The Murder Stone

by Charles Todd

  THE COUSINS

  Freddy . . . the musician

  It was a day that enticed small boys to roam.

  I remember it that way, at least. I was nearly seven years old, and beginning to believe I was invincible.

  Simon’s fault, of course—we had done battle in wars everywhere in the world, and won. (If History said we might. Simon was a stickler for getting it right.) That day I was tired of playing William the Conqueror. I’d never much liked him anyway, because he’d tricked King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. To my way of thinking, it wasn’t an honorable victory. We’d just finished reading Marmion, and I liked that story much better. But Simon had made new swords and he was set on Hastings.

  I dug in my heels.

  Simon and I argued.

  In the end I stalked away in a huff.

  We had been warned for as long as I could remember not to walk beyond the gates of River’s End. But the River Exe ran some fifty feet from them, passing under the bridge where the ghost of the spotted calf was said to appear.

  And I was all for seeing ghosts. It would be a grand adventure, I was sure.

  I hadn’t wandered far downstream—only far enough from the gatehouse that there was no danger of Wiggins spotting me—when a frog splashed noisily into the water.

  Frogs and little boys . . . irresistible.

  I took off my shoes and my stockings and waded in with gusto. The river ran swiftly just here, but by God, I nearly caught him twice.

  Off-balance and laughing, I didn’t hear anyone coming.

  The next thing I knew there was a voice at my back, calling to me. Not by name, but I turned all the same.

  Someone was standing near my shoes, holding the reins of a bay horse with black markings. The sun was behind her, and I couldn’t see her face clearly.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I saw you leave River’s End. Do you live there?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Frederick Louis Talbot Hatton.”

  “Indeed.”

  I could hear the voice, low and warm, but the sun was still in my eyes.

  I was turning back to search for the frog when an odor of something sweet rose in the air. I squinted and saw that she held a long stick in one hand, a match in the other. And as I watched, she set the stick alight. Quite leisurely, as if she did it all the time and knew it would catch. And it did.

  “What are you doing here, all by yourself, Frederick Louis Talbot Hatton? Are your brothers about as well?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m quite alone. They’re playing at war.”

  I heard her laugh. “Yes. I could hear them from the woods on the ridge, where I was riding.” The voice had changed, grown harder, and that made me uneasy. “You are an unexpected find. I feel as if I’ve been lucky after all.”

  I began to pick my way across the river, back to the bank. Suddenly afraid, although I couldn’t have said why. My feet, wet to the ankles, seemed to belong to someone else. Cold and numb now, and hardly able to balance on the stones. I’d forgotten utterly about the frog I was pursuing.

  She turned the stick in my direction. She had wrapped her handkerchief around the end, I could see that now. And the flames were gobbling at the cloth, turning it black, burning into the dry wood. She had thrown the first match into the grass and held another in a gloved hand, ready to use. By her boots I could see where she’d dropped a small, pretty bottle. I thought it might be perfume. Or ointment. The sweetness had mixed in with the smoke, an unpleasant combination, changing both.

  “Frederick Louis Talbot Hatton.” She gave each word an ugly emphasis. “How would you like to die, this morning?”

  Frightened, I stepped back, slipped off the stone I had been standing on, and felt the cold, rushing water move up the legs of my trousers. There was white ash now on the stick, around a red core of coals. I’d never known sticks to burn that quickly.

  “No, you mustn’t fall in the water, Frederick. I don’t want to see you drown. I want to watch you burn.”

  And with that she lifted the flaming stick and brought it down on my head and then laid it against my arm, almost the way Simon knighted us when he was king. But this wasn’t a make-believe sword, it was a brand, and I could smell my hair singe and then the cloth of my shirt catching, scorching the flesh beneath.

  The heat seared into my skin. My sleeve vanished in curls of white linen blackened at the edges, just like the handkerchief. Beneath it a terrifying pale streak was growing on my arm beneath red-hot coals. A lick of flames darted up and the patch turned a fiery red.

  Mesmerized, I stood there, unable to move. The stick veered toward the front of my shirt. I screamed then, and flung myself into the river, dousing the flames and sending a shock of cold water through my body. Even though the smoking wreck of my sleeve was extinguished, I could still feel the pain. My arm seemed to be afire from my wrist to my neck. And I rolled in the water, heedless of my clothes, trying to put it out.

  When I stood up, dripping, crying, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life, the woman was gone. Her horse was gone. The little bottle was gone. There was nothing there on the riverbank except bruised grass and droppings from the bay.

  I scrambled wildly out of the river, fearful that she might come back before I could escape. Stumbling over my shoes and stockings, I didn’t stop to put them on but ran barefoot, as hard as I’d ever run to win a competition against my brothers. Once I looked back over my shoulder, and I could have sworn I heard her laughing. But I didn’t care. I was blindly racing for the gates of River’s End, and safety. Home. Grandfather . . .

  I ran without thinking, ran in desperation, heedless of stones scraping my feet, my heart beating so heavily I could barely breathe. Past the gatehouse—Wiggins had gone to his dinner, and there was no help for me there.

  Up the drive, and as the drive curved, I turned toward the stables and the back garden. I was in no state to reason, but dripping and filthy, I was aware I wasn’t fit to come through the front door.

  I had nearly reached the Murder Stone, where Cousin Cesca was being burned at the stake. I could smell the twigs that Simon had lit in the grass. Nausea hit me like a wall.

  And then I slammed into someone—booted feet, rough hands—

  Bill, our coachman, already old to a child, but sanctuary.

  He caught me, held me away from him.

  “Here—what’s this, what’ve you been up to, my lad!”

  He carried me, wet and dripping, into the house, and told one of the maids to fetch my tutor from his room. My brothers had trooped after me, eyes solemn, mouths open. Cousin Cesca, smaller than Harry, had a torn pinafore, and one sash was dragging. Her face mirrored mine, horror followed by tears of shock.

  Mr. Gregory, the tutor, arrived, his face darkening as he caught sight of me. “What have you been up to, young man? Look at the state you’re in—disgusting!”

  I didn’t know how to tell them. About the river, about the woman, about the stick that had sent me headlong into terror.

  “I fell in,” I said, hiccoughing, and Mr. Gregory began to lecture me on leaving the bounds of River’s End while the cook, Mrs. Wiggins, was examining the blackened cloth of my shirt—

  “He’s been playing with matches, from the look of him!” Mrs. Wiggins was saying. “And serves him right to be burned like that! If I’ve told those boys once, I’ve told them a dozen times—”

  I stood there, trembling, dirty and wet with tears, and silently let the accusations wash over me.

  And then my grandfather was there.

  He lifted me in his arms, river water and all, and I flung my own around his neck, crying again.

  He sat down and held me on his knee, looking me over. The reek of singed hair and blackened cloth was heavy in the room and made me queasy again. Grandfather saw the burn soon enough, and the blood. Francesca saw it, too, and gave a little gasp. Then she, too, began to cry. My wound looked ghastly—I could just see myself.

  “What’s this?”
Grandfather wanted to know, his voice gentle. I just sat there, dumb and trembling with cold.

  Mr. Gregory was all for dire punishment, but Mrs. Trotter and her daughter came to clean and dress my arm, taking away my burned shirt and bringing me a new one. My grandfather sat there, silent, holding me on his lap all the while.

  Then, as the women were herding me up the stairs to my room, my grandfather disappeared through the kitchen door.

  When I awoke, my missing shoes were standing neatly side by side at the edge of the bed, a pair of clean stockings beside them. I knew then that he had gone searching the riverbank to see what had happened.

  Grandfather never said anything more to me. And it was years before I brought up that day to anyone.

  It was the first time I’d ever experienced cruelty. I realized when I was older that whoever she was, the woman by the river would never have set me alight. She was taunting me, which in some way was more horrifying. But to a child, it was not logic that mattered, it was primeval fear, and she knew that.

  Yet that day, as he sat at the kitchen table holding me, it was possible that my grandfather understood far more than I had been able to tell. I don’t know why I believed that, except that his mouth was a grim line and his eyes were as cold and green as the sea. Anger directed not at me but at something I didn’t understand. And why else would he have gone to the river straightaway, to search?

  It was three weeks before my arm was well enough to play the piano again. I’d always played the piano, long before I knew note from note and could barely reach the keys. It was anguish to be denied music.

  As boys will do, I delighted in thrusting the ugly wound on my arm under Francesca’s nose, terrifying her. It was cruel of me; I realized that when she cried when we next wanted to burn her as Joan of Arc. And I felt ashamed then. Yet somehow her fear made my own less—personal. As if by sharing the horror, it became bearable.

  Over the years the memory of the woman and what she’d done faded into the past. And then I was in the trenches, the first time the Germans used a flame thrower.

  For a black and appalling instant, I lost my nerve. I was without warning a small boy again, and the burning stick was as real as the woman and the horse. And it had nothing to do with war. The stink of blackened wool and flesh choked me.

  I have wondered, from time to time, if she was real—or a ghost. But my scar is real enough, and so she must have been as well—

  CHAPTER 25

  Leighton arrived with a pair of crutches under his arm.

  Overjoyed, Francesca was determined to try them at once.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” he confessed. “I must give credit where it’s due. Stevens found them in an attic. He’d used them in hospital. We’ve cleaned them up, and lowered the armrest. Do you think you can manage?”

  “Oh, yes, just watch me!” As she adjusted to them, she said, “I had an—unusual—visit last night: the woman who had been here before, posing as my nanny. She’s the one who took the photograph of my parents, the one we discovered in Falworthy. Her child was adopted from The Swans. It seems she believes Harry could be her son. Is she staying at the inn?”

  “There’s another guest. A woman,” he answered absently. He was watching as she moved awkwardly around the room on her crutches, slowly gaining confidence. “Francesca?” The change in tone made her turn to look at him. “I may not have long to live. Which makes me rather poor stakes for a husband. The truth is, I’ve fallen in love with you. God help me—it was never what I’d intended!”

  She fell then, tangling feet and the crutch’s tips in her astonishment. He caught her, hands holding her briefly before setting her safely on the chaise. She stared at him, searching his face.

  “But you hate my family!” she blurted, and bent to retrieve her crutches.

  When she looked up, in his eyes she could read an astonishment that matched her own. As if the confession had been unplanned.

  “I’ve hated your grandfather as long as I can remember. I tried to hate you. I’m afraid I’ve made you despise me. Francesca—it wasn’t Francis Hatton who comforted you during the night in the ward! It wasn’t a dream. Don’t you remember?”

  She did remember the hands that bathed her face. The voice that wrapped her in contentment as she fell asleep. “Dearest girl . . .”

  Richard?

  He moved away. “I’ve made rather a fool of myself,” he said. “Forgive me.”

  She said then, “I’m afraid to care for you. Every time I’ve come close to you, you’ve pushed me away. Even on the drive from Exeter! If it was you in the hospital ward, why were you so cold afterward?”

  “I thought you’d changed your mind. I believed that telegram, you see. I was frantic to reach you. I had to plead with Matron to let me in the ward at that hour. I needed to see with my own eyes that you were safe. And then you denied sending it. You were glad to see me in Exeter! I couldn’t be mistaken about that!”

  She had spent hours weeding the flower beds, the last time he’d gone away without a word. To root out caring. She said, “I don’t know what to feel.”

  “We’ve got off on the wrong foot—”

  “No, we haven’t,” she cried. “That’s the trouble, don’t you see? There’s always Victoria—your mother—standing in the shadows between us as surely as if she were still here. How can you love me, when your life has been devoted to proving that someone in my family drove her to her death! If I let myself love you—and someday you discover what happened when you were eight—I’ll be left to choose between you and Francis Hatton. How can I do that?”

  “I don’t expect you to choose—” He sat down beside her at the end of the chaise. “For the first time in my life, I’ve found something—someone—who matters more to me than what happened all those years ago. Will you believe that? Will you believe that when I walked away from you, all I could think about was coming back? I’m here with you, and all we seem to do is quarrel. I reach out to you—and you give me nothing in return. No sign of what you might be feeling.”

  “I’m afraid to love you!” she said again. But she remembered her silence that night after the Zeppelin raid. When he had held her hands and she had not known how to respond.

  “Which makes me believe you could.”

  She closed her eyes. The words she wanted to say were swallowed in the numbness inside her. How could she tell Richard that she had killed the man she had adored more than anyone, and that she couldn’t betray his memory now by marrying the very person who accused him of murder?

  He may have given up his quest—but Richard Leighton hadn’t given up what he had been taught to believe.

  There was a difference.

  And into the silence he said, “They’re dead, Francesca. My mother. Your grandfather. The time has come to let them go. While there is still time. I love you. And I want to spend what’s left of my life with you.”

  But there was a painful knot in her chest and she couldn’t answer him. From her grandfather she had learned how to keep secrets.

  Long after he had gone, Francesca sat where he’d left her, her crutches in her lap.

  If she had thought at all about falling in love, she would have pictured laughter and joy, her grandfather smiling broadly, her cousins teasing her, a sense of the rightness of her choice.

  Not hovering on the edge for weeks, reining in her feelings until she barely recognized them. Not confused by anger and uncertainty and even fear. And how had they managed to survive, these feelings? Because they had. In spite of everything. Growing deeper while she wasn’t looking.

  If Richard proposed again, how could she hold out a second time?

  As he left the room, Richard had asked, “Isn’t it a risk worth taking? To marry me? We’ll have a little time. It could be enough. . . . Will you at least do me the honor of thinking about what I’ve said?”

  And before she could remember to thank him for the crutches, he was gone.

  CHAPTER 26

  An
hour later, Mrs. Lane came to the sitting room to announce another visitor, her mouth tight and her expression hardly welcoming.

  It was Mr. Walsham.

  Annoyed, Francesca wished him at the devil.

  Entering the room, he said without greeting, “I’m told you paid a visit to Essex. What was your opinion of the property there?”

  “The villagers in Mercer tell me that my family has been a better steward than yours,” she answered him bluntly.

  “You must see that it’s a goodly heritage. And understand why my father and I were angry to have it stolen from us.”

  “Hardly stolen!”

  “My father was drunk. He was tricked into playing cards.”

  “So you say. But as I don’t know my grandfather’s side of the story, I’m not about to be swayed by yours.” She recalled what Branscombe had said—that there were always vultures at funerals looking for opportunities.

  “I tell you, that man cheated us out of our heritage and he did it out of sheer vindictiveness!”

  “Why should someone like my grandfather dislike your family so much?” she retorted. “What had you done?”

  There was surprise in the fair, Viking face. “Don’t you know? Hatton always blamed us for what happened to his precious son. He swore it was our fault Edward got himself into debt, our fault that he had to flee the country, our fault that he killed himself on some Canadian road and never came home. Well, I can tell you Edward Hatton joyfully made his own reputation! He’d cheat if there was no other way to win. He’d borrow money and never pay it back. Gambling was in his blood. He got out of England only a step ahead of the bailiffs, even though his father tried to hush up the scandal. Money can always buy silence in some quarters. If you’ve got enough of it. And when there was no recourse in law to punish us, Francis Hatton took the law into his own hands!”

  “I refuse to believe a word of this!”

  “I don’t care whether you believe it or not! The Hattons never care for the truth, do they?”