A Christmas Beginning (10 page)

“No,” Runcorn said quietly. “No, it is a very human and natural thing. Perhaps Miss Costain was not aware of the drain she was on his resources.”

“No. I think she was not always very practical,” Kelsall conceded. “It takes a long time for a man of the cloth to earn enough to keep a wife, never mind a sister as well.” There was loneliness and self-mockery in his voice, and he did not meet Runcorn's eyes.

“Or a policeman,” Runcorn responded. “But then a policeman's wife would expect far less.” There was self-mockery in his words too. On his salary he could not keep a woman like Melisande for a month, let alone a lifetime. It was not only social class that divided them, or experience and beliefs—it was money and all it could buy, the comforts a woman of Melisande's background accepted without even noticing them.

Kelsall caught the shadow of Runcorn's pain, and looked at him with new intensity and a sudden flame of gentleness in his eyes. He was tactful enough to say nothing.

Runcorn reported to Faraday just before dark as he had been commanded to do. It was an uncomfortable interview, and largely fruitless. He was leaving the vicarage and walking across the churchyard when Melisande caught up with him. She had come out of the house hastily and had no cloak with her. The wind blew her hair off her face and whipped long strands of it out of its pins. It looked soft, giving her a dark, wild halo and showing the pallor of her skin. She was frightened, he could see it in her eyes, but he did not know if it was for herself, or for the ugly things she could see unraveling before her, pulled at by the fingers of violent death.

He longed to be able to comfort her, and found himself wordless, standing there among the grass in the wind.

“Mr. Runcorn,” she said urgently. “Forgive me for following you, but I wished so much to speak with you without my brother knowing. Might we go into the lee of the church?”

“Of course.” He wondered whether to offer her his arm over the uneven ground. He would like to feel her touch, even through the thickness of his jacket. He could imagine it. But what if she refused? She might think it was impertinent. It was asking for humiliation to assume more than plain politeness, even for an instant. He kept his arm by his side and walked stiffly over to the shelter of the church walls. The silence was so painful that he started to speak as soon as they were there.

“I am learning a great deal more about Miss Costain.” He told her most of what Kelsall had said, but more gently phrased, and he did not mention that Faraday had courted her, too, although he wondered if perhaps she knew. “It seems she was unwilling to accept any marriage her brother recommended for her,” he finished. “And it was causing some ill-feeling, and a degree of financial stress.”

“You mean Mr. Newbridge?” she said quickly.

He did not know how to answer. He had been clumsy. In trying to tell her something of meaning he had put himself in a position where either he had to lie or admit that it also meant her brother, and her own suitor.

Too quickly she understood. Her smile was self-mocking. “And John,” she added. “It is no secret that he courted her as well, although I think he became a little disillusioned with her some short time before her death. I think he requires in a woman more sense of the practical than she was willing to give.” She looked away from him and sighed in exasperation. “I'm sorry, that is such a foolish euphemism. Olivia was an individual, she had the courage at least to attempt to live her dreams. They were not so very unreasonable. She wanted to travel, but she would have worked to achieve that. Of course a vicar's sister is not supposed to work at anything. What is there that a respectable woman can do?” There was an ache of longing in her voice, as if she were speaking of herself, not a friend she understood too well.

“She had no real skills, and not a great deal of practical knowledge of the world,” she continued. “One cannot survive without at least some money. If one had been born poor one might at least have learned to do something useful. Sometimes I wonder if necessity might not be a better spur than dreams, don't you think?” Without warning she turned to look at him, meeting his eyes with fierce candor. “Do you like what you do, Mr. Runcorn?”

He was at a loss to answer her. He could feel his face flaming, as if she would see his emotions drowning him. “I … not always. I … it …” This was his one chance to be honest with her. “Sometimes it is terrible, painful, you see awful things, and cannot help.”

“Isn't that better than seeing nothing at all?” she demanded. “And at least you can try!”

She was so vivid he almost felt as if he were touching her in the sharp air. Suddenly the words came easily.

“Yes. And at times I succeed. I can't bring back the dead, and catching the guilty doesn't always make sense, or justice, but it eases, and it explains. Understanding gets rid of the sense of confusion, the helplessness to know what happened and why.”

She smiled. “You are fortunate. You have something worth doing, even if you don't always manage to complete it, at least you know you have tried.”

He had never thought of it like that. Barclay had defined his job as clearing up the detritus of other people's crimes and follies, a sort of sweeper-up of dirt. Melisande clearly saw something more. “Is that how you see it?” he asked uncertainly.

She shook her head. “Oh, don't think of John. Sometimes he takes pleasure in being offensive. He denigrates what he doesn't understand. It's a kind of … fear. We are all afraid of something, if we are honest.”

“What was Olivia afraid of?” He hardly dared ask. Were they even speaking of Olivia, or of Melisande herself?

She looked away again. “Of loneliness,” she answered. “Of failure. Of coming to the end of your life and realizing all the passionate, beautiful things you could at least have tried to do, but you didn't have the courage. And then it's too late …” She stopped, not as if she had no further thought, but as if she could not bear to speak it aloud.

Perhaps he should have turned to the stark outline of the church, or even to the carved and ornamental gravestones beyond, but he did not. Her grief filled the air, and he knew it was not only a compassion for Olivia but also an acute awareness of her own suffering and emptiness. He had never so intensely wanted to touch anyone, but he knew he could not, not even the cold, ungloved hand at her side. There was no comfort he could offer except his skill, and now he was increasingly afraid that what he might learn further of Barclay would prove uglier than she could imagine.

But he, too, had to follow the truth, wherever it led. This wide, clean land with its endless distances had awoken a disturbing awareness of his own deficiencies, the narrowness that Monk had so despised. Suddenly he wanted to change, for himself, not even for dreams of Melisande, however sweet or hopeless. He was aware of a gaping hole, of a loss he could feel but not name. The silence of the air was a balm, but something inside him ached to be filled.

“I'll find him,” he said aloud to her. “But it will not be comfortable. It will show hatred you did not know was there, and weakness you had not had to look at before. I'm sorry.”

“I know,” she accepted. “It is foolish, like a small child, to imagine it is something out there, a piece of madness that just happened to strike us. It comes from inside. Thank you for being so honest.” She hesitated a moment as if to add something else, then simply said good night, and with a brief smile, was gone.

He took a step after her, not knowing if he should walk beside her at least back to the gate of the big house. Then he realized the foolishness of such an act. She had sought him in the tumble of gravestones, and then the lee of the church, precisely not to be seen.

He turned and made his way back to Mrs. Owen, and something hot to eat and drink.

In the morning he reported again to Faraday, who received him with a look of hope that he had at last found some concrete evidence. His expression died as soon as he saw Runcorn's face.

“I think you misunderstood me, Runcorn,” he said tartly. “There really is no need to keep coming here to tell me that you have learned nothing.”

Runcorn felt the chill and, for an instant, the thoughtless, ill-expressed temper he would have exhibited a year ago was hot inside him. He choked it down.

“I had a long talk with Kelsall, sir, and he clarified a great many things in my mind.”

Faraday gave him a sour look of disbelief, but he did not interrupt. His expression said vividly what he considered Runcorn's mind to be worth, if a conversation with the curate could improve it.

Runcorn felt himself coloring. He knew his voice was tart, but it was beyond his control. “He asked the nature of motives for murder. They are generally simple: greed, fear, ambition, revenge, outrage …”

“Get to your point, Runcorn. What does that tell us that we did not already know? She was hardly threatening to anyone.”

“Not physically, sir, but in reputation or belief, in challenge to authority, in threat to expose what is private, shameful, or embarrassing,” Runcorn explained.

“Oh. You think perhaps Miss Costain was privy to someone's secrets? She would not have betrayed such a thing. If you had known her, you would not even suggest it.”

“Not even if it were illegal?”

Faraday frowned. “Who? Whose secrets would she know? I shall have to ask Costain.”

“No, sir!”

“Surely he is the most likely to know who … Good God!” Faraday's eyes inclined. “You don't think he—”

“I don't know,” Runcorn cut him off. “But that is not the only kind of fear. There is the dread of humiliation, of being mocked, of having one's inadequacies laid bare.”

“That seems a bit fanciful,” Faraday said, but the color in his cheeks belied his words.

“Newbridge courted her, and she rejected him,” Runcorn observed, making it a statement. “So, apparently, did John Barclay.”

Faraday chewed his lips. “Do you think he is capable of such violence?”

“Did she reject him also?” Runcorn continued.

“Yes, I believe so. Surely he couldn't …” His eyes widened, the question already answered in his mind.

Runcorn saw it and anger burned up inside him for Melisande. This man was going to marry her, and yet in order to solve a murder he was willing to believe that her brother could be guilty. Or did it reflect a closer knowledge of Barclay than Runcorn had, especially during the time of his acquaintance with Olivia? Was he finally facing a grief he had tried to avoid, but could not any longer?

“You know him better than I do,” Runcorn said with a greater gentleness. “How did he accept her rejection? Did he love her deeply?”

Faraday looked startled.

It raced through Runcorn's mind that what he dreamed of as love was not something Faraday even considered. There was no understanding of the passion, the hunger, the tenderness, the soaring of the heart or the plunge of despair. He was thinking of an arrangement, an affection. Runcorn was harrowed up with a rage so intense he could have struck Faraday's smug, bland face and beaten his assumptions out of him. He wanted to feel blood and bone under his fists.

Were these the feelings Olivia's murderer had felt? Only they had used a carving knife? Why? Was the killer a woman? Someone with no physical power to strike, but the passion nevertheless?

“It doesn't have to be a man,” he said aloud. “Who else did Newbridge court? Or John Barclay? Who could have loved or wanted them with such fierce possessiveness?”

“A woman?” Faraday was stunned. “But it was … violent! Brutal.”

“Women can be just as brutal as men,” Runcorn said tartly. “It happens less often, simply for opportunity and perhaps schooling, but the rage is just as savage, and when it breaks through the years of self-control, it will be uglier.”

“Jealousy?” Faraday tasted the idea. Now he was meeting Runcorn's eyes and there was no evasion in him, no weariness. “Over Newbridge? I don't think so. Although to be honest, I hadn't considered it. I'll have Warner look into it more closely. John Barclay, that seems possible. He can be very charming, and he has a high opinion of himself. He would not take rejection easily.”