The frost broke into something sharper and stiller today — no wind at all for the first time since we were snowed in, just a hard, ringing cold and a sky so clean it looked scoured — and somehow that stillness has made the house more restless than the storm ever did, as though we'd all been leaning against the noise without knowing it and now have nothing to lean on.
Word came at last, and good word: the road-gang has broken through as far as the Marsh Lane bridge and expects to reach the village itself by Thursday, with the mail to follow within a day or two after. Bexley pinned the notice up in the hall himself, looking ten years younger for it, and there was something almost indecent in how eagerly everyone gathered round to read it, as though a dead man weren't still lying in the cold back room awaiting the same road to carry him properly away.
I have spent the two days since my last letter doing what you'd call, I think, tidying up loose ends, and I am glad to tell you most of them have come away clean in my hand.
Edmund's "private matter" turned out to be exactly the sort of thing a frightened man does when he's ashamed rather than guilty of anything worse. He came to me again, red about the ears, and confessed that he owes a rather alarming sum at cards and had convinced himself Dr. Penn — who once did some minor legal work for his family — might be holding a promissory note of his among his papers. He'd been searching, not scheming, and is mortified I noticed. I believe him. A man planning murder does not generally also confide his gambling debts to a woman he barely knows out of sheer nervous relief.
Nell's evening disappearances have an explanation too, and a rather sweet one, though she begged me not to tell Mrs. Bexley: she's been meeting Bexley's nephew, who helps with the horses, by the back stair each night, and living in terror of being thought forward and dismissed for it. That's all it ever was. I have promised to say nothing, and I hope you'll forgive me the same discretion.
Colonel Vane I feel worst about, in a way, because I forced the truth out of a proud old man who'd rather have died than admitted it: he is losing the sight of one eye, quite badly, and has been keeping a hand near the walls in dim corridors and carrying his stick everywhere as much for feeling his way as for show. That's why it was outside Dr. Penn's door — he'd gone the wrong way in the dark two nights running, groping for his own room, and left it behind once in his confusion. He asked me, with more dignity than I could have managed in his place, not to let it become the subject of the smoking-room's pity.
Which leaves, as it has for some days now though I've been slow to say so even to you, Miss Calloway.
Here is the small crack, and I don't like it. She told me, the very morning he was found, that she'd retired early with a headache and slept straight through. But Nell mentioned in passing today, quite innocently, while we were going over the linen, that she'd taken a fresh candle up to Miss Calloway's room close to midnight because the old one had guttered out — and found the bed still made, the room empty. Nell thought nothing of it; ladies wander down for a book, a glass of water, whatever it may be. But it does not sit, my dear, beside "retired early and slept straight through," and I cannot make it sit no matter how I turn it.
I don't know yet what it means. I only know that everyone else in this house has, one by one, turned out to be hiding something small and human and entirely beside the point — and she has not yet given me anything at all, except an empty bed at midnight and a story that doesn't match it.
Thursday will bring the road, and eventually the post, and I begin to think I want that post rather badly, for reasons I can't fully explain even to myself. Tell me plainly, since we're near the end of this now, one way or another — do you think an empty bed and a headache that wasn't a headache is enough to hang a suspicion on, or am I still only assembling coincidences because I want so badly for there to be a someone?
Yours, in the thick of it,
Purdie
P.S. — Three days now until the road clears, they say, and I find myself counting them the way I haven't counted anything since I was a girl waiting for Christmas — though what I'm waiting for this time, I couldn't in good conscience call a gift.