A Lesson in Secrets (12 page)

The second card was from the office of Dunstan Headley, suggesting Wednesday afternoon at half past four. Maisie’s sigh was one of relief—she could massage her timetable only so many times to account for absence, especially at such an early stage in her teaching appointment at the college. She would miss tea after her last lesson of the day and go straight to Headley’s office. In the meantime, using college stationery she had procured from the office in a moment when it had been left unstaffed, Maisie wrote to the Registrar for Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Ipswich. She explained her dilemma—she wanted to contact a former member of staff who had left without receiving wages owed to her—and asked if he might be able to locate records pertaining to the family of Rose Linden, née Gibson—or it might have been a name beginning with “Thur.” She understood there was a sister, and possibly a nephew. Any help would be most appreciated. She also added her gratitude for the assistance already extended to her.

W
hen she returned to the college, Maisie stopped alongside a noticeboard, situated just inside the main doors, that provided a forum for the many messages staff and students left for one another—a dance in the town, a literary salon, a meeting of the French Conversation and Appreciation Society, a warning about late homework. She had become used to casting her eyes across the many cards and scraps of paper, in case there was something of interest. A new card with bright-red lettering drew her attention, informing students that there would be an early evening practice session for the debaters, after the final class of the day. She made a note of the time and location.

T
he room was noisy as the debate team took their seats, with students who were not selected but would be substitutes in case of illness or absence, in the first row of the audience. Other students filled the seats, along with a few members of staff. Matthias Roth brought the students to order.

“The debate will be held in a hall that, though old, was made for debating. Expect your voices to carry, and expect to be able to hear almost every shuffle and sneeze in the hall. Your competitors will be familiar with their surroundings, but do not allow distractions to put you off your stride. Do you have any questions, ladies and gentlemen?” Matthias Roth looked back and forth across the twelve or so students before him. On the stage of the former ballroom, two tables had been set up at angles facing each other, clearly visible from the audience. Four students would sit at each table with an adjudicator at a lectern in the center.

“Dr. Burnham will moderate the first debate, so will teams one and two please take your seats?” He paused as chairs were scraped back and students made their way towards the stage. “Now we will see how well prepared you are.”

Among the students in the first team, Maisie noticed Dunstan Headley’s son taking his place. As he sat down, he looked up and grinned towards someone at the back of the room. Maisie turned and was not surprised to see him smiling at Delphine Lang, who waved in return; but instead of remaining in the hall, Lang turned and was leaving the room. As much as she wanted to view the proceedings, Maisie followed Lang out of the hall.

“Miss Lang! Miss Lang—do you have a moment?”

Delphine Lang turned to Maisie, then looked at her watch. “I have a language practice group at half past six.”

“I only need a few moments, if you can spare the time.” Maisie held out her hand towards double doors that led to the grounds. “Shall we go outside? The weather is really too good to miss.”

Delphine Lang stepped out into the balmy early evening, with the heady fragrance of jasmine on the air. “I don’t know how they get the jasmine to grow here, but it really is quite lovely,” said Lang.

“Yes, it has a lovely sweetness, doesn’t it?” said Maisie.

“What would you like to see me about, Miss Dobbs?” Delphine Lang continued walking, her voice firm but polite.

“I don’t know if you are aware, but I was called to Dr. Liddicote’s office following the discovery of his body by Miss Linden. I was a nurse once and she thought I might be able to help. I have some contacts at Scotland Yard—due to a previous job—so I called them to report the death. I believed they would have been summoned to the college at some point anyway, in the circumstances.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Lang had stopped walking and was facing Maisie, and it occurred to her, looking at the young woman, that, given her fragile beauty, she was probably seldom countered and rarely questioned as to why she might do this or that. Maisie suspected she had been a precocious, clever child, and might have been indulged by her parents. She seemed like a person to whom the word
no
was unfamiliar.

“I’m curious to know if you heard or saw anything of note when you went to see Dr. Liddicote that day. I know you were most insistent upon seeing him, so you came back several times to see if he was available—yet he was not free to see you, which must have been most frustrating. But your repeated attempts put you in the position of being in the corridor outside his office at different times during the day—I wondered if you saw anything unusual?”

Lang seemed to weigh Maisie’s words, and began walking again. She took a cursory glance at her watch. “I saw nothing exceptional. You always expect to see people waiting for Liddicote—he was a dreadful timekeeper and you never knew how long you might have to wait, and chances were that, when you did get in there, it was just before you had to rush off to a class.”

“May I ask why you wanted to see him?’

Lang’s blue eyes flashed at Maisie again. “I suppose it’s not secret. I wanted to know if my contract would be renewed. If not, I would have to return to live with my parents, and I really don’t want to go.”

“You like it here at the college.”

“It’s better than doing nothing at my parents’ house.”

“Your father was based overseas with his job, I understand.”

“All over the world. I was born in China, where I was quite the spectacle.” She pointed to her blond hair. “And we lived in several different countries, but spent most of the time in China—my father is an expert on the country, the people.”

“That must have been excit—”

At that moment, a cricket ball came flying through the air. In a snap Delphine Lang had reached out and deflected the ball from its trajectory. Without her intervention, it would have hit Maisie squarely on the head.

“Oh, my goodness!” Maisie gasped. “I didn’t even see that until you reached out.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Where on earth did you learn to do that?”

Lang smiled. “Oh, it’s nothing, really. I was just facing in the right direction to see it coming—you had your back to the ball.”

“But to hit a cricket ball with your hand, and with such dexterity, such speed—that takes a bit of practice.”

Delphine Lang was about to respond when a young man came running towards them, picked up the cricket ball, and approached the women.

“I am so sorry, Miss Dobbs, Miss Lang—I didn’t mean to hit the ball over here.” He turned to Maisie. “Are you all right, Miss Dobbs?”

“Yes, thanks to Miss Lang I survived your batting skills!”

The young man apologized again, and ran back to his friends, waving the cricket ball above his head. Maisie turned to Lang, who was checking her watch once more.

“I should be getting back now, Miss Dobbs. Do you have any more questions for me?”

Maisie decided that she had nothing to lose in putting another question to Lang. “Well, there is one. I don’t know if you know this, but it’s far from a secret that you are seeing Dunstan Headley’s son. I wondered if there was any way he could help you, with regard to your contract.”

Delphine Lang stopped, her blue eyes now icelike. “Far from it, Miss Dobbs. I believe Robson’s father talked Greville Liddicote into his position. When I first came to St. Francis, Dr. Liddicote could not have been more impressed with my education and my work here. That changed when I began seeing Robson. Now, if you don’t mind, I will be late for my tutorial.”

Lang turned and walked towards the double doors, her step quick and determined. Maisie noticed a fluidity to her movement, a grace that also spoke of strength and fortitude. And she closed her eyes and saw, again, Delphine Lang raise the flat of her hand and deflect the cricket ball. Nothing in Lang’s stance had changed, except her arm and hand, and she’d suffered no discomfort in her palm or fingers afterward. Maisie knew that such a quick, precise movement was not the result of luck. A swift response is learned, practiced; and in order to strike a solid cricket ball in midair with her delicate hand, Delphine Lang must have been the student of a different sort of teacher. She was a far stronger young woman than a first impression suggested.

Chapter Ten

M
aisie picked some fresh and fragrant late-blooming roses from her landlady’s garden, wrapped them in newspaper, and set off towards the address she had for the teacher’s flat in town. She had learned that Dr. Thomas was expected back at the college the following day, and wanted to ask if she would be so kind as to take her students on Friday morning, to make up for Maisie’s accommodating her class. She did not use the MG—she didn’t want staff or students to see her driving around in a sporty motor car if she could possibly help it. Instead she borrowed her landlady’s bicycle with its large wicker basket on the front, which was perfect for carrying flowers or groceries.

The flat was in a row of Georgian houses built next to the pavement, with no front gardens, though flower-filled boxes brought the windows to life, and lent the granite a less forbidding aspect. Slowing down to look at door numbers, she finally arrived at the correct address, stepped off the bicycle, and pushed down the stand. The front door was ajar, so Maisie walked in and was looking at the list of residents when the landlady came out of her room on the ground floor.

“Can I help you, madam?’

Maisie turned to look at the woman, who had her hair in curling pins, a pinafore over a gray day dress, and soft slippers on her feet. She smiled. “I’m looking for Francesca Thomas.”

“Dr. Thomas isn’t here today, probably not until tonight.”

“Oh—I thought she was ill.”

“She didn’t look too bad when I last saw her, but you never know, eh? What with all these students mixing with each other and getting up to Lord knows what, you could catch anything.”

“Do you know where she might be? I wanted to speak to her—and I have some roses for her.”

“I’ll take them, if you like. Put them in a bit of water—lovely roses, aren’t they? I love the scent of a cabbage rose.”

Maisie reframed her question. “Has she gone to her choir practice, do you think?”

The woman shook her head. “Choir? No, wrong time of year. She was only with the choir at Christmas. I reckon she might’ve gone down to London. She goes every now and again.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but I just sort of know. You can tell by the time she gets back—about twenty minutes after the last London train arrives, so that’s what I reckon. I believe she has friends there.”

“Does she?”

“Yes, a big black motor car came up here to pick her up one day. She was waiting on the doorstep for it, and off she went. I wondered what it was, on account of my window looking out onto the street—cast quite the shadow as it drew up, it did. You don’t see motors like that around here, so I thought it must’ve come from London. And the driver spoke with an accent, and I thought perhaps it might be someone from Switzerland, her being from there, you know.”

“I see, well—please give her the flowers, if you don’t mind.”

W
hen she returned to her lodgings, Maisie went to her room and removed all books and papers from the desk. She pulled a length of plain wallpaper from her suitcase and drew it across the desk, using brass drawing pins to secure the paper to the wood, pressing the pins to the underside of the desk so as not to incur the wrath of her landlady. With colored pens taken from her briefcase, she stood at the table so that she could look directly down upon her work. She wrote “The College of St. Francis” in the center of the paper and circled her words, followed by the names of all members of staff and some of the students encircled in different colors. Greville Liddicote, Francesca Thomas, Matthias Roth, Delphine Lang . . . everyone she had met or heard of during the past two weeks was listed, with lines linking the names if there was a link. She pinned the photographs found in Greville Liddicote’s office to the growing case map—the two children in the professional photograph, and the family in the other, more natural pose. She believed the two children to be Liddicote’s children by the wife who divorced him, but who were the children in the second photograph? She circled Rose Linden’s name and linked it to Rosemary Linden with a question mark on the red line between the names, and she wrote three more words close to Rose Linden:
Ursula?
Conscientious objector?
Then she sat back and looked at the case map, as a chess master might look at the board. The pawns were in place, but who—or what—was moving them? People, she knew, could be controlled by others, but the controllers were secondary. There was often some weakness, some emotion—an aspect of personal history, a deep love or an abiding hatred—that set a person on a given path, and often into the hands of someone who might then push that person to and fro. And, she knew, human beings were quite capable of moving in this or that direction, without interference from anyone else.

Her thoughts turned to her personal life. What was driving Sandra? Why did she not confide in Maisie? It was clear she was suspicious regarding her husband’s death. Then there was James.

“Oh, James,” said Maisie, aloud, to the room. She dropped the red pen onto the case map and closed her eyes. James had been gone now for over six weeks, and while she missed him, she also felt some confusion. She knew he loved her, though when she tried to distinguish her feelings for him, she felt a knot in her chest. She had loved Simon, the young doctor who had suffered devastating head wounds in the war and then had languished in a home until his death a year earlier. Maisie realized with a start that she had forgotten the day of his death, though she could never forget the day of his wounding, and his last words to her before a shell hit close to the casualty clearing station, where they were working together. But the bittersweet truth of their time together was that she had always known there was no future for them, that she could not “see” them as a couple beyond the war. And though she was in more control of her innate intuitive gifts, she knew that the only reason she could readily not see herself and James together in the future was that she had deliberately blocked such images—because she was afraid of what a union with him might mean. She had yet to trust happiness, that much she knew. It had been so fleeting with Simon, and she wondered what it might feel like for happiness to be a constant, so that she could rest in its cradle, rather than looking across the parapet for a marching army ready to shoot her contentment down in flames. And letters with Canadian stamps and a smudged London postmark made her uneasy, for it was as if one of her sentinels was asleep at his post and had failed to warn her that James Compton might break her heart.

M
aisie did not see Francesca Thomas the following day—again, she thought she might ask Thomas to cover her class on Friday morning. Thomas was on the premises, that much she knew. She had inquired with Miss Hawthorne if any word had come from Dr. Thomas, and asked if she was well again. Miss Hawthorne had looked at Maisie over her spectacles, and replied, “Miss Dobbs, kind as you are, I really do not have time to answer questions regarding the well-being of a member of staff who cannot see through the common cold to attend to her duties. As far as I can tell, Dr. Thomas is now well and in command of her timetable, thank heavens!” She looked down at her work again and, as if remembering that it was Maisie who had stepped in to accommodate the absent teacher’s class, added, “Though I thank you for not succumbing to the plague, and for dealing with the additional students at such short notice yesterday. Very good of you.”

“My pleasure, Miss Hawthorne.”

T
eaching invigorated Maisie, and she remembered how much she enjoyed being in a place of learning: the discussion, the back-and-forth of ideas, the delving into books for a quote here, and to substantiate a point there. Soon, though, her day’s work had come to an end and she had to rush to her appointment with Dunstan Headley. Once again she would walk to her destination; the office of Headley and Son was situated close to the center of the city, although she had since learned that the company also had offices in London and Hong Kong.

The gray building with a low-pitched roof was set in its own grounds, but they were neither so lush nor so grand as those surrounding the college. Maisie brushed some lint from the shoulders of a navy-blue jacket, which she wore with a cream linen skirt and blouse. On this occasion, she wore a light straw hat with a broad dark-blue silk band, and with a broader brim than she might usually wear. She clutched her shoulder bag and briefcase, opened the main door, and entered the building. A woman in an office to the right opened a hatchlike window and called to her.

“Are you Miss Dobbs? Mr. Headley’s four-o’clock meeting?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Take a seat, if you wouldn’t mind, and I’ll telephone his secretary.”

“Thank you.”

Maisie listened to the one-sided conversation.

“Valerie? Yes, I’ve got Mr. Headley’s four-o’clock here. Right you are—and when you come down we’ve got your pools coupon here; the Vernons’ man will be round on Friday to collect. Yes, I’ve told her to wait. About five minutes—I’ll tell her.”

The woman poked her head out of the window. “Mr. Headley’s secretary will be down in about five minutes. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Maisie shook her head. “No, thank you.”

Five minutes later a woman who was about the same age as Maisie came downstairs to escort her to Dunstan Headley’s office.

“We’ve been very busy today, what with one thing and another. Mr. Headley’s expecting you now.”

She showed Maisie into a room with bookcases on one wall; however, instead of books, each shelf held a series of ledgers with a year inscribed along the spine, or perhaps another indication of the contents: “Hong Kong, Supply” or “Singapore: Accounts” or “France: Orders.” She had not been completely clear on the type of commerce conducted by Dunstan Headley, but understood it involved purchasing materials in one country and shipping them to another for manufacturing, then to a series of other countries for sale. The actual items manufactured and sold depended upon what was deemed to be in demand by purchasers in that country.

“Miss Dobbs.” Dunstan Headley leaned across a large desk of dark wood with a pattern carved into each corner. He held out his hand. “What a pleasure to welcome you to my office. I’m not used to lecturers from the college going out of their way to visit me, so I’m curious as to the purpose of your visit.” Headley did not move from behind his mammoth desk, reminding Maisie of the captain who would rarely leave the wheelhouse of his ship. He was a stocky man, bald but for wisps of brushed and oiled gray hair at the sides of his head. His eyes were pale blue, and he wore a dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a tie the color of pewter. Beyond a gold pocket watch, there was no indication of his wealth. Indeed, the offices were comfortable but not ostentatious in any way. Maisie recalled seeing Robson Headley, and thought the son must favor the mother, given his height, yet his eyes were the same pale blue, and he had inherited a certain squareness of jaw from his father.

“I wanted to see you about Greville Liddicote. I know this is premature, but I have thought that in time people might wish to read more about his work, and I am considering writing a short biography. I thought I would start by talking to those who knew him best, who had some insight into his motives for founding the college.”

“Well, he was certainly an interesting character, to be sure. I must confess that I am still shocked by his death. It’s worrying that there are some questions regarding the cause.” Headley did not look at her when he spoke, but leafed thought papers in a tray marked “Urgent.”

“I understand the police are just tying up some loose ends,” said Maisie.

“I see.” Headley tapped a pen on the desk and began to fidget in a way that suggested he was keen to get on with his work. “And how can I help you?”

“I am curious to know what inspired you to support Dr. Liddicote in setting up the college. You have been a most generous supporter, and I understand the new building is to be called Headley Hall, in your honor.” Maisie took out her notebook, as if she were a newspaper reporter on assignment.

Headley tapped the pen for a few more seconds, then reached out towards a silver-framed photograph—it was one of several on the desk, and Maisie could see only the back of each frame. He held out the photograph for Maisie to take.

“That was my eldest son, Martin. He was killed in the war.”

“I am so sorry, I had no idea.” Maisie looked at the photograph of a young man in uniform; he bore a striking resemblance to Robson Headley, but appeared not to have his height.

“He was eighteen when he enlisted. When he came home on his last leave—he was nineteen by then—he showed me Greville’s book and told me how much it had touched him. He didn’t want to go back, Miss Dobbs; he was sick of the war, sick of what he had seen there, and he was in turmoil.” He took a deep breath, sighed, and then continued. “I discovered later—though there was nothing I could do about it—that he had been shot for desertion. Killed by his own. With that book in his hand, he had refused to fight.”

“I am so sorry, I never—”

“No, not many know. My son was never the most brave at school, would rarely speak up for himself. He was one of those boys who just wanted to get on with his life in his own way, with as little trouble as possible. My first wife passed away when he was eight years of age—what you might call the very worst kind of desertion, leaving a husband and small son.” He moved his head as if to shake off a memory, a picture in his mind that troubled him. “His mother’s death changed Martin in some ways—he became a very introspective young chap. I never imagined he would have it in him to join the business here, but when he enlisted, I thought that perhaps being in the army would do him some good. He didn’t say much, but what he said—about the war—shook me to the core. I lost my son, and I never wanted to see such a thing happen again. My son Robson was born to my second wife; he’s a quite different person. He has some memories of his brother—he looked up to him, as young boys will to a man in uniform. Robson’s twenty-four now and—unlike his brother—seems suited to joining the company.”