The Last Baronet

by Caroline Akrill

  Below him, all appeared tranquil. Rushbroke Hall slumbered peacefully in all its ruinous glory. There was no sign of the Hon. Nicola and the grey horse. But then, beyond the hall, at the far end of the big barleyfield, a movement caught his eye. There seemed to be some kind of activity on the mere; two coots possibly, squabbling over territory. No, it was more than that; it was some much larger disturbance. David Williamson opened the door of his Land Rover and reached for his binoculars. The next minute he was back behind the wheel and hurtling down his drive towards the barleyfield, looking remarkably like a madman.

  FOUR

  ‘Help me! HELP ME!’

  Anna, near-blinded by a coating of pond weed, spurning the reluctantly offered hand and fastening upon the wrist as the safer option, was immensely relieved to find herself towed up the bank like a log across the dry blades of the rushes. She could spare but one hand for her own rescue as her other arm was locked around the drowned man’s neck like a vice. She had bound the rope around her waist in a valiant attempt to ease the pressure upon his throat and now it bit into her flesh and threatened to cut her in half, but she barely noticed it. ‘The rope!’ she spluttered. ‘Pull up the rope!’ And as her rescuer hesitated, ‘PULL IT!’ she commanded.

  David Williamson, his violent arrival fired to deal with trespass, unauthorised bathing, possibly nudity and even indecent exposure, now uncertain whether he was to be instrumental in the rescue of his avowed enemy, or a witness to his expiration, pulled mightily, heaved upon the rope, and caused the millstone to rise at last amidst a great cloud of syrupy mud, dragged by weed and rotting vegetation, to arrive on the bank with a thud accompanied by a deathly stench.

  Anna, choking and wheezing, her hair and clothes plastered to her body, streaming water and trailing weed of a brilliant green hue, struggled free of the rope and threw herself at the rescued man, dragging the knot from his neck, throwing off the noose, snatching away the sodden tie. The collar of the shirt fell open of its own accord, having no button to secure it. ‘Who is he?’ she gasped. ‘Why has he done this?’

  David Williamson, looking down upon the blanched and sodden face of Sir Vivian Valentyne Rushbroke of Rushbroke, felt his stomach turn over in a sickening somersault, and quickly averted his gaze. ‘He’s my neighbour. He’s a madman. They’re all mad. The whole family. Every last one of them.’

  Anna looked up at him, aghast. She saw a youngish man, haggard and pale, his dark, haunted eyes having great shadows beneath, his fair hair dishevelled. Heavens, she thought, is he one of them? Is he mad as well? Frantically, she felt for the old man’s pulse, first at the bony wrist, then at the neck, and found nothing. His chest appeared motionless and when, offering her cheek to his mouth, she felt not the faintest whisper of breath and saw that his lips were blue, panic threatened to overwhelm her. ‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ she shouted at David Williamson. ‘HELP me!’

  But David Williamson had no idea how to help and, having looked death in the eye (or so he believed) was now most thoroughly shaken by the encounter. A farmer through inheritance, through parental expectation, though not by inclination, he was unusual in that he was unaccustomed to death because he had always taken pains to avoid it. A combination of sound stock, careful husbandry, and large veterinary bills kept his bullocks in rude health until it was time for them to go to market. He never attended. He had never set foot in an abattoir, nor had he allowed himself to imagine it. At Christmas, hired hands killed his turkeys, swiftly and professionally, in his absence. There were small deaths, of course, amongst his chicks, his poults, and whilst he accepted that they were inevitable and largely unavoidable, even these tiny fatalities were a source of dismay to him. So that now, faced with a large death, albeit that of his enemy, far from experiencing feelings of triumph and gratification (as might reasonably have been expected), he was instead distressed and filled with dread, and turned away. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how. I’m sorry.’

  Mercifully, Anna was better equipped to deal with the situation, although the first aid instruction she had received as part of her training had been somewhat rudimentary and inclined towards common occupational hazards in the working environment such as cuts, scalds, burns and electric shocks. Whatever she did, she knew she had to be quick if there was to be any chance of recovery at all and, lifting the old man’s chin, easing back the lolling head, forcing her fingers into the mouth and feeling for the position of the tongue, for lose dentures, for any possible obstruction to the passage for air, she searched her mind frantically for remnants of what she had learned about resuscitation, and all the time addressed herself to a God in whose existence, if pressed, she would have had to confess a deep scepticism.

  ‘Help me, God! Don’t let me be too late! Oh, God, don’t let him be dead, please!’

  For David Williamson, any prospect of escape vanished as he felt himself arrested by the leg of his trousers and yanked down onto his knees beside the drowned man. Never could anyone have been blessed with a more unwilling assistant, but Anna, laying hold of one of his hands and slapping it down upon the motionless chest, clamping the other hand on top, dragging him up by his shoulders, straightening out his arms, was not to be refused. ‘Now,’ she told him urgently. ‘Listen to me! When I tell you, you have to push down hard on his chest; hard enough to compress the ribcage and it has to move at least a couple of inches to do any good. You have to keep on doing it and you have to do it quickly, very fast – we need to get his heart restarted!’

  It seemed to him impossible, a vain hope; but, immobilised in his position, frozen, he waited and watched (although he would have preferred not to watch) as Anna twisted back her dripping hair, leaned determinedly over the lifeless face, took a deep breath and then, pinching together the beaky nose, and without even a trace of squeamishness, placed her mouth firmly over the cold, blue lips.

  Nauseated, David Williamson looked on as one forced to observe an obscene act. In terror, he felt the ribcage rise under his hands, then, as she removed her mouth, subside. Petrified, he watched as she lowered her head again, then ‘NOW!’ she shouted, taking him by surprise, causing him to jerk involuntarily into action. ‘PUSH!’ she commanded. ‘And release! PUSH! And wait!’

  This time he waited, breathless himself with a mixture of revulsion and anxiety, as she sealed the mouth again with her lips, anticipating now the rise and fall of the chest, knowing what he was about, ready for the second exhalation, for her command. ‘PUSH! Now! Again!’ Impatiently he watched as she fumbled for the pulse, caught up in her desperation, as furiously, relentlessly, he pumped and pushed, compressing and releasing the old man’s ribcage at her command, until suddenly the commands ceased and, looking up, he saw her face set in anguish, flooded with exhaustion and despair, the tears dripping off her chin falling onto the drowned man’s face, and even he, who knew nothing about resuscitation, could see that it was useless, that it was over, and stopped.

  It was hard to know what to say, hard to find words of comfort, yet anything seemed better than nothing. ‘Nobody could have done more,’ he said. ‘We did our best. We were just too late, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Inexplicably she turned on him in a fury, frantic and distraught, hitting out, knocking his arms away, pushing him, causing him to lose balance and fall backwards. ‘We were just too late, that’s all?’ In horror he saw her launch herself at the old man, battering at his chest, clawing at his clothing like a wild animal, pummelling him. ‘We were not too late! I saved him! I saved him!’

  Desperate to put an end to it he pulled her away, pinning her arms to her sides although she screamed at him, and kicked, although it took most of his strength, until finally she gave in and leaned against him, her body racked by sobs. David Williamson was amazed and humbled by such a display of grief for a perfect stranger and when, over her tangled hair, he saw a small roach, its rosy fins fluttering briefly in a sodden fold of the shirt where she had torn open the drowned man’s waistcoat, h
e reached out a hand for it and tossed it back into the mere so that there had, after all, been one life saved.

  He brought sacks from the Land Rover at her request and arranged them in the wheelbarrow. Together they leg-and-winged the drowned man into it. She had recovered now and seemed quite composed. Unbidden, she had assumed total responsibility for the old man and was determined to transport him back the way he had come, across the stubblefield; the way he had walked; the way she had watched him make his painful, laborious progress, only a few minutes earlier, when he had been alive.

  David Williamson did not demur. Quite desperately he had not wanted to be the one to deliver back his vanquished enemy into the fold of his family. Standing beside the rope and the millstone and the flattened rushes of his mere, he watched as Anna set off across the stubble; the wheelbarrow bearing its incongruous burden lurching and bumping across the hard, uneven ground. With her dripping hair, her drooping shoulders, and her long skirt soaked and dragging in the dirt, she could have been a refugee fleeing some ravaged and war-torn country or some appallingly catastrophic natural disaster. She looked desolate.

  *

  No wonder the poor man had found it tough going, Anna thought, as she struggled to push the wheelbarrow across the corrugated, sun-baked ridges of the stubblefield. No wonder it had taken him such an age to reach the water. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle that he had managed to get there at all, for she had noticed that the drowned man was lean to the point of emaciation, clearly much too light for his height, and this is spite of the added weight of the water.

  ‘You may have been suffering from a terminal illness, I suppose,’ she said aloud to the occupant of the wheelbarrow who, possibly due to the bumping and jolting, was now not nearly as blue, and lay quite peaceably spread-eagled upon the sacking. ‘That would explain a lot. But I suspect...’ here she paused for a moment as she negotiated a particularly rough patch of ground, ‘...that the simple truth is that you just didn’t eat enough. Old people can starve themselves without knowing it, apparently. Because they don’t feel hungry they tend not to bother about food. They forget that they need to eat to live; that food is the fuel of life. I expect that was it.’

  Was it to enable her to offer such futile post-mortem advice that she had studied nutrition at catering college, Anna wondered, because a fat lot of good it would do him now; no disrespectful pun intended. Ahead, she saw with some relief an oak door set in a wall of crumbling red brick. As she drew nearer she noticed that the door (behind which she supposed would be found the drowned man’s home and family) was weathered pale and dry and hanging open, suspended from its wasted frame by the merest thread of a grandly ornate but sadly rusted hinge. Obviously the family within were not inclined to occupy themselves with such unimportant matters as maintenance.

  ‘And what, in heaven’s name,’ she asked of her passenger in anguish, ‘am I to say to your family about all this? Do I just wheel you in and say “I’ve brought back your husband/father/grandfather, but I’m afraid he’s dead; unfortunately I was not quite quick enough to save his life?” Because I did do my very best for you, I would like them to know that. Furthermore,’ she continued, ‘as I seem to have been the only witness, I suppose I am morally obliged to inform them that you drowned yourself on purpose; that you meant to end your life! Have you any idea how they are going to feel about that? Did you even consider it, I wonder? You do realise,’ she demanded of the drowned man, ‘that this will be their last memory of you? This - delivered to their door, dead in a wheelbarrow!’

  But then, she thought, indignation turning to sudden alarm, the neurotic young man in the Land Rover had mentioned madness and, on the assumption that the young man had himself been quite sane and speaking the truth, what if this man’s family are indeed mad? What might I be walking into? What horrors am I going to find behind this ruined wall? What appalling scene of carnage might lie on the other side of this ancient door? For a moment, she faltered, picturing in her imagination a verminous farmhouse, a mange-ridden dog on a chain, and a family butchered with an axe, or blasted with a shotgun, minutes before this old man set out to drown himself with a wheelbarrow, a rope, and a millstone. Hesitating now, it occurred to Anna that the young man had not offered to accompany her. True, he had offered transport, but her refusal had been received with obvious relief. He had wanted no part in this. He had been afraid. Why? Well, whatever the reason, she could not abandon the drowned man now. Taking a deep breath, she forced the wheelbarrow resolutely onward towards the door in the wall, pushing it faster, allowing no time for further doubt or speculation.

  ‘Whatever happened,’ she told the drowned man, ‘however it was, God has certainly not helped you. God, had He so wished, could have allowed me to save you; it would have been so easy for Him, another minute was all that I needed. But He, in his infinite wisdom, begrudged you even that. Oh, bugger,’ this last exclamation as the wheelbarrow hit a particularly large lump of clay and leapt in the air, bouncing down again and lurching violently to one side, threatening to tip over, causing its occupant to be thrown upwards and to smack down again and almost fall overboard. As a direct result of this, there was a strangled choking sound, followed by a flood of pond water from the mouth, and the drowned man opened his eyes. He looked up at Anna in an unfriendly manner. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he spluttered.

  FIVE

  Anna dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow as if they were electrified; as if they had suddenly become red hot. Her hands flew up to her face. Afterwards, whenever she had cause to describe the incident, she would never be able to find words of sufficient intensity to explain how she felt. Words such as shocked, stupefied, dumbfounded and flabbergasted would, even after the passage of many years, always seem like understatement. For at first, sceptic that she was, unbeliever that she was, she thought she had witnessed a miracle and fell to her knees in relief and gratitude. ‘Oh, God! Thank you! Thank you!’

  At this, the drowned man struggled desperately to sit up, flapped his arms, coughed and gurgled in agitation: his face, no longer blue, turned to red, but all to no avail. He flopped back at length, defeated. ‘Rescued!’ he gasped in disgust. ‘Not only rescued, but rescued by a damned religious maniac!’

  Anna, struggling to believe the unbelievable, breathless, kneeling in the dirt, was nevertheless prompted to defend herself with indignation. ‘I thought you were dead! I was sure you were dead!’ She struggled to her feet, much hampered by the voluminosity of her wet skirt. ‘I was just telling God what a rotten so-and-so He was for not giving me time to save you, and then He... or it seemed to me that He... not that I really believe that He... anyway,’ she said finally, abandoning any further attempt at explanation, tugging at her skirt, having managed to recover her balance and most of her wits, ‘I’m not a damned religious maniac at all and you, Mr Whoever-You-Are, should be grateful to be alive!’

  The drowned man lifted his head with difficulty. He peered at Anna in disbelief. ‘Grateful to be alive?’ he wheezed, ‘for what? For what, eh? And if you’re not religious, what the devil were you thanking God for? I certainly wouldn’t bother thanking him on my behalf; he’s not interested in me! He’s never bothered to send in the troops before, and it’s too blasted late now! So if you think you’ve been sent as an instrument of divine intervention, young woman; if you see yourself as some sort of angel of mercy, you can think again! I am not grateful to be alive!’ The outburst exhausted him. His face turned perilously white. His head fell back upon the sacking in a manner that was frighteningly abrupt; nevertheless, ‘Saved,’ he managed in an agonising rasp. ‘Blasted impertinence.’

  Whilst she had not considered that she might reasonably expect to be thanked for saving a life, Anna was somewhat taken aback to find herself abused on account of it. Nevertheless, noticing that the old man was motionless and that a froth had appeared on his lips, she snatched up the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed on across the last few remaining metres of stubble and over a
strip of rough grass in a final, determined burst of effort. Then, ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed as she reached the door in the wall, and on the threshold stood transfixed by the sight of a romantic and beautiful house standing behind a walled moat; a house built of rose brick, serene and majestic, with deep wings surmounted by turrets shaped like pepper pots, and long stone-mullioned windows set with leaded glass.

  ‘Oh!’ Anna said again in wonder, and ‘Ho!’ gasped the drowned man, momentarily revived by being stopped short; ‘Am I saved or am I not, because if I am, better get on with it.’ He began to tremble violently. His face had regained a bluish tinge. His teeth chattered.

  Alarmed, Anna grabbed the handles and set off at a run. Through the door, down a grassy incline she steered the wheelbarrow, regardless of the bobbing, wobbling discomfort of its occupant, across a sunken, overgrown lawn, down a weed-choked path she pounded, and on across a mossy bridge over the moat where the crumbling walls were thick with ferns and toadflax and where, on the deep, dark waters below, a pair of mallard sailed away swiftly and silently from the commotion of their passing.

  In a courtyard formed by the wings of the house there was a mighty door with broken steps in a half-circle leading up to it, and at the top an iron bell-pull, but when Anna pulled with the utmost urgency, although there was immediately an answering clatter from within, nobody came.

  Anna stood on the steps, desperate, helpless, indecisive. It was unthinkable that she should find such a house deserted. Even though the air of neglect and dilapidation was palpable, the prospect of it being abandoned was inconceivable. ‘What now, God?’ she asked aloud, and almost at once heard the distant sound of music; of someone singing and playing a piano.