‘How dare you!’ thundered the magistrate.
Faith could see that in another moment Dr Jacklers was likely to find himself thrown out of the site in Uncle Miles’s wake. That did not suit her purposes.
She let her knees buckle, and dropped to the earth as a deadweight.
‘Miss Sunderly has fainted!’ Feet pounded the dust towards her.
She was raised to a sitting position and offered water. The doctor forgot his anger and tutted over her pulse.
Faith waved a vague hand in the direction of the ‘Bedouin tent’.
‘Shade,’ she whispered plaintively.
She was helped up the slope and guided to a chair beside Mrs Lambent. The magistrate’s wife did not look at her. As usual she was wrapped to the gills, but today the eyes that peered out above her shawls seemed uncommonly bright and apprehensive. Her hands toyed absently with cards in front of her, like a blind seer telling out her Tarot.
They were not Tarot cards, however. They were miniature scenes, prints of the photographs taken throughout the excavation, delivered to her that morning by Paul Clay. They rippled and leaped slightly in the breeze.
‘Mrs Lambent.’ Paul had appeared before the magistrate’s wife. He delivered a small bow, with the solemnity of a funeral mute. ‘My father is sending me back to the parsonage for more chemicals and wondered if you would like me to bring anything back from town for you.’
‘No, thank you, Master Clay.’
Paul bowed again, turned to leave, then stooped, straightened with a photograph in his hand and added it to the pile face down without so much as glancing at it. It was done deftly and naturally, so that anybody might think he had noticed it lying on the ground.
He briefly made eye contact with Faith. Neither smiled, but she closed her eyes in a slow blink, a cat smile. Thank you.
The winch was made ready and the curate and magistrate slowly lowered into darkness. The doctor glared at them resentfully now and then, but did not abandon his patient. Nearby, the magistrate’s horse cropped the grass with remarkable calm, tethered to the winch frame by a slip knot.
After a while, Crock came over and raised a knuckle to his own forehead.
‘They have touched down safely, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They say there is a large cavern down there – they will be happy for half an hour at least.’
‘He should never have gone down,’ Mrs Lambent said under her breath. ‘This is an ill day, an unhappy day . . .’ For an absent-minded moment, her gaze flicked down to the photographs in her hand. Her face froze and her jaw drooped. She gave a long, hoarse, lung-wrenching gasp, like a death rattle in reverse.
‘Mrs Lambent!’ Dr Jacklers sprang to his feet, and Crock hurried over as well.
The magistrate’s wife was staring at the uppermost photograph, hauling in breath after ragged breath.
‘That shape – clawing through the tent!’
No, no,’ the doctor reassured her, ‘I have seen a print of that photograph; it is only Miles Cattistock battling the canvas.’
‘No!’ Mrs Lambent straightened in her chair and held the photograph up for the doctor to see. ‘Look at him! Look at his face! Can you not see who it is? It is Erasmus Sunderly! I would know his face anywhere!’
‘How?’ asked Faith, not loudly but clearly. ‘How would you know his face?’ Her voice cut through the conversation like a blade, leaving a little hole of silence in its wake.
The doctor, who had been staring at the photograph, looked up in perplexity. ‘That . . . is a good question. How did you recognize him? I thought that you had never met him.’
‘He visited my house,’ Mrs Lambent said huskily.
‘But you never saw him while he was there,’ said Faith. ‘You never came to dinner, because if you had, he would have recognized you. He met you in China when you were travelling with your husband – Mr Hector Winterbourne, who died of malaria.
‘Some people think you have a weakness for gin, Mrs Lambent, but I am sure Dr Jacklers knows better. He is your doctor, so I am sure he knows why you have fevers, year in, year out. Maybe it was even Dr Jacklers who told you that gin and tonic could be used to treat malaria.’
Mrs Lambent’s breathing was developing a dangerous wheeze, and her eyes bulged slightly each time she inhaled.
‘Doctor – Mrs Lambent is unwell!’ Crock’s brow was furrowed as he regarded his employer’s wife.
‘Please, Doctor, let me tell you the rest!’ Faith said urgently. ‘This involves my father’s death – and I have proof, written proof!’ She could almost see the medical man and the coroner battling inside Dr Jacklers’s head.
‘Go on,’ he said, with a nod to Faith. For the first time the look he gave her was not indulgent or impatient.
‘Mrs Lambent’s name used to be Winterbourne,’ continued Faith. ‘You can find it in the parish register. My father left a journal – he writes about meeting the Winterbournes when they were travelling upriver in search of a specimen. When Mr Winterbourne was arrested, my father failed to arrange his release—’
‘Failed!’ Mrs Lambent’s deep voice throbbed with feeling. ‘He connived to keep Hector in that foul hole! He might as well have run him through!’
Faith felt a knot loosen inside her. Mrs Lambent’s outburst had confirmed Faith’s story. The weak link was breaking, just as Faith had hoped against hope that it would. Now she needed to keep up the pressure, force further confessions.
‘The morning before he died, my father received an unsigned letter, threatening to reveal his past and telling him to meet someone in the Bull Cove dell at midnight.’ Faith hesitated, then took her gamble and risked her lie. ‘It took a long time to find that letter. But now that we have it, it is easy enough to identify the handwriting.’
For some reason the thought of handwriting made Faith briefly uneasy. Some memory fly-tapped at the window of her mind, but it was a dull buzz, nothing more.
‘No . . .’ whispered Mrs Lambent. ‘He said that he burned the letter . . .’ The whites of her eyes showed as she gasped.
‘I know that the trap was your husband’s idea,’ Faith continued. She stood, and drew closer to the older woman. ‘I know that you would never have risked your own soul otherwise. You were being a good wife.’
‘Mrs Lambent, please tell us all you can.’ Dr Jacklers was every inch the coroner now. He stooped to look the magistrate’s wife in the eye, his face unusually earnest and solemn. ‘The law respects honesty – if you are willing to speak now, it will make a world of difference in the long run.’
Mrs Lambent opened her mouth, but all that came out was rough wheezes. At last, with visible effort, she heaved air into her lungs and forced out one loud, creaking syllable.
‘Ben!’
A shadow passed between Faith and the sun. It was Ben Crock, leaping forward to fling his arm around Dr Jacklers’s neck, wrestling him backwards. At the same time Mrs Lambent lunged forward, seizing both of Faith’s wrists with manacle firmness.
‘Crock, what are yerk—’
‘Dispose of him, Ben!’ snapped Mrs Lambent.
Without a crease in his brow, Crock dragged the doctor backwards, swung him around, and hurled him down the shaft. The doctor flailed as he fell. After he had disappeared from view, the guy ropes quivered like harp strings. Faith could only hope that they had slowed his fall.
Did you just crush my husband, Ben?’ asked Agatha Lambent in an aghast tone, still gripping Faith’s arms.
Crock leaned over and listened.
‘I think not, ma’am. He is shouting. Sounds healthy enough.’
The navvies were watching, calmly. Not protesting, or running to wrestle Crock to the ground. They were looking at Crock . . . no, they were looking to Crock, for orders. They were his navvies, if indeed they were navvies at all. Crock had recruited all of them.
‘Now, you little viper,’ said Agatha, turning her attention to Faith, you have your father’s journals. You know your father’s secrets. Where is my Tree?’
Faith was developing an inkling that her deductions had been only partly correct.
CHAPTER 34:
THE WIDOW
‘Your Tree?’
Faith had it at last. Too late, she understood her own nagging sense of unease.
Handwriting. Lambent’s handwriting on the coroner’s warrant, large, flamboyant and undisciplined. Mrs Lambent’s curt letter to Myrtle on the day of the funeral, cruelly precise in its tiny lettering. The small, neat writing on the labels in the cabinet of curiosities . . .
‘The cabinet! That was your writing on the labels. All those natural-history specimens – they never did belong to your husband. They were yours.’
The clues had been there, Faith realized. She remembered the stuffed snake strangling a mongoose. No wonder it had looked so much like her own pet. It was another Mandarin trinket snake. Agatha must have collected the specimen while she was in China.
‘I have excellent taste in husbands,’ said Agatha, ‘but they do tend to be dabblers.’
Her breathing was steadying now, and her eyes were steel. Faith wondered how she had ever thought that Agatha was a weak link.
‘I made the same mistake as everybody else,’ said Faith wonderingly. ‘You were the real natural scientist all the time. Winterbourne never dragged you along in his search for the Tree – it was the other way round. And Mr Lambent . . .’
‘. . . is a dear, noble soul,’ Agatha finished, with a devout air, ‘and willing to listen to good counsel.’
Faith’s image of a domineering husband with a loyal but frail wife faded away. Instead she saw an impulsive, enthusiastic man, led hither and thither by a clever and vengeful woman.
‘You persuaded your husband to invite my father to Vane.’ Faith imagined Lambent seizing upon the idea like a puppy, and making it his own. ‘You told him to hire Ben Crock.’
At last Faith realized why Agatha spent so much time at the excavation, and why Crock had kept dancing attendance upon her. While Lambent had been strutting and posing in pantaloons, his wife had been quietly running the dig.
As she understood, Faith felt the strangest mixture of jubilation, frustration and sadness. Here was that mythical beast that everybody had told her could not exist: a female natural scientist.
‘We could have been friends,’ Faith said.
‘As you can see, I am not without friends,’ Agatha answered coolly, gesturing towards the silent navvies. ‘Our friendship was forged in China, where your father’s machinations nearly saw us all rot to death in prison.’
‘But this is insane!’ Faith was still struggling to grasp the situation. ‘What are you planning to do? The people down that shaft will be missed! I will be missed! People will come to investigate.’ Her gaze crept to the shaft. ‘If you bring Dr Jacklers up now, maybe he won’t die. Otherwise it will be murder, and everyone will know you were responsible!’
‘We were attacked,’ said Agatha, without batting an eyelid, ‘by those louts from town who threw rocks at us before. They surprised us, knocked the poor doctor down the shaft, and had us at a disadvantage for a while before we chased them off and were able to haul up our friends once again. Depending on how annoying you choose to be, you may have fled in the confusion and fallen, breaking your neck.’
Faith looked at Crock. You liked me, she thought. You felt sorry for me.
With whiplash force, however, the truth hit her. You were only kind to me out of guilt. You killed my father.
‘Sorry, miss,’ Crock said. ‘I did hope to keep you safe as possible.’
In her imagination, Faith now saw Crock filing through the mining-basket chain, then adding the guy ropes in panic when two children climbed into the basket instead of his target.
‘But I owe Mrs Lambent my life,’ he continued. ‘I was Mr Winterbourne’s foreman, and they threw me into that prison too. I would have died there, but Mrs Lambent would not abandon me. She stayed in that swamp town until she could persuade them to let me go . . . but by then she had malaria.’ He still had outdoor eyes, but today they held winter skies.
‘The Tree, Miss Sunderly,’ said Agatha. ‘We have all earned that Tree. It is the key to prosperity that has long been denied us. It is our right.’
Much as it hurt Faith to admit it, Agatha had a point. The Winterbournes had never owned the Tree, but they had given years of their lives to chasing down the rumours, only to have it snatched away before they could finally claim it. They’re murderers, whispered Faith’s grief But the Reverend had caused the death of Agatha’s husband. Faith understood calculated, cold-burning revenge.
Indeed, Faith might have felt real sympathy for her enemies, had she not just seen Dr Jacklers being hurled down a shaft.
‘Please, miss.’ Crock’s smile was not unfriendly, but nor was it without menace.
‘I . . .’ Faith hung her head. ‘I did hide a plant. I . . . I can show you some of its leaves, and you can tell me whether it is the right one.’
Agatha released Faith’s wrists, Crock standing guard behind her so that Faith did not bolt. Faith reached into her pocket. Her fingers brushed the reticule containing the pistol and hesitated for a moment. However, if she drew the weapon half cocked, she could not stop Crock grabbing it from her. If she pulled back the hammer before drawing, her enemies would hear the click.
Instead she brought out her father’s tobacco tin. She held it out, but did not move forward.
‘The leaves are in there?’ Agatha moved forward eagerly to take it. Just as Faith had hoped, this brought her into the sunlight.
‘See for yourself Faith flipped open the box, and flung the contents over Agatha.
The leaf fragments littered the older woman’s dress, and as the sun touched them they ignited. Small fierce flames erupted on the cotton and taffeta, spitting and sizzling. Crock snatched up a rug and flung it over Agatha’s dress to smother the flames.
Faith ran. Before the navvies could react, she had sprinted to the grazing horse, pulled loose the slip knot and placed one foot in the nearest stirrup.
Then there was shouting, and rocks crackling under hasty steps. The horse’s flank shivered and its back legs danced nervously sideways. Faith desperately pushed up, hoping this would seat her on top of it. Instead she found herself sprawling across the saddle like a sack of potatoes as the horse lurched into skittish motion.
Faith clung to the far side of the saddle in desperation as the horse broke into a frightened canter, the saddle pummelling her chest with each bound. Each jerk threatened to drag her fingers free and send her plummeting to the turf. Faith could hear her shoulder seams tearing.
I am so glad Mother never put me in full corsets, she thought.
The hoofs were ringing on a roadway now, instead of pounding grass. There were still shouts behind, but they grew fainter.
In this ungainly fashion she bounced along for a few minutes, before losing her grip and landing with painful force on the dusty road. The horse slowed and halted, trailing its reins. Faith rose unsteadily, feeling her knee grazed beneath her skirts, and hobbled after it. She made a few wobbly attempts to mount it properly, but it had been saddled for a man. She had too many skirts to sit astride, and when she tried to ride side-saddle she slithered off. She had no choice but to continue on foot.
There was no time to lose. Faith’s only advantage was a head start. Her pursuers, on the other hand, were not bruised, exhausted, suffering the after-effects of visionary fruit or struggling with three layers of skirts.
Furthermore, her enemies knew where she was going. They knew where she lived.
By the time she reached the descent to the house at Bull Cove, Faith could feel the blood oozing from her knee and sticking to her petticoat.
Mrs Vellet opened the door to her and stared aghast at Faith’s dishevelled, dusty appearance. Myrtle appeared beside the housekeeper a moment later.
‘Faith, where have you been? Where . . . ? Oh, mercy, what has happened?’ She dragged Faith inside and int
o the drawing room. While Mrs Vellet ran off to the medicine cupboard, Myrtle stood staring at her daughter, touching tentative fingertips to Faith’s hair, a cut on her ear, rips in her dress. ‘Darling – oh, darling – what happened to you? Has . . . ? Has somebody . . .’
It took a moment for Faith to understand Myrtle’s drift.
‘No.’ Faith clasped her hands and tried to calm herself ‘No, I have not been despoiled. I am just bruised and bumped and . . . and I have been running. A band of murderers are coming this way, Mother! We all need to leave, right now, or they will kill us!’
‘Murderers? Faith, what are you talking about?’
‘Father did some terrible things in China,’ Faith blurted out. ‘He caused a man’s death, and stole a valuable specimen, and now the people he wronged are after us for revenge. Mrs Lambent, Ben Crock, the navvies . . . Mother, there is no time to explain it properly – we all need to go! Please, please, believe me, just for once!’
The housekeeper arrived at that moment with a bottle of medicinal brandy. Myrtle stood irresolute for a moment, tongue tip between her lips, frowning into Faith’s face.
‘Mrs Vellet,’ she said, ‘please fetch Howard. We must leave now, on foot. Some murderous brutes are coming to attack us.’
‘Does Prythe have a shotgun?’ asked Faith hopefully.
‘Prythe left yesterday afternoon,’ Myrtle answered distractedly.
‘But . . .’ Faith recalled Myrtle threatening to have the servants throw Uncle Miles out of the house the night before. Her mother caught her eye and smiled.
‘Yes, darling,’ Myrtle said crisply. ‘I was bluffing.’
Mrs Vellet left and returned with Howard.
‘The high road or the low road?’ Myrtle whispered urgently to herself. ‘If we take the low road, there is nowhere to hide or escape. On the high road, at least we can cut across the grasslands, or hide behind bushes . . .’