A Christmas Secret Read online

  It was an awkward job up the cellar stairs, and required both men, so Clarice walked in front of them with the lantern. On the way back up she moved ahead and laid a clean blanket on the kitchen table so they could put him down gently on it. As soon as it was accomplished, the doctor went to find the blacksmith.

  “I think I should clean him up a bit,” Clarice said very quietly. Her throat ached, and she found it hard to swallow.

  Dominic offered to do it, but she insisted. Laying out the dead was a job for women. She would wash the coal dust from his head and face and hands. She did it with hot, soapy water, very gently, as if he could still feel pain. He had had fine features, aquiline and sensitive, but they were hollow now, in death. There was a bad scrape on his nose, as if he had struck it falling—and yet they had found him on his back, and to reinforce that fact, there was a deep gash in the back of his head. He must have gone down hard.

  In straightening his legs, Clarice also noticed that his trousers were slightly torn at the shins, and the skin underneath abraded and bruised.

  “How did he do that?” she said curiously.

  “It happened before he died,” Dominic said quietly. “People don’t bruise after the heart stops. He must have stumbled as he went down the steps. Perhaps he wasn’t feeling very well even then.”

  “I wonder why he went down at all,” she said thoughtfully, pulling the fabric straight. “The buckets of coal and coke were all full.”

  “I expect Mrs. Wellbeloved filled them,” he pointed out.

  She looked at him almost apologetically. “If she’d gone down there, and he had the buckets with him, then why didn’t she find him?”

  “What are you suggesting, Clarice?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just wondered why he went down there, and nobody knew.”

  “They thought he had gone away on holiday,” he answered. “We all did.”

  She frowned. “Why? Why did the bishop think he was going on holiday?”

  “Because he wrote and told him,” Dominic said.

  She said nothing. Something made her more than sad, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

  There was a voice at the door, calling out urgently. Dominic turned and went back to the hall. “What is it? Can I help?”

  “Oh, Vicar!” It was a man’s voice, deep and unfamiliar. “Poor Mrs. Hapgood’s had bad news, and she’s that upset, I don’t know what to do for her. Can you come? Dreadful state she’s in, poor thing.”

  Dominic hesitated, turning back toward Clarice.

  She knew how much it mattered; this was their chance to prove they could do everything that a parish needed. “Yes, of course you can,” she said firmly. There was no need to tell this man that the Reverend Wynter was dead. He had his own griefs to aid first. “There’s nothing here I can’t take care of.”

  “Oh, bless you, ma’am!” the man in the hall said fervently. “This way, Vicar.”

  The doctor came back with the blacksmith and his cart, and the two men carried the body out quickly and discreetly, wrapped in a blanket. After they had gone Clarice went back to the kitchen and washed the few dishes they had used, her mind whirling. There was something wrong. She could not put her finger on it standing here at the bench. She would have to go down to the cellar again, and yet she was reluctant to. It was more than the cold or even the memory of what she had found.

  “Come on, Harry,” she said briskly. “Come, keep me company.” She relit the lantern and the dog, surprisingly, obeyed her. It was the very first time he had done as she’d asked. Together they went to the door and opened it. She went first down the steps, very carefully, and he followed behind. A little more than halfway he stopped and sniffed.

  “What is it?” she said, gulping, her hand swaying so the light gyrated around the walls.

  Harry sniffed again and looked up at her.

  Swallowing hard, she retraced her steps up to him and bent to examine what he’d spotted. It was a very small piece of fabric, no more than a few threads caught in a splinter of the wood. At first she thought how odd it was that the dog had noticed it; then she saw the smear of blood. It wasn’t much darker than the coal-smudged steps themselves, but when she licked her finger and touched it, it came away red. Was this where the vicar had stumbled, and then gone on down the rest of the way to the bottom? How could she find out?

  She held the lantern so she could see the steps closely. They were dark with years of trodden-in coal dust, each bit dropped from a bucket or scuttle carried up full. No matter how closely she looked, all she could distinguish were the most recent marks, a heel dent, and the smear of a sole. They could have been anybody’s: Dominic’s, the doctor’s, even Mrs. Wellbeloved’s.

  She went to the bottom and looked again, not expecting to find anything or knowing what it would mean even if she did.

  Then she saw it: a small, neat pattern of marks she understood very easily—cat prints. Etta had been this way. She walked after the marks, for no real reason except that they led to the second cellar. They were easy to read because they were on plain ground, as if someone had swept all the old marks away with a broom. Why would anybody sweep just a single track, no more than eighteen or twenty inches wide? It was not even clean, just brushed once. Several times it was disturbed at the sides by footprints.

  Then she understood. It was not swept—these were drag marks. Someone had pulled something heavy, covered in cloth, from the bottom of the stairs over into the second cellar.

  Could the Reverend Wynter have fallen, struck his head and become confused, mistaken where he was and dragged himself in the wrong direction?

  No. That was idiotic. There were no handprints in the dust. And his hands would have been filthy when they found him. They weren’t: only smudges here and there—the backs as much as the palms.

  She was in the second cellar now. When she had found him, he had been lying on his back. But his nose had been scraped, as if he had fallen forward. And there was coal dust on his front as well as his back. The hard, deep wound was on the back of his head.

  “Somebody killed him, Harry,” she said softly, putting her hand out to touch the dog’s soft fur. “Somebody hit him on the head and dragged him in here, and then left him. Why would they do that? He was an old man whom almost everyone loved.”

  The dog whined and leaned his weight against her leg.

  “I don’t suppose you know, and even if you do, you can’t tell me.” She was talking to him because it was so much better not to feel alone. “I’ll have to find out without you. We’ll have to,” she corrected. “I’ll tell Dominic when he comes back. Right now, in case anybody calls, I think we should pretend that we don’t know anything at all. Come on. It’s cold down here, and we shouldn’t stay anyway. It isn’t safe.”

  When Dominic returned from his visits, tired and cold, she had no alternative but to tell him immediately. It was already midafternoon; there would be little more than an hour before the light began to fade and the ground froze even harder.

  “What?” he said incredulously, sitting at the kitchen table, his hands thawing as he held the cup of tea she had made. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am sure,” she said looking at him steadily. “I’m not being overimaginative, Dominic. Remember the marks on his face and head? Remember how little coal dust there was on his hands? Or on his knees? But there was a tear on the shin of his trousers, and dust where he had been dragged. Go down to the cellar and look. It’s still there.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please,” she urged. “I don’t want to be the only one who saw it. Anyway, I don’t think the doctor is going to listen to me.”

  She was perfectly correct—Dr. Fitzpatrick did not believe either of them.

  “That suggestion is preposterous,” he said irritably, pulling on his mustache. “It is a perfectly ordinary domestic tragedy. An elderly man had a heart attack and fell down the cellar stairs. Or perhaps he simply tripped and then the shock of the fall bro
ught on an attack. He was confused, naturally, perhaps hurt, and he mistakenly crawled in the wrong direction. You are trying to make a horror out of something that is merely sad. And if I may say so, that is a completely irresponsible thing to do.”

  Clarice took a deep breath, facing his anger. “What did he go into the cellar for?” she asked.

  “My dear Mrs. Corde, surely that is perfectly obvious?” Fitzpatrick snapped. “Exactly the same reason as you did yourself! For coal!”

  She met his gaze steadily. “I took a lantern and a coal bucket, and I left the door open at the top,” she replied.

  “Then perhaps he went for some other reason,” Fitzpatrick said. “Didn’t you say something about the dog? He must have gone to look for it.”

  “Why would you go to look for anything in a cellar without a lantern?” Dominic pressed. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “He probably stood at the top and called.” Fitzpatrick was becoming more and more annoyed. His face was tight, lips thin. “Reverend, you are a guest here. In view of poor Wynter’s death, it will possibly be for far longer than you had originally intended. You are now required to guide the village through a sad and very trying time. As shepherd of the people, it is your calling to sustain, comfort, and uplift them, not indulge in what, I have to say, is idle and vicious speculation on the death of a deeply loved man. I am sorry that it falls to my lot to remind you of this. Don’t make it necessary for me to take it further.”

  Dominic’s face flamed, but he turned and left without retaliation. He could not afford it, as the doctor had reminded him.

  Clarice went with him, not daring to meet Fitzpatrick’s eyes in case he saw in hers the rage she also felt toward him. He had humiliated Dominic, and that she had no idea how to heal, so she could not forgive him for it. As she went out into the snow, she remembered her father telling her that if you sought wealth or fame, other people might dislike you for it, but if you sought only to do good, no one would be your enemy. How wrong he was! Good held a mirror to other people’s hearts, and the reflection was too often unflattering. People could hate you for that more than for almost anything else.

  She caught up with Dominic and linked her arm through his, holding on to him when he tried to pull back. He was ashamed because he had not found a way to stand up for the truth. She struggled for something to say that would make it better, not worse. If she were to sound superficial it would be worse than silence; it would be patronizing, as if she thought him not strong enough to face their failure. Yet she ached to comfort him. If she could not at least do that, what use was she?

  “I’m sorry,” she said a trifle abruptly. “I shouldn’t have urged you to speak to him so quickly. Perhaps if we had waited until tomorrow, and thought harder, we might have persuaded him.”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” he said grimly. “He doesn’t want to think that anyone would kill the Reverend Wynter.”

  “I don’t want to, either!” she said hotly. “I hate thinking it. But I have to follow what my sense tells me. And I don’t believe one goes into the cellar alone in the dark to fetch coal, to look for a cat or dog, or anything else. If he’d fallen down, then Mrs. Wellbeloved would have found him. The door would have been open—”

  “Maybe when she came in the front door, the wind slammed the cellar door shut?” he suggested.

  “It faces the other way,” she pointed out. “It would have blown it wider open.”

  “Well, what do you think did happen?” he asked. They were walking side by side along the road, their feet making the only tracks in the new snow. In the east the sky was darkening.

  “I think someone came in and said or did something to make him go into the cellar, then pushed him,” she answered. “When he was at the bottom, perhaps crumpled over, stunned, they hit him on the back of the head, hard enough to kill him, whether they meant that or not. Although I can’t see why they would do it unless they intended him to die. They could hardly explain it away.” Her mind was racing. The rising wind was edged with ice, and she blinked against it. “Then they dragged him into the other cellar, so he wouldn’t be found too soon—”

  “Why?” he interrupted. “What difference would it make?”

  “So nobody would know when it happened, of course.” The ideas came to her as she spoke. “That way nobody could have been proved to be here at the right time. Then they closed the door, and probably took his cases away, so people would think he had already gone on his holiday. Only they forgot about his painting things…and his favorite Bible.”

  He was frowning. “Do you really think so? Why? That doesn’t sound like a quarrel in the heat of some…some dispute. It’s perfectly deliberate and cold-blooded.”

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed reluctantly. “I suppose he must have known something about one of the people here that was so terrible to them, they couldn’t afford to trust that he would never tell anyone.”

  “He couldn’t tell,” Dominic argued. “They would know that. Not if it was confessed to him. No priest would.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t confessed to him.” She would not let go of the idea. “Perhaps he found it out some other way. He knew lots of things about all sorts of people. He would have to. He’s been here in Cottisham for ages. He must have seen a great deal.”

  “What could possibly be worth killing over?” He was putting up a last fight against believing.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “But he wrote to the bishop saying he was going on holiday,” he pointed out. “So he obviously intended to. Is that coincidence?”

  “Did he?” she asked. “Or did someone else write, copying his hand? It wouldn’t be too difficult, and if the bishop didn’t look closely, or compare it with other letters, it would be easy enough. And plenty of people in the village could have letters or notes the Reverend Wynter had written at one time or another.”

  Dominic said nothing, trudging steadily through the snow. The light was fading rapidly; the shadows under the trees were already impenetrable.

  “That’s what we have to find out,” she insisted quietly, her voice heavy with the burden of what she was thinking. She would very much rather have been able to say they should let it go, pretend they had never known, but it would be a lie that would grow sharper all the time, like a blister on the tender skin of one’s feet. “Christ was kind; He forgave,” she went on. “But He never moderated the truth to make people like Him, or pretended that something was all right when it wasn’t, because that would be easier. I think the Reverend Wynter was killed for something he knew. What do you think, really?” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll do whatever you decide.” That was so difficult for her to say.

  He gave an almost jerky little laugh. “You can’t do that, Clarice. You’d grow to hate me. I think he was probably killed. Either way, I can’t pretend I don’t know. The Reverend Wynter deserves better; and if someone did kill him, then they deserve better, too. They need justice more than he does. Justice heals in the end, if you allow it to.” He walked a few more yards in silence. “I suppose we need to find out what he knew, and about whom.”

  A wave of relief swept over her. “We’ll begin in the village,” she said. “We can’t get out of it now anyway.”

  “Whom do we trust?” he asked, glancing at her quickly.

  “No one,” she said simply. “We can’t afford to. We have no idea who it was.”

  They spent a long, quiet evening by the fire. Neither of them talked very much, but it was one of the most companionable times she could remember, despite the ugly task that awaited them the following days. The fire crackled and the coals grew yellow hot in the heart of it. The snow deepened in blanketing silence outside, except for the occasional whoosh as it grew too heavy on the steep roof and slid off to the ground. There was nothing to discuss—they were in agreement.

  Sunday morning was awful. Dominic was so anxious, he barely spoke to her as he ate breakfast before church. He picked up bo
oks and put them down again, found quotes, then discarded them. One minute he wanted to be daring, challenge people to new thought; the next to be gentle, to reassure them in all the old beliefs, comfort the wounds of loneliness and misunderstanding, and say nothing that might awaken troubling ideas or demand any change.

  A dozen times Clarice drew in her breath to say that he had no time, in three short weeks, to stay within safe bounds. No one would listen; certainly no one would remember anything about it afterward.

  She nearly said so. Then she saw his slender hand on the back of the chair, and realized that the knuckles were white. This was not the right time. But she was afraid there never would be a right time. The next sermon would be for Christmas. One pedestrian sermon now, safe and colorless, might be all it would take to lose the congregation’s sympathy, and their hope.

  “Don’t quote,” she said suddenly. “Don’t use other people’s words. Whatever they are, they’ll have heard them before.”

  “People like repetition,” he said with a bleak smile, his eyes dark with anxiety and the crushing weight of doubt Spindlewood had laid on him.

  In that moment Clarice hated Spindlewood for what he had done with his mealy mouth and grudging, time-serving spirit. “Do you remember how terrible it was when Unity Bellwood was murdered, and how the police suspected all of us?” she said quietly.

  “Of course!”

  “Tell them what you said to me about courage then, and how it’s the one virtue without which all others may be lost,” she urged him. “You meant it! Say it to them.”

  He did so, passionately, eloquently, without repeating himself. She had no idea whether the congregants were impressed or not. They spoke politely to him afterward, even with warmth, but there was no ease among them. She and Dominic walked home through the snow in silence.

  On Monday, the wind sliced in from the east like a whetted knife. Straight after breakfast Dominic set out to make his calls.

  Clarice started where she had traditionally been told lay the root of all evil, although actually she thought it was far more likely to find its roots in selfishness—and perhaps self-righteousness, which was not such a different thing when one thought about it. Still, money was easier to measure, and she had ready access to the vicar’s ledgers both from the church and from the household.