Scandal at High Chimneys (16 page)

“I will attend to all, sir. You may trust me.”

Wind whooped and swirled. Clive, reassured, watched them go. He could hear Superintendent Muswell’s hoarse voice speaking behind the closed door, but he paid no attention to the words. Another thought coiled into his mind.

“Miss Burbage!” he called after the two women, and held his lamp high.

“S-sir?”

“When you have escorted Mrs. Damon to the study, will you oblige me further by joining me in the conservatory?”

“If you distinctly wish it, sir.”

“I do wish it. You and I are the only living witnesses who have seen the murderer face to face. And yet neither of us can identify that face or even describe it.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” cried Georgette.

“If you and I compared notes, Miss Burbage, and understood why we were unable to see it even at close range …”

Penelope had held up her own lamp, so that the light of the two clashed in an unsteady shadow-play, slow and yet wild, across the walls and ceiling. But Georgette, nearly at the end of her nervous energy, cried out in a way that made the hall ring.

“
I
can tell you. Because of a woman’s black silk stocking, cut off near the top with slits for eyes, and fitted over the head like a mask. I found it hidden where the other clothes were hidden: in Kate’s bedroom. Is that all you wish to know?”

“No. Will you come and see me, Miss Burbage?”

“Yes, sir.”

Abruptly, behind the closed door of the study, Superintendent Muswell’s voice stopped speaking as though he had overheard. Clive retreated into the back-parlour. He had been keeping watch from the corner of his eye; no person could have left the conservatory and slipped out by way of the arch-entrance to the dining-room.

But then no person had attempted to slip out.

Clive returned to the conservatory, closing the glass doors behind him. The glow of his lamp moved steadily through greenery, catching another black dress. When he emerged into the cleared space by the Indian azalea, Mrs. Mary Jane Cavanagh was waiting for him.

Slyness, triumph, pleasure? What was the look on Mrs. Cavanagh’s face?

She stood beside the iron table, her strong hands folded. But her tone remained respectful, her bearing all unctuousness, as she lowered one shoulder in greeting.

“Good evening, sir,” she said. Then her voice poured with reproach. “I’m sure I’m the last person, sir, that would want to alarm you or the madam. But you should have called out, sir, really you should, when you heard me walking here!”

The warm damp air seemed choking in Clive’s lungs.

“It
was
you, was it?”

“Oh, deary me,” cried Mrs. Cavanagh, shivering, “but I often walk in here. I love the dear plants. It wasn’t my place to call out and announce myself, truly it wasn’t, when you and the madam were having a private conversation.”

“I see.”

“Such a private conversation, too! If poor Mr. Damon had known—”

“He knew many things, Mrs. Cavanagh.”

“Indeed and I’m afraid he did, sir! Poor Miss Kate wants to get away from this house (her own home, too); and I daresay she’d have done anything to be quit of her pa and all the people who are so good to her.—Did you say something, sir?”

“No.”

“But it’s a wicked world. Miss Kate’s not the only one, even if she’s the worst. Would you believe me, sir, if I told you Mr. Damon wanted to bring a detective-officer here because of the madam’s carryings-on with a certain noble lord?”

Once more Clive put down the lamp on the iron table and spoke clearly.

“Oh, no, he didn’t!”

“Sir?”

“It was not because of Mrs. Damon that he wished to bring a detective-officer here. It was because he thought himself in danger. Over three months ago, Mrs. Cavanagh, Jonathan Whicher learned the full truth about Harriet Pyke.”

“Lawk, sir, and who might Harriet Pyke be?”

“Don’t you know?”

Mrs. Cavanagh’s expression hardly changed. Yet it was as though malice, palpable if unspoken, slashed out at him like a cat’s claws.

‘My impulse to carry Kate away from here,’ he was thinking, ‘is more than passion for her or a wish to have her to myself. Kate is in as great danger from plots as Mr. Damon ever was from a bullet. I thought so before; now I know it. The murderer hid those clothes in Kate’s bedroom. This woman here, who ought to cherish the child she once nursed, for some reason hates Kate as it seems scarcely possible to hate anyone.

‘If I dared risk public opinion and abduct Kate this very night …’

Clive flung the vision away.

“Don’t you know who Harriet Pyke was, Mrs. Cavanagh?”

“Lawk, now, but is poor old Cavvy a mind-reader?”

“Then I had better tell you what Whicher told me this afternoon.”

“I’ve got no wish to hear what’s none of my business, thanking you very much! If you’ll permit me to go …”

“No. Stay where you are.”

The close air seemed to grow damper and warmer. Mrs. Cavanagh, shivering, suddenly unfolded her hands before clasping them hard.

“Nineteen years ago,” said Clive, “Harriet Pyke was hanged for the murder of her lover and of a maidservant. Whicher (yes, you’ve heard of him!) assisted at her arrest. But he was only a young sergeant under Detective-Inspector Charles Field. Even if Mr. Damon had questioned him then, Whicher knew very little.

“He knew she was the daughter of a very respectable poor family. Respectable mother and father, respectable brothers and sisters: none of these were in the courtroom when Mr. Damon prosecuted her. What else did Whicher know at the time? Only that Harriet Pyke, a brilliant dark-haired beauty with an overfondness for men, had borne a child by a former lover. This former lover (do you follow me, madam?) was a wealthy young idler named Ivor Rich.

“Whicher had not heard the name of the child or its age or birthplace. He knew only that such a child existed; Mr. Damon, suffering a change of heart towards Harriet Pyke when she was in the condemned cell, attempted to obtain a pardon or a new trial—and failed. Harriet Pyke was hanged.”

Mrs. Cavanagh started forward.

“And that was an end to it! What’s more to be said? That was the end!”

“No. That was not the end.”

“I’ll not hear—!”

“You will hear. Early in August of this year Ivor Rich, now a middle-aged man who had dissipated two fortunes, poisoned himself at a shabby-genteel lodging-house in Pimlico. Whicher’s a private detective now, I might remind you. The owner of the lodging-house, a friend of Whicher, sent word to him in a desperate hope of hushing up a suicide.

“The suicide couldn’t be hushed up; you may depend on that. But the notoriety could be stifled, and the notoriety was stifled, when the lodging-house-keeper and Whicher found a packet of old letters from Harriet Pyke to Ivor Rich: one of those letters, madam, written in the condemned cell and smuggled out.

“She must have been fond of that man, I think. She admitted she was guilty; she had shot her latest protector in a fit of rage. But she prayed Rich to be silent, to keep all things dark; hope was not lost yet. She knew much about the man who had prosecuted her, since one of her sisters was the nursemaid in Matthew Damon’s family—”

Clive stopped.

Mrs. Cavanagh, cracking the knuckle-joints of her fingers but not speaking, made a little swoop and dart to run out of the conservatory. Clive jumped in front of her.

“Don’t go, Mrs. Cavanagh. If Harriet Pyke could persuade Mr. Damon she was innocent, and make him prove his earnest by promising to adopt her child, she thought he would move heaven and earth to save her neck. So he did. And the child—”

Mary Jane Cavanagh did not speak loudly.

“There’s no proof of this, Mr. Clever! There’s no bit o’ proof!”

“Why do you think there’s not? Because you destroyed Mr. Damon’s will?”

“I destroyed nothing.”

“Not even Mr. Damon’s peace of mind? For nineteen years? Did you know your sister was guilty?”

“That poor lamb was innocent. Innocent, innocent, innocent!”

“Oh, no. That was what I meant by saying the notoriety could be stifled but Rich’s suicide could not be hushed up. Your sister committed two murders; the proof remains in a letter she herself wrote. That letter is now held by a lodging-house-keeper in New Elm Road. And your part in the deception—”

“Deception?”

“Yes.”

For an instant, as Mary Jane Cavanagh breathed thinly, Clive thought that the colour had drained from her eyes as well as from her face. She raised her right arm stiffly, with an effort, as though taking an oath.

“A good action,” she said. “A good, pious, Christian deed, maybe the best of me life! To take and cherish a motherless waif, to bring up an innocent child of an innocent mother, with the snares of the wicked far away! To hold sacred the memory of a sister I didn’t hardly know! You call it deception?”

“Yes. Let’s hear the truth.”

“May the Lord strike me dead—!”

“Perhaps He will. Why did you never disclose your relationship to Harriet Pyke? If you scarcely knew your sister, how could you have told her so much about Mr. Damon? Above all, what’s the reason for your hatred of Kate?”

Mrs. Cavanagh, square-shouldered, now threw up both arms with a yammering kind of noise as though bidding the Almighty to strike Clive instead of her.

“You do hate her, Mrs. Cavanagh. The very first time I saw you two together, in the morning-room about this time last night, you were taunting her or threatening her in some way I couldn’t quite understand. Why were you taunting her?”

“Me? Poor old Cavvy? And it’s lies! You can’t prove who the child is; now can you?”

“No,” admitted Clive—and lost the battle.

“Well!” said Mrs. Cavanagh. “Well, well, well, well.”

White-faced but triumphant, drawing an unctuousness of mock-respect round her, she straightened up and folded her hands.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I don’t think I’ll say any more. I’m not obliged to say more; and I won’t. Will that be all, sir?”

Smoothing her crinoline, daring him to stop her, she moved past him as though without a care in the world. But she could not resist turning round, on the gravel path towards the glass door, for a sly little last word.

“When the great Whicher discovered this letter from Harriet Pyke, or said he discovered it, I daresay he’d have told Mr. Damon?”

“That’s exactly what he did. It was after the beginning of the Long Vacation—”

“Sir?”

“The law vacation, I mean. Whicher made a special journey down to High Chimneys. Didn’t you see him here?”

“I was at Weston the first week in August, that’s what I was—”

“Or you’d have stopped him from speaking?”

The invisible claws slashed again.

“Don’t you put words into my mouth, sir, or you’ll wish you hadn’t. Lawks! Whicher went to a deal of trouble, though!”

“Naturally. For nineteen years Mr. Damon believed he had sent an innocent woman to the gallows. Whicher told him a different story. Mr. Damon did not mention this to you, I take it?”

“Maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t.”

“Mrs. Cavanagh, why do you hate Kate? Why did you plan to blame her for her father’s murder?”

“If I were you, sir, I wouldn’t talk soft! I wouldn’t; no! Blame Miss Kate? Why, there’s nobody would blame Miss Kate or harm her in any way. She’s in no more danger here at High Chimneys than if she lived in the blessed heaven itself.”

Mrs. Cavanagh broke off, twitching her head in the other direction.

Last night Clive had heard Celia Damon scream from upstairs, presumably when Celia was told of Matthew Damon’s death. He heard another cry from upstairs now.

Despite the shrill tumult of the wind, despite the closed glass door of the conservatory, he thought he could distinguish the words, ‘Who’s that? What do you want?’ followed by a scream for help. This time it was Kate’s voice.

Snatching up the lamp from the table, Clive plunged past Mrs. Cavanagh.

He flung open the glass door and raced across the back-parlour into the hall. Even as he ran, with all dreads astir, he wondered at the utter silence of the rooms on the ground floor. He had expected that Superintendent Muswell, at least, would have come charging out from behind the closed door of the study.

But nobody moved or spoke.

The downstairs rooms seemed deserted, with their curtains drawn together and their fires made up. The only noise, except for the wind, was the thud of his own footsteps when he ran towards the stairs.

“Kate!” he shouted, and took the staircase two steps at a time.

S
TILL NOTHING. NOBODY.

The upstairs hall, crossed by a transverse passage which turned it into two passages, was carpeted with coconut matting. A grandfather clock ticked at the back of the hall. Lines of closed doors gave on small bedrooms and dressing-rooms; they stretched away into what had been darkness before Clive brought the lamp.

“Kate!”

On his right, not far from the head of the stairs, someone scratched a match inside a partly open door. The reflection of a match-light, wobbling, grew larger into that of a candle-flame.

Kate, her mouth distorted, ran towards him. The brass candleholder slipped and fell on the floor, extinguishing its light. He could feel fear trembling through her whole body as he put one arm round her.

“I can’t endure this,” she said. “I believed anything was possible if I refused to be frightened, but it’s not possible. I’ve seen him. He’s—wearing the same clothes. He’s here.”

The steady ticking of the grandfather clock beat against silence. Though it was a good distance away, Clive could just make out that the hands pointed to fifteen minutes past six o’clock.

At this time last night …

“What happened, Kate? What did you see?”

“Georgette …”

“Where
is
Georgette?”

“No, no; she’s all right!”

“Are you sure? Where is she?”

“That’s the dressing-room I share with Celia.” Kate nodded towards the doorway from which she had run to him. She paused, tightening her face muscles in a desperate attempt at calmness. “I was—I was dressing for dinner in there. Celia’s asleep; the doctor gave her more laudanum, and she’s asleep in the bedroom next door.”