Upstairs he passed through an antechamber hung with more baize, then through another the walls of which had been completely covered in black cloth. Beyond this second one lay the Great Chamber, which had been shrouded in heavy black velvet, his family coat of arms attached by nails on every wall.
Whoever had arranged the details, while he had been too ill to see to them himself, had ordered them as his father would have wished.
Raised on a dais, on a bed of state beneath a canopy, lay his father’s shrouded body.
A sudden whine came from near the foot of the bed. Gideon stooped to pet the dog that came to greet him. The sleek, grey body of his father’s favourite lurcher whipped about his legs in a frenzy of relief.
“Hello, Argos. How are you, boy?” He had to fight the tightening of his throat provoked by the unfailing loyalty of his father’s dog.
No one else was in the room. Undoubtedly it had been cleared to allow him to express his grief in private. He gave a look about him and took a deep, aching breath before approaching the bed.
The room was being kept very cold, which was easy to do at this time of year with the weather still chill. Gideon glanced once at the empty fireplace, which at Christmas had been blazing with logs. He suppressed a shiver and moved on.
His father’s body had been preserved with sawdust and tar to give his mourners these few weeks to pay their respects. Its unnatural appearance was not to be wondered at, but Gideon could not help but be affected by the insult that had been done to it. He sought some sign of the man he had known inside this pale, cold shell. He stroked his father’s face and felt the impartialness of death.
This corpse no longer housed his father. The vigorous, iron-willed man that had been Lord Hawkhurst had long since abandoned it to go to another place. No matter how many days his soul had been allowed to reanimate his body by this formal delay, it was gone for good. Seeing his effigy brought Gideon some minor comfort, but there was nothing here to which to cleave. He had missed the chance to say goodbye, to ask for forgiveness, and nothing would ever bring his lost chance back.
He had never felt so alone. With neither parent nor sibling living, he was without kin in the world. He could not count his cousin Harrowby or his more distant relatives, for there was something about close family, the people who had watched one grow from birth, that could never be approached by anyone else.
His painful musings turned to fury at the person who had taken his father from him, especially at the moment when they had suffered the worst falling out of their lives. Gideon stood over his father’s body and swore an oath to bring the man to justice if it was the last thing he did.
Questions and worries that had been plaguing him since he’d recovered consciousness began to tumble through his mind. He wondered how his father had been wounded. If his sword had been near enough to grab—and apparently it had—how had his murderer managed to deal a mortal blow? In spite of Lord Hawkhurst’s age, he had been a large and powerful man with a long reach, and gifted with a sword. He had kept up his practice, even here in Kent.
Gideon’s curiosity led him to examine the body. His father’s white shroud had been made of linen, in defiance of the statutes. Even in death, he would never have condescended to wear wool next his skin, but it was unlikely that Mr. Bramwell, whose duty it was to report the infraction, would ever think of questioning his father’s right.
Before he quite knew what he was doing, Gideon had untied his father’s cravat and the chin cloth to his cap to get at the slit in his shirt.
The shroud had been folded about his feet and tied at the end. The opening over his breastbone had not been stitched together, as by custom, no dress for a corpse was to be sewed with thread. Gideon parted the linen layer and gently pushed it back to reveal his father’s injuries.
Starting at his heart and running to the middle of his abdomen, was a long, ugly rift with sharp, blue edges pulled badly together with stitches. The sight of it made Gideon pull back in horror, until he realized that this particular injury had been made by the embalmers themselves. Even knowing this, he needed a moment to marshal his will to carry on. He regretted his impulse to investigate, but now that his own disrespect had been added to the insults to his father’s corpse, he did not want to have acted in vain.
He forced himself to ignore his feelings and scanned his father’s thick chest for evidence of a mortal wound. His eyes soon found a small, surprisingly thin slit—no more than a half-inch across—in the region of his heart. He could not imagine that his father would have allowed a swordsman an opening like that, no matter how gifted his assailant had been. And the wound was neat, as if he had been unable to deflect it at all.
The wound was too neat. There was no sign of scraping or bruising or tearing. It was as neat as if a piece of beef had been pierced.
With a sudden hunch, Gideon pushed the shroud completely off his father’s left shoulder and turned him over on his right side. On his back he found another slit, only this slightly wider. The skin where the blade had entered had been scraped. And a small circular bruise around it showed where the edge of the hilt had hit.
His father had been stabbed hard, and from behind. A small-sword with a small, round hilt—a shape that Gideon had never seen before— had been thrust with so much force that it had run clear through him. It had been his murderer’s intention to kill him from the outset. There had been no fight.
As he eased his father’s corpse onto its back and began to redress it with gentle movements, his mind filled in the likely scene. Lord Hawkhurst had turned his back on someone he had known. Someone for whom he had apparently had no fear. He had turned to fetch something, for it would have been impolite otherwise to turn his back on a guest. And his killer had used that moment to murder him.
He had drawn a blade and thrust it into Lord Hawkhurst’s back, and only then had Gideon’s father been aware of the treachery. He would have fought—Gideon knew his father well enough to know that nothing could have brought him down immediately, not even a blade through his heart.
He would have reached for the sword that was never far from his side. He would have turned—perhaps with the other man’s blade still inside him. His murderer would have been defenceless, in that case, for only a few seconds before the impact of his father’s wound brought him down.
In that brief moment, however, at least his father would have had the satisfaction of getting in the last blow.
And then, while he was bleeding to death, his murderer stayed to withdraw his blade. Because he might be identified by it? It was likely. Swords were crafted by hand. A fine blade—and this had been very fine, judging by its narrow size—might have been easy to trace to its maker and, through him, to its owner.
As Gideon finished dressing his father, pulling the shroud back in place, relacing his cravat, and tying the broad chin cloth to his cap, he realized how very tired he was. The emotion of this day would not be something he would ever want to live through again.
When his father’s corpse was laid out as neatly as it had been before, he knelt on the floor beside the bed, took his father’s left hand in his, put his forehead against the mattress, and prayed.
He fell asleep like that and no one disturbed him until later that night when the Reverend Mr. Bramwell sent a servant to see if his lordship would receive him. Gideon learned that his cousin Harrowby was entertaining his guests in one of the Abbey’s large withdrawing rooms, information he welcomed because it absolved him of his hosting duties for one more day. Considering how widespread the news of his own illness had been, he believed he would be excused from receiving people tonight.
He revived himself with a visit to his own bedchamber and a bit of water splashed on his face, and ordered a supper to be brought up to his rooms. Then he met the Reverend Mr. Bramwell in the gallery with the intention of strolling up and down inside it, knowing that the sooner he exercised his strength, the sooner he would regain it.
Mr. Bramwell entered and made him
a deep, ceremonial bow.
Seeing the distress on the priest’s face, Gideon hastened to help him up and embrace him. Feeling the old man tremble beneath his palms, he gave up thoughts of walking for the moment, and instead led him to a wooden bench against the wall.
“I should not say it,” Mr. Bramwell said, “I, who spoke the prayers over his body as he lay there dying—But I cannot accept that his lordship is gone. The Abbey always echoed with his voice, and now that voice has been stilled.”
Gideon did his best to soothe him, though the silence the priest described had enhanced his own sense of loss. Eventually, Mr. Bramwell achieved a certain degree of calm.
After a few minutes’ talk, Gideon perceived that no small part of Mr. Bramwell’s sorrow was linked to his anxiety over the loss of his patron. A learned, nonjuring priest, he had long ago sought the protection of Lord Hawkhurst when all state positions had been barred to one of his tenets—not for his religion, which was conformist, but for his deep, unquestioning belief in the divine right of succession. When William of Orange had supplanted James II, Mr. Bramwell had refused to swear allegiance to the Crown, and he had refused to take the oath of loyalty to all subsequent monarchs, whom he regarded as usurpers of the legitimate line.
Gideon consoled the tutor of his boyhood years with a promise that he would always have a home at Rotherham Abbey. Then, he asked him why the funeral had been scheduled when it was doubtful he would be able to come.
“That was James Henry’s doing. You know how your father trusted him with all of his business. He made him his executor, and as such Henry insisted that the funeral should not be delayed. I begged him to wait until you were recovered, but he said that since your own life was feared for, we had better finish with one funeral in time for the next.”
Gideon wasn’t sure that his motive had been quite that simple—not since he knew that James Henry was the servant who had relayed the facts of his argument with his father to Sir Joshua Tate. But at least some reason had been given. He would speak to James Henry himself, tomorrow after the service, and find out how deep his hostility was.
“I should have liked to know of my father’s wishes before all the arrangements were made.”
“As to that, I believe you will be satisfied. I had expected your father to wish to be interred in Westminster Abbey, where most of your forebears have been laid,” Mr. Bramwell said, “but his will was very clear on the subject. He wished to be laid here in his own chapel. He did not want to be put to rest alongside so many traitors. Of late, he had become more hopeless about our cause, but his loyalty to our rightful king never wavered.”
Gideon hid a small smile. It would be impossible to tell how much of these sentiments had come from his father and how much from the person who reported them. Without a family to care for, Mr. Bramwell had always been rather unguarded in his Jacobite speech, and age had done nothing to make him more discreet.
“But the details are as he asked?”
“Right down to the number of pairs of mourning gloves and the rings that should be ordered. You will receive yours tomorrow after the service.”
“Mr. Bramwell, did my father express any fears to you before he was murdered? Was there anyone he especially feared?”
“You are asking me if I know who might have done this terrible thing. That toad-eating Whig, Sir Joshua Tate, tried to ask me the same thing, but I had to tell him I was not in his lordship’s confidence.”
He glanced over at Gideon. “You stare because you must have imagined that if anyone was in your father’s confidence, it would have been I, his spiritual advisor. But I will tell you something I never would say to that scheming magistrate. Your father always kept things close to his chest. He knew the risk of entrusting too many people with a secret. That is why he was so trusted himself.
“He also knew that, as an old man, I could be of very little use in spite of my constant devotion. I am sure his tendency not to confide his private business to me was more to the purpose of keeping me out of harm’s way than due to any lack of trust.”
He paused, then added in a voice full of grief, “He always protected the people who depended upon him, as well as those he loved.”
Gideon suddenly got the uneasy feeling that Mr. Bramwell had, if nothing else, believed that some great matter was afoot. He would not press him now, but after tomorrow’s service he would see what more could be got out of him.
He asked Mr. Bramwell to walk with him up and down the gallery a few times before he went to eat his supper. They strolled at a more moderate pace than Gideon would have chosen, but even this slight movement helped to clear his mind.
As they passed a portrait of his great-great-grandfather, painted by Van Dyck, he asked, “Had my father had many visitors of late?”
“Very few, I am afraid. The Tories, you know, have been quite unsettled by this German prince, and I am afraid the most recent parliamentary elections have tended rather to drive them far apart rather than bring them together. Your father was greatly distressed both by the elections and by the nature of the attacks the Whigs have made on our former party leaders. I am certain my Lord Bolingbroke sent a messenger here with notes describing their vicious nature, with a plea for his old comrades not to desert him.
“I am afraid that some of our old friends have not shown the courage of their convictions as they should. But —” he gave a sigh— “I suppose it is one’s Christian duty to forgive them.”
They had walked to his father’s portrait painted by Michael Dahl, a Swede. Lord Hawkhurst had refused to let “that Whig” Sir Godfrey Kneller have the job. Neither man could approach the talent of a Van Dyck, and Gideon had never much cared for this lifeless portrait. Now, pausing to stare at it, he was grateful that at least a shadow of his father remained.
The painter had done only minor justice to Lord Hawkhurst’s fiery character. It was there, certainly, in the hook of his nose, in the craggy brow, and in the stern, disillusioned lips. But the artist had failed to capture his lightning-quick temper and his equally strong urgency to forgive. Gideon had understood his father’s impulsive emotions, so very much like his own, as well as the reason and fairness that always triumphed over them. But had someone else taken offence?
Looking up at the picture, Mr. Bramwell said, “Various people have suggested that your father had a harsh face, but I always tell them that appearances can be deceiving.”
Gideon gave a smile. “Which one of his features was deceiving, do you think? The hawk-like beak, which all the male members of our family seem to be cursed with, or his threatening brows? I confess I can hardly remember him before they became so wild and thick.”
“I cannot pretend to know what other men saw in him, but he was a good man who always put duty before his personal wishes. For a man like that, he lived in difficult times. He made few attachments, but those he had were deeply sincere, even if he did not express his feelings well.”
Gideon knew that Mr. Bramwell’s intention was to console him for the manner in which he had parted from his father, but all he could feel was guilt for the part he had played in provoking him. The words they had exchanged had been laden with hurtful emotions he would be condemned to remember all his life.
They had reached the end of the gallery, and Gideon would have turned to continue, but Mr. Bramwell asked to be excused in order to prepare for tomorrow’s obsequies.
Recollecting that supper awaited him in his rooms, Gideon was about to bid him goodnight, when Mr. Bramwell said, “I believe I said that appearances can be very deceiving, my lord. While that is so, I might also say that they can hold truth for those who choose to search for it.
“Goodnight, my lord,” he said, turning to leave.
And Gideon was left to ask himself just what Mr. Bramwell had meant to suggest with such a curious remark.
The funeral had been set in the day, instead of in the evening which would have been more customary, to allow the mourners to return at least part way to
their homes. After breaking their fast in their respective bedrooms, they spent the better part of the morning dressing in their suits of black superfine, most of which had been last worn for Her late Majesty Queen Anne. The peers among them had added scarves and hatbands in black Alamode, while the servants had all received new black livery for the occasion.
As Gideon walked from his rooms in his parents’ wing towards the Abbey chapel, the two constables he had managed to lose for one precious night appeared at the top of the stairs. He ignored them as they fell in behind him like sentries.
He came across his noble guests in the antechamber to what had once been the queen’s suite. Here they had gathered, framed by the tapestries that hung on the walls. He saw that the mourning gloves had already been passed out.
The noise from the gentlemen’s visiting dwindled to a close as one by one they marked his entrance. In the midst of the crowd stood his cousin Harrowby, clad in a splendid mourning suit, with black lace trim, heavily embroidered with lilies. A new raven-coloured wig fell softly onto his shoulders.
Harrowby had the agreeable air of a host at a private party. He seemed on the verge of inviting his guests inside, when he started at the sight of Gideon.
“Zounds! Dear Cuz, how you do give one a fright! You look positively ghastly, you know.”
The others watched the interaction between the two before their eyes were drawn in shock to Gideon’s two constables. A few of the gentlemen stepped backwards as if to avoid an offensive odor. Others seemed not to know where to look.
Among them, Gideon noted a score or more of his father’s oldest friends, and—surprisingly— off to one side the Duke of Bournemouth.
He welcomed them all and said, “Harrowby, I must thank you for taking care of my guests.”
One of his father’s plainer-speaking cronies, Lord Peterborough, his short, squat body encased in black velvet, examined him grimly through a glass. “St. Mars. Didn’t know you would come.”
A suggestion of chagrin in the old man’s voice made Gideon say, “I must suppose you to refer to my recent illness, my lord. For no other reason would I be absent from my father’s funeral.”
The Birth of Blue Satan Page 11