by Anne Perry
There she stopped. After that it was too frightening. In her imagination she could smell rope and damp, inky darkness. It was not just a morbid thought; it could be real, with no warm bed, no relieved awakening.
She sat up and threw off the bedclothes, then reached for the bell. It was a long, flat five minutes before Digby knocked and came in, her hair a little hastily pinned up and her apron tied unevenly. She looked nervous but determined.
“Good morning, m’lady. Would you like a cup of tea straightaway, or shall I draw your bath?”
“Draw the bath,” Emily replied. There was no need to discuss what she would wear; it could only be the formal black barathea with black hat and black veil which she had sent for. Not a fashionable, flattering veil that lent mystery, but a widow’s weeds, hiding the face, disguising the ravages of grief.
Digby disappeared and came back a few minutes later, sleeves rolled up, a tentative smile hovering uncertainly on her lips. “It’s a fine day, m’lady. At least you won’t get rained on.”
Emily really did not care, but perhaps it was a minor blessing. Standing at a graveside with water trickling down her neck, wetting her feet, and making the edges of her skirts heavy and sodden would add a physical dimension to the bleakness that consumed her mind. It might even have been welcome; it was easier to think of frozen feet and wet ankles than of George lying white and rigid inside the closed coffin, being lowered into the ground and covered up, gone for the rest of her life. He had been so warm, so important, always at the foundation of her thoughts for so many years. Even when he was not with her, the sure knowledge that he would be there in a little while was a safety she had never considered losing.
Suddenly the tears came, catching her by surprise; all the sniffing and swallowing did not control them. She sat down again and covered her face with her hands.
Quite unexpectedly she found Digby’s arms round her and her head resting against Digby’s stiff, sloping shoulder. Digby said nothing; she just gently rocked Emily back and forth, stroking her hair, as if she were a very young child. It was so natural, Emily felt no embarrassment, and when the pain inside her eased and the relief of tiredness came over her, she let go, and went to her bath without the need to explain or reassert in any way that she was the mistress and Digby the maid. There were no questions or answers. Digby knew precisely what was needed, and the silence was one of understanding.
She took breakfast alone with Charlotte. She did not wish to see anyone else, except perhaps Aunt Vespasia, but she did not appear.
“She did not say so,” Charlotte said quietly as they took a thin slice of toast each and spread them with butter, then poured themselves cups of hot, weak tea from the flowered pot, “but I think she is busy massing a sort of defense.”
Emily did not ask what she meant; they both knew the ranks were closing against the police, against intrusion and scandal—and that meant against Emily also. If she were guilty it could all be over in a few days. No more investigation. They could grieve in decency for the appropriate time and resume their lives again.
Charlotte smiled bleakly. “I don’t think even Mrs. March will give her tongue full rein with Aunt Vespasia there. I feel there is not much love lost between them.”
“I wish I could think it was Mrs. March who killed George,” Emily said thoughtfully. “I’ve been trying to scrape up any kind of reason why she should.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No.”
“Nor I. But there must be an enormous amount that we don’t know.” Charlotte’s face was dark and tense, as if she was afraid. “Emily, I woke up in the night and I thought I heard you walking around.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No, it wasn’t you! It was coming from the stairs, so I got up to follow, but when I got the landing I saw it was Tassie. She was coming up and she walked past me to her bedroom. I saw her quite clearly. Emily, her sleeves were smeared with blood, and there were splashes down the front of her skirt and at the hem. She was smiling! There was a sort of peace about her. Her eyes were shining and wide open, but she didn’t even see me. I kept back in the small passage to the dressing room, and she walked so close I could have touched her.” She felt a little sick again as the smell came back, nauseating and sweet.
Emily was dazed—this was unbelievable. She offered the only explanation she could conceive of. “You had a nightmare.”
“No, I didn’t,” Charlotte insisted. “It was real.” Her face was tight and miserable but she did not waver. “I thought I might have been dreaming, with everything that’s happened, so I went down to the laundry room this morning and found the dress soaking in one of the coppers.”
“And was it covered in blood?”
Charlotte shook her head no more than an inch. “No, it was washed out. But then it would be; she’d hardly leave it like that for the maids to find, would she.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Emily still protested. “Whose blood? Why? Nobody’s been murdered that way”—she swallowed—“that we know of.”
Another hideous memory stirred in Charlotte’s mind, of parcels in a graveyard, but she refused to allow it to take shape. “Do you think she could be mad?” she said wretchedly. It seemed the only explanation left—and one must be found, for Emily’s sake.
“I suppose so,” Emily said reluctantly. “But I’m sure George didn’t know—unless he’d just found out. Which could be a reason for old Mrs. March to have killed him.”
“Do you think so?” Charlotte pursed her lips. “Would George ever have told anyone?”
“Yes! If she were dangerous—which she must be, if it was human blood.”
Charlotte said nothing, but she looked increasingly unhappy.
Emily knew why: she liked Tassie also. There was something in her that was immediately appealing, frankness, humor and generosity. But she had seen her coming up the stairs with blood bright on her sleeves and staining her dress. She shivered. Please God, it mustn’t be Tassie.
“It doesn’t have to be her,” Charlotte said quietly. “I suppose there could be some other explanation. An animal? An accident in the street? We don’t know anything. I just find it too hard to believe Tassie is ... Anyway, if the family knew they’d lock her up in an asylum, for her own sake.”
“Perhaps they didn’t know how bad she was,” Emily said quietly. “Maybe she has suddenly got worse.”
“But there is still Jack Radley,” Charlotte argued. “You can’t forget him. Or Sybilla. And William has to be an obvious choice. It could even be Eustace. I don’t know why, but maybe George found out something about him. After all, this is his house. Perhaps he’s doing something very wrong, or has a secret in his past that he couldn’t afford to have known.”
Emily looked up. “Such as what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an illegitimate child—or a love affair with someone wildly inappropriate.”
Emily’s fair eyebrows shot up. “Eustace? A love affair? That taxes the imagination! Can you visualize Eustace in love?”
“No,” Charlotte admitted. “But I wasn’t thinking of love so much as lust. The most unlikely people can feel that, even pompous and unctuous middle-aged men like Eustace. And anyway, it doesn’t have to be recent. It could have been something that happened years ago, even when Tassie’s mother was alive. And there are other, even worse possibilities. People have the strangest obsessions, you know. Maybe she found that out.”
“You mean something truly disgusting?” Emily said slowly. “Like a child? Or another man? Do you suppose Olivia could have found out, and he killed her?”
“Oh ...” Charlotte let out her breath with a sigh. “Actually I hadn’t thought of anything quite like that. Rather, a servant, or a farm girl. I heard of a highly respectable man who only liked big, dirty scrubwomen.”
“That’s rubbish!” Emily scoffed, taking another slice of thin toast and biting into it without any enjoyment.
“No, it isn’t, and one wouldn’t want i
t known.”
“No one would believe it, would they? Not to the point where it was worth murdering to keep them quiet.”
“Maybe. And certainly, if he killed Olivia it would be.”
“But unless he did kill Olivia—and I don’t believe that—George wouldn’t have told anyone. He wouldn’t want it known any more than Eustace would. After all, Eustace is family.” She swallowed the toast like a lump in her throat. “And George was rather conventional about things like that.”
“That’s true,” Charlotte said more gently. “But perhaps he didn’t trust George not to tell his friends, as a joke. George did not always think before he spoke. Or he might even have brought pressure on him to stop.”
“He wouldn’t!”
“Maybe not, but perhaps Eustace could not be sure enough of it.” She shook her head. “But all I’m saying is that we don’t know. There could be all kinds of things.”
Emily sat still. “Well, we’d better find at least one piece of evidence about some of them for Constable Stripe—and soon.”
“I know.” Charlotte bit her lip. “I’m trying.”
The service was to be held in the local church, which had also been the last resting place of the Ashworths since the family had acquired its first town house in the parish, nearly two hundred years ago.
Naturally Emily had informed her own household. That had been the most difficult of all the letters to write, and the only one with which Charlotte could not help her. How does one say to a five-year-old son that his father has been murdered? She knew he could not read her letter now; it would be his nanny, large, comfortable Mrs. Stevenson, who would try to explain to him, help him to understand death and allow his mind to grasp it slowly through the confusion of great and terrible emotions round him. Emily knew, too, that the gentle woman would try to comfort him, so he did not feel betrayed because his father had left him so soon, nor guilty that in some indefinable way it was his fault.
Emily’s letter would be for later on, when he was older, something he would keep and reread in quieter moments. He would find by the time he was a young man that he knew it by heart. So she had written it only once, letting her own loss and wholehearted grief come through. Inelegance of style would matter little; insincerity would clang like a false note with louder and harsher echoes through the years.
Today, of course, Edward would be there, small, cold and frightened but performing the rites expected of him. He was now Lord Ashworth: he must sit in the church, upright and well-behaved, and follow his father’s coffin to its grave, and mourn as was seemly.
Edward would come from home with Mrs. Stevenson and afterwards return with her. Charlotte and Emily would return to Cardington Crescent; the peculiar circumstances of murder made that necessary. They rode with Aunt Vespasia and Eustace in the family carriage, for this occasion draped in black and pulled by black horses. The hearse, of course, was provided by the undertaker and was draped and plumed as always.
Mrs. March and Tassie came next in the second-best barouche. Both Charlotte and Emily stared at Tassie, but she wore a veil, and beneath it her expression was invisible. It could have been one of sorrow and awe as everyone presumed, or it could equally easily have been remnants of the strange happiness Charlotte had seen in her on the stairs—or complete forgetfulness of it and whatever ghastly episode had preceded it. One could not even guess.
There was some argument as to where Jack Radley should ride; in the end, with great unease, Mrs. March took him with her, and William and Sybilla went in their own vehicle.
They alighted at the lych-gate one by one, and walked up the narrow earth and gravel path towards the old smoke-darkened, stone-towered church. The gravestones on either side were worn and green-rimed with age, inscriptions long since softened into blurred edges till one had to peer to distinguish them. Far towards the yew hedges and the long grass there were white ones, like new teeth. Here and there a bunch of flowers, laid by someone who still cared.
Charlotte took Emily’s arm and walked close to her. She could feel her shaking and she seemed thinner, smaller than she had thought. She could not forget for a moment that she was the elder sister. This was oddly like Sarah’s funeral4—only the two of them left—but Emily was far less vulnerable then. Then there had been boundless optimism under the sorrow, a sureness of herself that lay like a wide certainty underneath the surface grief and fear and was strong enough to outlast it.
This was different. Emily had not only lost George, the first man she had loved and committed herself to, but she had lost the confidence in her own judgment. Even her courage was a barer thing; not instinctive, but fought for—a broken-nailed, desperate clinging.
Charlotte’s fingers tightened and Emily reached for her hand. Mr. Beamish, the vicar, was waiting at the door, a thin, fixed smile on his face. His cheeks were red and his white hair fluffed, as if he had run his hands through it nervously. Now, as he recognized Emily, he stepped forward, extended his arm, and then hesitated and dropped it again. He murmured something indistinguishable that fell away in a downward cadence. To Charlotte it sounded like a bad psalm. Behind him his maiden sister shook her head fractionally and gave a little sniff. She touched her handkerchief delicately to her cheek.
They were embarrassed. Rumor, supposition, had reached them. They did not know whether to treat Emily as a bereaved aristocrat to whom it was their social and religious duty to extend every pity, or a murderess, a scarlet woman, a creature they should shun, as a good Christian example, and before they themselves were contaminated by her double sin.
Charlotte returned their stare without smiling. Part of her knew a moment’s empathy for their predicament, but a much larger part despised them; she was aware it showed in her expression. Her feelings always did.
Inside the church Mrs. Stevenson, somber and gentle, was holding Edward by the hand. His face was pale and looked so like Emily’s it was painful. He let go of Mrs. Stevenson’s hand and came to her, awkwardly at first, conscious of a new gravity; then as she put her arms round him he relaxed and sniffed fiercely, before straightening up again and walking beside her.
Mungo Hare was standing in the aisle beside the March family pew at the front. He was a large man with a fair, open face and blunt features. He held his head up and his eyes looked at Emily squarely.
“Are you all right, Lady Ashworth?” he said quietly. “I’ve put a glass of water on the ledge there, if you need it. It’ll not be a long service.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hare,” Emily said absently. “That is most thoughtful of you.” She slid into the pew with Edward, leaving Charlotte to follow her, then Aunt Vespasia and Eustace. She could hear Mrs. March clattering irritably in the pew behind and banging the hymnbook. She resented not being at the front, and she intended to make her displeasure known.
Tassie sat beside her, head down, hands folded in her lap. It was incredible to think of her as she had been last night; calm, blood-smeared, tiptoeing along the landing. The curate passed beside her and spoke to the old lady.
“Good morning, Mistress March. If I can be of any service to you, or offer you any comfort—”
“I doubt it, young man,” she said tersely, “except to keep my granddaughter sufficiently occupied in good works that she doesn’t run off and marry unsuitably, and end up getting murdered for her money!”
“That would be rather pointless,” Tassie murmured. “You wouldn’t leave me any if I did that.”
“If anyone murdered you it would be for your tongue!” the old lady snapped at her. “Kindly remember you are in church, and don’t be flippant.”
“Good morning, Miss March.” The curate bowed his head.
“Good morning, Mr. Hare,” Tassie said demurely. “Thank you for your concern. I expect Grandmama would be grateful if you called upon her.”
“I’d rather have Mr. Beamish,” the old lady interrupted. “He’s a good deal nearer to death than you are. He understands bereavement, loss, seeing one’s own blood ca
ught up in unholy passions, to fall victim to its rages, and pay its price.”
The curate gasped, and turned it into a sneeze.
“Indeed?” Vespasia said from the row in front, without turning her head. “If that is so then you know a great deal about Beamish that I do not.”
Tassie was making a curious little gurgling noise into her handkerchief, and the curate moved on to speak to William and Sybilla. Charlotte dared not twist around to observe.
The service was somber and intoned in the curious singsong voice of formalized grief. At moments, though, there was something vaguely comforting about it, perhaps no more than an expression of darker emotions that had been suppressed till now. This was an acknowledgment of what was unspeakable in the house; here was death and its physical corruption given name, instead of closed into the mind and forbidden the tongue, but always waiting just beyond, behind the spoken word. Even the organ notes shivered through the ear and held an eternal quality, so that one could hear them long into the next note. They seemed to come from the whole fabric of the church and the away into it again. The stonework and the jewel windows and the pipes were all one with the sound.
Emily stood straight and silent, and under her veil it was impossible to see her face. Charlotte could only guess her feelings. Between them Edward was stiff and upright, but he pressed very close to Emily and his free hand was clenched hard.
The last organ notes faded into the high arches of stone, and they turned slowly to face the worst. Six men in black, all expression wiped from their faces, lifted the coffin and walked in step, carrying it sedately out into the hard sunlight. Two by two the congregation followed, led by Emily and Edward.
The grave was a neat-edged hole in the damp earth. The Ashworths had never cared for a family crypt or mausoleum, preferring to spend their money on the living, but of course there would be a marble headstone, perhaps carved and gilded in time. Now all that seemed irrelevant, even vulgar.