Dead Man Riding (29 page)

‘Are you glad I didn't drown, Nell?'

‘I suppose I had the choice. I could have left you there after all.'

He kissed me first this time, on the mouth, his tongue pushing in between my lips. When he put his arms round me the dampness of our clothes made it seem almost more intimate, like flesh to flesh. So it seemed a small step after all to lie down together on some soft grass behind a rock. He was tentative at first, tactful. I could have said no if I'd wanted to and when we got past the point of saying no I didn't want to in any case. Afterwards we stayed clinging together for warmth, because the sun was right down by then.

We were up and walking by first light, stiff and chilled, our clothes still damp and itchy with bits of grass and heather.

‘Still glad, Nell?'

‘Yes, I am.'

*   *   *

It was mid morning before we were looking down on the pastures and neat fences of Studholme Hall.

He sighed, ‘I suppose we're going to have to tell them.' I looked at him.

‘About Nathan, I mean.'

‘Yes, I suppose we are.'

We went on down.

Chapter Eighteen

T
HERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO QUESTION OF SLIPPING
back quietly, even if we'd planned to, because nearly everybody was around the house and stable yard. Imogen and Midge were scattering food for the chickens, Dulcie sitting on a bench in the shade watching them, Kit reading at the other end of the bench. Midge saw us first and in her surprise threw a handful of feed so wide that the chickens cackled their annoyance and went sprinting after it, scrawny legs scissoring.

‘Well, what have you two been doing?'

Then she went red, realising that the question implied a lot more than she'd intended. Meredith said he'd fallen in a stream and I'd pulled him out. It was less than a complete answer but at least it broke the awkward silence.

‘Alan's out looking for you,' Imogen said, her voice carefully neutral. ‘He's ridden the cob down to the town.'

Meredith sat down on the bench between Dulcie and Kit and started unlacing his boots. He was obviously waiting for me to break the news.

‘We've seen Nathan,' I said.

‘Where?' The question came explosively from Midge. More chicken feed went scattering.

‘Up on the fells, on the way to Skiddaw.'

‘Why didn't you bring him back with you? What did he say?'

‘He didn't seem to want to talk to us,' Meredith said. ‘In fact, he ran away.'

They were all staring now, even Dulcie.

‘Are you sure it was Nathan?' Kit asked.

We both nodded. I felt desperately tired all of a sudden. The clothes I'd been wearing for twenty-four hours were itchy with sweat and bits of grass and heather. I told the others I was going to change and walked through the arch to the stable yard and upstairs to our loft. I wasn't surprised to find Midge following me.

‘Nell, what really happened? He must have said something.'

I took off my boots, peeled off the clinging wool stockings. My feet were pale and wrinkled from being damp so long.

‘No. He didn't want to talk to us. Meredith nearly killed himself trying to catch up with him.'

‘But what's he doing? How's he living out there?'

‘I think he's been building himself fires and he must have taken some food with him, or maybe he's been catching rabbits with snares. You know how practical Nathan is.'

Blouse and knickers joined the stockings in a pile on the floorboards. They'd have to be washed under the pump later. I stood in petticoat and chemise, poured water from the ewer into the basin and started sponging myself.

‘So all the time we thought he'd gone off and left us, he was only a few miles away,' Midge said.

‘Seven or eight miles perhaps. Not far, anyway.'

‘Far enough. So that he could get here quickly if he wanted to, but we wouldn't know he was there. It all makes sense after all, doesn't it Nell?'

Midge's mind moved fast, not just in mathematics, but this surprised me. So did her calmness, if she'd been thinking along the same lines as I had.

‘What exactly?'

‘We were all surprised when he went off without saying a word to anybody. I admit it hurt me but he really had no choice. It meant if the police or somebody from the coroner came back to ask more questions, we could honestly say we didn't know where he'd gone.'

She sounded remarkably cheerful about it. Maybe we weren't thinking along the same lines.

‘Why wouldn't he want to answer questions?'

‘Surely you've worked it out, Nell. He was terribly nervous when the two policemen were here even though they didn't ask him anything. You must have noticed.'

‘Yes.'

‘And Nathan's no good at lying, is he? Can't act at all. So if they'd started asking him questions he'd have let out everything he knew and he simply couldn't let that happen.'

‘Why not?' I stood, sponge in hand, terrified of what she was going to say.

‘Please Nell, don't start another ethical discussion.'

‘I wasn't…'

‘That's the whole point, you see. Nathan's not a philosopher like the others. You said yourself, he's practical. He looks at some situation, works out what the results will be in real life and if he doesn't like the answer he does something about it. In this case, he doesn't want to see somebody he knows hanged for murder.'

She said it as calmly as if she'd worked out a mathematical equation. Suddenly, I dreaded what she was going to say because up to that point there had been something that I hadn't even let myself think about. In my mind I heard Meredith's voice saying ‘Either don't start or go as far as it takes you.' I turned away, not letting her see my face and tried to keep my voice calm.

‘You think the Old Man was murdered?'

‘I'm as sure of it as you are, and the fact Nathan's gone off like that means he's sure of it too. He must have seen or heard something that night that he doesn't want the police to know about. So he'll probably stay out on the fells until the inquest is safely over and there's a verdict of suicide.'

‘So you think he's shielding a murderer and you don't mind?'

‘Oh, I'm sure we're all in favour of justice in the abstract. But it's a different matter, isn't it, when you think of a living, breathing human being you actually know being taken out one morning and … oh, just think about it.'

‘I am. But the Old Man was a living, breathing human being too.'

She touched my arm as if I needed consoling. ‘Yes, I know. And somehow it makes it worse thinking of anybody doing it just for money. But I've been thinking about that. Perhaps when you've got somebody besides your self to worry about, you care about having enough money more than when it's just you.'

‘You think that's how Nathan sees it?'

‘I'm not sure he'll have thought about it even that much. But he's so loyal, you see. If he likes somebody, he has to protect them and that's all there is to it.'

I felt sick, my mind racing back over all the things I should have noticed.

‘So it's all right then,' I said. ‘He stays out on the hills and next week I tell my story to the inquest about how the Old Man tried to kill himself, then we all go on as if nothing had happened.'

‘Nell, please don't get angry with me. I hate the thought of that as much as you do. But think about what the Old Man would have wanted. He thought it was his baby, after all. Would he want her to give birth to it in a prison cell, then have it taken away from her so that they could hang her? How could that do him or anybody any good?'

I breathed, ‘Dulcie Berryman.'

‘Yes of course Dulcie Berryman. Isn't that what we're talking about? You must have suspected that before any of us.'

I said nothing, weak with relief, and let her go on talking.

‘Only I don't think we should say anything to Imogen about this. She doesn't like Dulcie, does she?'

‘No.'

She said she'd leave me to change and went clattering happily down the stairs, pausing only to ask if we shouldn't leave some food out where Nathan might find it. Better not, I said. Then I undressed completely, lay down on the hay pallet under a sheet and slept dreamlessly for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon.

*   *   *

I woke around four o'clock feeling better. The panic that had come over me in the talk with Midge was because of reaction to all that had happened the day before. Her logical mind was on the right track and she'd got there even without knowing about the fish scales or the dropped note. But there was a thought I didn't want to come into my head again and the only way to keep it out was to find some certainties in this maze. One certainty at least was that Dulcie Berryman knew more than she was saying.

As I rummaged for clean clothes and got dressed I wondered whether to discuss what I was going to do with Meredith and decided against it. I was my own woman still and nothing that had happened the night before changed that. It was a relief to have got it over, after all the talking and reading and thinking, and to wake up in the same world as the same person. A little bit of my mind was appalled at what I'd done and expected retribution but that was primitive and superstitious and could be disregarded. On reflection I was still pleased with myself and perhaps that was why I now felt capable of tackling Dulcie. Brushing tangles out of my hair, I thought I should have done it before. There were excuses, of course – her own habit of silence for one thing, her age for another. From early twenties to mid or late thirties is a big gap and politeness to one's elders was something taken for granted, even in my unconventional upbringing. But there'd been something else about Dulcie from the start that silenced us and I recognised at last what it was. As I pinned up my hair I said to myself, ‘The sex question' and laughed to the empty loft. Dulcie had done it quite a lot and didn't regret it. Even before we knew about the baby it was there in the way she stood and looked, in the pad of her bare feet and the smell of her bed. It had disturbed all of us in our different ways, women and men. Well, since yesterday, I'd paid my entrance fee and joined that sisterhood. Somehow that made it easier to talk to Dulcie, even though it had nothing to do with what I needed to talk about.

I took the note out of yesterday's skirt and went downstairs, through the arch and across the yard to the kitchen, meeting nobody on the way. Even the hens were dozing in the heat. The porch was full of the usual clutter of tack, with the carriage whip where I'd left it and a pair of the Old Man's riding boots still there, as if he'd walk out any moment and put them on. The door to the kitchen was half open. Inside a few slow-moving flies circled in a shaft of sunlight and under them Dulcie sat at the kitchen table scraping carrots. That should have been somebody else's job under our new arrangements but she didn't seem to mind. She had an enamel bowl of earthy water in front of her, a pile of carrots and a tin colander beside her.

‘Dulcie, may I talk to you?'

She nodded and went on scraping. The blade of her knife was worn to a crescent with years of use and re-sharpening. I drew out a chair and sat facing her.

‘There's something I want to know. I'm not going to the police with it and it's done now in any case, but if we don't know what really happened we're going to go on wondering for the rest of our lives.'

The knife made a little rasping sound, whittling the dirty brown of the wet carrot into glowing orange. Her big amber-brown eyes were fixed on me, her hands so well accustomed to what they were doing that she didn't need to look at them.

‘I wish now that I'd never known about it,' I said, ‘but you can't unthink things, you have to go on.'

She dropped the scraped carrot into the colander and dunked another one in the bowl. I took the note out of my pocket and smoothed it out on the table.

‘This was meant for you, wasn't it?'

She read without touching it, head tilted sideways, muddy water drops from the carrot falling on the table, spreading into wood made soft-grained by scrubbing. After a long time she looked up at me, raised and lowered her head.

‘Where d'you find it?'

‘He dropped it climbing in. He wasn't a burglar, was he?'

Another nod. It was all so much easier than I'd expected that I felt off balance, like pushing on a door that opens too easily.

‘Arthur Mawbray?'

‘Did he tell you?'

‘I've never met him, apart from seeing him in the stable yard. It was Arthur Mawbray?'

Another nod. She started rasping the carrot, but slowly now, looking down at her hands.

‘And he's the baby's father, isn't he?'

Her head came up, frowning now. ‘Who says that?'

‘Somebody was writing anonymous notes to the Old Man about it.'

‘You allus get blatherskites. He didn't believe them.'

‘He wasn't sure. I think the Old Man tried hard to believe it was his because he wanted it to be, but he knew in his heart it wasn't.'

‘It made him happy. Is there awt wrong in that? Anyway, nobody can prove or disprove who the father of a baby is. Not all the slape and slippery lawyers in the world can prove that.' She was beginning to get angry.

‘No, and the Old Man acknowledged the child in his will. Did he tell you he was going to do that?'

Another nod.

‘And Arthur Mawbray knew that too?'

‘I told him.'

‘And now he's asking for money from you. Why?'

‘Because he needs it, I suppose.'

‘Did he suggest killing the Old Man before he could change his will?'

‘What?' The carrot thumped on to the table and her mouth fell open. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘There's a lot of money involved, thousands of pounds. Perhaps Arthur Mawbray decided that since the Old Man had tried to kill him it was fair enough to return the compliment.'