“In all weathers.” His sigh was martyred, as if the cousin were constantly dragging Crabbe along with him.
They had been discussing—rather, Crabbe had been soliloquizing on—Robert Southey that morning while Melrose had been working over file cards. Indeed, Melrose wondered if he had been hired not really so much to catalogue the books in this library (which smelled so pleasantly of old leather and beeswax) as to provide an untutored ear for Mr. Holdsworth, all other ears in the family having turned away.
Although the Southey-talk might have seemed cold-blooded to someone else in light of his daughter-in-law’s death and his grandson’s disappearance, Melrose imagined that it might be a case of what a psychiatrist would call “displacement,” a mental leap from his grandson to Southey and the death of that poet’s little son. No, Melrose didn’t think that Alex Holdsworth was far from his grandfather’s mind.
“I’ve always thought that Southey was an especially underrated poet, haven’t you?”
“Not really,” Melrose had replied, noting the title of a volume on his index card. His index cards were a mixed lot. Most of them were filled with information on the Holdsworth family, cards which he slotted in with the others until he had enough for a “report” to Jury. Thus he always appeared to be working on his indexing when he was doing little else than making notes on current events. The cards were either in his pockets, or locked in the desk. No one questioned this, since he doubted that anyone really cared. He imagined his presence here was really more to keep poor old Crabbe company. The man was a pleasant but dim companion. His wife certainly wasn’t listening to his monologues. Melrose’s difficulty lay in getting to the local fax machine to relay this information to London. He sighed.
Since his knowledge of the Southey ménage was pea-sized, he had decided that what might increase his credentials (if not his popularity) would be to disagree.
Crabbe Holdsworth blustered about, walking up to a reproduction of the famous painting of the poet (as if Southey might furnish him with a rebuttal) and then turning to Melrose again. “Mr. Plant, he was made poet laureate.”
Now Melrose could drag in his own little bit of erudition. “Only because Walter Scott turned it down, remember?”
Diane Demorney. Melrose never would have believed the woman would bring a genuine smile to his lips. When he realized that he was supposed to be something of an authority on the entire Lake School and further realized (after Jury had called him) that he had only overnight to become one, he had actually called on Diane Demorney. Diane had cotton bunting for a mind, but she had stuffed it with facts just as Agatha had stuffed her cottage with treasures from Ardry End. Diane’s little secret was that she kept the facts limited so that she could converse on any subject. Not “converse” as much as “stump” her listener.
“The Lake District, Diane,” Melrose had said.
“I think I might be ill. Come over for a martini.”
Melrose had drunk her martinis once. He hadn’t appeared for two days. “Don’t have time. Not the area itself, just the poets.”
“Not Wordsworth. I don’t bother with the ones everyone knows about.”
“Robert Southey, how about him?”
“Well, naturally, I’ve never read any of his writings. Let’s see: Robert Southey was made poet laureate in nineteen-aught-something but only because Sir Walter Scott refused it. That’s all, except I think he was another of them who freeloaded on Wordsworth . . . or was it the other way round? Oh, I do know one thing about Wordsworth. He wasn’t famous during his lifetime. Most people think he was being read six ways from Sunday, but he wasn’t. Not even after Strange Interlude.”
Melrose had squeezed his eyes shut. “Diane, that’s a play by Eugene O’Neill.”
“Really?” Total indifference.
“You’re thinking of The Prelude.”
“Never heard of it. How about—?”
“You come trailing clouds of glory behind you, surely . . . !”
“I do, don’t I? How about that martini?”
“Later. Thanks.”
Though considerably more beautiful, Diane Demorney was Long Piddleton’s answer to the Wizard of Oz. All curtains, pulleys, wigs and puffs of colored smoke.
Although Crabbe had to admit that Scott had been offered the laureateship first, he still felt he had to prove to Melrose that Southey was treated most unjustly. “Byron was especially sneering.”
“Byron wore a perpetual sneer.” That was probably a safe bet.
But Crabbe was conditioned to uphold the Southey honor and so took from the shelf a copy of Thalaba.
Even though Melrose’s ears were ready to drop off from boredom, he still didn’t mention the freeloading. He said only, to keep his hand in, “He was a better proser than a poet.”
• • •
Genevieve Holdsworth was giving plenty of thought to the disappearance of Alex.
It was teatime, and they were gathered in the drawing room at the rear of the house. Millie Thale had brought in the tray, Mrs. Callow following with the sandwiches and cakes. It was a small five-tiered table that Agatha would have died for. Millie stayed to pour the tea and drag the table from one to another.
Disdaining tea and cake, Genevieve had earlier poured herself a double whiskey and was smoking cigarettes. “I’ve called that policeman half-a-dozen times. You’d think that after three days they’d’ve found him.”
“Not if he doesn’t want to be found, Genevieve,” said Madeline. “His mother’s dead, my sister, in case you’ve forgotten.” She sounded more angry than sorrowful.
“Of course, I haven’t forgotten, but please don’t put on that injured air—” Without looking at Melrose, she must have remembered that they had a stranger in their midst and asked Millie to pour some more tea. Holding out her glass, she asked her husband, please, for another whiskey. “Sorry.” Her slight laugh was feigned. “I’m so upset I’m not sure just what I’m saying.” This was directed at Melrose; her adjustment of her position on the sofa suggested that she did indeed know what she was saying, at least in the legs department.
“Would you like a fortune cookie?” asked Millie of Melrose, staring at him in a manner that said he’d better.
“Millie makes them, if you can imagine,” said Crabbe. “I’ll have one.”
Melrose reached for one and she turned the plate ever so slightly. He took a cookie and she passed the plate to Crabbe. “I hope it’s cheerier than the last one, Millie. Oh, have one, Genevieve,” he said as she waved the plate by in the same way she’d declined all other sustenance that wasn’t liquid. Crabbe read from a narrow strip of paper: “ ‘Alex will be here soon.’ Well, thank you, Millie. That’s very encouraging. I’m sure you’re right.”
“What does yours say, Mr. Plant?”
Melrose grinned. “ ‘You’re not a poet.’ ” He looked round the assembled company, at Crabbe smiling smugly, as if Southey had been vindicated. “There’s a lot of truth in that.” Actually, there was more truth in the message than they knew. In extremely tiny letters she had written: “You’re not what you say.”
“Ha!” said George. “I’m to win at Braitherwaite Races, Whitsun, according to this.” He wagged the bit of paper at Millie and said, “Just see Hawkes gets that feed mixed right this time, will you? Thin as gruel it was yesterday. And don’t trust him to feed them, girl; do it yourself.”
His tone was not nasty. They all appeared to think of Millie as one who could be sent here and there on whatever large or small errands they deemed necessary. To none of this did she make verbal answer. She merely looked her reply or nodded—except where Melrose was concerned. Him she ignored utterly, apparently quite sure that he would find a way to talk to her.
When she’d left the room, Melrose gazed after her. “Is that little girl from this area? She hasn’t a Cumbrian or Lancastrian accent at all.” He thought of the guttural stops and elided l’s of the regulars in the Old Contemptibles.
“No; her family’s from
London. Well, what’s left of it. One aunt,” Crabbe said, “who is not, we understand, a very good sort.”
Madeline smiled slightly. “Aunt Tom. Hard to believe any woman would let herself be called ‘Aunt Tom.’ ”
“Thomasina, probably,” said Genevieve, absently, interested in little but the gold bracelet on her wrist.
“Why is it that Millie isn’t living with her aunt?”
Crabbe bit into his fortune cookie. “As I said, bad sort.”
What, Melrose wondered, did that mean? Prostitute? Terrorist? Moors-murderer?
“Millie didn’t want to go to her; she begged us to let her stay. We had no intention of doing so,” Genevieve was saying, “but Adam insisted. Adam thinks Millie is grand.” The emphasis made it clear that Genevieve thought neither of them so.
Madeline said, “The aunt apparently would have made the girl’s life hell because this person’s got no patience with . . . you-know.”
Since no one had mentioned a father, Melrose inferred that “you-know” was a sexual reference and that poor Millie was illegitimate.
“Beats her, the girl said. We did send her to stay with this Aunt Tom right after her mother’s, ah . . .” Crabbe looked down at his cup.
“Suicide,” said Genevieve impatiently. “Call it what it was.”
“Yes. And when she came back Adam insisted she come to us; there were, you know, bruises . . .”
“Horrible,” said Madeline. “We wanted to call police, but Millie got hysterical, even defended the woman, said she—Millie, I mean—had just had a bad fall. So we did nothing. And to think this aunt could do that after what the niece had been through.”
“Sex.” George offered his opinion abruptly. “ ‘Tom’ indeed. Victorian. Repressed. Pretty sister. Jealous. Dr. Viner knows. Tart?”
Melrose declined. He was more interested in finding Millie.
23
Which he did, after tea, when she was feeding hounds. As the cage of the kennel clicked shut behind, the raucous outcry he’d heard in the distance had died; hounds were gobbling down their glutinous feed and slurping at their water.
Mist had rolled in across the cobbled yard and covered their feet, Millie’s wellingtons squelching as she walked over to the wall to set down the empty buckets. For all the attention she paid, he might have been invisible. Then, with a feigned little start, she said, “Oh, hello,” as if she hadn’t noticed until that moment his approach through the rising ground mist.
“Don’t sound surprised. You knew I’d wonder just who I am, if I’m not what I say I am.”
She looked up at him, chewing at the inside of her mouth, as if now that he was here, she wasn’t too sure. “Oh, I don’t know that. I only know you’re not a book-cataloguer; you’re not really here to work on Mr. Holdsworth’s library.” Then she waited out the ensuing silence.
“Just how do you know that?”
“You told me.” She walked with her buckets through the door to the kennels. Hounds sounded as if they were rioting.
Melrose called after her, “What the devil’s that supposed to mean?”
She came out onto the cobbles and stared up at him. “If you were what you said, you’d have looked at my message, frowned, looked peculiar and read it out to everyone.” She shrugged. “But you made something up to say.”
He wouldn’t have minded so much being found out by Fellowes, or Madeline or any of them. But this eleven-year-old child with her witchy cat (Sorcerer had just emerged from the gloom) was really too much. “So you weren’t sure until then. Well, what would have happened if I had read it out?”
“I’d have said it’s a Chinese saying. Want to take a walk?” She was buttoning up an outgrown overcoat, short in the sleeves and not as long as her dress.
Melrose winced. “Are you sure you feel safe, walking about with a person who’s not what he says he is? I could be dangerous.”
“No more than anyone else around here. I want to show you something.”
• • •
“They told me it was an accident,” she said, as they stood on a small shelf of cliff surrounded by conifers that overlooked the foot of Wast Water. The three of them (Sorcerer making a third) had walked for perhaps ten minutes through the deeply wooded land and come out here, not far above the lake. “Come on,” Millie commanded, making her way down the rocks. Melrose followed.
It was not a cave, exactly, but another mass of lichen-covered rocks with the shelf above serving as a roof. Sphagnum moss dripped down from the rocks above. The overlapping flattish stones on which they stood, Millie pointing downward, were slippery with cladonia. “They said she slid and fell down onto the lake shore. See that sort of path?”
Not a path to walk down, certainly, more of a gully beside which ran a narrow beck. The path was an obstacle course of rock, roots, bracken and bog-myrtle. It would have been, as Millie was certainly smart enough to tell, hardly possible to plunge downward and into Wast Water. Too many things would have impeded the fall.
“Anyway, I tried it out. A person can’t.” Millie sat down and pulled up her knees.
“Tried it? What on earth do you mean?”
“To fall. You can’t do it. I got some cuts, but that stump there stopped me after I’d gone a few feet.” She looked up at him. “Mum was unhappy. She killed herself is what happened. You’d have to walk into that lake, anyway, to get deep enough.”
Melrose lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Millie.”
She was silent for a moment. “She found his body. I expect they told you that.”
“You mean Alex’s father.”
Millie nodded, her chin rubbing her knees. “Was that what made her unhappy?”
Melrose honestly thought she believed he knew. Because he wasn’t “who he said he was” and was therefore a mystery, he was fast gaining omniscience, perhaps, in her mind. “I didn’t know your mother; I can’t say; but something like that, finding someone you’re . . . fond of, dead. It could be terrible enough, I’d certainly think.”
“But it didn’t make Alex’s mother kill herself. Because it was years ago. Then maybe she didn’t care as much as mine did.”
Melrose said nothing; the coal-end of his cigarette as he dragged on it sparked the blue dusk. He looked up, suddenly; he thought he’d heard something like the crack of twigs. “What’s that?”
“What? I didn’t hear anything.”
“You must be deaf. It was loud as a pistol shot.”
“You’ve just got this big imagination. It’s from sitting here in this fog.” She sighed. “Alex knows his mum didn’t kill herself. All he wants is to find out who did.”
Melrose turned to her. “What do you mean? Why would he think someone actually killed his mother? And how do you know, Millie, what he thinks?”
She stared off toward Scafell, its eastern slope beginning to purple in the failing light, and asked, “Do you live with your mum?”
The question startled Melrose. In her mind, if you had a mother, you’d naturally live with her, no matter how old you were. “No. She’s dead.”
“Were you there?” Millie reached down to place her hand on the cat’s head, to still what was already stone-still.
“Yes.” He remembered the heavily curtained, medieval bed, his mother’s luminous skin, humorous eyes—as if this were only one more hurdle to get her jumper, Isis, across. The letter she had left with their firm of solicitors was not given him until he was thirty. It had taken him a long time to absorb its contents.
He looked down at Millie, who was looking up at him, her urgent little frown suggesting she was desperate for details from someone who had, actually, been there. He told her about the room, and how his mother had looked, and remembering the barren look of the room, cluttered though it was, for three or four minutes told Millie what his mother had said to him, what he had said to her. Melrose invented the dialogue; they had said none of it. After the stroke, his mother had been unable to speak, but had managed to convey a great deal with h
er eyes. Pale golden hair, pale green eyes. He had tried to say something to her and could think of absolutely nothing to say.
Millie seemed somewhat comforted by this conversation between Melrose and his mother. They had even had a laugh together over the cats chasing each other across the bedclothes (or so Melrose told her). Millie wanted to know what color they were, the cats. Black, both of them, he said, looking at Sorcerer.
No one said anything about anybody’s father for a long while.
In the deepening night and silence, finally Melrose asked, “Was his father fond of Alex?”
She nodded.
Melrose thought for a moment. “Did they fight? I mean his mother and father?”
“Mrs. Callow said they did. So did Mr. Hawkes. He said he’d pass by the gatehouse and hear them. That’s where they lived, where Mr. Fellowes does now. Railing, Mr. Hawkes said. But you can’t believe much of what he says because he’s always drunk.”
“Where did Mr. Fellowes live, then?”
“Oh, I think in the village. I can’t remember. Anyway, Alex’s mum was always going off to London or somewhere.”
“Then where was Alex? Did he stay behind, here?”
She lowered her head, pulled at a tuft of dry grass. “Sometimes. If it hadn’t been for me he’d probably have run away. He hated them.”
“Even his father?”
“No, he liked him, but not as much as her. Did you see his picture? He was handsome, like Alex. They said she went to meet someone. You know.”
In the gloom, Melrose couldn’t see her face, but he knew what she was implying and that she didn’t know how to talk about it. Jane Holdsworth had had a lover? “You mean Hawkes and the cook talked about it?”
Millie shook her head. “She did.”
She, of course, being the nemesis, Genevieve Holdsworth. Was there, Melrose wondered, any truth in this—that Jane had a lover? And would she sacrifice what would surely have been a fortune by involving herself with someone else?
“It’s time to go!” Millie jumped up.
“Time to go where?”
She didn’t answer, but turned and started her scramble up the rocks.
The Old Contemptibles Page 16