A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  I thought he’d probably heard that anyway, perched up on his ladder. He nodded politely, but did not seem enthusiastic about the idea.

  ‘I should love to read all of it,’ I said. ‘If you’re sure it’s not an intrusion.’

  I put a little emphasis on the ‘all’ to let her know that I was aware of what was happening. I wasn’t sure if she caught the implication, but he did. The look he gave me was both surprised and alarmed. She must have noticed it, because there was a touch of defiance in her voice when she spoke to me.

  ‘Would ten o’clock suit you? Excellent. Did you walk here, Miss Lane? May we offer you a ride back in the pony gig? The driver is going to the village in any case.’

  This was the polite dismissal I’d expected an hour ago. I gratefully accepted the offer of the gig and Robert Carmichael said he’d go and have it brought round to the front door. That was hardly a librarian’s job. I sensed that he wanted to see me off the premises and have a serious word with his employer. Lady Brinkburn and I lingered for a while, looking at some of her books on botany, then followed him out of the library. She pointed out a flight of polished wooden steps next to the library door.

  ‘That leads straight up to my own rooms. So convenient. When I have trouble sleeping I can come down to my books without disturbing anybody.’

  Her tone was surprisingly intimate. It was as if she were playing some kind of game with me, inviting an advance in friendship, but ready to draw back.

  She and the spaniel came with me to the front door. The pony gig and driver were waiting but there was no sign of her shepherd of books. She saw me into the gig beside the driver and waved me off, the perfect hostess.

  All the way up the drive and on to the road, I wondered what she wanted from me. Was she grasping the opportunity of using anybody reasonably intelligent from London to add to the gossip about the family? The other possibility was that she knew exactly who I was and why I was there. If she knew I’d come to judge her sanity and the worth of her evidence, her move would have more point to it. Mr Lomax and I had assumed that Mr Whiteley hadn’t noticed me at the inquest, but suppose he had and then had happened to see me when I arrived, or even have somebody from the village describe me? If so, Lady Brinkburn’s invitation to tea had been anything but impulsive.

  Before we came to the village, I realised I might be wasting an opportunity. A relatively modest establishment like Lady Brinkburn’s would only run to one driver. This one was a plump and red-faced man, genial-looking. I made some comment on the state of the roads and we got into conversation. It wasn’t easy, with the noise of the wheels, so I had to speak at the top of my voice.

  ‘Do you drive to London much?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. They all drive like madmen up there. Run straight into you as soon as look at you. I’ve had enough to last me a twelvemonth.’

  ‘You’ve been up recently, then?’

  ‘Just a week ago, in the old landau, with their armour.’ He flicked the reins and added, ‘And him. Not that I knew it at the time.’

  ‘Simon Handy?’

  ‘Yes. I said to the policeman, “Do you think I’d have driven a corpse up there if I’d have known? Do I look like a bleeding undertaker?”’

  ‘Policeman? When?’

  ‘Day before yesterday. Didn’t look like a policeman, but reckoned he was. All those questions. Had I gone straight to London? Had I stopped anywhere and left the crates without anybody looking after them? I said, sarcastic like: “Oh no, I went by way of Wigan and Manchester.” Of course I went straight there, or straight as I could in London. I was driving up and down Oxford Street three or four times, looking for the way into Bond Street.’

  ‘And did you bring Simon Handy’s body back again on Saturday?’

  He looked as if he were going to spit then thought better of it.

  ‘No, I did not. Somebody from London did that.’

  Once we’d turned into the track to the cottage he had to concentrate on steering among the ruts and potholes, so there was no chance to ask anything else. When we reached the turning point he got out to help me down, then spun the gig in an expert circle and went back up the track, waving to me with his whip.

  There was no sign of Tabby at the cottage. Plenty of things showed that she’d been active in my absence, from breakfast plates roughly washed, a broken cup on the table, a pile of sticks for kindling by the door. I decided there was enough time for me to walk into town before supper. I needed to keep my communications with London open, and though I wasn’t expecting any letters yet, I could at least find the mail office. It was a walk of two miles or so, but I discovered a footpath that cut through fields to the old bridge. The mail office was next to the Bear and still open. I made myself known and, to my surprise, was handed a letter that had arrived that morning. It was on scented pink paper with a silver wax seal, addressed in curly feminine handwriting. Evidently from neither Mrs Martley nor Amos Legge, the two people I thought might write to me. When I sat down on the edge of a horse trough and broke the seal, the first three words solved the mystery.

  My Dear Elizabeth…

  Celia. The date on the top was Saturday’s so her letter must have followed me down.

  It really is too provoking of you to be called to the country, just when you and I had met again. Is it some sick old aunt? If so, I only hope she leaves you a fortune in her will to make up for being such an inconvenience. It could not have come at a worse time. When I reached home after the party where we met on Monday night, Philip gave me such a lecture for being out late. Then, in the morning, he thought I looked pale so would insist on calling the doctor and the doctor said I must lie on my couch and not move a finger for days and days or the baby might suffer. So what can I do? I really had no idea that this whole process was so achingly tedious. Why is one not warned? So here I am, being waited on like a Sultana in a harem (is it really Sultana? It sounds more like something from a pudding, but Philip says that’s right) positively forbidden to move. My only refuge is to write letters like this one and have my friends visit with the latest gossip, which I’m glad to say they do. A propos of which, I have a bone to pick with you, my dear. Why didn’t you tell me when we met about what happened at the Eyre Arms? I assure you, the whole town is talking about it. The Brinkburns, of course, but you as well. Is it really true that you put on armour like the woman in that long and rather tedious poem, challenged Miles and knocked him out of the saddle?

  I groaned. I should have known that my moment of foolishness would be gossiped up into something quite ridiculous. After cursing myself, Amos and all the people in society who had nothing better to do, I read on. Wafts of perfume rose from the pages.

  In any case, you have made a conquest in every sense. They say that Miles has been asking everybody about you. You know, if things turn out one way, you could do worse. He’s the younger son, of course, but more than comfortably provided for and certainly one of the twenty most handsome men in London. (Some people say one of the ten, but the list keeps changing.) A sudden thought –is he why you left town so suddenly? I wonder. It can sometimes be good tactics to absent oneself for a while after provoking a man’s interest, but two or three days are enough unless he is staying somewhere remarkably quiet and without distractions, like a Scottish castle, in which case he may be safely left for a week or two.

  I felt like scrunching the letter up and throwing it in the drinking trough, but the smell of it might have frightened the horses, so I read on.

  But, of course, things are complicated by La Rosa. Stephen seems to be behaving very oddly in this respect. Nobody has seen him for three or four days. He has not been practising at the Eyre Arms and has missed two dinners, an opera and a ball– all of which he was expected to attend with Rosa. She went to the dinners with some old male cousin, but wasn’t to be seen at the ball or the opera. It is practically unheard of for an engaged man to desert his fiancée like this at the height of the season, unless he’s an officer called awa
y to the army, and even then the best regiments can be quite accommodating. They say Rosa is absolutely furious with him, and so should I be in her shoes. Perhaps she’s hoping that Miles will turn out after all to be The True Heir. (Isn’t there a play called that?) Of course, that might be disappointing news for you, if I’m right in my guess. I often am proved right. Philip says I have an instinct. In any case, if it really is your aunt, I do hope the old lady gets better or dies very quickly, so that you can return to town and to your affectionate friend who misses you and wishes very much that you were here to entertain her in her captivity,

  Celia

  By the time I got back to the cottage I’d walked myself into a better temper and was even ready to laugh about Celia’s fantasies. She was right about one thing. Stephen’s absence from fashionable London was puzzling. If ever there was a time to brave it out, it surely was now.

  There was still no sign of Tabby and I was beginning to worry. The back streets and yards of London were her element, but the country was new to her. She might have got lost in the woods, fallen in the river. The sun was well down towards the treetops before the sound of a voice singing came along the path from the village. The voice was not beautiful and the song was a bawdy tavern ballad that a girl her age shouldn’t have known. (I probably shouldn’t have known it either.) Still, in my state of worry, it was sweeter than a nightingale.

  ‘Tabby, where in the world have you been?’

  She looked surprised at my annoyance.

  ‘Up at the houses. Polly said I could go and look at her bees if I wanted.’

  ‘Polly?’

  ‘The woman who came and cleaned this morning. She keeps thousands of them in a sort of upside-down basket thing in her garden. She says they make honey. Was she pulling my leg, do you think?’

  ‘No. Tabby, it was kind of Mrs Todd to invite you, but I was worried. If you’d left a note for me…’

  She gave me an angry look. I deserved it. Where in the life she’d led could she have learned to write or read?

  ‘You didn’t tell me I was supposed to stay here,’ she said sullenly.

  Which was true, because I’d assumed she’d be too intimidated by her new surroundings to go far.

  Our supper was ham and eggs fried in a pan over the fire, the slices of ham plumper and pinker than in London, egg yolks golden as the evening sunlight coming through the window. Tabby ate with appetite, elbows on the table, egg on her chin. The fear that she was missing had started me worrying about what I was doing to her. It was all very well taking her with me on a whim. As far as I’d thought about her future, I’d supposed that working for me for a while might ease her path into proper domestic service, with her knees under somebody else’s table and a roof over her head. In time, she might even rise to the heights of a real lady’s maid. Now, obeying her casual request to pass the salt, watching her hack at the loaf of bread, I knew that was as unlikely as water running uphill. Tabby had never learned deference, a far graver defect in a servant than lack of reading and writing, and I was not the person to teach it to her. Instead, once her hunger was satisfied, I let her rattle on about her visit to the village. She seemed to have struck up an instant friendship with Mrs Todd.

  ‘Five children, she’s got. She said she wanted to stop at four, only her husband wouldn’t. He works at the public house. It’s his brother what’s married to the woman whose sister was friendly with the one what got killed.’

  ‘With Simon Handy?’

  I was trying to keep up with this tangle of relationships. As far as I could make out, we were talking about Mrs Todd’s husband’s brother’s sister-in-law.

  ‘Yes. I told Polly about what happened here last night. She says it might have been his ghost walking, because of being shut out of the churchyard like that.’

  She looked at me triumphantly.

  ‘Did you mention that he was rowing a boat as well?’

  She disregarded it.

  ‘Polly says it gives her the shivers, with her living right next to the churchyard, in case he decides to walk in on her one night. She says she wouldn’t have him in the house when he was alive, but she doesn’t know what she could do about it now he’s dead.’

  ‘She didn’t like him, then?’

  ‘Nah, she said nobody liked him, except her husband’s brother’s wife’s sister–Violet’s her name–and even then they were always quarrelling because he wouldn’t give her any money for herself or his kids.’

  ‘What children?’

  ‘Violet’s.’

  ‘By Handy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So was Handy married to Violet?’

  ‘Not in the church, no. That’s what Polly said to her: that she couldn’t do nothing about it in any case because of them not being married in church.’

  My head was spinning.

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘Put the plates in the sink and you can wash them in the morning.’

  We sat on the bench by the porch. The flowers of the evening primroses were still glowing yellow in the dusk as if they had their own source of light, the warm-animal smell of them filling the air.

  ‘So you were there when this woman Violet came to talk to Mrs Todd?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. She came when we were looking at the bees. Polly wasn’t any too pleased to see her, you could tell that. She said they shouldn’t be arguing in front of strangers.’

  ‘They argued?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Polly and me were out in her garden, then Polly looks over the wall and says, “Here comes trouble.” This woman comes in, hair all over the place and petticoat trailing in the dust, goes straight up to Polly and says, “What are we going to do about it then?” So Polly says she doesn’t know what she’s talking about–only you can tell she does really–and Violet says, “You know very well. Getting that wall put back in its proper place.”’

  ‘Meaning the churchyard wall?’

  ‘Yes. Violet says, “Lady or not, she can’t do that,” and Polly says, “She can, and she’s done it.” Violet says she had no right, and Polly says her husband owns all the houses in the village, so she can do what she likes.’

  ‘What did Violet expect Mrs Todd to do about it?’

  ‘Violet had this idea that all the men in the village should go out at night and put the wall back where it had been. She wanted Polly to tell her husband to help. Polly said it was a daft idea and she wouldn’t. That’s when she told Violet she had no rights anyway, because of not being married in church. Violet started shouting at her about having no respect for her own flesh and blood. Polly said, “You’re not my flesh and blood, and Handy certainly wasn’t. He didn’t even come from round here. In any case, he was only ever in your bed when he couldn’t find a warmer one.”’

  Tabby reported all this with complete tranquillity. I think it had even made her feel at home to find that people could quarrel every bit as fiercely in the country as in London.

  ‘Do you know where Violet lives?’

  ‘Two down from the public house. Keeps hens and sells eggs.’

  ‘I’m going to the big house tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘If there’s time when we get back, you and I will go and buy some eggs.’

  ‘But Polly brought a dozen…’ Then she looked at me and grinned.

  ‘I see. All right then.’

  Reading and writing weren’t everything. Nor was deference.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Next morning Lady Brinkburn must have seen me walking down her drive, because she was already in the hall when a maid opened the front door to me. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me and led me straight to the library. The journal was ready on the sloping desk, with a chair drawn up to it.

  ‘Betty will be in soon with coffee, Miss Lane. Is there enough light for you here? We can draw the blind up higher, if you like.’

  The light was perfect, I assured her. She lingered. Now the moment had come, she seemed nervo
us about leaving me with the journal.

  ‘Mr Carmichael has had to go on an errand into town,’ she said. ‘He won’t be back for an hour or so.’

  Was that intended as reassurance to herself or me? I wondered if her librarian had taken himself off as a sign of his disapproval.

  ‘So I’ll leave you with it then,’ she said, and went.

  The first page of the journal carried simply its title, in capitals and under-ruled: Journal of a Continental Tour, 1816. The year after the battle of Waterloo, the first year that British travellers had been able to visit Europe for pleasure, after it had been closed to them for so many years by the Napoleonic wars. I decided to start at the beginning and read all the way through instead of skipping straight to the part that mattered. I wanted to know more about the young bride Lady Brinkburn had been twenty-three years ago. I turned the page.

  16 March 1816, Rotterdam

  We embarked at Newcastle yesterday morning, arriving late and almost losing the tide. The sailors managed to have our travelling chariot taken on board quite easily, but there was a terrible pother with the fourgon that will carry all our luggage for more than six months, as well as Edward and Suzy. The gangway shifted and for a while it appeared that it and all our belongings were doomed to be an early tribute to Neptune. But the brave sailors pushed and pulled with a will and eventually we were all safely on board, just in time. I was sad to say goodbye to the horses that had pulled our carriage, but God willing they will be waiting for us when we return in the autumn. It was a turbulent crossing, although the sailors said we were making faster than usual progress because of the strong wind from the west. Poor Suzy and C were overcome with mal de mer before we were out of sight of the coast of England, and spent the entire voyage down below. I was mercifully unaffected and stood at the rail with the spray from the waves bursting over my head, feeling a thundering in my ears and all through my body as huge waves battered the oaken sides of our good ship.