The Assize of the Dying

by Ellis Peters

  Helen had not moved. She was no longer smiling, but her face retained its pale serenity. She stood looking at the doctor long and thoughtfully, and at length she said: ‘I notice that you don’t ask me why.’

  ‘No need,’ said the doctor, ‘I know that already. I’m the only person who’s in a position to know it. You killed him because you know, as I know, and as no one else knows, that your heart is in such a condition that you may drop dead at any moment, and can’t in any case live long. You killed him because you couldn’t bear to think of him living on after you, and enjoying life without you.’

  And Helen smiled; radiantly, contemptuously, proudly, she smiled into the old man’s face. The young man, rigid as an icicle between Rachel’s hands, and almost as cold, stood with a motionless, shocked face staring between the branches. He already knew that the horrified, incredulous denial for which he had waited would never come; the moment for it was past. If it came now, who could believe in it?

  ‘How little you know me!’ said Helen. ‘After all these years, how very little you know me! I killed him because without me he would have gone to pieces, and that was something I couldn’t allow to happen. Do you think I’ve forgotten what he was in the old days, before I married him? Do you think he had forgotten? If he could have known how soon I was to leave him, he’d have begged me to save him from slipping back into that decline and fall. I spared him the pain of knowing, but I have saved him. I couldn’t go away and leave my work unfinished.’

  ‘What you mean,’ said the doctor with a bitter, resigned smile, ‘is that you couldn’t go away and leave him free to live, and work, and love as he pleased. You couldn’t trust him not to marry again, and it was inconceivable to you that another woman should ever take your place. It was Mrs Renaud, wasn’t it, who made up your mind for you? And you needn’t have worried, my dear Helen, you needn’t have worried at all! Philip’s conception of love was something quite different from yours, and far more tragic. I’ve known him a long time. There never would have been anyone but you for Philip again, living or dead. That was his tragedy. But he’d have lived without you, oh, yes, and enjoyed what was left, enjoyed it to the full – so perhaps, according to your lights, you were still justified.’ He had been all this while staring into the river; now he lifted his grizzled head and shrunken, disillusioned face, and looked at the fair beauty of Helen shimmering in the watery sun. ‘Did you think that Philip shared your values, because he surrendered to them for your sake? Do you think he liked the kind of tribute you asked of him, because he brought it to you so faithfully? Do you know what he once said to me, Helen? He said: “I’m the only person in the world, except you, who’s ever seen through Helen. And they say love is blind!”’

  She was impervious. She smiled still, her pure pallor not even marred by the slightest flush. ‘I don’t believe you! I knew Philip through and through, it was I who taught him to realise the best that was in him. Without me he would have slipped back again into the waste from which I took him. I’ve done what I had to do! If it is a sin, I’ll answer for it.’

  ‘If what you have done is a sin,’ said the doctor grimly, ‘you’ll have to answer for it. And by our more worldly standards that could mean standing trial for murder.’

  ‘If you are threatening me,’ said Helen with angelic calm and patience, ‘may I remind you that you have no witness to what I have just said?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, I am neither God nor the law. I’m willing to leave you to those two – if one of them lets you slip through its fingers, I don’t think the other will. You’re condemned to death, and Philip’s dead, what more can we ask? In any case, for his sake, one couldn’t touch you. One can only go on serving you dispassionately for the rest of your life, and feel – forgive me! – unspeakably relieved when you die. No, I’m not thinking of taking any action. I merely wondered how you did it, from a hundred miles away.’

  In a matter-of-fact tone, without any embarrassment whatever, Helen told him. Her confidence was impermeable by shame or doubt; she needed nothing from him or anyone, she knew she was justified.

  ‘It was all very simple, Philip had shown me what to do. I was the first to go up to bed that Thursday evening, if you remember. I went straight to the bathroom, and took a number of tablets from Mary’s little bottle in the cabinet there. I don’t know exactly how many, I didn’t count them. Nobody had used them for a long time, I felt sure nobody would know how many there ought to be. I held the bottle with a face tissue, so as not to touch it with my fingers. Then I went to bed. I knew Philip intended to work late, so he wasn’t likely to disturb me for some time. When I was sure everyone else was asleep, I went down the back stairs – it’s one of the advantages of old houses like this, that they have back ways – and in the kitchen I melted a little gelatine, and crushed the tablets and mixed them into it, and dropped the white cream with a spoon on to the petals of the white flowers in the base of the black coffee-pot. The gelatine congealed very quickly on the cold porcelain, and the rims of the petals held it, and when it was set no one could have guessed there was anything different about the pot. But of course the hot coffee would melt it almost immediately. Then, when it was ready, I went back to bed. And in the morning I put Philip’s tray ready for the evening myself. There was nothing odd about that – Mary was used to my wanting to do things for him myself. The only odd thing is that I felt it to be necessary. He always had the same pot. I could have left it to Mary, and everything would have happened in exactly the same way. But somehow I felt I couldn’t leave anything to chance. And I went to London and gave my recital. That was my farewell to him – everything I sang was chosen for him – but you wouldn’t understand that. And he drank his coffee, and went to sleep with my image in his eyes and my voice in his ears, and died in his sleep, intact, at his peak, safe from ever slipping back again. I say I saved him. You say I murdered him.’

  ‘What do you expect me to call it?’ said the doctor. ‘Euthanasia? What do you think Philip was, a sick domestic pet? – a Mongol child?’

  ‘I loved him, and I intended to keep him from violation.’

  Her voice was high and secure; she knew herself to be without reproach.

  ‘I think,’ said Dr Benson, setting foot slowly on the mossy stones of the bridge, ‘that you had better begin to feel the same preoccupation with your own conscience that you’ve felt hitherto with Philip’s – before it’s too late.’ And he turned his shoulder abruptly upon her, and crossed with sudden, hurrying steps into the field. Helen stood for a moment where he had left her, and then, with some impulse to justify herself further, after all, walked after him to the middle of the bridge. But there she gave up the idea of pursuit. Perhaps he did not matter enough to her, perhaps she restrained herself because even to assay self-justification was an admission that she had doubts of her own, and she was unwilling to concede that she entertained any. Whatever the reason, she checked herself with a little, resigned shrug, watching the small, elderly figure for a few minutes as he stumped up the slope of the wet meadow. Then she turned, and began to retrace her steps.

  Bill was standing on the bank, the bushes quivering behind him, staring at her with a face quite expressionless with shock. He had plucked himself out of Rachel’s restraining arm, moving with the frenzied calm of shock, and she had let him go, following at his shoulder with eyes wide and wary for the moment when the ice would break. He stood in the wet emerald grass, staring at Helen as though he had never seen her before. At the suddenness of the apparition she halted for a moment, for once at a disadvantage. Then her face quivered into lively tenderness and pity for him; she had not meant him to learn the truth in this way.

  ‘Bill!’ There was no need even to wonder how much he had overheard, it was all there in the first struggling agonies of the stunned eyes as he came back to life. ‘I’m glad, Bill! I’m glad you know! I hadn’t meant you to find out this way, but it’s done, and I’m glad. I’m not afraid that you’ll fail to understand!’

>   She had recovered herself, she was coming towards him, smiling gently, confidently at him, holding out her arms to him. She expected him to walk into that proffered embrace and allow himself to be calmed and comforted. That was how she had always lulled his mind to sleep, and it had never failed her yet.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ cried Bill hoarsely, throwing up his arm to strike her hands away. ‘Don’t come near me! You killed Philip! You!’

  ‘Bill, darling! I know it’s been a shock to you—’ She waited, her hands still hovering, grieved but sure of her dominance.

  ‘Keep off! Don’t touch me! You’re a devil! No, you can’t be a devil, devils know what they are, and you don’t even know! You think you’re good! And, my God, you made us all think you good! What’s the matter with us all? How do we come to have everything the wrong way up? When I think of the years I’ve adored you, and been dazzled by you, and taken you for a saint! You!’ he shouted, trembling violently. ‘You, with your cool, small, self-conscious, self-centred virtue—And Philip—You think you redeemed Philip! My God! He was human, he had his faults, but they were all large, warm ones, like him, better than all your damned virtues. He was good! He was honest, and generous, and loyal, he made people feel brave and gay – he wasn’t capable of meanness. And you thought you could improve on that! You still think it! I wish I could think you were mad, but you’re not mad – you’re only a monster of vanity!’

  His voice failed him for a moment, and dimly through the thunder in his ears he heard her appalled and pitying whisper of: ‘Bill, my poor darling!’ She was incurably sick, nothing could penetrate her armour of complacency. He took a violent step towards her, wild with frustration.

  ‘You think you’ve done something fine! You murdered Philip – murdered him twice over, once when you scaled him down to your measure, and once when you put him to sleep, like a decrepit tom-cat, rather than let him outlive you and grow again. You killed him devoutly, and you expect the heavens to open and drop a halo on you—If there was a grain of truth anywhere in you, you’d know that you’re damned, damned, damned!’

  Rachel stretched out a hand to take hold of him and drag him back, but after all she arrested the movement. She was standing face to face with a horrible warning against trying to shape or influence anyone. He was a man, he had a right to his own actions and reactions. Even when he lunged forward with a wild gesture towards the bridge, Rachel did not touch him.

  Helen’s smile, which had not lost its confidence even before his last outburst, wavered at last; her soft, coaxing advance hesitated, shuddered, and swerved uneasily aside. She was out of reach of every other emotion that might have shattered her calm, but it seemed she was not out of reach of fear. The smoothness and beauty of her face seemed to break suddenly into fragments, like smashed glass, in a disintegration which was unpleasant to see; and more terrible than the terror itself was the ludicrous disbelief, that this malleable child whom she had raised in her own image should be proof against her now. She had managed him so dexterously through so many crises which seemed to her more extreme than this. Yet she recognised in Bill’s convulsed and outraged face the end of her dominion. The sweep of his long young arm wiping the air before his eyes clean of her, a symbolic gesture of repudiation, appeared to her as the threat of a blow. Her imagination, like her virtue and her values, was limited to material things.

  She uttered a whimpering cry, almost voiceless, as though pure surprise had paralysed her vocal cords. Her hands went up to ward him off, thrusting at the air between them, though he had already halted, yards short of touching her. She made a lame, stumbling leap back from him, and her feet slithered in the wet moss at the edge of the bridge. She uttered a scream that echoed back from the curtain of trees and coursed along the swollen water. Bill gave a cry that echoed hers, and sprang forward to try and catch her as she fell, but her silken sleeve ran through his fingers like rain. Then she was in the river, and for a moment swept under by the strong current below the bridge. She came up as an inert drift of black dress and fair, floating hair, rolling and turning in the eddies, her white hands limp as leaves. There was no movement in her now that was her own; the mill-stream animated her, and that was all.

  Bill had leaped over the rim after her almost before she vanished from sight. The stream was hardly deep enough for swimming at any time but the spring spate, and even now its appearance of ferocity was something of an illusion. But he had hard work to keep his feet against the drag and impetus of the water, and even when he had drawn the drifting body into the shelter of his own he had much ado to control its dead weight. The small, fair face, blue and still in unconsciousness on his arm, moved him again with treacherous memories of beauty, the wet gold hair plastered against his sleeve clung like the recollections of the past. Irresistible fondness tore at his heart again. You cannot be sick with love for someone for fifteen years and be cured in a moment, even by methods as drastic as the knife; even amputations ache afterwards.

  He gathered her into his arms, and brought her laboriously to the bank, and Rachel was there ankle-deep in the froth and rubbish of high-water to help him lift her up the slope of grass. He tugged off his wet jacket and rolled it up as a pillow for the streaming head.

  ‘Helen!’ He shook her, chafed her cheeks and her hands, took her by the chin and turned her face to one side, so that the water could run out of her lips. She did not stir.

  Dr Benson, coming down the field and over the bridge at a headlong run, saw the sliding green marks in the moss, and grasped the reason for the scream which had dragged him back from his car. The two young people were kneeling over Helen on the grass, the boy working hard at artificial respiration. The doctor reflected sardonically that the exercise might at least do Bill good, in his present sodden condition, and forbore from remarking at once that it was almost certainly useless to Helen. They looked up at him with wild relief, since he was the one person who already knew so much that he could be allowed to hear everything.

  Rachel scrambled aside to make room for him. Bill surrendered his patient to the accomplished old hands, and put back the streaming hair from his forehead. ‘She isn’t breathing – it doesn’t seem to have any effect.’

  The doctor turned Helen’s limp body over, drew down her arms, opened one eyelid with a finger-tip.

  ‘She can’t have drowned,’ said Rachel, ‘there wasn’t time. She wasn’t in the water more than a minute or two, Bill went in after her like a flash.’

  ‘No, she didn’t drown. It was a foregone conclusion her heart wouldn’t stand up to a shock like that. Fright, the fall, and the cold plunge killed her. Exactly how did it happen?’

  It was Rachel who told him, in the fewest possible words. ‘We were in the bushes when you came down with her, and we heard everything. We didn’t hide for that purpose, it just happened like that. When you’d gone, we came out. She tried to carry it off, but this time it didn’t work. When Bill made a move towards her – but he was nowhere near her, really – she jumped backward, and slipped there on the edge, and fell in. I think she thought he was going to hit her.’

  ‘Maybe I was,’ said Bill, staring at the translucent blue face motionless in the grass, ‘I don’t know!’ He began to shiver with reaction and cold, and clenched his teeth to stop them from chattering. She was still beautiful. Reduced to a helpless thing under the doctor’s probing hands, tumbled about in the soiled brown water and the wet and trodden grass, she was still beautiful. He could almost understand how she had been able to blind him for so long, and others with him. ‘And I can’t even remember her singing!’ he burst out, shutting his eyes against the vision of that face uplifted in ecstatic and agonised song in the television screen, making a ceremony of self-worship, with music by Bach, out of the mean and treacherous murder of her husband. ‘She’s even spoiled that! She’s spoiled everything!’ A sense of horror filled him, because he found himself suddenly so near to her attitude, so perilously near to her crime. He was afraid he had been in her ener
vating shadow too long, and would never be free of her. ‘I killed her!’ he said, quaking with the cold of his sodden clothes in the chilly spring air. His teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. ‘It was my fault! I killed her!’

  Rachel put a hand on his shoulder with surprising strength and considerable exasperation, and shook him so roughly that he almost lost his balance, and was moved to spring indignantly to his feet to face her. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said roundly. ‘You never touched her, and you never would have touched her. If you don’t know it, I do. For God’s sake don’t you start deluding yourself, leave that to the Helens! It wasn’t from you she was trying to get away, it was from the mirror you held up to her, and the face she saw was her own, and none of your making. Don’t start hiding behind a guilt you haven’t a shadow of a right to.’

  The momentary flash of reminiscent, angry dislike died out of his eyes as he looked at her. She, at least, was real, at times irritatingly so, but always reassuringly. Something like the gleam of a harassed but genuine smile visited his face for a moment, and the first flush of natural colour returned to his smudged cheeks. He looked down again at the doctor, and asked quietly: ‘What have we got to do about it? Must we tell the police? I suppose we must.’

  ‘My dear boy, that’s a matter of simple justice to yourself and Mary, as well as the Renauds. Yes, the police will have to know. It needn’t worry you, the case will never come into court now. There may not even have to be an inquest, if they’re satisfied with your statements and mine, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be. The cause of death won’t be in dispute. No, they’ll probably be content to make it known that the Greville case is closed to their satisfaction. A wasteful business,’ he said with bitterness, clambering slowly to his feet, ‘but an economical ending. No sensations, no loose ends, no immunity.’