by Nicola Slade
‘But… but that’s what I wanted to talk about, Henry told me,’ I stammered. ‘You first, what did they tell you about his death?’
‘It was yesterday morning, not more than ten minutes after we’d gone home,’ she said slowly. ‘Hutton did the six o’clock round and couldn’t wake Mr Trevelyan. He said it could only just have happened because he was still quite warm. The other officers were upset but by the time I arrived after luncheon there was no sign that he had ever been at the Hall. He’d been tidied away. His body was boxed up and already on the train to Kent, Matron’s orders, and his bed had been removed, so that Major Peebles has the bay window to himself.’
She gulped and I hugged her. ‘It was horrible, Christy. He was only a boy and it was as though he had never existed.’
‘Henry thought there was someone by Mr Trevelyan’s bed,’ I said, frowning as I repeated Henry’s recollection, such as it was, of someone brushing past his own bed and standing by the paralysed young man. ‘He thinks he was dreaming and drugged and he’s dismissed it as a nightmare. I didn’t say anything to him, but it made me wonder.’ I snuggled closer to my sister and lowered my voice though there was nobody who could possibly hear us. ‘I keep thinking… that poor boy was screaming off and on all night, remember? He’d start by moaning, which was horribly upsetting, then his cries would rise to a prolonged scream before breaking off into a trailing, gurgling wail into silence.
‘Listen, Alix,’ I urged. ‘It happened like that all night; the moaning, the screaming crescendo and the gradual tailing off, but… When we were making cocoa in the kitchen, do you remember I said something like: “He’s stopped, perhaps he’ll get some peace.” I’ve gone over and over it but that last time it was different. Yes, he moaned and screamed but just that once there was no gurgling and tailing off into pitiful murmuring. His screams stopped abruptly. One minute there were agonised screams, then silence.’
I felt Alix stiffen then she reached up to tug at the hanging light switch above the bed. In the sudden dazzle I could see her startled face. ‘W-what are you saying, Christy?’ she said in a shocked whisper.
‘I don’t know,’ I reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘I simply don’t know…’
Wednesday, 13th March
The next day was another quiet one, a welcome change after the recent busy weeks. I’d slipped back downstairs to my own bed after Alix and I had fussed and fretted about Lt Trevelyan’s sudden death without coming to any sensible conclusion, except that we’d talk again soon. For some reason I still felt uneasy.
The lodgers had settled in and seemed happy, apart from Mrs Mortimer’s perpetual grumbles, and the weather though still very cold was brighter, which meant everyone cheered up. The only unusual occurrence was that Bobs the Dog wandered off while we were eating breakfast. He reappeared with, of all things, a large, fat hen dangling from his mouth. Mercifully it wasn’t one of ours.
‘Oh, dear, oh dear.’ Granny sounded not in the least sorry as she wrenched the bird from the dog’s jaws. ‘It can’t have come far, he’s not taken a bite out of it. One of our neighbours will be most upset so let’s hope it’s never traced back to us.’ She drained her cup of coffee and set to work to pluck and clean Bobs’ trophy. ‘Hmm, that lamb stew I made yesterday will keep a day or two in this weather. Better dispose of the incriminating evidence so we’ll have roast chicken tonight instead, then curry or fricassée and soup from the bones. Well done, Bobs, you’re beginning to earn your keep.’
She glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I’ll see to this, Christy, you get on with your mother’s latest chapters and you two others had better be off. And no, Adelaide, you need not get your hopes up. I am not letting you dissect this bird; the guests would not appreciate the mangled scraps you’d leave. However…’ She forestalled Addy’s protest. ‘You may inspect the carcass before I make stock and if you’re no trouble in the meantime I might let you dissect the heart and giblets and liver before I use them. Now, be off with you. On your way please check that there’s no incriminating trail of chicken feathers leading to our door.’
Luncheon came and went with no sign of Henry and the afternoon felt very flat. I hoped his leg wasn’t giving him trouble though perhaps he was simply tired of a houseful of women. I studiously avoided any thought of the death up at the Hall and managed to do some work. Luckily Addy was blissfully happy because Miss Evershed had generously spent some time looking over her books and had given her some tips. As a result, she was much more pleasant to deal with and even agreed to take the dog out for a walk along the river when Miss Evershed remarked quietly that regular exercise was conducive to increased concentration.
Having churned out a whole chapter of her heroine’s latest romantic turmoil, Mother was in reflective mood as she pondered the novel’s dénouement, so I typed it out and retreated to my own writing. Alix had been quiet before she left for work but I didn’t probe. We all have times when we retreat into ourselves; besides I suspected she might be mulling over my theory.
Granny returned in triumph from the grocer’s accompanied by an errand boy who bore a small sack of flour. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters,’ she announced, looking smug. ‘Remember when the grocer asked me to give his youngest girl some tips on waiting at table? It seems she’s just been taken on as second parlour maid in a large villa in Winchester and her father attributes this to my training. Hence this welcome sack of flour as a thank offering.’
‘Well done, Granny. Penny’s shaping up well too. I wonder…’ I was aware of an idea floating somewhere at the back of my mind but decided to let it alone. It’ll come back to me if it’s a good one.
To our surprise, Henry appeared late that afternoon, accompanied by Alix who was in a state of great excitement. ‘Look, Christy,’ she cried, snatching a note out of Henry’s hand. ‘This is from Dr Pemberton. We’re invited to an At Home on Thursday, at four-fifteen, to take tea with the patients and staff. All of us, lodgers and all, they’ve been invited separately.’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘That’s tomorrow!’
Henry whisked it away from her and limped over to Granny.
‘I’m sorry, Lady Elspeth,’ he said as he handed it to her. ‘You must be horribly bored to see me so often, but this note is actually addressed to you.’ He frowned at Alix but my elder sister is immune to gentle reproof, or downright scolding come to that. Granny smiled kindly and gestured to a chair.
‘Sit down, Henry; someone will bring you a cup of tea. Does Dr Pemberton require an answer directly?’ He nodded so she went to look for pen and ink.
‘What about Mother?’ Alix spoke for us all. ‘We’ll have to tell her, we can’t risk leaving her alone, she might upset the lodgers. And you really have to go, Granny. You’re our captain and figurehead in one!’
Granny gave a non-committal smile, but I knew she would certainly attend the At Home if only for Noblesse Oblige or the Fyttleton version: Do your duty particularly if there’s free cake in the offing.
Addy was surrounded by books and had not looked up from the essay she was busily writing. ‘Miss Evershed explained so much to me. I wish she taught at St Mildew’s.’
I said nothing at the time. Addy is like the horse that you can take to water. You certainly can’t make her drink, but nevertheless I began to hatch a plan for my sister perhaps to study with Miss Evershed when the latter was forced to become a housekeeper. I looked at Addy’s face, stimulated and bright with eager interest, and sighed, until I turned my thoughts to the tricky subject of what we would wear tomorrow to the At Home.
The early sunshine had retreated behind fat-bellied grey clouds but the kitchen was cosy, even in the gloom of a depressed spring afternoon, and we – Alix, Henry and even Granny – were talking and laughing and drinking tea while the smell of a roasting chicken made our mouths water. Addy had persuaded Granny to let her dissect the giblets in the interest of scientific research and was fiddling about at the sink. Suddenly a chill fell on the kitchen and Henry rose awkwardly to his f
eet.
‘Good afternoon, Margaret.’ Granny waved the teapot at the newcomer. ‘Would you care for a cup?’
Mother stared blankly then shook her head which was wreathed in fair, untidy curls where she had been getting agitated as she wrote. She was clearly unaware that two pencils were sticking out like a debutante’s feathers from her crown of plaits. ‘You know I only drink water, Mother,’ she said. ‘What is going on here? Why are you girls sitting about like this? Working girls of your age would have been at the factory or on their feet in a shop for hours; you have no idea how fortunate you are to live in luxury.’
Henry looked shocked but we were used to Mother who then turned her attention to him. ‘And who is this young man, pray?’
I let Granny perform the introductions. She is the only person who can handle Mother when she appears downstairs like this. I work well with her and she needs me to do her typewriting, but she is uncomfortable in society. If a stranger speaks to her she is appalled and retreats into a haughty aloofness that frightens people into thinking she’s a high stickler. Besides this, she is often unconsciously rude, just as Grandpapa had been, though he had been much gentler in his final days last summer. Mother was rude now.
‘A gilded youth?’ She looked him up and down. ‘What a pity you are not working at the coal face, doing a man’s job, instead of idling here with my daughters.’
‘Mother,’ I stood up, scarlet with sudden anger. ‘How dare you, you forget that Captain Makepeace is a guest in our house. Besides, you are unjust. Do you not see that he is in uniform? Not only that, but he has been severely wounded in battle and will suffer constant pain his whole life long. And he was Bertie’s best friend. Are you telling us that our brother was an idle, gilded youth? Because—’
‘That’s enough, Christy,’ Granny intervened. ‘It’s stopped drizzling and it’ll be dark soon so I want you to go and shut up the hens securely. That old fox has been hanging around for days. You go with her, Henry.’ She shooed us out to the scullery and the back door.
‘Henry, I’m dreadfully sorry.’ I put my hand on his arm. ‘It’s nothing personal. You see she’s writing a book in which the heroine’s suitor turns out to be a shirker who has avoided conscription. He’s also a philanderer and has ruined several poor girls. Mother never goes into detail, of course, her books are too pure and high-minded. The heroine, a poor but noble young lady, will scorn him in the next chapter and find comfort in the kind and worthy, but less wealthy and less handsome clergyman who has loved her faithfully for many years.’ I drew a breath and was relieved to see that Henry’s mouth had quirked into a grin.
‘You mean she’s confused me with her villain?’ He was laughing now.
‘She does that, you see,’ I explained eagerly. ‘It’s terrible if any of her characters die, and they do – frequently. She goes into mourning and we have to tiptoe round her. At the moment she’s frustrated because Lady Esmerelda was supposed to marry a lord. It came as a surprise to Mother when he turned out to be a cad. Thank God it’s never yet occurred to her to have a heroine go into a decline or we’d have to force-feed her.’
‘Wouldn’t she be used to that? I thought you said she was a suffragette?’
‘A suffragette in theory only.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s the trouble. Until she met Papa her entire life was lived through the books and articles she devoured on the subject. She never met anyone and had no friends because the village saw her as gentry but the local lords and ladies looked down on her. They lived in a cottage on the estate owned by Grandpapa’s cousin, but there was never any spare cash for the train fare to London just to chain herself to a lamp-post to see what it felt like.
‘Papa met her at a garden party at the big house and they eloped within a month, quite to her surprise, I should think, but I suspect she saw him as her escape route. He was good-looking and he wooed her with a special licence when he swept her off her feet. He was very impulsive but we suspect he confused her with her cousin Marguerite, the heiress. He and Mother were both sadly disappointed.’
‘If you don’t mind my saying so…’ Henry bent down to peer behind the wheelbarrow but that was too obvious a hiding place for our hens, ‘your parents are almost more peculiar than mine.’
I giggled. ‘I didn’t realise yours were peculiar? I know Bertie said your father was strict.’
‘He was more than strict,’ the laughter drained from Henry’s face. ‘He was a bully. Oh, he didn’t resort to force, he didn’t need to. His vicious tongue did the job for him so that people went in abject fear of him: servants, workforce, sons, wife…’ I gasped and he looked bleak. ‘Oh yes, he’d met my mother when he was on a walking holiday in Brittany but they were quite unsuited. He made her life so unbearable that she ran away back to France when I was a baby so I never knew her. She tried to take us with her but our nurse was scared of Father, and the butler sent an urgent message to him. My brother was only three but his earliest memory was of screaming as he was dragged out of her arms. She died the following year but Father only told us of her death much later.’
‘Oh, you poor little boys.’ I tucked my hand into his. ‘I’m sure Papa loved us in his own peculiar way, but he was rarely here. He would disappear on some nefarious scheme and return in triumph or disaster, showering money on us or hiding in the cellar when anyone knocked on the door.’
Once more I was riven with doubt about Papa. Could Addy’s Person from Porlock, that American intruder, be right? The trouble was, it was only too easy to imagine my father, a ruthless opportunist, sliding away from trouble, and how better than to let everyone assume he had drowned? I pulled myself together and sighed. ‘Mother loves us too, Henry, in her own distant way, contrary to appearances. It’s just that she thinks we don’t need her sympathy.’
A scarecrow figure appeared fleetingly at the bottom of the garden and, on seeing a strange man, scuttled behind the apple tree.
‘Who was that?’ Henry frowned. ‘Do you want me to chase him off?’
‘Oh no.’ I wasn’t worried. ‘That’s Niggle, brother to our maids. He’s been staying with his aunt in Southampton but he came home yesterday. He’s the one I told you about, who sorts out our surplus kittens. He always helped Granny with the garden and he used to cure her rabbit pelts so she could sew them into rugs and blankets. He’s probably been digging the vegetable patch but he’s terrified of loud noises, so he’ll be hiding because I let the back-door slam.’
‘Niggle?’
I giggled. ‘Sorry, I forgot. His name is Nigel but his mother read it in a magazine and thought that was how it should be pronounced. He’s always been Niggle, his mother says she likes a classy name. Bella, who comes in to do our heavy work, is actually Belladonna, and the younger sister is Penelope, pronounced Pennylope.’
‘Why’s he afraid of loud noises?’ Henry was watching as Niggle emerged cautiously from his hiding place and picked up the garden fork.
‘Shell shock,’ I said. ‘He should never have been called up in the first place, he’s slow and sweet and gentle and quite unsuited to a battlefield, poor lad.’ I sighed. ‘You know better than I what it was like, and unfortunately he was caught up in a barrage on his first day at the front and almost buried alive. He was senseless with terror and luckily Bertie… Bertie came across him at the field hospital and managed to convince the authorities to ship him home.’
I waved to Niggle and pointed to Henry. ‘He’s a friend,’ I shouted then I carried on stalking the biggest hen, always known as Kaiser Bill because when she was a chick we’d thought she was a cockerel. Kaiser Bill was lurking near the old stable which was a favourite hiding place for eggs. She grumbled and pretended to peck at me, but I ignored her and found two more eggs while looking thoughtfully at the stable. At present it’s full of broken furniture and garden tools but I wondered if we could scrub it up and use it more profitably. A picture of Mrs Mortimer, or someone like her, faced with a stable as a bedroom made me bite my lip. I knew she’d be outr
aged if I cited Bethlehem as a precedent.
‘There’s no need to worry about our parents,’ I reassured Henry as we sat gossiping on the rickety bench under the apple tree. ‘They may be peculiar but we’ve always had Granny; she brought us up with intermittent assistance from Grandpapa. He was the youngest of nine, all boys, and the others were scattered all over the world: to the church, the army, the navy, India, Canada, and so on.
‘However, Grandpapa was very clever so he won scholarships to Eton and New College, Oxford, and became a Fellow there. When he met Granny she was just eighteen and he was almost fifty and, to everyone’s astonishment and probably his own too, he fell head over heels in love with her. Married Fellows weren’t allowed in those days so his family found him a position on a relative’s estate near Basingstoke. They dressed it up and called him the Agent or the Steward if they were feeling grand, but he was essentially the head gamekeeper.’ I started to smile.
‘He was absolutely useless as an Agent, and anyone would have been insane to trust him with a gun because he was absent-minded and short-sighted. Granny did it all instead, she had been trained for it, after all. Mother is just like Grandpapa but of course she couldn’t vanish into an ivory tower which would have suited her splendidly. He produced learned volumes about the Cathars which were unreadable except to the other Oxford dons who bought them. We all loved him but he used to look at the flock of small children around his feet, in utter astonishment and we knew he never remembered our names, or even who we were, most of the time.’
Henry seemed completely enthralled by our family stories and I was glad to see how much more relaxed he was than when we’d first met. I said nothing but chased the two younger hens, Jasper and Crombie, into the hen-house, much to their annoyance and saw that our occasional gardener was staring at us. I beckoned to him.
