No Graves As Yet wwi-1

by Anne Perry

  Lettie, the general housemaid, came in silently, her face pale and tearstained. Judith asked her to make up Hannah’s room, and she departed to obey, glad to have something to do.

  Reginald, the only indoor manservant, appeared and asked Joseph if they would want wine for dinner and if he should lay out black clothes for him and Matthew.

  Joseph declined the wine but accepted the offer to lay out the mourning clothes, and Reginald left. Mrs. Appleton’s husband, Albert, was outside working off his grief alone, digging in his beloved garden.

  In the kitchen they sat around the scrubbed table in silence, sipping the hot tea, each sunk in thought. The room was as familiar as life itself. All four children had been born in this house, learned to walk and talk here, left through the front gate to go to school. Matthew and Joseph had driven from here to go to university, Hannah to go to her wedding in the village church. Joseph could remember the endless fittings of her dress in the spare bedroom, she standing as still as she could while Alys went around her with pins in her hands and in her mouth, a tuck here, a lift there, determined the gown should be perfect. And it had been.

  Now Alys would never be back. Joseph could remember her perfume, always lily-of-the-valley. The bedroom would still smell of it.

  Hannah would be devastated. She was so close to her mother, so like her in a score of ways, she would feel robbed of the model for her life. There would be nobody to share with her the small successes and failures in the home, the children’s growth, the new things learned. No one else would reassure her anxieties, teach her the simple remedies for a fever or sore throat, or show the easy way to mend, to adapt, to make do. It was a companionship that was gone forever.

  For Judith it would be different, an open wound of things not done, not said, and now unable ever to be put right.

  Matthew set his cup down and looked across the table at Joseph.

  “I think we should go and sort some of the papers and bills.” He stood up, scraping his chair on the floor.

  Judith seemed not to notice the tremor in his voice or the fact that he was trying to exclude her.

  Joseph knew what he meant: It was time to look for the document. If it existed, then it should be here in the house, although why John would have set out to show it to Matthew and then not taken it with him was hard to understand.

  “Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed, rising as well. They had better give Judith something to do. She had no need to know anything about this yet, and perhaps not at all. He turned to her. “Would you go through the household accounts with Mrs. Appleton and see if there is anything that needs doing? Perhaps some orders should be canceled, or at least reduced. And there may be invitations to be declined.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “You’ll be staying?” Mrs. Appleton said with another sniff. “What’ll you be wanting for dinner, Mr. Joseph?”

  “Nothing special,” he answered. “Whatever you have.”

  “Oi’ve got cold salmon and summer pudding,” she said a little truculently, as if she were defending Alys’s choice. If it was good enough for the master and mistress, it was certainly good enough for the young master, whatever had happened in the world. “And there’s some good Ely cheese,” she added.

  “That would be excellent, thank you.” He then followed Matthew, who was already at the door.

  They went along the passage and across the hall to John Reavley’s study, overlooking the garden. The sun was still well above the horizon and bathing the tops of the orchard trees in gold. The leaves shimmered in the rising wind, and a swirl of starlings rose into the sky, black against the amber and flame, turning in wide spiral arms against the sunset.

  Joseph looked around the familiar room, almost like an earlier pattern of his own in Cambridge. There was a simple oak desk, shelves of books covering most of two walls. The books dated back to John’s university days. Some were in German. Many were leather-bound, a few well-thumbed cloth or even paper. There was a recently acquired folio of drawings on the table by the window.

  A Bonnington seascape hung over the fireplace, its color neither blue nor green, but a luminous gray that holds both at its heart. Looking at it, one could draw a cleaner breath and almost feel the sting of the salt in the wind. John Reavley had loved everything in this room. Each object marked some happiness or beauty he had known, but the Bonnington was special.

  Joseph turned away from it. “I’ll start over here,” he said, taking the first book off the shelf nearest the window.

  Matthew began with the desk.

  They searched for half an hour before dinner, and all evening afterward. Judith went to bed, and midnight found the two brothers still sifting through papers, looking in books a second or third time, even moving furniture. Finally they admitted defeat and forced themselves into the master bedroom to look with stiff fingers through drawers of clothes, in shelves where toiletries and personal jewelry were kept, in pockets of the clothes hanging in wardrobes. There was no document.

  At half past one, head throbbing, eyes stinging as if hot and gritty, Joseph came to the end of places to investigate. He straightened up, moving his shoulders carefully to ease the ache. “It’s not here,” he said wearily.

  Matthew did not answer for several moments. He kept his eyes on the drawer he had been going through for the third time. “Father was very clear,” he repeated stubbornly. “He said the effect of it, the daring, was so vast it was beyond most men’s imagination. And terrible.” He looked up at last, his eyes red-rimmed, angry, as if Joseph were attacking his judgment. “He couldn’t trust anyone else because of who was involved.”

  Joseph’s imagination was too tired and too full of pain to be inventive, even to save Matthew’s feelings. “Then where is it?” he demanded. “Would he trust it to the bank? Or the solicitor?”

  Denial was in Matthew’s face, but he clung to the possibility for a few seconds, because he could think of nothing else.

  “We’ll have to speak to them tomorrow anyway.” Joseph sat down on the chair by the desk. Matthew was sitting beside the drawers on the carpet.

  “He wouldn’t give it to Pettigrew.” Matthew pushed his hair back off his forehead. “They’re just family solicitors—wills and property.”

  “Then quite a safe place to hide something valuable and dangerous,” Joseph reasoned.

  Matthew glared at him. “Are you trying to defend Father? Prove that he wasn’t imagining it out of something that was really perfectly harmless?”

  Joseph was stung by the accusation. It was exactly what he was doing—defending, denying—and he was confused and dizzy with loss. “Do I need to?” he demanded.

  “Stop being so damn reasonable!” Matthew’s voice cracked, the emotion raw. “Of course you need to! It wasn’t in the car! It isn’t in the house.” He jerked his hand sharply toward the door and the landing beyond. “Doesn’t it sound wild enough to you, unlikely enough? A piece of paper that proves a conspiracy to ruin all we love and believe in—and that goes right up to the royal family—but when we look for it, it vanishes into the air!”

  Joseph said nothing. The tag end of an idea pulled at his mind, but he was too exhausted to grasp it.

  “What is it?” Matthew said roughly. “What are you thinking?”

  “Could it be obvious?” Joseph frowned. “I mean, something we are seeing but not recognizing?”

  Matthew looked round the room. “Like what? For God’s sake, Joe! A conspiracy of this magnitude! The document is not going to be hung up on the wall along with the pictures!” He put the papers in the drawer, climbed to his feet, and carried it back to the desk. He replaced it in its slots and pushed it closed. “And before you bother, I’ve taken the backs off all the drawers and looked.”

  “Well, there are two possibilities.” Joseph was driven to the last conclusion. “Either there is such a document or there isn’t.”

  “You have a genius for the obvious!” Matthew said bitterly. “I had w
orked that out for myself.”

  “And you concluded that there is? On what basis?”

  “No!” Matthew snapped. “I just spent the evening ransacking the house because I have nothing better to do!”

  “You don’t have anything better to do,” Joseph answered him. “We had to go through the papers anyway to find what needs attending to.” He gestured toward the separated pile. “And the sooner we do it, the less bloody awful it is. We can think of a conspiracy while we look, which is easier than thinking that we are performing a sort of last rite for both our parents.”

  “All right!” Matthew cut in. “I’m sorry.” Again he pushed the thick fair hair off his face. “But honestly, he sounded so certain of it! His voice was charged with emotion, not a bit dry and humorous as it usually is.” His mouth pulled a little crooked, and when he spoke again his voice cracked. “I know what it must have cost him to call me on something like that. He hated all the secret services. He wouldn’t have said anything if he hadn’t been certain.”

  “Then he put it somewhere we haven’t thought of yet,” Joseph concluded. He stood up also. “Go to bed now. It’s nearly two, and there’s a lot we have to do later.”

  “There was a telegram from Hannah. She’s coming on the two-fifteen. Will you go and meet her?” Matthew was rubbing his forehead sore. “She’s going to find this pretty hard.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll meet her. Albert will drive me. Can I take your car?”

  “Of course.” Matthew shook his head. “I wonder why he didn’t drive Father yesterday.”

  “Or why Mother went,” Joseph added. “It’s all odd. I’ll ask Albert on the way to the station.”

  The next day was filled with small, unhappy duties. The formal arrangements had to be made for the funeral. Joseph went to see Hallam Kerr, the vicar, and sat in the tidy, rather stiff vicarage parlor watching him trying to think of something to say that would be of spiritual comfort and finding nothing. Instead they spoke of the practicalities: the day, the hour, who should say what, the hymns. It was a timeless ritual that had been conducted in the old church for every death in the village. The very familiarity of it was comfortable, a reassurance that even if one individual journey was ended, life itself was the same and always would be. There was a kind of certainty in it that gave its own peace.

  Just before lunch Mr. Pettigrew came from the solicitors’ office, small and pale and very neat. He offered his condolences and assured them that everything legal was in order—and that he had been given no papers to keep recently. In fact, not anything this year. A couple of bonds in August of 1913 were the last things. He did not yet mention the will, but they knew it would have to be dealt with in time.

  The bank manager, the doctor, and other neighbors called in or left flowers and cards. Nobody knew what to say, but it was done in kindness. Judith offered them tea, and sometimes it was accepted and awkward conversations followed.

  In the early afternoon Albert Appleton drove Joseph to the railway station at Cambridge to meet Hannah’s train from London. Joseph sat beside him in the front of Matthew’s Sunbeam Talbot as they followed the lanes between the late wild roses and the ripening fields of corn already dappled here and there with the scarlet of poppies.

  Albert kept his eyes studiously on the road. He looked tired, his skin papery under its dark sunburn, and he had missed a little gray stubble on his cheek when he had shaved this morning. He was not a man to give words to grief, but he had come to St. Giles at eighteen and served John Reavley all his adult life. For him this was the ending of an age.

  “Do you know why Father drove himself yesterday?” Joseph asked as they passed into the shade under an avenue of elms.

  “No, Mr. Joseph,” Albert replied. It would be a long time before he called Joseph “Mr. Reavley,” if he ever did. “Except there’s a branch on the old plum tree in the orchard hanging low, an’ tossled in the grass. He wanted me to see if Oi could save it. Oi propped it up, but that don’t always work. Get a bit o’ wind an’ it goes anyway, but it tears it off rough. Leaves a gash in the trunk, an’ kill the whole thing. Get a bit parky an’ the frost’ll have it anyway.”

  “I see. Can you save it?”

  “Best to take it off.”

  “Do you know why Mother went with him?”

  “Jus’ liked to go with him, mebbe.” He stared fixedly ahead.

  Joseph did not speak again until they reached the station. Albert had always been someone with whom it was possible to sit in amicable silence, ever since Joseph had been a boy nursing his dreams in the garden or the orchard.

  Albert parked the car outside the station and Joseph went in and onto the platform to wait. There were half a dozen other people there, but he studiously avoided meeting anyone’s eye in case he encountered someone he knew. The last thing he wanted was conversation.

  The train was on time, belching steam and grinding to a halt at the platform. The doors clanged open. People shouted greetings and fumbled with baggage. He saw Hannah almost immediately. The few other women were in bright summer colors or delicate pastels. Hannah was in a slim traveling suit of unrelieved black. The tapered hem at her ankles was smudged with dust, and her neat hat was decorated with black feathers. Her face was pale, and with her wide brown eyes and soft features she looked so like Alys that for a moment Joseph felt his emotions lurch out of control and grief engulf him unbearably. He stood motionless as people pushed past him, unable to think or even focus his vision.

  Then she was in front of him, portmanteau clutched in her hand and tears spilling down her cheeks. She dropped the bag on the platform and waited for him.

  He put his arms around her and held her as close to him as he could. He felt her shivering. He had already tried to work out what to say to her, but now it all slipped away, sounding hollow and predictable. He was a minister, the one of all of them who was supposed to have the faith that answered death and overcame the hollow pain that consumed everything from the inside. But he knew what bereavement was, sharply and recently, and no words had touched more than the surface for him.

  Please God, he must find something to say to Hannah! What use was he if, of all people, he could not?

  He let go of her at last and picked up her bag, carrying it out to where Albert was waiting with the car.

  She stopped, staring at the unfamiliar vehicle, as if she had expected the yellow Lanchester. Then, with a gasp that caught in her throat, she realized why it was not there.

  Joseph took her by the elbow and helped her into the backseat, straightening the slender black skirt around her ankles before closing the door and going around to the other side to get in next to her.

  Albert got back in and started the engine.

  Hannah said nothing. It was up to Joseph to speak before the silence became too difficult. He had already decided not to mention the document. It was an unneeded concern for her.

  “Judith will be glad to see you,” he started.

  She looked at him with slight surprise, and he knew immediately that her thoughts had been inward, absorbed in her own loss. As if she read his perception, she smiled slightly, an admission of guilt.

  He put out his hand, palm upward, and she slid hers across and gripped his fingers. For several minutes she was silent, blinking back the tears.

  “If you can see sense in it,” she said at last, “please don’t tell me now. I don’t think I could bear it. I don’t want to know a God who could do this. Above all I don’t want to be told I should love Him. I don’t!”

  Several answers rose to his lips, all of them rational and scriptural, and none of them answering her need.

  “It’s all right to hurt,” he said instead. “I don’t think God expects any of us to take it calmly.”

  “Yes, He does!” She choked on the words. “ ‘Thy will be done’!” She shook her head fiercely. “Well, I can’t say that. It’s stupid and senseless and horrible. There’s nothing good in it.” She was fighting to make anger conquer the f
earful, consuming grief. “Was anyone else killed?” she demanded. “The other car? There must have been another car. Father wouldn’t simply have driven off the road, whatever anyone says.”

  “Nobody else was hurt, and there’s no evidence of another car.”

  “What do you mean, evidence?” she said furiously, the color flooding her face. “Don’t be so pedantic! So obscenely reasonable! If nobody saw it, there wouldn’t be!”

  He did not argue. She needed to rage at someone, and he let her go on until they were through the gates and had drawn up at the front door. She took several long, shuddering breaths, then blew her nose and said she was ready to go inside. She seemed on the edge of saying something more, something gentler, looking steadily at him through brimming eyes. Then she changed her mind and stepped out of the door as Albert held it for her and gave her his hand to steady her.

  They ate supper quietly together. Now and again one of them spoke of small, practical things that had to be done, but nobody cared about them. Grief was like a fifth entity in the room, dominating the rest.

  Afterward Joseph went to his father’s study again and made certain that all the letters had been written to friends to inform them of John and Alys’s death and tell them the time of the funeral. He noticed that Matthew had written the one letter he had considered most important, to Shanley Corcoran, his father’s closest friend. They had been at university together—Gonville and Caius. Corcoran would be one of the hardest to greet at the church because his pain would be so deep and the memories were so long, woven into so many of the best days right from the beginning.

  And yet there were ways in which the sharing would also help. Perhaps afterward they would be able to talk about John in particular. It would keep some part of him alive. Corcoran would never become bored with it or let the memory sink into some pleasant region of the past where the sharpness did not matter anymore.

  About half past nine the village constable came by. He was a young man of about Matthew’s age, but he looked tired and harassed.