and lifted her to a chair. With a savage look at Aunt Jaggers's departing back, Mudd thumped the scuttle on the hearth and went outside, slamming the door behind him.
'Do you think we should summon the doctor?' Kate asked worriedly, with a look at Harriet. The girl's cheek was heavily bruised, and her right eye was beginning to swell.
'No,' Mrs. Pratt said, smoothing Harriet's hair away from her face. 'I'll make a comfrey poultice. Th' doctor culd do no better.' She went toward the pantry.
Impulsively, Kate bent over the frightened girl. ' 'It will be all right,' she said, touching her cheek gently, but she was at once swept by a feeling of sad helplessness. How could she promise Harriet that Aunt Jaggers's brutality would be restrained, when she herself was vulnerable to the woman's whims? If Aunt Sabrina would not do what should be done, no one could protect the servants.
Biting her lip and wishing she had not offered such an easy comfort when there was none to be had, Kate turned away to prepare her tea. She kept her eyes on what she was doing, but as she heard Mrs. Pratt moving about the kitchen, preparing Harriet's poultice, a gnawing apprehension, a kind of fearful expectation grew in her mind.
'Jaggers is who killed Jenny,' Mrs. Pratt had said bitterly. 'All o' us knows it. All o' us hates her fer it.' Kate could not escape the terrible feeling that a hurricane was about to strike abovestairs, and a volcano to erupt below, and that both events would leave behind a scarred and barren landscape that none of them would recognize.
There was a soft knock at the back door. With an unreadable glance at Kate, Mrs. Pratt moved toward it. 'Who's there?' she called out quietly.
'Tom Potter,' a muffled voice replied.
Kate frowned. Tom Potter?
All o' us hates her fer it. Tom Potter most of all.
Mrs. Pratt faced Kate. 'If yer done makin' yer tea, miss,' she said pointedly, 'Mudd'll take that tray up fer yer.'
Kate picked up the tray she had prepared. 'Thank you,' she said, 'but I can do it.' She walked toward the door to the stairs. When she reached it, she turned.
Mrs. Pratt had already admitted Tom Potter, speaking to him in quick, hard sentences. He was a slender, boyish-looking young man in a rough brown coat, brown trousers, and brown felt hat. A fierceness shone in his eyes, and when he stepped to the fireplace to bend over Harriet, his voice was soft but vibrating with a scarcely restrained anger.
'Don' cry, child,' he said quietly. 'We'll make it right, I swear t' yer. She'll not be beatin' yer again.'
Mrs. Pratt stepped swiftly forward, interposing herself between Kate and the visitor. It was clear that there would be no introduction. Instead, she said, her voice level, 'I'm grateful t' yer, miss, fer what ye did this evenin'.'
'I wish I could have done more,' Kate said.
'Ye did what ye culd.' She squinted at Kate, considering. ' 'Tis true yer uncle's a copper?'
'Yes,' Kate said.
'Ah,' Cook said thoughtfully. She seemed about to say something else, but instead grasped the stairway door and opened it so Kate could go through. ' 'Well, ring if yer wants anythin' else.'
'I shall,' Kate said. 'Thank you.'
The apprehension did not leave Kate as she carried her tray upstairs to her room; rather, it was magnified by the recollection of Jenny's lover, vowing to right Harriet's wrong. All considerations of morality and ethics aside, Aunt Jaggers was inviting trouble when she mistreated the servants. It was not unheard of for them to take revenge, for the person who felt entrapped and powerless to turn to crime. There was the Belgian maid who strangled her elderly employer. And the Irish maid-of-all-work who was hanged at Newgate for bludgeoning her employer, hacking her body into pieces, andKate shook herself. She couldn't dismiss the fears that menaced her. They were legitimate, for the wrongs Jenny and Harriet had suffered were real wrongs, just as the Belgian maid and Kate Webster were real murderers, and not merely characters in Beryl Bardwell's sensational thrillers. But she couldn't give way to her apprehension, for if she did, she would have to ask herself what would happen to her, caught as she was in the web of her aunt's malice.
Kate carried her tray into her room, lighted the fire, and sat down to eat, grateful for the silence and the opportunity to be alone. When she was finished, she pulled off her shoes and took out the manuscript of 'The Conspiracy of the Golden Scarab.' If she expected to meet her deadline, she had to work-regardless of what storms might be brewing around her.
She scribbled furiously for several hours, pausing only to refill her teacup and mend the fire. When she finally laid down her pen and gulped the last of the cold tea, her draft of the next chapter-set in an English country manor and featuring characters that greatly resembled Sir Charles Sheridan and Bradford and Eleanor Marsden-was done. It was a trifle short on sensation, she thought critically, but it was satisfy-ingly full of the realistic details her readers loved. Perhaps she could devise*a startling plot twist-a death or some other disaster-involving the medium, whose character was beginning to seem to Kate more and more ambiguous. She still had the notes she had scribbled after her visit to Mrs. Farns-worth's. She might even work Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle into the plot- suitably disguised, of course.
And the Irish maid who had been hanged at Newgate for bludgeoning her mistress.
32
But answer came mere none.
It was raining in a drizzly, halfhearted fashion when Charles got back on his horse after leaving Mrs. Farnsworth's house on Keenan Street. If the lady had any answers, she had not imparted them to him. But perhaps there was another way to get to the bottom of the affair. He rode toward the village of Dedham, three miles to the north of Marsden Manor, along the River Stour.
Charles remembered Dedham quite well from the days of his youth. It was a market town for the hamlet of East Berg-holt, where he had spent summers that he still recalled with joy and wonder, visiting his grandparents and wandering the wooded hills and sweet, shallow vales. Dedham lay on the south side of the river, whose lush green banks sloped into deep water, verges fringed with willow and hawthorn and populated by choirs of songbirds. Barges moved slowly westward on the river from the harbor at Manningtree, through locks at Flatford and Dedham and Stratford St. Mary.
Dedham's High Street ran east and west along one side of a small square. On the northeast corner stood The Marlbor-ough Head, a half-timbered building of respectable vintage that had served as a wool market in the fifteenth century, an apothecary in the seventeenth century, and finally, after 1704
and the Battle of Blenheim, as an inn, named for the first Duke of Marlborough. It had from time to time offered the young Charles a place to warm himself and eat a hot pork pie while waiting for his grandfather to complete his business. Across High Street stood the brick Grammar School, a fine Georgian building with a calm facade and stately demeanor. And on the corner opposite stood the pride of the village, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, its tower foursquare and of commanding height, founded on the wealth of the woolen industry and raised before King Henry's bold interference in the divine order of things. The walls were faced with stone from Caen and local knapped flint had been used to construct the tower. The buttresses were outlined heavily by large quoins of dressed stone, and in the plinth of the tower was an arrangement of quatrefoiled shields, alternating with crowns. It was altogether an impressive church, the comer-stone of village life.
The vicarage was much less picturesquely impressive, designed not to celebrate the spirit but to answer the needs of the body for shelter and comfort. It stood beside the church, a solid, tidy brick residence with a slate roof, a respectable number of chimney pots, and green shutters. A carriage waited in the street, the mackintoshed driver hunched over his reins, clearly unhappy about the wet. As Charles rode up, a woman in a fur hat came out of the
