back for Virginia, Anna, and Peter. He was right; he had spent too much time alone and that also meant he hadn’t learned to properly lie without giving himself away. She had no idea why he wouldn’t want to reunite the children with their parents. Maybe he wanted to spare them the sight of their dead brother. Maybe he had his own agenda in Blackhampton and they weren’t a part of it. But whatever the case, she felt certain the children were strong enough for the brief trip to the inn.
“I’ll go,” Kingsley said. He looked around at the pews full of patients. “I’ll go, if it means that the case will be finished. Then Day and Hammersmith can come back with me and help.”
“I’ll come with you,” Henry said.
“No, I need you here, Henry. If we all go, these people will have nobody.”
“I don’t know medicine yet.”
“They don’t need medicine. They need a watchful eye.”
“I have two of those.”
“Indeed you do.” Kingsley turned to Campbell. “Take me there. Then bring me right back here.”
Campbell nodded and led the way. He waited impatiently in the foyer while Kingsley fetched his bag and buttoned his overcoat, then the doctor hurried up the aisle and allowed himself to be escorted out into the blowing wind and snow.
Jessica didn’t waste a second. She knew that the men’s tracks would quickly fill with snow. She grabbed the children and bundled them into their coats, slipped their overshoes on their feet, and hustled them out of the church, ignoring their questions. She carried Virginia.
Outside, footprints were still visible, pressed down into the snow, two or three inches deep. Two sets, Campbell’s and Kingsley’s. She pulled her hat down over her forehead, hitched Virginia higher on her hip, and set out in the direction of the inn, putting her own feet in the men’s tracks. She could only see two or three yards ahead, and snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, forcing them closed. They wanted to stay closed, to crust over with ice. The village was completely silent, white and womblike. She and the children might have been the only people left in the world.
“Hold each other’s hands,” she said.
Peter and Anna held hands and followed her away from the church, into the swirling veil of white snow.
51
Day broke the silence. “Mr and Mrs Price, I believe it’s time you told me what’s been happening here.”
Hester Price sat back on the edge of the bed and looked at her son and said nothing. Sutton Price seemed to be in a daze. He stared at his wife. Bennett Rose sat upright on the floor. “I told you what’s happened,” he said. “Sutton Price killed his own son. You saw what happened. Oliver bled when his father came near to him. The dead boy’s had his say and told us who did the deed.”
Without warning, Sutton Price roared as if every ounce of energy left in his body had found an escape route through his throat. He fell on Rose, bearing him back against the wall. Rose grunted as his back hit the plaster and the breath went out of him again. He batted Price about his head and shoulders, using his forearms and elbows, but Price seemed not to notice. He pounded his shoulders into Rose in a steady rhythm, over and over, as if rocking a baby. Rose couldn’t breathe. Day dropped Rose’s rifle and leapt on Price. He pulled the grief-stricken father off the innkeeper and pushed him toward the center of the room. The fight immediately left Price and he staggered back toward the wall for support. He stood dumb, looking off into the middle distance as if nothing had happened. Day checked Rose, who was breathing steadily, but was mercifully unconscious. It was for the best. Day had, quite frankly, heard enough from Bennett Rose for the moment.
Day straightened his jacket and picked the rifle back up, holding it down at his side, relaxed but ready. He sniffed and looked out the window. The wind didn’t seem to be blowing as hard now, but visibility was still bad. Puffy white flakes drifted swiftly past the glass, some of them piling on the outside windowsill, joining the mound there.
He had just decided to arrest everyone in the room and let a magistrate sort it out later when Hester Price began to speak. Day held his breath, scared that any distraction might halt the flow of her words. She looked down at Oliver’s little body as she talked, running the tip of her finger back and forth along his cheek and under his chin as if soothing him to sleep, as if telling him a story.
“You have to understand,” Hester said. “He killed a man for me. It’s the most anyone’s ever done for me, and I could never. .” She hesitated for a moment, but her finger continued to trace its pattern on her son’s face. “I was younger then. I was a pretty girl, and graceful, and he loved me. I lived in West Bromwich, where I grew up. Four sisters, and I was the youngest. They were all married, all except me, and my mother found suitors for me, hoping I might find a husband before I turned twenty. I didn’t want any of them, though. My sisters had their houses and some had children already, two of them did, and they knew their lives, everything that lay ahead of them. I can’t say what it was that made me think I was different, but I did think it. Youth, maybe. Maybe that’s all it was. But one day there was a stranger at the pub, a man no one had ever seen.”
“It was Campbell,” Sutton Price said. He leaned back until he was touching the wall behind him and then he slid down it and sat on the floor next to Bennett Rose. Price draped his arms across his raised knees and buried his face in the crook of an elbow. Day couldn’t tell if he was still listening or not, but Hester Price kept talking.
“I helped out at the pub. My sister’s husband, one of my sisters’ husbands, owned it, and so I spent an hour or two there in the evenings, washing mugs and picking up and trying to be of use, biding time until my mother found the proper gentleman for me.
“After a time, she thought she had found the right man. He was respectable, perhaps twenty years older than I was, maybe more. A grocer. My parents invited him to our house for dinner and left us to walk in the garden. His name was Mr Stephens, and he was not interested in walking in the garden. He didn’t want to listen to me when I talked, and he didn’t care what I wanted in life. The things he wanted from me, I won’t speak of them. But he was insistent and I had no other suitors left, and when he proposed marriage, I agreed. You understand, I didn’t want him. There was hair growing out of his ears and his breath smelled of fish and onions, and he talked and he talked and nothing he talked about was of any interest to a foolish little girl.
“But when the stranger began to come to the pub, it was as if a door had opened in my life. He was big and strong, but he was quiet. He had long hair, going grey, but he didn’t look old, at least not terribly old. Not like Mr Stephens. But he looked tired and he looked like he had seen a lot. And I had seen nothing. West Bromwich was my whole world. His name was Calvin Campbell, and he was the most exotic creature I had ever encountered. I stayed longer every night at the pub, did chores that didn’t need to be done, tried to do things that might make him notice me. And, finally, he did. He told me that he was only going to be in West Bromwich for a week. That he was on his way somewhere else, but he never said where. I felt like he wasn’t going somewhere at all, he was going away from something, or someone.
“But he stayed. A week went by, and another week, and Calvin didn’t leave. I began avoiding Mr Stephens and spending time with Calvin instead. We took long walks and we talked for hours. He had been to America and had been to war. He told me very little about his time there, he was quiet about those years, but the mere fact that he had survived their civil war and their prison camp made me admire him all the more. And he listened to me. Nobody had ever listened to me. He asked me questions about my silly little life in my silly little Black Country village. I must have seemed like the most boring person he had ever met, but he never made me feel like it.
“Like I say, I was pretty then.
“It was all so deliciously exciting, but Calvin didn’t know about Mr Stephens, and Mr Stephens didn’t know about Calvin.
“And then, suddenly, Mr Stephens did know. Someone must have told him, because one day, as I was waiting for Calvin by the banks of the stream outside of the village, Mr Stephens came out of a copse of trees. He had been waiting there, waiting for us. He didn’t say a word to me, just pushed me down and covered my mouth before I could cry out. I remember his hand tasted like salt and shit. His other hand was under my skirts, exploring me with his dirty fingers, and he was smiling at me with his yellow teeth, and I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t do anything.
