by Lorna Gray
This, unexpectedly, was that moment Phyllis had tried to invoke before dinner last night. This was the moment he gave me the gift of understanding a very little of his war experiences. I saw him grimace. Then he continued, ‘What I mean to say here is that we’re the same, you and I. Someone always seems to be trying to turn our actions to prove a harder point, whether for glory or for shame. But my actions are my own. And yours …?’
His eyes were on me. This was being said sternly beneath lowered brows. ‘You still seem to think that you’re considered a bystander in this. But to give you an idea of the contribution I think you’ve already been making, I’m going to tell you that Matthew Croft asked a favour of me today while we were peering at rubbish behind the generator at the pump house. He was very civil and left me plenty of room to pretend I hadn’t heard. It was all done very smoothly. He asked me to step into the squire’s shoes and do for Freddy what Father did for Hannis when he enlisted.’
I asked in quiet bewilderment, ‘And will you?’ My question was given automatically because he required it, not because I understood even a shred of what he was saying or how it related to me.
Richard’s attention was drawn past me to the glass in the driver’s side door by a movement at the house beyond me. It was Danny peering through one of the kitchen windows to see whether we were still inside the car. The man lifted his hand in a silent communication and then, satisfied that Richard knew fresh business was waiting for him, turned back to the gloom of the kitchen.
And all the time that this mimed exchange had been passing back and forth across me, Richard had been saying, ‘I understand that Freddy’s set his heart on doing his National Service, on the assumption it is still required a few years from now and the boy persists in refusing to claim a reserved occupation for his work on the various farms hereabouts. And although Matthew Croft and I didn’t get as far as outpourings of emotion or gushing confessions, I think I grasped enough of his thoughts on the matter to judge that he is desperate to keep the boy from blundering into a violent scene. Desperate enough, in fact, to set aside his own judgement of me long enough to gamble on what he thinks he’s seen of yours. I don’t know how you acted to that man and his people during the evening of Bertie’s scene on his garden path – although I can hazard a guess based solely on my own two ridiculously busy days of knowing you – but anyway, today, clearly your opinion holds sway.’
He took a breath. Then he added gravely, ‘So Matthew Croft asked his question, and I told him I would write to a friend of mine in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, for all the good it might do, but that I had a price.’
‘Ah.’
He sat back to settle more easily in his seat once more and made the springs creak as they adjusted. ‘That’s what he said too, but with rather less bewilderment. It’s hard to be surprised when you already think the worst of a man.’
He caught my eye. There was, inexplicably, the faintest of teasing notes there. Then Richard added, ‘I told him that he could have his letter on the condition that he gave a home to that blessed goat.’
Silence.
Then a creak of my own seat as I found my position uncomfortable and moved, only to find discomfort everywhere. Suddenly I knew I was going to cry. After such a morning, it was this news that was going to do it.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, fiercely examining the wadding that still lay in my lap. I fidgeted again and finally gave in and covered my eyes with a hand. And then dropped it again because I wasn’t going to do it. I gave a funny little choking laugh instead. The hand that dropped to my lap was the one he had taken earlier and it flexed involuntarily at the sensitivity of the memory. This was his gift to me; this explanation of what had prompted him to make that one intensely speechless gesture of taking my hand after his time in the pump house. He had been compelled then, just as he was doing now, to show me the part I had played in giving a vital introduction on rather different terms from the one he had been used to.
And for a man who bore the burden of blame in every recent memory, for whom a simple thing like his family name was an unbreakable shackle on his life and career, this little deviation from an old hostility was a wonderful lesson for the man on how he was really perceived. I thought the experience was so rare it was almost painful for him. It could be a liberation for me too. Richard was more confident than I; he didn’t allow other people to set the standard by which he measured himself, regardless of which way their judgement fell. But, in a way, none of that mattered here anyway because no one would dare define his kindness in telling me this now as a mark of weakness. And that meant whatever kindness dwelt in me couldn’t be dismissed as such, either.
It was a very beautiful way of showing me that my actions had a little more significance than I often believed. It addressed, too, my fear that he would wish to control me now.
Richard allowed me a moment to wrestle with myself, then he asked gently, ‘Why does that goat matter to you so much? It’s not as if you have spent every spare second since your arrival idly crooning over the creature’s stable door.’
I lifted my head from the fragments of fluff my fingers were shredding in my lap. I felt my determination build as it began to take on a surer form. It made my heart work in powerful, steady beats. ‘It’s because he belonged to your brother.’ For all the force of my restored sense of purpose, I made the confession in an unsteady jumble. ‘Your brother kept him and named him and gave him a job keeping company with flighty young horses. Now your brother is gone, the house and car he loved are being sold and this creature is the only living legacy of his left and after all the awfulness of what he did, it has seemed to me to be very close to revenge on the man to turn his poor goat over to the butcher. Believe me, I know you wouldn’t do it in that spirit, but all the same, given the way everyone talks about him, it’s as though, piece by piece, the real living John Langton is being expunged from memory. Eventually all that will remain will be the part of him that was a figment of horror. And, whilst I can’t say it’s wrong that it should be that way, since his victims must have respect, I don’t think either you or your father have considered just how damaging it would be for you both if this final piece of destruction is how you end your relationship with John too.’
I thought I’d surprised him. Stunned him, really. The amusement switched off like a light. I dropped my gaze to the mess in my lap again. After that brief respite, it wasn’t so easy to be happy. There was too much at risk here, even when fear was firmly held in check.
After a brief silence, I heard him draw a little breath. He said carefully, ‘In so far as my memories of John go, my most recent ones are that my hospitalisation last year made things difficult for him. He had many ferocious rows with our father about the cost of it all and I believe it coincided with his first real steps along the path of devastation. And yet, in the midst of all that, John paid many sly visits to London to do nothing more than sit for a day in the stark tedium of a hospital room with a sibling who wanted to talk about nothing of any importance at all. I don’t hate him, Emily, or wish to remove him from my memory. I miss him.’
When finally I dared to look, I found that I was sitting beside a man who was calm, relaxed and utterly serious. I let out a breath like a sigh. ‘Oh Richard,’ I said more steadily than I’d felt for some time. ‘How do we defeat this?’
I meant, I think, how do we defeat these people without losing ourselves in the process?
Richard extended his left hand across his body to accept some of the matter I was tidying from my lap. I shouldn’t have shredded it. White fibres were drifting everywhere. He closed his hand over the mass as I passed him the last of it, so that my fingers briefly covered the loose fist he’d made. His hand was warm and steady and it was such an ordinary, comforting gesture. If I hadn’t known, I would never have thought that there was an all-consuming anger burning beneath.
There was no sign of it in his reply when he said, ‘First you’re going to do what you’ve always done – yo
u’re going to surprise me with that beautifully unshakeable courage of yours and then you’re going to help me unpick whatever it is that we’ve missed. It’s just as you say; just because these people are determined to work the dark corners to get their way, why on earth should they get to dictate that we have to share the shadows with them? So, with that in mind, we’re going to begin by breaking the news to Father that his dinner will have to be cancelled. Then I’m going to beg you to keep up his morale by making him an early lunch.’ He glanced at his watch and his eyebrows lifted. ‘Very well, a late lunch, while I go over the house with the police to ensure we’ve secured every corner, every window and every possible entrance and exit that doesn’t have a policeman next to it. And then you and I … well, what do you think we should do?’
‘I imagine you’re going to ask me to help you find whatever it was that Abbey was doing in the Manor yesterday before he stole the Webley.’
‘Precisely.’ The agreement was accompanied by a flicker of amusement. Perhaps it was the release from surprise, because I thought I really had surprised him. I believe he had truly been bracing himself, all this time, for recrimination just as soon I had the room to understand what he had brought me to. And not because he’d meant to inflict his authority upon me. But because, in this instance, he’d thought the fear of the Abbeys would be enough to leave me clinging to him for shelter. He’d thought they would override every other idea I had of freedom that had only lately begun to find hope after the war.
It was a relief for both of us when he added, ‘And you’ll generally keep an eye on my father for me, won’t you?’
For the first time I smiled. I remarked dryly, ‘I believe that is a technique for giving the less-experienced members of your party a sense of purpose. You’ll be asking the same thing of him about me, won’t you?’
He grinned. I felt again then the full, humbling force of his care for me. And, more doubtingly, the hard resolve of a man used to battle. Suddenly, I was very conscious of what he had said; we’d only known each other for two short days, and it had been a brief enough time that my determination had still been unexpected and only served to unwittingly reaffirm the value of who I really was for him. But, with that in mind, and all that I, in my turn, thought he was, I couldn’t shake the fiercely chilling suspicion that while he’d been carefully supporting whichever choice I made, he somehow hadn’t quite filled the ambiguous void of just how far he was still preparing to act himself.
For the moment, though, his determination to shield me was dedicated to letting me see that he really did need me here. I sensed, with the sort of emerging confidence that hurt, that my fierce commitment to bearing equal responsibility was making him stronger, purely from the novelty of not being required to meet this particular battle alone.
‘Absolutely I will,’ he said decisively, with a fresh glance for the window beside me, where Danny was hovering again. ‘We’re going to do everything in a nice orderly fashion, and then we’re going to put a stop to this nonsense about enslaving me or bringing you face to face with my father’s gun. And we’re going to do it all with full benefit of good sense, law and policemen.’
Now the temper showed. Put like that, though, it all sounded perfectly calm and manageable. But then we entered the kitchen and found Phyllis sitting at the table with the dog on a string and looking as pale and magnificent as ever. The detective was there and he was able to tell us that they hadn’t neatly apprehended Abbey and they hadn’t found Mrs Abbey either, because her house was devoid of people and evidence. He also told us that the call was out in Gloucester to find our true arsonist Duckett. And then, in the wake of all those empty reports, we learned just how little control any of us had.
Chapter 27
It began with the discovery that while our time in the car outside the kitchen door had been comparatively peaceful, the rest of the house had been filling with policemen. The main drive beyond the library window was strewn with four or so liveried police cars because Detective Fleece had enlisted a number of additional hands from the county force. They absorbed Richard into their ranks just as soon as we stepped in through the door. I could hear them clattering about upstairs as I took my customary place at the kitchen counter.
Only two people seemed oblivious to the chaos. Phyllis and Danny were in the same room, at last, and Phyllis had the high colour that had alarmed me last night. After all her determination to snatch a chance to talk to Danny, she didn’t seem to be particularly keen to take advantage of the opportunity now. I suppose it didn’t suit her to play the helpless damsel any more than it did me, and that was, after all, presumably why Danny had abandoned Richard to the encounter with Matthew Croft. He’d come back to stand guard until Richard’s return and it was the sort of chivalry that went hand in hand with picking tearful invalids up from their bicycle accidents. It also, apparently, went hand in hand with showing no interest in wretched curtains and leaving an intelligent woman trapped in an odd purgatory, where neither marriage nor spinsterhood seemed to be remotely empowering.
That being said, it wasn’t exactly his fault that he’d helped her after her accident because he was hardly the sort of man to have driven blindly by, and it wasn’t his fault either that his presence here now had come at a time when she was painfully aware of the handicap of her well-strapped ankle and her wrist when she would have preferred towering elegance. Her mouth had set into a determined line as she looked at anything but him.
Danny was leaning in to rest his forearms on the tabletop beside her. He looked tanned and vigorous in his well-worn working clothes, like a capable man determined to say his piece, but also braced for the moment that someone – not Phyllis – barked out his name and dismissed him to his tractor.
He was saying in a persuasive undertone, ‘What does it matter if we talk here or in another room. Better to get this over with, wouldn’t you say?’
I was sorting through the battered contents of my shopping, but I saw Phyllis move in her seat. That stung, I think. There was an emphasis on the part that said it was over.
‘Fine,’ she snapped in a whisper. ‘I really didn’t want to do this with all the local constabulary listening in and my cousin over there looking like a cross between a cook and an avenging warrior after a bad scrap, but have it your way. Please explain.’
‘Which part?’
I thought that Danny was conscious of the way that Phyllis didn’t seem remotely out of place in the grandeur of this Manor kitchen – she would have mixed in some pretty cultivated circles after her studies and, besides, in the days of her early life here her father the steward had been ranked in this place as second only to the squire. But personally, at this moment, above any other, I was suddenly able to see why the Colonel should have been quite so defensive about rumours of this man’s parentage. And why, in defiance of the rumours, the Colonel persisted in encouraging Danny’s skills and ambition, even to the point of supporting his purchase of Mrs Abbey’s matrimonial home.
The same thought must have been in my cousin’s mind. She hissed, ‘That house!’ It was raw and angry and very lonely. ‘You let me think last week that you didn’t want to come and live in my cottage and I assumed it was because you didn’t want to stay here. Only now I know that you fixed yourself in this area months ago when you bought your own house in Gloucester. You kept it from me while you went on pretending that you had to live in that tiny little attic above your parents’ bedroom and I know now that all along it wasn’t because you were waiting to build a new life. You’d already got one and the simple truth was that you were just waiting for the right moment to explain that you didn’t want to share it with me.’
‘Nonsense,’ Danny retorted. ‘Don’t reduce the ultimatum you gave me last week to an argument about that house. You gave me my marching orders long before you knew about it.’
‘But the point is you knew about it—’
The curt manner with which Danny spoke over her made me think sharply of the concealmen
t that had stalked my understanding of his relationship with Mrs Abbey. He demanded, ‘Why have you suddenly decided that now is the moment to talk to me? I tried to give my side of things last week and you stopped your ears and told me in very incoherent terms to leave you alone for good. So what’s changed?’
As I say, I had thought he was angry because she was tackling him about the secret of the house. I knew now my suspicions had been a mistake; I knew there was no affair to be discovered there. And that meant that if it wasn’t concealment that was driving his behaviour now, I thought it must be self-defence.
I saw it suddenly. She had the power to hurt him and she didn’t even know.
She was saying briskly, ‘Nothing’s changed at all.’
‘Yes it has. You stole my dog and you haven’t done anything so decisive in months.’
‘I keep saying what it is and you’re just not listening. That house—’
‘— is just the perfect excuse for you. For ages now you’ve been entirely content to keep me at a nice, safe, friendly distance; ever since you moved into that cottage, in fact. And I think, today, the difference is that you’re here in the Manor instead of your cottage, and instead of being deaf to everything I say you’ve decided to seize upon this business about the house and you’re going to use it to slide unpleasantly into an end to our little affair.’
‘Am I?’ Phyllis’s eyebrows arched. ‘I suppose I might if it wasn’t the case that I don’t actually need to end anything at all, do I? Because it’s already over. You made that clear yourself last week when I mentioned curtains and you started going on about stagnation and retirement and your thoughts on moving away. So, if the lie about the house is irrelevant and I’m too stuffy and you’re still absolutely dead-set on plying your trade elsewhere, why on earth should it matter to you if I’m here now and not at home?’