A Tall Dark Stranger Read online

  Lollie joined us and we were finally allowed to listen to Auntie say grace and then eat. Afterward, since the day was too fine to spend a minute inside, I took my sketch pad and watercolor box to the orchard and sketched a yellow loosestrife that grew between the trees. When I tired of that, I dipped into my well-thumbed copy of Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne to read about nature.

  Lollie didn’t get to the shepherd’s hut to investigate, after all. A friend invited him to course hares and of course he was off like a shot to kill more harmless animals.

  We had company for dinner, which made it impossible for me to finish work on the morning’s sketches. This didn’t bother me. There were the long winter evenings to do the finely detailed work. Spring and summer were spent on the sketching outdoors.

  * * *

  The next morning I was back at the water meadow by nine. Lollie accompanied me to pacify Auntie, but in fact he intended to scoot off to oversee the sheep shearing.

  “You’ll be safe as churches for an hour or two, eh, sis?” he asked before leaving.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I began looking about for a subject to sketch. “What is that blue thing amongst the bulrushes? Not a flower, surely? There are no water lilies here.”

  I peered at the flecks of blue through the bulrushes that swayed in the middle of the water meadow. The water swells in the spring and the bulrushes ring the edge of the water for the rest of the year.

  Lollie got a branch and began poking at the blue thing. “Looks like Maitland’s people are using the water for dumping trash,” he called. We share the water meadow with Maitland. Half of it is on his property. “It’s an old jacket. I’ll have a word with Maitland.”

  He tried to hook the edge of the branch under the material, but the branch bent. Looking at Lollie, I saw his jaw fall open. He came to rigid attention, like a pointer on the scent of game.

  “There’s someone in the jacket,” he said in a high, disbelieving voice.

  I dropped my precious watercolor box and darted to join him. I saw a head bobbing in the water, facedown. The branch wasn’t strong enough to pull the body to the edge of the water. In his excitement Lollie waded in and dragged the body out by its topboots. Once on dry land he turned the body over. I was overcome by an unusual fit of maidenly reluctance and turned my head aside.

  “Good God, it’s Mr. Stoddart!” he exclaimed.

  That was enough to make me turn around. It was Stoddart, all right. He hadn’t been in the water long enough to become discolored or bloated, but he was entirely waterlogged. He was certainly dead.

  His open eyes stared at the heavens; his mouth was slack. He looked pathetic with his face as pale as a fish’s belly and his sodden hair plastered against his forehead, but he was recognizable. There were no visible marks of violence on him.

  I looked at Lollie in consternation and noticed that his face was as pale as the corpse’s.

  “He must have drowned,” I said, returning my gaze to the body and musing on the uncertainty of life.

  “What should we do?”

  “One of us should go for help. The other will stay here with the body.”

  “It’s odd that he’d drown in ten inches of water,” Lollie said, and bent over the body to examine it. “He must have fallen and knocked himself unconscious. Odd there’s no bump. Good lord!” he exclaimed. “Take a look at this, Amy!”

  “What is it?” I asked. I didn’t want to “take a look” at whatever it was, but I glanced down to see what Lollie was doing. He had opened the jacket.

  “He’s been stabbed!” he exclaimed. “I noticed the hole in his jacket. It goes right through the shirt. The water’s washed the blood away, but he was stabbed right enough.”

  I didn’t look at the evidence. After a momentary surge of nausea, I said in a hollow voice, “Then you’d best send for the constable.”

  “You’ll stay with the body? Wouldn’t you rather I stay?”

  “Yes, much rather.”

  I turned to leave, then turned back. “Come with me, Lollie. No one can harm a corpse, but whoever killed him might be lurking nearby.”

  “Stoddart’s been dead for hours. His killer wouldn’t stay around. I’ll be all right, but hurry.”

  He needn’t have suggested it. I flew through the meadow as if pursued by a madman, trampling wild-flowers underfoot in my dart, which is something I would not usually do. The rank grass entwined my ankles, as if to hold me back.

  The trip had never seemed so long. Finally, I ran, gasping, into the house and fell onto a chair in Cook’s steamy kitchen. I was grateful for the comfort of the familiar servants, the stove and aromas of cooking.

  “Dead,” I gasped.

  Cook turned as pale as paper and grabbed the edge of the table. “Not Master Lollie!” Cook hasn’t yet adjusted to calling Lollie Mr. Talbot, though I have become Miss Talbot.

  Her helper, Inez, screamed. Betty, the scullery maid, came darting out of her lair carrying a plate and a tea towel. She dropped the plate and it broke with a clattering noise.

  “Oh, no! Not Lollie,” I assured them. “There’s a body in the water meadow. The man’s been stabbed. We must send for Monger.”

  Inez and Betty screamed in unison and hugged each other for comfort. “Stabbed! We’ll all be kilt.” That was Betty.

  “A murderer! I ain’t going out into the garden for vegetables,” Inez averred.

  “Hush up, you silly girls,” Cook said. “Who’d bother to murder the likes of you?” On this piece of cold comfort she turned back to me. “Who was it, a stranger?”

  “Mr. Stoddart.”

  “Oh, the man you and Master Lollie met yesterday.” There are no secrets in a small household such as ours.

  “Yes. I’ll send George to Chilton Abbas to fetch Monger.” George is our footman, the only male house servant other than Lentle, our aging butler. We have grooms and gardeners outdoors, but in the house George is our factotum. I don’t know how we would get along without him. “I’d best tell Auntie first,” I said.

  “She’s doing a reading. Mrs. Murray stopped by.”

  Mrs. Murray is our local M.P.’s lady, nėe Marie Fanshawe. Whenever her husband brings her home from London, she entertains herself by swanning through the village in overly elaborate gowns, flirting with all the local fellows and having her fortune read by Auntie. In the earlier days she had held card parties, but once the local ladies discovered the high stakes she played for, they were always busy when she called.

  As soon as I had caught my breath, I ran upstairs and into the Rose Saloon. Our less worthy neighbors have their palms read in the morning parlor, but as the carpet and curtains there are well past their prime, such notables as Mrs. Murray are entertained in the Rose Saloon. It is a beautiful, lofty chamber, full of sunlight on that morning in May. Mama had redone it just before her death. Mama always liked to be in fashion.

  I stopped a moment in the doorway to compose myself. Auntie was examining Mrs. Murray’s hand. I knew from my own observation that Mrs. Murray was afflicted with club thumbs. It is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect physical specimen. She is a blond, blue-eyed, porcelain-skinned lady who is, incidentally, twenty years younger than her husband but still more than a decade older than myself.

  According to Auntie, those clubbed thumbs indicated an unmanageable temper and a coarse, violent nature. I had seen no evidence of these character flaws. Her nature was flighty and vain; I would hardly call her either violent or coarse.

  “Oh, Miss Talbot,” she said, glancing up. “Have you had a spill? I see your gown is all muddied.”

  “There’s a dead man in the water meadow,” I said. “Mr. Stoddart. He’s been stabbed.”

  “Oh, my!” She lifted both hands to her lips. The clubbed thumbs marred the beauty of ivory fingers and flashing diamond rings. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “He’s been dead for hours, I should think.”

  “The devil you say!” Aunt Talbot g
asped. “Stabbed? You mean ... murdered?”

  “Yes. We found him floating amidst the bulrushes. Lollie stayed with him.”

  “Stoddart, you say? That’s not a local name,” Mrs. Murray said, “How did you know him?”

  “I met him yesterday. We must send for the constable.”

  “Monger?” Auntie said. “The man’s an idiot. Send for the justice of the peace. This is a job for McAdam.”

  “Oh, I think in a case like this you should call the constable,” Mrs. Murray said. As the M.P.’s wife, she was allowed to have the final say in the matter.

  George—who else?—was sent off for Monger. Mrs. Murray graciously offered the use of her gig for the trip, as Monger has only a donkey cart and the donkey is approaching retirement age.

  “I believe we’ll continue this reading another time, Mrs. Murray,” Aunt Talbot said.

  “But my fate line! You were just about to read it.”

  “I’m too upset to continue this morning. A murder right on our doorstep while we were enjoying ourselves, merry as mice in malt! Gracious me, and Amy and Lollie were talking to him just yesterday.”

  “Who is he and where did you meet him, Miss Talbot?” Mrs. Murray inquired.

  I told her about meeting him while I was sketching.

  “Did he say why he was here?” she asked. I was a little surprised that she asked. It seemed she was beginning to assume the proper provincial curiosity. She didn’t spend much time in the country. Her being here in May was particularly unusual, with the London Season in full swing.

  “He said he was from Bath,” Aunt Talbot told her. “Amy caught him out in a black lie. He didn’t know a thing about Bath. It’s pretty clear the fellow was up to no good.”

  “But what was he doing here?” Mrs. Murray repeated.

  “He said he was on a walking tour,” I told her. “Actually, he was looking for relatives in the graveyard. Fanshawe was the name, Rupert and Marion. He said they’d died in the last century. There are no Fanshawes hereabouts other than yourself. You were a Fanshawe before marriage.”

  She paused a moment. “What did he look like?”

  “He was young, tall and thin, with fair hair and blue eyes. He seemed gentlemanly. Very well dressed.”

  She thought a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t know him. There are no Stoddarts in my family. Such a pity when a young man dies,” she said, rubbing her ugly club thumbs against her fingers. “Well, I was going to take my leave, but since I’ve lent my gig to your footman ...”

  We did the polite thing and had the horses put to to drive her home.

  “I thought she’d never leave,” Aunt Talbot exclaimed when the front door closed. “She seemed mighty interested in that corpse, didn’t you think?”

  “Yes, I noticed she asked twice who he was.”

  “I believe she was worried about her fate line. I hope I didn’t worry her unduly by mentioning it, but there was a noticeable break in her fate line. I judged it to occur near the end of her third decade. It will be a comeuppance for her after having her bread buttered on both sides since her marriage.”

  I shan’t venture into the intricacies of the fate line. Timing its irregularities is a tricky business.

  “Let us go down and keep Lollie company,” she continued. “It can’t be pleasant for him, sitting with a corpse. And there’s no saying the murderer won’t return.”

  She was keen to get all the details of the murder firsthand and I was becoming fretful at having left my paint box behind, so I went with her back to the scene of the crime.

  Chapter Three

  “That there man’s been murdered” was Monger’s verdict when he beheld the sodden corpse. Monger, a graying man with an undistinguished face and bad teeth, had been a solicitor’s clerk until he was dismissed for incompetence, at which time his cousin, McAdam, had appointed him to the post of constable.

  “We are not blind, Monger,” Aunt Talbot said, glancing at his hands. Despite his earth hands, he displayed nothing outstanding in the way of common sense. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “He’ll have to be buried” was Monger’s reply. “That’s not my job.”

  Auntie has a low tolerance for stupidity. “Send for McAdam, Lollie,” she said.

  Monger nodded his approval. “Aye, ‘twould be best, and a sawbones to give the certificate. There’ll be an inquest into this piece of work. I’ll sit with the body till Joseph gets here.” His cousin, Joseph McAdam.

  Aunt Talbot couldn’t resist a glance at Stoddart’s hands before leaving. “A fire hand, it looks like,” she said as an aside. “Unreliable. A revolutionary, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  I recovered my paint box and sketch pad, and we went back across the flower-strewn meadow toward the house. Monger lit up a pipe and sat down on my sketching rock to await McAdam’s arrival.

  When we had gone beyond hearing, Lollie opened his hand to reveal a waterlogged note. “I got this from Stoddart’s pocket,” he said, “You just might be right about his being a revolutionary, Aunt Maude.”

  She flushed with pleasure and forgot to chide him for going through the dead man’s pockets. “What does it say, Lollie?”

  “Not much, but it looks dashed suspicious. It’s printed, for one thing. That hides the handwriting. ‘Meet me at the water meadow at six. Bring the money. We’ll exchange.’ It isn’t signed. Stoddart obviously had some agreement with the writer. He knew who the note was from.”

  “Was there money in his pocket?” Aunt Talbot asked, hastening homeward without breaking stride.

  “Not a sou. His watch is gone as well. I noticed he was wearing one yesterday.”

  Auntie considered this for a moment, then said, “Since the murderer left the note behind when he went through Stoddart’s pockets, can we assume that he is not the man who wrote it?”

  “The note was folded up and in the bottom of his watch pocket. If the murderer pulled the watch out by its chain, he’d never have noticed the note.”

  “An unsigned, printed note doesn’t tell us much,” I ventured.

  “On the contrary,” my aunt said. “It tells us a great deal: that Stoddart was buying something clandestinely. Their meeting in the meadow at six in the morning suggests the seller wanted the utmost privacy. And that suggests some manner of illegality.”

  “The note doesn’t say six in the morning,” I pointed out. “Perhaps the meeting was for six last night, or tonight, or any night. It might have been in his pocket for days.”

  Auntie again considered for a moment, then jerked her head in acknowledgment. “Point taken,” she said curtly.

  “What is more interesting is that the meeting occurred in our water meadow,” I said. “Stoddart must have been meeting someone from this neighborhood who would know about it.”

  “That path through the meadow isn’t actually public, but it’s used widely by all the locals,” Auntie mentioned.

  The path she referred to joins two parallel roads. By cutting through the meadow pedestrians can cut a mile from their route. But still, it is only locals who would know about it.

  We continued discussing this exciting event after we reached home. We went in by the back door, the closest way. I noticed Cook had George out picking vegetables. Inez had stuck by her vow not to venture out into the garden. Already the effects of the murder were being felt. It seemed almost incredible that a murder should have occurred in this peaceful corner of the land.

  George looked up to tell us that the groom was taking Mrs. Murray’s gig home and would return in our carriage. One can always count on George to be on top of things. He knew we would want to go to the village ourselves that afternoon.

  We sat in the Rose Saloon, each of us keeping one eye turned to the window to watch for McAdam’s arrival. Auntie forgot herself so far as to accept a small glass of wine to recover her breath. She sipped at it as if it were hemlock.

  Lollie passed around the note, held in place on a plate to keep it from falling a
part. It was sodden, but the pulp that remained suggested that it had been a cheap sort of paper. Luckily, the message had been written in pencil. Ink would have run, making the writing illegible.

  “A gentleman would have written in ink,” Aunt Talbot informed us.

  “I wonder what he was exchanging the money for,” Lollie said.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if he was a spy for Boney, paying for war secrets,” Aunt Talbot replied. “Did he have a foreign accent at all?”

  “No, not a trace,” I said.

  “An Englishman, then. A traitor along with all the rest. Never trust a fire hand. I wonder if McAdam would let me take a print of it. Much the best way to read the lines and mounts.”

  The print is taken by smearing the hand with ink, placing a clean paper on a sheet of glass, and pressing the hand on the paper. The result is then studied with a magnifying glass to reveal the clues as to the person’s character. Even the whorls and loops on the fingertips are examined.

  “Don’t be a ghoul, Aunt Maude,” Lollie scolded.

  “His character hardly matters now,” she said. “The man is dead. He’ll no longer afflict society.”

  “You’re hard on Mr. Stoddart,” I said. “Are you forgetting he’s the victim? You speak as though he were the murderer.”

  Auntie looked quite surprised at this. Lollie seemed to have forgotten it as well. I expect it was the man’s lying about Bath that had prejudiced their view.

  “Perhaps he was an English spy trying to buy French secrets from his murderer,” Lollie suggested. He didn’t like to admit that an English spy would sink to murder.

  “We don’t know that it had anything to do with spying or even with that note,” I insisted. “It could be that Stoddart was buying stolen goods, or something of that sort.”

  “A fence,” Lollie said, nodding importantly at knowing the cant term. “But I haven’t heard of any big robberies hereabouts.”

  “I wager both men were from London,” Aunt Talbot decided. “Much wiser to sell stolen goods away from where they were stolen. What a villain the murderer is, and to think he’s running about the countryside, unknown.”