“It’s hard to say, my lady, because of all the gossip. First they said that John the Dairyman had a cough and it were consumption but then they said later she had done it by poison, see. And the others, the stories grow up afterwards. So I don’t pay no heed to them.” Clara tried to look aloof and smug. It was, after all, a Sunday, when one at least pretended to be a better person than one was.
“Thank you. And do either of you know how Mr Knight died?”
They looked at one another again but only Clara spoke. “He slipped? Hit his head? The police were saying that. We don’t know, my lady. Do you?”
She didn’t want to cause panic among the staff but she could hardly lie. She took a middle ground. “He has had an injury to his head, but I cannot see that Mrs Rush was anything to do with it.”
She left them to their work and went to find Felicia.
FELICIA WAS SITTING on her bed, knees together, hands clenched on her lap, staring at the wall and trembling throughout her whole body. The air in the room was close and sticky. Adelia went straight to the window but Felicia cried out as she made to fling it open.
“Mama, please, I beg you – don’t let the evil in!”
“Felicia, now listen. You are letting yourself fall victim to silly imaginings. You are not a girl any longer and you haven’t been for some years.” With a firm shove, Adelia got the upper part of the casement open. Some of the smaller panes were loose in their leaded network of diamonds and Adelia tutted. Percy was going to get a stern talking-to when he finally got home. An Earl had responsibilities to his house and his estate.
And turning to look at her daughter, she thought: he has responsibilities to his wife as well.
“There. Isn’t that better?” she said. “A bit of fresh air never did anyone any harm.”
Felicia was crying silently, shaking and shivering like she had a fever, wobbling her head side to side like she had been shouting “no” for a very long time and was now exhausted. She didn’t speak. She merely whimpered, a low animal sound.
Adelia was scared at the sight of her, and she hid it by becoming overwhelmingly brisk. She sat down on a chair, rather than on the soft bed, and remained stiff-backed as she tried to speak sense into her daughter’s fuzzy mind.
“Felicia. Felicia! Look at me! Yes, something quite dreadful has happened but it is the work of men and if there is such a thing as evil, then it resides in people – not in swamps, not in ice houses, not in curses. The police have removed the body and if there is anything amiss as to how he died, then they will surely find it out. You need not fear a single thing.”
“How did he die?”
With a prayer of apology for lying on a Sunday – as if it were worse this day than any other – she said, “He seems to have slipped on the step, that’s all.” She had to have a word with Theodore before he spoke with Felicia. She had to get him to agree to maintain this fiction, whatever his private suspicions, for Felicia’s own sake.
Felicia was still shaking her head as if she didn’t believe it. Adelia sighed. “Felicia, this house and this estate is in a sorry situation. Why does my Lord Buckshaw not attend to his responsibilities? How long has he been gone this time?”
“Seven months,” she replied. “But you knew he’d be like this when you married me to him.”
“And I thought that you would enjoy being the mistress of a castle just like in the fairy tales. Yet instead of ruling with a benevolent authority while he is gone, you are hiding up here and babbling about curses while the household goes to rack and ruin. What has gone wrong?”
The tears fell faster now and she bowed her head. She began to sniff and gulp, muttering only that she was sorry, sorry, but she didn’t fit in, and Adelia’s resolve broke. She moved from the chair to sit alongside her daughter on the bed, and she put her arm around her. Felicia fell against her. Now she was able to talk.
And talk she did.
“We were to have a child,” Felicia whispered, her voice muffled against her mother’s shoulder. “But I knew to keep it secret until the very last minute because ... because I thought if I told people it would all go wrong.”
That was an understandable and very common attitude. Adelia remembered the fear that had stalked her throughout all her pregnancies. You knew of so many women who died during or after the process that you would do anything at all, you’d cling to any superstition, just to take even the smallest bit of control – or to feel as if you were taking control, as forces from within your own body seemed to take over regardless. She stroked Felicia’s hair. She now knew, already, where this conversation was going. This was the “event” that had been alluded to, and it was as she had guessed. But it was important to let Felicia say it all in her own words.
She kept it brief, concluding with, “And after all that, it was good that I did not speak of it to everyone because then, suddenly ... there was no more child. Only a month more, it should have waited, but... it came, and it was not ... there was no more child.” She croaked out the last few words and cried for a little longer until her voice was hoarse.
Adelia murmured a few platitudes and then asked, “Did Percy know?”
“He knew I was with child, he knew right from the start
