Chapter Four
…I have told no one about the baby, Eliza. By which, of course, I mean that I have told no one but you. I hope you will excuse these long letters full of my own concerns; but it is such a relief to tell someone what is in my mind and I hesitate to confide in Catherine when everything is suspicion and uncertainty, for I do not wish her to be hurt more than she must be.
Exactly how much she must be hurt is not easy to judge. I am almost certain that it must all end in a broken engagement, no matter what I discover, for that is the course of action which Mr Montague himself desires. Her acquaintance with the young man has been brief and I trust the suffering of her heart will be in proportion. But how much the scandal will injure her reputation is much harder to determine.
Well, the next thing I want to tell you about is the shrubbery.
I went there yesterday, after I had spoken to Rose, and I found it to be as well cared for as everything else about this place. The laurels are as neatly clipped as Sir Edgar’s own side-whiskers. No great branches to collect the rain and be shaken over unsuspecting heads as we used to do when we were children. Here it is all very orderly: gravel paths raked quite clean of weeds, a murmuring of doves and a rich smell of damp earth and leaf-mould. Anyone knowing nothing of what had happened there could pass through without suspecting anything.
However, my eyes were awake to suspicion, so I noticed that beside the summerhouse – which, by the by, is called the hermitage; I do not quite know why, except that Belsfield is rather too grand to have something as common-place as a summerhouse, which every farmer may have these days – well, by the summerhouse, I noticed that there was a patch of gravel which was particularly well raked, and rather wetter than any of the rest. It looked very much as if it had been washed clean. And then, when I stooped down and looked closer, I saw that the water that had been thrown down had washed traces of a red crust onto the large white stones that border the path.
This was, undoubtedly, the place where the woman lay.
Eliza, knowing that, there was something indescribably disquieting about the very ordinariness of the place. I was not quite frightened, but it was oppressive to stand upon that spot and think that this picturesque little grey building, these banks of laurel gleaming with damp, were the last sights upon which a fellow creature’s eyes had rested.
Well, just beside the wet gravel was the door to the hermitage. I tried the lock, though of course I had not much hope of gaining an entrance. For you know how it is in these grand places: all the keys are jealously guarded by the gardeners and only they are able to go about wherever they like. But, to my very great surprise, the door swung open – letting out a faint smell of damp and dead leaves. There was not much light inside because the shutters were closed, but it was possible to see the usual collection of stools and basketwork chairs that fill such places, a stand with three umbrellas in it, and two forgotten sunhats lying on a small table. The floor was covered in dust and dry, brown leaves.
Nothing of interest, I thought, and I was about to close the door when my eyes became sufficiently accustomed to the dim light to make out footprints in the dust. I looked closer. Yes, some time recently someone – or maybe two people – had come into the summerhouse. I followed the track of the feet and saw that two chairs had been turned slightly towards one another. On the back of one of the chairs a cushion had been balanced and bore still the impression of a resting head.
Well now, Eliza, I did a very clever thing. I sat down in that chair and I tried to rest my own head against the cushion. But I found that it was impossible for me to do so and I was able to calculate that the person who had placed it must be almost a foot taller than I am. Was not that remarkably well done of me?
Indeed, I begin to think that, terrible though this whole business is, it has at least the advantage of allowing full play to my genius, which I have long considered wasted in the contriving of new gowns and roast mutton dinners out of a small income; and if there was such a profession as Solver of Mysteries, I think I should do as well in it as any man. Perhaps I should set myself up in town with a brass plate upon my door: ‘D Kent. Detector of Crimes and Discoverer of Secrets.’ Do you not think I should do good business?
But, rather than cry my own praises, I shall tell you instead of everything that I have been clever enough to deduce.
First of all, there is the question of when this murder took place. Well, about that there can be little doubt; we are all quite certain that it must have occurred while the men were out shooting. It must have happened then, otherwise the single shot would have been heard and remarked upon, if not by people up at the house, then certainly by the men working in the garden.
So much is certain.
But, Eliza, this has brought me to a shocking conclusion. You see, after most exhaustive enquiries among the servants – and I might add that there is a veritable army of men employed here in maintaining that exquisite order that Sir Edgar demands in his park and pleasure grounds – none of these men are able to recall seeing a stranger here during that time. So, you see, it seems most likely – though I find this hard to countenance, and nobody else in the household will even acknowledge it to be possible – that it was a man from the house who did the terrible deed. Of course there are the beaters and the servants to consider; but they would have had no weapon. Eliza, it was only the gentlemen who were carrying guns.
It is a shocking conclusion, is it not? But I think it must be braved. What was it that Edward used to say when he was preparing for his debates at Cambridge? ‘Logic is a matter for the head and it is best not to let the heart have anything to do with it.’
And I sincerely hope that Edward would have approved of the logic I applied yesterday in my study of the shrubbery.
After I had closed the door of the hermitage, I followed the gravel path beside its wall. This brought me to the edge of the shrubbery and the ha-ha that divides it from the park. I stopped here and looked about me.
The first thing I noticed was that it would indeed have been impossible for the woman to have been killed by a shot fired from the park side of the ha-ha because the summerhouse itself stands in the way. The fatal shot must have been fired from within the shrubbery.
But, as I looked across into the park, I also saw that the little wooded hill known as Cooper’s Spinney, which is the place where the gentlemen were shooting that day, begins barely two hundred yards away.
Here the parkland ends with a romantic little Greek ruin, which, it seems, Sir Edgar built last summer. It is rather pretty with its white, fresh-looking walls and fallen columns, though it probably has as much of Greece about it as the stable block; for Sir Edgar has never visited Europe, since England has, as I heard him telling the colonel at dinner yesterday, ‘always been enough’ for him. Anyway, this ruin marks the end of the parkland and beyond it is the rougher ground where the game birds thrive.
Now, looking at the spinney, I thought that one of the men might, just possibly, have been able to slip away while the guns and the beaters were all intent upon the sport and, if luck was with him, his absence might not have been noted. I looked carefully at the distance between the spinney and the shrubbery and I am sure that a man running could have covered the ground in a minute – or maybe two.
