Susan’s mother sat there for a time reminiscing about the Booker twins, and then said, “I don’t know how many more shocks I can bear. First Arthur and then Harry, and now Mr. Ted.” She shook her head. “I ought to count poor Mr. Peregrine as well. He’s as good as dead, isn’t he?”
“I was talking to Mrs. Clayton earlier. She told me she had expected to go to London with the family, until plans were changed at the last minute. Were you to go as well?”
“I was to stay here. I can tell you, I was more than a little envious of Hester Clayton, at the time. As it turned out, I was glad I wasn’t there. It was a terrible shock. I heard Mrs. Graham speaking to Inspector Gadd, describing how he’d ripped that poor girl to pieces in an orgy of lust and blood. Very like Jack the Ripper, it was, that’s how she put it. I didn’t sleep for two nights, picturing it. And Mrs. Graham walking in to find the body and Peregrine there with blood all over him. It’s a wonder she didn’t lose her mind.”
Shocked, I said, “I thought-” But I don’t know what I thought. A nice quiet killing with no blood and the victim someone I didn’t know and never would? Appalling and all that, but somehow until now, not real.
“Mrs. Graham cried all night, saying she wished he’d died there and then, so she could bury him beside his father and have done with it, and never have to think about it again. Ever.”
There were tears in her eyes again, and she bit her lip to hold them back. “I was that fond of him, as a boy. Very like his father, he was, when he was young. I tell you, it was such a blow. But then he went away, and we all tried to go on as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t as if we’d seen him every day, even when he was young, running about and coming in from some lark, muddy and looking for a bite to eat. I used to save a little treat for him, setting it aside, before he was found to be different. After that he never came down to the kitchen, and his tutor told us that he must be quiet, or it would damage his brain.”
“Damage-” Medically, unless he was subject to seizures, that didn’t make much sense. But of course the tutor was not trained to deal with such a child, and he probably meant well.
“I never liked that tutor,” Susan’s mother was saying. “Sly, he was, and not much one for conversation in the servants’ hall. He took his meals separately, a step above the rest of us. But he would come down sometimes and speak to one of us about Mr. Peregrine’s needs. As if the Prince of Wales was wanting something, mind you, and the tutor was the Lord Chamberlain. I never resented it, knowing what the poor boy must be suffering. His brothers running and shouting about the house, or in the back garden, while he must sit by his window and watch. There was talk that little Prince John had such seizures and was sent away. I remember that. And I thought, Poor Mr. Peregrine, and wondered if he was to die young too.”
She seemed to tire, her face drooping a little. “I should never have told you such things. You won’t let on to Susan, or to Mrs. Graham, will you?”
“No, I wouldn’t dream of speaking of it-truly. I wouldn’t wish to remind any of them-”
“You’re kind, Miss. It’s been bottled up in me all these years, and I thought I’d carry it to my grave, but I’ve been that upset over Mr. Ted.”
“Will you be all right, if I leave you?”
“Yes, go, if you don’t mind. I need to rest. Thank you for coming, Miss.”
I made my farewells and slipped out. The cat jumped into her lap as I latched the door, and she bent her head, as if nodding.
I walked back to the house and went up to my room without meeting anyone. I was grateful for the respite.
Small wonder no one in the family wanted to see or speak to Peregrine Graham while he was there, ill. Even after all these years, the memory of what he’d done must still be raw.
It explained too why there were constables on watch. And why at the first sign of recovery, Peregrine had been sent directly back to the asylum. While he was still too weak to do anything frightful again.
CHAPTER NINE
THE MAGISTRATE, THE aging relict of the man who had held that position before her, was nearing seventy, hunched and sharp-tongued. Dr. Philips pointed her out seated nearest the roaring fire, one of her grandsons beside her.
She had commanded that we hold the inquest at once, so that she could visit her granddaughter in Canterbury in time for the birth of her first great-grandchild. And everyone, from the Grahams to the police, agreed without argument.
It was the day after poor Ted Booker had been buried. Indecent haste, I thought, but perhaps no more than a duty to Lady Parsons.
I didn’t know the Coroner, a dour man of fifty, who, according to Dr. Philips, had come down from Tonbridge to conduct the proceedings.
I listened to the evidence given about Theodore Russell Booker’s state of mind, as if he were a stranger the witnesses barely knew. An embarrassment, something to put behind us quickly, so that we get on with living.
Dr. Philips gave a very clinical report on his mental state, and then added, “I think perhaps we haven’t considered the whole man. He and his brother were close, and Harold’s death must have been appalling. Theodore Booker was not in another part of the Front, word coming secondhand, he was there, a witness, he held his brother in his arms as Harold died. We must accept as well our failure as a member of the medical profession to find a cure for horror and heartbreak. If Theodore Booker took his own life while in the grip of such painful memories, it was not his fault. It was the fault of war and of our inability to understand how to save him.”
There was silence as he stepped down and walked to his place next to me. We were in The Bells, in a parlor that was more often the scene of parties and filled with laughter, not talk of death. The dark beams over our heads and the dark paneling of the walls, added to a dreary day with rain coming down in sheets, fit our somber mood.
I reached out to touch the doctor’s arm as he sat down, then heard my own name called to give evidence.
I did so, to the best of my ability, remembering that I was under oath. But I also told the truth as I’d observed it: on the night of his death, I had felt so strongly that Lieutenant Booker had turned a corner. Then, like Dr. Philips, I added more than I was required to tell. “He loved his wife very much. He told me that. He tried to heal for her sake. I felt a great pity for him, because he wanted to be a good husband.”
There were two questions for me-one to do with my training and whether or not I knew enough about such cases to judge the circumstances surrounding Ted’s death, and the other to do with whether or not Theodore Booker was, in my view, of sound mind.
I answered, “Grief is difficult to bear at the best of times. Ted Booker was perfectly sane but so overwhelmed by what he saw as his responsibility for his brother’s death that he couldn’t find his way back to the man he was.” I wanted to add that a little more understanding from his mother-in-law might have gone far in saving him. But I held my tongue.
She was seated in the front row with her daughter, her face smug with satisfaction that the troublesome man was dead. Sally was so shrouded in widow’s weeds that her feelings were hard to read. There was no way of knowing whether she felt relief or despair. Indeed, most of the people attending the hearing seemed to be unsympathetic to the dead man. I had a fleeting thought that the poor man was well out of it. These were neighbors and friends, they had known him since he was a boy, and yet they had turned away from him when he most needed them.
Was that what had happened to Peregrine Graham in his own hour of need?
In the end, the finding was that Theodore Booker, while not in his right mind due to grief over his brother’s death, had taken his own life. The stigma of suicide had been lifted from the survivors. That was all Mrs. Denton had wished for.