‘He says Charles is coxing Monarch,’ the Duke informed him.
‘Gosh, Gerry, that’s an honour,’ Edward said in surprise.
‘Tell an ignorant woman what “Monarch” is,’ Connie commanded.
‘Oh, you know, it’s the “eight” which is in fact rowed by ten boys in the procession of boats,’ the Duke said.
‘Clear as mud. I know what the procession of boats is. It’s actually quite fun, Elizabeth. Just as it’s getting dark, all these eights row past and the boys stand up in the boat with their oars upright in front of them.’
‘Do they fall in?’
‘Sometimes, but not often,’ said the Duke.
‘But Monarch’s different. In the last century, boats could be rowed by ten or even twelve, not just eight,’ Edward lectured Elizabeth, who had regained some of her poise.
‘And Monarch is one of them?’ she asked politely.
‘Yes, and not only is it very awkward to handle but it’s also rowed by drybobs as well as wetbobs – I mean boys who usually play cricket as well as those who row.’
‘So they are most likely to fall in?’
‘That’s right, but not when they first process down the river when it’s still light. About nine or ten o’clock, when it’s dark, they process again and in the dark it really is difficult. Then, just short of the weir, they turn and float back downstream. That’s when they stand up.’
‘If there’s no light, how do we see them?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘There are flares on the bank. After that are the fireworks, which are the climax of the whole day, but the boys are often rather “lit up” themselves by then.’
‘Got at the scrumpy,’ Gerald said, knowingly.
‘On a wonderful hot day like today,’ Connie said, ‘the procession really is beautiful. The boys all wear such pretty costumes.’
‘Costumes?’ said Elizabeth, puzzled.
‘Yes,’ Edward said. ‘For some reason, they dress up in costumes resembling the uniforms which midshipmen wore in Nelson’s time. I don’t suppose they’re very accurate. Prettified Victorian versions, I expect. Anyway, it looks good.’
‘But why did they choose Charles to cox Monarch?’
‘Can’t you guess, Connie?’ the Duke said. ‘They wanted to cheer him up – make him feel he has a family.’
Elizabeth was very nervous by the time they reached Eton and Fenton drew up outside Frank’s house. The tangle of cars made progress very slow, despite much waving and whistle-blowing by white-gloved policemen. From that point, it made sense to walk everywhere and Fenton was told where to park and to meet them on the river bank at eight o’clock with the picnic. They were to have luncheon with Chandler, Frank’s housemaster, but the evening picnic was a tradition, however wet the weather and uncomfortably crowded the situation.
Frank greeted them with enthusiasm which he tried unsuccessfully to disguise, no doubt considering it to be childish. For the first minute or two, he assumed an air of sophisticated world-weariness and professed to be bored by the whole occasion but he could not conceal his excitement at his friend’s starring role in the procession of boats that evening.
He explained the significance of this to Elizabeth in considerable detail. ‘Of course, he’s the best fellow in the world but not everyone knew it. Now they will.’
Charles was much quieter than Frank. He talked to Edward and the Duke about the cricket and about his new passion for painting. Edward was relieved to see that the boy did not seem to have been as badly affected by his father’s murder as he had feared. As they had time to spare before lunch, he said he would walk over to the art school with him to look at the exhibition which included three of his pictures. The others went off to see Frank’s room.
Eton, like most English public schools, did not give the arts a high priority and the art rooms were cramped and badly in need of redecoration. Edward was therefore not expecting to find anything very startling on the walls but, when Charles shyly pointed out his own paintings, they fairly took his breath away. Instead of the insipid watercolours of cricketing scenes or views of College Chapel which he saw all around him, he found himself face to face with three dark and angry portraits all featuring the bloodied carcass of a male figure looking uncannily like butcher’s meat. He looked at the boy beside him and his clear, grey eyes met his with chilling calmness. Edward said nothing but looked back at the pictures with a concentration which seemed to please Charles.
‘Do you like them, sir?’
‘I think “like” is too bland a word, Charles. I think they are magnificent but . . .’
‘Yes?’ the boy prompted him with polite interest.
‘They are very fierce, very savage. Are they in any way portraits of . . . do they symbolise . . .?’
‘They don’t symbolise anything. They are based on a photograph of my father.’
‘I see,’ said Edward cautiously. ‘Forgive me if I am wrong, but they seem angry. You must tell me if I am being too obvious.’
‘Oh no, sir. My art master, Mr Boyd, suggested it might help relieve my feelings if I painted them. He said I shouldn’t bottle them up – my feelings, that is.’
‘He sounds a sensible man. But the anger . . . is that directed at his . . . his murderer?’
‘Yes, sir. Frank says you will find out who he is so he can be punished.’
Edward caught his breath. This calm confidence in his powers of detection might, he feared, be unfounded. ‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘I was so sorry to hear that your friend, Miss Browne, had been attacked. Did that have anything to do with my father’s death?’
‘I believe it has,’ Edward replied gravely, ‘but if you don’t mind, I won’t say anything more just at the moment. And Charles – I’m probably being absurd but I think it’s just possible that you might be in some danger. I don’t want to alarm you but until all this is cleared up, and that should be no more than a few days I hope, I want you to keep with the others as far as you can. Don’t wander off on your own and . . . and don’t go anywhere with strangers.’ He saw the look in the boy’s face and thought he had gone too far. ‘Please, I’m sure it’s nothing but . . .’
‘Oh no, sir, I’m not afraid. I want to meet the man who killed my father. I want to ask him why he did it.’
‘Well, I hope it won’t come to that, my boy. Now, let’s go back to the others. They will be wondering where we’ve got to.’
Chandler was giving a private lunch for selected boys and their parents. Charles and his aunt had been invited at the Duke’s request. Chandler was, in most respects, a sensible man who ran his house with judgement and enthusiasm. If he had a fault, it was that he was something of a snob and enjoyed having a duke’s son under his wing. It was all harmless enough and Gerald, rather unexpectedly Connie thought, enjoyed a touch of sycophancy. The other parents included the Home Secretary, a man of considerable stupidity and infinite cunning with a wife who smiled and smiled but said not a word, a bishop and his wife, and a doctor whose wife complained continually about the expense of having a boy at the school. Edward was seated beside Charles Thayer’s aunt, Mrs Cooper, who was now his guardian – a woman of about fifty-five, he guessed, who did not seem to fit her clothes. She gave the impression that she found her new responsibilities an almost intolerable burden. Elizabeth had Charles on one side and the bishop on the other.
Edward made a point of being friendly to Mrs Cooper but found her dull and predictable. He became even more determined that he would make Charles his charge as far as it was possible. He felt he owed it to his dead friend to keep an eye on his son and guide him through the crucial years of adolescence. Mrs Cooper, when he hinted that he would like to take an interest in her nephew, seemed gratified but he knew he had to be tactful so she would not resent his patronage.
‘I’m afraid I’m too old and stupid to bring up the boy as his father would wish,’ she said. Edward demurred politely. ‘I know nobody and go nowhere so if you, Lord Edward, re
ally mean to take him under your wing – well, that would be wonderful and a great weight off my shoulders.’
In a gap in the conversation, he said casually to Chandler, ‘It was so good of you to put me in touch with my old Dame, Miss Harvey. I had the most interesting talk with her when I was last here. I thought I might call in on her this afternoon, if you think she would not mind.’
‘Oh dear, Lord Edward, I am afraid you cannot have heard.’
‘Heard what?’ he said sharply.
‘Miss Harvey fell downstairs only last week. Her sight was not what it was, you know.’
‘Was she badly hurt?’ inquired Edward, with a sinking feeling in his stomach.
‘She’s dead, Lord Edward. She died immediately – broke her neck, I’m afraid.’
‘How ghastly,’ said Connie, a glass of wine half-way to her lips suspended in mid-air.
‘Yes, it was a great shock. She was old, of course. Nearly eighty-five, I believe, but we had got into the habit of thinking she was immortal.’
Edward uttered conventional regrets but his mind was racing. Someone had wanted to prevent him getting the whole story out of Miss Harvey – the secret behind the public scandal which she had refused to divulge on his first visit to her. Now he was too late. Damn, damn, damn. Why had he delayed in coming to see her? He had never dreamed that the murderer would move so swiftly and efficiently against a harmless old woman. Though, of course, she was not harmless – not to the killer. It suddenly occurred to him that he had been right to worry about Charles. He must put an end to all this danger, all this anger. His lips thinned and two heavy creases appeared on his brow. Mrs Cooper was saying something to him, but he did not hear a word. He lifted his eyes and met those of Elizabeth across the table. She was staring at him intently and her face was white beneath her suntan. In that instant he knew that Elizabeth knew who had killed Miss Harvey and who might have killed the father of the boy who sat at her side eating over-cooked lamb, He laid down his knife and fork and pushed away his plate. Suddenly, his appetite had vanished.
25
After luncheon they strolled across to School Yard where Absence was called by the headmaster on the steps of the chapel. It was an oddly impressive ritual: the slow toll of names, each boy’s shouted response, the occasional silence, the repeated call to confirm that a boy had failed to appear and then a sense of loss – of something being not quite right. Elizabeth was so pale that even the Duke noticed and asked if she was feeling faint.
‘It’s this heat,’ he said. ‘Ned, there are deck-chairs in the shade on Agar’s Plough. Why not take Elizabeth over there and sit her down so she can rest. There’s nothing to do now except watch the cricket until the first procession of boats at six.’
‘Yes, do that,’ said Connie, solicitously passing Elizabeth a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-cologne. ‘This will make you feel better. I never come to something like this without eau-de-cologne.’
‘And we’ll disappear too,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve got to help get Charles ready for the procession.’
The party broke up and Gerald and Connie went over to talk to friends. Edward, taking Elizabeth by the arm, led her across School Yard, over the ancient cobbles and past the bronze statue of Henry VI. Without either saying a word, they walked under Lupton’s Tower, through the cloisters and on to the playing fields. Elizabeth’s arm was limp under his and neither had eyes for the ancient beauty around them. They found two canvas chairs in the shade of a great oak. In the distance, they could see a cricket match in progress. The white-flannelled figures were too far away to be recognisable as individuals, but the occasional cheer or groan reached them on the breeze. Even the sharp crack of leather on willow could be heard above the rustle of the leaves which shaded them.
At last, Edward said, ‘ “Regardless of their fate the little victims play.” Do you know that when a boy leaves Eton he is presented with a specially bound copy of Gray’s poem? It certainly touches the spot. I mean,’ he said, twisting in his deck-chair to look at Elizabeth, ‘in a rather sentimental way, it does remind us of the fleeting nature of happiness. One day we are children playing happily with ball and bat on a green field and the next – where are we? Old, wrinkled, disappointed, disillusioned? Is that worse than the fate of my eldest brother, Franklyn, after whom young Frank is named?’
‘Playing happily, did you say?’ Elizabeth said in a low voice. ‘Are you so sure?’
‘You mean, we are privileged here and many children have nowhere to play in safety?’ Edward was by now so used to the sort of comment Verity would make that he thought he knew what Elizabeth was saying, but he was wrong.
‘That too, but it’s not what I mean. I know of at least one boy – a boy I think you may have heard of – who was here and who was not happy. Indeed, his unhappiness ended in his suicide.’
‘Suicide! Elizabeth, you must tell me. Is it this . . . this suicide which lies behind the deaths – the four deaths we now know of? If so, someone is exacting a high price.’
She did not answer but stared unseeing toward the white specks in the distance.
‘Please, Elizabeth, tell me who is playing judge and jury.’
‘You know who it is,’ she said, turning towards him for the first time. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I believe I do. It’s . . .’ Before he could utter the name, Elizabeth held her finger against his lips and he did not finish the sentence. ‘It’s over now, isn’t it?’ he said at last. ‘So why not tell me about it? I’m not a policeman. I just want to understand.’
‘Oh, Edward, I wish it was all over,’ she said bitterly. ‘God knows, I want it to be. I tried to stop it. You must believe me, I tried to stop it.’ Her face was wet with tears and the expression of pain on her face made her almost ugly.
‘The boy . . . that was Federstein . . . Oliver Federstein, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I wasn’t sure you knew. But did you know his father entered him at Eton as Featherstone?’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Because he didn’t want him to be a Jew at Eton. He thought it would help if Oliver was enrolled under the name of Featherstone. It was a fatal mistake because, of course, it was a secret that could never be kept. Whether it was the housemaster or someone else, the truth got out – that Oliver Featherstone was really a tradesman’s son and a Jew.’
‘But there have always been Jews at Eton.’
‘Jews called Rothschild, Samuel or Seligman – a dozen or so families. I’m talking about an ordinary Jew. Rich, maybe; successful, certainly, but not one of those names. However, the bad times for Oliver began not because he was a Jew but because his father owned department stores. They called him “grocer”. He tried to laugh it off but he was only thirteen and it really hurt.’
‘But Max Federstein’s wealth was based on oil, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, but that cut no ice with certain young Etonians. He had come to England as a refugee from the pogroms. He was Russian and learnt the language of his adopted country slowly, but he loved all things English. He knew he could never be an English gentleman but he wanted . . . he wanted so badly for his son to be one.’
‘And he thought he could buy it? He thought if he sent his son to Eton . . .?’
‘Yes, but it didn’t work. You don’t remember anything about it?’
‘No, I . . . I don’t. It was a big school and I . . .’
‘But, Edward, it was your friend Stephen Thayer who made his life a misery even if it wasn’t his intention.’
‘I can hardly believe it. Thayer? He didn’t have any reason to. He was a success . . . he was in Pop . . . he was a hero.’
‘Maybe, but he and Hoden and Tilney – those two were in Oliver’s house – were in the . . . you know . . . the room?’
‘The library?’
‘Yes, they were in the library. They ran the house and the housemaster . . . he had no interest in it and left everything to the older boys.’
‘And they bullied him?’
‘They bullied him, but it was more than that. You see, Oliver wasn’t good at games and he wasn’t too bright but he did have two things going for him: he was rich – his father gave him all the money he asked for – and he was pretty.’
‘ “Pretty”?’ said Edward with distaste.
‘Yes, damn you, pretty. He was their fag – their servant . . .’
‘But that’s normal!’
‘Is it normal for there to be a “beauty parade” of new boys? Is it normal to make the “winner” . . . do things with the older boys?’
‘Do things?’ said Edward faintly. ‘You mean . . .’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, measuring out the words as though they were links in a chain.
‘Why didn’t he tell someone?’
‘Who could he tell? The housemaster? He was never there.’
‘His father?’
‘How could he tell his father who was so proud of him . . . was so proud he was at Eton with lords and dukes . . .’ she said with withering scorn.
‘He didn’t have any friends?’ Edward asked, shocked to the core by what he was hearing.
‘He had no friends . . . he was isolated. A small boy alone and abused by people who should have cared for him. But that was not all. Your friend Stephen Thayer . . . your hero . . . he found out . . . it wasn’t difficult . . . that Oliver’s mother was not an ordinary woman but a film star.’
‘Dora Pale,’ Edward said flatly.
‘Yes, Dora Pale, as you discovered. It changed everything. Dora Pale was famous . . . glamorous . . . shocking. Thayer was entranced. He said everything would be different for Oliver if he invited his mother down to the school, and for a time it was. He was popular . . . he was even happy.’ Again, Elizabeth’s voice was drenched with bitterness.
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