Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
The Witness in the North
My solicitor’s people finally ran Brookes to ground with the thoroughness I paid them for.
With no time to waste, I took the next train to Edinburgh—the night mail from King's Cross.
It put me there a little after eight in the morning, stiff in every joint and worst of all in the leg, which had spent the dark hours informing me, mile by mile, exactly how it felt about being folded into a railway carriage for the better part of the night.
The address they had given me was a narrow house in a close off the Canongate, the sort of respectable poverty that announces a man come down in the world and anxious that it not be remarked upon.
I had not sent word. I had learned the value of that with Mainwaring. But Mainwaring, it transpired, had sent word for me.
I knew it the moment the door opened. The man who stood in the gap was in his late thirties, though he wore his years badly and his fear worse. He had been handsome once. But now the flesh had gone loose at the jaw, and the eyes were the eyes of a man who slept with a lamp burning.
He looked at me, my stick, and my scar, and something in his face simply gave way—not to surprise, but to a dreadful confirmation.
"You're Everthorne," he said. "Mainwaring wrote me you'd come."
"Then I am spared the trouble of explaining myself."
"He wrote me—" Brookes's hand went to the doorframe.
"He wrote me that you'd been asking about that night.
And that Lydia Gray was dead. That she was killed for it.
For knowing who was in the house." His voice climbed.
"I want you to understand, before you say another word, that it was not me.
Whatever you have come to lay at my door, it was not me.
I never touched the girl. I swear it before God. "
"May I come in, Brookes? Or shall we conduct this on your step, for the benefit of your neighbors?"
He stepped back and let me in.
The room was cold and close and smelled of damp wool and the herring he had evidently had for breakfast. He did not offer me a chair, which suited me. Standing kept my leg from seizing. Behind him, I could see a trunk, half-packed, its lid thrown back.
"You are leaving Edinburgh," I said.
"I have people in the north." He said it the way a hunted thing says the name of its burrow. "I should have gone years ago. I stayed because—" He stopped. "It does not matter why I stayed. I am going now. Today, if I can manage the trunk."
"Then I have come at an opportune moment."
"You have come," he said, with a flash of something that was almost spirit, "at the worst moment of my life, my lord, which I gather is a thing that follows you about." He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. "Forgive me. I am not—I have not been well."
I let the silence work. It was the most reliable instrument I owned. Most men cannot bear the weight of an unfilled pause. They will rush to fill it, and in the rushing, they say more than they intended. Brookes lasted perhaps ten seconds.
"What do you want from me?" he burst out. "I'll tell you it wasn't me a hundred times over, but you've not come four hundred miles to hear that. So say it. Say what you want and let me be gone."
"I want that night," I said. "All of it."
He sat down on the edge of the trunk, heavily, as though his legs had given way. “How much did Mainwaring tell you?”
“A great many things. He was careful to make none of them his fault. I should like to hear it from a man who was there. In the conservatory.”
That reached him. I had not been certain it would.
But guilt had a curious vanity to it. A man who had spent twelve years hating himself will sometimes resent being thought a mere bystander to his own damnation.
Brookes had not been in the garden relieving himself.
Brookes had been there. And some buried, ruined part of him would want that acknowledged now.
"It was a bet," he said, low. "You'll think us monsters.
But we were only four young men drunk past sense.
That is its own kind of monster, I suppose.
But it did not feel so at the time. It felt like sport.
" He stared at the floorboards. "William said—your brother said—there was a housemaid, a pretty one, who'd not say no to any of us.
He said it would be a kindness to her because we would pay for her time.
And then it became a wager, the way everything became a wager with William.
Who could—" He swallowed. "Who could have her first. There was money on it.
Five pounds. I remember the figure. I have tried for twelve years to forget the figure, and I cannot. Five pounds."
“But it was not a housemaid. It was Emily Driscoll,” I said. “How did you bring her to the conservatory?"
“We didn’t. She was already there smelling the night-blooming flowers. Something that only opened after dark.” He swallowed hard. “When we saw Emily, the wager changed. The housemaid would not prove a challenge, but young, innocent Emily would.” His voice had gone to gravel.
I kept my face as I have learned to keep it. But inside I was sickened by it. “Who suggested the change?”
“I can’t remember. On my life, I don’t.”
I didn’t believe him. “Go on.”
"She understood what we were about the moment the conservatory door was shut.
She tried to leave. One of us put himself between her and the door, and then—" He shut his eyes.
"And then it was not sport any longer. She fought.
I had not expected her to fight. God help me, I do not know what I had expected.
She screamed, and the glass roof took the sound and threw it up into the whole house, and I—"
He stopped.
“I threw up on some plant as she screamed, as her screams were muffled, as they turned to whimpers and sobs. I never lifted a finger to stop it.” He opened his eyes.
They were wet. "I'll not dress it as something better than it was.
You may judge me. You cannot judge me more harshly than I have judged myself, and I have had twelve years of it. "
"Who assaulted her?"
The change in him was immediate. The confession had been pouring out of him like water from a breached cask. But now, all at once, the cask sealed itself. His hands, which had been moving, went still in his lap.
"No," he said.
"Brookes—"
"No." He looked up at me, and beneath the fear, there was something harder, the bedrock a frightened man strikes when he has finally found the one thing he will not give up.
"She cried out a name. I heard it. I will carry it north and into the ground when the world is done with me, but I will not say it aloud.
Lydia Gray is dead, my lord. A clever, careful woman who never did a wrong thing in her life is dead in the street because she knew.
I have a wife. I'll not be the next notice in The Times. "
“You did not kill Lydia Gray."
"No," Brookes agreed. "But you are asking the question that killed her. I don’t want the next to be me."
It was, I conceded privately, not an unreasonable position.
I let it stand. I knew the difference between a man who was concealing and a man who had reached the floor of himself.
Brookes had reached his floor. I would get no name from him.
Pressing for it would cost me what else he had—which was, in the event, the thing I had truly come for.
"Then we will leave the young men where they lie," I said. "Tell me about the others. The ones who came after the screams. The older men."
Something eased in him, and curdled at the same time—relief at the change of ground, and a fresh dread at where the new ground lay. "You know about them."
"I know what Mainwaring saw. Three men who arrived together after the screams. My father. A man in black he took for a clergyman. And a third. Immaculately dressed. Not as old as my father. Mainwaring could not name them. Can you?"
For a long moment, Brookes said nothing. Then he laughed, once, without any humor in it at all.
"You don't know," he said softly. "After all this time, you don't know who they were.”
"That is why I am asking."
"Brookes's mouth twisted. "Grimshaw. The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw. Your father's clergyman."
Not a surprise, but good to have it confirmed.
"And the third man," I said. "The one who went to the girl."
"I saw him only as I went through the door.
A glance. But I have that glance still." Brookes's gaze had gone distant, fixed on something twelve years behind him.
"Black coat. White at the throat. I took him for a parson too, at first. But then I saw him cross to her.
No parson alive ever moved like that. He did not kneel to comfort her.
He took hold of her. He was—" He searched for it, and arrived, as Mainwaring had arrived, at the same flat and dreadful word.
"Practiced. He had the look of a man arriving at work he had done before. "
"Did you learn his name?"
"No. He was nothing to me." Brookes spread his hands.
“The next day I left for London and then, eventually, came to Edinburgh.
I have spent twelve years making very certain that I learned nothing further about a single soul who was under that roof.
Ignorance has been my whole estate. It is the only thing that has kept me alive, and even that, it seems, is failing me now. "
I believed him. That was the maddening thing—I believed every word. Brookes did not know the man's name. He had been running ever since that night. His ignorance was as complete as it was useless to me.
But I did not need Brookes to name the third man.
I already had the name. Aubrey Strode.
Harkness had given it to me before I left London, dug out of the registers and the directories and the quiet enquiries a careful solicitor knows how to make: the medical man whose signature appeared, year upon year, on the documents that committed women to my father's charitable establishment.
A physician of standing. Rooms on Gower Street.
The street where Lydia Gray had lived. The street where, on a clear afternoon, she had stepped—or been made to step—in front of a carriage and died of it.
"You have told me more than you know," I said instead.
"I have told you nothing you can use," he said, with a bitter accuracy that did him more credit than anything else he had said.
"Croome is dead. Your brother is dead. Your father is dead.
The girl is gone wherever girls like her go.
And I will be in the Highlands by week's end. I will not come back. If you are wise, you will not look for me.” He rose from the trunk.
"I am sorry for Lydia Gray. I am sorry for the girl.
I am sorry, if it signifies, for you. You wear that night on your name.
You did not earn it. I have always known it, but I never once spoke up.
That is the whole of my courage, my lord.
To express regret to the one man who already knows. "
It was, God help him, an honest summation. I had heard generals give worse accounts of themselves.
"You will not be troubled by me again," I said. "Go north. Burn Mainwaring's letter. And if any other man comes to your door asking after that night—any man at all—you will not open it."
He understood me. The color, what little there was, went out of his face entirely.
"You think he knows about me."
"I think a man who would silence Lydia Gray would not overlook the others who were in the house." I took up my hat. "I think your trunk is the most sensible object in this room. Finish packing it."
I left him there, among his half-folded things, in the grey northern light. I did not shake his hand. There was nothing in it I wished to take with me.
By the time I left Brookes’s quarters, my leg was beginning to betray me.
I caught a cab directly to Waverley Station, where I planned to take the afternoon train to King’s Cross.
Somewhere between the jolting streets and the station platform, the ache sharpened into something vicious and hot beneath the old scar tissue.
The refreshment room provided tea and a plate of cold beef. I forced down enough of both to satisfy necessity rather than hunger before boarding the afternoon express south.
The journey passed in fragments. Rain streaking the windows.
The rhythmic violence of iron wheels over rails.
Sleep arriving in brief uneven stretches before pain dragged me back awake again.
By the time the train pulled into King’s Cross close to eleven o’clock, my leg felt as though someone had buried a blade deep into the joint and twisted it slowly for the better part of eight hours.
For one humiliating moment, I was not entirely certain I could stand.
But London moved around me with its usual merciless indifference. Porters shouting. Steam hissing beneath the lamps. Carriages rattling beyond the station entrance.
So I stood. Somehow, I crossed the platform and, using what remained of my pride and very nearly the last of my strength, climbed into a waiting cab.
I scarcely remembered the drive home. Only Dawson opening the front door with immediate concern darkening his expression.
“I am perfectly capable of reaching my bed without assistance,” I informed him before he could offer any.
Whether he believed me or not, he stepped aside and let me proceed with my pain.