No Graves As Yet (3 page)

He did not try to stop her or find any comforting words. There was no reason that made any sense, and no answer to the pain. He tightened his arms around her, clinging as much to her as she was to him. She was nothing like Alys, not really, yet the softness of her hair, the way it curled, slightly choked the tears in his throat.

Matthew went in ahead of them. His footsteps faded along the wooden floor of the hall, and then they heard his voice murmuring something and Mrs. Appleton replying.

Judith sniffed hard and pulled back a little. She felt in Joseph’s pocket for his handkerchief. She took it out and blew her nose, then wiped her eyes, screwing up the linen and clenching it in her hand. She turned away and went inside also, talking to him without looking back.

“I don’t know what to do with myself. Isn’t it stupid?” She gulped. “I keep walking around from room to room, and going out again, then coming back—as if that would make it any different! I suppose we’ll have to tell people?”

Joseph went up the steps behind her.

“I sent Hannah a telegram, but that’s all,” she went on. “I don’t even remember what I said.” Inside she swiveled around to face him, ignoring Henry, the cream-haired retriever who came out of the sitting room at the sound of Joseph’s voice. “How do you tell people something like this? I can’t believe it’s real!”

“Not yet,” he agreed, bending to touch the dog as it pushed against his hand. He stood in the familiar hallway with its oak staircase curving upward, the light from the landing window catching the watercolors on the wall. “It’ll come. Tomorrow morning it will begin.” He could remember with sickening clarity the first time he had woken up after Eleanor’s death. There was an instant when everything was as it had always been, the whole year of their marriage. Then the truth had washed over him like ice, and something inside him had never been warm again.

There was a fleeting pity in Judith’s face, and he knew she was remembering also. He made an effort to force it away. She was twenty-three, almost an afterthought in the family. He should be protecting her, not thinking of himself.

“Don’t worry about telling people,” he said gently. “I’ll do that.” He knew how hard it was, almost like making the death itself happen over again each time. “There’ll be other things to do. Just ordinary housekeeping, for a start. Practical things.”

“Oh, yes.” She jerked her attention into focus. “Mrs. Appleton will deal with the cooking and the laundry, but I’ll tell Lettie to make up Hannah’s room. She’ll be here tomorrow. And I suppose there’s food to order. I’ve never done that! Mother always did.”

Judith was quite unlike either her mother or Hannah, both of whom loved their kitchens and the smells of cooking, clean linen, beeswax polish, lemon soap. For them, to run a house was an art. To Judith it was a distraction from the real business of living, although to be honest, she was not yet certain for herself what that would prove to be. But Joseph knew it was not domesticity. To their mother’s exasperation, she had turned down at least two perfectly good offers of marriage.

But this was not the time for such thoughts.

“Ask Mrs. Appleton,” Joseph told her. He steadied his voice with an effort. “We’ll have to go through the diaries and cancel any appointments.”

“Mother was going to judge the flower show,” she said, smiling and biting her lip, tears flooding her eyes. “They’ll have to find somebody else. I can’t do it, even if they were to ask me.”

“And bills,” he added. “I’ll see the bank, and the solicitor.”

She stood stiffly in the middle of the floor, her shoulders rigid. She was wearing a pale blouse and a soft green narrow skirt. She had not yet thought to put on black. “I suppose somebody’ll have to sort . . . clothes and things. I—” She gulped. “I haven’t been into the bedroom yet. I can’t!”

He shook his head. “Too soon. It doesn’t matter, for ages.”

She relaxed a fraction, as if she had been afraid he was going to force her. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.” He was surprised how thirsty he was. His mouth was dry.

Matthew was in the kitchen with Mrs. Appleton, a square, mild-faced woman with a stubborn jaw. Now she was standing at the table with her back to the stove on which a kettle was beginning to whistle. She wore her usual plain blue dress, and her cotton apron was screwed up at the right-hand corner as if she had unthinkingly used it to wipe the tears from her eyes. She sniffed fiercely as she looked first at Judith and then at Joseph, for once not bothering to tell the dog not to come in. She drew in her breath to say something, then decided she could not trust herself to keep her composure. Clearing her throat loudly, she turned to Matthew.

“Oi’ll do that, Mr. Matthew. You’ll only scald yourself. You weren’t never use to man nor beast in the kitchen. Do nothing but take my jam tarts, as if there was no one else in the house to eat ’em. Here!” She snatched the kettle from him and with considerable clattering and banging made the tea.

Lettie, the general housemaid, came in silently, her face pale and tearstained. Judith asked her to make up Hannah’s room, and she departed to obey, glad to have something to do.

Reginald, the only indoor manservant, appeared and asked Joseph if they would want wine for dinner and if he should lay out black clothes for him and Matthew.

Joseph declined the wine but accepted the offer to lay out the mourning clothes, and Reginald left. Mrs. Appleton’s husband, Albert, was outside working off his grief alone, digging in his beloved garden.

In the kitchen they sat around the scrubbed table in silence, sipping the hot tea, each sunk in thought. The room was as familiar as life itself. All four children had been born in this house, learned to walk and talk here, left through the front gate to go to school. Matthew and Joseph had driven from here to go to university, Hannah to go to her wedding in the village church. Joseph could remember the endless fittings of her dress in the spare bedroom, she standing as still as she could while Alys went around her with pins in her hands and in her mouth, a tuck here, a lift there, determined the gown should be perfect. And it had been.

Now Alys would never be back. Joseph could remember her perfume, always lily-of-the-valley. The bedroom would still smell of it.

Hannah would be devastated. She was so close to her mother, so like her in a score of ways, she would feel robbed of the model for her life. There would be nobody to share with her the small successes and failures in the home, the children’s growth, the new things learned. No one else would reassure her anxieties, teach her the simple remedies for a fever or sore throat, or show the easy way to mend, to adapt, to make do. It was a companionship that was gone forever.

For Judith it would be different, an open wound of things not done, not said, and now unable ever to be put right.

Matthew set his cup down and looked across the table at Joseph.

“I think we should go and sort some of the papers and bills.” He stood up, scraping his chair on the floor.

Judith seemed not to notice the tremor in his voice or the fact that he was trying to exclude her.

Joseph knew what he meant: It was time to look for the document. If it existed, then it should be here in the house, although why John would have set out to show it to Matthew and then not taken it with him was hard to understand.

“Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed, rising as well. They had better give Judith something to do. She had no need to know anything about this yet, and perhaps not at all. He turned to her. “Would you go through the household accounts with Mrs. Appleton and see if there is anything that needs doing? Perhaps some orders should be canceled, or at least reduced. And there may be invitations to be declined.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“You’ll be staying?” Mrs. Appleton said with another sniff. “What’ll you be wanting for dinner, Mr. Joseph?”

“Nothing special,” he answered. “Whatever you have.”

“Oi’ve got cold salmon and summer pudding,” she said a little truculently, as if she were defending Alys’s choice. If it was good enough for the master and mistress, it was certainly good enough for the young master, whatever had happened in the world. “And there’s some good Ely cheese,” she added.

“That would be excellent, thank you.” He then followed Matthew, who was already at the door.

They went along the passage and across the hall to John Reavley’s study, overlooking the garden. The sun was still well above the horizon and bathing the tops of the orchard trees in gold. The leaves shimmered in the rising wind, and a swirl of starlings rose into the sky, black against the amber and flame, turning in wide spiral arms against the sunset.

Joseph looked around the familiar room, almost like an earlier pattern of his own in Cambridge. There was a simple oak desk, shelves of books covering most of two walls. The books dated back to John’s university days. Some were in German. Many were leather-bound, a few well-thumbed cloth or even paper. There was a recently acquired folio of drawings on the table by the window.

A Bonnington seascape hung over the fireplace, its color neither blue nor green, but a luminous gray that holds both at its heart. Looking at it, one could draw a cleaner breath and almost feel the sting of the salt in the wind. John Reavley had loved everything in this room. Each object marked some happiness or beauty he had known, but the Bonnington was special.

Joseph turned away from it. “I’ll start over here,” he said, taking the first book off the shelf nearest the window.

Matthew began with the desk.

They searched for half an hour before dinner, and all evening afterward. Judith went to bed, and midnight found the two brothers still sifting through papers, looking in books a second or third time, even moving furniture. Finally they admitted defeat and forced themselves into the master bedroom to look with stiff fingers through drawers of clothes, in shelves where toiletries and personal jewelry were kept, in pockets of the clothes hanging in wardrobes. There was no document.

At half past one, head throbbing, eyes stinging as if hot and gritty, Joseph came to the end of places to investigate. He straightened up, moving his shoulders carefully to ease the ache. “It’s not here,” he said wearily.

Matthew did not answer for several moments. He kept his eyes on the drawer he had been going through for the third time. “Father was very clear,” he repeated stubbornly. “He said the effect of it, the daring, was so vast it was beyond most men’s imagination. And terrible.” He looked up at last, his eyes red-rimmed, angry, as if Joseph were attacking his judgment. “He couldn’t trust anyone else because of who was involved.”

Joseph’s imagination was too tired and too full of pain to be inventive, even to save Matthew’s feelings. “Then where is it?” he demanded. “Would he trust it to the bank? Or the solicitor?”

Denial was in Matthew’s face, but he clung to the possibility for a few seconds, because he could think of nothing else.

“We’ll have to speak to them tomorrow anyway.” Joseph sat down on the chair by the desk. Matthew was sitting beside the drawers on the carpet.

“He wouldn’t give it to Pettigrew.” Matthew pushed his hair back off his forehead. “They’re just family solicitors—wills and property.”

“Then quite a safe place to hide something valuable and dangerous,” Joseph reasoned.

Matthew glared at him. “Are you trying to defend Father? Prove that he wasn’t imagining it out of something that was really perfectly harmless?”

Joseph was stung by the accusation. It was exactly what he was doing—defending, denying—and he was confused and dizzy with loss. “Do I need to?” he demanded.

“Stop being so damn reasonable!” Matthew’s voice cracked, the emotion raw. “Of course you need to! It wasn’t in the car! It isn’t in the house.” He jerked his hand sharply toward the door and the landing beyond. “Doesn’t it sound wild enough to you, unlikely enough? A piece of paper that proves a conspiracy to ruin all we love and believe in—and that goes right up to the royal family—but when we look for it, it vanishes into the air!”

Joseph said nothing. The tag end of an idea pulled at his mind, but he was too exhausted to grasp it.

“What is it?” Matthew said roughly. “What are you thinking?”

“Could it be obvious?” Joseph frowned. “I mean, something we are seeing but not recognizing?”

Matthew looked round the room. “Like what? For God’s sake, Joe! A conspiracy of this magnitude! The document is not going to be hung up on the wall along with the pictures!” He put the papers in the drawer, climbed to his feet, and carried it back to the desk. He replaced it in its slots and pushed it closed. “And before you bother, I’ve taken the backs off all the drawers and looked.”

“Well, there are two possibilities.” Joseph was driven to the last conclusion. “Either there is such a document or there isn’t.”

“You have a genius for the obvious!” Matthew said bitterly. “I had worked that out for myself.”

“And you concluded that there is? On what basis?”

“No!” Matthew snapped. “I just spent the evening ransacking the house because I have nothing better to do!”

“You
don’t
have anything better to do,” Joseph answered him. “We had to go through the papers anyway to find what needs attending to.” He gestured toward the separated pile. “And the sooner we do it, the less bloody awful it is. We can think of a conspiracy while we look, which is easier than thinking that we are performing a sort of last rite for both our parents.”

“All right!” Matthew cut in. “I’m sorry.” Again he pushed the thick fair hair off his face. “But honestly, he sounded so certain of it! His voice was charged with emotion, not a bit dry and humorous as it usually is.” His mouth pulled a little crooked, and when he spoke again his voice cracked. “I know what it must have cost him to call me on something like that. He hated all the secret services. He wouldn’t have said anything if he hadn’t been certain.”

“Then he put it somewhere we haven’t thought of yet,” Joseph concluded. He stood up also. “Go to bed now. It’s nearly two, and there’s a lot we have to do later.”

“There was a telegram from Hannah. She’s coming on the two-fifteen. Will you go and meet her?” Matthew was rubbing his forehead sore. “She’s going to find this pretty hard.”