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.
Melinda was seated in a chair, draped in lovely silk Paisley shawls, and she registered no surprise at seeing me in her doorway. I wondered why.
“I’ve had a letter from your mother,” she said, rising to kiss me. “She was worried about you. She said you haven’t been the same since you went to visit the Grahams.”
I kissed her cheek and smelled the scent of sandalwood and roses in her hair.
She was tall and straight, with the bearing of a soldier.
“And this is…” She turned to Peregrine and held out her hand like an empress greeting a new and interesting courtier.
Before I could stop him, Peregrine gave her his real name.
She turned to me again. “I thought the Graham boy you were so fond of died aboard Britannic?”
I could feel my heart fluttering into my throat. “This is his eldest brother,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant.
Melinda nodded. “Welcome to my house, Lieutenant Graham. Come and sit by me. I see you’re in the colonel’s old regiment. My husband’s as well. Wounded in France, were you?”
We sat down as far from the fire as was polite.
The room hadn’t changed much, crowded as it was with Melinda’s Indian souvenirs as well as objects she’d discovered on her travels. There was a tall porcelain Russian stove in the left corner of the room, a gigantic ceramic affair in blue and cream that she’d seen in Leningrad and shipped home. A samovar from Moscow-often used to brew her tea-stood on a table between the windows, and above it were two great African elephant tusks that curved around a Garuda mask from Bali.
I couldn’t help but wonder what Peregrine made of it all. If he’d thought the Prince Regent’s Pavilion intriguing, this must seem exotic in the extreme.
Melinda was asking him how much action he’d seen, and he was answering, “More than I care to recall,” and she nodded, satisfied.
“What brings you here, my dear girl?” she asked me next. “Your mother says your orders have been cut and should arrive at any moment. And I’ve yet to thank you for the letter you sent from Athens. Most reassuring, let me tell you.”
I said almost bluntly, “Peregrine needs somewhere to stay. Would you mind? He doesn’t wish to go home, and there are no beds to be had in London. He’s good company, and as soon as he’s well enough to manage on his own, he’ll be rejoining his regiment.”
“Of course he may stay. We’re a quiet house. If he doesn’t heal here, he never shall.”
I felt distinctly uneasy. Had she heard about Peregrine’s escape? Surely not. Truth was, I’d expected more resistance on her part. Damn Peregrine for not remaining Lieutenant Philips.
It was much later, after a light luncheon, that Peregrine was shown to his room by Shanta, leaving Melinda to cross-examine me at her leisure.