The World Before Us (38 page)

“And roses,” she adds, and Cat remembers that in the button shop
where she worked it was her job to put fresh flowers in the vases on either side of the doorway. When they started to wither she was allowed to take them home.

“Stout!” the girl calls, and we turn and applaud her lightly, even though the one who loved stout is gone.

“Ha … Haydn!” she says, and the musician starts humming.

“Clocks!” she shouts enthusiastically, and we applaud again, and John says, “Thank you,” because that is his word.

“And … Dock!” she repeats, enjoying being the centre of our attention.

“You said that one already.”

“Shoes of grief!”

“Shewes,”
the poet mutters, and we all laugh; we would ruffle her hair, swing her around if we could.

“Evens!” she says. But we aren’t sure where the word comes from, and for a second we waver, the way a parent would if their child came home with a toy that did not belong to them.

“Jane,” she says finally, breaking the spell, and she turns to where Sam is sleeping by the door and says as sweetly and studiously as any five-year-old would: “Sam! Good dog. Nice dog. Good Sam, stay.”

Before she leaves for the pub—going early because she’s hungry now that her headache is gone, and because she’s not sure she wants to commit to meeting Blake—Jane sifts back through the Whitmore files and finds her copy of Leeson’s casebook. Despite what William told her on the phone, the casebook clearly states that he died at the Whitmore. She pulls the photocopy of Palmer’s notebook out of her bag and tries again to decipher his scrawl. She reads his scribble taking into account what
William told her, and she thinks she can discern the word
shot
, thinks that the phrase
death by
may end in
exsanguination
.

After she’d hung up with William, Freddy had confirmed that George Farrington’s personal letters were in private hands—which means that William, in researching his book, had access to them, and, for this week anyway, Jane does not. It’s not that there are pieces
missing
, she thinks now; it’s that the lines between scattered bits of information have yet to be firmly drawn.

By the time Jane closes the door of the inn behind her and turns toward the pub she has decided that the undertaker’s fees in the Inglewood household account book for 1877 must have been for Leeson, especially given William’s use of the word
trespassing
. It would make sense that if he died at Inglewood the fees would be modest, especially when compared to what the Farringtons had paid a year before to bury one of their retired butlers. The removal of a body would have cost less than a burial proper.

If she’s right about that, Jane thinks as she opens the door to the pub, then the undertaker’s invoice puts Leeson’s death at just over a month after N went missing. Which fit with the theory she was developing: that Leeson had come back here to Inglewood, hoping to find N.

24

George Farrington momentarily saw the dead man as he’d appeared that night not so long ago in the parlour at Inglewood: overly mannered, twitchy, halting in conversation. The shot had made an impossible red flower out of the white shirt he was wearing and parts of the body that should not be seen were gawping out of his wound.

“I’ve met this man before,” George said over his shoulder to Norvill. “He’s a patient at the convalescent hospital.”

The group assembled around the body was transfixed, the situation so unreal that George could hardly believe it himself. One minute he’d been in the boat and the next the Chester girl was screaming and everyone on shore was racing around trying to find her. Celia’s chest was still heaving, although she was now firmly in her mother’s grip, Charlotte pressing the child’s shoulders against her abdomen as if she were trying to will her back into the womb. Edmund was staring wide-eyed at his wife. The boys, meanwhile, were less shocked than curious—oblivious, George thought, to their mother’s and sister’s roles in this.

The housemaid was still on her knees beside the dead man, bloodstains on her hands and white cuffs. She was glaring up at Norvill, her
face flushed in a way that George suddenly remembered having seen before.

“Edmund, would you please escort Miss Hayling to the lake to wash her hands? And might I suggest that the ladies be taken back to the house with the children?” George glanced at Sutton, who was pacing nervously, and looked around for Rai. Norvill would be useless—he had never shot a man in his life, had little experience of death at all. “Mother, would you please fetch me a blanket?” George kept his voice even, but inside he was seething—such a waste, such stupidity, and over, in a tangential way, a woman. Norvill responding too dramatically to Charlotte’s frenzy and stupidly picking up a shotgun.

Edmund made a cup with his palms and dipped his hands into the lake. The housemaid was beside him, water lapping at her knees. He washed her hands clean and then wiped at her stained cuffs with a handkerchief, wanting the bloodstain erased, all traces of what had happened gone. Behind him he heard the boys whispering and he turned toward them. “Tom, Ned, come here.” He smiled weakly at the housemaid, trying to remember her name. She’d been very good with the children, though he wasn’t quite clear as to why Celia had been allowed off on her own and why this girl hadn’t stayed with her. He vaguely recalled some debate about the housemaid’s shoes.

“Is that better?” he asked. The cuffs were still tinged pink.

“Yes, Mr. Chester, thank you.”

They stood up and the boys moved dutifully toward their father, a trace of excitement still palpable between them, and a hint of a smile on Thomas’s face.

“Go and wait by the boat,” Edmund said, more sternly than he’d intended.

The boys looked over at the grey blanket covering the body, then turned to where the boat was sitting farther along the shore. They did not move until Edmund stood and took a step in their direction.

As he offered the maid his hand, Edmund noticed a fleck of blood on his own cuff. “Why don’t you go and wait with the boys? Mind them.”

The maid nodded but her lip twitched.

“What is it?”

She shook her head.

“It’s all right, speak your mind.”

“It’s just that he wasn’t a bad man, sir, he wasn’t going to cause any harm.”

“You said you knew him?”

“I did, sir.”

“In what capacity?”

“He was a friend.”

George stood a few feet away from the body, mulling over how the situation was going to play out. There was no question of fault: the man had been trespassing on private grounds and he was, or had been—though George hated to take advantage of the term—committable. It wasn’t a question of reporting the matter to the authorities, but of how to handle it. Without care, word of the incident would spread and Norvill would be marked by the gossip, and so, too, would he and the rest of the party, the Chesters and Suttons included. Already it must have struck Edmund as odd that Norvill would charge forth with such authority to protect a child who wasn’t his, strange that Charlotte’s panic would cause him to act so quickly and aggressively.

“What must we do, George?” his mother asked, placing one hand under her son’s arm. “The poor fellow.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Of course I do.”

“What was he doing here,” Sutton asked, “skulking about like that?”

“Did he say anything?” Charlotte stepped forward shakily.

George looked to the boat where the housemaid and children were waiting. The maid had rushed to the man before anyone else had, would know if he’d spoken.

“His death was instantaneous,” George said, meeting Sutton’s eye. “Has anyone seen Rai?”

“I think he’s scouting the area,” Norvill said, “looking for others.”

“Rai!” George called.

The Hindu emerged from the bushes just as Leeson had done, the dog behind him.

“I need you to summon Wilson. Tell him only there’s been an accident, say nothing else. Edmund will go with you to see the ladies and children safely back to the house.”

Rai bowed almost imperceptibly and turned to go.

Edmund recovered his hat from a nearby boulder. As he did so, he glanced at the blanket that was covering all but the dead man’s tufted hair and dress shoes. When he’d first reached him, the man’s mouth was open and hanging to one side as if he’d been stricken with palsy, when only a minute before, in the instant when he’d emerged from the woods, he had seemed jubilant, as if arriving late for the picnic and delighted at the day. He’d alarmed no one but Norvill. The shotguns Rai had lined up for the afternoon shoot were leaning against the rocks near where Norvill was sitting, ready enough to hand that Norvill had picked one up after Celia’s first scream. Not a word had passed between Norvill and the man, Edmund reflected, none of the pomp that usually preceded engagement: no “Halt,” no “Declare yourself.” Still, the man’s proximity to the women, his muddied appearance and wild look were enough to justify the assault. Any investigation would support the claim of self-defence and, for George’s sake, the authorities would be careful to avoid incriminating language in their report. In the end George would be unmarked, but Norvill and, Edmund supposed, Charlotte would be much affected, whether word of what happened went beyond those assembled or not.

We believe that the shooting did not make the papers. What had happened took on the form of village gossip—stories that said more about the person telling them than they did about the Farringtons or the Chesters. In later years the events of that day were let slip here and there as a kind of confession—a line in a letter or a thought in a diary—declarations that now make sense to us, and to Jane, although it was hard to see them for what they were, to sense the reverberations of the day when the matter at its centre—Leeson himself—was absent from the account.

“The day of the exploring party was sunny,” the one with the soft voice says, as she watches Jane enter the pub. “The photographer waited on the far side of the lake. He had on a greatcoat and when he stepped out of the boat with his tripod and boxes everyone applauded.”

“They were probably applauding the sun,” the poet said drily, “because they’d forgotten what it looked like.”

“I think I was let go shortly after the picnic,” the theologian says, though he’s roused from his daydream when a group of hikers straggle out of the pub door, slipping back into their jackets and donning their caps as they pass through us.

“Let go from what?” the idiot asks.

“From my post. Farrington hired me. It lasted …” He squinted up at the globe light that hung outside the pub and in his concentration we could see some semblance of a man with cropped grey hair, a trimmed beard and a prominent nose. “It might have lasted a year.”

George Farrington would later admit that when Bernard Hibbitt presented himself at Inglewood estate with three trunks and a bamboo aviary
containing, of all things, a linnet, he was taken aback. Not only was Hibbitt older than George had expected by almost a decade—a man in his fifties, not forties as he’d claimed—but also he appeared incapable of uncurling his lip, as if everything he set his eyes on left him with a sense of distaste.