“You asked me to look into any event here at the school while members of the Eastfield Company were students. I couldn’t tell you that I’d already learned something about one of them. It had been in my aunts’ personal papers, and I stumbled across it in my first year as head mistress. Although it was rather shocking, it had no immediate importance then, you see, except for a personal interest in the child this once belonged to.”

She upended the envelope, and something fell out onto her blotter. Rutledge looked at the tangle and then felt cold as he recognized what it was.

A garrote.

No, not really a garrote. A clumsy, crude imitation of one.

“Daniel,” she went on, “was apparently very different from his brother. Anthony was a gentleman in every sense. Daniel was—he was more at home with the sons of tradesmen. He fought with them, played with them, felt comfortable in their presence. My aunts referred to him as a little ruffian. He enjoyed the Army as well, I think. I’ve been told that he was very popular with his men.”

Her fingertip touched the garrote. “According to my aunt Felicity’s note, on the last day before the Pierce brothers were to leave Eastfield and go to the school in Surrey, Daniel brought this in, and during the morning, he threatened his classmates with it. The boys, that is, not the girls. Aunt Felicity was quite shocked when she overheard him swearing he’d slip into their houses in the dead of night and dispatch them, and she took the garrote away from him. She insisted on summoning his father, but Daniel begged her not to. He swore he’d done it to protect someone. It’s all there in the file. The fear of God, he told my aunt, was nothing to the fear of death, and so he’d used the threat. In the end, she was dissuaded, against her better judgment. So she wrote an account of what had transpired, kept the garrote with it, and told Daniel that if he didn’t behave himself in Surrey and become a fine example of the Misses Tate School, like his brother, she would go directly to his father. He gave her his solemn promise.”

Rutledge reached for the garrote, picked up the length of rope and the two short, carefully whittled sticks tied at each end. Crudely made though it was, it was still too close to the mark for comfort. “Where the devil did a small boy Daniel’s age come to learn about garrote?”