*
The day of the funeral was warm. The little church of St. Benedict was pleasantly cool that morning, although the sun was already working its magic, beating against the East Window and through the reds and greens of the stained glass. As Francis and Edward Pember settled into a pew half way down the nave, a small woman in black, a tidy black netted hat perched at one side of her head, passed in the aisle.
‘It’s Rose,’ said Francis.
She turned briefly in their direction as she arranged her dress before sitting. She didn’t smile, but made a slight nod. It had been twenty years since she had set eyes on him. Francis didn’t suppose she would recognize him.
The vicar tactfully waited a few moments in the hope that a few more people might make the effort to walk up through the town to pay a last homage to the last of the family that had made it all possible, and began. As he walked to the front of the church, Francis took a last look behind him and whispered to Edward ‘I don’t see Jonathan Bothwell here.’
Edward almost burst out laughing. ‘Now, that would have enlivened the proceedings,’ he whispered back. ‘They’re burying him next week.’
*
The vicar welcomed everyone to the vicarage for refreshment after the service. When Francis and Edward came out of the church, Rose was already getting into a taxi. Francis thought he would probably never see her again, but when they reached the vicarage Rose was standing in the garden, speaking to some mourners.
‘So glad you could come,’ said the vicar, who had changed into a sports shirt and slacks. ‘I hope the sandwiches hold out. Thank God for Sainsbury’s.’
Francis had often thought how much more enjoyable were the parties after funerals; the ones at weddings were much more stressful. He supposed one of the reasons might be that, having seen off the dead, people were suddenly aware that they were alive and kicking. Most of the time, he kept Rose in his sight until, all at once, he thought she must have left without seeing him, and there she was, bird-like as ever, looking up at him with those arched eyebrows.
‘You’ve grown,’ she said. ‘But I would have known you anywhere.’
‘Rose.’ He balanced a wine glass and plate in one hand and stretched out the other to grasp hers.
‘Se never lost track of you,’ she said. ‘She was so proud of all you achieved. She often talked about you.’
Francis wanted to say how often he had talked of Rose, and Alicia, and the Vale, and all they had meant to him, but the vicar was calling from across the lawn, ‘Rose. Your taxi is here!’
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘When do you leave for home?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Do you remember the manicure set?’
‘Do I? Of course I do.’
She was foraging in her handbag for keys. ‘I must get back to The Vale,’ she said, and then she was gone. Edward Pember drove Francis back to the hotel, made arrangements to meet the following month for lunch, and left for London.
*
It was late afternoon by the time Francis walked through the town for perhaps the last time, up through the shabby streets of Blackton, forever unsure whether it would be more sensible for it to still be known as Ackington. The iron gates at the entrance to The Vale had rusted. One creaked when he pushed it aside, resistant against the thick weed at the start of the approach to the house. The sound was a fanfare for his return to that place of childhood enchantment, Ivy bringing him here in her Morris Minor, Auntie Winn and Uncle Eric (both gone) wide-eyed at what he told them of his visits here, and now on he walked, along the paths of luscious black-green laurel.
Today, he didn’t make for the garden but went directly along the side of the house. He hadn’t gone far when he stopped to listen. He knew that sound. The French windows of the drawing room were wide open. His skin tingled. He stood, listening and waiting, a stranger in the garden, just as he had twenty years before. When the music stopped, he was standing in the frame of the French windows. Rose was facing away from him, seated at the piano. She didn’t switch her head, but said ‘I’m glad you came.’ She turned on the piano stool and looked back at him. ‘It seems such a long time ago when you were left to wander through the garden.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘The first thing I did was to go and look for the rats I’d been told to avoid.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rose, and almost smiled. ‘The rats. That might have been the only time you ever came here, and you could have told your grandchildren, “I once was taken to this extraordinary old house and was given a cup of tea by an old housekeeper, and I never realized that the old lady who lived in the house was very famous.”’
She rose, and walked over to Francis.
‘But she liked you. She liked the look of the boy outside in the garden, and I can’t say she was wrong. Alicia had good taste.’
‘I’ve heard that music before,’ said Francis.
‘I thought you had,’ said Rose.
‘That very first day. Of course, I’ve always thought it was Alicia who was playing the piano.’
‘And now you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘It wasn’t until a few years ago. I’d had it in the back of my mind that someday I might write about Alicia and you and this house. I wrote to ask if she’d give her consent to my doing some research about her days studying at the Academy.’
‘Yes. She told me.’
‘The rules are quite strict. I had to have her written permission before the Academy would let me consult her records. She agreed, on condition that I wrote nothing about her during her lifetime, and of course I said I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. The librarian made it quite clear that I was only allowed to look at the few pages that dealt with Alicia’s time at the Academy. She sat facing me throughout my visit, to make sure I didn’t misbehave, but she was suddenly called away for a telephone call and, of course, still being the boy who went in search of the rats when Ivy had told me not to go anywhere near them, I turned over the pages. One of the reports at the Academy showed that Alicia had started her studies two years after her elder sister had begun to study there, and there you were, on one of the pages I wasn’t meant to see.’
‘I hope they said nice things about me,’ said Rose.
‘They could hardly find the words for you. They wrote that you had a brilliant career ahead of you, that your qualities were something quite out of the ordinary. That your studies in composition suggested you would go on to write music that would be significant.’
‘I see.’
‘And when I turned back to read Alicia’s reports, I could only find polite encouragement, and the professor’s doubts as to the extent of her talents, and the worry that arriving at the Academy where her elder sister had already established a reputation as an outstanding composer would profoundly affect her progress. And yesterday … yesterday I saw the portrait of Alicia.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Rose. Her face crumpled. ‘I told Alicia to have it destroyed but she wouldn’t. What did you think of it?’
‘It was as cruel a thing as I’ve ever seen,’ said Francis.
‘Our father was a cruel man. To have immortalized her forever on canvas in such a way. Such disfigurement.’
‘She can’t have been very old when he painted it? Sixteen? Seventeen?’
‘About that, yes. Alicia had been arguing with him. She had always hated his portraits, and in those days the house was filled with them. You couldn’t escape them. She told him that real painting was about telling the truth. The terrible thing is, she couldn’t express those feelings herself, couldn’t put them into anything she did. The even worse thing was that she had such ambition. It overwhelmed her. She wanted to achieve, but she hadn’t any talent.’
‘And you were the mirror image,’ said Francis. ‘You had all the talent, just as the Academy realized, and you lacked the ambition. No wonder she always declined to speak of her work. Alicia became the great composer of all the work yo
u had created, and you became Rose the housekeeper.’
Rose sighed. ‘It didn’t matter to me. I was content to see her lauded, and to know I had done what I had to do. It all meant so much more to Alicia than it would ever have meant to me. In the end, it was my lack of ambition that finished it. For some reason unknown to the public, it seemed that Alicia Ackington just gave up composing. I’d had enough, you see. I’d said all I’d ever wanted to say in music, so far as my ability allowed, and I told her it had to stop.’
‘What will you do now?’ asked Francis. ‘You could become famous overnight. You deserve to be recognized. Tell the truth. It can’t hurt Alicia. The truth is what she believed in, in art if not in life.’
‘Oh, Francis.’ She sat beside him, put her hands over his. ‘What would be the point of it? It would betray Alicia and ruin the rest of my life. I know I can depend on you to keep the truth in its box where it belongs.’
‘Of course,’ said Francis. ‘You are a remarkable woman, Rose. I suppose I knew that from our very first meeting. And we won’t lose touch again.’
‘I hoped you would say that,’ she said, and poured tea into their cups. A plate of banana loaf sat on the tray.
‘But it wasn’t only us that knew, was it?’ asked Francis.
For a second, Rose’s hand faltered, and then she began pouring the tea again. ‘No?’
‘I must have been almost a professional eavesdropper when I was a boy,’ said Francis. ‘I happened to be walking up the terrace one day when I heard Jonathan Bothwell speaking to Alicia in the drawing room. He said something like “Our secret is perfectly safe with me’” and then he said something like “Here” – and there was a pause – and then he said “There”, and then it sounded as if he was so pleased with himself that he might almost cry out with excitement at any moment, and then he said something like “We don’t need to mention it again.” It struck me at the time that it was a slightly odd way of talking for a respectable lawyer whose firm had looked after the family for generations. Wouldn’t a trustworthy lawyer have said ‘Your secret is perfectly safe with us.’ He would have been representing Bothwell, Bothwell and Staine, not himself. It jarred with me. And then there were those words “Here” and “There”. It was him pointing to where he wanted Alicia to put her signature to an agreement.’
‘You were always an intelligent boy, Francis.’
‘He knew, didn’t he? He knew the secret, and he made Alicia sign a document revealing the truth.’
‘Yes. She didn’t want to do it, but Jonathan Bothwell threatened to expose us if she didn’t. She signed on the understanding that only at her death would he reveal the truth. And now,’ she said, pouring more tea, ‘you know it all.’
The rest of their talk was of Francis’s career, of how Rose had plans to bring the garden back to its Victorian glory, of everything that might happen at The Vale now that Rose had it to herself. For that time, she seemed a younger woman, vital and interested in everything they spoke of, but as the sun went down she grew visibly tired, and Francis said he must go.
‘Wait a moment,’ she said, all life and energy again. She left the room and came hurrying back with one of the familiar brown paper parcels that she pressed into his hands. ‘Loose tea. You can’t go without your parting gift.’
‘You are the last of the Ackingtons now,’ said Francis.
She smiled at him.
‘Yes. I suppose I am.’
She went with him, down the terrace steps, along the drive, to the gates that opened out on the street, and waved as he walked away, back through her father’s blackened old town. At the corner of the road, Francis turned and saw that she was there still, watching him, her hand raised. He walked on, as happy as he could ever remember being, clutching Rose’s parting gift, as he had that first day. It was probably just such a parcel that she had pressed into Jonathan Bothwell’s hands on the day after Alicia’s death, when he had come to speak to Rose of the arrangements to follow. Into that parcel of tea, Francis knew that Rose had sprinkled a generous spoonful or two of the poison that for years had proved rather less effective at killing The Vales’ families of rats.
Time and its tricks, thought Francis. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
THE BOY DETECTIVES Page 12