Death at Dawn (23 page)

‘Why?’

‘Yesterday evening, when you came down the stairs, you were so beautiful, I hardly recognised you – no, that’s not complimentary, is it? I mean, you were by far the most beautiful of the ladies there. That young
fop who took you into dinner was clearly entranced and …’

‘Daniel, that’s nonsense.’

‘When I looked for you after dinner, you weren’t there. Then rumour began to get round that somebody had died and I couldn’t help worrying. You’ll say that’s nonsense too, I suppose.’

‘But you must have soon found out it wasn’t me?’

‘Yes. The word spread that our host’s elderly motherin-law had died suddenly of a heart seizure. I’m sorry, but I felt like playing a jig when I heard. Not that the bereaved son-in-law would have cared if I had.’

‘You talked to Sir Herbert?’

‘Yes. I asked him whether, in the circumstances, he wished us to continue to play.’

‘What did he say?’

‘At risk of offending your ears, I shall quote him verbatim: “Damn your eyes, sir, it’s only my mother-inlaw. I’m paying you, and if I say so, you’ll go on fiddling until hell freezes over.”’

‘I’m sure he knows something about it. Whoever killed her must have been a member of his household or one of his guests.’

Daniel went quiet again.

‘Well, mustn’t he?’ I said.

‘I understand that they brought in additional staff for the occasion.’

‘That’s true, yes. But why should some jobbing waiter want to kill her?’

‘Liberty, there is something it is only fair you should know. I don’t think for one moment that it has anything to do with her death, but …’

He looked embarrassed and miserable.

‘What?’

‘My dear, please don’t jump to conclusions, but the fact is, Blackstone is here.’

I stared at him.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘We think he must have contrived to have himself employed among the extra waiters. He collapsed while serving dinner last night.’

I thought of the black legs sprawling among the peas and carrots. If an elderly man had just run up the back stairs and down, he might well collapse. I let go of Daniel’s hand.

‘Where is he now?’

Daniel gestured to the pavilion behind us.

‘Here. Asleep in my bed, as a matter of fact.’

I felt myself going hard as stone. I pulled my hand away from Daniel.

‘What is he doing here?’

‘One of my musicians – another friend of his – saw him fall. We couldn’t leave him to the tender mercies of the household. All they were concerned about was that he shouldn’t get in the way of the other waiters.’

‘I mean here at Mandeville Hall.’

Daniel looked surprised at my tone.

‘I haven’t had a chance to ask him yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s a very sick man, Liberty. He was hardly conscious when we brought him in here last night, certainly not in a state for conversation.’

‘Probably not, seeing as he’d just bludgeoned a poor old lady to death.’

‘Child, you can’t …’

‘Don’t child me. She needed to tell me something, that was why she wanted to meet in the schoolroom. If she’d discovered Blackstone was here disguised as a waiter –’

‘Did she even know the man?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, no. But what if she’d found out he wasn’t a proper waiter, and begun to ask what he was doing here …’

‘That’s mere supposition.’

‘You’re not claiming that he was here simply as a waiter, I hope?’

‘I’m not claiming anything.’ Daniel was beginning to be annoyed now. ‘And no, I don’t suppose he was simply acting as a waiter.’

‘Then what was he doing here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You should know. He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Liberty, when he wakes up, of course I’ll ask him, provided he’s strong enough.’

‘He was strong enough to kill Mrs Beedle. He was strong enough to kill my father.’

I stood up. He tried to take my hand again, but I pulled it away.

‘Liberty, please. You can’t know –’

‘I know he was in Calais when my father was killed. Now he’s here and she’s dead too. What more do you need?’

‘Quite a lot more, if I’m to think him guilty of two murders.’

‘Of course, he’s more than a friend, isn’t he? What was it you said? A lodge brother.’

‘I promise you that if even half of what you suspect is true, that won’t protect him. If I find cause to believe he killed your father or that poor old woman, I shall hand him over to the hangman with pleasure.’

‘Well, let’s go in there now, wake him up and ask him.’

I made for the door of the pavilion. Daniel jumped up and stood in front of me.

‘Later, I promise you …’

‘I’m tired of promises. He made me promises when he wanted me to spy for him, and look what …’

It came to me that I might be partly to blame for Mrs Beedle’s death, if my reports had brought Blackstone there, and my voice choked with tears. I was too angry with Daniel to let him see that, so I turned away and walked quickly down the spiral path and back across the park.

By the time I reached the house, I’d recovered myself enough to face Betty and the children. The schoolroom was still being cleaned, so they’d been allocated a sitting room at the far end of the nursery corridor that might once have been the territory of a minor relative. Hasty efforts to tidy it had only stirred up the smell of old dust, and the chairs and sofa were sagging and faded. The two boys were at the table, listlessly spooning up bread and milk, with broad black bands round the sleeves
of their jackets. Henrietta was sobbing on the sofa in bodice and petticoats, while Betty sat in an armchair, hurriedly stitching away at a small black crepe dress. I supposed it had been saved from some earlier generation’s mourning and she was altering it to fit. Betty’s eyes were red, her cheeks swollen with crying. I knelt on the floor beside her, threaded a needle and started on the dress hem. My stitches were large and uneven, but it didn’t seem to matter. I could see Betty wanted to talk, but we couldn’t in front of the children and they needed all our attention.

Once breakfast was over and Henrietta fitted into her dress they had to be taken to pay their last respects to their grandmother.

‘You can stay here if you like,’ Betty said.

She must have heard from the other servants that I had been the one who found the body.

‘Thank you, but we’ll both go.’

We filed into the room and stood in a line by the bed, Betty holding Henrietta’s hand, I James’s, with Charles alone in the middle. For a second time I looked down at that stern, wrinkled face under the nightcap. Somebody had put vases of gardenias and tuberoses from last night’s dinner table on either side of the bed. Their sickly smell helped to mask the scent of blood and decay. James’s hand tightened in mine. Henrietta started sobbing again, loudly and painfully. It was, I think, their first experience of death. As soon as we decently could, we took them back upstairs.

Strictly speaking, I suppose we should have emphasised the solemnity of the occasion by making them read the Bible or some devotional work, but when I fetched a book of fairy stories and started reading to them, Betty raised no objection. It would have taken more than spells and princesses to keep my mind from dwelling on Mr Blackstone and Daniel. After a gloomy lunch, Betty said I should go up and lie down for a couple of hours. I was reluctant to leave her on her own with them but the effects of a night without sleep were catching up with me and I knew I’d be no use to Celia unless I rested.

I hesitated on the landing outside my room, reluctant to open the door for fear of finding things disturbed again. Now I knew it had been invaded, it wasn’t my safe haven any more. There was a wooden ladder fixed to the wall that led upwards from the landing. I’d barely noticed it before, assuming that it was there to give workmen access to the roof. Today, for some reason, it seemed different. Sunlight caught the cobwebs trailing from its rungs and a waft of fresh air came from higher up. My eyes followed the ladder up to a square of blue sky. There shouldn’t have been a square of sky. It had never been there before. A trapdoor then, left open to the roof.

The ladder was a rough affair, two uprights nailed to the wall, narrow rungs of raw pine. I put my hands on the uprights, then my foot on the first rung. What I intended to do wasn’t wise, but I was too tired and angry for wisdom. I climbed up towards the square of
blue until there were no more uprights to hold and my head came out into the warm sun while my hands felt the chill of the lead roof covering, still wet with dew. I pulled myself through somehow, with my skirts and petticoats bunching in the hatchway, and ended crouching in a kind of broad trough that ran behind the parapet of the house. After a while I stood upright and stared out over the battlements to the terrace with its white statues and formal gardens, the meadows and the Jersey cattle looking more golden than ever in the morning light, and beyond them, the heath. I could even pick out a string of horses walking across it in the distance and imagined Rancie in her stall with the black cat watching from the hayrack. The wish to have good, solid Amos Legge beside me was so sharp and sudden that it felt like pain. I put it out of my mind and looked left and right along the ramparts.

The view was similar in both directions, some yards of emptiness and then the solid brick base of a chim-neystack, narrowing the walkway. No sign of anybody. But when my eyes adjusted to the light there was a difference between left and right. Something small was lying at the base of the right-hand chimney stack. It looked like a dishcloth at first, until I recognised the green-and-grey stripes of the shawl I’d borrowed from Betty. I took a few steps and bent to pick it up. When it resisted, I tugged harder, thinking it had caught on something. It still wouldn’t budge and from behind the chimney stack came a little noise, halfway between a protest and a
moan. There was nothing threatening about the sound, so I went round the chimney stack. The rest of the shawl was wrapped round a woman sitting with her back to the brickwork. She was clinging on to the shawl with her right hand and had the other arm raised, guarding her face, as if she expected to be hit. Her hair was a mixture of faded brown and silver grey with a cobweb clinging to it, her dress of thick brown wool. The boots braced against the lead roof were clumsy and dust-covered, with coarse grey stockings showing above them.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

I let go of the shawl. She rocked backwards and let her arm fall, blinking up at me. Her face was yellowish and deeply lined, her grey eyes bewildered. She seemed to be in her late forties. A light came into her eyes as if she thought she knew me, but I was certain I’d never seen her before in my life.

‘Are you employed here?’ I asked.

In a great household like Mandeville Hall it was possible there might be some servant I hadn’t met. She laughed.

‘Employed here? On the roof to scare the crows? Oh yes.’

The words were mad, but the voice wasn’t. It was hoarse but fairly cultivated, like an upper servant’s, though she wasn’t dressed as one. She was looking at me as if trying to place me.

‘It’s my shawl,’ I said. ‘You can keep it if you like, but did you take it from my room?’

‘Your room, was it?’

‘What’s your name?’

I’d intended to say it quite kindly, as far as I could control my voice when my heart was racing from the shock of finding her. But it must have sounded harsh because she braced her boots more firmly against the roof and pulled the ends of the shawl tightly around her.

‘No more questions. I’ve had enough of questions.’

‘Well, you can’t stay up here all day.’

‘I’ve been up here all night, so I don’t see why I can’t stay up here all day.’

‘All night? When did you …?’

She pulled the shawl up right over her head.

‘Aren’t you – I mean, you must be hungry and thirsty.’

‘Thirsty, yes.’ It came muffled through the shawl.

‘You’ll be like a hotcake on a griddle, up here all day. If you’ll come down with me, I’ll fetch you some water.’

She seemed to consider it, then: ‘Did the old lady send you?’

‘Yes.’

It was true, after a fashion. My tongue was twitching with questions I wanted to ask her, but the first thing was to persuade her down from the roof. She poked her head out from the shawl and began to straighten up painfully, pushing against the chimney stack. I helped her along the roof trough and went first through the trapdoor so that I could guide her down the ladder. Her legs smelled sweaty and unwashed, though there was
something about her that suggested she had once been a fastidious person.

The moment the door of my room shut behind us she collapsed on the chair and eyed the cold, soapy water in the wash-bowl so thirstily I thought she might lap it like a dog. I told her to wait, ran down the stairs to the nursery kitchen and came back with a jug of water and a glass. She drank two glassfuls of water straight off, closed her eyes and gave a shudder. It seemed to bring her back to herself because she made an attempt at tidying her hair, scooping up the fallen tendrils and re-pinning them with shaking hands.

‘I look a sight, don’t I? I’m sorry I used your good soap.’

‘So it was you in my room yesterday?’

She nodded. At least she’d answered a question.

‘What were you doing here.’

‘The old lady said I was to stay here until she called me.’

‘What old lady?’

‘It’s no good asking me her name. I don’t know.’

‘An old lady in black?’

A reluctant nod.

‘What were you doing on the roof?’

‘It’s no use keeping on at me. Where else could I go?’

She gulped more water. I waited.

‘So are you going to take me to her?’ she said.

‘Do you want me to?’

I decided not to tell her at once about Mrs Beedle’s
death. For all I knew she might have had a hand in it.

‘It’s not a question of what I want or don’t want, is it? I’ve been passed like a parcel, hand to hand, over the sea and back until I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.’

‘Over the sea and back?’

‘Over by trickery and back by force. I told the old lady about it. She said she’d look after me, once it was all over. Will she keep her promise, do you think?’

‘Why shouldn’t she?’

‘There was a gentleman promised to look after me too, but he didn’t come back.’

My whole body tingled, not with shock yet but the feeling of shock coming, like lightning singing in the air.

‘A gentleman where?’

‘In France.’

I’d picked up the water jug to refill her glass. I almost dropped it and when I managed to put it down on the wash-stand, my hand was shaking as badly as hers. I tried hard to keep my voice steady.

‘You said he didn’t come back. What happened to him?’

‘They told me he’d been shot. I don’t know what to believe from anyone any more.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He said he was Mr Lane, but I don’t know if it was his real name.’

‘It was his real name. He was my father.’

Visions of beautiful ladies and angry husbands fell
away. The search for the woman in my father’s letter had ended here, in this bleak room, with a dumpy woman in a brown wool dress, water-drops clinging to the little hairs on her upper lip from drinking so thirstily. She was staring at me as if my distress had woken up something in her mind.

‘Do you know, I thought you had the look of somebody I recognised when I saw you up there. Only I couldn’t call it to mind. There’ve been so many of them, you see, and I haven’t been myself.’

‘The old lady, Mrs Beedle, she was killed last night,’ I said.

I was past being careful. Her mouth fell open, showing small, gappy teeth.

‘Where?’

‘Downstairs in the schoolroom.’

‘Is that the room with the horse and the big globe?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘She took me in there, before she brought me up here. She said I was to come back down when she gave me the signal.’

‘Signal?’

‘She was going to tap on the bottom stair with that stick of hers. I waited. I washed myself and I put on the shawl and I waited a bit more. Then I heard a noise from downstairs.’

‘Her stick tapping?’

‘It might have been that, or it might have been a door closing, I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d better go down, so
I did. The door was closed, but I heard her voice from inside the room, talking to somebody about me.’