what remained were mostly small, sociable things – an invitation to tea from her friend Mrs Dell, politely declined because of the difficulty of getting home afterwards, a thank you for a book she'd sent somebody. One note, ornamented by cut-out pictures of hearts and roses, wished her happy birthday from Barbara, but had no date.

A few scraps of paper carried memoranda to herself, mostly facts to be checked when she next visited the library in town. Only one was of interest. It looked like a copy, in her handwriting, of a page from a road book giving times of stagecoaches between Cheltenham and Gloucester. Then just two words: St Luke's. She'd written it thriftily on the back of a receipt from a bookshop, with a date in early May of the present year. So, sometime after that date, Mary had either made or contemplated a visit to Gloucester to go to a church. If she'd needed a church, there were many closer than Gloucester and there'd been nothing in her letters to suggest particular piety. Could the distance even be the point of it, wanting to talk about her dilemma to somebody outside the circle of Cheltenham gossip? If so, why that particular church? I read the note again, memorized it and then put it back, closed the desk and made sure everything in her room was as I had found it. On my way back along the corridor, I looked into Barbara's room, but Maggie had gone and the clothes were tidied away. I went downstairs, found the butler and asked him to give my compliments to the colonel when he returned. Nobody was watching me from the windows, so after I'd gone a little way up the drive, I turned off it and walked round a shrubbery towards the side of the house.

A whistle too shrill to be a blackbird's sounded from a big cedar. Tabby was sitting comfortably on a wide branch, legs stretched along it and back against the trunk. When I signalled to her, she slid down, landed neatly on her feet and reported.

‘Nothing's come out except the pig bins earlier on, and you wouldn't hide anything in those because of the stink.'

‘We missed it,' I said. ‘I'm nearly certain Barbara arranged for Maggie to send it somewhere while we were away yesterday in Cheltenham, only I don't know how.'

Tabby and I walked in silence. She was frowning, clearly thinking hard, and when we were nearly back at Mr Godwit's, she announced the result.

‘I think I know.'

‘How she sent it?'

‘With you.' I supposed my jaw dropped, because she laughed. ‘You know when you sent me away – well, I walked around for a bit, looking at things. Then I saw the carriage we came into town on, the same driver. He was on a road going out of the town. There was nobody inside, just him.'

‘Odd, yes.'

‘So I thought I'd follow him for a bit,' Tabby said. ‘He didn't go far. Just outside the town, there's a public house with three stars on the board. He drove into the yard. I thought that was just a place he liked to drink at, so I came back and didn't think any more of it till now.'

‘You didn't see him unloading anything?'

‘We weren't looking for anything then, were we? If it was only a little trunk, he might have kept it up at the front, under his driving box, and we wouldn't have known it was there.'

The more I thought of it, the more convincing it sounded. The driver wouldn't even have to be conscious of Barbara's plot. It would be quite a normal thing to deliver something to a staging post to be picked up by somebody else, although the usual place would be one of the big coaching inns, not some out-of-town establishment.

‘You could take us there?' I said.

‘Course I could.'

We were both ravenous so we stayed for lunch, I with Mr Godwit, Tabby with Suzie in the kitchen. Afterwards we groomed and tacked up Rancie. When I'd told Mr Godwit that we might be away for the night, he'd hardly raised any objection, dazed by all that was happening. Once I was in the saddle and we'd buckled on the saddlebag, Tabby hopped on to the mounting block and up behind me. Having your maid riding pillion was country manners and would raise a few eyebrows in the streets of Cheltenham, but I was used to that. I shouldn't have inflicted it on Rancie with anybody else, but Tabby was so light and well balanced that a horse would hardly feel the extra weight. We enjoyed a few long canters and were in town by mid-afternoon.