No one came for the girl that day or the next. Emily arrived home as the Sunday morning bells at the Parish Church rang eight; she’d set off early from Headingley, her shoes covered in dust from the road. She carried herself with pride and confidence these days, Nottingham thought with pleasure as they all strolled together to morning service.
Later he heard the laughing burble of voices from the kitchen as she prepared dinner with Mary, the scent of cooking meat making him hungry. It was good to have the family together, however briefly it might be. He enjoyed having his wife to himself, to rediscover why they’d fallen in love and do it all over again, but this. . it brought a different, deeper contentment.
Emily was full of tales of her charges, Constance and Faith. She cared about the girls, that much would have been clear to a blind man, her eyes smiling whenever she talked about them. He listened, basking in her joy, thinking of her when she was small and still in apron strings herself, then a little older and gawky, her head always in a book.
In the evening he walked her back into the city, her arm daintily crooked in his, the late warmth rising from the ground.
‘Are you happy?’ he asked as they crossed Timble Bridge and began the gentle climb up Kirkgate.
‘Yes, I am, papa.’ Her answer was heartfelt. ‘I love the girls, and the Hartingtons are very good to me. I sit with them at dinner, and they listen to my opinions.’
‘Then you’d better make sure you’re not too free in what you say,’ he advised.
She blushed. ‘I’m always very careful, papa.’ She paused, and he could tell she was looking for a neutral topic. ‘They took me to see the oak last week.’
‘The oak?’
‘The big oak tree on the main road in Headingley. People say it’s been there for hundreds of years. Mr Hartington explained how important it used to be, how people met there to govern things long ago.’
He smiled. Thoresby, the historian, had told him about the old shire oak years before, but he’d never paid much attention. In those days he’d been too busy surviving the present to concern himself with the past.
They parted at the jail, and he waited by the door until she vanished up Briggate with a wave. Grown up and gone, off into her own life. He smiled and unlocked the door.
He expected a note from Sedgwick, saying the body had been claimed and giving her a name, but there was nothing. He could smell her corpse, rotting by the hour in this weather, the stink of her decomposition clawing at his throat.
The Constable was surprised, and worried. By now, surely, someone must have missed her and come looking. She couldn’t have lived too far away. Then his mind fell to the practicalities. The way her body was turning, if no one arrived tomorrow they’d have no choice but to put her in the ground, to tip her into a pauper’s grave before she became too rank.
There was something wrong, skewed, about all of this. Why would someone leave her at the abbey where she was going to be found? Who wanted to kill her and leave her that way? And the biggest question — why was she still nameless? It was as if someone wanted her to be a mystery, to tantalize.
It could have been her husband who’d killed her, he mused. If that were the case, no one would report her missing for a time. It was easy enough to spin tales to cover a wife’s absence. He gave a sigh; until he had information, everything was just a guess. He pulled a ragged old handkerchief from his breeches, put it over his mouth and glanced around the cell door at her face, so empty and lonely in death.
She was buried the next day. They could do nothing else; the foul stench of her filled the jail. Once she’d been carried out, it still took hours for the air to sweeten enough so they didn’t gag when they breathed.
On Tuesday morning, as Nottingham sat with his quill, scratching at the paper to ask for more money from the city for the night watch, the door opened and a man entered cautiously, glancing around as if not sure he should be there. He cleared his throat, clutching his hat in his hands, blunted fingernails scratching at the felt of the brim as the Constable looked up at him.
‘My wife’s disappeared,’ he said.