Page 17 of Linenfold (The Alice Chronicles #4)

Alice knocks on the door of the two French girls but receives a solemn negative.

They have not seen Lord Hardcastle. The search in the servants’ areas and the rest of the house is similarly fruitless.

Outside, while Allan joins Grace to search the dairy court, herb garden and nearby areas, and Joe with Angus covers woodshed and stables and the path towards Freemans, Lord Hardcastle’s men are sent to the front to cover the clearing and the belt of trees out as far as the road.

Alice and Philip check the kitchen court buildings together.

The barn is next but there is no sign of His Lordship in there.

With none of the searchers yet returned, Alice veers away towards the drying bushes behind the stables.

Might as well check there, though why His Lordship would … and stops dead.

‘Philip?’

He is behind her in a moment. ‘Christ’s nails!’ He pushes past to kneel by the prone figure of his uncle lying face down in the soft mud of the vegetable garden.

There is something pathetically sad about him lying there, his dark hair shot through with grey, ruffled and unkempt, the long-gown of embroidered velvet that he wore last night spread in soft folds around him, mud-smeared on the back, and beneath that, his nightshirt.

Both gown and nightshirt are rucked up to the knees, exposing his calves, his soles.

His hands are clenched and muddied where they have clawed the ground, but most shocking is that his face is resting so deep in the mire that only the back of his head shows above the surface.

Philip stoops down but it is a moment before he can master himself to pull at his uncle’s shoulder to lift him.

The mud makes a sucking noise as it gives up the face.

‘Oh, no!’ Alice gags and gags again, her stomach trying to eject contents that are not there. The entire front of his head is plastered in sludge, eye sockets filled, nostrils blocked, lips drawn back, teeth gaping wide around a mouth plugged with mire.

She grasps at a drying bush for support, breathing hard, and the baby chooses that moment to kick and wriggle within her.

‘Oh, sweeting, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ she whispers, cradling her unborn child as though it were crying for comfort.

Alice takes a deep breath and then another, and steels herself to turn back to the grisly sight.

After a moment Philip rests the body down again and looks up at her. In the dawn light his face is bloodless, the tendons of his neck standing out. Inconsequentially she thinks, I probably look the same.

‘He was alive!’ Philip’s voice grates with horror and disbelief. ‘Desperate for air. They pushed his face into this !’ His face screws up in angry remorse. ‘And I wasn’t there to protect him!’

‘You expected something like this?’

‘No, but I should have done.’

‘You know who did it?’

‘Did this? Who else but a cold, pitiless heart.’

‘How could any human being kill another in this way?’ she asks. Against her will, her gaze is drawn back to the body. The horror of how he died overrides clear thought.

Philip turns to her. ‘We can’t leave him like this, it’s indecent, disrespectful. We’ll place him on a litter and take him to his chamber.’

Alice pulls herself together. ‘I think we must leave him as he is for the coroner to see,’ she says gently. ‘He has to determine cause of death.’

‘I could tell him that. They put a foot on his back and held his face down in the earth! He was aware! He fought to breathe!’

‘There will be a coroner’s jury, an investigating justice.’

‘I’ll take him to London and do it there,’ he says. ‘They’ll hound his killer into the open—’ He halts as she shakes her head. ‘What?’

‘It happened here, so it will be investigated here. For your uncle’s sake, and yours no less, this must be seen to be fittingly done.’

‘ My sake?’

‘If you take him away, albeit for the best of reasons, accusations could fly.’

Reluctantly Philip nods.

‘We will cover him with a sheet,’ she says, ‘and one of my men will stand sentry.’ Ned, she thinks.

He will take no nonsense from anyone approaching.

The sheet she brings from the house covers the body from head to toe and Philip anchors it with heavy stones he finds around the dug-over patch.

Ned, newly arrived from his strip, is installed to stand guard, and Alice and Philip return to the house.

Passing through the kitchen, ‘What of Master Cranley?’ she asks. ‘We must give him this news.’

As though with the same thought, Philip is already heading for the stairs. ‘You don’t have to come, mistress,’ he tells her.

‘Of course I shall.’ This is her house, these people are under her care.

At the door of Sam’s chamber Philip pauses, knocks. ‘Master Secretary?’ He opens the door. The fire is not lit, though the air wafts warm with the slight stuffiness of a closed chamber. The secretary lies on his side, turned away from the door, hunched under the covers.

‘Cranley?’ Philip goes round to the far side of the bed and reaches to rouse the Secretary.

‘Cranley.’ The secretary stirs, pushing himself onto an elbow to peer up at Philip.

His plain night cap is pulled close over crown and ear.

Greasy tails of grey hair protrude and lie on his shoulders.

The cap strings tied under his chin are buried in the wispiness of beard.

A strip of loose wrinkles peeps above the neck of his night shift.

‘Have I overslept?’ he asks, castigating himself even as he goes to push back the bed clothes.

‘I should stay where you are, Cranley,’ Philip advises.

‘His Lordship will not be pleased. Amongst all my transgressions—’

‘Sir,’ Alice interrupts, ‘we have ill news to impart.’

He swings round, clutches the coverlet to his chin. ‘Out! Out, I say, thou Jezebel! Thou—’

‘Cranley!’ Philip roars.

‘Calm yourself, Master Secretary!’ Alice cries and indicates Philip. ‘Listen to your master.’

‘You must prepare yourself, Cranley,’ he says. ‘Sorry I am to say it, but His Lordship has been murdered during the night.’

‘His Lordship?’ He looks from Philip to her and back to Philip. ‘Murdered?’

‘Murdered,’ Philip confirms. ‘We have just found him.’

‘Murdered,’ the secretary repeats again. ‘Oh! Ooh …’ his eyes move back and forth, unseeing. ‘My Lord of—’ and he falls limp across the pillows.

‘Pull yourself together, Cranley!’ Philip orders, but the secretary makes no response. ‘Cranley?’

Alice leans to draw back an eyelid. The eye stares. She feels the side of the neck. The heart’s echo is present though feeble. ‘I think he’s swooned.’

Philip straightens. ‘Poor fellow,’ he says. ‘I was too bald in giving him the news.’

She draws up the coverlet to his chin. ‘I will send warm ale to restore him when he comes to his wits. Will you stay with him? I must get word to Sir Malcolm Wipley, he’s the coroner.

And someone to the justice.’ Already she is thinking ahead.

Old Angus from the woodshed to walk to Poyle for the coroner, and Joe from the stable to ride to Freemans for Jack Egerton.

She must let the household know something of what has happened, give them time to collect themselves, and herself time to be ready for the coroner who hated her husband, and after Henry’s death, nearly succeeded in having her tried for murder.