‘Yes. I ain’t touched her,’ Christopher answered.
Eliza tried to pull her thoughts from the cyclone in her mind. From the back, in the dark, Ann Woods could very easily have been mistaken for her. But that couldn’t be. Why would anyone want to murder her? Then she knew. The whirling winds of her mind stopped.
‘Shall I be fetching help?’ Christopher said.
Eliza shook her head, still transfixed by the dripping of Ann Wood’s blood. Blood that should have been hers.
‘No,’ Eliza replied, quietly but firmly. ‘We don’t be getting help. Not yet. Go and get Hattie and bring her here, but don’t be saying a word to the other girls.’
Eliza sat quietly, her mind racing as it struggled to process her jittery thoughts.
Moments later, Christopher arrived with Harriet. ‘Close the door, quick,’ Eliza ordered.
Harriet obeyed and shut the street door behind her, joining her mother and Christopher in the almost-dark parlour. Eliza, still wearing her nightdress cut a haunting figure in the gloom.
‘Can we be lighting the candles?’ Harriet asked.
‘No,’ Eliza answered decisively. ‘What be said to Keziah and Ann just now?’
‘Nothing, Ma,’ Harriet said. ‘I be telling them to play, like what Christopher said.’
‘Good. Now you two, be listening good,’ Eliza began. She didn’t know how she was going to explain what she needed to. ‘I be thinking Mrs Woods were killed in my place…’
‘What do you be meaning?’ Harriet begged. ‘I be so boffled, I don’t be knowing what’s happening.’
‘I be meaning that someone wanting me dead took a knife to poor Mrs Woods by mistake,’ Eliza clarified. ‘Not knowing that that I be living above the Horse now.’
‘Who be wanting you dead, Mrs Lovekin?’ Christopher asked.
‘The same person who took your Ma’s life, Christopher.’
Despite the low light, Eliza could see the look of shock on Christopher’s face.
‘But my Ma took her own life,’ he muttered.
‘I don’t be thinking she did take her own life. Be sitting down, both of you, and I be telling you everything.’
The three of them sat at the parlour table and, in a sometimes quivering and unsteady voice, Eliza revealed her past to Christopher and Harriet. Every last pertinent detail of her childhood, that she had hoped would be nailed shut inside her coffin, came out in a dispassionate uninterrupted monologue.
‘Richard be your son?’ Harriet exclaimed, standing up, horrified and sickened at what she had begun to feel for him. Suddenly her feelings became clear: she had had some innate sense of their connection to each other and their shared kinship.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, a confession that she had hoped never to make. It was a secret that only she, Lydia and Amelia knew. Even Joe went to his grave unaware that she had ever given birth to a son. A son whom she could never love because of the blood that flowed in his veins: the blood of Thomas Honeysett. From the moment that she had discovered herself pregnant, she had known that she could never love the child and secretly wished that the vile drugs given to her had worked.
Harriet began to sob and Christopher stood to comfort her. ‘Blame me, I don’t be believing it,’ she cried. ‘It ain’t true!’
Eliza suddenly felt the weight of her past decisions pressing down on her heart, just as surely and painfully as she would have felt the crushing weight of ten men standing on her ribcage. Had she done the right thing in confiding in her daughter like this? Right now, she sincerely believed that the only way for her family to survive was through honesty.
Harriet was about to blurt out I be certain-sure Richard ain’t killed nobody, but then the recollection of the brutality that he showed towards her in his office sprang into her mind.
‘Now what do we be doing?’ Christopher asked.
‘Now you be fetching the coroner and Hattie be fetching Keziah and Ann. You both be saying the same thing: that I be dead.’
The horror and unexpectedness of Eliza’s declaration stunned Harriet and Christopher into silence. Even Harriet’s mortified sobbing ceased as Eliza carefully explained her plan.
Minutes passed before anybody spoke. ‘Ma,’ Harriet said softly. ‘It ain’t the right time, I be knowing, but we got some news of our own.’ She turned shyly towards Christopher, then back to Eliza. ‘We be engaged to be married.’
Eliza smiled and held her eldest daughter. ‘Congratulations,’ she uttered, before hugging Christopher. ‘I think your Ma be proud.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bunny threw both hands dramatically to her chest, the bangles rattling noisily. ‘Not murdered?’ she screeched. ‘But the burial entry—is that a mistake? Or do we have the wrong Eliza?’
Morton shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t a mistake and we do have the right Eliza.’ He turned several pages in the file. ‘Everything ties up to your Eliza Lovekin. Look, this is a report from the Sussex Weekly Advertiser about her murder.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m perfectly lost,’ Bunny declared. ‘She was murdered in 1827 but also went on to live until 1862?’
Morton laughed. ‘Someone was murdered in 1827—a vagrant perhaps, or someone who wouldn’t be missed—and the family covered it up, which was why, when the three girls were sent away to Westwell, Harriet gave her mother’s maiden name as Smith; she knew they wouldn’t find any evidence of their entitlement to be settled but they needed it to look above board.’
‘Surely not?’
Morton nodded. ‘Christopher Elphick was the person who found the body—you’d think he would have recognised his own mother-in-law. Besides which,’ he said, locating another page in the folder, ‘Look who the informant was on Eliza’s 1862 death certificate.’
Bunny squinted at the evidence before her, then looked up at Morton. ‘Harriet Elphick, daughter of the deceased. So they’re not even trying to hide the fact?’
‘Seems
