The Dead Songbird (The Northminster Mysteries) (7 page)

“You are sure?”

“Truly. I am only more convinced of it. It is the right thing to do.”

“Well, if you think so. But I cannot help but think –”

“Sal,” Lambert said, “Let it be, for goodness’ sake.”

“I cannot help thinking you are being swayed by sentiment,” she said.

“That may be the case – but since when was sentiment such a bad thing?” Lambert said.

“I am not saying that,” she said. “But it may cloud the judgement on occasion, and this is a business that demands the clearest thinking.”

“Yes, I know,” said Giles. “But I have to live with my conscience. I cannot consign her to oblivion any longer. It is does not feel right.”

“You have hardly done that, Giles,” said Lambert.

“I know, I know – she is well cared for there and doing as well as can be expected, but I do not feel comfortable with it any more. I want her within reach.”

“But you say she does not know you,” said Sally.

“She might know me again if she sees me more often. And even if she does not, then at least... well, it has to be better than that place. A real home for her. That is all I am trying to do.”

Sally sighed and said, “I do not mean to quarrel with you Giles, you know that. I just want to make certain that this is the right thing to do. What if – well, what if she becomes agitated again, as she was before?”

“Then we will deal with it. And that house is well suited. She will not be able to wander off. She will be watched day and night.”

“It will be expensive,” said Sally.

“Perhaps, but what else am I to spend my money on? I don’t have any children to educate, do I?”

“God may still grant you that, in time. Things change,” said Sally, “in the most surprising ways. You should not be profligate.”

“This is hardly being profligate,” Lambert said. “What is that worries you so, Sally?”

There was a long silence and then Sally said, rather quietly, “It is just that... that I find her so difficult. I do not have your faith or your courage, Giles, I have to admit it. I find her a challenge. It is so distressing...” She got up from her chair. “And I know how weak, how un-Christian that must sound, but –”

“You do not have to do anything,” Giles said. “I do not expect that.”

“And how could I not? My own sister?” she said, throwing up her hands. “I must!”

“Sister-in-law,” Giles said. “You owe her nothing. You need have nothing to do with this. I know what you mean. She
is
disturbing and distressing. I do not expect either of you to feel in any way obligated towards her or that you have to become involved in this. It is my responsibility alone.”

“If only we had known,” Sally said. “If only we had known that when you married her there was –”

“It would not have stopped me,” Giles said. “I would have dismissed it as a slander.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said.

Giles caught her hand and pulled her towards him.

“It may work. It may not, but I must try. Please do not trouble yourself about her. I can managed everything.”

She passed her hand across his hair.

“I will do all I can,” she said. “I just must find some of your courage. That is all. And we can spare Ned and his boy one day a week to keep that little garden in trim. He does not have enough to do here as it is.”

As he walked back to the Constabulary Headquarters, Giles turned over her words in his mind, thinking of that clean, sea-swept place, the white house in the meadow with its pretty gardens, surrounded by high walls where Laura was presently lodged. It was a sweet secluded spot, the very definition of asylum. He thought of the quiet room where Laura sat with her dolls or fiddling with bits of twine, as if she were doing some great work, but only ravelling then up and ravelling down. Those were the good passages.

Then were the times when she was sullen with her private miseries, and did nothing but sit, rocking back and forth, never meeting the eye of another soul, least of all his. Perhaps Sally was right and he ought not to move her. But at the same time he knew it would prey on his conscience more not at least to attempt something new.

It had been an exceptional marriage, in the sense that it was rare for English officers in Canada to be married there. Any wives remained at home, and most of his fellow officers were not married. Laura was an Englishwoman stranded in Ontario by an accident of family circumstance. She was the niece of the Colonel of another regiment who was pleased to get her settled and off his hands. He had no inclination to live respectably and the girl was something of an inconvenience. He committed himself only to finding her a good marriage in as short a possible time as possible. Giles was an unblemished prospect – letters went back and forth across the Atlantic, all parties were mutually approved and Miss Romney and Captain Vernon were allowed the uncustomary indulgence of making a match of it.

The local girls were annoyed to see that one of the red-coated gentlemen who formed a necessary part of their assemblies had been allowed to marry after all. They wondered in vain if any other exceptions might be made but then learnt the hard truth – Englishmen only married in their own circles. They flirted a great deal but it was never to be taken seriously.

As a result the new Mrs Vernon was not popular with the local girls and ladies, especially as the other officers made such a pet of her. They had no Colonel’s lady, but they had Mrs Vernon, and gave her her due and much more, as the senior woman connected with the regiment, and the doyenne of an already constricted society.

For a high-spirited girl of twenty, not entirely sensible, with only a patchy education, this was not the best of situations. But she was sharp as a needle – that was what had drawn Giles in from the start and he thought that her intelligence would grow with her years and that marriage and his protection would settle her. Colonel Romney was more explicit. He told Giles that he would not have trusted her to a lesser man – he would correct that slight giddiness she exhibited from time to time. There was nothing to fear. They were well matched in temperament, fortune and position. It augured well.

For the first six months they were happy. The novelty of their situation was enough to keep them cheerful. Giles liked the comforts that a domestic establishment brought him – her cat, his well-cared for linen, the posies of flowers about the house. He liked the intimacy – having conversations in bed, sleeping with her locked in his arms, his face buried in her hair. He liked the unrestrained pleasures of marital love and discovered, once beyond her innocence, that she was saucy and as eager as he was.

He knew that these pleasures would soon be interrupted, imagining in the normal way that there would be children. He had anticipated this to the extent that he gave up one of his horses, and made a few what he hoped were prudent investments back in Northumberland. He acquired a couple of small farms near his brother’s estate, to which he hoped to add in future years, much as he hoped to add to the stock of Vernons on the earth. Indeed all his family wished them well in this endeavour. His siblings professed to love Laura without ever having seen her, in their typically generous way. Johnny, his elder brother and the squire, was a settled old bachelor and had put a substantial amount of money down on the table on the occasion of Giles’ match, rather expecting him to take the trouble and the risk of getting an heir for his property.

The trouble and the risk proved great enough. As he ploughed through the fraught months of Laura’s pregnancy and then all the disasters that followed, Giles began to see why Johnny had never married. Edward’s death and Laura’s subsequent descent into that miserable, impossible state of living death which now afflicted her, made him think that an obsession with perpetuating a family name was folly. The world existed balanced on a knife edge. One could fall either way – into happiness and prosperity or into unimaginable tragedy. Giles, who had never had much of a stock of self-love or any taste for amateur dramatics, had never fancied he might become a tragic hero. He had tried to live a practical, cheerful, energetic life and had married in hope, not of a great love affair, but for a contented family life, such as that he had known from his own boyhood. His own parents had married in obedience to their parents’ wishes and had made a good bargain of it. He had hoped for nothing more, and had been prepared to work to achieve it.

But with Laura, he soon found that her illness was not one that could be dealt with easily. He found he was in possession of a broken-down house, through the empty rooms of which starlings flapped their inky wings and fouled the floors. Good landlords kept their properties in repair but the more he tried, the less viable the structure became. It had crumbled in his hands, leaving nothing to repair.

But that, he told himself as he walked briskly along, was no reason not to try again.

Chapter Nine

After dinner, Felix found himself standing next to Miss Kate Pritchard at the piano, as she searched through her music, at his request, looking for the aria he had heard Mrs Morgan singing.

“I think it is an air from Theodora,” she said. “With rosy steps,” and she picked out the melody.

“That is it,” he said.

“I can’t sing it for you, I am afraid. For one, it is too hard for me,” she said, “and I have no wish to spoil your memory of hearing Mrs Morgan sing it. You were lucky.”

“It was remarkable,” he said, looking over the music.

“And I don’t think my father wishes us to have any music tonight,” she said, glancing across the room to where the Dean sat talking to another of the dinner guests, “in the circumstances.”

“Yes, yes of course,” said Felix.

“A ridiculous idea,” she said. “Not at all what Mr Barnes would have liked.”

“Did you know him?”

“I knew his voice well,” she said. “And his playing. And we shared a teacher of course.”

“Oh, who?”

“Mr Watkins,” she said.

“Is he a good teacher?”

“Yes. I was getting on very well with him until my father –” She broke off with a sigh. “He has notions, you see.”

“Your father?” Felix said.

“I am sure your father has notions too. He is a clergyman, is he not?”

“Yes. Plenty of notions.”

“It seems to be a feature of the profession,” Miss Pritchard said.

“Not just the clergy,” said Felix thinking of Lord Rothborough and his little lecture in the Minster. He would not like to see him standing there in the corner of the drawing room with Miss Pritchard, having what a casual, conventional observer might label a vaguely flirtatious conversation.

“Papa’s idea was that I was taking it all too seriously. That composition was not an appropriate study for a young woman. And of course since that terrible business with my sister and Mr Rhodes, well, he is apt to be –”

“I understand. Then perhaps I ought not monopolise you. I wouldn’t like to cause any difficulty, pleasant though this is,” he added.

“I can’t keep you against your will,” she said. “And we ought to see to the proprieties, but –”

“But?”

“I would rather you stayed. I know everyone else so well. They have nothing new to say. You heard the conversation at dinner, how thrilling it was not?” He nodded. “And although my father might be disquieted, my mother will not be.”

“Oh,” said Felix, thinking that he really ought to move away. “I see.”

“Please, Mr Carswell, do not be afraid. I am not my mother. I am not looking for a husband. Just for a little interesting talk – talk that does not involve the Christianisation of the savages or the impudence of dissenters.”

Felix burst out laughing and found that everyone else in the room was looking at them.

“Now we have given them something to talk about,” he said.

“Good,” said Miss Pritchard, meeting his eyes with a warm, disarming smile. She really was a charming girl, he thought, and in other circumstances he felt he would have been in all the danger that Lord Rothborough had predicted. But pleasant though it might be to stand and talk like this, it was nothing to the feelings that Mrs Morgan had produced in him. He had never felt anything like that for a woman before, not even for Isabella. That was something new to him.

“You are a mischief maker,” he said.

“No, no, I am not,” she said. “It is a distraction for them. To see us talking like this and draw all their conclusions – well, we do good by our actions. We are entertaining them.”

“No, I think it was pure mischief on your part,” he said, grinning. “And you know I find that far more amusing.” It occurred to him that if he were seen to flirt with Miss Pritchard, a report of it would inevitably find its way to Lord Rothborough. It would be an excellent way to ruffle his feathers.

“Oh, do you?” she said, in such a manner that he realised that she perhaps also wished to be seen flirting with him.

He did not understand why she wished this, but it was clear they had begun to play a game, and one which he found diverting. So he took a half step closer to her and said, “I like to think you are not a paragon.”

“I should, of course, be insulted.”

“You should – but you are not. Which proves my point.”

She smiled and said, “Come and admire these watercolours, Mr Carswell. There is nothing much to admire in them, but we will be able to stand with our backs to everyone.”

So they moved away from the piano.

“This is positively scandalous,” he said, as they went and stood in front of a pair of landscapes.

“Our alliance will be the talk of Northminster. They will be choosing wedding bonnets.”

“They will have to be disappointed,” said Felix. “I thought we would elope to Gretna. That would upset the apple cart, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh yes, it would,” she said. “Now, will we be rehabilitated in time, or shall we die in penniless squalor, never having been received in polite society again, exiled from all those we love?”

“It depends what sort of a novel you are reading,” Felix said, and glanced at her. She suddenly looked rather grave.

“This is not really anything to joke about,” she said.

“I think we might be forgiven,” Felix said as lightly as he could. “Almost certainly we would be.”