“Yes,” I managed.
Constable Quillfeather was very tall and very thin—a friendly skeleton, in fact—clad in brown flannel with a red-and-yellow-checked shawl-collared vest and tall leather gaiters. His face boasted a jutting chin, an aggressively hooked nose, deep-set hazel eyes, a looming brow, and a great framing shock of forward-swept hair of a dark brown not unlike mine. Everything about Constable Quillfeather seemed to lurch forward on a parabola; I guessed him to be above middle age, but his lanky limbs were puppyish in their urgency, a propulsive quality matched only by his incessant questions. Though he was far from handsome, he exuded a riveting aura of eager enthusiasm.
“Ha! I thought she must have done?” Constable Quillfeather’s soft tenor lilted so much at the ends of his sentences, statements became queries. “Was she fond of sewing?”
“Sometimes.” My mother had enjoyed needlework, but not as much as she relished throwing new projects across the room.
“I never had the pleasure of meeting her but once, in the village, at the stationer’s?” The policeman’s bright eyes swept to Agatha’s. “She was so charming, and . . . I think a little sad? But I presume too much—Miss Steele, may we talk about how you discovered your poor cousin’s body?”
Swallowing, I nodded. No speech was forthcoming, however.
Constable Quillfeather clapped his hands to his bony knees. “Miss Steele, do you require water? A sip of wine to strengthen you?”
I shook my head.
“But you shiver—are you cold?”
Helpless to stop myself, I emitted a hysterical trill of laughter.
Frowning, Agatha attempted, “She’s been so poorly, she don’t know which end is up, left, or ’indmost, Constable.”
“Naturally, naturally!” Constable Quillfeather smiled, a warm horizontal spread which failed to check his air of headlong momentum. “Will you tell me the origins of the magnificent work above the mantelpiece?”
The constable’s nose crinkled as he gazed at a wild collection of pinks and yellows incidentally suggesting a landscape, one reminiscent of Turner’s works when important structures are burning down. He rose to study it—or perhaps to give me the illusion of unfettered space.
“Mamma was a painter,” I rasped.
“And a fine one! Now, this is not a picture set in England? Where, then?”
“In the countryside near Paris.”
“Ah, just so. Did she like it here?”
“Why?”
Constable Quillfeather’s eyes, dappled with green and brown and amber, twinkled compassionately. “Neighbourly curiosity?”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted. “But we were safe.”
Sam Quillfeather returned to his armchair. “Safety and the comforts of home—what more can one ask of life?”
“Longer life?” I returned without thinking.
The constable winced ruefully. “Quite so. Miss Steele, do you grasp how brave you are being? I know of grown women who, after the multiple tragedies you have undergone, would be prostrate! But here you are, so steady and sure. Might we begin again, and you tell me what happened yesterday?”
He was one of the most engaging men I had ever encountered, and anyway there was nothing for it: I set to.
I informed Constable Quillfeather in a voice trembling like a plucked harpsichord string that I had been to tea at my aunt’s residence and that there had been a great row over my going to school. Following this dash of truth, I said that Cousin Edwin and I were so upset that we quit the main house. After planning to run away together to London, and planning to build a tree fortress, and planning to live as highwaymen, we had decided to play a game.
“A game?” Constable Quillfeather repeated slowly.
Yes, I told him, a game called Robin Hood.
Constable Quillfeather rubbed his hands as he leant forward, inquiring what this game involved.
“Hunting for deer in Nottingham Forest.” My words may have been false, but my tears were true. “We separated so as to meet again and show what we’d killed for supper. But it was all pretend. Then I went to the meeting place—there’s two fallen logs crossed like a crooked X not far from the cottage—and, and no one was there. Then I thought Edwin must have . . .”
“There, there,” Agatha said as a sob escaped. “There, now.”
Like a fever dream, I saw Edwin approaching with a hemmed square of cotton he imagined was an apology.
“I thought he must have been playing one of his tricks,” I forced out. “But, oh, I was so vexed he’d left me alone in the woods when it was getting dark. I searched everywhere. I thought of the ravine because we collect things down there sometimes.”
“What sort?” Constable Quillfeather desired to know.
“Bright rocks, wildflowers, bones. When I found him, dusk was nearly finished, and . . . he wasn’t breathing.”
“He had already expired?”
I drew a shuddering breath. “His eyes looked—I can’t stand to think of how his eyes looked, don’t ask me, please!”