A Christmas Homecoming (14 page)

Netheridge stopped abruptly.

Douglas Paterson swore.

Mercy screamed, loud and piercingly sharp.

Lydia quietly slid to the floor in an awkward heap.

Douglas swiveled around, saw her, and went to her anxiously, calling her name and trying to raise her in his arms.

James went to Mercy, catching her hands, which she was waving around. “Stop it!” he said loudly. “It’s all right! He’s not here. There’s no danger at all.”

“No danger?” she shrieked. “He was dead, someone murdered him, with a stake through the heart, and
now he’s not there anymore, and you say there’s no danger? Are you mad, or stupid? I told you there was something wrong with him, terribly wrong. He came here out of the night and during a storm just like the one that brought Dracula’s coffin ashore.” Her voice was getting louder and more high-pitched. “He knew everything about vampires, more than we did, more than Bram Stoker did. He was dead and locked in, and still he escaped. He wasn’t dead, you fool! You can’t kill him, he is the ‘undead.’ ”

White-faced, Eliza turned to Caroline.

Caroline stepped forward. “Mercy!” she said abruptly. “You are not helping anyone by being hysterical. If you really want to step out of reality into Mr. Stoker’s book, then for goodness sake live up to the character you chose to play. Mina Harker would never have been so peevish and cowardly, and she was faced by a real vampire who was determined to kill her. Mr. Ballin, poor man, is dead and can do you no possible harm, even if he wanted to. Take hold of your emotions and stop making such an exhibition of yourself. We need to think very clearly what to do if we are to defeat whatever evil is lurking here.”

“Evil!” Mercy repeated the word with a loud wail.

“Stop shrieking!” Caroline commanded. “I would be delighted to have an excuse to slap your face. If you insist on giving it to me, I shall take it, I warn you.”

Mercy fell instantly silent.

“Thank you.” Caroline’s voice was tart. She turned to Netheridge. “There is no point in our standing here. Clearly the body has been moved. Since there is no one in the house except us and the servants, you had better find out if one or two of them came here and found him and, perhaps out of decency, felt obliged to move him somewhere else. One thing is absolutely certain: He did not remove himself, either as a man, or as a bat or a wolf, or anything else supernatural. If you don’t want all the maids in hysterics, and possibly the footmen as well—or, worst of all, the cook—then you had better be very circumspect as to how you do it.”

“Yes,” he agreed, as if he had thought of it himself. “Of course.” He turned to Joshua. “I’m sorry, but under the circumstances I don’t believe there is any point in your continuing to practice for the play. I …” He shook his head. “Just at the moment I hardly know what decisions to make about anything. Please … look after
yourselves. Do as you please. I’m sorry, but as such it is quite impossible for you to leave, or even to walk outside. The snow must be a couple of feet deep, and it is bitterly cold. There are books in the library, quite a good billiard table …” He did not bother to finish.

Caroline felt sorry for him. The party he had planned with such care for his daughter had collapsed in a tragedy no one could have foreseen. Now instead of celebration he had a crime, and a group of strangers in his home without a purpose, one of them possibly a killer.

She stared at Joshua, then at Netheridge. “Mr. Netheridge.”

He turned toward her, simply out of good manners. His face was weary, and he looked ten years older than he had when he welcomed them to his home. “Yes, Mrs. Fielding?”

“Alice has written a play that we have all worked extremely hard on, particularly she. We will perform it one day; if not here, then somewhere else. Possibly even in London, at the very least in the provinces. Considering how much he contributed to it, we could do it in memory of Mr. Ballin. Our time and her efforts have not been wasted.”

He swallowed, sudden emotion filling his face. It was a moment or two before he could master his voice.

“Thank you, Mrs. Fielding. You are a generous woman, and brave. I hope one day that will indeed be possible.” Then, before he embarrassed himself by a display of his vulnerability, he made his excuses and left.

One by one they all went: either to their bedrooms, the billiard room, the library, or the room set apart for letter writing with desks, inkwells, and ample supplies of paper.

Caroline walked away from the corridor and up the stairs to go back to her bedroom. Then she changed her mind and went to the window seat in the long gallery from which she could see across the snowbound countryside. The hill fell away, covered by trees bending under the weight of last night’s new fall. Some of them looked precariously close to breaking. There was no mark on the landscape of human passing: no wheel tracks, no footprints. It was impossible to tell how deep the snow lay, except that all the smaller features—rocks, low walls, and fences—had disappeared. They were alone.

Far out toward the sea more clouds were piled up, ominous and heavy gray. There was worse weather to come.

She realized as she sat there that they must solve the crime themselves. They could not remain here day after day knowing nothing, doing nothing. One of them had killed Anton Ballin. They had to find out which one of them it was, and be strong enough to deal with the answer together, whatever that answer was. Of course, it must also be done with caution and care. They could not risk anyone else being killed. A person who would spear Ballin to death might not hesitate to do the same to anyone else who threatened him or her.

How had this happened? It seemed unimaginable that it was one of them, from the slight vanities and squabbles they had, no more than pinpricks to the self-esteem: The play made no difference to any one individual’s career. It was a lesser part on the small stage, no money involved, nor any critical review to care about.

And yet someone had cared about or feared something so intensely that they had driven a broom handle through a man’s body. Why? What was it that lay below a surface that appeared so normal? They had all been
deceived, ignorant, walking a razor’s edge across an abyss, and never thinking to look down.

She shivered, although it was warm in the house. Fires burned in every room. Candles blazed. Food was plentiful and excellent. There were servants to attend to every physical need. What lay hidden behind such apparent ease?

How could she find out, and so discreetly that she did not get herself killed in the process? If she had any sense at all, she would take very great care indeed. For a start, she would tell no one what she was doing, and that included Joshua. In fact, more than anyone else, she absolutely mustn’t tell Joshua.

She was speaking to herself as if she had accepted that identifying the murderer was her responsibility. But who else was there who could possibly do it? None of them had any experience of murder, except herself. Douglas Paterson was possibly guilty! He had loathed Ballin, and made no secret of the fact that he thought Ballin was deluding Alice that she had talent when she did not. And even if she did, it was not a talent Douglas was willing for her to use. It would mean her leaving Whitby, where his future lay. If she did not marry him,
then perhaps he did not have a future—not in the way he had imagined, and intended. Charles Netheridge was a very wealthy man indeed. The house more than attested to that, quite apart from his frequent and large investments in the London theater. Alice was his only child. That was why he had been willing to invite an actor of Joshua’s fame and quality up to Yorkshire for the whole Christmas period, and pay his expenses and those of his company, on the understanding that he, Netheridge, would stake them next London season.

But could Douglas have hated Ballin so much for helping Alice? Or could anyone in the company have hated Ballin so much? He was a stranger to all of them. What danger could he present? Surely nothing in the four days since he arrived had given birth to a passion so violent it had ended in that terrible act in the corridor?

He must have known one of them before. Had he come intending to seek revenge for some old wrong?

Caroline watched the sky. The dark clouds over the sea were closer now, and heavier. A gust of wind stirred the bare branches, sending piles of snow falling off into the deep drifts beneath.

Was it possible that Ballin had not been the intended victim? In the uncertain light of the corridor could the killer have mistaken Ballin for someone else? He was tall, but so were Vincent and James. With his back to the candlelight, would such a mistake be possible? If so, they must not have spoken; Ballin’s voice was too distinctive.

Netheridge was of average height, and broader than any other man here. He walked quite differently. Douglas Paterson was a good height, but he had not the practiced grace or elegance of Ballin.

No. She could not believe there had been such a mistake.

The sharpened broom handle was a very carefully prepared weapon. It had been created, not used in any spur-of-the-moment anger or self-defense. Nobody possessed such a weapon offhand, never mind carried it around with them in the middle of the night, unless they had an attack in mind.

Was it possible someone really did believe in vampires? Was anyone so crazy? Surely not? They were actors; they played all sorts of parts, real and fantastic. They could take up roles as they stepped onto the stage,
and discard them again as they left it. She had seen Joshua as every character imaginable, from a pensive hero like Hamlet to a blood-soaked tyrant like Tamburlaine; as philosopher, cynic, and wit in the works of Oscar Wilde; and the lover Antony to Mercy’s Cleopatra. None of them was the real Joshua, the man she knew.

Had Ballin known his killer? Had they intended to meet there in the middle of the night? It was ridiculously unlikely that the meeting was purely a chance encounter, surely? Which meant that Ballin knew his attacker at least well enough to be willing to keep a midnight tryst.

Why was the body moved?

She thought of Mercy’s fear of the “undead,” which she had dismissed as a vain woman’s pretense to get attention. But the fact that the body had apparently disappeared now made her fancies seem less ridiculous. Was it likely that someone had hidden the body to cause and heighten that very fear?

Possibly. But it was more likely the body was moved because there was something about it that would give away the truth of the crime. What could that be? Either
something of the identity of whoever had killed Ballin, or something about Ballin’s own identity, which would betray whom he had known well enough for them to hate or fear him with such passion.

Whom could she ask for help? The only person she trusted without question was Joshua. However, he would be fully occupied trying to keep up morale and sensible behavior among the cast, especially now that there would be no performance, at least in the foreseeable future. He would have to find them something to do, to keep them at bay and hold them together as a group. Any old jealousies or squabbles that surfaced now might result in near hysteria, and things could be said or done that could not be mended.

Someone must find out who had killed Ballin, and prevent the wrong person from being accused. She, Joshua, and the rest of the players were strangers here in close-knit Whitby. Who would suspect Douglas Paterson, never mind Netheridge himself, when they had the perfect scapegoats in a group of strangers, and actors at that?

She must squash down her own emotions and think clearly. What would her son-in-law, Thomas Pitt, do?
He would ask questions to which there would be precise answers and then compare those answers. If she did the same, with luck a picture would emerge, even if it was merely an understanding of who was lying and who was telling the truth.

Maybe she would be better equipped if she knew more about everyone present. For a start, she would definitely need the help of Eliza to speak to the servants. She did not imagine for an instant that any of them had killed Ballin; why on earth would they? But they should be eliminated as suspects all the same.

She found Eliza in the housekeeper’s room. After waiting several minutes for her to complete her conversation, she followed Eliza as she walked back to the main part of the house.

“I was wondering if I could be of help in any way,” Caroline began. “I don’t know if you have told the servants or not.”

Eliza looked very pale in the white daylight reflected off the snow outside. The fine lines around her eyes and mouth were cruelly visible.

“Charles said I should not,” she replied. “He has told them that Mr. Ballin was taken ill. We were going to
say that he had died and we had placed him in the coldest storeroom until the authorities could come, but of course now we don’t know where he is.” She stopped and turned to Caroline, her face tight with misery. “Where on earth do you think he could be? Why would anyone move him?” She was trembling very slightly. She seemed to want to say more, but some discretion or embarrassment prevented her.

Caroline longed to be able to help her. Eliza looked frail and a little smaller than she had seemed only yesterday. Had she been about to ask Caroline if she had any belief in the supernatural, but stopped because she feared seeming ridiculous?

“Perhaps to frighten us,” Caroline answered with a very slight smile. She meant it to be reassuring, but was suddenly anxious in case Eliza imagined that it was out of mockery, or amusement at her superstition. “And they’ve succeeded,” she went on hastily. “We are all unnerved by it. But honestly I think it is probably for a more practical reason. If we were to look at the body more closely we might learn something that would indicate which one of us killed Ballin.”

Eliza looked close to tears. She stood still and stared
at the huge hall with its magnificent decoration and its oil portraits of various Yorkshiremen of note, portraits that were the choice of a rich man who had local roots, but no ancestry of which he was proud.

Eliza gazed at them one by one on the farthest wall, her face filling with dislike.