At New Manor, I found Tom Turvey at home at last. But in an uncomfortable, fidgeting state. He was walking back and forth in the yard, wringing his hands from agitation and seeming at a dead loss in face of this development.
‘Oh! Cragg! What’s to be done? I was seeing to the hives all day. I had no idea. No idea at all.’
‘You must walk me over the whole of New Manor,’ I said. ‘Mrs Horntree may have become ill somewhere, as she did once before at Hatchfly Hall. She fell into a swoon and could not be immediately revived.’
He took me through the whole of the ground floor and then into all the bedrooms on the upper floors, and even asked Danny to find a lantern to light the cellars. But although he took us everywhere, I cannot say Turvey helped very much. His manner continued highly nervous, as if he was afraid a ghost might jump out of the wainscoting or flit from a wardrobe. Evidently, the disappearance of the lady had much affected him.
I inspected every recess and cranny. Then we visited every one of the rooms, outhouses and stables around the courtyard, and every part of the garden along the bank of the river. No trace of Flora Horntree could be found.
‘I should like to look at the belongings that were in her bedroom,’ I said to Turvey. ‘They might yield some sort of clue to her fate.’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Turvey in agitation. ‘Did you say “fate”, Cragg? You do not conclude she is dead, I hope? That some fatal chance has overtaken her?’
‘I make no conclusion,’ I said, ‘but something has happened to Mrs Horntree, either by her own will or against it.’
Her bedchamber was a curious little corner room with a round oriel window in the corner itself. Her hooded cloak lay across the bed beside her valise, which I opened, taking out a few handfuls of female clothing and placing them carefully to one side. I reached deeper inside, and to my surprise the first thing I felt was heavy and hard. It proved to be a silver candlestick in a cloth bag.
‘Good heavens!’ said Turvey. ‘That’s one of mine!’
The Squire appeared to have regained some of his self-possession. He pulled the bag towards himself and rummaged inside, producing several smaller things: the necklace of true pearls (if Elizabeth was right), two bracelets, various earrings and brooches, and a tiny silver-stopped perfume flask.
‘This was my wife’s,’ he said. ‘And this. And this. All from her jewel box on the dressing table.’
He felt around inside to see if he had missed anything.
‘Look here!’
He withdrew what looked like a small rounded pillbox made of silver.
‘This too, I suppose,’ he said, studying it. ‘It has a monogram with an H, who I presume was my late mother-in-law. Her name was Henrietta.’
He held the item up and pointed to the entwined initials engraved on the lid: H and F.
‘You are surprised at our finding these,’ I said. ‘I take it you did not give the valuables to her, Turvey.’
‘Of course not! They were my wife’s. The only possible explanation is that … that the lady is a thief, Cragg.’
‘Were none of these goods her own? There may be things she brought with her from Hatchfly Hall.’
‘A few items I don’t recognize,’ said Turvey, his voice again beginning to tremble with emotion. ‘But I am mightily offended by the woman’s deceit of me. Mightily. She has grievously abused my hospitality.’
‘Well, there is enough stolen value here to hang her many times over, if she should be prosecuted,’ I said, glancing at him. There was moisture in his eyes.
To give him time to recover from his unwelcome discovery, I began replacing the items taken from the valise.
‘I should make an inventory of everything we have found in her baggage. It may prove essential to have such a list. So I’ll take the bag into my own keeping, with your permission, Turvey. You shall have your wife’s things back in due course.’
He sniffed and fetched a great sigh.
‘As you wish, Cragg.’
Back at the Dower House, I found a letter had been delivered by the hand of the potboy from the inn, having arrived earlier by the post. It was in Furzey’s finest hand.
Dear Mr Cragg,
Item the first, we have had notice of a death needing Coroner’s attention at Manchester. I think you are near enough to attend and I have written to say they can expect you. Go to the inn called the Swan Inn and the matter will be explained. The deceased is one Greenwood.
Item the second, with further reference to the case of the stray examen of bees, insofar as the bees have settled on a neighbour’s land, and irrespective of whether they have remained in sight, the law says the neighbour has control over them and the first owner cannot recover the said bees except by agreement. If he goes and takes them, he is liable for theft and trespass. The neighbour is free to do with the bees as he sees fit. I trust this is to the purpose.
I am, Sir, etc., Robert Furzey, Clerk at Law.
P.S. Mr Oldswick wishes to sue Jerome Snelgrove over a pair of shoes.
P.P.S. The dog Suez is well, but he is unkind to my mother and likes to keep her pinned in corners. I have had to rescue her more than once.
‘Oh dear!’ said Elizabeth when I had read the letter to her. ‘Shall you go to Manchester?’
‘I suppose I must. Tomorrow, I think. It’s strange – I come to one of the least frequented parts of the commonwealth and I’ve never been busier. But first things first. I must draw up this inventory.’
I fetched pen, ink and paper and spent half an hour at the dining table, listing the contents of Mrs Horntree’s valise, with its cargo of ill-gotten gains.
‘So, you did not after all misprize that woman,’ I said to Elizabeth as I worked. ‘It seems she was indeed a criminal – a thief, in fact. Turvey was extremely distressed at the discovery. But what can have happened today? Has she fallen ill somewhere? Or killed herself through guilt? Or did she merely go out to see the May’s Hole game and is safe but not yet returned?’
‘There cannot be much safety for her now, even if she is alive,’ Elizabeth said. ‘As soon as she reappears, she will be arraigned as a felon. My fear is that she’s in the hands of her husband, he having come back from Manchester. Why else would she have left her valise behind?’
‘But how could Horntree have abducted his wife from New Manor in broad daylight without them being seen? And besides, she is not at Hatchfly Hall. Is it not more likely she has harmed herself?’
‘She was not the kind. And I don’t think she was abducted, Titus. I think she left New Manor by herself, maybe to go to May’s Hole, and was found by Horntree, somehow. The village was almost deserted and, with everybody at the game, this might easily have been unobserved. And he could have taken her somewhere other than Hatchfly.’
‘Why on earth didn’t she stay where she was? To leave her sanctuary was the act of a madwoman. And why did she refuse to see Luke Fidelis yesterday, when she is supposedly relying on him to help get her away?’
I drummed with my fingers on the table impatiently. The questions were going round in my head like a screw that turns in bad wood and will not take a grip.
‘I wish we knew a little more of her history. What we do know is puzzling. If her thoughts are so much centred on herself, why would she ever willingly become subject to a man like Horntree? Can we believe that it was as simple as falling in love with him?’
‘Do you think love is simple?’
‘It is for me.’
‘But you have an unusual soul, my dearest. I suppose she may have loved him at some point, but I doubt it. There was much of calculation in that young woman’s mind. So what brought her to the North Country, so far from her home?’
I looked again at the things laid out on the dining table, alongside the schedule I had drawn up.
‘The fact that she left all this surely means she intends to come back today. Something must have happened to prevent her.’
One by one I re-examined each object and ticked it off on the list. There was nothing remarkable about the clothing, except perhaps that there was not very much of it – a skirt, blouse, two camisoles, some silk stockings and the hooded cloak. The candlestick had punchmarks that told they were made in the previous reign – that is, at least twenty years before.
The more personal possessions comprised a silver thimble, comb, brushes and mirror, and a cosmetic bag containing white hair powder, face powders and lip paint in various colours. There was also a selection of face patches.
‘What do these things tell us?’ I asked Elizabeth.
‘She has more cosmetics than I would expect in a country wife. She puts a high value on her appearance.’
‘What else?’
‘Apart from the thimble, there are no sewing materials. And no books or writing materials. She was not a reader or much of a writer. She was definitely more interested in adorning her body than in improving her mind.’
I began to separate the pile of jewellery with my fingers: a bracelet made of bone, a pair of enamel-headed hatpins, and then the little monogrammed pillbox. I picked it up. It was an oval, an inch and a half long, of tarnished silver, having plainly not had a rub of vinegar for many weeks.
‘Look,’ I said, showing Elizabeth the two engraved interwreathed letters.
Elizabeth examined the monogram.
‘F and H. It must be for Flora Horntree.’
‘No. Mr Turvey told us it belonged to his wife’s mother as a girl. Her name was Henrietta.’
‘Oh, well! A coincidence that would have appealed to Flora when she helped herself to it. What is that on it?’
Elizabeth took the box from me and put her finger on a tiny ring soldered into place at the top of the box.
‘To hang it on a chain around the neck as a locket?’
‘There is no chain now. Is there anything inside?’
She inserted a fingernail behind the tiny flange that allowed the locket to be opened. It did not yield immediately, but when she applied more pressure it snapped open and she picked out a lock of wispy hair and a folded scrap of paper.
There was no knowing how long the paper had lain in the pillbox. It might have been a year or two, it might have been decades. The paper itself was clean but not of any particular quality, and appeared to have been torn from an octavo-sized piece of paper from a book perhaps. But as the page had been torn in half lengthwise and this was the right-hand portion, only the second half of each poetical line was visible:
… lovely styled,
… what nature mild,
… ect, all are filed
… is one child
… ming of the soul,
… we keep this roll.
‘These are rhymes,’ I said. ‘But from what book?’
‘A puzzle which you will enjoy resolving, dearest,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And when you do, we may yet know this locket’s secret.’