A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  It was some days before I realised that this was not the general opinion. I think I got the message from the pursed lips of Aunt Jane, reinforced by the raised eyebrows of Cousin Anselm, on a visit with his two sons while his wife was in labour. Both reactions told me there was something odd, off-key, wrong about the proposed marriage.

  It was, of course, a matter of class. Miss Roxby was in an ambiguous position, somewhere between servant and family, but the official line was that she was a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, and certainly not a servant. Robert had had the minimum education that the state provided, was the son of one of those men who had moved the earth to form the Blakemere estate, and thus was what we now confidently call working class.

  ‘What will they find to talk about?’ asked Aunt Jane.

  Ignorant as I was, I knew enough to go away and have a good giggle.

  It was some time before I, too, began to think there was something odd about the marriage, and that it was not a matter of class. Miss Roxby was to start a school in Wentwood, and, after prolonged and anguished suing on my part, it was agreed that I would attend it, both for ordinary classes, and to receive special tuition from a graduate (the word was spoken with bated breath) in mathematics, to fit me for the Cambridge Tripos. It was wonderfully exciting for me, the thought of mixing for the first time with real people (by which I meant not family and not hangers-on).

  I realise now that my attendance was also symbolic: it showed potential parents that the project, and therefore the marriage, were approved of (after mature consideration) by the great, the rich, the powerful Fearing family.

  ‘Isn’t it grand?’ I said to Edith, when I first saw Bankside School, two weeks before the September opening.

  ‘It has to be quite big,’ said my former governess. ‘We aim to take quite a lot of boarders.’

  It was two substantial houses, with a newly constructed passage between them. The main bedrooms in the second house were large enough to form two substantial dormitories. The classrooms were on the ground floors of both houses, and the living quarters for Edith and Robert were in the upstairs part of the first house. The grounds were extensive, and a tennis court had been constructed. Everything was of the first quality, and it was really most attractive for a school, suggesting that Edith had been planning such an establishment, or perhaps just dreaming of it, for many years.

  How could they afford this?

  The question occurred to me after my first two weeks of school, when I had been well taught, well protected, and well fed at my midday meal. I was wandering around on my own – I enjoyed the unaccustomed experience of mixing with other girls, but I needed solitude now and then because I had so often been used to it. I was waiting for the carriage to come and fetch me back to Blakemere. It was not until the next year, my last, that I was allowed to catch the train. I was in the pleasant and well-catered-for grounds at the back of the two houses, gazing pensively up at the two stone structures, marvelling at the extent of the enterprise.

  Robert could have saved little from his wages – enough, perhaps, to give him some little pre-eminence in a rural environment, but not enough to contribute anything meaningful to a set-up such as Bankside School. Miss Roxby was well paid by governess standards, a hundred pounds a year, but such free time as she did not spend with her surviving sister she used to go up to London, to plays, concerts, and opera. I did not get the idea that she was a great saver, and even if she were – this?

  I talked to Robert when I had got my ideas clearer in my head. Robert was Bankside School’s man – functions vague but various. He could be general handyman when there was call for one, but at any time when parents might call he was well dressed, imposing, and a deferential but confidence-building front. He was the girls’ and teachers’ escort when outside the school. He could also impose order. Many girls fell in love with him, but all hopelessly. Few troublemakers ever got the better of him.

  ‘Is the school going well, Robert?’ I asked him, as he stood surveying the girls in the grounds during a recreation period.

  ‘Quite nicely, thank you, Miss Sarah,’ he replied complacently. ‘Two new girls starting next week. Parents not happy with the school they’re attending at the moment. They’d heard good things about Bankside.’

  ‘That must be very gratifying.’

  ‘Oh, it is, Miss Sarah. Mrs Beale is very happy about the way things are going.’

  ‘How lucky you were,’ I said, gushing a little, ‘to be able to set up a wonderful place like this when you got married.’

  ‘Ah, well, you see, Miss Sarah, Edith and I were a lot later than most in getting wed.’

  I said nothing, and he seemed to find the pause awkward. ‘And I don’t mind saying that your family were very helpful, in view of our long service at Blakemere.’

  ‘That was very generous of them.’

  ‘A loan, o’ course, but on good terms, and very welcome and timely.’

  His manner had less than its usual confidence. I meditated on this, and on his words, during the carriage ride home that day. It seemed to me that Robert would have let me think that, due to their unusually mature years at marriage, he and Edith had acquired the property and equipped it as a school out of their savings if I had not left that pause. It had then occurred to him that he was talking to a young lady who intended to go to Cambridge to study mathematics, and possibly a future head of Fearing’s Bank to boot. He then amended his account to praise my family’s generosity and then – sensing a degree of scepticism – had amended this once again to describe it as a loan. Interesting.

  I considered this whole account, wondering whether my family was really generous to its retainers. Only so-so, I thought, though they were paid well, a fact that was resented by other employers of domestic labour in the vicinity. I wondered, too, whether Miss Roxby’s ten-year service could really be described as ‘long’, and whether Robert’s service, starting low-down and ending as a mere under-footman, was so very special.

  But most of all I meditated my waking nightmare of the time of Uncle Frank’s disappearance, and that view from above of a shape that I thought was Robert’s, holding the lantern beside the stretcher that bore a long shape covered by a dark rug.

  I found I could not discuss this with Edith: we shared our thoughts on matters of moment, we were unrestrained in each other’s company, we liked each other – yet we were not intimate. And even if we were, could I have approached a subject that might have amounted to an accusation of blackmail: that they had used Robert’s involvement in the disposal of Uncle Frank’s body to screw money out of my family? It was out of the question.

  I meditated, as I say, long and hard. I decided that the only person to whom I might broach such a topic – and then only cautiously – was Beatrice. I waited two days or so, trying to get the situation right in my mind, then went to see her and Richard on a fine Saturday in early October. We had decided to leave Richard with Bea another year, then bring him back to Blakemere. Watching him playing with the South children (another was on the way, as usual) made me sure we had come to the right decision. However, Beatrice sounded a note of caution.

  ‘It may not be for the best for him to stay here much longer,’ she said.

  I looked at her in surprise: she did not often change her mind.

  ‘Tom is getting cussed.’

  ‘Cussed?’

  ‘Bad tempered. Doesn’t like children around his feet the whole time.’

  ‘Well, he’s got a funny way of showing it, Bea.’ I said, nodding toward her belly. We both giggled. ‘Anyway, Blakemere is full of cussed people.’

  ‘But he can be kept away from them. Never need see them. Here he gets upset by the bad atmosphere.’ My heart lifted with love as I looked toward his puffy, slow-eyed face, and saw the consideration of Bea’s eldest as he adapted his play to suit the boy. ‘Mind you, he soon forgets it when Tom’s out of the way,’ Bea went on. ‘And anyway, Blakemere’s a much happier place now, isn’t it?’
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br />   ‘I suppose so,’ I considered, almost surprised. ‘Yes, something has made a difference, and I suppose it must be Papa, and Mother leaving, and all the changes. But I did want him to come back during the summer holidays, when I have all my time to give him.’

  ‘But you’ll have another year’s school after that, and then Cambridge. You’ll need someone there to look after him and love him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, think on’t. Have you considered that Bertha?’

  We chewed over this for some time. Typically for Bea it was an instinctive but a brilliant suggestion, as time proved. Bertha looked after Richard literally as if he was her own. We had ranged in our conversation over that and related matters when finally I said, ‘You should see Edith’s new school, Bea. She and Robert have really done themselves proud. Two large houses with lots of grounds, and “beautifully appointed”, as the advertisements say.’

  Bea nodded, unsuspecting.

  ‘That’s nice. I thought you might find a school pokey, after what you’ve been used to.’

  ‘Beautiful pokiness!’ I laughed. I added prophetically: ‘If I ever own Blakemere, I’m going to live in the coach house or the gatehouse. Then I’ll let that awful barn of a place to … to …’ But my imagination failed me.

  ‘The King of Siam and all his wives,’ suggested Bea. We both laughed.

  ‘It is difficult to think who’d want it,’ I conceded. ‘But Bea, how would Edith and Robert have found the money to start a splendid spic-and-span new school like Bankside?’

  Her manner seemed to take on a degree of caginess.

  ‘How would I know? Maybe she came into some money.’

  ‘She doesn’t have rich relatives. Anyway, she would have told me. We talk about things like that … Robert says the money came from my family.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘That sort of generosity doesn’t sound like them.’

  ‘The Fearings are not “them”, they’re “us” to you, Miss Sarah. And you won’t hear many below stairs complaining about them.’

  ‘I know that. But if they – we – handed out a big sum like that must have been to anyone we’d employed, it would generally be a quid pro quo.’

  ‘Don’t be throwing those foreign tongues at me, Miss Sarah.’ It was a common complaint with Bea, but it sounded like a dodging tactic.

  ‘I mean, we don’t generally give anything for nothing.’

  ‘Not many people do.’

  ‘Maybe not. And I suppose we wouldn’t be bankers if we did … What do they say in the servants’ hall happened on the night Uncle Frank went away?’

  ‘What do you bring that up for?’

  ‘I want to know. You know how I loved Uncle Frank.’

  She looked down at her lap, or her rounded belly.

  ‘They say there was some kind of … of violence, like … and Mr Frank had to leave double quick.’

  ‘I see. What kind of violence?’

  ‘Nobody knows. But the family took it so serious they wouldn’t have nothing more to do with him, not ever. Like maybe he hit his wife.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said sceptically. ‘I admire them for taking it so seriously if it was that. I’ve never heard of any trouble from the Coverdales about it.’

  ‘Happen it was all hushed up. But I’ll tell you what else they say.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They say it’s something better not talked about, better not looked into. There’s something of that sort in all families, as you’d know if you were a bit older and a bit more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. Let sleeping dogs lie – homely advice, but good.’

  I think in the long run her homely advice influenced me. I was beginning not to forget Uncle Frank, but to get over his loss. I was starting to think about going up to Cambridge, and about what I was to do after that. And I suppose this accounts for the fact that my pursuit of the truth of Uncle Frank’s death was distinctly desultory and unsuccessful, even when I was head of the Fearings and mistress of Blakemere. I had my own life to lead, and it was a life that involved many hard decisions.

  Alas, I missed entirely Bea’s oblique allusion to herself in what she said, and to her own marriage. Not that I could have done anything about that when Bea put up with it so uncomplainingly for the sake of the children. I made one more attempt at that time – my seventeenth year – to find out the truth about That Night. It was in the entrance hall at Bankside School, and I had just arrived from Blakemere. By now Robert and I were firm friends, and I often gave him little snippets of news from his old home, about the people there.

  ‘Papa was very thoughtful at breakfast today,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, dear, Miss Sarah. Not trouble at the Bank, I hope.’

  ‘No, it couldn’t be. Papa was there yesterday. He got a letter with a foreign stamp on it. I think it must have been from Uncle Frank.’

  Robert jumped a fraction, then with an effort resumed his calm passivity.

  ‘I didn’t know your uncle still kept in touch with his family.’

  ‘Nor did I. I didn’t like to ask Papa about it. Is it true Uncle Frank went to Australia, Robert?’

  ‘Of course it is, Miss Sarah. He was unhappy in his marriage and he went to Australia. You were told about that, I’m sure. Why do you ask me? I was just a servant at Blakemere.’

  ‘Servants often know more than family – especially young people like me.’

  ‘Well, I only know what I was told. Your uncle is in Australia. It’s a long, long way away, Miss Sarah. I shouldn’t bank on him ever coming back if I were you.’

  That was all I got out of him. Robert was always splendidly impassive. If those last words were a coded message, it was one he could easily deny: I was jumping to conclusions like any silly girl was apt to. It was very seldom, in all the years I knew him, those years of my friendship with Edith and him, that I got anything of substance out of him.

  I thought about these things on the way home from visiting poor Edith. How lucky Robert was, to have died first, though the younger. And how Edith would have hated being in her present condition, if she could be conscious of it. Would we in this country, I wondered, ever legalise euthanasia?

  At the gatehouse there were boxes from London. I was in for a hard, boring evening. There was also a letter from cousin Digby Fearing at the Bank: long and dry about banking matters, with some personal details at the end. He has a dull, loving wife and two children, of whom the boy is promising to be a high-flyer in the Conservative Party (‘I shouldn’t say this to you, but …’). To blow the cobwebs away before putting a meal together and then getting down to work I decided to take the dogs for their walk – indeed, my relationship with them is such that I had no choice: humans I can command, and have done so from a quite early age; dogs I obey.

  I had nearly used up my petrol ration, so we went the familiar way up to the house. That monstrous, sprawling bulk with all its innumerable windows securely boarded up is an almost frightening sight – if one notices. I hardly do. Blakemere, in one state or another, has always been there in my life. To the dogs it just seems something to go around – a monstrous obstacle between smells and more smells. Lizzie, the old dog, has forgotten she ever lived there, and is infinitely happier in the smaller, cosier, warmer gatehouse. Ernie, the younger but fatter dog, has never been inside.

  Meditating on this blind hulk in the midst of a vibrant landscape rich in wildlife, thrilling for the dogs, I realise that Blakemere is now dead. By the locals it is not forgotten, but it is discounted: it is no longer of any moment. It is as dead as Uncle Frank, who someone, somehow, killed in the red sitting room and buried in the little wood which I could see in the distance, basking in the late sunlight over on the horizon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  False Start

  To go up to Cambridge in 1898 was to enter an institution where women were accepted but unwanted. They themselves were so aware of this, so desperate to be wanted and valued, that the college
principals and academics fenced girls in with so many rules and prohibitions that they were hard put to find a way off the rails even when they had a mind to it.

  Nevertheless, for me it was liberation.

  It was no more family, no more Blakemere. But it was more positive than that as well: it was friends who were my intellectual equals, it was teachers who were penetrating thinkers (some – and the ones who were not, I avoided), it was sitting in libraries and it was going shopping, it was attending exciting new plays at theatres, it was singing in the college choir, it was circumventing regulations and, just occasionally, talking to a man about men’s matters without his displaying condescension or surprise.

  When the end of my first term approached I sent a note to Mrs Merton, the Blakemere housekeeper, telling her when I would be arriving back. When the end of my second term came near, as an experiment, I wrote a note to my father, ending it ‘Your loving daughter Sarah.’ Somewhat to my surprise I received a reply. It was a hand-tinted postcard of one of the stars of the Doyly Carte Opera, typewritten on the back, doubtless by one of the Bank’s secretaries – a new breed of employee, representing a new if subservient role for women. The note read:

  Will be delighted to see you again. Place not the same without you. Would invite eminent mathematicians for weekend if knew any. You will have to make do with bankers and politicians.

  Your loving father

  Claud Fearing

  The postcard, which my father seemed to have written as if he was composing a telegram, was enclosed in a conventional bank envelope. As the picture represented the star dancing a cachucha, fandango, or bolero with lots of frilly skirts it would otherwise have caused scandal at Newnham. My papa obviously understood these things better than I would have given him credit for. I replied: