A Dangerous Mourning Read online

  “And what?” he finished for her. “The jury will believe Percival? Or I should call Martha herself? Or Sir Basil, who dismissed her?”

  “No, of course not,” she said miserably, turning away. “I don’t know what else we can do. I’m sorry if I seem unreasonable. It is just so—” She stopped and looked across at him. “They’ll hang him, won’t they?”

  “Yes.” He was watching her, his face grave and sad. “There are no mitigating circumstances this time. What can you say in defense of a footman who lusts after his master’s daughter, and when she refuses him, knifes her to death?”

  “Nothing,” she said very quietly. “Nothing at all, except that he is human, and by hanging him we diminish ourselves as well.”

  “My dear Hester.” Slowly and quite deliberately, his lashes lowered but his eyes open, he leaned forward until his lips touched hers, not with passion but with utmost gentleness and long, delicate intimacy.

  When he drew away she felt both more and less alone than she ever had before, and she knew at once from his face that it had caught him in some way by surprise also.

  He drew breath as if to speak, then changed his mind and turned away, going over to the window and standing with his back half towards her.

  “I am truly sorry I could not do better for Percival,” he said again, his voice a little rough and charged with a sincerity she could not doubt. “For him, and because you trusted me.”

  “You have discharged that trust completely,” she said quickly. “I expected you to do all you could—I did not expect a miracle. I can see how passion is rising among the public. Perhaps we never had a chance. It was simply necessary that we try everything within our power. I am sorry I spoke so foolishly. Of course you could not have suggested Myles—or Araminta. It would only have turned the jury even more against Percival; I can see that if I free my mind from frustration and apply a little intelligence.”

  He smiled at her, his eyes bright. “How very practical.”

  “You are laughing at me,” she said without resentment. “I know it is considered unwomanly, but I see nothing attractive in behaving like a fool when you don’t have to.”

  His smile broadened. “My dear Hester, neither do I. It is extremely tedious. It is more than enough to do so when we cannot help ourselves. What are you going to do now? How will you survive, once Lady Moidore no longer considers herself in need of a nurse?”

  “I shall advertise for someone else who does—until I am able to search for a job in administration somewhere.”

  “I am delighted. From what you say you have not abandoned your hope of reforming English medicine.”

  “Certainly not—although I do not expect to do it in the lifetime your tone suggests. If I initiate anything at all I will be satisfied.”

  “I am sure you will.” His laughter vanished. “A determination like yours will not be thwarted long, even by the Pomeroys of the world.”

  “And I shall find Mr. Monk and go over the whole case again,” she added. “Just so I am sure there is nothing whatever we can still do.”

  “If you find anything, bring it to me.” He was very grave indeed now. “Will you promise me that? We have three weeks in which it might still be possible to appeal.”

  “I will,” she said with a return of the hard, gray misery inside her. The moment’s ineffable warmth was gone, Percival remembered. “I will.” And she bade him good-bye and took her leave to seek Monk.

  Hester returned to Queen Anne Street light-footed, but the leaden feeling was at the edge of her mind waiting to return now that she was forced to think of reality again.

  She was surprised to learn from Mary, as soon as she was in the house, that Beatrice was still confining herself to her room and would take her evening meal upstairs. She had gone into the ironing room for a clean apron, and found Mary there folding the last of her own linen.

  “Is she ill?” Hester said with some concern—and a pang of guilt, not only for what might be dereliction of her duty but because she had not believed the malady was now anything but a desire to be a trifle spoilt, and to draw from her family the attention she did not otherwise. And that in itself was something of a mystery. Beatrice was not only a lovely woman but vivid and individual, not made in the placid mold of Romola. She was also intelligent, imaginative and at times capable of considerable humor. Why should such a woman not be the very heartbeat of her home?

  “She looked pale,” Mary replied, pulling a little face. “But then she always does. I think she’s in a temper, myself—although I shouldn’t say that.”

  Hester smiled. The fact that Mary should not say something never stopped her, in fact it never even made her hesitate.

  “With whom?” Hester asked curiously.

  “Everyone in general, but Sir Basil in particular.”

  “Do you know why?”

  Mary shrugged; it was a graceful gesture. “I should think over what they said about Miss Octavia at the trial.” She scowled furiously. “Wasn’t that awful! They made out she was so tipsy she encouraged the footman to make advances—” She stopped and looked at Hester meaningfully. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Was that not true?”

  “Not that I ever saw.” Mary was indignant. “She was tipsy, certainly, but Miss Octavia was a lady. She wouldn’t have let Percival touch her if he’d been the last man alive on a desert island. Actually it’s my belief she wouldn’t have let any man touch her after Captain Haslett died. Which is what made Mr. Myles so furious. Now if she’d stabbed him, I’d have believed it!”

  “Did he really lust after her?” Hester asked, for the first time using the right word openly.

  Mary’s dark eyes widened a fraction, but she did not equivocate.

  “Oh yes. You should have seen it in his face. Mind, she was very pretty, you know, in a quite different way from Miss Araminta. You never saw her, but she was so alive—” Suddenly misery gripped hold of her again, and all the realization of loss flooded back, and the anger she had been trying to suppress. “That was wicked, what they said about her! Why do people say things like that?” Her chin came up and her eyes were blazing. “Fancy her saying all those wretched things about Dinah, and Mrs. Willis and all. They won’t ever forgive her for that, you know. Why did she do it?”

  “Spite?” Hester suggested. “Or maybe just exhibitionism. She loves to be the center of attention. If anyone is looking at her she feels alive—important.”

  Mary looked confused.

  “There are some people like that.” Hester tried to explain what she had never put into words before. “They’re empty, insecure alone; they only feel real when other people listen to them and take notice.”

  “Admiration.” Mary laughed bitterly. “It’s contempt. What she did was vicious. I can tell you, no one ’round here’ll forgive her for it.”

  “I don’t suppose that’ll bother her,” Hester said dryly, thinking of Fenella’s opinion of servants.

  Mary smiled. “Oh yes it will!” she said fiercely. “She won’t get a hot cup of tea in the morning anymore; it will be lukewarm. We will be ever so sorry, we won’t know how it happened, but it will go on happening. Her best clothes will be mislaid in the laundry, some will get torn, and no one will know who did it. Everyone will have found it like that. Her letters will be delivered to someone else, caught between the pages, messages for her or from her will be slow in delivery. The rooms she’s in will get cold because footmen will be too busy to stoke the fires, and her afternoon tea will be late. Believe me, Miss Latterly, it will bother her. And Mrs. Willis nor Cook won’t put a stop to it. They’ll all be just as innocent and smug as the rest of us, and not have an idea how it happens. And Mr. Phillips won’t do nothing either. He may have airs like he was a duke, but he’s loyal when it comes down to it. He’s one of us.”

  Hester could not help smiling. It was all incredibly trivial, but there was a kind of justice in it.

  Mary saw her expression, and her own eased
into one of satisfaction and something like conspiracy. “You see?” she said.

  “I see,” Hester agreed. “Yes—very appropriate.” And still with a smile she took her linen and left.

  Upstairs Hester found Beatrice sitting alone in her room in one of the dressing chairs, staring out of the window at the rain beginning to fall steadily into the bare garden. It was January, bleak, colorless, and promising fog before dark.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Moidore,” Hester said gently. “I am sorry you are unwell. Can I do anything to help?”

  Beatrice did not move her head.

  “Can you turn the clock back?” she asked with a tiny self-mocking smile.

  “If I could, I would have done it many times,” Hester answered. “But do you suppose it would really make a difference?”

  Beatrice did not reply for several moments, then she sighed and stood up. She was dressed in a peach-colored robe, and with her blazing hair she had all the warmth of dying summer in her.

  “No—probably none at all,” she said wearily. “We would still be the same people, and that is what is wrong. We would all still be pursuing comfort, looking to save our own reputations and just as willing to hurt others.” She stood by the window watching the water running down the panes. “I never realized Fenella was so consumed with vanity, so ridiculously trying to hold on to the trappings of youth. If she were not so prepared to destroy other people simply to get attention, I should feel more pity for her. As it is I am embarrassed by her.”

  “Perhaps it is all she feels she has.” Hester spoke equally softly. She too found Fenella repellent in her willingness to hurt, especially to expose the foibles of the servants—that was gratuitous. But she understood the fear behind the need for some quality that would earn her survival, some material possessions, however come by, that were independent of Basil and his conditional charity, if charity was the word.

  Beatrice swung around to face her, her eyes level, very wide.

  “You understand, don’t you? You know why we do these grubby things—”

  Hester did not know whether to equivocate; tact was not what Beatrice needed now.

  “Yes, it isn’t difficult.”

  Beatrice dropped her eyes. “I’d rather not have known. I guessed some of it, of course. I knew Septimus gambled, and I thought he took wine occasionally from the cellars.” She smiled. “In fact it rather amused me. Basil is so pompous about his claret.” Her face darkened again and the humor vanished. “I didn’t know Septimus took it for Fenella, and even then I wouldn’t have cared about it if it were sympathy for her—but it isn’t. I think he hates her. She’s everything in a woman that is different from Christabel—that is the woman he loved. That isn’t a good reason for hating anyone, though, is it?”

  She hesitated, but Hester did not interrupt.

  “Strange how being dependent, and being reminded of it all the time, sours you,” Beatrice went on. “Because you feel helpless and inferior, you try to get power again by doing just the same to someone else. God how I hate investigations! It will take us years to forget all we’ve learned about each other—maybe by then it will be too late.”

  “Maybe you can learn to forgive instead?” Hester knew she was being impertinent, but it was the only thing she could say with any truth, and Beatrice not only deserved truth, she needed it.

  Beatrice turned away and traced her finger on the dry inside of the window, following the racing drops.

  “How do you forgive someone for not being what you wanted them to be, or what you thought they were? Especially when they are not sorry—perhaps they don’t even understand?”

  “Or again, perhaps they do?” Hester suggested. “And how do they forgive us for having expected too much of them, instead of looking to see what they really were, and loving that?”

  Beatrice’s finger stopped.

  “You are very frank, aren’t you!” It was not a question. “But it isn’t as easy as that, Hester. You see, I am not even sure that Percival is guilty. Am I wicked still to have doubts in my mind when the court says he is, and he’s been sentenced, and the world says it is all over? I dream, and wake up with my mind torn with suspicions. I look at people and wonder, and I hear double and triple meanings behind what they say.”

  Again Hester was racked with indecision. It would seem so much kinder to suggest that no one else could be guilty, that it was only the aftermath of all the fear still lingering on, and in time it would melt away. Daily life would comfort, and this extraordinary tragedy would ease until it became only the grief one feels for any loss.

  But then she thought of Percival in Newgate prison, counting the few days left to him until one morning there was no more time at all.

  “Well if Percival is not guilty, who else could it have been?” She heard the words spoken aloud and instantly regretted her judgment. It was brutal. She never for an instant thought Beatrice would believe it was Rose, and none of the other servants had even entered the field of possibility. But it could not be taken back. All she could do was wait for Beatrice’s answer.

  “I don’t know.” Beatrice measured each word. “I have lain in the dark each night, thinking this is my own house, where I came when I was married. I have been happy here, and wretched. I have borne five children here, and lost two, and now Octavia. I’ve watched them grow up, and themselves marry. I’ve watched their happiness and their misery. It is all as familiar as bread and butter, or the sound of carriage wheels. And yet perhaps I know only the skin of it all, and the flesh beneath is as strange to me as Japan.”

  She moved to the dressing table and began to take the pins from her hair and let it down in a shining stream like bright copper.

  “The police came here and were full of sympathy and respectfully polite. Then they proved that no one could have broken in from outside, so whoever killed Octavia was one of us. For weeks they asked questions and forced us to find the answers—ugly answers, most of them, things about ourselves that were shabby, or selfish, or cowardly.” She put the pins in a neat little pile in one of the cut glass trays and picked up the silver-backed brush.

  “I had forgotten about Myles and that poor maid. That may seem incredible, but I had. I suppose I never thought about it much at the time, because Araminta didn’t know.” She pulled at her hair with the brush in long, hard strokes. “lama coward, aren’t I,” she said very quietly. It was a statement, not a question. “I saw what I wanted to, and hid from the rest. And Cyprian, my beloved Cyprian—doing the same: never standing up to his father, just living in a dream world, gambling and idling his time instead of doing what he really wanted.” She tugged even harder with the brush. “He’s bored with Romola, you know. It used not to matter, but now he’s suddenly realized how interesting companionship can be, and conversation that’s real, where people say what they think instead of playing polite games. And of course it’s far too late.”

  Without any forewarning Hester realized fully what she had woken in indulging her own vanity and pleasure in Cyprian’s attention. She was only partly guilty, because she had not intended hurt, but it was enough. Neither had she thought, or cared, and she had sufficient intelligence that she could have.

  “And poor Romola,” Beatrice went on, still brushing fiercely. “She has not the slightest idea what is wrong. She has done precisely what she was taught to do, and it has ceased to work.”

  “It may again,” Hester said feebly, and did not believe it.

  But Beatrice was not listening for inflections of a voice. Her own thoughts clamored too loudly.

  “And the police have arrested Percival and gone away, leaving us to wonder what really happened.” She began to brush with long, even strokes. “Why did they do that, Hester? Monk didn’t believe it was Percival, I’m sure of that.” She swiveled around on the dresser seat and looked at Hester, the brush still in her hand. “You spoke to him. Did you think he believed it was Percival?”

  Hester let out her breath slowly. “No—no, I thought n
ot.”

  Beatrice turned back to the mirror again and regarded her hair critically. “Then why did the police arrest him? It wasn’t Monk, you know. Annie told me it was someone else, not even the young sergeant either. Was it simply expediency, do you suppose? The newspapers were making a terrible fuss about it and blaming the police for not solving it, so Cyprian told me. And Basil wrote to the Home Secretary, I know.” Her voice sank lower. “I imagine their superiors demanded they produce some result very quickly, but I did not think Monk would give in. I thought he was such a strong man—” She did not add that Percival was expendable when a senior officer’s career was threatened, but Hester knew she was thinking it; the anger in her mouth and the misery in her eyes were sufficient.

  “And of course they would never accuse one of us, unless they had absolute proof. But I can’t help wondering if Monk suspected one of us and simply could not find any mistake large enough, or tangible enough, to justify his action.”

  “Oh I don’t think so,” Hester said quickly, then wondered how on earth she would explain knowing such a thing. Beatrice was so very nearly right in her estimate of what had happened, Runcorn’s expediency over Monk’s judgment, the quarrels and the pressure.

  “Don’t you?” Beatrice said bleakly, putting down the brush at last. “I am afraid I do. Sometimes I think I would give anything at all to know which one of us, just so I could stop suspecting the others. Then I shrink back in horror from it, like a hideous sight—a severed head in a bucketful of maggots—only worse.” She swiveled around on the seat again and looked at Hester. “Someone in my own family murdered my daughter. You see, they all lied. Octavia wasn’t as they said, and the idea of Percival taking such a liberty, or even imagining he could, is ridiculous.”

  She shrugged, her slender shoulders pulling at the silk of her gown.

  “I know she drank a trifle too much sometimes—but nothing like as much as Fenella does. Now if it were Fenella that would make sense. She would encourage any man.” Her face darkened. “Except she picks out those who are rich because she used to accept presents from them and then pawn the gifts for money to buy clothes and perfumes and things. Then she stopped bothering with the pretenses and simply took the money outright. Basil doesn’t know, of course. He’d be horrified. He’d probably throw her out.”