A Bad End
“Sir?” I knelt beside him, setting my basket on the ground. “Sir? Are you all right?”
Sniffing the air above him, I caught no scent of drink. Still, it was the most likely explanation. I’d found Jack like this once on the side of the road in front of our cottage; thankfully I’d managed to rouse him before any of our neighbors noticed.
The man lay on his stomach, head turned to one side, his hat crushed and half covering his face. Heart thumping, I reached out and gently lifted the hat.
I snatched my hand back with a gasp, upsetting the basket of scones. The whites of the man’s eyes—open and staring—glowed in the silver light of the moon. Something dark smeared his cheek. Blood?
Holding a fist to my chest, I struggled for breath.
Then it struck me that I knew this man. The customer with the newspaper. The customer with the magpie in his teapot.
Before I could recover enough to think what to do, I noticed another movement beyond the wall.
“Hello?” I called in a reedy voice. “Is anyone there? Please help!”
No answer came. A curtain of cloud fell back over the moon, leaving me alone in the dark with a dead man.
I darted up, lifted my skirt, and ran—stumbling, tears streaming down my face—back to The Magpie.
Settled in front of the stove again with another cup of tea—this time with a blanket, too, and no mind for reading about a girl who dreamed up imaginary terrors—I tried to attend to the constable’s questions.
Fetched from his supper table, Mr. Hilliard sat in the armchair across from me, his own cup of tea untouched. He was about the age my father would have been and more well-to-do, his dark hair and mustache groomed and greased with care, skin grayed from the shock he’d received this evening.
“You saw no one else in the area, Miss—er—” He looked down at his pocket diary, where he had scribbled a few notes. “Miss Penrose.” Glancing up again, he said, “There are Penroses aplenty on and around these moorlands, but with that hair I reckon you must be kin to Jack Penrose.”
Mr. Hilliard was one of the bosses from Wheal Enys, Jack’s mine. “Yes, sir. Jack is my brother.”
He nodded and leaned forward in his chair. The door of the coal stove stood open, and firelight glinted in his keen, dark eyes. “So you saw no one else in the area where you discovered the body?”
Pulling the blanket tighter around my shoulders, I shook my head. “Just a stag on the heath.”
His lips curved down. “Indeed? You’re certain that’s what it was?”
“Fairly so. I saw antlers.”
Mr. Hilliard blinked a couple of times, thinking, then jotted something else down in his diary. “And you say you don’t know this gentleman?”
“I don’t, sir. But as I mentioned, he was here in the tearoom this afternoon.”
“How did he seem to you, then?”
I exchanged a look with Mrs. Moyle, who stood behind the constable. She nodded her encouragement.
“He seemed all right to me. But I didn’t speak with him other than to get his order. He just read his newspaper and drank his tea.”
“Didn’t mention his name?”
“Not to me, sir.”
“Mmm.” More scribbling.
When Mr. Hilliard first arrived at The Magpie, he’d been sour-faced—grumpy, no doubt, about missing his supper. He’d asked me where to find the body, and he’d left straightaway, warning me to stay put so that he could question me. Half an hour later he returned, sour mood turned sober.
“You don’t believe anyone’s killed the poor man, do you, Mr. Hilliard?” asked Mrs. Moyle.
“Something certainly has killed him, ma’am, but I think an animal of some kind is more likely. The wound is ragged, like it was made by teeth rather than a weapon.” I shuddered, and Mrs. Moyle’s cheeks lost their rosy color. “We’ll have a better idea once he’s been examined by Mr. Perry.”
Mr. Perry was Roche’s surgeon. He’d seen to Da when he was dying with the miner’s lung sickness. Then Mum when she started coughing, too, though from a different cause.
The front door swung open, and a younger man came in. Like Mr. Hilliard, he was dressed for office work, and he carried a leather case.
“What’ve you got there, Gibbs?” asked Mr. Hilliard.
The man held up the case. “I found it on the heath, sir.”
The constable stood. “Let’s have a look, then.”
Gibbs set the bag on one of the tearoom’s white tables. Mr. Hilliard joined him and opened the bag’s clasp. Reaching inside, he drew out a handful of papers, then held them close to the lamp resting on the table.
His eyes moved over one paper, and then another. “Tregarrick,” he said at last.
I sat up and Mrs. Moyle gasped. “The master of Roche Rock?” she said.
Still squinting at the papers, Mr. Hilliard said, “Looks like the fellow was his solicitor. One Henry Roscoe. You said you found this on the heath, Gibbs?”
Gibbs nodded. “Just the other side of the wall, sir.”
Mr. Hilliard looked at me. “You said you didn’t go straight home after work, Miss Penrose, but sat awhile with Mrs. Moyle?”
I nodded. “For a couple of hours.”
“Doing what, may I ask?”
I was about to answer “reading” when I recalled the tea leaves, and my conversation with Mrs. Moyle.
My heart sped up as I glanced at her. Should I tell him?
He was bound to think it strange, or worse.
Some would call it the devil’s work, my employer had said.
But what if it could help him figure out what had happened to poor Mr. Roscoe?
Mrs. Moyle spoke up first. “We’re a widow and a young woman whose only relation works in the clay pits. Which means we’re lonely, Mr. Hilliard, and we keep each other company sometimes.”
He pondered this a moment. “Well, two hours would have given Mr. Roscoe time to meet with his client. After that he may have set out for Carbis—maybe to the inn there—which would have put him on your route, Miss Penrose.” He looked at Gibbs. “We’d better go and have a word with Tregarrick.”
The man’s eyes opened wide. “Roche Rock? Tonight, Mr. Hilliard?”
The mining boss raised one brow. “We aren’t talking about poachers, Gibbs. His solicitor’s been killed less than half a mile from his door. Tregarrick might have been the last person to see the fellow alive. Moreover, if some rabid animal is on the loose, he could be at risk himself.”
Gibbs swallowed. “Yes, sir. Only I don’t think they welcome visitors there.”
Mr. Hilliard heaved a sigh. “For the love of God, man. Stay here with the women and the fire, then, and I’ll see to it myself.”
If this taunt was intended to stiffen his man’s backbone, it failed entirely. Gibbs looked hugely relieved, and Mrs. Moyle offered him a cup of tea.
Mr. Hilliard picked up the leather case and turned to me. “After I see Tregarrick, I’m going to fetch your brother to walk home with you. Where might I find him?”
I knew Jack must still be at the tavern, else he’d probably already have been to The Magpie looking for me and his supper. I didn’t like saying this to one of his bosses but couldn’t see a way around it. “I reckon he’s at The Wolf’s Head, Mr. Hilliard.”
His grunt suggested he wasn’t surprised to hear it. “All right. If I don’t find him, I’ll stop back by and take you home myself. No going off on your own, hear? It’s not safe.”
“No, sir.”
I wished Gibbs had worked up his courage to go along with the constable.
I was quite badly shaken, and desperate to speak more with Mrs. Moyle about Mr. Roscoe and his tea leaves.
To make matters worse, Gibbs became a chatterpie after two cups of tea.
You’d never know he’d just been out fumbling around on the heath in the dark looking for a dead man’s personal effects.
Mrs. Moyle’s worried gaze landed on me several times, and she did her best to hold his attention so I wouldn’t have to pretend to be interested in his conversation.
After about half an hour of this, Jack appeared.
He had not met with Mr. Hilliard but had come on his own, sullen about his supper, after finding our cottage empty.
Mrs. Moyle brought Jack tea and bread with jam while I told him what had happened. He and Gibbs knew each other from work—Gibbs was a clerk at the mine office—which may have kept Jack from being as sharp as he would have liked.
Jack had not always been ill-tempered. It was just that he wasn’t cut out for mine work, and he’d never had a choice.
Da had mined tin on Goss Moor when he was a boy, like his own father, and then gone to work in the clay pits when they came along.
Jack, too, was only a boy when Da first took him to Wheal Enys.
Growing up, my twin brother had been gentle and happy. He’d loved making up pretend games involving the fairies, and Robin Hood, and especially King Arthur, who’d lived in a castle in nearby Tintagel and hunted on Goss Moor. But after the mine, Jack grew less gentle and less happy every day.
When lung disease took Da one harsh winter, and Mum so wore herself out caring for him that winter fever took her, only Jack was left to provide for the two of us.
That was when he took to drinking. Seeing what it was doing to him, I meant to go to the mines, too.
Girls could get work turning clay in the drying buildings or hammering ore in the copper mines.
Jack wouldn’t hear of it, though. Said it wouldn’t mean he’d have to work any less, and I had enough of a job in keeping house for us.
He hadn’t wanted me to go to The Magpie, either, but when I told him I’d let go of the idea if he stopped spending every night at The Wolf’s Head, he quit arguing about it.
“You’ll have to give it up now, Mina,” said Jack as we set out for home by the meager light of his tin lantern.
His words were softer now that the tea and toast had sobered him and taken the edge off his hunger. Still, they frightened me more than the shadows the sputtering candle had set dancing.
“The Magpie?” I said, unable to steady the tremor in my voice.
“Hilliard’s a windbag, but he had the right of it. You can’t be out on the road with some rabid animal loose.”
“No, Jack,” I pleaded. “Mrs. Moyle needs me.”
“She’ll find someone else easily enough.”
“No,” I repeated with more force. “I’ll make sure to be home well before dark from now on.”
Thick, dark-red brows lifted over eyes the same pale shade of green as my own. “The light of day didn’t come between this fella and a bad end, did it?”
We were just passing the spot where the body had lain, though the constable’s men had removed it by now.
I was scared of whatever had killed Mr. Roscoe, but not as scared as I was of leaving my job.
I didn’t know what would become of me if I had to go back to the way things were before.
The silence of our empty cottage—the remembrances of what we’d lost there—might crush the life out of me.
“What if I wait there for you every night?” I said. “Mrs. Moyle won’t mind. I can read her books until you get there. Then you can walk me home.”
Jack scowled. “Both of us have better things to do than—”
“Better things?” I snapped, glaring at him. “Like drinking at The Wolf’s Head?”
“Now, I work hard, Mina, I shouldn’t have to tell you that. And I didn’t choose it, any more than you chose to take on the things our mother used to do. I’m the eldest, and she would want you—”
“Eldest?” I let out a bark of laughter. Jack had emerged first from our mother’s womb, and he never let me forget it.
“Mum and Da would want you to do as I say! Now you find yourself a husband, and then you can—”
“Do what he says instead?” Loneliness had turned my thoughts to it many a time.
But any man who would marry me would likely be a miner, too, and he might not want me at The Magpie any more than Jack did.
It wasn’t as if I’d been turning down offers, anyway.
There were plenty of girls in the parish with dark hair, or flaxen, and faces not covered in freckles.
With easy smiles, soft eyes, and blunter tongues.
“I’m tired, Mina,” Jack said, hard and flat. “And I want my supper. I’ll say no more about it.”
We were home too late for me to do more than cobble together a meal.
I made pasties every morning for the tearoom and for Jack to take to work, but I always held one out for when I returned from work.
Tonight I halved my pasty and served it with slices of apple from the tree out back and cheese from the market, along with the last of the hevva cake from the night before.
As we ate, I thought of a new argument to try. It occurred to me that Jack might need reminding that we were probably the only mining family in the parish no longer cooking over a hearth fire, thanks to Mrs. Moyle. She’d given me the cookstove she’d replaced after opening the tearoom.
But Jack finished quick and went straight to his bed—the one that had belonged to our mother and father, behind a folding screen downstairs. I left the washing for the morning and went up to the loft and my own bed.
Tucked under the covers, I prayed for sleep.
Instead, I felt tears gather under my eyelids and squeeze onto my cheeks.
I kept seeing Mr. Roscoe’s face in my mind—in the shop with his newspaper and tea, then on the heath with his staring eyes and blood-smeared cheek.
The way his head had been turned, and with the twist of collar and coat at his neck, I hadn’t seen the wound.
I was grateful for that now, though my imagination was doing plenty on its own.
Had it truly been an animal? What animal was big enough to take down a full-grown man like that? As far as I knew, the only wolves to be found in Cornwall were the ones in stories, and no fox could ever manage such a thing. I supposed it must have been a large dog.
Shuddering, I turned my thoughts to The Magpie, and Jack’s decision.
In a way, I dreaded going back there. I wished to see no more auguries.
I could always empty the teapots without looking into them, of course, but would I really be able to?
What if I missed something that could help someone?
Yet what help had I been to Mr. Roscoe? I recalled Mum and her tea guests and wondered—had she been able to help them?
Weariness gradually slowed my thoughts, unraveling them until they no longer made any kind of sense.
Still, as I was dropping off, there was a moment when a final clear thought did come to me: Though I had failed to make Jack understand about The Magpie—in losing our parents, we’d also lost the sympathy of feeling we’d shared all our lives—it was impossible for me to do what he wanted.
I fell asleep wondering what the consequences would be.