A Duty to the Dead (14 page)

“No, I wouldn’t dream of speaking of it—truly. I wouldn’t wish to remind any of them—”

“You’re kind, Miss. It’s been bottled up in me all these years, and I thought I’d carry it to my grave, but I’ve been that upset over Mr. Ted.”

“Will you be all right, if I leave you?”

“Yes, go, if you don’t mind. I need to rest. Thank you for coming, Miss.”

I made my farewells and slipped out. The cat jumped into her lap as I latched the door, and she bent her head, as if nodding.

I walked back to the house and went up to my room without meeting anyone. I was grateful for the respite.

Small wonder no one in the family wanted to see or speak to Peregrine Graham while he was there, ill. Even after all these years, the memory of what he’d done must still be raw.

It explained too why there were constables on watch. And why at the first sign of recovery, Peregrine had been sent directly back to the asylum. While he was still too weak to do anything frightful again.

T
HE MAGISTRATE, THE
aging relict of the man who had held that position before her, was nearing seventy, hunched and sharp-tongued. Dr. Philips pointed her out seated nearest the roaring fire, one of her grandsons beside her.

She had commanded that we hold the inquest at once, so that she could visit her granddaughter in Canterbury in time for the birth of her first great-grandchild. And everyone, from the Grahams to the police, agreed without argument.

It was the day after poor Ted Booker had been buried.
Indecent haste,
I thought, but perhaps no more than a duty to Lady Parsons.

I didn’t know the Coroner, a dour man of fifty, who, according to Dr. Philips, had come down from Tonbridge to conduct the proceedings.

I listened to the evidence given about Theodore Russell Booker’s state of mind, as if he were a stranger the witnesses barely knew. An embarrassment, something to put behind us quickly, so that we get on with living.

Dr. Philips gave a very clinical report on his mental state, and then added, “I think perhaps we haven’t considered the whole man. He and his brother were close, and Harold’s death must have been appalling. Theodore Booker was not in another part of the Front, word coming secondhand, he was there, a witness, he held
his brother in his arms as Harold died. We must accept as well our failure as a member of the medical profession to find a cure for horror and heartbreak. If Theodore Booker took his own life while in the grip of such painful memories, it was not his fault. It was the fault of war and of our inability to understand how to save him.”

There was silence as he stepped down and walked to his place next to me. We were in The Bells, in a parlor that was more often the scene of parties and filled with laughter, not talk of death. The dark beams over our heads and the dark paneling of the walls, added to a dreary day with rain coming down in sheets, fit our somber mood.

I reached out to touch the doctor’s arm as he sat down, then heard my own name called to give evidence.

I did so, to the best of my ability, remembering that I was under oath. But I also told the truth as I’d observed it: on the night of his death, I had felt so strongly that Lieutenant Booker had turned a corner. Then, like Dr. Philips, I added more than I was required to tell. “He loved his wife very much. He told me that. He tried to heal for her sake. I felt a great pity for him, because he wanted to be a good husband.”

There were two questions for me—one to do with my training and whether or not I knew enough about such cases to judge the circumstances surrounding Ted’s death, and the other to do with whether or not Theodore Booker was, in my view, of sound mind.

I answered, “Grief is difficult to bear at the best of times. Ted Booker was perfectly sane but so overwhelmed by what he saw as his responsibility for his brother’s death that he couldn’t find his way back to the man he was.” I wanted to add that a little more understanding from his mother-in-law might have gone far in saving him. But I held my tongue.

She was seated in the front row with her daughter, her face smug with satisfaction that the troublesome man was dead. Sally was so shrouded in widow’s weeds that her feelings were hard to read. There was no way of knowing whether she felt relief or despair.
Indeed, most of the people attending the hearing seemed to be unsympathetic to the dead man. I had a fleeting thought that the poor man was well out of it. These were neighbors and friends, they had known him since he was a boy, and yet they had turned away from him when he most needed them.

Was that what had happened to Peregrine Graham in his own hour of need?

In the end, the finding was that Theodore Booker, while not in his right mind due to grief over his brother’s death, had taken his own life. The stigma of suicide had been lifted from the survivors. That was all Mrs. Denton had wished for.

No mention was made of Dr. Philips or his skill as a physician. I hoped that my conversation with Inspector Howard had well and truly spiked those guns.

As I was walking out of The Bells, glad to be away from the crowded room inside, I looked out at the rain and thought about going back to the Graham house, then decided to sit in the church for a few minutes until I felt a little more tolerant. Jonathan Graham had said nothing about going to see Ted Booker, and the Coroner hadn’t called on him to give evidence. I had seen Mr. Montgomery look at him several times, as if expecting him to add what he knew, but he didn’t speak up. And neither did the rector.

I had closed the churchyard gate behind me and was walking toward the stained-glass windows of saints, when I heard someone shouting. I turned to see who it was.

It was a rider, coming fast, and calling to Jonathan Graham as he was escorting his mother home. They had reached the large trees that overhung the churchyard wall—not twenty yards from where Ted had been buried—when they heard the shout.

They turned as one, and the rider came up to them, reaching down to hand them a letter. As Jonathan opened the envelope, his mother was questioning the man on horseback. I realized then that it was Robert Douglas, holding the horse steady as he answered.

Jonathan’s face was flushed with something very like fury, but he nodded curtly, passed the letter to his mother, and she bent over it, trying to see it in the shadows cast by the bare limbs and her black umbrella. I thought for an instant she was going to faint, but she steadied herself, said something more to Robert, who wheeled his horse and went back toward the stragglers just coming out of The Bells. I realized that he was looking for Timothy, who was speaking to Mrs. Denton while Sally was being handed into a carriage by the young man I’d seen with Lady Parsons during the proceedings.

Timothy broke off, excused himself, and spoke sharply to Robert, who answered and pointed. Timothy Graham turned toward where his brother and his mother were standing and without a word of farewell to Mrs. Denton, strode away to join them, rigid with emotion.

Robert lifted his hat to Mrs. Denton, with a brief word, then put his horse to a trot to follow Timothy.

No one had seen me there by the church nave. And I stood watching the little scene play itself out as Timothy also read the letter and then passed it back to his mother. The Grahams walked briskly toward home, Robert riding ahead to stable his horse.

From their posture, heads together, backs rigid, I knew that the news was bad.

All I could think of was that the journey back to the asylum had been too much for Peregrine Graham, and that he had got his wish—he’d succumbed to his pneumonia after all.

I
HURRIED INTO
the church and sat down in a corner near the pulpit, where no one could see me, huddled into my cloak for warmth and comfort.

This wasn’t the right moment to go to the house. Let them have their time to grieve. But it was cold in the church, as cold as the tomb, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, and so after a time, though the rain was coming down hard, I left the church and crossed to the rectory, my shoes wet to my ankles, and the hem of my skirt dragging.

A middle-aged woman opened the door when I knocked and ushered me into the hall, clucking over how wet I was.

The rector wasn’t to home, she informed me. He’d gone to speak with the widow, to offer what comfort he could after the inquest.

At first I thought she meant Mrs. Graham, and then I realized she was speaking of Sally Booker. I turned away, wondering where I could go now, and she said, “No, you mustn’t leave here so wet as you are, Miss! The kitchen is warm, I’ll dry your shoes and your cloak while you have a bite of something. I’ve a nice bit of soup that’s just the right thing on such a day. Rector wouldn’t like me to send you away just because he’s not to home.” She glanced at the sky. “I don’t think this will last for more than a quarter of an hour. See, it’s brighter to the west.”

I smiled, trying to hold back tears of gratitude. “Thank you—”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s Rector says turn away no one in need.”

Was I in need? Yes, in a way. I wanted to go home, to see Colonel Sahib, to listen to my mother being sensible and comforting at the same time. Right now, being tucked into bed with a glass of warm milk would have been the epitome of happiness. Ted Booker was dead, there was nothing I could do to change that, and now Peregrine Graham had died, because he had been sent back to the asylum over my objections. Coming to Kent had been a bad decision—I was sure no one would carry out Arthur’s last wishes. Nothing would be done about whatever it was he wanted set right.

I tried to come to grips with my despondent mood, and couldn’t.

The housekeeper took me down the passage to the kitchen, and as I glanced over my shoulder, I could see the two china dogs in the parlor window, staring back at me. I’d glimpsed them on my first night in Owlhurst, and this was most likely my last night.

She introduced herself as Mrs. Oldsey, housekeeper here for many years, because the last two rectors hadn’t been married. “Not that I’ve lost hope for Rector,” she added as she helped me out of my heavy wet cloak and draped it in front of the kitchen fire. “He’s young yet. We’ve six bedchambers in this house, did you know that? And only one of them being used. I long to see children about the house. I wasn’t blessed with any myself, but I sincerely do love the little ones.”

She bustled about, setting the kettle on to boil as I removed my wet shoes and looked around.

It was an old-fashioned kitchen, with no wife to complain and have it redone. But Mrs. Oldsey seemed not to mind.

“What brought you out on such a morning as this?” she asked as she set down cups and saucers from the cupboard.

“I was at the inquest—”

“Yes, the poor Booker lad. Sad. I didn’t have the heart to go. I remember him and his brother. Imps, they were, but good-hearted. What was the verdict brought in?”

“Death by his own hand in the throes of grief for his brother.”

“Ah, well, best that way. He can be buried in holy ground, and his widow doesn’t have his memory hanging about her neck like something to ward off the plague.”

Amused by her way of seeing life, I said, “That’s what her mother hopes as well.”

“Mrs. Denton? A piece of work, that one, though it isn’t Christian of me to say so. But a spade’s a spade, for all that.”

I kept my opinion to myself, but the twinkle in Mrs. Oldsey’s eyes told me she suspected I shared her views.

She fed me tea and toast and a cup of soup warmed up from the night before. I ate because I was hungry, and because I dreaded going back out in the rain to the Graham house.

Mrs. Oldsey rambled on, sitting across from me as if we were old friends having a gossip.

I found the courage to ask her about Peregrine.

She frowned. “That was another tragedy. He used to come to services with his father. A handsome child with good manners. And then he stopped coming, and later the whispers began that he wasn’t quite right in the head. I thought, often enough, that Mrs. Graham was ashamed of him. Else she’d have seen to it that he lived as normal a life as possible, gossip or no gossip. But she didn’t, and as I never set eyes on him again until he was almost fourteen, who’s to say what was right and what was wrong?”

“You saw him when he returned from London?”

“Oh, yes, they brought him here. He was in such a state of shock—white as his shirt, shaking with fright, and unable to utter a word—that I thought he ought to be in his own home and his own bed. But Mrs. Graham wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I’ve three boys to think of,’ she told me, ‘and I can’t go to them until I’ve settled Peregrine.
I’ve sent Robert for Inspector Gadd, and Dr. Hadley. Can you find the rector for me, please?’ And she asked me to send for Lady Parsons, Sir Frederick’s widow. I kept the boy down here in the kitchen, trying to warm him up a little, and wash his hands, but he wouldn’t let me touch him, whatever I said. Then they insisted on locking him in one of the bedchambers, without so much as a word of comfort to him. After a bit, they went up for him and took him away, him still all bloody and without a coat, and Rector told me later he was in the asylum. I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy in a place like that, not to speak of my own child. I didn’t learn until later that he’d killed someone. I thought somehow he’d done himself an injury, all that blood. They never said who he’d killed, and when I asked Rector, he told me it was best I didn’t know. That it was horrible beyond human imagination. I never forgot that. Horrible beyond human imagination.”

She repeated it, as if the words had been imprinted in her memory.

“Most folks have forgotten Mr. Peregrine, you know. Perhaps that’s for the best.”

But they’d remember all the whispers soon enough, when he was brought back to Owlhurst to lie next to his father. I had a feeling it would be a brief graveside service, with few mourners, though the curious would be there to gawk.

She went on with other stories about her years as housekeeper, and after a while, since the rector hadn’t returned, I put on my still-damp shoes and my cloak and set out for the Graham house. The rain had let up, just as Mrs. Oldsey had prophesized, and I was grateful.

I let myself in the front door. There were no sounds to greet me—no conversation somewhere in the downstairs rooms, and no voices on the first floor as I quietly went up the staircase. I wanted to find Susan and ask her what was happening. But she too seemed to have vanished. I expect she had gone to visit her mother and give her the outcome of the inquest. She had one afternoon off a week.

I sat by the fire in my room and waited. There was nothing else I could do.

But it wasn’t Mrs. Graham who came to speak to me—it was Robert. He knocked at my door, and when I opened it, he said gruffly, “Mrs. Graham’s apologies, Miss Crawford, but there’s been terrible news. Mrs. Graham would take it as a favor if you could be in Tonbridge in time for the six o’clock train tonight. I’ll be taking you myself, as soon as you’re ready.”

I had expected this—and I hadn’t.

All I could manage to say was, “I can be ready in an hour. I’d like to say my farewells—”

“Mrs. Graham begs you to forgive her if she isn’t able to wish you a safe journey. I’ll ask Susan to pack a box of sandwiches for you, and a Thermos of tea, to see you as far as London. I’m to send a telegram to your father to meet you there.”

I could hardly tell him that I would rather leave in the morning than arrive in London so late. Instead I thanked him and added, “I’ll write Mrs. Graham as soon as I reach Somerset. Please tell her she’s been more than kind.”

I didn’t know what else to add.

He nodded, and was gone.

I packed my belongings for a second time, and looked around for Elayne’s letter to me, to read again on the train. I’d forgot the name of the man she was so sure she’d marry. But it wasn’t in my case, and it wasn’t in the little desk between the windows. I’d last seen it in the sickroom, and I went there to find it. It wasn’t on the table by the bed nor on the mantelpiece, and I knew that if Susan had found it, she’d have brought it to me. As a last resort, I got down on my knees and lifted the coverlet to look under the bed. And there it was, the three pages scattered there. I chuckled. Susan hadn’t used the carpet sweeper—my fingers came up with dust clinging to them. I looked again for the envelope, but it wasn’t with the pages. That she might well have found, without the enclosed letter, and tossed it in the
grate. I took the letter back to my room, and after closing my case, I left it outside my door with my valise for Robert to take down.

I was ready when he came for me, and in the dogcart I saw the box with my sandwiches. He handed me warmed rugs as I stepped into the cart, and I settled myself as comfortably as I could. He draped a length of canvas over my baggage and my lap, handed me a large black umbrella, and then mounted the box. No one had come to see me off.

I watched the house disappear and then the church dwindle to a distant smudge as we turned away, and The Bells with it. And then Owlhurst was gone. I felt like crying. Nothing had happened the way I’d hoped or even expected. And somehow I’d lost Arthur as well. I had liked Dr. Philips and the rector and was sorry not to say farewell to them, but surely they would understand.

Soon the asylum loomed ahead, in daylight a grim place with no redeeming softness—
as grim,
I thought,
as a prison.
At least Peregrine was free of it, and his suffering over.

Like Ted Booker, he would be buried in a wintry churchyard and forgotten before the spring.

I was thoroughly miserable when we finally reached the station in Tonbridge, and the train was already there, white plumes of smoke curling about the booking office roof as the engine worked up a head of steam. Robert left me in the cart while he went quickly inside, speaking to the stationmaster. I could see them through the grimy, lamp-lit window. The winter darkness had come down, and it fit my own dark mood.

And then Robert was back again, my tickets in his hand, hurrying me toward the train. I had forgotten my sandwiches, and with a muttered word, he went back for them, then caught me up. All the while, the stationmaster was fingering his watch, impatience in every line as he stood by my compartment.

I expected Robert to leave me then, but he helped me up into the train, settled me by the window, then stowed my case and valise
where I could reach them if I needed them. That done, he stood for a moment, looking down at me, as if he didn’t know what to say. Finally he took my hand and held it for a moment, like a gentleman telling a lady good-bye. Without a word, he touched the brim of his hat and was gone, and the train started with a lurch almost before his boots had touched the platform again.

I sat back in my seat and prepared myself for the long journey ahead.

We were just coming into Sevenoaks when a thought brought me out of my drowsiness.

I remembered Timothy and Jonathan arguing in their mother’s presence about who should inherit when Peregrine was dead.

Well, they would soon know.

I found that I didn’t care.

In Sevenoaks, I got off the train to send a telegram to my father, telling him I would like to stay in London a few days with Elayne. He had no way of knowing she was in France, and I needed a respite before I faced his sharp eyes or my mother’s intuition. So much for longing for their comfort. That had been a moment of weakness, and I was rather ashamed of it now that I’d put some distance between myself and Owlhurst.

The train was slow, a troop train taking precedence up the line, and I listened to two elderly women comparing notes on the funeral they’d attended in Tunbridge Wells. I knew Tunbridge—it had once been a garrison town, and I’d visited friends of my parents there on one of my father’s leaves. But dissecting a funeral was not a comfortable subject for me, and I tried to shut out their voices with a book I borrowed from the gentleman across from me. He had just finished it and was stuffing it back in his case when I asked to see it.

It was a treatise on the history of the Turkish Empire, and I found it quite absorbing. Our P&O boat had stopped in Istanbul on
our return from India, and I had spent an afternoon in a carriage, touring the city.

I fell asleep all the same.

And then we were pulling into London, the outskirts a series of back gardens and small industries, depressing in winter garb. But mostly I could see only my own reflection in the glass as I looked out from our brightly lit carriage, and there were circles under my eyes nearly as dark as those I saw in the glass on my way home from Greece in November.

The two ladies were met by a young man with one arm, his sleeve pinned to his coat. Without a word, the man from whom I’d borrowed the book helped bring down our bags, and then a porter was there to pile them on his cart.

“There’s no one to meet you?” the book lender asked as I gave in my ticket and stood there, wondering how I was to arrange to have my heavier valise delivered.

“I daresay they’re late,” I answered, smiling, not wanting a portly knight in shining armor to see me home. The relief at not finding my father on the platform made me feel giddy.

“Then let me summon a cab and see you into it.”

I thanked him, and in ten minutes I was in the cab and on my way to the flat. I was tired despite my brief nap, it was late, and I would be glad for a night’s sleep.

Mrs. Hennessey wasn’t there, and I asked the cabbie to leave my luggage outside her door. She’d see that it was taken upstairs. The dustman always stopped for an early cup of tea, and the promise of a slice of cake or tart would be enough to send him up with it.