by Anne Perry
“Isadora, please take control of yourself,” the bishop said between his teeth. “I can quite understand your distress, but we must keep calm. Hysteria will help no one.” He was talking too quickly. “I merely meant that the matter has come to a natural conclusion and there is nothing to be served by pressing it any further. And that God will take care of the judgment necessary.”
“That is not what you meant,” she said bitterly. “You meant that now it can all be put away without any effort on our part to conceal a scandal. The real scandal is that we want to. That we knew Ramsay Parmenter all those years and we never noticed his misery.”
The bishop smiled apologetically at Cornwallis. “I am so sorry.” He shook his head very slightly. “My wife is deeply distressed at this turn of events. Please excuse her unguarded outburst.” He turned to Isadora, his lips a thin line. “Perhaps you should go and lie down for a little, my dear. See if you can compose yourself. You will feel better shortly. Have Collard bring you a tisane.”
Isadora was livid. He spoke to her as if she were mentally incompetent.
“I am not ill! I am considering our responsibility in the violent death of one of our clergy, and trying to examine in my heart whether we could and should have done more to help when there was still time.”
“Really—” the bishop started, his face pink.
“We all should have,” Cornwallis cut across him. “We knew someone in that house killed Unity Bellwood. We should have found a way of preventing a second tragedy.”
The bishop glared at him. “Since the poor man was obviously incurably insane, it is not a tragedy that he should have died, and thank the Lord, not by his own hand,” he corrected. “Given the already irreparable circumstances, this is the least appalling outcome we could expect. I believe I have already thanked you for coming to inform me, Mr. Cornwallis. I do not believe there is anything further I can tell you that will assist you in any other matter, and this one is mercifully closed.”
Cornwallis rose to his feet, his expression a mixture of embarrassment and confusion, as if he were struggling to reconcile warring emotions, both of which hurt him.
Isadora knew how he felt. She was filled with the same conflict of anger and shame.
Cornwallis turned to her. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Underhill. Good day, Bishop.” And without extending his hand he swiveled around and went out of the dining room door.
“I think you had better retire for a while until you can compose yourself,” the bishop said to Isadora. “Your behavior in this matter has been something rather less than I had hoped for.”
She looked at him steadily and with a detachment of which she had not expected herself to be capable. Now that the moment had come, there was a calm center of warmth inside her, quite steady.
“I think we are both disappointed, Reginald,” she replied. “You hoped for discretion from me, and I cannot be discreet about this. I hoped for compassion and honesty from you, and a little self-examination as to whether we could and should have done more to understand before this happened. And it seems you have neither the pity nor the humility to be capable of that. Perhaps you had a right to be surprised in me. I gave too little sign of what I felt. I had no right to be surprised in you. You have always been like this. I simply refused to see it.” She walked to the door and opened it. She heard him gasp, and he started to speak as she went into the hall, but she did not listen. She went across the floor and through the baize door into the kitchens, where she knew he would not follow.
Pitt returned to Brunswick Gardens to clear up the last details of Ramsay Parmenter’s death. He did not expect to achieve anything, it was merely necessary.
He was let in by Emsley, looking red-eyed and exhausted.
“There is no need to trouble Mrs. Parmenter,” Pitt said as he crossed the hall. “I don’t think I have any further questions to ask.”
“No sir,” Emsley said dutifully. He seemed to hesitate. If so dignified and unhappy a figure could be said to do so, he dithered.
“What is it?” Pitt asked gently.
“It is not my place to ask, sir,” Emsley said miserably, “but is it necessary to allow those in the newspapers to know all this, sir? I mean, I … I mean, could you just say Mr. Parmenter died in an accident? He was …” He took a shaky breath and attempted to control himself. “He was such a quiet gentleman, Mr. Pitt, never a rough word to anyone all the time I knew him. And I’ve served in this house above twenty years. Kindest man, he was, sir. Always had time … and patience. The worst you could say of him was that he was a bit remote … like absentminded. Forgot things. But that’s hardly a sin. Most of us can be forgetful. Terrible worried, he was, lately.” Emsley swallowed and sniffed. “All that stuff about Darwin and monkeys and all that. Got him down terribly.” His face puckered. “I tried to tell him it was all nonsense, but it’s not my place to say things like that … not to the likes of the Master, him being a proper churchman.”
“I don’t think it matters who says it, if it is true,” Pitt answered. “And I will certainly not volunteer any unnecessary information to anyone. I cannot imagine that Mrs. Parmenter will. How is she this morning?”
“I haven’t seen her myself, sir, but Braithwaite says she’s very upset, naturally, and feeling the shock of it now. But she’s very brave. Did you need to see anybody, sir? I can tell Mr. Mallory you’re here, or Mr. Corde.”
“You could tell Mrs. Parmenter I’m here, as a courtesy,” Pitt answered. “But I don’t need to speak to anyone, thank you. I need to go back to the study.”
“Yes sir. It’s locked up. I suppose you have the key?”
“Yes, I have, thank you.”
“Right sir. Will you be wanting anything? A cup of tea, perhaps?”
“In an hour or so, thank you,” Pitt accepted, then excused himself and went up the black staircase, along the passage and unlocked the study door.
The room was exactly as he had left it. There were still dark bloodstains on the floor beside the desk. The paper knife was in the farther corner, where it had fallen. There had never been any question of its not being the weapon, or of anyone else’s having touched it. It was evidence, but there was nothing to dispute.
He stood staring at it, trying to picture in his mind what had happened. Physically it was easy, but what had happened between Ramsay and Vita in the years leading up to it? Or more correctly, what had happened to him? How had his doubts so distorted his thinking, his feeling, that he had moved from being a loving husband dedicated to the care of other people’s souls to being a man whose own weaknesses so overwhelmed him he made love to a woman he despised, under his own roof, and when she blackmailed him with her pregnancy, killed her—and then tried to kill his wife?
Perhaps the answer was simply madness—as clear and as incomprehensible as that.
He went to the desk and started to look through the papers lying in piles. If Ramsay and Vita had quarreled over love letters, they must have been where she could easily see them. He had been in the room when she went in, so she had not searched for them; her eye had caught them by chance. And she would have had no opportunity to move them since then.
There was a paper on St. Paul. Half folded was the draft of a sermon on the Epistle of St. James titled “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally, and up-braideth not!” Under that were two short letters from missions abroad, one in Africa, one in China. He put them in a pile again and looked at the surface of the desk. There was a red leather-bound copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. A Stoic philosopher, albeit an emperor of Rome, was odd reading for a cleric of the Church of England, but not perhaps for what he had first believed Ramsay to be. Its dry, brave, rather comfortless wisdom would be exactly what would echo his own philosophy. It would be a companion voice. He looked beside it and saw half a dozen papers written in two quite different sets of handwriting. He picked up the first.
It was a neat, exact hand with open Greek E’s.
Ramsay’s writing. Pitt knew that from other papers on the desk. He began to read it.
You who are dearest to me, how can I express to you the sense of loneliness I feel when we are separated? The distance between us is immeasurable, and yet thoughts may fly across it and I can reach you in heart and mind in as short a space as it takes for one to find some solitary corner where I can summon you to my heart’s eye.
Then time vanishes and once more we can walk and talk as of old. I can share with you my dreams, the explorations of all truth and meaning which is surely our greatest treasure. I am no longer a wanderer among strangers, but am at home in you. We breathe the same air, our understanding is but two halves of the same whole …
He continued down to the end of the page and turned it over. It was all in the same vein, about loneliness and separation, about unity of thought and heart, symbolized by unity of person.
The second was in the same hand, and while dealing with a different subject, it was of the same nature. Again loneliness was a continuous thread running through it, the desire to be together again, to remove all difficulties and barriers that kept them apart. The underlying emotion was obviously deeply felt, but it was couched in metaphor, a trifle pedantic, drawing back from the ultimate of verbal commitment. Pitt could hear Ramsay Parmenter’s careful, slightly dry voice all the way through it.
The third was in a different hand, rapid, exuberant, full of confidence. Here the meaning was undisguised. It began instantly and passionately.
My own beloved, my hunger for you is inexpressible. When we are apart I drown in a void of loneliness, engulfed in the night. Infinity yawns between us. And yet I have but to think of you and neither heaven nor hell could bar my way. The void disappears and you are with me. I touch you, hold you again. We are one heart and one flesh. I drown in you. All pain is forgotten as a dream.
The sweetness of times past returns with all its echoes of passion and hopes and terrors shared. We climb together the starry heights of truth and leap beyond into the unknown deeps of faith, life’s greatest gift, eternity’s crowning glory. All my grief is in the past, slipping from me like shadows before the rising sun. We melt into one another in eternal ecstasy …
There were three more in the same dashing hand. Little wonder Vita Parmenter had been amazed and had challenged her husband to explain them. What could he possibly say?
Pitt set them down again in the place where they had been. He felt confused, overtaken by his own sense of not being equal to the task given him. He had failed to understand Ramsay while he was alive, and thus to prevent his death. And he could not dismiss the fact that Ramsay could have succeeded in hurting Vita. Then Pitt would have been responsible for that, too. Now he understood even less. He had read the love letters, and anyone could see how they would precipitate a quarrel. It was inevitable the moment Vita saw them … or for that matter if anyone else in the family had, or even Dominic. But why had Ramsay left them out on the desk where they must be seen? Why did he have both his and hers? Presumably he must have retrieved them from her belongings after her death. With any sense at all he would have destroyed them.
Did he still love her, or was he so obsessed with her, that he could not, in spite of the risk they represented? Had he abandoned hope of escape for the result of his act? Was he only waiting for the inevitable?
And yet looking at the unbridled passion in the letters, Pitt could see neither Ramsay nor Unity in them. The wording was characteristic of what he had seen of him and heard of her. But the emotion was not. He still could not imagine them in love with each other at all, let alone so wildly.
Which showed the depth to which he had failed in this case.
He sighed and started to look through the drawers of the desk. There were the usual personal accounts and trivial letters regarding Ramsay’s profession. He read them all as a matter of duty. They were even drier than he had expected, the same pedantic phrases repeated in each one. Perhaps they were meant sincerely, but there was a stiffness about them which made it difficult to believe.
In the next drawer down there were more letters. They were from various people, colleagues, parishioners, friends. He glanced at them. Most of them were several years old, apparently kept because they were of emotional value. Among them he found one from Dominic. It was an invasion of privacy to read it, yet he found he had done so even while the thought was in his mind.
Dear Ramsay,
I know I have said so many times to you when we have spoken, still I wished to put on paper, my gratitude to you for your unending patience with me. I must have tried you sorely at times. I remember in guilt and embarrassment how long you argued with me, and I repeated the same selfish objections over and over. Yet you never lost your kindness towards me nor allowed me to think you valued your time more than you valued me.
Perhaps more than anything you said was your example of what it is to minister to those in need. If I could so follow in your footsteps that one day anyone might feel the joy I do, because of something I have done for them, then my whole life will have a completeness and a happiness I can now only aspire to.
The best thanks I can offer, and which I know would be of the most value to you, will be to try to be as you are.
My gratitude will not fade.
Your devoted friend, Dominic Corde
Pitt refolded it with an overwhelming sadness. For a moment he was at one with Dominic in a way he had never imagined possible. He could understand his hurt now, the lost opportunity that could not be retrieved. The reproach would never leave.
And the letter must have been precious to Ramsay, because he had kept it among the few other tokens of friendship over the years. Some had dates as far back as his university days.
There were none from Vita. Perhaps they had not written to each other, or if they had, then he had kept them somewhere else, possibly in his bedroom. It hardly mattered.
He looked at the drawer below. There were only more letters to do with his profession. Several of them concerned the book he was currently working on. Pitt leafed through them rapidly. They were all brief and exceedingly dry. Then he came upon one in Unity’s hand. He recognized it instantly. It was dated from the end of 1890, just over three months before. It was her application for the position she had occupied.
Dear Reverend Parmenter,
I have read your earlier work with the greatest interest, and a deep regard for your scholarship and your lucid and enlightening explanations of matters hitherto not clearly understood by me, and I must say in honesty, by those more learned than I, to whom I had addressed my questions.
I hear you are to write another work which will require research and translation of early classical letters and papers. I am a scholar in Aramaic and Greek and have a working knowledge of Hebrew. I enclose copies of my qualifications in these subjects, and references from past employment, with names and addresses of those who would confirm my abilities to you.
I would humbly, but with as much urgency as may be judged not too immodest, request that you consider me for the position of assistant to you in this most important undertaking. I believe I have the necessary scholastic skills, and you will not anywhere find a person who has a greater belief in the work, or admiration for you as the only man capable of doing it justice.
I write with the greatest hope, and remain yours faithfully,
Unity Bellwood
He folded that also and put it in with the love letters. It was one thing more which confused him. She had written as a stranger, and yet that was only six or eight weeks before she had become pregnant, at the outside. It was a short time for such passion to explode.
There was one more thing. Ramsay had kept a notebook, a brown leather-bound volume about an inch thick. Glancing through it, Pitt saw that it did not seem to be a diary so much as a journal of occasional thoughts. He looked at one page, then another, and found it too difficult to understand. Some of it seemed to be in Latin, some in almost a shorthand of Ramsay’s own devising
. He would take it with him and study it and the letter later, when he had time.
There was nothing more to be done here. He should speak to Vita, and perhaps Dominic, and then check finally with Tellman and attend to the formalities. The cases of Unity Bellwood and Ramsay Parmenter were closed—not satisfactorily, but still closed, for all that.
10
PITT WENT HOME early. It was good to have some time to spend with his family. The verdict of the inquest on Ramsay Parmenter had been exactly what he’d expected. While the balance of his mind was turned he had attacked his wife, and she had defended herself. Death by misadventure.
Now Pitt forced the matter out of his mind and simply put on his oldest clothes and pottered in the garden. There was not a great deal to be done. The growing season had barely begun. The weeds had not established themselves, but there was always tidying of one sort or another, things to mend. And perhaps it was not too cold to sow the first seeds.
Daniel and Jemima helped him. They each had their own marked-out pieces of earth where they could grow what they pleased. Daniel’s was largely designed with stones, which he had taken to collecting, but there was a small fuchsia bush in it, at the moment looking rotted and very sad.
“It’s dead!” Daniel said tragically. He reached to yank it out by the roots. Jemima watched, feet together, face glowering, full of sympathy.
