We’d watched Carew walking away into the sunlight, with a lightness of step that belied his weight. Spring was in his walk and in the air, but it was a spring smirched now, like his smile, with a cold malevolence. I moved further up the path, up the hillside, putting more distance ’twixt us and Carew… and also the herb garden, sullied now. I did not want to go back to it. Carew had assiduously reburied the skulls where he’d uncovered them. Promising, as he walked away, that he’d send word to Wells to arrange a meeting for me with the prisoner – that I might ask her, he said, about all the other body parts which could be unearthed in her garden. ‘I know how it looks,’ I said to Dudley, ‘and I know how it’ll sound to a jury in court, but that doesn’t make it any less of a contrivance. The bones were brought here not by Nel Borrow.’ But I was sickened to see that Dudley’s patrician face was marked now with doubt. ‘How do you know that, John? You don’t. You can’t.
