affection for her children, meant that his bruises were significant. They’d been fading on Monday, so the fight had taken place perhaps a week ago. She wondered if Wick’s body had also borne evidence of a fist-fight.
Mrs Wick, whose attention had wandered to her children, passed a weary hand over her forehead and yawned. The languid gesture pulled her dress tight against her body – her thin, narrow body – and the slight swell of her lower belly. Mary’s gaze was riveted once more. On a woman that gaunt, such a belly could mean only one thing; even she knew that. It might not be Reid’s baby, of course. But odds were it was, and that was more than sufficient motive for violence. It was enough even for murder.
The door clicked shut behind Reid and Mrs Wick smiled at Mary, meek and conciliatory. “Forgive me, ma’am. I’m sure I don’t know why I’m so weary these days. It’s in my bones, like.”
Mary murmured something about trying times. “Have you family close by? Someone to help with the children?”
She shook her head. “I ain’t from London; it was Wick as wanted to work here, and what could I do but follow? I was right sorry to leave Saffron Walden.”
“Have you thought about what you might do? Go back to Essex, perhaps? Or at least send some of the children?” A better-off relative might even offer to raise one of them for her.
“I don’t rightly know, ma’am. It’s all so sudden, and Wick not yet buried on account of that ink…” She made a helpless gesture.
“What do you do, for work?”
“Straw-plaiting, ma’am.”
So that was why her hands were so callused and scarred. They were the hands Mary herself ought to have had, the better to pass as a builder’s assistant. “And you find time to plait straw, with six children in the house?”
“Aye, ma’am. Katy’s a wonder for looking after the little ones, and Johnny’s old enough to help in his way. Wick had his trade, but it’s powerful hard to keep a family of eight even on a bricklayer’s wages, ma’am, and a working man’s wife has got to help in any way she can.”
“Very proper,” said Mary. “You must both have worked hard, indeed.”
Mrs Wick nodded. “Oh yes, ma’am, poor Wick worked hard enough for his wages. Why, they’s nights he ain’t come home till nine, ten, nor even eleven o’clock! A working man’s life is a hard one, they say, and it were so for Wick.”
Nine or ten o’clock, from a building site? From the pub, more like. Mary looked critically at Mrs Wick’s bruised eye, still swollen and slightly distorted. They were an oddly discoloured pair at the moment, Jane Wick and Robert Reid – and it was almost certainly thanks to the same, dead man. “And was Wick a good husband to you?”
Mrs Wick flushed defensively. “I hope you’ll pardon my saying so, ma’am, but if a man’s so hard-worked, he’s often weary.”
But not too weary to beat his pregnant wife. Mary’s mouth twisted in disgust, but there was no point in pressing the issue if Mrs Wick was only going to defend her husband’s brutality. And what would such an admission prove? Only that Wick was like thousands of men across England. “I ask,” she said in a conciliatory voice, “because I wonder what else I might be able to do for you. What do you need, Mrs Wick?”
A prouder woman would have refused, at this point. A pragmatic one would have made a request. But Jane Wick merely shook her head, uncertain. “I don’t rightly know, ma’am, for all you’re so kind…”
“The funeral’s tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am, and there’s my mourning to finish … I been that busy, I ain’t yet put the bodice to the skirt.”
“Who will watch the children?”
Three sharp raps on the door interrupted them.
Mrs Wick looked anxious once again. “I ain’t never had so many callers,” she said apologetically. “Johnny, do you answer that, there’s a good boy.”
Johnny left the table still chewing, a hunk of bread-and-butter in one hand. The hinges were rather stiff and he had to pull on the door with his body-weight in order to open it. What he saw on the other side caused him to gasp and let go of the doorknob, dropping onto his bottom with a thump. His bread-and-butter tumbled to the floor and he made no move to retrieve it.
“Good evening, young man,” said a low masculine voice. “Is your mother home?”