The bodies had been taken from the jail, and a note from Cookson curtly announced that Pamela’s funeral would take place the following morning at nine. Nottingham sent a boy up to inform Meg and tell her that he’d call in ample time.
By nightfall they’d learned nothing more. Sedgwick was going around the inns once again, still trying to find someone who might have seen Morton on the night he died. As he walked home, the streets quieter now the working day was long over, Nottingham reflected on his deputy’s eagerness. He was ready to do anything; all he lacked was the education. Nottingham remembered having that energy himself, in the days when he’d started working for the Constable, and when he was courting Mary. But thinking back it was as if he was looking at another man, a good man, maybe a better man than he was now.
Sometimes he could barely remember himself at twenty. At other times he didn’t feel a day older, youthful and vital inside. That only lasted until he saw his reflection in a glass or looked at the girls. Even sullen Emily could spark with daunting energy at times.
He opened the door, expecting to hear Mary moving around in the kitchen and the girls in the room they shared. Instead the house was silent except for Emily, turning the page in a book, her face half-illuminated by the light on the table.
“Hello,” Nottingham said gently.
She looked up, startled, obviously absorbed in the words she’d been reading. He glanced at the title on the spine — Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe — and understood why she’d been so captured by the words. “Where’s everyone?”
“Mama and Rose are visiting Mrs Middleton.” She was an elderly widow who lived alone down the street.
“And what about you?”
Emily shrugged. “I just wanted a little time to myself, that’s all.” She closed the book and stood up, her gown rustling softly.
Nottingham was struck by how mature she looked, how poised, more a woman than a girl now. She carried an air about her, he thought, a kind of lingering sadness mixed with ill-formed bitterness, and he didn’t understand where it came from. Emily began to walk to her room.
“We’ve been at odds a bit, you and me,” he began tentatively, and she turned to face him, a small smile on her lips. “I don’t like it, you know.”
“Neither do I,” she replied sadly.
“Well, I’m pleased to hear that,” he laughed, relieved and surprised at her reaction. “I was beginning to think you hated us all.”
“Sometimes I do,” Emily said with the blunt, weary truthfulness of youth. She came back and sat on the chair, facing him. Her eyes were glistening as if tears were beginning to form. Nottingham reached across the table and put his hand of top of hers.
“We don’t like to see you unhappy.” It was the truth. He wanted everything for her. He just wondered if she could see that.
“Sometimes I just feel there has to be more to life than this.” She waved her hand around the house. “Do you know what I mean, Papa?”
“I’m not sure I do,” he answered honestly. All this seemed ample to him, everything he could have dreamed of and more.
“Well…” Emily took the time to be exact with her thoughts. “What’s going to happen to me? Maybe I’ll make a respectable marriage, the second son of a merchant or a farmer, perhaps? Or if not I’ll probably end up as governess to some awful child. That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”
“Something like that,” he agreed. At least she had a candid view of life, he thought.
“And if I marry I’ll have children and grow older and that will be my life.”
“But a life lived in comfort,” he pointed out.
“Comfort, charm and genteel surroundings.” She uttered the words as if they were vile.
“They’re a lot better than starving, believe you me,” Nottingham told her with complete conviction.
“I’m sure they are, Papa.” She caught the look in his eye and added, “Really, I do believe you. But what will I have done with my life in all that? Where will I be?”
“You’ll be at the centre of a family. People will love you and you’ll love them.”
“And I’ll take care of the household accounts, play with my children and supervise menus with the cook.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked in bewilderment. To most women he’d known, even to Mary, a life like that would seem to be paradise. But paradise, he knew, could be lost.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Emily said cautiously. “It’s fine if that’s what you want.” She tapped the book cover. “Do you know how many times I’ve read this?”
He shook his head, wondering why she’d changed the subject.
“Five. It’s my very favourite book. Do you want to know why?”
“Of course.” He was genuinely curious.
“Because he gets to build his own life. There’s no one to say he should be doing this or that and something needs to be done at such a time. He’s on a desert island but he’s free.”
“It’s just a book, Emily,” he told her.
“But books have ideas, Papa.” Her fists were clenched so tight that her knuckles were white. “When I’m reading it I’m on that island and I’m free, too. He gets to feel, he gets to be, and I want that!” A small tear leaked from her eye and she brushed it away with a quick, embarrassed gesture.
“You’re young still,” Nottingham started, but she cut him off.
“I’ll feel differently when I’m older? Maybe I will.” Her face was flushed with pinpoints of colour and she ran a hand through her hair in a gesture that reminded him eerily of himself. “All I know is that I’m young now and this doesn’t seem enough. I want love, I want some passion in my life.”
“And you’ll have it, I promise you,” he tried to reassure her. They’d never talked like this before. For the first time he started to believe he might understand her, and he felt closer to her than he had since she was tiny, in apron strings. “Things like that happen in their own time, Emily.”
“But that doesn’t help me now, does it?” she asked plaintively.
“No,” he admitted quietly, “it doesn’t.”
So now he knew why she hurt, but he had no idea what to do about it. She was right about her future, that was the way society worked, and there was no respectable place for women outside that — unless you were rich and titled. He looked at her sympathetically, but couldn’t find any honest, comforting words.
“I wish I’d been born a boy,” Emily said finally.
Nottingham gave a small smile at her innocence.
“Because boys have freedom?”
She nodded sharply.
“I’ll tell you something,” Nottingham confided. “It only looks that way.”
“What do you mean?” she wondered, her attention engaged.
“A man gets married, they have a child, often five or six,” he explained. “Who do you think has to earn the money to feed that family? Who has to find a job that pays enough? Aye, it’s the wife who’s looking after the children all day, but it’s the man who has to make the brass. That’s responsibility, not freedom.”
“But you can go where you like, when you like, stay out drinking until all hours…”
“True enough,” he conceded. “And there are plenty who do. But let me ask you, would you want a husband who did that?”
“No, of course not,” Emily answered. “I’d expect him to be more considerate.”
“So then, if you were a man, you wouldn’t be like that,” Nottingham said after a moment. He was remembering his own father, a man who’d been anything but considerate to his wife and son.
“I suppose not,” she agreed slowly.
“Drinking and whoring doesn’t make someone a man,” Nottingham said with quiet conviction, “and don’t you ever forget it.”
“But whores can become ladies. Moll Flanders — ”
“You’ve read that?” he asked sharply.
“Yes — ” Emily began, but before she could continue the door opened and Mary and Rose bustled in.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” Mary said in a merry voice. “We were talking and lost track of the time. Good Lord, we need more light in here. It’s almost pitch black.”
“That’s all right,” Nottingham told her. “Gave us time for a chat.” And he winked at Emily.
Later, after the girls were in bed, Nottingham and his wife sat by the dying fire. He was dozing intermittently, jarring awake as his chin fell on his chest.
“So was it daggers drawn earlier with Emily?” Mary asked.
He shook his head. “Not at all. Not even a cross word,” he answered happily. “We could have talked a lot longer.”
She raised her eyebrows, not quite believing him.
“Then that’s a change.”
“She’s just beginning to learn that the world is a smaller place than she’d hoped.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do you ever feel like all this isn’t enough?”
“All what?” said Mary, confused.
“This.” He groped to put the idea into words. “Me, the girls, this house. Don’t you ever feel your life should be more than that?”
“Ah,” she replied with gentle understanding. “So that’s the problem. I’m content with this, Richard. I always have been. It’s easier now than when we started out, but I was happy then, too, you know.” She reached over and took his hand, her fingers lightly stroking his palm. “But I knew what I wanted and I got it.”
“Emily’s different.”
“I suppose she always has been.” Mary sighed and started to lose herself in the past. “She was never one for playing with the other girls, do you remember that? She always seemed happiest on her own. And after she learnt to read, it was all we could do to pry her away from a book.”
“True,” he smiled. He couldn’t remember all the times he’d found her reading in bed when she should have been sleeping.
“Rose is like me. She’ll be quite content to settle down with her nice lad and have a family. But I don’t know that Emily’s ever going to be happy,” Mary said with a tinge of sadness. “Not really happy. And I know that’s a terrible thing to say about your own daughter, but it’s true. I think deep down she knows it, too. That’s why she’s so angry. She just wasn’t made for the world as it is.”
Nottingham knew she wanted to talk about this, but he was uncomfortable. He felt at home with facts, even ideas, but emotions always left him uneasy and restless.
“So what do we do about her?” he asked, hoping his wife would have an answer.
“I honestly don’t know, Richard,” Mary replied with a helplessness that reflected his own. “I wish I did.”
“She told me something that worried me.”
“What’s that?”
“Did you know she’d read Moll Flanders?”
Mary laughed lightly, her eyes twinkling in the dim light.
“Of course I did, Richard. Who do you think lent it to her?”
The sun was shining, the sky clear and blue, with just the faintest breeze coming from the west. It was as if summer was enjoying its final gasp. Normally Nottingham would have enjoyed the weather, but now it seemed to be making a mockery of the day.
He’d borrowed a cart to take Meg to the church, and he was soberly dressed in his best coat and breeches, sweating under their weight as the grey woollen hose itched against his calves. The old woman was in the same dress she’d worn the last time he’d seen her — probably the only one she owned, he thought — leaning heavily against him for support as they walked very slowly on the path through the churchyard to the imposing wooden doors.
Mary and the girls were already inside, sitting in the front pew. Mary put her arms around Meg’s hunched shoulders, whispering in her ear as the new curate began the service.
He spoke sonorously, letting the litany of the words flow smoothly, much to Nottingham’s surprise. He’d expected Crandall to rush through the funeral. Cookson would have given him the task, and Pamela was nothing to him. He glanced at the others; Meg’s face was in her hands, Rose and Mary both looked down and Emily was gazing at the curate.
Outside, they followed the cheap coffin to the waiting grave in the far corner of the churchyard. The curate took his time, letting the power of the words flow into the listeners. Reluctantly, Nottingham had to admit that Crandall was a powerful, mesmerising speaker. He watched the curate pause, eyes moving around the mourners to gauge the effect of his voice, his glance lingering on Rose, and a little longer on Emily, before returning to the verses. Finally it was all done, the ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and Nottingham followed Meg in tossing a clod of dirt into the grave. Another life spent so fast, to be covered and forgotten as the days went by. At least Pamela had a proper burial, he thought, and remembered another whore in a pauper’s grave.
As he walked away, Crandall called to him and took him aside.
“I wanted you to know I don’t approve of this,” he said in a low, angry voice.
“Of what, Mr Crandall?”
The curate’s eyes were dark. He spoke quickly.
“Of burying a whore here. Of giving her a service in the church. Her profession was evil.”
Nottingham answered slowly, coldly, and carefully.
“Then understand this for your pains. You did your duty for a woman who was brutally killed, a woman who’d once been the servant in my house, someone who was loved. Think on that. Then try remembering that Our Lord took in Mary Magdalene. Wasn’t she supposed to have been a whore?”
He turned on his heel and walked away.
They rode back to Harrison’s almshouses. Mary, Rose and Emily would stay with Meg for a little while. Nottingham would return the cart and get back to work; Thursday was already slipping away. Sometimes he wondered if death wasn’t easier than life.
Sedgwick was waiting for him at the jail, nibbling the remains of a pie that was probably his dinner. He stood up quickly as Nottingham entered, crumbs falling from his cheap, worn waistcoat on to the floor.
“Sit down, John,” the Constable said, pulling off his coat and draping it over the chair. He felt exhausted, drained by the funeral, his heart empty. “Did you find anything more yesterday?”
“Oh aye,” Sedgwick grinned broadly. “I’ve finally got someone who saw Morton Monday night.”
“Oh?” Suddenly Nottingham felt alert again, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Where was this?”
“The Talbot.” The deputy let the name roll off his tongue.
The Constable raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I wonder why such an upstanding man of God was in a place like that,” he said. “It’s not filled with the holy spirit.”
The Talbot was notorious in Leeds. It had a pit for cock fighting, and a reputation as a thieves’ den, where violence was exchanged as common currency.
“Maybe he didn’t know what it was like,” Sedgwick suggested graciously.
“A couple of minutes inside should have told him all he needed to know,” Nottingham dismissed the idea. “You’ve got a good witness?”
“A man called Martin Hooper. He was at the Market Cross on Saturday, saw Morton preach. Called him ‘that bloody mouthy bastard.’ No mistaking the identity.” Sedgwick paused. He’d been carefully hoarding the last piece of information. “And he says Morton was drinking with Carver.”
“Carver?” Nottingham sat upright quickly. “What time was this?”
“He claims it was about ten.”
“And we know Carver left the Ship around nine with Pamela,” the Constable mused. “Did your witness say anything about her?”
Sedgwick shook his head.
“I asked him if there’d been a girl about. He just looked at me as if I was daft and said that of course there were bloody girls about, but he didn’t remember one in particular.”
Nottingham rubbed his knuckles over his chin. She might have been there, taken a shine to Morton’s money, and the old drunk could have become jealous… it was possible.
“Let’s have Carver in,” he ordered abruptly. “I want to hear him explain this.”
“I’ve already got a couple of the men on it,” Sedgwick answered. “But I think we’ll have better luck tonight once he goes out drinking.”
The Constable nodded his agreement. Like some strange beast, Carver only seemed to emerge as the daylight faded.
“Just make sure you find him before he gets pissed, then. We don’t need another fight.”