Brunswick Gardens (23 page)

Dominic rose to his feet. “I will go and visit these people. Please … please don’t despair …”

Ramsay smiled bleakly. “I won’t. I suppose I owe you that much, don’t I?”

Dominic said nothing. The debt was his, and he knew it. He went out and closed the door softly.

    His first call was to Miss Edith Trethowan, a lady whose age it was difficult to determine because ill health had robbed her of the vitality she might normally have enjoyed. Her skin was pale and her hair was almost white. Dominic had at first assumed her to be in her sixties, but one or two references she had made had embarrassed him for his clumsiness, and he had realized she was probably no more than forty-five. It was pain which had marked her face and bent her shoulders and chest, not time.

She was fully dressed, but lying on a chaise longue, as she usually did on her better days. She was obviously pleased to see him.

“Come in, Mr. Corde!” she said quickly, her eyes lighting. She waved a thin blue-veined hand towards the other comfortable chair. “How nice to see you.” She peered at him. “But you are looking tired. Have you been doing too much again?”

He smiled and sat down where she invited. It was on the tip
of his tongue to tell her why he looked weary, but it would only distress her. She liked to hear of happy things. Her own trials were as much as she could bear.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” he agreed with a shrug. “But I don’t mind. Perhaps I should use better judgment? But today is for visiting friends. How are you?”

She also hid reality. “Oh, I am very well, thank you, and in excellent spirits. I have just read some beautiful letters from a lady traveler in Egypt and Turkey. What a life she leads! I do enjoy reading about it, but I think I should be fearfully afraid to do it myself.” She gave a little shiver. “Aren’t we fortunate to be able to partake of all these things through other people? All the interest, and none of the flies and heat and diseases.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “No travel sickness, no lumping or bumping on the back of mules or camels, and no sleeping on the ground. You know, Miss Trethowan, I confess, above all I like to have decent plumbing …”

She giggled happily. “I do so agree. We are not all the stuff of explorers, are we?”

“And if nobody stayed at home, whom would they tell when they returned?” he asked.

She was greatly amused. She lay for half an hour talking of all she had read, and he listened attentively and made appropriate remarks every time she stopped long enough to allow him. He promised to find her more books on similar subjects, and left her feeling well satisfied. He had said nothing of religion to her, but he only thought of it afterwards. It had seemed inappropriate.

Next he visited Mr. Landells, a widower who was finding himself acutely lonely and growing more bitter by the week.

“Good morning, Mr. Landells,” Dominic said cheerfully as he was admitted to the chilly sitting room. “How are you?”

“My rheumatism is fearful,” Landells replied crossly. “Doctor is no use at all. Wettest year I can remember, and I
can remember a fair number. Shouldn’t wonder if we have a cold summer, too. Happens as often as not.” He sat down stiffly, and Dominic sat opposite him. This was obviously going to be hard work.

“Have you heard from your daughter in Ireland?” Dominic enquired.

“Even wetter there,” Landells said with satisfaction. “Don’t know what she went for.” He leaned forward and put a tiny piece of coal onto the fire.

“I thought you said her husband had a position there. Did I misunderstand?”

Landells glared at him. “I thought you were supposed to cheer me up! Isn’t that what the church is for, make us believe all this is somehow for the best? God is going to make it all worth something!” He waved his rheumatic hand irritably at the world in general. “You can’t tell me why my Bessie is dead, and I’m sitting here alone with nothing to do and no one to care if I die tomorrow. You come here because it’s your duty.” He sniffed and glared at Dominic. “You have to. The Reverend comes by now and then because it’s his duty. Tells me a lot about God and redemption and the like. Tells me Bessie is resurrected somewhere and we’ll meet again, but he doesn’t believe it any more than I do!” He curled his lip. “I can see it in his face. We sit opposite each other and talk a lot of nonsense and neither of us believes a word.”

He fished for a large handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. “What do you know about growing old, finding your body doesn’t work properly anymore and those you love are dead and there’s nothing to look forward to except dying yourself? I don’t want any of your platitudes about God.”

“No,” Dominic agreed with a smile, but looking at Landells very directly. “You want someone to blame. You are feeling lonely and frightened, and it is easier to be angry than to admit that. It is a nice releasing sort of emotion. If you can send me away thoroughly crushed, you will feel you have power over
somebody … even if it is only power to hurt.” He did not know why he said it. He heard his words as if they were a stranger’s. Ramsay would have been horrified.

Landells was, too. His face flushed scarlet.

“You can’t speak to me like that!” he protested. “You’re a curate. You’ve got to be nice to me. It’s your job! It’s what you’re paid for!”

“No, it’s not,” Dominic contradicted. “I’m paid to tell you the truth, and that is not what you want to hear.”

“I’m not frightened,” Landells said sharply. “How dare you say that I am. I’ll report you to Reverend Parmenter. We’ll soon see what he has to say. He comes and prays for me, talks to me with respect, tells me about the resurrection, makes me feel better. He doesn’t sit there and criticize.”

“You said he doesn’t believe it, and neither do you,” Dominic pointed out.

“Well, I don’t, but that’s not the point! He tries.”

“I do believe it. I believe we will all be resurrected, you and Bessie,” Dominic answered. “From what I hear of her, she was a lovely woman, generous and wise, honest, happy and funny. She laughed a lot …” He saw the tears in Landells’s eyes and ignored them. “She would have missed you, had you died first, but she would not have sat around getting angrier and angrier and blaming God. Just suppose there is a resurrection … Your body will be renewed to its prime, but your spirit will be just the same. Are you ready to meet Bessie like this … never mind meeting God?”

Landells stared at him. The fire settled in the grate. It needed stoking again, but there was too little coal in the bucket. “You believe that?” the old man said slowly.

“Yes, I do.” Dominic spoke without doubt. He did not know why; it was a certainty inside him. He believed what he had read about Easter Sunday and Mary Magdalene in the garden. He believed the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaeus
who had walked with the risen Christ and discovered it only at the last moment, when he had broken bread with them.

“What about Mr. Darwin and his monkeys?” Landells demanded, the expression in his eyes flickering between hope and despair, momentary victory and lasting defeat. Part of him wanted to win the argument; a larger, more honest part was desperate to lose.

“I don’t understand it,” Dominic confessed. “But he isn’t right if he says God did not create the earth and all that is on it, or that we are not special to Him but simply accidental forms of life. Look at the wonder and the beauty of the universe, Mr. Landells, and tell me it is chance and there is no meaning to it.”

“There’s no meaning to my life now.” Landells’s face crumpled. He was winning, and he did not want to.

“Since Bessie has gone?” Dominic asked. “Was there before? Was she no more than an accident, a monkey’s descendant gone gloriously right?”

“Mr. Darwin …” Landells began, then subsided in his chair, smiling at last. “All right, Mr. Corde. I’ll believe you. I don’t understand, mind, but I’ll believe. You tell me why the Reverend Parmenter didn’t say that, eh? He’s senior to you … a lot senior. You’re only just a beginner, you are.”

Dominic knew the answer to that, but he was not going to tell Landells. Ramsay’s faith was rooted in reason, and his reason had deserted him in the face of an argument more skilled than his own, growing out of a field of science he did not understand.

“I’m still right,” Dominic said firmly, rising to his feet. “Go and read your Bible, Mr. Landells … and smile while you’re doing it.”

“Yes, Mr. Corde. Will you pass it to me, please? I’m too stiff to get up out of this chair.” There was a flash of humor in the old man’s eyes, a parting shot of victory.

    Dominic visited Mr. and Mrs. Norland, had luncheon late, and spent the rest of the afternoon with Mr. Rendlesham. He returned
to Brunswick Gardens in time for an early dinner, which was quite the most appalling meal he could remember. Everyone was present and extremely nervous. The day’s silence from the police had told upon their fears, and tempers were frayed even before the first course was cleared away and the second served. Conversation went in fits and starts, often two people speaking at once and then falling silent, no one continuing.

Vita alone tried to keep some semblance of normality. She sat at the foot of the table looking pale and frightened, but her hair was immaculately dressed as always, her gown soft gray trimmed with black, as was suitable to observe the presence of death in the household but not of a family member. Dominic could not help noticing once again what a lovely woman she was, how her grace and poise were better than conventional beauty. Her charm did not fade, nor had it ever become tedious.

Tryphena, on the other hand, looked terrible. She had taken no trouble at all with her normally lovely hair. At the moment it looked dull and disorderly, and her eyes were still puffy and a little pink. She was sullen, as if resenting everyone else’s failure to equal her depth of grief. She was dressed in unrelieved black, no ornament at all.

Clarice was also untidy, but then she had never had her mother’s sophistication of dress or manner. Her dark hair was often as unruly as it was now, but its natural sheen and wave gave it a certain beauty regardless. She was very pale and kept glaring from one person to another, and spoke to her father unnecessarily often, as if making a tremendous effort to be normal towards him and show she did not believe what everyone else might think. She only succeeded in drawing attention to it.

Mallory was absorbed in thought and answered only when addressed directly. Whatever his preoccupation, he did not allow anyone else to know it.

The table was set as always with the usual crystal and silver, and there were flowers from the conservatory in the center.

Dominic tried to think of anything to say which would not sound too callous, as if there had been no tragedy. They should be able to speak sensibly to one another, to talk of something more than the weather without quarreling. Three of them were men dedicated to the service of God, and yet they all sat at the table avoiding each other’s eyes, eating mechanically. The air was filled with fear and suspicion. Everyone knew that one of the three men there had killed Unity, but only one of them knew which, and he carried the burden of guilt and the terror that went with it.

Sitting there chewing meat that was like sawdust in his mouth, wondering how to swallow it, Dominic looked almost under his lashes at Ramsay. He looked older, more tired than usual, perhaps afraid as well, but Dominic could see no trace of guilt in him, nothing to mark him as a man who had killed and was now lying about it, allowing his friend, and worse, his son, to be suspected in his place.

Dominic turned to Mallory and saw his shoulders tense, neck stiff, eyes towards his plate, avoiding anyone else’s. He had not once looked at his father. Was that guilt? Dominic did not particularly like Mallory Parmenter, but he had thought him an honest man, if humorless and something of a bore. Perhaps it was largely a matter of callousness. Time would alter that, teach him it was possible to serve God and laugh as well, even to enjoy the beauties and absurdities of life, the richness of nature and of people.

Was he really such a coward as to allow his father to take his punishment for a crime of … what … passion?

“I suppose it is very hot in Rome?” Clarice’s voice cut across his thoughts. “You’ll get there in time for summer.” She was talking to Mallory.

He looked up, his face dark and angry.

“If I get there at all.”

“Why shouldn’t you?” Vita asked, her brow puckered as if she did not understand. “I thought everything was arranged.”

“It was,” he replied. “But I did not ‘arrange’ for Unity’s death. They may view things rather differently now.”

“Why should they?” Tryphena said boldly. “It has nothing to do with you. Are they unjust enough to blame you for something you didn’t do?” She set down her fork, abandoning her meal. “That’s the trouble with your religion; you think everybody is to blame for Adam’s sin, and now it looks as if he didn’t even exist, but you are still wandering around dipping infants in water to wash it away … and they haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on. All they know is they are dressed up, passed to a strange man who holds them up and talks over them, not to them, and then hands them back again. And that is supposed to make it all all right? I’ve never heard of such idiotic superstition in my life. It belongs in the Dark Ages, along with trial by ordeal and ducking witches and thinking it is the end of the world if there is a solar eclipse. I don’t know how you can be so gullible.”

Mallory opened his mouth.

“Tryphena …” Vita interrupted, leaning forward.

“When I wanted to wear bloomers to ride a bicycle,” Tryphena went on regardless, “because it would be very practical, Papa nearly had an apoplexy.”

She waved her hand, only just missing her glass of water.

“But nobody thinks it the least bit odd if you all dress up in long skirts with beads around your neck and sing songs together and drink something you say turns from wine into blood, which sounds absolutely disgusting, not to mention blasphemous. And yet you think cannibals are savages who ought to be—”

Mallory drew in his breath.

“Tryphena! That is enough!” Vita said sharply. She turned to Ramsay, her face creased with irritation. “For goodness sake, say something to her. Defend yourself!”