up any kind of reason why she should.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No.”
“Nor I. But there must be an enormous amount that we don’t know.” Charlotte’s face was dark and tense, as if she was afraid. “Emily, I woke up in the night and I thought I heard you walking around.”
“I’m sorry-”
“No, it wasn’t you! It was coming from the stairs, so I got up to follow, but when I got the landing I saw it was Tassie. She was coming up and she walked past me to her bedroom. I saw her quite clearly. Emily, her sleeves were smeared with blood, and there were splashes down the front of her skirt and at the hem. She was smiling! There was a sort of peace about her. Her eyes were shining and wide open, but she didn’t even see me. I kept back in the small passage to the dressing room, and she walked so close I could have touched her.” She felt a little sick again as the smell came back, nauseating and sweet.
Emily was dazed-this was unbelievable. She offered the only explanation she could conceive of. “You had a nightmare.”
“No, I didn’t,” Charlotte insisted. “It was real.” Her face was tight and miserable but she did not waver. “I thought I might have been dreaming, with everything that’s happened, so I went down to the laundry room this morning and found the dress soaking in one of the coppers.”
“And was it covered in blood?”
Charlotte shook her head no more than an inch. “No, it was washed out. But then it would be; she’d hardly leave it like that for the maids to find, would she.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Emily still protested. “Whose blood? Why? Nobody’s been murdered that way”- she swallowed-“that we know of.”
Another hideous memory stirred in Charlotte’s mind, of parcels in a graveyard, but she refused to allow it to take shape. “Do you think she could be mad?” she said wretchedly. It seemed the only explanation left-and one must be found, for Emily’s sake.
“I suppose so,” Emily said reluctantly. “But I’m sure George didn’t know-unless he’d just found out. Which could be a reason for old Mrs. March to have killed him.”
“Do you think so?” Charlotte pursed her lips. “Would George ever have told anyone?”
“Yes! If she were dangerous-which she must be, if it was human blood.”
Charlotte said nothing, but she looked increasingly unhappy.
Emily knew why: she liked Tassie also. There was something in her that was immediately appealing, frankness, humor and generosity. But she had seen her coming up the stairs with blood bright on her sleeves and staining her dress. She shivered. Please God, it mustn’t be Tassie.
“It doesn’t have to be her,” Charlotte said quietly. “I suppose there could be some other explanation. An animal? An accident in the street? We don’t know anything. I just find it too hard to believe Tassie is … Anyway, if the family knew they’d lock her up in an asylum, for her own sake.”
“Perhaps they didn’t know how bad she was,” Emily said quietly. “Maybe she has suddenly got worse.”
“But there is still Jack Radley,” Charlotte argued. “You can’t forget him. Or Sybilla. And William has to be an obvious choice. It could even be Eustace. I don’t know why, but maybe George found out something about him. After all, this is his house. Perhaps he’s doing something very wrong, or has a secret in his past that he couldn’t afford to have known.”
Emily looked up. “Such as what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an illegitimate child-or a love affair with someone wildly inappropriate.”
Emily’s fair eyebrows shot up. “Eustace? A love affair? That taxes the imagination! Can you visualize Eustace in love?”
“No,” Charlotte admitted. “But I wasn’t thinking of love so much as lust. The most unlikely people can feel that, even pompous and unctuous middle-aged men like Eustace. And anyway, it doesn’t have to be recent. It could have been something that happened years ago, even when Tassie’s mother was alive. And there are other, even worse possibilities. People have the strangest obsessions, you know. Maybe she found that out.”
“You mean something truly disgusting?” Emily said slowly. “Like a child? Or another man? Do you suppose Olivia could have found out, and he killed her?”
“Oh …” Charlotte let out her breath with a sigh. “Actually I hadn’t thought of anything quite like that. Rather, a servant, or a farm girl. I heard of a highly respectable man who only liked big, dirty scrubwomen.”
“That’s rubbish!” Emily scoffed, taking another slice of thin toast and biting into it without any enjoyment.
“No, it isn’t, and one wouldn’t want it known.”
“No one would believe it, would they? Not to the point where it was worth murdering to keep them quiet.”
“Maybe. And certainly, if he killed Olivia it would be.”
“But unless he did kill Olivia-and I don’t believe that-George wouldn’t have told anyone. He wouldn’t want it known any more than Eustace would. After all, Eustace is family.” She swallowed the toast like a lump in her throat. “And George was rather conventional about things like that.”
“That’s true,” Charlotte said more gently. “But perhaps he didn’t trust George not to tell his friends, as a joke. George did not always think before he spoke. Or he might even have brought pressure on him to stop.”
“He wouldn’t!”
“Maybe not, but perhaps Eustace could not be sure enough of it.” She shook her head. “But all I’m saying is that we don’t know. There could be all kinds of things.”
Emily sat still. “Well, we’d better find at least one piece of evidence about some of them for Constable Stripe-and soon.”
“I know.” Charlotte bit her lip. “I’m trying.”
The service was to be held in the local church, which had also been the last resting place of the Ashworths since the family had acquired its first town house in the parish, nearly two hundred years ago.
Naturally Emily had informed her own household. That had been the most difficult of all the letters to write, and the only one with which Charlotte could not help her. How does one say to a five-year-old son that his father has been murdered? She knew he could not read her letter now; it would be his nanny, large, comfortable Mrs. Stevenson, who would try to explain to him, help him to understand death and allow his mind to grasp it slowly through the confusion of great and terrible emotions round him. Emily knew, too, that the gentle woman would try to comfort him, so he did not feel betrayed because his father had left him so soon, nor guilty that in some indefinable way it was his fault.
Emily’s letter would be for later on, when he was older, something he would keep and reread in quieter moments. He would find by the time he was a young man that he knew it by heart. So she had written it only once, letting her own loss and wholehearted grief come through. Inelegance of style would matter little; insincerity would clang like a false note with louder and harsher echoes through the years.
Today, of course, Edward would be there, small, cold and frightened but performing the rites expected of him. He was now Lord Ashworth: he must sit in the church, upright and well-behaved, and follow his father’s coffin to its grave, and mourn as was seemly.
Edward would come from home with Mrs. Stevenson and afterwards return with her. Charlotte and Emily would return to Cardington Crescent; the peculiar circumstances of murder made that necessary. They rode with Aunt Vespasia and Eustace in the family carriage, for this occasion draped in black and pulled by black horses. The hearse, of course, was provided by the undertaker and was draped and plumed as always.
Mrs. March and Tassie came next in the second-best barouche. Both Charlotte and Emily stared at Tassie, but she wore a veil, and beneath it her expression was invisible. It could have been one of sorrow and awe as everyone presumed, or it could equally easily have been remnants of the strange happiness Charlotte had seen in her on the stairs-or complete forgetfulness of it and whatever ghastly episode had preceded it. One could not even guess.
There was some argument as to where Jack Radley should ride; in the end, with great unease, Mrs. March took him with her, and William and Sybilla went in their own vehicle.
They alighted at the lych-gate one by one, and walked up the narrow earth and gravel path towards the old smoke-darkened, stone-towered church. The gravestones on either side were worn and green-rimed with age,
