Scandal at High Chimneys (7 page)

“You made atonement—how? By adopting Harriet’s Pyke’s child as one of your own?”

“Yes,” said Matthew Damon.

He was silent for a moment.

“Oh, not a legal adoption! Every act had to be done in secret. When my wife died, we were living in the north of England. I had dismissed all my household except the nurse of my two real children. Only one person shares my secret; the children themselves do not know. Friends? I have so few friends.”

Clive looked at the carpet.

“All this I should have been happy to do (yes!), if Harriet Pyke had been innocent. But what is the result? Tainted blood! This very evening I have seen Harriet Pyke’s eyes and Harriet Pyke’s hands. ‘The sins of the fathers—’”

“Or the mothers.”

“Let us have no blasphemy, Mr. Strickland!”

“I meant no blasphemy, believe me.”

“‘The sins of the fathers—’ Need more be quoted?”

“No; I suppose not.”

Thunder split its echoes round the house and vibrated amid roof-slates.

“Tell me, sir: was Harriet Pyke insane?”

“On the contrary, she was most calculatingly sane. She cared nothing at all for the offspring of an unknown father; she would have saved her life, could she have done so, by lies to strike at my conscience; she screamed and screamed only when she had failed. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” answered Clive, with all the pressure of his ancestors’ wisdom against him, “it’s hard to believe that tainted blood, the certainty of brutality or theft or murder, can be handed down from father to son or mother to daughter. I have seen things in London streets …”

“Indeed. Do you doubt these facts?”

“No. Not really. It’s rather more than that. In my heart, I suppose, I prefer to go on writing gingerbread romances about the best of all possible worlds.”

“It is an evil world, young man. You have guessed, of course, who has inherited these criminal traits?”

“No.”

“Then it is time for plain speaking.—
What was that?
”

“What was what?”

“That noise.”

Matthew Damon rose to his feet. So did Clive.

“You mean the thunder?”

“No; I do not mean the thunder. Or the fire, or the clock.”

Irrationally, as the mind will seize on trifles, Clive remembered that they faced each other now as they had faced each other in the train that afternoon, though in Clive’s case at least with very different emotions.

Matthew Damon, his left hand on the desk-top and his right hand straying again towards that same desk-drawer, moved his eyes sharply to the right. He looked at the closed door to the hall. Then he looked behind Clive’s back, at the closed door to the library some fifteen feet away.

“No, it was nothing. I was mistaken.”

There
was
nothing. Clive had followed his glances, and looked back at the ravaged face.

“They complain of me, Mr. Strickland, that I do not show affection. But I have tried. I have tried to love a changeling as I should, and do, love my own. To all outward appearances, in any event, I believe I have succeeded. You can bear witness—”

Once more he broke off, his lower lip drawn down so that you could see the teeth. He was staring past Clive’s shoulder.

Clive whipped round.

The door to the dark library had softly opened, with someone’s left hand holding the knob. The figure standing in the library was partly shaded by the door; its face, at least, was in such fashion hidden that it seemed to have no head.

In the blur of dazed impressions following the shock when that shape lifted a weapon and fired, Clive could be sure only that he saw a man wearing a dark frock-coat, a dark waistcoat, and trousers of a patterned red-and-white design.

T
HEY ASK YOU QUESTIONS
, and you are honest. But what did happen and what did you see?

A heavy explosion of thunder, close above all these unwieldy chimney-stacks piled into the sky, almost blotted out the explosion of the pistol-shot. The weight of a man’s body, a man struck between the eyes as though by a sledgehammer, went back and over a chair behind the desk.

Clive heard this; he did not see it. Without knowledge of what he was doing, he ran straight at the library door.

The figure before him seemed to worm or dodge in a curious way. Clive himself instinctively dodged as something flew out towards him, catching the light, and landed with a thud on the carpet. The library door was pulled shut in his face; he heard a key turn from the other side. It was no use seizing at the knob and wrenching it. The door was locked.

He looked back over his shoulder, quickly, towards the chair behind Matthew Damon’s desk. Then he looked away again.

“‘Will wash out rust-stains, mud-stains, blood-stains …’”

Clive ran to the door leading to the hall. That was locked too, and on the outside.

He could not believe this. After twisting at the knob, resisting the impulse to hammer at the upper panels, he had to go down on his knees and peer at the keyhole. A key, which had not been there a while ago, was turned in the lock.

Matthew Damon’s right cuff twitched. Now you could hear his breathing.

Clive, averting his eyes from the place where the bullet had entered just above the bridge of the nose, was compelled to go to the man thrown back over the padded chair.

But it grew worse a moment later. Mr. Damon did not move for long, and he did not breathe ever again.

The rain began, a deluge, as Clive stood looking just past the edge of a limp arm. A reek of black powder stung the nostrils and made a palpable haze. He looked round at what lay on the carpet, a foot or two inside the study where it had been thrown.

Because he had seen a weapon just like it recently displayed at Stover’s, the gunsmith’s in Piccadilly, he knew it for metallic-cartridge revolving pistol, six-chambered, of the sort called rim-fire because the hammer struck the rim of the cartridge in exploding it.

They were manufactured by a French firm whose name he couldn’t remember, and they were much lighter than the customary heavy and unwieldy revolving pistol. They—

Clive glanced back at Matthew Damon’s desk.

There was a drawer on the right-hand side, a drawer his host had been about to open when the man could still move and speak. Not without an effort Clive touched the drawer and then pulled it open. He found nothing inside.

What was
that?

Small noises darted out and struck at the nerves under the tumult of the storm. He imagined that a door, not one of these doors, had opened and closed in the direction of the hall. He was right. Hurrying towards the door to the hall, he heard outside certain stately footsteps which could belong only to one person.

“Burbage!”

The footsteps halted. “Sir?”

But Clive’s voice, loud and hoarse in his own ears, would never do. About to speak again, thinking of the tone he must achieve, he saw the clock which hitherto he had only heard. It stood on a low bookcase; its dial, white against black marble, swam out at him.

And the hands stood at only twenty-eight minutes to seven.

“Sir?” repeated Burbage’s voice.

What he had heard, Clive knew, was Burbage returning from the servants’ quarters at the back after the servants had finished their evening meal together.

“Burbage, this door is locked on the outside. Unlock it, if you will. Don’t open it; simply unlock it.”

A slight pause. “Very good, sir.”

The key turned quietly, as though in an oiled lock. The other key had also turned in the same soft way when he was locked in.

“Now, Burbage, will you stand well to one side of the door?”

The footsteps outside complied. Unless Burbage stood well to one side, he would have a clear view of what lay inside. Clive opened the door, slipped out, and shut it behind him.

The wall-lamp shed its dim glimmer beside the green-baize door to the servants’ quarters. To Clive all shapes and colours seemed unreal; he supposed he must be pale.

“Burbage, the questions I mean to ask may seem unusual. Bear up; we shall need to. Is a key usually kept in the lock of the study door here?”

“No, sir.” Burbage’s expression did not change.

“Or in the lock of the door between the study and the library?”

“No, sir. But a key from any door downstairs will fit them.”

“Have you just come from having your dinner? I think you nodded? Good! Were all the other servants there?”

“Yes, sir. They are still there. That is,” the house-steward amended, “all except Mrs. Cavanagh and my unhappy daughter. They were indisposed, and left the table.”

The drive of the rain had deepened, making a hollow noise here in the hall. Clive glanced up and down the hall.

“Burbage, will you now go round and make sure that all the doors and windows are still fastened on the inside?”

“Very … yes, sir.” Now Burbage’s gaze did flicker.

“On the way, present my compliments to Mrs. Damon, and say—” Clive hesitated.

“Mrs. Damon, sir, is not in the house.”

“Oh? Where is she?”

“I could not say, sir. About an hour ago Mrs. Damon ordered the landau, so that Hopper could drive her to Reading. Mrs. Damon took luggage, but not her maid. I re-locked and re-barred the front door when Mrs. Damon had gone.”

“Did Mr. Damon know this?”

“I could not say, sir. It would be possible to ask him.”

“It would not be possible, I fear. Mr. Damon is dead.”

What Burbage said to this, or even what he thought as judged by his expression, Clive missed altogether. Other concerns had caught him.

About to add, “I must break the news gently to Miss Kate and Miss Celia,” he saw in his imagination so clear a picture of Kate Damon’s face (and, to a lesser degree, of Celia’s too) that he began to understand the terrifying implications of that statement, “Mr. Damon is dead.” He stopped feeling and began to think.

Burbage, a face of consternation between sandy whiskers, blurted out words of which he heard only the last few.

“No, it was not an accident,” said Clive. “Stay a moment! I have remembered something. Come with me.”

Turning the key and locking the study door, he removed the key and put it in his waistcoat pocket. Then he almost raced to the front of the hall.

When he left the drawing-room at six-fifteen, both Kate and Celia had been there. Now the room was empty.

Its thick carpet and curtains seemed a swathing for evil thoughts. The lamp, its shade painted in blue forget-me-nots against red and white, still stood on the circular centre-table. The curtain of different-coloured bead-strings, which shrouded the archway entrance to the library from this direction, glimmered as Clive took up the lamp.

He parted the curtain and held the lamp high inside the library. That was empty too.

“Sir!” protested Burbage behind him.

“Look there,” said Clive, indicating a closed door just opposite at the far end. “That leads into the study, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Still another door, towards Clive’s left now, opened from the library out into the hall.

“Mr. Damon was shot through the head. The—the person who did it was the same man who frightened your daughter on the stairs last night. He wasn’t a figment of Penelope’s imagination. She didn’t dream him.”

Burbage said nothing, though his tongue moistened his lips.

“The murderer opened that door to the study,
there,
” Clive nodded opposite, “and fired a shot with what I think was Mr. Damon’s own pistol. Then he locked me in and got away. He must have locked the hall-door beforehand. If you heard no shot—or did you?”

“No, sir.
No!
”

“Well! That was because he fired just at the beginning of a peal of thunder. Has the coachman returned from driving Mrs. Damon to Reading? No? When he does, I am afraid we can’t avoid sending him back for the police. In the meantime, you might fetch that doctor: Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland. He can’t help us, but we had better have him.”

“Sir, which of all these things do you want me to do first?”

They were yelling at each other; even Burbage was yelling. Clive strode back and banged down the lamp on the centre-table.

“First of all, make sure the house is locked up. Then fetch the doctor.”

Following Burbage out into the hall, he stopped and looked up. Kate Damon, a little out of breath, stood halfway down the heavy oak staircase, her fingers on the banister-rail.

Kate stood mainly in shadow, but he saw the shock in her eyes and the quick lift of her bodice in the dull-yellow gown with black trimmings. She gripped the banister-rail, swaying; for a second Clive thought she might faint. Then she ran down the stairs and across to him.

“You heard, did you not?” Clive asked bitterly. “You heard what I was saying to Burbage?”

“Yes. I heard. My father has been—”

She could not go on.

This was no longer the impatient, rebellious Kate, lashing out at things her intelligence would not accept. That aspect had disappeared. This was a warm-hearted and impulsive girl, perhaps a little too romantic-minded in her own way, and above all things physically desirable.

‘Lock up your thoughts, fool!’ Clive said to himself.

If in a manuscript he had so much as used the words ‘physically desirable,’ he could imagine what would be said by Mr. Wills of
All the Year Round;
not to mention the awesome Charles Dickens, its editor. You were not to think of such matters, let alone write of them. A man might keep a mistress or wallow among easy conquests; that could be tacitly ignored, so long as he did not intrude it into the sacred home circle. The fact that ladies in this circle themselves thought of such matters, and all too often, must not even be suspected.

Face it! Suppose
Kate
is the daughter of Harriet Pyke?

Well, even suppose she is? Suddenly Clive realized what astonishingly little difference it would make.

Now that Matthew Damon was dead, the secret was known only to Clive himself and one other person unnamed. Why shouldn’t the secret be kept and never mentioned at all? Ah, but that was what he might not be able to manage. Jonathan Whicher knew much, perhaps everything.