Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman

by Tessa Arlen

  “I didn’t know what to do. We both thought he might be dead. I told Violet to get out of it. Run, I told her, and whatever you do, don’t come back.”

  “So what happened next?” Somewhere in Mrs. Jackson’s mind she was reminded of unraveling an old sweater to reuse the wool for another purpose. You teased out a loop of wool from the hole in the edge of the cuff and then very carefully pulled, and before you knew it you were winding up the yarn into a nice tidy ball.

  “I needed to get help.” He looked away from her, off into the corner of the room.

  Ah, she thought, now he’s going to lie. She waited until he had lost his evasive and persecuted look.

  “Dick, sit down.” She pointed to a nearby chair. He sat on it and stared down between his hands. After a while he looked up at her and continued.

  “I knew after Vi had gone that he wasn’t dead, but he was knocked out cold. I didn’t kill Mr. Teddy, though I know you won’t believe it.” His voice was low and she saw a look of defeat beginning to take hold on his frightened face.

  “I believe you, Dick. You were only missing for twenty minutes—the time it took to get Violet out of the north pavilion and give Mr. Teddy a good punch on the nose. But you have to tell me what happened next so I can help you.” And then she simply sat there, her hands still on her lap, and waited.

  “You see, we had to get him out of there. I had to tie him up and gag him, in case he came to. I took him over the pavilion wall, and dragged him round the back. I laid him down and checked the dray. No one was there.” Dick paused and licked his lips. “I went back and picked him up again, and dragged him through the hedge. I got him up onto the dray and put him in the tool-storage box … because, he was going to have to be there awhile.” He paused again and looked at Mrs. Jackson out of the corner of his eye. She nodded her head slowly in sympathetic agreement.

  “I went back to work on the terrace. The rest I only know because I was told what was going to happen. At the end of the ball, when the orchestra went back to the stable block for the night in the dray, Mr. Teddy was handed over to the man who had been looking for him for the last two days. Mr. Draper I think his name was, you know, the strange man from London. I didn’t know he was going to kill him!” Sweat had broken out on Dick’s forehead and he looked white and shaken. “He was to take Mr. Teddy away, and we would never see him again. I believed it because that was what I was told!” He stopped and stared down at his hands, and eventually managed to meet Mrs. Jackson’s gaze. She nodded again, encouraging him to go on.

  “Next afternoon we heard that Mr. Teddy had been found dead. And I didn’t know what to think. I knew it were the man from London who did it, because…”

  “Because that was what you were told?”

  “Yes! That’s what I was told.”

  “And who told you that, Dick?”

  Dick started to shake his head and his face became sullen. He was shutting down, Mrs. Jackson thought with desperation. She stopped herself from pushing him too hard.

  “Does Violet know what happened after she left the pavilion?”

  “No, she don’t, nor did Miss Lucinda. That night she saw Violet running along the front of the house and went after her, and Vi told her what had just happened with Mr. Teddy. Miss Lucinda hid Violet in her room. They left early in the morning, before anyone was up.” He paused and took another look at Mrs. Jackson, who kept her face neutral as she risked another question.

  “Why do you call him Mr. Draper? How do you know his name?”

  “I don’t know who he really is. I never even saw him.”

  “So who was it who helped you? Who was it who handed Mr. Teddy over to Mr. Draper?”

  “Who are you going to tell? Not Mr. Hollyoak?”

  Mrs. Jackson appreciated just how innocent Dick really was.

  “No, Dick,” she said patiently. “Not Mr. Hollyoak.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Lord Montfort went for a walk when the late afternoon faded into early evening. The light turned to golden-green as the sun slowly sank in the western sky; it was the time of day he loved best. His dogs were trotting beside him as he walked into the village and crossed the green, where the two younger dogs peeled off on their own paths, enticed by new scents and bored with obedience. He slowed his pace so that the oldest dog of the three could keep up with him. As he walked past the church, he called out a good evening to the verger who was locking up after evensong.

  Twilight deepened to dusk and the lane softened to dull greens and purple shadows as Lord Montfort arrived at Jim’s cottage. He told the dogs to stay and they sank into deep, damp grass, watching him through narrowed eyes, mouths opened wide to pant, as he turned to knock on the closed door.

  “Good evening, your lordship.” Jim opened the door, and his hand automatically lifted in salute as he recognized his visitor.

  “Good evening, Jim. I’ve come to tell you we’ve found Violet.” It was hard to see Jim’s face in the half-light. Inside the cottage, lamps had been lit for the coming night. Jim opened the door wider and stepped to one side.

  If Lord Montfort had expected tears and cries of relief when he told Jim Simkins that his daughter had been found, he was disappointed.

  “How long have you known where she was?” he asked Jim as they walked farther into the cottage’s main room.

  “Since she first went to Cambridge, the morning after she was taken there by Miss Lucinda.” Jim was standing in shadow and was quite motionless. “She had written me a letter that night, and they posted it on their way.”

  “Yes, they left before Teddy was found. Of course, Miss Lucinda thought she was doing the right thing, since we had been so lax in our responsibility to Violet. A sort of punishment, I think. There you have it, Jim, the arrogance of the young. How much better it would have been if Lucinda had come to me. How much trouble, heartache, and worry it would have saved.” He noticed that Jim did not react to his frustration, but was watching him, his face composed, disinterested almost.

  “No one could have saved Mr. Teddy, your lordship. He was already on his path. The boy had caused nothing but misery and hurt his entire life. It was his time to go.” Jim’s voice sounded remote. It was not shaded with blame, anger, or concern.

  Lord Montfort was not prepared to hear the beginning of a confession so easily and his response was far brusquer than he intended. “It was not your decision to make,” he said.

  “He was a parasite: corrupting, weak. Men like him eventually destroy everything; they destroy hope and the future. It was a natural end.” Again Jim sounded distant, removed from the moment.

  He accepts his fate, thought Lord Montfort. He has been waiting for this time.

  “Not for revenge, not by murder.” Lord Montfort kept his voice even.

  “Not murder … justice…” Jim started to reply. But got no further. Lord Montfort saw his face gleam with a sudden slick of sweat as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a strip of cloth. He buried his face and started to cough deeply, hacking for a long time. Lord Montfort watched Jim make his way to the high-backed chair by the fireplace. He walked to the sink and poured water from a pitcher into a cup, then took it over to Jim and waited until the old man’s chest heaved less and he regained his breath. Jim laid his head back against the chair and looked up at him. When he was sure that Jim had caught his breath, he handed him the mug and took the only other chair in the room; turning it to face Jim, he sat down and waited.

  “Everything seemed to start well enough for Violet up at the house. She was adapting well and was learning fast; I think she was almost enjoying it in her own way. On her day off she would come home for tea and tell me about her new life. Then she started to miss a visit or two, and after a while I knew things weren’t going too well, because she stopped her visits altogether. I never guessed how badly things were going for her, though.

  “By chance Mr. Wallace, from the drapery, asked me to take his place in the orchestra for the ball, because
he’d hurt his wrist. It was an opportunity to see Violet and reassure myself she was all right.”

  In the brief pause as Jim caught his breath, Lord Montfort heard one of the dogs scratching at the cottage door. It whined, but he did not move. He waited for Jim to continue.

  “Well, it was worrying to see how she’d changed. She looked thin and I knew something was wrong, but she didn’t tell me what.” Jim paused and Lord Montfort made himself meet his gaze. Jim’s face was pallid and there was an expression of deep pain that was not from his illness.

  “I decided that after the ball I would tackle Mrs. Jackson about her. I had almost decided that I would take her away, something was not right.” He paused, and Lord Montfort watched him hack into his handkerchief, his shoulders heaving. He forced himself to sit quite still without saying anything as he waited for Jim to continue.

  “Well, later that night, things got more complicated. Violet was watching the ball from the little temple in the garden and Mr. Teddy came along and found her there.” Lord Montfort nodded as Jim repeated almost word for word what he had been told earlier that evening by his wife.

  “Well, as you no doubt already know, Dick knocked Mr. Teddy down and thought he’d killed him. Dick didn’t know what to do. He lost his nerve and came to me for help. He told me what he had seen in the pavilion, what Teddy had been trying to do to Violet. He told me she had confessed Mr. Teddy had raped her. Raped her repeatedly after she had come to the house. And there it was, the opportunity to clean up this nasty mess completely.” Jim bent forward and again pulled the cloth from his pocket. Lord Montfort looked away to avoid seeing the bright stain glistening on Jim’s handkerchief and waited until the man had recovered himself enough to continue.

  “I did what I had to do: Dick wouldn’t get sent to jail for assault, Violet would be free to start her life over, and Mr. Teddy would not be able to damage any more young lives.”

  “How did you do it?” Lord Montfort had a pretty clear idea from his wife’s account, but he needed to hear Jim’s side of the story.

  “I had to get Dick to put Mr. Teddy onto the dray. The boy was in a panic. If he knew what I had in mind he would have caved in. And so I told him I’d hand Mr. Teddy over to the man who’d been looking for him—the ‘stranger’ that had been hanging at the back of the pub that afternoon. I’d seen the man myself walking from the station to the village and I saw him later that afternoon getting into Mr. Teddy’s motorcar in the lane behind my cottage. I told Dick no one in Haversham would see him again and he believed me. So he hauled Mr. Teddy through the hedge and stowed him in the toolbox of the dray. I went back to play violin for the last dance of the night.”

  Short of breath, Jim stopped. Lord Montfort got up and poured him more water, and he noticed the that Jim’s eyes were sunken deep in their shadowed sockets, as he took a cautious sip, and then another, before he could carry on.

  “At the end of the ball we were driven over to the stables in the dray. When the rest of the musicians had gone to sleep, I went back outside and drove the dray up to Crow Wood. When I got to the wood the rain was heavy, the storm was coming in fast. I managed to tie off a length of rope to the gibbet. I made a noose, put it around his neck, and drove the dray forward.”

  Jim’s face was the color of wet putty. Lord Montfort got up from his chair and laid his hand on Jim’s shoulder. More than anything he understood why Jim had killed the man who had so harmed his daughter. It was understandable but not forgivable. What kept England’s “green and pleasant land” the most civilized country in the world were its laws. The first Baron of Mountsford had been present at the signing of Magna Carta, which had led to the rule of constitutional law in England. Laws had been written and refined over the centuries, laws that people of Lord Montfort’s education and background had worked hard to instill and maintain. Without law, without order, England would just be France.

  * * *

  Clementine stood by the open window of the music room and looked down on the drive. It was late and she had just left her husband and Colonel Valentine, who were tying up the details of Jim Simkins’s arrest. Watching from the window, she saw the two men walk out of the front door. As they moved away from the lights of the house they disappeared into the shadow of Valentine’s motorcar. She heard the car door slam shut and her husband’s voice as he called out a last good-night. She watched the lights of Colonel Valentine’s motorcar disappear around the last bend and with a tremendous sigh of relief she closed the window.

  The day had been enormously long and she was still trying to come to terms with the fact that one of the gentlest men she knew had committed murder. Because she was blessed, or cursed, with an abundant imagination, images of the frightened, vulnerable Violet had crept into her conscious thoughts wherever she went in the house. They had been quite vividly with her earlier that day, when she had laid the facts of her investigation with Mrs. Jackson before her husband.

  Clementine had not expected congratulations and relief that she had saved the Talbot name from disrepute when she told her husband that she knew who had murdered Teddy Mallory. She had carefully rehearsed beforehand what she was to say, touching minutely on the process and prudently skirting around Mrs. Jackson’s actual contributions. But Lord Montfort had asked questions and had kept asking them until Clementine had described every step along the way of their quest. It had been a relentless interview. As her story unfolded, his look of puzzled concern had given way to one of incredulity and then to shocked embarrassment. She had known all along that colluding with a servant to discover information about their friends and servants was in poor taste. But to have shared the secrets of their friends’ intimate lives with Mrs. Jackson was a definite no-no. Her husband had made his disapproval quite clear, leaving Clementine feeling a bit grubby. In his opinion, she had forgotten her position and by doing so she had rather let the side down.

  He ended by saying, “I’m rather surprised that you involved Mrs. Jackson.” His face and manner were chilly. He was covering annoyance and confusion by being distant.

  “I could not have done it without her.” Clementine would not justify colluding with her housekeeper out of loyalty to Mrs. Jackson. She had made her apologies for her unconventional behavior earlier, and had no intention of repeating them. To grovel at this point would mean losing all self-respect.

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t have done it at all.” This was his first direct criticism and it had hurt.

  “I’m sad you see it that way, darling. I believed it was the right thing to do. As for Mrs. Jackson, the more I worked with her, the more I found I could trust her. She is a woman of remarkable integrity and loyalty, and awfully clever in her practical way. I think I trust her more than I would one of our friends.” This had been a startling concept for him no doubt. The loyalty of servants and friends was clearly divided in his mind.

  “That all remains to be seen. I will have to square Valentine. I trust he will keep your name out of things, he is a gentleman after all.” He was coming around, but still a bit stiff and sniffish.

  She did not say that Teddy, a gentleman only because of his position in society, had completely broken the code most gentlemen live by. She also understood that although her husband enjoyed and respected her natural intelligence, he was probably wistfully wishing for the days when she had used it only for planning gardens, organizing balls, and smoothing over spats on the boards of the charitable organizations she belonged to. They had parted politely, if not amiably, and Lord Montfort had trudged off to the village for his talk with Jim Simkins.

  Now that Colonel Valentine had gone, Clementine would go downstairs and join her husband so that they might begin the business of being friends again. But before she did that she had one more thing she wanted to take care of.

  The door opened behind her and Mrs. Jackson came into the room.

  “Ah, here you are, Jackson. Yes, please shut the door. My goodness, you have had a long wait; Colonel Valentine had to ha
ve his say, of course.” Clementine settled herself in a chair and looked up at her housekeeper. “Jim Simkins confessed to the murder, it was just as you said.”

  To her credit, Mrs. Jackson received this news quietly, with not a flutter of self-congratulatory pride, no display of vulgar excitement. She nodded, and Clementine heard the faintest sigh. “What a terrible business, m’lady, so very sad,” Mrs. Jackson said, and Clementine knew she was not referring to the death of Teddy Mallory.

  “Yes, indeed it is. It’s late, Jackson, and you have had a long day.” Clementine indicated the chair to her right. “Please take a seat, Jackson. Now, I should fill you in on the missing bits. Where should I start?”

  “If you would be so kind, m’lady, was it perhaps Mr. Wallace in the shrubbery that night?” An inquiry, rather than a direct question.

  “Yes, Colonel Valentine is sure it must have been. As we suspected from the drawings Oscar described to me and gave to the colonel, Mr. Wallace was a sort of go-between for a gang of thieves in London, run by a man called Baker. They specialized in country-house break-ins: good jewelry, old silver, and valuable paintings. Mr. Teddy provided information on the houses, the staff, how to get in and out, and what was worth taking. Mr. Wallace set up the burglaries. The police investigation must have prompted Baker to contact Wallace, and so when you came into the shop and noticed that his sprained wrist was miraculously healed, he worried that you had made the connection. It’s quite amazing really. I still can’t take it in. Mr. Teddy was up to all sorts of tricks it would seem.”

  The distress Clementine felt at her husband’s annoyance with her was beginning to fade and she warmed to her story.