A moment of silence

‘Was she a lady?’

‘Oh no!’ came the immediate reply. ‘Not with hands like that!’

‘What were her hands like?’

Rose dropped her eyes. ‘Red, working hands, miss.’

Dido followed the girl’s eyes, which were fixed on her own hands, clasped in her sacking apron: red, cracked and scarred with chilblains. ‘This woman had chilblains on her hands?’ she suggested.

‘Yes,’ said Rose. Then she stopped herself. ‘At least she had old ones. Healed mostly. No new ones.’

‘Now, it was very clever indeed of you to notice that. Very clever indeed. It tells you a lot about her, you see.’

‘Does it, miss?’

‘Why, yes. It means she was a working woman, you see; but one that had perhaps gone up in the world a bit just lately. Got a better job perhaps.’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose it does,’ said Rose, much encouraged.

‘And what of her dress?’

‘Covered in blood it was.’ Her hand flew back to her mouth.

Dido quickly produced another peppermint; Rose took it and sucked noisily.

‘Apart from that,’ said Dido gently when the crisis seemed to have passed, ‘was it a nice dress?’

Rose nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, yes, it was, now you ask. A very nice dimity it was, with a pretty blue stripe.’

‘New?’

Rose was thinking hard now. ‘Yes, I think it was new.’

‘The dress has made you think of something?’

‘Yes. It was when I said that then about it being blue-striped dimity. It made me think because I’d never seen anything like it before and I remember Jenny – that’s one of the housemaids here – I remember her saying she’d seen some lovely blue dimity new in from London in a draper’s shop last month when she had her day off.’

‘That’s very interesting, Rose. Do you remember what shop it was?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t know the name of the shop, miss; that was way over by Hopton Cresswell, I should say, because that’s where Jenny’s people live.’

‘Well, well, you have got a lot to tell them all! You can even make a guess that the unfortunate woman lived somewhere near Hopton Cresswell. And I suppose you know roughly how old she was.’

‘Oh no, miss! Because her face—’

‘Yes, yes. I know you could not see her face. But what was her hair like?’

‘Fair, miss,’ said Rose, frowning to remember. ‘Long and yellow and it didn’t curl over much.’

‘Was it thick?’

‘Yes, quite thick.’

‘Were there any grey hairs mixed in with the fair ones?’

‘Oh no.’

‘Well then, she was rather young. On the right side of thirty, I would think.’

‘Oh yes, miss, yes I suppose she was.’

‘And was she fat or thin?’

‘Neither really, miss.’

‘A good figure then?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’

‘There now,’ said Dido, getting to her feet, ‘I should think all that is worth a nice little sit down in the housekeeper’s room at least – and perhaps a dish of tea too. Remember, don’t tell them anything unless they are kind to you.’

‘No, miss, thank you, I won’t.’ Rose smiled happily, picked up her skirts and started off across the wet cobbles to the kitchen door. But then she stopped and turned back, biting her lip thoughtfully.

‘Have you remembered something else, Rose?’

‘Yes, miss, it’s that dress I keep thinking about. Funny, it was. But I don’t seem to be so good at making out what things mean like you are.’

‘What was funny about the dress?’

‘It was made really odd. Too much stuff in it. Lots of little tucks, and stuff all folded into the seams. I ain’t never seen a dress like it. Do you think that’s interesting at all? Does it mean something like those other things?’ She peered hopefully at Dido’s frowning face. ‘Well, miss? What do you think?’

‘Oh? Oh no. No, I doubt it is important. I expect it just means that she was a bad dressmaker and a little bit wasteful. And,’ she added brightly, ‘we should not speak ill of the dead, should we? No, I would not bother to tell anyone about that. You have plenty to tell without that. Remember now, a nice rest by the fire and a drink of tea.’

Dido smiled encouragingly and clattered away across the cobbles in her pattens. She went out of the yard, skirted the red-brick wall of the kitchen garden, and came, by a side gate, into the park.

She had left the house with the intention of inspecting the place where the woman had been found and it was only the sight of a covered cart from the village bearing its sad burden away from the stables that had prompted her to make a detour into the kitchen yard, in the hope of learning something there.

But now her mind was full and she walked on in some agitation across the park until she came to a little rise in the ground which afforded a particularly good view of the house and estate. Here there stood the broad stump of a walnut tree – one of the ones which Margaret had pointed out to her in their drive through the park yesterday as having been felled in the ‘Great Storm’. It must have been a remarkably fine tree, for even its broken remains had a kind of melancholy dignity. There was an ornate bench of green wrought iron standing close beside it and Dido sat herself down upon it to think.

Before her the yellowing autumn grass stretched away under a heavy grey sky, each blade thickly beaded with dew. The great trees of the park stood out black against white mist and the squat tower of the family chapel rose up above a dark bank of yews. On her right, a well-trodden path led off along the edge of the ha-ha that bounded the shrubbery, and beyond the shrubbery rose lawns and fountains and all the columned grandeur of the house-front. It was a beautiful, tranquil scene which spoke not only of the master’s wealth, but also of his care that everything around him should be well kept and present a picture of perfection.

Thoughts of guilt and murder seemed out of place amid such tranquillity.

That the dead woman had been young was very bad news indeed. Respectable spinster though she was, Dido understood the ways of the world quite well enough to see that a woman of that class was much more likely to be…acquainted with the son of Sir Edgar Montague if she was young and…not ill-looking. That she should have been rather well dressed and that she should seem to have lately given over menial work was worse still. That telling phrase ‘a kept woman’ would insinuate itself into Dido’s mind in spite of all that she could do to keep it out.

She gazed at a beautiful, intricate mass of spiders’ webs that hung between the iron curls of the bench and she recalled Mr Montague’s words: ‘I must speak with my father.’ ‘He will not like what he hears.’ ‘It is impossible that he and I can remain friends after tonight.’

The words of a young man whose secret amour had been discovered?

But no, Dido would not, could not think that. After all, a woman was dead. This was not simply a matter of a gentleman’s youthful indiscretion (and again the vicarage-raised Dido proved herself more worldly-wise than most people would have suspected) such as had been passed over and covered up in many respectable families. This was a case of murder. By allowing herself to consider that Mr Montague’s strange behaviour and the woman’s death were connected, she seemed to be delivering up Catherine’s beloved, not simply to moral stricture, but to the very hands of the hangman.

Except, she thought guiltily, I am not delivering him up. I am protecting him.

Her last words to Rose had come unbidden to her tongue, surprising her with their fluency and calculation. For she had believed that her role at Belsfield was to uncover the truth, not to obscure it. But she had moved instinctively to conceal the last fact that Rose had unknowingly revealed to her.

The dead woman’s dress had been a puzzle to the scullery maid, coming, as she no doubt did, from a family