The Murder Stone

by Charles Todd

  They had reached the circle in front of River’s End. On impulse, Francesca said, “I have no idea what Mrs. Lane has left for my luncheon, but there’s generally enough for two—”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  The abrupt refusal, with neither grace nor explanation, brought the warm blood to Francesca’s cheeks. She’d been out of line, and he had been forced to remind her of her manners. So much for any expectation of working together! She wasn’t certain it was what she’d wanted, anyway.

  She said, “I hope you can find the answers you’re searching for. I must tell you that I agree with Miss Trotter. I don’t think they lie here, in the Valley. You are wasting your time—wasting precious time.”

  She stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her without looking back.

  But she carried with her the anguish she’d heard in Leighton’s voice only a few minutes before. That made it all the harder to believe that her grandfather could have had anything to do with Victoria Leighton. He had never been a heartless man—

  Yet the rector had said only recently that sometimes her grandfather could be cruel. . . .

  The next morning she paced the house in a restless mood. If there was only someone she could confide in—trust with her questions! With her doubts and fears. But where to put that trust?

  That was the price of being the last of the Hattons. She could rely only on her own instincts, her own wisdom. Her own courage.

  She summoned Bill to drive her into Exeter to call on Branscombe.

  The solicitor rose from his desk as she was admitted by his clerk, and said, with some surprise, “Miss Hatton—? Did we have an appointment set for today?”

  Francesca took the uncomfortable chair across from him and replied, “There are several—matters—I wish to arrange. The first is a set of memorial plaques for my cousins, to be placed in St. Mary Magdalene’s nave. White marble, I think, with an inscription. A simple one—dates—their names—their ranks and regiments, and where they died.”

  “Your grandfather was quite certain he did not wish to commemorate his grandsons’ deaths—”

  “It would have meant accepting that they were lost forever, and he couldn’t bear that. Sadly, I’ve been forced to face up to the truth, and I shall feel better when there’s a memorial to each of them,” she said firmly, “set up where it can be seen by all who loved them.”

  Branscombe was too well-bred to frown. “Then it shall be as you wish—of course.”

  Francesca thought: You’d much rather ignore me, and deal with my grandfather. But it’s too late for that. Aloud she said, “And there’s another matter. A young woman, some years younger than I am, came to the service for my grandfather. A Miss Andrews.” It had taken her most of the drive to Exeter to recall the name of the woman she’d encountered during the reception after the funeral. The one in black veils. “She seemed to expect a legacy of some sort in my grandfather’s will—”

  “On that point I can relieve you of any concern. Miss Andrews came to me, as you had rightly suggested, and I informed her roundly that Mr. Hatton had not seen fit to include her in his will. And that was the end of it.”

  “Did you know the name? Were you familiar with her story?”

  “Not at all. But a small act of kindness is not something a man of your grandfather’s stature would have spoken of to me. If her story is true, of course!”

  “I’d like to settle five hundred pounds on her,” Francesca said, surprising herself.

  “My dear Miss Hatton—are you aware that this woman may make a practice of turning up at funerals and pathetically making a claim on the deceased? It’s sometimes done, sad to say.”

  “I don’t believe she was lying. And I’ve more money than I know what to do with. A few hundred pounds will make no difference to my life, and it might to hers. Do you have her direction?”

  “I made a point of asking for it, in the event she was not what she appeared to be.” Branscombe stirred the papers on his desk in a halfhearted effort to locate it.

  “Then you will see to this for me, if you please.”

  “I shall make a note of it—”

  “No. A note serves no purpose. I want it done this day.”

  “Miss Hatton—”

  “And there’s another matter. The estate in Essex. Do you know how it came into my grandfather’s possession?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t handle that transaction. He brought me the deeds after the fact and asked me to hold them for him.”

  “I was informed by a Mr. Walsham that the estate was in settlement of a gambling debt.”

  “As to that—”

  “Could it be true?”

  Branscombe paused. “After the funeral, Mr. Walsham asked if he might call on me later. We set an appointment, which he failed to keep. As to what he wished to see me about, he refused to say, calling it a very private matter.”

  Which meant that Walsham could have lied to both of them . . .

  “Do you know why someone hated my grandfather enough to send him a threatening message—one that my grandfather kept?”

  “I know nothing about threatening messages!”

  She gestured to a box sitting on his desk. “You held it for him in one of those—in my grandfather’s box.”

  “If it’s there, your grandfather placed it in my keeping. I have not read it!” he replied angrily.

  Francesca nodded; she believed him. “Could you give an approximate date on which you received this letter for safekeeping?”

  “That I can do. We keep a log of all transactions.” He sent for the ledger, and while they were waiting, Francesca asked, “I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about the Somerset property.”

  “Indeed I can. It’s a house called The Swans, in Falworthy, one that had once belonged to your late grandmother’s family. Centuries ago, as I understand it. It came up for sale—much diminished now, you understand!—some thirty years ago. What had once been a very fine house in its day was quite small by modern standards, and needed a considerable amount of work. Much of the land had been sold off. But what remained was fair enough, and Mr. Hatton felt it suited his purpose. He ordered our firm to purchase it for him, in confidence.”

  “What was his purpose?”

  “He didn’t confide in us. But the house was restored and enlarged. There are accounts paid attesting to the work. I have no recollection of a tenant. No rents are collected by our firm. Which is foolishness—a house ought not stand unoccupied, and so I have told Mr. Hatton. But he was well satisfied with matters as they stood. Both in Somerset and in Essex.”

  “There are a number of charities listed in the will, charities that my grandfather had supported. Could you give me their names again?”

  Mr. Branscombe summoned his clerk to fetch the Hatton box, and delved into the contents for the will. He began to read, peering at each line as if he didn’t recognize it.

  “There’s the sum for St. Mary Magdalene’s Church, of course. We’d spoken of that at the reading. There’s a sum set aside for a monument to the missing of the Somme Offensive. Such a memorial has been suggested in a number of quarters and was dear to Mr. Hatton’s heart.”

  Harry had died on the Somme. He had been missing for a week before they had found his body.

  “A bequest to his club in London,” Branscombe went on, running his finger down the sheet of heavy paper. “Quite a large sum—an endowment to be precise—to the Little Wanderers Foundation—”

  “What on earth is that?”

  “It’s to do with children, I believe. There’s a bequest to Moresley, where he was at school, and one to St. Mary’s Church here in Exeter. Another to the Seamen’s Benevolent Society for widows and children of men lost at sea.” He set aside the document and sighed. “Nothing of great import, but showing a proper concern for the needs of others. He was always a generous man.”

  Francesca found herself remembering the unpaid smith, who had looked at the shoe of a horse drawi
ng a carriage similar to her grandfather’s.

  “Where is this Little Wanderers Foundation located?”

  “It’s an address in Somerset. Falworthy, in fact.”

  Another connection with Somerset . . . Why was Francis Hatton drawn there? Guilt? Retribution? Or a secret life . . .

  The clerk had returned with the ledger, opened at the appropriate page.

  Mr. Branscombe scanned the entry. “Here we are. ‘Letter, Francis Hatton, to be placed with his papers. No action.’ And the date—”

  It was the year Victoria Leighton had been married. She remembered the date from the marriage lines that Richard Leighton had shown her.

  She thanked Mr. Branscombe and took her leave.

  But on the journey back to River’s End, Francesca asked Bill if he had ever heard her grandfather speak of a Little Wanderers Foundation.

  Something flickered in his eyes as he looked back at her in the small mirror. “Did Mr. Hatton never mention it to you, Miss Francesca?”

  “No. Never.”

  “That’s odd! But then it was like him not to want praise for his good deeds. He was always such a one!” There was warmth in the old man’s voice, as if serving Mr. Hatton had been a matter of great pride.

  “What is the Little Wanderers Foundation?”

  “It supported orphans, Miss. Not any orphans, mind you, but those Mr. Hatton felt deserved a better chance in life. Many’s the time I’ve driven him to look at a child. A good few have gone on to do well—to my knowledge one is a captain in the Navy, another a barrister. Mr. Hatton gave them respectability, you see, as well as education, and that stood them in good stead when they went out into the world.”

  “Where did he find these children?” Francesca asked, fascinated. Had Miss Andrews been one of them?

  “They’d be brought to his attention, in one fashion or another. I never quite understood that part of it. Nor was it my place to ask. But I’ve glimpsed one or two of the little ones, and they’d break your heart, to see them so happy and well kept.”

  “I wonder why he never took me with him.”

  “I couldn’t say, Miss.”

  They were well into the Valley now, the trees flitting across the sun like pickets in a fence. She asked:

  “Does Mrs. Lane know about this?”

  “I never spoke of Mr. Hatton’s business, Miss. If he wished the rest of the staff to know where he’d been or what he’d done, it was his place to tell them.”

  “Yes, quite right,” she answered, absently. It appeared that her grandfather hadn’t been a complete ogre after all, with dark secrets shadowing his life. Perhaps Mr. Branscombe had been right, that vultures came to funerals to fight over whatever scraps they might find. And how vulnerable she must have seemed! A young woman all alone and likely to be susceptible to their schemes.

  A comforting thought to cling to . . . but it still didn’t explain away Victoria Leighton.

  They drove in silence for miles, Bill concentrating on the heavily rutted road and Francesca enjoying the beauty of the Valley, as she always had.

  And then Bill said, “This Mr. Leighton, Miss. The gentleman who has been coming to the house. Is he a relation of your family’s?”

  “Mr. Leighton? Not at all! I’d never heard of him until he came to call the day the will was read.”

  “I see, Miss. Begging your pardon.”

  But she asked, “Why should you think he’s related to the Hattons?”

  “I was enjoying a pint at The Spotted Calf the other night, and he came in to sit down for a bit. I could see him quite clear. It’ud been nagging at me, why he looked so familiar. And then it came to me. I’ve seen that dark, brooding shadow on your grandfather’s face, time and again when there was something on his mind. Something troublesome that he couldn’t see an end to. And on Mr. Harry’s face, for that matter, when he was by himself and thought no one was watching. Deep thinkers, both of them. It set me to wondering . . .”

  He glanced back at her in the tiny mirror by his head. “You’re the same, Miss Francesca, if you don’t mind me saying so. You take trouble to heart yourself and don’t let it out. Two peas in a pod, you and that Mr. Leighton . . .”

  THE COUSINS

  Peter . . . the engineer

  I was born to build things. Or on occasion to take them apart to see how they worked. It was in my nature—and got me into trouble now and then, when what I took apart was beyond putting back together again.

  Grandfather would say that no one in his family before me had ever yearned to build. But he was laughing when he told me that, and I was pleased.

  I’d had an insatiable curiosity about the Murder Stone ever since I could remember. It was unusual, that stone, unlike any other I’d seen in the Valley. White and curved, almost human in the way it nestled in the grass, cradled by the earth. Our tutor told us it was immensely old. Older than Rome, certainly, and nearly as old as the pyramids. To my eyes it didn’t appear to be native stone, but the logistics of dragging it here and setting it in place must have been incredibly difficult. I was fascinated.

  A year later I decided to look at the position of the stars from the stone. I could see Orion swinging overhead, and other constellations I recognized. But what pleased our tutor was my discovery that at the solstice, from the end of the stone nearest the house, the winter sun rose to strike its cold pale surface with a golden light and travel its length until the whole glowed for a brief and glorious moment.

  All my wild brothers could think about was Druids—Simon raided the linen closet and we’d dance through the garden, chanting, in the light of the moon.

  But I found myself—not usually given to flights of fancy—wondering if sacrifices were ever made there on the stone, to summon the sun north again. To bring back its warmth for the planting season. The Celts, we had been taught, did such things.

  Another day I took my notebook out there and made my measurements. I used a trowel from the toolshed to scratch around the edges, to see how deep the stone went down into the earth. There was no budging it. I didn’t like digging around it, to be honest. It was like trespassing in some private place. Every time the steel of the trowel touched the stone, I could feel the jolt in my arm. As if I were meddling with things best left alone.

  Idle superstition, of course. Simon’s fault for all the bloody war games we had played here.

  But nor could I chip a bit off the edge to put on the shelf in my room. . . .

  Still—as I was excavating the rim of the stone, I saw a fleck of gold shining in the sunlight.

  I fished it out, stared at it, and could make no sense of it. A tiny triangle with one raw edge, as if it’d broken off something else. No markings, nothing to tell me anything.

  I held it in the palm of my hand and the cool feel of the gold gleaming in the sun was exciting at first. And then strange. As if I’d disturbed something I shouldn’t have.

  I marked the place of that bit of gold on the chart I was making, and then thrust it back deep into the warm earth again. Out of sight . . .

  I never told anyone about what I’d found.

  I often wondered if I’d done the wrong thing . . . or the right thing.

  Wiggins, who lived in the gatehouse, told me that a long time ago, the stone had been called the Witch’s Stone. He couldn’t say why, just that before River’s End had been built on the hill, people had avoided the place, as if it were cursed. No one had wanted to farm just there. Hallowed or haunted, it didn’t matter, Wiggins insisted, they stayed away.

  Mr. Gregory laughed when I repeated the story, but unlike our tutor, Grandfather listened to me with sober interest. “Stones aren’t evil. It’s what people do with them that’s evil. Build a garden wall—or a catapult for war. You can destroy anything by your actions, even love.”

  I couldn’t think, at thirteen, what love had to do with the Murder Stone.

  The image of ruthless sacrifice on a cold, bare winter’s morning was far more in line with a boy’s
bloody imagination.

  I often thought about the Murder Stone when I was doing sappers’ work in France. Somehow it had become a talisman of boyhood and happiness, far safer for a soldier to remember in the intervals of battle than the people one misses so desperately. I didn’t like tunneling underground, in the darkness and wet. It’s an engineer’s task, and I did it well, but that had nothing to do with liking it.

  But I swore that if I survived this war, I would come back to River’s End and watch the winter sun touch the Murder Stone one more time. To mark a new beginning.

  CHAPTER 11

  Deep in the night, Francesca woke with a start. She had been dreaming, and somehow the sound of the dog Tyler scratching at the door of her room had been masked by the dream. But now the noise was persistent, anxious. With a sigh she threw back the bedclothes and felt on the floor for her slippers, pulling them on.

  “Yes, I’m coming—” she murmured, flinging a shawl around her shoulders and running her fingers through her unbound hair.

  But when the bedroom door was opened, the dog didn’t turn straight for the stairs to be let out. Instead he stood in the passage staring toward the room at the end where her grandfather had slept.

  “He isn’t there,” she said softly, stroking his smooth head. “He’ll never be there again.”

  The dog’s ears twitched, as if he understood; and after a moment he moved toward the stairs, nose to the polished floorboards. Francesca followed.

  The case clock in the hall struck three, and as she counted the strokes, she heard the dog growl, low in his throat.

  “What is it?” she asked quietly. “What’s wrong, Tyler?”

  He growled again, and looked up at her. The hair on the back of her neck seemed to stand on end as the dog’s had done. She could feel the animal’s stiff fur under her fingers as she gripped his collar. Foolishness, she scolded herself. He was old, confused. But in the dim light from the night candle at the top of the steps, he didn’t look confused. Whatever had disturbed him was below—prowling.