When Cat’s character is defamed, Mrs Bell demands to speak, and stands up for the girl. She, too, denies that Cat was involved with Robin Durrant in any way, and hints that the theosophist must have coerced her out of her room somehow, must have found some way to unlock her door and force her out into the meadows, since she herself had locked the girl safely in the night before. When she cannot give a rational explanation of this, glances are exchanged and notes taken, and it is assumed that the housekeeper feels guilty about forgetting to lock the door and is trying to cover her mistake. Hester hears all this, and stays silent. She thinks of the skeleton key that she gave to Cat, and she stays silent. She forgets to blink for long, long minutes, until her eyes itch and sting.
Barrett Anders, the dairy man, testifies that he had been coming south in his milk cart, along the lane from the London Road, to make his deliveries in the village, and as he’d neared the bridge he’d seen Robin Durrant crossing the meadow towards the canal with the girl in his arms, all broken and dead, and that he’d knocked the killer down while George Hobson, who had come along the towpath, leapt into the water to pull the girl out, even though she was clearly dead and nothing could be done to help her. Hester tries to shut her mind to it, to the unbearable pain George must have felt, seeing Cat that way. Cat, with scarlet water streaming from her black hair, her thin limbs limp, her little hawk’s face a ruin. The images strike her like lashes of a whip. ‘Minutes too late to save her, I was,’ George moans, his face ravaged, twisted with grief. ‘Only minutes.’ Robin Durrant is charged with wilful murder and committed for trial at the next Berkshire assizes. He does not react to the verdict. He does not react to anything.
The Sunday after Cat’s death, the Reverend Albert Canning gives his sermon as usual, to a packed church that hums with suppressed excitement; illicit, disrespectful excitement that the congregation can’t help feeling or showing. They’ve come to see the Cannings, who have housed a murderer all summer long; whose maid has been smashed to death with a rock; who are at the centre of the biggest scandal the parish has ever known. Hester sits in the front row, where she always sits, her back stiff, her skin burning. The tide of whispers rises, laps the nape of her neck, threatens to close over her head. Albert does not mention Cat in his sermon. Hester listens in dismay, as he does not. He repeats a sermon he gave only three or four weeks before, on the subject of material wealth, staring at the back of the church as though his thoughts are a million miles away; the words bitten off and falling from his mouth like chunks of wood. Solid and dry and dead. As if he no longer believes a single one of them. At home, he sits in the parlour and never asks about his journal, or the leather bag, or his binoculars. He never asks about any of it, and Hester never speaks up. Her Albert has gone, and in his place is this sleeper, this man of ice, this shadowy person who barely speaks and barely eats and only goes out on church business; in his place is a man she doesn’t know at all – a shell, a liar. She watches him with a heart full of dread, frightened of him, and of what she has done to protect him. The man is a changeling, he is a stranger. And perhaps, perhaps, he is a killer.
Wednesday, October 15th, 1911
Dear sir,
Why don’t you reply to my letters? I don’t know who else to talk to and I must get out some of my thoughts or I will run mad. I used to write to my sister, and there were no secrets between us two, but now I have things I can’t write, even to her; and so I must write them to you. Why do you not speak out? If what I think is true, why do you stay silent? Perhaps I know the reason. To keep your own secret – that of the elemental, and of the photographs you published. To keep your name and this place in history that you have carved for yourself, at whatever cost. But it is a sorry world we live in if the infamy caused by a lie should be greater than that of a murder. Do you really think you have chosen the lesser crime of the two to be guilty of?
I found your bag, which was brought back to the house. I found what was in it, and Albert’s binoculars. I know your secret. The secret you will go to gaol to protect. Are you willing to die for it? They might hang you! And what use is your reputation as a theosophist when you have lost all standing as a man? Will your precious Society still have you, when you are a convicted killer? I think not. I think not. So why persist in this silence? What good does it do you? The date of your trial approaches. There isn’t much time. If you are hanged, what then? Is that what you wish – do you think that even if your life ends now, your name will live on for ever? That you will always be the theosophist who captured proof of the existence of elementals? I tell you now, it is not worth it. Already there are some who denounce your work, and the pictures you took, and their numbers will grow. You will be forgotten, as will your work. Speak out, and there is time to start again! Your father would rather have a failed theosophist or even a fraudster for a son than a murderer; I am utterly convinced of it.