The Death Chamber (10 page)

Lewis had loved his son undemonstratively but very deeply, even though he had never cared much for the name Clara had insisted on. Surely they were not going to saddle the child with a name like
Caspar Caradoc? he had said at the birth, half amused, half annoyed – but Clara had refused to give way. A romantic name, she had said. Names shaped people, she had always believed that, and
this was a name that might lead their son to do great things. In those days it had been easier to give way to Clara and so he had agreed, thinking he would shorten it to Cas, which was a not
unattractive diminutive, and which should not cause the boy too many problems during his school years. Clara had persistently called him Caspar, but to most people he had been Cas and Lewis had
always thought of him as that, so much so that when the telegram arrived there had been a moment when he had not recognized it as referring to his son at all. Not my boy after all! he had thought.
Thank God!

‘Deeply regret to inform you . . . Lieutenant Caspar Caradoc killed in action, 23 March, 1916, at Verdun. A heroic death, fighting to save several of his comrades . . . Our deepest
condolences . . .’

The fact that Cas’s death had been heroic had not made losing him any easier. Lewis had been in agony at his son’s death, and although he had done his best to comfort Clara she had
shut him out. Months later, when Lewis was beginning to reach some degree of acceptance, she had seized on a mawkish custom of the long-gone Victorian era. She was already wearing black for Cas, of
course, but now she had a lock of his soft baby hair made into one of the old-fashioned mourning brooches. She commissioned a large, elaborate marble stone for their local church and visited it
every day, sitting in front of it, sometimes until it was dark, murmuring the engraved words over and over to herself. When this wretched war was over she would travel to France to find
Caspar’s burial place; no, she did not want Lewis to accompany her, thank you; she would prefer to be on her own to find her beloved boy. Lewis had been trying to hold on to the good things
about Cas – his vivid enthusiasm and bright intelligence – but Clara’s grief had become bound up with graves and cold stone memorials and worm-nibbled coffins in lonely foreign
soil.

After a time he consulted Dr McNulty, Calvary’s new doctor, who said that people dealt with grief in different ways, but that he would very gladly come to dinner to observe Lady Caradoc.
Lewis did not much care for the man, but since 1914 so many doctors had joined the medical corps that Calvary had had to take what it could get, and what it had got was Denzil McNulty.

McNulty watched Clara intently throughout the meal: Lewis tried not to think there was a greediness in his eyes as he did so. After dinner, seated in Lewis’s study, McNulty said the
healing process progressed in stages, and he thought Lady Caradoc’s present melancholy was one of those stages. The bereaved person repudiated the reality of death, he said, and sought to
call back the spirit who had gone ahead. Whether it was conscious or unconscious, this was what Lady Caradoc was doing now; it was the reason for the visits to her son’s memorial and her
insistence on finding his grave after the war ended. It was not unusual to encounter such behaviour and there might be ways that he, McNulty, could help. Seeing Lewis’s slight frown, he said
smoothly that he had colleagues who might guide her thoughts onto more positive paths.

Lewis, thinking McNulty referred to psychiatrists, and disliking the rather flowery references to souls and spirits going ahead, said, non-committally, that he was most grateful for the advice
and he would think it over.

It had not, of course, been possible to tell McNulty that one of the stages in Clara’s mourning appeared to be an inflexible chastity. After an enforced celibacy of almost six months Lewis
had made a tentative move to share his wife’s bed again, only to be met with flat rejection. Her life was devoted now to the memory of her beloved boy, said Clara, and she was surprised and
rather saddened to discover that Lewis could contemplate anything of such an
earthy
nature. This was said with a delicate shudder and the implication that it was insensitive and even
rather coarse of him to have made such an approach. Intimacy, said Clara, with her maddening air of closing a subject, was quite out of the question; Lewis must understand that.

What Lewis understood was that Clara – never overly impressed by the physicality of marriage was locking her bedroom door for good. It did not come as much of a surprise; the marriage had
been lukewarm from the start, but it had been entered into in the days when such things were still as much a matter of business as anything else. The young people of today would express incredulity
and derision at such an outlook – Cas, if he had lived, would probably have done so, and so, Lewis thought, would Walter Kane – but in the closing years of the nineteenth century it was
how people had behaved: your money, my title. Clara had been very pleased to become Lady Caradoc, and Lewis had been very pleased with the marriage settlement made by her wealthy merchant banker
family.

He supposed he would have to accept Clara’s embargo – he was damned if he was going to knock humbly on his own wife’s bedroom door again, especially when there were other
bedroom doors he might knock on and be reasonably sure of finding them unlocked. There were probably not many possibilities for that in Thornbeck, but despite his work at Calvary he was in London
quite often; Clara’s money made that possible, of course, just as it made the upkeep of the small elegant house in Cheyne Walk possible.

He had begun to consider which bedroom doors he would try, when the next stage of Clara’s mourning presented itself. It was a stage that startled Lewis very much indeed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

November 1917

‘Lewis,’ Clara said, ‘the most remarkable thing has happened.’

It must be very remarkable indeed because it had brought Clara into Lewis’s study, a room whose existence she normally ignored, apart from regularly asking when he was going to discard the
disreputable leather chairs and the battered desk because guests would think they could not afford good furniture. A nice chintz from Liberty’s, and one of those fumed oak desks with a
leatherette top, said Clara. It would be much easier to clean. She did not, of course, do any cleaning of the house herself but she was strict with the two housemaids and could not abide an
undusted surface or a badly swept carpet. Lewis had given up saying he liked his study as it was; the chairs and the desk had belonged to his father and been part of the library. The desk still
bore the inkstain where his father had knocked over the inkpot. Cas, when he was very small, had said the mark was the shape of an elephant, and had made up a story about a miniature elephant that
lived in the desk and had built itself a house from pens and inkpots and writing paper.

Two weeks earlier Dr McNulty had persuaded Clara to leave Thornbeck and the sad stone monument in the churchyard for the livelier environs of London and the Cheyne Walk house. Lewis was guiltily
grateful for her absence which allowed him to concentrate on drafting a report for the Home Office on the rehabilitation of long-term prisoners before their release. This was a subject on which he
felt quite strongly: he believed it was wrong to turn unprepared men and women into the world after several decades behind prison walls, and he thought he might one day want to focus on it more
fully. He had been delighted to be asked to form part of an official inquiry into the subject.

Clara returned in the middle of the afternoon, and when she came into the study Lewis saw at once that something had wrought a massive change in her. Not only had she entered without her normal
polite tap on the door (‘I know that gentlemen, when engaged in business, do not like to be disturbed.’), she seated herself in one of the despised chairs. Her hands were clasped, her
bosom was heaving with some suppressed emotion, and her rather large face was flushed. For a wild moment Lewis wondered if she had been drinking or taking drugs; this particular exalted well-being
was something he had occasionally seen in prisoners who had managed to get their hands on a few grains of cocaine.

But he would have sworn that Clara knew nothing of drugs, and the only alcohol she ever took was a ladylike glass of sherry. He listened to the account of the last fortnight, which appeared to
include such innocuous pastimes as a little dilettante shopping, visits to her family, and tea at Gunter’s with her cousins. There was nothing in any of that to account for this astonishing
change.

And then Clara said, ‘But, Lewis, I have saved the real news until last. I have formed a new friendship.’ She sat back, and Lewis stared at her and thought, A man? An affair? Is that
what she’s going to tell me? But Clara was surely the very last person to have an affair. And she was saying something about there being two friends. She had met them through the good offices
of Denzil McNulty, who had been so kind. Lewis could not imagine how very kind Dr McNulty had been.

‘I hadn’t realized McNulty would be in London,’ said Lewis. ‘Who are the new friends?’

‘A Mr Bartlam Partridge and his wife, Violette. They have a house in North London. Quite out of the fashionable part, of course, but one is not a snob, or at least, one hopes
not.’

‘Indeed no,’ said Lewis, managing to keep the irony from his voice.

The meeting, said Clara, had been arranged before she left Thornbeck but she had deliberately not told Lewis about it. Yes, she knew he made no objection to her having her own friends and to
coming and going as she wished – her dear mother often said how very modern that was. But she had thought Lewis might pour scorn on these new friends, so she had said nothing.

‘When did I ever pour scorn on anyone?’ murmured Lewis. ‘After all, I spend most of my days with villains and murderers.’

Clara disliked it when Lewis talked about Calvary’s residents and she ignored this. She said that she and Violette Partridge had taken to one another immediately and Violette believed they
were intended to become the greatest friends. Bart – his wife always called him Bart – had said in a very jovial way that he could see he was going to have his nose put out of
joint.

‘It’s always pleasant to make congenial friends,’ said Lewis after a moment. ‘I look forward to meeting them some time.’

‘You must meet them as soon as possible,’ said Clara earnestly. ‘But you have not yet heard the really wonderful part about all this.’

A faint prickle of apprehension brushed across Lewis’s skin. She’s too happy. This is all wrong. ‘Yes?’

‘Violette Partridge is a – a medium. Able to call up the spirits of those who have passed over.’

‘Dear God,’ said Lewis.

‘She and Bart hold seances at their house. Lewis, they are going to enable me to speak with the spirit of my dearest boy.’

Lewis had no especial prejudice against the practice of spiritualism. He considered the dead should be left alone, and in his heart he did not really believe it was possible to contact them. He
thought most of the so-called conversations with spirits were the results of elaborate tricks, but, that aside, it seemed to him a harmless deception and something that apparently brought solace to
a great many people. If it comforted Clara he would not object to her attending one or two spiritualist gatherings, although he did not much care for Denzil McNulty’s involvement.

‘Oh, you need have no qualms about Dr McNulty,’ said Clara when Lewis mentioned this. ‘He attends the seances as an observer only – he is extremely interested in all
aspects of the Great Mysteries, you know.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘He is a member of several learned societies which study the subject,’ said Clara. ‘Groups of gentlemen who enquire into such matters in a scientific and scholarly
manner.’

McNulty’s kept all that quiet, thought Lewis. Still, a man’s beliefs are his own, and providing it doesn’t interfere with his work at Calvary – which I don’t think
it does – I can hardly object.

‘Vita is very eager to meet you,’ Clara was saying.

‘Is she? I would prefer not, Clara. In any case, I’m far too busy.’

‘Oh, your wretched murderers again. I should have thought the opportunity to talk to our boy would have been more important than a parcel of common felons.’

If Lewis said that for the next few days he would be absorbed in the death of a young man who made him think of Cas, Clara would succumb to one of her stately sulking fits and life would be
unbearable. So he said, ‘This Home Office sub-committee is taking up a lot of my time.’ That ought to satisfy her; she liked to think of him having dealings with government ministers;
she boasted about it.

‘Then I must attend the meeting on my own.’

‘I hope it brings you some comfort,’ was all Lewis could think of to say.

Lewis had presided over perhaps a dozen executions during his time at Calvary. He had thought, at the beginning, that he would become accustomed to this business of taking a
man’s life, to the old biblical premise of an eye for an eye, but he had not.