Silent in the Grave

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  I lifted my chin and drew myself up as Aunt Hermia had taught me.

  “Inappropriate? The question of Edward’s syphilis touches on my own health, health that you endangered by your silence.”

  He opened his mouth, aghast. “But I could not tell you! Such things are private between a man and his doctor.”

  “But not a man and his wife,” I said bitterly.

  He cleared his throat and attempted a mollifying tone. “It was an unfortunate thing that Sir Edward contracted this disease. I did not feel it warranted distressing your ladyship by revealing it.”

  “Do not, I beg you, dress your cowardice in the cloth of compassion. You kept your silence because it was the simplest thing to do. You told Edward to abandon my bed and any hope of an heir, but you never once thought what it might cost me. For him to leave my bed on the grounds of mortal illness is a thing I could have borne. For him to have left it, left me thinking it was because of my barrenness, was too cruel.”

  “It might have cost you your life or your sanity if he had not!” Griggs returned hotly, his plump cheeks trembling with rage. “Would you have rather he kept at you, trying for a child that would surely have been diseased and infecting you in the process? For that is what would have happened, my lady. I see it was too much to think that you might appreciate my efforts on your behalf.”

  We stared at each other a long moment, so far apart that we both knew the gulf could never be bridged. There was anger and bitterness and righteous indignation on both sides. Finally, I took a step backward, my hand on the doorknob.

  “You may continue to treat Sir Simon until his death. After that, you will not come here again.”

  He gave me a bow from the neck, coldly furious. His mouth worked, as if he wanted to say something, but resisted it. I stepped aside to let him pass. I did not want even my skirts to brush against him as he left Grey House.

  After Griggs left, I sat for a long time in the dimly lit drawing room, thinking over everything I had learned that day, none of it pleasant, perhaps some of it useful. I had been dealt a number of blows, to my pride, my vanity, my smug sense that I knew those about me. I had been so secure in my certainty, and yet there had been secrets, swirling about me like fog-bound shadows the whole time, while I stumbled, blindly oblivious to it all.

  But after a while I grew tired of feeling sorry for myself and I rose, intending to go and change for luncheon. At the door I collided with Desmond, his head down, looking neither right nor left. He collected himself with a shudder.

  “My lady! I am so sorry—please, I was not attending.”

  I brushed at the crease in my skirt. “It was nothing, Desmond. Do not trouble yourself. How is Sir Simon today? I thought to look in on him after luncheon.”

  The comely face clouded a little. “Not well. Doctor Griggs was discouraged at his lack of appetite.”

  “Well, I suppose that is to be expected.” I looked closely at Desmond. His own face seemed thinner to me, his eyes ringed with shadow. “Are you eating enough yourself? I daresay your rest is broken with caring for Sir Simon. Perhaps the task is too great for one person. We could engage a nurse.”

  Desmond swallowed thickly. “No, my lady. I am quite well. The city air does not always agree with me.”

  “Ah, yes. You are country-bred, I know. Well, we shall soon have you back in the countryside. I have spoken to his lordship and he is very happy to have you come and tend the dogs for him at Bellmont Abbey.”

  Desmond bowed his head. “Thank you, my lady.”

  “Are you certain you don’t mind the duties? Tending the kennel is a bit of a comedown from a footman’s lot. And you won’t have any livery to lord over the rest of the staff,” I said, smiling.

  He smiled back, blushing a little. “I do not mind that, my lady. I am out of my livery now, and the more comfortable for it. I look forward to tending his lordship’s dogs. I think the country is where I belong.”

  “Well, it is settled, then. When your duties here with Sir Simon are concluded, I will send you down to the Abbey.”

  He looked distraught for a moment, doubtless thinking of the difficult days ahead as Simon’s life drew to a close. I moved on, leaving him to his errand, and went to luncheon, making a mental note to myself to make certain that Aquinas had raised Desmond’s pay. He was working himself to death for the Greys, and the poor boy should be compensated for it.

  Luncheon was dull, or perhaps I was. I had no taste for the salmon and left the fish almost untouched on my plate, picking instead at my peas. Aquinas clucked softly as he removed my uneaten food, but did not scold. We talked briefly of Desmond and other household matters, but I had little interest in any of it. I was still quite overwhelmed by all that I had learned of Edward. I was thinking of Edward, in fact, when Aquinas brought my pudding, and something else.

  “A list of supplies that Desmond has drawn up at Doctor Griggs’ direction, my lady. With your approval I shall dispatch Henry after luncheon to the chemist.”

  He busied himself whisking crumbs from the tablecloth while I looked over the list. “It all seems in order, I suppose.” It was written in Desmond’s simple, painstaking hand, a holdover from his days at a village school, no doubt. His writing was plain and serviceable, meek even, nothing like Brisbane’s bold scrawl. But Brisbane’s hand would have left no margin at all, I thought with a smile, where Desmond’s had left him a good four inches for a bit of doodling. He had a fair drawing hand, but his subjects were a touch morbid—understandable, I supposed, given his current post in a dying man’s room. There was a tiny horse, plumed in funeral black, and a hideously accurate undertaker’s mute with large, sorrowful eyes. It must have taken tremendous skill to infuse the little drawing with such mournfulness, I thought, raising the paper to scrutinize it more carefully.

  Aquinas set his mouth in disapproval. “I know, my lady. I already spoke to the lad about using house paper for his drawings. That is the trouble with country-bred servants. They none of them know the cost of things in town.”

  “It isn’t that, Aquinas. Look at the figure of the mute. He’s obscuring something, but you can just see it, there.”

  Aquinas bent swiftly, peering at the page.

  He paled, as white as the table linen.

  “It is a gravestone, my lady.”

  I nodded. “Exactly like the one in the last note Edward received. I think I shall keep this, Aquinas.”

  He came near to me. “My lady, I shall send for the police.”

  “No!” I did not mean to thunder at him, but I think the silver rattled on the table. He stepped back sharply.

  “As you wish, my lady.”

  I rose. “This must not become public, Aquinas. I could not bear that. I will speak to him myself first.”

  “My lady, you must permit me to be present when you interview him. For your own protection.”

  “You may wait outside. He will not harm me.” I still do not know what made me so certain of that, but I believed it then.

  I rose, having no appetite for pudding, and beckoned Aquinas to follow me out of the door and up the stairs to Edward’s room. Once there, in those still, quiet rooms, where Edward seemed to linger, I hesitated, then gave Aquinas his instructions. He raised a brow, but did not demur. I moved across the hall and waited. After a moment, there was a soft scratch and Desmond entered. He did not look about him, but stood, staring at the floor.

  “Does it make you uncomfortable, to be here? In his room?”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing sharply in his slender throat.

  “My lady?”

  “Do not pretend with me, Desmond.” I held out the list of supplies with its tiny testimony of his guilt. “You should never have put one of your drawings on the note you sent to threaten Sir Edward. It was foolish.”

  I do not know what I had expected. Angry denials, violence, insults? Instead he crumpled inward, folding himself over like a wounded animal. He hugged himself tightly with both arms, as if
to contain the pain.

  “I never meant it,” he said, so softly I had to move nearer to hear him. “Not really. I meant only to frighten him, to make him see what he had done to me.”

  “What had he done to you?” My voice would not go gentle. It cracked, and through the cracks, I could hear my own anger and disgust. But there was pity there, too, in spite of myself.

  He shook his head angrily and scrubbed at his tearing eyes. “Oh, do not make me say it, my lady. You must know.”

  I did not make him say it. I did know, and that was enough. “When did it begin?”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath and his head fell back, tears slanting backward down his cheeks. “Two years back,” he said finally. “I did not wish it, but he was so kind when he wished to be. It was as if he cast a glamoury over me.”

  I started at the word, so old-fashioned. But then I recalled where Desmond came from—a tiny village, buried in the countryside. They still believed in such things, I had seen it in my own village of Blessingstoke. We even had our own white witch there. Why should Desmond not believe that Edward could ensorcell him into lovemaking against his will?

  Of course, if he believed himself bewitched, it excused him from the greater crime of wanting it, I thought cynically. I looked at him carefully, from his pretty hands to his lightly-limned profile and wondered. How much force had Edward had to use? Persuasion, certainly, but force? I did not believe it.

  “Why the notes? Was it really necessary to torment a dying man?”

  He went all sorts of unnatural colours. White about the nostrils and fingers, red everywhere else. He wiped again at his eyes, shaking his head. “I was angry, my lady. There is no excuse for it.”

  “Angry? Why, then? By your own reckoning you had been his lover for a year already. Why then?”

  He gave a shudder, like a tiny convulsion of pain.

  “Because it was then that I fell ill,” he said softly.

  I felt my own breath leave in one sharp exhalation, as if I had been struck hard and fast in the stomach.

  “You have syphilis.” It was not a question; I stated it flatly, knowing it.

  He nodded. “We were not always careful about using the sheaths. Sometimes, we were overhasty together.”

  If I had doubted this boy’s passion for the affair before, I did not now. He had convicted himself with a pronoun. We.

  “Were you angry enough to kill him?” I asked blandly. He stared at me, as if I had suddenly begun speaking another language, a foreign tongue he had never heard.

  “Kill him? My lady, I loved him. I could not raise my hand against him enough to leave this house as I should have done, as I prayed to do so many times. How could I want to kill him?”

  He still had not grasped the truth, and I watched him carefully as it was borne in upon him. A paleness washed over him, and a stillness with it, of so profound a shock and despair that I knew it could not be feigned.

  “My God,” he said softly. “Tell me this is a poor jest, my lady, for pity’s sake.”

  “I wish that I could,” I said evenly. “But my husband is dead by another’s hand.”

  He started, violently, but I raised a placating hand.

  “Not yours,” I told him, holding his gaze with my own. “Not yours, you have not the stomach for it. But you must tell me this. Were you with him, as lovers, the night that he died?”

  He hesitated, biting at his lip. He would have liked to refuse the question, but he knew that he could not. Finally, he nodded slowly, fresh tears coursing slowly down his cheeks.

  “Half an hour before,” he said softly. “The house was in such a bother about the party, it was easy to slip away. We had not been together for months. I had missed him so.”

  I remembered then what I ought to have recalled before. Desmond had been at Grey House while Edward and I wintered in Sussex, at my father’s estate. We had only been in London a few days before we planned our entertainment. There would have been little opportunity for these tempestuous lovers to have renewed their relationship. But this brought a new question.

  “Why did you lie with him if you were angry enough to send those notes?”

  He flinched at my plain speaking, but he answered quickly enough, smiling a little at the memory.

  “I was angry before because I had just learned of my illness. I learned I had not been the only one for him. I was jealous and angry. We were parted for the winter, and my bitterness was everything to me. I sent him the notes, but smiled to his face. He never suspected I was angry with him. But when he came back, and still wanted me—” He paused, his face rapturous. “I could not believe he had chosen me. He said we would be together, that he was finished with the others. I loved him, my lady,” he ended on a sob.

  I turned my face away as he wept softly. There was only one thing more to ask. “Why the sheath that last night? Both of you were infected, why bother?”

  “The doctor had told him it was necessary for him to use them, even if he was with someone who already had the disease. Something about it making the disease more virulent if he were exposed again. I did not understand it entirely.”

  But I did. Edward’s constitution was already weakened, almost fatally so. Even without the poison, he would have likely lived only a matter of months. But with his declining health, he could not risk a fresh infection of the disease—having it already was no protection against a new infestation of it, an infestation that could prove quickly fatal in his condition. It was ironic that the very device he used to preserve his health had been the means of destroying it.

  I squared my shoulders and faced Desmond. “You will speak of this to no one. When your duties here are at an end, we will see you settled into a proper nursing home, where you will be looked after.”

  He nodded, his face awash with misery. He did not attempt to apologize again, and for that I was glad. I had dealt with him calmly enough, but I realized my hands were fisted damply at my sides. I needed a few moments to compose myself. I dismissed him with a jerk of the head and he left me. I sat woodenly on the side of Edward’s bed, feeling raw with emotions I could not entirely identify.

  Humiliation was only the first. How many others had there been? Who had known? Who had watched me with pity and scorn and the secret knowledge of what Edward was? I felt sick to my stomach with it, and I sat there, swallowing it down. I thought of the conspiratorial smiles Edward had given me, and wondered how many others had received them as well. The little jokes, the charming ways—I had thought them mine, at least for a while. I had been so bloody stupid, I told myself savagely. How could he have done such things, under my very roof? But more importantly, how could I not have known?

  I looked about the room, silently hating everything in it. I had not been here since Magda and I had made an attempt to clear it. There were boxes, still only half-packed with suits of clothes. There were still sheets on the bed, a few shirts in the drawers. His ring and watch were still in a box on the dresser, his cologne still scented the air. I looked around at the little statues—a shepherdess, a flute-playing youth, a Roman warrior. I saw the invitations still tucked into his mantel mirror—from the wealthy and respectable. How many of those men—a cabinet minister, a vicar, a duke—had been party to his visits to the brothel? Were they all privy to that? Did they occasionally catch one another’s eyes over the saddle of mutton at dinner parties, winking discreetly and thinking of other delicacies they would enjoy together as their wives sat, pretty and oblivious?

  I wrenched my eyes away from the invitation cards and looked about the room, seeing Edward through his things. It was like reading a stranger’s palm. His brushes, just so and painfully clean, without a single blond hair to mar their perfection. His books, clean and unmarked, because he preferred things fresh and new. His pictures, some good copies of famous pieces, some little paintings done by friends to commemorate happy times. There was a view of the Colosseum bought when he toured Rome, and another of a country folly, Gothic and dark, w
ith autumn leaves curling at the foot of the stones….

  I stopped there, my progress arrested by this little sketch. I stared at it, scrutinizing the twisted branches and crumbling leaves, the carved stone and the pointed arches. I had seen another picture, very similar, but done by another hand. Between them, they linked two people to one shared moment, one place where they had been together, long enough to make separate sketches of the same courtyard, sketches they both kept as a memento. The sketches linked them to each other and to this place—and to a motive I had never guessed at.

  In that minute, as I stared at the lightly penciled lines and arches, everything I had heard and learned over the past weeks came rushing back at me. I stood, letting them wash over me as I heard the voices, as clearly as if they were speaking in my ear. Whispers about mysterious travels, ravens and follies and thwarted, poisonous love, jealousy and disease, and a virgin’s skull. Everyone had contributed something; their voices threaded and tangled, merged and knotted, but I could still hear them, saying the things that I had heard but not understood until just this minute, when it all fell into place and I simply knew, as one knows that fire is hot and sleep is sweet. It was just that sudden, that elemental, and it occurred to me then that the truth is precisely that—elemental. It is the essence of itself; it cannot be argued or winnowed down to something less than what it is. It simply is.

  To be certain, I removed the sketch from the wall. The wallpaper was bright behind it. In all the years I had lived at Grey House, I had never seen this picture moved from its place, a significant place, I realized now. Edward would have been able to see it from his bed, the first sight of his morning, the last sight of his evening. I opened the frame and slid the sketch out. There was an inscription penciled on the back, very brief, but it was enough. I knew now who had killed Edward. And more important, I thought I knew why.

  There was not much to be done. I made my arrangements for that evening, telling no one, not even Aquinas, what I had discovered. He went smoothly along with them, thinking that I was still pursuing poor, pathetic Desmond. I let him believe it because I had no choice. I had to face the murderer alone. I was not afraid, although I know now that I should have been. And as I dressed myself that night, I began to wonder if I had in fact known it all along….