Rustication (34 page)

Euphemia went to put on her bonnet and I walked with the old couple a little way up the lane to their coach. I took the opportunity to ask if the servant they had mentioned had been the one who looked like a jockey. It was indeed he and Mr Tomkinson explained that he had been keeping a fighting-dog in an abandoned outbuilding. He had been cheated in some fraud involving the animal and had killed the dog in a paroxysm of rage. To restore his losses he had stolen and sold one of his employer’s saddles.

So that explained what he had been doing that night when I followed him across the fields in the snow. And I’m sure he was a victim of the fraud that Tobias told me about in which Tom the Swell
alias
Lyddiard had deceitfully improved the odds against his winning dog by disguising it.

Euphemia came hurrying up and got into the carriage without looking at me. As soon as it began to move I turned and ran back to the house.

Now was my chance to talk to my mother alone. I rushed into the parlour and she looked up in astonishment. I wasted no time on preliminaries:
The evening I arrived you addressed me as “Willoughby” and I know now that the man you took me for was Willoughby Lyddiard—the earl’s illegitimate nephew—and that he used to come regularly to the house before I came home. You were expecting him when I arrived. That was why Euphemia went out into the rain: To warn him not to come into the house. Later I saw Euphemia out walking with him. Because both men are very tall, I assumed he was Davenant Burgoyne. Euphemia realised that I had made this mistake and she took advantage of it. She saw that she could make me hate Davenant Burgoyne by making me believe he was compromising her character in the most flagrant manner. Mother, you must have understood all of that. Why did you allow her to deceive me?

Her hands moved restlessly and she avoided my gaze as she answered:
I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve been behaving more and more strangely, Richard. I don’t think you always know what is true and what is invented
.

She must be lying. She used that name to me. She must have known about Lyddiard and Euphemia meeting on the Battlefield and at Lady Terrewest’s house. In that case, why is she denying it?

Mother
, I said.
I know what has been going on and I want you to explain to me what the point of it is. Why were you and Euphemia so anxious to get me to go away? That revelation you threatened me with, it was about my father and what he and Bartlemew had been doing, wasn’t it? I now know about all that
.

She simply shook her head from side to side in bafflement.

What were my sister and her lover hoping to gain by misleading me?
I asked.
And why was the ball so important?
Mother kept her eyes cast down. I said:
Are you really saying that you know nothing about this?

Nothing
, she said.

I said:
I met Mr Boddington last night and he told me everything about the Chancery suit
.

She turned to me a wavering look:
Is he hopeful?

Hopeful! On the contrary. He explained why it is without foundation
.
The court set your father’s will aside because he was not mentally competent when he wrote it
.

Mother flinched and said:
That was Sybille’s lie! My father was not insane. He became confused in his later years but he always knew what he was doing. But even if that had been so, I am his only child and therefore his heir
.

I said:
I’m afraid not, Mother. Mr Boddington explained to me that the distribution of the estate follows the rules of intestacy. Cousin Sybille is your father’s heir
.

I just need more time and I know I will be able to find the proof I need
.

I said:
Mr Boddington says it’s a waste of money to continue
.

She twisted her hands together and said:
My mother always told me she had married my father and I don’t believe she would lie to me
.

Of course she would lie to you
, I said more brusquely than I had intended.
She wanted to hide the unpalatable truth from you just as you wished to conceal it from me. And while we’re talking of lies, Mr Boddington told me the facts about your marriage to my father. You weren’t lowering yourself. It was the other way around. The reality is that my father risked his career. He was a rising clergyman who was marrying the illegitimate daughter of a wastrel and a drunk
.

Not that
, she protested.
Not illegitimate. My father always treated my mother like his wife
.

I said:
You mean he beat her when he was drunk and then abandoned her to poverty and shame
.

9 o’clock.

I can understand why Mother turned the circumstances of her early life into a fairy-tale. Growing up in a shabby little cottage in a row of ill-built houses, visiting her raging-mad father once a year, enduring the patronising contempt and miserable charity of his starched brothers and sisters. To be so close to wealth and rank and yet to be on the wrong side of an invisible barrier. What a wound it must have been for my mother to feel shut out of that big house. To walk past it with her scandalous mother—an illiterate servant seduced by her addle-pated master. Her drooling, pitiful, worthless father—she had to transform him into a parent worthy of her, of her illusions at least. A generous, admirable figure—the cynosure of the town, the county. A Trimalchio of legendary hospitality. Not a lunatic scattering his inheritance on gaudy trifles. A madman spending his last years in a barred room at the top of his siblings’ house. And I’ve done something as stupid and self-destructive as she. I’ve taken upon myself guilt for my father’s offences. What a fool I’ve been. Why should I feel any shame on behalf of another? My father did those things, not I. All my life I felt an obligation to please him even though my truest nature caused him displeasure: my refusal to take seriously the things he believed to be important. Above all, a religion which seemed to scorn the idea of earthly happiness and yet over-value social status. When he died I felt relief and then I felt overwhelming guilt for that. I look back now at what I wrote and see it so differently. Now I realise that I didn’t just fail to love him. I feared him. I knew he threatened my deepest being. He wanted in effect to kill me in the sense that he struggled to force me to become the cleric he wanted me to be.

Our father made us love him because he was weak—not because he was strong. We all collaborated in the pretence that he was a good parent and a worthy cleric because none of us could face the truth: that he was a bully and a lazy drunken incompetent dishonest man driven by bestial desires who neglected the modest talents he possessed. He condemned others for small moral lapses in order to divert suspicion from himself. A man who judges others so harshly must be judged as harshly himself. I always hated him and I felt guilty about that. Well, I feel guilty no longer.

· · ·

The pains have begun. I have no means of alleviating them and no desire to do so if I were able. The worse the agonies—the sleeplessness, the headaches, the stomach cramps—that I suffer now, the less likely I am to relapse, knowing that I would have to go through this again.

Monday 11
^th
of January, 11 o’clock.

I
came down late for breakfast to avoid the others and just went to the kitchen to beg some bread and coffee. Betsy was curt and simply thrust the loaf and a knife into my hands. I tried to find out how she feels about me, but she said:
I’ve to go to the village to buy provisions. I don’t have time to waste
.

I thought
I
was avoiding
her
but it seems
she
has been avoiding
me
.

3 o’clock.

Everything is now clear!

I was upstairs at about noon when I heard someone running up the path and then the slamming of the front-door and I hurried down just in time to see Betsy come into the hall with a flushed face and an air of excitement. She glanced at me and then rushed into the parlour without knocking. I entered right behind her. My mother was sitting at her embroidery and Euphemia was playing the pianoforte.

Betsy cried:
He’s dead. The earl’s nevy is dead
.

Euphemia rose to her feet in horror and then staggered and nearly fainted, sinking back into her chair pale and shaking. The performance was so accomplished that I almost clapped.

Mother’s response was hard to interpret. She seemed shocked rather than surprised.

Betsy poured it all out. She had heard the news in the shop and according to Mrs Darnton, Davenant Burgoyne’s body had been found in a ditch beside the road to the earl’s country-house late yesterday.

In an unsteady voice Mother asked if he had fallen from his horse and Betsy said she didn’t know. Nobody had seen him since he left his uncle’s house in town a few hours after the ball to ride to Handleton Castle.

I came up here to ponder this turn of events. In the instant that Betsy spoke, I saw the point of it all. The deed has been done and the trap has snapped shut upon me. It is more than just the letters that I am to be incriminated for. I am overcome with admiration for their ingenuity.

Davenant Burgoyne did not fall from his horse. He was murdered. I am certain of it. And it has all been done so cleverly. Suppose that I want to kill someone. Suppose further that I am the obvious suspect because his death benefits me. And I am all the more likely to be suspected because it is thought that I have already tried to murder him and failed. Under those circumstances I would select a plausible culprit—someone who is believed to have a grudge against my quarry. I would goad and deceive him so that he appeared to be violent and even unstable and if possible I would try to make it seem that he was the author of a series of deranged letters filled with threats of violence against the intended victim and that he was wandering the fields at night venting his rage on dumb beasts. If he could be induced to threaten my “mark” in front of witnesses, that would be perfect. And it would be ideal if I could arrange for him to have no alibi at the moment I committed the murder. If I managed all that successfully, the police would not even bother to investigate me.

Looking back through these pages I can see things so clearly now:

They met at Lady Terrewest’s house—perhaps Lyddiard sought Euphemia out after hearing that Davenant Burgoyne had jilted her—and made common cause since both had good reason to hate Davenant Burgoyne. I imagine that the bargain they struck was that once he was dead, they would marry. So although Euphemia would not be a countess, she would be the wife of a wealthy man at least. He visited her often and that is why, the evening I returned, Mother mistook me for him and why Euphemia was wearing her best clothes. Davenant Burgoyne had to die—and, as Mr Boddington explained, that had to happen before his next birthday—and the difficulty was that Lyddiard was the obvious suspect and was already widely believed to have made an attempt on his half-brother’s life. So they needed a scapegoat. When did the conspirators conceive the idea of making me their dupe? I believe I know that. It was the moment I revealed my erroneous belief that Euphemia was still meeting Davenant Burgoyne out on the Battlefield. She and her lover realised that they could take advantage of my mistake to whip me into a fever of rage against the man they wanted dead. That’s why Euphemia unexpectedly changed her mind about me. Instead of being hounded out of the house I was urged to stay and then charmed into agreeing to attend the ball. (The Yass woman—the so-called cook—was sent away the same day and I must admit that I don’t yet understand the significance of that.) And then the letters and the attacks on animals. They wanted to arouse fear that some deranged person was on the loose and then gradually incriminate me. That is why Euphemia was so determined that I be present at the ball: I had to have a public confrontation with the victim a few hours before he was murdered.

I have been reading and re-reading what I wrote in this Journal about the ball, trying to find some clue that might help me. Some things I understand and others I don’t. That moment when I saw Euphemia running down the stairs in tears was the bait that led me into the argument with Davenant Burgoyne.

Yet I had seen her again as I was being pushed out of the billiard room a few minutes later. Had she come up to listen at the door? And then there was that mysterious business of her hurrying off while we were going back to the inn. At least I now understood her insistence that she would not share a carriage with me: I had to be made to walk home to ensure that I had no alibi. But I’m sure there is something I have failed to grasp.

However much I disliked Davenant Burgoyne, I take no joy in his premature death. I can’t help thinking of the grief of the old earl. This is a blow for him. Although he has two good-for-nothing nephews, he is said to be a decent and honourable person. And as for Maud—I am truly sorry to think how devastated she must be. Just a day ago I saw them smiling and laughing. She and the earl are the really innocent victims in this imbroglio. I, in contrast, have contributed to my destruction: I have at the very least been guilty of wilful stupidity.

5 o’clock.

Events are unfolding with the strange logic of a dream where what should appear astonishing seems inevitable and normal.

A couple of hours after luncheon we heard the sound of a chaise in the lane and then there was a hammering at the door. I went out and found a police-officer in uniform with a man in civilian dress. The latter introduced himself as Sergeant Wilson of the Detective Force. He asked if he might talk to my family and myself about a grave matter and I led him into the parlour where my mother and sister were.

He explained that he was from Scotland Yard and had been commissioned to investigate the circumstances in which Mr Davenant Burgoyne had died.