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.”