He had listened to what Sebastian had to say, looked carefully at the exquisite drawings in his portfolio – and laughed. “Don’t let yourself get carried away with funny ideas about concert halls and cathedrals. Don’t forget, architecture’s about drains as well. What are your mathematics like?”
Not his strong point, Sebastian had been forced to admit, abashed.
“Well, they were never mine either, but you’ll learn as you go.”
Sebastian had gone away with his heart on fire, his head full of talk of draughtsmanship, the need to gain knowledge of practical applications, calculations – and the offer of a job as a paying pupil in the New Year, when the man he was due to replace had left. He sometimes had the feeling that it had been too easy, but as yet he’d managed to tell no one, not even Louisa, since he believed his family had the right to be the first to know. Sylvia he could envisage having hysterics at the very idea, though his mother might well accept it as simply one of the crazes young men were apt to take up and then abandon. His grandmother, on the other hand, would certainly be seriously displeased, and would no doubt see it as a betrayal of his obligations. Without exception, they would all be astonished. Not one of them, he thought, would entirely believe he was serious.
As for his father – the decision was sure to raise a furore, notwithstanding that architecture was a perfectly respectable profession, and there was nothing about it to be ashamed of. It wasn’t as though he would be condemned to scraping a miserable living in a garret as an artist, dammit – but he knew his father would never be persuaded to see it like that, much less to stump up the money he would need to pay for his pupillage. Sebastian certainly didn’t have the money to fund himself. He just about got by as it was – and he still owed a hundred pounds on his new car.
He smoked a cigarette, buried his head in his hands, and it wasn’t until the sun was high in the sky above the brow of the hill that he realised it was nearly lunch time. Calling the dogs to heel, he made his way back to the house.
He turned into the stable yard just in time to encounter a very small boy pedalling up towards the back entrance on a bicycle much too large for him. Red-faced and panting with the effort, the lad clutched a letter in one hand, which proved to be for Sebastian himself, from Louisa, with ‘Urgent’ scribbled across the corner.
Having read it, he turned to the waiting boy, whose fascinated eyes were now glued to the Ascot in front of the stables in the yard, at present being cleaned of the previous day’s mud by one of the grooms, wielding a shammy leather and hissing under his breath as if he were grooming a horse. “Well, Davey – it is Davey, from the smithy, isn’t it? – this letter demands my presence in the village urgently, and as you see, I’ve no means of transport at the moment. What do you say to lending me your bicycle, hm?”
“T’ain’t mine, sir. ’Tis Miss Louisa’s. ’Er borrered it me, to get here quick.”
“Right, then, I can return it to her.”
Barty considered. “’Er give me a thrupenny bit.”
“I believe I could make that sixpence.”
A tanner? A predatory gleam appeared in the boy’s eye. “It be a long walk into they village.”
“It’s all downhill,” Sebastian replied heartlessly. Relenting, he added, “I dare say Timmins will let you sit in the driving seat of my motor and show you how things go if you behave yourself.”
“Cor!”
Sebastian felt in his pocket for a sixpence and the bicycle was handed over with no further argument from the budding extortionist.
Chapter Five
Flying down the village street towards the Fox’s house on Louisa’s bicycle, sending the would-be intimidating flock of hissing geese on the green about their business, waving to Lister’s youngest little girl who was sitting on the cottage doorstep blissfully blowing bubbles from a clay pipe dipped in soapy water, Sebastian scarcely registered the knot of excited people gathered outside the village school, the bicycle propped up against its wall, or the horse and covered cart drawn up outside.
He did, however, become aware of the unusual silence among the crowd as he approached. He raised a hand in salute and this was returned, but without the usual cheeriness. He felt the stares on his back and prudently lessened his speed until he came suddenly on the house, sitting like a surprise in the bend of the road.
It always brought a smile to his face, the old manor house that Augustus Fox had purchased from the Scot who had bought it sixty years ago, added to it and sentimentally renamed it ‘Aynholme’ – although it was still known to everyone in the locality, and the family, too, for that matter, as the manor. On the outside, the best thing that could be said about it was that it was decidedly individual: to the original Jacobean buildings had been added fancy Victorian extensions and a Scottish baronial tower to one side, in questionable but exuberant taste, which nevertheless had appealed to Gus’s quirky sense of humour when he first saw it. Whatever it looked like outside, inside it was spacious, pleasant and comfortable, an ideal house in which to bring up a large, widely-spaced and energetic brood. Children could be noisy here, slide down banisters, roast chestnuts in its huge, old-fashioned fireplaces, play hide and seek in its many secret corners (though once Barty had been tied up as an enemy Red Indian, left in the pepper-pot tower and been forgotten). There was a field where you could play French cricket without being fearful of spoiling the lawns. Robert, now married with children of his own, had been Sebastian’s greatest hero, and it was here that the boys – and Louisa – had fished and climbed trees, where Louisa had beaten Sebastian at conkers and let him teach her how to skate on the pond behind the house. He still missed Gus’s wife, Ellen, an endless source of comfortable common sense, who had always made sure there were cups of cocoa, cake and glasses of milk available for hungry children. Or better still, crusty bread, still warm from the oven, plastered with sweet butter and raspberry jam – ambrosia! Having known this untidy house with its threadbare carpets and scuffed, well-worn furniture so intimately from childhood, Sebastian often felt more of a sense of homecoming here than he did at Belmonde.
The door was opened, almost before he’d lifted the knocker, by Louisa, who had strategically placed herself in her father’s study, where she had a good view of anyone coming round the bend in the road. He saw at once by her flushed face and bright eyes that something was up, but before he could enquire, Gus had called a greeting to him from behind his open door.
The old man looked up with a smile when he saw Sebastian in the doorway. His manuscript was on the desk; Louisa had evidently been writing down notes for her father, at his dictation, a task all his girls were roped in to do from time to time, since his deteriorating eyesight was not up to the manuscript pages of his ‘Lepidoptera’. He was wearing, as he invariably did, a black jacket and pepper-and-salt tweed trousers of exactly the same pattern as always. Whether it was the same outfit, or whether he’d taken a liking to the style and simply gave his tailor a repeat order when necessary, Sebastian had never had the temerity to ask. Or why he chose to wear such a formal jacket when its line was invariably spoiled by bulging pockets which were the receptacle for a magnifying glass, pencils and India rubber, a small sketchpad and a bag of the striped humbugs of which he was inordinately fond.
They exchanged small talk, and after a few minutes the paper bag came out. The sweets having been offered and declined, Gus popped one into his own mouth. “Well, Louisa,” he said indistinctly, “You’ve been very helpful, as usual. Run along now. You’re like a cat on hot bricks. I can see there are things you want to talk to Sebastian about.”
She led the way to a seat in the inglenook in the big main room, where the fire was still a heap of warm pink ash from the previous day, and threw on another huge log. Today didn’t have the same chill of a damp summer’s day as yesterday, but it was a big, draughty room that demanded a fire, and except in the deepest heat of summer, one was usually kept lit. The scent of woodsmoke and beeswax was one Sebastian always felt w
as inseparable from this house. He took the bellows from her and gave the embers a go. When the log had caught flame he sat down, and only then did he ask her whether anything was wrong.
“This letter came this morning.” Louisa picked up the sheet of thick, inlaid cream paper lying on the settle beside her and handed it to Sebastian. On it was written a declaration in a forceful but unmistakably feminine hand: “Freed, this morning! Mary, at 11 a.m!” It was signed with a single initial: A.
He handed it back. “Who is Mary? And who’s A?” Though he had little doubt they were more of the brave, foolish women who were always getting themselves locked up on one pretext or another in order to bring their grievances to the attention of the public.
“Friends in the movement. Mary Leigh – oh, Seb, she’s been so brave —”
“What has she done?”
Climbed on to a roof in Birmingham, apparently, and bombarded the police protecting the Prime Minister with tiles and slates. Then been taken to Winson Green prison. As must have been her intention, thought Sebastian.
“Then she went on hunger strike and those monsters fed her by force. But it’s all right, she’s out now, she’ll be looked after.”
“Force feeding. Good God.” He couldn’t begin to understand the depth of passion and feeling that could drive a woman so far. “But – what is it – is that why you wanted to see me so urgently?” he asked, though he couldn’t see that it could be.
“No, it wasn’t that – at least, not entirely.” She looked confused, and flushed slightly. “Oh, I don’t know …I had a little spat with Meg that upset me, and – well, I just felt I wanted to see you. There’s no one else I can talk to about these things. I know you’re sympathetic, underneath, only you won’t commit yourself. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Of course you should. I’m always good for a shoulder to cry on, if nothing else, you know that,” he replied, trying to hide how inordinately pleased he was that she’d turned to him for support. In fact, she was right: he had a good deal of sympathy with what the women were striving for, and he’d often thought it might be rather jolly to join those male medical students, friends of Louisa’s, who were always ready to interrupt meetings with their rowdy songs and bags of flour and rotten eggs, only he’d never quite got around to it. If her fellow sympathisers had all been like Louisa, now …but the truth was, some of them acted more like harridans than ladies and, like this Mary Leigh, whoever she was, frightened him to death with their intensity. “But why have you and Margaret quarrelled?”
“Oh, it was nothing, really. This letter. I dare say she would soon have dismissed the unwarranted joy it caused me as the usual feminist hysterics,” she said drily, “and we’d have made it up and that would have been that, if this other business in the village hadn’t come up and made it worse.”
He recalled the unusual stir as he rode down the street. “I noticed Perkins’ cart outside the village hall as I passed, and the crowd. What’s happened?”
“You haven’t heard? I would have thought they’d have been up to see you all at the house before now.”
“I’ve been out all morning. I met young Davey with your message in the stable yard and came down here immediately. Who are ‘they’, pray?”
“The police. Apparently a woman’s body has been found in the Abbey grounds in mysterious circumstances.”
“What? One of the village women?”
She shook her head. “No one knows who she is. She’s a stranger, no one from here, or seemingly from anywhere round about.”
“In the Abbey grounds, did you say? When was she found?”
“This morning – by the gamekeeper who lives at the lodge —”
“Jordan.”
“Tom Jordan, yes. But they seem to think she died yesterday. Poor woman, she must have been taken ill and then died from exposure, out there in all that rain. What’s the matter? Is anything wrong?”
“What? Oh no, no. Do go on.”
But of course, something was very wrong indeed. That woman he had seen had been real enough, after all. But why had she not left the grounds by the main gates as he’d surmised? If she’d had no right to be there at Belmonde, could she have somehow lost her way, looking for some way out, other than by way of the main drive, along which she must have entered? The gates weren’t kept locked nowadays, and were left unattended, except at night. Due to his father’s economies, there was no one at the lodge to open and shut them during the day when Jordan was about his gamekeeping business. But the woman wasn’t to have known this, and might have slipped in, thinking them left temporarily open.
He became aware that Louisa, after a curious glance, was speaking again, an unusual edge to her tone. “According to Margaret, she must have been one of ‘my’ suffragettes. Why else would a lone woman be lurking in the Abbey grounds, if not to throw a brick through a window, or to cause some other mischief?”
“So that’s why you quarrelled?” he asked, temporarily distracted from thinking about that poor woman’s fate. “Hmm. Well, I have to say it seems a perfectly sensible viewpoint, especially given that my Uncle Monty was expected down here this weekend. After that speech he made last month, he might well be regarded as a target —”
“And the fact that there are simply no grounds for such suspicion isn’t sensible?”
The colour had risen in her face, and for once he said what he had been thinking for a long time. “Dear Louisa, you simply can’t let these hysterical women who are running this campaign and making martyrs out of themselves take you over and jeopardise your chances of a career with all their nonsense.”
“Nonsense?” The colour receded, leaving her face unusually tight-lipped and angry. Then she took a deep breath. “Don’t let this become an argument between us.” She stood up abruptly and rested her forehead on the great stone lintel than ran ten feet across the fireplace. She was wearing a fashionably narrow, russet coloured dress that came a little above her ankles, with a high waist and an inset of patterned silk filling in the V-neckline; a long necklace of dark amber beads hung nearly to her waist, almost the colour of her bright chestnut hair, which at the moment was flying round her face where she’d run her fingers through it. But when she turned round to face him and spoke, it was rather sadly.
“You needn’t be afraid I shall turn into one these ‘hysterical women’ – though I wouldn’t have the chance of a career at all had it not been for one or two of them. But Seb, I’m a medical student. If you’d seen the terrible things I’ve seen, you’d feel the same …women knocked about by their husbands …often abandoned by them and then forced to work on starvation wages to keep their children fed …marriage and divorce laws that keep them tied down. Wasn’t it Rousseau who said, ‘Man is born free but everywhere is in chains’? If he’d said women he would have been nearer the mark. Can’t you see how hopeless they must feel with no one to turn to? Can’t you see how it’s turning them to violence, too? One can hardly blame them for it.”
He was humbled by her passion and sincerity, though he was more afraid than ever for her safety. “Yes, I do see that, but I’m very sorry indeed you and Margaret should have quarrelled over it.”
“It’ll blow over – and I dare say,” she sighed, “it was more my fault than hers. I take offence too easily on these subjects. And there’s always the faint possibility,” she added honestly, swallowing hard, “that she – and you – may be right, to some extent. There are some women in the movement who must go to physical and emotional extremes.”
“Which only makes everyone think they are motivated by nothing more than a desire for notoriety.”
“I’m afraid that may be true in some cases – though they’d say they had no more desire than to put the Cause in the public eye. But really,” she went on, “Meg’s such an old sobersides. I believe she thinks women who have the nerve to protest deserve everything they get! No, perhaps that’s unkind—”
“Who deserves everything they get?”
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This was Alice, who had just come through the door, pulling off her tam-o’-shanter, cheeks glowing with riding her bicycle from Sunday confirmation classes at the rectory, where she also shared lessons during the week with the rector’s children. Sebastian stood up, ready to give her a big-brotherly hug, as he usually did when they met, before realising it wouldn’t do, not this time. Though her hair wasn’t yet up, she had taken another step towards young womanhood since the last time he’d seen her. Receiving no answer to her question, she went on with obvious excitement, “Have you heard the news?”
“I’ve just told him, Alice.”
“I don’t mean about your friend, though that’s really good, isn’t it, Seb? I meant the woman who’s been found.”
“Yes, Alice, Louisa’s told me.”
“What you can’t have heard – nor you, Louisa, since it’s just come from Joe Simmons – is that they don’t think she died from exposure.”
“Then what?” Louisa sounded a little nonplussed.
“Joe Simmons says there’s a police inspector come from Bridgnorth, and he thinks she was killed! Old Perkins says she might have been trespassing and was shot.”
“What!”
There followed a taut silence before Louisa and Sebastian spoke simultaneously: “Then Old Perkins has been at the bottle again, take no notice,” came from Louisa, and from Sebastian, “My dear Alice, you’d better inform Tom Perkins that we haven’t yet started shooting trespassers at Belmonde.”
In any case, it was inconceivable that anyone would have been out shooting in that weather yesterday – or even if they had, that the woman had been shot, accidentally or otherwise.
“Well,” said Alice with relish, “they’re taking her away to cut her open and find out more.”
As a young child Sebastian had been subject to nightmares, and he could not now rid himself of the feeling that he was again in the middle of one. The bad feelings he’d had about this woman, right from the first moment he’d seen her, were reinforced tenfold. He was aware of shadows closing in, of a scent of evil.
Shadows & Lies Page 6
