This was the truth: his eyes had looked utterly betrayed before they had glazed to an unseeing shimmer like ice crusting a pool.
“And no one else saw you?”
“No.”
“And no one else saw him?”
“No one I know about.”
“And then you returned here?”
“Yes. Slowly,” I whispered, hedging my bets as to whether Agatha had noticed the gap between twilight and my return. “I felt so weak. This morning, I should have thought it all some horrid dream, except . . . except it’s true.”
“Miss Jane, that was very complete,” Constable Quillfeather complimented. He brushed his hands over his head, and the wiry locks like accusers arrowed towards my face all the surer. “May I ask you a few more questions?”
“I suppose so.”
“The courage in this one, the pluck!” Whistling, Constable Quillfeather winked at Agatha. “She’s been raised by a paragon of a mother, but that’s in addition to a few stout friends, I think?”
“I hope so, but judge for yerself, sir,” Agatha answered calmly.
“That I shall, ma’am. Miss Steele, was Edwin in any sort of fight that evening?”
Either the clock which had been ticking stopped, or I went deaf with panic.
“His button was missing?” Constable Quillfeather indicated the top button on his own waistcoat. “Hereabouts? Seemed to have been torn away?”
“We played at highwaymen before Robin Hood, to practise.” I glanced up at Agatha. “We staged a fight. Edwin . . . he’d not have wanted Aunt Patience to know about that, she likes everything to be so proper.”
The policeman blew out a breath. “It gave me a turn, you understand? Didn’t know what to think—signs of a struggle?”
My stomach heaved. As suddenly as he had introduced the subject, however, Constable Quillfeather abandoned it.
“You’ll miss your playmate, Miss Steele, and the blow comes too soon on the heels of another, and it hurts me to see it,” he averred, shaking his head. “There’s an . . . incongruity? About grief in the very young. It doesn’t belong on you? Well, I’m for the grieving mother now.”
Constable Quillfeather came to stand before me on spindly stork’s legs, bending over like a question mark.
“You’ll take care of yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What’s happened to your dress sleeve?”
We looked at my blue-and-grey-patterned dress sleeve and the short tear in it made by Edmund’s final game. Agatha’s vision was as keen as a whiskered mole’s, and she had brushed off my dress the night before without seeing the rip; since I donned the nearest thing I could find that morning, there it was, a grisly cotton wound with a lurid smoke-coloured bruise beneath.
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “It must have been torn when we were playing highwaymen, just like Edwin’s button. It’s the only explanation.”
After a pause, Constable Quillfeather shook my hand and stood tall as a beanpole, gently frowning. “Well, I am in tremendous debt to you, Miss Steele. If that is the only explanation, then I shall never have to seek out another one, shall I?”
Constable Quillfeather settled a brown beaver hat on his head, bowed to us, and set off for the main house—and only when the ridiculously tall pipe shape of his headgear departing passed our front window did I allow myself the highly literary indulgence of losing consciousness.
? ? ?
After recovering my wits that afternoon, I stood before the broad white steps of the main house with Agatha, preparing myself to enter. My aunt wished to see me, a request which could not be refused. Vacillating, I paced, staring miserably at the lofty leaded windows.
“Sooner a thing’s started, sooner as it’s done,” Agatha mentioned.
“I’m frightened.”
“That’s neither ’ere nor there,” she advised, and since this was again inarguable, I made a proud church spire of my spine and walked inside.
No one greeted me; up I went towards my aunt’s bedroom. The servants ought to have been bustling, making arrangements for the inevitable condoling relations and dealers in the commerce of death, but Aunt Patience must have sent them off; the only faces I saw were painted ancestors whispering murderess from the cages of their carved gilt frames. I felt as if I were going to my doom.
I was perfectly correct—but it was a doom of my own making, not my aunt’s. Of this I can at least be proud, if of nothing else.
Following a knock at Patience Barbary’s half-opened door, I entered. The light here was dimmer, keeping its distance as if out of respect for the bereaved. My aunt lay on a fainting couch. She beckoned; it was not until I drew within three feet that I could see her plain, and I stiffened.