Death at Dawn

by Caro Peacock

  For the next few minutes the children clustered round their mother’s sofa, more relaxed now that their father’s attention was not on them. Betty and I stood out of the way near the door. Mrs Beedle went on sewing something white and ruffled and Celia stood staring down at a book on a small pie-crust table, not turning the pages. Sir Herbert finished his conversation and announced that it was high time to go into dinner. Lady Mandeville gently put the children aside and stood up.

  ‘You must go, darlings. Sleep well. See you tomorrow.’

  Betty hurried forward to claim them and I followed more slowly. The family began filing through a door on the opposite side, presumably to the dining room, while we went towards the hall. I was almost through the doorway when I felt a hand gripping my arm.

  ‘Miss Lock?’

  Celia’s voice, with its little lisp. I turned.

  ‘I need very much to speak to you,’ she whispered.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No. Tomorrow. Will you meet me and not tell anybody?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Early, very early. I hardly sleep. Six o’clock in the flower garden.’

  ‘Celia?’

  Mrs Beedle’s voice, sharply, from the drawing room.

  ‘You will, won’t you? Please.’

  I nodded. She put a finger to her lips and turned away. I followed Betty and the children back up the horseshoe staircase, still feeling the pressure of Celia’s fingers on my arm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Later, when the children were in bed and Betty Sims and I were sharing supper in the schoolroom, I asked her where the flower garden was.

  ‘Right-hand side of the house looking out, behind the big beech hedge.’

  She showed no curiosity about why I wanted to know, because by then I’d asked her a lot of other questions about the house and the Mandevilles – all perfectly reasonable for a new governess. She’d been there thirteen years, from a few months before the birth of Master Charles, but her time of service with Lady Mandeville went back longer than that.

  ‘She wasn’t Lady Mandeville then, of course, she was Mrs Pencombe. I came to her as nursemaid when her son Stephen was six years old and she was confined with what turned out to be her daughter Celia.’

  ‘So you’ve known Celia from a baby?’

  I wanted to know everything I could about Celia. It might help me decide how far to trust her.

  ‘From the first breath that she drew.’

  ‘What was she like as a child?’

  ‘Pretty as a picture and sweet winning ways. But headstrong. She was always a child that liked her own way.’

  ‘What happened to Mr Pencombe?’

  ‘He died of congestion to the lungs when Celia was six years old. We thought we’d lose Mrs Pencombe too, from sheer grief. It was a love match, you see. With her looks, she could have married anybody in London.’

  ‘And yet she must have married Sir Herbert quite soon afterwards.’

  Betty put down her slice of buttered bread and gave me a warning look.

  ‘Two years and three months, and I hope you’re not taking it on yourself to criticise her for that.’

  ‘Indeed not.’

  ‘What would anyone have done in her place? Mr Pencombe hadn’t been well advised in the investments he made and he left her with nothing but debts and two children to bring up. She was still a fine-looking woman, but looks don’t last for ever.’

  ‘Did she love Sir Herbert?’

  ‘A woman’s lucky if she marries for love once over. I don’t suppose there’s many manage it twice. May I trouble you to pass the mustard?’

  That was her way of telling me I was on the edge of trespassing. It might also have been a gentle hint that she’d made a comfortable little camp for herself and the children in this great house and that it was kind of her to let me into it. At first I took her achievement for granted and it was only when I began to learn more about the household that I appreciated her quiet cleverness. The fact was that we should not have been enjoying our ham, tea and good fresh bread in the schoolroom at all. For all her long service, Betty as nursery maid was only entitled to a place about halfway down the table in the servants’ hall – well above kitchen maids but a notch below the ladies’ maids. I as governess – stranded somewhere between servant and lady – would have been permitted the lonely indulgence of eating in my own room. Over the years, patient as a mouse making its nest, Betty had built up such a network of little privileges and alliances that the nursery area was hers to command. We had our own tiny kitchen with an oil burner for making warm drinks and a bathroom for the children’s use, grandly equipped with a fixed bath, water closet, piped cold water and cans of hot water carried up twice a day by Tibby, the schoolroom maid. Betty was bosom friends with Sally the bread and pastry cook, so tidbits arrived almost daily from the kitchen, in exchange for Betty’s sewing skills in maintaining Sally’s wardrobe. All this I found out later and was ashamed of my readiness to take its comforts for granted. On that first evening, the tea and candlelight were so soothing I could scarcely keep my eyes open.

  ‘You’re for your bed,’ Betty said. ‘Take that candle up with you, but remember to blow it out last thing. You can sleep in tomorrow, if you like. I’ll see to the children.’

  In spite of my tiredness I must have slept lightly because I was aware of the rhythms of the house under me, like a ship at sea. Until midnight at least the sounds of plates and glasses clinking and the occasional angry voice or burst of laughter came up from the kitchens four floors below, as scullery staff washed up after family dinner. Later, boards creaked on the floor immediately below me as maids shuffled and whispered their way to bed in the dormitory. Then the smaller creakings of bedframes and the sharp smell of a blown-out candle wick. After that there was silence for a few hours, apart from owls hunting over the park and the stable clock striking the hours.

  By four o’clock it was growing light. An hour after that the floorboards below creaked again as the earliest maids dragged themselves back downstairs. I got up too, folded back the bedclothes and put on my green dress and the muslin tucker. There was still nearly an hour to go before my meeting with Celia but I was too restless to stay inside. I tiptoed past the maids’ dormitory so as not to wake the lucky ones who were still snoring and crept on down the dark back stairs, with only the faintest notion of where I was going. I had a dread of going through the wrong doorway and finding myself on the family’s side of the house, onstage and with my lines unlearned. But I need not have worried because it was mostly a matter of keeping bare boards underfoot and travelling on downwards by zigzagging staircases and narrow landings towards the sounds coming from the kitchen.

  The last turn of the staircase brought me into the light, a smell of piss and a glare of white porcelain. Chamber pots, dozens of them, clustered together like the trumpets of convolvulus flowers. They must have been gathered from bedrooms and brought down for emptying. I picked my way carefully through them and out into the courtyard. A kitchen maid was carrying in potatoes, a man chopping kindling, but they took no notice of me. There was an archway with an open door on the far side of the courtyard. I walked through it and the parkland stretched out in front of me, glittering with thousands of miniature rainbows as the sun caught the dew. I bent down and bathed my face and eyes in it, breathing in the freshness.

  On the other side of the ha-ha, cows were already up and grazing. Nearer to hand, a narrow flight of steps led up to the back of the terrace, with a stone nymph guarding them. At right angles, a freshly mown grass path stretched to an archway cut into a high beech hedge. I followed it and found myself in an old-fashioned kind of garden, not so grand and formal as the rest of the grounds and to my eye all the better for that. Four gnarled mulberry trees stood at the corners of the lawn, with an old sundial at the centre. Hollyhocks grew at the back of the borders, love-in-a-mist and mignonette at the front, with stocks, bellflowers and penstemons in between. The whole area, no more than half
an acre or so, was enclosed by the beech hedges with a semicircular paved area on the south side, a rustic bench and a summerhouse dripping with white roses.

  I sat down on the bench and made myself think how to manage the conversation with Celia Mandeville when she arrived. I was reluctant to do it because, instinctively, I liked her. But she wanted something from me and – although she didn’t know it – I badly wanted several things from her. The most important by far was confirmation that Sir Herbert had been in Calais the day my father died. I could hardly expect from her proof that Sir Herbert had killed him. Surely she couldn’t know anything so terrible and be in the same room as the man?

  It wasn’t a great wrong I was doing her, after all. Her stepfather was an arrogant, cruel man and she surely could not love him. At the very least, she must be ready to go behind his back, or why should she want this meeting with me?

  She was late. Ten minutes or so after the stable clock had struck six she came running through the archway in the beech hedge, face anxious and hair flying.

  ‘Oh, here you are. Thank you, thank you.’

  She was wearing a rose-pink muslin morning dress, thrown on hastily with only the most necessary buttons done up and, I couldn’t help noticing, no stays underneath. Her feet were stockingless in white satin pumps, grass-stained and wet from the dew. Perhaps I should have stood up, since she was my employer’s daughter, but it never occurred to me. She sat down beside me and took my hand, panting from her run.

  ‘Last night … I couldn’t believe it. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Your mother was kind enough to engage me as governess.’

  ‘But when we met in Calais, I thought …’

  I think she might have been on the point of saying that she’d taken me for a social equal. She glanced at me, then away.

  ‘I suppose you’ve had some misfortune in life?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Another glance at my face. She seemed nervous, poised to run away. But she, if anybody, should feel at home on this stage and sure of her part.

  ‘I liked you, you know,’ she said. ‘Liked you at once.’

  ‘And you were kind to me.’

  Part of me wanted to reassure her, but a harder and colder part that had been born only in the last few days told me to wait and see.

  ‘Your poor head. Is it better now?’

  ‘Head? Yes, oh yes. Thank you.’

  We stared at each other. Her eyes were a deep brown, not the periwinkle sparkle of her mother’s in the portrait.

  ‘Can I trust you?’ she said. The question should have been offensive, but somehow it wasn’t. She seemed to be asking herself rather than me. ‘You see, I do very much need to trust somebody.’

  Perhaps I should have leapt in there and assured her of my total trustworthiness, but I couldn’t quite bear to do it. I watched her face as she came to a decision.

  ‘I must trust you, I think. Goodness knows, there’s nobody else.’

  That in a household of – what was it – fifty-seven people, not counting the family.

  ‘You have a mother and a brother,’ I said.

  She looked away from me. ‘Stephen doesn’t always do what I want, and my poor mother is … has other things to worry her. Then if he found out that I’d confided in her and she hadn’t told him, he’d be so angry with her …’

  ‘“He” being your stepfather?’

  She looked away from me and nodded. A full-blown rose had dropped down from its own weight so that it was resting on the arm of the bench. She began plucking off its petals, methodically and automatically.

  ‘Miss Lock, would you do something for me and keep it secret?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Promise me to keep it secret, even if you won’t do it?’

  Rose petals snowed round her grass-stained pumps.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  She let go of the despoiled rose and gripped my hand. I could feel her pulse beating in her wrist, like a panicking bird. I remembered what Betty had said – sweet winning ways.

  ‘What is it that you want me to do?’

  ‘Take a letter to the post for me.’

  ‘Only that?’

  I felt both relieved and disappointed.

  ‘Only that, but nobody must know. I can’t trust any of the servants, you see. They’re nearly all his spies.’

  ‘Spies?’

  ‘I’m sure my maid Fanny is, for one. Or they’re all so terrified of him, they’d tell him at the first black look. But he’d never guess it of you, being so newly come here.’

  ‘This letter is to a friend?’

  ‘Yes. A gentleman friend. Not a love letter, in case that’s what you’re thinking.’

  She glanced sideways at me and must have caught my sceptical look.

  ‘It’s more important than that. It’s …’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, waiting.

  ‘If … if a certain thing happens, my life may be in danger.’

  There was a flatness about the way she said it, more convincing than any dramatics might have been.

  ‘What certain thing?’

  She let go of my hand.

  ‘I mustn’t tell you, and you mustn’t ask any more questions. But you’ll take the letter for me?’

  ‘I’ve already said so. But how am I to get it to the post?’

  Though Celia was not to know it, I’d been giving the question some thought on my own behalf. With the amount of work demanded from a governess, I couldn’t see how I was to find the time to get to the Silver Horseshoe, let alone make regular reports to Mr Blackstone.

  ‘There surely must be a way,’ she said.

  I let her see that I was thinking hard.

  ‘There must be some livery stables near here, with carriages that meet the mail coaches,’ I said. ‘If I could take your letter to one of those …’

  ‘Yes. Oh, Miss Lock, how very clever of you. Could you do that?’

  Her eyes were shining. She took hold of my hand again.

  ‘I think so, yes. I’ve heard somebody talking about a place called the Silver Horseshoe, on the west side of the heath.’

  ‘Yes. We pass it in the carriage sometimes. I think they keep race horses there as well as livery.’

  ‘Is it far away?’

  ‘About two miles, I think.’

  ‘If I were to walk there, in the very early morning, say, do you suppose anybody would notice me?’

  ‘You must not be noticed. You simply must not be noticed.’

  Which was hardly an answer to my question. She turned her head suddenly.

  ‘What was that?’

  A chesty cough came from the far side of the beech hedge. A bent old gardener in a smock limped through the arch into the garden, trug over his arm. He didn’t glance in our direction and moved on slowly to a bed of delphiniums.

  ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘We must not be seen alone together.’

  ‘You surely don’t take him for a spy?’

  I kept a firm hold of her hand.

  ‘It was strange, wasn’t it, meeting in Calais like that?’ I said.

  She nodded, but her hand was tense and her eyes were on the old man.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you and your stepfather doing in Calais?’

  With an effort, she brought her attention back to me.

  ‘He had business in Paris. He wanted me to go with him.’

  ‘Does he often travel abroad?’

  ‘Not very often, no.’

  ‘I suppose you stayed several days in Calais?’

  ‘Not even a day. He’d worked himself into such a fume about getting home, we hardly had time to sleep. It was nearly two o’clock on Tuesday morning before we got to Calais and we were on the packet out by Tuesday afternoon.’

  She said it so naturally, with half her mind still on the old gardener, that it sounded like the truth. My father’s body was brought to the mo
rgue in Calais early on Saturday morning. So if she was right, by the time the Mandevilles arrived there, he was nearly three days dead. And yet a memory came to me of the foyer of the Calais hotel, and her stepfather disputing a bill several pages long.

  ‘You’d built up a very long hotel bill in a few hours,’ I said.

  She blinked, as if she didn’t understand what I meant at first.

  ‘Oh, that was mostly Stephen’s. He was there waiting for us. My stepfather frets if he thinks Stephen’s being extravagant.’

  She let go of my hand and stood up. The stable clock was striking.

  ‘What time is that?’

  ‘Seven,’ I said.

  ‘Fanny will wonder what’s become of me. I shall say I couldn’t sleep. Lord knows, that’s true enough. I’ll make some excuse to come to the schoolroom and give you the letter.’

  She took a step or two then turned round.

  ‘I can trust you, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then she was gone through the gap in the beech hedge, a few white rose petals fluttering after her. The old gardener went on cutting delphiniums, not noticing anything.

  I went through the back courtyard and the backstairs route to my room in the attic. From there, I hurried down to the schoolroom as if I’d just got up. Betty had the three children round the table, choosing pictures to paste into their scrapbooks.

  ‘Say good morning to Miss Lock.’

  They chorused it obediently.

  ‘It’s such a lovely morning, I thought we might all have a walk on the terrace before breakfast,’ Betty said.

  So we went on to the terrace through a side door and the children played hide and seek among the marble statues.

  ‘I let them run wild when there’s nobody about,’ Betty said. ‘They’re not bad children, considering.’

  After breakfast at the schoolroom table of boiled eggs and soft white rolls with good butter, it was time to start my governess duties. I realised that, with all my other concerns, I’d given no thought to the question of teaching, and with three freshly washed faces looking up at me and three pairs of small hands resting on either side of their slates I felt something like panic. Still, we managed. I devoted most of the morning to finding out how much they knew already, and the results were patchy. They were very well drilled in their tables and the Bible (I thought I detected Mrs Beedle’s influence there), adequate in grammar and handwriting and able to speak a little French, though with very bad accents. Their geography and history seemed sketchy, with many gaps, although they could all recite the kings and queens of England from Canute to the late William. Charles’s Latin was nowhere near as good as he believed and consisted mostly of recognising a few words in a passage then giving an over-free translation from memory. That possibly explained why he had not been sent away to school yet, although he was clearly old enough. I discovered early on that he had a passion for battles. Problems in addition and multiplication that otherwise brought only a blank stare were solved in seconds if I presented them in terms of so many men with muskets and so many rounds of ammunition. It was a principle of my father’s, following the great Rousseau, that learning should be made a pleasure for a child. I decided that in what would probably be a very short time with the Mandevilles, I’d try to put it into practice. After all, whatever had happened was hardly the children’s fault.