The Path of the Wicked Page 16

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Lane.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Amos.’

  In a public place, it should have been ‘Mr Legge’, but the sense of what a good friend he was came over me, and how much better he was than the sportsmen I’d been sitting with, even though the world would regard them as his betters. As I walked the short distance to the Queen’s Hotel, I knew he was watching me and the devilment drained out of me, leaving only sadness.

  Mr Godwit was waiting at the hotel, with tea things laid out and an older man sitting beside him. They stood up, the older man rather unsteadily, and Mr Godwit introduced him as his fellow magistrate, Septimus Crow. He made the introduction with that slight ‘don’t blame me’ air of a man burdened with an unwanted companion. Since Mr Godwit had described the third magistrate on the bench as old, deaf and entirely under the thumb of the chairman Penbrake, I’d envisaged somebody small and quiet. Mr Crow was certainly elderly and deaf – an ear trumpet on the table among the tea things confirmed that – but he was plump, cheerful and loud. Since he had trouble hearing other people, he assumed that they had equal trouble hearing him and spoke in a voice that could be heard on the other side of the tea room. At first we discussed the usual things – the heat, the number of visitors, the difficulty of finding anywhere to park carriages. I could see that Mr Godwit was anxious that I might let slip my true reason for visiting, and tried to calm him by playing the obscure female relative as well as I could. I was only too grateful that he hadn’t seen me with the sportsmen.

  Mr Crow remarked it had been hot in court. Mr Godwit tried to change the subject, worried that any mention of the court might set me asking inconvenient questions. Mr Crow wouldn’t be deflected.

  ‘And the smells, eh? I hope you won’t think I’m being indelicate, Miss Lane, but there was a fellow we sent up the hill for poaching – you’d have thought he’d brought his ferrets into the dock with him.’

  Teacups rattled all around the room. A plump woman fanned the air in front of her nose as if the smell had been carried in by the mention of it.

  ‘Up the hill?’ I asked.

  ‘House of correction in Northleach. He’ll be taking his exercise on the treadmill for the next three months. We sent them a brace of poachers and a pickpocket today. Fifteen on the clerk’s list and most of them wasted our time pleading not guilty when we knew their faces as well as our own.’

  Mr Godwit murmured something about not discussing the affairs of the bench in public. He was disregarded.

  ‘Total of twenty-two pounds, fifteen shillings and sixpence in fines,’ Mr Crow bellowed cheerfully. ‘And what about the young Prewett fellow, eh? Five pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence, all on his own. If he’d been able to pay up, it would have made it a record for the day.’

  The last part was said in what was intended to be a confidential aside to Mr Godwit, which meant that only the neighbouring three tables would have heard it.

  ‘He couldn’t pay up?’ I said.

  ‘Not a chance of it. So it was up the hill for him too, young dog. At least he won’t be making himself liable for any more up there.’

  By now Mr Godwit was acutely uncomfortable, signalling to the waiter to bring his bill.

  ‘Nearly six pounds is a pretty stiff fine,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, but he’d been building it up every week over eighteen months, hadn’t he? Eighteen months and one week exactly. He’d never have got away with it so long if the board of guardians had been—’

  Abruptly, Mr Godwit stood up.

  ‘Miss Lane and I really have to go. I hope you’ll excuse us. See you next week, Crow.’

  He plonked half a crown down on the table and practically marched me outside.

  ‘I do apologize for Crow. He’s a good enough man in many ways, but does tend to forget himself.’

  I said I’d liked him. Mr Godwit insisted on walking with me to the Star to collect Rancie. The gardener was waiting for him with the gig at another hotel not far away. There was no sign of Amos in the yard. An ostler brought out Rancie and helped me mount, and I rode out of town towards the hills in the cool of the evening.

  On the way, my mind kept going back to the indiscreet chatter of Mr Crow. I wondered how the young dog Prewett had come to build up such a fine. Eighteen months’ uninterrupted poaching would have been a tall order. Drunkenness, perhaps. I’d have liked to ask Mr Godwit over dinner, but took pity on him. In my room, the small question still nagged at my mind, perhaps as an escape from all the large ones. Idly, I picked up a pencil and did sums on the blotter. Five pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence, divided by eighteen months and one week – seventy-nine weeks that would be – to give the weekly total of the young dog’s fine. When I’d worked it out, I stopped being sorry for Mr Godwit and was angry with him again.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘One shilling and sixpence a week,’ I said. ‘That’s eighteen pennies.’

  It was just after breakfast on Saturday morning. Mr Godwit had disappeared into his study with unusual promptness. I’d invaded it and found him in the urgent task of labelling a collection of dried fern leaves. He looked up at me, face pained and apprehensive.

  ‘Mr Crow was about to say that the fine wouldn’t have mounted up for so long if the board of guardians had been paying attention,’ I said. ‘You’re on the board. He was talking about something to do with the workhouse, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Properly speaking, it’s not precisely a fine,’ Mr Godwit said. ‘Crow could never be made to understand the difference.’ He was playing for time. I didn’t give it to him.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘It’s a matter of paying for upkeep.’

  ‘Upkeep for somebody in the workhouse?’

  A nod. Remembering Crow’s tone of voice and a certain look on his face, I was certain that the young dog’s debt had not been incurred for maintaining his mother.

  ‘Or rather, I should say, for two people in the workhouse,’ I said. ‘A mother and her baby.’

  A law had been brought in quite recently, vulgarly known as the Bastardy Act. The flush on Mr Godwit’s face showed I’d hit the target.

  ‘Crow shouldn’t have talked about it in front of you. I’m afraid Prewett is quite a deplorable case.’

  I wasn’t interested in Prewett. ‘If a man fathers a child out of wedlock and won’t marry the mother, he can be made to pay towards her keep and the baby’s in the workhouse. That’s the case, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not fair that all the charge should fall on the parish,’ he said, not looking at me.

  ‘And the amount he has to pay is eighteen pence a week. Which is precisely the amount the men threw at Colum Paley. One of the men shouted that it should see his lad all right for the week. I told you about it. You must have seen the connection, but you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been right to tell you about it.’

  ‘Because you didn’t think it was respectable to talk about it? How can I work if you won’t tell me things in case they shock me? I assure you, I’m not so easily shocked.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ He looked at me now, prepared to be mildly combative. ‘I meant that it wouldn’t be fair to Colum Paley and his son.’

  ‘You don’t even like the man very much. But I suppose it’s a case of gentlemen holding together. The likes of Prewett go to the house of correction and the likes of the Paleys laugh over their brandy about the number of bastards they’ve fathered.’

  He gasped. ‘That’s a very irresponsible allegation.’

  I sat down on a chair opposite his desk.

  ‘Very well. If I’m irresponsible, then you won’t want to go on employing me. But before I leave you’re entitled to a report on what I’ve found out so far. Is this a convenient time to give it to you?’

  I glanced at the pressed ferns spread over his desk, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. He looked at me and then sat on the chair behind his desk, on his dignity and as bu
sinesslike as he could manage.

  ‘Then give your report.’

  ‘We’ll go back two years – the day of the races the year before last. Joanna Picton goes to the fair without her employer’s consent and falls into the hands of some men, or gentlemen, who give her too much to drink. One of them, possibly more than one, takes advantage of her.’

  When I thought of that quick, probably brutal, coupling behind a tent or under a wagon, it was as much as I could do to keep my voice level, but I didn’t want Mr Godwit to see how it affected me.

  ‘The poor girl’s already in a state of panic when something else happens. Reverend Close and your magistrate friend Penbrake choose that day to make a stand against gambling and drunkenness at the races. A lot of people are arrested and Joanna probably thinks herself lucky not to be one of them. She runs back to her workplace and again is lucky not to lose her job. Months later she finds that she isn’t lucky at all. You know the next part of the story. It’s public knowledge. Only there’s one aspect of it that almost nobody knew.’

  I had his attention now. I took a deep breath and embarked on what was still speculation.

  ‘Joanna seemed as alone as a girl could be. The child’s father would be no use to her, even if she knew who he was. She was on bad terms with her mother, and her brother was away somewhere stirring up riots, more or less an outlaw. But as it turned out, she did have one friend in a most unlikely place.’

  I waited to see if he’d say anything. He didn’t.

  ‘The governess,’ I said. ‘Mary Marsh. Normally, a governess wouldn’t condescend to notice a kitchen-maid. But Mary Marsh was different. It’s odd about governesses, isn’t it? They have to be so conventional and respectable and yet they’re educated women, with opinions of their own. Mostly, they can’t show them. But Mary had courage and a warm heart. She knew from the servants’ gossip that Joanna was expecting a child and wanted to help if she could. She talked to her, and the whole story came out, including the likely identity of the father.’

  I imagined the girl crying on the back staircase, the governess stopping to comfort her. Joanna had probably not experienced many kind words in her life. Naturally, she’d have told Mary Marsh everything.

  Something like alarm showed in Mr Godwit’s eyes now, but he said nothing.

  ‘It’s quite possible that Joanna herself didn’t know a name,’ I said. ‘But she told Mary Marsh enough to put her on the right track. As it happened, Mary had another source of information. Rodney Kemble had fallen in love with her.’

  It looked as if Mr Godwit was going to protest.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘She deserved to be loved. She went to him to ask him to help the girl, perhaps to persuade his father to have her back when the baby was born. Perhaps she’d already guessed who the father of the child might be. If not, she could have found out from Rodney.’

  ‘I simply won’t believe it of him. I’ve known Rodney since boyhood. He’s an entirely moral and admirable young man.’

  It wasn’t the time to talk about sins committed by moral and admirable young men, so I reassured him.

  ‘I’m not saying it was Rodney himself, only that he had a very shrewd idea of who the likely father was. In fact, he’d almost come to blows with him at the fair where it happened.’

  I guessed that Rodney Kemble had probably wanted to avoid his sportsmen acquaintances at the fair. When he’d seen one of them trying to calm a distressed girl, or perhaps even mocking her, he might even have passed by, except that he recognized that girl as his father’s kitchen-maid. Was it concern for her or a sense of ownership that had made him stand up to the other man? No way of telling, so give him the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘You knew Rodney Kemble and Peter Paley had quarrelled,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you wonder what it was about?’

  ‘We all assumed it was to do with the breaking-off of the sister’s engagement.’

  ‘I think you’ll find the breaking of the engagement followed what happened at the fair. Rodney told his father, so of course letting Barbara marry young Paley was out of the question. Only they wouldn’t tell her why. All this male delicacy again. It’s possible that Mary knew all this before she went to Rodney Kemble to ask for help, and didn’t get it.’

  I imagined that she’d have to choose a time when Rodney was on his own, probably out walking the estate. The young man would have seen that as a god-sent chance to confess his warm feelings for her. Even if he weren’t especially vain, he might have expected that she’d welcome his confession with a blush, bright eyes and beating heart. Perhaps she’d done exactly that. Why not? But then . . .

  ‘As I said, she asked him to help Joanna. I guessed it was help to keep her job, but perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps she wanted him to stand up in public and say that Peter Paley was the father of Joanna’s child.’

  The look of shock on Mr Godwit’s face showed what an unthinkable demand that would have been. A man in love might swim oceans and fight monsters at his beloved’s request. To outrage his social circle with accusations about the parentage of a kitchen-maid’s brat was asking too much.

  ‘Whichever it was, he wouldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘So there wasn’t much she could do for Joanna. I don’t suppose Mary had more than a few pounds she could call her own and she was in no position to offer Joanna a roof over her head. So Joanna and the baby went into the workhouse. Even then, I don’t think Mary gave up trying. If you made inquiries among the workhouse staff, you might even find that she’d managed to visit her.’

  I suspected more than visit, but I didn’t want to go into any more detail to Mr Godwit. Mary might have planned some way of getting mother and baby out of the workhouse. If so, something must have gone wrong with the plan and Joanna was left wandering alone with her baby. Then what a burden of guilt Mary would be carrying, with Joanna in prison and condemned to death.

  ‘So, Joanna’s in prison and that’s when Jack Picton comes on the scene,’ I said. ‘How he and Mary Marsh found each other, I don’t know. His Chartist friend, William Smithies, might have met her, or possibly an agitator named Barty Jones was involved.’ Mr Godwit shuddered at the name. ‘In any case, they met and agreed to do what they could to help Joanna. The first thing was the petition. They succeeded in getting the death sentence commuted to transportation, but it didn’t end there. Jack Picton was determined to do something about the injustice of the whole thing, and Mary helped him, doing great harm to her reputation when people found out that she was meeting him.’

  More than meeting, I wondered? Certainly, that was not a road I intended to go down with Mr Godwit, but I couldn’t help being curious. On the one hand, the handsome, self-assured outlaw; on the other, the warm-hearted governess with radical opinions that she’d had to suppress for most of her working life. Would it be so surprising if their alliance led to something more? But Mary had suffered enough from speculation and gossip in her life, and if I could help it, I didn’t want to add to it after her death.

  ‘Then Mary Marsh was killed,’ I said. ‘And – the day after – Peter Paley disappeared.’

  I expected some protest from Mr Godwit, but it didn’t come. He looked older, weary. I thought that until then he’d somehow managed to convince himself that the whole business would blow over like a summer cloud. He’d hired me to quiet his conscience so that he could go back to his ducks and bees thinking he’d done his best. In that way, I’d failed him.

  ‘It must have occurred to you,’ I said, more gently.

  ‘You think young Paley killed her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s why he went?’

  ‘That sudden departure of his was nowhere near as impulsive as it looked. He practically forced that bet he lost on the other man. When it seemed as if he might win it, he made his horse stumble. His father might even have helped him plan it when he put that advertisement in the paper repudiating Peter’s debts. The rumours that young Paley was the father of Joanna’s baby were already ci
rculating and Paley senior might have told his son to vanish for some time until the scandal died down. But they had to concoct a reason that had nothing to do with Joanna.’

  ‘But why kill the governess?’

  ‘Because she’d talked to Joanna. She was the one who knew who the father was. I think that, almost until the last, young Paley was reluctant to do his disappearing act. If he could persuade or frighten Mary Marsh into saying somebody else was the father, there’d be no need for it. But it went wrong, so disappearing was even more necessary.’

  Mr Godwit leaned back and closed his eyes.

  ‘You can’t prove any of this?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There does seem to be a flaw.’ He spoke slowly. You could almost sense the reluctant movement of his brain. ‘Your whole case turns on the parentage of the child, and the belief that Peter Paley was the father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then – forgive me – I must say something that might offend you, but things have already been said that I should not have dreamed of discussing with you in normal circumstances. So I’ll ask you this question: was fathering the bastard child of a kitchen-maid something so serious that the Paleys would go to such lengths to hide it?’

  He opened his eyes before I could hide the surprise on my face. I waited.

  ‘As you’ve gathered, I’m no great friend of Colum Paley,’ he said. ‘I consider him arrogant, purse-proud and something of a bully. I know little about the son, and what I do know is not to his credit. But there’s one thing I will say for Colum Paley – and anyone will tell you the same: the man’s honest, sometimes brutally so.’