I have made Bexley cry, or very nearly, and I am not proud of it, though I can't say I'm sorry either, since it's given me the piece I've been missing.
It happened over the account books again — I'd gone back to him about that express-postage charge, more persistently than good manners strictly allow, and this time I didn't let him change the subject. I told him plainly that I thought he knew something about Dr. Penn's last days that he hadn't told anyone, and that I'd rather hear it from him gently than have him asked less gently by whatever official eventually does reach us. He went quite grey, poor man, and then it came out in a rush, the way these things do once the dam's given way.
It was never about money at all. That first afternoon, the afternoon the snow began in earnest, Dr. Penn came to him in something close to agitation — unlike himself entirely, Bexley says, he'd never seen the old gentleman anything but placid — and begged him to get a letter into the last post before the roads closed, whatever it cost, however it had to be managed. Bexley told him the post had likely gone already; Penn insisted, nearly pleaded, that it be tried regardless, and pressed money into his hand for express carriage to make certain of it. That was the raised voices I heard — not a grievance over the bill, but Bexley protesting there was nothing more to be done and Penn refusing to accept it. Bexley sent a boy running for the carrier's cart on the strength of that money, not knowing or asking what the letter contained, only that it went out addressed, he thinks, to some institution or registrar — he didn't read it closely, he swears, only saw enough of the direction to know it wasn't a tradesman's account.
He's ashamed, he says, because he let a dying man's last frantic request look like a squabble over sixpence in front of the whole downstairs, and because he was so relieved afterward that no scandal seemed to follow it that he never thought to mention it once Dr. Penn was found dead — until I made him.
I sat with that a long while after he'd gone, and I confess, my dear, I went back and reread the little dosage book with entirely different eyes. I had been thinking of it as the record of a careful man's careful habit — reassuring, almost, in its orderliness. Now I think it is something else. A man who measures his own drops that precisely, every night, without fail, is not a man who is careless of small differences. He would know, better than anyone in this house, exactly how much was safe and exactly how much was not — which means whoever added to what he'd already taken either did not know that precision existed, or knew it exactly and used it.
And a man urgent enough to beg, nearly weep, to get one particular letter out before the roads closed was not a man idly writing to an old colleague about the weather. He was trying to confirm something, and trying to do it before he had to say a single word to anyone here about what he suspected.
I don't know yet who he suspected, or of what. But I no longer believe, not for one moment, that Dr. Penn's heart simply gave out because the excitement of Christmas guests was too much for it. I believe he knew something, or half-knew it, and was racing the snow to be certain before he spoke — and someone in this house could not afford to let him become certain.
Miss Calloway asked after the post again today, quite lightly, in the middle of some other remark about the weather, so lightly I think I was meant not to notice she'd asked at all.
Tell me I'm not inventing a murderer out of grief and a snowed-in imagination. Tell me, if you were in my position, whether you would begin, as I find I already have, quietly watching one person in particular.
Yours, in the thick of it,
Purdie
P.S. — Edmund came to find me this evening, oddly confiding, and told me — unprompted, which itself struck me as strange — that he'd been "sorting out a private matter" near Dr. Penn's room and hoped I wouldn't think ill of him for it.