Chapter 26
The country residence of Sir Montagu Malthus lay three miles south of Banbury. Built around forty years before, Draycott House was a fine example of early Georgian architecture and had been home to the landowner and lawyer for almost all that time. It had served him and his household well over the years, although had he known that his wife, who had died a decade before, would be without issue, he might have chosen somewhere a little more intimate.
He very often found himself rattling around in rooms that should have been filled with warmth and laughter, or strolling in the grounds without another soul in sight. Now and again he was enveloped by a desperate loneliness. So many of his friends had passed on; Richard Crick, then dear Felicity two years ago. He was himself in his dotage and was beginning to feel the lack of progeny most cruelly. Lydia Farrell was the nearest he had to a family and it pained him to see her making the same mess of her young life that her brother, his godson Edward, had before her. That was why he had sent his notary on a quest.
It had been so remarkably fortuitous, he told himself. One might even say a sign. He had been sitting at Lydia’s bedside as she lay as still as a statue in the depths of unconsciousness a few weeks before. Her attempt to take her own life had, thankfully, backfired, and so there she was in her bed at Boughton, in a coffin of her own making; not dead, but then not quite alive. She would go for hours without a single movement or a word passing her beautiful lips and then suddenly, one afternoon, she began to mumble. Her eyes remained closed, but her mind was obviously active. At first she made odd croaking sounds, but they soon grew louder. It was then that her parched lips formed intelligible sounds and her face screwed itself up in terror. “No! No!” she had cried. “My baby!”
Leaning forward, Sir Montagu had stilled her flailing arms. “Hush, my dear. All is well,” he soothed. A few seconds later her breathing had steadied and she appeared to fall, once more, into a deep slumber. But the seed had been sown. “A baby,” he repeated softly. He recalled he had been helping Lydia go through her late husband’s papers shortly after his death. There had been boxes and folders and cases full of ledgers and receipts and bills. Lydia’s grief had been so great that her mind was not fully on the task in hand. That was why he had said nothing when he had come across some invoices from a wet nurse in Hungerford for the upkeep of a child by the name of Richard Farrell.
Putting together this written evidence and Lydia’s own, albeit involuntary, outburst, he had begun making inquiries the previous month. Could it really be that Boughton had a legitimate heir after all? His own visit prior to her ridiculous suicide attempt had shown her to be unwilling to remarry a suitable peer and produce children. He suspected that she was still besotted with that upstart from the Colonies. But now, no matter. He had received word from the notary, a reliable man, if a little slow in some respects, that his mission had been accomplished. The child was in his custody and would be arriving at Draycott House later on that day.
Such news had certainly put a spring in Sir Montagu’s step. He had ordered the principal guest room to be made ready. Pastries and sweetmeats were to be baked and even a pony and trap to be put at the young man’s disposal. Yes, it would be wonderful to have some young blood coursing ’round Draycott for the time being. Until, that is, Lydia acceded to his demands.
The body of Lady Julia Thorndike lay on the marble slab in the game larder ready to be examined. A sickly sweet smell wafted around the corpse and Thomas lit a pipe to mask it as he worked. He had already divested her and covered her in a thin white sheet. Now he rolled up the sides to inspect her feet and hands. Taking her cold fingers, he turned them over so that he could see her palms. They were wrinkled, like parchment. The skin on her feet, too, was creased. Dozens of deep furrows lined the soles and between her toes. She had been in the water for at least two days, he told himself.
Next he pressed down on her chest once more, keeping his eyes on her mouth. Just as before, no liquid dribbled from her lips. If she had drowned, then foam would have appeared. He had seen it so many times before. If victims were alive when they went into the water, as Agnes Appleton had been, then their lungs and, indeed, their whole respiratory passage would be filled with foam—the result of a great churning motion that occurs within the chest cavity when water mixes with mucus before the victim is starved of oxygen. Thomas saw for himself there was none here. He did not even have to use his scalpel to determine that Lady Thorndike had almost certainly not drowned.
Thomas drew heavily on his pipe and straightened his aching back. He knew he did not have long to examine the body. Sir Henry did not even know that he was conducting a postmortem and would be engaging an undertaker within the next few hours. He looked at Lady Thorndike’s hands once more and in particular her fingernails. They were completely clean. No struggle was indicated. There were no deposits of gravel or mud from the pond bottom. He would have to start from the top: the head.
Resting his pipe on a nearby stone shelf, he began to feel the skull. His fingers raked through the still-damp hair to the temples, then the crown, but he could feel nothing untoward. It was only when he lifted up the cranium and examined the smooth curve of the occipital lobe that he began to suspect. Quickly he turned Lady Thorndike over onto her face to take a closer look. Using a comb to part her thick red hair, he could see a deep livid bruise, almost as long as a man’s hand, covering the lower half of the cranium. Reaching for a pair of scissors from his bag, he cut away the hair near the scalp, then taking his magnifying glass he studied it more carefully. The contusion was, indeed, long, and there was a small cut of less than an inch. Nevertheless the area was swollen, with a great bulge of fluid protesting underneath.
There was something more, too. He peered at the wound more closely. There were two or three flakes of organic material dotted in the hair. Reaching for his tweezers, he teased them out, one by one, dropping them into a phial. Holding the glass tube up to the light, he examined the contents closely. They were leaves of some kind and definitely not duckweed from the pond. He sniffed at them. There was no perfume. Two days in the water had put paid to any scent they may once have had.
His own back was already aching and he stepped away from the table to straighten his spine for a moment. The movement made the candle by the corpse flicker and as it did, the shaft of light caught something reflective. Thomas reached for his magnifier and, leaning over, inspected the wound once more. And there it was: a tiny flake of shiny material embedded deep in the tissue. Grasping his tweezers he plucked it out and held it to a flame. A piece of glass? A shard of mirror? He dropped the fragment into another phial and stood away from the slab. Picking up his pipe, he sucked on it once more. Lady Thorndike had, he concluded, been hit on the head with a blunt object from behind, causing a swelling of the brain. She had, most definitely and irrefutably, been murdered.
Thomas told Lydia the disturbing news as she sat in the study, going over the accounts.
“Lady Thorndike did not drown.”
“Then what . . . ?”
“She was hit on the head from behind before she either fell or was dragged into the water.”
Lydia put down her pen. “Murder?”
“I need to return to the lake to look for the weapon that was used,” he told her, turning for the door.
She stood up suddenly. “No, wait,” she said. “Let me come with you.”
Thomas shook his head. “The fog still lingers, my love. It is not safe to be outdoors for long.” But she set her gaze on him, and he could tell from her determined expression she would not take no for an answer.
They took the dogcart down to the waterside and arrived just as a fiery sun began to set behind the haze. Thomas helped Lydia climb down and saw to it that she covered her mouth with her shawl. He watched her as she picked her way through the reeds over to the shore, rustling as she went. She paused to gaze out over the water.
“We had happy times in this place,” she told him, her voice muffled. “My brother and I used to picnic on these shores when we were children. There was a boat here, once. We used to row to the other side.” Thomas joined her and put his arm around her. “It used to be moored up by the jetty,” she went on, pointing over to the rickety landing stage.
“What happened?” he asked.
“To the boat?”
He put his face close to hers. “To everything.” He was looking at the dilapidated fishing lodge, with its moldy thatch.
She shrugged. “Papa died and Edward wasn’t ready for the responsibility.”
He slipped his hand in hers and together they began to walk toward the lodge, skirting the water’s edge.
“Where did they find Lady Thorndike?” she asked as they approached the jetty.
“Just here,” said Thomas, stopping suddenly. He dropped his gaze and began scanning the ground. The sand at the lip of the lake was dry and pitted with gravel and larger pebbles. Lydia looked down, too, but walked on ahead slightly. Thomas noticed she left small footprints in her wake. Now he began scanning more intently. There could still be signs of activity on the shore. There had been no rain for two weeks. Somewhere, in among this patchwork of reeds and water flags, there must be tracks, impressions, or some other clue.
They remained looking intently around the rim of the lake for several minutes, but found nothing. Thomas’s back started to ache again and he straightened himself. As he did so, he looked to the opposite shore. A handsome house stood squarely on the other side, its roof swathed in the fog.
“Who lives there?” he asked Lydia.
“Mr. Lawson,” she replied, her eyes meeting his.
The same thought darted across both their minds, but they said nothing and turned to go back to the hall.