Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman

by Tessa Arlen

  “At about quarter past one o’clock, I saw you, too. I think it was actually the Dashing White Sergeant, my hip remembers it well.” Colonel Valentine gave her a regretful smile, no doubt, she thought, to encourage her to believe that he was a harmless old dog whose dancing days were pretty much over. Clementine in turn hoped that her inaccuracy would in some way build up a picture in Valentine’s mind that poor Lady Montfort was getting to that time of life when her memory was unreliable. Watch yourself, she instructed, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security.

  “Know of any discord between Teddy and anyone staying at the house?” he asked. And it was here that she knowingly told her second lie, or what came close to it.

  “Teddy was such a complicated young man, often secretive and rather self-centered. I do not think he got on particularly well with anyone.” She was again surprised at how smoothly this came out.

  “Quite, I understand that. No quarrel that you know of … with anyone?”

  She felt a moment of real fear. Did Valentine know of Harry’s falling out with his cousin?

  “No quarrels of any kind, Colonel,” she replied, compounding her second white lie into a whopper. Her heart raced and she felt a huge wave of heat wash over her face and neck. Now I’ve done it, she thought. I have blushed like a blasted housemaid after breaking a teacup. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was engrossed in his notebook, thank God.

  He then asked her what time she had retired for the night, if her maid had been with her, and what time Pettigrew had left her and then awakened her in the morning. He was punctiliously correct in how he phrased these particular questions. He didn’t actually refer to her bedroom at all. In fact, afterward she wondered if he had even said the word retired. Somehow they had managed that part by implication alone.

  When it seemed that he was finished with his questions, Clementine decided it was time to reciprocate and swiftly asked if the colonel had heard from the coroner and when he thought it would be possible for them to release poor Teddy’s body so that she might talk to his mother, when she arrived in a few days’ time, about funeral arrangements.

  “Probably by the end of the week,” she was told.

  She innocently followed this one up with what time he thought Teddy had died. She infused enough sadness into her tone to make her question one of concern rather than a desperate need of facts. It struck her as she asked this that in Valentine’s view she no doubt lacked all feminine decorum with this ugly question. Men like Valentine so hated it when women asked the sort of questions that it was acceptable only for men to ask. But she had surprised him into answering that Teddy had died between three and six o’clock on Sunday morning.

  Clementine heaved an immense mental sigh of relief as she left the morning room. As soon as she closed the door behind her she almost felt triumphant and could not imagine why anyone thought that Valentine wasn’t up to the job. He had been careful not to offend, but he had certainly been searching with his questions. Of course, he had not asked her if she had an alibi, which she found a little strange. Perhaps this was a question he felt he need not ask of her; after all, she obviously had no motive to kill her husband’s nephew. She felt she had handled her untruths very well indeed, which made her feel a little like a whited sepulcher, and she hoped that she was not tempting fate to intervene and even out the score.

  Outside in the hall she found Oscar drooping by the radiator as he waited to set off for Oxford with Valentine. She noticed that his appearance was rather distressing. He was extremely pale and his eyes were so wretchedly tired that Clementine was immediately concerned for him.

  “Oscar dear, what are you doing here?” she asked as she crossed the hall toward him.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Montfort. I am going to Oxford with Colonel Valentine…” He paused and muttered, “Just to help him tie up some loose ends about Teddy’s business.”

  Clementine rather approved of Oscar, another boyhood friend of her children. He was always deferential and his manners were quite beautiful. There was a genuine sweetness to him that she found charming. He often took the time to chat about this and that, unlike Harry and Ellis, who were always intent on their own pursuits. She was saddened to see him looking so desolate and thought that of all of them, he was possibly the only one who was genuinely grieving for Teddy.

  “This must be especially hard for you, Oscar. I am so sorry about what happened.” She grasped his lower arm in sympathy genuinely felt.

  To her immense astonishment, she saw tears spring into his eyes. He dashed them away and nodded, too overcome to speak. She gave him some breathing room. It was awful to see him so unhappy.

  “He was the greatest friend anyone could have…” he muttered at last, looking down at his feet. “I simply can’t believe he has gone. I can’t believe … what happened to him.” A small, tight sob almost broke, but after a few moments of struggling Oscar managed to get himself back on track.

  Clementine was horrified. She felt terrible that she had helped to unravel the poor boy so thoroughly just before his meeting with Valentine. It really wouldn’t do, she thought, for him to fall apart quite so easily in the middle of a murder inquiry. “All will heal in time, Oscar,” she said, careful not to overdo it and precipitate another bout of anguish. “All this will fade and you will remember him as he was.” She patted his shoulder briskly and sought to change the subject to help him pull himself back together.

  She fell back on the national love of Bradshaw train timetables and the best roads to take between towns, and asked him if he was driving up or going by train. He cleared his throat and managed to get out that Valentine was driving them up.

  “Ah good, then you will be back in time for dinner, and I’ll see you then, Oscar.” She said this in a rallying tone, hoping to infuse him with a little more backbone than he appeared to have.

  He looked at her directly as he said that he really hoped she did see him for dinner. She shivered slightly as it struck her that Oscar had completely accepted he was Colonel Valentine’s favorite suspect for Teddy’s murder.

  So much for Gertrude’s convenient stranger, she thought as she walked across the hall and went out through the terrace door. Walking briskly to the bottom of the lawn, she looked across the valley to the hills beyond as if hoping to see her husband. What a long, long day it had been: it was only four o’clock now and it would be hours yet before the search party returned. More than anything she wished to ride out and join him, but that would never do. Instead, she must return to the house and change her dress for tea so that she might brave the rest of the afternoon in the company of her closest friends.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lord Montfort rode out earlier that morning with the search party for Lucinda Lambert-Lambert and Violet Simkins, joining more than three hundred men from his estate, nearby farms, and the surrounding villages. He found the activity similar to beating for a local shoot, but it covered a far greater distance and many of the men had brought along their wives and older children. Knowing what was expected of him, Lord Montfort had laid on a good supper for the searchers with local publicans for the end of the day.

  After the inertia of the past two days, he was grateful for the opportunity to leave his house and take an active part in the day as they searched hedgerows, copses, ditches, country lanes, meadows, fields, pastures, and woods, and the barns and outbuildings of small holdings and large farms. After the downpour of the preceding night, the air was heavy with evaporation. Overhead, clouds formed and broke, and on the horizon the sky concentrated into a thick, dark metallic gray line to meet the earth’s heavy green.

  Lord Montfort’s hunter, Bruno, towered over the tall June meadow grass, eager to canter every lane and mown pasture. At their heels were his three yellow Labradors, ready to enjoy to the fullest extent the freedom offered on this summer day. They romped through fields and undergrowth, their large rumps disappearing into tall grass, and their enthusiastic faces peering up from
ditches, with the flowers of Queen Anne’s lace adorning their ears. Lord Montfort was an uncomplicated man: a day spent on his horse with his dogs for company was a good one, even this day.

  The day wore on and by four o’clock his energy and that of his horse and the dogs began to fade. He separated from his group, rode up to the brow of the hill, and came to a halt under the canopy of Saint Simon’s Wood, not fifteen miles as the crow flies from Haversham, and halted in the shade of a beech hanger. He took off his hat and let the breeze cool his head. The dogs collapsed in an ungainly pile around Bruno’s legs, ears pulled back, huge mouths wide and tongues lolling. The sound of their heavy panting completely drowned the birdsong and made Lord Montfort feel hot and thirsty.

  He looked around him and considered his lot. This wood had once been part of an ancient oak forest that had stretched from the base of the Pennine Gap in an unbroken bulwark to the south downs of England. Before his family had even come into existence, six hundred years ago, the forest had no boundary or purpose other than to cloak England with a habitat for wolves, bear, deer, and boar, providing wild game for the royal hunt and for the occasional outlaw seeking shelter and a bit of poaching. It occurred to Lord Montfort that he would have loved to be alive at that time, when the words petrol, cotton mill, and slag heap were unknown. His wife always told him that he had been born two hundred years too late.

  The Talbot family had been active in century after century of British civilization. They had certainly contributed to finding a use for the old forest. The oaks had been felled for timber and had lived on, for a time, in the country’s cathedrals, churches, fortresses, ships, and great houses. Talbot ships in the eighteenth century had made his family tremendously wealthy and influential.

  He turned in his saddle to look over his shoulder. Saint Simon’s Wood came to an abrupt end on an escarpment of land jutting southward, and at its base were the domesticated fields and pastures of the Talbots’ land. It was flanked by gentler, rounded hills, and beyond that by another long ridge that lay almost on the boundary of the two counties.

  Lord Montfort, perched on the highest point in several miles, gazed down on the years of human endeavor that had created his properties. He saw the straggling line of men working their way through fields and into small stands of trees, toward the road to Market Wingley that cut his estates into two almost-equal halves. Fields green with young wheat and barley stood brightly, segregated by dark beech and hawthorn hedgerows. To the south, cumulus clouds moved gently northward. Between billows of rounded clouds the sky was a transparent aquatint of northern blue.

  If Lord Montfort were to indulge himself in a sense of loss for what had been and what might come, this would be the moment, as he looked down on his family’s hard-won, carefully tended agricultural land. The Talbots had been country men throughout the ages. Their fortunes, however great or small, depending on the time in which they had prevailed, had been returned over and over into the land. The people who had worked hard to drain, hedge, ditch, plow, and reap had raised large families on the estates and lands of the Talbots. This was all Lord Montfort had ever known, a still-feudal way of life that had struggled into a new age and a progressive century. As head of the Talbot family he was bound to the people who lived and worked for him, no matter what came, and he earnestly believed that they were still bound to him. He was also astute enough to know that this orderly life was doomed to change completely within the century; he was an antiquated old relic, as his son had so often said.

  All that day he had searched the country for the two girls. But it was Violet Simkins who had predominated in his thoughts as he paced the countryside on Bruno’s strong back. He wasn’t terribly sure what Violet looked like, but in his mind he saw a young girl, frightened and injured, waiting to be found, and who depended on him for her existence. Because of Teddy’s terrible death, he had been most anxious that they might find her badly hurt, perhaps even dead. As the day wore on, he realized he had been dreaming. His hope of finding her was just that, and bore no reality to what had happened at Iyntwood in the last two days, and to the changing world he lived in. Violet, like her more sophisticated counterpart, Lucinda, had certainly disappeared from Iyntwood, but for her own reasons, and ones that he couldn’t begin to understand. Now all that remained was for him to walk his tired horse back to the village and let Jim Simkins know that they had been unable to find his only child.

  The search wound down as Lord Montfort and the Haversham men tramped to their village. They were too many to cram into the Goat and Fiddle, so they grouped themselves outside, filling their tankards from the keg. Lord Montfort was pleased to discover that Fred Golightly and his wife had spent the day cooking up large, generous pots of a rich beef stew with dumplings, all costs to be absorbed by him. As the men gathered to eat, Lord Montfort walked his horse over the green toward the church and the one-room schoolhouse behind it.

  Jim Simkins lived in a small two-up-and-two-down cottage next to the schoolhouse. There was a light in the lower window, and Lord Montfort slid off his horse and tapped on the door. It was not closed fast. It swung open as if Jim had known someone would drop by and had made sure that he would hear their knock or call. The older man walked across the brick floor of the kitchen and pulled the door open wide. Lord Montfort was stunned by the change in the man’s appearance. It looked as if he had lost height in just a few days: his body seemed to have folded in on itself. Jim straightened up as he saw who his visitor was, nodded his hello, and extended a welcoming hand into his cottage.

  “Jim, I am most terribly sorry … we have not been successful.” He closed a mollifying hand on the older man’s shoulder; it was stick thin, the skin hot under the fabric of Jim’s rough wool coat.

  “Well, your lordship, I didn’t think somehow it would be. But I thank you for your time, thank everyone for their time. I know you have done all you can.” They stood awkwardly for a moment before Jim took hold of the door and swung it back.

  “Would you come in for a moment?” The room was stuffy and although clean and tidy had an airless atmosphere. Lord Montfort looked over at Bruno, who wanted his stable, oats, and hay, and was grinding away at his bit and tossing his head, ears pinned at the unwarranted stop that was far from home. Feeling that it would be unsympathetic to leave too quickly, Lord Montfort sat himself down outside under the cottage window on a small bench and gestured to Jim to join him. The two men sat in the quiet of the evening; the clouds were banked up on the horizon, but the sky was still clear, and the coming night was cool.

  “Coming in to rain again, you can smell it in the air,” Jim said, and Lord Montfort nodded.

  “Yes, the barometer was falling when I left the house this morning, and it looks like another rainstorm…” He stopped. He didn’t want to remind Jim that somewhere out there without a roof over her head was his only child.

  Together they watched early stars come out. Lord Montfort listened to the hedgerow creatures scurrying about their nightly routines in the hawthorn and eglantine hedge by the lane. The hunter and the hunted, he thought. He watched the bats as they flapped in the upper canopy of the elm trees. A flock of crows flew noisily across the lane to roost in the trees at the edge of Deansfield.

  “And the other young lady, Miss Lucinda—anyone know where she’s got to?” Jim asked.

  “We haven’t heard directly from her. We are hoping that none of this is linked…”

  “I’m sure it’s not, just a set of coincidences. I expect Violet will turn up, word will get out and someone will have seen her. She might even be with her aunt over in Ticksby. It’s hard to understand the young sometimes.”

  Jim was a gentle man, if not a gentleman. There was not a shade of blame or reproach in his voice, Lord Montfort realized, grateful for the man’s dignity. He had always had time for Jim Simkins, a philosopher and natural scholar much liked and respected in the village though he didn’t quite fit in. He’d heard somewhere that in his youth Jim had left the village but
had never been the same since he had worked as a housepainter in Market Wingley when he was a lad. The Reverend Bottomley-Jones had told him that Jim was already sick and broken down by town life and had returned to the village with his only child. And with some strange ideas about a new philanthropic and collective social order—a socialist, some of the villagers said. Lord Montfort thought that if Jim was a socialist he was a remarkably quiet one. There was nothing of a Keir Hardie about this man. He lived quietly in his cottage with his books and his thoughts, tending his garden and rambling through the countryside. Ten years ago, at Lord Montfort’s suggestion and with his backing, he had started the village school. He taught the children how to read and write and do their sums when they could be spared from their work on the land. He had thought Jim a good teacher; he had a gentle authority and was a kindly schoolmaster, determined to do what he could for the country children and always happy to find a bright spark among them whom he could bring on. He knew the challenges Jim faced, as the children rarely stayed on a regular basis, often pulled away from their studies for haymaking, harvesting, or seasonal planting.

  Lord Montfort kept Jim company for a little longer, until he was summoned by his horse, snorting and stamping for his saddle and bridle to be off.

  “Well, Jim, you know we are still on the lookout for her. If you hear anything, or if you need anything, please let me know.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Jim turned and almost shuffled into the house. His health had never been good, but Lord Montfort was concerned to see how thin and frail he had become in so short a time. It was known that Jim had trouble with his lungs, had been nursing his condition for years. Now the shock of Violet’s disappearance had broken the last reserves of his health. Lord Montfort led Bruno up the lane to a stile, climbed up onto his back, and trotted back to the village, and the heaviness he had felt in his chest since the death of his nephew deepened.