by Nicola Slade
Copyright © 2018 by Nicola Slade
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Editor: Jeff Gardiner
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.
First Red Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018
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This book is for the men and boys in my family –
Morley, Duncan, Jason, Adam, Austin,
Joe, Jim, Noah, Jack & Kurt –
in gratitude that they have never had to go to war.
Acknowledgements
‘The Convalescent Corpse’ is a work of fiction and the characters and events in it are not based on real people or real happenings.
Olivia Barnes has been part of the Fyttleton sisters’ struggle to cope with poverty, rationing, and the occasional corpse right from the beginning. I couldn’t have done it without her.
Thanks too, go to Sheryl Burke for her continued enthusiasm and to Ruth Allen, Caroline O’Sullivan, Annabel Smyth and Linda Gruchy for their support, and to Liz Filleul for her helpful suggestions. More thanks to everyone who recommended books, who read the manuscript in the early stages, and generally held my hand.
About the Author
Nicola Slade lives near Winchester in Hampshire. While her three children were growing up she wrote short stories for children and for women’s magazines before writing novels. Her first novel, Scuba Dancing, a romantic comedy, was published in 2005 and she now writes two traditional mystery series: Charlotte Richmond Investigates set in Victorian England and featuring a young Victorian widow. Her contemporary mystery series features Harriet Quigley, a retired headmistress and her cousin and sidekick, Canon Sam Hathaway.
Nicola enjoys painting, travelling, and anything historical – and she has been a Brown Owl and an antiques dealer!
Follow Nicola at http://www.nicolaslade.com!
The Convalescent Corpse
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Family at Sandringham Lodge
Alix The eldest, whose godmother proved disappointing
Christabel The sensible one who had the Brilliant Idea
Adelaide The youngest, who found a body and didn’t dissect it
Mrs Margaret Fyttleton Mother: novelist & armchair suffragette
Lady Elspeth Gillespie Granny: failed society belle and expert poacher
The Convalescent Officers & Staff at Groom Hall Hospital
Dr Pemberton Impressed by a title but will his teeth fall out?
Matron Ruddock A starched apron and a starched mind
Captain John Halliday Mute and bewildered
Lt Stanley Trevelyan Human wreckage
Major Reginald Larking Teeth like a horse, brays like a donkey
Captain Henry Makepeace A hopeful traveller
The Paying Guests at Balmoral Lodge
Mrs Beatrice Mortimer A difficult guest
Miss Judith Evershed A quiet guest
Mrs Evelyn Peebles A guest with a hearty appetite
Miss Pamela Peebles A guest with a mission
A Person from Porlock Or Pittsburg. Or Powkeepsie. Somewhere foreign, anyway
Assorted visitors; dead male relatives (some of them quite respectable); wounded officers; nurses; a large, annoying dog; some hens (seriously annoyed by the large dog); and an increasing tide of cats and kittens.
Chapter One
Spring 1918 Ramalley, Hampshire
‘We were all coping splendidly until my elder sister Alix decided to become a nun…’
I looked at what I’d written and sighed because there is nothing splendid about the way my family lurches from one crisis to another. As always, I began my diary with high hopes on New Year’s Day, intending to produce noble, uplifting sentiments to impress future generations. Not like Pepys’s diary, which, according to my former headmistress, is not at all respectable, or even Queen Victoria’s (indisputably respectable), but a famous diary in its own right. Once again real life interfered and for the third year in a row I had abandoned my journal by the second week of January. However, so many things have happened – although not particularly noble or uplifting – that I’ve started writing it again, beginning in February.
Between last November and the end of March, five important things occurred. The first, and by far the worst, was the thing that almost broke us, the thing we can still scarcely bear to talk about, so I’ll say it quickly. Early in November we received a telegram announcing that my brother Bertie had been posted Missing Believed Killed on the first of the month, his nineteenth birthday. No trace of him has ever been found.
The second thing that happened, about ten days before Christmas, was that our recently deceased next-door neighbour turned out not to have owned his house at all. In fact it actually belonged to Mother, Papa having bought it – along with our own house – with the proceeds of a win on the Derby in 1908. (The winning horse was ‘Signorinetta’ which means Little Miss. We like to believe he chose it because the name reminded him of his three daughters but with Papa it was never safe to make assumptions.)
We did know the house was in Mother’s name and we also knew about the win on the Derby, but not that Papa had bought the adjoining house too. No doubt fearing the weight of disapproval from his female relatives, he had never got round to mentioning that he’d also put the other house in Mother’s name. Papa was lost in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, so it was quite a shock to us all when the solicitor arrived to explain the situation.
The third thing that happened, a week or so into the New Year, was that my elder sister Alix announced that she intended to become a nun. This was because she had diligently attended every party she could cajole her way into in the town, but still failed to attract a man willing to become the husband she so desperately wanted. The nun idea was speedily cast aside and instead she decided to volunteer as a nursing assistant at the convalescent home for officers at Groom Hall, the gloomy hunting lodge next door to us. Her reasoning was that a wounded officer, being unable to escape her attentions, might well be a good marital prospect provided his injuries were neither unsightly nor injurious to the married state.
Number Four in the catalogue of life-changing events came a few weeks into Alix’s time up at the Hall, when a moment of inspiration led to my Brilliant Idea.
Oh yes, there was a fifth thing, but that came not long afterwards. Somebody died and it wasn’t from natural causes or a from a war injury. It was murder.
And that wasn’t all…
February 1918
I’ve gone back to writing my diary so I’d better explain about my Brilliant Idea, which was several weeks before the murder.
I was in the larder wondering whether I could possibly stretch the housekeeping money to concoct a meal for five of us out of potatoes, some fat bacon and the solitary egg that was all the hens had felt equal to laying that morning. Of course they might have sneaked off to lay in new hiding places because they are experts in the art of concealment but I had spent fifteen minutes scuttling round the garden until the relentless downpour defeated me, so I shouted at them. ‘This isn’t good enough, you horrid fowls. Don’t you know there’s a war on and a food shortage and rationing too?’
I
don’t think they were impressed and I suspect they know perfectly well that we’d (probably) never be able to eat one of them unless it died of old age, though I expect we would harden our hearts if Bobs the Dog ever managed to catch and kill one. Which he won’t because they run rings round him; and always assuming we could snatch it away from him before he ate it. There were only four hens left after a visit from the fox and I dreaded the day they stopped laying. I wasn’t entirely sure Granny would agree to keep them as pets.
Our oldest and fattest cat, Boadicea, was also in the larder where she was keeping an eye on a knothole in the skirting-board.
‘If you catch a mouse, Bodie,’ I told her, ‘I might have to confiscate it for our dinner.’
Anyway, as I stretched an arm towards the back of the cold marble slab in the larder in search of lurking treasure, I found a spilled bag of lentils and a piece of forgotten cheese that the mice had probably rejected. There were some candles too and I wondered briefly if anyone would notice if I grated them into a vegetable shepherd’s pie to bulk it out. I rejected the idea in case it poisoned us, which it might. I have a suspicion that candles aren’t made of real beeswax these days or even tallow.
As Addy recently said, plaintively, ‘We’ve always had feast or famine, with Papa’s goings-on, but there’s been an awful lot more famine lately.’
That’s an exaggeration so please don’t think we’re starving. We have enough to live on – just – but it takes a lot of juggling to make the money go round and the threat of rising prices is always with us. However, compared to many, we are comfortable and we know it. We do have enough to eat; for example, there was the unappetising slab of beef for tomorrow’s dinner that I’d bought that morning from the apologetic butcher. We had both stared at the slight rainbow sheen on its greyish surface and shrugged in unison. I had also, tactfully, refrained from asking which part of the cow (if any) had provided the joint.
The problem is that we all hanker for something more filling and much tastier than our very plain daily bread. I was trying not to drool over the memory of a large joint of beef roasted in dripping with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings, when my sister Alix banged the back door shut so vigorously that the house shook. I could hear her stamping about in the scullery and shaking her wet mackintosh over the sink out there, before hanging it up. Then silence.
‘You’re home early,’ I said, looking at the clock as I poked my head round the larder door to see her staring into space. ‘It’s not half-past four yet. What’s the matter? Talked them all to death or have the officers formed a league to resist your fortune-hunting?’
‘Very amusing,’ she snarled as she dropped a shopping bag containing several pounds of sodden vegetables on to the draining board. Out of her pocket she took a piece of cheese wrapped in greaseproof paper; then she sat down at the big scrubbed table and burst into tears.
I bit my lip and felt tears welling up in my own eyes as I took off my apron and emerged from the larder to put my arms round her. It’s months now but we still, all of us, have these moments ever since Bertie… Oh well, better not think about it, there’s no point in dwelling on misery. As a general rule we don’t go in much for crying and besides, Alix is usually annoyingly cheerful, so she really had me worried now.
She had been helping out at Groom Hall for about a month. It lies next door to us, if next door is the right term for a grandiose hunting lodge, separated from our own more modest semi-detached villa, by parkland and a drive nearly a mile long. That’s if you go by road and the main entrance, but in fact we’re much closer because there’s a short cut from our back gate to the Hall’s kitchen garden.
Groom Hall was built fifty years ago in the Scottish baronial style of grim granite walls and a frowning roof of dark purplish slate. In an attempt to copy Balmoral, the Hall has a round tower which means the drawing-room and the master bedroom above it, have inconvenient circular bay windows. Only its first owner, the old Lord Greysdale who built it, admired the monstrosity and even he abandoned plans for any further towers. After his death the rest of his family never came near the place, and who can blame them? It is quite unlike the red-brick-and-flint buildings of Ramalley, our little market town in the south of England, halfway between Winchester and Southampton. The Hall served briefly as a hospital for the newly wounded, though truth be told it was always too small and inconvenient for that, so its role has lately changed to that of a convalescent home.
Alix is always cheerful, an attribute that serves her well in her morning job as companion to a bad-tempered old lady, and she is equally popular with the officers in the afternoons. She has high hopes of persuading one of them (as yet unselected) that his future survival depends on having her always at his side.
‘Meanwhile,’ she says, ‘I spend my afternoons in cutting bread and butter, peeling vegetables, reading aloud to the blind officers and sorting out the boxes of books sent in by well-wishers. And wondering whether every new arrival might turn out to be Mr Darcy.’
Mother, a severely plain woman herself, tends to undervalue Alix, dismissing her as “a pretty flibbertigibbet, with the limited intellectual capacity of a hat pin”. This wounding criticism is based on Alix having an interest in clothes and parties and wanting to have some fun, rather than learning Latin and Greek. Mother mistakenly believes that Addy and I exist on a higher plane because we do enjoy ancient history. Addy also laps up higher mathematics and anatomical theory – and practice too, if only she could persuade someone to let her near a knife and a corpse. I also like clothes and, despite being shy, I should probably like parties if I were ever invited to one.
Addy regards clothes as a necessary evil, coverings for warmth and decency, and as for parties – like me she’s hardly ever been to any. My theory is that Mother thinks that way because she secretly envies Alix’s prettiness and cheerful nature, and that she prefers Addy and me because we’re not delicate and dainty. Happily for us we’re not plain like Mother because we resemble Papa, who was tall and lean and good-looking.
“Florid and going to seed” was Granny’s characteristically terse description of Papa’s looks and that was true the last time we saw him though, as in earlier times he was still built like a whippet. “Ready to make a dash for it” as Alix once said, unusually sourly for her. As to looks, Addy and I wouldn’t frighten the horses, but Granny says, “Praise to the face is open disgrace” so we make little of it.
Mother takes after Grandpapa who died last summer. The plainest of men, he was a brilliant former Fellow of New College, Oxford but Alix is like Granny, slender and fair-haired. Although invariably bright and chirpy and a chatterbox, Alix also has a kind and sensitive heart and is better suited to keeping up morale than nursing at the Front, constantly confronted with dreadful injuries.
Despair is still present at Groom Hall and pain too, because leaving hospital is only the beginning for most of them. It takes its toll on Alix. For her first fortnight as a volunteer she came home in tears every day, but she has gradually become accustomed, though never inured.
Today’s tears were unexpected so I gave her an extra warm hug.
‘Thank you, Christy,’ she snuffled, pulling out a handkerchief and blowing her nose loudly. ‘It’s been an awful day. Old Mrs Redfern was in a bad mood this morning and I spent all my time at the Hall in the kitchen, chopping dozens of onions for tonight’s stew. I cried over that for hours and then something horrid happened. Major Maxwell’s wife was supposed to visit today but instead, a telegram arrived to say she died yesterday giving birth to a stillborn six-months child. It’s so-oo sad. If she’d lived somewhere locally he could at least have seen her before she…’
It was while I was patting her back that I had my brainwave. ‘Listen, Alix,’ I began, excitedly. ‘They say there are no rooms to let in Ramalley for love nor money, but we have Mr Clarke’s empty house next door now. Since the solicitor dropped his bombshell about it belonging to Mother, there’s been precious little time to discuss what
to do with it, but why shouldn’t we turn it into a guest house for the wives and mothers of patients up at the Hall? We might even cover the rates that way.’
At that moment Granny walked briskly in on us, carrying something wrapped in a blood-stained newspaper. She does everything briskly. My Papa once said her middle name ought to be Competence, but as she always says, her sense of humour where he was concerned has been eroded over the years. Proving her point, she had reminded him crossly that her middle name was, in fact, McKenzie.
She headed to the sink now and disgorged a couple of rabbits from their wrapping and inspected the lump of cheese, as well as the parsnips and a large swede spilling out of Alix’s shopping bag.
‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Cheese! What a treat, and vegetables too. I see you’ve been smiling at the cook and the gardener up at the Hall, Alix. That’ll be a nice change from turnips and beets. Keep up the good work and while you’re about it, why don’t you go and smile at the butcher and the fishmonger too?’ This was greeted with silence, which is most unusual when Alix is in the room, so Granny obviously realised there was something up.
‘Why the long faces, girls?’ Her searching stare swept over us and her blue eyes softened for a second before she pulled open the kitchen drawer and took out a sharp knife. Bodie, the senior cat, peered round the larder door and watched with interest. Three more cats, one hung about with squeaking kittens, materialised out of thin air to sit in front of the range while they stared fixedly at Granny. Outside the back door, Bobs the Dog, an eternal optimist, howled to be let in.