The Echoing Stones
Page 21
This and much else had the young student pieced together in support of his theory. Drunk with excitement, he had handed in his startlingly original thesis to his revered supervisor, the famous Humphrey Penrose; and had been correspondingly shattered when the great man, far from being impressed, had rubbished the whole thing. “Peurile and contemptible nonsense,” he’d declared and “I don’t know how a serious B. Litt student could have the face to turn in such gibberish! And at the tax-payers’ expense, too! You should be ashamed!”
And ashamed he was. Shattered, humiliated, almost suicidal, he had burned the whole thing, notes and all, in a gigantic bonfire; and assumed that Sir Humphrey had done much the same.
But he hadn’t. He couldn’t have because now, nearly thirty years later, here was the despised and rejected thesis turning up nearly word-for-word in a prestigious historical journal under Sir Humphrey’s prestigious name.
When Gordon had first come across this article, a few weeks ago, his initial reaction had been one of incredulity; but gradually, as it dawned on him what must have happened, incredulity was replaced by rage, by frustration, by a towering sense of injustice, hardly softened at all by the passage of years since he had written the thing. He could see how the delay must have come about. This highly contentious article had probably dismayed some previous editor so that he had put it in cold-storage, from whence it had recently been resurrected by his successor, a more flamboyant, up-and-coming sort of person, delighting in maverick ideas and controversy; and with an eye, too, for which kinds of maverick idea were going to attract the attention of the media, as this one was already beginning to do. And all under the name of Sir Humphrey Penrose, without the smallest acknowledgement of the work of the despised B. Litt. student of long ago.
Fame, prestige, common justice, all slipping through his fingers … Gordon almost groaned aloud as he contemplated the mountains of paper, the dozens – perhaps hundreds – of files still to be gone through. Somewhere, there would have to be the correspondence between Sir Humphrey and an editor. Somewhere, too, there would be a copy of Gordon’s original thesis, with the odd correction here and there in his own handwriting, as well as his signature. Three copies had had to be submitted, he remembered; and if Sir Humphrey had been planning his dastardly trick right from the beginning, he would surely have kept at least one of these copies, to be secretly referred to as required.
Had it, though, been quite as cold-blooded as this? Was it perhaps just as likely that Sir Humphrey, at some much later date, had come across the offending thesis tucked away somewhere, and had been struck for the first time by its originality, its audacious ingenuity, and the intriguing plausibility of some bits of the assembled evidence? All this, of course, long after the undistinguished B.Litt. student had disappeared from the academic scene, and could thus be safely ignored.
Which way had it been? The only brain which had once known the answer lay now deep beneath the wet winter grass of Emmerton churchyard.
Gordon hadn’t attended the funeral, and he suspected that Joyce was still a little bit sore that he hadn’t “bothered” to do so. Of course, she hadn’t realised that it wasn’t actually a question of “bothering”. His reasons for staying away had been more subtle than that, and difficult to explain.
For it seemed to him that Sir Humphrey’s death was an occasion not for grieving, but for rejoicing. It had come, had it not, at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right way: painless, instantaneous, and at a moment of great, albeit imaginary, glory. What better death could the old man have looked for? What, if he had lived on, would have been his future? Ever-increasing feebleness, ever-worsening physical deterioration, and an ever-darkening mind awash with ever weirder fantasies, spiralling down and down towards some dark and final nightmare from which he would experience no awakening.
So how could Gordon have gone to the funeral and pretended to mourn? Nothing but good had come of the old man’s death; good for the daughter, Joyce, who now at last was free to live a life of her own: supremely good for the old man himself.
A good death if ever there was one. Good, and right, and to the benefit of absolutely everyone.
Well, everyone, that is, except perhaps for poor little Mildred who had had such a nasty fright. When he, Gordon, had made his way into the dungeon to intervene decisively in that ridiculous fantasy-fight, he’d had no idea at all that Mildred was in there too. It had given him the shock of his life. Well, she’d had the shock of her life, too, poor soul, and though he’d done his utmost to calm her, it remained a horrid experience.
Still, she’d get over it, of course she would, he’d try and help her to do so, to blunt the vividness of those frightening memories. Make it up to her in some way.
Why, even for her it might turn out to be all for the best. All for the best for everyone. Nothing but good had come from Sir Humphrey Penrose’s death. This was a fact that he couldn’t repeat to himself too often.
The butt end of the eighteenth-century pistol which he’d brought down on Sir Humphrey’s head had indeed been the murder weapon, but somehow he hadn’t felt like a murderer, even in the moment of striking the blow. He’d felt more like an angel of mercy, doing good.
Good, good, good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!” said Val; and Mildred promised that she wouldn’t. Since Gordon had made his startling offer of a vacant room at the top of his house, rent-free in return for help with his research, she had been asking advice from all and sundry, even including Joyce, at Emmerton Hall.
“Better safe than sorry,” Joyce had advised; but Mildred hadn’t been so sure. It is all too possible in this world to be both safe and sorry. She’d seen it happen.
“It’s just that he’s awfully rushed at the moment,” she now explained to Val. “He’s working on his book about tapestries, and now something urgent has cropped up about some American journal that he’s involved with; and so he really does need some help. It won’t involve anything I can’t do, not word-processing or anything like that. I’ll just be filing things. And answering the telphone. And helping with the Index – putting things in alphabetical order – you know. And I do know the alphabet!” she finished defiantly, tossing her head.
“Pity you don’t know something about men, too,” Val warned. “Research Assistant,” indeed! You know what will happen, don’t you? Once you’re living there, on the premises, you’ll find yourself doing everything: shopping; cleaning; cooking lunch; sewing on buttons; watering the house-plants …”
It sounded lovely, just the sort of life that Mildred enjoyed most; but she didn’t quite dare say so.
“And then there’s sex,” Val continued relentlessly. “He either will or he won’t, and either way you’re going to be dead embarrassed. I know you. And it’s not as if he loves you.”
No, he probably didn’t. But need that involve saying “No” to everything? It was obvious that Gordon liked her – found her good company in some sort of a way – enjoyed having her around. If one is no sort of a femme fatale, and never has been, should one not grasp with both hands such tepid passions as one is capable of inspiring? But how to explain this to Val, with all her theories about being your own person, and not being used, and all the rest of it?
In the end, no explanation was necessary. Suddenly, after a long and inconclusive debate about the pros and cons of the project, Val gave her friend a quick, surprising hug, and wished her lots of luck with the new venture.
“It seems crazy to me,” she averred, with a wry smile and shaking her head, “but since you’re so set on it, Mills, I suppose you’ll have to give it a try. After all, if it all goes wrong, you can always come back here and weep on Auntie Val’s shoulder, can’t you?”
Which was nice. Not that Mildred had any serious expectation of her new venture ending in tears. She knew already that she was going to avoid trouble, and probably tears too, by going along with whatever was expected of her.
But she could hardly confess this to Val. Why spoil so warm and affectionate a parting from her friend by provoking yet another dissertation on Assertiveness?
Besides, there was something else she couldn’t confess to Val. She had only recently, with much hesitation, confessed it to herself. It concerned that moment in the dungeon when she’d at last ventured to open her eyes. In that fraction of a second before the lights went out, she had seen Sir Humphrey’s body and how it was lying, face down and several feet away from the rack. But when he had been officially found, he had been lying face up, and with the injured back of his head in contact with the iron frame of the rack, a clear indication that this was the way he had so unfortunately fallen.
Only Mildred, in all the world, knew that this was not the case; and why should she say anything? What’s done is done, and why look for trouble? People who look for trouble find it; this was one of the things she had learned during her quiet and unadventurous life.
She had read somewhere – or maybe heard it on the radio – that less than a third of murders and homicides are ever solved. This must mean that at least two thirds of all murderers are right now leading ordinary, inconspicuous lives somewhere or other. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They can’t all be solitaries; most of them will have a woman in their lives; which means that hundreds and hundreds of women must be living unremarked and probably comfortably enough with some murderer. Why shouldn’t Mildred be one of them?
Mildred thought of all the things she couldn’t do: couldn’t type, couldn’t drive, couldn’t programme a computer, couldn’t operate a word-processor. But this was something she felt quite sure she could do – live comfortably, uncritically and at peace with a man who had once committed murder.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Celia Fremlin, 1993
Biographical Sketch © Chris Simmons, 2014
Preface © Rebecca Tope, 2014
The right of Celia Fremlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31273–3