Honor's Kingdom (40 page)

“And what’s
that?”

“What’s that in her arms?”

“Is that a
doll?”
Miss Thumper asked, although the toy’s identity was plain.

“What on earth would a young lady want with a doll?”

Fanny cowered again, bringing her warmth back to my side, and clutching me with one hand, while the other protected her dolly.

“Is this child to be
spoiled?”
Miss Thumper demanded. I am not certain at whom the question was pointed, for I never sensed that she was speaking to me. Twas as if a great, invisible arbiter filled that draughty hallway.

“A spoiled child is ever mean and ungrateful,” Miss Sharp said.

Just then the Irish maid appeared, back by the stairs, in the tactical position maids prefer. And I had an inspiration.

“My dear ladies,” I said, “you must forgive my interruption, see. But I am late for my appointment with the colonel. He asked me to meet him at the Convent School of the Sisters of Mary—isn’t that where those Irish nuns keep their orphans? Though I do not know why he should ask my advice about checques and monies and legacies.”

There come a span of silence over the house, like the quiet when a battle is suddenly over and all those still on two feet
return to sense. Miss Thumper looked aghast, as if surveying a field of the horribly wounded, and Miss Sharp appeared alarmed in the extreme.

“The colonel has never taken an interest in Catholic charities before,” I added for good measure. Although it was a bit mean and most unnecessary, like slaughtering the wounded left by the enemy. “But, then, I do not believe I have seen him so angry as he was when we last parted. I feared for his health.” I looked up at the gaunt Miss Thumper. “With his legacies undecided and so much in the balance.”

“The poor man,” Miss Thumper said.

“The
good
man,” Miss Sharp added.

“The kind man.”

“The
no
ble man.”

Miss Thumper plunged toward me, as if to grapple with me in deadly combat. I thought she would seize my arm, at least, but she only mauled the air.

“You
must
go to him at once, sir! You
must
not let those wicked Romans deceive him,” Miss Thumper told me. “Oh, his heart’s so open to the suffering of the world, the dear,
dear
man! And there’s nothing those Catholics like better than stealing the bread from the mouth of an innocent
Pro
testant child.”

“Like this child,” Miss Sharp specified.

“Like this
dear
child.” Miss Thumper intensified.

“Like this dearest child,” Miss Sharp conjugated.

“With her sweet little dolly.”

They had by then positioned themselves on each side of the lass, who had been artfully edged from my side by the two of them. Miss Sharp petted Fanny’s hair and I believe Miss Thumper meant to do the same, but only stroked the doll. I am not certain she could tell the difference.

“Go
forth,
sir,” Miss Thumper exclaimed, as if she had been reading Mr. Tennyson. “Go forth and save him from the nets of Rome!”

“From priests and nuns and all that sort of thing,” Miss Sharp added. “And tell the colonel—”

“—he must come by for tea,” Miss Thumper assisted. “To see how happy the child is in our care.”

“I cannot imagine that a child could ever be happier!” Miss Sharp stated emphatically.

Now, I suppose that servants must know their places, for that is the way of the world. But I do believe that Irish maid gave me a nod and a wink as I said my farewells.

INSPECTOR McLEOD was as good as his promise. A brief appearance by myself at his office was all it required to bring him to my hotel before two o’clock. When the Earl of Thretford’s rig pulled up, the two of us were waiting outside in the gray air.

The coachman, Hargreaves, did not change his expression when I explained that the inspector would accompany me. “Very good, sir,” was all he said, for he was English and had a servant’s soul.

The carriage traveled St. Vincent Street, past a church that looked like a pagan temple and houses severe as crypts. The walks were crowded with men in somber dress, arisen from their middle meals to return to the Royal Exchange or their banks or firms. Glasgow was much the same as London in its preference for sunset over sunrise, for the farther west we travelled, the wider and cleaner were the streets, and the prouder the look of the people. We turned up a long rise of a road, then the coachman jollied his team to the west again, and we began a steeper, shorter climb.

The Earl of Thretford lived in a sort of community newly got up for the rich and rising. He did not have a mansion set off separate, but had taken the corner house of the handsomest town row I ever did see. Their stone was pale, buff with a hint of lemon, and those along Park Terrace each had five stories, if we count the servants’ attic and cellar kitchens. On the other side of the street, the land declined into a green park, then stretched out to offer a view of the growing city and the furnace clouds that wrapped it like a shawl. All storybook castles perched up
high, those clean-built houses seemed, as if to say: “Climb up here, if you dare.”

Down we got, with the inspector hesitant of a sudden. I think I understood him. Among the men and women of the streets he might seem a lord, but here among great fortunes he felt a lackey. It is the way of things most everywhere, although it is less fierce in our America. It is only that, in America, every man thinks he just might get up the hill, while in Britain a fellow worries he may fall lower.

The servant who bid us inside would have seemed like a lord himself, had I not known better. He did not wear a livery, or any affectation, but black cloth better by half than what covered me.

“A moment, gentlemen,” he told us, and left us in the brightness of that hall. For though the day was gray and stubborn without, the architecture had a trick of light.

How pleasant that house seemed. It made me jealous, and that is not my habit. It was only that I thought of my darling wife, and wished that she might someday grace such rooms. But I was not fool enough to think it likely.

I did not think I should like the Earl of Thretford, but our judgements must be fair. If wicked he was in his ways, I must allow that he had an eye for fineness. Now, I have seen a great plantation house—or part of it—built with the blood of slaves in Mississippi, and I have seen the palaces of India, when we tore into them like a red-coated storm. But I was old enough to know that what I had before me was taste of a different value, and a higher one. Nothing I could see begged to be looked at. There was no sense of money on display, or of any brash superiorities. Far the furniture and paintings were from the gilt and paint and colored glass of India, or the damnall ostentation of our Southland. If the composition of a room could speak, those furnishings would have said—-quietly—“We are the very best, and we know we are the very best, and you may take us or leave us, sir.”

I especially liked a picture of two dogs.

The Earl come out, announced only by the opening of a door by a servant’s hand that might have been disembodied.

“Ah, Major Jones. How very good of you to accept my invitation.” He did not offer to shake my hand, for such folk don’t.

Turning to my companion, he said, “Inspector, I’m grateful for your consideration, but I don’t believe Major Jones has come here to threaten me. Really, I shall be quite safe. You may wait here. Spencer will give you tea.”

And that easily, with the devilish knack the high-born have, he separated the two of us and had me inside a great, grand room of oddities, with the door shut behind us and Inspector McLeod left behind to pace and growl.

I did not know if I was in the finest of libraries or a museum of all the strangenesses of the world. As for the books that filled most of the walls, they looked to be specially bound in private Moroccos and blues. But elsewise there was all of nature’s color, and some of her cruelty, besides. Stuffed parrots and predator birds I did not recognize vied for the eye’s attentions with the skeletons of unknowable creatures and instruments of brass and polished steel. I fear my dear wife would have thought it a clutter, yet everything seemed comfortable in its place.

“Really, Jones,” the Earl began, “this is the first time you’ve been a disappointment.” He looked unspeakably confident, groomed beyond fine to a touch of elegant carelessness, in a long gray coat that looked as soft as a dove. “Did you seriously believe I meant to do you harm? And after sending my own carriage for you?” He floated his hand along a curious model of a building. “I had begun to think you cleverer than that.”

Of course, he was right. I had been foolish. Had he meant to do me ill, he would have done it. Without the least degree of show or ceremony. And he would not have done it within the walls of his home.

He smiled. Perhaps because he had achieved the effect he wanted. “Tell me, Jones, what do you think of this?” He gestured toward the model, which was a thing of spires and steep rooflines. It made me think of one of those old cathedrals. “I’m told you take an interest in education. I’m thinking of giving this building to the new university. It’s to be built just on the
next hill, you see. I shouldn’t like to look out and see something unpleasant. And I rather think I should honor my father’s memory with a little gift. Lord knows, it’s time for the university to move. Do you think I should accept the architect’s plan? Or might you prefer something plainer and more to the purpose?”

I looked at the model, almost against my will.

“The architect describes it as Gothic Revival,” he continued. “Personally, I’m not at all certain the Gothic wants reviving. The eye doesn’t know where to settle. I should think something calmer might better suit an atmosphere of study. To be frank, I find the design a bit tasteless.” He looked at me, as if we were two old friends deciding the matter. “What do you think, Jones?”

“I think this university will be glad of whatever you may give,” I said honestly.

He smiled and turned away from the model, passing from muted light into the pale cast of a window. “Do you
like
it, though?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Very good! You see, we’re already in agreement. I don’t like it, either.” His lips widened in a brief display of mirth. “Perhaps I shall give it them just as it is. As our little joke. And you and I will always know how easily the tastes of Glasgow may be hired.” He stepped back toward the model, returning to the softer light, and tapped the roofline with his hand. “I think that I shall add a tower here. Just here, you see? To make the building a resolute monstrosity.”

With that, he turned to face me.

“You think I’m a monstrosity, don’t you, Jones?”

“Why did you kill the Reverend Mr. Campbell?”

“Ah, I thought you were Welsh. And now I find you must have Scottish blood. Economizing even time and conversation.” He passed to a globe and gave it a spin, as if he were the master of the world, then he raised his eyes to mine again. “The fact is, I’ve never killed anyone in my life.” He frowned. Mockingly. “Really, do I seem the sort? A common murderer?”

“Then why did you have the Reverend Mr. Campbell killed?”

“Really, Jones! I’m not Benjamin Disraeli. I’m not given to playing these little games with words. I’ve never killed a man. Nor have I ever ordered a man be killed. Is that plain enough?”

“And in New York?”

“Those deaths were incidental. If I recall, it was you who did much of the killing. And Kilraine—perhaps you remember him as Kildare?—was crude. As the Irish are wont to be. I can’t say I was sorry to lose him, you know. The fellow made a dreadful botch of things. I was frightfully angry at the time. Not accustomed to losing, you know.” He smiled, and it almost seemed genuine. “He didn’t give you credit, that was the thing. It caused me to underestimate you myself. I judged you a mere annoyance. And then you turned everything on end. I don’t think I shall let that happen again.”

“And Campbell?”

“Is he so important to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then the suspicions about him must have been correct. To the effect that he was not only a double agent, but a triple one.”

I did not understand the implication. Not then. “He was murdered,” I said, too quickly. For I needed to think, instead of which I spoke. “And I believe you know who murdered him.”

He gave the globe a rap and a spin, then eased behind a divan, spreading his arms and applying his hands to its wooden frame. “Now you’re coming closer to the matter. Yes, I do know who lost patience with him. One may, in fact, serve two masters. But not three. In a just world, one might say he killed himself. The human instrument hardly figures.”

“It was in your interest to see him killed.”

“Was it?”

“Yes,” I said, although my confidence was not all that it should have been.

“But even if it had been in my interest . . . I could hardly be blamed if some well-intentioned fellow believed he was serving
me by acting in a manner that I had never suggested. Murder seems to me . . . a failure of the wit. An embarrassment, a tantrum. Like a child knocking over a game board when he sees he’s losing. I should feel myself terribly inadequate, if I had to litter the earth with corpses.” He lifted his hands from the back of the divan. “That’s what soldiers do, isn’t it? Kill, then lay the blame to some pompous cause?”

“And the boy? In London? Whose body was cut to bits?”

“I rather like little boys,” the Earl said. “Unlike my half-brother.”

Clumsy I was, and in a fragile temper. “I know exactly how you ‘like’ little boys,” I told him.

“Let’s not be indelicate. Although I am less ashamed than you might expect. I am in a position to facilitate my pleasures, and it might surprise you to find how fondly my pleasures are viewed by those who apply to me for attention. Do you really think children are made of sugar candy?”

“That is evil.”

“Evil? Is it evil to share a pleasure that harms none, but virtue to slaughter one’s fellow man under a flag?” He picked up a silver box from a table, then put it down again. “That was extreme of me. Forgive me. It’s only that I so dislike that word, you see. ‘Evil.’ Need we really subscribe to the bigotries of a tribe of brute, old men who gathered in the desert some thousands of years ago? Who cobbled together a heartless set of rules to insure their own paramouncy would never be threatened? Shall we cast women into the desert, do you think, because they bleed where a man does not? Shall we put adulterers to
death? Why, if we did, half the churchmen in the three kingdoms would be dangling from the gallows.” He shook his head. “You’ve seen this city, Jones. I don’t mean the terraces and crescents, but that alley you blundered into yesterday evening. Do you really think your god is merely testing those people, to see if they might be worthy of salvation? Sounds a bit capricious, at least to my ears. If he has the power to make the earth spin backward, why should he let those children that so concern you starve, or be beaten half to death? Or all the way to death, for that matter? Why doesn’t he reach down and put things right?”