A Duty to the Dead

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I TOLD PEREGRINE that shifting Lady Parsons’s belief in her own judgment was going to be an uphill struggle. “And one I don’t think we’re likely to win.”

He got up and began to pace. “I don’t even know what I believe. Logic tells me I could have done it. Honesty says I probably killed her. The problem comes back to what I remember. And memories are difficult to refute.”

“That’s probably because you were drugged to keep you out of the way and manageable while in London. And it turned out to be a godsend, that you were acquiescent to whatever was asked of you.”

Stopping at the window, he lifted the edge of the white lace curtains that my flatmates and I had hung there, idly glancing out. And then his interest sharpened, and he stood there, watching something or someone in the street below.

After a moment, he said, “Come here, will you?”

I went to stand beside him, reaching to pull the curtain wider so that I could see the street. But he caught my hand, pulled me in front of him, and said, “No. Through this crack. Don’t disturb the curtain!”

I could feel him behind me, tense as a steel rod, and the hand on my shoulder was gripping it hard.

“I don’t see anything,” I said uneasily. “The street. The houses opposite, the carriages and motorcars and people-”

“There. At the house across the way. There’s a man loitering there. See, the one with the cane.”

The house he spoke of was closed up. The children had been taken to the country for safety from the zeppelin raids, staying with their grandparents for the duration of the war. Mrs. Venton was nursing burn victims at her sister’s country house near Winchester. Her husband was serving in the Navy, the gunnery officer on a cruiser.

I looked again at the man. He was moderately well dressed, but the cane he was carrying caught my eye. “That’s not a cane,” I said, intrigued. “Well, it is, if you like, but I recognize it. My grandfather had one-it’s a sword stick. A twist of the handle, and the blade slides out.”

“Your father has set someone to watch over you. What have you told him?”

“Nothing-truly, I haven’t betrayed you. I wouldn’t. Besides, the general view is that you must be dead.”

Just at that moment, Mrs. Hennessey came out of our house and crossed the street, her market basket on her arm. The man stepped out of the shelter of the Venton porch and tipped his hat to her.

I could see then that he was older than he looked, his head bald save for a ring of graying hair like a laurel wreath worn rather long. He looked more like a hopeful poet than he did a menace. And perhaps that was by design.

Mrs. Hennessey listened to him for a moment, then shook her head. He asked other questions, and she again told him no. After that he let her go, walked in the other direction from the one she took-and just as he was about to pass out of sight, he turned and came back again to the porch across from us.

I moved away from Peregrine and the window. “I’ll collect my coat and walk out. See what he does. Whether he follows me or stays where he is. We need buns for our tea, and the bakery is just in the next street. You’ve been there.”

“What if he stops you, as he stopped Mrs. Hennessey?”

I smiled as I pulled on my gloves and reached for the market basket we kept in the flat. “I’m forewarned, aren’t I?”

Peregrine was uneasy with my going. “I still don’t like this idea.”

“No, I want you to see that I had no part of this watcher, and that we’re both beginning to imagine things.”

Before he could argue, I was out the door and down the stairs.

This house had four floors, three of them let to people like my flatmates and me-in need of a base in London but seldom there to enjoy it.

I went down the stairs and out the door without looking in the direction of the watcher-if that is what he was. Instead, I walked briskly to the corner of our street, turning toward the small shops huddled together on the main road.

When I got to the corner, I risked a glance behind me, and to my surprise, no one was following me-and the watcher had vanished.

“Tsk. I’ve come out into the cold for nothing,” I said to myself. But I had come this far, and I went to the bakery to see what was available. We were all doing without the niceties by this time, and it depended entirely on what the baker had been able to find in the way of sugar and flour and eggs as to what was for sale. He put all his resources into bread, which everyone needed, and what was left over went into the tea cakes and buns and an occasional surprise, like the Sally Lunns on sale last week.

We weren’t as fortunate today. I bought bread and looked at the pathetically thin arrangement of sweets on trays that now dwarfed the selections and that used to be filled to overflowing with good things. There was a little white gingerbread left, and I bought two cakes of that for our tea.

Mr. Johnson, serving me, said, “You aren’t at the Front yet, Miss Crawford, nursing our lads? They must be heartsick without your sunny presence.”

He was a string bean of a man with thick white hair, black brows, and a pleasant disposition. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in a foul mood.

“Alas, they must wait another week, Mr. Johnson. I’ve no word yet on where I’ll be sent.”

“If you see my grandson, God forbid he should be hurt, but if you do, tell him I send him my love.”

It was his greatest fear, that his grandson would die in the war. A fear that too many people shared.

“I promise,” I told him as he handed me my tidy little square of cakes. And then someone else was holding his attention, and I went out the door.

The man, when I approached the flat, was walking back up the street, toward me. But he stopped to watch a small boy trying to make a toy horse set on wheels crest the uneven cobbles of the street. I went on to our flat and opened the door.

Peregrine was standing there, his face a thundercloud.

“He came into the house,” Peregrine said before I’d even crossed the threshold. “I watched him cross the street, heard him climb the stairs, and he went to each door, listening and then trying the latch. I’d locked your door. But I could hear him fumbling with it.”

“Then he wasn’t sent by my father. My father knows which flat I occupy. He must be looking for someone else.”

“You saw Jonathan in Tonbridge. You saw Timothy in Owlhurst. You called on Lady Parsons, the rector, and the doctor. Someone set a watch on you.”

“No, I was circumspect. Except with the rector and Lady Parsons. I don’t see either of them running to Mrs. Graham, telling tales. I gave your brothers-and Dr. Philips-the impression that I was still concerned about Ted Booker’s unhappy death.”

And then it occurred to me that we had counted Ted Booker among the six dead. Because Lady Parsons had survived.

“Dear God. Peregrine, what if we were right about the killing continuing? And I let it be known I was concerned about the Booker suicide…”

He said nothing, but behind his dark eyes, his mind was racing. I could see it in his face.

“Then I’m still in the clear,” he said finally. “That is, if they still consider me dead as you said. But you are most definitely in danger.”

He tried to persuade me to go home, where my parents could protect me until I left for France. Here, alone in London, I was vulnerable. If, that is, the man watching the flat was indeed here because of me.

And before long, through me, someone would surely discover that Peregrine wasn’t dead in Winchelsea but alive and in London. That would never do.

“Don’t you see?” I said to Peregrine. “The first order of business is to get you safely out of London, and I don’t know where to put you. Not at home-I won’t involve my father or Simon in this business. They’ll do something rash.”

I wouldn’t put it past either of them to kidnap our watcher and make him tell who had hired him, and why. They had served on the Khyber Pass-kidnapping there was something of a local pastime. Not among the British, but the wild tribesmen who lived on either side of the pass had no compunction about treating their foes as they were accustomed to being treated in their turn.

“I can protect myself.”

“With the doctor’s pistol? And this time you will hang. Be sensible.”

He rubbed his face. “I wanted nothing so much as to leave that asylum and get at the truth about that night in London. Afterward-well, if I didn’t like what I learned, there was a way out. And then when I was free of the gates, trudging through the cold night, I was tempted to turn back. Much as I hated the asylum, I was afraid. Of the night, of myself, of what lay ahead. I told myself I might never have another chance, and so I kept walking. It took more courage than I ever knew I had. And I don’t know much more now than I did when I started this search. You’ve done all you can-all anyone can do. But there are more questions than answers still.”

I asked, “If you could prove you were not the murderer, and you were set free, what would you do?”

He dropped his hands. “I don’t think I’d ever considered the future. But then I met Diana. I’m not in love with her. But I saw in her what I’d missed.”

“You know that if you were cleared, and you could return to Owlhurst, the army would be on your doorstep tomorrow. And you’d be sent to France or somewhere to fight.”

He considered what I was saying. “I’m not afraid of dying.”

“War isn’t about dying so much as it is about horror.”

He shrugged. “Living in an asylum, I knew what horror was.”

We came back, then, to the man standing patiently in the cold, waiting.

For what? For me, for Peregrine, for answers?

“I came to believe it was Arthur who had killed Lily. I didn’t want to, but the facts pointed almost as strongly to him as to you. Now I have to ask myself if he could also have killed the others-if it’s true they were murdered. But if we count Ted Booker among the six, it couldn’t have been Arthur, could it? If it wasn’t one of your brothers, who, then? Robert Douglas? But he was with your mother the night Lily died. I’m not a policeman, Peregrine, I’m not trained to sort out the sheep from the goats.”

“Robert Douglas?” Peregrine’s voice was bitter. “He’s no murderer. He’s just made a habit of looking the other way. That’s his failing, if you like. He swallowed his pride and his self-respect when he followed my stepmother to Kent, and he knows the price he’s paid to stay near her. He’s willing to live with that. He was kind when he knew she wouldn’t care. He sat with me at my father’s funeral, and held my hand when I cried. He brought me cake on my birthday. When he took me to the asylum in her stead, he told them that if I was mistreated, she would see that they answered for it. He persuaded Inspector Gadd to insist on a warm meal, a bath, and fresh clothes straightaway. Little things. But he wouldn’t take my part to her face.”

It had been Robert who had insisted that the dying Peregrine be cared for at home.

“Then we can’t expect him to be an ally. All right, we’ll set any other suspicions aside and concentrate on Lily. Why was her family given money to leave England so quickly? So they wouldn’t make a fuss and bring you to trial? And why was Mrs. Graham so persuasive, convincing London that you should be committed to the asylum for observation as soon as possible? Because she feared that once the shock wore off, you’d remember too much? And why bring in Lady Parsons and the others, unless it was for the same reason-to see you in such a state that they were convinced beyond any doubt that you were the killer?

“What’s more, I begin to wonder why you were drugged to keep you quiet in London. You could have been shut up in your room there, just as you had been in Owlhurst. The only explanation is that your stepmother really did want you to see a specialist, with an eye to having you committed, even before the murder. And you wouldn’t have been in your right mind. Another thing-her own state just after the murder. If you’d really been guilty, she’d have jumped at the chance to be rid of you. She was beside herself because it was one of her sons, and in the midst of her horror and grief, she saw the only way out of her nightmare was to put the blame on you. And if you’re right about Robert, he stood there and let her do it.”

He had listened carefully. But at the end he said, “She told me that if I caused any trouble, then or in the asylum, that I’d be taken away and hanged. I believed her. I didn’t know any better.”

“In prison, they wouldn’t have kept you drugged. And at the asylum, if you tried to tell anyone that she’d slept with Robert Douglas or that one of your brothers was not your father’s son, they would put it down to your madness. And if you remembered too much about London, they wouldn’t listen. After all, the police had what amounted to your own confession, that you wanted your knife back after using it to kill the girl. You said yourself that little effort was made to help you get well. You were in that place for a lifetime, and even if they had restored you to sanity, the only option was a prison cell.”

Peregrine shook his head. “You make it sound logical. But how do you explain the dreams?”

“I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “But tomorrow we’re leaving London. In the dark before dawn, if we have to. There’s one person I can think of who would keep you safe. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before. And I promise you, as soon as I have leave again in France, I’ll find a way to prove what I just told you. And the watcher will have nothing to tell whoever hired him. He’ll be called off.”

“I dragged you into this at the point of a gun.”

“That’s water over the dam. Let it go.”

“Do you still brace your door with a chair at night?”

I opened my mouth to deny I ever had done, and then said, “No. Not now.”

Peregrine smiled, and this time it reached his eyes, but he said nothing.

We ate what I’d brought from the bakery, and I cleared away the dishes. Peregrine watched me, and as I dried the cup that I’d used for my tea, he reached out and took it from my hands.

It was the cup with Brighton Pavilion on it, that exotic palace that the Prince Regent had built for himself not so very far from here, his cottage at the seaside.

“I’d like to see that,” he said wistfully. “It’s very un-English.”

“If we can clear your name,” I answered him, “I’ll take you there myself.”

When Mrs. Hennessey returned later in the day, I went down to ask her what the man who had accosted her earlier had wanted with her.

“He was looking for a flat to rent for his daughter. He thought I looked to be the sort of person who would keep her from getting herself in trouble.”

“When you were away, he came into the house and went up the stairs to try every door.”

“Did he, indeed!” She was quite angry. “Is he looking to murder us in our beds? Or to rob us blind?”

“I thought perhaps you ought to know. Especially since I’ll be leaving quite early in the morning-”

She was quite exercised at the thought of someone coming into her castle and threatening it. It made me feel guilty for frightening her. But it was true.

“Is he still out there?” She went to her window and peered through a slit between the curtains. “By Judas, so he is. Just you wait-when Constable Brewster comes by on his rounds I’ll have a word with him, see if I don’t! And we’ll see then who is the clever one.” She let the curtains come together again. “Did you say you were leaving? Oh, my dear girl, you will be careful, won’t you? Those Huns are cruel, they shot that poor Edith Cavell, just for staying at her post with the wounded. And look how they sank Britannic. A hospital ship! You must stay as far away from them as you can.”

“I’ll keep myself as safe as possible. We’re behind the lines, it will be all right.” I didn’t tell her that sometimes when the shelling began, we were too close.

She embraced me, saying, “Of all my girls, you are the closest to my heart.”

I left her with tears in her eyes and went back up the stairs, feeling a certain elation.

The constable would see to our watcher just long enough for Peregrine and me to slip out of London.

There was no one watching when Peregrine and I quietly let ourselves out the door an hour before dawn. I had spent most of the evening removing any trace of Peregrine’s presence from the flat. The sheets were set out for the woman who did Mrs. Hennessey’s wash and ours, all the cups and dishes we’d used were in their accustomed places, and Elayne’s bed had fresh linens from our cupboard.

I’d borrowed a valise from another of my flatmates for Peregrine’s belongings, and repacked my own. When we crept down the stairs, I could hear Mrs. Hennessey snoring gently from her rooms, the house was so quiet.

There was a misting rain this morning, cold and wet on the face, as we walked several streets over in search of a cab to take us to the station. I had thought of everything, and I was rather pleased as we stepped into the train at Victoria Station, on our way to Rochester.

I had even fashioned a bandage for Peregrine’s head, so that he wouldn’t be required to speak, and I’d told him he was my brother, going home from hospital to complete his recovery. He had looked in the mirror and said, “It’s more believable than the bandage I contrived.”

“Well, of course, what did you expect?” I demanded.

We left the train at Rochester, walking up the hill to the old heart of the city. The squat, powerful Romanesque cathedral and the keep of the castle across from it were floating in disembodied splendor above the fog that had swept up from the Medway’s estuary. I needed transportation to my final destination, the home of a woman my parents had known for some years. The best place to find a driver was at an hotel. The long winding High Street was still nearly empty, though it was close on nine o’clock in the morning, but the shops had opened, and a chimney sweep walked by, whistling.

We were just by a butcher’s shop when I saw coming toward me an officer I knew, now a captain in my father’s old regiment.

I clutched Peregrine’s arm and steered him into the shop. “Wait here,” I said, in a low voice. “Whatever you do, don’t come out.”

To the astonished butcher, I said, “We’re eloping-can my fiancé wait in a back room? Someone who knows my parents is coming up the street!”

The butcher, a burly man with thick graying hair, nodded, and beckoned to Peregrine as I stepped out of the shop and walked on.

Captain Raynor recognized me, waved, and we met in front of a milliner’s, well beyond the butcher’s shop.

“Bess? Is that you?”

“Of course. What on earth are you doing in Rochester?” I asked. “I thought you were the terror of the Hun?”

“I could ask you the same. Your father isn’t here with you, by any chance. I thought I saw you with an officer.”

“Someone who was my patient on Britannic. He walked a little way with me, catching up on news. But tell me, how is Margaret?”

He grinned from ear to ear. “We’ve a son! I was here for the birth-nasty shoulder wound, and they sent me home. I never thought I’d ever be glad of German marksmanship. His name is William, and he’s beautiful.”

“I’m so happy for you.” I embraced him lightly. “That’s for Margaret. Tell her she’s wonderful.”

His eyes were bright with pride. “So she is. She could ask for the moon tomorrow, and I’d do my best to reach it for her.”

“How long is your leave?”

The brightness faded. “Ten days, and I’m off again. I don’t know how I can bear to go. I never hated the Germans until William came. And now I’m not very happy with the French either. And what about you?” he asked, quickly changing the subject. “I heard what happened. Are you all right? Are you returning to duty? The Colonel must have been beside himself.”

“I survived with nothing more than a broken arm,” I said. “And I expect my orders will be here next week.”

“I’m sure this break from blood and death has been good for you. But I must say you still look a little tired.”

If only he knew!

“The arm was slow to heal.”

“Don’t tell me. They worked on this shoulder of mine until I wished it had been blown off. But see, I can almost reach above my head.” And he demonstrated how far he’d come.

I made congratulatory noises, all the while praying that he’d be spared and come home safe to William and Margaret.

He asked after my father and Simon, and sent his dearest love to the Colonel’s Lady, and then we parted. He embraced me warmly, saying, “Keep safe, Bess. I’ll do the same, trust in that.”

And he was gone. I walked on as far as a small bookshop, stopping there to look in the window while surreptitiously watching Captain Raynor turn a corner and disappear.

Weak with relief, I hurried back the way I’d come, and opened the door to the butcher shop, still smiling at our close call.

The butcher was nowhere to be seen, nor was Peregrine.

But at the sound of the bell above the door tinkling its warning, the butcher appeared from the back, his ruddy face nearly as white as his shirt.

“You’d better come,” he said, and gestured toward the back.

I had no idea what was wrong, but I almost ran through the shop to follow him.

In the room behind the shop where the butcher worked, out of sight, there was a long wooden table, a block for a top, and beside it an assortment of knives and other tools.

Peregrine was on the far side of the table-rigid with shock, his face a mask of horror.

“I don’t know what’s wrong-I was cleaning a brace of geese-what happened to him in the war, then?”

I had nearly forgot that Peregrine was in uniform.

“I-a head wound-” I managed to say, and then my training asserted itself, and I put my hand on the butcher’s arm. “Could you leave us, please? For a little while? I’m a nurse…”

The butcher all but fled the workroom. I looked at the blood on the worktable, the entrails of the geese lying in an ugly heap. That hint of rusty iron that was the smell of blood caught in my throat.

I went around the table without speaking. I was afraid to touch Peregrine, and the shared knowledge of war that had helped me deal with Ted Booker was no use to me here.

“Peregrine?” I spoke softly. “It’s Bess Crawford. What’s wrong?”

He started back as I spoke. “No, I won’t put my hands there-you can’t force-”

I looked from his staring eyes to the bloody entrails, and my heart turned over.

I hadn’t been there when Mrs. Graham found Lily Mercer. But I was seeing the scene now as Peregrine must have seen it.

“Peregrine-” I reached out for his arm, to turn him away, but he flung his arm out at me, knocking me halfway across the room, where I ended up next to a large basket of live chickens, their startled cackling adding to the nightmarish scene. This wasn’t a slim, dazed, and frightened fourteen-year-old. He was a fully grown man, and I was winded from the blow.

He was screaming, “No, don’t touch me! I won’t, I tell you, I won’t-!”

I had helped Ted Booker by taking part in his nightmare. I tried it now.

“But this is what you did, Peregrine. Do you hear me?” I said in a voice as near to that of Mrs. Graham as I could make it.

“I didn’t touch her. I only wanted my knife-”

“You can’t have it. The police must take it. Look at what you did. Put your hands in her body, Peregrine, and touch what you have done! Your father would despise you, if he’d lived to see this. Here, hold out your hands, and I’ll show you how it feels to be ripped apart-”

He screamed and went on screaming, and then began beating at the front of his uniform, as if frantically trying to rub something off, his eyes wide with horror and revulsion. And he kept on beating at his chest before turning with such loathing in his face that I nearly fell back again into the basket of chickens.

“I hate you,” he said, no longer screaming, his voice cold and hard and young. “I have always hated you-”

He broke off, as if he’d been slapped, his head jerking.

And then to my astonishment, he began crying, silent tears of anguish rolling down his cheeks, and with a bravado I hadn’t thought possible, he reached out and buried his hands in the bloody mass.

“There,” he said. “I’m my father’s son, which is more than my brothers can say.”

I hurried to him, caught his hands, and with a cloth that hung from a hook by the table, I cleaned them as best I could. Then I made him dip them in a bucket of water standing beside a sheep’s carcass. I was crying myself now, tears of pity for a child who hadn’t been able to defend himself, tormented beyond bearing.

He seemed to shudder, and after a moment he said, “Bess?” As if he couldn’t see me there beside him. It was the first time he’d used my given name.

I dropped the cloth to the floor and took his arm.

“I’m here, Peregrine. It’s all right, come with me.”

He moved like a sleepwalker, and I led him like a little child back out into the shop. The butcher was standing there, hands to his sides, his expression one of pity mixed with horror.

I think he believed Peregrine was reliving some war experience, for he said to me in a low voice, “I’d not marry him, Miss. Not if I was you. Not in this state. He belongs in hospital, where they can see to him.”

I thanked him, telling him I would reconsider, and I led Peregrine out of the shop. The damp air clung to our faces as I guided him to the nearby side street, and we climbed the hill to the cathedral. It was the only quiet, empty place I could think of. We walked to the side door that I could see was open, on the south side, crossing the lawn wet with dew.

Inside it was cold and quite dark, the massive pillars almost ghostly sentinels against the windows. I found a bench in the back, and we sat down.

Peregrine was calmer now. As if the nightmare had receded and left him drained. I think I could have ordered him to jump from the squat tower and he’d have done it, his will destroyed.

We sat there for some time. I didn’t touch him, but I was close beside him, where he could sense my presence.

Gradually he seemed to recover. I could almost watch the progression of emotions. In the distance someone came in from another door, a woman, lifting the holly branches and fir boughs out of the vases by the altar and going off with them. I doubted she could see us here beneath the west doors. But I said nothing until she had come back for the vases and carried them away as well.

“Peregrine?”

“Where are we?” he whispered, looking at the cavernous nave and the long row of columns, the only light that small one in the altar and the rain-wet windows reflecting the dark day. “I don’t know this church.”

“Rochester Cathedral,” I replied. “Did you ever come here?”

He frowned. “Once. With my father. We saw Becket’s tomb-”

“That’s Canterbury.”

He didn’t answer. I thought perhaps he must have been very young at the time. His father hadn’t lived very long after Timothy’s birth. I could see them walking along together, man and child. Arthur would have been too young to accompany them. Peregrine would have still had his father to himself.

“Do you remember what happened in the-er-the shop where you waited for me?”

“There was someone who knew your family…”

“Yes. He’d have been curious about this uniform. He’s in my father’s regiment. And I couldn’t pass you off as a brother or a suitor, or he’d have known it was a lie.”

He turned to me, the first spark of the man I’d seen yet. “You don’t have suitors?”

I felt like laughing out loud. “Not at the moment, at least.”

“I’d forgot. You were in love with Arthur.”

“Hardly love.” Yet I could hear his laughter, remember the warmth in those blue, blue eyes, and still feel, sometimes, the touch of his hand, how it had seemed to open a world of happiness. No shadows, no secrets, just a good man, what people often called a natural leader, who had put aside his own pain to make the others in the ward believe they would all survive together.

“Well, then. You felt something. There was a softness in your voice when you spoke his name.” He paused. “It’s not there any longer.”

“No.” Which was the real Arthur? The dying man who gave others the gift of his spirit, or the devious man who had concealed the ugly crime of murder? Were they one and the same? How could they be? How could I care for one-and not the other?

I shook off that train of thought and went back to my probing. I wasn’t sure how far to press.

Then I remembered something that Daisy, the laundress in London, had said. “Someone had tried to clean away most of the blood-”

That hadn’t been what I needed to learn at the time, and so I had ignored the words. But now I began to see a picture of such hideous behavior that I felt ill.

Mrs. Graham had so terrified Peregrine that he had never really recovered from it-as much a victim of shock as Ted Booker cradling his dying brother in his arms. The dreams-

How could a woman commit such an act of betrayal? But there had been a choice. Peregrine-or her own son. And so she had destroyed her husband’s child with a cold and malicious trick.

And then she had displayed him to the London police and after that to everyone who mattered in Owlhurst-Inspector Gadd, the rector, Mr. Craig, Dr. Hadley, and Lady Parsons-to leave them in no doubt that Peregrine was a monstrous boy whom she had saved from prison but lost to the asylum. And all the while, the child who had really killed was safe at home with Robert Douglas.

He must have loved Mrs. Graham very much to allow himself to be used as he was-or perhaps it was his own child he was protecting, at any price?

I’d guessed what she must have done that night-but I couldn’t have imagined the cruelty of the scheme she had used to make the changeling work.

I said to Peregrine, “What were you served at the noon meal the day of the murder?”

He gazed at me as if I’d lost my mind. Then he said, “I don’t remember.” He sat there for several minutes, his thoughts elsewhere. And then he said, “Yes. Yes, I do, it must have been a goose, because there was a fricassee of goose for dinner. It made my stomach queasy. I couldn’t finish it. And later I lost it, and Lily told me I ought to be made to clear the vomit up myself. Timothy told her to smear it on my face, the way one shows a dog he mustn’t soil the carpet. She was angry with all of us because she had so badly wanted the night off. She felt that Mr. Appleby ought to have been forced to give up his evening instead.”

His eyebrows rose. “I hadn’t thought about that. I heard her call Arthur a spoiled mama’s boy, and later she told Timothy that a cripple ought not be so prideful, that he had only to look at his ugly, misshapen foot to know that he had an ugly, misshapen nature. I don’t know what she said to Jonathan, but he slammed his door and wouldn’t unlock it again, however much Lily wheedled, until she threatened to send for Robert.”

A girl disappointed because she couldn’t have an anticipated free evening, four boys teased and called names-and then some final exchange that must have triggered fury and finally murder.

But if it wasn’t Peregrine, someone had had the forethought to use his pocketknife.

Someone, perhaps, who was jealous that it had been given to the eldest son, and wanted to punish Peregrine for being his father’s firstborn.

I said, breaking the stillness, my voice almost overloud in the quiet cathedral, “Peregrine. You were very young at the time. Do you know how your father died?”

“My father? He’d gone to Cranbrook. On the way home his horse bolted and the carriage overturned. He was dead when he was brought to the house and laid on his bed. All I knew at the time was that he lay there with his eyes open, and I couldn’t understand why, when someone tried to close them, they wouldn’t stay closed.”

“Who found him?”

“I don’t remember that, if ever I was told. Later I overheard my stepmother talking about Gypsies, but it was a child who ran under his horse’s hooves.”

Peregrine remembered his father’s corpse with sadness but without terrors. He’d have remembered Lily Mercer’s in that same way, if he hadn’t been made to put his hands in what he’d thought was her bloody body. It had never occurred to him in those few minutes with Mrs. Graham that the offal was not a human being’s, and she’d counted on that-counted on his state of mind warping all he saw.

“Let’s find the hotel,” I said, getting to my feet. It was cold as a tomb in here, with the stone walls and stone flooring locking in the frigid January air. “We could use a cup of tea while the hotel finds someone to drive us.”