Silent In The Grave (2 page)

The women were little better. Under Aunt Hermia’s direction, the funeral was planned, the burial arranged, and my household turned entirely on its head. She carried around with her a notebook filled with endless lists that she was forever consulting with a frown or ticking off with a satisfied smile. There was the crepe to be ordered, mourning wreaths, funeral cards, black-bordered writing paper to be purchased, the announcement for the
Times,
and of course my wardrobe.

“Unrelieved black,” she informed me, her brow furrowed as she struggled to make out her own handwriting. “There must be no sheen to the fabric and no white or grey,” she reminded me.

“I know.” I tried not to think of the new gowns, delivered only the day before Edward’s death. They were pale, soft colours, the shades of new flowers in spring. I should have to give them to Morag to sell at the secondhand stalls now. They would never dye dark enough to pass for mourning.

“No jewels, except hair jewelry,” Aunt Hermia was saying. I repressed a shudder. I had never warmed to the notion of wearing a dead person’s hair braided around my wrist or knotted at my ears. “After a year and a day, you will be permitted black fabric with a sheen, and deep purple or grey with a black stripe. If you choose to wear black after that time, you may relieve it with touches of white. Although,” she added with a conspiratorial look, “I think a year is quite enough, and you must do what you like after that.”

I glanced at my sister Portia, who was busy feeding her ancient pug some rather costly crab fritters laced with caviar. She looked up and wrinkled her nose at me over Puggy’s head.

“Don’t fret, dearest. You have always looked striking in black.”

I grimaced at her and turned back to Aunt Hermia, who was deliberately ignoring Portia’s flippancy. As children, we had been quite certain that Aunt Hermia was partially deaf. It was only much later when we realized that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her hearing. The trick of hearing only what she wanted had enabled her to raise her widowed brother’s ten children with some measure of sanity.

“Black stockings of course,” she was saying, “and we shall have to order some new handkerchiefs edged in black.”

“I am working on them now,” said my sister Bee from the corner. Industrious as her namesake, she kept her head bowed over her work, her needle whipping through the fine lawn with its load of thin black silk.

“Very good, Beatrice. That will save time having them made up, and I simply could not bear to purchase readymade for Julia.” Aunt Hermia paused, her pencil poised. “You know, the queen has hers embroidered with black tears for Prince Albert. What do you think of that?”

Bee lifted her head and smiled. “I think perhaps plain is best. I mean to get through all of her handkerchiefs before I have to return to Cornwall, and I shall be lucky just to finish the borders.”

“Of course, dear,” Aunt Hermia said. She returned to her list, but I kept my eyes on Bee. She had not looked at me, and I fancied that her preoccupation with my handkerchiefs was a means of keeping herself too busy to do so. I wondered then how much she knew, how much any of them knew. Marriage is a private thing between a man and his wife, but blood calls to blood, or so my father always said. Was it possible for them to know? I had said nothing, and yet still, I wondered.…

“And we should tell Aquinas to prepare the China Room for Aunt Ursula.”

I swung round to face Aunt Hermia. The room had gone quite productively silent. Bee was busy with her needlework, Portia and Nerissa were writing out the funeral cards. Olivia immediately picked up a book of hymns to peruse.

“Aunt Ursula? The Ghoul is coming?”

“Really, darling, I wish you children would not call her that,” Aunt Hermia said, frowning. “She is a good and decent soul. She only wishes to offer comfort in your bereavement.”

Portia smothered a snort. We all knew better than that. The Ghoul’s purpose in life was not to give comfort, it was to haunt the bereaved. She appeared at every deathbed, every funeral, with her trunks of mourning clothes and memorial jewelry, reading dreary poems and tippling the sherry when no one was looking. She kept a sort of scrapbook of the funerals she had attended, rating them by number of mourners, desirability of the gravesite and quality of the food. The worst part of it was that she never left. Instead, she stayed on, offering her own wretched brand of comfort until the next family tragedy. We had been quite fortunate in London, though. A spate of ill luck had carried off three of our elderly uncles in Scotland in as many years. We had not seen her for ages.

“Julia?” Aunt Hermia’s voice was edged only slightly with impatience, and I realized she must have been trying to get my attention for some time.

“I am sorry, Aunt. I was woolgathering.”

She patted my hand. “Never mind, dear. I hear Uncle Leonato’s wife is suffering again from her old lung complaint. Perhaps she won’t last much longer.”

That was a small consolation. Uncle Leonato’s wife usually hovered on the brink of death until he presented her with whatever piece of jewelry or lavish trinket she had been pining for, then she made a full recovery quickly enough. Still, there was a pack of hunting-mad cousins in Yorkshire who were always highly unlucky. Perhaps this season one of them might be mistaken for a stag.…

Aunt Hermia coughed gently and I looked up. “Olivia was asking about the gravesite. She said there is a very nice spot just beyond the Circle of Lebanon.”

The Circle of Lebanon in Highgate Cemetery, perhaps the most fashionable address for the dead in all of London. That would have appealed to Edward.

“That sounds fine. Whatever you think best.”

She ticked off another item in her notebook. “Now, what about music?”

What followed was a spirited debate in which I took no part. I tried to appear too grief-stricken to decide, but the truth was, I could not bring myself to care. Edward was gone, there seemed little point in arguing over what the choirboys sang. In the end, my eldest sister, Olivia, prevailed by sheer strength of personality. It did not matter. I never heard the boys sing at all. In the same fashion, I saw the lilies, but I did not smell them. I knew it was cold the day of Edward’s funeral because they bundled me into a black astrakhan coat, but I felt nothing. I was entirely numb, as though every nerve, every sense, every cell had simply stopped functioning.

Perhaps it was best that way. I had begun to get snappish and fretful. I had slept poorly since Edward’s death, and having no peace, no privacy in my own home was beginning to tell. All I wanted was to bury Edward and send my family home. I loved them, but from a distance. Their quirks and eccentricities, for which we Marches were justly famous, were magnified within the walls of Grey House.

Mercifully, most of them stayed with Father, but a few elected to comfort me in my grief and had moved in, lock, stock and barrel. The least offensive of these was my brother Valerius. A quiet, somewhat sulky youth, he was six years my junior, and I think he found my company marginally less repressive than Father’s. Edward’s first cousin and heir also gave me little trouble. Simon was sickly and bedridden, afflicted with the same heart complaint that had taken all of his kinsmen. Like Edward he would not make old bones, but it was my lot to care for him until he passed.

The last of my new houseguests was the Ghoul, who had arrived with the expected trunks and a lady’s maid half as old as God. Aquinas had installed them in the China Room, which elicited a flurry of complaints. The room was too cold, the exposure too bright—the litany went on and on. I waved my hand, leaving Aquinas to manage, which he did with his customary efficiency. A small heater was installed, the heavy draperies were drawn, and a fresh bottle of gin was placed on the dressing table, sherry having apparently been given up in favor of something more potent. Since then, I had heard nothing from her whatsoever, and I made a note to instruct Aquinas to add a weekly bottle to the household expenses.

But as much as I complained about them, I was glad to have my family around me as I moved through that awful day. I felt like a sleepwalker, being shifted and guided and turned this way and that, but feeling nothing. They told me later that the sermon was lovely. I was glad of that. I had not listened, and I much suspected that the vicar could not possibly have anything comforting to say. He probably quoted Job, that absurd passage about flowers being cut down. They always quote that. And he probably made some innocuous observations about Edward, observations from a man who had not known him. Edward had not been a great believer, nor was I for that matter. We had been brought up to attend when absolutely necessary, and to observe the conventions, but my family was populated with free-thinking Radicals and Edward’s was simply lazy.

The end result was, I was certain, a eulogy that could have been spoken over the body of any rich, youngish dead man. I did not like to think of that. I did not like to know that Edward, the boy I had loved and married, was already being lost. He was anonymous to the vicar, to the grave digger, to anyone who passed his grave. No one would remember his charm, his beautiful gilt hair, his sweetly serious smile, his ability to tell jokes, his utter incompetence with wine. I would be the only one to remember him as he truly was, and I did not want to remember him at all.

I tried to imagine, as I stood over his open grave, what I would have carved onto the stone. Nothing seemed appropriate. I ran Bible verses and bits of poetry through my mind as the vicar droned on about ashes and death, but nothing fit. I had a few months yet before they would put the stone in place. They would wait until the ground settled before they brought it. I knew that I had to think of something, some brief commentary on his life, some scrap of wit to sum him up, but that was impossible. Words are simple, Edward had not been.

As I struggled to remember a snippet of Coleridge, a cloud passed over, obscuring the sun and throwing the graveyard into chill shadow. A few of the mourners shivered and Father put his arm about my shoulders. The vicar quickened his pace, cracking through the last prayer. The others bowed their heads, but I looked up, studying the graveyard through the thick black web of my veil. Beyond the grave, where the Circle of Lebanon sheltered its dead, there was a figure, or an impression of one, for all I saw was the dead white of a shirtfront against a tall black form.

I dropped my eyes, telling myself it was a trick of the light, of the veil, that I had seen no one. But of course I had. When I raised my eyes again I saw the figure slipping away through the marble gravestones. No one else had seen him, and he had vanished, silent as a wraith. I might have imagined him, except for the question that burned in my mind.

What had brought Nicholas Brisbane to Highgate Cemetery?

Somehow, I knew I should not like the answer at all.

“Time for the will,” he said tersely. “You haven’t accepted your cousin Ferdinand, have you?”

He glanced over my shoulder to where Ferdinand was still tipsily proposing marriage to a marble statue of Artemis and her stag, completely unaware of the fact that I had excused myself.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I am glad to hear it. He is a famous imbecile. They all are. Marry one of them and I will cut off your allowance.”

“I shouldn’t marry one of them if you doubled it.”

He nodded. “Good girl. I never understood why we Marches always married our cousins in the first place. Bad breeding principle, if you ask me. Concentrates the blood, and God knows we don’t need that.”

That much was true. Father had been the first to marry out of the March bloodlines and had ten healthy children to show for it, all only mildly eccentric. Most of our relations who had married each other had children who were barking mad. He had strongly encouraged us to marry outside the family, with the result that his grandchildren were the most conventional Marches for three hundred years.

In the study, the solicitor, Mr. Teasdale, was busy perusing a sheaf of papers while my eldest brother, Lord Bellmont, viscount, MP and heir to the family earldom, browsed the bookshelves. He was fingering a particularly fine edition of Plutarch when Father spied him.

“It isn’t a lending library,” Father snapped. “Buy your own.”

Bellmont bowed from the neck to acknowledge he heard Father, nodded once at me, then took a chair near the fire. His manners were usually impeccable, but he hated being barked at by Father. Mr. Teasdale put aside his papers and rose. I offered him my hand.

“My lady, please accept my condolences on your bereavement. I have asked Lord March, as head of the family, and Lord Bellmont, as his heir, to be present while I explain the terms of Sir Edward’s will.”

I took a seat next to Bellmont and Father took the sofa. He snapped his fingers for his mastiff, Crab, who came lumbering over to lie at his feet, her head on his knee. Mr. Teasdale opened a morocco portfolio and extracted a fresh set of papers, these bound with tape.

“I have here the last will and testament of your late husband, Sir Edward Grey,” he began pompously.

My eyes flickered to Father, who gave an impatient sigh.

“English, man, plain English. We want none of your lawyering here.”

Mr. Teasdale bowed and cleared his throat. “Of course, your lordship. The disposition of Sir Edward’s estate is as follows: the baronetcy and the estate of Greymoor in Sussex are entailed and so devolve to his heir, Simon Grey, now Sir Simon. There are a few small bequests to servants and charities, fairly modest sums that I shall disburse in due course. The residue of the estate, including Grey House and all its contents—furnishings, artworks and equipages, the farms in Devon, the mines in Cornwall and Wales, the railway shares, and all other properties, monies and investments belong to your ladyship.”

I stared at him. I had expected a sizable jointure, that much had been in the marriage contract. But the house? The money? The shares? All of these should have rightfully gone with the estate, to Simon.

I licked my lips. “Mr. Teasdale, when you say all other monies—”

He named a sum that made me gasp. The gasp turned into a coughing fit, and by the time Mr. Teasdale had poured me a small, entirely medicinal brandy, I was almost recovered.

“That is not possible. Edward was comfortable, wealthy even, but that much—”

“I understand Sir Edward made some very shrewd investments. His style of living was comparatively moderate for a gentleman who moved in society,” Mr. Teasdale began.

“Comparatively moderate? I should say so! Do you know how little he gave me for pin money?” I was beyond furious. Edward had never been niggardly with money. Each quarter he had given me a sum that I had viewed as rather generous. Generous until I realized he could have easily given me ten times as much and never missed it.

Father’s hand stilled on Crab’s head. “Do you mean to say that he kept you short? Why did you not come to me?”

His voice was neutral, but I knew he was angry. He was famous for his modern views about women. He favored suffrage, and had even given a rather stirring speech on the subject in the Lords. He made a point of giving each of his daughters an allowance completely independent of his sons-in-law to offer at least a measure of financial emancipation. The very idea that one of his daughters might have been kept on a short lead would gall him.

I shook my head. “No, not really. My pin money was rather a lot, in fact. But there were times, when I wanted to travel or buy something expensive, that I had to ask Edward for the money. I always felt rather like Marie Antoinette in front of the mob when I did, all frivolity and extravagance in the face of sober responsibility. It’s just lowering to know that he could have thrown that much to a beggar in the street and never missed it.”

Father’s hand began to move on Crab’s ears once more. She snuffled at his knee, drooling a little. Bellmont stirred beside me.

“Mines in Cornwall. Surely those have played out by now,” he said to Teasdale.

Mr. Teasdale smiled. “They are still profitable, I assure you, my lord. Sir Edward would not have kept them were they not. He was entirely unsentimental about investments. He kept nothing that did not keep itself.” He turned to me, his manner brisk. I swear he could smell the money in the air. “Now, if your ladyship would care to leave the management of the estate in capable hands, I am sure that their lordships would be only too happy to make the necessary decisions.”

“I do not think so,” I said slowly.

Beside me, Bellmont stiffened like an offended pointer. “Don’t be daft, of course you do. You do not know the first thing about managing an estate of this size. You will want advice.”

Father said nothing, but I knew he agreed with me. He would not say so, not now, because he wanted to see if I would stand my ground with Bellmont. Few people ever did. As the eldest son and heir, Bellmont had been entitled since birth, in every sense of the word. Mother had not died until he was almost grown, so he had felt the full force of her far more conventional ideals. It was not until her death, when the raising of the younger children had been left to Father and Aunt Hermia, that the experiments had begun. Bellmont had been sent to Eton and Cambridge. The rest of us had been educated at home by a succession of Radical tutors with highly unorthodox philosophies. Bellmont had never gotten accustomed to thinking of his sisters or his younger brothers as his equals, and of course he had the whole of the English legal, judicial and social systems to back him. He paid lip service to Father’s Radical leanings, but when the time came for him to run for Parliament, he had done so as a Tory. Father had refused to speak to him for nearly four years after that, and their relationship still bumped along rockily.

I swallowed hard. “Of course I shall want advice, Bellmont, and I know that you are quite well-informed in such matters,” I began carefully. “But I am an independent lady now. I should like very much to make my own decisions.”

Bellmont muttered something under his breath. I could not hear it, but I had a strong suspicion Aunt Hermia would not have approved. In spite of Bellmont’s elegant demeanor, he was always the one who had contributed the most to the family swear box. The box had been established by Aunt Hermia shortly after she came to live with us. We had fallen into the habit of cursing after a visit by Father’s youngest brother, our uncle Troilus, a naval man with a particularly spicy vocabulary. He had taught us any number of new and interesting words and Father had made little effort to curb our fluency, believing that the charm of such words would dissipate with time. It did not. If anything, we grew worse, and by the time Aunt Hermia came to live with us, it was not at all uncommon to hear “damns” and “bloodys” flying thick and fast at the tea table or over the cricket pitch. It only took a day for Aunt Hermia to devise the swear box, which she presented to us at breakfast her second morning at Bellmont Abbey. The rule was that a shilling went into the box every time one of us cursed, with the proceeds counted up once a year and shared among the family. For the most part it worked. We learned that while we could speak more freely in front of Father, Aunt Hermia’s sensibilities were more refined, and we curbed our swearing in public almost entirely. Except for Bellmont. The year that he was courting Adelaide we all had a nice seaside holiday at Bexhill on the proceeds.

Now he turned to Father. “You must speak to her. She cannot play with such a sum. If she speculates, she could lose everything. Make her see reason.”

Father’s hand continued to stroke lazily at Crab’s ears. He shrugged. “She has as much common sense as the rest of you. If she wishes to manage her own affairs, under the law, she may.”

Bellmont turned to Mr. Teasdale, who shrugged. He had been retained by the family for more than thirty years. He knew better than to involve himself in a family quarrel. He busied himself with papers and tapes, keeping his head down and his eyes firmly fixed on the task at hand.

I put a hand to Bellmont’s sleeve. “Monty, I appreciate your concern. I know that you want what is best for me. But I am not entirely stupid, you know. I read the same newspapers that you do. I understand that to purchase a share at a high price and sell it at a low one is unprofitable. I further understand that railways give a better return than canals and that gold mines are risky ventures. Besides,” I finished with a smile, “having just acquired a fortune, do you think I am so eager to lose it?”

Bellmont would not be mollified. He shook off my hand, his face stony. “You are a fool, Julia. You know less than nothing about business, and less still about investments. You are not even thirty years old, and yet you think you know as much as your elders.”

“Don’t you mean my betters?” I asked acidly. He flinched a little. He was always sensitive to criticism that he was playing the lordling.

“I wash my hands of it,” he said, his voice clipped. “When you have thrown this money away with both hands and are leading a pauper’s life, do not come to me for help.”

Father leveled his clear green gaze at Bellmont. “No, I daresay she will come to me if she has need, and I will help her, as I have always helped all of my children.”

Bellmont flushed deeply and I winced. It was unkind of Father to needle him so. Bellmont had called upon Father’s famous indulgence himself once or twice, but applying for a favor rankled him twice as deeply as it did the rest of us. He felt that, as the eldest and the heir, he should be entirely self-sufficient, which was ludicrous, really. He should and did take his livelihood from the March estate. He oversaw many of the family holdings on Father’s behalf, and his future was so deeply entwined with the future of the family that it was impossible to separate them. Even his title was on loan, a courtesy title devolved from Father’s estate at Bellmont Abbey. He had nothing to call his own except dead men’s shoes, and I think the highly Oedipal flavor of his existence sometimes proved too much for him.

As it did now. His complexion still burnished from his humiliation, he rose, offered us the most perfunctory of courtesies and took his leave, closing the door softly behind him. Bellmont would never create a scene, never slam a door. He was too controlled for that, although I sometimes wondered if a little explosion now and again mightn’t be just what he needed. He longed so much for normalcy, for a regular, unremarkable life. We were alike in that respect, both of us rather desperate to be ignored, to be regarded as conventional. We had spent a great deal of time and effort suppressing our inherent strain of wildness. I knew it cost Bellmont deeply. I wondered what it had cost me.

I looked up to find Father smiling down a little at Crab.

“Oh, don’t. It’s dreadful. I did not mean to hurt his pride—and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Bellmont cannot abide being made a figure of fun.”

“Then he ought not to provide such good sport,” Father retorted. He and Mr. Teasdale made a few polite noises at each other and the solicitor, after several more protestations of his willingness to be of service, left us. Father gave me a moment to unbend, but I did not. I kept my gaze fixed upon the window and its rather unpromising view of the garden. For May, it seemed rather unenthusiastic, and I wondered if Whittle was attempting sobriety again. He was a brilliant gardener when inspired by drink, but when he turned temperate, the garden invariably suffered.

“Oh, don’t be in a pet, Julia. Monty will come round, he’s just having a bit of a difficult patch just now. I remember forty—a hard age. It is the age when a man discovers that he is all that he is ever going to be. Some men are rather pleased at the discovery. I suspect your brother is not.”

I shrugged. “I suppose I shall have to take your word for that. But you might be kinder to him, you know. He wants to please you so badly.”

Father fixed me with a stern look and I broke, smiling. “Well, all right, that was a bit thick. But I do think he would like it if you approved of him. It would make life so much simpler.”

Father waved a hand. “A simple life is a dull life, my pet. Now, tea? Or something more medicinal, like brandy?”

I shuddered. “Tea, thank you. Brandy always reminds me of the cough preparations Nanny forced us to drink as children.”