Brunswick Gardens (7 page)

“I know that,” he answered quickly. “I thought your knowing it was the truth would tell you that you must speak it … I think …” Would he have said it had he been in her place, had he been the one to hear the cry? Would gratitude and loyalty have held his tongue? What then? What if murder was provable in some other way, and then another person was blamed? Even if that did not happen, should murder go unknown, unpunished? “No, of course you had to speak,” he said with confidence. “I am just so terribly sorry that burden had to fall on you. I cannot imagine the courage it must have taken you, or how deeply you must be hurt now.”

She reached out and laid her fingertips on his arm.

“Thank you, Dominic,” she said softly. “You have no idea how you have comforted me. I am afraid we have terrible times ahead of us. I don’t know how we are going to bear it, except by supporting one another.” She stopped and gazed at him for a moment with her pain completely undisguised. “I don’t think we are going to persuade Tryphena … do you? I am afraid she is very angry and very hurt. She regarded Unity in quite a different
light from the way the rest of us did. Her loyalties are very … torn.”

He would have liked to disagree with her, but a lie would be of no comfort; it might only make her feel more alone in her distress.

“Not yet,” he said quietly. “But she has barely had time to think or to realize that the rest of her family is going to need her.”

“We are, aren’t we, Dominic?” Her voice was tense, husky with fear as she realized more and more sharply what must happen. “This policeman is not going to go away. He is going to persist until he has the truth. And then he is going to act upon it.”

That was the one thing Dominic knew without any doubt at all. “Yes. He has little choice.”

She looked wistful, a half smile on her lips. “What miserable luck! We might have had someone foolish, or more easily impressed by the church, or diverted by difficulties, or afraid to say something uncomfortable and unpopular. And it will be unpopular. I have no doubt influence will be exerted—by Bishop Underhill, if no one else. I think it is largely on his recommendation that Ramsay may become a bishop himself.” She sighed almost silently. “Sometimes it is very hard to know what is right, what is best for the future. It is not always what seems best now. The world’s judgments can be very harsh.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed. “But they can be kind as well.”

Again the smile hovered about her lips, and then it vanished.

“You are going to tell me I shall find out who my true friends are?” A shadow of humor crossed her mouth. “When the scandal comes, newspapers are writing dreadful things about us and hardly anyone comes to call anymore?” She lifted one shoulder in a characteristically graceful gesture, but one of denial. “Please don’t. I really don’t think I wish to know. There are bound to be most unpleasant surprises, people I cared for and trusted, and believed that they cared for me.” She was looking away from him, across the extraordinary hall, her voice very
low. “We shall discover cowardice in places we least thought, and prejudice, and all sorts of ugly things. I would far rather not know. I would prefer to look at smiling faces and not see behind them to the weakness or the fear or the spite.” She turned back to face him. “Dominic, I’m terribly afraid …”

“Of course you are.” He wished to touch her, but it would have been unseemly. It was the most instinctive way to offer comfort when there were no words that could help, but it was not a way available to him, not even with her, nor with any parishioner. He must find the words. “We all are. There is nothing to do but face each day with the best courage we can and love one another.”

She smiled. “Of course. Thank God you are here. We shall need you desperately. Ramsay will need you.” She lowered her voice still further, and there was a fragile edge to it. “How can this have happened? I know Unity was an exceedingly difficult young woman, but we have had difficult people here before.” She searched his eyes. “Heaven knows, we have had some curates who would drive a saint to desperation. Young Havergood was such an enthusiast, always shouting and waving his arms around.” She moved her hands delicately in imitation of the remembered curate. “I can’t count how many things he broke, including my best Lalique vase, which my cousin gave me as a wedding present And there was Gorridge, who was always sucking his teeth and making bad jokes.” She smiled at Dominic. “Ramsay was so good with them. Even Sherringham, who would keep on repeating things and remembered everything you ever said to him, but slightly wrong, just enough to ruin the meaning completely.”

Dominic was about to say something, but she moved towards the conservatory door and led the way in. The damp smell of leaves was very pleasant, almost invigorating. The conservatory was all glassed arches and white wood above the palms and lilies.

“What was so different about Unity?” Vita went on, walking
along the brick path between the beds. Twenty feet away, the chair where Mallory had been studying was empty, but his books and papers were still there, piled on a white-painted, cast-iron table. She was moving very slowly now, looking down at the ground. “Ramsay has changed, you know,” she went on. “He is not the man he used to be. You couldn’t know that, of course. It is as if there is a dark shadow over him, something that eats away at the confidence and the belief he had before. He used to be … so positive. Once he was full of fire. The very quality of his voice would make people listen. That’s all changed.”

He knew what she was referring to: the secular doubts that had afflicted many people since the popularity of Charles Darwin’s theories on the origin of mankind, an ascent from lower forms of life rather than a unique descent from a divine Father in Heaven. He had heard the doubts in Ramsay’s voice, the lack of passion in his belief and in his reiteration of it for parishioners. But Unity Bellwood was not responsible for that. She was certainly not the only person to believe in Darwinism, or the only atheist Ramsay had encountered. The world was full of them and always had been. The essence of faith was courage and trust, without knowledge.

Vita stopped. There was a dark stain of something across the pathway, at least four feet wide and in a spreading, irregular pattern. She wrinkled her nose at the faint, sharp smell which still came from it.

“I wish that gardener’s boy would be more careful. Bostwick really shouldn’t let him in here. He keeps forgetting to put the tops on things.”

Dominic bent down and touched the stain with his finger. It was dry. The brick must have absorbed it. It was brown, like the mark on Unity’s shoe. The conclusion was inescapable. But why had Mallory lied about having seen her?

“What is it?” Vita said.

He stood up. “I’ve no idea. But it’s dry, if you want to walk over. It must have gone into the brick very quickly.”

She picked up her skirts anyway, and stepped over the stain lightly. He followed her into the open central area amid the palms and vines. She gazed past winter lilies, oblivious of their delicate scent, her face pale and set.

“I suppose it was the unbearable frustration,” she said quietly. “She went on and on, didn’t she?” She bit her lip, and there was acute sadness in her eyes and in the angle of her head. “She never knew when to allow a little kindness to moderate her tongue. It is all very well to preach what you believe to be the truth, but when it shatters the foundations of someone else’s world, it isn’t very clever. It doesn’t help; it only destroys.” She reached out and touched one of the lilies. “There are people who cannot cope with losing so much. They cannot simply rebuild. Ramsay’s whole life has been the church. Ever since he was a young man, it is all he has lived for, worked for, sacrificed his time and his means for. He could have been outstanding in university life, you know.”

Dominic was not sure if that was true. He had an uncomfortable feeling that Ramsay’s scholarship was limited. He had thought it brilliant when he had first known Ramsay, but gradually over the last three or four months, as Unity Bellwood had worked with Ramsay, Dominic had overheard remarks, discussions and arguments which he had been unable to forget. He had tried not to be aware that she was quicker than Ramsay to see a possibility, an alternative meaning to a passage. She could grasp an idea she did not like, instead of refusing to consider it. She could make leaps of the imagination and connect unlikely concepts and then visualize the new. Ramsay was left angry and confused, failing to understand.

It had not happened often, but enough for Dominic now to think, painfully against his will, that academic jealousy might have been at the root of some of Ramsay’s dislike of Unity. Had her intellect, its speed and agility, frightened him, made him
feel old, inadequate to fight for the beliefs he cared about and to which he had given so much?

Dominic’s own mind was confused, uncertain what to think. Violence was so unlike the man he knew. Ramsay was all reason, words, civilized thought. In all the time Dominic had known Ramsay, the older man’s kindness and his patience had never failed. Was it a veneer beneath which there was emotion only barely controlled? It was hard to believe it, yet circumstance forced it into Dominic’s mind.

“Do you really believe he meant to push her?” he asked aloud.

She looked at him. “Oh, Dominic, I wish I could say no. I’d give anything to be back in yesterday again, with none of this having happened. But I heard her, too. I couldn’t help it. I was just coming into the hall. She cried out ‘No! No, Reverend!’ And the moment after that, she fell.” She stopped, her breathing rapid and shallow, her face white. “What else can I believe?” she said desperately, staring at him with horror.

It was as if someone had closed a door on hope, an iron door without a handle. Until this moment some part of him had believed there was a mistake, a hysteria prompting ill-judged words. But Vita would never have confirmed such a thing. She had no love for Unity, no divided loyalties, and no one had questioned or pressured or confused her. He tried to think of an argument, but there was nothing that did not sound foolish.

Vita was looking at him with frightened eyes. “As the policeman said, there is nothing up there to trip over.”

He knew that was true. He had gone up and down those stairs hundreds of times.

“It is something I would much rather not face,” she went on softly. “But if I run away, it will only make it worse in the end. My father—you would have liked my father, I think—he was a truly great man. He always used to teach me that lies get more dangerous every day. Every time you feed them by another lie, they grow bigger, until in the end they become bigger than you
are, and consume you.” She looked down at last, and away from him. “And dearly as I love Ramsay, I must honor my own beliefs as well. Does that sound selfish and disloyal?”

“Not at all,” he said quickly. She looked very fragile in the dappled light through the leaves. She was a smaller woman than she at first appeared. The strength of her personality sometimes made one forget. “Not at all,” he repeated with greater conviction. “No one has the right to expect you to lie about such a thing in order to protect him. We must do what we can to contain the damage, but that does not include denying either the law of the land or God’s law.” He was afraid he sounded pompous. He would have said the same words to a parishioner without a moment’s hesitation, but with someone he knew well, saw every day, it was different. And she was in every way senior to him; that she was older in years did not matter, but she was so much senior in the life of the church.

He was startled by her reaction. She swung around and gazed at him with wide eyes, bright, almost as if he had offered her some real and tangible comfort.

“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “You don’t know how much you have strengthened me with your conviction of what is right and true. I don’t feel as if I am alone, and that is the most important thing. I can bear anything if I do not have to do it alone.”

“Of course you are not alone!” he assured her. In spite of the chill of shock inside him, and a strange tiredness, as if he had been up all night, with her words a kind of ease spread through him, an unraveling of long-knotted muscles. He would never have wished such a tragedy upon anyone, least of all upon the family who had given him so much, but to have the strength and the compassion to be of help to them was the core of the faith he believed and upon which he built his calling. “I shall be here all the time.”

She smiled. “Thank you. Now I think I must compose my thoughts for a while …”

“Of course,” he agreed quickly. “You would prefer to be alone.” And without waiting for her response, he turned and went back along the brick path to the hall. He was crossing towards the library when Mallory came out. As soon as he saw Dominic his face shadowed.

“What have you been doing in the conservatory?” he said sharply. “What did you want?”

“I wasn’t looking for you,” Dominic replied guardedly.

“I would have thought you’d be seeing what you could do to help Father. After this, he’s barely going to be able to carry on with his pastoral care. Isn’t that what your duty is supposed to be?” The criticism was sharp and brittle in his voice.

“My first care is in this house,” Dominic replied. “As yours is. I was speaking to Mrs. Parmenter, trying to reassure her that we would all support one another during this time …”

“Support one another?” Mallory’s dark eyebrows rose, filling his face with sarcasm. “Isn’t that rather absurd, considering that the highly objectionable young woman who was assisting my father has just met a violent death in this house? One of my sisters is all but implying that my father is responsible, and the other is as busy defending him and making irresponsible remarks she imagines are amusing. We have the police on the doorstep, and no doubt it will all only get worse.” The dislike sharpened still further in his voice. “The best you can do is take the pastoral care off Father’s shoulders so he doesn’t have to leave the house. Then at least you will give us a little privacy to deal with our shock and grief, and those people Father is responsible for will have someone to minister to them.”