that Cousin Edwin and I were so upset that we quit the main house. After planning to run away together to London, and planning to build a tree fortress, and planning to live as highwaymen, we had decided to play a game.
“A game?” Constable Quillfeather repeated slowly.
Yes, I told him, a game called Robin Hood.
Constable Quillfeather rubbed his hands as he leant forward, inquiring what this game involved.
“Hunting for deer in Nottingham Forest.” My words may have been false, but my tears were true. “We separated so as to meet again and show what we’d killed for supper. But it was all pretend. Then I went to the meeting place—there’s two fallen logs crossed like a crooked X not far from the cottage—and, and no one was there. Then I thought Edwin must have . . .”
“There, there,” Agatha said as a sob escaped. “There, now.”
Like a fever dream, I saw Edwin approaching with a hemmed square of cotton he imagined was an apology.
“I thought he must have been playing one of his tricks,” I forced out. “But, oh, I was so vexed he’d left me alone in the woods when it was getting dark. I searched everywhere. I thought of the ravine because we collect things down there sometimes.”
“What sort?” Constable Quillfeather desired to know.
“Bright rocks, wildflowers, bones. When I found him, dusk was nearly finished, and . . . he wasn’t breathing.”
“He had already expired?”
I drew a shuddering breath. “His eyes looked—I can’t stand to think of how his eyes looked, don’t ask me, please!”
This was the truth: his eyes had looked utterly betrayed before they had glazed to an unseeing shimmer like ice crusting a pool.
“And no one else saw you?”
“No.”
“And no one else saw him?”
“No one I know about.”
“And then you returned here?”
“Yes. Slowly,” I whispered, hedging my bets as to whether Agatha had noticed the gap between twilight and my return. “I felt so weak. This morning, I should have thought it all some horrid dream, except . . . except it’s true.”
“Miss Jane, that was very complete,” Constable Quillfeather complimented. He brushed his hands over his head, and the wiry locks like accusers arrowed towards my face all the surer. “May I ask you a few more questions?”
“I suppose so.”
“The courage in this one, the pluck!” Whistling, Constable Quillfeather winked at Agatha. “She’s been raised by a paragon of a mother, but that’s in addition to a few stout friends, I think?”
“I hope so, but judge for yerself, sir,” Agatha answered calmly.
“That I shall, ma’am. Miss Steele, was Edwin in any sort of fight that evening?”
Either the clock which had been ticking stopped, or I went deaf with panic.
“His button was missing?” Constable Quillfeather indicated the top button on his own waistcoat. “Hereabouts? Seemed to have been torn away?”
“We played at highwaymen before Robin Hood, to practise.” I glanced up at Agatha. “We staged a fight. Edwin . . . he’d not have wanted Aunt Patience to know about that, she likes everything to be so proper.”
The policeman blew out a breath. “It gave me a turn, you understand? Didn’t know what to think—signs of a struggle?”
My stomach heaved. As suddenly as he had introduced the subject, however, Constable Quillfeather abandoned it.
“You’ll miss your playmate, Miss Steele, and the blow comes too soon on the heels of another, and it hurts me to see it,” he averred, shaking his head. “There’s an . . . incongruity? About grief in the very young. It doesn’t belong on you? Well, I’m for the grieving mother now.”
Constable Quillfeather came to stand before me on spindly stork’s legs, bending over like a question mark.
“You’ll take care of yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What’s happened to your dress sleeve?”
We looked at my blue-and-grey-patterned dress sleeve and the short tear in it made by Edmund’s final game. Agatha’s vision was as keen as a whiskered mole’s, and she had brushed off my dress the night before without seeing the rip; since I donned the nearest thing I could find that morning, there it was, a grisly cotton wound with a lurid smoke-coloured bruise beneath.
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “It must have been torn when we were playing highwaymen, just like Edwin’s button. It’s the only explanation.”
After a pause, Constable Quillfeather shook my hand and stood tall as a beanpole, gently frowning. “Well, I am in tremendous debt to you, Miss Steele. If that is the only explanation, then I shall never have to seek out another one, shall I?”