Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman (13 page)

When she turned the corner into the stable yard she was thrilled to find her son examining the right front shoe of his horse. As he called his good-morning to her, she asked him who he was riding out with.

“No one, Mother, I'm all yours,” he said as he dropped his horse's hoof, lifted the saddle flap, and tightened the girth. She watched his groom, Davey, give him a leg-up onto his tall bay gelding and felt almost happy at the thought of a ride on her favorite mare, with her son for company.

Clementine's pretty gray mare, Catch, was led out into the yard. She bent her head and rubbed her cheek against the mare's soft, delicate muzzle, and then led her over to the mounting block. As she settled herself on her horse's back and organized her riding habit, she asked the head groom, “How is she this morning Tom?” as Catch pinned her ears at Harry's dignified hunter.

“She's in a sweet and listening mood, your la'ship.” Tom Makepeace touched his cap to her. “Took her out yesterday and she was a lamb.” The mare snaked her neck at Harry's horse and Clementine heard her teeth click.

“Little witch, she's full of herself.” Clementine laughed and felt almost lighthearted. “Come on then, Harry, let's be off,” she cried out to her son as she trotted around him on her excited mare, who insisted on being the first to leave the yard. In the sunlight atop Catch, she felt normalcy and even optimism return as the two of them clattered out of the yard and up the lane in the direction of the home farm.

“Not that way, Mother,” Harry said as she turned her mare into the home-farm lane. “Let's give that blasted wood a miss for a few weeks. If we go left up the cart track we can pick our way round the back of the dower house, come out by Feltham's field, and take our gallop across the top there.” He slowed his bay to a walk and she fell in beside him, careful not to let her mare's nose poke ahead and cause rivalry.

They walked their horses through the gate and onto the cart track and then broke into a trot and Clementine could almost feel her liver thanking her for exercise. They rode in silence through the pasture where a herd of cows slowly turned to watch them, their heavy, bovine jaws working steadily as they tore up rich mouthfuls of lush green grass.

Grateful to be away from her house, she inhaled the soft scents of the day: rain-drenched earth warming in the sun, the sweet crushed grass under their horses' hooves, pollen and meadow flowers. A blissful morning, she thought as she looked out across the pasture and into the shady beech woods at its edge. She almost felt normal again.

Harry urged his bay forward and Clementine's mare broke into a canter before she was asked and off they went. She heard herself laugh as Catch exuberantly kicked out at a patch of dandelions, sending seed heads flying into the sunlit air.

She felt like a new woman when they returned more than an hour later, her face flushed with the effort of their long gallop. They turned down the lane past the dower house and fell into a slow walk. As they passed the turnoff for the home farm she saw Mr. Jenkins and his farm laborers walking up the lane, no doubt on their way to the stable block to join the search party assembling there. She lifted her hand in greeting.

“Wish I could go out with them, but I can't,” said Harry. “Valentine wants to see me later this morning, before he and Oscar leave for Oxford.”

Clementine was instantly alert. “Why are they off to Oxford? Surely Valentine doesn't believe Oscar had anything to do with Teddy's gambling club?”

She turned in her saddle and noticed that Harry was looking particularly derisive as he answered her: “Well quite, anyone who knows Oscar knows he never plays cards. It's pathetic really. And even if Oscar and Teddy were as thick as thieves, I just don't see Oscar running an illegal club.”

Clementine thought this rather an unfortunate aphorism considering that Teddy had in actual fact been a thief and privately wondered that even if Oscar didn't play cards, perhaps he had something to do with the organization of the gambling club and the systematic cheating that had taken place. She rather liked Oscar, and had often puzzled over his friendship with her husband's nephew. She asked her son if he knew why Oscar had to go to Oxford.

“Only thing he said was that he had some papers of Teddy's and that he had to go with Valentine up to Christ Church so he could hand them over. He didn't
say
anything more, but I could tell he was all shaky and anxious about it. You know Oscar, he gets keyed up about little things, it's just how he is.”

“I don't think that going up to Oxford with Valentine as part of a murder investigation is a little thing. Oscar looked almost ill last night at dinner.”

“Well that's an understatement. He was Teddy closest … only friend at Oxford. Poor chap's quite sick with nerves, and then of course he had quite a few too many last night … so he is probably feeling pretty low this morning. Now he's got to spend the entire afternoon with Valentine, what a thought.” Obviously Harry, like Gertrude Waterford, held Morris Valentine in low esteem.

She sat deep into her saddle as Catch decided to be melodramatic about an old wheelbarrow leaning up against the post of the gate. When she had the mare walking obediently alongside Harry again, she asked if he thought Valentine suspected that Oscar had something to do with Teddy's death.

Her question made Harry turn toward her. He considered and then said, “Well, Oscar seems to think that Valentine might suspect him. Apparently he does not have what Valentine calls an alibi from the end of the ball until early the following morning.”

Clementine digested this sizable crumb and then cautiously asked her son if he had an alibi.

“Yes, Mother, I do, actually.” He turned in his saddle to look at her and smiled. “Do you?”

“Is that what Colonel Valentine is asking everyone?” she persisted.

“Yes, that's what he is asking. He says, ‘Do come on in, Lord Haversham, and take a chair,' all very friendly. Then all of a sudden it's, ‘How much time did you spend with Teddy, were you close, did you get on with your cousin, what do you know about his card club, did you play?' And just as you are adjusting to that, it's a wallop: ‘I need to know where you were from the end of the ball till breakfast the following morning. Who were you with, will they vouch for you?' You have to give the right answers of course; it's like being back at Eton, but not as intimidating.”

“Did you give Valentine the right answers, Harry?”

He gave her the smile he had used since he was a boy when he was asking too many questions of her. She felt hugely irritated by it.

How infuriating he could be,
she thought.
Why was he so flippant about something so terribly important?
His unselfconscious charm could be very disarming, but it worked only with mothers, nannies, and young women. She was quite sure that someone like Valentine wouldn't be taken in by it.

Inwardly fuming over the inconsequential attitudes of the young, she became aware that he had slowed his horse to a halt, turned its nose toward her mare, and was now looking at her very seriously indeed. Surprised by the rapid switch from playfulness to gravity, she drew her mare up and looked back at him expectantly. He was evidently going to tell her something significant. He was watching her intently, as if trying to decide how best to put what he had to say. She held her breath and her inner tension communicated itself to Catch; the mare danced up and down on the spot and then started to back up.

“Mother, I rather need your help…” Harry said and waited as she brought her mare back under control.
Oh God,
she thought,
what is he going to tell me?
She composed herself for the inevitable.

When he had finished explaining his situation, she became so alarmed that it was hard for her to let him finish. She had to force herself to be silent until he was done.

“So you see, Mama,” he said as he wound up, “I really need you in my corner. Will you help me?” His disarming smile had gone, and his face was as grave and serious as it had been when he was a boy and had brought home a sack of mongrel puppies, rescued from the village pond, and had come looking for her as an ally. But this request was far more calamitous than hand-raising mutts.

She finally found her voice: “A flyer? You want to become a flyer? I'm not even sure I understand what that means. It has to do with those blasted aeroplanes, doesn't it? We all know they are death traps.” She felt the tension of the last few days return and had to hold her breath when she saw the look of incredulous dismay on his face. She waited until she was quite sure her next words would not sound angry. She breathed evenly as she waited for calm, for patience.

“We are in the middle of a murder inquiry, Harry, and you are in a very precarious position indeed. How could you possibly bring up a thing like this? Of course your father will object to your flying. Most strongly I hope.” She had managed the first part quite well, but heard her voice beginning to rise.
Breathe,
she said to herself,
calm down before you continue.

“Harry, you have a duty.” She waved her whip around her at the stables, the horse pastures, and the great beyond that stretched all around them, acre upon acre of farms, fields, and woodland. “And it's all this…” She pointed her arm down the valley. Productive, bountiful, arable Talbot land stretched for miles, representing the Talbots' responsibility to hundreds of families: tenant farmers, estate workers, and neighboring landowners who made up their agrarian world.

But Harry had grown up with “all this” and apparently, unlike his father, he was not as impressed with his duty to it as he should be; she could tell by the look of polite patience on his face.

“Yes, I know that, Mother, but it will be years until I inherit. I need something useful to do…”

“Of course you do, Harry, and it's taking your place as a member of parliament for the county. That's your job, until you inherit. That is what people like us do: we take our place in government, and we are responsible for the land we inherit.” She reined in her frustration and her nervous mare.
And you can't do that with a broken neck,
she said to herself.

“Yes, Mother, I am completely aware of my duty, and completely prepared to do it. But I can also join Tom Sopwith and that is what I want to do this summer. He is the best aeroplane designer this country has, and we both believe flight is a big part of the future.”

As they walked their horses back to the stable she asked herself in despair why children were such a challenge when they grew up.

*   *   *

Clementine's interview with Colonel Valentine was set for a little later that afternoon. As she waited for her turn to come, she had plenty of time to prepare her thoughts as she idled away the afternoon with her friends.

After luncheon she had settled down to play bridge with Olive, Gertrude, and Sir Wilfred, who had already paid their visits to the morning room. Gertrude seemed a good deal more relaxed since her interview with Colonel Valentine, she thought. Clementine watched her play with her usual effortless skill, interjecting the occasional amusing observation, doing her best to keep the occasion lighthearted. She was grateful that her friend was holding the social fort because she had never felt so anxious and miserable in her life.

She knew she was playing badly, unlike Olive, a serious and competitive player who bent to her work with the relentless focus of an addict. Her partner, Sir Wilfred, was inattentive and his concentration for the game erratic. Between them they put up such a poor show that Olive got quite tetchy and reproached her husband for drumming his fingers on the table and scowled when Clementine had to be reminded that it was her play.

Instead of concentrating on her hand, she glanced over at Sir Wilfred. What an odd duck the man was, she thought. His interests in life were focused only in two distinct and separate areas. He did something very important on the board of the White Star shipping line, and when he was not directing the efforts of others, he spent as much of his winter as he could on his archaeological dig in Egypt, of which he was apparently the sole financial contributor, and where, she had no doubt, he continued to direct the efforts of others. She had always found him a desiccated and rather self-absorbed specimen, who relinquished all responsibility for social intercourse on whoever he was with at the time, making him an exhausting person to be seated next to at dinner, unless you were a shipping magnate or an Egyptologist.

She found Olive, on the other hand, practical, pleasant, and socially adept. She enjoyed her company and her fund of wicked and often very funny stories about her arch nemesis, the ambitious and ruthless Lady Constance Gwladys, the Marchioness of Ripon, who had successfully competed with Olive for Sir Thomas Beecham's wandering attentions.

Clementine idly wondered how her dear friend Harriet was holding up. She knew Lady Harriet and Gilbert Lambert-Lambert were keeping each other company as they made or waited for telephone calls from butlers at their various houses, in their quest to locate their elusive daughter. Clementine had made the study available to them to be handy for the telephone room, where they repaired to shout instructions to servants at their house in London and their country houses in Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

After luncheon, when she was walking through the hall she heard their voices raised in accusation or argument behind the closed door of the stuffy telephone room. She had almost laughed when she heard Gilbert's voice shouting, “How many bloody times do I have to telephone the house? It's harder to be put through to damn Nanny than to Herbert Asquith.” Gilbert's overbearing and humorless pomposity had evaporated overnight, she thought with compassion, for although she often found him hard to take, she was immensely fond of his wife.