A Trace of Deceit

by Karen Odden

  The night was unusually beautiful and the water serene. The sky was black and clear, the moon delicate as an eyelash among the constellations tracing their own arcs across the sky. I took a deep breath of briny air and felt the coolness in my lungs. Matthew stood beside me, bent over with his forearms resting on the rail, and I was relieved to see he didn’t look quite so queasy as he had on our first crossing.

  “I want to talk to Lewis,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought you might.”

  “I have a feeling he might know more about events that happened at Tennersley.”

  “He’d certainly provide a different perspective,” Matthew allowed. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. But Felix mentioned Lewis to me once. He may know where I can find him.” I hesitated. “I doubt Lewis has anything to do with Edwin’s murder, or the theft of the painting, and . . . well, I don’t think he’ll talk to me as readily if you’re there.”

  “Probably true.” He laid his warm hand over my cold one and gave it a squeeze. “Just—be careful.”

  I nodded a promise, and he let his hand remain where it was just long enough that I felt the chill when he let it go.

  Chapter 18

  The next morning, by sheerest luck, I came upon Felix as he was leaving his flat. He looked bleary-eyed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, and he certainly didn’t seem pleased to see me. Indeed, he wouldn’t even meet my gaze. I imagined his surliness was partly due to feeling ashamed of his behavior the other night.

  “Where are you going?” I asked as I fell into step.

  “To find something to eat,” he muttered.

  “Could I come along?”

  He heaved a sigh that held the bitter tang of gin and squinted at me sideways. His eyes were bloodshot, and his wisps of brown hair were blown this way and that by the wind. “I suppose that inspector told you I broke into Edwin’s flat,” he said gruffly.

  I stared. “No, he didn’t. Why would you break in?”

  “I wanted to see if he had the guaranty among his papers. I thought he might’ve signed it.”

  I almost asked why he hadn’t simply asked me for the key. But perhaps he’d made the choice to break in when he’d been drinking. So instead, I said merely, “I understand. I should have thought of that myself.”

  He gave a phlegmy cough. “So what is it you want?”

  His manner was so prickly I wondered if I should abandon the conversation. But I needed Lewis’s address. “Let’s eat first, shall we?”

  He grunted and continued on until we reached a pub. “Here.” He held the door and gestured for me to step inside. The establishment felt seedy, with a meager fire on the hearth and the smell of rotten meat and ale. There were two older women at small round tables, with men who might have been their husbands. At the bar, four men hunkered over their pints, drinking with a doggedness that made me uneasy, and as we made our way to a table, the barkeep nodded familiarly to Felix. My heart sank. How often did he frequent this place?

  As Felix started in on his stew, I told him an abbreviated version of what we’d learned from Mr. Rawlings. As I finished, his head was bent, and he spooned the last bit of broth from the bowl. Then he took up his pint of ale and gulped most of it.

  “Felix, did you know he was unhappy at Tennersley?”

  “Not at the time.” He set down his glass and met my gaze. “I gathered afterward that something unpleasant had happened. He never told me specifically.”

  “Do you know where Lewis Witt lives?” I asked.

  He sat back with a skeptical look. “I doubt he’ll speak with you about Tennersley. Edwin told me he was expelled.”

  “I won’t ask him about himself,” I promised. “I’ll only ask about Edwin.” Felix’s expression remained dubious, and I added, “For goodness’ sake, Felix! Surely Lewis will understand if I want to hear about my brother from someone who was his friend.”

  He held back a belch and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I don’t know where he lives, but he works in his uncle’s gallery on Coulton Street, about a mile or so from here. Massey’s.”

  “A gallery,” I echoed.

  “Tennersley provided the proper training for that, if nothing else.”

  I pushed back my chair and stood. “Thank you.”

  He gave a “hrrmph” under his breath, and I waited. He’d finished his meal, but he showed no signs of getting up. Instead he sat with his eyes fixed on his empty bowl.

  I nearly walked away, but instead I put my hand on his arm. “Why don’t you come with me?” I asked persuasively. “Don’t stay here in this place.”

  He pulled away and looked up at me sourly. “Stop it, Annabel. I’m a grown man, and you’re not my keeper. I don’t need you pestering me about how to spend my time.” A pause. “I’ve nowhere I need to be.”

  Stung, I shut my mouth and backed away from the table.

  I left without a word. I reached the pavement overcome with resentment at his rudeness, when I’d only meant to be kind. But as I walked, my anger gave way to worry. Felix wasn’t acting himself. I’d known him for years. He might be reserved, but he wasn’t churlish. Was he unwell? Or just profoundly miserable?

  He certainly had a right to be, but spending his days in a pub wouldn’t help. My fear was the drink was making his misery worse.

  I proceeded toward Massey’s with a mixture of curiosity and dread, and a knot in my stomach that tightened as I drew near.

  LEWIS WAS OCCUPIED when I entered, and though I waited until his customer was gone, he told me he couldn’t speak with me until he’d finished for the day. So I spent the next two hours waiting in a tea shop nearby, nursing several cups of tea and glancing over the papers, all the while keeping an eye on the front door of the gallery. At last, as the clock struck four, the shop door opened, and Lewis emerged. I saw him take a breath in and out; he hesitated, and in that moment, he appeared to debate whether to elude me. I nearly jumped up and ran out, but with an evident unwillingness he turned and started toward the tea shop. I watched as he entered and approached my table.

  I gestured toward the empty chair. “Please.”

  He didn’t take it but stood above me, his lanky frame restless, his pale hair falling over his brow, his gray eyes wary and watchful. He reminded me of a jumpy hare.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “I asked Felix Severington. He told me where you worked.”

  He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “D’you mind if we walk? I’ve been inside all day.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I took some coins out of my reticule and deposited them by the plate.

  As we reached the street, I began, “Thank you for talking to me. I miss Edwin a great deal. Felix says that you and he were good friends.”

  He gave me a look that was skeptical and scornful all at once. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve either response, and it made me wonder how to proceed. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He walked with his head slightly in front of his neck, like a horse reaching for the bit, and his eyes darted about, left and right. With his long legs, he walked quickly, and I wanted to slow him down, calm him down, if I could.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t walk this fast,” I said. Sweat was dampening the back of my dress, and my rapid breathing wasn’t wholly feigned.

  He muttered something under his breath that might have been an apology or a curse, but the sound of passing wheels on the cobbles drowned it out.

  “Lewis, please.”

  He spun to face me. “Look here, what do you want with me?”

  “I just want to talk to you about Edwin.”

  “Edwin.” As he said the name, some of his anger dropped away, and we stood together on the pavement, just staring, each taking the other’s measure.

  At last I dragged in a deep breath and let it out. “He was my brother, and I just want to talk to someone who knew him. Someone who was his friend.” My voice broke over the words, and per
haps he heard it, for his expression softened.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, if you’ll tell me one thing.” His voice carried a challenge. “How could your father have done that to him?”

  I gaped at the degree of resentment and disgust in his voice.

  His eyes—narrowed and gray and black-lashed—were locked on mine. This was no timid hare, I realized; his eyes were glittering as a snake’s. Instinctively, I stepped back, realizing this wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with the distraction of dodging other pedestrians. I cast around and saw a triangle of tree-lined park nearby. I pointed. “Can we sit down? Over there?”

  Reluctantly, he nodded and started toward the green. His eyes remained fixed on the pavement in front of him, and he stalked forward in a stubbornly straight line, although several times I had to step left or right to make way for the pedestrians coming toward us. At last we reached the park entrance. One of the two black wrought-iron panels was ajar, and we went inside. The park wasn’t large. It would’ve taken only a few minutes to walk the single, sinuous gravel path among the gardens. The trees arched gracefully overhead, as if holding out a promise of some peace, and the air had the pleasing smell of old leaves. I led him to the nearest empty bench and perched sideways, so I could view him in profile. He sat with his back pressed rigidly against the wooden slats, his hands buried so deep in his pockets they strained the seams. His hair lifted in the breeze and fell over his pale brow, the late-afternoon light carved shadows under his cheekbones, and it occurred to me that he would be handsome if he ever smiled.

  “Lewis, I don’t know much about Edwin’s life at Tennersley,” I said. He remained silent, so I continued, “I went to see Headmaster Rawlings yesterday. He lives on the Isle of Wight now. Did you know that?”

  He snorted. “I’d have thought he’d be dead.”

  “Well, he’s failing,” I admitted. “But he was well enough to talk with me, and he had photographs of all the classes—including yours and Edwin’s. He remembers Edwin, and . . . well, he insists that Edwin was happy there.”

  Lewis stiffened but still did not look at me.

  “But from some things in Edwin’s sketchbooks, I gather he wasn’t. Not at all. I just wonder if you might help me sort it out.”

  At that he turned to stare incredulously. “There’s nothing to sort out! He was bloody miserable. Surely, you had to know!”

  I stared. “How would I? I was a child when Edwin left for school, and after he left, he only wrote to me twice.” I paused. “Lewis, he didn’t come home except for at the holidays. And once he came back to London, he never spoke about school to me, ever.”

  Lewis remained stubbornly silent, as two birds in a nearby tree twittered at each other.

  I tried another tactic. “The headmaster said you were one for pranks. He told me how you and Edwin once tried to run away to London.”

  “Pranks?” He gave a short bark of a laugh and shook his head. “Bloody Christ.”

  I felt a rising impatience with this young man who was making a show of having plenty he could tell me but refusing to do it. He seemed genuinely angry at my ignorance, which seemed hardly fair. Yet I also sensed underneath, he desperately wanted me to understand.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” I said finally. “Just tell me.”

  He bit at his chapped lower lip.

  Stifling a sigh, I propped my elbow on the back of the bench and rested my head in my hand. “Lewis, when did you come to Tennersley?”

  “Two years before Edwin.”

  “Are you a painter, too?”

  He shook his head and sniffed hard enough to pull his mouth out of shape. “Not like him. I didn’t like it much. But rowing was all right.”

  “Mr. Rawlings seemed very proud of the school’s crew teams.”

  He met my gaze and his smile was sardonic. “Of course he’d say that. He ran a proper school. Did he say that, too?”

  “Several times.” I paused and added pointedly, “Maybe as if he were trying to convince himself. But it couldn’t have been a perfectly proper school. He told us about Alan Kane and the lies he told about Mr. Boulter.”

  A quick sideways glance. “Hmph.” He leaned forward to pick up a dead branch from the ground, rested his elbows on his knees, and began to pick off the leaves. I waited patiently, and at last he said, “You should know about Alan, so you understand what happened later.”

  “All right.”

  “He wasn’t a liar, whatever Rawlings told you. Alan was a few years older than Edwin and me, and he was talented.” A deprecatory shrug. “Not like Edwin, mind you, but good enough that Boulter took him under his wing, held his work up as a model for others. That’s what we all saw back then, anyway.” He rolled the bare stick between his thumb and forefinger. “Boulter’s son Sam hated him for it. He and Will Giffen—we used to call him Sam’s henchman—would take Alan behind the boathouse and beat him.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “They did?”

  My words were only an instinctive, unconsidered response to my shock, but he turned toward me, his eyes narrowed and furious. “You don’t believe me?” He dragged up his pant leg so I could see his white calf, with a shining scar that ran six inches along the bone. “They beat me, too, for taking Will’s spot in the first boat one term. He and Sam threw me down the riverbank and left me there with a broken leg. I’d have died of cold except Edwin came to find me. They made me tell Rawlings I’d fallen in the river.”

  Mr. Rawlings had used the word accident-prone, I thought.

  I shivered. “What did your parents say?”

  He pulled his pant leg back down to his boot. “It’s just my mum. But she never knew, not till later. School never told her. I spent a week in the infirmary, and a month hobbling around on crutches. Edwin kept Sam and Will from kicking them out from under me and carried everything for six weeks.”

  Something in the way that Lewis said their names, Sam and Will, made me think about how they were always together in the pictures.

  “You and Edwin were good friends by then?” I asked.

  He bent to scrape the end of the twig in the dirt. “We were friends almost right away after he came.” He gave a faint grimace. “Even though he made me jealous, he was so bloody good at everything. But he helped me with my maths and Latin. Same way when he came back to London, he taught me how to restore paintings and build frames and gild them, so I could find work.”

  “That’s what you do at the gallery?”

  “Yah.” He raised an eyebrow. “Though I’ve never been asked to clean anything like the Boucher.”

  I started. “Did he show it to you?”

  He grunted. “I happened to stop by his flat the day after it came.”

  I took a deep breath in and tried to find my way back to Tennersley. “So what happened to Alan?”

  “He went to see Rawlings.” He gave a particularly vicious stab at the dirt with his stick. “People told him not to bother.”

  “But Rawlings said Alan accused Mr. Boulter of cruelty,” I said slowly. “Why didn’t he just explain about Sam and Will beating him?”

  He shrugged. “Probably because he knew if he ratted on Sam and Will, and ended up staying at the school, he’d be dead.”

  I swallowed. “Mr. Rawlings said Alan told lies about Edwin.”

  My words surprised him enough that he turned to stare. “Well, he’s wrong. Alan was gone by the time Edwin arrived. He left the spring before.”

  I stared. “Perhaps Mr. Rawlings was confused.”

  A snort. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “So Edwin arrived, and you became friends,” I prompted him.

  He nodded. “Mr. Boulter recognized Edwin’s talent straightaway, same as he had with Alan. Sam hated it, so he and Will started in on Edwin. There was a river nearby. They’d push us in, hold us under sometimes.”

  I had a sick feeling in my stomach, for I recalled Edwin’s sketches of the river, and now I understood. “How did the headmaster not notice
all this . . . this . . .”

  “Torture?” Lewis spat out the word. “He was gone most of the time, raising money, meeting benefactors. Left everything except for crew in the hands of the assistant, who was more interested in giving a green gown to the kitchen maids than minding the school.” He grimaced. “Besides, none of us would ever say anything. Sam and the rest of them would only come down on us harder. By the spring it was bad enough Edwin and I tried to run away.”

  “What Mr. Rawlings called a prank,” I said.

  “Yah. We made it to the train station at Milton Keynes and bought tickets. But the train was stopped at Bletchley, and we were pulled off. The school had telegraphed ahead.”

  “So you didn’t reach London?” I asked in some surprise. I’d assumed they had.

  “Nah.” A sniff. “Not that time.”

  “You did it more than once?”

  “The following year, after they broke Edwin’s arm. Not his painting arm, thank God.” He gave a dry smile. “That’s what Edwin said at the time. But yes. This time we weren’t just trying to get away for a while. We wanted to see if our families would let us stay. Only this time we were smarter about it. We paid a couple boys to keep quiet and made it to London.” He looked at me skeptically. “Don’t you remember him coming home?” He ran his hand along his left shoulder and bicep. “He had a sling on.”

  Into my mind came the image of Edwin in the doorway, the sky dark behind him. The image merged with half a dozen other times he’d stood in the doorway. But now I could almost see, like a white blur, something that might have been a sling hanging from his shoulder.

  “Yes, maybe,” I said.

  He ran his thumbnail along the bark of the stick, scraping it away. “Edwin told me your father thought he was a liar.”

  “Yes.”

  “Edwin had a broken arm, for God’s sake! Why wouldn’t he believe him?”

  I shook my head miserably. “I don’t know. I’m not excusing my father by any means. But Edwin and he had been having rows for years, with my father trying to force Edwin to take painting seriously. He didn’t know that Edwin was taking it seriously at school. When Edwin returned home that time, I’m sure he simply assumed Edwin was being rebellious as usual.”