A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  ‘Did she seem nervous or frightened?’

  ‘Her poor nerves were bad. She was always jumping at loud noises, if a door slammed or anything. I always tried to move quietly round her, not drop things.’

  ‘Worse than usual yesterday evening?’

  ‘I think so, yes. And the storm had upset her nerves.’

  ‘Did she say anything about her son’s visit?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  I didn’t think Betty was concealing anything. If Lady Brinkburn had quarrelled with her son, it would hardly be something she’d discuss with her maid.

  ‘Did she say anything about what she intended to do with the rest of the evening after you left her?’ I said.

  ‘No. I supposed it would be as usual.’

  ‘What was usual?’

  ‘About eight o’clock or half past, while the servants were having their supper, she’d take Lovelace out for a walk out on the lawn before they settled for the night.’

  ‘Did she do that last night?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I didn’t see her, but Ruth had to go outside for something, and she did.’

  ‘Was Lady Brinkburn alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she always walk the dog on her own in the evening?’

  ‘No. Sometimes Mr Carmichael was with her.’

  She blushed but looked me in the eye, as if challenging me to say something. I guessed that she’d had to defend her mistress against gossip among the other servants. It would be cruel to embarrass her any more on that score.

  ‘Did you notice her writing anything yesterday?’

  ‘I didn’t see her writing, but she had been.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘She had ink on the inside of her finger, where you get it when you hold a pen.’ She held up her fingers to demonstrate. ‘I noticed because sometimes when she gets ink on her fingers she asks me to bring a bowl of warm water and a pumice stone to get it off. She didn’t last night.’

  ‘Did she give you a letter to post or deliver to anyone?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  I still didn’t believe I’d find a suicide note, but this was a trail that had to be followed.

  ‘Betty, Mr Carmichael has asked me to go through Lady Brinkburn’s rooms and see if she left a note. If you can bear it, I’d be very grateful if you’d come with me.’

  She bit her lip and nodded. We went together into the hall. The maid Dora was polishing the stair rail. Her eyes were pink and the edge of her white apron crumpled as if she’d been using it to mop up her tears, but the stare she gave us was greedy for more news. We went past her and up the stairs by the library. Sunlight was streaming through the windows of Sophia’s sitting room, on to a pot of auriculas on a table. Instinctively, Betty ran to the curtains to shut out the light.

  ‘Leave them for a while,’ I said. ‘Is there anything here that looks different from when you saw it yesterday evening?’

  She looked round and shook her head. To me, it was almost exactly as it had been when I’d had supper with Sophia. Even a novel on the window seat was splayed open, cover uppermost, just as I remembered. I picked it up, just in case there should be a note underneath it. Nothing. She’d been in the middle of a chapter.

  Betty and I made a fairly systematic search, though I could see her heart wasn’t in it. I opened the drawers of the writing desk and found nothing but blank paper, wafers for sealing letters, a half-used stick of wax. After a while we went through to her bedroom. A green afternoon dress with ribbon trim was flung over the back of a chair. Automatically, Betty gathered it up and shook out the creases in the skirt.

  ‘Is that what she was wearing when you last saw her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The coverlet on the bed was smooth and unrumpled.

  ‘Would anybody have come in to make the bed this morning?’ I said.

  ‘No, I always made her bed myself. I knew just how she liked it.’

  So the bed hadn’t been slept in.

  ‘Where did she keep her nightdress?’

  ‘In here.’

  She opened the top drawer in a chest of drawers, on to lavender-scented emptiness.

  ‘It’s gone.’

  I thought I’d caught a glimpse of white lace under the cloak when they’d moved Sophia out of the boat. So she’d taken off her dress, changed into her night-dress and drunk her dose of laudanum. At least that much made sense. The empty bottle was there on a cabinet by her bed, the glass beside it. Why, having drunk it, didn’t she get into bed? I turned back the coverlet and felt under the pillows, the bolster and the sides of the mattress for a note. Nothing, of course.

  Betty was crying again, still holding the green dress in her arms. Before we left, she insisted on hanging it up in the wardrobe.

  We were walking out of the bedroom into the sitting room when a thought came to me. I turned back into the bedroom.

  ‘Betty, would you come here and look at the bottle, please.’

  She came, looking puzzled. An ordinary empty dark green glass bottle of the kind you find by the dozen in any chemist’s shop. I’d seen it in Sophia’s hand the night before last. Only I hadn’t.

  ‘Does anything strike you about the shape of it?’ I said.

  She peered at it, then made a shape with her hands.

  ‘It’s got…’

  The shape she was making was of a bottle with shoulders.

  ‘And what was it usually like?’

  ‘Straight down, like this.’

  This time the shape was of a smoothly tapering bottle.

  ‘What were they usually like, her bottles?’

  ‘The smooth ones.’

  ‘Not like this one, then?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Can you recall ever seeing her take laudanum from a bottle this shape?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Have you any idea at all where this bottle might have come from?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked both puzzled and scared. I told her to leave the bottle and glass as they were, and asked whether she could lock the bedroom. She nodded, went back to the sitting room and took the key from the drawer of a table. Once the door was locked, she insisted on drawing the heavy curtains of the sitting room to shut out the sunlight before we left. We went back down the stairs that led to the library door.

  ‘What shall I do now?’ Betty said.

  I felt like telling her I had no idea. I supposed there were a dozen places I should be looking, hundreds of questions I should be asking, but my mind was a blank.

  ‘I think you’d better ask Mrs Bream,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the library for a while.’

  Wait for Robert Carmichael to come back. I knew that most of those questions should concern him.

  It was a relief to walk into the high, sunlit library, not so full of her intimate presence as the rooms upstairs. For a while, I simply walked from bay to bay, among the ranks of tooled leather spines and gold lettering, books nobody had read for generations, old sermons, county records, European genealogies with quaint crests. My wanderings took me towards the table where I’d read her journal, thinking of the secret that she’d come close to telling me and now never would. Sunlight was coming through the window under the half drawn-down blind, just as it had been on the morning when I’d last sat there. A leather-bound volume was lying closed on the reading desk. At first I thought I was imagining it because I’d been thinking about her journal. But it was the journal itself. I was sure Robert Carmichael had put it back on the shelf after I’d read it. Who had taken it out again?

  I sat down at the desk, opened the journal at random and found myself looking at the Antwerp entry with its picture of the boy wrapped in a blanket, holding the cup of tea she’d brewed for him. The young Handy. Now that I knew his name and her opinion of him, it seemed that there was something shrewd and knowing about the eyes, too old for his round boyish face. I read on, hoping to find something I’d missed on first r
eading that might give a clue to the story she’d almost told me. There was nothing new, except my sense of loss for the observant and talented young woman she’d once been and how all that had ended.

  Her account of the storm by Lake Como was almost unbearable now, reminding me of the night I’d spent with her. I turned the page, steeling myself for that diagonal scrawl across the two pages: This morning Lord Brinkburn has told me something terrible, terrible. It was still there, but it wasn’t alone any more. Both pages, above it and below it, were filled by neat and level lines of writing, in what was unmistakeably her hand. At first I wondered if I’d made some ridiculous mistake and the writing had been there all the time. Then, at the start of the line in the top left-hand corner I saw yesterday’s date. I read on.

  I’m going to write it now at last. I feel time is running out. The storm last night was a sign, I think, like the first one. I am not sure who will read this, or whether anybody will read it, but I’ll write it and fate will have to decide. I’m too tired to decide things myself any more. I’ve had to make too many decisions that nobody should be asked to make. Here’s what happened. My husband really was away that night. There was nothing new in that. Time and time again on our tour, he’d spent nights away from me. At first he’d make excuses about meeting old friends and suchlike and I’d believe them, or at least try to believe them. He always took the boy Handy with him. After a while, I’d catch the boy looking at me sidelong and grinning, as if he knew something I didn’t. Then my husband would make sudden changes of plan–staying in some place days longer than expected or hurrying us on to the next.

  I tried to enjoy the travelling and my sketching and not think about him. I succeeded for much of the time, but it was almost as if it made him angry to see me in anything like contentment. He took to dressing very carefully and ostentatiously before these nights away, as if to make clear that whatever was happening elsewhere was more important than his life with me. I began to ask questions. He never answered them. Once, when I became angry and demanded an answer, he slapped my face and said it was no business of mine. I thought it might be better when we got to Lake Como and established ourselves in the villa, but it was worse. He was away several nights a week and often did not come back till the afternoon.

  That morning after the storm, I was determined to have it out with him. Perhaps the electricity had stirred up my brain. I woke up early in the morning, just as it was getting light. It seemed as if the storm had drained all the beauty out of things. The lake was a dull pewter colour, the pine trees without the sun on them were greenish-brown, the colour of moss in winter. It came to me suddenly that, if I didn’t challenge him, my whole life would be like that, without warmth or colour. That gave me a kind of desperate courage. He came back earlier than he usually did after those nights away, about ten o’clock in the morning. I heard the wheels of his coach on the cobbles. Then his voice yelling for the groom to come and take the horses.

  He sounded to be in a bad temper. Somehow, that made it easier to keep to my resolution. I didn’t care if he hit me again. Even pain would be better than nothingness.

  That brought us to the bottom of the double page. I looked at the neat lines of writing, with the entry from twenty-three years ago slashing across the paper like a brand on an animal’s smooth hide. I turned the page, holding my breath in case there was no more, but the neat writing went on down the page that had been blank when I last read the journal.

  I knew he’d come to me straight away in my tower. Although he left me alone so often and paid me little attention when we were together, he’d always come to see me when he returned, much in the way a man might check that his horse or hound hadn’t run away. I waited for him in my sitting room, in a chair by the window. As soon as he came through the door I said to him, quite coolly, I believe: ‘I wonder why you took the trouble to marry me, since you seem to prefer anybody’s company to mine.’ He closed the door and stood there looking at me for a long time, with a strange smile on his face. I think even at that hour in the morning he had taken drink, and when he spoke at last, his voice was slurred. Clear enough though for me to hear what he said, although at first I simply couldn’t understand it. ‘Oh, but I haven’t married you, my dear,’ he said. I think I accused him of being drunk, upbraided him for saying such a wicked and monstrous thing, even in jest. He went on smiling. ‘I assure you, I’m not jesting,’ he said. He went to the door, opened it and yelled for Handy. The wretched boy was never far away from him and appeared in seconds. C told him to go to his dressing room and bring his black leather portfolio.

  While he was away I sat frozen, unable to move so much as a finger. C straddled the arm of a sofa and lit a cigarillo. Handy brought back the portfolio. C untied it, sorted through it and gave Handy a piece of paper to bring across the room to me. It was a record from a church in Northumberland of C’s marriage to one Natalie Stevens, dated nine years before. I write down this fact calmly now. Even after this gap of time I cannot begin to describe the sensations of anger, bewilderment, incredulity that made me more like a mad thing than a rational being. Two things, though, I must bring myself to write down. The creature I had thought of as my husband informed me that he had a son by this woman, then eight years old. Also, in reply I suppose to some sobbed-out question from me as to how he could do this thing, he said: ‘She is a very beautiful woman, much more so than you are, my dear.’ The Handy creature had been in the room all the time this was going on.

  Cornelius asked him, asked a malevolent child: ‘Is not your other mistress much more beautiful?’ And Handy looked into my face, laughed, and said, ‘Yes.’

  There the writing ended, halfway down the page. It had been a warm day when I came into the library, but I was shivering as if it had become midwinter. Like Sophia, I couldn’t take in what I was being told.

  ‘Is she telling the truth now?’

  I must have said it aloud because a voice from behind me said, ‘The truth about what?’

  Just as when I first read the journal, Robert Carmichael had come quietly into the library while I was too absorbed to notice and was standing a few steps behind my chair.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After that first glance behind me, I didn’t look at him. When I turned back the page to show him the start of what she’d written, I had to force my hand to stop trembling. He must have read quickly, because within seconds his arm came over my shoulder and turned the page onwards. The sleeve of his jacket brushed my cheek. I gave him enough time to read to the end.

  ‘Did you know she’d written this?’ I said.

  I still didn’t turn and look at him, not trusting my face to hide the horror I felt.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Had she talked about it to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So is it true?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  The reply came without hesitation, his voice heavy.

  ‘Why didn’t she denounce him? He’d committed bigamy. She could have had him sent to prison.’

  I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he was moving round the desk to face me.

  ‘Is that what you’d have done, Miss Lane?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it what any woman would have done?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Imagine her circumstances. She’d been living with him since the wedding as his wife, with all that implies. Yes, if she could have proved the earlier marriage, he’d have spent a long time in prison, but would that have helped her?’

  ‘She’d have had her freedom.’

  ‘Freedom. It’s a grand word, isn’t it, Miss Lane? A dog dying in the gutter has all the freedom in the world to get up and walk away, if only he could.’

  ‘She was an intelligent woman. Surely she had friends and family?’

  ‘Her father was dead and she’d never been close to her mother. Besides, what could they have done? She was neither wife nor maid, and nothing could change that.’

  I met his look
, willing myself not to blush.

  ‘Are you telling me her reputation was gone, through no fault of her own?’

  ‘As the world sees it, yes.’

  ‘Then the world’s a donkey. Surely, when the truth was known, anybody whose opinion mattered would pity her.’

  ‘Pity, yes. If you’ll permit me, you are probably about the same age now as Sophia was then. Would you want to spend the rest of your life being pitied?’

  His way of bringing the conversation back to me was disconcerting. I didn’t want to put myself in her place, but there was an intensity about his voice and his look that was forcing me to do it.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Forgive me if I’m being indelicate, but for her sake you should know it. By the morning he told her about the marriage, Sophia had good reason to know that she was in a certain condition.’

  ‘She was expecting his baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I dropped my eyes again, not so much from delicacy as from pain for her.

  ‘You see, when he put his terms to her, she really had no alternative,’ he said.

  ‘Terms?’

  ‘The terms on which she lived for the rest of her life. She should have this house, a comfortable income, freedom to travel if she wanted. He and she would remain married in the eyes of the world but live separate lives.’

  ‘As long as she didn’t denounce him as a bigamist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So she accepted?’

  ‘As I explained, she really had no choice,’ he said.

  I wanted to scream out that, yes, of course she had a choice–child or no child; that she’d have been better begging for their bread, singing in the street for their supper, than living with the bargain she’d made. If he was waiting for me to agree with him, he’d be waiting a long time. Perhaps he realised that.

  ‘In a sense, she won in the end,’ he said.

  ‘In what sense? Living with her books and her auriculas?’