Highgate Rise Read online

  She had shared with Pitt both the few scraps of definite information and the large and very general impressions she had gained.

  He was sitting in the armchair beside the parlor fire, his feet stretched out on the fender, watching through half-closed eyes the flames jumping in the grate.

  “I shall go to the funeral,” she added in a tone that was only half a statement and left room for him to contradict if he wished—not because she thought he would, but as a matter of policy.

  He looked up, and as far as she could judge in the firelight his eyes were bright, his expression one of tolerance, even a curious kind of conspiracy.

  “I shall be in some respects in a better position than you to observe,” she went on.” After all, to most of them I shall be another mourner and they will assume I am there to grieve—which the more I know of Clemency Shaw, the more truly I am. Whereas those who know you will think of the police, and remember that it was murder, and that there is so much more yet ahead of them that will be exceedingly unpleasant, if not actually tragic.”

  “You don’t need to convince me,” he said with a smile, and she realized he was very gently laughing at her.

  She relaxed and leaned back in her chair, reaching out her foot to touch his, toe to toe.

  “Thank you.”

  “Be careful,” he warned. “Remember, it is not just grief—it is murder.”

  “I will,” she promised. “I’m going in Emily’s carriage.”

  He grinned. “Of course.”

  Charlotte was not by any means the first to arrive. As she alighted with Emily’s footman handing her down, she saw Josiah and Prudence Hatch ahead of her passing through the gate and up the path towards the vestry entrance. They were both dressed in black as one would expect, Josiah with his hat in his hand and the cold wind ruffling his hair. They walked side by side, staring straight in front of them, stiff backed. Even from behind, Charlotte could tell that they had quarreled over something and were each isolated in a cocoon of anger.

  Ahead of them and passing through the doors as Charlotte crossed the pavement was Alfred Lutterworth, alone. Either Flora was not coming or she had accompanied someone else. It struck Charlotte as unusual. She would have to inquire, as discreetly as possible, after the cause.

  She was welcomed at the door by a curate, probably in his late twenties, thin, rather homely of feature, but with such animation and concern in his expression that she warmed to him immediately.

  “Good morning, ma’am.” He spoke quietly but without the reverential singsong which she always felt to be more a matter of show than of sincerity. “Where would you care to sit? Are you alone, or expecting someone?”

  A thought ran through Charlotte’s mind to say she was alone, but she resisted the temptation. “I am expecting my mother and grandmother—”

  He moved to go with her. “Then perhaps you would like the pew here to the right? Did you know Mrs. Shaw well?” The innocence of his manner and the traces of grief in his face robbed his question of any offense.

  “No,” she replied with complete honesty. “I knew her only by repute, but all I hear of her only quickens my admiration.” She saw the puzzlement in his eyes and hastened to clarify to a degree which surprised her. “My husband is in charge of the investigation into the fire. I took an interest in it, and learned from a friend who is a member of Parliament about the work Mrs. Shaw did to fight against the exploitation of the poor. She was very modest about it, but she had both courage and compassion of a remarkable degree. I wish to be here to pay my respects—” She stopped abruptly, seeing the distress in his face. Indeed he seemed to be far more moved by grief than were either of Clemency’s aunts, or her sister, when Charlotte had visited them two days before.

  He mastered his feelings with difficulty, and did not apologize. She liked him the better for it. Why should one apologize for grief at a funeral? In silence he showed her to the pew, met her eyes once in a look for which words would have been unnecessary, then returned to the doorway, holding his head high.

  He was just in time to greet Somerset Carlisle, looking thin and a trifle tired, and Great-Aunt Vespasia, wearing magnificent black with osprey feathers in her hat, sideswept at a marvelous angle, and a black gown of silk and barathea cut to exaggerate both her height and the elegance of her bearing. It was asymmetrical, as was the very ultimate in fashion. She carried an ebony stick with a silver handle, but refused to lean on it. She spoke very briefly to the curate, explained who she was, but not why she had chosen to come, and then walked past him with great dignity, took out her lorgnette and surveyed the body of the church. She saw Charlotte after only a moment, and lost further interest in anyone else. She took Somerset Carlisle’s arm and instructed him to lead her to Charlotte’s pew, thus making it impossible for Caroline or Grandmama to join her when they arrived a few moments later.

  Charlotte did not attempt to explain. She simply smiled with great sweetness, then bent her head in an attitude of prayer—to conceal her smile.

  After several minutes she raised her eyes again, and saw well in front of her the white head of Amos Lindsay, and beside him Stephen Shaw. She could only imagine the turmoil of emotions that must be in him as he saw the agitated figure of Hector Clitheridge flapping about like a wounded crow. His wife was in handsome and serviceable black in the front row, trying to reassure him, alternately smiling and looking appropriately somber. The organ was playing slowly, either because the organist considered it the correct tempo for a funeral or because she could not find the notes. The result was a sense of uncertainty and a loss of rhythm.

  The pews were filling up. Quinton Pascoe passed up the aisle, finding himself a seat as far as possible from John Dalgetty and his wife. Nowhere among the forest of black hats of every shape and decoration could Charlotte see any that looked as if they might belong to Celeste or Angeline Worlingham.

  The organ changed pitch abruptly and the service began. Clitheridge was intensely nervous; his voice cracked into falsetto and back again. Twice he lost his place in what must surely be long-familiar passages and rumbled to regain himself, only making his mistake the more obvious. Charlotte ached for him, and heard Aunt Vespasia beside her sigh with exasperation. Somerset Carlisle buried his face in his hands, but whether he was thinking of Clemency, or the vicar, she did not know.

  Charlotte found her own attention wandering. It was probably the safest thing to do; Clitheridge was unbearable, and the young curate was so full of genuine distress she found it too harrowing to look at him. Instead her eyes roamed upward over and across traceries of stone, plaques of long-dead worthies, and eventually, with a jolt of returning memory, to the Worlingham window with its almost completed picture of the late bishop in the thin disguise of Jeremiah, surrounded by other patriarchs and topped by an angel. She recognized the bishop quite easily. The face was indistinct—the medium enforced it—but the thick curls of white hair, so like an aureole in the glass with the light shining through, was exactly like the portrait in the family hallway and it was unmistakable. It was a remarkably handsome memorial and must have cost a sizable sum. No wonder Josiah Hatch was proud of it.

  At last the formal part of the service was over and with immense relief the final amen was said, and the congregation rose to follow the coffin out into the graveyard, where they all stood huddled in a bitter west wind while the body was interred.

  Charlotte shivered and moved a little closer to Aunt Vespasia, and behind her half a step, to shield her from the gusts, which if the sky had been less clear, would surely have carried snow. She stared across the open grave with Clitheridge standing at the edge, his cassock whipping around his ankles and his face strained with embarrassment and apprehension. A couple of yards away Alfred Lutterworth was planted squarely, ignoring the cold, his face somber in reflection, his thoughts unreadable. Next to him, but several feet away, Stephen Shaw was folded in a mixture of private anger and grief, the emotion so deep in his face only the crudest of strangers wou
ld have intruded. Amos Lindsay stood silently at his elbow.

  Josiah Hatch was taking control of the pallbearers. He was a sidesman and used to some responsibility. His expression was grim, but he did his duty meticulously and not a word or a movement was omitted or performed without ceremony. It was done to an exactness that honored the dead and preserved the importance above all of the litany and tradition of the church.

  Clitheridge was obviously relieved to allow someone else to take over, however pedantic. Only the curate seemed less than pleased. His bony features and wide mouth reflected some impatience that appeared to increase his grief.

  Charlotte had been quite correct, there were about fifty people present, most of them men, and quite definitely neither Angeline nor Celeste Worlingham were among them; nor was Flora Lutterworth.

  “Why are the Worlinghams not here?” she whispered to Aunt Vespasia as they turned at last, cold to the bone, and made their way back to the carriages for the short ride to the funeral supper. She had not been specifically invited, but she fully intended to go. They passed Pitt standing near the gate, so discreet as to be almost invisible. He might have been one of the pallbearers or an undertaker’s assistant, except that his gloves were odd, there was a bulge in one pocket of his coat, and his boots were brown. She smiled at him quickly as they passed, and saw an answering warmth in his face, then continued on her way to the carriage.

  “I daresay the bishop did not consider it suitable,” Aunt Vespasia replied. “Many people don’t. Quite idiotic, of course. Women are every bit as strong as men in coping with tragedy and the more distressing weaknesses of the flesh. In fact in many cases stronger—they have to be, or none of us would have more than one child, and certainly never care for the sick!”

  “But the bishop is dead,” Charlotte pointed out. “And has been for ten years.”

  “My dear, the bishop will never be dead as far as his daughters are concerned. They lived under his roof for over forty years of their lives, and obeyed every rule of conduct he set out for them. And I gather he had very precise opinions about everything. They are not likely to break the habit now, least of all in a time of bereavement when one most wishes to cling to the familiar.”

  “Oh—” Charlotte had not thought of that, but now some recollection returned to her of other families where it had been considered too much strain on delicate sensibilities. Fits of the vapors detracted rather seriously from the proper solemnity due to the dead. “Is that why Flora Lutterworth isn’t here either?” That seemed dubious to her, but not impossible. Alfred Lutterworth apparently had great ambitions towards gentility, and all that might seem well-bred.

  “I imagine so,” Vespasia replied with the ghost of a smile. They were at the carriages. Caroline and Grandmama were somewhere behind them. Charlotte glanced over her shoulder and saw Caroline talking to Josiah Hatch with intense concentration, and Grandmama was staring at Charlotte with a look like thunder.

  “Are you waiting?” Vespasia asked, her silver eyebrows raised.

  “Certainly not!” Charlotte waved her arm imperiously and Emily’s coachman moved his horses forward. “They have their own equipage.” It gave her a childish satisfaction to say it aloud. “I shall follow you. I assume the Misses Worlingham will be up to the occasion of the funeral supper?”

  “Of course.” Now Vespasia’s smile was undisguised. “That is the social event—this was merely the necessary preamble.” And she accepted her footman’s hand and mounted the step into her carriage, after handing to the crossing sweeper, a child of no more than ten or eleven years, a halfpenny, for which he thanked her loudly, and pushed his broom through another pile of manure. The door was closed behind her and a moment later it drew away.

  Charlotte did the same, and was still behind her when they alighted outside the imposing and now familiar Worlingham house, all its blinds drawn and black crepe fluttering from the door. The roadway was liberally spread with straw to silence the horses’ hooves, out of respect for the dead, and the wheels made barely a sound as the coachman drove away to wait.

  Inside everything had been prepared to the last detail. The huge dining room was festooned with black crepe till it looked as if some enormous spider had been followed by a chimney fire and an extremely clumsy sweep. White lilies, which must have cost enough to feed an ordinary family for a week, were arranged with some artistry on the table, and in a porcelain vase on the jardiniere. The table itself was set with a magnificent array of baked meats, sandwiches, fruits and confectionary, bottles of wine in baskets, suitably dusty from the cellar and carrying labels to satisfy even the most discriminating connoisseur. Some of the Port was very old indeed. The bishop must have laid it down in his prime, and forgotten it.

  Celeste and Angeline stood side by side, both dressed in black bombazine. Celeste’s was stitched with jet beads and had a fall of velvet over the front and caught up in the bustle. It was a fraction tight at the bosom. Angeline’s was draped over the shoulders with heavy black lace fastened with a jet pin set with tiny pearls, a very traditional mourning brooch. The lace was also echoed across the stomach and under the bombazine bustle; only the most discriminating would know it was last year’s arrangement of folds. And it was even tighter around the bosom. Charlotte guessed they had performed the same service at Theophilus’s funeral, and perhaps at the bishop’s as well. A clever dressmaker could do a great deal, and from observation it seemed, like many wealthy people, the Worlingham sisters liked their economies.

  Celeste greeted them with deep solemnity, as if she had been a duchess receiving callers, standing stiff-backed, inclining her head a fraction and repeating everyone’s names as though they were of significant importance. Angeline kept a lace-edged handkerchief in her hand and dabbed at her cheek occasionally, echoing the last two words of everything Celeste said.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Pitt.” Celeste moved her hand an inch in recognition of a relative stranger of no discernible rank.

  “Mrs. Pitt,” Angeline repeated, smiling uncertainly.

  “Gracious of you to come to express your condolences.”

  “Gracious.” Angeline chose the first word this time.

  “Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould.” Celeste was startled, and for once the fact that she was a bishop’s daughter seemed unimpressive. “How—how generous of you to come. I am sure our late father would have been quite touched.”

  “Quite touched,” Angeline added eagerly.

  “There would be no reason for him to be,” Vespasia said with a cool smile and very direct stare. “I came entirely on Clemency Shaw’s behalf. She was a very fine woman of both courage and conscience—a rare-enough combination. I am truly grieved that she is gone.”

  Celeste was lost for words. She knew nothing of Clemency to warrant such an extraordinary tribute.

  “Oh!” Angeline gave a little gasp and clutched the handkerchief more tightly, then dabbed at a tear that started down her pink cheek. “Poor Clemency,” she whispered almost inaudibly.

  Vespasia did not linger for any further trivialities that could only be painful, and led the way into the dining room. Somerset Carlisle, immediately behind her, was so used to speaking gently with the inarticulate he had no trouble murmuring something kind but meaningless and following them in.

  There were some thirty people there already. Charlotte recognized several from her own previous brief meetings at the Worlinghams’, others she deduced from Pitt’s description as she had done in the church.

  She looked at the table, pretending to be engrossed in admiring it, as Caroline and Grandmama came in. Grandmama was scowling and waving her stick in front of her to the considerable peril of anyone within range. She did not particularly want Charlotte with her, but she was furious at being left behind. It lacked the respect due to her.

  It was a gracious room, very large, with fine windows all ornately curtained, a dark marble fireplace, an oak sideboard and serving table and a dresser with a Crown Derby tea service set out for disp
lay, all reds, blues and golds.

  The main table was exquisitely appointed, crystal with a coat of arms engraved on the side of each goblet, silver polished till it reflected every facet of the chandelier, also monogrammed with an ornate Gothic W, and linen embroidered in white with both crest and monogram. The porcelain serving platters were blue-and-gold-rimmed Minton; Charlotte remembered the pattern from the details of such knowledge her mother had taught her, in the days when she attended such functions where information of the sort was required in the would-be bride.

  “They never put all this out for her when she was alive,” Shaw said at her elbow. “But then I suppose, God help us, we never had the entire neighborhood in to dine, especially all at once.”

  “It often helps grief to do something with a special effort,” Charlotte answered him quietly. “Perhaps even a trifle to excess. We do not all cope with our losses in the same way.”

  “What a very charitable view,” he said gloomily. “If I had not already met you before, and heard you be most excruciatingly candid, I would suspect you of hypocrisy.”

  “Then you would do me an injustice,” she said quickly. “I meant what I said. If I wished to be critical I could think of several things to comment on, but that is not one of them.”

  “Oh!” His fair eyebrows rose. “What would you choose?” The faintest smile lit his eyes. “If, of course, you wished to be critical.”

  “Should I wish to be, and you are still interested, I shall let you know,” she replied without the slightest rancor. Then remembering that it was his bereavement more than anyone else’s, and not wishing to seem to cut him, even in so small a way, she leaned a little closer and whispered, “Celeste’s gown is a trifle tight, and should have been let out under the arms. The gentleman I take to be Mr. Dalgetty needs a haircut, and Mrs. Hatch has odd gloves, which is probably why she has taken one off and is carrying it.”