A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  Tutors were often engaged straight out of university, so that would make him perhaps ten years older than Miles, therefore in his early thirties. In spite of his occupation, he had the look of an active and athletic man.

  ‘Are you happy with a life among books?’ I said.

  His eyes widened in surprise, as if at an unexpected move, then he smiled.

  ‘You think I should be out in the great world? “‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said the Lady of Shalott.”’

  ‘She died, out in the great world,’ I said.

  ‘And Sir Lancelot lived and had no notion what he’d done. It hardly seems fair, does it?’

  ‘He didn’t mean her any harm,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose no man ever does–no normal man, anyway. In answer to your question, yes, I am content with my life here. There’s the river to row on and swim in, a horse to ride, paths to walk and a perfectly adequate library. What more could I ask?’

  Somehow, we’d already passed the boundaries of normal conversation. The gateposts of the hall were behind us and we were out on the public road, alongside a field were women were still turning hay with long wooden rakes. He showed no sign of turning back.

  ‘Lady Brinkburn’s not mad, you know,’ he said.

  I stopped and stared, wondering if he’d really said the words, or if I’d imagined them. He stopped too and stared back at me. He’d taken off his glasses before leaving the house. His brown eyes were sad.

  ‘But I think you’ve come to that conclusion anyway,’ he said. ‘I think you like her.’

  I hesitated, so as to be clear on what I did think. We started walking again.

  ‘Yes, I do like her. And from what I’ve seen and read so far, I don’t think she’s mad either,’ I said.

  ‘Will you be reporting that?’

  He knew or had guessed so much that there was no point in pretending.

  ‘In all conscience, I can hardly do otherwise.’

  I was sure that was not what the family’s lawyer, Mr Lomax, wanted from me. He might refuse to pay my fee, which would be a hard blow, but I could do nothing about that.

  ‘On the other hand, she may be misguided,’ he said. ‘As you’ll have seen, she’s a strong-willed lady.’

  ‘Misguided and mad are two different things. If they weren’t, most government ministers would be in asylums.’

  He laughed. We’d passed the hayfield now and were alongside a copse.

  ‘And there’s a legal difference,’ I said. ‘A court won’t listen to a person who’s known to be mad, but it has to decide for itself who’s misguided.’

  I was sounding him out, trying to see what side he was taking in the family quarrel. He must have guessed that, because it was some time before he spoke.

  ‘I like both the young men–though they both have their faults–and I hold no brief for one against the other. If I have any interest in this, it’s to see that the family doesn’t inflict more damage on itself than it has done already.’

  ‘And to protect Lady Brinkburn?’

  ‘Yes, that especially.’

  A jay flew out of the woods on one side of the road, into them on the other. His eyes followed the blue flash of its wings into the leaves.

  ‘Miss Lane, you implied that I’d chosen to live a retired life…

  ‘I didn’t mean any criticism of–’

  He pressed on, as if he’d nerved himself to say something and wouldn’t be distracted.

  ‘As it happens, that’s largely true. But I’ve some experience of the world and I pride myself on being a good judge of character. That’s why I’m about to take a step which may be a mistake. Whether it is or not, depends very largely on you.’

  I said nothing. We walked on a few paces.

  ‘I don’t think you should ask Lady Brinkburn any questions about the journal or anything else.’

  I didn’t reply. That was a decision for me to take.

  ‘And I think you should report back to Mr Lomax that Lady Brinkburn is, unfortunately, not in her right mind,’ he said.

  ‘What!’

  For the second time, I came to a halt. The minor surprise–that he knew that Lomax had sent me–was outweighed by the greater one.

  ‘But we’ve just agreed that she isn’t mad.’

  ‘Not mad, exactly. Certainly not mad in the sense that she’d need to be restrained or confined in any way. Simply subject to delusions, fixed ideas, eccentricities. I’m sure you could gather evidence quite easily. You’ll find plenty of people in the village with stories about her–wandering in the woods reciting poetry to herself and so forth.’

  He was speaking fast now, like an inexperienced barrister who senses he’s lost the sympathy of the court but is determined to get through his piece. I started walking, so that he had to fall into step beside me.

  ‘Mr Carmichael, you know as well as I do that walking in the woods reciting poetry is not evidence of insanity. Eccentricity and insanity are not the same thing. Are you asking me to perjure myself?’

  ‘No, of course not. In any case, we hope it won’t come to anything as serious as perjury.’

  ‘So I’m to lie, and hope it won’t have to be in court?’

  He blushed from hat brim to collar stud, but kept doggedly to his brief.

  ‘Miss Lane, this whole affair has been fed by gossip, most of it in London. At least, let’s try and use gossip against gossip. If enough people in society become convinced of Lady Brinkburn’s mental instability, perhaps it will die as quickly as it arose, before any more harm is done.’

  He was talking as if I were already part of this conspiracy.

  ‘But why?’ I said.

  ‘Surely you see? You tell me that you like Lady Brinkburn. Can anybody who has any consideration for her at all bear the thought of her standing up before the House of Lords, telling the story we both know about?’

  ‘Even if the cost of preventing it is having her thought mad?’

  ‘Yes. Even at that cost.’

  We came to the track through the woods that led to the cottage and turned on to it.

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ I said. ‘There’s a policeman down here from London who’s trying to find out what happened to Handy. He was there just after they found the body. He’s not the usual sort of policeman.’

  He went tense.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He spoke to me. Not that there was anything I could tell him.’

  I didn’t add that he’d spoken to the family coachman as well. Let him find out some things for himself. He didn’t speak again until the chimney pots of the cottage were in sight.

  ‘Well, are you going to do as I suggest about Lady Brinkburn?’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘I want to help her, I think, only I can’t do it this way.’

  He said nothing, just raised his hat to me and turned back along the track.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I reached the cottage, Mrs Todd was just preparing to leave. Goodness knows what she and Tabby had found to do all morning in so small a place, but it looked tolerably tidy.

  ‘Polly says that fisherman you didn’t want me to talk to has gone back to London,’ Tabby told me as soon as I came through the door.

  She sounded regretful. Mrs Todd nodded.

  ‘Went first thing yesterday. He told the landlord he’d be coming back as soon as he got another day off. He likes it here.’

  ‘Oh, he does, does he?’

  I wondered what news Constable Bevan was carrying back to the coroner.

  ‘Ever such a nice man,’ Mrs Todd went on, unwinding the scarf that she’d worn like a turban over her hair. ‘He wanted to know all about the village and the hall and Lady Brinkburn and so on.’

  ‘Polly says he spent a lot of time talking to Violet,’ Tabby put in, with a sideways glance at me.

  Mrs Todd’s expression changed. She crammed the scarf violently into the pocket of her apron.

  ‘Goodness knows
why he bothered talking to her. I suppose she was leading him on as usual.’

  ‘Leading him on?’ I said.

  Mrs Todd looked at Tabby, as if questioning whether she could speak freely in front of me, and got a nod.

  ‘Anything in trousers. Now she’s lost one man–not that she had much of him in the first place–she’s looking round for the next.’

  Eventually she went away up the path, promising to be back in the morning.

  ‘Well, are we going to get the eggs?’ Tabby said.

  ‘Not before you’ve made a pot of tea. My throat’s parched.’

  ‘Polly says she saw you walking up to the hall. Have you been calling on the lady again?’

  ‘Yes. Go and fill the kettle.’

  She fidgeted all through our lunch of bread and cheese and wasn’t happy until we were walking up the path to the village together. She walked well, at a good swinging pace that matched my own, our skirts tucked up out of the dust. I had to remind her to pull hers down again at the edge of the wood, or she’d have shown her lower legs to the world like the girls in the hayfield.

  Violet was out in her front garden, a space of scuffed earth and vigorous weeds, mostly thistles and Good King Henry. Hens scratched in the bare patches. She looked at me suspiciously, narrowing her eyes against the sun.

  She was no more than five foot tall and thin as a stick of kindling, sharp cheekbones pushing at the skin of her pale face. Hair that might have been an attractive chestnut brown when clean was scraped into an untidy knot at the nape of a neck that hadn’t seen soap for a while. She wore a grey cotton dress, stained at bodice and shoulder, and the milky whiff of infant clung round her. At the open door of the cottage a child of three years old or so crouched in the dirt, playing a game with pebbles.

  ‘We want some eggs,’ Tabby told her.

  Violet stayed where she was, still staring at me. I introduced myself, explaining that we were staying in the cottage by the river. It seemed to take a while for the information to reach her brain.

  ‘There’s not many. They haven’t been laying on account of the heat,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t matter, just what you can let us have.’

  She led the way along the side of the cottage, passing the child without looking at it, to a shed leaning unsteadily against the back wall. Her bare feet were narrow and high arched, seeming more elegant than the rest of her. Inside the shed, five eggs nestled on soiled straw in a cracked bowl.

  ‘They’ll do very well,’ I said. ‘But that won’t leave any for you.’

  ‘Don’t matter.’

  I took a shilling from my pocket and laid it on the shelf beside the eggs. It was at least twice as much as they were worth. I signed to Tabby to pick up the eggs. She looked at me.

  ‘We haven’t got nothing to put them in.’

  I sighed, and produced another shilling.

  ‘Then we’ll have to buy the bowl as well.’

  It wasn’t worth a halfpenny and yet, surprisingly, Violet hesitated.

  ‘It was a good bowl until it got cracked. It’s one he gave me.’

  I moved it into the light from the cobwebbed window space. Under the grime it was fine porcelain, delicately patterned.

  ‘Mr Handy gave it to you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Could we talk about him, do you think?’ I said.

  ‘What’s he to you?’

  ‘I was there when they found his body.’

  She said nothing, but flinched and drew in her breath as if I’d punched her in the stomach. I hadn’t intended brutality, but her question was a fair one and didn’t deserve a lie.

  ‘I never knew him alive,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for what happened.’

  ‘He wasn’t a bad man,’ she said, as if begging a reprieve for his reputation, if not for him.

  ‘I’m sure he wasn’t.’

  ‘Is it true they stuffed him in a packing case and had him sent to London?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was. Who told you about it?’

  I decided not to ask who ‘they’ were at this point.

  ‘Janet, she works up at the hall, in the kitchens. She came running down here, full of it, how Mr Whiteley had had to go up to London in a hurry because of him being dead. She made sure I knew about it, little cow. “Well, thank you very much for telling me,” I said. I wasn’t going to let her see me crying.’

  But she was near to tears now.

  ‘Do you think we might sit down?’ I said.

  She led the way through the back door, into a kitchen-cum-living room that took up the whole ground floor of the cottage. A baby slept in a wooden cradle by the window, wrapped in a reasonably clean blanket. A heavy oak table took up most of the floorspace, with three roughly made chairs drawn up to it. Apart from that, the only items of furniture were a dresser with a few cheap plates and oddments, and a rocking chair with one broken rocker. Flies circled in the shaft of sunlight coming through the front window. Violet sat at the table and signed to me to take the chair opposite. Tabby perched carefully on the broken rocking chair.

  ‘Had you known Mr Handy long?’ I said.

  ‘On and off, four or five years.’

  After that first question of hers, she seemed to take it for granted that I had a right to ask anything I wanted.

  ‘On and off?’

  ‘He came when he could, only he wasn’t here very often. That’s what none of them here allow for, you see.’

  ‘Away with Lord Brinkburn?’

  ‘Yes. Italy, mostly, and France. Up in Newcastle sometimes. All over.’ She stood up, went to the dresser and came back with two things clutched in her hands. ‘He always brought me back something, like these.’

  She put them carefully on the table: a carved wooden bear of the sort they make in Switzerland, and a bracelet of red glass Venetian beads. When I picked up the bracelet the beads caught the sunlight and threw scatterings of light like blood drops round the walls.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he was always thinking of me, see, whatever they said.’

  ‘How long had he been working for Lord Brinkburn?’

  ‘All his life, since he was a boy of ten. His family were coal miners, up north where Lord Brinkburn’s family comes from. His lordship picked him out for a bright lad and took him into service, then later he made him his vally. Handy by name and Handy by nature, his lordship said.’

  ‘And Handy travelled abroad with him?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘But…’

  I looked at the baby in the cradle, the bear and bracelet on the table.

  ‘But when did you…did he…?’

  Tabby rescued me.

  ‘Are they his children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From when he came back here?’

  ‘Yes. Every year, Lord Brinkburn would come here for a week or ten days to go over the estate accounts with Mr Whiteley. Sometimes it was nearly two weeks at a time.’

  She was smiling at the thought of it. I felt like crying at the desperate patience of some women.

  ‘So Handy never worked at the hall until now?’ I said.

  ‘Only for his lordship when he was there, and for these last few weeks, after they put him in the madhouse. Handy was the man who had to take him there–not his wife or his sons. Handy was the only one he’d have near him.’

  ‘So once Handy had left him in the asylum, he came here?’

  ‘That’s what Lord Brinkburn told him he should do. When they were still in Italy, he could feel his mind going. So he gave Handy a letter to give to Whiteley if anything happened to him. Handy read it out to me three or four times, so I know by heart what it said. Handy has been my most faithful servant. He is to be given suitable employment at Brinkburn Hall as long as it suits him. He signed it and sealed it with his ring, all legal.’

  I hazarded a guess.

  ‘I suppose Mr Whiteley wasn’t too pleased about that.’

  She laugh
ed.

  ‘Handy said he looked like he’d been butted by a bull in the backside. But he couldn’t do nothing about it.’

  ‘So after all the travelling, Handy settled at Brinkburn Hall. How long ago was that?’

  ‘Nearly two months. Only I wouldn’t say settled. The last time I saw him, he told me he was so fed up with them all that he was thinking of moving on. He’d have done it already, he said, only he was waiting for some money.’

  ‘Weren’t his wages paid, then?’

  ‘It wasn’t wages he was talking about. A tidy sum of money, he said.’

  ‘Do you think he expected to be left something when Lord Brinkburn died?’

  She shrugged. I asked where Handy had been thinking of moving.

  ‘Back up north, where he came from. He’d have sent for us when he got himself settled, I know that.’

  But she sounded far from sure of it.

  ‘Why was he fed up at the hall?’

  ‘The other servants didn’t like him. Jealousy, it was, because of him having travelled and knowing more about everything than they did. They’d do little things to spite him, like the cook giving him the piece of meat with all the gristle. And they were making him work too hard. “I’m being asked to do too much,” he kept saying to me. “It’s not fair on a man.”’

  ‘And he didn’t get on well with Lady Brinkburn?’

  ‘She couldn’t abide him. She gave orders that he wasn’t even to come within sight of her, only he took to popping out of hedges and round corners now and then, just to show her. It was his lordship he’d worked for, not her.’

  I was forming a poor opinion of Handy, but tried not to let her see it.

  ‘Have you any idea why she disliked him so much?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘The way she felt about her husband, anybody he liked, she didn’t.’

  ‘Surely there must have been more to it than that. She wouldn’t have the churchyard wall moved just because she didn’t like him.’

  ‘Sheer spite, that’s all,’ Violet said.

  Clearly there was no progress to be made in that direction. I tried another tack.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  She looked down at the table.

  ‘On the Sunday.’

  By Monday morning, Handy had been dead and in a crate on his way to London. Hardly the moving on he’d have expected.