A Duty to the Dead

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE NEXT THING I knew, a watery sunlight shone through the curtains and splashed across my bed.

I sat up with a start, dressed hastily, and removed the chair from my door.

Peregrine Graham was asleep across the threshold of the outer door, and the instant he heard me, he opened his eyes and stared at me as if he hardly knew me.

“I’m awake.”

“I’m cold. I want my tea. Will you let me prepare it?”

“Go ahead.”

I busied myself with the tea things, then said, “You’ve got yourself a small problem. There’s no food in the flat. We’ll both starve.”

“I’ve considered that. You’ll go and buy what we need. If you call the police or in any way betray my whereabouts, I’ll kill Mrs. Hennessey. If she’s out, I’ll shoot the first three people I see on the street, and then myself. I’m a murderer. What can they do to me? A man can only hang once.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking me or not.

“Your family will be hurt-it will bring up all the old gossip and make their lives a misery.”

“Except for Arthur, who is dead and beyond hurting, I don’t really care.”

“That’s a vicious thing to say-”

He rose from his bedding, then faced me, taller, malevolent. “My stepmother treated me worse than an animal. She slept with her cousin before and after my father’s death. I don’t know if any of my half brothers are related to me. What do I owe any of them?”

“Her cousin-”

“Robert Douglas. He was always decent to me, I give him that-but he did nothing to protect me.”

Well, I thought, that certainly explains a good deal…if it’s true.

He saw the surprise in my face, and added, “I should have thought you’d guessed. You must have seen them together. You must have seen the resemblance between Timothy and Robert, if not Jonathan.”

But I’d thought they favored their mother…I said as much.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he responded impatiently. “But you haven’t lived with them and watched as I did when we were young. Look at their hands, they’re his, and the way their hair grows. The way their upper lips curl when they say words like church or children.”

It sounded more like obsession than observation, and he must have sensed my disbelief, because he went on earnestly, persuasively.

“I had no idea until one day I caught them in bed together. I was a child, I didn’t know what that meant. But that evening I was locked in my room and seldom allowed to join the family again until we were taken to London.”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. The only confirmation I had was the ease with which Robert came and went in that house, and his familiar attitude toward Mrs. Graham. But of course they were cousins-

“You have a devious mind for someone the world claims is half-witted.”

“I was told often enough that I was slow, stupid. I had trouble concentrating, and Jonathan took pleasure in taunting me about it. Mr. Appleby-our tutor-did nothing to stop him. I’d be tongue-tied with anger, and I must have seemed dull and belligerent and unable to learn. But in the asylum, I saw how half-witted children behaved, and I knew I wasn’t like them. Still, I’d been told the alternative was hanging, and I stayed in that God-bereft place and held my tongue. Literally. They thought after a time that I was mute, that it was the shock of what I’d done, or where I was. They got used to not hearing my voice from one month to the next.”

I hadn’t heard him speak when he arrived or as he left my care. Only in the privacy of the sickroom had he talked to me. And then not in the beginning.

The teakettle began singing merrily, jolting both of us. I made the tea, and while it steeped, I said, “Surely you remember what you did that sent you to the asylum.”

“My memory isn’t clear. Some of it was shock. Some of it was the nightmare of being taken from London directly to the asylum and never going home again. I was kept at the rectory until arrangements were made. I was dazed, confused, frightened out of my wits. I do remember being led away from something too ghastly to look at anymore. I could smell the blood on my hands and feel the stiffness of it on my shirt. And I remember vomiting on the stairs as we started down them. Robert took me away and tried to clean my face and hands, then shut me up somewhere. They were amazed to find me asleep on the floor when they came back for me. I remember they were shocked that I could sleep after what I’d done. I remember all that, but not what happened in that room-only in my dreams does it come back again, and for years I’d wake up screaming. I also remember standing in the drawing room of the London house, and my stepmother was telling someone-a policeman, I think-that she blamed herself for allowing me to accompany the family to London. She said that shutting me away in my room had made me resentful and angry, and twisted something in me, but she had thought London might be good for me. She’d wanted me to see a doctor there. It was the first I’d heard of it. She said-I can hear her voice now-that I’d killed the woman the way I’d have liked to kill her. That she’d found the pocketknife that my father had left me buried deep in her pillow one night, and never spoken of it.”

I felt cold, despite the tea. Peregrine was mad…however lucid he might seem at times.

But what was the difference between this man and Ted Booker? My conscience wanted to know. You were sympathetic enough to the soldier…

I tried to think of something else to talk about, something to take his mind off killing.

“Did you know where you were in London? Did you know the house where all this happened?” I was sure he couldn’t tell me.

“We were to spend the autumn in London. A month. My stepmother had friends there, relatives. We went up by train, and I was allowed to look out the window as long as I didn’t speak to anyone. The house in London seemed small after Owlhurst. But Timothy and Jonathan shared a room, and Arthur and I were put together. Robert took them to the zoo, but I stayed behind because I might make a scene. I was never allowed to see people, and my tutor told me that I was different and mustn’t make a fuss when I was told to stay in my room. He said people would stare at me and be unkind. I didn’t want to be stared at. And so they went to the Tower, and Arthur told me afterward about the cannon and the ravens. Everything was the same, I’d come to London but I might as well have stayed at home. There was an upstairs maid. She was pert, teasing, when no one else was about. I didn’t like her and told her so to her face. My stepmother put me in a room by myself, as punishment. One night there was a dinner party, and my stepmother went, taking Robert with her. I wasn’t well, I hadn’t been since I was put in the room alone. My head swam, and my stomach was queer. I remember lying on the floor, because it was cold, and it felt good. The rest is hazy, a botched jumble of images.”

He rubbed his face with his hands, scrubbing at it. I could hear several days’ growth of beard rasping against his palms, and his voice came through his fingers in an odd sort of echo that made it sound like someone else’s.

“That’s why it haunts me. I can’t make sense of things. What happened when, and who was there.”

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t kill that young woman?” I thought he was hoping to win me over with a lie.

“I killed her. Of course I did. When the police showed me my knife, I told them the truth. Do you think I’d have lived nearly fourteen years in that godforsaken asylum if I wasn’t sure what I’d done?”

The admission was shocking.

“But you just said-you haven’t come to London to remember, you already have-” If I hadn’t been afraid before, I was now.

“You aren’t listening. I want to remember why I wanted to kill her. Why I picked up that knife, and when. And how it felt to do what I did that night. I’ve shut it out, it’s all missing, and when I was so ill, when I thought I was dying, I realized that I had to know. I had to put it all together and look at it in the light.”

His eyes were intense, and I wondered if I would live through his nightmare. Or since he knew what murder felt like, whether he would be eager to experience it again. I’d read somewhere that when men kill, as in wars, they lose a little of their humanity each time until it becomes easier, less awful, and they accept killing in a way that civilized people can’t tolerate. Whether it was true or not, I didn’t know. But in front of me was a man who had killed not in war but on a quiet London street, without provocation or, as far as I could see, a drop of repentance.

Peregrine Graham must be as dangerous as his family claimed-it would behoove me to be very careful, or I could trigger his anger and suffer the consequences.

A part of my mind said, They should have hanged him when they had the chance…

I asked, clearing away the tea things in an effort to keep my hands from shaking, “Peregrine. What good will it do to remember? What will you have gained, bringing it all back again?”

“I can heal.”

It was such an unexpected answer that I stared at him.

“You don’t know what it’s like to look in the mirror every time you shave and see a normal face when you know that beneath the flesh and bone there’s a monster inside. I told myself there in the bed in Owlhurst that if God forced me to live, I’d find a way to force myself to face myself.”

I caught my breath. It was all so logical. And so macabre I didn’t know how to respond.

He smiled crookedly. “This is a poor recompense for saving my life. But then I didn’t want it to be saved.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled envelope from Elayne’s letter. “You gave me the means. Unwittingly.”

I wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock, arrive on my doorstep and find the flat empty-or filled with my friends and their friends, all of them real, all of them normal.

I was allowed to go and do the marketing, a little later in the morning. I was reminded that Mrs. Hennessey would suffer if I talked to anyone, or sent a telegram to Kent. She was there at her door when I came back, smiling at me, asking how my arm was faring, and if I’d come to London to take up my next posting.

I answered her questions, smiling as if nothing had happened to change my world or hers. I told her that I’d been in Kent and had returned to London to spend a little time with friends, that I had missed them, shut away in Somerset.

She nodded and told me that I had only to ask, and she would bring me anything I needed.

I thanked her and went on up the stairs, feeling Peregrine in the darkness at the top, watching and listening. He had the door open for me, and then shut it behind me. “That was well done.”

Ten minutes later, he was asking me how to go about finding a particular house in London.

“You don’t remember where you were staying?” I asked, surprised.

“You don’t understand. I was never told these things. I was taken to the train, I was taken to the house, and I never left it until we returned to Kent. I can only tell you what I saw from my window-a fenced square with trees, a walk, several benches, and a gate on four sides. The house across from ours was a pale cream, with six chimneys, a false balcony on the upper floors-no more than an ornate iron railing in front of the windows-and a black door with a brass knocker and short iron railings up the two steps to the door.”

“There are any number of houses in London that match that description.”

I debated how far I should go in helping him, whether dragging my heels would wear him down or if helping him would buy some protection in the end.

“Then we’ll walk the streets until we find the right one.”

“You aren’t in any condition to walk the streets. This is winter, and London is damp, cold. You could find yourself ill again. Pneumonia can come back.”

“It behooves you to help me. The sooner the better.”

I made up my mind. “I’ll take you to a place I know that fits your description. It may be the wrong place. But it’s somewhere to start.”

“Fair enough.”

I had bought a razor for him while I was out, and he used it, ridding himself of the dark beard and, with it, some of the sinister expression that I hadn’t seen while nursing him. I’d kept him reasonably well shaven then because of the need to wash his face after his fearsome coughing fits.

We left the flat together. I expected-dreaded-Mrs. Hennessey popping out her door and asking who my young man was.

An escaped murderer, Mrs. Hennessey. My father will be horrified.

But she didn’t come out her door, and then we were in the street.

London in winter is cold. The damp from the Thames pervades the city, and the wind seems to sweep down the long streets without hindrance, as if blowing across Arctic ice floes. A bitter and penetrating cold, the sort that makes life miserable for those who live here.

We found a cab in the next street, and I gave the driver the only address I could think of, the one that Mrs. Clayton had mentioned in her enthusiastic account of nearly visiting London. But would Peregrine know it now? Would he recognize the square or the houses?

We said very little to each other-from the time we left my flat, our conversation had been limited to necessities. I could feel his presence beside me, determined, and surely dangerous if crossed.

We got down by Carroll Square. In the center of it, the garden was winter bleak, trees that blossomed in spring showing bare branches to the steel gray sky, and the earth of flower beds looking like the burrows of fat, invisible animals. I began to walk along the street, looking up at the houses as we passed.

I could see Number 17 now, across from the southern gate into the square. It was a handsome house, white with black shutters, and there were two small evergreens in pots on either side of the black door. I looked across to the other side of the square. Number 17 was almost a mirror image of the house directly opposite, across the garden. In place of the ornamental pots, there were decorative mock wrought-iron balconies at the first-floor windows and railings at the shallow steps to the door.

I didn’t draw attention to either house but watched Peregrine as he gazed from one to the next. Let any flicker of memory be his and not a reflection of my knowledge. But I thought perhaps this was where the murder had occurred, and wondered what might be stirring in Peregrine’s mind.

Peregrine looked about him with a frown on his face. “The trees in the square are different-”

“It was probably early autumn, when the trees were in leaf.”

“Yes. Of course.”

There was no one about at the moment, and we had the street to ourselves.

We strolled around the square as he sought to find something familiar.

“I don’t think this is the right place,” he murmured to himself. And then as we went around for a second time, he said, “I should be in an upstairs bedroom looking out. At this level, nothing is the same…”

“I don’t think we would be welcomed-”

“No.”

We had come back to Number 17. Peregrine stopped to gaze up at the chimney pots of the house across the square.

A constable strolled into Carroll Square and came toward us. I could feel the tension that gripped Peregrine Graham at the sight of him.

Did he have that pistol with him? My throat was suddenly dry.

Peregrine said under his breath, “If you do anything to attract that policeman’s attention, I’ll kill him.” There was no emotion in his voice. I believed him.

We walked on, two people enjoying a companionable silence. I could feel the smile plastered on my face begin to crack from the strain of keeping it in place. But the constable looked at us anyway. I realized that I was a respectably dressed young woman, while the man at my side was wearing a suit that didn’t fit him and his face was still pale, with dark circles under his eyes.

Oh, my God. Does he look like a convict-or someone just escaped from an asylum?

Or will he pass for a wounded soldier in civilian clothes he’s outgrown?

The constable walked on, in spite of the second glance he’d given Peregrine. I started to breathe again.

“If we’re to promenade around London like this, you must have decent clothes,” I said, my voice angrier than I’d intended. But I could see again in my mind’s eye how that constable had stared, and if he’d stopped us, it didn’t bear thinking of.

Peregrine turned to me, amusement in his eyes. “You don’t care for the good doctor’s taste in clothes?”

I retorted, “If you attract attention to yourself because you don’t appear to belong in a neighborhood like this one, it won’t be my fault.”

He looked down at his clothing. I don’t believe he’d given a single thought to his appearance, except for the beard.

“I have told you. I have no money. There’s nothing to be done about it. Can we go into the square? It has benches. I need to sit down.”

“Only the residents have a key to the gates.”

“Ah.” He did look exhausted. “All right, I want-” He stopped. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, and suddenly the windows on the far side of the square were lit as if from within by the golden light. “Look!” His exhaustion vanished in his excitement. “I remember now. That chimney pot, the one on the left side-see, there’s a missing tile, and when the sunlight hits it just so, the shadow resembles a small dog.”

I couldn’t see it. But he crossed to the square, the better to see Number 17 and stare up at its windows, as if expecting to find himself at fourteen gazing down, then he positioned himself on the walk, and turned toward the house opposite.

“They’ve painted the door a dark green, but it was black once. As were the shutters. But, by God, this is the right street!”

“There must be others just like this one.”

“No, I’d stake my life on this.”

Across the square, the constable stopped to speak to a housemaid just coming up from the tradesmen’s entrance. Then he turned our way and began to stroll back toward us, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“Come away, Peregrine, please! We’ve loitered here long enough. Please, before that constable catches us up.”

Peregrine seemed not to hear me, his mind on something else. Then he turned, took my arm, and we walked on, toward the corner. I wanted to hurry, to look back over my shoulder, but I dared not draw attention to us again. At the corner we turned away from Carroll Square, and I felt my heart begin to beat normally again.

Peregrine’s grip on my arm tightened until his fingers felt like they were bruising the skin. “How did you know?” he asked. “Who told you where to find that house again?”

Surprised by the unexpected attack, I said, “It was Mrs. Clayton-”

“I don’t remember anyone of that name. You’re lying.”

“No, truly, I’m not.”

“Did you live here before, is that it? Is that why you came to visit the Grahams? I asked you if you were Arthur’s wife. You told me he was dead. Why were you in Owlhurst?”

“Peregrine. Mr. Graham. I was the nursing sister with Arthur when he died onboard Britannic. I came to visit Mrs. Graham, to-to talk to her about the day Arthur died. He had asked me to. It was his dying wish.”

“He wouldn’t have asked you to come to Owlhurst. Unless there was more to your relationship than nurse and patient.”

“You aren’t required to judge any relationship of mine,” I retorted coldly. “I’m helping you because you are here, you are armed, and I have no choice.”

“You saved my life,” he said sardonically. “And your letter gave me a place to hide in London. And you must have been asking questions about me, or you wouldn’t have known about a house my family lived in for only a few weeks nearly fourteen years ago.”

I could feel myself turning red, and not from the cold wind.

“I admit to some curiosity. Arthur Graham told me he had three brothers, but he said almost nothing about them. When I arrived in Owlhurst, there were only two, and no one told me anything about you. When you were being carried to Owlhurst, and I’d volunteered to attend you, your mother explained in the briefest terms what I was getting myself into. I should have trusted my instincts and let you die!”

He chuckled. It was the oddest sound, coming from a confessed murderer. I hadn’t expected a sense of humor and looked up at him, startled.

“Some curiosity, indeed,” he repeated, mimicking me.

We were standing on Radcliffe Street, waiting to hail a cab.

I felt a touch on my shoulder. “Miss?”

I turned, alarmed, and found myself face-to-face with the constable we’d seen in Carroll Square.

“Constable?” It was all I could manage. Peregrine’s fingers were still digging into my arm, their iron grip biting through the cloth of my coat and my sweater.

“Is this man annoying you, Miss?”

My eyes moved to Peregrine’s face. He had turned toward the constable, and was waiting for me to answer.

“His name is William,” I said in a voice I knew wasn’t my own but prayed the constable would think I was shrill as a rule. “He worked for my family before the war. He wanted to see where his-his brother had been in service before volunteering for the army.”

“He’s not in the army himself?” the constable asked.

“I’m home on leave,” Peregrine answered. “Pneumonia. Not as glorious as dying, is it?”

The constable nodded. “You oughtn’t be out of uniform,” he admonished Peregrine.

“It’s just for today.” He indicated his cuffs and the shortness of his trousers. “I’ve outgrown them. My mum says I’d added an inch since I’ve been in the army.”

The constable smiled. “Good luck to you, son.” He touched his cap to me and walked on.

Before I could fall down in relief, I caught the eye of a cabbie coming toward us and hailed him.

“I see what you mean about the clothing,” Peregrine said after I’d given the man the address of Mrs. Hennessey’s house. “Will you buy me a new suit of clothes, for your sake and the sake of the police? I have no money. I can’t pay you back.”

There was the shop where my father bought his clothes and had his uniforms tailored. I leaned forward and told the cabbie that I’d changed my mind and wished to go to Oxford Street. He nodded, and we turned toward Piccadilly.

Peregrine sat back and closed his eyes. His face was gray with fatigue.

I sat there counting the lies I’d told to the police. I’d be an accomplished liar before Peregrine Graham and I were done.

I leaned a little forward. Where was the pistol? In his coat pocket? If he was being measured for a new suit of clothes, he’d have to remove that heavy coat…

When we arrived at Gladwynn and Sons, I was grateful to find that young Mr. Gladwynn, who knew my father very well and who must be nearing eighty years of age, was not in the shop that morning. The clerk who greeted me, a Mr. Stanley, informed me that Mr. Gladwynn would regret not having seen me and would surely wish to know how my father fared.

“Very well,” I said. “He’s in Somerset at the moment. Meanwhile, I have brought a friend who finds he’s outgrown his prewar clothes. This is Mr.-Philips, and he’s in need of something to finish out his leave.”

“We’ve a backlog of uniforms on order,” Mr. Stanley informed me, and my spirits plummeted. “But,” he went on, eyeing Peregrine like an undertaker eyeing his next customer, “I think we just might have something to fit his size…”

I sat down in the chair before the tier of mirrors, and Mr. Stanley went off to find whatever he had in mind. He was a thin man, with thinning hair, and close to sixty. I wondered what tale would get back to my father.

Peregrine stood there, ill at ease. It occurred to me that Peregrine had never come to London to have his clothes fitted. He’d either been shut away at home or shut away in the asylum, everything he needed ordered for him. I felt a wave of pity for the child, if not for the man.

Such shops as this one have an air of their own. The smell of wool blended with the beeswax polish that gave a rich luster to the wood of counters and a wall of drawers containing everything from collars to buttonhooks to handkerchiefs. The bolts of cloth on the other side were mostly khaki now or in the colors of various dress uniforms from scarlet to naval blue. Someone had just been fitted with the dress uniform of a Highland regiment, and there were trays of buttons and braid ready to go back into their respective shelves. The tweeds and woolens from before the war were sadly missing, and there were only a few civilian hats to choose from, the rest being military caps of various ranks and services. They were lined up above the bolts of cloth with the precision of Old Mr. Gladwynn, who was legendary.

Mr. Stanley came back, wringing his hands in apology. “I fear there’s nothing in civilian clothes to match the gentleman’s height,” he said. “But I have uniforms that might fit. Alas, they were ordered by someone who died on the Somme. What regiment is the gentleman?”

The gentleman, I informed Mr. Stanley, was in my father’s old regiment and held the rank of lieutenant.

Half an hour later, Peregrine and I walked out into Oxford Street again. Mr. Philips had been transformed into Lieutenant Philips, and I wondered if I would be shot at the Tower for making it possible for him to impersonate an officer.

But the streets were filled with officers and men, and as long as Peregrine remembered when to salute and when not, we had a good chance of getting by with this charade. And a young lady in the company of an officer would attract no attention at all. Such couples were everywhere.

I found us a cab as quickly as possible and wondered how I would smuggle my officer past Mrs. Hennessey.