“He’s a very charming gentleman,” I observed.

“Aye — and so good-humoured! Full o’ jokes and teazing, Mr. Andrew is.”

“Jokes and teazing. And — playacting, perhaps?”

“Aye.”

“Is it possible, Jennet, that Mr. Andrew persuaded your sister to wear Charles Danforth’s clothes?”

The girl took a step backwards. “Why should he?”

“I don’t know. Can you think of a reason why she was dressed as a man? Another joke, perhaps? An attempt at playacting?”

Jennet turned her head away and reached for her basket.

“Mr. Andrew is also a Freemason, Jennet. Like his brother.”

She did not answer; but her limbs were rigid with fear. She had revolved the idea already in her mind. For no one should wonder as Jennet why her sister had worn a man’s clothes.

“Would Andrew think it a joke to bring Tess to the Lodge, arrayed as a gentleman, under cover of darkness? Could your sister have died, Jennet, by way of a mistake? A bit of teazing gone wrong?”

Her eyes, when she turned back to me, were ablaze with pain and anger. Not only Tess Arnold had been fond of her playfellow; this girl with the ugly stain across her cheek had yearned for years in silence, and watched as Master Andrew escaped the Penfolds estate, and grew into a man, and considered of her no more than he should an old piece of drugget beneath his feet.

“Did Tess tell you where this meeting place was — the place in the rocks where the Masons gather?”

She shook her head.

“Might she have told anyone — a friend perhaps, another girl in service at the house?”

“She’d have told me if she told anybody,” Jennet said defiantly; then some of the anger drained from her frame. “Our Tess were close-mouthed. But happen it’ll be in her book.”

“Her book? — Tess could read and write?”

Jennet’s head came up with a dangerous pride. “Tha’ thinks we’re all simple as the remedies we make? Tess knew her letters. She kept a book, she did, all filled wit’ writin’. Receipts for ills, and the days she gave ’em out. The names of the ones as paid her.”

A stillroom book. One received, perhaps, from her mother before her, a veritable history of life and death at Penfolds Hall. “And have you looked into it, Jennet?”

The young woman averted her gaze. “I don’t have Tess’s learning.”

And her mother was blind.

“But you possess the book.”

All that was visible of her face was the wine-dark map.

“If you showed me it, Jennet — we might read it together.”

The young woman did not reply. Silent tears were rolling down her cheeks; and with a sensation of pity, I saw that at least one person in the world had truly loved Tess Arnold, and deeply mourned her loss. I reached out a hand, but stopped short of touching Jennet. Such containment — such inward suffering — commanded respect.

“I am no Michael Tivey,” I told her, “and all I seek is justice for your sister.”

“And a noose for Mr. Andrew,” she whispered miserably.

29 August 1806, cont.

JENNET ARNOLD LED ME SWIFTLY DOWN THE NORTHERN slope of Miller’s Dale, speaking not a word, while I struggled to keep her in view and abandoned all attempts to shelter my complexion with the tedious sunshade. Where the line of distant fields met the sapphire arc of sky, I could just make out a cluster of buildings and a church spire — Tideswell, I presumed. Well before it, rising from the fields like a fortress, were the stone walls and many courtyards of a great house. This was no country gentleman’s manor, with a modest gabling and an upper storey half-timbered; this was a Norman keep, hallowed by centuries of upheaval endured. At the first sight of its noble outlines I stopped short, arrested and open-mouthed. I had possessed no notion that Penfolds Hall was such a grand old pile. From its appearance it might have been formed in the time of the Black Prince, and survived the years of Tudor Wars. It had gloried in Elizabeth, and sheltered Charles I; it stood silent while Cromwell’s armies marched like so many ill-clad ants over the landscape, and felt its crenellated towers crumble under the reign of Hanover. Regarding the estate, with its vanished moat filled in by time, I had an idea of the first John d’Arcy, heir to the Earl of Holderness, plotting a Glorious Revolution by its hearth-stones.

It was clear, moreover, whence arose the local legends. However venerable those halls spread out below me, they wanted the appearance of happiness. What had Lydia Danforth felt, as she watched her babes die in the stony fastnesses? And felt her own spirit ebbing with last winter’s snows, into the bitter ground? Had she loved Charles Danforth enough to face the rumours of ill-fate — and been defeated at the last, so that not even love could survive her children’s graves? A chill hand clutched my heart, as though merely to gaze upon Penfolds Hall was to suffer a sort of petrification; I swallowed hard, and forced myself onwards in Jennet Arnold’s wake.

THE HOUSE’S APPEARANCE OF COLD DESERTION WAS immediately belied, however, upon achieving the kitchen gardens.

It was through these Jennet Arnold led me — down a well-trimmed grass path, between rows of trellised beans and lavender past its bloom; along solid hedges of box and rosemary, their fragrant arms entwined to keep the rabbits from the root plants — turnips and onions, carrots and potatoes. There was an admirable glass-paned conservatory, where tomatoes and melons and lemon trees basked in captured warmth; pears and quinces were trained against the main house’s walls; and every kind of herb ran riot in a knot garden outside the servants’ door.

Here, the sunlight fell in a golden wash, and two bright-cheeked young maids were gossipping and laughing with the mending under an apple tree. They fell silent and looked askance as we approached; the sound of singing drifted towards me through the kitchen’s leaded windows. “Greensleeves.”

“Come thee through to the stillroom, miss,” muttered Jennet, with her basket of elder over her arm. “That’s where our Tess’s book’ll be found.” She skirted the herb garden and pushed open a small side door set into the Great House’s walls, waiting for me to follow her example. I broke off a branch of lemon balm, crushed the leaves, and held it to my nose. All the joys of my girlhood at Steventon — the long morning hours rolling down the grassy slope in company with my brothers — rushed upon me. I breathed deep, and closed my eyes.

“It’s jus’ through here, miss,” Jennet called in a low, insistent voice. I tossed aside the lemon balm, aware of the girl’s urgency. She feared discovery — from Mrs. Haskell, probably. I stepped quickly to join her, and entered the cool dimness of Penfolds Hall.

We were standing in a stone-flagged corridor, low-ceilinged and flanked with simple plaster walls; the bones of the house were evident in the branching stone architraves that supported the upper storeys. This was the ground floor of the house, reserved for every sort of function except those of elegance and refinement: here there would be the kitchens — and I doubted not there were two, one for winter and one reserved for the airiness of summer; here were the washrooms, with their great tubs and mangles, the heavy irons ranked upon the shelves; here the offices and sitting-rooms of the housekeeper and the steward, where accounts were settled, rents paid, and country news exchanged; here, the pantries for china; the entrance to the wine-cellars; the storerooms for every sort of goods procured from England and abroad.