Page 79 of Winterset

She lifted her chin a little defiantly. “You’re thinking I’m wicked, aren’t you, miss, not to tell and to take the money for it? But I wanted out of that life—forever taking orders and cleaning up after folks, my hands red and raw all winter—and when they offered me that money, I saw it was my chance to get away. So I took it. Besides, who’d have believed me, even if I had told? The lord and lady would have sworn it wasn’t true, and Mrs. Hartwell, too, and I’d ’ve been turned off without a reference.”

“You were in a difficult situation,” Reed told her sympathetically.

Anna let out a soft groan and brought her hands to her head. “Oh, God, he was mad, wasn’t he?”

Mrs. Parmer nodded. “I’m sorry, miss. But he wasn’t right in the head. And he got worse.”

“But no one told you that it was Lord de Winter who killed Susan?” Reed asked. “Did they?”

“Who else could it have been?” Mrs. Parmer retorted. “One of the servants, they wouldn’t have done all that to cover it up, now would they? And Master Charles was only a lad. Who else would have been in that room with her? Then, after Will Dawson was killed, too, her ladyship locked Lord Roger up. In the nursery, see, where the windows had bars on them. They added a good stout door with a lock on it, and only Mrs. Hartwell had the key. He had several rooms there to walk around in, and his valet did for him, you see.”

“So was his madness common knowledge?” Anna asked.

“Oh, no, miss, the other servants weren’t told. Nobody saw him except when he would go walking in the gallery with his valet or her ladyship. They put out the story that he was ill, weak. His valet always took his meals up to him. The servants knew he was odd, and there were whispers, of course. But her ladyship was a sweet woman—kind, she was, and nobody wanted to hurt her. And the pay was good. Nobody wanted to get dismissed. So no one talked much outside the house. The doctor knew, of course. He used to come and check on him, bandage him up when he hurt himself, give him something to make him quiet. You know.”

Anna thought of the missing pages in the doctor’s journal. Had they referred to his visits to the mad Lord de Winter?

“The solicitor knew, too, I guess—the old one before Mr. Norton, I mean. Oh, and Perkins. He used to come by, regular-like. He’d help the valet sometimes, when the old lord was too wild. There was another servant, too, one they hired to help the valet. He was a big, strong fellow, but he never talked much with any of the rest of the servants.”

“What was Lord de Winter like?” Anna asked her.

The old woman shrugged. “He never talked much to me. Whenever I went in to clean his room, the valet would take him out to walk in the garden or somewhere. Sometimes they’d go down to the summerhouse—he liked the summerhouse. But he looked at you, and his eyes…” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “They weren’t like normal eyes. I can’t explain it, but there was this look in them I never saw in anyone else, and I hope never to see again. Just being in his rooms was bad enough, what with all the masks and writings and such.”

“Excuse me?” Reed interrupted her. “Masks? Writings? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh. No, I guess, they would all ’ve been taken down. He liked to collect masks, Lord de Winter did. Strange looking things from all over the world. They looked like animals, some of them. And others were like something I’ve never seen—demons, maybe. Wicked-looking things, they were. He’d always collected them, see, and he was that fond of them. So they hung them all around in the nursery, so he could have them around. Whenever I was cleaning the rooms, it always felt like someone was watching me, ’cause of all those masks.”

“You mentioned writings,” Anna prodded when the woman fell silent.

Mrs. Parmer nodded. “Sometimes, when the spells took him, he would write on the walls. They painted them over now and then, but he’d always go back to writing on them.” She shook her head. “Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, I couldn’t. Some if it didn’t even look like English.”

Anna thought of the symbols her uncle drew, and her stomach constricted. Was her uncle like his father? Was his madness, too, the kind that drove a man to kill?

“What was Lord de Winter like before he descended into madness?” Anna asked. “You said he was hard.”

“Oh, my, yes. Everything had to be just so, and woe betide anyone who put things out of place or wasn’t quick enough. And servants weren’t the only ones. Her ladyship could never please him, except for giving him a son. I heard him take her to task something terrible. He even hit her sometimes. But she and Nurse were good about keeping Master Charles out of his way. A child could never be neat enough for that one.”

Her uncle, too, wanted things done just a certain way—utensils in the correct order, the stones lined up according to his plan—and he did not like anything changed. But he had never been one to erupt into violence, or even shouting, if things were not done exactly to his plan. He simply worried and stewed about it. Charles’ personality was mild, and surely, Anna thought, that made all the difference between him and his father.

They left not long after that. Anna was reeling from the information that they had received.

“My own grandfather!” she exclaimed as they rode back toward Winterset. “No wonder Nick was reluctant to tell me about the murders. He must have known the truth, and he could not bear to tell me that my grandfather was a murderer.”

“It explains a great deal,” Reed agreed. “It is little wonder that the murders went unsolved. There was obviously a conspiracy of silence to protect Lord de Winter.”

“The doctor must have known,” Anna said. “Or at least suspected that Lord de Winter was the culprit. He knew he was insane. He knew that they locked him up after the murders. And after that the murders stopped.”

“Yes, I would think he must have wondered about it. Perhaps those pages torn out of the doctor’s journal were about Lord de Winter.”

Anna nodded. “That is exactly what I was thinking.”

“I would like to look at that nursery myself,” Reed commented. “Obviously I should have trusted more in what Grimsley said. Lord de Winter did live in the nursery.”

“That poor woman,” Anna said, shaking her head. “Lady de Winter, I mean. Think of being married to a monster like that. Knowing what he was, what he had done—yet she must have felt she had to shield him from the law because of her children. She would not have wanted them branded as mad, too. The scandal would have tarnished their name beyond repair. I can understand why she covered up for him. But to continue to live with him in the house, to see him…Why, Mrs. Parmer even said sometimes Lady de Winter walked with him in the gallery. She was with him in the summerhouse when they had the fire.”

Reed looked at Anna. “That is where they both died, isn’t it?”

Anna nodded, her expression changing. “Are you thinking—that he killed her, too?”