by Anne Perry
But if he had killed Sebastian, that was something that could not possibly be overlooked. He realized with surprise that using those words, even to himself, meant that he had considered ignoring the cheating.
What other explanation was there? Where could he look? Who was there to ask?
His thoughts went immediately to Beecher. He could at least depend on him to be both honest and kind. Perhaps he would even honor Joseph’s silence if he was asked to.
He caught up with Beecher on his way across the quad toward the dining hall.
Beecher squinted at him. “You look awful,” he said with a half smile. “Anticipating something disgusting in the soup?”
Joseph fell into step beside him. “You’ve been teaching far longer than I have,” he began without ceremony. “What explanation might there be for two students coming up with the same highly individual translation of a passage, other than cheating?”
Beecher looked at him with a frown. “Has this something to do with Sebastian Allard?” he asked as they walked into the shadow of the archway and turned into the dining hall. Bright patterns of colored light danced on the walls from the coats of arms on the windows. There was a buzz of conversation and expectancy.
Beecher sat down at a table apart from the others, nodding to one or two other people, but giving nothing to his glance to suggest he wished their company.
“Possibly a conversation,” he said at last, just as a steward appeared at his elbow to offer him soup. “An experience shared that began a train of thought. They might even have read the same source book for something.” He declined the soup, picking up bread instead and breaking it apart.
Joseph also declined the soup. He leaned forward a little across the table. “Have you ever had that happen?”
“You mean is it likely? Whom are we talking about?”
Joseph hesitated.
“For heaven’s sake!” Beecher said exasperatedly. “I can’t give you an opinion if you don’t tell me the facts.”
Was Joseph willing to put it to the test? Was it even inevitable now? “Sebastian and Foubister,” he said miserably.
Beecher chewed his upper lip. “Unlikely, I agree. Except that Sebastian didn’t need to cheat, and I can’t see Foubister doing it. He’s a decent chap, but he’s also not a fool. He’s been here long enough to know what it would cost if he were caught. And if he did want to cheat, he’d pick someone less idiosyncratic than Sebastian.”
“How do I find out?”
“Ask him! I don’t know of anything else.” Beecher grinned suddenly. “Logic, my dear fellow! That rigid goddess you admire so much.”
“Reason,” Joseph corrected. “And she’s not rigid—she just doesn’t bend very easily.”
He went back to Foubister, carrying the paper with him.
“That’s an excellent line,” he said, disliking the duplicity. “What made you think of it? It’s quite a long way from the original.”
Foubister smiled. “There’s a line of trees a good bit like that,” he answered. “Over there in the Gog Magog Hills.” He gestured roughly to the south. “Several of us went up that way one Sunday and we saw them, outlined against a clear sky, and then a summer storm came up. It was rather dramatic.”
“Good use of opportunity,” Joseph observed. “Do it when you can, as long as it doesn’t destroy the spirit of the author. The way you have it here, I think it adds to it. It was the right feel.”
Foubister beamed. It lit up his dark face, making him suddenly charming. “Thank you, sir.”
“Who else was there and saw it?”
Foubister thought for a moment. “Crawley, Hopper, and Sebastian, I think.”
Joseph found himself smiling back, an easy, genuine feeling full of warmth. “I should have told you earlier,” he said. “It’s very good.”
In the middle of the afternoon Connie sent Joseph a note inviting him to join Mary Allard and herself for a cold lemonade. He recognized it as a plea for help, and steeled himself to respond. He closed his book, walked across the quad, and went in through the Fellows’ Garden, where he found Mary Allard alone.
She turned as she heard his footsteps on the path. “Reverend Reavley,” she acknowledged him, but there was no welcome in her eyes or her voice.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Allard,” he replied. “I wish I had something helpful to tell you, but I’m afraid I know nothing of comfort.”
“There is nothing,” she said, her tone very slightly softening the abruptness of the words. “Unless you can stop them saying such things about my son. Can you do that, Reverend? You knew him as I did!”
“I didn’t know him as you did,” he reminded her. “For example, I did not know that he was engaged to be married. He never mentioned it.”
She looked up at him defiantly. “That is a personal matter. It had been arranged for some time, but obviously he would have completed all his studies first. What I meant was that you, of all people, knew his quality! You know he had a clarity of mind, of heart, that he was honest in a way most people do not even understand.” The anger and the hurt burned through her words. “You knew that he was nobler than ordinary men, his dreams were higher and filled with a beauty they will never see.” She looked him up and down as if seeing him clearly for the first time and finding it incomprehensible. “Doesn’t it hurt you unbearably that they are questioning his very decency now?” Her contempt was raw and absolute.
At that moment Elwyn came out of the sitting room door and walked toward them. Mary Allard did not turn.
“When you love someone, surely you must also find the courage within yourself to see them with honesty, the light and the darkness as well?” Joseph said to her. He saw her anger gathering to explode. “He was good, Mrs. Allard, and he had amazing promise, but he was not perfect. He had much growth of spirit yet to accomplish, and by refusing to see the shadows in him we reinforced them instead of helping him to overcome them. I am guilty as well, and I wish it were not too late to mend it.”
Mary’s face held no forgiveness. “Reverend Reavley—”
Elwyn took her by the arm, his eyes meeting Joseph’s. He knew his mother was wrong, but her weakness was something he did not know how to face, let alone to overcome. His eyes pleaded with Joseph not to be forced to.
“Let go of me, Elwyn!” Mary said sharply, leaning away from him.
“Mother, we can’t help what people are saying! Why don’t you come inside? It’s hot out here, especially in black.”
She whirled on him. “Are you suggesting I shouldn’t wear black for your brother? Do you imagine a little discomfort matters a jot to me?”
Elwyn looked as if he had been slapped, but also as if he was used to it. He did not let go of her. “I’d like you to come inside where it is cooler.”
She snatched her arm away. She was hurting too deeply to be kind, absorbed in her own pain and careless of his.
Joseph was suddenly angry with her. Her grief was unbearable, but it was also selfish. He turned to Elwyn. “Some pain is intolerable,” he said gently. “But it is generous of you to be more concerned for your mother than for yourself, and I admire you for it.”
Elwyn flushed deeply. “I loved Sebastian,” he said huskily. “We weren’t much alike—he was cleverer than I’ll ever be—but he always made me feel he respected what I could do, sports and painting. I think a lot of people cared for him.”
“I know they did,” Joseph agreed. “And I know he admired you, but more than that, he loved you also.”
Elwyn turned away, embarrassed by his emotion.
Joseph looked steadily at Mary until a deep stain of color worked up her cheeks. With a look of fury at him for having seen her weakness, she went after her younger son and caught up with him as he reached the steps to the garden door.
Joseph followed her inside, but she barely hesitated in the sitting room. Offering the briefest apology to those there, she hurried after Elwyn through the other door into the hall.
Jos
eph looked at Thyer, Connie, and Harry Beecher standing uncomfortably in the silence. “I can’t think of anything helpful to say,” Joseph confessed.
Thyer was by himself, nearest the garden doors, Connie and Beecher at the other side of the room, closer to each other, glasses of lemonade in their hands.
“No one can,” Connie said. “Please don’t blame yourself.”
Thyer smiled slightly. “Particularly her husband, poor devil, and he’s trying the hardest.” There was pity in his face, and a degree of irritation. “Strange how in times of severest grief some people move further from each other, not closer.” His eyes flickered toward Connie and then back to Joseph. “I would like to remind her of her husband’s loss as well as her own, but Connie says it would only make it worse.”
“Everything makes it worse,” Connie answered him. “It’s Elwyn I’m sorriest for. Mr. Allard is old enough to look after himself.”
“No, he isn’t.” Beecher contradicted her quietly. “No one is ever old enough to hurt alone. A little tenderness would help him face it, and then begin to recover enough to start again with something like normality.”
Connie smiled at him, the warmth filling her eyes, her face. “I don’t think Mary is going to see that for a long time. It’s a pity. In grieving for what she has lost, she risks forfeiting what she still has.”
Beecher’s face tightened.
Connie saw it, blushed a little, and looked away.
Joseph heard Thyer draw in his breath, and glanced across at him, but his face was expressionless.
Connie plunged into the silence, talking to Joseph. “We’ll do what we can, but I don’t think we’re going to make much difference. I’ve tried to reassure Elwyn, but I know a word or two from you now and then would matter to him more.”
“He’s in an impossible situation,” Thyer added. “Neither of them seems to give a damn about him.”
Connie put her glass down. “Sometimes what people are is so much woven into their nature and their lives that no outside force, however great, can change them. They were like this long before Sebastian was killed.”
It was later the same afternoon that Joseph caught up with Edgar Morel walking on the path along the river.
The conversation began badly.
“I suppose you think I killed him over Abigail!” he challenged Joseph as soon as he caught up with him.
Joseph felt pressed to find the truth before it did any more damage. “I hadn’t thought it,” he replied.
Morel’s face was hard and defensive. “Of course if Sebastian was killed, it has to have been because he knew something foul about someone else, doesn’t it?” he said bitterly. “It has to be envy of his brilliance, or his charm or some bloody thing! It couldn’t be that he was cheating someone, or stealing, or anything so grubby!” The sarcasm was too overwrought to be truly cutting. “He’s far too good for that.” Unconsciously he was mimicking Mary Allard’s voice. “Nothing’s ever his fault. To listen to his mother you’d think he’d been martyred in some holy cause and the rest of us were heretics dancing on his grave.”
“Try to have patience with her,” Joseph urged. “She has no means of coming to terms with her loss.”
“No one has,” Morel said with sudden fury. “My mother died last year, just about the time Abigail dumped me for Sebastian. I didn’t go around saying everybody else was heartless because they didn’t care! The world doesn’t stop for anyone’s death! And it doesn’t excuse making yourself a pain in the arse to everybody else!”
“Morel!” Joseph said sharply, putting out his hand to steady him.
Morel misunderstood the gesture and swung his arm back and let fly with a punch. It caught Joseph glancingly on the cheek, but it knocked him off balance, at least as much with surprise as from the weight of it. He staggered backward and just saved himself from falling.
Morel stood aghast.
Joseph straightened up, feeling painfully foolish. He hoped no one else had seen. He did not wish to pursue the matter, but it would be the end of his authority, and of Morel’s respect for him, if he simply let it go. Then the answer came to him instinctively. He took a step forward, and to Morel’s total stupefaction, he hit the young man back. Not very hard, but sufficiently to make Morel stagger. He was surprised by the skill he showed; a little more weight and he would have knocked him over.
“Don’t do that again,” he said as levelly as his pounding heart would allow. “And pull yourself together. Somebody shot Sebastian, and we need to keep our heads and find out who it was, not run around like a lot of schoolgirls getting hysterical.”
Morel took a shaky breath, rubbing his jaw. “Yes, sir,” he said obediently. “Yes, sir!”
Joseph knew he had handled the situation well, but he felt like a long walk and a drink by himself in some quiet pub where he could be surrounded by the warmth of laughter and friendship without having to participate in it. He was exhausted by other people’s emotions. He had more than a sufficient burden of his own. It was not yet a month since both his parents had been killed, and the loss was still raw.
Added to that, since Eleanor’s death had shattered his emotional world, taking the energy and the drive out of his faith, he had carefully rebuilt a strength out of reason, impersonal order, the sanity of the mind. It had seemed good, proof against the injuries of grief, loneliness, doubts of all kinds. It had cost him a great deal to create it, but the truth of it was a beauty sufficient to sustain him through anything.
Except that it wasn’t working. Everything he knew was still there, still true; it just had no soul. Perhaps hope is unreasonable? Trust is not built on facts. Dealing with man, it is wise not to leap where you cannot see. Dealing with God, it is the final step without which the journey has no purpose.
He dismissed the thoughts and returned to the present, more earthbound troubles. He seesawed between fear that his father had been right and the nagging, aching doubt that perhaps John Reavley had been deluded, losing his grip on reality. That thought hurt with an amazing fierceness.
Added to that, his cheek where Morel had hit him was scratched and definitely tender. He did not want to have to explain that to anyone, especially Beecher. Somehow or other the conversation would get around to the subject of Sebastian and end unpleasantly.
So instead of going to the Pickerel, with its familiar tables by the river and people he knew, he went along the Backs in the opposite direction, almost as far as Lammas Land. He found a small pub overlooking the fields and the millpond, and went into the bar. It was paneled with oak worn dark with time, and pewter tankards hung along the rail above the bar itself, gleaming in the sunlight through the open door. The floor was broad, rough beams and not long ago would have had sawdust over them.
It was early; there were only a couple of elderly men sitting in the corner, and a pretty, fair-skinned barmaid with a wealth of wavy hair tied in a careless knot on the back of her head.
She handed a foaming mug to one of the men, who thanked her for it with ease of habit. Then she turned to Joseph.
“Afternoon, sir,” she said cheerfully. She had a soft, pleasing voice, but distinctly broadened with a Cambridgeshire accent. “What can Oi get for you?”
“Cider, please,” he answered. “Half a pint.” He’d begin with a half, and perhaps have another half later. It was a pleasant place, and the sense of solitude was exactly what he wanted.
“Right y’are, sir.” She poured it for him, watching the clear, golden liquid till it stopped just short of the top of the glass. “Haven’t seen you here before, sir. We do a fair enough meal, if you’d loike a boite? Just plain, but it’s there if you fancy it.”
He had not thought he was hungry, but suddenly the idea of sitting here gazing at the flat water of the millpond and the sun setting slowly behind the trees was a far better prospect than going back to the dining hall. There he would have to make polite conversation while knowing perfectly well everyone was wondering what on earth he had done to his f
ace, and making guesses. Sometimes tact was so loud it deafened one. “Thank you,” he said. “I probably will.”
“You’ll be from one of the colleges?” she asked conversationally as she handed him a card with a list of the possibilities for supper.
“St. John’s,” he replied, reading down the menu. “What sort of pickle?”
“Green tomato, sir. It’s homemade, an’ if Oi say so when maybe Oi shouldn’t, it’s the best Oi’ve ever had, an’ most folks agree.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have, please.”
“Roight, sir. What sort of cheese? We got Ely cheese, or a good local half an’ half.” She was referring to the half milk cheese, white and hard, half soft, yellow cream cheese. “Or do you like the French?” she added. “We moight have a bit o’ Brie.”
“Half and half sounds good.”
“It is. All fresh. Tucky Nunn brought it in this morning,” she agreed. She hesitated, as if to add something but uncertain if she should.
He waited.
“Did you say St. John’s, sir?” There was a faint color in her cheeks, and her soft face was suddenly a little tighter.
“Yes.”
“Did . . .” She swallowed. “Did you know Sebastian Allard?”
“Yes, quite well.” What could she know of him? “You did, too?” he asked.
She nodded, her eyes flooding with tears.
“I think I’ll have my meal outside,” he said. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to bring it to me?”
“Yes, sir, course Oi’ll do that,” and she turned away quickly, hiding her face.
He walked out into the sun again and found a table set for two. Less than five minutes later the barmaid came with a tray and put it down in front of him. The bread was thick-cut with sharp crusts, cracked where they had broken under the knife. The butter was cut in small chunks off the yard, with a bright sprig of parsley on it, the cheese rich and fresh. The pickle was not one he had seen before, but the pieces were large and the juice of it a dark, ripe color.