No Graves As Yet (30 page)

That was the Beecher that Joseph knew, a man of great kindness, which he always masked as something else so there was never debt.

“You must have been talking together when young Allard was killed,” he remarked. How bare that sounded.

“Not that mornin’, sir,” Carter shook his head. “Oi tole the police gentleman it were, because Oi forgot, but that were the day Oi ’ad the bad puncture. Oi ’ad to fix it, an’ it took me an age ’cos it were in two places, an’ Oi didn’t see it at first. An hour late ’ome, Oi were. O’ course Dr. Beecher must’ve bin ’ere if ’e said so, but Oi didn’t see ’im ’cos Oi weren’t, if you get me?”

“Yes,” Joseph said slowly, his own voice sounding far away, as if it belonged to someone else. “Yes . . . I see. Thank you.” And he turned and walked slowly along the grass.

Did he have a moral obligation to tell Perth? He had agreed that the law was above them all, and it was. But he needed to be sure. Right now he was certain of nothing at all.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

On Saturday afternoon Matthew dined with Joseph at the Pickerel, overlooking the river. There were just as many people there as always, sitting around the tables, leaning forward in conversation, but voices were lower than a week earlier, and there was less laughter.

Punts still drifted back and forth on the water, young men balancing in the sterns with long poles clasped, some with grace, others with precarious awkwardness. Girls, wind catching the gossamerlike sleeves of their pale dresses, lay half reclined on the seats. Some wore sweeping hats, or hats decked with flowers to shade their faces; others had parasols of muslin or lace, which dappled the light. One girl, bare-headed, with russet hair, trailed a slender arm into the river, her skin brown from the sun, her fingers shedding bright drops behind her in the golden light.

“One of us ought to go home,” Matthew said, reaching his knife into the Belgian pâté and spreading more of it onto his toast. “It ought to be you, and anyway I need to go and see Shanley Corcoran again. With things as they are, he’s about the only person I dare trust.”

“Are you any further?” Joseph asked, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He saw the frustration in Matthew’s face and knew the answer.

Matthew ate another mouthful and swallowed the last of his red wine, then poured himself more, before replying.

“Only ideas. Shearing doesn’t think it is an Irish plot. He seems to be trying to steer me away from it, although I have to admit his logic is pretty sound.” He reached for more butter. “But then of course I don’t know beyond any doubt at all that he isn’t the one behind it.”

“We don’t know that about anyone, do we?” Joseph asked.

“Not really,” Matthew agreed. “Except Shanley. That’s why I need to speak to him. There’s . . .” He looked across the river, narrowing his eyes against the brilliance of the lowering sun. “There’s a possibility it could be an assassination attempt against the king, although the more I consider it, the less certain I am that anyone would benefit from it. I don’t know what I think anymore.”

“There
was
a document,” Joseph said. “And whatever was in it, it was sufficient for someone to kill Father.”

Matthew looked weary. “Perhaps it was evidence of a crime,” he said flatly. “Simply a piece of ordinary greed. Maybe we were looking beyond the mark, for something wildly political involving the grand tide of history, and it was only a grubby little bank robbery or fraud.”

“Two copies of it?” Joseph said skeptically. Matthew lifted his head, his eyes widening. “It might make sense! Copies for different people? What if it were a stock market scandal or something of that nature! I’m going to see Shanley tomorrow. He’ll have connections in the City, and at least he would know where to start. If only Father had said more!” He leaned forward, his food forgotten. “Look, Joe, one of us has got to go and spend a little time with Judith. We’ve both been neglecting her. Hannah’s taken it all very hard, but at least she’s got Archie some of the time, and the children. Judith’s got nothing, really.”

“I know,” Joseph agreed quickly, guilt biting deep. He had written to both Judith and Hannah, but since he was only a few miles away, that was not enough.

There was a short burst of laughter from the next table and then a sudden silence. Someone rushed into speech, something completely irrelevant, about a new novel published. No one responded, and he tried again.

“Anything more on Sebastian Allard?” Matthew asked, his face gentle, sensing the slow discovery of ugliness, the falling apart of beliefs that had been held dear for so long.

Joseph hesitated. It would be a relief to share his thoughts, even if as soon as tomorrow he would wish he had not. “Actually . . . yes,” he said slowly, looking not at Matthew but beyond him. The light was fading on the river, and the firelike scarlet and yellow poured out across the flat horizon from the trees over by Haslingfield right across to the roofs of Madingley.

“I’ve discovered Sebastian was capable of blackmail,” he said miserably. Even the words hurt. “I think he blackmailed Harry Beecher over his love for the master’s wife. For nothing so obvious as money—just for favor, and I think maybe for the taste of power. It would have amused him to exert just a very subtle pressure, but one that Beecher didn’t dare resist.”

“Are you sure?” Matthew asked, his face puckering with doubt. There was not the denial in his voice Joseph hungered to hear. He had overstated the case deliberately, waiting for Matthew to say it was nonsense. Why didn’t he?

“No!” he replied. “No, I’m not sure! But it looks like it. He lied as to where he was. He’s engaged to a girl his mother probably picked out for him, but he’s got a girlfriend of his own in one of the pubs in Cambridge. . . .” He saw Matthew’s look of amusement. “I know you think that’s just natural youth,” he said angrily. “But Mary Allard won’t! And I don’t think Regina Coopersmith will, either, if she ever finds out.”

“It’s a bit shabby,” Matthew agreed, the flicker of humor still in his eyes. “A last fling before the doors of propriety close him in forever with Mother’s choice. Why hadn’t he the guts to say so?”

“I’ve no idea! I didn’t know anything about it! Anyway, he would never have married Flora, for heaven’s sake. She’s a barmaid. She’s also a pacifist.”

Matthew’s eyebrows shot up. “A pacifist? Or do you mean she agreed with whatever her current admirer happened to say?”

Joseph considered for only a moment. “No, I don’t think I do. She seemed to know quite a lot about it.”

“For God’s sake, Joe!” Matthew sat back with a jerk, sliding the chair legs on the floor. “She doesn’t have to be stupid just because she pulls ale for the local lads!”

“Don’t be so patronizing!” Joseph snapped back. “I didn’t say she was stupid. I said she knew more about pacifism and about Sebastian’s views on the subject than to have been merely an agreeable listener. He was drifting away from his roots at a speed that probably frightened him. His mother idolized him. To her he was all she wished her husband could have been—brilliant, beautiful, charming, a dreamer with the passion to achieve his goals.”

“Rather a heavy weight to carry—the garment of someone else’s dreams,” Matthew observed a great deal more gently, and with a note of sadness. “Especially a mother. There’d be no escaping that.”

“No,” Joseph said thoughtfully. “Except by smashing it, and there would be a strong temptation to do that!” He looked curiously at Matthew to see if he understood. His answer was immediate in the flash of knowledge in Matthew’s eyes. “It’s not always as simple as we think, is it?” he finished.

“Is that what you believe?” Matthew asked. “Somehow Sebastian was making a bid for freedom, and it went wrong?”

“I really don’t know,” Joseph admitted, looking away again, across the river. The girl with the bright hair was gone, as was the young man who had balanced with such grace. “But very little I’ve discovered fits the idea of him I had—which makes me wonder if I was almost as guilty as Mary Allard of building a prison for him to live in.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Matthew said gently. “He built his own image. It may have been in part an illusion, but he was the chief architect of it. You only helped. And believe me, he was happy to let you. But if he did see what happened on the Hauxton Road, why wouldn’t he say something?” His brow furrowed, his eyes shadowed and intense. “Do you think he was mad enough to try blackmail on someone he knew had already killed two people? Was he really such a complete fool?”

Put like that, it sounded not only extreme but dangerous beyond any possible profit. And surely he would have known the people concerned were Joseph’s parents—even if not at the time, then later.

“No,” he answered, but there was no conviction in his voice. Matthew would never have done such a thing, but he was accustomed to thinking in terms of danger. He was only a few years older than Sebastian, in fact, but in experience it was decades. To Sebastian, death was a concept, not a reality, and he had all the passionate, innocent belief in his own immortality that goes with youth.

Matthew was watching him.

“Be careful, Joe,” he warned. “Whatever the reason, someone in college killed him. Don’t go poking around in it, please! You aren’t equipped!” Anger and frustration flickered in his eyes, and fear. “You’re too hurt by it to see straight!”

“I have to try,” Joseph said, reasserting reason into its place. It was the one sanity to hold on to. “Suspicion is tearing the college to pieces,” he went on. “Everyone is doubting things, friendships are cracking, loyalties are twisted. I need to know for myself. It’s my world . . . I have to do something to protect it.”

He looked down. “And if Sebastian did see what happened on the Hauxton Road, there may be some way of finding out.” He met Matthew’s steady blue-gray eyes. “I have to try. Was he saying something to me that last evening on the Backs, and I wasn’t listening? The more I think of it, the more I realize he was far more distressed than I understood then. I should have been more sensitive, more available. If I’d known what it was, I might have saved him.”

Matthew clasped his hand over Joseph’s wrist for a moment, then let go again. “Possibly,” he said with doubt. “Or you might have been killed as well. You don’t know if it had anything to do with that at all. At least for this weekend, go and see Judith. She’s our world, too, and she needs someone, preferably you.” It was said gently, but it was a charge, not a suggestion.

Matthew offered to drive him, and no doubt Judith would have brought him back, but Joseph wanted the chance to be alone for the short while it would take him to ride there on his bicycle. He needed time to think before meeting Judith.

He thanked Matthew but declined. He walked briskly back to St. John’s to collect a few overnight things such as his razor and clean linen, then took his bicycle and set out.

As soon as he was beyond the town the quiet lanes enclosed him, wrapping him in the shadows of deep hedges, motionless in the twilight. The fields smelled of harvest, that familiar dry sweetness of dust, crushed stalks, and fallen grain. A few starlings were black dots against the blue of the sky, fading gray already to the east. The long light made the shadows of the hay stooks enormous across the stubble.

There was a hurt in the beauty of it, as if something were slipping out of his grip, and nothing he could do would prevent his losing it. Summer always drifted into autumn. It was as it should be. There would be the wild color, the falling of the leaves, the scarlet berries, the smell of turned earth, wood smoke, damp; then winter, stinging cold, freezing the earth, cracking and breaking the clods, ice on the branches like white lace. There would be rain, snow, biting winds, and then spring again, delirious with blossom.

But his own certainties had fallen away. The safety he had built so carefully after Eleanor’s death, thinking it the one indestructible thing, the path toward understanding the ways of God, even accepting them, was full of sudden weaknesses. It was a path across the abyss of pain, and it had given way under his weight. He was falling.

And here he was, almost home, where he was supposed to be the kind of strength for Judith that his father would have been. He had not watched closely enough, and John had never spoken of it, never shown him the needs and the words to fill them. He was not ready!

But he was in the main street. The houses were sleepy in the dusk, the windows lit. Here and there a door was open, the air still warm. The sound of voices drifted out. Shummer Munn was pulling weeds in his garden. Grumble Runham was standing on the street corner lighting his clay pipe. He grunted as Joseph passed him, and gave a perfunctory wave.

Joseph slowed. He was almost home. It was too late to find any answers to give Judith, or any wiser, greater strength.

He turned the corner and pedaled the final hundred yards. He arrived as the last light was fading, and put his bicycle away in the garage beside Judith’s Model T, finding the space huge and profoundly empty where the Lanchester should have been. He walked around the side and went past the kitchen garden, stopping to pick a handful of sharp, sweet raspberries and eat them, then went in through the back door. Mrs. Appleton was standing over the sink.

“Oh! Mr. Joseph, you give me such a start!” she said abruptly. “Not that Oi i’n’t pleased to see you, mind.” She squinted at him. “Have you had any supper? Or a glass o’ lemonade, mebbe? You look awful hot.”

“I cycled over from Cambridge,” he explained, smiling at her. The kitchen was familiar, full of comfortable smells.

“Oi’ll fetch you some from the pantry.” She dried her hands. “Oi dare say as you could eat some scones and butter, too? Oi made ’em today. Oi’ll fetch ’em to the sitting room for you. That’s where Miss Judith is. She in’t expecting you, is she? She din’t say nothing to me! But your bed’s all made up, loike always.”

He already felt the warmth of home settle around him, holding him in a kind of safety. He knew every gleam of the polished wood, just where the dents were, the thin patches worn into carpets by generations of use, the slight dips in the floorboards, which stairs creaked, where the shadows fell at what time of day. He could smell lavender and beeswax polish, flowers, hay on the wind from outside.

Judith was sitting curled up on the couch with her head bent over a book. Her hair was pulled up hastily, a little lopsided. She looked absorbed and unhappy, hunched into herself. She did not hear him come in.

“Good book?” he asked.

“Not bad,” she replied, uncurling herself and standing up, letting the book fall closed onto the small table. She looked at him guardedly, keeping her emotions protected. “I like my fairy tales with a little more reality,” she added. “This is too sweet to be believable—or I suppose any good, really. Who cares whether the heroine wins if there wasn’t any battle?”

“Only herself, I imagine.” He looked at her more closely. There were shadows of tiredness around her eyes and very little color in her skin. She was dressed in a pale green skirt, which was flattering because she moved with grace, but very ordinary. Her white cotton blouse was such as most young women choose in country villages: high to the neck, shaped to fit, and with minimum decoration. She was not interested in whether it pleased anyone else or not. He realized with a sense of shock the change in her in a few weeks. The regularity of her features was still there, the gentleness of her mouth, but the vitality that made her beautiful was gone.