The Murder Stone

by Charles Todd

  “You seemed to have made a habit of doing it,” Francesca answered lightly. “I’m not actually driving to London. I’m going to Essex.”

  “Ah. That explains your quandary when the doctor insisted on hanging me about your neck like an albatross. What takes you to Essex?”

  “A property in the family. Have you ever been there?”

  “A time or two. I had friends near there before the war. Geoffrey had withdrawn from Cambridge and was set on writing a history. Then he met his future wife and that was the end of the history.”

  They rode down the Valley in silence, and then Leighton said, “This is a sudden decision, I think. On your part. As precious as petrol is, why not go by train?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was making polite conversation—or probing. “Bill suggested I travel by carriage.”

  “No, I’m afraid I agree with you about taking the motorcar. You’ll be away a week, even so.” He paused, and then added, “A constable came to The Spotted Calf this morning. To ask me questions about the shot that was fired in my direction.”

  “I doubt it was intended to be in your direction. Still. What were his conclusions?”

  “That he would make the rounds of the Valley and warn everyone that guns fired indiscriminately were dangerous. He had other matters on his mind, I think, and this business of killing a cow and wounding a man weren’t high on his list of urgent affairs. In his opinion that was all the shooter, as he called him, warrants. A good talking-to.”

  “The Tiverton police have always taken little enough interest in us!”

  “I also asked him about your housebreakings.”

  “Indeed!” She didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed.

  “He told me that there had been no problems in that line for six months or more. He suggested perhaps it was a case of—nerves.” Leighton smiled to take away any offense, capturing the Devon accent of the constable as he said, “‘Likely she’s not accustomed to staying in the house alone after dark. And old dogs dream. If nothing was taken, and no harm done, I’d put it down to a lady’s—um—anxiety.’”

  “I wish he’d come to speak with me as well—”

  “I told you, something else was on his mind. He wasn’t interested in your Valley’s petty problems.”

  Beyond Exeter it was a stormy journey. A sweeping misting rain left everything it touched damp. The bad weather continued for the first three days, and the smell of wet wool permeated the motorcar. Although he never asked, when the tenseness around Leighton’s mouth warned her he was in pain, she felt obliged to stop on whatever pretext and allow him to stretch the cramped, abused muscles of his back. Sometimes they took shelter in the warmth of a hotel, a tearoom, a pub. When the rain held off, they simply walked up and down a village street until he felt some relief.

  Their relationship was stormy as well. Francesca exclaimed in the heat of one argument, “If you want my own opinion—for what it’s worth!—your grandfather is the villain of this piece. It’s Alasdair MacPherson who has driven you—and driven himself—to the brink of obsession over a family tragedy that might just as well have been no one’s fault. I’d like very much to meet him, in fact! One of Simon’s military dictates was ‘Know your enemy.’ ”

  Leighton smiled crookedly. “I’m not sure my grandfather is aware of your existence. Much less sees you as an adversary.”

  “If he hates Grandfather this much, you can be sure he would have no love for me!”

  “What if I said that I love him as much as you loved your own grandfather? Respect him—trust him. Does that seem strange? Yes, I can see it does. Yet when my father drank to forget what had happened, it was Alasdair who looked after me. I was doubly orphaned for over five years.”

  And he used the opportunity to indoctrinate you, Francesca thought. Repeating his lies until you believed them!

  How twisted that was—to take a vulnerable child and shape him to one’s own ends, like a smith forging a weapon at the anvil. In her view, only someone bitter and possessed could do such a thing. How it must have galled Alasdair when Thomas Leighton pulled himself together and got on with his life, putting his late wife behind him! Had that simple act of survival been viewed as betrayal? Had it served to reinforce the older man’s determination to keep his grandson’s memories raw and painful?

  “Was he a solicitor, as you are?” Francesca asked one afternoon. “Your grandfather?”

  “His family owned factories in Manchester and mines in Lancashire. But he lives in Surrey. South of Guildford. In his day he was a famous cricketer. That’s where he met my father—at a match. As far as I know he’d never met Francis Hatton until the wedding, but years before they’d exchanged a heated correspondence in the Times on several political questions.”

  “What sort of questions?” She was intrigued.

  As far as she knew, Francis Hatton had never expressed strong opinions on political issues. Any discussions at the dinner table had been tempered, well considered rather than heated.

  “My father believed in the dignity of work so that the poor could feed and clothe themselves,” Richard Leighton was saying. “Hatton called that exploitation. Alasdair countered that his factories were a model of modern thinking on the subject of child welfare and labor—and had been even before the Berlin Conference on that issue. Hatton all but called him a liar. Alasdair responded that Hatton was a wealthy man dabbling in social matters to assuage his conscience. Hatton replied that bread on the table and clothes on the back hardly amounted to dignity. These were necessities, whereas education gave a man the tools he needed to spring beyond his station in life. Not simply to survive but to grow. Alasdair allowed me to read several of the newspaper cuttings.”

  “Heated? Vitriolic is more the word.”

  “Yes, well. It was hardly the best beginning for a wedding party when they came face-to-face.”

  Francesca smiled. “Hardly.”

  But she was thinking about the Little Wanderers Foundation. “He did more than dabble, you know. My grandfather. He tried to help where he could.”

  Still, Francis Hatton was arrogant enough to look down his aristocratic nose at what he must have considered this social upstart, brash new money built on trade, trying to assume the moral high ground about his workers. And MacPherson would have angrily resented the suggestion that land and a long family tree made the gentleman.

  So these two men had been adversaries long before Victoria had cluttered up the picture. Had that had any bearing at all on later events?

  She said, to shift the subject, “South of Guildford, you say? It’s not too far off our route. Isn’t that true, Bill? Shall I drop you there?”

  “No—” Leighton quickly shook his head, and then said, “I have nothing to tell him. It’s what he’s waiting for. News. Hope has kept him alive far longer than his doctors expected. His will is remarkable.”

  “I should think you’d want to be with him now. Especially now.”

  “I’m afraid to sit by his bed. He knows me far too well. I couldn’t lie to him. I wouldn’t try.”

  There was a sadness in his voice that touched her.

  As the motorcar neared the turn for Guildford, Francesca insisted that they pause for half an hour, long enough for her to meet Alasdair MacPherson.

  And Richard Leighton was equally adamant that it was too great a risk, given the old man’s state of health.

  The next morning Francesca, still angry at being thwarted over Guildford, broke suddenly into the ensuing verbal battle and said, “Look, if we must share this motorcar, can’t we at least carry on a civilized conversation? Otherwise, I shall be forced to put you out here and let you make your own way back to London!”

  For she had noticed that Bill, silent, his eyes on the road, shifted uncomfortably during the worst assaults on Francis Hatton’s character. He had revered his lifelong employer, and she thought it must be difficult for him to listen without the privilege of saying a single word in her grandfather’s
defense. It was unfair.

  “Dr. Nealy will have something to say about abandoning me,” Leighton was answering. “All right, then pick a topic. Religious life in ancient Mesopotamia, for starters. Or how to grow coffee in unsuitable African climates. We’ll manage to quarrel about that, too, sooner or later!”

  And she laughed in agreement.

  But in the back of her mind she kept asking herself why Francis Hatton had refused to clear his own name from the start. If he wasn’t guilty, why had he never spoken out? Silence was almost an admission . . .

  What did he know about Victoria that he couldn’t tell?

  She was back to that single word: suicide.

  There was one thing that Francesca hadn’t bargained for when she agreed to share the narrow confines of the motorcar with Richard Leighton.

  More than any of the cousins, he reminded her of her grandfather.

  The boys had inherited the family height, the athleticism that had marked Francis Hatton’s own youth, the shape of the jawline, the coloring—physical attributes passed on through their father. But sometimes she could shut her eyes and hear the timbre of her grandfather’s voice as Leighton became absorbed in their discussion.

  She tried to convince herself that it was a trick of her imagination, but when the anger had been set aside and Leighton appeared to have forgotten who she was—an enemy—she could hear nuances that struck her at once. So like her grandfather when he was well launched on a favorite theme: warmed by enthusiasm, vibrant and enthralling.

  And the darkness that drove this man at her side—the fearful intensity of his need to find answers—was all too reminiscent of Francis Hatton’s moody introspection as the war moved into early 1915 and Simon was killed.

  What answers had her grandfather searched for, without her knowledge? What had driven him into an isolation that shut her out?

  Had he somehow been trying to protect her—had he believed that, for her sake, silence was better than confession?

  There was something else these two men had in common. Both knew they were dying. Her grandfather had lain in his bed for weeks, his iron will alive until the end, but his body helpless to obey it. He had not found it easy to endure mere existence when he had always been accustomed to shaping his life. Francesca had watched him day and night, and seen the passionate hunger for peace. What she hadn’t realized until the end was that peace was beyond him, and what Francis Hatton relished more than life was oblivion.

  When Richard Leighton failed to find the answers his grandfather wanted to hear about Victoria Leighton, when his own body had forsaken him, would he take the sleeping draughts he’d refused in hospital and finish what the war had begun?

  As she had held the cup of dandelion wine laced with laudanum to her grandfather’s lips that dreadful night, he had opened his eyes, smiled at her, and drunk it down with such relief that she had wept with his head in her lap, overwhelmed by grief. The guilt had been hers—it still was. But that haunted desire for an end of suffering had been his. How could she have pretended not to see it?

  It would never do to let any memory of Francis Hatton color her feelings toward Richard Leighton. The latter was dangerous. She had told the rector, Stevens, as much. It would never do to let sympathy for the man blind her to the truth—that he would ruthlessly sacrifice her family if he could find his dead mother.

  A truce there could be, to see them to London. But even the simplest friendship was out of reach.

  In the small hotels where they lodged each night, they dined together and then sat by the firelight of the lounge, sometimes not talking at all but listening to the soldiers on leave. Accustomed to a houseful of men, she felt at ease there.

  Francesca vowed not to let the companionable silences lull her into confidences—or even worse, trick her into trust. The unresolved grief for her cousins and her grandfather was a raw wound—and loneliness had become a hurting that wouldn’t go away.

  I could like this man, if I’d met him in different circumstances—if I were not a Hatton or he were not a Leighton.

  But it didn’t matter—even if she fell head over heels for Richard Leighton, there was nothing she could tell him about his mother’s fate.

  It’s a quarrel we had no part of, but we’re caught up in it as surely as if we had been there, shaping the events. It’s as if Victoria Leighton is alive and vindictively bent on destroying all of us. . . .

  Or worse still, was she dead, leaving a curse as her legacy, like a living presence?

  What would she say if she could know that her own son had been dragged into its vortex, too?

  Late the third day, they found the road to London clogged with military vehicles, troops, and lumbering wagons of fodder, shells, and weapons, their lumpy canvas coverings roughly defining what lay beneath as the rain weighed them down. The roads to and from the Channel ports as well as the southern ports, one weary officer informed them, were hopeless, mired in mud.

  “Fighting at the Front has been heavy. Everything’s in short supply,” he said. “And the trains are packed.”

  Frustrated, Francesca said to Leighton when the officer had gone back to unsnarl a tangle of harness and horse from an overturned wagon, “We shan’t get anywhere near the city. Not tonight, not tomorrow.”

  “We could turn north and make better time,” Bill recommended. “While you were speaking with the officer, a supply sergeant told me the north roads were clear enough. But that won’t help Mr. Leighton here reach London.”

  “I can stay with my friends outside Cambridge. And it’s on your way.”

  “All right, then.”

  Assessing the tiredness in Leighton’s face, she wondered if he was in need of more care than even Dr. Nealy had judged. On the other hand, she didn’t think he was in any mood to return to his father’s house and his half sister’s nursing. There was a restlessness in him now, as if he sensed time growing shorter, and he didn’t want to die before his quest was finished.

  It was a quest, this search. She knew that even when he was at his most charming. Yet somehow it was changing, going far beyond his grandfather’s obsessive insistence on vengeance, perhaps beyond Leighton’s own need to prove that his mother hadn’t callously abandoned a small boy. It was becoming something that kept the pain at bay, that made the struggle to go on living worth the effort. The darkness that she had seen in him when he first came to River’s End was still there, but now it had a different quality—as if he was clinging to it with a fierce tenacity to shut out another approaching darkness.

  She had come to know, too, that he wasn’t a man to ask for quarter, however much he might be in need of it. Like Simon. Or Harry. Even her grandfather. It was a trait she could unequivocally admire.

  But blood was still thicker than water. Or anything else she might feel.

  CHAPTER 15

  They ran into a Zeppelin raid just north of London. The rain had returned, a thin veil that fell from a dark smudge of a sky. The great airship was invisible coming across the tops of the heavy clouds, the deep whump-whump-whump of its engines marking its relentless progress. Bill switched off his headlamps and pulled the motorcar off the main road into a churchyard shadowed by yews.

  It was coming closer—the rumble of the engines louder—

  “I think it’s dropping down,” Francesca warned over the noise. “They sometimes do, when there’s no visibility! Looking for a landmark, something to guide— We ought to find cover, now!”

  They scrambled out of the motorcar and crouched in the rain in the shelter of the stone tombs, anxiously scanning the sky.

  Leighton called out, “Bombs—!” and threw his arm across Francesca, pushing her to the ground before she could hear them fall.

  The night was suddenly orange and gold and blue, unbearably bright. The force of the blasts stunned them, hurting her ears. The hail of falling masonry and roof tiles and chimney bricks scything through the streets was terrifying, and flames leapt high, feeding on the gas mains. Somethin
g came rattling down from the church tower and fell with a crash only feet away from them. People everywhere were screaming, running out of houses, calling to one another. The stench of burning filled the night wind, making Francesca nauseous.

  Bill was swearing, sailor’s oaths, learned in his Cornish youth.

  Francesca, her nose in the wet grass, realized she was crying, her hands pounding the earth beside her. Leighton shifted, drawing his arm back from her body.

  People were still running through the streets, coming out of houses, staring in fright up at the sky, mouths opened, faces blanched in the queer light. Children wailed and somewhere Francesca heard a man shouting obscenities at the invisible airship as the fires boiled up.

  And then in a single moment the brilliant light caught the Zeppelin’s sleek gray hull, sliding obscenely through the clouds.

  Bill was saying roughly, “You’ve no business going back to London with those things about, Miss Francesca! They’re the devil’s work. You ought to stay well out of it!”

  But she was already on her feet, her training overcoming the first shock. “We must help—”

  The bombing had stopped. The ship was gone.

  Bill had the motorcar in gear, and they were quickly in the thick of the damage. The fires had turned the bottoms of the clouds an angry, flickering red, the smoke rolling upward, seeking escape.

  On the other side of the square, two streets had taken the brunt of the attack. Hardly a building on either side was still standing, rubble flung about with the force to kill, making it impossible to tell what was roadway and what was not. Impossible to take the motorcar any closer.

  Dust was rising in virulent clouds, and the fires were still producing volumes of heavy smoke.

  People were already frantically digging out victims with their bare hands and whatever tools they could find, mostly splintered boards and lengths of railings. Coughing in the unspeakable air, Francesca threw herself into the line, frantically heaving aside the hot rubble, scorching her face, burning her gloves. They found two children, scratched and bruised but otherwise unharmed. Francesca wrapped them in the blankets someone passed to her, soothing them and holding them close.