A Mansion and its Murder (7 page)

She was remembering her sister, I knew. Mary was not loved, but a death in childbirth strikes chill in the hearts of all women.

But the labour was not soon over. The afternoon wore on, evening came, the sun sank low in the sky. I tried to imagine ‘great pain and suffering’ lasting as long as this, and failed utterly. I had not had a happy childhood, but my physical pains had been few and short.

‘How
can
it go on so long?’ I asked Miss Roxby, feeling almost sorry for Mary.

‘It often does. It’s women’s lot.’

‘It won’t be mine.’

At last I sensed, by the house’s noises, that it was over. It was as if the whole mountainous structure relaxed. I had no sense of tragedy, of the house having been struck by an unusual disaster. I wondered what would happen to me. Would I just go to bed in the usual way? Surely
someone would understand what a child feels about a new baby in the house?

Miraculously someone did. Almost two hours after I had sensed that the house was relaxing, almost rejoicing, Robert, our favourite footman, knocked on the schoolroom door.

‘Miss Sarah is to go and see the new baby.’

I didn’t quite like the way he put it, but there was no question of my refusing to go. I got up and led the way, Miss Roxby behind me, and Robert a short but respectful distance behind her. We went down one flight, then through endless, progressively grander corridors till we came to the immense and gloomy bedroom where I knew the lying-in had taken place. Robert knocked on the door, and Mr McKay, looking as grand as grand (grander than any Home Secretary could have looked) let us in.

Mary, on the bed, was white, drowsy, but triumphant. Uncle Frank was not by her but beside the cradle, and he looked – how can I analyse it? – pleased with himself, for once not dissatisfied or ashamed over the shoddy bargain he had been forced into, and above all proud of the little bundle in white lying quiet in the ridiculously grand cradle in the centre of the room.

‘Can I hold him?’

I knew it must be a him. The medical man, immensely portly and pompous, looked dubious, but Uncle Frank said, ‘Of course,’ and took up the little bundle tenderly. I held my breath, feeling it would break like a china doll if he dropped it. Then I put out my arms and he put the bundle into them. I looked down into the quiet, sleeping little face and I felt a love so overpowering, so all-embracing for the helpless little thing that I realised I had never felt love before – that my affection for Uncle Frank was the natural feeling I would have for one of the few attractive people in my life, but that this was the real thing – the passion that took hold of you, took over your life, filled every part of your body and mind.

The eyes in my little bundle opened, the face screwed up, and he began to whimper.

Physically the baby thrived. I was delighted, but a little surprised. Blakemere did not seem to be the sort of place where babies would flourish. A
grand
nursery, for example, seemed a contradiction in terms, yet since the baby had to have a nursery in the body of the house, close to its mother, a grand nursery was what he had. And a nursery, of course, was what Grandpapa thought appropriate. A large, authoritative woman from Wentwood, Mrs Nealson, was the nurse in charge, and it was Mrs Nealson whom I had to propitiate if I wanted to hold my little cousin, tickle him to make him gurgle, dangle things before his eyes, or put things in his chubby
little hands. She was, I think, a good woman at bottom, but she was a very fearsome one at top, and for her I was the model little girl which I was for no one else.

It was Mrs Nealson who noticed first. Cousin Richard (as he was to be christened) was Mary’s first child, so though he got what was called his infant succor from her, it was natural she wouldn’t remark it. To me a baby was as foreign as a kangaroo would be if one was imported to graze on Blakemere’s grassy expanses, so there was no question of my noticing.

I got no whisper of it when Mrs Nealson first brought the matter out into the open. I think I may have heard of a joint visit to the nursery by Dr Morris and Dr Petherbridge, but I thought this was merely routine – high-level routine, certainly, but that would have been in keeping with all Grandpapa’s other dealings during the pregnancy and the lying-in.

My uncle Frank was summoned home from Paris, and this time he came.

The news, the awful news, gradually seeped down to me.

Richard was not responding as a baby of six weeks should – not observing, not reacting. In a word – and it was a word that began to be
whispered around even below stairs – he was ‘backward’. Worse than that, he was what we today would call retarded. Under their breaths the servants used the word ‘idiot’.

I was never told whether this was due to something either of the doctors had done during the delivery, and I made no inquiries later on when I was in a position to. To what end? And it would have seemed too much like trying to attribute
blame.
How could I want to put blame on anyone for the condition of a boy, a man, who was so much happier and nicer than anyone else at Blakemere?

The medical men came fairly frequently, together or separately, for several weeks after that. I think, like most professional people, they had an aversion to delivering bad news with any brutal suddenness: doing it by dribs and drabs is much more beneficial financially. Certainly Mary was a long time taking the news in: she went on feeding the quiet, plump little bundle, and seemed to think that his condition might be reversed by treatment – an operation, or a course of the waters.

When the truth was revealed to her, her world fell apart. The fact that it was an unlovely world, a piece of self-glorification and
self-aggrandisement, did not make its shattering any the less appalling. She continued feeding Richard, but she otherwise preferred not to see him. Any nursing, cradling, cuddling he got came from his father, or from me, or from one of the women paid to take care of him, who felt their importance suddenly diminished. It bound me still more tightly to Uncle Frank that the confirmation that his son was mentally retarded did not shake by one iota the love that he felt for him.

‘It’s obvious that sooner or later he will have to be put in an institution,’ I heard Mary say one day to her husband. ‘Best for him if it’s sooner.’

She said ‘him’ as if she wanted to say ‘it.’ They were on the terrace, and I saw Uncle Frank’s face darken, and he strode off without a word down to the meadows.

I think if he could have chosen, Uncle Frank would have been much more at Blakemere from then on. But it was not to be thought of: Blakemere contained his wife, and everything she did from the time of the doctors’ final pronouncement jangled his nerves and outraged his feelings of justice and decency. The poor little mite had in effect lost both parents.

‘I think Richard should go and live with Bea
South for a bit,’ I said to him, one day after tennis. ‘That way he would get a bit of love.’

He looked at me mystified.

‘You remember Beatrice. I used to be always talking about her. She used to be an upper parlormaid here – she married the coachman at Tillyards about the time you married … your wife. She gave
me
love when I needed it.’ He hesitated, attracted by the idea, yet reluctant.

‘I wouldn’t want it thought it was in any way like putting him away in an asylum.’

‘It wouldn’t be. It would be just while he is a baby. Babies are often put out to nurse. Bea has a son, too – they would be together, and it might … help.’

Uncle Frank thought about it, and two days later we rode over together and he broached the possibility to Bea. She would have agreed whatever her feelings were – she was loyal to the Fearings without being starry-eyed about them. What sensible person could be? In fact, she was delighted, as I knew she would be.

Mary, when the idea was put to her, agreed with a shameful alacrity, though she made it clear that to her mind it was merely the prelude to the inevitable institutionalising of Richard. She
was not, at this period, behaving at all wisely. I think the crash of her hopes had unsettled her calculating brain. I imagine she clung to the thought that she was still, in spite of everything, wife to a Fearing and mother to one. She did not realise just how empty such titles could be. She had only to look at my mother to understand that.

I have no doubt she still had hopes of producing another heir.

I think that thought was at the back of everyone’s mind. Indeed, it occasionally occurred to me, but I had other and less distasteful things to think about. The arrangements for Richard were first among them, and they involved several visits to Tillyards, which were a great delight. Uncle Frank accompanied me if he was at Blakemere, and he and Bea got on famously. He was less taken with Tom South, her husband.

‘Mark my words,’ he said, as we rode home one day, ‘she’ll have trouble with that one.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He’s jealous of his own son. Can you imagine a man being that? And with another on the way, it won’t get any better.’

Mrs Nealson took her dismissal with good grace, and expressed the wish to be of service
in the future. She was probably in some sort of conspiracy. I never saw Uncle Frank’s reaction to this remark when it was repeated to him, as it surely was, but I was with him when, in one of the less cumbersome family carriages, and accompanied by Mrs Nealson, we took Richard over to the cottage on the edge of the Tillyards estate and handed him over to Bea. They took to each other at once, and Richard showed delight in having another baby around him. He was a placid, often listless baby, but he had the capacity to express spontaneous delight that never left him during his short life. As we slipped away, Mrs Nealson said it was ‘probably for the best’, and we both agreed with her, though for both of us it was only a short-term measure, and it was left to me to make sure that was what it was.

It was no part of Uncle Frank’s plan (though it certainly was of Mary’s) that Richard should be shunted off to Bea’s cottage and forgotten. It was arranged from the start that Bea should bring him over once a fortnight to Blakemere.

‘Got to get him used to the monstrous pile,’ said Uncle Frank. ‘Poor little beast.’

This pleased Bea, because it enabled her to renew friendships with the Blakemere staff formed while she worked here. It pleased me,
because I could take charge of him while he was here, especially if Uncle Frank was away. It pleased Mary not at all, and she usually kept to her apartment while he was on his visit, causing much adverse comment below stairs.

It was on one such visit, when Richard was about nine months old that I overheard a conversation between my grandfather and Uncle Frank. Well, overheard is a genteelism, because I eavesdropped; and conversation is another, because they were having a row. Uncle Frank had wheeled Richard in his magnificent
perambulator
with the new pneumatic tires – ordered before his birth, and apparently designed with a Brobdingnagian baby in mind – over to a clump of trees just reaching maturity at the brow of the slope leading down to the river. There they had paused, and unseen by Uncle Frank (he would have sped off, I felt sure, if he had noticed), Grandpapa came purposefully over from the terrace. I was reading in the summer sun some way away, but the moment they became engaged in conversation I stood up and slipped silently over till I could hide behind the trunk of a reasonably sturdy oak. Nothing at Blakemere, remember, was actually old. The conversation was already becoming warm in tone. I heard my grandfather first.

‘Of course I wouldn’t want to come between husband and wife.’

‘There’s nothing to come between.’

Grandfather tugged at his moustaches.

‘You know what I mean. I would rather we could leave you to yourselves to sort out your difficulties.’

Uncle Frank shrugged. ‘There are no difficulties. We understand each other perfectly.’

‘You know very well that is not the case. In fact, everyone in the house knows that relations between you are … not on a normal footing.

‘I should have thought they were pretty much the same footing as those of my brother Claudius and his wife.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ exploded my grandfather, almost tugging his moustaches off in his exasperation. ‘You know there is no question of Claud and Harriet providing Blakemere with an heir.’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’

‘It has everything to do with everything. Your debts were paid, an allowance was given you for life, and in return you were to marry and provide Blakemere with an heir.’

‘How admirably you express our business arrangement, Papa,’ Uncle Frank said, with that
irony which must have been so irritating. ‘It sounds like one in the Old Testament between God and a mere mortal. But you can’t play God, Father. You can’t order events just to suit your own plans. I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain.’ He pointed to the pram. ‘There’s your heir to Blakemere.’

And, choking with rage, he set off with Richard down the hill to the river. Grandpapa was by now red with a combination of embarrassment and anger. He watched father and son for a moment, fuming, then turned and stumped back to the house. I kept myself on the furthest side of the oak, away from him, then, as he disappeared into the distance, I walked through the clump of trees to watch Uncle Frank.

Miss Roxby and I were embarking on the novels of Sir Walter Scott and were reading
The Bride of Lammermoor
(the first of innumerable disappointments). Uncle Frank’s words reminded me of the story it was based on, and the words of poor mad Janet Dalrymple, as retailed in the Introduction, after she had stabbed the husband she had been forced to marry: ‘Tak up your bonny bridegroom.’ I was sure Uncle Frank intended no cruelty about the poor son he loved so much. But the sight of his moon face in the
magnificent baby carriage must have pointed up with poignant clarity the overreaching blasphemy of my grandfather in trying to organise human events to suit his grand plan for the Fearing family and its bank. Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes. Something in Uncle Frank’s stance as he wheeled the perambulator toward the tranquility of the river suggested that he was hating himself for using his son to score a debating point off his father. He was quiet for several days after that, and very thoughtful.

Not that this brought him peace. I overheard, and Miss Roxby overheard, and even Bea on her fortnightly visits to Blakemere overheard various members of the family making niggling remarks to him on the subject of the need for a new heir. Aunt Jane’s was the most indirect and genteel, as befitted her status as a maiden sister.

‘We all do hope you and dear Mary will be a family again soon,’ she said to him one day in the library when he was searching for a book to assuage his boredom. He merely grunted. Grandmama, I regret to say (for I respected her) was more trenchant.

‘It’s time you did your duty by Blakemere and did your duty as a husband,’ she said. She had for the moment taken on her husband’s order
of priorities, I fear. Uncle Frank did not even honour this with a grunt. Any respect he had once had for his parents vanished at the time of his forced marriage.

I am approaching the crucial event of my girlhood, the climax of this botched attempt to manipulate the strongest and most private human feeling. I shall find the telling difficult, for at the time I knew so little and understood even less. I walked yesterday, with my dogs Lizzie and Ernie bounding beside me, to the boarded-up blankness of Blakemere, thinking not of my duties at the present time, but of those long-ago days in 1893.

It was almost funny, in these days of austerity, to look on the bloated facades of Blakemere. What on earth could be done with it today – what could the house
be
? It was not suitable for anything – and certainly not for a house. Even if Victorian architecture were to come back into fashion, Blakemere was only notable for magnificence. My great-grandfather and grandfather stinted on nothing except the architect. Taste and style had they none, and he had delivered them a building that was suitably tasteless and styleless.

But in the context of the house’s heyday the
magnificence was all. And thinking of my uncle’s marriage, its distastefulness to himself, I had to admit that many royal marriages at the time were contracted on a similar bases. Wasn’t May of Teck at around this time passed from one dead brother to the next living one like a parcel because she so obviously was cut out to make a formidable Queen (she had not then developed those kleptomaniac tendencies that today make her the terror of antique shop and stately home owners)? The magnificence of Blakemere made the Fearings see themselves as semi-royal, and behave accordingly.

‘The Bank’ everyone used to say in the hushed, reverent tones that royalty might use when they talked of ‘The Country.’ Blakemere was named in plump, proprietorial fashion, as royalty might name the finest of its palaces. My grandfather, pacing the spacious rooms, corridors, and staircases of Blakemere, thought of himself as a king – and no tinpot or parvenu king of a Balkan state, either, but the genuine royal article.