After the service and greeting time finally broke up, Timothy boarded the train in Milverscombe to return to London. Jocelyn, the two girls, and Maggie climbed into Charles’ Peugeot and drove back to Heathersleigh. The three Rutherford women then walked Maggie home to her cottage.
The sun shone warm and bright and they chatted freely as they went, feeling the beginning of a new day in their spirits. Laughter more easily escaped their lips, especially from the two sisters who, in reacquainting themselves as young adult women, were quickly becoming the best of friends. Though Jocelyn’s smile remained tinged with sadness, for the first time since the tragedy she found it possible to breathe in deeply of the fresh warm air without reservation.
“This was an extraordinary day,” Amanda said as they went. “After the service was over, no one wanted to leave. There was such a wonderful . . . I don’t know what to call it—such a feeling of oneness, like the whole community was one big family. Was it all because of Daddy and George and people wanting to talk about them?”
“There were a few more present than usual, I think,” Jocelyn replied.
“But it is like that every Sunday,” added Maggie. “Even when there’s not so many.”
“Do you mean people staying and visiting? Surely it isn’t always like that.”
“Oh, but it is,” said Catharine. “It’s the best part of the week.”
“I’ve never known a church like that before,” Amanda said. “Even Rev. Diggorsfeld’s—I mean Timothy’s church in London wasn’t. He just got through with his sermon, then everyone shook his hand, filed out of the church, and left. But here everyone was so friendly—I thought it was going to go on all day.”
“It was your father’s idea,” said Jocelyn.
“He’s the one who started it. He decided one day that he wasn’t going to leave, or let other people go home either, until he had greeted everyone. Before long everyone got into the spirit of it. It has been going on ever since.”
They had just come into view of the clearing and the cottage. Suddenly Maggie burst into a labored, ambling run.
“Flora . . . Flora, you get out of there!” she cried, grabbing up a stick as she passed the barn and open gate into a small adjoining pasture. She arrived at her garden in front of the house, still yelling at the cow and proceeded to beat her on the hindquarters with all the vigor of Donal Grant taking his club to Hornie.
“Get out of the garden, Flora, you dumb beast. My flowers are not for your lunch. Get back into your field!”
The three others hurried after her. With the four making a slowly tightening semicircle, hands outstretched and blocking all directions but one, Flora soon began methodically wandering back toward her permitted grazing pasture, showing no inclination toward either hurry or concern.
“I’m too old for such foolishness!” panted Maggie. “It puts me in mind of the day Bobby had his fall, when suddenly I found Flora with me in my garden when she should have been with him.”
Gradually Maggie turned pensive as they made their way toward the cottage.
“It reminds me too,” she went on, “of what dear Timothy was saying just an hour or two ago in the church, about the glow of eternity.”
“Yes, that was nice,” added Catharine. “Very poetic, I thought.”
“It seems to me that glow’s getting a bit brighter for me lately,” Maggie went on. “With Bobby’s passing coming so sudden, and now George and Charles, one can never tell how or when the end might arrive.”
“Don’t talk that way, Maggie,” said Jocelyn. “Don’t you remember what Timothy told us—that we Heathersleigh women have to be strong and stick together. You can’t leave us anytime soon. We need you.”
Despite her comments, Jocelyn could sense Maggie’s serious mood deepening.
“I’m no longer forty, my dear,” said the older woman. “I’m climbing up to seventy-eight, and it won’t be long.”
“You’re as strong as any of us, Maggie. You’re not going to leave us for a good long time.”
“Your Charles was as strong as most men,” rejoined Maggie. “And look at your George—young and vigorous with his whole life ahead of him. But the Lord’s got his own way of marking out our days, and even the strength of a bull doesn’t carry much meaning with his schedule.”
Maggie’s words at last caused the others to grow pensive with her.
“And when a woman is my age,” she continued, “it’s time she spends some time thinking about that garden that lies beyond the door, like Timothy was telling us about, as well as the one in front of her house.”
The other three now realized something serious was on Maggie’s mind as they followed her into the cottage.
“I think it’s time I had a talk with you three,” Maggie said. She stoked the fire in her stove and put a kettle of water on for tea.
“What about?” Jocelyn asked.
“About Heathersleigh, and what’s to become of my cottage here when I’m gone,” answered Maggie.
She led them into her sitting room. They all sat down together.
“I know,” she began, “that all this will come out eventually anyway. But I want you to hear it from my own lips. At first I kept it to myself. I didn’t think the time was right to speak out. But with all that’s happened this week, I think I oughtn’t to remain silent any longer. Your being home, Amanda dear,” she added, “may have something to do with it. You see, it was last October when the revelations came to me.”
“Revelations?” repeated Amanda.
“I was praying for you, my dear,” Maggie said. “I remember the night well. I woke from a sound sleep with my Bobby’s words about a hidden legacy in my brain. I don’t know if you remember, but it was something he said one time to you when you were visiting us.”
“I remember,” nodded Amanda with a smile.
“And I was telling you about the mystery of the kingdom and my grandmother’s favorite passage.”
Again Amanda nodded.
“As I said, I had awakened from a sound sleep. It was the middle of the night. I’d gone to bed, as I said, praying for you. When I awoke several hours later I was thinking about the past and the word ‘legacy’ from my Bobby’s lips. And I wondered again how this cottage came into the hands of my family, a mystery that has perplexed folks around here for longer than most people can remember. And I found myself wondering what was to become of this place after I was gone.
“Many stories and rumors from my childhood began to come back to me—things my mother had said about the Hall and its people. And, of course, in the village everyone had their own opinion on the matter and were free with various speculations. Now they all began to rush back into my mind, things I hadn’t thought of in years. It was as if I was suddenly alive to things I had heard sixty or seventy years before but had completely forgotten.
“My brain was so full by then that I got up and sat down right here, in this very chair, with my Bible in my lap. I found myself drawn to the passage I had told you about, Amanda, on that same day—the passage my grandmother liked so well. That was the night I made my discovery.”
She got up and walked toward the kitchen.
“I think the water’s ready,” she said. “Let me make us some tea, and then I will tell you all about it.”
————
Find the key and unlock the mystery.
Maggie had read the words in her grandmother’s hand in the margin beside the fourth chapter of Mark over and over. But what could the key she had just found in the secretary be meant to unlock?
She began snooping and looking about the old cabinet with enlivened interest. She pulled the small drawer above the desk all the way out and set it aside. Key still clutched in her left hand, with her right she sent her fingers probing into the opening. Her hand did not go far, for it was not a deep drawer. She now looked at the desk portion of the secretary. Neither was it of great depth.
In fact, Maggie thought, stepping back and examining the entire piece from the side angle, both desk and drawer only extended about halfway toward the back board of the cabinet. Why were they so shallow when the cabinet itself was at least twice as deep from front to back?
Again she probed into the empty drawer cavity, investigating every inch with the tips of her fingers.
What was this . . . the back panel felt loose?
She jiggled it, finally realizing it was meant to slide back and forth! Maggie jostled it vigorously and managed to slide it about half an inch to one side. She stuck a finger into the crack and the next instant had it sliding along grooves which were now suddenly visible. Behind it in the new opening her fingers felt a small metal apparatus.
Excited now, Maggie stooped and gazed into the cavity. A brass lock was built into the hidden recess of the cabinet, kept from view behind the panel of wood she had just slid away.
With fingers trembling, she took the key and inserted it. It slid into the mechanism as smoothly as if it had been oiled yesterday!
Maggie turned the key a quarter turn.
From somewhere inside she heard the faint metallic sound of a lock releasing.
Below the drawer, the back wall of the desk gave way and opened toward her. A secret panel, held vertical and secure by the lock directly above it, now swiveled smoothly down on embedded pivots somewhere in the cabinet, revealing a faceless shelf whose base was the opposite side of the back panel of the secretary.
Lying inside the newly revealed box-shelf lay a single folded sheet of heavy paper yellowed with age.
Heart beating, Maggie removed it, brought it out to the light, sat back down in her chair, and unfolded it.
Twenty minutes later Maggie still sat, shaking her head in disbelief. To think it had been here all along—the key, the lock, the hidden compartment—right in front of her eyes—and the answer to the mystery that had plagued the people of Milverscombe, and given rise to so many stories and rumors, for over half a century—how the cottage of the Heathersleigh estate had come into the hands of a poor local peasant family with hardly two shillings to rub together.
In her hands Maggie held the deed to Heathersleigh Cottage—this very cottage, sold, as was written on it, in the year 1849 from Henry Rutherford, Lord of the Manor of Heathersleigh, to one Arthur Crompton, Bishop.
What could its significance be but that to which her grandmother was referring as the sale of the birthright of the Genesis passage? Further documentation seven years later, in the year 1856, apparently upon Crompton’s death, recorded the transfer of the deed to Orelia (Kyrkwode) Moylan, Maggie’s own grandmother, to be passed to her heir after her death, or, in the absence of descendants, to the Church of England. The stamp of the solicitors’ firm Crumholtz, Sutclyff, Stonehaugh, & Crumholtz attested to the legality of the 1856 transfer of ownership.
What were the circumstances behind this most peculiar transaction? she wondered. Those circumstances were not illuminated by the deed. Why had Lord Henry sold the cottage to the bishop? And why had he in turn, apparently by a will, then given it to her grandmother?
She had discovered the legal origins to the long-concealed mystery . . . but not the why.
That she would have to fill in for herself.
As Maggie’s reflections began to tumble back in time to her childhood, she tried to grab on to the ends of what mental threads her memory caught faint sight of.
There had always been rumors about old Lord Henry. Everyone knew them. As a girl growing up around Milverscombe, Maggie certainly had heard her share and trembled at them too. Chief among them was the rumor hinted at by old men with knowing glances and clicks of the tongue that Henry had done in his poor wife at the very moment she had given him an heir. No one actually used the word murder, but among the children of the village a certain singsong verse had always been sufficient to plunge fear into the hearts of timid little children whenever they played in the neighborhood:
Look where you go, watch what you do,
or Lord Henry will snatch and make you a stew.
He’ll cut you in pieces, like he did that night
when his poor Eliza screamed out in such fright.
With his own hand he killed her, or so they say,
and began to go batty the very next day.
It will happen to you, no one will hear your call,
if you venture too close to Heathersleigh Hall.
No one actually thought he had cut her up, for the lady was buried with a proper funeral and lay even now under the ground behind the church. But according to a loose-tongued servant lad who lived at the Hall and had been sent that night for the vicar through the storm, there were indeed screams coming from the house.
But what did such rumors have to do with the sale of the cottage? wondered Maggie. And why would her grandmother have likened it to the sale of a birthright?
What did Bishop Crompton have to do with the affair?
Gradually sleep returned and Maggie extinguished her light and went back to bed.
The next day, at the earliest possible hour, she was bound for the parish church in the village.
“Hello, Vicar Coleridge,” she said as the vicar greeted her.
“You are out early, Mrs. McFee.”
“I am on an important errand, vicar. May I have a few minutes with the parish register?”
“Which book—births, deaths, or marriages?”
“Births and deaths.”
The vicar produced the ancient journals. It did not take Maggie long to locate what she wanted. Not only were the entries in both books made in the same year, but on the very same day—February 11, 1829.
Henry’s wife, Eliza, had indeed died on the very day she gave birth. Perhaps there was some truth to the old rumors after all! And both events were witnessed and recorded in the parish registry by none other than one A. Crompton, Vicar, Milverscombe!
There was the connection between the deed she had discovered and the fateful night of Eliza’s death. Early in his career, the good bishop had been the presiding vicar of Milverscombe!
He had witnessed both events. Whatever had happened to cause Eliza’s death, and if indeed old Lord Henry had snuffed out her life as the servant lad and abundant rumors maintained, the vicar must have known of it.
The sale of the cottage to Crompton years later after he became a bishop must have been a payoff for his silence!
Not only was Crompton there that fateful night, thought Maggie, if there was a birthing, then her grandmother, the only midwife in the region, would have been on hand too.
That was the connection between vicar and midwife! They shared the secret of that night.
Was it too much to conjecture that the bishop had paid off the midwife with the cottage in similar fashion as had Lord Henry paid him off several years before? It was certainly a credible explanation of the known facts.
But as Maggie thanked the vicar and left the church to make her way home, a feeling of unease began growing within her. She recoiled at the idea that the cottage that had been theirs all this time had come to her family by stealth and secrecy, and perhaps even to cover up a crime. They were not the rightful owners. Whatever manner of evil man Lord Henry might have been, the estate still belonged to the Rutherford family. They were the rightful heirs. It was their birthright, not her own or her family’s.
And here she was nearing the end of her life, and she and Bobby hadn’t a living relative on the face of the earth. If she didn’t do something to set it right, the ill-gotten birthright would pass to the Church. She had nothing against the Church, but it seemed the cottage ought to belong to whom it rightfully had been intended.
She would consult Crumholtz, Sutclyff, Stonehaugh, & Crumholtz in Exeter. She could not undo what had been done years before. But she could at least put it back into the hands of the true heirs of the Heathersleigh birthright—if it lay in her power legally to do so.
She would go to Exeter, execute a will, and write a letter explaining what she had discovered.
————
“So though I’ve found the deed,” Maggie concluded, “I can’t say exactly why it all came about in the first place. But I’ve spent the past months thinking about it all and trying to figure it out, and that’s how the thing appears to me.”
“That old Lord Henry murdered Eliza?” said Amanda.
“He was more than just a little mad, as everyone knew,” replied Maggie. “That much I know myself. Whether it is from the blood of murder on his hands as the verses say, who can tell? They say he desperately wanted a son to whom he could pass on his estate, but his wife Eliza did not give him one for many years. Although it wouldn’t have mattered what kind of child she had, for the law governing Heathersleigh allowed that the estate would pass to the eldest whether it was a son or a daughter. I recall my mother saying it was openly talked about in the village when she was a girl. In any event, Eliza remained barren and Henry grew furious and more demented, like his namesake the old king of England of many wives, vowing to get rid of her and marry another. They say he came in time to despise the very sight of her, all the time becoming more worried, lest he grow too old or die himself. Should that have happened, Eliza’s family would have inherited Heathersleigh, and Henry was said to hate a certain brother-in-law with a passion, Eliza’s greedy brother, who would have done anything to possess the estate.
“Finally Eliza was discovered to be carrying a child. When the night of the birth came, she gave him his son, and not only a son, but twins, a boy and a girl. The second child sealed Eliza’s fate. For now, even if something later happened to Ashby, the son which Henry had so longed for, at least he would have a daughter too. He had no further need of Eliza, for suddenly Lord Henry had two heirs. No matter what happened, his inheritance was secure, and Eliza and her brother would never get their hands on Heathersleigh.
“Lord Henry had his heir, and the next day Eliza was dead. The rumors began almost immediately that he had murdered her. I don’t know how much they resulted from the servant lad—who himself, my mum said, met with an untimely end not many years later. But she said he told dreadful things about what he had seen and heard that night. And the fact was, Eliza was dead in the prime of her life.”
Maggie now handed the deed to Jocelyn.
“The strange circumstances of this transfer of the cottage,” she went on, “seem to substantiate the rumors. What else but such a crime would draw together the attending vicar and midwife into a secret transaction? Many children’s rhymes are not so far off from the truth. Lord Henry must have sworn the two witnesses to secrecy, but later needed to pay off the bishop with the cottage to keep him quiet—the sale of birthright to cover the crime.”
“But why would the bishop will the cottage to your grandmother several years later?” said Jocelyn, still puzzling over the dates on the document she was holding.
“The only thing I can imagine,” replied Maggie, “is that the old bishop must have come to feel guilty over the affair, or maybe had pangs of conscience that he had prospered and my grandmother hadn’t by their mutual complicity in the thing. So he gave the cottage to her when he died. Then it came to my mother, and then to me and my Bobby.”
“That is logical, I suppose,” remarked Catharine. “But I must admit, I am more than a little confused by everything you’ve said.”
“But the reason I started to tell you all this,” Maggie went on, “is because of the one other curious fact that came to light when I discovered the deed. That is the clause there—look, Jocelyn, in the fine print at the bottom. It says that should ever Orelia Moylan’s heirs who are in possession of the cottage die without heirs themselves, the property would be transferred to the Church of England. I realized I was exactly such a one, and a woman getting on in years who had no will. That’s when I went to Exeter myself to see those lawyers—you remember, Jocelyn, last October. I showed them the deed with that provision and asked if I could legally pass the cottage on to someone who was not related to Orelia Moylan by blood. They said they would look into the matter. But just to be sure, I made a will right then and left it at their office. Three weeks ago I received a letter back from Mr. Bradbury Crumholtz. He told me that the provision in the deed is somewhat ambiguous, but that my will was legal, and that it was doubtful it would be contested, especially by the Church.”
“So what did you do?” asked Amanda.
“I wrote out a will leaving Heathersleigh Cottage to the two of you, Catharine and Amanda, and your brother, George,” replied Maggie.