Page 20 of Lies in Little Sutherland
She was a woman of middle age, with bobbed brown hair turning gray.It looked as if it were threaded through with strands of tinsel.The eyes were blue, cloudy under thin brows.Her mouth was open, and there was a trace of blood on the lower lip: perhaps she had bit herself while the pillow was held over her face.The skin was a pasty white, as the blood had already started to respond to gravity and pool in the parts of the body that touched the bedclothes.
Beside me, Constance made a little noise, and I glanced at her.She was biting her lip, and her eyes—brown, not blue—were huge and filled with sadness.
“Is it she?”I asked.“Is it Lydia Morrison?”
Constance nodded.
“Go on, then.Get some fresh air.Sit with Christopher.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you,” I said.“Just a minute or two.”
“There isn’t much here.”
No, there wasn’t.I still wanted to look at it.“I won’t be long.Go on.”
I nudged her towards the door.She went, after one final look at Morrison.I waited for her footsteps to start down the stairs before I turned to the toilet table.
Morrison’s handbag was sitting there, next to a handkerchief and a door key.The key was for the front door, no doubt.The handkerchief didn’t appear to have been used.A pair of small earrings sat next to it.Marcasite, with screw-on backs.Nice-looking, but not fancy and probably not valuable.
I draped Christopher’s handkerchief over my hand before I flicked open the clip on the handbag and peered in.
A coin purse sat inside, next to a lipstick and a few other odds and ends.One of them was a small black book, and my heart sped up as I pulled it out.A calendar showing Morrison’s movements over the past six months—who she had met and communicated with—would come in handy.
But it was just an address book.I flicked through the pages anyway, but there was nothing of interest inside.She did not have Margaret Hughes’s address in Bristol written under H, although that didn’t necessarily mean anything.She might have known it and simply not have noted it down.
The Astleys were in there, or at least the ones of them who lived at Sutherland Hall.Iris Peckham’s name was under the Ps, with Constance’s and her brother Gilbert’s names in a parenthesis below, along with Johanna de Vos’s.The M page was filled with lots of names: there were the Marsdens: Lady Euphemia and Lord Maurice, Geoffrey and Laetitia.There was Doctor Lionel Meadows, the medical chap in Little Sutherland—which was interesting, considering that there were more than two decades since Morrison had lived in Wiltshire—and there was also a name and an address for an Edith Morrison in Somerset.A mother, or perhaps a sister.Might be a daughter, although that wasn’t very likely.Surely someone would have known if Morrison had had a daughter.
Unless that was why Doctor Meadows’s name was on the list.If Morrison had been young, and had given birth to a child during the time she had worked for Aunt Charlotte, Doctor Meadows may have delivered the baby.For all I knew, it might have been his child.Stranger things have happened.Twenty-four years ago, they had all been young, and there was nothing inherently terrible about the local doctor having had a fling with one of the maids at the Hall.
He ought to have married her, though, if that were the case.So perhaps he hadn’t been the father of the child.Perhaps someone else had been.
What if it was Uncle Harold?A daughter wouldn’t have meant anything to him; he was focused on a male heir, so he wouldn’t have cared about an illegitimate daughter.And that would explain why Aunt Charlotte had contacted her good friend Lady Peckham and traded her lady’s maid away to Constance’s mother in exchange for Hughes.
I gave Morrison a dubious look.Compared to Aunt Charlotte—who had been a beautiful woman—she was nothing to look at.Aunt Charlotte had been attractive up until the day before she died.A little strained at that point, of course—committing several murders and attempted murders can take it out of a woman—but she had still been lovely.Morrison was merely average, and had probably been average in her youth, as well.
Uncle Harold had always struck me as a cold fish, so thinking of him possibly carrying on with Morrison behind his wife’s back was difficult, not to mention deeply unpleasant.I did not enjoy the mental images that accompanied the idea.But the idea itself was intriguing.It would explain Morrison’s exile to Dorset, if nothing else.
I flipped through the rest of the book, but didn’t see anything else of interest, so I stuffed it back into the handbag and snapped the catch closed.
It was probably getting on for the time I ought to go back downstairs, but I took two minutes to open the wardrobe by the wall.A handful of frocks, skirts, and blouses hung in it, all of them perfectly dull and respectable, in drab shades of brown and blue and gray.Morrison’s stockings and unmentionables, kept in the drawer below, were likewise plain and boring.No silk stockings or dripping negligees for Morrison.Her nightgown, what I could see of it under the counterpane, was a perfectly serviceable white cotton.
I was about to close the drawer when something that wasn’t underwear or stockings caught my eye.Between the fabrics, something dark blue and leathery peeked out.Brows arching, I reached in and nudged the garments aside so I could see what I was looking at.
A deposit book, for the Post Office Savings Bank.
Wasn’t that interesting?
Not that Morrison didn’t have every right to have a deposit book, of course.She might have been a prodigious saver, for all that she was a maid.
I fished the book out with the use of Christopher’s handkerchief, and dropped it on the toiletries table.And made certain to cover my fingertips when I flipped open the cover and prepared to turn the pages.
There turned out to be no need.The first page wasn’t even full, and that was despite the original entry having been made more than twenty years ago.
Twenty-three, to be precise.A week into August, 1903, when Crispin was two months old, Morrison had deposited five hundred pounds sterling with the Post Office Savings Bank.
Was it severance pay, to sweeten the move from Wiltshire to Dorset, and from the Viscountess St George to Lady Peckham?Was it hush money?Or, if Edith Morrison was Lydia’s daughter (but not Uncle Harold’s child), might it have been a gift from Aunt Charlotte to a maid she hated to lose, but who wanted to get away from Little Sutherland before the news of her pregnancy got out?
