A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  I felt like adding…and with you, but stopped myself in time.

  ‘She married him after all,’ he said. ‘A year later, Natalie Stevens died. She and Lord Brinkburn had been living in Rome. He came back here and showed Sophia the death certificate. It said she’d died of a fever. Then he took Sophia off to Germany and married her. It was a perfectly legal marriage this time. Unlike his elder brother, Miles is his father’s legitimate son.’

  ‘He was protecting himself when he married Sophia,’ I said. ‘Once he’d made her his legal wife, she couldn’t be asked to give evidence against him in court, so he was safe from a bigamy charge.’

  ‘Yes, and of course he had her money. That was probably what weighed most with him. I think that occurred to Sophia later. At the time, she even hoped he’d had a change of heart and regretted what he’d done to her.’

  ‘Why did Lord Brinkburn take such a risk in the first place? He must have known he was risking prison. Or was the man always mad?’

  ‘No, not as the world sees it. But almost insanely arrogant. Believe me, I’ve thought about the man’s character a lot. I wanted to understand how he could cause such harm. I decided that he believed anything he wanted must happen, more or less as a natural law. He wanted Natalie Stevens, so he married her. He might even have acknowledged the marriage sooner or later. I’m sure society would have said he’d married beneath him, but he never cared much for public opinion. That changed when he learned of his father’s debts. The almost worthless state of the inheritance must have come as a shock to him. A reasonable man might have sold off the estate and lived economically with the woman he’d married. But that wasn’t in Brinkburn’s nature. He hadn’t told his friends about the marriage, so when they pointed him in the direction of a rich bride to solve his problems, he seized on that, as he’d always seized on anything else he wanted. Perhaps that long honeymoon tour gave him an opportunity to see what a tangle he’d made for himself.’

  He spoke without a pause, not looking at me for understanding or approval, as if Lord Brinkburn’s character had been a life study with him.

  ‘Did you discuss this with Sophia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His reply was simple and dignified. Perhaps I was being unfair to him, almost blaming him for the wrong another man had done. And yet there’d been too many evasions for me to trust him.

  ‘So is that where this wretched business started?’ I said. ‘She knows Miles is legitimate, as the world sees it, but Stephen isn’t. So she thought Miles should inherit, but couldn’t bear to tell the real story.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In any case, according to her account, neither of them’s the heir. If his son by the other woman has survived, then he must inherit. Didn’t she see that?’

  ‘Condemn her for not thinking clearly, if you must. God knows, I tried to talk her out of doing anything about it.’

  ‘You thought she should keep quiet and let Stephen inherit,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course she loves Miles but doesn’t love Stephen.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  He seemed surprised.

  ‘Yes. She said he’d accused her of driving his father away. It seems hard that she should go on blaming him for something he said when he was not much more than a child.’

  ‘It was. Believe me, I tried to tell her so. But you’ve seen how stubborn she could be when she thought she was in the right.

  ‘She thinks Stephen takes after his father.’

  ‘No more so than Miles does. Believe me, I know the pair of them very well. But there was no convincing her.’

  ‘Because of what he said when he was fourteen?’

  ‘There was something else. She didn’t tell you that Stephen went to visit his father in Italy during his first long vacation from university?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was natural enough. He was a young man with money and freedom to travel for the first time. He hadn’t seen much of his father through his childhood, and I believe Brinkburn had thrown out some casual invitation. But, as Sophia saw it, he was enlisting on his father’s side, and that was that. Ironic, in its way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘From hints thrown out by Stephen, I gathered that the visit had not gone as well as he’d hoped. He seemed depressed in spirits when he returned. I think he’d seen the sort of life his father led in Italy and didn’t like it. Sophia didn’t see that. She chose to think Brinkburn had let Stephen in on some terrible secret.’

  ‘The first marriage? Did he?’

  ‘No, I’m quite certain of that.’

  ‘Something else?’

  He said nothing for a while, as if making up his mind. Then he put his hand on the back of the chair at the other side of the desk, glanced at me to ask permission and sat down.

  ‘I’m going to tell you this because there is no point in not telling it now, and it may explain something to you. Sophia believed there was something worse. As you know, she was a highly imaginative woman, and she had been thinking about all this for more than twenty years. She’d convinced herself that Natalie Stevens did not die of natural causes.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘She thought that once he found his first wife inconvenient, he poisoned her, with Handy as his accomplice, and bribed a doctor to write the death certificate he showed Sophia.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘That last day I was with her, she said Handy’s death was justice being done,’ I said. ‘Was that what she meant?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘Is there any proof?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’

  ‘No. But it fitted with Sophia’s mood in the last few days. She told me she thought things were coming full circle. She believed she was going to die soon.’

  ‘Was she ill?’

  ‘No, apart from the reliance on laudanum. It started when she knew her husband was near death. She got it lodged in her mind that, because he was so possessive, he’d somehow take her with him when he went. When Handy arrived here out of the blue, that was the last straw. I remember what she said to me: He’s sent his homunculus to claim me, like a daemon come from hell. Handy helped him kill one wife, now he’s come for the other. There was no reasoning with her.’

  I looked up at him.

  ‘So did she kill Handy?’ I said.

  He looked at me.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  His voice was so quiet that the words seemed no more than a rearrangement of the air around us.

  ‘It wasn’t Mr Lomax who coached poor Whiteley to lie at the inquest,’ I said. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘That was a bad thing to do to an honest man,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think I didn’t know that? I wanted to give the evidence myself, but Lomax said it would come better from the steward. If my first plan had succeeded, we wouldn’t have needed Whiteley.’

  ‘What was the first plan?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘If she did kill Handy, would you blame her–knowing what you know now?’ he said.

  I knew I wouldn’t get a response to my question until I answered his. I thought about it.

  ‘I don’t think I should blame her, or not much. Not enough to see her hanged for him.’

  ‘Yes, it was my idea. Lomax knew about it, but it was my idea.’

  ‘So what was this plan?’ I said. ‘And how did Handy die?’

  I expected him to demand some promise of secrecy, but he settled himself on a chair and told me.

  ‘There’s a fruit store by the garden wall. It’s not much used at this time of year.’

  It was one of the places I’d searched for Tabby. I remembered empty shelves and a lingering smell of apples.

  ‘The head gardener does his rounds every night,’ he said. ‘He noticed that the door had been left ajar and went to close it. That’s when he found Handy’s body on the floor, wi
th his head battered in. There was a coal hammer beside him, with blood and hair on it. The hammer had been left there from the time they’d been repairing a shelf back in the autumn. The head gardener went and told Whiteley, and Whiteley told me. As luck would have it, that was the same evening they were packing up the armour to go to London.’

  ‘And it was your idea to pack up Handy’s body with it?’ I said.

  He looked me in the eye.

  ‘My idea entirely. Whiteley helped. I think the poor man was in a state of shock. Our coachman came round in the morning, as arranged. I watched him and one of the gardener’s boys loading the crates, hoping against hope nobody would smell or see anything unusual. They didn’t.’

  ‘Then you went up to London to consult with Lomax,’ I said. ‘By the locomotive, I suppose?’

  ‘How did you guess? Yes. It had already struck me that, with the advent of the North Star, a man could virtually be in two places at once: I could see the crates off, in apparent innocence, then reach London while he was still on the road.’

  ‘You were planning to intercept him before he got to Pratt’s, say there’d been some mistake and reclaim the crate with Handy in it, somewhere near London and well away from the hall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Even the North Star, it seems, is not entirely reliable. Between here and London it did whatever the locomotive equivalent is of a horse casting a shoe. We were delayed for three hours at Slough. By the time I reached London, the load was delivered and Pratt’s closed for the night.’

  ‘So you tried to break in,’ I said.

  Up to then, he’d been telling the story calmly. Now his eyes widened and his body tensed.

  ‘Were you watching me?’

  ‘Of course not. At that time, I didn’t even know you existed. But a policeman scared you away. He happened to talk to the officer who gave evidence at the inquest, Constable Bevan. Bevan’s been down here, asking questions.’

  He sunk his head into his hands.

  ‘Does he know who I am?’

  ‘I don’t think so. All he has is a description of a dark-haired gentleman. But he’s a clever man, and I think he’ll be back.’

  He raised his head to look me in the eye and gave a nod, accepting what I’d said.

  ‘Tell me, what would you have done with Handy’s body if you’d managed to get it from the coachman or away from Pratt’s?’ I said.

  ‘Thrown it in the Thames at night. Bodies of unknown people are being taken out of the Thames every morning, you only have to look in the newspapers. So the assumption would have been that he died in London.’

  ‘And might never have been identified or associated with the Brinkburns?’

  ‘If the fates had been kind, no.’

  ‘But they weren’t. I suppose once you’d been almost caught by the police, you had to give up the idea. He had to be left for Miles to discover next day.’

  ‘I never intended to involve poor Miles. I thought he’d simply be found by one of Pratt’s workmen when they unpacked the armour.’

  ‘So when did you know about Miles finding the body?’

  ‘As soon as it happened. I was watching.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a jeweller’s across the road from Pratt’s. I was in there, pretending to take an interest in bracelets. I saw Miles go in, but was too late to stop him. Soon afterwards, a young woman in a blue dress came tripping down Bond Street without a care in the world and went inside. I wished I could protect her from what was going to happen.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. I still wish it.’

  ‘Too late now.’

  ‘It’s all too late.’

  He closed his eyes and leaned back, looking nearly dead from tiredness.

  ‘How much did Lomax know about this?’ I said.

  ‘Once the body was discovered, I had to tell him. He was angry, but we were too deeply in by then.’

  ‘Protecting Sophia?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So what happened?’ I said. ‘Did Sophia somehow decoy Handy to the fruit store, jump out from the shadows and batter him to death with a hammer, then go quietly back to her room?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t know.’

  His eyes stayed closed.

  ‘Then, some time later, she’s overcome with remorse and commits suicide. With a dose of laudanum that you yourself said wasn’t enough to kill her.’

  ‘What else am I to think? Until I saw that entry in her journal, I doubted it. Why did she write that after all this time?’

  ‘I think she came very close to telling me the story on the night of the storm,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, if she hadn’t been killed, she’d have given me this to read.’

  His eyes snapped open.

  ‘Killed? You’re saying she didn’t kill herself?’

  ‘I am, for two reasons. There’s an empty bottle that probably contained laudanum by her bed. But it’s not the one I saw, or that Betty ever saw. It’s a different shape.’

  I sketched with my hand in the air the shape of the bottle with shoulders. His eyes followed my hand.

  ‘Do you know anything about that bottle?’ I said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘And you still think she couldn’t have arranged an extra supply without your knowing about it?’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ he said.

  ‘Suppose it contained a stronger solution of laudanum than she usually took? Enough to kill her.’

  ‘But the boat–who put her in the boat?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He said nothing for a while, then: ‘You said there were two things.’

  ‘The man on the lawn. Very early that morning I was with her, she screamed out because she’d seen a man standing on the lawn, looking up at her window. I thought at the time it was a figment of her imagination. I’m wondering about that now. If somebody wanted to change that laudanum bottle, he’d have been spying on her, looking for his opportunity.’

  ‘You thought it might be me.’

  ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t have needed to spy on her. You knew her routines better than anybody.’

  ‘So I’d have been ideally placed to substitute the bottle,’ he said. ‘I suppose that has occurred to you too?’

  ‘Why would you do that, when you’d gone to so much trouble to protect her?’

  ‘Perhaps because I thought I couldn’t protect her any more and wanted to spare her suffering.’

  ‘Is that the case?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If there was a man spying on her, he was either an outsider or a person who doesn’t come here very frequently,’ I said.

  I didn’t need to mention names. He knew that neither Miles nor Stephen had been frequent visitors to their mother’s house.

  ‘We still don’t know a man was really there,’ he said.

  ‘No, but there’s something that makes me almost sure of it. My maid Tabby hasn’t been seen since that night. I’m becoming very much afraid that she saw something she wasn’t meant to and has…’ I hesitated, not wanting to say the worst, ‘…has come to some harm.’

  We said nothing for what seemed like a long time. Then he reached across and closed Sophia’s journal.

  ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I said.

  ‘Burn it.’

  ‘No.’

  My cry of protest was instinctive, not because of anything that might happen now, but for the final destruction of what she might have been.

  ‘It could do harm,’ he said.

  ‘Not to her, not any more. Is it Stephen you’re thinking of? You’re still worrying about a smooth succession and no scandal. You loved her and somebody’s killed her. Doesn’t that matter more?’

  He was angry now.

  ‘I don’t think you’re the best judge of what matters.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I am. But I know this matters.’
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br />   I tied the tapes of the journal, stood up and tucked it under my arm. For a moment I thought he was going to wrench it away from me.

  ‘Where are you taking it?’

  ‘Somewhere safe. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to show it to policemen or lawyers. If that changes, I’ll give you warning.’

  He could have got it from me quite easily if he’d really wanted. In spite of his protest, I sensed a relief in him that it was being taken out of his hands. He stood back and let me walk out of the library and out of the house without saying anything. The journal sat on my lap on the railway journey back to London.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Abel Yard was in its summer evening state of drowsiness, hens scratching in the dust, Mr Colley’s bone-idle son-in-law straddling an old chair in front of the carpenter’s shed where he pretended to work. The chair only had three legs, so at least he had to exert himself to the extent of keeping it balanced. I asked him if he’d seen anything of Tabby.

  ‘Neither hide nor hair of her.’

  Not taking his word for it, I looked in her outhouse. The sacks were just as I’d last seen them, so she hadn’t slept there. I took my bag and the journal upstairs and found a note from Mrs Martley on the table: If you get back, I’m sleeping over at Mr Suter’s just in case. There was the heel of a loaf in the bread crock and the remains of a ham in the meat safe, so it was just as well I was too tired to be hungry. I brewed tea and drank a couple of cups, then went upstairs. It had been a long day. I took off my dress and corsets and lay down on the bed, dozing in the golden evening light that filled my room.

  I was almost asleep when a sharp knock sounded on the door downstairs. I thought it might be Mrs Martley, back for some reason and having forgotten her key, so I opened the window giving on to the yard and shouted down, ‘Is that you?’ No answer. I couldn’t see whoever it was standing at the door because of the angle of the roof. Then a man’s voice:

  ‘Miss Lane?’

  Surprise jolted me back from the window. It was either Stephen or Miles Brinkburn. Their voices were alike, but goodness only knew why either should come and seek me out, on a Sunday evening in a place like Abel Yard.

  ‘Wait there,’ I called down.

  I took my time putting my clothes back on, trying to give myself a chance to think. I was so mazed with drowsiness and the events of the day that it was hard to get my thoughts in order. Finally I went downstairs and opened the door on Stephen Brinkburn. He was a tall streak of black: black gloves, black cravat, black top hat.