The Black Mountains (64 page)

As if echoing her thoughts, Jack said musingly, “ I can't understand it. I've gone over and over it, and I still can't. It didn't look as if our Ted had even hurt him. He looked more surprised than anything. Then he just sat down in his chair and stared at us. It was a strange look, vacant almost. But I tell you this, and I'll swear to it in any court in the land. Rupert Thorne was alive when we left him.”

“Could somebody else have gone in after you left?” Charlotte asked.

Jack shook his head. “Well, that I wouldn't know. I suppose if there was more than one blow, it'll come out at the post-mortem. But I don't see how one blow could kill a man of his size, anyway. I'd have thought it would take a bullet or a hatchet to do that. It isn't even as though he fell. No, he just sat there.”

The group around the table fell silent. There was nothing more to say, yet they were unwilling to leave one another, unwilling to move out of the bright pool of light thrown by the lamp.

At last, Charlotte got up, stirring the dying embers of the fire and swivelling the kettle on to the hob.

“How would we get by without a cup of tea? What this old pot has seen us through is nobody's business.”

James got up then, stretching. “Ah, and it'll see us through again. It's not the end of the world you know, not yet.”

“Oh, how you manage to take everything so calm, I'll never know!” Charlotte exploded. “ You'll be telling us next, worse things happen at sea!”

“Well, so they do,” James said philosophically. “ It don't do a bit of good, getting in a state, Lotty. Not one bit.”

Charlotte snorted impatiently.

“Dad's right, you know,” Jack told her, taking the teapot out of her hand and spooning tea from the caddy into it “It doesn't help anybody. But what will help our Ted is a good solicitor.”

Charlotte snatched the pot back again, irritated to have the task taken from her.

“Give that here, Jack. P'raps you're right about that solicitor. We'll have to see.”

“P'RAPS you're right,” she said again next morning to Sergeant Eyles, and did not add that, to her, the calling in of a solicitor seemed like admitting the seriousness of what was happening.

Besides that, she had an inbred distrust of professional people, whom she considered looked down their noses at ordinary working folk. But what both Jack and Sergeant Eyles had said was true. Ted was in serious trouble, and perhaps it was time Arthur Clarence, the one and only solicitor in Hillsbridge, was called in.

She turned it over in her mind as she walked along the street, but even preoccupied as she was, she could hardly avoid noticing the way heads turned as she passed.

She knew what they were saying, of course—that they had always known Ted would come to no good—and the knowledge hurt. She had always been so proud of her family's reputation, and the fact that none of them had ever been in trouble with the police. Now, she guessed there would always be somebody who would be ready to exaggerate out of spite or jealousy, the story becoming more distorted with each telling.

By the time she reached Mr Clarence's office, her mind was made up. She would go and see him, and she would do it now, before her courage failed her.

The office was on the first floor, above a row of shops on the main street. For some reason it had always intrigued her, the impressive brass plaque on the wall, the steep flight of stairs leading to a murky unknown, the patterned glass windows bearing the legend Willoughby & Clarence—although only the oldest people in the town could remember a time when there had been a Mr Willoughby. Now it overawed her too, but with a quick, determined movement, she rang the bell beside the brass plate, pushed open the door, and started up the steep staircase.

Josia Horler, Arthur Clarence's stooped and balding clerk, met her at the top, motioning her into the glorified cupboard that did duty as a waiting room. “You've come to see Mr Clarence, I dare say,” he said gravely, and she could tell he knew exactly why she was here.

He left her, and after a few minutes returned to show her into Arthur Clarence's office, a small, frowsty room, cluttered with piles of musty, pink-ribboned documents. Behind the large, leather-topped desk sat Arthur Clarence. He rose to greet her, then sat down once more, pressing his fingertips together beneath his chin and regarding her solemnly from behind owlish spectacles.

“You want me to represent your son, Mrs. Hall. Is that it?”

“Yes … well … we thought …”

“I'm not at all sure I'm the person to help you,” he said seriously.

“Murder is a grave charge, and it's not something I've had many dealings with. In many ways, Hillsbridge is a backwater, you know.”

“But we only want someone to keep an eye on his interests, Mr Clarence,” she explained. “ It was an accident—it wasn't murder.”

Mr Clarence tapped his fingers together lightly. “ But to prove it, that's the difficulty. When it comes to something like this, I don't think I'm the person you require.”

“Are you saying you won't take the case on, Mr Clarence?” she ventured.

“No, but I feel there may be someone else better able to help you than I.”

“In Hillsbridge?”

The fingers tapped together again. “I do see the problem. Anticipated it almost, you could say. I even took the liberty of making a few enquiries as to who is a good criminal lawyer …”

“Criminal!” Charlotte was on her feet, indignation making her bold. “ Ted is no criminal!”

“Mrs Hall, please don't misunderstand me …”

“I don't think I do, Mr Clarence! You won't help because you've already made up your mind our Ted is guilty, and you won't soil your hands with him. Maybe you're even against him because Rupert Thorne was one of your own. Well, we can manage without grudging help of that sort. I'm sorry to have taken up your time!”

“Mrs Hall, please, don't take it like this …” he protested.

“How else am I supposed to take it, Mr Clarence? No, don't bother to see me out. I can find my own way.”

“But Mrs Hall …”

She hardly heard him. The blood was singing too loudly in her ears. The cheek of the man! The barefaced cheek, to call Ted a criminal like that! Oh, she'd show him they could manage without the likes of him, just as they always had. And when Ted's innocence was proved, she'd tell everybody about the way that stuffed shirt Clarence had treated her!

She clattered down the stairs and into the street. It was a sultry day, and before she had gone far the sweat was prickling on her forehead, but her indignation drove her on. Even in the steepest part of the hill she did not falter, and it was only when she reached the corner of the rank that the mist before her eyes and the drumming in her ears made her slow down. As she did so, she realized she was trembling all over, and her legs felt as heavy as lead. Her own weakness only added to her impatience, and she drove herself on, throwing open the scullery door and going into the house.

“Jack—James!” she called, but the effort of finding her voice on top of all the other efforts seemed suddenly too much. The room swam around her, and she groped her way along the stone sink and cupboard.

“James!” she called again. But there was no reply, and in the doorway her knees buckled. She clung to the frame, gasping. The settle was so close, yet it looked far away. Without much hope she took a step towards it. Then the ground came up to meet her with a rush, and the mists closed in around her.

CHARLOTTE WAS ILL.

She ‘hadn't been right' as James put it, since the day she fainted in the kitchen, although as soon as she came round, she had insisted on taking charge once more.

Try as James might to persuade her to go up to bed, she had refused to leave the settle in the kitchen, saying it would finish her to be cut off from the family at a time like this.

But clearly she was not well. Although it was high summer, she kept having bouts of shivering, and it hurt her to breathe too deeply.

She didn't look well, either. Most of the time, her skin was too pallid, moist and lifeless, except when she seemed to burn up into a scarlet flush.

“It's nothing,” she insisted, “ Just my time of life.”

James, knowing her as he did, was certain it was more than that. He had seen the pain in her face when she drew a deep breath; he'd seen her stop when she thought no one was looking, head down, hands splayed against the upper part of her chest. And he had heard her cough too when she exerted herself—a rasping cough that seemed to leave her breathless and shaken.

He told her she should pay a visit to the doctor, but she dismissed that suggestion as if it were the silliest thing she had ever heard.

“Doctor? We can't afford a doctor's bills at a time like this!”

“But Lotty, your health comes first …”

“I'll be all right,” she said shortly, and he sighed with resignation. It was a waste of breath trying to tell Lotty what to do.

For more than two weeks she soldiered on, up one day, down the next, but on the day of the resumed inquest, her temperature suddenly shot up, her breathing became worse, and although she still stayed stubbornly downstairs for as long as she could, huddled over the fire while icy waves rippled over her burning skin each time she moved, at last there was nothing for it but to give in and go to bed.

“It's my own fault,” she told James through chattering teeth. “This all started the day I came rushing up the hill in a temper. My vest was wringing wet, and I let it go cold on me. I've caught a chill, that's all.”

“Ah, I expect you'm right,” James said stoically, not bothering to voice his own opinion as to the cause of her illness—that this time events had simply been too much for her.

“Try not to think about it, Lotty,” he told her. “ T'won't do no good. If I know our Ted, he'll be as chirpy as a sparrow. If the Germans couldn't break him, I'm darned sure Stack Norton isn't going to.”

She tried to answer, but her breath was short and hard, and he went on, “ Now look. Our Jack's gone off to the inquest, and when he gets home, he'll be able to tell us all about it. You get some rest now. I don't like the look of you at all.”

Get some rest! As if she could, knowing her boys were both in Bristol being looked on as common criminals. Ted and Jack, two of the finest boys that ever were.

She wished now she hadn't been so hasty with Mr Clarence, for she couldn't get it out of her head that if he had been able to represent Ted, there would have been no need for Jack to be mixed up in the business at all.

And although it was Ted who was accused of the murder, nevertheless it was Jack she was worried about. So convinced was she of Ted's innocence, she simply could not conceive of anyone doubting his story. And once it was over, that would be the end of it as far as he was concerned. He would treat it with the same stoic resignation as James, putting it down to experience. What was more, it might even help him to get over Becky Church—the only thing that had really ever touched him deeply. This nasty business could very well be the way to cauterize that wound.

But Jack was a different matter. In spite of his wartime experiences, she still thought of Jack as too gentle for this kind of brush with vulgarity, and she couldn't stop thinking it could damage his career.

It was as if all her life she had been working towards the moment when he would achieve his ambition and step away from the trap of a miner's life and into the world where he belonged. And that now, by her own actions in sending him after Ted that day, and refusing legal advice when the whole horrible business had exploded around them, she had brought it all tumbling down.

The worst can't happen, she thought. If there's any justice, it can't.

But in the corner of her mind, a small persistent devil seemed to taunt her. “ You got rid of Rosa Clements. You were needlessly cruel. Maybe this is your punishment, to see him back where he started, or worse, and all through your own doing.”

With a touch of her old impatience she shifted herself on the pillows, telling herself not to be so stupid. But the devil was still there, mocking her from every corner of the room. Wherever she looked, he was there, his small, ugly face forming part of the pattern on the wallpaper and somehow working its way into the array of bottles on the dressing-table.

Sleep began to overcome her, weighing down her eyelids and wafting her back and forth like the waves of the incoming tide, but the devil did not go away. His nagging became more insistent, so that her whole mind, waking and sleeping, was full of it.

If things went wrong for Jack now, it would be more than a misfortune—it would be a betrayal of his birthright. But she was the only one who knew that, the only one who could tell him he must not sacrifice his due, but be true to himself and the blood that was in him.

The secret she had kept for more than twenty years was sharp and clear again, just as it had been that day in the Rector's study when she had asked for his help to educate Jack. The smell of the early summer afternoon was in her nostrils, and she felt again the potent mixture of grief and desire that had made her ache with a strange restlessness and a need for … what? She did not know. She had never known, any more than she had known where the attraction lay between a miner's wife, twenty-two years old, who had borne four children, and the Rector's nephew, a college boy, and four years her junior. She had not known then, and in the years afterwards she had sometimes wondered how it could have been.

Now, she did not stop to wonder. It was all so real—much more real than the bedroom where she lay sick with fever—and she felt as if she could reach out across the years and touch him, his hair, fairer even than James's, long, straight and thick, his finely chiselled cheekbones, his dreaming eyes, his wide, sensitive mouth.

Oh, Jack was so much like him! So much like him she had never ceased to wonder that James could not see it. Sometimes the look of him had been a knife-thrust in her heart. She had learned to ignore it, to push the memory to the back of her mind. But now it was here, real and vivid, and she was too weak … too weak …