Free Shadows & Lies by Marjorie Eccles Page B

can talk to about these things. I know you’re sympathetic, underneath, only you won’t commit yourself. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
    â€œOf course you should. I’m always good for a shoulder to cry
on, if nothing else, you know that,” he replied, trying to hide how inordinately pleased he was that she’d turned to him for support. In fact, she was right: he had a good deal of sympathy with what the women were striving for, and he’d often thought it might be rather jolly to join those male medical students, friends of Louisa’s, who were always ready to interrupt meetings with their rowdy songs and bags of flour and rotten eggs, only he’d never quite got around to it. If her fellow sympathisers had all been like Louisa, now …but the truth was, some of them acted more like harridans than ladies and, like this Mary Leigh, whoever she was, frightened him to death with their intensity. “But why have you and Margaret quarrelled?”
    â€œOh, it was nothing, really. This letter. I dare say she would soon have dismissed the unwarranted joy it caused me as the usual feminist hysterics,” she said drily, “and we’d have made it up and that would have been that, if this other business in the village hadn’t come up and made it worse.”
    He recalled the unusual stir as he rode down the street. “I noticed Perkins’ cart outside the village hall as I passed, and the crowd. What’s happened?”
    â€œYou haven’t heard? I would have thought they’d have been up to see you all at the house before now.”
    â€œI’ve been out all morning. I met young Davey with your message in the stable yard and came down here immediately. Who are ‘they’, pray?”
    â€œThe police. Apparently a woman’s body has been found in the Abbey grounds in mysterious circumstances.”
    â€œWhat? One of the village women?”
    She shook her head. “No one knows who she is. She’s a stranger, no one from here, or seemingly from anywhere round about.”
    â€œIn the Abbey grounds, did you say? When was she found?”
    â€œThis morning – by the gamekeeper who lives at the lodge —”
    â€œJordan.”
    â€œTom Jordan, yes. But they seem to think she died yesterday. Poor woman, she must have been taken ill and then died from exposure, out there in all that rain. What’s the matter? Is anything wrong?”

    â€œWhat? Oh no, no. Do go on.”
    But of course, something was very wrong indeed. That woman he had seen had been real enough, after all. But why had she not left the grounds by the main gates as he’d surmised? If she’d had no right to be there at Belmonde, could she have somehow lost her way, looking for some way out, other than by way of the main drive, along which she must have entered? The gates weren’t kept locked nowadays, and were left unattended, except at night. Due to his father’s economies, there was no one at the lodge to open and shut them during the day when Jordan was about his gamekeeping business. But the woman wasn’t to have known this, and might have slipped in, thinking them left temporarily open.
    He became aware that Louisa, after a curious glance, was speaking again, an unusual edge to her tone. “According to Margaret, she must have been one of ‘my’ suffragettes. Why else would a lone woman be lurking in the Abbey grounds, if not to throw a brick through a window, or to cause some other mischief?”
    â€œSo that’s why you quarrelled?” he asked, temporarily distracted from thinking about that poor woman’s fate. “Hmm. Well, I have to say it seems a perfectly sensible viewpoint, especially given that my Uncle Monty was expected down here this weekend. After that speech he made last month, he might well be regarded as a target —”
    â€œAnd the fact that there are simply no