Dying In The Wool: A Kate Shackleton Mystery by Brody Frances

Author:Brody, Frances [Brody, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781405511704
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

Sometimes it seemed to Wilson that Marjorie provoked him deliberately. She made no effort to appear anything but drab, with her buttoned-up black clothes, like some widow, her greasy grey hair plaited and fastened up with big hairpins that fell out all over the show. One of them was popping out now. She pushed it back with a bony finger.

‘What if it had been the other way round, and you’d been in the beck and he’d found you? It was a bad day’s work.’

She timed her words so that he could not answer because Hettie lumbered in with their Sunday tea of lettuce, tomato and a slice of left-over mutton.

‘Thank you, Hettie,’ Marjorie said.

If he had told her once, he had told her a hundred times. She should not thank the skivvy. The girl should be doing the thanking, glad to have a place with a mistress who chose to turn a blind eye to her bushel of faults. But what other type of servant would Marjorie want around her? Bad day’s work indeed. She had the cheek to reckon it could have been him. Did she really think that he, Arthur Wilson, could have been caught face down in the beck? He was true coin of the realm, Braithwaite the counterfeit. Everyone knew Braithwaite philandered his mucky socks off. Upright all-on-the-shake-of-a-hand businessman filch a contract from a rival’s back pocket. Take your invention for a mere pittance, an invention that could transform the weaving in a thousand mills.

Braithwaite might be the master and Wilson the man, but morally Braithwaite wasn’t fit to piss in the same pot.

‘What the blue blazes do you mean by that?’ he demanded as Hettie’s steps retreated down the tiled hall towards the kitchen.

‘If we had been blessed with a son, and he had been killed, who knows how you would have felt?’

‘But we weren’t, and I wouldn’t have been so weak-minded.’

He chewed with his mouth open in the way he knew irked her. When they were first wed, she asked him – actually asked him – not to slurp his soup. He never did anything but slurp now. Let her put up with it. Let her put up with everything. One useful part of being married so long was that he knew every little habit that grated on her.

She did not have the sense to leave it alone.

‘People will think …’ She stopped. A look of alarm crossed her face, as well it might.

‘What? What will people think? Go on, go on.’

‘That you took the scoutmaster’s side against your own master because you’re still smouldering over that dratted loom picker. They’ll say it was spite.’

‘You’ll say it was spite you mean. No right-minded person would blame me.’

How dare she say it was spite? It was a matter for the law. Anyone with an ounce of sense would know that. Constable Mitchell would stand on his head for a quiet life. He would have hush-hushed the whole episode. Joshua Braithwaite would have been home in his own bed, being doctored and danced attendance on if it had been up to Constable Mitchell.

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