A Christmas Return Read online

  She forced the memories away, deep into her mind, both the laughter and the pain. She opened the gate and went up the paved path, knowing in advance where the unevennesses were, as if she had walked it only days ago. At the front door she climbed to the porch and pulled the bell rope, then stepped back, as was only good manners.

  The wind whined in the bare branches of the trees and rattled a loose twig against the side of the drainpipe.

  The door opened and an elderly manservant stood on the polished floor inside.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he said without any recognition at all. His face was round and scrubbed-looking, and there was a tiny cut on his chin, as if he had been careless when shaving.

  Mariah swallowed. “Good morning.” She did not know his name. If he had been here twenty years ago, she did not remember him. “I am an old friend of Mrs. Wesley’s and I have come some distance to visit her,” she said. “Would you be kind enough to tell her that Mariah Ellison has called?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but I doubt she will…be well enough to see you.” His face was almost expressionless. Just in case Mariah was telling the truth, he kept a degree of civility, but it was clear he doubted her. “If you would be kind enough to wait, ma’am, I shall inquire.”

  “I am not waiting on the step in the cold, Jenkins!” she said tartly. They had had a footman called Jenkins, though whether it was this particular one or not she didn’t know. His hair was thinning. He might have looked different twenty years ago. And better!

  “Mr. Jenkins left, ma’am,” he said bleakly. “But I suppose you had better come inside. It is a most inclement day.” He stepped back and allowed her to enter the foyer and then the hallway. There was a very pleasant settle, a hard, carved wooden bench, rather like a church pew, near the stairs. She walked over to it and sat down.

  The man closed the front door, bowed to her very slightly, then went upstairs to see if Rowena would receive her.

  This could be awkward.

  The room was familiar in all its details. Nothing she noticed seemed to have changed since she had left in such unhappiness twenty years ago. The pictures on the walls were all sea and cloud scenes in the hallway, and, she remembered, all gentle slopes of hillside, trees and wildflowers, in the sitting room. These were Rowena’s taste, the comforts of long-established land. The wilder ones elsewhere, eyes traveling to the horizon, were Cullen’s. From what Mariah could see, Rowena had not moved any of them.

  Was that comforting? Or disturbing? Mariah thought the latter. But then she had not wanted to remember anything of her own marriage. She had created a fiction around it, like the protective scabs around a wound. Except that they were supposed to fall away of their own accord, once the wound was healed and the new skin had grown over it.

  Would that ever happen? One day…

  The wind rattled bare shrubbery branches against the glass. It was the only sound.

  Then the footman returned.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ellison, but Mrs. Wesley is not feeling well and is unable to receive callers today,” he said quietly. He looked very faintly flushed, as if the remarks were not his own.

  Mariah knew it was a refusal, not a valid reason. Rowena was either recalling their less happy associations, the occasional disagreements, or else she was simply too frightened to order her thoughts at all. Neither was an acceptable excuse.

  “I am most sorry to hear that.” Mariah measured her words with care. She tried to take the irritation out of her voice, even out of her eyes. He must not sense that she was perfectly aware of the lie. “It is particularly sad to be ill at Christmas. I think perhaps you are new here? I spent many happy times visiting Mrs. Wesley in the past. I had cause to think of her particularly this year. I live in London, you know?” She went on quickly, not wanting an answer. “I came on the train to visit Mrs. Wesley. We have many memories together of this time of year.”

  The footman struggled for something fitting to say, and failed to find it.

  “I am staying at the local inn,” she continued. “And will do so, in the hope that sometime very soon Mrs. Wesley is well enough to receive a visit, even if it is a brief one. Please be kind enough to tell her that I am very loath indeed to come this way and not at least have a few minutes with her.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I will give her your message.”

  Mariah glanced out the window at the leaves bumping the glass in the rising wind. “Can you tell me if it is raining?” she asked. “I would appreciate your hospitality if it is. I prefer not to walk back and get soaked.” She hoped he understood that she intended to remain.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated. “Perhaps you would care for a pot of tea, before you leave?”

  Mariah smiled. “How thoughtful of you. Indeed, I would be most grateful.” She sat down again before he could change his mind.

  The tea was brought and she was shown into the familiar sitting room, with all the pictures she remembered, the bookcases with Cullen’s books. There were new curtains, flowered ones. She preferred the old, warm brown velvet.

  She was halfway through tea and light biscuits and wondering how to continue her stay and persuade Rowena to see her, when there was a considerable activity at the front door. She heard it open and close, the sound of footsteps, voices, more footsteps moving rapidly, and then silence. No one came into the sitting room.

  Was Rowena really ill, and they had sent for the doctor? How unfair that Mariah had assumed she was hiding. She could not even apologize without admitting she had thought it a lie.

  Then the door opened and a young man came in. He was tall, with thick, fair brown hair and an easy smile. He looked perhaps thirty.

  He did not seem in the least surprised to see her there and walked straight over to her without excuse for intruding. He held out his hand.

  “Mrs. Ellison?” It was more an affirmation than a question. She did not know him. The footman must have told him her name.

  He smiled very briefly, and there was something vaguely familiar about it, a tug at the memory.

  “Peter Wesley,” he said briefly. “I was only ten when we last met. I have probably changed rather more than you have. I’m so glad you came. May I join you?” He sat down opposite her without waiting for her reply. “They’re bringing more tea, and I hope something a little more robust than those biscuits.” All the time he was speaking his eyes were searching her face.

  “I have grown older too,” she said, rather more waspishly that she had intended. “But I am still perfectly well and able to put up a fight.”

  His face lit with a wide smile of relief. “There isn’t really anyone else I can rely on,” he admitted. “I’m afraid it’s going to be rather nasty. You see, this is the twentieth anniversary of Grandfather’s death, and damned Durward has decided to come back to the village and clear his name. He can only do that by raking the whole tragedy up again, and condemning Grandmother at the same time. They can’t both be telling the truth…”

  She glared at him. “Are you suggesting there is some doubt about who is lying?” she demanded.

  He smiled again in a way so charming it was as if he were defending himself against her. Perhaps he was. He had been a child when they last met, and a child suddenly bereaved, at that.

  “I’m sorry.” She surpassed herself by saying it aloud. “Of course you don’t believe Durward. And I am of no use to you if I don’t face the facts that we have no proof yet, or you would not have requested I come—especially not in such a…melodramatic manner.”

  He colored faintly, but it showed on his fair skin. “I wanted to be certain of gaining your attention…”

  “You succeeded.”

  “Thank you.”

  Before he could say anything further, the footman returned with fresh tea and a large plate of toasted crumpets. Peter thanked him profusely and began to eat even before Mariah poured the tea for him.

  “You haven’t spoken to Grandmother yet, have you?” He asked it as a question, but it was really a
statement of fact.

  She realized that the first sound of the door had been his arrival, then the space in time between that and his coming into the sitting room had been his going upstairs and speaking with Rowena. He must know already that she had refused to see Mariah.

  “What did she say?” she asked, feeling no need to acknowledge his question.

  He looked down, then up at her with apology in his face. “She doesn’t want to see you. She knows you will fight…unless you have changed entirely, which I am trusting you haven’t?”

  “I haven’t.” She did not elaborate. Of course she had! She was twenty years older, stiffer and more easily tired. But there were other ways in which she had changed also, over things that had hurt deeply, but had also healed. Circumstances totally outside her control, other people’s tragedies, had forced her to acknowledge that her husband had abused her in ways that even now she found too painful to put into words. But finally she had realized that her humiliation at his hands was his sin, not hers. Nor was she alone in such an experience. She could not speak of it to anyone else, but the simple knowledge that she was not unique allowed her to thaw the iron-hard ice inside herself.

  And last year, by herself, she had solved the mystery of someone’s death. She had found justice for a woman she had begun by loathing, and ended by admiring more than anyone else she had known, a woman whose passion for life had warmed her ever since. Even though the woman was dead, the light of her living had not faded.

  The changes in Mariah need not alter anything regarding what Peter Wesley wished of her.

  “So this wretched man has returned to Haslemere?” she said.

  “Yes. I don’t think any of us foresaw that happening. And, of course, the place is hopping with newspaper reporters like an old dog with fleas!”

  “A delightful analogy,” she commented drily.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come!” He said it with warmth, as if he really meant it, and his smile went all the way to his eyes.

  Mariah was annoyed with herself for responding to it, but she felt the irritation easing out of her in the same sort of way one smiles automatically in the sun. “Well, we’d best be thinking clearly,” she said. “The only way we can mend the situation now is to find the truth, and prove it.”

  They sat in silence for several moments, and then an awful fear came into her mind. The silence grew longer. There was no point in running away from it. She took a deep breath. “Peter, are you afraid that the truth is worse than this suspicion, and that your grandfather refused to defend Durward out of spite, because of some affair with your grandmother? Because that is what the worst gossips are saying. And it is what they will all believe, if we don’t prove them wrong.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he answered quietly. “But I have no idea how to prove anything different.”

  Her mind raced. She thought of all the conversations she had ever overheard from her granddaughter Charlotte, who had married a policeman, one who solved murders. Her mother had encouraged her to marry such a man, possibly because she had refused to marry anyone else. Her father, Edward, Mariah’s only son, had been appalled, but had given in.

  Actually, the marriage had turned out extraordinarily well. She had at first dismissed her granddaughter’s husband as some kind of servant, a person who should go round to the back door, the tradesmen’s entrance. She would be ashamed of that thought now, if she had the time. He was actually quite clever—no, very clever. It was one of few matters in which Mariah had been delighted to be proved wrong.

  So what would a policeman do now?

  “Can you think of a more practical alternative?” she asked Peter.

  Peter remained silent for some time. “No,” he said at last. “I believe the truth is that Durward kidnapped Christina Abbott and then killed her, just as he was charged. I believe Grandfather somehow knew that, and because he did, he couldn’t lie to the court, nor could he tell them. That was why he wouldn’t continue with the case. Durward was entitled to a lawyer who could at least tell himself he believed Durward’s denial. But then, that’s what I want to believe. I know enough of the law, Mrs. Ellison, to be aware that, guilty or innocent, everyone has the right to be tried in court, and have a lawyer defend them. Sometimes the police are wrong. Quite often they have some of the truth, but not all of it.”

  “Indeed.” She nodded. “And they are no longer investigating the case of Christina’s death. In fact, since Durward was tried and found not guilty, he cannot be charged again.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “Being charged is not all that matters. What are we most concerned about?” She was thinking as she spoke and answered her own question immediately. “That poor Rowena will be tried by public opinion, and on a bit of evidence she will be found guilty, with no trial and no one to defend her.”

  Peter winced, and his face clearly reflected his pain.

  “So we will attack Durward the same way!” Mariah said rashly, hearing her own voice filled with conviction, and wondering if she had lost her wits. Peter looked so like Cullen at that age, or a little older. That was when Rowena had married him and Mariah had married her own husband. Within weeks, Mariah had known it was the mistake of her life. Perhaps it had always been Cullen she loved…

  Now she was an old woman, and he was long dead. But maybe she could still save his name, his memory, and save his widow and his grandson from grief. They should remember him as they believed he had been, and as she had never doubted he had.

  “We must think!” she said fiercely, before Peter could argue. “It is a perfectly justifiable cause. If Owen Durward has come back to Haslemere to prove his innocence, then the only way he can do that is to prove someone else guilty!”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But guilty of slander, not of killing Christina.”

  “Someone killed the poor child! If it was not him, then who?”

  Peter said nothing.

  “It was Durward,” she insisted. “He can’t have come back to prove his innocence, because the court already cleared him, the more fools they.”

  “Then why is he here?” Peter asked.

  She took a deep breath and tried to keep her voice level. “He is trying to show that Cullen should have defended him. It was his pulling out at the last moment, after accepting to do it, that cast the shadow on Durward. He won’t want that case opened again. He will want to blame your grandmother for Cullen’s withdrawal from the case. If she was at fault, then Cullen’s withdrawal had nothing to do with Durward’s guilt. That is all he needs to prove: that he was the victim of a weak man’s need to defend his wife’s foolishness.”

  Peter frowned a little. “You make it sound simple, but it isn’t. Most of the people who’ll think about it, write about it now, never knew him. They don’t know how far that was from what he was really like.” He looked crushed, as if he could see the embarrassment, the humiliation already.

  “I know,” Mariah agreed quietly. “I don’t think it will be easy, but if we don’t find the truth, this will never be finished. Your grandmother will never be able to go down the street with her head high, knowing she wasn’t wrong, and Cullen wasn’t either.” Then the anger boiled up inside her again at the thought of Cullen being slandered like that. “There’s no one who can or will fight for them except us!” She stared straight at Peter, meeting his eyes.

  He did not look away. “Have you any idea where we can start?” he asked.

  She thought quickly. She had police in her family. What would Charlotte’s husband do?

  Peter was staring at her, the hope still in his eyes. Why on earth had he thought Mariah was the one who had either the courage or the intelligence to solve this? She was not going to be able to live up to anything that he believed of her. He probably thought she wasn’t afraid of anyone. A ten-year-old boy! How could he ever imagine the terror she had lived in all her married life?

  She forced it to the back of her mind. No one else must ever know—not ever! Especia
lly not Peter.

  “The police must have investigated the kidnapping, and then the murder,” she said levelly, as if she really knew what she was talking about. “If they had not had some sort of evidence against Durward, they would not have charged him, and there would never have been a trial. Someone has to know all about it.”

  Peter bit his lip. “I doubt that the constable will be able to tell us anything. He’s relatively new here. Only ten or eleven years.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of police,” she answered. “We need someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in justifying what happened, or failed to happen.”

  “Everyone who was here then had some part in it,” he pointed out. “They all remember it as they want it to have been. I don’t wish to sound sceptical, but it’s natural to want to have done the right thing, and to rewrite it all a little bit in your mind.”

  “Then I think we have to…” She hesitated, trying to find the right word; she must get Rowena to face forward and pull herself together! But that was probably not a sentiment Peter would agree with.

  He smiled with a dry humor. “Get Grandmother to fight beside us?” he suggested.

  Mariah let out her breath slowly. “You have put it rather well.”

  He finished the last piece of crumpet. “I’ll go and tell her.” He stood up and walked over to the door, then stopped, turning back to look at her. “By the way, would you like to stay here, or do you prefer it at the inn? You might remember something useful there, in peace. But on the other hand, you could help Grandmother stay resolved if you were here. She can prevail over me, if she tries hard enough. Nobody ever prevails over you, if you’ve got your mind set.”

  “Humph! Do they really prevail over you?” She looked at him with a hint of disapproval.