Susanna Fothergill

Susanna Fothergill is 24 and has spent her whole life within walls. Born in the fortress, where her father, Elias, has served for thirty years as Keeper of the Jewels, she has never lived anywhere else. Her mother died of fever when she was eight, and since then she has cooked, mended, counted the month's coins and read her father the letters his tired eyes could no longer manage. She defends the old man in every sentence, as if someone were accusing him.

She lives with him in a whitewashed stone lodging beside the courtyard, low-ceilinged with narrow windows. The kitchen has an iron stove, copper pots hung by size, an oak table scored by the knives of three generations of guards and a pewter jug that comes and goes full of wine on visiting days. Since the reverend began to appear, the dinners have grown longer, and so has the conversation.

She is thin, with a pale, freckled face, brown eyes now swollen from crying and dark red hair tucked under a white linen cap. She wears a blue-gray wool dress with a tight bodice, a white apron always bearing some stain and a brown shawl on her shoulders. She speaks fast, in short sentences, politely to a fault, and twists her fingers when she feels watched.

About the morning of the crime, she says her father opened the jewel room at 7, before visiting hours, for the Reverend Pendleford, who has dined with them for three weeks and arranged her betrothal to his nephew. The reverend, the young man and two friends from the country arrived together; her father went down accompanied by the reverend and the two friends, and the young man stayed upstairs with her. Today her father breathes, but does not wake, and the surgeon says the blow came from something heavy and round.

Susanna knows the keeper's daughter, the only one who knows the grille, is the one asked how someone got in. When the detective suggests she gave the key to the thieves, her fingers fold over her apron and her voice breaks: her father lies upstairs unwaking and they still ask her this. The grief of a daughter treated as an accomplice, or quick tears that close off the question: the folded fingers keep the secret.