Page 98 of Fire Must Burn

‘By whom?’ asked Gwen.

‘Who do you think?’ asked Mrs Dorter. ‘I grew up as a servant in a servant family in a large house set away from civilization, and Lord Pickard watched me grow up and waited, licking his chops, until he couldn’t wait any more. I had no say in the matter, and my parents were too beholden to make any fuss about it.’

‘What about Mr Dorter?’ asked Gwen. ‘What happened when he came along?’

‘There never was a Mr Dorter,’ she said. ‘When Mum and Dad grew too old and were pensioned off, I took over, and the Pickards called me that to give me some respectability. There were no men on the staff who were brave enough to try to pry me away from Pickard’s grasp, and the few in town who knew my situation considered me damaged goods, so I was trapped there, kept at his beck and call. And it became even worse.’

‘How?’ prompted Gwen, guessing and dreading the answer.

‘When Kevin turned fourteen, his father decided he needed proper instruction in manly behaviour, and why take the lad to a bawdy house in the city when good old Dorty was right there for the taking?’

‘How horrible,’ said Gwen.

‘Yes, well, Kevin didn’t stick with me for long,’ she said. ‘Once he was up and running, the rich pretty boy became accustomed to the local girls falling for him. And fall they did, one after another, but he tired of them quickly. I became accustomed to sobering up many a confused girl after she would wake there, not sure where she was or what had happened. And I turned away more than a few tearful discards when they would show up on our doorstep, begging to see him again, hoping for another chance. He was a precocious littlemonster, was our Kevin. And when he brought Bruce into his orbit, the two of them became even worse.’

She sighed.

‘I say all of this to give you an idea of the hellish situation I was trapped in,’ she said. ‘Not to justify what I did, but to explain it.’

‘What you did?’ repeated Iris. ‘You mean to Nancy? You did something to her?’

‘I saw her as my means of escape,’ said Mrs Dorter. ‘She was different because she came from outside the world ruled by the Pickards. And she was a Cambridge girl, so I thought maybe that meant she had more to her than all those frightened local girls. So when the opportunity came, I used her.’

‘How?’

‘She showed up at my door that night, sobbing and hysterical. Instead of telling her to go crawl into a room, lock the door and sober up until she could think straight again, I took her into my own room and comforted her. I didn’t even know I was capable of giving comfort to another person, but somehow I managed with her, and she responded. She told me what had happened to her, that she had been violated and wanted to go to the police. I told her that nothing could be done right then, that the only constables who would be on duty wouldn’t give a fig about a girl who went willingly to the Pickard house to drink and spend the night, then complain about what happened. But I told her there was one honest policeman in Kimbolton I could go to. I told her to write down everything that had happened and that I would protect her for the night, get her to safety in the morning and then bring the letter to him and see that she got justice. She believed me. She wrote the letter, I witnessed it, then I let her sleep in my bed while I went to collect her belongings from the master suite.

‘I woke her early the next morning. The only person she would trust to drive her to the railway station was Tony. I roused him, told him that she had an emergency and was called away, and that he was the only one sober enough to drive her. I told him to keep quiet as the others were sleeping off the previous night’s drinking.

‘I told Nancy that I would take her letter to the policeman after the weekend. Only I didn’t, of course. I saved it for myself, to use when I saw fit. She called a few times, asking what happened, why they weren’t doing anything. I told her to be patient, that these things took time. But finally, I told her the truth: that there was no possible way that the police would act on the word of a silly little minx like her against the local lords and masters, and that she should have known better.’

She glanced over at the stove. The fire had burned down. She got up, took the poker and prodded the remaining embers until they fell apart.

‘I didn’t know that she’d go and throw herself in the river after that,’ she said. ‘But that ended up working out better for me, didn’t it? I had to wait for the father to come back from his travels. It was too late for the dead girl, but that letter could still ruin his precious son and heir.’

‘So you blackmailed Lord Pickard,’ said Gwen.

‘Pickard? No point in going to him about it,’ said Mrs Dorter bitterly. ‘If it was Kevin she would have happily gone along with everything, wouldn’t she? She thought she had a chance with him, just like they all did at first, until he got bored and sent them packing. No, it was the other one.’

‘Bruce,’ said Iris.

‘Yes, little Brucie, who usually got the leavings from Kevin, only he didn’t want to wait that night. His girl had begged off from that particular party, hadn’t she? So there he was, all alone, and his best friend wasn’t about to let him go without. So Kevin gave her to Brucie. Held her down when she didn’t want to go along with it. Held her down while his best friend satisfied himself with her, then they took turns, and when they were both spent, that’s when the screaming started. Maybe it started before that, but with two of them it was easy enough to stop her screams. Every detail of what happened to her was in what she wrote. When I read it, it sounded like one long scream. And it sounded that way to Bruce’s father when I brought it to him later that summer.’

‘My God,’ whispered Gwen.

‘He paid for my silence and my escape here. I told everyoneit was Lord Pickard’s generosity after my years of devoted service that allowed me to retire to a life as an innkeeper.’

‘You could have saved her,’ said Iris.

‘So could you,’ said Mrs Dorter.

‘I didn’t know what had happened.’

‘You knew,’ said Mrs Dorter. ‘Kevin told you by not telling you when you sat with him the next morning in the breakfast room.’

‘You were listening.’

‘I was listening. So were you. And you stayed. You stayed, and you ate his food and drank his liquor and danced all night with him and his friends and all of you pretended to worship him.’