stamping their numb feet and attempting to rub a little warmth into their hands. The others hurried indoors, but Harriet hung back and caught at Dido’s arm. ‘Are you sure of this?’ she asked.
They paused a moment in the encroaching dusk of the yard, where the edge of the year’s first frost cut through the smells of horses and wood-smoke.
‘Oh yes,’ said Dido with great conviction, ‘Mr Coulson has certainly been assisting the poachers – and, I don’t doubt, making “a mint of money” from the business. The carts carrying the felled trees to the sawmills at Great Farleigh have also been carrying away Mr Harman-Foote’s woodcock and partridges. And the ruins have made a very convenient place in which to hide the birds till they can be removed. Mr Harman-Foote is known to be lenient towards poachers, but I do not believe even he would countenance his kinsman abusing his hospitality in such a way.’
‘Oh this is wonderful news!’ cried Harriet joyfully, ‘I shall take the first opportunity of speaking to Mr Coulson!’
She hurried away indoors, but Dido stood a moment longer in the aching cold. ‘Now,’ she said quietly to herself, ‘the question is whether I have finished with Mr Henry Coulson, or whether he has yet another, more dangerous, role to play in these mysteries.’
Chapter Forty
My Dear Eliza,
‘Strange things I have in head that will to hand!’ Someone says that in one of Shakespeare’s plays I believe, and tonight I find myself in accord with the poor fellow. And so I shall begin upon a letter which it may be I shall never send. For my head is full of strange things which must be expressed before they can be understood and, since I have no one to whom I may speak them, I needs must write them down. Yet I do not know that even your patient affection can bear with the outlandish ideas which torment me tonight.
I have the parlour fire to myself now – which is a very great luxury. Although it is only nine o’clock, Margaret is gone away to bed with a headache. Francis is engaged upon a sermon; at least, he is in his study, deep in the perusal of a large book – though since it seems to be the writings of some old Greek philosopher that he is reading, I doubt the parishioners of Badleigh will gain much from it. So, I have been left to myself, with a precious handful of coals still in the box on the hearth – and a whole three inches of candle! It is a cold night – and very foggy. The fog was gathering with the dusk as I walked home from Madderstone four hours ago.
My business there was to look again at those pieces of gold and silver which were discovered with Miss Fenn’s body. And I regret to say that I found among them something which I had been sincerely hoping not to find …
Dido hesitated. She was approaching now those outlandish ideas of which she had warned her sister. She bit the end of her pen and gazed down into the red cave of hot coals as she wondered how best to express her darkest suspicions; suspicions which were all built out of such very tiny details as seemed of no importance on their own – details which anyone else might have passed over entirely, but which clung to her brain like burrs and briars on a gun-dog’s coat after a day’s rough shooting.
If you have been attending as you should to all my accounts, Eliza, you will by now be aware of some very great problems and discrepancies in the account of Miss Fenn which I have so far pieced together. To borrow a phrase from dear Harriet: it will not do at all. And the most incongruous fact is still the letters in the bible. I have, as yet, said nothing to Anne about them – nor about the true identity of ‘Miss Fenn’; but the time draws near when I must decide what she is to know and not to know – as well as determining how Mr Portinscale is to be persuaded that there was no suicide …
The letters seem to prove that there was a lover: a man who lived close at hand (the evidence for his proximity is, you will recall, the absence of a post office mark on the letter’s cover and Miss Fenn’s reference to seeing him ‘again and again’). But this accords so very ill with the neighbourhood’s opinion of the woman that I find myself going over the words of the letters, in the hope that I might yet discover some other meaning concealed within them.
And then there is that very jarring fact which has preyed upon my mind since my visit to Mrs Nolan: her assertion that she had never seen Miss Elinor Fenn.
This is inexplicable, Eliza. How could it be that Miss Fenn had never called upon her daughter in Bath? When the child was with Mrs Pinker, she had visited her every week without fail, going to the considerable inconvenience of driving herself fourteen miles in a pony carriage in order to do so. This argues a very natural and amiable maternal attachment, does it not? And yet this attachment was done away entirely when Penelope came into Mrs Nolan’s care! Why?
Dido set her pen aside with a restless motion, chafed together her hands, then dropped a coal or two more onto the dying fire. She crept closer to the hearth until her feet were resting upon the fender and her face warm, even though the cold night air continued to chill her back. Her tired eyes watched the coals gently pulsing from black to red and her thoughts were so very strange she could not help but wonder whether she was like dear Mr Cowper when he looked into his fire – ‘myself creating what I saw’. But there was a kind of sense and pattern to her ideas – a way of fitting together all the pieces to make a complete map – even though it was one with a very surprising geography indeed.
She picked up her pen, determined upon writing down her incredible tale, even if, when it was finished, she had not the courage to publish it.
You see, Eliza, when I began to look for the cause of this change, I was reminded of one other very slight discrepancy in the accounts I have heard of Penelope’s going to Mrs Nolan’s school. Lucy told me that Penelope had been in Bath since she was five years old – and Mrs Nolan herself confirmed that account in my first interview with her. But, Mrs Pinker’s maid told me that girls were not sent from the house in Great Farleigh until they were seven.
Is not this rather strange? It alerted me to a possibility which can make comprehensible a great many of the mysteries which surround me. The possibility which has been tormenting me these past two days. Eliza, I do not believe that the child Mrs Pinker cared for was Penelope at all. I believe there was a switch made at the time of the removal to Bath, and, while her own child was hidden somewhere close to Madderstone, Miss Fenn pretended that Penelope was her daughter …
Small flames began to lick at the coals, brightening the room, lighting up the noble black profile of old Mr Kent in his frame, and sending shadows dancing across the ceiling. Out in the foggy night a fox barked sharply. Dido brushed her pen against her lips as she thought. Were her suspicions too fantastic? She had tried to ground each new idea in fact – that was a principle which her brother Edward had taught her. And Edward had once won a medal for debating at Cambridge. But he had never told her what one was to do when facts led to monstrous suspicions against the most innocent-seeming people. The great logicians of the university seemed to be entirely silent upon that point.
She sighed. What else could one do but follow the trail of reason relentlessly to its end?
Of course the next question must be: why was the exchange made? And I think that the reason lies in Miss Fenn’s remarkable determination to keep a particular secret from her husband.
As I told Mr Lomax at Bath, I believe Miss Fenn was an exceptionally clever and resourceful woman. (And I apologise, by the by, for my continued use of that name. I know that I ought to write instead of Lady Congreve, but I have known her too long as Miss Fenn to be comfortable with any other name.) Now, although the abominable laws of our land decree that a woman fleeing her husband’s ill-usage may take nothing with her, I believe that this remarkable lady contrived to steal one thing which he valued very highly indeed – and, having taken it, she was forced to do all that she could to keep it concealed. Even the friends who had helped her knew nothing of it. Because if Lord Congreve had known, he would never have rested until he had got back his property.
