by Caro Peacock
‘I can’t answer that. All I can say is if you expect me to believe Stephen is going to try to kill his brother, I simply don’t.’
‘Somebody killed Simon Handy,’ I said.
We walked in silence for a while. Then he said quietly: ‘We buried Sophia yesterday.’
‘Have they held the inquest on her?’
‘Yesterday morning. The verdict was accidental death. They decided she drank too much laudanum, meaning only to sleep, and was sufficiently confused to get into the boat, as she sometimes did.’
With a country jury, sparing the feelings of a prominent family, the verdict hardly came as a surprise.
‘I suppose you gave evidence,’ I said.
‘Yes, I did.’
It was a simple statement. There wasn’t a trace of combativeness or evasion in him. He was too tired for that, as if he’d been living on his nerves for a long time. As before, I was caught between feeling liking and pity for him, but still nagged by a sense of something hidden.
I asked him if anything had been said at the inquest about the extra bottle of laudanum.
‘It was mentioned that there was an empty bottle her maid couldn’t account for. Nothing more.’
‘The police think they know where it came from,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t mentioned at the inquest because they couldn’t prove it.’
I told him about Tabby, and my theory that Lady Brinkburn had met her and asked her to buy the laudanum. He shook his head.
‘Sophia had more pride than that. She’d rather have gone without than got some girl she hardly knew to run errands behind Betty’s back and mine. She was a deeply honourable woman.’
Perhaps he caught some doubt on my face.
‘Miss Lane, some time ago I asked if you’d believe me when I told you that Lady Brinkburn and I were not lovers. You were kind enough to say that you would.’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t say it then. There were reasons. But it’s only just to her memory to say so now. Sophia was more kind and generous to me than any man had a right to expect, but we were never lovers. She lived and died an entirely faithful wife to a husband who treated her shamefully.’
We turned into the side road.
‘So, do you believe me?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you for that.’
We said nothing more until we came within sight of the asylum. Its gates stood open to the road.
‘Even if you don’t believe me about Stephen and Miles, please do what you can,’ I said. ‘Keep as close to Miles as possible.’
Most of my trust was in Amos, but it was just possible that Robert Carmichael might have some effect. When we came to the top of the drive, I told him he should walk on ahead.
‘You’re here by right,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
But I was still puzzled about his presence there. He nodded, and to my surprise, reached out and touched my hand.
‘Thank you for being concerned, for Sophia and for them too. I hope to see you when it’s over.’
I watched him walk down the drive. A group of people and three vehicles stood in front of the house. The hearse and mourning carriage now had their teams of horses attached to them and were a fine sight in their way, like some great monument in ebony and silver. The hearse had broad glass panels at the back and sides to give a clear view of the coffin, which was draped in black velvet with gold braid edging. A knight’s helmet, brightly burnished and looking remarkably like the ancestral one that had belonged to Sir Gilbert, stood on top of the coffin. There was even a small page, or ‘tiger’ standing on the step at the back of the hearse, dressed in black velvet breeches and tunic and a black tricorne hat. Lord Brinkburn had contrived a grand spectacle for himself, perhaps in the knowledge that nobody cared enough to do it for him.
Apart from the two principle vehicles there was only one other carriage, an old-fashioned travelling chariot. Since a society funeral usually included a train of at least a dozen carriages bearing friends and relations, and even empty carriages sent to represent their owners, this was a sign of how few friends Lord Brinkburn had left in his native land. One of them, Oliver Lomax, was standing by the travelling chariot, looking at his pocket watch. Even from this distance he looked less upright and confident than when I’d last seen him. Perhaps he was genuinely mourning the death of his old friend. Miles was beside him, holding his tall black horse by the bridle. There was no sign of Stephen.
Miles glanced at Lomax and, at a nod from him, mounted the black horse and rode to take up position in front of the hearse. Under his black top hat with its crepe streamers, his face was pale and expressionless. The driver of the hearse, red-faced and sweating in his heavy funeral cape, flicked the reins and the six black geldings came to attention. Lomax opened the door of the travelling chariot and seemed to be inviting Carmichael to get in with him, but Carmichael glanced towards Miles and stayed on foot. I looked round for Amos but couldn’t see him. My guess was that he’d be waiting on his horse by one of the shrubberies, ready to join the procession once it moved off. Miles pressed his heels into his horse’s side and set off at a slow walk. The hearse driver let him get three lengths ahead then set his team in motion, in a slow grinding of wheels on gravel, creaking of leather and jingle of harness chains, the page clinging to a strap on the back. After another three lengths’ gap, the mourning coach followed. By then, I was close enough to glance inside and wasn’t surprised to see it was empty. All part of the show. Robert Carmichael paced beside it, his eyes on Miles. The travelling chariot followed, with Lomax as its only passenger. I fell in behind it. If we went on as slowly as this, it would be easy to keep up on foot.
Halfway up the drive, a tall shadow of man and horse fell across me and there was Amos.
‘Best if I ride on ahead of them, see if there’s anyone up to anything,’ he said.
Before he’d finished speaking, he was cantering along the grass beside the drive, passing the hearse. Carmichael gave him a startled look and moved up closer to Miles, then visibly relaxed as Amos rode on and out of the gates. Inside his carriage, Lomax would probably be annoyed at this informality, but there was nothing he could do about it.
As we’d guessed, turning six horses and a hearse through the gateway proved a difficult business and the whole procession slowed to a halt. On foot, I was able to squeeze past to the road. Amos, as the unofficial outrider, was well in front, going at a walk now and turning his head from side to side to see over the hedges. He looked back at me and gave a thumbs-up sign. All clear so far. I stood back as Miles rode out of the gateway, with Carmichael on foot by his side. They were deep in conversation, with Miles leaning down from the saddle. Behind them the hearse manoeuvred itself through the gates, followed by the two carriages, and they rolled slowly behind Miles and his horse towards the main road. From the point of view of anybody intending an attack, that was a good opportunity missed.
I walked behind Oliver Lomax’s carriage, thinking about what Carmichael had said. If he’d spoken the truth in saying that he and Sophia weren’t lovers, what explained this devotion to the family? Then both my thoughts and my feet were brought to a sharp halt because the carriage had stopped so suddenly I’d almost walked into the back of it. Lomax’s head came out of the window, shouting to his driver on the box to ask what was happening. I pushed my way past, walking on the bank close to the hedge through swathes of buttercups and red campion. The whole procession had also come to a stop. The small page on the back of the hearse was swinging out on the hand-strap, trying to see round. I pushed past the mourning carriage and hearse to where Miles, still on horseback, and Robert Carmichael on foot were standing in the middle of the narrow road. In front of them, blocking the way, was a tree trunk that certainly had not been there when we’d walked along the same road about a quarter of an hour before. It wasn’t a particularly substantial tree trunk, but since six horses and a hearse could hardly be expected to jump, it blocked the way as effectively a
s a larger barrier. There was no possibility that it could have fallen accidentally on a calm day, with not enough breeze to stir a grass blade.
Amos had dismounted from his cob and was standing in front of the fallen tree.
‘Get back,’ he shouted at Miles and Carmichael. ‘Get back behind the hearse there.’
Carmichael took the point at once and grabbed the bridle of the black horse, trying to drag it round, but Miles hauled on the rein, resisting him and demanding to know what was happening. The hearse driver echoed the demand more plaintively, and the alarmed voice of Oliver Lomax sounded from two coaches back. Nervous horses started whinnying and fidgeting, jammed in the narrow road and sensing the unease of the humans round them. Amos bent his legs, hooked his arms under the tree trunk and began to raise it. Two men might have found it a heavy burden, and at first it looked as if even Amos’s strength couldn’t shift it alone. The hearse driver clambered down from his box with the intention of helping, but before he got there Amos straightened his legs and stood upright. For a moment he stood with the tree balanced across his forearms, then pivoted and tossed it alongside the hedge, leaving the road clear.
Even as the grass was still quivering from the impact of it, and before the hearse driver could clamber back on his box, a man appeared from a gateway just beyond where the tree had been. He was hatless, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, leaves and earth clinging to his black jacket. He was carrying a large woodman’s axe. Miles was looking in his direction and saw him first.
‘Stephen, what are you doing here?’
Stephen made no reply. He walked out into the centre of the road, stopping in front of the hearse.
‘Better let me take care of the axe, sir,’ Amos said peaceably.
Stephen ignored him. I could see Amos debating with himself whether to take it off Stephen by force. When Stephen grounded the axe, its head down, but kept his hand round the shaft, Amos glanced at me and moved close to him.
‘Not yet,’ I mouthed.
Stephen was facing the funeral cavalcade like a man about to make a speech. I for one wanted to hear what he had to say. Oliver Lomax had left his carriage and pushed his way through to stand alongside Miles and Carmichael.
‘There’s no necessity for this,’ Lomax called to Stephen.
‘There is every necessity.’ Stephen’s voice was loud, but sounded calm. ‘You wouldn’t listen to me any other way. This whole funeral is a fraud and a farce. You are burying a man who’s not dead.’
‘Get out of the way,’ Miles shouted at Stephen. He kicked his horse into a trot and came riding at Stephen, barging Carmichael aside. Stephen shifted his weight and began to raise the axe. Amos grabbed for Stephen’s arm a moment too late. His momentum took Amos swinging past Stephen so that he was standing between the two brothers, off-balance. The axe rose. Amos let himself fall back against the black gelding’s chest. Whether he was most concerned to save the horse or Miles there was no telling. But either they’d never been the targets or Stephen had misjudged his blow. The axe swung and struck, not at Miles but at the glass side panel of the hearse.
Even the glass seemed frozen by the suddenness of it. For one heartbeat, the cracked pane hung in its place, defying the laws of gravity. Then it split apart and slithered down to the packed earth of the road, hissing and tinkling. Stephen dropped the axe and took his stand by the shattered panel.
‘Just come here and look, if you don’t believe me.’
He yelled it to everybody. Carmichael was the first to move. He put his hand on Stephen’s arm.
‘What is it you want us to see?’
His calm and the quietness of his voice came like cool water in a fever. Stephen looked to be on the point of clambering into the hearse but he stopped and turned to his old tutor, trying to match his reasoned tone.
‘What Lomax won’t admit is that we’ve all been led by the nose…’
Miles threw himself down from the horse at and came towards them.
‘Don’t try and reason with him, Carmichael. He’s taken leave of his senses.’
Any hope of calm flew away. Stephen seared a look of hatred at his brother, pushed Carmichael aside and started running. Before any of us could see what was coming, he’d vaulted on to the driver’s box of the hearse and grabbed the reins. The startled horses flung their heads up and down like black sea waves. I had just a second before the wheels started turning to make my decision, so I suppose it should be called more of an impulse. I ducked my head down, wrapped my hands in my skirts to protect them from the glass, and dived inside the hearse. As it lurched forwards I heard shouts from outside, Amos’s deep tones loudest among them, but Stephen had put the scared horses straight into a canter, so there was nothing anyone could do about it.
There’d been no time to explain, and precious little that would have sounded reasonable even if I’d tried. Simply, I was taking a gamble: a gamble that–in spite of what his brother had said–Stephen had not after all taken leave of his senses, and based on his behaviour of the last few minutes, I’d have had to admit that the odds did not look promising.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I crouched on the floor, everything rattling and bouncing round me like an ironmonger’s shop in an earthquake. Clouds of brown dust from the road whirled in through the shattered side, setting me coughing and stinging my eyes. I doubt if a hearse had ever moved so fast. A mere coffin was no burden at all for six excited horses, and Stephen was driving like a man trying to win a bet. Through the small window at the front of the hearse, I could see his back as he sat on the driver’s box. He didn’t turn and had no reason to suppose I was on board. Looking through the back window, I glimpsed a shape in the dust clouds that looked like the mourning carriage coming after us, with a figure large enough to be Amos on the driver’s box. It was travelling fast but not gaining on us, having four horses instead of six. As well as the dust, my view of it was restricted by what seemed to be two black columns on the outside of the window. It took me some time to realise that they were the legs of the unfortunate page, forgotten by everybody and clinging to the back of the hearse for dear life.
Through it all, something was clanging like a funeral bell gone mad. The knight’s helmet had fallen off the coffin in the first few strides and was now rolling round the floor, striking against the corners of the vehicle and the coffin sides. On one of its revolutions, I caught it and looked at it. I couldn’t be certain that it was the one I’d seen in Pratt’s workshop in Bond Street, but it certainly looked like it. My theory, still forming among the whirling dust clouds, depended on the idea that it was one and the same. The clowns from Astley’s–acting on somebody’s behalf–had taken the armour from Pratt’s to an unknown destination. One of the clowns had been at Kingston that very morning and might well have been sent on to meet the hearse at its first stop at Esher. These two facts, combined with Stephen’s claim that we were burying a man who wasn’t dead, had formed the wild idea that sent me diving into the hearse. I wished Miles hadn’t interrupted Stephen, or that there were some way of talking to him. You’re missing something clear as noonday. I thought I knew what he meant now. I’d no idea where he was heading, but he’d surely have to stop at some time. He could hardly drive a hearse and six horses for long on the public roads at this speed. Soon we’d have to turn out of the side road and on to the main highway with heavy traffic. Did he have a plan at all?
The helmet was in my hands, but there was still a metallic clashing noise somewhere. It took me a while to realise that it was coming from inside the coffin. So the rest of the armour was in there. It made sense of a kind, the way that some madness makes sense if you follow the thread patiently enough. A change in our speed sent the velvet pall slipping from the coffin top, hanging askew with the gold braid grazing the floor. We’d slowed from a canter to a trot and the shape behind us was gaining. It was indeed the mourning carriage with Amos on the box, getting all the speed possible out of his four mares. The black legs of the
page were still there on the other side of the window. Then as I watched the legs canted over to one side because we were turning left, still at a trot and dangerously sharply. I thought the poor lad must fall and be badly hurt, and then that the hearse itself would topple over and all of us, people and horses, be killed. A vehicle less broadly based would have gone for a certainty, but somehow we were past the turn, out on the high road and cantering again, and the legs of the page had returned to upright. Amos and his team managed the turn better and gained some ground. I guessed that his plan was to overtake us and force the hearse to stop, but there was still a lot of ground to make up.
The pall was crumpled on the floor now, the gleaming coffin top bare. It had shifted. The sharp turn had dislodged it so that it was at an angle to the coffin itself, a triangle of blackness gaping at the corner. Surely coffin lids were screwed down? This one wasn’t. There were holes all round the lid, expensively brass lined, but no screws in them. That made sense too. It gave me just enough confidence to do the thing that would prove my theory right or wrong. I moved from a crouch to a kneeling position, accustomed enough now to the motion to risk a move, and put the helmet on the floor. Still on my knees, I shuffled towards the end of the coffin and gave the lid a push to open it a few inches wider, heart hammering in case I was wrong. My reward was a gleam of burnished metal–a pair of greaves, lying neatly side by side.
‘Leg armour, but no legs.’
I said it aloud, wild with relief. Stephen was right. All this funeral pomp for a suit of empty armour. The person who thought he had a right to wear it wasn’t dead at all, but alive and enjoying his bitter joke. Anger as well as relief made me shove the whole coffin lid aside. The thump it made as it fell off jarred through my body. I looked from the greaves, up to the swell of the corselet, and a scream jagged through my head, through the interior of the hearse, so that the whole world was ringing with it.
