A Duty to the Dead

by Charles Todd

  He seemed to shudder, and after a moment he said, “Bess?” As if he couldn’t see me there beside him. It was the first time he’d used my given name.

  I dropped the cloth to the floor and took his arm.

  “I’m here, Peregrine. It’s all right, come with me.”

  He moved like a sleepwalker, and I led him like a little child back out into the shop. The butcher was standing there, hands to his sides, his expression one of pity mixed with horror.

  I think he believed Peregrine was reliving some war experience, for he said to me in a low voice, “I’d not marry him, Miss. Not if I was you. Not in this state. He belongs in hospital, where they can see to him.”

  I thanked him, telling him I would reconsider, and I led Peregrine out of the shop. The damp air clung to our faces as I guided him to the nearby side street, and we climbed the hill to the cathedral. It was the only quiet, empty place I could think of. We walked to the side door that I could see was open, on the south side, crossing the lawn wet with dew.

  Inside it was cold and quite dark, the massive pillars almost ghostly sentinels against the windows. I found a bench in the back, and we sat down.

  Peregrine was calmer now. As if the nightmare had receded and left him drained. I think I could have ordered him to jump from the squat tower and he’d have done it, his will destroyed.

  We sat there for some time. I didn’t touch him, but I was close beside him, where he could sense my presence.

  Gradually he seemed to recover. I could almost watch the progression of emotions. In the distance someone came in from another door, a woman, lifting the holly branches and fir boughs out of the vases by the altar and going off with them. I doubted she could see us here beneath the west doors. But I said nothing until she had come back for the vases and carried them away as well.

  “Peregrine?”

  “Where are we?” he whispered, looking at the cavernous nave and the long row of columns, the only light that small one in the altar and the rain-wet windows reflecting the dark day. “I don’t know this church.”

  “Rochester Cathedral,” I replied. “Did you ever come here?”

  He frowned. “Once. With my father. We saw Becket’s tomb—”

  “That’s Canterbury.”

  He didn’t answer. I thought perhaps he must have been very young at the time. His father hadn’t lived very long after Timothy’s birth. I could see them walking along together, man and child. Arthur would have been too young to accompany them. Peregrine would have still had his father to himself.

  “Do you remember what happened in the—er—the shop where you waited for me?”

  “There was someone who knew your family….”

  “Yes. He’d have been curious about this uniform. He’s in my father’s regiment. And I couldn’t pass you off as a brother or a suitor, or he’d have known it was a lie.”

  He turned to me, the first spark of the man I’d seen yet. “You don’t have suitors?”

  I felt like laughing out loud. “Not at the moment, at least.”

  “I’d forgot. You were in love with Arthur.”

  “Hardly love.” Yet I could hear his laughter, remember the warmth in those blue, blue eyes, and still feel, sometimes, the touch of his hand, how it had seemed to open a world of happiness. No shadows, no secrets, just a good man, what people often called a natural leader, who had put aside his own pain to make the others in the ward believe they would all survive together.

  “Well, then. You felt something. There was a softness in your voice when you spoke his name.” He paused. “It’s not there any longer.”

  “No.” Which was the real Arthur? The dying man who gave others the gift of his spirit, or the devious man who had concealed the ugly crime of murder? Were they one and the same? How could they be? How could I care for one—and not the other?

  I shook off that train of thought and went back to my probing. I wasn’t sure how far to press.

  Then I remembered something that Daisy, the laundress in London, had said. “Someone had tried to clean away most of the blood—”

  That hadn’t been what I needed to learn at the time, and so I had ignored the words. But now I began to see a picture of such hideous behavior that I felt ill.

  Mrs. Graham had so terrified Peregrine that he had never really recovered from it—as much a victim of shock as Ted Booker cradling his dying brother in his arms. The dreams—

  How could a woman commit such an act of betrayal? But there had been a choice. Peregrine—or her own son. And so she had destroyed her husband’s child with a cold and malicious trick.

  And then she had displayed him to the London police and after that to everyone who mattered in Owlhurst—Inspector Gadd, the rector, Mr. Craig, Dr. Hadley, and Lady Parsons—to leave them in no doubt that Peregrine was a monstrous boy whom she had saved from prison but lost to the asylum. And all the while, the child who had really killed was safe at home with Robert Douglas.

  He must have loved Mrs. Graham very much to allow himself to be used as he was—or perhaps it was his own child he was protecting, at any price?

  I’d guessed what she must have done that night—but I couldn’t have imagined the cruelty of the scheme she had used to make the changeling work.

  I said to Peregrine, “What were you served at the noon meal the day of the murder?”

  He gazed at me as if I’d lost my mind. Then he said, “I don’t remember.” He sat there for several minutes, his thoughts elsewhere. And then he said, “Yes. Yes, I do, it must have been a goose, because there was a fricassee of goose for dinner. It made my stomach queasy. I couldn’t finish it. And later I lost it, and Lily told me I ought to be made to clear the vomit up myself. Timothy told her to smear it on my face, the way one shows a dog he mustn’t soil the carpet. She was angry with all of us because she had so badly wanted the night off. She felt that Mr. Appleby ought to have been forced to give up his evening instead.”

  His eyebrows rose. “I hadn’t thought about that. I heard her call Arthur a spoiled mama’s boy, and later she told Timothy that a cripple ought not be so prideful, that he had only to look at his ugly, misshapen foot to know that he had an ugly, misshapen nature. I don’t know what she said to Jonathan, but he slammed his door and wouldn’t unlock it again, however much Lily wheedled, until she threatened to send for Robert.”

  A girl disappointed because she couldn’t have an anticipated free evening, four boys teased and called names—and then some final exchange that must have triggered fury and finally murder.

  But if it wasn’t Peregrine, someone had had the forethought to use his pocketknife.

  Someone, perhaps, who was jealous that it had been given to the eldest son, and wanted to punish Peregrine for being his father’s firstborn.

  I said, breaking the stillness, my voice almost overloud in the quiet cathedral, “Peregrine. You were very young at the time. Do you know how your father died?”

  “My father? He’d gone to Cranbrook. On the way home his horse bolted and the carriage overturned. He was dead when he was brought to the house and laid on his bed. All I knew at the time was that he lay there with his eyes open, and I couldn’t understand why, when someone tried to close them, they wouldn’t stay closed.”

  “Who found him?”

  “I don’t remember that, if ever I was told. Later I overheard my stepmother talking about Gypsies, but it was a child who ran under his horse’s hooves.”

  Peregrine remembered his father’s corpse with sadness but without terrors. He’d have remembered Lily Mercer’s in that same way, if he hadn’t been made to put his hands in what he’d thought was her bloody body. It had never occurred to him in those few minutes with Mrs. Graham that the offal was not a human being’s, and she’d counted on that—counted on his state of mind warping all he saw.

  “Let’s find the hotel,” I said, getting to my feet. It was cold as a tomb in here, with the stone walls and stone flooring locking in the frigid January air. “We
could use a cup of tea while the hotel finds someone to drive us.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A MR. FREEMAN agreed to conduct us to the home of Melinda Crawford.

  She was a connection on my father’s side, her ancestors army officers who’d fought at Yorktown with Cornwallis, followed Old Duro through Spain, and danced with my own great-grandmother—so the story went—on that fateful eve of Waterloo.

  As a child in India she had lived through the siege of Lucknow, where the British were nearly wiped out during the Great Indian Mutiny. She had seen death and disease close-up, and survived to marry her own cousin against all advice—and been extraordinarily happy with him. When he died, she returned to England by a roundabout route that would have made the hardiest explorer blanch to contemplate. At least those were the stories I’d been brought up on, and I’d believed them. When one knew Melinda, one did.

  With that past, I was hoping she’d accept an escaped lunatic with equanimity if not precisely with enthusiasm.

  I’d omitted the polite telegram signaling my imminent arrival. She just might take it into her head to telephone the Colonel Sahib and ask him if he knew what his errant daughter was up to.

  She still might.

  But it was worth the risk. No one would think to look for Peregrine Graham in Melinda Crawford’s lair, and if they tried, she was more than capable of dealing with them.

  Her house was closer to Tonbridge than to Rochester, but I was wary now of Tonbridge, after our encounter with Jonathan Graham there. Better a long drive across Kent than the worry of a confrontation at the train station or the hotel.

  A cold rain had started again as we set out, and the countryside, winter bleak, was colorless and dreary: muddy roads leading through brown, fallow fields, apple trees raising twisted limbs to the gray sky, sheep huddled wherever they could find shelter. And any people out in the weather were hurrying about their business with heads down.

  Not far from Marling, we found the turning that led to the Crawford house, and shortly after that, the stone gates with their elephant lanterns loomed through the mists. As the drive wound up the knoll, the views were shrouded in rain.

  I had heard many British exiles in India describe the “cottage” they would have when at last they could go home. Roses and daffodils and wisteria and all the beauty that the brown and tan and cream shades of Indian dust made impossible out there. Melinda’s gardens were beautiful in season, and she indulged herself with arrays of color. Not for her single beds of pinks and red, beds of yellow and gold, beds of blues and lavenders. Here flowers mingled in rampant glory, a rainbow of blues nodding to cream and yellow, lavenders touching rose and pink and dark blue, golds indulgently shoulder to shoulder with white and purple and red, all striking to the eye and visible from every window. Now of course the beds were dormant, but a bank of holly trees and a dramatic cedar and the leathery green of rhododendron softened the scene.

  To a child, coming home on leave from India, this was heaven.

  All the way here I’d debated with myself what I should tell Melinda Crawford, and how to explain Peregrine. Nothing believable came to mind.

  We rang the doorbell, huddling close under the small porch. I had paid off the driver but asked him to wait until we were certain someone was at home.

  The door opened, and in it stood Shanta, the Indian woman who had served Melinda for so long she could speak her mind without reprimand.

  Now she took one look at the orphans of the storm on her doorstep and raised her eyebrows.

  “I do hope,” I said, mustering a smile that had more of Cheshire cat in it than I’d have liked, “that Melinda is at home. It’s been a wretched drive!”

  “Miss Elizabeth,” she said severely, “if you are eloping, you can go home now and be sensible.”

  Thank God I’d warned Peregrine that the household was a little eccentric, but still I felt myself flushing.

  “I’m not eloping. The lieutenant here is a patient, and he has nowhere to go. Er—the zeppelins destroyed his flat in London—”

  He did look every inch the wounded hero—his eyes dark-circled and tired, his shoulders thin from fever, and his skin without much color. I found myself thinking that as my choice for eloping hero, he was off the mark.

  “If that is the case, come inside and be warm.”

  I turned to wave good-bye to Mr. Freeman and followed Shanta inside, taking Peregrine’s arm and ushering him ahead of me. I could feel his silent resistance—the muscles in his arm were corded bands.

  We were taken to the study, where a fire blazed on the hearth and the room was suffocatingly hot. Melinda Crawford’s blood still yearned for the heat of India, and I could remember as a child thinking that all old people must be on the verge of freezing to death. Two other widows my father had visited over the years, wives of officers who had died out there, lived in the same tropical environment. They were the only people I knew who kept roaring fires in high summer. One had suffered from malaria on and off and was always feverish.

  Melinda was seated in a chair, draped in lovely silk Paisley shawls, and she registered no surprise at seeing me in her doorway. I wondered why.

  “I’ve had a letter from your mother,” she said, rising to kiss me. “She was worried about you. She said you haven’t been the same since you went to visit the Grahams.”

  I kissed her cheek and smelled the scent of sandalwood and roses in her hair.

  She was tall and straight, with the bearing of a soldier.

  “And this is…” She turned to Peregrine and held out her hand like an empress greeting a new and interesting courtier.

  Before I could stop him, Peregrine gave her his real name.

  She turned to me again. “I thought the Graham boy you were so fond of died aboard Britannic?”

  I could feel my heart fluttering into my throat. “This is his eldest brother,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant.

  Melinda nodded. “Welcome to my house, Lieutenant Graham. Come and sit by me. I see you’re in the colonel’s old regiment. My husband’s as well. Wounded in France, were you?”

  We sat down as far from the fire as was polite.

  The room hadn’t changed much, crowded as it was with Melinda’s Indian souvenirs as well as objects she’d discovered on her travels. There was a tall porcelain Russian stove in the left corner of the room, a gigantic ceramic affair in blue and cream that she’d seen in Leningrad and shipped home. A samovar from Moscow—often used to brew her tea—stood on a table between the windows, and above it were two great African elephant tusks that curved around a Garuda mask from Bali.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what Peregrine made of it all. If he’d thought the Prince Regent’s Pavilion intriguing, this must seem exotic in the extreme.

  Melinda was asking him how much action he’d seen, and he was answering, “More than I care to recall,” and she nodded, satisfied.

  “What brings you here, my dear girl?” she asked me next. “Your mother says your orders have been cut and should arrive at any moment. And I’ve yet to thank you for the letter you sent from Athens. Most reassuring, let me tell you.”

  I said almost bluntly, “Peregrine needs somewhere to stay. Would you mind? He doesn’t wish to go home, and there are no beds to be had in London. He’s good company, and as soon as he’s well enough to manage on his own, he’ll be rejoining his regiment.”

  “Of course he may stay. We’re a quiet house. If he doesn’t heal here, he never shall.”

  I felt distinctly uneasy. Had she heard about Peregrine’s escape? Surely not. Truth was, I’d expected more resistance on her part. Damn Peregrine for not remaining Lieutenant Philips.

  It was much later, after a light luncheon, that Peregrine was shown to his room by Shanta, leaving Melinda to cross-examine me at her leisure.

  “Child, what are you playing at? The truth, if you please!”

  “There’s nothing—”

  “Balderdash. I’m not senile yet, Bess Craw
ford, and I’ll thank you to give me credit for knowing you well enough to see through your happy little charade. I do read the papers, you know. That man’s an escaped lunatic, and here you are roaming the countryside in his company.”

  “He’s escaped from the asylum, but he’s not mad—you have talked with him for two hours or more, Melinda. Tell me you believe he’s crazy, much less a murderer!”

  “What I believe is beside the point. There’s his family to consider. The world believes he must be dead. You can’t leave them to grieve. It’s unconscionable.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not when everyone is glad to be rid of him at last. I don’t think he killed anyone. Did you know his father? Ambrose Graham? He was twice married, and Peregrine is his son by his first wife….”

  I found myself telling her everything, trying my best to make what I’d done seem reasonable and logical under the circumstances. And all the while her dark eyes seemed to bore into my head to look beyond my words and find the truth.

  “So you now think it must have been Arthur who did these terrible things? Except for the fact that someone else died after Arthur himself was dead.”

  “I don’t know. It must be one of the sons. Everyone else was away that evening. Robert Douglas had accompanied Mrs. Graham to a dinner party. Lily Mercer was still alive, then. As she was when the tutor left the house. Peregrine feels he was persecuted by his stepmother after he found her in bed with her cousin Robert. I think she took Peregrine to London because she was afraid to leave him at home. Not because he was dangerous, but because someone might discover that he wasn’t what everyone thought he was and perhaps believe what he had to say. He was angry and violent sometimes, I’m sure, but not in that way—more frustrated and unhappy than mad or murderous. And I strongly suspect he was drugged part of the time he was in London, to keep him quiet. Especially between the time of Lily’s death and his arrival at the asylum.”