Portrait of Peril

by Laura Joh Rowland

  I think back to the wedding and remember my happiness when Barrett kissed me. All the while, the Reverend Thornton stood by with darkness in his heart, aware that the body of the man he’d stabbed to death lay in the crypt below us.

  “How could you?” Barrett demands. “Kill somebody, and then marry Sarah and me the next day as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth?” He beholds the vicar with a mixture of disbelief, confusion, and anger. “I respected you. I trusted you. I thought you were an honorable man, an example to follow. How could you?”

  Reverend Thornton flinches as if Barrett’s words are stones hurled at him. “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.” He turns to me. “I’m sorry I dishonored your nuptials.”

  Amid my own bewilderment and indignation, I see him as if he’s a stranger. My memory of his kindness to me darkens like the edges of a page torn from a diary and dipped in acid. His old, threadbare coat hangs on a man who seems just as devoid of a soul, of morality, as a wooden statue.

  “We’re not the only ones you owe an apology to,” Barrett says. “There’s my mother and my father and everyone else in the parish. And don’t forget Charles Firth’s widow.”

  “I know.” The vicar looks humbled and contrite, but his voice regains strength as he says, “That’s why I’m prepared to accept my punishment. I’ve only one thing to ask of you before you arrest me: please don’t tell anyone about Alice.”

  Surprise raises Barrett’s eyebrows. Disapproval draws them into a frown. “What am I supposed to do? Just leave her like this?”

  “It won’t be for long.”

  “Who will take care of her in the meantime? And what will happen afterward?” Barrett’s question alludes to the major problem of a corpse in the tower.

  A sigh of resignation deflates the vicar’s chest. “I shall have to tell Mrs. Thornton. She’ll make arrangements.”

  I suppose that foisting the burden onto the wife he’s kept ignorant is the least of his sins. Barrett says, “How do you expect to keep Alice’s passing a secret? There will have to be a death certificate and a burial.”

  “I hope there will be enough time between my arrest and her passing that the public won’t connect the two events. Mrs. Thornton will have to explain many things about Alice, but nobody needs to know that she had anything to do with my killing Charles Firth.”

  I’m so angry at the vicar that I hate to grant him any favors, but I remember how my mother and I were shunned by neighbors who thought my father had murdered Ellen Casey. I pity Alice Thornton, her children, and her mother, all innocent bystanders to his crime. I look to Barrett, expecting him to agree with me that the vicar should have his wish.

  Barrett paces the floor. “I don’t think it’s possible to leave Alice out of the picture. She’s your motive for killing Charles Firth. Without her, what are you going to say at your trial? That you killed him for no reason? The jury might not believe you.” He halts, faces the vicar, and shakes his head. “You’re guilty, you confessed, but you might be acquitted.”

  “That’s a good point,” I say. Heaven forbid that Charles Firth’s murderer goes free because important facts were withheld from the jury. Barrett and I can’t risk such a subversion of justice.

  “Please.” Reverend Thornton’s voice is back to normal, urgent with desperation. “I’m begging you, for my family’s sake.”

  Barrett turns from side to side, like a man trying to see a way out from between a rock and a hard place. “Because of everything you’ve done for my family, I wish I could do what you ask. But I can’t.”

  “We’ll have to testify at your trial,” I remind the vicar. “What are we supposed to say?”

  “You can say I told you that I thought Mr. Firth was a burglar and I stabbed him in self-defense.”

  “I won’t lie to help you cover up your dirty secrets,” I say. Heaven knows I’ve plenty of my own, but I draw the line at keeping those of my friend’s killer.

  “You’re asking us to lie in court, under oath.” Offense flares in Barrett’s eyes. “Forget it. Lord Hugh has gone to fetch an ambulance for Alice. It will take her to the hospital. I’m taking you to the police station.”

  The vicar bows his head in sad, resigned dignity. “So be it.”

  I’m thanking God that at least one crime is solved, and without violence, when a shrill voice cries, “No!”

  CHAPTER 30

  Lucie Thornton stands in the doorway. She wears a blue wool coat over a long white flannel nightdress, and on her feet are the little red rubber boots I saw at the vicarage. In the frame of her dark, tangled hair, her face is contorted with terror. She must have sneaked up the stairs and overheard the whole, awful scene.

  “Lucie, go back to the house.” The vicar’s tone is sharp with alarm.

  Ignoring him, Lucie glares at Barrett and me and stomps her foot. “You can’t take Mama and Grandfather away.” Her babyish voice quivers.

  I think of the day the police interrogated, threatened, and beat my father while I listened. There’s no saving Lucie’s grandfather, but I have to get her out of here so she doesn’t see the ugliness of what happens next and dwell on it for the rest of her life. I hold out my hand to her. “Lucie, come with me.”

  “Daniel, stop them!” Lucie cries.

  From the dark stairwell behind her, Daniel steps into the room. His coat sleeves and his blue-and-white-striped pajama trousers are too short; he’s outgrown them. With his tousled blond hair, he looks like a child who’s just gotten out of bed, but his soft face has hardened into new, grim angles. He’s carrying an ax. My heart sinks. The violence I thought we’d avoided is now all too possible.

  “Go away,” Daniel says to Barrett and me. His voice cracks. “Leave us alone.”

  “Daniel, put the ax down.” Barrett speaks with deliberate calm.

  Daniel raises the ax in both hands, and his strange smile plays across his face. Our guns are useless; Barrett and I can’t shoot a child. To cut short a life that’s barely begun, to destroy his innocent hopes and dreams, to bereave those who love him—the very thought is impossible.

  “I’ve been protecting my mother ever since I got big enough,” Daniel says. “Once she brought a man home, and he started beating her. I hit him with a chair. I broke it over his head. Then there was the man she owed money to. He made her sell herself to other men to pay it back. I followed him across a bridge, and I pushed him off. He fell in the river. He couldn’t swim.” Daniel utters a hearty masculine laugh that slides up to a giggle. “I watched him drown.”

  He’s shockingly not so innocent after all. Lucie smiles up at Daniel, her eyes shining with hero worship. I feel a complicated mixture of revulsion and pity. The twins have seen too much, and Daniel took matters into his own hands at too young an age. He must be half mad.

  The vicar beholds his grandchildren with a horror that says he didn’t know all the sordid details of Alice’s life and that the things Daniel has done are a complete surprise to him. “Daniel.” He holds out his hand. “Give me the ax.”

  Daniel tilts his head at his grandfather. “Why are you going to let the policeman arrest you?” His childish bewilderment contrasts with the bulky muscles of his body, the big hands holding the ax. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Either Daniel didn’t overhear the vicar’s confession or he didn’t understand it. Again I wonder if his mind is slow.

  “That’s enough, Daniel. Go home, and take Lucie with you.” Reverend Thornton moves toward the children, waving his arms, shooing them to the door.

  Daniel stands firm. “You only tried to help after the man was dead.”

  Lucie pipes up, “You shouldn’t have to go to jail, Grandfather.”

  The candlelight wavers, as if from a sudden change in the atmosphere, while I begin to suspect that there’s more to the story than has been revealed. Barrett asks the vicar, “What are they talking about?”

  The vicar shouts at the children, “Go!”

  Barrett steps between them and the door.
“I want to hear what they have to say. Daniel, were you in the church that night?”

  “Yes.” Relief colors Daniel’s strange smile. He brings to mind a pupil who’s been waving his hand in class and the teacher has finally called on him. “Lucie and I both were.”

  It’s just as I speculated previously: the children were at the scene of the murder, and Reverend Thornton didn’t want them to talk to me and reveal what they know.

  The vicar groans. “Daniel, for God’s sake, be quiet.”

  “Grandfather, I’m only trying to help you.” Daniel says to Barrett, “Lucie woke me. She was upset because she’d dreamed that a ghost had killed Mother. That’s why we went to the church—to see if Mother was all right. When we got here, she was asleep. We climbed in bed with her and lay there together.”

  The image of the children snuggled against their dying mother fills me with sorrow. If there’s anything worse than a father suddenly gone missing and presumed dead, it’s this gradual, secretive, nightmarish demise.

  “Mother started moaning and moving around,” Daniel says. “I got the bottle of laudanum. Lucie held her mouth open, and I poured some in.”

  Alice’s moans, and the growling, slavering noises she made when she swallowed the laudanum, are the sounds Eva Piper described.

  “That’s when the man came here,” Lucie says.

  “Don’t listen to them,” the vicar pleads. “You know that children make things up.”

  Lucie pouts. “We’re not making it up.”

  “He asked us who we were. After I told him, he asked who she was.” Daniel points at Alice. Her head rolls from side to side as her body convulses. “He asked why she was hidden in the church.”

  My heart contracts with dread as I absorb the fact that it was the children, not the vicar, whom Charles Firth confronted. Suddenly I remember the dinner with Barrett’s family and the vicar’s hoarseness when he talked about his daughter’s death. He was lying—just as he lied when he confessed to murdering Charles Firth and his voice went hoarse.

  “I told him she’s our mother and she’s sick and nobody is supposed to know,” Lucie says.

  “He said he was sorry, but he couldn’t let her stay here like this,” Daniel says. “He tried to untie her, but the knots were too tight.”

  That was how he got her drool on his clothes, not during a fight with the vicar.

  “So he said he was going to tell the police, and they would help him take her to a hospital,” Daniel says.

  “We followed him to the crypt,” Lucie says.

  An eerie sensation accompanies my new recollection of Anjali Lodge’s vision: A girl or woman wearing a white dress. She was crying. I think she’s the ghost that people have seen at the jail. I think she knows who the murderer is. Anjali was true in her vision and false only in her interpretation. It was Lucie Thornton she saw.

  “I begged him not to tell,” Daniel says, “but he said she needed help and he wasn’t going to change his mind.”

  That was the argument Eva overheard. Reverend Thornton turns his back on his grandchildren, as if he’s despaired of silencing them, of forestalling the consequences.

  “So I took out my knife.” Daniel holds the ax in his left hand while, with his right, he pantomimes reaching in his pocket and bringing forth the weapon.

  I picture the initials, D. T., carved on the handle. Not just the vicar’s but Daniel’s too, on the family relic passed down from grandfather to grandson.

  “And I stabbed him.” Daniel makes a thrusting motion with the imaginary knife.

  The “ghost” in the last photograph Charles Firth took was Daniel, not the Reverend Thornton. I see my shock reflected in Barrett’s eyes. Daniel is the culprit of the crime to which his grandfather has confessed, and it was Daniel and Lucie whom Eva Piper glimpsed entering the vicarage. Still, I find myself making excuses for the boy. He’s too young to understand fully that impulsive actions can have permanent consequences and murder isn’t a game in which the defeated opponent comes back to life when it’s over. I understand why, after Reverend Thornton learned we’d found the knife, he was so eager to take the blame for the crime: he’d been protecting Daniel, who is an innocent despite his guilt.

  “It wasn’t my fault.” Daniel’s tone changes from matter-of-fact to petulant. “He wasn’t supposed to be in the church. He didn’t have the right to take our mother away.”

  “If he hadn’t come, Daniel wouldn’t have needed to stab him,” Lucie says. “He deserved it.” She nods her head once, emphatically, as if to say, so there.

  Daniel’s strange smile returns. “I always protect my mother.” He moves closer to her bedside. “I always will. Even if it means I’ll go to H-E-L-L.” He raises the ax.

  Even as excitement stirs my blood and my muscles tense for a fight, I say, “What did you do then, Daniel?” I have to keep him talking and stave off violence.

  “Lucie and I went home. We woke up Grandfather and told him what had happened. He taught us that it’s best to be honest.” Daniel sounds like a child reciting a Sunday school lesson. “Grandfather, shouldn’t you be honest now? And tell these people that it was me, not you, who stabbed that man?”

  Reverend Thornton turns to show us a face ravaged by grief. “I told the children to go to bed. Then I went to the church. I found Charles Firth dead in the crypt, with the knife sticking out of his chest.” His voice is hushed but clear; he’s telling the truth now. “There was nothing I could do for him except pray for his soul.”

  I picture Charles Firth lying surrounded by his cameras, the self-timer in his hand, while the vicar muttered useless, ritualistic words.

  “Then I pulled out the knife. I locked the church, went home, and hid the knife in my study. I meant to get rid of it later, but I was afraid of being seen. I told the children that if they were asked about the murder, they should say they’d been asleep all night and didn’t know anything.” His mournful gaze encompasses Barrett and me. “When you have children, you’ll understand—for their sake, you do whatever you must.” His words are an eerie reprise of Eva Piper’s.

  Barrett has fallen silent, his expression woeful as he beholds the clay feet of the man he placed on a pedestal of virtue. “Reverend, you obstructed a police investigation. You lied, and you instructed the children to lie. That’s perjury.” For lack of other words, he’s resorted to the language of his profession. “You made yourself an accomplice after the fact of the crime.”

  The vicar stands his ground as if bravely facing a firing squad. “That’s not all I did. I believe you’re also looking for the person who committed the murder at the Clerkenwell House of Detention. Well, you’ve found him.”

  This is how it must feel during an earthquake, when the ground that was once solid and stable begins to move and the most remarkable thing isn’t the motion itself but the fact that there’s no stability anywhere near. I say, “You’re confessing that you killed Richard Trevelyan?”

  “I am.”

  I had given up on my theory that the two crimes were connected. When the vicar confessed to the first, I reluctantly accepted that solving it didn’t solve the second or exonerate Mick. Now, new hope springs from the shambles of disappointment.

  “You’ve already confessed to one murder you didn’t commit,” Barrett reminds the vicar. “Why should I believe you this time?”

  “Because this time I’m telling the truth.”

  I take a closer look at the vicar. The old coat makes him appear less like a leader in the church than one of its lower-class, impoverished members.

  The coat.

  I point at it as another quake upsets my precarious balance and my knees buckle. “Reverend Thornton, did you wear that coat to the spirit-hunting expedition?”

  He looks down at it, touching the worn, patched tweed. “Yes. I thought that if I wore my usual garments, I might be recognized.”

  I exclaim to Barrett, “He’s the tramp that the witnesses saw!” I’m thrilled to be vindicated, to
see a chance of saving Mick.

  With a skepticism born of hearing many dubious tales during his police career, Barrett challenges the vicar. “Did you even know Richard Trevelyan? What reason could you have for wanting him dead?”

  “I didn’t know him. I’d never laid eyes on him until that night.”

  “Then why …”

  “I wanted to direct your attention away from the church. I was afraid that if you kept snooping around, you would find Alice. I was also afraid that you would force Daniel and Lucie to tell you what really happened with Charles Firth. But if there were another, similar crime somewhere else, his murder would appear to be one in a series, and my family would be left in peace. When I read about the spirit-hunting expedition, it seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

  His voice isn’t hoarse; he’s not lying. Barrett’s response says he hasn’t failed to notice. “You plotted to kill a total stranger, in cold blood.” Barrett is visibly appalled, distraught. “Just to throw us off course.”

  It seems worse than killing, in the heat of the moment, a trespasser who’d stumbled onto his family’s dirty secret.

  “I was desperate.” The vicar glances at the children, who huddle together, whispering anxiously. But he doesn’t seem desperate now. The elation in his eyes is like that of a gambler who thinks he has a winning hand. “I went under the old jail and hung around the crowds, watching and listening.” I picture him in his old coat, anonymous in the throng. “I saw Richard Trevelyan giving an interview to some reporters.”

  I saw him too, and I’m shocked to realize that his murderer was close by me.

  “He seemed to be someone important in the spiritualist community,” the vicar says.

  “And you thought he would be a perfect victim.” I wish I knew what he’s thinking now.