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.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A MR. FREEMAN agreed to conduct us to the home of Melinda Crawford.
She was a connection on my father’s side, her ancestors army officers who’d fought at Yorktown with Cornwallis, followed Old Duro through Spain, and danced with my own great-grandmother-so the story went-on that fateful eve of Waterloo.
As a child in India she had lived through the siege of Lucknow, where the British were nearly wiped out during the Great Indian Mutiny. She had seen death and disease close-up, and survived to marry her own cousin against all advice-and been extraordinarily happy with him. When he died, she returned to England by a roundabout route that would have made the hardiest explorer blanch to contemplate. At least those were the stories I’d been brought up on, and I’d believed them. When one knew Melinda, one did.
With that past, I was hoping she’d accept an escaped lunatic with equanimity if not precisely with enthusiasm.
I’d omitted the polite telegram signaling my imminent arrival. She just might take it into her head to telephone the Colonel Sahib and ask him if he knew what his errant daughter was up to.
She still might.
But it was worth the risk. No one would think to look for Peregrine Graham in Melinda Crawford’s lair, and if they tried, she was more than capable of dealing with them.
Her house was closer to Tonbridge than to Rochester, but I was wary now of Tonbridge, after our encounter with Jonathan Graham there. Better a long drive across Kent than the worry of a confrontation at the train station or the hotel.
A cold rain had started again as we set out, and the countryside, winter bleak, was colorless and dreary: muddy roads leading through brown, fallow fields, apple trees raising twisted limbs to the gray sky, sheep huddled wherever they could find shelter. And any people out in the weather were hurrying about their business with heads down.
Not far from Marling, we found the turning that led to the Crawford house, and shortly after that, the stone gates with their elephant lanterns loomed through the mists. As the drive wound up the knoll, the views were shrouded in rain.
I had heard many British exiles in India describe the “cottage” they would have when at last they could go home. Roses and daffodils and wisteria and all the beauty that the brown and tan and cream shades of Indian dust made impossible out there. Melinda’s gardens were beautiful in season, and she indulged herself with arrays of color. Not for her single beds of pinks and red, beds of yellow and gold, beds of blues and lavenders. Here flowers mingled in rampant glory, a rainbow of blues nodding to cream and yellow, lavenders touching rose and pink and dark blue, golds indulgently shoulder to shoulder with white and purple and red, all striking to the eye and visible from every window. Now of course the beds were dormant, but a bank of holly trees and a dramatic cedar and the leathery green of rhododendron softened the scene.
To a child, coming home on leave from India, this was heaven.
All the way here I’d debated with myself what I should tell Melinda Crawford, and how to explain Peregrine. Nothing believable came to mind.
We rang the doorbell, huddling close under the small porch. I had paid off the driver but asked him to wait until we were certain someone was at home.
The door opened, and in it stood Shanta, the Indian woman who had served Melinda for so long she could speak her mind without reprimand.
Now she took one look at the orphans of the storm on her doorstep and raised her eyebrows.
“I do hope,” I said, mustering a smile that had more of Cheshire cat in it than I’d have liked, “that Melinda is at home. It’s been a wretched drive!”
“Miss Elizabeth,” she said severely, “if you are eloping, you can go home now and be sensible.”
Thank God I’d warned Peregrine that the household was a little eccentric, but still I felt myself flushing.
“I’m not eloping. The lieutenant here is a patient, and he has nowhere to go. Er-the zeppelins destroyed his flat in London-”
He did look every inch the wounded hero-his eyes dark-circled and tired, his shoulders thin from fever, and his skin without much color. I found myself thinking that as my choice for eloping hero, he was off the mark.
“If that is the case, come inside and be warm.”
I turned to wave good-bye to Mr. Freeman and followed Shanta inside, taking Peregrine’s arm and ushering him ahead of me. I could feel his silent resistance-the muscles in his arm were corded bands.
We were taken to the study, where a fire blazed on the hearth and the room was suffocatingly hot. Melinda Crawford’s blood still yearned for the heat of India, and I could remember as a child thinking that all old people must be on the verge of freezing to death. Two other widows my father had visited over the years, wives of officers who had died out there, lived in the same tropical environment. They were the only people I knew who kept roaring fires in high summer. One had suffered from malaria on and off and was always feverish.