“What d’ye suppose did kill ’em, then, Richard Gibbon?” demanded Ann Dovey, a hot flush on her face, her tone full of resentment.
“That’s just what has to be found out,” returned Gibbon, passing on his way.
“If it hadn’t been for Dobbs and Butcher Perkins holding out again’ it, Crew ’ud ha’ been brought in guilty safe enough,” said Ann Dovey. And the tone was again so excited, so bitterly resentful against Dobbs and Perkins, that I could not help looking at her in wonder. It sounded just as though the non-committal of Abel were a wrong inflicted upon herself.
“No, he would not have been brought in guilty,” I answered her; “he would have been committed for trial; but that’s a different thing. If the matter could be sifted to the bottom, I know it would be found that the mischief did not lie with Abel Crew’s pills. There, Mrs. Dovey!”
She was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes—for all the world as if she were afraid of me, or of what I said. I could not make her out.
“Why should you wish so particularly to bring it home to Crew?” I pointedly asked her; and Figg turned round to look at her, as if seconding the question.
“Me want particular to bring it home to Crew!” she retorted, her voice rising with temper; or perhaps with fear, for she trembled like an aspen leaf. “I don’t want to bring it home particular to him, Mr. Ludlow. It were his pills, though, all the same, that did it.”
And with that she whisked through the forge to her kitchen.
On the morning following I got old Jones to let me into the lock-up. The place consisted of two rooms opening into one another, and a small square space, no bigger than a closet, at the end of the passage, where they kept the pen and ink. For that small space had a window in it, looking on to the fields at the back; the two rooms had only skylights in the roof. In the inner room a narrow iron bedstead stood against the wall, a mattress and blanket on it. Abel was sitting on that when we went in.