Chapter Twenty-One #2
Something about the way Jonathan phrased this—Are we to believe—encouraged Juliet to question further.
“If so, why did she not say this precisely?” When both Jonathan and Mr. Lucas turned to her, Juliet elaborated: “If she intended to claim responsibility, she might have done so explicitly. She might have explained what drove her to the act, for I still know not why she would have wished to harm Mr. Hurst. If Mrs. Lofton felt guilty enough to take her own life, why did she not bother to explain?”
“Despair, perhaps,” said Mr. Lucas.
Yet Jonathan, more attuned to Juliet’s thinking in this matter, said, “It is a good point. Not dispositive, but we must consider it.”
Mr. Lucas grimaced. “May we first have her body taken down?”
An unlucky two of the servants had the task of doing this.
It appeared that Mrs. Lofton had stood atop the high bed to tie the makeshift rope around the chandelier, then put her head through the noose and stepped away from it.
Yet as the servants worked, Jonathan murmured, “Does not that seem high to you? Difficult for Mrs. Lofton to reach?”
“Difficult, yes,” Juliet said. “Not impossible.” Yet this detail bothered her also.
Conversations they had had with a certain Dr. Hitchcock on a prior case had taught Juliet enough to know that the phenomenon of rigor mortis began an hour or two after demise, not fully taking hold until nearly half a day.
Mrs. Lofton showed no sign of it. So this had in fact happened very shortly before Mrs. Bingley had discovered the aftermath.
(It had occurred to Juliet that, if Mrs. Lofton’s body had been stiff, Mr. Lofton must have been suspected, for he alone would have been with her through the night.)
“I do not like this,” Jonathan murmured. “I cannot say why. Not—of course I do not like seeing any such thing as this—but it seems an odd end to the matter.”
The servants had begun wrapping Mrs. Lofton in a sheet, the makeshift noose still around her neck. Juliet put out her hand. “Wait. First, before you take her away, you should remove the noose.”
This was done, and Juliet determinedly knelt down beside the body to look closer. Immediately she spotted the lie. “Mr. Darcy, do you see?”
“Finger marks,” Jonathan said, gesturing for Mr. Lucas’s sake at the unmistakable imprints of fingers on Mrs. Lofton’s neck. “Thus she was strangled and killed before she was hanged from the chandelier!”
“My word,” Mr. Lucas breathed. “But—the note?”
Jonathan remembered the raillery of Mrs. Hurst and Mrs. Allerdyce as well as Juliet did, for he replied, “Mrs. Lofton’s handwriting was full of blots, difficult to read, as was well-known. This could be imitated more believably, perhaps, than more regular script.”
Juliet realized the rest. “This may be why the note is so short. A longer missive might have betrayed the difference in handwriting, regardless of blots. A shorter one would be more likely to pass muster.”
Mr. Lucas appeared grim, as well he might. “I must report this third murder to those downstairs.”
“Wait,” Juliet said. The thoughts formed in her mind almost as she spoke. “Do not tell them. Let them believe that this was an act of self-murder for a while longer.”
“But—” Mr. Lucas’s consternation was considerable. “There is still a killer among you!”
Jonathan, however, understood her immediately. “Yes, Mr. Lucas. If that murderer believes we have accepted the lie, this may lead to more carelessness about the truth. Much may be revealed.”
That day was perhaps the saddest of all those Netherfield had recently known. Mr. Hurst’s death had resulted in shockingly little grief, and Becky, mostly unknown to those upstairs, had been regretted more in the abstract.
Mrs. Lofton, however, had been sister to Mrs. Hurst, Mrs. Allerdyce, and Mr. Bingley.
Mrs. Allerdyce was quite overcome, and her husband laid aside his recent grievances to be at her side; her daughters, though only somewhat mournful for an aunt who had never made much time for them, were not so upset with their mother as to fail to condole with her in her time of need.
Mr. Bingley wept openly for his youngest sibling, whom he remembered as an infant he had held in his arms. He did so in the arms of his wife, who grieved for Mrs. Lofton more sincerely than the relationship had truly deserved, and then in conversation with Mr. Darcy, who came immediately to support his friend.
Mrs. Hurst and Mr. Lofton also appeared grief-stricken, but kept to themselves more, not even coming down to greet the Brookses when Mr. Brooks came to minister to them in the time of travail.
Juliet, who sat with Jonathan alone in the drawing room—with the door still open for propriety’s sake, though no one could possibly take any notice of them at the moment—murmured, “It cannot be either of the Brookses, then.”
He nodded. “No. The other murders were set into motion in the dead of night, when either of the Brookses could conceivably have entered Netherfield with the aid of an accomplice. This took place in the morning, after Mr. Lofton arose. Mr. and Mrs. Brooks could not possibly have avoided being seen at that hour.”
“I have been thinking,” said Juliet, “about Mrs. Bingley’s cry of distress this morning, and about the little peacock ornament on the table in the hall. It fell over amid the fuss, just as it had the morning of Mr. Hurst’s death.”
Jonathan said, “I have been thinking about Aunt Kitty’s new gloves.”
She knew then that they had reached the same conclusion. The murderer remained a mystery no longer.
“Yet we have no proof.” Jonathan grimaced. “We can demonstrate that Mrs. Lofton was a case of murder, not self-murder. But we cannot demonstrate who did it, not to the satisfaction of a court of law.”
Juliet thought hard, until an idea came to her. This plan seemed to her to involve much risk, but it seemed their only path to justice. “If we have no proof, then we shall have to force the murderer to create it.”
She went to the nearby writing desk, took up pen and ink and a piece of the fine stationery the Bingleys shared with all. Jonathan came to her side as she wrote:
I know what you have done. I would tell Mr. Lucas all, and your life would then be forfeit. However, I believe that we can benefit each other. If you will meet me at ten o’clock this evening at the Grecian folly, we shall come to terms.—Juliet Tilney
“You have signed it?” Jonathan said.
“My position is known to be compromised,” Juliet replied. “I am understood to be desperate. That is why the note will be believed.” How great was her satisfaction in the moment when she realized her disgrace could also prove to be a weapon for truth.
The night proved to be the coldest since early March.
Juliet put on the warmest pelisse she had brought and wound a scarf around her throat—though the memory of the fabric around Mrs. Lofton’s neck gave her momentary pause regarding the scarf.
From the drawing room, she could hear the continuing murmur of conversation: The Brookses had come to condole with all those at Netherfield just after the evening meal, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would depart the house until well into the night.
Juliet considered this for the best, as it comforted her to know how many others were close at hand.
She took up a small lamp and went outside to the folly half an hour early, lest she be unpleasantly accosted on her way. Before ten minutes had passed, Juliet had begun to shiver, but this was from dread as much as the chill in the air.
Pacing back and forth kept her warmer, and helped to pass the seemingly interminable time, until the moment she heard one of the back doors creaking.
Juliet shifted so that she faced the sound, and so that her back was to one of the thicker columns of the folly.
Footsteps came closer and closer, until the figure came into her lamp’s sphere of light.
She said, “Good evening, Mr. Lofton.”
His congeniality had vanished. He said only, “What do you want?”
“I want one hundred pounds,” Juliet said, choosing the amount at random. “Give me this, in notes, and I shall leave this part of the country together, to begin again someplace new. What I know will depart with me.”
“You will have to allow me to visit my bank,” said Mr. Lofton. “If there is one word from you in that amount of time, it will go the worse for you.”
The tone of his voice frightened Juliet, for she knew what he meant by this: If three persons could fall prey to him, so could a fourth.
However, she kept her head enough to recognize that as yet Mr. Lofton had admitted nothing.
He might claim that he paid her only to keep her from spreading scurrilous rumors, or even out of pity for her plight, rather than to prevent the revelation of the truth.
He turned as though to go. Quickly Juliet said, “Do not you wish to know how I found you out?”
This was sufficient to stop Mr. Lofton, though still he said nothing—only glared.
“First,” Juliet said, “there was the matter of the peacock.”
“The peacock?”
“The little ornament on the table in the hall upstairs. Mrs. Bingley had noticed that it had been knocked over on the morning of Mr. Hurst’s death.
I knocked it over myself this morning when I ran to the bedroom you had shared with your wife.
It is heavier than it appears, however. Only my collision with the table disturbed it, and it made a thud when it did so. ”
“What has that to do with anything?” Mr. Lofton demanded.
“The table sits between the doors of your room and the Hursts’ room.
Your dressing gown—which I saw the morning Becky’s body was discovered—has long, heavy tassels.
Had you been running from the breakfast room after placing the arsenic in the coffee cup, you could have collided with the table yourself, or one of the tassels of your dressing gown could have knocked the peacock over.
” Juliet gripped the lamp more tightly, afraid it might show her to be trembling.
“Nobody else would have passed that way. I even believe the thud might have been what awoke Mr. Hurst so unusually early that morning. Had he not been disturbed, the first coffee drinker to come down for breakfast would almost certainly have been your wife.”
“Unless it was she who placed the poison and knocked over this trinket,” Mr. Lofton retorted. He had begun to look as though he would like to keep his one hundred pounds. “Did she not admit to it, even if not in so many words?”
Juliet shook her head. “If Mrs. Lofton had placed the poison, she would have had no idea who else would drink the fatal dose. Nor did she have any reason to wish disgrace upon the house for its own sake.”
Mr. Lofton scowled at her, but he said nothing. Once again, she thought he might depart without incriminating himself.
In desperation, she said, “And, of course, there is the matter of the finger marks on the neck of your wife. Mr. Lucas, the magistrate—he lacks familiarity with strangulation, he does not know—but I know. The bruises on your late wife’s neck will prove it.”
A long moment of silence followed, and Mr. Lofton said, “Would you like to know how I strangled my wife? Exactly how? Then I shall show you!”
He came at her, hands raised, and Juliet cried out.
Yet even as she did so, Mr. Lucas and the constables emerged from behind the folly, where they had secreted themselves, Jonathan only one step after.
As Juliet went to Jonathan’s side, Mr. Lucas proclaimed, “We have all heard you confess to one murder, Mr. Lofton, but I dare say you shall swing for all three.”