A Pair of Sharp Eyes by Kat Armstrong

Author:Kat Armstrong [Armstrong, Kat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-916410-34-3
Publisher: Bookline & Thinker
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Thursday 1st November, 1703

The following morning Mrs Hucker has just shown me to the sink where I am to wash Mrs Tuffnell’s linen when Mr Roach charges in.

‘Abe’s lying out there in the yard.’

George is just behind the coachman. ‘He’s dead!’

Jonathan, seated at the kitchen table with a cup of small beer, leaps to his feet as the rest of us—Mrs Hucker, Suke Cross and I—rush outside. I glimpse a bundled figure in the corner nearest the stable before Mr Roach tears off his coat and throws it over the corpse, too late to conceal the bloody neck and the ghastly sightless eyes. Suke Cross screams and throws herself into Mr Roach’s arms; he pats her shoulder awkwardly before taking a step back.

Nell Grey, who had been sweeping grates, comes running to see the cause of the commotion. Her eyes alight on a small brown hand just visible beneath the coat and she begins to cry.

Mrs Hucker raises her face to the window that overlooks the yard and fills her lungs. ‘Mr Tuffnell! Mr Tuffnell!’

Jonathan joins us, deathly pale. ‘The master’s coming. Be quiet, all of you.’

Mr Tuffnell takes in everything at a glance, though he is too late to prevent his wife, who has followed him outside, from collapsing in a faint as she realises who lies beneath the coachman’s coat.

‘My dear Maria!’ Mr Tuffnell bears up his wife, whose form is as limp and lifeless as her page-boy’s. ‘Amesbury, help.’ Somehow we scramble back into the house, Mr Tuffnell lowering his wife into the chair nearest the kitchen hearth, Nell Grey and I running to fetch water and a napkin to moisten our mistress’s forehead.

I am dimly aware of Mr Roach and Jonathan carrying the body into the scullery and shutting the door so the rest of us are spared the sight of the child laid out on the stone sink where I was due to wash my mistress’s linen. We struggle to revive Mrs Tuffnell as the men call for George Goodfellow to fetch the constable, and Mrs Hucker and Suke Cross vie with each other to grieve loudest for a boy neither regarded when he was alive. Mrs Hucker shrieks and wails, hysterical, and Suke Cross blubbers like a baby, every now and then gasping out, ‘Poor lad, poor little lad,’ as if Abraham was her own brother instead of the object of her senseless jealousy.

Finally, Mrs Tuffnell gives a feeble moan.

‘Thank the Lord.’ Mrs Hucker sinks onto the bench and fans her face with her apron. ‘I thought her dead too.’

The sun is not yet risen, and the kitchen remains chilly despite the fire. I unpin my shawl. ‘Sir, put this around her.’ Mr Tuffnell drapes the shawl tenderly around his wife’s shoulders, examining her face as if afraid she may succumb to another faint.

By and by he supports her through to her usual chair in the parlour, while Nell Grey, with more patience than Suke Cross deserves, offers the scullery maid her arm and brings her in their wake.

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