Cavalier Case (26 page)

"That case of yours hit the headlines all right," said Cass. "Did she really do it all—The second wife? What's her name? She looked so tiny and helpless in the photographs."

"Charlotte. Charlotte Lackland. She was and is tiny. She wasn't helpless. But she's feeling pretty helpless now, not just because she's on a charge of murder but because he's turned on her. He'll get a lawyer and all that—play the gentleman, if you like—but he won't speak to her. And he won't let her children visit her. So then she made a full confession. Said she did it all for him, to save his family heritage. A sort of Lady Macbeth who didn't even let Macbeth know what was going on."

"Ah, she did it all for him—the handsome tennis player."

"Exactly. She was even inclined to point out how clever she had been, using the Meredith family history, as she put it, the legend of the ghost and all that. She told him she got the idea from Zena—that's the sister—always going on about the Decimus Ghost. Then Zena had a Decimus costume, made for a fancy dress ball, which she liked to parade about in. That gave Charlotte ideas too. But she couldn't wear Zena's costume, let alone her boots—the two of them are about eight inches different in height, let alone the shoe size..."

But Jemima did not really want to discuss the Cavalier Case with Cass Brinsley. He belonged—like the rest of the sensation-seeking public—to the outside world. For a time, a short but crucial time, she had been part of the inner world, the inner world of the Cavaliers— then and now.

One nightmare was the prospect of Charlotte's children in the future: those little blond girls, the blond ebullient little boy she had loved so much, tagged in the public memory forever by their mother's crime (or crimes). Yet there was always some prospect of natural elasticity where children were concerned: or one hoped there was. Dan would marry Alix, and in view of her pregnancy, marry her soon. There would have to be some kind of plea for a dispensation and a quick divorce in order that this ceremony could take place before the birth of the baby.

"You see, it's a boy. I've had a test. We're going to call him Thomas Antony Norton—Thomas is the real Meredith name, by the way, not Decimus, that was just a fluke because of that huge family, did you know that?" As Alix communicated this to Jemima, she had a kind of creamy complacency in spite of all the tragedies around her. She rattled on: "And of course if he's not born within marriage, then he couldn't succeed to the title. Even if we married later." 

The words gave Jemima a terrible momentary pang. Was poor Dessie, the first son, not to inherit? Was there to be more violence? Then she relaxed. Alix, the loyal if occasionally neglected mistress, was certainly no Lady Macbeth. She had simply adopted the Meredith family history in her own way, as Meredith wives had done for centuries, and was making sure her own son was part of the (legitimate) family tree.

How quickly Alix had learnt! But she would surely act as a kindly step-mother to Charlotte's children, and even to Nell, whose brief love affair with her aunt Zena had been brought to an abrupt end by the latter's total involvement with Dr. Rupert Durham. Besides, Lady Manfred, in one of those swift, elegant volte-faces which had enabled her to maintain her powerful social position for so long, had become charmingly enamoured of Alix.

"Those poor children. They need someone like that. So down-to-earth. So practical." (Jane Manfred had once used almost exactly the same terms about Charlotte.) "And of course Dan does too—not that he hasn't been a naughty boy." Jane sighed. "But I'm too busy, really, for all the attention a man like that needs. And darling Alix absolutely understands that Dan and I will continue our delightful
amitie amoureuse
. " 

Alix certainly did understand. Her conversation—she kept in touch with Jemima in a way that would probably not outlast the birth of her child—was now larded with "Jane Manfred says this" and "Jane Manfred says that." Furthermore Alix, the new Viscountess Lackland, had been placed on Jane Manfred's prestigious Euro-Opera 92 Appeal Committee (a project to which her other new protegee, Cherry, was also lending a good deal of voluntary assistance, it turned out). Besides, Alix's understanding—if it had been in any way lacking—was further helped on by the fact that Lady Manfred was at last going to make that long-needed heavy investment in both the Plantaganet Club and the future Lackland Court Country Club.

So you could argue, thought Jemima, that Handsome Dan Meredith, a.k.a. Decimus Antony Norton, 18th Viscount Lackland, had as usual secured everything he wanted through the agency of women. His wife had secured the death of the aged cousin whose prolonged existence, coupled with the sales of heirlooms, was ruining him; after covering her own tracks by the death of a suspicious witness, and an attack on her teenage step-daughter, she had then, no doubt perfectly correctly in legal terms, taken all the blame on herself. Whatever Charlotte had told him, or he had suspected, which caused him to repudiate her at the Planty rehearsal—overheard by Jemima— and subsequently decide to marry unhappy pregnant Alix, Dan had certainly not had foreknowledge of Charlotte's grand design, let alone the murders. What was more, he had ended up with a devoted new wife (with the prospect of a second son), a wife who would always be totally understanding of his outside activities . . .

Yet did Handsome Dan really bear no moral responsibility for it all? Even if he had been "horrified"—the word heard by Jemima behind her own kind of plastic arras on the tennis court. It was an imponderable question: how much ultimate responsibility for all the destruction should be borne by the spoilt, charming man. But then who, how many women, had conspired to create this spoilt charming creature himself? That too was imponderable. What, for example, was the responsibility of Olivia and Lady Isabella for creating Decimus a poet who happily wrote the same poems to two women?

Like Lady Manfred, Jemima sighed. Had she not herself agreed, frankly, to whatever Dan proposed, albeit briefly; including playing the part of Lady Isabella at the Cavalier Celebration? When she did not even support the notion of historic Lackland Court being turned into a country club. Just as Zena, who hated the idea, had also agreed to take part and play a leading role. Hadn't Zena, too, in a sense created Dan, from their shared childhood onwards? She was glad she was not the judge trying Charlotte either in court, or for that matter, at the Last Judgement Day.

How would Charlotte's desperate outcries fare then? Jemima remembered the aftermath of that ghastly scene, the screaming, the appearance of Dan himself, soaking wet, eyes terrible with shock—or perhaps, like his daughter Nell, with hatred.

"I did it for the family," Charlotte had cried, trying vainly to get her arms round his neck like a puppy trying to embrace an Alsatian. Then she shouted, "I did it for you. That horrible drunken old man was going to die sooner or later and he was selling everything! Your heritage. Dessie's heritage. You wanted him dead. You did. You said it to me, 'I wish he would bloody well fall downstairs and break his neck.'"

So perhaps after all Lady Macbeth was not the right analogy: Charlotte had been more like one of those knights who listened to King Henry II raging against Becket:"Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"—a knight who had ridden off and done the deed.

Dan Lackland himself showed no signs of ever wishing to discuss the subject with Jemima Shore once Charlotte had been arrested. When they ran into each other at the Plantaganet Club a little later, each was coolly polite: but this time there was not even a ritual kiss-on the-cheek for Jemima, neither proffered nor desired. But that was understandable and not only because of all the terrible public pressures Dan was currently facing. The fact was that Jemima had come too close: she had come too close to the mysterious heart of Dan's relationship with Charlotte, the responsibility which was not responsibility, the irresponsibility which Charlotte's behaviour allowed him to have.

That night, that dreadful night, she had impulsively taxed him with it: "But you knew
something
, Dan! I heard you that evening at the Planty, I was in the far court. 'Get away from me,' you said, and 'It's over.' Why else did you decide to leave Charlotte for Alix?"

But Charlotte, shivering in Dan's angry grip, a man's dressing gown incongruously cast over her wet costume, had glared at Jemima now more like a tiny lioness than a puppy. They were in the Long Gallery and Nell had already been rushed away. The huge pictures of Merediths and their bejewelled and beruffed wives gazed down on the latest Meredith wife: one whose portrait would surely never in future hang in the ancestral home. Ironically enough, Charlotte was actually standing directly beneath the portrait of Olivia Lackland: another wife who had stood fast for her family. (Charlotte, if no-one else, might have directly compared their two actions.)

"He knew nothing!" Charlotte shouted. "And he would never have left me for Alix, never... I'm his wife, the mother of his
heir
." She put a dreadful breathy emphasis on the last word.

Dan, without letting go of Charlotte, swayed slightly. In the light his thick poll of wet fair hair looked white not flaxen: Jemima suddenly had a glimpse of what he would look like when he was old.

"She hinted—" he began, "the other day when I told her about Alix and the baby, I had to tell her, and she began to talk about all she had done for the Merediths and their family heritage. I had this ghastly realisation—poor little Nell—I've always known that deep down Charlotte hated Nell, she couldn't hide it from me, she hid it from the world, all that public affection, but that's why I was so careful not to spoil Nell—I didn't want to upset Charlotte. Then some of Charlotte's movements at night. They didn't quite add up. There was one time, I came back in the small hours—oh, why pretend now, I was with Alix—and she wasn't there, and her car wasn't there. That's why I was originally worried about you, you're so clever, talking to poor old Haygarth, just an uneasy instinct. Then there was the odd time when we all ended up roaming round the gardens; Charlotte hadn't been where she said she was. And I found the door to the roof staircase open. I didn't know what to do—so I just locked it. All the same, it puzzled me. But Nell! That was what finished her for me."

"But you did nothing!" Jemima knew that she sounded fierce. "Except make a promise to another woman—Alix."

"It was the Celebration," said Dan weakly. "And the Club. I had to get the Celebration over for the sake of the Club. And that was to save Lackland Court. I know it sounds terrible now, but they were both dead, nothing would bring them back ..." His voice tailed away. Once again he looked not so much a glamorous former athlete in his late forties as an old man.

On the subject of Dan's secret foreknowledge—but it was not exactly that, more growing suspicion after the event—Jemima decided to hold her peace to everyone else. She did not think it necessary, for example, to tell the police. They were, after all, in the person of Detective Inspector Mike Spain and others, rejoicing in the very full confession which Charlotte had insisted on making, without waiting for her lawyer.

"It's as though she wanted to be found guilty!" exclaimed Mike Spain to Jemima almost ruefully. "I can't believe it. It's too good to last. Look here, how else would we make a case like that stick? She's dishing it out to us like some bloody great soap opera. It's as though she was determined to punish him, just because the red-haired bimbo has a bun in the oven. Hasn't noticed she's doing herself in along the way. "

Jemima could only agree.

It was appropriate that the fullest conversation Jemima ever had on the subject with a member of the Meredith family was not only with Zena (who had commissioned her investigation in the first place) but held once more in the cool precincts of Taynford Cathedral.

The general agreement on the identification of the Taynford Grange skeleton as that of Decimus, 1st Viscount Lackland, was followed in due course by a brief private interment ceremony in the Cathedral. Gillian Gibson had wanted to attend but was prevented by a husband who had evidently not yet pardoned "those damn bones." She sent the only wreath, although Rupert Durham, who attended, along with Zena, declaimed the last "Swan" poem beautifully, and Jemima echoed the greatest of all the love poems silently to herself. Decimus, 1st Viscount Lackland, now lay close to the plaque which in fact stated that his body was absent. But for the time being it was not planned to alter the original tablet.

"It won't be the first false inscription in this Cathedral," exclaimed Rupert cheerfully. 

The 18th Viscount Lackland, however, did not attend the Ceremony. "A horror of any more publicity" was the official reason for his absence.

"But Dan never did care much for history," added Zena bleakly. "Whereas Charlotte, it seems, cared too much. At least, that's, as it turns out, the kindest explanation."

They were sitting together in the cloisters where Jemima had once listened to Nell's tale of the phantom who was not a phantom. Rupert had bounded away to talk to the new Dean of the Cathedral, a rubicund friar of a man, who promised something of interest to him to discuss, presumably concerning that great television series,
BUNK OR HISTORY.
The two women sat close enough for the fresh lily-of-the-valley scent of Diorissimo—the perfume Zena and Charlotte had in common—to remind Jemima all too poignantly of that particular elusive, if unhistorical ,detail of the Cavalier Case.

"I'm not complaining. You did as I asked. 'Whatever I find,' you said. And I agreed." Zena turned and looked at her. "But
how
did you know or rather guess? Should we have known? That's what tortures me. May God forgive me, I did think that perhaps Dan...he can be so ruthless when he goes for something, I suppose it's the games player. That's why I asked you to investigate. I couldn't bear to do it myself. And yet, I couldn't get over my awful suspicions. But Dan never knew, did he?"

"Dan never knew until the last moment." That was true—even if Jemima did not care to specify what the last moment was.