Zeb was not there. ‘He is sloth itself,’ I grumbled, all the while dreading the sight of him. We spread the hangings over some bushes until our brother should come up with the line. Izzy sat in the shade of a pear tree and began swishing about him with the beaters, as if killing flies. ‘This for me,’ he said, setting one apart from the rest. ‘Do you wish to choose?’
‘They’re all alike.’ Surely Zeb was lingering in the house expressly to torment me.
‘Not in the least,’ said Izzy. ‘This one is the fastest, and that the prettiest.’
Sometimes, I reflected, my brother had odd notions: he had preferences in cups and candles as well as in the customary things like food and music, wherein each man has his particular taste. He had once told me that when we worked in the fields as children, every implement had for him its own character. But this was, after all, a small oddity. Apart from Caro, I loved Izzy better than anyone I knew, much more than I loved Zeb or my mother, perhaps because he never teased me.
A whistle, full and liquid, drifted over the orchard among the songs of blackbirds and thrushes.
‘See, he is not so late,’ said Izzy the peacemaker.
Zeb’s face, solemn, even strained, was oddly out of tune with his warbling of ‘There Lived a Pretty Maid’. He nodded to us, then began looping the rope he had brought over the apple boughs.
‘Higher,’ suggested Izzy. Zeb obeyed without question.
‘We are alone,’ I prompted him.
‘There.’ Zeb gave a final tweak to the line and turned to face us. ‘If someone comes, we put up the hangings.’
‘Yes, yes!’ My shirt was all damp. ‘But tell us, how did you break it to them at Champains?’
‘Godfrey gave me a note for the master. He – Mister Biggin – called me into his study and asked me was I sure, how was the lad, dark or fair – you know how it goes. In the end I did persuade him that what we have in the laundry is the earthly shell of Christopher Walshe.’
‘And did you say how he died?’
‘Drowned, of course. When you find a lad in a pond—’ he shrugged. ‘Would I had known about the stabbing. There will be more explanations tomorrow.’
‘Not from you, surely? You don’t think they suspect you?’ Izzy
‘Perhaps not of killing the boy.’ Zeb picked up the hanging on the top of the pile and laid it ready. ‘They kept asking me how we knew it was he, as if our knowing him were some proof of guilt.’
I felt a twist of fear. ‘What did you say?’
‘I told them Godfrey knew him. That was nothing but truth, Godfrey did know him from when he was sent over there last year.’ Zeb took a beater (like me, not choosing for the beauty of it but merely seizing the nearest) and lashed out at the pallid face of Chastity, represented in the act of taming a unicorn.
I took the next hanging and spread it over the line next to Zeb’s. ‘They suspect one of us, then.’
He shot me an impatient look. ‘Would they tell me if they did?’
‘You said “Not of killing” him. But that’s the way they’re thinking. They’ll fasten on somebody, if not you, then—’
‘Listen, both of you.’ Zeb hit his tapestry again, sending a cloud of motes into the air. ‘Biggin had one of his tenants waiting in the corridor outside. When he brought him in, he called the man Tom Cornish.’
I cried, ‘Not the intelligencer?’
‘The same.’
Izzy and I spoke together: ‘What manner of man is he?’ and ‘What is he like?’
‘Grey-haired, with purplish cheeks. But if he were young, I’d say he was amazingly like Christopher Walshe.’
I stiffened and felt Izzy do the same.
‘Cornish began crying right in front of me.’ Zeb waited for this to
‘The lad is – was – a nephew of his?’ faltered Izzy.
‘Closer.’
I gasped.
Izzy’s hand flew to his mouth. He stammered, ‘But – but why was he called Walshe?’
‘A bastard, I guess, brought up under the mother’s name until Cornish put him out to service.’
‘God have mercy on us,’ Izzy whispered.
Zeb went on, ‘He worked for Biggin but it seems to me that Cornish had uses for him too. The servants whipped for their reading, remember? Spiders and spies, do draw in the flies.’
Now I saw it, the wretched little Judas bringing us the bait with which his father would scoop us into the net. There he had sat, with Zeb’s arm round him, sharing the pipe of tobacco which Zeb and Peter could ill afford. I brought down the carpet-beater with such force that the tapestry leapt like a fish on the line, and I kept on cutting into it, dust settling on my face, which was already beaded with fresh sweat.
‘So we are all suspected for that part,’ I said. ‘Nay, Cornish knows.’
‘And thinks one of us put a stop to the game,’ said Izzy, his cheeks pale. I felt a pang at having exposed such a gentle, upright soul to suspicion. He was innocence itself, but what was that to a spy?
‘We must burn every pamphlet in the house,’ I declared. ‘And look behind the stables, in case we left anything there.’
‘But what was he doing here at night?’ mused Zeb. ‘I cannot come at it.’
‘I am going behind the stables this minute,’ said Izzy. ‘And after to Caro and Peter, to bid them burn anything in the chambers. Have you papers or pamphlets, either of you?’
‘Under the bed,’ I answered. ‘An Answer to the Great Tyrant. Bid Peter look near the bedhead, along the wall.’
Izzy ran off. Zeb and I continued flogging the hangings. I looked down at his lady and her unicorn. She was as tawdry a female as I have seen; only a beast disordered in its wits would yield to her its magic power. My tapestry showed the same woman strolling in a knot garden, one unlikely-looking flower held to her nose. A young man watched her from a tree. I had always thought him a lover, but now I saw he could as easily be a spy set on by her husband. I brought the beater down upon his stupid face until my arm ached.
‘There is worse,’ Zeb said.
This was a novelty. As a rule he avoided reposing any confidences in me, preferring to talk to Izzy. Observing him, I thought he looked sickly. Perhaps the thing could not wait, but had to come out, like the secret of King Midas’s ears.
There was a woman waiting in the corridor where Cornish was.’ Zeb’s voice shook. ‘I saw her through the open door as he came in. She was very like Patience.’
I concealed my shock. ‘Why would she go there?’ Zeb shrugged. ‘I never denied the child was mine, how could I? She had a promise of marriage, and she loved me, why, she could scarce—’ He recollected himself. ‘That is, I thought she loved me. Suppose she was there to give evidence against us? I am afraid she was.’ He rubbed at his brow with the back of his hand.
‘What evidence? Peter and Caro have burnt the papers by now. But this woman’s not Patience. You will see.’
‘I