Beldam Kills Willowjack

Mistress Beldam’s killing of Willowjack turns the search for an unknown attacker into a reckoning with Charles Kent’s earlier punishment of her kin. The horse’s death is discovered at first light; the clues lead to Lucy Kent’s velvet shawl and to a woman whose identity Charles chooses not to disclose to Edmund Jordan.

Discovery and Initial Suspicion

At first light, Anne Rogers brings news of Willowjack’s death to Kitty Gosse’s door, where she finds Walter Thirsk. The horse had been killed in the standing barn with a tethering prong taken from the winter tool chest. A heavy stone, previously taken from the churchyard and used as a mallet, is also found in the straw. It is carried to Charles Kent’s mantelshelf, while a search begins for whoever wielded the weapon.

Anne reasons that the killer must have been strong and able to approach a horse that was difficult to get close to. Her speculation points first toward Abel Saxton, the blacksmith, whom she describes as someone horses might trust. Walter recognizes that Anne wants those present to suspect him, and her suggestion supplies an early, plausible lead rather than the eventual explanation.

The Shawl and the Hidden Culprit

During Edmund Jordan’s search of the village’s roughly twenty inhabited dwellings, he goes up the path to the tenement where Walter’s late wife, Cecily, was raised. He soon returns with a heavy, bloodstained wrap of cloth. In daylight, its silver threads and rich Turkish mauve color identify it as a velvet shawl. Jordan asks Walter to name its owner, but Walter withholds what he knows: he recognizes the woman associated with it, yet she has no title of identity beyond the name Mistress Beldam gave her.

Walter leaves the identification to Charles. He understands that the woman who spat at Willowjack also killed her, entering the barn after she had brought the dancing there to an end. She took a prong from the tool chest and used the churchyard stone as a mallet. These clues connect the killing to the same woman, but the shawl becomes the decisive object in the search: Charles identifies it as his late wife Lucy Kent’s, a garment no cottager could readily have owned or had the opportunity to obtain.

Retaliation and Charles’s Response

Charles does not name the woman to Edmund. Walter interprets this silence not as ignorance but as a choice shaped by guilt: Charles appears prepared to blame himself for Willowjack’s death, though he does not regard the killing of the horse as justified. The horse mattered deeply to him, and the deliberate destruction of something he loved makes the discovery personal as well as criminal.

The woman’s kin had been sent to the pillory on Charles’s command and left there to die. Walter therefore recognizes that she had grounds for anger, while refusing to treat those grounds as a justification for killing Willowjack. The event binds private retaliation to the consequences of Charles’s authority: the search identifies a culprit, but it also points back to the punishment that helped set the violence in motion.