And there is the curlicue.
Are they indistinguishable?
Not quite.
Miss Burgess’s is a little looser and more flowing.
Even so, they are extremely similar, and the difference could be easily attributed to a hand trying to vary its familiar patterns.
But that is just one letter, so I look at the next and the next and the next.
They are all so alike, not conclusively identical but close enough that I can admit only the narrowest vein of doubt.
“Well?” Miss Burgess asks with an air of anticipation.
She expects to be exonerated, which I find unnerving.
Even knowing her tactic is to play a weak hand with conviction, I am disquieted by her cavalier impatience because it makes me doubt the obvious conclusion.
That is the point of her performance, I suppose.
Hesitantly, I show the two samples to Sebastian to ascertain his opinion, which she recognizes as an inauspicious sign.
“Why are you giving them to Mr. Holcroft?” she asks, her voice growing shrill with alarm. “You do not need someone else’s opinion. It should be as plain as day. It cannot be anything but plain as day, because I did not write the letters. I am not Eternally Devoted.”
Sebastian murmurs noncommittally, which increases her apprehension, and she swirls around the room, seemingly with no purpose, and then lands on Mr. Nutting.
“Tell her I did not read the book,” she says imploringly. “The wretched gothic that Miss Hyde-Clare said inspired the letters. Tell her I did not read the book. You recommended it highly and gave me a copy, and it sat around the vicarage for weeks, and I told you that I read it because I did not want to hurt your feelings, but then you asked all sorts of questions about the plot and I had to admit that I did not read a word because I loathe gothics, which I had told you repeatedly, but you kept insisting this one was different.”
“Did I recommend it?” Mr. Nutting says coolly. “I do not recall.”
Overcome with frustration, she shrieks wildly before calling him a sniveling cur and alighting on Mrs. Holcroft, from whom she begs corroboration. “You know it is true, because we discussed it. I mentioned that a friend had given me the book with the highest recommendation, but I could not bring myself to open it because I find gothics silly, and you told me I was right not to bother because youhadopened it and found it the silliest bit of nonsense you had encountered in an age. You read only a few chapters and stopped. You remember that conversation, don’t you, Mrs. Holcroft? Please say you remember.”
“I do remember,” Mrs. Holcroft says soothingly.
But she looks at me with troubled eyes.
She knows the disavowal is a slight thing compared to the handwriting.
We all do.
If that is the whole of her defense, she will surely hang.
With almost pathetic gratefulness, Miss Burgess thanks the other woman for her recollection, then says with frantic repetition, “What else, what else, what else? A motive! A murder must have a motive, and there is none that can be ascribed to me. I did not wish Mr. Keast harm. I have no reason to! He was nothing to me. I rarely encountered him. What is my motive? For me to be the killer, I must have a motive. And I have none!”
“You were no more fond of his land policies than I,” Mr. Nutting says.
Miss Burgess swivels around again to face him.
“You see the misery he has caused in the district, through your brother’s work as well as your own, and dislike it. You think it is intolerable that one man should be allowed to impoverish so many. We talked about it many times because I share your disdain for his methods,” he explains, then turns to me with a glint in his eyes. “If you are looking for a motive, Miss Hyde-Clare, then I suggest you start there. Her brother will confirm it all.”
“That is the motive for half the village!” Miss Burgess says dismissively. “It is like saying I killed him because I do not like rain. It is nonsense! How am I even meant to have done it? He was killed in the early hours of the morning, right? I am a lone woman and would never dare to traverse the distance in the dead of night. I lack the nerve.”
Mr. Nutting says she had nerve aplenty when she would meet him at the barn behind the mill, causing Mrs. Holcroft to mutter, “Detestable creature.”
That is true.
He is horrible, and if I could make him the guilty party with a wave of my hand, I would do so in an instant.
