by S K Rizzolo
A quarter of an hour later he went outside. Marina was already seated in a pony-chaise that was hitched to a sweet-mouthed gray that looked fresh and eager to depart. Chase eyed the girl’s arms with trepidation, but he needn’t have worried. She proved an excellent whip, controlling her horse effortlessly as they bowled down a green lane and took the carriage road through the Common, passing poplar groves and a pond with a pagoda and pleasure boats.
Marina snapped her wrists, and the chaise picked up speed. Chase thought of telling her to slow down; instead he bit his lip and gripped the seat. The breeze carried a pleasant coolness, and from somewhere cows lowed. On the hillside above their heads, laundry maids stretched out garments to dry in the sun. Marina pointed out the elm trees her father had planted to beautify the Common and indicated the parish church of Holy Trinity. Here, not far from Garrod’s front door, stood the modern brick church where the Clapham evangelicals had worshiped and prayed for the day that ended the British slave trade.
She checked her horse as a drover with his herd of cattle came into view. Chase gave her time to negotiate the obstacle; then he retrieved the feather and nail from his pocket. “I need to show you something. Do you know what this is?”
Her hand yanked back on the reins so that the chaise veered toward some trees at the side of the road. “Where did you get it?” she said, correcting course.
“Someone nailed this feather above your father’s door. I didn’t see it last night, and the constables didn’t notice it when they came through this morning. Who can say when it was put there, but I do know that it’s an Obeah charm.” Chase watched with amazement as she quickly masked her surprise.
Marina sent him a quick, sidelong glance. “Why ask me if you’ve already written your own story?”
“I let the facts—the evidence—dictate the story.”
“Don’t you see that facts can lie like truth?”
“I’m right, aren’t I? This is an Obeah charm.” He knew a bit about Obeah but wanted to hear what she would say. It was an African spiritual practice, which had been adopted by the Jamaican slave population and which the planters were determined to eradicate. Obeah men and women were rumored to have the power to inflict curses, issue protective charms, or communicate with the dead. Despite the intervening years, Chase recalled the young boy with the fan, who had been in the room when he lay ill of yellow fever. Joanna—Marina’s mother—had frightened this boy. John Crow, he had whispered to her before he fled after Chase had unwisely joked about poisons. The Jamaican vulture with its black feathers was associated with Obeah, as was the use of poisoning to strike back at enemies. So now Chase wondered: had Joanna once been suspected of being an Obeah woman? Did someone take advantage of that connection now?
Marina replied, sounding reasonable, “Here? Impossible, Mr. Chase.”
“What would be the purpose of such a charm?”
“I suppose it would be intended as a key to the world of spirits, a protection from evil or a curse.”
He studied her profile. “Charms? You don’t believe in such stuff?”
As if reciting a memorized lesson, she said, “Belief is an ever-shifting thing. We have our beliefs in the light of day, as well as those arising from darkness. These are equally, sometimes more, potent. They can do harm or good.”
Chase’s head pounded, and frustration built within him like a storm. “We speak in riddles. Who’s been telling you these tales, Miss Garrod?”
This time she answered without evasion. “The Reverend Tallboys. He is quite knowledgeable on the subject.”
“I don’t think your father would approve of your interest.”
“No, but I was curious.”
They continued along the graveled road that traversed the Common to a clearing, where the elevation of Clapham above the Thames laid before the viewer the gray and smoky city. It seemed incredible that the metropolis, that endless expanse of pavement, could be a mere few miles away from this verdant suburb.
“Pull up here,” he said roughly. When she’d brought the pony to a halt, he set the feather and nail in her lap. She couldn’t hide her instinctive recoil, but she did not remove or touch them.
“This feather is a message,” Chase told her. “I saw the John-Canoe dancers once in Jamaica. They decorate their headdresses with the black feathers of the John Crow vulture. And feathers and seeds, as well as fish bones and cats’ teeth and other such things, form the bundle of an Obeah man—or woman. Did you know, Miss Garrod, that these native doctors are also suspected of murdering with plant poisons?”
She sat upright on the bench, gazing out over the Common. Chase put a hand to her cheek to turn her face toward him. Marina confronted him proudly, though Chase could see the fear behind the pride. It was there in the tight chords of her delicate neck and in her frozen look.
He cleared his throat but somehow couldn’t remove the hoarseness. “I met your mother in Jamaica. She saved my life when I was ill. I intend to repay that debt by helping you. That’s why your father chose me to protect you.”
The blank look fled, and light flooded into her eyes. She said, “You astonish me, Mr. Chase. My father didn’t tell me you knew my mother. What is she like? I don’t…remember her.”
“I didn’t know her well, but I can tell you that she used her great skill with plants to cure disease.” He hesitated, struggling to find the words to describe Joanna. His memories of that time were fragmented, but he could recall one thing plainly. “When she was busy with the other patients, I used to wait for her to come back into the room. I believed she would not allow me to die because she was a staunch ally of life, Miss Garrod. Or perhaps just stubborn.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. Chase handed her the handkerchief that had held the feather and nail. She mopped her tears, gave a sniff, and offered him a tremulous smile. “No one has ever spoken of her to me as if she were a real person, who might enjoy the company of a friend, lose her temper, or take a walk in the sun—no one except my father sometimes when the mood was on him. I won’t forget what you said, sir.”
“Then help me find your father’s attacker. Have you been dabbling in superstition? Playing a game? I could understand that you might have wanted to return some of the insults you’ve received. Were you upset with your family?”
She pulled away. “Don’t be ridiculous. In Jamaica, to possess an Obeah charm would bring the penalty of transportation at the least. Not so long ago a slave might have been gibbeted alive or burnt by a slow fire. In England this charm means nothing.”
“Even when left above the door of a dying man?”
She stared at him woodenly. After a moment she said in a small voice, “You think I put it there. You think I invent stories and do harm to others.” Her hands were clenched on the reins. “You think I was the one to put the poison in the tea.”
He tried to reassure her, but it was no good. The truth was that he didn’t know how to talk to a seventeen-year-old girl. She was right to question his belief in her innocence. But was she disturbed enough to murder the father who had used her as a pawn? Poison was often considered a woman’s method, a devious way of exerting power. This thought brought him to Beatrice Honeycutt. She had lived for years on her uncle’s bounty. How might she benefit from his removal and the chance to make a life for herself? He supposed the same could be true of Anne Yates. Where did her loyalties lie?
And Chase knew that a man could poison as well as a woman. There was Ned Honeycutt, at loggerheads with his rich uncle and fearful he would be cut out of his inheritance should the heiress wed someone else. There was also the Reverend Samuel Tallboys. Chase had learned that the clergyman was to be one of Garrod’s executors and a trustee of the estate. Should Garrod die, he would be in control of a massive fortune. But Tallboys and Beatrice Honeycutt were ill from the poison. Surely this must exclude them from consideration, though Chase could not be sure of
that.
On the way back to Laurentum, the doubts and worries circled in his brain. When they pulled up in the yard, a groom came out to take the chaise, and Marina went upstairs to remove her bonnet, leaving him without a backward glance.
Chapter Eleven
Penelope had been dreaming of the hothouse and those steaming cups of tea. In the dream she’d known what was about to happen but could not utter a word of warning. She stopped in front of each guest to dispense a cup of death, her face a smiling mask, until at last she approached Edward Buckler. This time he tossed the tea down his throat as if it were nothing, despite the fact that he knew its contents too. To acknowledge this courage, she kissed him there in front of everyone, watching as he crumpled to the ground. Then her dream-self drank the tea and collapsed with the others into a pile of corpses to be wept over by a single, motherless child. Sarah—a pang of anguish pierced Penelope’s heart. But I didn’t take any sugar, she objected, and came awake with a start.
She could tell from the angle of the sun on the curtains that she’d slept only a short time, perhaps an hour. She splashed water over her face, then penned a chatty note to her daughter, relating as many light anecdotes as she could muster, including the story of John Chase’s new hairstyle. Penelope hoped Maggie was guarding her tongue and hiding her own worry so that Sarah need never know what had happened in Clapham. Since Penelope’s husband, Jeremy, had left without a word three months ago, her daughter had been nervous and sometimes withdrawn. Penelope told herself again that she should not have come here. Her letter finished, she changed her gown and studied her face in the mirror. The shadows under her eyes could not be helped, she decided, though she pinched her cheeks to give them more color. Downstairs, she handed the butler her letter and asked if he knew Lewis’ whereabouts.
“He and Miss Garrod are in the garden, ma’am,” the butler said with stone-faced disapproval. “Go out the library doors and follow the path through the shrubbery. No doubt you’ll come upon them.”
She kept her irritation from showing. Blast it, Lewis, she thought. The girl’s father suffers in agony—hardly the time for youthful amours. But it seemed Nature did not agree with her. Outside, the earth’s clamor was hushed, and all was still in the perfection of the summer’s day. She hurried along the path, which wound past a folly and several vantage points, finally locating her brother and Marina Garrod in an arbor, where a statue of Apollo overlooked a small stretch of water and green fields beckoned beyond the ha-ha fence. Lewis and Marina sat, heads close together, on a bench under shady trees.
“Am I intruding?” said Penelope.
***
The rest of the day was long and cheerless. Penelope endured a strained dinner followed by a vigil in the drawing room as everyone waited for word from Garrod’s sickroom. Mrs. Yates conversed too loquaciously with Ned Honeycutt, who listened with only half an ear as he watched Marina, a frown in his eyes. Penelope, seeing that Lewis and Marina now avoided each other’s company, felt her uneasiness grow. She didn’t trust that limpid innocence.
Buckler had also dined with them, obviously ill at ease to be foisted upon the family at so difficult a time. But Penelope thought his feeling went deeper, for his eyes seemed dulled, and he was less energetic than usual. She knew he was despondent about the future of their relationship. For that matter, he sometimes seemed to reject the promise of any human happiness at all, an attitude she could neither understand nor approve. Watching him make desultory conversation with Garrod’s family, she hoped he wasn’t punishing himself for that kiss in Vauxhall Gardens.
After dinner she suggested they take a stroll in the garden. The sun hung low in the sky, its fading warmth touching the shrubs with gold. Buckler and Penelope paced the laurel-walk in silence, their shoulders just brushing. Assessing Buckler’s mood, she decided he looked weary and sad, but she didn’t know how to help him.
At length, he spoke. “Chase says Mr. Garrod won’t last the night, poor devil. If something should happen, if you need me for any reason, you’ll send word?” He had paid a boy to fetch him a clean shirt from his chambers and had taken a bed for another night at the public house.
“I don’t see why you should remain here,” she said for the second or third time that evening. “You must have your own affairs to attend to.”
He stopped, seized her hands, and turned her toward him. “Do you mean to drive me mad, Penelope? I’m sure that must be your intention.”
Suddenly, her temper rose. “What I said is true, isn’t it? You sacrifice yourself for my sake, and I can’t think of a single reason why you should. I can see that our…friendship lowers your spirits, and no wonder. What do you get out of it, after all?”
“I do not view friendship—the real kind—in that light,” said Buckler tightly. “It’s not a commercial transaction.”
She gazed up into his face, which seemed to her dearer than it had ever been before. She read fire in his tawny eyes, steadfastness in his nose and chin, anxious love on his lips—and felt a powerful grief.
“I know that,” she answered.
“I don’t stay just for you, Penelope. There’s John. Don’t you see how worried he is, how beset by doubts that he ought to have prevented Garrod’s death? He is my friend too.”
“Of course, he is, but you know very well that wasn’t what I meant.”
“Yes,” he said with some bitterness and released her hands, “you want to end it, don’t you? I suppose you’ve decided, all on your own and without consulting my wishes, that it would be best for both of us.”
“And so it would,” she said, pleading now, though the desolation was keen and she found it torture to deny him when she wanted to throw herself in his arms. “All I do is drag you into turmoil and scandal at every turn. What can I give you in return? Nothing but sorrow and frustration and loneliness. How do you expect me to live with that? You deserve a woman with bright and fresh hopes to share with you. An entire life to share with you, not a half-life.” Her voice sank lower. “And children. When I see you with Sarah, I wish with all my heart that she were yours. But it cannot be.”
“I suppose there’s nothing more to say. I will not add to your troubles, Penelope.”
“You seemed determined to misunderstand me. I am thinking of you.”
He shook his head, his expression turning remote. After kissing her hand, he went away without another word. She watched his upright figure retreat down the path to the gate and thought her heart would break.
In no good humor she returned to the drawing room, sitting next to her brother on the sofa. “Lewis,” she said in an undertone, “we must help Mr. Chase and leave as soon as possible. We don’t belong here. If Miss Garrod has confided in you—”
“We can’t go. There will be an inquest. You will be asked to testify. As for Miss Garrod, I’m not a fool. I know she needs to speak to Mr. Chase—and soon.”
“Why hasn’t she asked for help? Can’t she see that her secrecy only encourages others to think ill of her?”
“I’ve told her that. Give her a little longer. She’s had no one for so long, Penelope. She’s grown used to acting for herself. You see, I know what that feels like.”
She put her hand in the crook of his arm and leaned against his shoulder. “Yes, I know you do. Still, I don’t want you involved in this. It’s not your affair. People will say—”
He grinned down at her. “Say what? That bad blood will tell? That I saw a chance to take advantage of a troubled girl? Maybe even that I conceived a plot to murder her father and elope with the heiress?”
“It’s not a joke!”
“Since when do we care what people think, Penelope?” He pressed his hand over hers, but she saw he would not be swayed.
“John Chase deserves better than this from us, Lewis,” she said.
***
Eager to escape, she went early to bed and fell into a d
reamless sleep to the company of a gentle patter of rain on the window. Some hours later a thump from the corridor brought her fully awake. Her ears caught the rustling of cloth, soon followed by a bang on the wall. Startled, she sat up to listen. Thinking it was probably the nurse on some errand to the kitchen or someone in quest of one of Mr. Garrod’s fancy water closets, she was about to lie down again when she heard a low murmur that sounded so close it might have been in the room with her. Her pulse quickened with fear, but then she realized the sound came from just outside in the corridor. It came again, and this time the voice started low and rose to a high pitch.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, donned her dressing gown, and slid her feet into slippers. Padding to the door, she edged it open to peer into the corridor. It must have been very early in the morning, several hours before sunrise. Though the house seemed peaceful, Penelope distinctly heard uneven breathing and hushed footsteps on the thick carpeting. Then she saw a flash of movement and caught sight of a figure moving away from her.
The figure was slight—that of a woman, or rather, a girl—and Penelope knew at once it was Marina Garrod. Penelope watched her list to one side and stumble into the wall. In the moment before she righted herself, something dropped from her hand. She went on, more quickly and surely, until she reached the stairs and disappeared, a white blur in her nightgown.
Penelope set off in pursuit. She considered fetching John Chase—he’d told her where his room was on the floor above—but didn’t want to lose Marina. She did pause to fumble for what the girl had dropped, her fingers grasping a round, smooth object. A bead? Stowing it in her pocket, Penelope followed Marina down the stairs.
About twenty feet ahead and gaining, the girl passed the landing between the first and ground floors. Here she stopped to glance over her shoulder, and for the first time Penelope saw her clearly in the square of moonlight framed by the large window. Her face floated in an unearthly way, her eyes like two holes. Ay but their sense is shut, Penelope thought, and she understood with a shiver of fear that Marina Garrod was not aware of her surroundings. The girl raised one hand, and a second object fell from her grip. Then she slipped lightly down the rest of the wide, curving staircase, her hand on the banister. Hard on her heels, Penelope retrieved the object Marina had dropped—another bead like the first—but there was no time to do more than snatch it up and hurry on. Marina reached the ground floor, where a light burned in the entrance hall, and turned left.
