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curls. She might well have been a gentleman’s daughter, abroad on some lark in the dead of night. That would explain the fancy-dress. “And did she belong to one of the estates in the neighbourhood?”
    “To a place called Penfolds,” my cousin said, “some five miles distant. She was a stillroom maid.”
    “A servant!”
    “By the name of Tess Arnold.”
    I glanced over my shoulder at the parlour door, concerned lest word of the girl’s unhappy end should travelunbeknownst into the hallway; Sally might be hovering there, her ears grown large with the intelligence. I shut the door firmly and placed my back against it.
    “Was Mr. Tivey able to determine when she was killed?”
    My cousin’s eyes moved blankly to meet my own. “He thinks it possible that life was extinguished some hours before the body was discovered, but cannot tell exactly when. The maid probably met her end in the middle of the night.”
    “Quite alone and far from home”—Cassandra shuddered—“where her cries for assistance must certainly go unheeded. How dreadful, to be sure!”
    “You say that Penfolds is five miles from Bakewell, Cousin,” I said. “But how great a distance separates it from Miller’s Dale, and the place of the maid’s gruesome end?”
    “Less than a mile, Sir James Villiers tells me. Sir James is in commission of the peace for Bakewell, and a very fine gentleman; he has known Charles Danforth from birth.”
    “Mr. Danforth, I conclude, is the owner of Penfolds?”
    “And a man of very easy circumstances—a clear ten thousand a year. The Danforth family is an ancient one in Derbyshire, and boasts a considerable reputation and influence; Sir James assures me that they are everywhere esteemed and valued.” The respectability of the Penfolds family appeared of some importance to my cousin, as though it might blot out the savagery of their dependant’s murder.
    “I knew a Danforth once,” my mother offered, “but he was killed at sea in the year ’sixty-nine. They carried his body in the hold of his ship for six weeks together, pickled in a hogshead of rum, so that his wife might have the burying of him. Unsavoury business. I cannot think that any wife should wish to see her husband so thoroughly disguised in drink.”
    “But how came this young woman to be from homeso late at night?” Cassandra enquired. “And attired as a man?”
    “And whose,” I added, “were the clothes? It must be tolerably difficult for a serving girl to obtain the articles of a gentleman.”
    “Unless she were intimate with the Penfolds laundress,” my mother observed—a point not without its merits.
    “One does not wish to speak ill of the dead—particularly when death was achieved in so hideous a manner,” Cassandra began hesitantly. “One does not like to place an unpleasant construction on events—”
    “But clearly duplicity was the maid’s object. You may speak freely, Cassandra; your words cannot harm Tess Arnold now.”
    “I fear I cannot agree, Jane,” objected Mr. Cooper. “It is not for us to canvass the matter of the girl’s death. It is an affair for the Justice.”
    Impossible for my cousin to comprehend the restless agitation that had held me in its grip throughout the morning; or the feverish activity of my intellect, in its effort to make sense of so much brutality. He could not be expected to apprehend that having seen the blood on the rock, I must be
doing
something to rid myself of nightmare. Such behaviour in a lady was beyond Mr. Cooper’s experience, and, indeed, beyond what he might consider the bounds of decorum. But I would not submit willingly to nightmare for anyone.
    I took a turn before the unlit grate and came to a halt at my cousin’s chair. “Did Mr. Tivey offer his opinion of the girl? Or any views that might throw some light on this dreadful business?”
    Mr. Cooper drew a laboured breath, and failed to meet my eyes. “Tivey is the sort who would consign his own mother to the