She said it as calmly as if she’d worked out a mathematical equation. Suddenly, I dreaded what she was going to say because up to that point there had been something that I hadn’t even let myself think about. In my mind I heard Meredith’s voice saying ‘Either don’t start or go as far as it takes you.’ I turned away, not letting her see my face and tried to keep my voice calm.
‘You think the Old Man was murdered?’
‘I’m as sure of it as you are, and the fact Nathan’s gone off like that means he’s sure of it too. He must have seen or heard something that night that he doesn’t want the police to know about. So he’ll probably stay out on the fells until the inquest is safely over and there’s a verdict of suicide.’
‘So you think he’s shielding a murderer and you don’t mind?’
‘Oh, I’m sure we’re all in favour of justice in the abstract. But it’s a different matter, isn’t it, when you think of a living, breathing human being you actually know being taken out one morning and … oh, just think about it.’
‘I am. But the Old Man was a living, breathing human being too.’
She touched my arm as if I needed consoling. ‘Yes, I know. And somehow it makes it worse thinking of anybody doing it just for money. But I’ve been thinking about that. Perhaps when you’ve got somebody besides your self to worry about, you care about having enough money more than when it’s just you.’
‘You think that’s how Nathan sees it?’
‘I’m not sure he’ll have thought about it even that much. But he’s so loyal, you see. If he likes somebody, he has to protect them and that’s all there is to it.’
I felt sick, my mind racing back over all the things I should have noticed.
‘So it’s all right then,’ I said. ‘He stays out on the hills and next week I tell my story to the inquest about how the Old Man tried to kill himself, then we all go on as if nothing had happened.’
‘Nell, please don’t get angry with me. I hate the thought of that as much as you do. But think about what the Old Man would have wanted. He thought it was his baby, after all. Would he want her to give birth to it in a prison cell, then have it taken away from her so that they could hang her? How could that do him or anybody any good?’
I breathed, ‘Dulcie Berryman.’
‘Yes of course Dulcie Berryman. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? You must have suspected that before any of us.’
I said nothing, weak with relief, and let her go on talking.
‘Only I don’t think we should say anything to Imogen about this. She doesn’t like Dulcie, does she?’
‘No.’
She said she’d leave me to change and went clattering happily down the stairs, pausing only to ask if we shouldn’t leave some food out where Nathan might find it. Better not, I said. Then I undressed completely, lay down on the hay pallet under a sheet and slept dreamlessly for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon.
* * *
I woke around four o’clock feeling better. The panic that had come over me in the talk with Midge was because of reaction to all that had happened the day before. Her logical mind was on the right track and she’d got there even without knowing about the fish scales or the dropped note. But there was a thought I didn’t want to come into my head again and the only way to keep it out was to find some certainties in this maze. One certainty at least was that Dulcie Berryman knew more than she was saying.
As I rummaged for clean clothes and got dressed I wondered whether to discuss what I was going to do with Meredith and decided against it. I was my own woman still and nothing that had happened the night before changed that. It was a relief to have got it over, after all the talking and reading and thinking, and to wake up in the same world as the same person. A little bit of my mind was appalled at what I’d done and expected retribution but that was primitive and superstitious and could be disregarded. On reflection I was still pleased with myself and perhaps that was why I now felt capable of tackling Dulcie. Brushing tangles out of my hair, I thought I should have done it before. There were excuses, of course – her own habit of silence for one thing, her age for another. From early twenties to mid or late thirties is a big gap and politeness to one’s elders was something taken for granted, even in my unconventional upbringing. But there’d been something else about Dulcie from the start that silenced us and I recognised at last what it was. As I pinned up my hair I said to myself, ‘The sex question’ and laughed to the empty loft. Dulcie had done it quite a lot and didn’t regret it. Even before we knew about the baby it was there in the way she stood and looked, in the pad of her bare feet and the smell of her bed. It had disturbed all of us in our different ways, women and men. Well, since yesterday, I’d paid my entrance fee and joined that sisterhood. Somehow that made it easier to talk to Dulcie, even though it had nothing to do with what I needed to talk about.
I took the note out of yesterday’s skirt and went downstairs, through the arch and across the yard to the kitchen, meeting nobody on the way. Even the hens were dozing in the heat. The porch was full of the usual clutter of tack, with the carriage whip where I’d left it and a pair of the Old Man’s riding boots still there, as if he’d walk out any moment and put them on. The door to the kitchen was half open. Inside a few slow-moving flies circled in a shaft of sunlight and under them Dulcie sat at the kitchen table scraping carrots. That should have been somebody else’s job under our new arrangements but she didn’t seem to mind. She had an enamel bowl of earthy water in front of her, a pile of carrots and a tin colander beside her.
‘Dulcie, may I talk to you?’
She nodded and went on scraping. The blade of her knife was worn to a crescent with years of use and re-sharpening. I drew out a chair and sat facing her.
‘There’s something I want to know. I’m not going to the police with it and it’s done now in any case, but if we don’t know what really happened we’re going to go on wondering for the rest of our lives.’
The knife made a little rasping sound, whittling the dirty brown of the wet carrot into glowing orange. Her big amber-brown eyes were fixed on me, her hands so well accustomed to what they were doing that she didn’t need to look at them.
‘I wish now that I’d never known about it,’ I said, ‘but you can’t unthink things, you have to go on.’
She dropped the scraped carrot into the colander and dunked another one in the bowl. I took the note out of my pocket and smoothed it out on the table.
‘This was meant for you, wasn’t it?’
She read without touching it, head tilted sideways, muddy water drops from the carrot falling on the table, spreading into wood made soft-grained by scrubbing. After a long time she looked up at me, raised and lowered her head.
‘Where d’you find it?’
‘He dropped it climbing in. He wasn’t a burglar, was he?’
Another nod. It was all so much easier than I’d expected that I felt off balance, like pushing on a door that opens too easily.
‘Arthur Mawbray?’
‘Did he tell you?’
‘I’ve never met him, apart from seeing him in the stable yard. It was Arthur Mawbray?’
Another nod. She started rasping the carrot, but slowly now, looking down at her hands.
‘And he’s the baby’s father, isn’t he?’
Her head came up, frowning now. ‘Who says that?’
‘Somebody was writing anonymous notes to the Old Man about it.’
‘You allus get blatherskites. He didn’t believe them.’
‘He wasn’t sure. I think the Old Man tried hard to believe it was his because he wanted it to be, but he knew in his heart it wasn’t.’
‘It made him happy. Is there awt wrong in that? Anyway, nobody can prove or disprove who the father of a baby is. Not all the slape and slippery lawyers in the world can prove that.’ She was beginning to get angry.
‘No, and the Old Man acknowledged the child in his will. Did he tell you he was going to
do that?’
Another nod.
‘And Arthur Mawbray knew that too?’
‘I told him.’
‘And now he’s asking for money from you. Why?’
‘Because he needs it, I suppose.’
‘Did he suggest killing the Old Man before he could change his will?’
‘What?’ The carrot thumped on to the table and her mouth fell open. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘There’s a lot of money involved, thousands of pounds. Perhaps Arthur Mawbray decided that since the Old Man had tried to kill him it was fair enough to return the compliment.’
‘Compliment? I don’t understand a word you’re saying. He never killed anybody. Nobody killed anybody.’
‘The Old Man didn’t do that to himself. He couldn’t have.’
‘He could do anything once he’d set his mind to it. Nearly anything.’
She stared down at the carrot then up at me, as if she couldn’t make sense of either of us any more.
‘You going to talk to the lawyers about this?’
‘No, but on one condition.’
I was surprised at my own brutality. I’d no intention of saying anything to any lawyer but was ready to use the threat of it, desperate that my idea of Arthur Mawbray should become reality.
‘What’s that?’
‘I want to talk to Arthur Mawbray.’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘No, but you know where he’ll be on Saturday, that’s tomorrow. The usual place, he says in his note. He was here last Saturday too, wasn’t he, when the dogs were barking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take me with you when you go to meet him. I promise not to say anything to anybody else until I’ve talked to him.’
She sat with her hands on the table. They were neat pink hands with shiny little fingernails like sea shells, amazingly unroughened by her hard work. I felt touched by them, almost ashamed of myself.
‘All right. Tomorrow night, when it’s getting dark. But he never killed anybody. He’ll tell you himself.’
It was rabbit stew again for dinner, with plenty of carrots. Dulcie behaved just as she always did, apart from not looking at me.
* * *
Not much happened on the Saturday. It was thundery, headachy weather and Imogen, Midge and I spent some of it attending to our clothes, washing blouses and underthings in buckets in the yard with cold water and hard soap, then rigging up our own washing line to dry them. Usually this would have been a splashy, girlish time with gigglings and harmless banter. Now Imogen and I were treating each other with careful politeness and Midge hardly said a word. I noticed her glancing up to the fells now and again and guessed she was thinking about Nathan. When we needed to borrow soap or clothes pegs from the kitchen I let Midge do it. I was in no hurry to face Dulcie again before the rendezvous in the evening. I’d told nobody about that, not even Meredith. I’d been tempted, but I’d made a promise to Dulcie. Besides, he might have turned anxious and protective and that was the last thing I wanted from him. When we met going about the yard or at mealtimes we behaved normally to each other I think. Or perhaps we didn’t. It was like one of those terrible opening scenes in an amateur drama when the producer appeals to the bit-part players, ‘Just behave normally’, so of course they do anything but.
It was a relief when the evening meal was over – cold ham, hot potatoes and cabbage – and everybody went their various ways, Alan and Robin to see to the horses, Imogen and Midge to the loft with armfuls of dried clothes, Meredith and Kit strolling up the drive in the last of the sun. I offered to help Dulcie with the clearing up as an excuse to stay with her in the kitchen when everybody else left. We worked in silence, she swirling plates and cups in a bowl of greyish water, I stacking them on a rickety wooden rack to dry. The light went from the kitchen early because of the walls round the yard so it was dusk by the time we’d finished but we didn’t bother to light the lamps. She dunked the last cup, emptied out the water and dried her hands on the whitish apron she was wearing.
‘Are we ready then?’
I nodded. She took off the apron and arranged it over the back of a chair to dry.
‘Have a look and see if anybody’s around.’
I looked out into the yard and up the drive and came back to report that nobody was about. Dulcie licked her lips and smoothed a hand over her hair. She was nervous, Dulcie of the creamy calm.
‘Better be going, then.’
Outside it was still more light than dark, with some clouds in the west. We went quickly through the arch into the stable yard, across it to the gateway on the far side. It creaked when we opened it and Dulcie caught her breath, but nobody came.
She said, ‘He won’t like me bringing you.’
‘Tell him you had no choice.’
We went side by side down a little track to the paddock at the back of the house where the two cows grazed. They raised their heads and ambled up to Dulcie. She pushed them gently away. We walked on across the paddock, Dulcie looking over her shoulder sometimes. As we got near an unkempt hedge on the far side a dark figure came out from under the trees.
‘I’ll tell him first,’ Dulcie said and broke into a run, stumbling on the cow-trampled earth. I kept striding close behind her, not wanting to give them time to work out a plan of action. I heard her say. ‘There’s somebody with me. She’s one of the people staying. She made me bring her.’
‘Hello Mr Mawbray,’ I said. ‘My name’s Nell Bray. I picked up the note you dropped the other night.’
My voice sounded a lot more confident than I felt. He made a sound something between a snort and a nervous giggle and took a step towards me. Even in the half-light his hair was as yellow as straw. It wasn’t a bad-looking face, a little weak about the chin and the eyes narrow, though that might have been with the effort of getting a good look at the stranger in the dusk. The broad forehead was very like his father’s.
‘Moy name ain’t Mawbray. Oi’m Diggory, Dick Diggory. What be you wanting with me?’ The rustic accent wouldn’t have fooled a baby.
‘If you go on trying to talk like that, you’ll get very tired of it. I know you’re Arthur Mawbray because Dulcie told me. I’d guessed in any case.’
‘Oh.’
The look he gave Dulcie was bewildered rather than reproachful. He was off balance and I had to keep it that way.
‘I told Dulcie I had to speak to you because you’re both in very serious trouble. It’s up to you what you do about it, but people have guessed and you haven’t got much time.’
I said ‘people’ because I wasn’t fool enough to let him know that I was the only one. My idea was that they’d probably run away together and I shouldn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t a carefully worked out ethical position, just revulsion at the idea of Dulcie’s pink hands with their sea-shell nails being strapped behind her one morning in a cold shed after a walk across a prison yard.
‘It was a joke. We didn’t mean any harm.’ He looked about my own age but he sounded like a schoolboy.
‘Joke!’
‘Well, he had tried to kill us, after all. He deserved worrying a bit. Anyway, we wouldn’t have let them hang him or anything. If the police had arrested him Dulcie would have got word to me and I’d have popped up right as ninepence, wouldn’t I, Dulcie?’
‘So all the time he thought he’d killed you, you were hiding?’
‘Yes. When he started letting off that bloody … excuse me, that shotgun in the dark, me and my mates naturally hit the deck. We crawled away and somebody said it would have served the old b … the Old Man right if he really had killed somebody. Well, I knew I’d be in a bit of trouble with my father anyway if it all got out so I thought I’d make myself scarce and my mates put the word round that he’d shot me. We didn’t mean any harm by it.’
‘And you didn’t mean any harm deceiving him about Dulcie and the baby?’
A long silence. He’d been standing his ground up to then and so
unding confident. Now he took a step back into the shadows and his voice went hurt and gruff.
‘Why did you want to tell her about that, Dulcie?’
‘She didn’t need to,’ I said. ‘The gossip’s all round the town. I suppose the idea was once the Old Man was dead and the baby born, you’d share the money.’
‘It’d be the baby’s money, wouldn’t it?’
‘So you knew about it, then?’
‘He told Dulcie what he’d put in his will, and she told me.’
‘Because it was your baby?’
Another silence then, ‘Yes.’
‘But you were quite prepared to let him think it was his?’
Dulcie said, ‘He was that pleased about it. His merry-begot, he called it.’
‘Merry-begot?’
‘That’s what we say round here for the wrong side of the sheets. He was as happy as when one of his mares falls pregnant. And we’d been sleeping in the big bed together and … and cuddling up and he was a lish enough man considering his age so…’
The picture came into my mind of Dulcie and the Old Man in the big four-poster.
‘Then he started getting anonymous letters saying the baby was somebody else’s. Did he discuss them with you?’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘But you could tell he was having doubts. Even I could tell that.’
‘The day with the mare?’
‘Yes. So you and Mr Mawbray decided you had to do something about it before he found out the truth?’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered once he’d acknowledged it,’ Arthur Mawbray said. ‘Once he’d held it in his arms and acknowledged it, it would have been his. That’s the law.’
And he a magistrate’s son. Yet he’d brought out this piece of rural primitivism with what sounded like total conviction.
Dulcie backed him up. ‘Arthur was away anyway. It was just a case of him staying away a few months more until the child was born and the Old Man had got him in his arms and everything would have been all right.’
‘You weren’t far away, were you Mr Mawbray? You were seeing Dulcie regularly.’
‘Not regularly, just sometimes.’
Dead Man Riding Page 23