Emily cowered, but surely Dulcie would not recognize her in this dress, in the uncertain light of the bull’s-eye lamp.
“Women?” Dulcie said incredulously. “They look like women.”
“They are women, ma’am,” Woodrow agreed. “After vegetables, likely. Don’t worry about it, ma’am. I’ll take ’em in and likely as not, you won’t ’ave ter do anything about it except agree ter the charge. Now come on.” He yanked at Charlotte a good deal less gently than before. Apparently his patience had snapped and he had changed his mind. Dulcie’s quiet authority had been enough to dispel any doubts.
“Charlotte!” There was panic rising in Emily’s voice. “Think of something! Not only will Thomas be ruined, Jack will be too!”
Such desperate times called for extreme measures. Charlotte opened her mouth and let out an earsplitting scream.
“Gawd!” Constable Woodrow leapt into the air and dropped the lantern. It rolled on the ground without breaking, ending up almost at the stone edge of the path. Charlotte did it again, and was rewarded by blinds shooting up in the house and more sounds of obvious activity.
“What did you do that for?” Emily hissed furiously.
“Witnesses,” Charlotte replied, and screamed again.
Woodrow swore vehemently and dived for the lantern.
“For Heaven’s sake stop it!” Dulcie commanded. “You’ll disturb the entire neighborhood. What on earth is the matter with you? Be quiet at once!”
Emily hesitated on the edge of trying to run away, and abandoned it.
Charlotte moved towards Dulcie, and into the radius of the light from the back door, just as Landon Hurlwood, hair disheveled, nightshirt showing above and below his dressing robe, appeared behind Dulcie, his face filled with alarm.
“Are you hurt?” he asked her, his voice husky with anxiety.
She froze, the blood draining from her face, leaving her suddenly ashen.
He looked beyond her at Charlotte, but there was no shred of recognition in his eyes. Then he turned to the constable. “What’s going on? What’s this? How serious is it?”
“No one’s hurt, sir,” Woodrow said, for the first time total uncertainty in his voice. He understood a scandal when he saw one, but to find it in Mrs. Arledge’s house destroyed his composure entirely. “This woman”—he indicated Charlotte—“this woman screamed, but no one has touched ’er, I swear.”
Hurlwood peered at her, and saw a young woman in a maid’s dress and with her hair wild and her skin stained with creosote and dust. Then his eyes went beyond her to Emily, now also in the light.
“Mrs. Radley …” Then he blanched, realizing at last what Dulcie had seen from the first.
“I can’t imagine, Mrs. Radley, what persuaded you to break into my garden in the middle of the night,” Dulcie said with a cold, shaking voice. “But there is nothing I can do to assist you. I think you must be mad. Perhaps the strain of childbirth, and then the political campaign, has broken your health. Your husband—”
“The police are coming,” Charlotte interrupted firmly.
“The police are already here!” Dulcie pointed out.
“I mean Superintendent Pitt.” Charlotte pushed her hair out of her eyes. “We have found the place where Mr. Arledge was murdered. There is still blood on the ground, in spite of the creosote you’ve poured over it. And also the wheelbarrow in which you took him to the park, after you had cut his head off.”
Dulcie opened her mouth to protest, but her voice died in a gasp.
Behind her, Landon Hurlwood was so white his eyes looked like holes sunken into his skull.
“And the oilskins,” Charlotte continued relentlessly. It must be finished. “Which you used to protect yourself from the blood.”
“That’s stupid!” Woodrow said with a strangled gasp. “Why would Mrs. Arledge ever think of such a dreadful thing? That’s wicked.”
“To be free to marry Mr. Hurlwood, now his wife is dead too; to escape from a dead marriage and revenge herself for twenty years’ betrayal,” Charlotte said, her voice strangely level in the awful silence. “She took advantage of the Headsman’s crimes to kill him and open the way for her.”
Woodrow turned to Dulcie. Landon Hurlwood had moved a step away from her, a terrible comprehension filling his face, like the knowledge of death.
Dulcie shot a look of hatred at Charlotte so intense Emily stepped backwards away from her, and Charlotte felt the cold run right through her body. Then Dulcie turned to Hurlwood.
“Landon!” She let out a single cry, then saw his expression—the horror, the tearing bruising guilt, and the revulsion—and knew that everything was lost.
It was impossible to say what she might have done next, because the garden doors had opened without their hearing them and Pitt stood wild-haired and ill-dressed not a yard from them.
Dulcie turned to him, opened her mouth, but no sound came.
Pitt’s face was filled with a disillusion that carried all the pain of every awakening from a sweet and gentle dream into a bitter reality. Then even as Charlotte watched him, she saw the admiration and tenderness bleed away until there was only an agonizing remnant left, that small shred of pity that never left him, no matter for whom or what the wound or the guilt. And with a coldness that ran right through her, leaving her shaking, she realized how deeply he had been moved by Dulcie, and how close she herself had come to losing a part of him which she could never have regained.
