The Murder Stone

by Charles Todd

  The knocker on the door clanged loudly, and at the head of the stairs, she watched Mrs. Lane cross the hall below and open to the undertakers from Tiverton. They had brought Francis Hatton home for the last time.

  The massive oak coffin stood on velvet-hung trestles in what had been the drawing room when the Hattons had felt the need to entertain. The room hadn’t been used in years—not since the war began, certainly. Most people had given up entertaining on a formal scale. Francesca stood watching as the undertaker’s men arranged swags of black crepe across the tops of portraits and over the closed drapes at the windows, then veiled the lovely oval French mirror. The room seemed excessively warm and suffocating, with candles burning at either end of the coffin and above the mantel, their reflection glinting in the polished surface of the wood.

  A macabre setting fit for a Gothic melodrama.

  Grandfather wouldn’t care for it—he’d fling the windows wide and say bedamned to them all! I wish I had the courage to do the same.

  She turned to see a broad man standing in the drawing room doorway, staring fixedly at the casket. She thought at first that he had come to make certain that everything was done properly. His words told her differently.

  “It’s true, then.” A rough voice, strongly accented.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’s dead.” His eyes swept the room, examining it as if he were the tax man come to assess the price and the quality of the household goods.

  “I’m sorry, we aren’t receiving guests—”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow.” And with that he was gone, tramping out the door as if furious to be put off.

  “Who was that?” Mrs. Lane asked, standing in the hall and staring at the slammed door.

  “I have no idea.” Francesca gestured to the drawing room and its grim decorations. “I thought this sort of thing went out with the Victorians—”

  “It’s Mr. Branscombe’s taste, I expect. He’s one for ceremony.”

  Francesca sighed. “You must be right.”

  The men were setting about the task of opening the coffin lid.

  “No—!” Francesca cried out, before she could stop herself. “Leave it closed, if you will!”

  The undertaker’s men gaped at her. “You don’t care to have it opened now, Miss? Will you be opening it before the service instead?”

  “No—no, I don’t want it opened at all!” She felt an unreasonable panic, knowing suddenly that she couldn’t bear to look down at that still face, the eyes shut, the mouth an unyielding line. Or were the eyes shut? The nurse had closed Francis Hatton’s eyes when she’d been summoned to pronounce him dead. A gentle hand passed over the lids. Had they opened again?

  Francesca shuddered at the thought.

  “No—please. Leave it as it is!”

  They must have been accustomed to grieving family wanting to look a last time on the face of a loved one. The four men stood there and waited, as if expecting her to change her mind.

  She could feel her heart thudding against her ribs. What was she to do? “Please—if you’ve finished, go now! I—I need time alone—”

  That seemed to be an emotional response they recognized. With polite bows in her direction, they left the drawing room in single file, like penguins, she thought, as she went to the door, firmly closing it behind them.

  She turned, trembling, to Mrs. Lane. “Does it have to be here? The coffin?”

  “There, now, it’s what’s always done, Miss Francesca. Don’t you remember? And I think your grandfather would have liked coming home a last time. After all—”

  “Well, then, I shan’t look at it!” She walked firmly back to the drawing room and shut the doors with as little fanfare as possible.

  “There’s the candles, Miss, they’ll have to be seen to—”

  “Then I should be grateful if you’d see to them, Mrs. Lane.”

  She picked up a shawl she’d left on the table by the passage to the rear of the house, and went quickly down toward the kitchens and out through the yard door.

  How am I to sleep tonight with that casket in the drawing room? I shan’t be able to set foot in that room ever again, without seeing it all in my head!

  But what had she to fear from her grandfather?

  Throwing the shawl over her shoulders against the afternoon chill, she walked briskly down the path through the kitchen plots, and let herself out the gate into the landscaped lawns. At the bottom of the garden was a small pool that had in its time played the role of baptismal font, witch’s pool, Cape Trafalgar, and whatever else her cousins could conjure up in their fertile imaginations.

  Halfway to the bench that was set above the pool, she stopped to look down at the Murder Stone.

  It lay there, mocking her, a long white curved lump of stone that had always seemed as alive as the five boys who played upon it. Or had they made it so? Yet something there was. Perhaps that was why her grandfather had been so set on removing it now that they were gone.

  But in God’s name—why to Scotland? Why not simply break it into pieces and throw them into the river?

  Francesca put a hand down to the cool dampness of the rock, expecting that vivid response yet again, as if the stone knew she was there.

  And felt stone—only stone—under her fingers.

  It’s as dead as they are now. Nothing—I can’t feel anything here!

  Or could it be that she was the one who had changed?

  Francesca ran her fingertips over the rough surface again, then began to brush aside leaves that had drifted down with the changing of the season.

  How creative the cousins had been—and how often they’d inadvertently made her life a misery.

  “Yes, yes, I know your mother and father are buried in Canada!” Simon had repeated impatiently. “But let’s pretend you’re another girl, Cesca, kneeling to mourn the murder of your father in Scotland, and I’m Rob Roy, come to avenge his barbarous death. And Harry is the Red Indian that killed him—”

  “Rob Roy never met any Red Indians,” Robin had scoffed. “It’s not in the story!”

  “Well, he might have, you can’t know for certain!” Simon had retorted, and Freddy had agreed with Simon. “Besides, we cut off Harry’s hair yesterday, and now he looks like a Red Indian.”

  “I’ll only do it if you’re sure there aren’t any spiders,” Cesca had told them resolutely. “Push the grass aside, and be sure.”

  The grown Francesca’s fingers were busy pushing the grass back from the stone, as Freddy’s graceful pianist’s hands had done, and it was then that she noticed that something—mouse? vole? fox?—had been scratching around the edges of the stone in the night. As if to see what the dimensions were, and where it could best burrow under.

  She hastily drew away.

  Or had Leighton been here? Had that obsessive search for his dead mother led him to consider every bizarre possibility? It was a disconcerting thought.

  That man kept thrusting his family nightmare into her private world at every turn! And she was helpless to stop him. What demons of guilt or uncertainty or delusion had driven his family to fix blame on Francis Hatton, of all people? What did Leighton really want?

  Had her grandfather been capable of committing cold-blooded murder? A few days ago, she would never have believed such defamation of his character. Now—now that she knew how many other secrets he’d kept from her—she was filled with uncertainty. There was the property he’d never told her about—the visits to Italy as a younger man—his unexpected obsession with the Murder Stone. There was even a suggestion of something disgraceful in the lives of his sons. And now a charge of murder. What else lay beneath the seemingly smooth surface of his life?

  Would it matter to her if he had killed someone?

  What if a murderous nature ran in families?

  She looked down at the silent white stone. What would the practical cousin, Robin, have to say to Richard Leighton? Would he have questioned their grandfather’s character as she�
�d been doing? Or would Robin simply have knocked Leighton down for even voicing such a malicious accusation?

  The Murder Stone.

  How had it come by such an appellation? Even the cousins’ tutor didn’t know, although he’d told them that the stone was of ancient origin, possibly hand-hewn like those at Avebury and Stonehenge, and from a forgotten culture that was even older than either of the famous rings.

  “It’s been lying here far longer than any house built in this Valley,” he’d said, making the most of their curiosity for his lessons. “Think of that! Try to picture those early people setting it here to honor a great king or a heathen god. Even Arthur, if he had come to the Valley, wouldn’t have been able to tell you how it got here or by whose hand! It was shrouded in time even then.”

  That had launched a round of Arthurian wars, Merlin and Lancelot battling the Druids.

  Francesca felt a shiver of fear. Murder had a harsher reality now. It was no longer games in the back garden.

  A stark reminder to her to be about her duty and remove the stone to the far north of Scotland, as her grandfather had commanded. Even if she didn’t understand why it had to be done.

  She slept poorly again that night, all too aware of the candlelit coffin in the room below. Even the dog had deserted her and gone to sleep across the threshold, wishing to be as near to his master in death as he had been in life.

  The Tyler by the door . . .

  If her grandfather had walked a last time through the empty rooms of River’s End, he had not come to visit hers. Consideration—or condemnation?

  She wished he would confront her and say whatever had to be said, and let her mourn him properly.

  Or was he being cruel—leaving her to her own conscience?

  An eye for an eye—

  A secret for a secret—

  What did my father do that was so disgraceful? she asked the silence out in the passage. Or my uncle Tristan?

  Is there a darkness in our family that you kept from us as long as you could?

  Mists clung to the river in the early dawn, but it was turning fair when the pallbearers arrived to shoulder their heavy burden and carry Francis Hatton to his final resting place. Burly men, but older, they took their time, and Francesca followed them with the servants. It was not a short walk to the church, and the men were red-faced by the time they arrived. But no one would have asked Francis Hatton to make his last journey on a cart or in a hired hearse. Such were their feelings for the man who had all but ruled them for most of their lives. Old loyalties ran deep in these people. For her grandfather, they would have perjured themselves, many of them, and taken the blame for his sins, real or imagined.

  Mourners were waiting inside the church. Neighbors and villagers for the most part, faces she’d grown up with, names she knew. Greengrocer, sexton, innkeeper, smith, butcher, sheepman, farmer . . . Most were middle-aged, with children still in school as well as sons at the Front and daughters in London.

  It was as if the Pied Piper of War had lured the older boys to France, and the girls had rushed to the cities to fill their empty shoes. It hadn’t happened just in Hurley; all over England the story had been the same. Would this displaced generation ever come home again? Or, like the cousins, had they left never to return?

  The organ was playing one of her grandfather’s favorite hymns, now. Francesca’s throat closed.

  Standing apart from the Valley families was a sprinkling of strangers. To be expected, of course. One of them she knew: Leighton, his eyes unreadable in the shadows cast by one of the clustered columns that separated the nave and the aisles. She also recognized the gruff man who had intruded at River’s End yesterday, the one she had mistaken for an undertaker’s assistant. He glared at her as if he could pierce the dark veil she wore and know what was in her mind. But who was that woman, also in a veiled hat, as if sharing her mourning? A second woman stood in the next row, her face half hidden by the handkerchief she was pressing to her mouth. Then Francesca’s eyes passed on to an angry man, who stood upright as the coffin passed, and all but spat at it.

  Who are these people? Have they come here to grieve with me—or, like Richard Leighton, have they brought bitter memories to be exorcised? It was a horrid thought. Please, God . . . ! Not today of all days. Let him be buried in peace!

  But as she found Branscombe’s satisfied face in the last row but one, she recalled the obituary in the Times. Had that brought them, just as it had brought Leighton? It was a long way to travel on a whim, to say good-bye to someone they couldn’t have known well . . . Or perhaps they had, and it was she who was the stranger to them.

  Close as she was, she could hear the muffled sounds of the oak casket being settled firmly on the black velvet draped trestles.

  As she took her place, the rector stepped into the pulpit. The wheezing box organ produced a final musical chord and stopped, as if choking on the sound.

  Francesca listened to William Stevens extol her grandfather for his kindness and his charity, and wondered if Francis Hatton was laughing quietly in the darkness of his oak coffin. He had indeed been a generous man and a kind one, but he had also given short shrift to fools, carried himself with a haughty sense of his own worth, and put his family above all else. He had made a home for his orphaned grandsons and his orphaned granddaughter, giving of himself, in time and money and love, to make each of them feel safe and happy.

  How much of that was a lie, how much the truth? Why had his sons died in disgrace? In spite of the rector’s attempt at comfort, Francesca had lost her faith in herself. And that was making it impossible now to read the actions of a man she had once believed she knew to the very core. But she couldn’t tell Stevens that, could she? Without raising other ghosts . . .

  The rector was saying that Francis Hatton had cared for the church, seeing to its needs and recognizing its pastoral duties. But Francesca knew that for another lie. Francis Hatton had viewed the church as a social obligation, and given God only a passing nod. He had insisted that his grandchildren attend services with strict regularity, but it had always been the tutor, Mr. Gregory, who accompanied the six youngsters.

  So many secrets—

  The voice of the rector echoed in the church, rising to the rafters and bouncing off the cold stone as he ended the funeral eulogy.

  Francesca found herself devoutly wishing that the cousins were still alive and sitting here with her, their shoulders comfortably touching, Harry’s hand clasping hers, sharing her burden.

  But there was no one, except the old dog who wasn’t allowed in the church . . . and a dead man in his coffin. It was beginning to dawn on her just how alone in the world she was. A frightening thought—she must muster the courage to cope with it. As she had mustered her courage the night Francis Hatton died.

  When the final prayers had been said and the coffin had been carried into the churchyard, a passing shower of rain dotted the polished oak with what seemed to be myriad tears.

  And I haven’t cried at all, she realized.

  The committal was brief and ceremonious. Stevens pressed Francesca to let the first handful of earth fall back into the open grave, dust returning to dust. She heard it strike the wood, a hollow sound, as if the body within had already departed and there was nothing left but the shroud of his best suit of clothes.

  Bill was waiting beside the motorcar while she spoke to a number of people at the graveside, and then he drove her steadily, with an air of state, back to River’s End.

  Mrs. Lane and her friends from the village, including the rector’s own housekeeper, hurrying ahead, were putting the finishing touches to what was a feast by wartime standards—a roasted hen, an enormous ham scavenged from one of the outlying farms, platters of sandwiches, and plates of cakes and tarts. Tea was already steeping in the silver teapots by the time the motorcar arrived at the door, and the fragile porcelain cups were sitting in rows like a waiting army.

  With relief, Francesca relinquished her hat and veil to Mrs. Lane
. Peering through the closely woven black silk threads was beginning to give her a headache. She felt as if she were drowning in darkness.

  She was waiting at the door, the assiduous Mr. Branscombe at her side, when the first of the mourners came to accept hospitality from the bereaved household.

  She spoke to each villager, bidding each welcome as he or she shyly passed through the door and into the high, paneled hall with its tall medieval chairs and the great curve of the newel post ending in a carved leopard. The doors of the drawing room stood wide, and the candles struck fire from the gold trim. No amount of black bunting disguised the fineness of the French love seats, or the grace of the table covered now with a crisp white cloth and the Georgian silver tea service. Francesca had not meant it to be overwhelming—but Mrs. Lane had insisted that River’s End reflect its late owner.

  “They’ll expect no less!” the housekeeper had warned. “Wait and see.”

  Many of the mourners had never set foot here except as tradesmen come to the kitchen door or tenants stepping, hat in hand, into the estate office. They looked around them with subdued interest as they made their way across the checkered tile of the hall floor.

  Richard Leighton, taking her hand perfunctorily, said, “A fine send-off for a murderer, I must say.”

  “Do shut up,” she hissed. “This isn’t the time or the place.”

  “No, you’re right. I apologize.” He nodded stiffly and walked on into the room.

  The gruff man she’d seen the night before with the undertakers slipped from the hall into the drawing room past a neighbor who was cajoling Francesca to consider spending a few days with them up the Valley. “We’d be delighted to keep you as long as you like,” Mrs. Markley was saying. “You know you can be comfortable with us, my dear.”

  Francesca thanked her, keenly aware it was true. But she wasn’t ready to abandon the house yet, and if she did it would be back to London that she traveled, her leave nearly up. Back to the trains of misery that came in the dark of night, and made her heart break.