An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

After Dallington had spoken with Fox and Forrest he had returned to Leck Castle, eaten supper with Peter and Frances Hughes — they had a very good chef, unusual in a household with only three servants, because Frances loved food — and gone to sleep while there was still light in the sky, exhausted. The next morning he went to Raburn Lodge.

Before he had left for Hampshire, Dallington had acquired, jointly from Jenkins and Shackleton, a letter that introduced him as their representative and begged the cooperation of witnesses.

It induced no special awe among the people of Raburn Lodge, unfortunately.

“What happened?” asked Lenox.

“An old stooped white-haired fellow answered the door, looked at the letter, and then spat at my feet and told me to be on my way.”

“What did you do then?”

“He had dogs on the leash, so I took his advice. I didn’t leave altogether, though. I spent the morning watching the house. I had a little eyeglass and looked in the windows. Curtains were drawn over most of them, but I could see three people at one time or another moving about the place, as if they expected Hetty and Archie Godwin back imminently — the old butler, an equally old housemaid, and a footman who must have been brushing up near a hundred.”

“Family retainers,” said Jenkins.

“Yes, and loyal I thought, unlikely to tell me anything. Then I had a stroke of luck. Just before noon, when I thought perhaps I would leave, a woman rode up to the house in a beaten-up dogcart, tied off her horses, and walked around to the servants’ quarters. She knocked on the door, and it opened, and then closed again, and she waited outside for some time. When the door opened again it was the footman. He gave her the laundry.”

“Excellent,” said Jenkins, smiling.

“How old was she?” asked Lenox.

“About fifty. Robust, though. Needless to say, I stopped her as she came back out to the road.”

“And showed her the letter?” asked Jenkins.

Dallington laughed. “I did show her the letter, and she couldn’t have been off quickly enough. Then I offered her money.”

“That did it?”

“Not exactly. It made her pause, and at last she declined. She said she couldn’t stand to lose the business of the lodge. As she was driving away, though, she said that everyone in town knew about the old man — old man Godwin — and that I only had to ask about the note.”

“The note,” said Lenox, furrowing his brow.

“I didn’t understand either. Nor did Hughes. I had lunch in the village and made a few friends at the public house, and none of them could make sense of it. At last I had the idea to seek out the local constable.”

“First thing you should have done,” said Jenkins, with professional satisfaction.

“He was about eighteen, sadly, a poor young pup, and didn’t know anything about the Godwins — or the note — but he gave me the name of the old constable, who had retired to Allington, one town over, and opened up a public house. The Godwin Arms, it was called, if you can credit that. It was there, you’ll be elated to hear, Jenkins, that the letters of introduction you and Shackleton wrote finally came in handy.”

“What did he say?”

“The old constable was a reedy fellow with big eyes, Jonathan Blaine. Always felt he was watching me too closely — an uneasy sort, you know. Kept his cards close to the vest, but sharp. Once he had examined the watermark on Shackleton’s notepaper and looked at the seals with a magnifying glass, he poured me a pint of mild and told me about Henrietta and Archibald Godwin’s father, Winthrop.

“Apparently Winthrop was a bit of a devil. He was litigious — suits against about thirty different people across Farnborough and Hampshire, from what I could gather — and it was widely known that he used his wife and children cruelly. His wife died not long after giving birth to Archibald. She fell down a flight of stairs.”

Lenox recalled the words in Hughes’s letter: a vicious old fellow, according to my own pater. He was always in and out of court. “He pushed her, you think?”

“It’s difficult to say — bad people’s wives take tumbles, too. It seemed enough to me that everyone in the village blamed him for her mishap. Anyhow, as I say, he was always at law, but the local cases, Blaine said, were only minor pleasures for him. His chief quarrel was with the government. He wanted to reclaim the lands of his ancestors.”

Jenkins bit his pipe thoughtfully. “You think Archibald was acting out his father’s wishes, then, for revenge?”

“The story’s not over,” said Dallington. He paused and took a long sip of water; he looked tired and energized at once. “Three years ago last Tuesday, Winthrop Godwin killed himself.”

Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Did he, though.”

“Blaine was still the town’s constable then. The household made the initial report of the death to him, and he went out to Raburn Lodge. Soon enough the Hampshire police took over, but not before Blaine saw Archibald and Henrietta’s father hanging from the rafters of the great dining hall. It was the central room of the house.”

“Is this where the note enters into the story?” asked Lenox.

Dallington nodded. “I’m coming to it. According to Blaine, Winthrop Godwin had received a letter from the courts the day he hanged himself. His final request for the restoration of the Godwin lands had been denied.

“Apparently his death was a matter of no great sorrow to the people round about Farnborough, for he was in suit with half of his neighbors and threatening the other half — he sued Peter Hughes because Hughes refused to repair a fence on his own property, Lenox — but there was a great deal of concern for Archibald and Henrietta Godwin.”

“They were well liked?” asked Jenkins.

“Neither was well known in the town or the county. Archibald had just returned from Oxford and Tonbridge, so in all he must have been away eight years or so at the time of his father’s death. Henrietta kept house for her father, but she didn’t have much of an acquaintance. It was widely expected that after their initial period of mourning, the two would take their place in local society — dine with the bishop; hire more staff, for of course their fortune was known to the last farthing, as it always is in such places; join in the Hunt.”

“The Beagles.”

“Yes, precisely. The Beagles are lords of all they survey in the Clinkard Meon Valley; it was astonishing. At any rate — they did none of that. On the contrary, they dismissed all of the staff except for the three I mentioned, they stopped ordering from local shops, they refused all invitations. They built up the hedges around the house.”

“There is something eerie in them, these two,” Lenox said. “I have seen it before. There was a case in Lower Danforth some years ago. There were two sisters, twelve and thirteen. Their mother was dead. Their father was a terror, beating them, berating the household, losing servants every fortnight. The two sisters grew strangely close. They had their own language, their own gestures. They wouldn’t speak to anyone except for each other. The walls of the room they shared were covered with an odd kind of cuneiform writing, you might call it. I’ve never wanted to leave a place as badly.”

Jenkins nodded. “I remember the case. The Thompsons.”

Dallington looked puzzled. “What was the crime?”

“They had killed their father,” said Lenox, “and after that every servant in the house. We found the housekeeper facedown in the coal scuttle. Old Thompson’s valet was in the bathtub with his throat slit. As for the father, he was dressed in his Sunday suit, sitting at the head of the table, where they had been eating for a week before anyone suspected that things had gone amiss. He had been stabbed dozens of times — before and after death.”

Dallington shivered. “Charming story, Lenox. You ought to tell it at parties.”

The older detective smiled. “Apologies.”

“No, it’s relevant. I don’t think they had their own language, these two, but they were uncommonly close. They were sometimes seen walking arm in arm upon the moor, as lovers might, according to the landlord at the Godwin Arms.”

“Do you think they killed their father?” asked Jenkins.

Dallington shook his head. “No. If anything, I think they were hoping to avenge him. Clearly there is some madness in the blood of that family. I would be curious to hear about Godwin at school, at Oxford. He already told us that he didn’t have friends. He must have been an odd soul.”

“You think they were attempting to avenge their father simply because of the timing of his suicide?” asked Lenox.

“No,” said Dallington and smiled faintly. “There we come to the note. It was found in Winthrop Godwin’s chest pocket. It was signed ‘VR,’ and Blaine said they interrogated a fellow named Victor Robertson, with whom Winthrop had quarreled, at length. Of course, I saw something else immediately, though I didn’t tell Blaine as much.”

“What?” asked Jenkins.

“Victoria Regina,” said Lenox. “Queen Victoria. What did she write, John?”

Dallington took a sip of water. “She used the royal ‘we,’” he told them. “The note said, “We forgive; we cannot forget.’”