‘So you feel no particular urge to throttle me?’
‘Not at the moment. But do not presume on that too far.’
‘I shall be careful. I do have something to tell you, Peter.’
The telephone rang.
‘My dear, I’m sorry about this, but I must go. Will your news wait?’
‘Yes, if you must go. What has happened?’
‘Another little diplomatic hitch. I hope it won’t take as long as last time, but . . .’ He had already got that frozen, abstracted expression.
‘Peter, before you go, what happened about Rosamund Harwell’s note?’
‘Nothing. I put it away in the drawer marked “pending”. Why do you ask?’
‘Did anyone tell Laurence Harwell about it?’
‘I certainly didn’t,’ said Peter. ‘And I doubt if Charles did. It isn’t necessary for evidence in the face of his confession, and on the whole I think it would be merciful to spare the Hampton girls the witness-box.’
‘But he should know. He should know she wasn’t deceiving him with someone else.’
‘Should he? Won’t that make his remorse more pungent, if he is remorseful? Dr Johnson said somewhere that the remembrance of a crime committed in vain was the most painful of all reflections. But, Harriet, I haven’t the time to spare thought for Harwell now.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Off with you, and back as quickly as you can.’
‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth.’
The library door closed behind him.
There were voices in the hall. And then silence in the house; for the moment no servants moving audibly, and a great sense of absence – as consciousness of Peter’s presence ebbed away.
Harriet paced up and down in the library. She lit a Balkan Sobranie, and extinguished it half smoked. A simple and terrible thought had occurred to her. It was not Laurence Harwell she was thinking of; she was thinking of Rosamund. Of what would be fair to her. Was this the great sisterhood of women coming into play?
‘She was not the sort of woman of whom I could have made a living friend,’ Harriet reminded herself. ‘And yet I do feel like befriending her ghost.’
The note should be shown to Harwell, she was sure of that. And as soon as may be; he had none too much time left. How? She telephoned to her brother-in-law.
‘Charles, supposing I wanted to visit Laurence Harwell, how could I do it?’
‘Remand prisoners have visitors,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You would just find out the visiting hours, and present yourself. He’s in the Scrubs. But—’ He broke off as it occurred to him that Harriet must know perfectly well that remand prisoners can have visitors, and would surely risk deep discomfiture in doing what he had just suggested. ‘What does Peter say?’ he asked.
‘He’s called away again.’
‘Hard luck,’ said Charles. ‘I don’t like it when this happens too often; I can’t help thinking it means deep trouble breaking out somewhere. It’s only too easy to imagine these days. Couldn’t it wait till he’s back?’
‘It’s like having toothache and dreading the dentist,’ she told him. ‘Better to get it over with.’
‘Well, you know best. But, Harriet, I do hope if you ever felt lonely or down – well, Mary would be delighted to see you, you know, any time.’
‘Thank you, Charles, I’ll remember that.’
She still hesitated. And then it dawned on her that if she did not summon up the courage to face the shades of the prison house she would, instead, have to live for ever with the knowledge that she had funked it. That even Peter’s love, her liberty, the ring on her finger, had not succeeded in freeing her from the ordeal of being tried for the murder of Philip Boyes, had left her disabled, left her unable to do something which she thought she ought to do. She found the telephone number she needed; she enquired for the visiting hours; she put on her coat. Going to Peter’s desk – it was unlocked – she found Rosamund’s note and put it in her pocket, and went out.
It was, of course, a different prison; she managed quite well approaching the gate, announcing herself, sitting in the waiting-room. Only when the guard appeared to conduct her to the interview-room, and she had to walk, escorted, down the passageways, accompanied by the rattling of keys as the security gates were opened, and the dreadful sound of the gates clanging shut behind her, did she begin to quail. The place smelled of human misery; somewhere someone was shouting, and the sound echoed and boomed in the stone and iron spaces. But when she sat down at one end of a table, facing Harwell sitting at the other; when the little window to the side showed her the familiar blur of a face watching through glass; when the door was clanged shut behind her, and she heard the sound of the lock, bitter recollections of the past swung up to hit her somewhere; she reeled under the impact of memory. But memory came to her rescue, for she found she could remember and command also the numbing detachment from her surroundings, the narrowing focus that held the attention blinkered rigidly on what would happen in the next few minutes, and reared away like a frightened horse from any prospect more remote than the present hour.
She turned her attention on the sullen, silent man sitting opposite her. His leonine form and tawny hair reminded her of an animal in the zoo. His eyes were dull, his gaze baffled.
‘You?’ he said at last. ‘Why should you come?’
‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.
‘Does your bloody husband know you are here?’ he asked.
She blinked at the insult offered to her by his swearing in her presence. ‘As a matter of fact, no,’ she said.
‘And what would he say if he did? I wouldn’t have let my wife go calling on murderers. But then, I wouldn’t have spent my time pursuing them. Is it a family taste?’
‘Mr Harwell, I might have more idea how you are feeling than you realise,’ she said.
‘Oh, might you?’ he said. ‘But you didn’t actually do it, did you? What do you think it feels like really to have murdered someone?’
‘I’m sorry; that was impertinent of me. I can’t imagine what that would – does – feel like.’
‘So what are you here for? Have you come to flaunt your innocence under the nose of the guilty?’
‘I wanted to tell you something about Rosamund,’ said Harriet.
‘I would have forgiven her in a minute or so,’ he said, his voice suddenly unsteady. ‘But do you wonder I was angry? I gave her everything, everything she wanted, for herself or for anyone; I had half ruined myself to get her pet poet’s play put on; but she should have been grateful; she owed it to me not to fool around with another man. Do you take lovers, Lady Peter? Do you have secret assignations? Or does owing your life to Wimsey make you toe the line?’
‘I have come to tell you that she didn’t, that she wasn’t making secret assignations.’
‘And what can you know about it? Why the devil should I believe you?’
‘I would like to tell you that I think it was my suggestion, innocently made, that persuaded your wife to spend a few days at the bungalow. We were talking, and I said it might be fun, and might please you, if she set about some decorating there. As you can imagine, I have since greatly regretted making the suggestion.’
‘Did you also suggest setting up a candlelit dinner for two?’ he said after a moment.
‘This is the invitation Rosamund sent,’ said Harriet. ‘With great ingenuity it has been found.’ She put the note down on the table between them, and withdrew her hands into her lap. Both of them glanced at the watchful presence at the surveillance window before Harwell picked it up. He read it.
‘Rosamund gave that to an unreliable messenger, late in the afternoon of the day that she died. It should have been brought to you at your club. It went astray,’ said Harriet, gently. He was looking at her with an ashen face. ‘I thought you ought to know,’ she said. ‘I hope that it does not make your suffering any worse than it necessarily must be.’
He said bleakly, ‘She might h
ave told me, if I had not had my hands around her throat.’
Harriet stood up, ready to go. ‘If there is anything that I or Lord Peter can do for you . . .’
‘Nothing can be done for me,’ he said. ‘I can pay for a good lawyer. Wait; let me talk to you a moment. Nobody else will listen to me ever again. I thought, you see, that I had been so wholly, so horribly deceived; that I had made such a complete fool of myself, giving abject adoration to a loose woman . . . poor Rosamund! How terrible for her: she must have thought I had come in answer to her summons, and I – and I . . .’
‘I am afraid I ought to take that note back with me,’ said Harriet.
‘Oh, yes!’ he said eagerly, pushing it across the table to her. ‘But, yes, there is something you could do. Ask Lord Peter to make sure that this note comes out in court; that the blame all lies where it ought to lie, and her name is cleared of any stain. I shall get what I deserve, but let her reputation be unblemished.’
‘I expect the note can be used as you wish.’
‘To show it was a terrible misunderstanding; that it was neither her fault nor mine.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Harwell. I am sorry for you.’
‘I shall be able to think of her without bitterness in the time that remains to me,’ he said. ‘And thinking about her is all that is left.’
Harriet picked up the note, and signalled to the warder that she wished to leave. She walked away down the interminable corridors behind the warder with a kind of disorientated astonishment at being able to go; at being let free. When the outer gates closed behind her she broke, childlike, into a run, gulping in great lungfuls of the grey, cool open air of the London street as though she had surfaced from drowning.
‘But you didn’t have to do that,’ said Peter Wimsey. ‘I would have done it, I would have taken your word for it that it was the right thing to do.’
‘You would have protected me?’ said Harriet.
‘I would have spared you the affront to your feelings. It must have been gruesome for you.’
‘And that’s just why I had to do it. I had to know that I wasn’t still walking wounded; that I could do what was needful just as anyone else would.’
‘Almost anyone else would have felt ready to leave Harwell to his fate.’
‘The truth about himself, about what he has done must be bad enough; to leave him suffering the torment of the damned over an untruth, over the false idea that Rosamund had betrayed him . . .’
‘I hope he was grateful to you, Harriet. I doubt if he could have had the slightest idea of what pain it must have given you, what memories it reawakened.’
‘He was very glad to be able to think her innocent, and to engross the blame to himself. And, my dear, I am no longer in flight from memory. To be in a prison again cost me a pang or two, I won’t deny it. The ordeals of the past were terrible at the time, but they brought me to you. See, here I am, perfectly calm. In fact, Peter, you look the more harried of the two of us; was your errand difficult?’
‘They use me as an emergency message-boy these days. The message was duly delivered, with certainty and in secrecy. So I suppose it was not difficult, and that I have succeeded in it.’
‘But it has left you very depressed, I see.’
‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another,’ he said, taking her in his arms, ‘For we are here, as on a darkling plain. . .’
‘Is it as bad as that?’
‘I’m afraid so. I think we have been living in the eye of the storm, and mistaking it for calm. We shall find ourselves at war again before all this is sorted out.’
‘And all these people around us who are saying that after all the Rhineland is part of Germany; that the Versailles Treaty was unfair, that Hitler will negotiate a peace when Germany’s just demands are met . . .’
‘They believe what they hope, Harriet. But they are wrong.’
‘War is so terrible a thing.’
‘Don’t I know it! And the next one will be worse than the last. The machinery for inflicting death and destruction is better than it was. Mussolini’s tactics show the way; we must expect to have poison gas used against civilians, and multiple other horrors. I’m not surprised that people have no stomach for it. And this time we shall go into the fray with the Americans sworn to neutrality, and the country led by an irresponsible and pro-German King.’
‘You are very hard on him.’
‘I suppose one should remember half his family are Germans. The talk is, he wants to marry that woman.’
‘Which woman?’
‘Mrs Simpson.’
‘But she’s married to somebody else.’
‘She can get a divorce. The fact that he’s the head of the Church of England and if he did such a thing it would split the country top to bottom has apparently escaped his attention.’
‘It’s very hard on someone not to have the person that they love,’ said Harriet.
‘He can have her. He just can’t marry her.’
‘I offered to live with you, once, without being married to you. You took it badly.’
‘So I did. Perhaps I am being curmudgeonly. How do you put up with it?’
‘I just point it out to you and wait for a change in the weather.’
‘The thing is, Harriet, I can understand perfectly a bit of fooling around. Carrying on like Jerry; he knows he has burdens to carry when he inherits the title, he can see how it weighs on his father, and he wants to play the boy out of school while he still can. But when you do inherit; when the responsibility is yours, you have to do your duty.’
‘I do see that, Peter; even though I think nobody has had as little freedom of choice as the King has since the abolition of slavery.’
‘He could abjure his title, I suppose; renounce the crown. What is contemptible is trying to keep the thrones and titles and wriggle out of the responsibilities. Enough of this; you had some news for me.’
‘Yes, I have, my lord, although I might have chosen the wrong moment. This isn’t the best time, I take it, to be giving hostages to fortune?’
‘My dearest, are we really?’
‘So it seems; some time in October. You’ll think me incredibly foolish, but I wasn’t keeping an exact check. I didn’t even notice at first; I kept feeling sick, and I kept thinking there were reasons for that. Chapparelle purported to see some mysterious change in me, and I thought he was just flannelling. Eventually Mango put two and two together, and sternly admonished me to go to the doctor.’ She was talking rapidly, watching him to see what he felt.
He said, ‘Domina, it will be all right; you will be all right, won’t you? What did the doctor say?’
‘He gave me an approximate date, and told me to drink plenty of milk. He measured my hips and told me that if my interior dimensions were in the usual proportion to my exterior ones there would be no cause for concern. Peter, it’s nice of you to react by worrying about me – but are you pleased?’
‘Pleased?’ he said. ‘Pleased? That’s no sort of word for it – my blood rejoices in my veins! I can feel the eternal stage-hands shift the scenery around us as we stand.’
‘What scene gives way to what, my lord?’
‘In all the vanished legions of the past,’ he said, ‘the Vanes and Wimseys glory in our light, wearing ancestral titles down another swathe of years.’
‘Oh, Peter,’ she said, smiling, ‘I told Jerry once I was tempted to marry you just to hear you spouting nonsense.’
‘And the future,’ he said, suddenly sombre, ‘opens up before us real and urgent.’
‘That’s not nonsense,’ she said. ‘Do we do right to bring a child into the present time?’
‘There’s what we can do for any child of ours,’ he said, ‘and there’s what no one can do for any child at all.’
‘They make their own way, you mean?’
‘They claim or renounce their inheritance in their own time, and make or break the time accordingly. We shall lavish every gift we can on ours, but we ca
nnot give it safety.’
‘You know, until this happened I would have said that I no longer cared a fig for the fate of the world as long as you and I were together.’
‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arc of the ranged empire fall? No, Domina, that’s not our style. If there’s another war we shall have to face it, and we shall have to win it,’ said Peter.
21
Hanging and marriage, you know, go by Destiny.
GEORGE FARQUHAR
You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse
I made a second marriage in my house . . .
OMAR KHAYYAM
Extracts from the diary of Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver:
29th March
Peter came in just after breakfast, exultant, to bring news that Harriet is pregnant! Much rejoicing together. He says she has been not very sick, but nevertheless told him that he must see to it that she has a cup of tea in bed every morning, as tea before getting up was the only thing any good against morning sickness in my case, and it might run in families. The remedy, I mean. Peter pointed out that Harriet not in the family in that sense. Quite right, of course, but she seems like a daughter to me. Told him so. Did not add more so than Mary, as it seemed disloyal. Besides, I am very fond of her. Mary, that is.
Well, now there will be family confabulations! Wonder if Helen will be glad at prospect of reserve heir, or annoyed at loss of prospect of Peter’s money for Jerry. Went to Garrard’s to buy spoons for christening present, and then bought gold and garnet brooch for Harriet instead. Baby can, indeed must, wait. Coming out, bumped into Peter on same errand. Longed to wait to see what he chose, but thought better of it.
Arrived home to find Gerald and Helen waiting. Gerald cock-a-hoop about it, saying he always thought Harriet a sensible woman who would know what was expected of her – would have told her himself if Peter hadn’t forbidden him. Helen worried that Harriet not aware how to bring up children of upper classes, but said at least she would now have to give up writing ‘those dreadful books’. Told her I hoped not, as I would lose favourite reading. Don’t know why Gerald makes me so cross. He said it would be a relief not to have to lean so hard on St George; thought privately it would make Jerry even harder to call to order, but didn’t say so. Told Gerald it would probably be a girl. Decided not to give brooch to Harriet till tomorrow, to let Peter get in his gift first.
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