“You did this twice,” the Justice said between his teeth. “Twice you violated a hallowed grave in consecrated ground. Did you intend to effect a similar abomination on the night of the maid’s death?”

The surgeon nodded once in despair. “There was a suicide,” he told us, “along oot Taddington way. A young fool lost a deal o’ brass at cards and blew ‘is brains oot in ‘is father’s barn. Parson meant to bury’m at the crossroads near Taddington, just where the road meets the fork down fra’ Miller’s Dale. Tess could walk over right easy fra’ the Hall.”

“And so you required her to come.”

“I sent bit o’ note in some morphia she’d ordered.”

And Tess had walked out through the hills from Tideswell, wearing her borrowed suit of black clothes, a spectral figure under a fitful moon. Only she had never arrived for her dreadful assignation.

“I found the grave right enough,” Tivey went on. “And who’s to care, what befalls the corpse of a sinner? ’E weren’t in churchyard, any road. I waited more’n two hour fer Tess. She nivver coom, she nivver sent no word.”

“And then?”

Tivey hesitated, and dropped his eyes from Sir James’s face. “I weren’t aboot to let a good corpse go to waste. I opened the grave and took’m out.”

“May God have mercy on your soul, Michael Tivey,” the Justice muttered; and turned away in revulsion.

WE LEARNED LITTLE MORE FROM THE SURGEON AFTER that, though we pressed him closely for particulars of all he had taught Tess Arnold. A formidable character emerged from Michael Tivey’s words: intent upon her skill, with the toughness of a man twice her years; ruthless in pursuit of knowledge, and possessed of a heart of stone. Tess Arnold, I judged, should use any tool that fortune placed within her power, whether the tool possessed a soul or no; but perhaps it was her unswerving passion that had proved her downfall.

“We must have, at least, the names of those they anatomised,” Sir James said in a voice full low. “Did their families learn of the violation in the churchyard, any form of violence might well result. The most respectable of folk might well find it in their hearts to murder with such a cause — and to visit upon the maid’s corpse, the very savagery that their own Deceased had suffered at her hands.”

I nodded, and studied Michael Tivey’s crestfallen countenance. Sir James should be left to secure this final intelligence; it was he who must pursue the bereaved families, and visit further anguish upon those already torn with loss. Tivey looked, to me, to have divulged the worst part of his guilty knowledge; he huddled now, drained of all emotion, on his hard wooden stool.

The great bell of All Saints tolled the hour of five o’clock. The kitchen maids were hovering beyond the door; the innkeeper’s dinner should be decidedly behind-hand. I informed Sir James of my engagement for the evening, received his ardent thanks on the room’s threshold, and fled without a backwards glance.

Though murder will out, and the guilty must pay, I sometimes fear the turn of my own understanding. I had possessed not an idea of Tivey’s secret when first I undertook to persuade; but the apprehension of all that he had done arose in my mind as swift and sure as a passage of vows between two lovers, such as I might pen on paper with my own hand. It was extraordinary — by any construction, extraordinary; and I knew, as I sped towards my bedchamber and Cassandra’s grey silk, that I should not rid myself of the horror of Tivey’s confession for many nights to come.

AT SIX O’CLOCK I ONCE MORE DESCENDED THE FRONT stairs, a woman transformed in her outer garb, however shaken she remained within. I found myself already expected — Dawson the coachman stood correct by the door of an elegant crane-necked coach. And so, in borrowed combs and a gown rather breathless through the bodice, I set off for Chatsworth House. Being absolved of the burden of conversation on this second journey along the Baslow road, I had leisure to think; but such thoughts as must come ensured a violent headache. Better to banish reason, and peer instead through the closed carriage’s octagonal side-lights — to admire the verdant folds of Manners Wood, the stone enclosures of the fields, the long rays of sun gilding the saddles of the hills. I found that I should be sad to leave Derbyshire on the Monday. It was a landscape that beguiled without intending — a harsh and lovely fall of ground that inspired passion, but cared nothing for those who would claim it. One might be suffered to pass unscathed through the Peaks, but one could never claim to own them, whatever the Devonshires might say.

The country was not unlike the character of those it bred. I considered Tess Arnold — a girl grown more inscrutable, the more I learned of her. We knew, now, why she had worn a man’s clothes on the night of her murder, but not why she had been killed. Had some grieving person, entirely unknown to us — whose late wife, or dead child, or long-suffering parent she had torn from an open grave — taken up his gun, and despatched her as brutally as she had served his kin? Then why leave Michael Tivey at liberty, to plunder graves anew?

And what, exactly, had been the maid’s relations with Andrew Danforth? Had she loved him — or merely used him to obtain her borrowed feathers? The state of undress Mrs. Haskell had observed in the privacy of the ice-house, might have been nothing more than an opportunity seized for the exchange of a maid’s habit for that of a gentleman; seduction might have been the farthest thing from Tess Arnold’s mind.

The carriage jolted over a dry rut in the road, and I clutched at the edge of my seat. Reveries about unknown persons, and their possible grievances, were all very well in their way; they might serve quite admirably to divert Sir James Villiers’s attention from the man who now sat in the Bakewell gaol. But the story, to my way of thinking, would not do. Had Tess been despatched by an outraged mourner, in revenge for crimes of anatomisation, why then should George Hemming confess to murder? All Michael Tivey’s talk of churchyards and suicide threw not the slightest light on Hemming’s anguish. I shook my head. Whatever Tess Arnold had intended in her gentleman’s clothes on Monday night, it had played no part in her death.

IT WAS AS WE APPROACHED PILSLEY, AND THE TURNING in our road for Chatsworth, that I espied the lone horseman. He had pulled up his mount on a little rise above, and was staring keenly down at my equipage as it approached the western gates of the park. Both horse and rider were utterly still, their figures suggesting the statue rather than life; and something chilling there was in so undisguised, and so acute, a scrutiny. Indiscernible myself behind the shutters of my coach, I stared implacably back. Only one person in Derbyshire was plunged in so profound a mourning; and only one bore that air of grief, even in stillness. The Marquess of Hartington, Devonshire’s heir.

But why was he not already at home, and dressing for his sister’s dinner?

He wheeled the horse’s head — raised one arm — a whip flashed out, and as swift as a bird in flight, the boy and his mount had put Chatsworth to their backs. I watched, until a turning in the road swept them both from my sight; and knew that it was the last glimpse of the Marquess I should have, that evening.