An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  LANE AND DARLING sat next to each other in the interview room “God, I’d like a good clean murder so I could charge someone. By all rights he’ll be charged with the manslaughter death of Henry Anscomb.” Darling said with a sigh.

  “Too bad, really. You know, like I do, that this is a tragedy. Well, I’m not adding to the misery by pressing charges against him for holding me.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” They were speaking quietly, so much so that they were leaning close. He felt a nearly irresistible desire to kiss her and then pulled himself together, puzzled by his own lack of the sense of the occasion. He would have to avoid this proximity in future. It was clear she certainly would not have him.

  “That’s fine, I suppose. I don’t agree with it. But I’ve enough to hold him as it is.” Darling stood up to put some distance between them.

  Ames came back in and mentally shook his head at the sight of Lane sitting on a chair with her arms folded and leg crossed looking one way and Darling standing on the other side of the room looking the other. “Mr. Blake would like to know about giving the boy a proper burial, sir.”

  Lane looked at Darling. “Is there any reason not to? I can contact our vicar and we can have a service at our little church. It will make the Hughes ladies feel better, I know.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Darling said with a sigh. In so many ways it had been a most unsatisfactory afternoon. This, at least, might rescue part of it.

  THE MORNING OF the funeral dawned clear with the promise of a warm spring day that presaged the coming long days of summer.

  Lane, dressed in her one dark suit, adjusted her only proper hat, finding she would have to pull her hair into a bun to make it work. She disliked wearing a hat. One of the joys of living in the New World, she always thought, was freedom from the necessity of wearing headgear, except in the winter, when a woolly hat kept out the cold. Her stomach was in knots, so she ate little for breakfast. As she backed out of her driveway on her way to pick up the Armstrongs, she wondered at her nerves. The funeral was, she decided, a sad finale to a tragic story. She knew the Hughes ladies would be there. They had been very much affected when they had finally heard the whole tale. And Darling and Ames. Her innards did a lurch at the thought of Darling, and she tried to banish the image of him, the scent of him, as they had sat close together in the hall at the police station. Her feelings for him, once teasing, light, theoretical, had suddenly begun to cascade, gathering strength and texture, keeping her awake at night and interfering with her appetite.

  They pulled up at the little graveyard. It still had the air of a pioneering burial place, carved out of the forest, the few headstones seemingly growing out of the ground with the spring grass. The tall evergreens looked down, casting an ever-shortening shadow across the site. The sun seeming to suggest the end of darkness for the tiny victim they were burying. The vicar was in place, talking quietly to the Hughes ladies in their flowered frocks—Lane had seen the same dresses at their Christmas party the previous winter—with jackets and hats pre-dating the war. Pre-dating the decade, Lane thought, suddenly missing the easy clothing of the thirties that had given way to the sensible cloth-saving masculine look of the war. She started toward them with a view to saying how lovely they all looked, and then realized it was perhaps not the tone for a child’s funeral, however late it had come. She saw the maroon police car pull up and firmly moved to the Hughes, refusing to watch Darling emerge from the car, just as she refused to acknowledge the way her breath caught when she finally did look and see him in a dark suit, looking back at her from under the brim of his hat.

  Ames opened the back door and Charles Blake stepped out. He was clean-shaven and held his hat in his hand. At the sight of him, Mabel turned away and looked only at the little grave that was waiting for its coffin.

  “It’s such a lovely day,” Lane said. She and Eleanor and Kenny had joined the Hughes ladies. “How right for the funeral.” Gwen looked up at Lane and nodded. “It’s the least he deserves. Though I don’t suppose being buried in our backyard was so bad.”

  Mabel frowned at her. “You don’t know anything,” she said and turned angrily away. Gladys, who had been watching the procession of the tiny wooden coffin to which the bones and been consigned and was now being carried by Charles Blake and the two policemen, turned to them, whispering, “So how about showing some respect instead of arguing like a couple of children?”

  The vicar, who, upon learning of the story, insisted that the little shirt and pair of boots be buried with him, chose a scripture from Romans 8: 38–39:

  I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

  How appropriate, Lane thought. All things had bedevilled this poor child in his life, but perhaps he was not then, nor could ever be, separated from his God. As a last gesture, Charles said a quiet word to Joseph’s spirit and threw the locket into the grave.

  “Poor little thing,” Lane said softly to Gladys. “At least we are closer to knowing what really happened. It is the least we can do for him.”

  It was at that moment that Mabel fainted, crumbling to the ground like a scrap of cloth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MABEL JERKED HER HEAD AWAY from the burning. Someone had put smelling salts under her nose. She tried to sit up. She was in the back of the car, her sister by her side.

  “For God’s sake, Mabel, pull yourself together. I knew you hadn’t been eating enough. What’s got into you?” Mabel’s eyes widened as she looked out the window. She could see her mother talking to the vicar and shaking her head, and Lane and the two policemen talking, heads close together.

  “I’ll be arrested!” She cried, clutching at Gwen’s arm.

  “Arrested? Why should you be arrested? You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Because, I was there! Don’t you see? I was there, and I knew, and I didn’t say anything for all these years!”

  March, 1910

  The pigs snuffled toward her, pushing one another, looking into the trough. Mabel emptied the slop bucket, put it down, and stood back to watch them. She should go back, she knew. Her mother had said they were to come in and do their lessons after chores, but she could not imagine sitting quietly in the kitchen, cozy by the stove, pretending, reading some book about the empire.

  “Mabel.” It was Bob, suddenly behind her, hidden from the house by the pigsty. She felt herself start at the shock of seeing him.

  She turned to walk toward the house, but he grabbed her arm. “Mabel, don’t be like that. I’m thinking of leaving. Come with me, like we said.” He had a worn brown jacket on, done up tight against the cold, and his cap was tilted back on his head. “I’m going to make my fortune somewhere far away from here.”

  “Leave me alone. I don’t care where you go. Mummy was right. You’re horrible people.”

  “Mabel, I’m not like them . . . him. He’s not even our pa. We was just placed with him. I . . . it’s too long to explain now.”

  He looked past her toward the sound of the screen door slamming at the house.

  “Mabs? Get in here. We have to start our lessons.” It was Gwen calling.

  He turned back to her, tried to take her hand. “Please, think about it. I can’t stand it here anymore. We’ll go to the coast. We’ll get settled and send for the other children.”

  But Mabel pulled away from him, suddenly imagining what it would mean, some squalid hovel with those other children to look after, and began to run to the house, fear and shame equally tearing at her.

  SHE STARED INTO the darkness. It had been the day before yesterday that Bob had said he would leave. She knew he was probably far away now, would have given up on her. She tried to take comfort from it, from the darkness of the moonless night outside her window. No sound came through the window, now slightly ajar to let in t
he milder weather that had returned, after the cold beginning of October. The darkness and the presence of her sister sleeping in the next bed intensified her sense of aloneness, her guilt, her fear that somehow her mother and sister would find out she had been with Bob in the shed, would find out about what nearly happened. That he had tried to make her run away with him. She closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. Nothing happened, she told herself, there was nothing to be ashamed about. But she could still feel the pain of Mr. Anscomb’s hand on her arm, pulling her up like a rag doll, calling her a slut. But I’m not, she thought. I’m not. Nothing happened.

  She had tried to make sense of what Bob had told her. What did it mean, “he was not their pa?” She had the feeling that she’d been pulled into a world that she could not understand. That’s what it was like, being in love. You thought it was just you and the other person, in a bubble, but it wasn’t . . . you were pulled into a whole universe of someone else’s frightening existence. She heard him over and over saying, “We was just placed with him.” What did that mean? Were they orphans? The idea that she had even thought of placing herself in the power of these rootless people brought another wave of fear.

  Her eyes widened. There was someone outside. She turned toward where her sister lay. Gwen was asleep. Mabel could hear her quiet, sibilant snore. She sat up and pulled the blankets to her chest with both hands, as if they would protect her. It must be Bob! He’d come back for her. When she hadn’t gone to the train station, he hadn’t gone like he said he would. He’d come back for her!

  Terrified now that he would be reckless, would bang on the door or call out, she got up and moved swiftly toward the door, and went down the stairs, hugging the edge by the banister because there was less squeaking. In the kitchen she pulled on her robe. She could hear the spaniels stirring and beginning to whine where they slept in the mudroom, and she spoke quietly to them as she slipped on her boots. One of the spaniels emitted a low growl, and both looked alertly at the door.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered “You can come with me. Please don’t bark!”

  Carefully closing the screen door so it wouldn’t snap shut loudly, she went toward where she saw him moving, her heart pounding. She shivered as the cold night air hit her and tried to rehearse what she’d say to make him go away and leave her alone forever.

  “Who’s there?” The harsh male whisper made Mabel stop, puzzled and then frightened. “Who’s there?” Repeated the voice closer. His voice sounded strange and broken. The dogs trotted toward the voice. One of them gave a slight whimper.

  “It . . . it’s Mabel.” She wanted to run back to the house, lock the doors.

  “What are you doing here?” He seemed distracted as if he didn’t quite know her.

  Something in his uneasiness gave her courage. Her fear of him turned to a kind of rage at all of them. “Why are you here. Get away! You’ll wake my sister and my mother. I told you. Leave me alone. I don’t ever want to see you or your kind again!” She could just discern an elongated shape lying at Bob’s feet. She struggled to understand. Why was there a shovel next to it? She looked up at him wide-eyed, unable to make sense of what she saw.

  “I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” His whisper was harsh and rasped. His face was close to hers, his breathing uneven, his breath stale.

  Mabel felt words stuck in her throat. She was frozen, watching him, feeling as if the life was draining out of her.

  “Some wood rolled onto him, we couldn’t . . .” here his voice seemed to catch. “No one can know!” He hissed. “I swear to God, if anyone finds out, if anyone comes looking, I will kill you. I’ll tell your ma about us. You’re part of this now. Do you understand?”

  Somehow he had retrieved the shovel and was brandishing it near her. She could smell the dried earth stuck to it, could see the sharp edge of the metal near her. Scarcely knowing what she was doing she turned and ran back to the house, but even buried under her blankets, she thought she could hear the shovel pushing into the earth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A WEEK AFTER THE FUNERAL DARLING was at his desk, hanging up the phone from the call he’d been waiting for from the home for boys in Manitoba. It had been very unsatisfactory, all in all.

  “Ames!” he called. In a moment Ames was filling the doorway with his youthful optimistic presence. “I thought you were out attending to that car robbery.”

  “If I was, sir, I wouldn’t be at your beck and call, now would I?”

  “If I want your cheek, I’ll ask for it. I’ve been on the phone to the Patterson Home for Boys, and I must say they could not have been more unforthcoming. They took a week to get back to me because they had to fish out their records from 1907. They had a record of a Charles Blake, AKA Bob Anscomb, and a boy of four was registered that same year whose name was recorded as Joseph Smith. I don’t even know if that was actually his name, or was, in the traditional manner, a pseudonym because they’d lost track of his siblings. The whole business of Home Children is incomprehensible, especially in the early years. They indicated the older boy was assigned to the Anscombs and that’s that. Nothing about the younger one. I imagine they let him go because it was easier for them not to have such a young child on hand who could not work or be placed. Any details of their lives or how they got there they say they cannot tell me. It’s a very untidy and unsatisfactory way to handle children, in my view. I asked them, out of curiosity, how a person who had been there as a child could trace his own family and was told they were not able to give out that information.”

  “We’ve sent poor Charles Blake to a facility closer to his wife. I don’t think they should even bother to keep him locked up in Kamloops. He’s hardly going to run off. He did say he felt better now the child was buried properly.”

  “Poor my left arm! I don’t want him feeling better right now. You seem to have forgotten he is to stand trial for the murder of Henry Anscomb and kept your beloved Miss Winslow locked up for over twenty hours in yet another example of appalling judgement.”

  “Speaking of Miss Winslow . . .”

  Darling waved his hand, dismissing Ames, “Car theft, Ames. Get on it.” And he went back to his notes.

  “Sir,” said Ames with a sigh. He lingered for a moment, wanting to escape from their bantering but hierarchical relationship, wanting to sit down with him as the friend he most desperately wished to become, and talk to him about not letting his chance of real love, for this is what he believed it to be, go. He had seen the old inspector, who had retired when Darling had come back from the war. He had been bitter and isolated, his wife, for it was rumoured he had had one, had long since decamped and left him to his own devices. He could not bear to think of Darling old and alone like his old boss, and thought that once he had secured the lovely Miss Winslow, she would never leave him.

  “Ames, I’ll need to use that door in a minute, and I don’t want you blocking it up.”

  “Sir.”

  LANE SAT IN front of her typewriter, holding a cup of coffee and staring out at the changing clouds above the lake. She felt herself on a trajectory she could not get off. She cursed Darling and herself, cursed the end of what she thought of as her peace of mind. She had been happy here in the last year. She had a beautiful house set in a paradise that had helped her begin to put the war and its effects behind her, especially now, as the spring released a riot of greens in the trees and bushes. She wanted to be free to be outside smelling the scents of her new home, having tea with her neighbours, drinking wine with the Bertollis, who, thank God, would be back in a few days. She wanted to be free to do all these things and continue to live unruffled, alone, in peace. Instead, she had fallen in love, a circumstance that had yanked her violently from her splendid isolation.

  When she was young she had dreamed love would be like it had seemed at first when she was nineteen and had fallen for Angus. He had consumed her; she had felt protected and loved by him. She had felt that the butterflies and inabili
ty to eat and sleep were the glorious garments of true love. Now she felt them more as an illness to be overcome, and love a deceptive pitfall. Love tricked one into believing in another person.

  Love was, in fact, truly blind, a destroyer of judgement. Darling would be another Angus. The instant she told herself this, she knew it to be wrong. Darling was not another Angus. Darling was Darling, and that was what was so utterly disturbing. He was a good man, a man, if she dared to admit it, she wanted. A man who was not dishonest and did not manipulate. A man who was impossible in every way. He could not, she knew, love her. Her background was too untidy, there was too much she could not say. You cannot build a relationship on secrets.

  “And anyway,” she said out loud. “I could never leave here. And I have work to do.” She put down her cup and adjusted the paper in the machine.

  Here’s the thing, the green shadow said

  You must relinquish everything to be like us

  Abandon your petty loves and dreads

  Leave your human house, and fly to the forests’ hush

  Home? House? “Home” was a soft word, but should she always give in to soft? Should poetry not have some good Anglo-Saxon edges? Maybe she should escape the tyranny of the rhyme like the modern poets. If she could but blend into the flickering green of the forest and be done with it!

  She was interrupted in this escapist sentiment by the ringing of the phone. She waited. It was for her. “KC 431,” she said into the mouthpiece, her heart pounding. Stop it! she told herself.

  “Miss Winslow? It’s Erin.”

  “Erin. How lovely to hear from you,” Lane said, meaning it, angry at the rush of fear and hope that had overcome her at the sound of the phone. It was utter nonsense and had to stop.

  “I hope you don’t mind my calling. You did give me your number.”

  “Not at all. Is everything all right?”