The Attenbury Emeralds (32 page)

‘Distressed people often forget to eat,’ said Harriet.

It was Ada DuBerris who appeared first in the room; she was being propelled from behind by Ottalie. Ada was weeping, swollen-eyed, hardly able to see where she was going. Ottalie had that bright-eyed, flushed, alert appearance that excitement, good or bad, confers. ‘Peter! Please – you must help us!’ she said.

‘I will help you if I honourably can,’ said Peter.

Harriet was surprised by the chill in his tone. ‘Please sit down, both of you,’ she said. ‘Bunter is bringing tea.’

‘Oh, tea!’ said Ottalie dismissively.

Ada said, very quietly, ‘Please, Lord Peter, tell me what my mother is supposed to have done…’

Peter in sombre tones launched into the tale of the substitute emerald.

Ada said, ‘I didn’t know she had done that. But…no harm has been done, has it? We can just swap the things back. What sort of punishment will she get for that?’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t the worst of it, Miss DuBerris,’ said Peter, and he proceeded to tell her about the deaths.

As he spoke a desperate calm descended on Ada. ‘Why should anyone think all that had anything to do with my mother?’ she asked.

‘It has to be someone who over many years knew when the Attenbury family took their emerald out of the bank,’ said Peter. ‘You and your mother fit that bill. It’s hard to think who else does.’

‘Me?’ said Ada. And then, ‘She was furious with me when I borrowed our emerald to go to the Café de Paris in fancy dress. I’ve never known her so furious. But, but as God’s my witness, I didn’t know why she was so interested in gossip about the Attenburys, I really didn’t…Oh, God, are you saying I helped her commit murder?’

‘I think you did,’ said Peter, ‘although I have no idea whether you knew what you were doing. No; don’t answer that. You urgently need a lawyer, and your mother needs one even more urgently. The less you say to anyone in the meantime the better.’

Ada ignored him. ‘She was angry enough for that,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t have thought she could be brutal enough.’

‘Believe me,’ said Peter, ‘you should say nothing till you have spoken to a lawyer.’

‘We couldn’t possibly afford a lawyer,’ she said.

‘You could sell your emerald.’

‘She wouldn’t agree. She would die first…’

A horrified silence hung in the room at that remark.

Ada uttered a choking sob. ‘Will you talk to her, Lord Peter? Will you persuade her she needs a lawyer? I’m sure she won’t listen to me, she never does.’

Harriet thought that Ada’s mother had listened to her all too well, but she left the thought unuttered.

‘Yes; I will talk to her,’ said Peter. ‘No – don’t thank me. Go home and get some sleep if you can.’

‘You’ll spend the night in my place, Ada,’ said Ottalie. And then, already standing up to go, she said, ‘What was your mother so angry about, Ada? We always tried to be so kind to her, to both of you.’

‘That’s it,’ said Ada bleakly. ‘Your kindness made her angry. And you know what, Ottalie? I don’t entirely blame her for that.’

When the two women had left Harriet surprised herself by taking a sandwich from the plate as Bunter bore it away. Peter had left the room, and she could hear his voice on the phone.

‘Lawyer all fixed up?’ she asked him when he returned.

‘Not till the morning. But I’ve got a couple of names from Impey Biggs of rising talents who might take it on. Unless she confesses it will be very hard to pin the murders on her. But it’ll be hard to clear her of fraud. Some bright young fellow will be glad to try.’

‘And is it up to you to find him?’

Peter looked shamefaced. ‘Everyone in jeopardy deserves a decent defence,’ he said.

‘Do you think I could argue with you about that?’ she replied.

‘It’s so hard on you when I throw a wobbly like this,’ he said, turning away from her.

She said to the back of his head, ‘It’s when I love you best, Peter.’

Peter went out early the next morning, leaving Harriet to her novel. Few people appreciate that authors have deadlines; that they owe a completed book somewhere in the expected window for it in a publishing schedule. The image of the writer staring into space waiting for inspiration, which when it comes will not entail labour, but merely writing something down, as if taking dictation, is wide, wide of the mark. Harriet’s publisher was expecting something from her in time for the autumn list; indeed he had already announced it under a provisional title in his catalogue. But not surprisingly, she found it difficult to concentrate. At an average of one thousand words to four pages of typescript, she was some twenty thousand words short of the gratifying moment when she could begin to unwind the tightly coiled turns of the plot and let the reader see an outline of the denouement. Clever readers, of course, would already have seen through the entire thing, and for them the ending would lack surprise. But Harriet knew from experience that the pleasures of having guessed it all, with the concomitant pleasure of feeling clever, would make up for that as long as matters were not humiliatingly easy to guess. This present work had been interrupted – no, positively invaded by life; and she would have much ado to get it back on course. The invasions and interruptions promptly arrived in battalions to sit in the front of her head, and divert her attention.

She fought for the direction of her thoughts, and had so far succeeded that when Peter came in at about midday she was lost to the real world, and so reluctant to surface that she did not emerge from her study until an hour after the usual time for lunch. The two places set on the little breakfast table were both untouched. Peter was sitting at the window, with a copy of
The Times
in his hand.

‘Goodness!’ said Harriet. ‘You needn’t have waited for me. You must be starving, Peter.’

But the moment he looked up and their eyes met she said, ‘What’s wrong? Was she horrible to talk to?’

‘The lady won’t see me,’ he said.

‘Can she refuse?’

‘Oh, yes. One of the few liberties remaining to an incarcerated prisoner is the right to accept or refuse a visitor.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Harriet.

‘You didn’t know? And there was I all those years ago taking comfort from the thought that you could have, and did not, refuse to see me. Such slender strands of hope were all I had.’

‘We’ve made up to each other for all that long ago,’ said Harriet crisply. ‘What’s wrong this morning?’

‘She refuses to see me, but says that she would see you,’ he said.

‘Ah.’

‘Harriet, you absolutely don’t have to do it. She has no right, no claim in the matter at all. It isn’t in the least like that visit you made to Harwell; you had something personal to tell him – with this woman you have no connection at all.’

‘Hush, Peter,’ said Harriet softly. ‘You know that I will do it. Define for me exactly what the mission is.’

‘To talk her into saving her daughter’s skin, and just possibly her own, by hiring a good lawyer.’

‘A lawyer that you are paying for?’

‘No. The sort of lawyer she needs would cost the wages of three gardeners at Denver for several years. I will help her find the right man; but why should we pay for it when she has a huge sum of money at her own disposal if she will only see sense and sell her emerald?’

Harriet observed, but did not comment on, the minting of a new currency: value determined by what it would pay for at Denver.

Mrs DuBerris sat at one end of a scrubbed deal table, and Harriet at the other. She was, to her own surprise, rather distressed at her surroundings. Or perhaps her discomfort arose from her dislike of the other woman…

‘There is a good deal about your situation that I do not understand,’ she began.

‘That’s a bad start,’ said Mrs DuBerris calmly. ‘I cannot think of anyone better placed to understand me. You too have married above yourself – streets above yourself. How would you feel if you had been despised and rejected by your husband’s family? If you had been made to feel that he could have married you only as a result of some trick, some exploitation of his illness? If nothing had been done to assist his child; if you had been left to struggle in poverty for years? If his family had even got at the College of Arms to deny you the title that should have belonged to his wife?’

Harriet considered that. ‘I shouldn’t have approved their conduct,’ she said, ‘but I could have got along with my own life, I think. I should have despised them in return.’

‘That’s it. I knew you would comprehend me.’

‘Remember that I came on the scene long after all this, and have only heard tell of what happened. But don’t I understand that the Attenburys – Lady Attenbury particularly – were kind to you?’

Mrs DuBerris was suddenly suffused by rage. Fists clenched, eyes flashing, she practically spat the word. ‘
Kind?
Oh, yes, they were kind! If you call occasional invitations and gifts of cast-off clothes kindness. Everything they gave us I gave away again at once! It was intolerable, you understand,
intolerable
. Lady Attenbury should have compelled her brother to accept me, not merely wrung her hands at him and given me cups of tea. We needed money and a place in society, not hand-me-downs. And that was William’s
right
. It was his daughter’s
right
.’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Harriet.

‘He was entitled to marry whom he chose!’ Mrs DuBerris continued. ‘And what was wrong with me? There’s many a vulgar chorus girl married into the aristocracy and prancing around playing the grand lady. They never asked, they never knew where I came from, they just assumed I was dirt because I was nursing common soldiers. How we hated them!’

‘But you had that emerald,’ said Harriet.

‘It was William’s plan. When he was dying. We were living in a squalid lodging house in Dover; I couldn’t safely get him any further, and his family wouldn’t come; wouldn’t help. We got cold letters. When the one came that told him he was disinherited we made a plan. Swap the emerald, and wait for the right moment for revenge. William knew the Attenburys well. He thought they lived beyond their means. He thought the time would come when they needed to sell their baubles. And then our day would come!’

‘But wouldn’t you be avenged on the wrong person? The Attenbury family weren’t the main offenders, surely, however little you liked their cast-off clothes.’

‘Oh, they all stick together, those toffs. We could have threatened the ruin of one branch of the family unless the other branch changed their tune.’

‘So you swapped the emeralds.’

‘That was easy, although that fool Northerby nearly spoiled it. No sooner had I swapped it than he lifted it. Couldn’t wait. Greedy bastard; he was supposed to be in it with me, and then he thought he could take it and cut me out. But it was my jewel he took. At first I thought he had wrecked the plan, but I just sat tight, and by and by your Lord Peter had got it back, and it was in the bank.’

‘How was it that William had one of the emeralds to give you?’ Harriet asked.

‘An old soldier gave it to him. His father had won it in a raffle, he said. He gave it in exchange for a new coat.’

‘I don’t understand you, though. You waited all those years, and you killed people – what was all that about?’

‘I wanted to choose my time to strike. The longer I had waited the more I had to lose if anyone saw it was the wrong stone in the Attenburys’ box. That wasn’t likely unless someone saw it who could read Persian. But that kept seeming possible. So I did what I had to do. For William; it was his idea. In his last few nights he was feverish, and he thought we could buy Fennybrook Hall, and eject the Attenburys, and live in it ourselves. And I thought if I waited and watched, I might manage to do that.’

‘You did it with the aid of a Mr Tipotenios, I understand. Who was that?’

‘An out-of-work actor. He borrowed a theatrical costumier’s suit. Not hard.’

Harriet was coming to the firm conclusion that the woman she was talking to was mad. And that that would be her best defence.

‘You needn’t think you have got me to confess,’ said Mrs DuBerris. ‘Hearsay is not evidence, and this conversation would be your word against mine. I shall deny every word of it. And I haven’t been read my rights.’

‘Did you mean to incriminate your daughter? William’s daughter?’

Mrs DuBerris shook her head.

‘But you have done. Someone will have to defend her from the obvious conclusion that she was your accomplice in murder. I am here, since you won’t see my husband, to persuade you, if I can, to hire a lawyer, for Ada’s sake if not for your own.’

‘I can’t…’

‘You must sell your emerald.’

Silence.

Harriet continued, ‘You may have felt justified all those years in keeping your jewel as a means of revenge, and living in poverty as a result; it’s another thing, surely, to hang on to it now, when any confusion is sorted out, and Ada risks a prison sentence for something she knew nothing about. Do you love your daughter, Mrs DuBerris, or is hatred all that you feel for anyone?’

Mrs DuBerris gestured to the prison officer, looking at them through the grille, and the interview was abruptly at an end.

‘Failure,’ said Harriet to Peter when she returned home. She recounted the interview as well as she could remember it.

‘And did you sympathise?’ asked Peter.

‘I allowed myself a moment’s complacency at the thought that I had never felt homicidal when being chipped at by Helen,’ said Harriet. ‘And then I remembered that I had my husband at my side when being snubbed and insulted. She was alone.’

‘I don’t think you needed me to avoid becoming murderous,’ said Peter. ‘And I don’t think a defence of insanity is an easy wicket. A plan devised and pursued for so many years is going to look to a jury more like wickedness than lunacy.’

‘Such a ramshackle and improbable plan,’ said Harriet. ‘And I need you for everything. But, Peter, it’s a bitter sort of irony, isn’t it, to realise that that woman has sold her soul, embittered her whole life, and become homicidal to get something that we have simply been landed with, and would so gladly be without!’