A Mansion and its Murder

by Robert Barnard

  An hour would see them through dinner, I calculated. I sat on my bed, not sure what to do. I sometimes read for a while when I went to bed, if I had anything exciting under way (Jane Eyre, for example, or Oliver Twist), but mostly I went straight to sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be able to settle to reading that night, and feared that if I tried I would probably fall asleep. There were soft footsteps in the corridor and I wondered who it was: our part of the house was mostly deserted at night. I thought about the approaching confrontation and decided that the family would almost certainly lose: Uncle Frank having it already in mind to break with the Fearings suggested that, as did his invincible distaste for the wife they had forced on him. The Fearing clan, I concluded, had very few good cards in their hands. Soon after eight, darkness having fallen, I put on my coat, scuttled along back corridor after back corridor, then down an obscure staircase and to a back door that gave on to the terrace. The night air came as some relief to hectic, troubled thinking.

  The window in the sitting room that I had opened looked out over the croquet lawn and the rose gardens nearby. I had no fear for myself in the surrounding vastness of the Blakemere estates, only fear for Uncle Frank – or rather the fear of losing him. I recognise now that my concern was essentially selfish, as children’s usually are. I approached silently, or as silently as was possible over gravelled paths. I heard a voice as I was still some way away.

  ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  It was my father’s voice, the first and only time he contributed.

  ‘Agreed,’ came Uncle Frank’s voice.

  ‘If I may presume, as a relative outsider—’ This was the voice of Sir Thomas Coverdale, one I knew less well, but unmistakable. ‘An interested outsider, of course, but one who has not been involved in any wrangling or recriminations—’

  ‘You have been the model in-law,’ came Uncle Frank’s ironic tones. ‘You have kept out of it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the difficulties of the marriage have distressed Mary’s mother and me, because of course she has talked all the problems over—’

  ‘The last thing I’d try to do is to stop her having a heart-to-heart. If such is possible.’

  ‘Frank!’ said my grandmother commandingly. I was now just beside the window, and though the heavy velvet curtains prevented my seeing anything, I could imagine her look.

  ‘The point I would make,’ resumed Sir Thomas, ‘is that marriages where the heart is not … not initially engaged, if I may put it so, are not uncommon among people such as ourselves … gentlefolk with a position to maintain locally and nationally, and that such marriages quite often go through a crisis early on. But a modus vivendi is almost always found. Where there’s a will … It is Lady Coverdale’s and my devout wish that such may be the outcome in this marriage, on which so much rests.’

  He sounded like the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  ‘You are ignoring the fact,’ said Uncle Frank, his voice even and unemotional, ‘that such marriages are willingly undertaken, with both parties clear in their minds what they are doing: making an alliance, ensuring the family’s continuance and stability, extending its influence or boundaries.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Mine was not willingly undertaken. It was entered into as a result of strong and continuous pressure from my family.’

  ‘You condemn yourself by saying that.’

  ‘I am aware of the fact.’

  That was the end of Sir Thomas Coverdale’s attempts at mediation. The next voice to emerge through the thick velvet was, surprisingly, that of Aunt Jane.

  ‘But my dear Frank,’ she said, her voice unusually sweet, ‘remember that love may come, bloom, after marriage, and with the coming of little ones.’

  ‘That, my dear Jane, is a view of marriage that comes from reading rather than observation. Look at Claud and Harriet.’

  ‘I was aware,’ came his wife’s clear, passionless tones ‘that Francis did not love me – not in the usual sense.’

  ‘Not in any sense. I made that clear.’

  ‘What you did not make clear was that you had no intention of trying to make the marriage work.’

  ‘That was not the case – then. Though I did have the gravest doubts as to whether it could.’

  ‘Then you should never have gone through with it.’

  Uncle Frank’s tone was now totally serious.

  ‘Again – the blame, the criticism, is all on me. I accept that. We entered into a contract that was doomed before it was signed and sealed. I should have recognised that, and set sail for Timbuktu rather than let you enter into it.’

  ‘But my dear Frank’ – it was Cousin Anselm – ‘all of us here want to see the marriage work. Margaret and I, though it may seem not to be in our best interests, are desperate to see it back on a firm and happy footing.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Might it not be that, away from the family, in another environment, say on a cruise, maybe to India, or the Cape, that you could on your own sort out a modus vivendi?’

  In the darkness I could just imagine his face when he said this. Cousin Anselm was what we today would call smarmy.

  ‘Tried that. Didn’t work,’ said Uncle Frank, with a return to more satirical tones. ‘Too much of each other just shows us how hopeless it is.’

  ‘Not us,’ said Mary.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘The truth of the matter is,’ came the impatient tones of my grandfather, ‘that the boy made no effort to fulfil his side of the agreement.’

  I think all this talk of love, of relationships, was inimical to Grandpapa. Contracts, bargains, agreements were more in his line.

  ‘I made every effort to fulfil my side of the agreement, and did so,’ Uncle Frank said now.

  ‘Then how does it happen that the marriage has come to the sorry state it is now in? Husband and wife separate in the same house. It’s unnatural.’

  ‘No, it was the marriage itself that was unnatural.’

  ‘You are an unmanly cad to describe it so in the presence of your wife.’

  ‘Mary knows my feelings. She had no illusions.’

  His wife’s voice rang out.

  ‘I have feelings! Do you think you don’t cruelly hurt me when you talk about our marriage like this in front of people?’

  ‘I thought it was precisely to talk about our marriage that this whole confabulation was set up.’

  ‘My feelings have never been thought about, not from the very first. You say you were pressured into the marriage. But a marriage is a union of two persons. What about me? What about what I was led to expect? The position I would occupy? Is it any wonder I’m dissatisfied with what I actually got?’

  ‘No. No wonder at all. So let’s end it.’

  ‘Think, Frank dear,’ came the voice of Aunt Clare ‘how children may alter things, as Jane has said. They would bring you together.’

  ‘We have a child. He has driven us further apart.’

  ‘How can you compare that … that child with the children we might have?’ demanded Mary. She was getting on to dangerous ground, but seemed totally reckless.

  ‘How can I? Because I love him.’

  ‘You don’t love him. You can’t. Nobody could. You pretend to love him to annoy me, to make people think I am an unnatural mother.’

  ‘I don’t care in the slightest how people think of you. I love Richard. I have an idea that when he grows up he will be a better person than any of us.’

  ‘That’s just silly fantasy,’ came Mary’s contemptuous voice.

  ‘Better than us,’ insisted Uncle Frank. ‘Because some of the things that make us what we are won’t develop in him: greed, jealousy, love of status and position.’

  ‘They won’t develop in him because he is an idiot.’

  There was a second of silence, then Uncle Frank hissed, ‘Don’t use that word!’

  ‘He’s a cretin, then.’

  Another silence, then a carefully controlled Frank seemed to turn on the whole ass
embly around him.

  ‘All right. He’s a cretin. Shall I tell you why he is a cretin? Either it’s because my family insisted on using an expensive nincompoop at the birth, or else it’s because Nature, having created generation after generation of covetous, pushing individuals – greedy gentry, greedy bankers, it makes no great difference – finally said: “We’ve got to strike a balance. We’ve got to show that human beings can be something else, too.” And so it gave us Richard. A wonderful gift.’

  Mary’s voice was hard and ungiving as rock.

  ‘You’re talking fantasy. He’s only a baby. And when he grows up he will be the mock of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘A rich idiot. Pointed at by everyone.’ The venom in her voice was palpable even outside in the chill night air. She hated the son who had been born to her, perhaps because she regarded his birth as personal shame.

  ‘You really enjoy saying things like that, don’t you? Idiot, cretin. You cold, unfeeling bitch!’

  ‘Frank!’ It was Grandmama’s voice again.

  ‘I enjoy the truth,’ said Mary, her voice rising higher. ‘He’ll be a moron, and he’ll have to be shut in an asylum.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Yes, he will. He’ll be put away.’

  ‘Monster!’

  ‘In a sensible society he’d be put down.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Something – I had no idea what – was happening. ‘You—’

  ‘Frank!’

  I heard a scuffle, a great cry from my uncle Frank, several bodies colliding, a punch, a heavy fall. I turned from the window and ran, ran, ran away across the lawn, terrified at the thought of my family fighting, terrified at the thought of father against son, of brother against brother. Who had punched him? What had Frank’s terrible cry been caused by? I found the door to the obscure back staircase, and had regained my wits enough to steal in and creep up it, then along the dark, pokey corridors. But as I was turning into my own corridor I held back. A door had opened.

  I withdrew round the corner, and waited a moment. Then I poked my head cautiously round and took a look. The footman Robert was emerging from Miss Roxby’s bedroom. He looked around him furtively, then stole away from me toward the body of the house. As he turned the corner he squared his shoulders, began to walk more confidently, then disappeared from my view.

  Shaken to the heart, I pressed my hot cheeks against the cold stone wall. It was as if my whole world had been violently reversed – first my family world, then my schoolroom world. I stayed like that for what seemed an age. Then I swallowed hard and hared silently along the corridor to my bedroom. Once there I locked the door behind me. I needed very much to be alone. This time I didn’t cry, but sat long on my bed, thinking about what I had heard from the sitting room, what I had seen in the corridor outside. Shock, bewilderment, revulsion were succeeded by numbness. Slowly, reluctantly, I took off my clothes, put on my nightdress, and went to bed. Eventually, hours later, I went to sleep.

  That night I dreamt a strange dream. I dreamt I woke up in the middle of the night, disturbed by the happenings of the evening, or perhaps by the muffled sound of voices. I lay for a minute or two, mulling over the horror of fighting in the family, of violence against Uncle Frank. Then I was sure I heard a male voice.

  I got up quietly and went over to the window. Outside the expanses of Blakemere’s park and meadowlands stretched darkly away into the distance, and clouds were sweeping across what moon there was visible. But there was one little patch of light, way below me, and to my left. One of the obscure back entrances to Blakemere was open, and a man with a lantern was standing just outside it. I recognised the shoulders and head of Joe Mossman, one of the gardeners, father to one of my early playmates. He bent down, and seemed to be propping open the door with a slab of stone. I shivered in the night cold, and began twisting the scrap of ribbon that held back my hair. I was nervous with foreboding.

  Joe disappeared inside for a moment, but then more light appeared – lanterns, from just inside the house. Then slowly, carefully, I saw another man emerge, and as he moved forward – it was Robert again – I saw he was holding his lantern with difficulty, by its little bow of a handle, because most of his hand was taken up by a pole, and so was his other hand. I saw with horror that he was holding one end of a stretcher, and as he moved forward I saw it contained a long shape, wrapped in some dark stuff that could have been carpeting, and that the other end of the stretcher was held by Joe. And when they had fully emerged and had begun their progress across the terrace, I saw that they were followed by old Ben Burke, one of the family’s pensioners from over Wentwood way, and that he was carrying spades.

  I let out a squeak of horror and then put my hand to my mouth when I saw that he in his turn was followed by a dark shape in a tall hat, who turned and closed the door behind him. In the gloom I could see almost nothing. I twisted my ribbon, and as the procession, speeding up now, began to cross the meadow toward the little wood on the other side of the river known as Foley’s Wood, the ribbon snapped as I thought I recognised the walk of the dark figure who had now gone to the head of the group.

  I thought it was my father’s walk.

  I watched till there was nothing more to see. Then, in my dream, I went back to bed, and finally to sleep. In the morning when I woke I found my hair untidy round my face. I got up and went to the window, and there on the window ledge was a piece of broken ribbon.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Consequences

  I was very quiet the next day.

  Partly this was because I was upset about what I had overheard the previous evening – upset and uncertain. I was even more upset over what I had seen – if I had seen it. On thinking it over it seemed to me that the snapped ribbon proved little. In any case, I knew very well that if I told anybody what I had seen, or thought I had seen, they would have said ‘You’ve been dreaming.’ Even Miss Roxby would have said that. And such a dismissal of my testimony would have been entirely plausible.

  Even now I do not know that I saw it.

  In any case, who could I tell who was a power of any kind in the household? Miss Roxby or someone in the servants’ hall would have been the best I could come up with, and I knew what their response would be.

  If Miss Roxby noticed my quietness the next day, she did not comment on it. She was very good like that: sympathetic to my moods, but not demonstratively so. We went about our daily round as usual, and of course I did not ask her about Robert the footman.

  But a screaming imperative was gaining force within me: I had to know about Uncle Frank. In any case, Miss Roxby was not the obvious person to ask about that, being cut off for much of the time from the body of the house. Failing members of my own family – or, rather, my heart failing at the thought of asking Aunt Jane or my father – I finally decided to ask my friends in the below-stairs part of the house.

  ‘I haven’t seen Uncle Frank today,’ I said to Mrs Needham, in the afternoon, when preparations for dinner were under way in the kitchens.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Is he still in the house?’

  ‘I couldn’t say I’m sure. Nobody ever tells me how many there will be for dinner, if it’s just a family dinner.’

  ‘Well, I know that. The waste in this family is shocking.’ I turned to Mr McKay, who was pottering around in his intensely dignified way. ‘Do you know if Uncle Frank is still at Blakemere, Mr McKay?’

  ‘Ah … I think not. I rather think he left the house either last night, or very early this morning.’

  ‘You must know if his bed had been slept in.’

  A silly comment. Mr McKay drew himself up.

  ‘On the contrary, that is not something that comes within my sphere of inquiry … You are getting rather old, Miss Sarah, for coming into the kitchen – or below stairs generally.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was an age limit,’ I said, with some of my old pertness.

&
nbsp; ‘A child may go anywhere, but a young lady generally keeps herself to her own part of the house. Lady Fearing herself seldom or never comes here – only at Christmas, in fact, to thank the staff for their work over the years, and to distribute gifts.’

  ‘It’s nice of her to distribute gifts,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see why she celebrates Christmas at all. Jews don’t believe in Christ.’

  This was in no way pejorative, merely a showing off of a recently acquired piece of knowledge. I knew perfectly well that Grandmama was a Christian. I was not, in fact, diverted from my inquiries, and I meditated who else I might ask. Mrs Merton, the head housekeeper, was so fantastically discreet and remote that she was out of the question, but I thought I might ask one of the maids. I meandered through the baronial wastelands of the Blakemere servants’ hall and kitchens until I spotted Bertha, about some arduous but useless task in a corner. Bertha was sweet and not too bright, which was ideal.

  ‘Bertha, is Uncle Frank still at Blakemere?’

  ‘Oh, no, Miss Sarah Jane—’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Miss Sarah. I can’t get used to these changes, Miss Sarah J—’

  ‘Uncle Frank.’

  ‘He’s left.’

  She said it with no prevarication or embarrassment. But of course if something had happened to Uncle Frank, someone like Bertha would be the last to know.

  ‘Did he go last night or this morning?’