A police surgeon had arrived. He had been acting as a witness in another action, and one of the more enterprising constables had fetched him to the spot. He pronounced Sir Ratcliffe dead, and Mr Grant nearly so. He would first try to staunch the bleeding wound before accompanying him home.
Dinah had placed her fur stole under Cobie’s head. She could not bear to see him lying, white and unknowing, on the cold grey pavement. When he had opened his eyes to look at her, after she had wildly called his name again and again, she had hoped that he might remain conscious, but he had closed them again almost immediately.
Now all that she could do was climb into the Kenilworths’ carriage, to be driven back to Park Lane behind their own in which her husband lay, the surgeon beside him. One litany, and one alone, ran through her head for the next few terrible hours, ‘Oh, if only I had told him about the baby last night. Now he might never know.’
Mr Hendrick Van Deusen walked rapidly away from the alleyway in which he had waited, prepared to deal with Sir Ratcliffe if he attempted to attack his friend. A spectator in his line of fire had stopped him from shooting at Sir Ratcliffe before he had fired the shot which had laid Cobie low.
That morning he had been visited by a sense of foreboding so strong that he had fetched his six-shooter and shoulder holster out of the locked trunk in which he had kept them, and had loaded the gun so as to be ready for anything.
It seemed ridiculous to believe that Sir Ratcliffe, or anyone else, would make an attempt on his friend’s life in London but—back-up, Professor, back-up, he had told himself. Once before, on Jake’s return to Bratt’s Crossing, seeking revenge, he had acted as back-up. Well, Jake hadn’t asked him to do so today, but he had thought that Sir Ratcliffe had a wild look in his eye when he had been giving the evidence which cleared Jake’s name—and who knew what the fool might get up to next?
He had taken up his watch, out of sight, feeling that perhaps he was the fool, and oh, how he now wished he had been. He couldn’t even go over to see whether Jake lived or died, for he had deliberately told Dinah that he had to leave as soon as the action was over. He must not be found near the spot where the killing—or killings—had occurred.
He must also rid himself of the six-shooter, probably in the Thames, in case someone from Scotland Yard wondered how truthful the story he had told in the witness box really was. They might ask themselves that if Jacobus Grant had truly been a boy gunman in the West, then what had his friend, Hendrick Van Deusen, been?
After that, he would allow himself to learn of what had passed outside the court, for the story would be on everyone’s lips, and the newsboys would be shouting out the lurid details on every street corner.
Only then could he go to Park Lane, either to mourn, or to keep vigil.
Afterwards Dinah was to wonder how she managed to endure the next few days. If she had been told beforehand that she would have to live through that length of time while Cobie hovered between life and death, she would have said that she could not have borne it.
Bear it she did, although when she went into his bedroom where he lay quiet and still, so unlike the active man whom she had known since those early days at Moorings, she could hardly contain her grief. Would he ever laugh and talk with her again? Would he ever know that she was carrying his child? Would he live to see his child?
The doctors came and went, looked gravely at him, and puzzled over why he did not regain consciousness—for there was no reason why he should not. There were nurses, several of them, working in shifts, all of them a little surprised at Lady Dinah’s unwavering self-control. But he would not want me to weep and wail and be a nuisance, she told herself severely, for how would that help him?
What she really wanted to do was shriek at the heavens, at God, for doing this to them when they were at last coming to terms with one another. She would not use the word love, for to think of it was almost enough to cause her to break down.
She was never sure whether the constant stream of visitors and their revelations made it easier, or harder, for her to carry her burden. First of all Mr Hendrick Van Deusen arrived. He had, he said, heard the newsboys shouting about the tragedy, and once he realised that it was his friend whose life was in danger, he had come to see her.
He stayed at Park Lane, sitting quietly in a corner of the library, waiting for Jake to recover—or not. Dinah gave him a bedroom, and saw him fed. One afternoon he came to her after she had been keeping vigil at Cobie’s bedside, and said, ‘No news?’
Dinah shook her head. ‘None, neither good nor bad. The doctors say that he ought to recover, but they are worried that he has not regained consciousness for any length of time. He wakes up and drinks a little, but he never speaks. He then falls asleep again, except that it is not really sleep for no noise ever awakens him. There is no medical reason for it, they say.’
‘Oh, doctors say many things,’ returned Hendrick gloomily.
‘Mostly wait and see,’ sighed Dinah. ‘Shouldn’t you rest, Mr Van Deusen?’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You are kind to let me stay here, and I am selfish to do so, but you must understand. He is my son. The one I lost, many years ago.’
He paused, before lifting his grey face to stare into her eyes.
‘You would bear with me if I spoke of it. I have told no one, not even Jake. I lied in the witness box, you know. Oh, no, not just about Jake, as I am sure you, at least, realise, but about myself. It was no mid-life crisis which took me to the West. I was what I said I was, an academic. I had everything I wished for in life, a good brain, and a successful career based on it, I was shortly to become Dean of the Faculty, I had a wife, and a clever little boy. The gods had blessed me.
‘What the gods give, the gods can take away. Call no man happy till he dies, Lady Dinah, is something useful to remember. One morning we all went to the bank together, to open an account for young Guy. He was twelve years old, and I was already teaching him about the practicalities of life… There was a bank robbery. Two thugs came in, and made us all stand in a line against a wall.
‘One of the tellers had a gun beneath the counter and fired at them, killing one of the thugs. The other shot him down, then turned to face us. Someone rashly tried to attack him, and the wretch sprayed bullets around. My wife and Guy were killed instantly. He ran out, but not before clubbing me unconscious after I had gone for him and pulled the mask from his face.
‘The police tracked him down and arrested him. He was tried for murder. It was an open-and-shut case, I and several other witnesses identified him. But his lawyer found a flaw in the indictment: it had been wrongly drawn up. He pointed it out to the judge, and the murderer of my wife and child was acquitted on a technicality.
‘I shall never forget it, never. He walked by me, laughing. My wife and son were dead, and I was denied even the dubious satisfaction of revenge. My life was in ruins. It was not only that I had lost my family, but that I had nothing left to live for. The doctor of philosophy, who had lived his life in such quiet superiority over ordinary mortals, had disappeared for good.
‘I had believed in the Lord God Almighty, Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, the American Constitution and the Rule of Law. False gods, every one! If I wanted revenge—and, oh, how I wanted revenge—on the criminal, the judge and the law, then I must get it for myself. I learned to shoot. I found that I was a good shot, and then I hunted down the man who had killed my wife and son, and killed him, secretly—none knew of my crime.
‘The only thing was, that having lost my belief in what I had been, I could no longer stay at Harvard, no longer practise a philosophy which had become hateful to me. I threw up my position and went to the South West to make a new life for myself—as a desperado who thought the law a bad joke.
‘There I met Jake. I flattered myself that Guy might have been like him if he had lived. I had found a son. A son to whom I owed my life—for that is what he did, Lady Dinah. He saved my life when I was ambushed, and nursed me back to health after
he had killed the two men who would have killed me. For that I shall eternally owe him. But I couldn’t tie him to me, Lady Dinah, that wouldn’t have been right.
‘Besides, Jake didn’t want a father. He hated all fathers, and all authority—other than his own—with an abiding hate. So when we left the South West, for I had decided to make a new life for myself back home, I let him go. Back-up, I was, back-up I am, and shall remain, so far as he is concerned.’
He fell silent. Dinah had said nothing during his halting tale, had not moved, save once when she had taken his hand when he had told her of the death of his wife and son, and she had held it until he had finished speaking.
‘I’ve never told anyone of that before,’ he said, with a little wonder. ‘What a wise child you are, my dear. One who knows when to speak and when not to. No wonder he values you so.’
‘What is there for me to say?’ she told him gently. ‘Words cannot help you.’
‘No, indeed. At last I have found a certain peace, Lady Dinah, but I don’t think that I could bear it if Jake were to be killed by the wicked as well.’
He did not tell her that he had shot Sir Ratcliffe down, he did not need to. Nor did she ask him, or speak of it.
It wasn’t only Hendrick who made his revelations to her. A constant procession of visitors called at the house, some of whom she had never met before, and some whom she had. They all came to bear witness to Cobie Grant and to what he had done for them.
The day after the shooting, she was told that a Father Anselm, from a parish in the East End, and a captain in the Salvation Army were waiting to speak to her.
‘Yes, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’
Father Anselm, an Anglo-Catholic by his person and dress, and who seemed a strange companion for a Salvation Army captain, said, ‘Inspector Walker has told us, Lady Dinah, that our benefactor, Mr Dilley, who has paid for the establishment and running of a home for abandoned children, and for other acts of charity in the parish, is in reality your husband, Mr Jacobus Grant, who lies gravely injured.
‘He was due to perform his magic show for us at the Christmas concert for the poor of the parish, which is why the inspector informed us—since Mr Dilley…Grant might not be able to come to amuse us after all. We are here to pay our respects to him, and to offer you our deepest sympathy, and our hopes for his recovery.’
The captain said, ‘We have a little girl outside, from the home he finances. She has a basket of flowers for you which the children have paid for, through their pocket money. We wondered if you would allow her in to present it to you.’
Dinah, almost too full of unshed tears to speak, nodded her head. ‘Of course. You must understand that my husband can have no visitors. He is still critically ill.’
The small basket of flowers, when it arrived in the hands of a little girl whose eyes were big with wonder at being allowed into such a splendid palace, affected Dinah more than the great bouquets which arrived every day from the Prince and Princess of Wales. Not that their kindness was false, but that the sacrifice which the carnations and roses represented was a very real one since children had given up all their small savings to buy it.
For the first time she was on the verge of breaking down. Both men saw that this was so, and both, in their different ways, tried to comfort her.
‘I cannot believe,’ said the Salvation Army captain, ‘that God will take him from you, Lady Dinah. But if he does, rest assured that it is all part of the divine plan. We must trust in Him, or we have nothing.’
Mr Dilley, thought Dinah, placing the flowers on a small console table. So that is what he called himself when he was wearing those strange clothes—and financing a children’s home! Whoever would have guessed that? She would have liked to throw that piece of information at Sir Halbert Parker!
Besides flowers from the Prince of Wales, there were his daily messengers, and a letter written in his own hand, hoping that Mr Grant would make a full recovery.
‘I owe your husband a debt of gratitude,’ wrote the Prince, ‘and I wish there were some tangible way in which I could thank him. Believe me, my thoughts are with you both.’
She was reading this with some wonder when Mrs Susanna Winthrop was announced. Susanna almost ran into the drawing room, looking tired and ill, the radiance which had shone from her when Dinah had first met her quite gone.
‘How is he?’ she began, without preliminary or waiting for an answer. ‘Lord Kenilworth says that he is still unconscious. I cannot tell you how I feel…’
She burst into tears, sank down on to a sofa and buried her head in the cushions, lifting it only to wail at Dinah, ‘Oh, life is too cruel, and I have behaved quite dreadfully. I cannot think what came over me. I have allowed people to believe that Cobie was my lover, when the truth is, he refused me when I asked him…and I hated you so because he did…
‘After that I threw myself at Sir Ratcliffe to try to forget him, and he only wanted me to spite Cobie, and was vile to me when his child was on the way…and then I lost it…and now Cobie’s dying, and I feel responsible.’
Dinah worked out from this jumble of self-reproach what Susanna was trying to say. She sat down by her, took her into her arms and rocked her so that the wild crying presently stopped.
‘I didn’t believe you,’ she told the distraught woman gently. ‘Oh, perhaps a little at first, but I never thought that he would play me as false as that.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Susanna, sniffing inelegantly. ‘We did love one another when he was very young, but I sent him away, which I knew was the right thing to do, but I have regretted it all my life. Even more when he married you, and I saw that he truly cared for you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for lying to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dinah said stoically, thinking that everything which Susanna said bore out what Cobie had told her.
‘What I really came to say,’ Susanna announced a few moments later when Dinah had rung for tea and she was drinking it, and beginning to regain her self-control, ‘is that his father and mother are on the way here. Not to see him, but because I invited them. They don’t know what has happened, of course, they’re still on the high seas. I think that they will take this badly, although they have been at outs with him ever since he went to the South West. I thought that you ought to know, not have it sprung on you at the last moment.’
She drank her tea in a desperate manner, as though it were brandy. Once she had gone, after yet another bout of wild crying, Dinah went up to Cobie’s room and stared at his unchanging appearance. His face was white and the pure lines of it were strongly marked now that illness had thinned it. She wondered at the true nature of the man she had married. Oh, if only he would wake up properly and speak to her, even if only for a moment. In his brief periods of consciousness he never spoke to anyone.
After that nothing could her surprise her—not even Lady Heneage’s arrival. What on earth could she have to say to the wife of the man whom her husband had tried to kill? Might even have succeeded in killing—for there was no sign of Cobie returning to life.
‘My dear Lady Dinah,’ Lady Heneage said when she was shown in, ‘I have to thank you for seeing me when your instinct must have been to refuse to have anything to do with the connections of the man who tried to murder your husband. I felt, though, that I ought to come, if only to thank him, through you, for what he did for me after I left my husband.’
She saw Dinah’s small start of surprise, and said drily, ‘Yes, my husband lied in the witness box, Lady Dinah. I left him immediately after the Markendale house party broke up, I could no longer endure his cruelty. Last week, before the action ended, I discovered that your husband had paid into my account half the value of the stolen Heneage diamonds. I walked in on him when he was stealing them,’ she said, as though she were speaking of the most banal thing in the world.
‘Oh, he was disguised, but I knew him at once. He could not disguise himself from me. My husband deserved to lose the diamonds. There
was a note waiting for me at the bank. Mr. Grant simply wrote that he thought that I had earned half of what the diamonds were worth and he hoped that I would not refuse it. He also said that the rest of the money for them had gone to support a good cause—he didn’t say what.’
The children’s home—among other things, thought Dinah. How enraged Sir Ratcliffe would have been if he had ever discovered that his diamonds had paid for a small fortune for his neglected wife and a sanctuary for poor children!
Like Susanna, Lady Heneage drank tea—it seemed to Dinah that she had dispensed gallons of the stuff while Cobie lay ill. When this is over, she thought wearily, I shall never see or drink it again.
Then there was Walker. Like the Prince, Hendrick Van Deusen, Susanna, Lady Heneage and Father Anselm and Captain Bristow, he owed her husband a debt of some sort, but he gave her no clue as to exactly what it was. He came most days to ask how Mr Grant was doing, and to offer her his rough comfort.
Once he said, cryptically, ‘I shouldn’t say this, Lady Dinah, but it was a good thing that someone shot that brute, Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, down. The scandal which would have been created if he had lived would have shaken society even more than his action did—and that was bad enough.’
Dinah gave him tea, too. And chocolate cake—the cake which Cobie had once taunted him with. He, too, ate his food desperately, and took her hand before he left, saying, ‘Hold on, Lady Dinah, for all our sakes.’
She carried the thought with her upstairs, wondering how many more grateful people would arrive to tell her what Cobie had been doing when she had imagined him doing—what? Exactly how he had become involved with Inspector Walker was a bit of a mystery—something to do with his role as Mr Dilley, she supposed.
Outside his bedroom she was met by an excited nurse. ‘Oh, Lady Dinah, we must send for the doctors at once. Mr Grant has not exactly woken up, but he has started to talk in his sleep!’
Dinah sat by him on the bed, and picked up his hand which lay lax on the coverlet. He looked blindly at her, before beginning to speak again. Elation that he might be recovering gave way—considering what all her visitors had said, and had not said—to fear as to what he might be saying, and how it might betray him.
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