A Duty to the Dead (22 page)

And then in an addendum dated some weeks later:

I thumbed through some twenty ensuing pages, but there was nothing more about Peregrine Graham.

I was disappointed that the rector had only been able to describe events as he was told them by the Grahams, but his remark about Arthur cut me to the quick. Subdued…

Peregrine read the sections again. “I don’t recall much about any of this, I was half sick and too dazed to take in what was happening to me.”

“Had you been sedated—given anything to calm you?”

“I don’t know, I hardly remember my conversations with the police. My stepmother brought me a cup of sweet tea that made me drowsy. Still, I can recall that Inspector Gadd was very kind. He asked me why I had done such a thing, and then again, what Lily had done to me that made me want to harm her. I could only stare at him, but he didn’t shout as the London police did. He put his hand on my knee, and told me not to worry, that I would be all right. But I wasn’t, was I?”

I was nearly sure that Peregrine had been drugged. To keep him quiet on the journey to London, and while he was there, so he wouldn’t trouble anyone. But then why take him? There had been the excuse of seeing a doctor, but nothing had come of it. I was left with the only logical answer. If he was left at home alone with only the servants, someone might have discovered that the public view of Peregrine Graham was not the real truth.

Whatever my feelings about Mrs. Graham, this was a horrible supposition, that she would have treated her stepson so cruelly. But then I remembered something else—something Peregrine had told me.

He had found his stepmother in bed with her cousin Robert Douglas.

I sat back in my chair.

“My good God,” I whispered.

Peregrine looked at me. “What is it?”

“I—it’s nothing. Just—look, I need to be by myself for a while. Do you mind?”

“I’d like to take these to my room and read the passage again. Is that all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’m tired, Peregrine, that’s all.”

I thought he saw through me, but he turned and went to his room, and I sat there staring out the window, not seeing the traffic in and out of the shops, not seeing the sun fade behind gray clouds, looking inward at something rather terrible.

Peregrine believed that Jonathan or Timothy—or both—were the sons of the liaison between Mrs. Graham and her cousin Robert Douglas.

Was Timothy’s clubfoot the mark of that liaison? I had no idea if a clubfoot was a result of inbreeding. But it might be, for all I knew. It might also run in families.

I tried to picture each of the sons in turn. That got me nowhere. I hadn’t been looking for indications of their ancestry when I was speaking to them face-to-face. But even if they weren’t Robert’s offspring, Mrs. Graham might have been so frightened that Peregrine would tell his father what he’d seen, she’d done her best to destroy his credibility. And what better way to do that than by indicating he wasn’t really right in the head? However cruel that was, it would be nothing to what she might have done years later to protect her own child and blame Peregrine for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Everyone agreed she had been terribly distressed by the death of Lily Mercer—and she’d paid the girl’s family handsomely to leave England. Would she have felt so strongly about protecting Peregrine, or gone to such lengths to hide what had been done? She had kept him out of prison, not from kindness but because his brothers would have suffered the shame of being related to a murderer. And I hardly thought Mrs. Graham was the first person to send an unwanted family member to an asylum. Little better than a prison in some ways, it could at least provoke a measure of sympathy for the family of the afflicted.

I thought about the young Prince John who had had seizures, and how he’d been removed from the public eye very quietly, until
he’d been nearly forgotten. Mrs. Graham had succeeded in doing much the same with Peregrine.

I was still trying to understand the full impact of my thinking when there was a knock at the door. It was Peregrine, and he held one of the rector’s journals in his hand.

“I think you ought to read this,” he said, and walked into my room.

I took the book and carried it to the window, reluctant to turn up the lamp. Peregrine followed me and pointed to an entry some years after the murder of Lily Mercer.

I read it quickly, and then again.

I turned to Peregrine. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with your situation?”

“None. Except that I know Jonathan boasted that he’d raided Herbert Meadowes’s henhouse for eggs, and not been caught. “He thought it was a fox,” he told me, “I’m as sly as a fox.” And Arthur had said, “That’s not brave. You must give him a fair chance to catch you. You must do it three times.” This was in London.”

“And how did Jonathan answer him?”

“He didn’t. I think he was put out. Timothy taunted him too, saying, “No, it must be six times, to be fair.’ And Arthur said, ‘Six
it is, then.’ Timothy asked him, ‘When will you try? When we go back to Owlhurst?’ But Arthur answered him, ‘Not then. When I’m ready.’”

“But that’s not proof of anything. Boys boast, striving not to be outdone.” Even the young subalterns under my father’s command took foolish risks and accepted dares, to prove they were brave. More than one was given a dressing-down for imprudent conduct. Come to that, I’d heard my father and Simon Brandon wager on the outcome of a fight between a mongoose and a cobra.

“But no one came forward to admit to being there. And no one got help for the inspector, when he went down.”

For fear of being punished for trespassing.

“You’re telling me that Arthur did this?”

“No. Now read this.”

He held out another diary, and I saw that it was some six months after Inspector Gadd had died.

“I don’t know, Peregrine, you’re leaping to conclusions. Accidents happen—”

“Read this.”

He had marked another passage in that same diary.

Lady Parsons had had a close call. She had been out riding in the woods where the owls lived, when her horse stumbled and rolled on her.

So ran the rector’s account.

“No, Peregrine, you’re trying to make connections that aren’t there.”

“Indeed.” He retrieved the book from my hand and left the room with a final comment. “I lost track of events here in Owlhurst. These journals make for interesting reading.”

I thought,
He’s playing mind games. He offered me that pistol, knowing I wouldn’t take it then or later. He’s trying to show me other deaths that he couldn’t possibly have been responsible for. He knows I suspect Arthur, though. And that will be his salvation.

I returned the journals to the rector just after dusk had fallen. He thanked me formally, and then asked, “Have these set your mind at rest?”

“They were very informative. While I was a guest in her house, I could hardly ask Mrs. Graham to relive what must have been a very painful past. And Peregrine Graham was too ill to tell me anything, even if I’d asked. I don’t much care for mysteries; I just used whatever skill I possessed to see him well again.”

“And the same for Ted Booker, I think. Only he was beyond human help.”

“Sadly,” I agreed.

“I’m glad you came to see me, my dear Miss Crawford. It’s why I am here.”

“Tell me,” I asked, “how did the man who wrote these die?”

His eyebrows went up. “Are you suggesting he wasn’t in his right mind when he made his entries here?”

“No, no. I just—I felt I came to know him, a little, through his words. I was told that he had nearly worn himself out, caring for his flock.”

“That’s true. He was in the church one morning, and went up into the pulpit to find something he’d left there. He tripped over
his own feet and went down the stairs headfirst. He lived for several months afterward but hardly knew where he was or what had happened to him. It was a blessing for him when he died. He wouldn’t have wanted to linger. He’d put a note with these journals years earlier, that they should go to his successor for guidance. A very thoughtful gesture.”

I said, “An unfortunate mishap. Like the burst blood vessel that killed Inspector Gadd, like the carriage overturning and killing the doctor. The fall that injured Lady Parsons so badly. Have there been other incidents of this nature since the war began?”

He pursed his lips, thinking. “In fact, no. Unless you count young Peter Mason. But that’s ridiculous—”

“What happened to him?”

“He was swimming in the pond on his father’s farm, when he apparently got a cramp. He drowned. Arthur was at home, just before being sent to France, and he and his brothers swam in that murky water looking for the body. Jonathan found it, but it was hours too late. He was a promising lad, Peter was, and my first service for one so young.”

I thanked him and said good-bye. But I couldn’t go back to the hotel straightaway. There was too much on my mind. Peregrine’s doing.

I walked in the wood where the owls nested. The trees were tall and sturdy, the last of the ancient forest that had once covered this part of Kent. The forest that had stood at Harold’s back in the Battle of Hastings, on the main track that led from the sea to London.

I counted. Inspector Gadd. Lady Parsons. The doctor. The rector. But surely not the boy Peter. Without him, Lily Mercer made five.

Six, Timothy had suggested, and Arthur agreed. But that was six times taunting the farmer Meadowes, to give him the chance to catch the culprit. Not six murders. Or near murders, if we counted Lady Parsons among them.

But to look at it another way, six opportunities for the police to
catch their man. And Peregrine locked away in his room at the asylum could only have been blamed for one of them.

It was dark under the trees, but peaceful. A little wind rustled the dry, bare branches, and once I thought I heard an owl glide past me, after other prey. They are silent, owls are, as they fly, but there’s something, a disturbance in the air, a sixth sense, that catches one’s attention sometimes.

It was time to turn back. I was nearly out of the wood when someone stepped from the shadow of a tree trunk and confronted me.

I drew in a breath, I was so startled, and he could hear that. He laughed, and then my eyes adjusted to the barest glimmer of ambient light, and I saw that it was Timothy Graham.

“It is you,” he said then. “I thought I saw you walking toward the wood, but I told myself it was impossible. What brings you back to Owlhurst?”

“You gave me such a fright!” I declared.

“Guilty conscience, I’ll be bound.”

That was too close to the mark for comfort. I laughed, more an admission than a denial, I was certain.

“I—a personal matter brought me back. And so I stayed the night. But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

He fell in step beside me. “I saw you coming from the rectory. If I were to guess, I’d say it was Ted Booker who has been on your mind.”

“I’d rather not discuss Lieutenant Booker.”

“You tried to help him. I think it was unfinished business on Ted’s account.”

I answered. “Sometimes when you try to save a patient, and you fail—even if it isn’t your fault, you still take it more personally than you should.”

“As you did in Arthur’s case.”

Surprised, I answered, “In a way, yes. He sent me here with a
message, and I felt honor bound to bring it. However it might be received.”

“I can understand that.” He hesitated, then asked, “What did you make of Arthur? I don’t mean what you told my mother, but what you really felt?”

“He was a good patient. We often talked—I’d be coming off my shift, and I’d stop by his cot and he’d tell me what he’d been reading. Or I would tell him about some part of my day. He was restless, his foot hurting him like the very devil, and I knew that any distraction was welcomed.”

“Did he talk to you about Owlhurst or his family?”

“Only in the most general terms. You see, the wounded often live in the present, because they’ve been very badly frightened, even if they refuse to admit it. And so they hold on to the present. The past is still too—I don’t know—precious.”

“Did he tell you about his brothers?”

“I knew he had three, and no sisters. That was all.”

“Not that I was lame, or that Jonathan has a cold streak in him that I’ve never fathomed, and I doubt if Arthur did either? Or that Peregrine had been clapped up for murder?”

“In a hospital ward, with other ears hearing every word, men seldom bring up such personal things. I knew Jonathan was also in the army—I heard Arthur telling someone that.”