Down Weaver's Lane (34 page)

She had even been tempted to rid herself of Marcus. That was what hatred did to you. But she had settled instead on running away for she did not wish to kill, even in self-defence.

Was her husband really capable of it?

After a moment she nodded. Yes, she was quite sure he was.

 

Three days later Jane watched from her usual vantage point at the bedroom window as Marcus left the house on business. He would never discuss what he did with her, telling her that a woman would not understand the activities of a Manchester merchant. Of course she could! Such men sent consignments of Lancashire goods round the world, acting as middlemen, taking a small profit here and another there. She had heard her father talk several times about John Owens, a gentleman who was apparently making a fortune for himself in this way. She could have done the same thing herself easily enough after listening for years to her father and his colleagues talking over dinner, but of course no one would deal with a woman.

Soon afterwards she got dressed on her own, then summoned her maid to say she was going for a stroll in the gardens and perhaps out on to the nearby moors. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so, Hellie.’

‘Oh, Mrs Armistead, you shouldn’t leave the grounds on your own. It’s too soon!’

‘I shall come straight back if I feel at all tired, I promise you. But I’m desperate for some fresh air.’

 

Since walking was an old habit of Mrs Armistead’s no one worried when she did not return straight away. However as the hours passed Hellie grew anxious and went out to look for her. She was nowhere in the gardens and the gardener said he had seen the mistress go out through the little gate and over the brow ‘an hour or two gone’.

By lunchtime the two maids and cook-housekeeper were getting really worried, though the young woman whom the others referred to scornfully as ‘Mr Armistead’s maid’ mocked their anxiety. As one o’clock struck on the hall clock with no sign of their mistress still, they decided to send a message across to Moor Grange. The master’s mother would know what to do, they were sure.

‘She’s turned her ankle and can’t walk,’ Hellie kept saying. ‘That’ll be what’s happened. My mum did that once.’

They waited for an hour for an answer, worry deepening by the minute.

‘She’s been murdered,’ Cook said finally with dark relish. ‘It’ll be some rascal on the tramp. He’ll have beaten her to death and thrown her body into the quarry. Someone killed an old woman on the moors a few years ago, I remember it clearly.’

Hellie shivered. ‘Oh, don’t say things like that! It’ll be dark soon and then how shall we find her?’

When Eleanor arrived in person at half-past two she expected to find Jane waiting for her. She had been so sure that all the fuss was about nothing she had not hurried. Her daughter-in-law was fond of taking long walks and it was a fine mild day for March, so Jane had probably just gone too far and had to rest before returning.

But she had still not returned and the whole household was in a twitter, all work suspended, so after checking that her grandson was being properly cared for by the wet nurse, Eleanor went up to Jane’s room and searched it thoroughly.

She summoned the maid to help her and it was Hellie who thought to check her mistress’s jewellery. As she opened the leather-covered box, she let out a shriek. ‘It’s all gone! She’s been murdered and robbed. Oh, my poor mistress!’ She began to sob.

‘Stop that noise!’ Eleanor took the box from her. Not every item was missing. Jane’s wedding ring lay in solitary splendour on the velvet pad in the top compartment. ‘Does she usually leave her wedding ring in here?’

Hellie shook her head and the two women looked at one another in consternation.

‘If someone had stolen her things they’d have taken this as well. Jane must have done this herself.’ After a moment Eleanor said quietly, ‘Go and wait in the kitchen until I call you. And say nothing of this if you wish to keep your place here.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Hellie, who was fifty and as plain as the other maids Jane had engaged, went to sit in the kitchen. She kept her mouth firmly shut and scowled at the master’s flibbertigibbet who was lolling around drinking a cup of tea. What was the world coming to when someone like that was employed openly in a gentleman’s household? Not that the master was much of a gentleman in her opinion, though the mistress was a nice lady and had to put up with a lot, poor soul. But to leave the wedding ring behind like that! Surely her mistress had not run away? If she had, what would the master do about it, eh? He’d be furious, that’s what, and would probably take out that anger on the servants. She’d beg Mrs Armistead not to let him turn her off without a reference, that’s what she’d do.

When the bedroom door had closed on the maid Eleanor had no compunction about searching every drawer and cupboard again. But she could find no clue to indicate what had happened. She went down to the parlour and from there to Marcus’s smoking room, searching with equal thoroughness but with the same result. Jane had definitely not left a note. Only the ring. And its message seemed all too clear.

Going back upstairs she stood staring out of the window at the village below, wondering what to do and facing up to the fact that her daughter-in-law had run away. Was Marcus such a monster to live with, then?

He must be.

With a sigh Eleanor went downstairs again to write a note to her husband and another to Samuel Rishmore. After some hesitation she decided not to send for Marcus until later. She had no doubt they would find Jane before too long - a woman could not vanish into thin air, after all. Perhaps she could insist the couple come to live at Moor Grange from now on, so that she could keep a better eye on things and offer Jane a little support? Not to mention keeping an eye on their grandson.

Samuel arrived first, just before dusk, and Eleanor told him the bald facts, not attempting to hide her fears about her son’s behaviour and his daughter’s unhappiness.

He stared at her in shock. ‘You mean, you think our Jane’s just - run off? Left her husband and child?’

‘I fear so.’

‘She’s gone mad, then. Women do that sometimes after they’ve had a child.’

‘I don’t think so. I saw her yesterday and she seemed in full possession of her faculties. In fact, she looked better than she had for a while.’ And that thought made Eleanor even more certain that her daughter-in-law had indeed run away. Knowing Jane, it would have been carefully planned. For the first time it occurred to Eleanor that they might not find her and she sucked in her breath in shock.

Samuel glared at her. ‘I’m not having it said that my Jane has broken her marriage vows and run off like a loose woman.’

‘We shall not be able to hide the fact, I’m afraid.’

‘Then we’ll say she wasn’t in her right mind because of the child.’

Eleanor did not argue. It would be easy enough for her to set rumours circulating to contradict such a statement and she intended to do just that. She already felt guilty for helping bring about such a disastrous marriage and was definitely not going to add to that guilt by allowing them to malign the poor young woman. If she did, Marcus might lock Jane up in an asylum once they found her. It had been done before by cruel husbands.

When Claude joined them it was after nightfall and he was in a sour mood at having to leave a convivial evening with friends. His reaction was the same as Samuel’s. They must tell everyone Jane was in low spirits after bearing her son Charles and had been behaving irrationally. ‘And why the hell haven’t you sent for Marcus?’ he asked his wife. ‘Didn’t you think he needed to know?’

‘I thought that since she might have run away from him, we could work out some way to help her when she was found before sending for him. I see you do not agree.’ Suddenly, listening to the two men plotting how to keep the news a secret, not even considering that Jane might need help more than condemnation, she hoped her daughter-in-law really had been clever enough to get away. But she did not say that or openly argue with Claude who was bright red with anger.

Marcus did not arrive until well after midnight and like his father he was furious, threatening to beat his wife within an inch of her life when she was found and to teach her a lesson she would never forget.

Eleanor retreated to a corner of the parlour and watched them. Both fathers were on Marcus’s side still, she could see, though Rishmore said firmly that there would be no beating of his misguided daughter. ‘If I consider it necessary for her protection, I’ll take her to live with me again,’ he stated as his son-in-law ignored him and continued to rant.

‘Sir, she is in my charge now,’ Marcus said. ‘You would have no legal right to do that.’

Samuel stared at him through narrowed eyes. ‘If I thought you were beating my daughter, I’d find a way.’

Marcus had an ugly twist to his mouth sometimes, his mother decided, watching. She would not fool herself about her son from now on. What’s more, if she ever saw a way to help her daughter-in-law, she would do so. In the meantime she said quietly, ‘Until we find Jane, I think the baby and its wet nurse should be brought to Moor Grange where I can keep an eye on them.’

All three men agreed instantly, almost absent-mindedly, then the two Armisteads went back to making angry comments about women and their irrationality while Samuel sat frowning at them.

Feeling exhausted and upset, Eleanor left them to it.

 

No one on the regular stage coach from Manchester to London thought anything of the young fellow who sat so quietly in a corner, wrapped in a heavy cloak and looking white and wan. When he mentioned in a hoarse whisper that he was recovering from the influenza, they took care to keep as far away from him as possible, relieved that he was not sneezing all over them.

In London he strode off down the street with his small valise swinging in his hand.

Two days later a lady wearing the flowing black veils of recent widowhood took a house in a small village in Hertfordshire. She and her elderly maid settled down to live together very quietly and frugally, working in their garden, attending church every Sunday and borrowing books from a circulating library to enliven their peaceful evenings.

The maid told everyone that her mistress had lost not only her husband but also her only child in a carriage accident. Such a tragedy. And the late Mr Barrow had been a rather foolish young man where business matters were concerned, so sadly her mistress was now living in straitened circumstances.

But Mrs Barrow must have been a trifle homesick for the north because it was noticed that she still found the money to take the
Manchester Guardian
every week.

 

When several days had passed without news of Jane and with no sign of a body, Samuel Rishmore reluctantly agreed to the printing of handbills and posters offering a reward for anyone giving information which might lead to the discovery of his missing daughter. His wife had drawn a likeness of Jane only the previous year which, unlike most of Margaret’s sketches, actually bore a resemblance to its subject. The printer used it to make a woodcut and again, chance made it turn out well.

‘That’s her to the life, the jade!’ Marcus snapped when he saw it. ‘If that doesn’t find her for us, nothing will.’

The posters were sent out far and wide across the county.

A pawnbroker in Manchester studied one of them and decided that the young woman who had brought in a rather fine pearl necklace a few weeks ago was probably the one they were looking for. He smiled as he tore the poster down from the wall outside and threw it away. He did not intend to say anything. If his customer really had been this Mrs Armistead, it would do him no good to have her found. If she stayed lost no one would come to retrieve the necklace she had pawned and he would make a fine profit for himself by selling it.