Death at Rottingdean

by Robin Paige

  Patrick hunched his shoulders against the wind. He should tell someone what he had seen, before he was accused of complicity. But whom should he tell? If it had been any other matter, he would have gone directly to Harry Tudwell, the stablemaster and his friend and benefactor. But something made him think that Mr. Tudwell already knew about this particular happening, and that telling him might complicate the matter. The village constable, a fat, lazy man whom Patrick held in contempt, was a great friend of Mrs. Higgs’s, and telling him would be the same as telling her. He might tell Lady Burne-Jones, who lived at North End House and employed Mrs. Higgs as a laundress. She was a bit of a busybody but she had befriended him, insisting that he call her Aunt Georgie and giving him copies of Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, and several of Conan Doyle’s detective stories, which he enjoyed a great deal. But Lady Burne-Jones was a member of the Parish Council and considered herself the guardian of everyone’s welfare. She would certainly ask discomforting questions, such as what he was doing at the cliff’s edge at midnight. And there was no guarantee that she would not tell Mrs. Higgs about his nocturnal adventures.

  Patrick looked up and caught sight of a dark-haired man clad in a canvas jacket and carrying a fishing rod and bucket, descending from the Quarter Deck—the cobbled area on the cliff above the beach—to the pier. The man waved at him, and Patrick waved back. The fisherman was Mr. Kipling, Lady Burne-Jones’s famous nephew, who had come to Rottingdean on Derby day to take The Elms, the walled house at the far end of the Green. Patrick had already read the adventures of Mowgli before he met their author in Aunt Georgie’s back garden and discovered to his great delight that Mr. Kipling was full of even more wonderful stories. The tales of bazaar life and wandering lamas in India, where Mr. Kipling had once lived, excited him wildly, but the teller had intrigued him even more. Patrick had met all sorts of men on his various errands and considered himself a fair judge of character. An excellent judge, come to that, as Harry Tudwell the stablemaster would attest, or Trunky Thomas, the proprietor of the bathing machines, both of whom relied on Patrick’s reports concerning the visitors who stayed at the White Horse Inn. But Mr. Kipling, who was said to earn a fine living by spinning tales, was entirely new to the boy’s experience. He had a worldliness born of wide travel, sharpened by an enormous curiosity about the workings of ordinary things and softened by a warm friendliness toward children, whom he treated with thoughtful respect. Patrick meant to learn more about this man, and hear as many more of Mr. Kipling’s stories as he might be willing to tell.

  Patrick reached into his pocket and pulled out the bent cigarette for which he had traded his friend Ernie Shepherd a striped peppermint humbug. He turned his back against the wind to light it expertly, and squatted down on the shingle to smoke and think as he watched Mr. Kipling walk jauntily out to the end of the pier and settle down to an hour’s fishing, as he did almost every day. After a few minutes, the boy stood and extinguished his cigarette, saving what was left for a later smoke.

  Yes, if he should tell anyone the story of what he had seen on the beach, it should be Mr. Kipling. But not just now. Just now, the story was a thin one, only a beginning, with no middle and no end, hardly worthy to be heard by Mowgli’s creator. So he would not tell, not yet. He would wait and use his eyes and his ears and see what else he might learn.

  2

  The principal “Green Properties are The Elms, the flint wall

  of which now forms the northern boundary of the Green; The

  Dene on the South, and... North End House to the West.

  Each is a house with a history, and each was once the home

  of some of Rottingdean’s most illustrious and remarkable

  characters. Writers and poets, painters and Prime Ministers,

  judges and politicians, actors, racehorse trainers, country

  squires and eccentrics—all have lived round the Green at one

  time or another, and some still do.

  —HENRY BLYTH Smugglers’ Village: The Story of Rottingdean

  “I must say, my lord, you have the makings of a first-rate motorcar mechanic.”

  From the driver’s seat, Kate smiled down at her husband, who, stripped to his shirtsleeves in the noonday sun, knelt by the front wheel, patiently repairing yet another tire. “But you really must speak with the Home Secretary about the shocking state of these Sussex roads,” she added archly.

  Charles pushed back a shock of brown hair with a dirty hand. “What was that about the Home Secretary?”

  “Nails,” Kate said succinctly. “In the roads. Can’t someone do something? This is the third flat tire we’ve had this morning!”

  “These roads collected horseshoe nails for centuries before anyone thought of a pneumatic tire,” Charles said. “I daresay it will be a few more years before all of them have been retrieved. In the interim, it’s not the Home Secretary but the Parish Council that—” The last few words were drowned out by a loud hiss.

  Kate smiled as she watched the tire swell to its proper size and seat itself on the rim. Instead of using the frightfully inefficient hand pump, Charles inflated flat tires from a metal cylinder formerly filled with the oxygen he used to power the limelight for his photography, now filled with compressed air—a device that demonstrated his inventive turn of mind. Few gentlemen of her husband’s social rank—he was the Baron of Somersworth—turned a hand to anything of practical merit, or demeaned themselves with physical labor, or did anything real. But Charles quite astoundingly did all three, and she loved him for it.

  While her husband put away his tools, Kate adjusted her hat and motoring veil, smiling to herself. Despite the tires that went flat with maddening frequency and the necessity of carrying a supply of extra petrol, she was delighted with her new Panhard, a truly revolutionary automobile with its engine in front and a wheel for steering, instead of a tiller. The French automobile had been obtained for her by Charlie Rolls, who raced it in publicity competitions. She had met Mr. Rolls during such a competition the previous year, when she commandeered his automobile—stole it, according to one journalist’s account of the event—to drive to Charles’s rescue, a terrible trip of fifteen miles at speeds of nearly twenty miles an hour. The feat, an unusually reckless one for a lady, had given her a certain celebrity in motoring circles. With this reputation, Mr. Rolls had not found it difficult to convince the manufacturer of the marketing advantages to be had by equipping Lady Sheridan with their most modern machine—and so Kate had received her first automobile. Charles could hardly say no.

  Charles shrugged into his long duster and settled his goggles over his eyes. “Brighton is only a mile or so, and I thought we might have lunch at The Old Ship. I asked Lawrence to meet us there so we could go on to Rottingdean together.” He started the engine, then climbed into the passenger seat and touched his fingers to the brim of his cap. “Shall we soldier on, my dear? Our seaside holiday awaits!”

  Steering the motorcar toward Brighton and a quiet lunch, Kate thought how good it was to see her husband smile. When she agreed to become his wife, she’d known that their marriage would be difficult. She was an American, and Irish, old enough to have lived her own life and independent enough to insist on her freedoms; he was the son of a wealthy and aristocratic British family that seemed bound to the past by every imaginable tradition. The best she could hope for was that their love for one another-a love that had grown and deepened in the eighteen months of their marriage—would help to ease the worst of the inevitable bumps in the road ahead.

  And so it had, for a time. Charles’s mother, the Dowager Lady Somersworth, had been bitterly opposed to her son’s marriage and made no secret of her dislike for her Irish-American daughter-in-law. The newlywed couple had taken up residence at Bishop’s Keep, the Essex manor Kate had inherited, and avoided visiting Charles’s family. Now, Kate looked back on that quiet and happy time with a regretful pleasure, for a momentous change had overtaken them, testing their love and making the past n
ine months desperately difficult.

  At Christmas of the year before, Charles’s brother Robert, the fourth Baron of Somersworth, had died. The elder brother’s death was not unexpected, and it finally visited upon Charles the obligations of the peerage, which both he and Kate had anticipated with dread. Charles’s new responsibilities opened a new era in their marriage. From then on, Kate felt, nothing had been the same.

  Now the fifth Baron of Somersworth, Charles seemed determined to do his duty. He saw to his brother’s funeral and assumed the management of the estates, both in England and Ireland. When Parliament sat in late January, he moved to the family’s large London mansion and took his seat in the House of Lords. Because Kate felt it was her duty to be with Charles, she went with him, and tried as best she could to play her role in Society. London in the season, with money to spend, a splendid home, and nothing to do but enjoy herself—what more could she want?

  But it hadn’t been a happy time. Charles was remote, occupied with meetings all day and sessions in the House at night. London was dirty and noisy, and Kate pined for the easy freedoms of her rural life at Bishop’s Keep, where she had tended her gardens, managed her own household, and ridden her bicycle to the village. The London house was a mausoleum—immense, uninviting, and efficiently managed by a housekeeper who made it chillingly plain to the new baroness that she wasn’t welcome belowstairs. While Kate had enjoyed vigorous health in the country, she was quickly exhausted by the interminable whirlwind of London social life: morning rides in Hyde Park, afternoons spent shopping and making calls, evening soirees and dinners, glittering balls that went on until three in the morning. She had also tried hard to keep up with her writing, for Kate had already published a number of fictions and wanted to do more. And on top of that there was the work she had undertaken for the Countess of Warwick, who had asked her to see to the problems of the orphanage in the parish of George the Martyr.

  Kate sighed to herself, thinking back over the hectic spring and early summer. Perhaps it was the exhaustion that had led to their great tragedy. If only she’d had the sense to take better care of herself! If she had gone home to Bishop’s Keep in April when she learned she was pregnant, instead of agreeing to help the Countess with yet another of her impractical schemes to improve the lives of slum children—

  “I hope,” Charles said loudly, over the clatter of the engine, “that you will like Rottingdean. It is a very little village, after all, with only a few families.”

  “I’m sure I don’t care,” Kate said, “as long as you are there. In fact, I shall be glad for some time alone together.” It would be such a relief to have no luncheon appointments, no dinner engagements, no balls or parties—not even any servants, except for their own Amelia and Lawrence. She might even be able to get back to the book she had started writing so many months before, which was fearfully overdue at her publishers.

  Charles nodded and went on. “But they are interesting families. The Burne-Joneses have a house on one side of the Green—the painter, you know, and his wife. She is quite an independent woman, I understand, with a great many ideas of her own. Stanley and Lucy Baldwin—you’ve met them both—visit Lucy’s parents, the Ridsdales, who live on another corner of the Green. And the Kiplings have taken a house nearby. Rudyard’s wife is an American; Caroline, her name is.” He paused. “Perhaps, while we are there, we should host a dinner or evening’s entertainment.”

  Kate’s heart sank. She admired the painting of Edward Burne-Jones, who was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She had planned to take some time to study the stained glass windows that he and his fellow artist, William Morris, had created for the parish church. She would like, as well, to meet Lady Burne-Jones, about whom she had already heard a great deal. But as for a dinner or a party—

  “We didn’t come to Rottingdean for company,” she protested. “We were to have a private holiday, with time to walk on the beach and among the downs.” They were to have time, she hoped, to recapture the pleasure in one another’s company that had seemed to elude them in London—to return, perhaps, to the charm of the early days of their marriage, when all seemed so right and full of promise.

  “Yes, of course,” Charles said. “But I’m sure you and Caroline Kipling would get on famously. She has a new baby, a boy, I understand, just over a month old.”

  And then he stopped and turned to her, stricken, and she saw in his sherry-brown eyes what she knew was in his heart: an overwhelming sadness at the loss of their own child, and at the awful knowledge that there could never be a son, at least not her son, to fulfill the obligations of his lineage.

  3

  At Brighton, the lanes remain much as they were in the eighteenth

  century, when goods were landed on the beach and carried

  straight up for sale and distribution from shops and inns

  among the winding alleys and narrow courtyards. The Old

  Ship Hotel nearby has changed little since the days of George

  IV’s coronation in 1821, when it was the scene of an admirable

  bit of smuggling opportunism. While the town celebrated

  elsewhere, the free-traders took advantage of the empty streets

  and moved tubs of spirits out of the pub stables completely

  unobserved. Today it’s one of the town’s better hotels, with

  an air more of smugness than smugglers.

  —RICHARD PLATT Smugglers’ Britain

  Charles turned away from Kate with an inward groan, cursing himself for his thoughtlessness. What a way to begin their holiday—by reminding her of her terrible loss, the very loss he had brought her here to forget! Kate had been wonderfully brave in the months since her illness and miscarriage, but he knew she needed to be away from everything—away from that huge, cold London house, even away from Bishop’s Keep, where they had dreamed together of the children they would have.

  Now that dream was dead, and to ease Kate’s heart, he had arranged this month-long holiday in a peaceful village on the south coast of England, where he could spend every moment with her, helping her forget, helping her heal the loss for which she seemed to carry such a dreadful burden of responsibility and guilt.

  These were topics he found difficult to discuss. But then, Charles, like most of the men he knew, could not speak easily about the things that were closest to him. On their wedding night, Kate had run her finger over one of the wide scars on his bare chest. When she asked about it, he said only that he had been in a tight spot in the Sudan, and gently silenced her. She had understood that it was a matter he did not wish to discuss, and though they slept in each other’s arms every night, she never mentioned the scars again. The moment never arose when he could tell her how it was that he had lived and all of his men had died, that he had been rewarded with a knighthood for his bravery, while their courage was forgotten, and how sad he still felt about these things. In fact, he had been in India to convey his condolences to the parents of his young sergeant, when Rudyard Kipling, then the eager new assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, had heard a rumor of the affair and sought him out. He could not talk of it to Kipling, either.

  They now were entering Brighton. It was Saturday, and the bright autumn sunshine, as always, had lured hundreds of day-trippers from the city on the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway. Working-class families dressed in their best, they came to listen to a concert on the lawns near the Metropole Hotels, or stroll along the sea-front promenade and laugh at the banjo-playing blackface minstrels in their striped blazers and straw boaters. They joined the crowds visiting West Pier and the Aquarium and the new Palace Pier, scheduled to open the next year. Or they rode in horse-drawn buses to the neighboring seaside resorts of Rottingdean and Hove, or boarded a paddle-wheeled pleasure-steamer for a trip to the Isle of Wight. Brighton had its own fine Society, of course, led by the Duchess of Fife (who was frequently visited by her father, the Prince of Wales) and the two wealthy Sassoon brothers, both banke
rs. The Brighton season began in October and lasted through March, with the theater, the opera, and the hunt providing abundant entertainment. The pleasure city might not be the brilliant social center it had been when the monarchy came regularly to town, but it still had plenty of life—and far too much traffic.

  “Be careful, Kate!” Charles cried, as a horse-drawn brewer’s wagon pulled out directly in front of them. Momentarily distracted from her driving, Kate had turned her head to stare at a bizarre cluster of buildings on the right, with a gaudy Oriental facade, Moorish trellises, fantastic onion-shaped domes, and dozens of minarets. Now, she braked hard, and Charles pitched forward.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you all right?” But she was beginning to giggle. “Is that the Royal Pavilion? It looks like something out of The Arabian Nights.”

  “That’s it,” Charles said, resettling his goggles. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “Words can’t begin to describe it,” Kate said wonderingly. “Whoever built it must have been crazy—and very rich.”

  “Yes to both. I’ve always thought of the damn thing as a monument to royal excess. Now, the place belongs to the town of Brighton. It’s the first stop for day-trippers just off the train.” He pointed to a heedless and noisy crowd crossing the cobbled street in front of them and pausing to stare at the motorcar. “Watch out for that lot.”

  Kate frowned through the heavy veil that swathed her face. “Would you care to take the wheel, my lord?”

  Charles smiled and shook his head. To tell the truth, he was quite proud of the fact that she was a better driver than he was—and certainly a fearless one, with a calm, even temperament that enabled her to meet every vehicular crisis with aplomb. He would change the tires, add petrol when necessary, and lend a shoulder when they found themselves stuck in the mud, but he was content to let her drive when they went somewhere together.