“That is to remind us that life is never certain,” said Father solemnly.
“Nor always dry,” said Lizzie, who shared a bedroom with May in that corner of the house.
After dinner, Fanny required “the young people” to entertain her, since she had entertained us. Anna, Sylvia, and I agreed to play a brief scene between Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia Languish, and the maid, Lucy. Clarence Hampton, with a great lack of enthusiasm, agreed to be, for the evening, Lydia’s suitor, Captain Absolute, disguised, as he is for much of the play, as impoverished Ensign Beverly.
“Then we will disguise you,” said Anna with great determination. “Uncle, may I?” And she fetched from the hall coatrack his Turkish hat and cape.
“Here, here,” said Uncle with consternation. “See it comes to no harm.”
“What harm can come to it?” replied Anna cheerily, placing the cap on Mr. Hampton’s head and the cape about his shoulders. He cast angry looks about the room.
“Ready?” asked Sylvia, who donned one of Abba’s aprons to signify her role as a maid. She carried a tray with a tea set on it. Abba’s face was solemn with worry for the china, but she said not a word.
“Places,” I instructed. “The parlor door will now be the entrance to Miss Lydia Languish’s sitting room, where she awaits a secret visit from her lover, Ensign Beverly, to be announced by her maid, Lucy, while her guardian, Mrs. Malaprop, lectures her on the duties of youth.”
I had tied a pillow round my waist and covered it with a coat to simulate the bulk my slender figure lacked; I stooped to hide my height and walked crablike, jutting my chin unpleasantly, encouraging laughter, and the scene went better than I had originally feared; we earned our applause and bows despite Clarence, who muttered his lines with obvious distaste.
“Bravo!” cried Fanny, when we finished. “Anna, I have never seen a more enchanting ingenue give a lover more difficulty! And Louy, if your Walpole audience doesn’t hurt from laughing at your portrayal of Mrs. Malaprop, well, then we will have a measure of their lack of humor, for you are humorous in the extreme.”
“Port all around!” cried Uncle Benjamin, for he had laughed loudest of all.
“Not all around,” protested Abba, looking at May and Lizzie.
“A sip won’t hurt them,” insisted Uncle.
“Indeed it won’t, Abba,” said May hopefully.
“No,” said that wise mother. “Not even a sip until you are twenty-one.”
“But I have no port!” protested Father.
“Clarence, there is a bottle stored in the potato cellar. Would you fetch it?” Uncle Benjamin said. “And while you are there, bring up a basket of potatoes for Mrs. Fisher’s Sunday roast. Make sure they haven’t sprouted, mind you.”
“Yes, sir,” said Clarence, so eager to be away from the group that he neglected to remove Uncle’s hat and cape.
The potato cellar was the traditional kind based on colonial housekeeping, just large enough to store a few baskets and barrels and dug outside the house, so we heard the kitchen door slam behind Clarence as he went out.
“I must powder my nose,” said Ida Tupper, heading for the same door to the outdoor conveniences. Father snorted with displeasure. He did not like to hear of women powdering their faces.
As we waited, we discussed the performance of that evening, and the performance to come, when we would appear before the good people of Walpole. Fanny looked at my script and suggested a few changes in lines and exits, and Lizzie and May began to yawn. Mrs. Tupper returned. We waited fifteen minutes for the sound of the back door to open once again, for Clarence’s step in the hall. It did not come.
“Perhaps I should go see,” said Uncle Benjamin. “That last step is tricky.”
“Perhaps he had a call of nature,” said his mother. “Give him time.”
We waited another fifteen minutes.
“Something is wrong,” said Abba, rising from her chair by the hearth.
“I am sure he has taken offense and returned home,” said his mother. “He is thin-skinned, and the girls had fun at his expense tonight. He often behaves in this manner, coming and going with no regard for others.”
“I will check the cellar, to be certain,” said Llew. He was unenthused about his chore, for we all knew his antipathy to Clarence, yet he disliked seeing Abba distressed. Llew returned four minutes later. “The cellar is empty,” he announced.
“Why didn’t you bring back the port and potatoes?” grumbled Uncle Benjamin.
“Forgot them,” said Llew, grinning sheepishly.
It was growing late, and Cousin Eliza, too, began to yawn. We all made little stretching movements of fatigue. Anna and Abba went to the kitchen to begin the washing-up. Lizzie and May went upstairs to their beds.
Mrs. Tupper rose. “I’ll be off. So charming to have met you, Mrs. Kemble. Perhaps sometime when I am down to Boston we might have tea together.”
“Perhaps,” said Fanny noncommittally. “I, too, will be off. Louy, will you ask my servant to meet me at the front door with a lantern?”
I went to the little pantry off the kitchen where the man was having a pint of lager and making conversation with Fanny’s maid.
Uncle rose to go, and scratched his head with great distress.
“The young scamp has gone off with my hat and cape,” he complained.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Ravine, or a Long Way to the Bottom
THE NEXT MORNING, though I was fatigued, I rose at dawn as usual and dressed for my run in the ravine. When I returned, I spent several hours in my writing shed, working with only a modicum of success, for I admit my thoughts were elsewhere than with the words marching uneventfully across my pages of foolscap. The morning had menace in it, somehow.
At midmorning, when I returned to the kitchen for a cup of tea, Ida Tupper knocked at our cottage door. Her hair was undressed and looked skimpy and dull; she had not rouged her cheeks and lips. In fact, she was still in her nightdress, with a thin coat thrown over it.
“He did not come home last night,” she said. “Clarence did not come home. I woke up and went to his room and he was not there. Oh, I just know something is wrong!” She gave a little shriek and would have fallen to the floor in her faint, had Abba not caught her by the waist.
We lifted Ida by her ankles and arms and carried her to the parlor. She was small, and the task was not difficult. We put a compress on her forehead and passed smelling salts under her nose several times, bringing her to.
“It is my fault, my fault,” that strange mother sobbed. “I should have been ever so much better. My poor boy!”
“Now, now,” crooned Abba. “Mothers always take the blame for their children. Even so, we have no reason to believe he has come to harm. Why think so? Young men sometimes find places to rest other than their own beds.”
Sylvia came in then, carrying her book of Confucius and looking dreamy-eyed, which meant she had again been attempting meditation.
“Clarence Hampton has disappeared,” I told her.
“Ah. Fled,” she said knowingly.
“Fled?” Ida Tupper began to wail.
“Louy, make us a pot of chamomile tea,” said Abba. “We must wait this out.”
Llew heard the commotion and came in from Father’s study, where he had been at his work of classifying rock specimens gathered from the ravine.
He looked at Ida Tupper, swooning on the settee, and then at me.
“What has Mr. Hampton got up to now?” he asked.
“He did not come home last night,” I said.
Llew paused and considered. He stroked his chin, the way Father did when deep in contemplation. “Perhaps I should give the cellar a better search,” he said.
“You searched last night.” I chafed Mrs. Tupper’s wrists.
“Well, I peered in through the door,” he admitted. “I was certain he had gone on home, so I didn’t actually go past the doorway.”
“Oh, Llew,” I said.
“
Should I fetch the sheriff?” he asked.
“Check the cellar first,” said Abba. “Take a lamp so you can see all the corners. Maybe he fell on the bad step and hit his head.”
Llew returned minutes later, bloodied on his hands, his feet, his knees, his face. I couldn’t help but think of Lady Macbeth: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Llew seemed all in blood, and what we could see of his face beneath that blood was bone white and dazed.
“Mr. Hampton is found,” said Llew in a strange voice.
Some presentiment of doom brought Father out of his study. He lowered his reading glasses halfway down his nose, and eyed us with great misgiving. He flinched slightly when his gaze landed on Llew.
“Well,” he said calmly. “I see you have found some trouble.” Transcendentalists, I have observed, tend to be fond of understatement.
“Trouble,” repeated Llew stiffly. He lifted his right hand, and in that hand was a walking stick dripping with blood and gore.
Ida shrieked, and this time her faint was complete. She lost consciousness.
I realized, at that moment, that I had been purposely misled by some evil greater than a young man’s vanity and stormy pride. The evil had been there, close to me, and I had not identified it. I had let my desire to know human nature be misused by false starts and leads. My search to discover the whereabouts of Jonah Tupper had blinded me to the fact that another young man was in great danger. And now he was dead.
With a great sense of failure mixing with my horror, I went to Llew and closed the parlor door behind him. But my sisters, who had been sitting in the garden, had heard Ida’s scream and gathered now in the doorway, pale and frightened.
Abba hastily took May and Lizzie by the hand and rushed them upstairs to their rooms. “Anna, sit with them and read,” she ordered my older sister. “Do not let them come back down the stairs.” Anna left, her eyes wide with terror.
Abba, that true and wonderful woman, had already recovered from the first shock and was ready now to begin to repair this situation. Trouble, for Abba—whether it be a fallen cake, an unwed girl cast out from her home, or a new widow with six children to feed—was to be cleaned up, in much the same manner that smudges are wiped from windows and mud removed from carpets. It is part of the process of restoring the world to righteousness.
“Bronson,” she said, “go and fetch an officer of the law. Some abomination has been done in our home.” Her voice already carried absolute conviction that Llew had been victimized by the situation, and was not the cause of it. She never once doubted his innocence.
“I will do just that.” And Father took his cane and hat from the hall coat stand and, to hearten Llew as he passed, he gave him a gentle shaking of the shoulders and called him “My boy.” Llew did not respond, but only looked down at his bloodied hands.
“Sylvia.” Abba turned to my companion. “Fetch Dr. Burroughs for Mrs. Tupper.” Without a word, Sylvia was out the door and running down the sidewalk after Father.
Abba then suggested I take Llew into the kitchen, while she saw to Mrs. Tupper.
“Now, Llew, sit,” I said when we were alone. I wiped his hands and face with a towel. He was as passive as a child, and once the blood was removed his face was deadly white.
“Tell me what happened, Llew,” I coached.
“It was horrible,” he said, his eyes wide. “I pulled open the door and went in, past the doorway and the rotted step. I tripped on something. I tried to get up, but it was soft and slippery. I could not get my footing. It was when my hand touched another that I realized I had fallen over a body. A body!”
Llew started to shiver so forcefully I feared he would fall from his chair. I took the decanter of sherry from the cupboard and poured all that was left from yesterday’s festivities into a glass. Last night Clarence had gone on an errand to that cellar and never returned. Had the body been there for almost a day already? The dampness would have kept the pooling blood from drying, making the floor slippery.
“Drink, Llew,” I said. “You look so pale you may lose consciousness.”
“Never!” said Llew, flailing with his arms the way some people do just before they fall into a dead faint, as if they are besieged by a plague of flies.
He finished the sherry with difficulty. There was blood caked under his nails, and I scraped at it. I had seen other men look that bloodied, in country autumns when hogs are slaughtered. Poor Clarence Hampton.
After Llew was somewhat restored and had discarded his stained jacket into the sink, where I would later try to remove the rusty stains already drying on the tweeded flannel fabric, we returned to the parlor. Dr. Burroughs was there by then, and he was half lifting, half carrying Ida Tupper, with Sylvia’s assistance.
“Miss Louisa,” he said, smiling at me through his thick white whiskers. “Your guest has taken quite ill. We must see her home to her own bed.”
Abba gave me a warning glance. She had not told him about the body in the cellar. That was the sheriff ’s business; it was too late for the doctor.
“May I assist?” I asked.
“No, no, your friend and I will see to it.” Ida moaned, and when Sylvia waved the salts under her nose she flailed and shrieked once again.
“Her brother is an invalid and unable to care for her,” I told Dr. Burroughs. “Will you stay with her till she is sleeping? Then you might come back here. There is another matter that will want your attention.”
His expression grew stern. “I will return,” he promised, walking slightly bowed under the weight of Ida Tupper’s arm around his shoulders.
Abba scrubbed at a red spot on the floor. Her face was thoughtful and worried, and now that she had gotten us through the first moments of the nightmare, she seemed at a loss.
“I must go into the cellar,” I said.
“No!” said Abba and Llew simultaneously.
“But if the murderer—”
“Returns? All the more reason for you not to go alone into that place,” Abba insisted. She was right, of course. So we waited, and fifteen minutes later Father reappeared with Sheriff Bowman.
The tall, gangly Walpolian man had thrown on his coat and trousers over his nightshirt, some of which still stuck out the sides, and he wore a tall beaver hat over his uncombed black hair. He must have had a late evening and slept in, for it was near noon by then.
“I understand you have found a body,” he said after giving Abba a brief nod of greeting and removing his absurd hat.
Llew looked up. Oh, his expression was horrible.
“I found it.” Llew could barely speak.
Mr. Bowman studied him for a moment. The man looked comedic, but I could see by the sharpness of his gaze that he was no fool.
“Well, we’d better go see this body, hadn’t we? Can you walk, boy?”
Llew rose to his feet and cast down the blankets with which we had wrapped him. Mr. Bowman saw then the dark stains on his cuffs and knees.
“Probably a dead raccoon,” said Bowman, frowning. “They are fierce fighters over territory.”
“It is no raccoon,” said Llew darkly.
“I will come with you,” I said.
“No, Miss Louisa, you will not,” said Officer Bowman. “Stay in the house with the women.”
I took a deep breath to protest, but Abba gave me a nudge. I knew what she was thinking, and she was right: The more I protested, the longer it would take to complete the process now begun, the hideous process of identifying the dead.
The men—Llew, Father, and Officer Bowman—took Abba’s lamp and went back out the door. From inside the parlor, where I opened the window, we could hear their steps crunching on the dirt-and-gravel path, hear the creaking of rusted hinges as the cellar door was opened. There was a moment of silence, and then I heard Officer Bowman say, “Mother Mary and all the saints. It’s Clarence Hampton. At least I think it’s Clarence Hampton. Hard to tell.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The S
on Returned Home
THE REST OF that day grew even more horrible.
It was decided by Abba and myself that Clarence would be removed from the cellar and cleaned up as best we could before sending his battered body back home to his mother. I left the group and went to the dining room for a minute, knowing already what had to be done. Wasn’t this how my vacation in the country had begun? With a body, Ernst Nooteboom, being carried to the last stop before its final resting place. I took the cloth and saltcellar off the table and spread an old, thick blanket over it. I fetched a bucket of hot water and soap.
Dr. Peterson Burroughs had returned by then, and was in the parlor with Father, Llew, and Sheriff Bowman.
“A body?” he said, plainly stunned. “Clarence? No wonder his mother is in that condition. I had to give her thirty drops of laudanum to calm her, and another ten to get her to sleep. Well, let’s have a look at this body. Bring it in.”
I was glad he was there, with his stern, practical manner and his medical experience. Perhaps his examination would reveal more about the murder, for it was obvious that Clarence Hampton had been murdered. No simple fall could have so devastated the body that Llew and Father and Sheriff Bowman now laid on the dining room table.
Anna stuck her head back downstairs, and we shouted that she was to stay up there with May and Lizzie; on no condition was she to come down or allow them down. Abba closed the curtains tightly and brought a lamp over to the table. Its light made the red poppies on the wallpaper seem to wink in and out of focus, and that was how I knew her hands were shaking.
Clarence was still dressed in Uncle’s cape, which trailed on the floor as they carried him, but the Turkish cap was missing. Of course, it would have been knocked off by one of the many blows that had killed the young man. Tomorrow I would go into the cellar myself and find that cap.
Carefully, as though he might come to further harm, Llew and Officer Bowman placed the body on the table. I could see how bloody was that body. I sighed heavily, feeling pity for the young man in death, though in life I had neither cared for him nor trusted him.
Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) Page 17
