Instruments of Darkness Read online

  She looked at him to see if he were teasing, but his eyes remained steady and serious; his breath smelled a little of punch. She was confused.

  “I like this house. And I have seven dresses.” She heard him sigh, but he pulled her to him at the same time, so she supposed the answer had pleased him.

  “Well then. If you have dresses enough, I don’t think I need go away at all. And I am glad you like this house. I hope we may share it a long while.”

  Then he released her and said, “Now, as you are awake I think you may be allowed to join us downstairs for a while. Mr. Paxton is to give us his concerto.”

  For the rest of her life Susan would search out that music, or any that reminded her of it, not only for its elegant passions, but for the memories that it carried of the long parlor by candlelight, the profiles and shoulders of her early friends and neighbors and the feel of her father’s chest rising and falling below her small hand, her cheek pressed against the silver threads of his waistcoat.

  2

  It was a particularly handsome, particularly English summer’s day, and the Sussex countryside was full of the pleasing and fruitful colors of the season. The meadow where Harriet and Crowther dismounted was glowing with tall buttercups and purple knapweed, and the morning wind that stirred them was lazy and good-humored. Any civilized man, or woman, might be expected to pause a moment and consider the landscape and his or her place in it. A good season to be away from the city, its bustle and stink. Here the earth was preparing to offer up its gifts to its lords and their dependents. Crops grew, the animals fattened and the soil served those who had cared for it through the year. Here was England at her best, providing reward to satisfy the body, and beauty to feed the mind and soul.

  Mrs. Westerman and Crowther, however, were indifferent to the scenery. Neither paused to admire the picturesque swell of the valley’s flanks, or philosophize on the greatness of the nation that had borne them. They disappeared into the woods without a backward glance. The groom dismounted and made his arrangements to lead the horses in his charge to their stables, and it was left to the beasts themselves to admire the view and tear up the wildflowers in their satin jaws.

  The path ended in a clearing after some thirty yards of roughish rising ground, overhung with the branches of elm and oak. The way was dry—Crowther tried to remember the last time he had heard rain from the confines of his study—and the air was heavy with the scents of the woodland uncurling into its summer wear. Wild garlic, dew. It would be a pleasant place to walk before beginning the duties of the day, he thought; no doubt that was why Mrs. Westerman had happened along this path.

  Crowther realized he had not noticed the year was already blooming into its height. He would have been able to tell any man who inquired that today’s date was the second of June, of course, because he had written the date of the previous day in his notebook as he began work, but he never felt the shift of seasons in his bones, as so many in the country claimed to do. He knew winter because it was the best time to dissect, and summer because servants were more likely to complain then of the smells. From the world outside in its greatness, its bulk, its multitudes, he had turned away to pick apart the smallest vessels of life. He had stayed faithful now for years to the mysteries he could confine to his tabletop. It had therefore been some months since he had lifted his eyes. Now he could feel the first prick of his sweat under the cotton of his shirt, felt his heart begin to labor with the climb. The sensations were oddly novel. He put his hand to his face where the sun reached it through the leaves.

  Mrs. Westerman came to a halt, and pointed with her riding crop.

  “There. About ten yards along the track to Thornleigh. My dog noticed it first.” Her eyes dropped to the path. “I took her back to the house before I came to you.”

  Crowther glanced at her. The voice was steady enough; her face was perhaps a little flushed, but that might be only a result of the climb. He walked in the direction she had indicated, and heard almost at once a small sigh, and her own footsteps following him.

  The body lay just off the track and one might have thought it a bundle of old clothing but for the arm and its waxy gray hand extended at right angles from the tumble of a dark blue cloak.

  “Has the body been moved?” he asked.

  “No. That is, I got close enough to see that he was dead and how—I lifted the cloak to do so—then covered him again. That is all.”

  A little swarm of flies had gathered, and were walking as daintily as shop girls in Ranelagh Gardens around the edges of the cloak, and into the nooks and crannies it hid for their private business. Crowther knelt down, lifted the fold of cloth away from the corpse’s face and looked into the dead eyes. The flies buzzed angrily, and he waved them away without judgment.

  He had heard it discussed as a student that in death the retina was imprinted with the last image the eyes had seen. The idea had intrigued him in his younger days, and he had made experiments in his former home with a number of unfortunate dogs and two cats before he had given the idea up as impossible. The signs murder left on the body were at the same time more subtle and more commonplace, but he did believe one could often read the expression of a human corpse. Some looked at peace, others, like this face before him, looked only surprised and a little disappointed. The man was wearing his own hair. Dark blond and thick. Crowther lifted the body a little and felt the ground below the corpse, and the back of his cloak. Both dry. And the body stiff, though perhaps not fully so. The flies settled again as he let the ground take the body’s weight once more.

  “There was dew on the body when I found it, and the body was not as stiff as it seems to be now,” Harriet said.

  Crowther nodded, but did not look up. “Then I imagine that he died last night.”

  “That he was murdered last night,” she corrected him.

  Indeed, the wound through the neck was unequivocal. Crowther waved away the flies again and bent toward it: a single, violent blow completely severing the carotid artery, leaving the man with an extra, gaping mouth. He would not have suffered long, Crowther thought. The blow had been delivered with enough force to almost sever the neck, leaving the shocking white of the man’s vertebrae visible at the back of the wound. A quantity of dark staining around the collar showed where the heart had continued, briefly, to push blood through the body. Crowther looked along the man’s trunk. He was wearing clean-enough looking linen and an embroidered waistcoat that was made of some richer stuff; black stains were dappled across it in ugly dark pools. He could see in his mind’s eye the man caught and held from behind, the knife at its work, then the release of blood glutting out onto the soil with vivid and final force. He looked about him. Yes, there were marks on the trunks of the trees directly in front of him, and the last of the lilies of the valley had caught a little of his blood. They looked as if they were fading under the weight of it. This man lay where he had first fallen.

  Harriet followed the movement of his eyes with her own.

  “There is a legend that takes place not far from here,” she said. “A saint did battle with a terrible dragon, and wherever the saint’s blood touched the ground, lilies of the valley have bloomed from that day to this.” She sighed. “Though I doubt we can blame a duel with a dragon for this death, don’t you agree, Mr. Crowther? It was not a fight at all, I think. One stroke, from behind. He was probably dead before he fell.”

  Crowther never liked to be hurried as he worked, and he found her enthusiasm a little grating. He punished her by standing silently and looking about him, particularly behind where the body lay, where a killer might have stood. The thornbushes curtsied at him and he reached among their white flowers to pull free a few threads he saw hanging there; he drew out his handkerchief to wrap them in. Only when they were securely in his pocket did he attempt to make any sort of reply.

  “And you have concluded this as a result of your extensive reading, I suppose, Mrs. Westerman?”

  “I have irritated you. Forgive
me.” The frankness of her answer rather embarrassed him. He bowed swiftly.

  “Not at all, madam. Your conclusions are in tune with what I see here.”

  She was quiet a moment, twisting the riding crop between her fingers, then spoke softly.

  “It is hard, don’t you think, Mr. Crowther, to draw conclusions and have no one to discuss them with? One begins to doubt one’s own judgment, or trust it too much. I did not mean to hurry you. Perhaps I wish to prove to you I am not a fool, and in trying to prove it—behave like one.” She met his eye briefly and looked away again. “To answer your question, I do not read as much as I would like. It was by chance I happened on your article. But perhaps my lack of squeamishness offends you. Before we bought Caveley, and my son Stephen was born, I sailed for three years with my husband. I have seen men killed in war and in peace, and served as a nurse, so I have witnessed more than perhaps I should.”

  Crowther looked directly at her and Mrs. Westerman turned away, a little embarrassed. Well, Crowther thought as he bent down again to the body, it was a universal truth that in the presence of a corpse people often said more than they intended. He felt it was as a result of this phenomenon that some people believed a corpse could condemn its murderer by bleeding again in his presence. No, the truth was simply that people had a nasty tendency to run on and confess before such a vivid memento mori.

  Crowther began to run his hands over the body. His hand stopped at a bulge in the corpse’s waistcoat pocket and he pushed his long white fingers between the silvery folds of cloth to withdraw a ring. It was heavy in his palm, and as he turned it he saw a crest stamped into the gold. He recognized it from the carriage that rolled through the village from time to time, and also from the gates to the great park. He heard his companion draw in her breath and stood up, dropping it into her outstretched hand. She closed her fist around it, and Crowther could have sworn he heard her curse softly.

  “The arms of Thornleigh Hall, of course,” he said dryly. She looked at him, then away. He raised an eyebrow. “I should have asked before, Mrs. Westerman: do you know this man? Is he from Hartswood? Is he from the Hall?”

  As she replied she tapped her riding crop against her dress.

  She did not take her eyes from the body, and her tone was that of private contemplation.

  “He is a stranger. I think if he were from Thornleigh or the village I would know him, but ... How old do you think this man, and of what condition in life?”

  “I would put him between thirty-five and forty-five. About his condition—I would say he is not poor. He has a coat and cloak, and his hands are clean enough, and unscarred. You can see that yourself. What is it you know, Mrs. Westerman, that I do not?”

  “Nothing. Merely local history. And the history says the eldest son of Lord Thornleigh left the protection of his family some fifteen years ago, and would be now of this age. His name was Alexander, Viscount Hardew. He is a blond-haired man in the portrait I have seen.”

  She took a pace away from the body and turned to look up the path toward the Thornleigh lands. A breeze murmured through the trees and tugged gently at the edge of Crowther’s coat, as if trying to take him back to his rooms and his books before any more was spoken, before some line was crossed.

  “You see, sir,” she went on, “I cannot help wondering if this poor man is the heir to the great estates of my neighbors, and if so, why he received so cold a welcome home.”

  3

  As Susan practiced in the shop the morning after the concert, she wondered if she had been a little too quick to turn down the maid and carriage that her father had offered her the night before. The heat was oppressive: she could feel the sweat gathering under her arms and on the back of her neck, and in London heat brought the stench of the city all through the house. It might have been pleasant to drive around the park with a pony and a pretty dress on instead of going through her exercises here in the shop, with the scores and parts of music her father printed and sold piled around her.

  Normally the room stayed cool even in the summer, for it was a long and elegant space with nothing to disturb it but her own harpsichord, the counter running along one wall and some small displays of the latest airs and themes arranged on tabletops below the windows, but already this year the air felt hot in her chest. These exercises her body knew almost better than her mind. She could watch her fingers on the keys and hear the pluck and thrum of the instrument as if she watched from outside her own body. It left her free to think while appearing busy, so she let her mind wander through the city outside.

  She had seen carriages enough stopping at the shop, and the ladies who tended to get out of them. She had not seen anyone of her own age in them, though. The ladies in carriages tended to have maids with them or more ladies, never young girls. They were all very beautiful, but all seemed to look rather tired as if wearing those heavy dresses was a great deal of work. She remembered a lady who had come in when she was at her instrument once, and who had wanted her to play at a party for her friends. She had called her a little Mozart and had gone into raptures. That is what she had said. “I’m in raptures!” Her dress made a great deal of noise, and she had red stuff on her mouth. She had put her face right up to Susan’s and declared her “such a pretty thing.”

  Susan had not liked it. And her father neither. He had been relatively firm with the lady, and she had not come back. He had told Susan that if she met “that woman” on the street she was on no account to go anywhere with her. Susan wondered if she was a Cyprian. She knew about such women from the talk in the square: they let men kiss them and do other things for money, but as she thought it was something her father would not want her to know, she had not questioned him. There were other ladies who smiled at her without coming so close, and her father often asked her to play through some of the music they sold so the ladies could say if they liked it and take it away to learn. They did all seem only half-alive to her, though. She thought how horrible it must be to walk around so slowly all the time. She found her fingers were playing the next variation all by themselves.

  “We all need time to think, Susan,” her father said, smiling over his ledger at the counter. “But I know perfectly well you have not been concentrating at all in the last little while. If you wish to stop, you may. Otherwise, never forget you are in search of the music under the mechanics.”

  Susan looked up. Her father was pushing a thread of his yellow hair out of his eyes. She grinned and sheepishly turned back to the keyboard, trying to remember the music, the cut and run of counterpoint growing under her hand. Alexander was a lover of music. The backyard of their house contained the brute force of his enterprise, the place where the copper plates were kept on which he carved other men’s notes, the presses that fixed them, and he had passed on the love and the craft to his daughter. Yet, at times when the metal smelled hot and bitter and her hands were reluctant and weak on the keys, music could seem a tyrant and a bully. It mocked her, being always a little beyond what she could do, what she could know. She had seen her papa often enough late and tired sorting through his accounts to suspect he felt the same. Yet music was mother to her now, and her father’s beloved. Her nine years had been spent smothered in music, fed by it. She could not imagine any other way of life.

  A gentleman came in through the door, bowed slightly to them both, then turned to browse through the open scores on the countertop. Susan looked at him again. Perhaps not a gentleman after all. When her father turned back to his books, the man covertly studied him with a narrowed, calculating look. Her fingers tripped, and he noticed and glanced around at her. His skin was rather yellow. He smiled—and she saw that his front teeth were missing. Just then, the bell rang again, and a woman in a skirt wide enough for three ladies swept in with a loud greeting and offered Alexander her hand. The yellow man slipped away before the door had time to close again. Susan shivered. The feeling of oppression the man had brought into the room lasted with her for much of the rest of the morning, and wh
atever her efforts, her practices were wasted.

  4

  Mrs. Westerman’s home, Caveley Park, was acknowledged to be a well-run, handsome estate, flourishing under the care of its new owners. True, it had none of the pretensions to greatness of its nearest neighbor, Thornleigh Hall, but Commodore Westerman was a talented and, still better, a lucky commander of some seniority, and it showed in the size of the purchase, and the care with which the refitting of the house and investment in the estate had been carried out. His wife had acquired a reputation as a capable manager of his interests, and her arrangements were approved of, and often copied, by others in the area.

  Harriet Westerman had not intended to remain ashore when the purchase was first discussed, but a number of circumstances had rendered her presence on the estate both practical and necessary while her husband continued abroad, first in the Channel and since the new year serving his sovereign by cruising the West Indies. She had therefore given up life aboard ship, or at some far-flung naval base, dining sometimes with potentates and kings, sometimes with fishermen and the threadbare officers of the more uncomfortable postings around her country’s growing empire, and taken on instead the more settled life of a country gentlewoman.

  The first of these circumstances was the realization that an estate of this size would need more close attention than the irregular and unreliable communications from a ship of His Majesty’s Navy might allow. The second was the birth of her son Stephen, who, though now he seemed to be thriving and strong, had been a weak, sickly sort of baby—reluctant to grow fat in sea air. He had been born afloat on his father’s ship as she labored against unseasonable winds home from a posting in the East Indies. The Westermans had already lost one child in the previous year, and the grief of that little boy’s loss was a small burning place between them. He had been born and died on the far side of the world, and lived long enough only to be named. His little body was laid in the ground of the East India Company’s church in Calcutta. Harriet still sometimes saw that little patch of foreign soil under her feet even as she walked her paths of English lavender. She spoke of that time rarely even with her sister. The Westermans would do all they could to avoid such another grief. The question of the little boy’s remaining on land with some respectable family had been touched upon, but Commodore Westerman put the case forcefully for the advantages of a mother’s care.