“Phoebe worked at the Hall, you imply?”
“Yes. Housemaid. Started when she was fourteen. Eighteen hours a day, heaving buckets of coal and baths of water up and down four floors. Slavery. I saw her on Sunday afternoons, her only time off. She was looking forward to the time I could stand on my own feet and marry her out of there. Trouble was—when she was rising sixteen I was eighteen and Sir Sidney was sending me off to Cambridge for three years.”
“You forgot about Phoebe in all the excitement?”
“Never! No! I reckoned I could offer her a better life if I worked hard and made my own way in the world. It wasn’t to be that simple, though. As she got older she caught the eye of someone at the Hall. Not difficult to guess who. The last two times I saw her, she was withdrawn, losing weight, nervy, clinging. She kept trying to tell me something but could never get the words out. Pretty little thing she were. A young gel in her fair prime and pollen …” His voice had taken on the sad slowness of Suffolk speech as his mind concentrated on the distant past. He broke off to fumble in his breast pocket and draw out a wallet. Joe held out a hand to take the much-worn studio photograph he was being offered.
The young face looked back at him wide-eyed. Startled by the flash or overawed by the occasion of having her photograph taken in distant Stowmarket? Long fair hair fell in tidily combed ripples over her shoulders. She was wearing her Sunday best—possibly her only—dress and buttoned ankle boots. A large silk bow emphasised the tiny waist.
The image of that slim little frame now rotted to dust only feet below him triggered in Joe a response he suspected to have been carefully calculated, though it was none the less instinctive and inevitable. He swallowed and tried manfully to keep emotion out of his voice as he handed back the photograph.
“ ‘Fair was this young wife, and there withall / As any weasel, her body gent and small,’ ” he murmured. “Though I’ve never been able to understand ‘gent.’ ” When words fail you, Chaucer could always come riding to the rescue with a pithy phrase, Joe reckoned.
Hunnyton’s smile was full of warm surprise. “He weren’t wrong! We still use the word over here. It means neat, worthy of the gentry. Chaucer’s Alisoun was lithe as a weasel and so was my Phoebe. She was proud of her eighteen-inch waist. Prettiest girl in the county. May Queen in her last year at school. Clever too. She was wasted emptying chamber pots and scrubbing floors. She could turn her hand and her head to anything. Only one thing she never learned—how to swim.”
The abrupt pause invited Joe’s next question. “Are you ready to tell me how she died?”
“She drowned. One summer night. In the moat behind the Hall.”
Joe waited.
“She were afeard o’ water. She’d never have gone near it willingly.”
“The household at the time—1908?—remind me. Sir Sidney and Lady Truelove were in residence?”
“Yes. Sir Sidney was … oh, forty-six years old. A man in his prime, you’d say. His prime lasted him thirty years. And to prove it—his wife was heavily pregnant at the time with what turned out to be young Alexander.”
“James? What of him?”
“You had to feel sorry for him. No longer the centre of attention. Down from Eton for the holidays. Rather embarrassed by his mother’s late showing of fecundity, I’d say. Not easy at that age to be told you’re about to acquire a baby brother or sister.”
“How did he cope with it?”
“By ignoring it. He disappeared off into the woods playing with catapults and shooting off his airgun from dawn to dusk.”
More and better particulars required from that source, Joe decided. Boys stalking about in the woods saw more than they were supposed to and remained, themselves, unseen.
As he got to his feet, Joe caught a stirring of foliage, at the periphery of his vision, a flash of colour. He turned his head casually to check the source. The nerve endings on the back of his neck were sending an alert, as was the sudden stillness where there had been movement.
“We’re being watched, Hunnyton.”
“I’d be surprised if we weren’t! A stranger in the village, a smartly turned-out feller driving a showy car—he’d come in for a bit of interest. You’ll have set all the lace curtains twitching,” Hunnyton replied easily.
Joe nodded. No old biddies would be sneaking about hiding behind tombstones to drum up a bit of gossip and all the children were in school. His unease was not dispelled.
Hunnyton was a policeman and he knew what was expected of a willing witness. Joe asked him again for his view of the events of that summer night a quarter of a century ago and prepared to hear a professionally ordered account. But Hunnyton didn’t follow with the response Joe was waiting for.