Cain His Brother

by Anne Perry

  The court rose. Caleb was taken down, the crowd spilled out to purchase whatever refreshment it wished, and Rathbone, Goode and the judge partook of an excellent meal, all separately, at a nearby tavern. They returned early in the afternoon.

  “Proceed with your next witness, Mr. Rathbone,” the judge directed. “Let us get to some meat in this matter.”

  Rathbone spent the rest of the day calling the Stonefield servants to corroborate what Genevieve had said regarding Angus’s absences from home, which were considerable, although only when returning from seeing Caleb was he ever injured. On two of these occasions the wounds had necessitated considerable treatment. He had refused to call a doctor, in spite of the apparent seriousness, and Mrs. Stonefield had attended to him herself. She had some skill in that area.

  Had Mr. Stonefield been long in recovering?

  On one occasion he had been obliged to take to his bed for over a week. It seemed he had lost a great deal of blood.

  Had he given any cause for his injury?

  No. But the butler had overheard Mr. Stonefield speak of his brother, and Mrs. Stonefield had made no secret of her assumption that Caleb was the assailant.

  The jurors’ faces made the belief plain, and their contempt for Caleb, who ignored them almost as if they were irrelevant.

  The butler was very straightforward. He offered Goode no opportunity to trip him, and Goode was far too wise to be seen to embarrass such a plain man. He was courteous and complimentary. All he could achieve was another reminder to the jury that the precise dealing of the wounds was still all surmise. Angus had never said in so many words that Caleb had stabbed him. And he did not labor that. Every man and woman in the room believed it was Caleb; it was in their faces when they looked at the dock, and at Caleb’s jeering, insolent stare back at them.

  The first day of the trial closed with a conviction of the mind, but no evidence which the judge could direct as law, only massive supposition and a crowd filled with a frustration of loathing.

  Rathbone left and almost immediately found a hansom. Without thinking he directed the driver to Primrose Hill. That was where his father, a quiet, studious man with a gentle manner and an alarmingly sharp perception, lived.

  His father was sitting by a large log fire with his feet on the fender and a glass of red wine by his side when Oliver arrived and was shown in by the manservant. Henry Rathbone looked up with surprise and then a shadow both of pleasure and concern.

  “Sit down,” he offered, indicating the chair opposite. “Wine?”

  “What is it?” Oliver sat down, feeling the warmth of the fire creep over him with intense satisfaction. “I don’t like that burgundy you have.”

  “It’s a claret,” Henry replied.

  “I’ll have a glass.”

  Henry nodded at the manservant, who departed to bring the wine.

  “You’ll burn your feet,” Oliver said critically.

  “Scorch the soles of my slippers, perhaps,” Henry argued. He did not ask why Oliver had come. He knew he would be told in time.

  Oliver slid a little farther down in the armchair and accepted the claret from the manservant, who went out and closed the door with a quiet snick.

  The ash settled in the fire and Henry reached forward and put on another log. There was no sound in the room but the flickering of the fire, no light but the flames and one gas lamp on the far wall. The wind outside was inaudible, as was the first beginning of the rain.

  “I’m thinking of getting a new dog,” Henry remarked. “Old Edgemor has some retriever pups. One I like in particular.”

  “Good idea,” Oliver said. He was going to have to open the subject himself. “This trial is troubling me.”

  “So I gathered.” Henry reached for his pipe and put it in his mouth, but did not bother to light it. He seldom did. “Why? What is not as you expected?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  “Then what is there to be distressed about?” Henry looked at him with his clear, light-blue eyes, so unlike Oliver’s own, which were very dark, in spite of his fairish hair. “You are off balance. Is it your mind, or your emotions? Are you going to lose when you should win, or win when you should lose?”

  Oliver smiled in spite of himself. “Lose when I should win, I think.”

  “Summarize the case for me.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at Oliver absentmindedly. “And don’t address me as if I were the jury! Just tell me the truth.”

  Oliver gave a jerky little laugh, and listed the bare, literal facts as far as he knew them, adding his feelings only as he believed they were relevant to some interpretation and not furnished by evidence. When he had finished he stared at his father waiting for his response.

  “This is another one of Monk’s,” Henry observed. “Have you seen Hester again? How is she?”

  Oliver found himself uncomfortable. It was not a subject he wished to contemplate, much less discuss.

  “It is exceedingly difficult to get a jury to convict for murder without a body,” he said irritably. “But if ever a man did deserve to hang, it is Caleb Stone. The more I hear of Angus, the more I admire him, and the worse Caleb appears. The man is violent, destructive, sadistic, an ingrate.”

  “But …” Henry raised his eyebrows, looking at Oliver with piercing gentleness.

  “He seems to have not a shred of remorse,” Oliver went on. “Even looking at his brother’s widow, and knowing there are five children, and what will happen to them now—” He stopped.

  “Do you doubt his guilt?” Henry asked, sipping his claret.

  Oliver picked up his own glass. The firelight shone ruby in it, and the clean, slightly sharp aroma of it filled his head.

  “No. He is just so vividly alive. Even when I am not looking at him, which is almost all the time, I am aware of his emotions, his rage … and his pain. And I am aware of his intelligence.”

  “And if you win, he will be hanged.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that offends you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you lose, he will be a free man, guilty, and vindicated.”

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot help you, except to a quiet evening by the fire and another glass of claret. You already know everything I would say.”

  “Yes, of course I do. I suppose I simply do not want to say them to myself alone.” He drank from the glass and the taste of it filled him. At least until it was time to leave, he could let the matter go.

  Monk had not been in court. He would be called as a witness, so he could not attend until after he had given evidence, and he had no desire to wait around in corridors catching snippets of news.

  He had no further word from Drusilla Wyndham. If she intended drawing the police into the matter of his alleged assault, she had apparently delayed her complaint. He thought it far more likely she knew the futility of such a prosecution, and would ruin him by innuendo, a slower, subtler form of torture, and far more likely to be successful. He would have to wait with the sword hanging over his head, never knowing when it would fall.

  He went to see Evan, only to find he had been sent to Crouch End to interview a burglary suspect and would not be back until tomorrow. There was little he could do to help Monk until he knew at least what case, if any, was involved.

  Monk strode the cold pavements almost oblivious of the gusts of wind blowing in his face. A carriage passed too close to the curb, its wheels splashing through the gutters and soaking him. His trousers flapped wetly around his ankles.

  What had he done to Drusilla? What had he done to any woman? He knew so little about his personal life. He had not written regularly to his sister, Beth. He knew that from the few letters of hers he had kept. He had loathed Runcorn, and been at least partially responsible for the aggressive, self-serving way in which he now behaved. Runcorn had felt Monk’s contempt all his professional life. His original mild dislike of him had hardened into fear, not without cause. Monk had sensed his
weaknesses, and played on them.

  There was nothing in that to admire.

  Granted, Runcorn was an unattractive man, narrow, self-absorbed and a coward with no generosity of soul. But he was the poorer for having worked with Monk, not the richer.

  Who else was there? No one from the past that he knew. Perhaps he had treated Hermione well? It seemed it was she who had let him down. But if he had known her longer, if she had not so bitterly disillusioned him, would he in time have hurt her also?

  That was a futile line of thought.

  He crossed the road, ignoring the horse droppings which had not been swept.

  What of the present, the brief span of two years since the accident? He had behaved honorably with Evan. He was perfectly sure of that. And with Callandra. Callandra was fond of him; she quite genuinely liked him. The knowledge of that was one of the most pleasant of all his possessions, and he clung to it with a fierceness which he would not have believed possible even a month ago.

  But Callandra was in her fifties. A far truer mirror would be Hester. How had he treated Hester, who had stood with him against such terrors in the past, and who had been unquestioningly brave and loyal in the teeth of failure and opposition?

  He had been there, unfailingly, when she was in danger. He had never for an instant doubted her honor or her innocence. He had worked night and day to save her. He had not even had to think about it: it was the only possible course he could follow. No other had entered his thoughts.

  But how had he behaved towards her as a woman?

  If he were honest, he had been consistently abrasive and critical, even offensive. He had done it intentionally, wanting to hurt her, because in some indefinable way—what? Why did she make him so uncomfortable? Because there was some elemental truth in her he did not want to know, some emotion within himself she touched and he could not afford to feel. She was demanding, uncomfortable, critical. She demanded of him what he was not prepared to give—change, uncertainty, pain. She had the difficulties of a man without the virtues, the ease that went with them. She required friendship.

  But Drusilla was utterly different. How he regarded Hester was irrelevant to this.

  He crossed the next street, dodging a dray.

  He had been happy with Drusilla, enjoying her company without shadow. She was fun, lighthearted, witty, feminine. She had made no intellectual demands, no moral judgments. There was nothing in her which irritated or discomforted him. Certainly, Hester was irrelevant.

  But had he hurt Hester? Was he innately selfish, cruel? And had he always been? That was not totally irrelevant … indeed, it was the entire point.

  He did not admire selfishness in others. It was ugly from every aspect, a spiritual weakness which soured every other virtue. Even courage and honesty were marred by it in the end. Is that what he was? Basically a man with no generosity of soul? Everything began and ended with his own interest?

  What utter and abominable isolation. It was its own punishment, more terrible than anything imposed from outside.

  He must know! Why did Drusilla hate him?

  There was nothing he could do until Evan returned and he knew for certain whether it was a case or not. If it was not, then the next thing was to travel to Norfolk, but he could not leave London until he had testified in the Stonefield trial.

  He could join the police in their further search of the river for Angus’s body. Not that there was much hope of finding it now, but it was still worth every effort. It would almost certainly close the case against Caleb, and God knew, he deserved that. If ever a man warranted hanging, it was Caleb. More importantly, it would free Genevieve from the emotional and financial prison of not knowing. When he thought of her suffering, and her courage, her loss, he was barely aware of his own dilemma, or the gray street around him.

  It was a clear, cold afternoon when he stood in the small boat setting off from the Shadwell Dock Stairs and started downstream with the wind in his face. They took the north bank. Another boat was searching the south.

  It was a long, bitter day, filled with the smell of tide and sewage, the endlessly moving filthy water, the sound of lapping and slurping as the wake of the larger ships washed against the shingle or the pier stakes and stairs, and cargo boats, and barges bound for the east coast, passenger ships for France and Holland, clippers for every part in the Empire and the world.

  They went in and out of every dock, every yard and stair, poked every pile of wood or canvas, every hulk, every shadowed stretch of water, lifted every drifting piece of flotsam. They scoured carefully through the pier stakes where long ago those convicted of piracy on the high seas were tied until the morning tide drowned them.

  Monk was frozen. His feet and trousers were wet from where he had jumped ashore onto the shingle. His body ached, his knuckles were skinned, as were his palms from the wet ropes, and he was hungry.

  As dusk drew over a clear sky, the air began to prickle the skin with cold and on shore the rime of moisture on the cobbles was turning to ice. The tide was rising again. They were beyond Woolwich and the Royal Arsenal, down as far as the end of Gallion’s Reach. Ahead of them was Barking Reach.

  “Nothing,” the sergeant said with a shake of his head. “We’re wasting our time. If ’e went in at all, ’e’s long gone now. Poor devil.” He waved his arm, rocking the boat slightly. “Right, men. Might as well go ’ome. Gawd knows, it’s going ter freeze as ’ard as the ’obs o’ ’ell tonight. Pass ’round that tot o’ rum. It’s far enough ’ome, dammit.”

  “We’ll find ’im somew’ere,” one of the others said laconically. “Sea gives up its dead, sooner or later.”

  “Mebbe,” the sergeant agreed. “But not tonight, lads.”

  They turned in a wide circle and leaned their weight into the oars, too tired to bother talking. The shore was only a greater density in the night, lit by yellow lamps, carriage lights moving slowly. Sounds were faint across the water, a rattle of wheels, a shout, the creak of spars in midstream.

  It was a good hour later when they bumped into the mass in the water and the man in the bow called out. It took them another twenty minutes, working by lamplight, awkward with the small boat tipping and the sodden heaviness of it, to haul the body into the bottom and examine it.

  Monk felt his stomach knot, and then churn with revulsion and he thought for a moment he was going to be sick.

  It was the remains of a man in his late thirties or early forties, as much as one could tell. He had been dead for some time, in Monk’s judgment well over a week. His features were badly decomposed by the river and its natural inhabitants. What was left of his clothes were beyond recognition except that they must once have been a shirt and some form of trousers, but of what quality or color it was impossible to say.

  “Well?” the sergeant asked, looking at Monk. “This ’im?” There was a dry smile on his mouth, and hopelessness in his eyes. “Geez! Poor devil. No ’uman bein’ should come ter this.”

  Monk steeled himself and looked at the body more closely. He was surprised his stomach had settled again although he was shuddering with cold. He must have done such things before, perhaps often. The man was tall, strongly built. His hair was thick and dark. There was nothing to disprove it was Angus Stonefield.

  “I don’t know. It could be,” he said with a sense of sadness which all but overwhelmed him, as if up to that moment he had in some way still believed Angus might have been alive.

  The sergeant sighed. “I suppose we’ll ’ave ter ask the wife, although Gawd ’isself knows ’ow yer could expec’ any woman ter look at that … the more so if it’s ’im.”

  “Take him to the morgue,” Monk said quietly, loathing what he was doing even as he heard his own voice. Suddenly it seemed easy to hang Caleb. The anger was not enough even for that. “I’ll bring her. It has to be done. There may be some mark on the body where the clothes have protected it, something she can recognize … or which makes it possible.”

  The sergeant searched hi
s face in the moon of the lamplight, then nodded slowly. “Right y’are, sir. We’ll do that. C’mon now, boys, put yer back inter them oars. D’yer wanter be stuck ’ere in the middle o’ the damn’ river till yer freezes solid?”

  “Yes, Mr. Monk?” Genevieve looked at him, her face creased with anxiety, fear already at the back of her eyes. He had been admitted to the parlor. She was not using the larger, more formal rooms, probably to save the cost of heating them. She looked exhausted. He knew she had been in the courtroom all day, and in the witness-box a great deal of it, testifying in an attempt to prove her husband’s death. Watching Caleb, so physically like him, must have been the worst ordeal of her life. And now he was possibly going to add to it the final horror.

  Yet it could not be avoided. No one else could do this. If his face were undamaged, recognizable, perhaps Ravensbrook or Mr. Arbuthnot could have spared her. As it was, only she could know the intimacies of his body which were left.

  Monk was not often at a loss for words, but even though he had thought of this since their grim find in the river, he still did not know how best to tell her.

  “What is it, Mr. Monk?” Her eyes did not leave his face. “Have you found Angus? Is that what you cannot bring yourself to tell me?”

  “I don’t know.” It was ridiculous that she should be helping him, when he should somehow be easing it for her. It was her grief, her loss, not his. “We have found a body, but it will require someone who knows him well to identify it.”

  “I don’t understand.…” She swayed a little bit. “What are you trying to say?” She swallowed. “Is it Angus, or not? You have seen Caleb. I can see a multitude of differences between them, but to you they will be so alike you must know if it is Angus or not!” There was a rising panic in her voice and her eyes. “Please! This … this uncertainty is worse than knowing would be.” She stood with her hands knotted in front of her, her body so right she was shaking.