Funeral in Blue wm-12 Page 8

  “For heaven’s sake! I never imagined you did,” Hester said, and the moment she said it, she realized it was not true. The darkest fear inside her was that somehow Imogen had been involved, and worse, that she had drawn Charles in as well, although she could not think how.

  “Good.” Imogen’s eyes were still wide and bright. “Is that what you really came for? Not luncheon? Or afternoon tea? Or a little gossip about the theater, or fashion, but to find out if I was involved in some sordid murder?”

  “I came to try to help you stay out of the investigation,” Hester said, with anger, the deeper because it was unjustified.

  “Thank you for your concern; I can care for my own reputation,” Imogen replied stiffly. “But had I witnessed anything to do with the murders, no one could protect me from the necessity of doing my duty regarding it.”

  “No. .” Hester felt foolish. She was caught in a trap of her own words, and it was perfectly apparent that Imogen knew it. “Then I’m sure you have other calls to make, or visitors to receive,” she went on awkwardly, trying to retreat with some grace and knowing she was failing.

  “I suppose you saw it as your duty to come,” Imogen replied, swirling towards the door to show her out. Her words could have meant anything at all, or nothing, merely the formula for saying good-bye.

  Hester found herself out in the street feeling inept and still afraid for both Charles and Imogen, and with no idea what to do next to be any help at all. She was not even sure whether she wanted to tell Monk anything about it.

  She started to walk in the mild, damp breeze, knowing that the fog could easily close in again by nightfall.

  Monk and Runcorn went from Haverstock Hill to Ebury Street to see Fuller Pendreigh, Elissa Beck’s father. It was a courtesy as much as anything. They did not expect him to have information regarding the crime, but it was possible she might have confided in him some fear or anxiety. Regardless of that, he deserved to be assured that they were giving the tragedy the greatest possible attention.

  The house in Ebury Street was magnificent, as fitted a senior Queen’s Counsel with high expectations of becoming a Member of Parliament. Of course, at the moment the curtains were half lowered and there was sawdust in the street to muffle the sound of horses’ hooves. The house was further marked out from its neighbors by the black crepe over the door to signify the death of a member of the family, even though she had not been resident there.

  A footman with a black armband received them unsmilingly and conducted them through the magnificent hallway to the somber, green-velveted morning room. The curtains hung richly draped, caught up with thick, silk cords. The walls were wood paneled, the color of old sherry, and one wall was entirely covered with bookshelves. There was a fine painting of a naval battle above the mantelpiece; a small brass plate proclaimed it to be Copenhagen, one of Nelson’s triumphs.

  They waited nearly half an hour before Fuller Pendreigh came in and closed the door softly behind him. He was a very striking man, lean and graceful, far taller than average, although standing to his full height seemed to cost him an effort now. But it was his head which commanded most attention. His features were fine and regular, his eyes clear blue under level brows and his fair hair, untouched by gray and of remarkable thickness, sweeping up and back from a broad brow. Only his mouth was individual and less than handsome, but its tight-lipped look now might have been the shock of sudden and terrible bereavement. He was dressed totally in black except for his shirt.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said stiffly. “Have you news?”

  “Good morning, sir,” Runcorn said, then introduced them both. He had no intention of allowing Monk to take the lead on this occasion. It was very much police business, and Monk was there only as a courtesy and would be reminded of such should he forget it. “I am afraid there is little so far,” he went on. “But we hoped you might be able to tell us rather more about Allardyce and save time, as it were.”

  Pendreigh’s fair eyebrows rose. “Allardyce? You think he might be involved? It seems likely, on the face of it. The model was surely the intended victim, and my poor daughter simply chanced to arrive at the worst possible moment. .”

  “We must look at all possibilities, sir,” Runcorn replied. “Mrs. Beck was a very beautiful woman. I daresay she awakened admiration in a number of gentlemen. Allardyce certainly appears to have had intense feelings for her.”

  “She was far more than merely beautiful, Mr. Runcorn,” Pendreigh said, controlling the emotion in his voice with obvious difficulty. “She had courage and laughter and imagination. She was the most wonderfully alive person I ever knew.” His voice dropped a little to an intense gravity. “And she had a sense of justice and morality which drove her to sublime acts-an honesty of vision.”

  There was no possible answer, and it seemed trivial and intrusive to express a regret which could be no more than superficial compared with Pendreigh’s grief.

  “I believe she met Dr. Beck when she was living in Vienna,” Monk remarked.

  Pendreigh looked at him with slight surprise. “Yes. Her first husband was Austrian. He died young, and Elissa remained in Vienna. That was when she really found herself.” He took a very deep breath and let it out slowly. He did not look at them but somewhere into the distance. “I had always believed her to be remarkable, but only then did I realize how totally unselfish she was to sacrifice her time and youth, even risk her life, to fight beside the oppressed people of her adopted country in their struggle for freedom.”

  Monk glanced at Runcorn, but neither of them interrupted.

  “She joined a group of revolutionaries in April of ’48,” Pendreigh went on. “She wrote to me about them, so full of courage and enthusiasm.” He turned a little away from them, and his voice grew huskier, but he did not stop. “Isn’t it absurd that she should face death every day, carry messages into the heart of the enemy offices and salons. . walk through the streets and alleys, even over the barricades in October, and live through it all with little more than a few scratches and bruises-and then die in a London artist’s studio?” He came to an abrupt halt, his voice choking.

  Runcorn waited a moment as he felt decency required, glancing severely at Monk to forbid him from interrupting.

  “Is that where she met Dr. Beck?” he said at last. “In a hospital there?”

  “What?” Pendreigh shook his head. “No, not in a hospital. He was a revolutionary as well.”

  Monk drew his breath in sharply.

  Pendreigh looked at him, frowning a little. “You only see him now, Mr. Monk. He seems very quiet, very single-minded in serving the poor and the sick of our city. But thirteen years ago he was as passionate for revolution as anyone.” He smiled very slightly as memory stirred, and for a few moments the present was swallowed in the past. “Elissa used to tell me how brave he was. She admired courage intensely. . ” A strange expression of pain filled his eyes and pulled his lips tight, as if a bitter memory momentarily drowned out everything else.

  Then he moved his hands very slightly. “But she certainly wasn’t foolish or unaware of the dangers of speaking out against tyranny, or of making friends with others who did. She marched with the students and the ordinary people in the streets, against the emperor’s soldiers. She saw people killed, young men and women who only wanted the freedom to read and write as they chose. She knew it could be she at any time. Bullets make no moral choices.”

  “She sounds like a very fine lady,” Runcorn said unhappily.

  Pendreigh turned to him. “You must suppose me prejudiced in my opinion. Of course I am; she was my daughter. But ask anyone who was there, especially Kristian. He would tell you the same. And I am aware of her failings as well. She was impatient, she did not tolerate foolishness or indecision. Too often she did not listen to the views of others, and she was hasty in her judgment, but when she was wrong she apologized.” His voice softened and he blinked rapidly. “She was a creature of high idealism, Superintendent, the imaginatio
n to put herself in the place of those less fortunate and to see how their lot could be made better.”

  “No wonder Dr. Beck fell in love with her,” Runcorn said.

  Monk was afraid he was beginning to suspect Kristian of jealousy, because he could not keep the thought from his own mind.

  “He was far from the only one.” Pendreigh sighed. “It was not always easy to be so admired. It gives one. . too much to live up to.”

  “But she chose Dr. Beck, not any of the others.” Monk made it a statement. He saw Runcorn’s warning look and ignored it. “Do you know why?”

  Pendreigh thought for several moments before he replied. “I’m trying to remember what she wrote at the time.” He drew his fair brows into a frown of concentration. “I think he had the same kind of resolve that she did, the nerve to go through with what he planned even when circumstances changed and the cost became higher.” He looked at Monk intently. “He was a very complex man, a disciple of medicine and its challenges, and yet at the same time of great personal physical courage. Yes, I think that was it, the sheer nerve in the face of danger. That appealed to her. She had a certain pity for people who wavered, she entirely understood fear. . ”

  Monk looked quickly at Runcorn and saw the puzzlement in his face. This all seemed so far away from an artist’s studio in Acton Street and the beautiful woman they had seen in the morgue. And yet it was easily imaginable of the woman in the painting of the funeral in blue.

  Pendreigh shivered, but he was standing a little straighter, his head high. “I remember one incident she wrote about to me. It was in May, but still there was danger in the air. For months there had been hardly anything to buy in the shops. The emperor had left Vienna. The police had banished all unemployed servants from the city, but most of them had come back, one way or another.” Anger sharpened his voice. “There was chaos because the secret police had been done away with and their duties taken over by the National Guard and the Academic Legion. There was an immediate crime wave, and anyone remotely well-dressed was likely to be attacked in the street. That was when she first noticed Kristian. Armed only with a pistol, and quite alone, he faced a mob and made them back down. She said he was magnificent. He could easily have walked the other way, effected not to notice, and no one would necessarily have thought the worse of him.”

  “You said he was complex,” Monk prompted. “That sounds like a fairly simple heroism to me.”

  Pendreigh stared into the distance. “I knew only what she told me. But even the most idealistic battles are seldom as easy as imagined by those not involved. There are good people on the enemy side also, and at times weak and evil people on one’s own.”

  Runcorn shifted position a little uncomfortably, but he did not interrupt, nor did he look away from Pendreigh.

  “And battle requires sacrifice,” Pendreigh continued, “not always of oneself, sometimes of others. She told me what a fine leader Kristian was, decisive, farsighted. Where some men would see what would happen one or two moves ahead, he could see a dozen. There was strength in him that set him apart from those less able to keep a cause in mind and understand the cost of victory as well as that of defeat.” His voice was edged with admiration, and now even his shoulders were straight, as if an inner courage had been imparted to him by the thought.

  Monk admired it, too, but he was confused. Pendreigh was painting a picture of a man utterly unlike the compassionate and scrupulous person Monk had seen in the fever hospital in Limehouse, or all that he had heard from Callandra. The leader of such inner certainty and strength was of a nature unlike the doctor who labored without judgment of any kind, risking his own life as much for the fever- and lice-ridden beggar as for the nurse like Enid Ravensbrook. How had Hester seen him? A man of compassion, idealism, dedication, moral courage perhaps, but not a man capable of the ruthless leadership Pendreigh described. The Kristian Beck that Hester saw would not have raised his hand against anyone, much less with a sword or a gun in it.

  He looked at Runcorn. His face was only slightly puckered. But then he did not know Kristian, he had not even met him until today. This picture that Pendreigh had received from Elissa, and re-created for them, did not contradict any image in his mind.

  Could Kristian have changed so much in thirteen years? Or was he a man of two natures, and showed the one that suited his purpose or the need of the time?

  Runcorn was staring at him impatiently, waiting for him to say something.

  Monk looked directly at Pendreigh. “I’m deeply sorry for your loss, sir. Mrs. Beck was obviously a person of extraordinary courage and honor.”

  “Thank you,” Pendreigh said, turning at last to face them fully. “I feel as if the world is darkening, and there will not now be another summer. She had such laughter, such hunger for life. I have no other family left. My wife has been gone many years, and my sister also.” He said the words with very little expression, which made their impact the greater. It was not self-pity but a bleak statement of fact. He spoke with neither courage nor despair but a kind of numbness.

  Monk was overtaken by anger on Pendreigh’s behalf, for the profound foolishness of an action which in a moment’s violence had robbed him of so much. He turned to Runcorn, expecting to see him preparing to make their excuses and leave. He was startled to see a confusion of emotions in his face, embarrassment and alarm, an acute knowledge that he was out of his depth. Monk turned back to Pendreigh. “I assume that had you any idea who might be responsible you would have spoken of it?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, yes, of course I would. I can only imagine that there was some quarrel with the other poor woman, a lover or whatever, and Elissa was unfortunate enough to witness it.”

  “You commissioned the portrait?” Monk continued.

  “Yes. Allardyce is a very fine artist.”

  “What do you know about him personally?”

  “Nothing. But I’ve seen his work in several places. I wasn’t interested in his morality, only his skill. My daughter did not sit alone for him, Mr. Monk, if that is what you are wondering. She took a woman friend with her.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “No, of course I don’t! I imagine it was not always the same person. If I knew who it was this time, I would have told you. I assume she went to some assignation of her own, and is too shocked and ashamed of having left Elissa to come forward yet.”

  Runcorn turned abruptly to Monk, annoyance in his eyes. He should have thought of that himself. “Naturally!” he said, looking back to Pendreigh. “We’ll see if we can learn who it was. We will ask Dr. Beck for a list of possibilities. Thank you, sir. We’ll not disturb you any further.”

  “Please. . let me know what else you learn?” Pendreigh asked, his face stiff with the effort of control.

  “Yes sir. As soon as there is anything,” Runcorn promised. “Good day.”

  Outside on the pavement, Runcorn started to speak again, then changed his mind and marched down the street in the hope of finding a hansom. Monk followed after, deep in thought.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The funeral of Elissa Beck was held the following day, and Monk and Hester attended, although they were unrelated to the deceased. Hester went largely to support Callandra, who would go as someone who had long been a friend of the widower and had worked beside him at the hospital. No one else would know the crushing loneliness she could feel, watching him in this agonizing ritual and excluded by propriety from offering more than a few formal phrases. She must not linger or show more than the usual emotion anyone might feel.

  Monk went to observe, in the vague hope that he might see an expression or overhear a word which would lead him closer to the truth. He hoped profoundly it was as Fuller Pendreigh had said: Sarah Mackeson was the intended victim, Elissa only a tragic intrusion at the worst possible moment.

  It was a very moving affair, held in the High Anglican Church with all the weight of spectacle accorded the death of someone who had been brave and beautiful, and deeply
loved.

  The fog had closed in again, thick yellow-gray in the weak daylight. One of the feathermen waving the black ostrich plumes began to cough as the chill of it caught in his throat. Another stood red-nosed and shivering.

  Like everyone else, Hester was dressed in black, not the dead, light-consuming fabric of true mourning, where one was not permitted even a faint gleam in case it should be considered not to be taking bereavement seriously enough. After a year a widow might wear silk, but still black, of course. Petticoats should also be black, and boots and hose, and as plain as possible. If a lady in mourning should lift a skirt to avoid a puddle, there would be considerable talk should she thereby exhibit a petticoat of some lighter shade.

  The cortege had not yet arrived, but Kristian and Pendreigh were standing outside the main entrance of the church receiving the mourners and accepting condolences. The magnificent stone archway was carved with angels and flowers. The facade soared above until it faded and all but disappeared in the clinging, motionless fog, only here and there a gargoyle face leering downward.

  Pendreigh looked haggard. His fair hair was still smooth and thick, but his face had sunk as if the flesh had withered, and in spite of standing as to attention on parade, there was still something within him that sagged, giving an illusion of emptiness. He was dressed in perfect black, so dark it absorbed even the little light there was, making his hair look the brighter. He spoke with the same gesture to everyone, courteous and mechanical.

  Beside him, Kristian also looked stunned and pale. He seemed to be making an effort to say something individual to people, but after a little while he, too, began to repeat himself.

  Hester saw Callandra move forward in the line to express her sympathies, and for a moment their eyes met. Callandra was dressed in unrelieved black, but her hat was uncharacteristically stylish, very simple in line, and it became her very much, accentuating the strength in her face, and for once her hair was immaculate. She gave a tiny smile of recognition, but Hester saw the pain of exclusion in her eyes, the misery of not being able to share this whole area of Kristian’s life which cut to the heart. All she could do was offer the same polite words as everyone else. She was merely one of the hospital’s chief benefactors and was possibly representing them all.