Wattle Circus: Chapter Twenty-One
Stanley turned the letter over but the other side was blank. These five words were all he had. Yet they said everything he could ever have wished to hear. For some weeks, things continued normally at home and if anything his visits to Willis’ office became rarer, terrified as he was of raising suspicions beyond the point they must have already reached.
Nevertheless his wife, although she did not love him, was alert to the subtle shifts a man undergoes in the throes of new feelings. Try as he might to obscure them, she could smell it in his clothes, could hear an almost imperceptible shift in the pitch of his voice, sense strange heat radiating from his body that had not been there for untold years.
With clinical precision, she set to finding out what had changed. First, the letter. The only locked drawer in the house – could he have been more obvious? From there, it was quite simple to narrow things down. Their town was a small one and there had only been one new arrival of note in the past two years, only one person who could possibly be the source of her husband’s ridiculous, childish infatuation.
From there it was a very simple matter of lying in bed one night until the whole town must have been sleeping. With Stanley snoring soundly on the pillow in his room – they had not shared a bed since the first year of their marriage – she gently closed the front door behind her. She walked to the end of the street, turned the corner and made her way to the two-storey stone house where she knew the lodger had taken out the top floor. Slipping through an unlocked rear window, lifting it in its sash without a sound, she passed through the kitchen on her way up the stairs.
It was out of character for Charlotte not to be at work on the stroke of eight o’clock. John Willis waited until a quarter past nine before sending a messenger boy to enquire as to what was delaying his employee. The boy reported back that the town policeman, Sergeant McAllister, would be dropping by later in the day. It was in relation to Miss Dalfoy is all he would say.
Sergeant McAllister had never seen anything like it in his 20 years in the force. He could not understand how nobody would have heard a thing. A bloodied kitchen knife had been sunk into the bedroom wall, a terrible name for a fallen woman scrawled across the wall in Charlotte’s own blood.
It had not escaped John Willis’ attention that Stanley had taken a shine to Miss Dalfoy. He had no designs on the young worker himself, his own affections taking on a different form, one not generally discussed in such society. This observation led to Sergeant McAllister being at the kitchen table of the Daley residence later that afternoon, quite unable to drink any of the tea Mrs Daley had just poured as she gave him a casually off-hand account of her visit to Miss Dalfoy during the early hours of the morning, guided by a waxing moon along streets she had known her entire life, streets she could have travelled with her eyes closed if she had so wished.
She appeared not to leave a single detail lacking in her account, explaining the way she had run her finger down the blade of the kitchen knife to ensure it was keen enough, the way she had taken only one continuous movement with an arm built up from years of hand washing and dough pounding to carry out her task. How she had used her finger to paint the accusation she had left behind.
“I suppose you will be wanting me to come with you?” she asked, as simply as if she had asked about the weather or offered another cup of tea. She wiped her hands on the apron, hung it on its hook behind the door, patted her hair and waited for the policeman to lead the way to the station.
The trial had been a minor sensation due to its graphic nature, but neither Abigail nor Mary Ann had been aware of Maureen until they were on the ship. Mary Ann’s ‘crime’, it appeared, was a more than passing resemblance to the unfortunate Charlotte; she was a younger, prettier version of Maureen’s victim.
Mary Ann tried her best to make her peace with Maureen but it was beyond salvation. As the days wore on, their memories of streets and lamp-posts or fields and stiles began losing their tethers, floating in and out of reach. Tempers grew fractious. Women who had been quite friendly to Abigail to begin with now barely noticed her, or even seemed irritated if she tried speaking with them. So Abigail, Mary Ann, Finn, his new friend Jack and of course Lord Byron pretty much kept to themselves, trying to stay out of the way of the others as they counted off the days. Not that they had any idea how long the voyage would take as nobody had told them. Every day still felt like they were leaving somewhere, there was no sense of a future arrival, imminent or otherwise.
to be continued. . .
