Brunswick Gardens

2

AFTER PITT LEFT, Dominic Corde was acutely aware of the distress which at least to some extent had been masked during the presence of strangers. Unity’s body had been removed. The police had seen everything they needed to and notes had been taken of the scene. Now the house was unnaturally quiet. The curtains and blinds were closed in decent respect for death, and to signify to all passersby and potential callers that this was now a house of mourning.
No one had wanted to continue with normal pursuits until the last formalities were completed. It looked callous—or worse, as if they might be afraid of something. Now they stood in the hall, self-conscious and unhappy.
Clarice was the first to speak.
“Isn’t it absurd? So much has happened and yet everything looks the same. Before this, I had a dozen things to do. Now every one of them seems rather pointless.”
“Nothing is the same!” Tryphena said angrily. “Unity has been murdered in our house by a member of our family. Nothing is ever going to be the same again. Of course everything you were going to do is pointless! How could it have meaning?”
“We don’t really know what happened …” Mallory began tentatively, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I think we should not rush into saying things …”
Tryphena glared at him, her eyes red-rimmed, the tears standing out in them.
“If you don’t know, it is because you refuse to look at it. And if you start preaching to me I shall scream. If you come up with your usual platitudes about the mysteries of God and abiding God’s will for us, I swear I’ll throw something at you, and it will be the heaviest and sharpest thing I can find.” She was struggling for breath. “Unity had more courage and honesty than all the rest of you put together. Nobody can ever replace her!” She turned on her heel and ran across the mosaic floor and up the stairs, her heels loud on the wood.
“You might,” Clarice murmured, presumably referring to Tryphena’s replacing Unity. “I think you’d do it rather well. You’ve got just the same sort of wild ideas and you never listen to anyone else or look where you’re going. In fact, you’d be perfect.”
“Really, Clarice!” Mallory said impatiently. “That is uncalled for. She is distraught.”
“She’s always distraught about something,” Clarice muttered. “She lives her life being distraught. She was beside herself when her marriage with Spencer was arranged. Then when she decided he was a bully and a bore, she was even more beside herself. And she still wasn’t satisfied when he died.”
“For heaven’s sake, Clarice!” Mallory was aghast. “Have you no decency?”
Clarice ignored him.
“Aren’t you distressed?” Dominic asked her quietly.
She looked at him, and the anger melted out of her face. “Yes, of course I am,” she admitted. “And I didn’t even like her.” She looked at her father, who was standing near the newel post. He was still very pale, but he seemed to have regained at least some of his composure. He was usually a man of great calm, and reason always prevailed over emotion, self-indulgence, or any kind of indiscipline. So far he had avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. Naturally he was aware of what Stander and Braithwaite had told the police, and he must be wondering what the rest of his family made of the extraordinary charge. Now he could no longer put off some kind of communication.
“I don’t think there is anything new to be said.” His voice was husky, thin, totally lacking its usual timbre, his face white. “I don’t know what happened to Miss Bellwood. I sincerely trust that no one else in the house does either. We had best continue with our duties as far as possible in the circumstances, and bear ourselves with dignity. I shall be upstairs in my study.” And without waiting for any reply, he turned and left them, walking with measured and rather heavy tread.
Dominic watched him with a mixture of sadness and guilt because he knew of no way to help him. His admiration for Ramsay Parmenter was profound, and it had never been long absent from his mind. Ramsay had found him at a time of acute distress—despair would not be too strong a word for it. It was Ramsay’s patience and strength he had leaned on, and which had helped him eventually to find his own. Now, when Ramsay needed someone to believe in him and to offer a hand to lift and sustain him, Dominic could think of nothing to say or do.
“I suppose I might as well continue my studies, too,” Mallory remarked miserably. “I don’t even know what time it is. I don’t know why the maid muffled the clock. It’s not as if a member of the family were dead.” He shook his head and walked away.
Clarice left without explanation, going to the side door to the garden and closing it behind her, leaving Vita and Dominic alone.
“Did I do the right thing?” Vita asked softly, her voice little more than a whisper as she looked up at him. She was an extraordinary woman, not beautiful in an accepted way—her eyes were too large, her mouth too wide, her whole face a little short. And yet the longer one looked at her, the more beautiful she became, until the classic features of other women seemed too thin, too elongated, possessed of a uniformity which became tedious. “Should I have told that policeman nothing?”
He wanted to comfort her. She was in a most appalling situation, a dilemma no one should have to face. With the faith he had found in these last years, how could he advocate lying, even to protect a husband? The greatest loyalty of all must be to the right. That was never a question. The difficulty was in knowing what was the right, which of all the ways was the least evil. For that, one needed to be able to see the outcome, and too often it was impossible.
“Did you hear her cry out?” he asked.
“Of course I did.” She looked at him with clear, steady eyes. “Do you imagine I would say such a thing if I had not? I did not mean it was not true, I meant should I have kept silent?”
“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.”
Dominic felt his temper rising. All the differences of opinion he had had with Mallory over the months he had been in the Parmenters’ home welled up in his memory, and the suppressed anger flashed to the surface. He was too raw with shock to control it.
“Perhaps if you were to set aside your studies for Rome for a few days and comfort your mother, reassure her of your loyalty, then I would not need to,” he snapped back. “And I should feel free to perform my usual duties. As it was, you went off to read more books, which may be very enlightening, but it is hardly helpful!”
Mallory’s face flushed pink. “I don’t know what you found to say to her that could possibly help and still be even remotely true. Unity was a Godless woman who insisted on parading her immoral and blasphemous views in our house. My father was wrong to employ her in the first place. He should have investigated what kind of woman she was before he took her on.” He drew breath. A maid scurried across the back of the hall and disappeared along the passage to the side door.
“A little time and effort, a few enquiries,” Mallory went on, “and he could have known what she was like. Whatever her academic abilities, they were overwhelmed by her radical moral and political views. Look what she has done to Tryphena! That alone should be enough to condemn her.” His lips tightened and his chin came up a little, showing the clenched muscles of his throat. “I know you have very liberal views in your church, allowing people to do more or less as they please, but perhaps now you can see the folly of that. We cannot help but be influenced by the wrong ideas around us. Mr. Darwin is accountable for more misery in the world than all the poverty and disease imaginable.”
“Because he raised doubt?” Dominic said incredulously. “Does he make you doubt, Mallory?”
“Of course not!” And indeed there was no doubt in his eyes. They blazed with certainty. “But then I am of a faith which does not equivocate and hedge and trim its creed to suit the climate of the day. Father was not so fortunate. He had already committed himself, his life, his time and all his energy. He could not go back upon it, sacrifice it all.”
“That’s a piece of sophistry,” Dominic said angrily. “If a faith is true, it ought to be able to withstand all the arguments thrown at it, and if it is not, how much you have invested in it is irrelevant. No human being can make God one thing or another.”
“Perhaps you should go upstairs and comfort Father with that thought?” Mallory suggested. “You seem to have taken it upon yourself to lead the family, although I cannot imagine who asked you.”
“Your mother. But if you had been there, no doubt she would have asked you,” Dominic rejoined. “I did not know you disliked Unity so much. You always seemed very civil to her.”
Mallory’s eyebrows rose. “What did you expect, that I should be rude to her under my father’s roof? She knew perfectly well what I thought of her views.”
Dominic could recall several highly uncomfortable confrontations between Mallory and Unity Bellwood. They had centered mainly upon two subjects: her mockery of his absolute belief in the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings; and a far subtler taunting of the celibacy his choice would place upon him. It had been delicately done. Had Dominic himself known Unity less well, had he been Mallory’s age instead of a widower of over forty with a more than passing acquaintance with women, he might not even have known her deeper meaning under the banter. The suggestions were slight; the remarks had double meanings. He might not have understood her looks or her laughter, the hesitations close to him, and then the smile. Mallory himself was never entirely certain. He knew he amused her, and that it was a joke he did not share. It was not surprising he did not mourn her now.
“You think I was too mealymouthed to tell her,” Mallory went on accusingly. “Let me assure you, I know what I believe, and I will permit no one to speak the blasphemy she did and not challenge them.” He spoke firmly, pleased with himself. “She was utterly misguided, and the standards of morality she espoused were appalling. But I would greatly have preferred to persuade her of her error than see any harm come to her. As I imagine anyone would.” He took a deep breath. “This is a very tragic day for all of us. I hope we shall survive it without greater loss.” For a moment he looked very directly at Dominic. “I cannot offer my father any comfort. He needs faith now, and I disagree with him too profoundly to be of any service to him.” In spite of his height, he looked very young, like a child who has outgrown his strength. The expression in his face was sad and confused beneath the anger. “We have been too far apart in the ways which matter most. You seem to have a belief rooted in something more than words and a way to earn your living in a respectable fashion. I have been racking my mind since I have been able to concentrate at all, but I can think of nothing to say to him. There are too many years of difference between us.”
“Is this not the time to forget the differences?” Dominic suggested.
Mallory’s body tightened up. “No,” he said quickly, without even thinking about it. “For God’s sake, Dominic! If Tryphena is right, it is possible he has just cold-bloodedly pushed a woman down the stairs to her death!” His voice rose close to panic. “What can anyone in his family say to him? He needs spiritual counsel! If he has done something terrible, he must come to some kind of terms with it and then search his soul for repentance. I can’t ask him! He’s my father!” He looked helpless, but his unhappiness focused on Dominic, so there was nothing Dominic could say that would help.
“You don’t have Confession in your faith—you don’t have Absolution!” Mallory went on with pent-up rage twisting his mouth. “You threw out all that when Henry VIII had to have his divorce to go after Anne Boleyn. You have nothing left for the times of worst trial, the dark of the night when only the blessed sacraments of the true church can save you!” He stood with his chin high, his shoulders squared. One might have thought he was facing an actual physical fight.
“If he did kill her, and any part of him meant to,” Dominic replied, struggling in his own mind between refusal to believe such a thing and the incredible meaning of Vita’s words, “then it will take more than anyone else’s comfort or counsel for him to work through this towards any kind of peace with himself.” He waved his hand sharply, dismissing the idea. “You cannot simply say ‘I forgive you’ and it all disappears. You have to see the difference between what you are and what you ought to be, and understand it! You must—” He stopped. Mallory was ready for a long theological argument about the true church and its mysteries, and the heresy of the Reformation. He had already drawn in his breath to begin. It was easier than talking about the realities which faced them.
“This is not the time,” Dominic said firmly. “I’ll go and see him when I’ve thought about it a little more.”
Mallory shot him a disbelieving look and walked away.
Dominic turned and nearly bumped into Clarice. Her hair was coming undone, and actually it would have looked rather becoming were her eyes not pink and her skin so pale.
“He used not to be so pompous,” she said grimly. “Now he reminds me of the stuffed carp in the morning room. It always looks so surprised, like a vicar who has accidentally backed into one of the organ stops.”
“Clarice … really!” Dominic wanted to laugh, and he knew it was entirely inappropriate. She herself still looked profoundly upset.
“Not you, too!” She pushed her hand through her hair and made it worse. “Tryphena is locked in her room, which I suppose is reasonable. She really cared for Unity, heaven help her. Although I suppose it is a good thing she did. Everyone should have at least one person to mourn for them when they die, don’t you think?” Her eyes were full of pity, her voice hushed. “How terrible to die and have no one to weep, no one to feel as if they have lost something irreplaceable! I couldn’t replace Unity, but then neither would I try. I think she was pretty odious. She was always mocking Mal. I know he asks for it, but he’s too easy a target to be worthy of anyone who’s worth anything themselves.”
She was talking quickly, nervously, her hands twisting together. Dominic knew without asking that she too was afraid that her father might be guilty.
They were standing in the hall, by now far nearer the door to the morning room. He was aware that Vita must still be in the conservatory.
“I’m going up to see Father.” Clarice made as if to move away and go towards the stairs. “Mal may think he wants a long theological conversation. I don’t. If it were me, I should simply want to know that somebody loved me, whether I had lost my temper and pushed that miserable woman down the stairs or not.” She said it defiantly, challenging him to disagree.
“So should I,” he answered. “At least at first. And I think I would want someone to consider the possibility that I was innocent, and perhaps to listen to me if I needed to talk.”
“You can’t imagine pushing her down the stairs, can you?” She looked at him curiously. Her eyes were earnest, but there was the characteristic flicker of laughter there, far beneath the hurt, as if she were picturing it in some part of her mind, and the absurdity of it.
“Actually, I can imagine it only too easily,” he confessed.
“Can you?” She was surprised, and he thought there was a hint of satisfaction also. Was it because she would rather it were he than her father? The thought chilled him. He was suddenly aware of being an outsider, the one person in the house who was not a member of the family. It was a shock that it should be Clarice of all of them who reminded him of it. She had seemed the warmest, the one who had the fewest barriers between herself and the world.
“I imagine we all could, if we were hurt,” he said a little coolly. “Mallory certainly expressed plain enough satisfaction that she was gone.”
“Mal?” Her eyebrows rose. “I thought he rather liked her, underneath all the arguments.”
“Liked her?” Dominic was amazed.
“Yes.” She turned and started towards the foot of the stairs. “He hung that Rossetti picture back in the library for her. He hates it. He hid it away in the morning room where none of the family ever go.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t like it?”
“Yes, of course I am. It is far too sensuous, almost provocative.” She shrugged. “She liked it, but then she would.”
“So do I. I think Rossetti’s subject is lovely.”
“She is, but Mal thinks she is wanton.”
“Then why did he hang it back in the library?”
“Because Unity asked him to!” she said with a lift of impatience at his slowness. “He also went for her to pick up a parcel of books from the station … three times in the last two weeks. He was in the middle of studying, and it was pouring with rain. Why?” Her voice rose. “Because she asked him to! And he stopped wearing that green jacket he is so fond of … because she objected to it. So I am not entirely sure that he disliked her as much as you think.”
He cast his mind back to the incidents she was referring to, and in each case she was right. The more he thought about it, the less did Mallory’s behavior seem in character. He hated the rain. He spoke often of how he looked forward to the warmer, drier climate of Rome; it was an incidental blessing of his vocation. Dominic had never known him to run errands for anyone else. Even his mother met with a polite refusal when she asked him to go to the apothecary. He was studying; it took precedence over everything. Dominic knew nothing about the green jacket. He seldom noticed what men wore—though always what women did. But the Rossetti picture was different. That was unforgettable.
How curious. So Mallory had done Unity a number of favors in spite of his apparent contempt for her. Dominic did not have to look far for an explanation that was believable. Unity had been a remarkably attractive woman. It had been far more than a beauty of face or coloring, it was a vitality, an intelligence, a constant awareness of the joy and the challenge of life. He still remembered it himself with pain. But he had not realized it had touched Mallory.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said aloud. “I didn’t know about that.”
“He was probably trying to convert her,” Clarice remarked dryly. “He could have beaten Father soundly if he won her for the Church of Rome after all the time she’s spent translating learned documents for the Church of England.”
“They were the same at the period of time they are dealing with,” he pointed out.
“I know that!” she said tartly, although it was obvious she had forgotten. “That’s why they need all these different translations. One for each sect, don’t you know,” she added, and with that she went up the stairs quickly and without looking back at him.
    No one bothered with luncheon. Ramsay remained upstairs in his study. Vita wrote letters, Tryphena mourned in private, and Clarice went down to the music room and played the Dead March from “Saul” on the piano.
It would be nice to think the tragedy would be left as an unsolved mystery, something about which the truth could never be known. But Dominic recalled his past acquaintance with Pitt too vividly to nurse that illusion. Pitt had gone for now, but he would be investigating evidence, details, possibly things no one else had thought of. He would examine the body. He would see the mark on the shoes, and sooner or later, the mark on the conservatory floor. He would know about Unity’s going in to see Mallory. He would question and argue and reason until he knew why.
He would be very cautious, but he would probe into every detail of life in Brunswick Gardens. He would unearth any quarrel between Ramsay and Unity; he would uncover their personal weaknesses, all the little sins that might have nothing whatever to do with Unity’s death but were painful and so very much better hidden.
Dominic was alone in the library. He closed his eyes and could have been back in Cater Street ten years before, feeling the prickle of fear in the air around him. He remembered with a flush of embarrassment that Charlotte had been in love with him then. He really had not known it until it was almost too late. Pitt knew it. Dominic had seen it in his eyes. The shadow of dislike was still there.
Cater Street seemed like a world away. Hundreds of things had happened to him since then, good things and bad. But for the moment he could have been there, ten years younger, more arrogant, more frightened. He could be married to Sarah; they could all be afraid of the “Hangman,” who had killed again and again in the neighborhood. They could be looking at each other, wondering, suspecting, discussing things about frailties and deceits they would so much rather not know but could not forget.
Pitt had persistently uncovered everything until he knew the answer. He would do that now. And as before, Dominic was afraid, both of what that answer would be and of what the process of finding it would uncover about himself and those things in the past he would rather forget. It was easier here, in the Parmenter house, because they saw him as he wished to see himself: young in his calling, making occasional mistakes, but dedicated and whole of heart. Only Ramsay knew what had gone before.
Without making a conscious decision to do it, Dominic found himself going to the far end of the hall and through the door into the servants’ quarters. Since Ramsay was in his study, and hardly in a position or a frame of mind to do it, perhaps it fell to Dominic to reassure the servants, offer them whatever comfort and reminder of duty they needed. Mallory did not seem inclined to, and he already knew the feelings in the house over his conversion to “Popery,” as they called it, even though they had known him since childhood. Some of the more devout among them even regarded it as a betrayal. Perhaps that very fact made it cut the deeper.
The first person he encountered was the butler, a portly, usually comfortable man of middle years who managed the household with avuncular pleasantries masking an excellent discipline. However, today he looked deeply disturbed as he sat in the pantry checking and rechecking his cellar stocks, having counted the same things three times over and still unable to remember what he was doing.
“Good morning, Mr. Corde,” he said with relief at being interrupted. He stood up. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Good morning, Emsley,” Dominic replied, closing the door behind him. “I came to see how everyone is after this morning’s events …”
Emsley shook his head. “I just don’t understand it, sir. I know what they’re saying, but I can’t see how it’s possible. I’ve served in this house for thirty years, since before Mr. Mallory was born, and I just don’t believe it, no matter what Stander and Braithwaite say they heard.”
“Sit down,” Dominic invited, and sat on the other chair to make Emsley comfortable.
“The sergeant came in here, sir,” Emsley continued, accepting gratefully. “Asked a lot of questions that seemed pointless. None of us know anything.” His lips tightened.
“None of you were near the stairs?” Dominic did not know what answer he hoped for. The whole thing was a nightmare from which there seemed no waking.
“No sir,” Emsley said grimly. “I was in Mrs. Henderson’s room going over some accounts with her. We needed more linen. Funny how it all goes at once. At least a dozen sheets. Best Irish linen, too. Still, they don’t wear forever, I suppose.”
“And Cook?” Dominic prompted, trying not to sound as he knew the police must have.
“In the kitchen.” Emsley shook his head. “All the kitchen staff were, or in the scullery. James was cleaning the knives. Lizzie was laying the fire in the withdrawing room; Rose was in the laundry room. She’d just turned the mattresses and changed the beds and taken the linen down. Margery was polishing the brasses, so she’d got them in the main pantry on the table, and Nellie was dusting in the dining room.”
It was ridiculous to think of one of the maids’ having pushed Unity down the stairs. But then it was absurd to think of Ramsay’s doing it, either.
“Are you sure?” he said, then, seeing the look of vulnerability on the butler’s face, wished he could think of some way of explaining himself. “No one could have seen or heard anything and be afraid to say so?”
“The police sergeant asked that, too,” Emsley said unhappily. “No, Mr. Corde. I know how fast a maid should be able to polish brasses. I’d know if she’d left her job. And Mrs. Henderson’d know if Rose wasn’t where she said, or Nellie.”
“How about the between maid, what’s her name, Gwen?”
“She was telling off the bootboy,” Emsley said with the shadow of a smile which vanished again instantly. “They were well heard by the kitchen staff. None of us knows what happened. I only wish we did.” He shook his head. “There’s got to be some explanation better than the one they’ve come up with. I’ve known Reverend Parmenter since before he married, sir. That Miss Bellwood was a mistake, I don’t mind saying. I didn’t care for it when she came here. I don’t think young women have any place in serious thought about religion.”
He looked at Dominic very gravely. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Corde, I think women can be as religious as any man, in some ways more so. They have a simplicity and a purity about them, the best of them do. But they aren’t built for studying the deep things, and it only ends in trouble when they do. But then Reverend Parmenter wanted to be fair. A very fair man he always was, and open to reason, maybe a bit too open, poor man.” He regarded Dominic anxiously, his eyes dark and troubled. “Can you help him, sir? This is a very terrible thing, and I swear I don’t know which way to turn.”
Dominic was every bit as confused. But it was his task to offer comfort, not to seek it. “I agree with you, Emsley.” He made an effort to smile. “There must be some other explanation.” He rose to his feet before Emsley could press him as to what it might be. “How is Mrs. Henderson?”
“Oh, very distressed, sir. We all are. Not that anyone liked poor Miss Bellwood so much. She could be very difficult. Unsettled people with her ideas.”
“Did she?”
“Oh yes, sir. Made mock of our prayers … ever so polite, never open, but let slip little remarks that made people worry.” His face pinched with distress. “Found Nellie in tears once. Her grandmother had just passed over, and Miss Bellwood was making remarks about Mr. Darwin’s notions. Poor Nellie was convinced her grandmother wasn’t going to heaven after all.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Dominic said quickly. He should have. If someone was bereaved right there under the same roof, how was he so blind he had not seen it and offered her some assurance himself? If he was not good for that, what purpose had he? “No one told me!”
“No, of course not, sir,” Emsley said calmly. “Wouldn’t want to trouble you with our worries. Mrs. Henderson gave her a talking-to. Good Christian woman, Mrs. Henderson, none of these silly modern fancies. Nellie was all right after that. Just avoided Miss Bellwood, and we had no more nonsense.”
“I see. I still wish I had known.” Dominic excused himself and went to speak to the rest of the staff individually. He spent some time with Nellie, trying to make up for his earlier shortcoming. He realized within a few moments that his effort had been unnecessary. Whatever Mrs. Henderson had said had been more than sufficient. Nellie harbored no uncertainties as to the nature and existence of God, or that, given time, He could ultimately forgive even Unity Bellwood her sins, which Nellie had no doubt were many.
“Were they?” Dominic asked innocently. “Perhaps I did not know her as well as I thought.”
“Yer’d want ter think well of ’er, sir,” Nellie replied with a nod. “It’s yer job. But it in’t mine. I see’d ’er plain. Got some terrible ideas, she ’as. Leastways, she ’ad. She’ll know better now, poor soul. But gave poor Mr. Mallory a terrible ’ard time, she did. Used ter make fun of ’im summink awful.” She shook her head. “I could never make out why ’e took it. Mus’ be summink ter do wiv ’is religion, I s’pose.” For her that explained everything. It was foreign, and no one should be expected to understand it.
He left Nellie and continued on his course, but none of the servants was able to help, except in the most negative sense. At the time which mattered, and was fixed very clearly at five minutes to ten, they were all accounted for and nowhere near the stairhead. The only two upstairs at all were Miss Braithwaite and the valet, Stander, and they would have had to pass Ramsay’s study door to reach the landing.
Was it possible that Ramsay really had pushed her? Had her constant erosion of his confidence, his belief in his faith and its root in reality, been wearing him down over the weeks and months to the point at which suddenly he had lost control and lashed out at his tormentor, at the voice which had robbed him of all the old certainties, the very meaning of all his work? Had he so lost touch with the realities of faith, the human spirit, the living emotion, that his despair had robbed him of all sense?
Dominic came into the hall again from the kitchen and the servants’ dining room. It was so familiar, for all its exotic design, so very functional with its umbrella stand, reminding one of the English climate and the practicalities of walking in the rain. The tall clock normally chimed the quarter hours, the daily needs of punctuality. Of course it was muffled now, with death in the house. The side table held the salver for calling cards. The hat stand stood in the corner, next to the settles where carriage rugs were sometimes kept. The mirror, for last-minute adjustments to the appearance, reflected the light. The window pole for the footman to close the upper sash, the bell rope, the telephone machine discreetly in the corner, all seemed so anchored in sanity. Even the potted palm was an ordinary one, a little overgrown, perhaps, but just like those common enough in thousands of houses. The screen and the floor he barely noticed, he had seen them so often.
He walked slowly up the stairs, one hand on the black wooden banister.
It was like Cater Street all over again. He found himself thinking of people and wondering if they could be feeling something utterly different from what they said, from the facade they presented. Even as his feet climbed from step to step, suspicions took shape in his imagination. Mallory’s behavior towards Unity did seem inconsistent. He remembered small cruelties she had displayed towards him. He should have hated her for it, or at least despised her. And yet it seemed he had gone out of his path to do her favors. Was that his way of battling against his own emotions, of trying to be the person he believed he should?
Vita must have loathed her at times, too. She could not have failed to see how Unity undermined the confidence and the happiness of both her husband and her son.
But Vita and Tryphena were the two members of the family who could not possibly have pushed her. They were both downstairs at the time. Lizzie swore to that. Not that Tryphena would have harmed Unity in any way. She was the only person in the house who truly grieved for her.
It was Tryphena whom Dominic now intended to speak with. No one else seemed to offer her any understanding. They were fairly naturally consumed in their own fears.
Unity had quarreled with Clarice several times, but it was over ideas, nothing violent or touching on the personal emotions or needs that mattered. It had all been on the surface of the intellect … at least that was how it had appeared. Perhaps that too was an illusion?
He knocked on Tryphena’s door.
“Who is it?” she asked sharply.
“Dominic,” he replied.
There was a moment’s silence, then the door opened. She looked disheveled, her fair hair falling out of its pins. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she made little effort to conceal the fact that she had been weeping.
“If you’ve come to try to persuade me to alter my view of Father, or to try to defend him, you are on a fool’s errand.” She lifted her chin a little higher. “My friend is dead, a person I admired more than anyone else I’ve ever known. She was a bright light of honesty and courage in a society that is black with hypocrisy and oppression, and I am not going to allow her to be snuffed out and no one raise a voice to protest.” She glared at him as if he were already guilty.
“I came to see how you were,” he said quietly.
“Oh.” She tried to smile. “I’m sorry.” She pulled open the door to the small sitting room she shared with Clarice. “Just don’t preach at me.” She led the way in and invited him to sit down. “I really couldn’t stomach a sermon now. I know you mean well, but it would be insupportable.”
“I should not like to be so insensitive,” he said honestly, but with the shadow of a smile in return. He knew something of her dislike for what she regarded as the tedium and the condescension of the church. He had never met Spencer Whickham—Tryphena’s marriage and widowhood predated his acquaintance with the family—but he had heard about him from Clarice and seen the pain he had caused reflected in Tryphena now in a dozen different ways. Without having the slightest idea of it, the man had apparently been a natural bully. It was hardly surprising Tryphena had such a fierce admiration for Unity, who had both the will and the weapons to fight back where she saw masculine domination and what she saw as injustice.
“Can I say anything to help you?” he asked gently. “Even that there was much in Unity that I admired?”
She stared at him, her brows puckered, mastering her tears with difficulty. “Was there?”
“Certainly.”
“I feel so alone!” There was anger and pain behind her words. “Everyone else is horrified, of course, and frightened, but it is for themselves.” She jerked her hands angrily. They were small-boned and delicate, like her mother’s. This gesture was full of contempt. “They are all terrified there is going to be a scandal because Father did something appalling. Of course there will be! Unless they all get together and hush it up. That’s exactly what could happen, isn’t it, Dominic?” That was a question, but she rushed on without waiting for an answer. Her shoulders were stiff; he could see the strain on the fabric of her dress. It was floral. She had not yet thought to change to black.
“That’s what they’re all doing right now,” she went on. “They sent that important policeman from Bow Street, which is miles from here, just so they could keep it quiet.” She nodded her head. “You watch. Any time now the bishop will arrive full of false sorrow and bending all his mind on how he can deal with it discreetly, pretend it was an accident, and everyone will heave a great sigh of relief. Unity will be forgotten in their desire to save themselves embarrassment.” She spat the last word. “For all their cant about God and truth and love, they’ll save their own faces and do whatever is expedient.” She moved her hand again sharply. The tears spilled over her cheeks. “I am the only one who really cared about her, who loved the person she was.”
He did not interrupt her. She needed to say it and not be argued with. And in truth, he was horribly afraid she might be at least partly right. Certainly she was the only person who grieved for Unity rather than for the situation. He would not offend her, nor demean himself, by trying to say otherwise.
She gulped.
“You didn’t know what it was like for her!” It was an accusation, and she stared at him challengingly, her blue eyes bright and hard through the tears. “You don’t know how hard she had to fight to be allowed to learn, to be accepted, or what courage it took. It’s all so easy for you. You’re a man, and no one tells you you are not meant to have any intelligence.” She sniffed fiercely. “People don’t conspire silently to keep you out, looks and nods, unspoken agreements. You simply have no conception.” She was thoroughly angry now through her misery. “Unity made trouble,” she went on. “She showed you some of your own prejudices, the fear and oppression you exercise without even knowing it.” Her hands clenched. “You are so convinced you are righteous sometimes I could hit you! In your heart you are all glad she’s gone, because she asked questions and made you feel uncomfortable. She’d have forced you to look at yourselves, and you wouldn’t like what you’d see— because you’d see hypocrites. God! I’ve never felt so alone!”
“I’m sorry,” he said with as much sincerity as he could. He thought she was wildly wrong; she seemed to have caught Unity’s passions as if they were a contagion. But her feeling was real, of that he had no doubt at all, and it was that he addressed. “I can see that you do mourn her more honestly than the rest of us. Perhaps you will be able to carry on her ideas and beliefs?”
“Me?” She looked startled, but then not entirely displeased. “I’m not fit to. I haven’t any education except to sew and paint and to manage a household.” Her face twisted with disgust. “Given a good housekeeper and a good cook, of course. Clarice was the one who studied … theology, of all the useless pursuits for a girl. I think she only did it to please Father and to show she was cleverer than Mallory.”
“Didn’t you learn French at school?”
“I had a French governess for a while. Yes, of course I speak French. But that’s no use, for heaven’s sake! Nothing ancient or theological is written in French.” She still dismissed it.
“Wouldn’t any branch of learning do just as well in which to succeed and make the same point about women?”
Her eyes blazed. “Is that what I am supposed to do? Are you now going to tell me Unity’s death is all part of God’s plan, which we are meant to accept but not to understand? Will it all be explained to me when I get to heaven?”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said tartly. “You don’t want to hear it, and I don’t think it’s true anyway. I think Unity’s dying was a very human plan, and nothing whatever to do with God.”
“I thought God was all-powerful,” she said derisively. “Which means that all this”—she flung out her arm—“is His fault.”
“You mean like a puppet master, pulling everybody’s strings?” he enquired.
“I suppose so …”
“Why?”
She frowned at him. “What?”
“Why?” he repeated. “Why would He bother? It sounds like a very pointless exercise to me, and hideously lonely.”
“I don’t know why!” She was exasperated with him. Her voice rose high and sharp. “You’re the curate, not me. You’re the one who believes in God. Ask Him! Doesn’t He answer you?” She was angry, but there was a ring of triumph in her now. “Perhaps you aren’t speaking loudly enough?”
“That depends on how far away God is,” Clarice retorted, coming in through the door. “I could hear you halfway down the stairs.”
“What are you suggesting?” Tryphena asked her sister angrily. She resented the intrusion. “That God lives halfway down the stairs?”
“Hardly,” Clarice replied, her mouth twitching. “If He did, He could have stopped Unity from reaching the bottom, and she’d only have sprained her ankle instead of breaking her neck.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Tryphena shouted, and turned on her heel and stormed out of the door at the farther side of the room, slamming the door so hard the pictures on the wall shook.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Clarice observed contritely. “I never know when to hold my tongue. I’m sorry.”
Dominic did not know what to say. He had thought he was used to Clarice’s irresponsible notion of humor, but he found he was not. Part of him wanted to laugh, as a release from grief and anxiety, but he knew it was utterly inappropriate—in fact, quite shocking. He was guilty for not disapproving more than he did.
“It was very wrong of you, Clarice,” he said sharply. “Most thoughtless. Poor Tryphena is grieving for a friend, not just shocked and afraid like the rest of us.”
Clarice winced, and the misery was plain in her face. She turned away from him.
“Yes, I know. I wish I could say I had liked Unity, but I didn’t. I’m terrified of what will happen to Father, and it makes me say things without thinking.” She took a deep breath. “No, it doesn’t. I did that anyway … and I am thinking. That’s just the way my mind is.” There was defiance in her now. She turned back and looked at him very directly. “I wonder if we are all meant to wear black for dinner? I suppose I had better. But I’m not wearing it for a year,” she added. “A week is good manners, a year is hypocrisy. I refuse to be a hypocrite. I’d better go and see if Braithwaite can find me something.” She shrugged and turned to walk away.
    Dinner was extremely difficult. Ramsay remained in his room, and whether he ate what was taken up for him or not, no one in the dining room knew. They sat around the long mahogany table in near silence. The servants brought the various courses and removed plates hardly touched. Vita tried to begin some trivial conversation, but no one assisted her.
“Cook will be insulted,” Tryphena observed, watching the dishes being taken away. “She thinks eating is the answer to any problem.”
“Well, not eating doesn’t help, except an upset stomach,” Clarice pointed out. “And other unmentionables. Being weak doesn’t make you any use. Nor does staying awake all night.”
“No one has stayed awake all night,” Mallory said patiently. “It only happened this morning. But if we do, it will be because we are too distressed and worried to sleep. God knows what is going to happen now.”
“Of course,” Clarice muttered.
“Of course what?” Mallory stared at her. “What do you know? What are you talking about? Did you hear something?”
“Of course God knows,” she explained with her mouth full of bread. “Isn’t He supposed to know everything?”
“Please!” Vita interrupted sharply. “Let us keep our ideas of God out of the dinner table conversation. I would have thought that subject had caused sufficient trouble for us all to be more than willing to leave it alone indefinitely.”
“I don’t know why we bother to try to talk at all.” Tryphena looked from one to the other of them. “We none of us know what to say, and we are all lost in our own thoughts anyway. We aren’t going to say anything we mean.”
“Because it is the civilized thing to do,” Vita replied firmly. “Something very dreadful has happened, but we are going to carry on with our lives with the courage and dignity we desire. And Tryphena, my dear, if you admire Unity as much as you seem to, you know she would be the last person to wish us to give in to our emotions. She had no time for self-indulgence.”
“Unless it was her own,” Clarice said under her breath. Dominic heard, but he hoped no one else had. He reached out sideways with one foot and kicked her sharply under the table.
She gasped as the toe of his shoe caught her ankle, but she knew better than to make any sound.
“Of course,” Dominic said aloud, “I shall be making the usual calls on parishioners tomorrow. Are there any errands I can do for anyone?”
“Thank you,” Vita accepted. “I am sure there are several things. Perhaps if you go near the haberdasher’s you could get some black ribbon.”
“Yes, of course. How much?”
“I think a dozen yards, thank you.”
He tried to think of something else normal to say, but nothing came to mind. It all sounded stilted and callous. He was aware of Tryphena looking at him with loathing, and Mallory studiously avoiding saying anything at all. It seemed he and Vita must carry on the conversation to prevent the silence from becoming unbearable.
“I shall write the appropriate letters tomorrow,” Vita went on, looking across the table at him, her eyes wide. “I shall ask Ramsay, of course, but I think as things are he may consider it more suitable for you to find out what the formalities are.”
“We all know what the formalities are, Mother!” Mallory jerked his head up. “We were practically born in the church. We know church rituals—breakfast, luncheon and dinner!”
“Not with the church, Mallory,” she corrected. “With Superintendent Pitt.”
Mallory flushed dull red and said nothing, bending to concentrate on his food, although he ate hardly any of it.
This time the silence was beyond rescue. Vita looked across at Dominic, but with resignation.
    When he could decently escape, and knowing he could put it off no longer, Dominic left the dining room and went up to Ramsay’s study. If he hesitated he would lose his nerve. Surely if he had the calling he imagined, no situation should be beyond his ability to face it with honesty and a degree of kindness.
He knocked.
The answer was immediate. “Come in.”
Now he was committed. He opened the door.
Ramsay was sitting at his desk. He seemed almost relieved to recognize Dominic. Perhaps he had feared an encounter with one of his own family more.
“Come in, Dominic.” He waved towards one of the other chairs and marked the book he was reading with a loose piece of paper, then closed it. “It’s been a truly terrible day. How are you?”
Dominic sat down. It was difficult to begin. Ramsay was behaving as if there had been a simple domestic accident and Tryphena’s accusations were no more than the product of grief.
“I admit, I feel very distressed,” Dominic said frankly.
“Of course you do,” Ramsay agreed, frowning and fiddling with a pencil that lay between his hands on the desk. “Death is always a shock, especially of one so young and whom we all are accustomed to seeing daily. She was a very trying person, at times, but no one would have wished this upon her. I grieve that it happened so soon after I had quarreled with her.” He met Dominic’s gaze quite steadily. “It leaves me with a feeling of guilt because one cannot repair it. Foolish, I know.” His lips tightened. “My reason tells me not to feel such things, but the sadness remains.” He sighed. “I am afraid Tryphena is going to take it very badly. She had a great fondness for her. I did not approve of it, but there was nothing I could do.” He looked tired, as if he had been struggling for a long time and saw no end in sight, certainly no victory.
“Yes, she is.” Dominic nodded. “And she is very angry.”
“A common part of grief. It will pass.” Ramsay spoke with certainty, but of a flat, comfortless kind. There was no lift of hope in it for better times.
“I’m so sorry,” Dominic said impulsively. “I wish I could say something that would make sense of it, but all I can do is repeat what you said to me in my worst despair.” It still touched him deeply. “Take each day at a time, cling onto the faith of your own worth and build on it, no matter how slowly or how little each step. You cannot go backward. Have the courage to go forward well. At the end of each day, praise yourself for that, and then let go … rest, and hope. Never let go of hope.”
Ramsay smiled bleakly, but his eyes were gentle. “Did I say that to you?”
“Yes … and I believed you, and it saved me.” Dominic remembered it only too vividly. It had been four years before. In some ways it was as sharp as yesterday, in others a world away, another life where he had changed from being one man to being another, totally different, with new dreams and new thoughts. He longed to be able to help Ramsay as Ramsay had helped him, to give back the gift now that it was so badly needed. He searched Ramsay’s face and saw no answering spark.
“I had a different sort of faith then,” Ramsay said, looking beyond Dominic as if he were talking to himself. “I have done a great deal of studying in the years since it became so spoken about I could no longer avoid it.” He shook his head a little. “At first, thirty years ago, when it was published, it was just the scientific theory of one man. Then gradually one began to realize how many other people accepted it. Now science seems to be everywhere, the origin and the answers to everything. There is no mystery left, only facts we don’t yet know. Above all, there is no one left to hope in beyond ourselves, nothing greater, wiser, or above all kinder.” He looked for an instant like a lost child who suddenly knows the full meaning of being alone.
Dominic felt it like a physical pain.
“I can admire the certainty all these old bishops and saints seem to have had,” Ramsay went on. “I can’t share it anymore, Dominic.” He sat oddly still for the emotions which must have been raging inside him. “The hurricane of Mr. Darwin’s sanity has blown it away like so much paper. His reasoning haunts my mind. During the day I look at all these books.” He waved his arm at them. “I read Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and every theologian and apologist since. I can even go back to the original Aramaic or Greek, and for a little while I am fine. Then at night the cold voice of Charles Darwin comes back, and the darkness engulfs all the candles I’ve lit during the day. I swear I would give anything I possess for him not to have been born!”
“If he hadn’t said these things, someone else would have,” Dominic pointed out as gently as he could. “It was a theory ripe for its time. And there is a thread of truth in it. Any farmer or gardener would tell you that. Old species die out, new ones are created, by accident, or purpose. That does not mean there is no God … only that He uses means that can be explained by science … at least in part. Why should God be unreasonable?”
Ramsay leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I can see that you are trying very hard, Dominic, and I am grateful to you for it. But if the Bible is not true, we have no foundation, only dreams, wishes, stories that are beautiful, but eventually just fairy stories. We must go on preaching them, because the majority of people believe them—and more importantly than that, they need them.” He opened his eyes again. “But it is a hollow comfort, Dominic, and I find no joy in it. Maybe that is why I hated Unity Bellwood, because at least in that she was right, even if she was wrong in everything else, and utterly, devastatingly wrong in her morality.”
Dominic felt as if he had swallowed ice. There was a bitterness in Ramsay he had never seen unmasked before, a depth of confusion which was more than mere tiredness or the shock of death and accusation, a fear far older and more familiar than anything this day had brought. It was the loss of inner belief, the core of hope that lies deeper than reason. For the first time he was touched by the possibility that Ramsay really could have killed Unity. It no longer seemed beyond the realm of the thinkable that she had assaulted his faith one time too many, and his loss had escaped his control and he had lashed out, she had slipped, overbalanced, and the next moment she had pitched down the stairs to lie dead at the bottom. It was a hideous mischance. They could have quarreled a hundred times and even physically struck each other without any serious injury done. Perhaps in the innocence of his intent Ramsay had not realized that it was at the very least a manslaughter—and the end of his career.
But it was still a far cry from murder.
How could Dominic begin to help? What could he say to reach Ramsay’s despair?
“You taught me that faith is a thing of the spirit, of trust, not knowledge,” he began.
“It was what I believed at the time,” Ramsay retorted with a dry laugh. He looked very directly at Dominic. “Now I am terrified, and all the faith on earth is not going to help. That wretched policeman seems to think that Unity was pushed, and that is murder.” He leaned forward earnestly. “I did not push her, Dominic. I never left the room until after she was dead. I cannot imagine any of the servants did …”
“They didn’t,” Dominic agreed. “They were all accounted for and in sight of someone else, or performing duties they could prove.”
Ramsay stared at him. “Then it could only be one of my family … or you. And both thoughts are dreadful. Faith may be gone, a dream from which I have awoken, but kindness is real, help to another person in their distress will always be precious and good and lasting. You are my one real success, Dominic. When I think I have failed, I remember you, and I know I have not.”
Dominic was hideously uncomfortable. He had wanted to speak honestly to Ramsay, to brush aside the usual politeness and trivialities with which real emotion was hidden, and now that it had happened he did not know how to face it. Such naked hunger for comfort embarrassed him; it was personal, a debt between them. Ramsay had given his hand and pulled Dominic out of the morass of his despair, a morass of his own making. Now Ramsay needed the same help, needed to know he had succeeded, that Dominic was what he wished him to be. And he was afraid Dominic had killed Unity Bellwood.
And he would know why!
“And Mallory is my son,” Ramsay went on. “How can I bear to believe it was he?”
Should Dominic remind him it was his name, or to be exact his title, that she cried out … not “Dominic,” not “Mallory.” The words came to his lips, and then he could not say them. It was futile. He had not killed her. If Ramsay had not, it left only Mallory … or the impossible … Clarice! No one else could have.
“There must be something they have not thought of,” he said miserably. “If … if there is anything I can do to help, please allow me to. Any duties …”
“Thank you,” Ramsay said quickly. “I think perhaps in the circumstances it is right for you to make the funeral arrangements. You might begin that tomorrow. I imagine it will be very quiet. She had no family, I understand.”
“No … no, I believe not …” It was ridiculous. They were sitting in a quiet study with its books and papers and the fire flickering in the hearth, making civilized remarks about the details for the funeral of a woman they each believed the other might have killed.
Except that Dominic found himself believing more and more wretchedly that Ramsay simply refused to recognize what had happened. He was still in a state of shock, with death, with the physical reality of it, and with the spiritual reality of what he had done.
Tomorrow it might be very different. He might wake to the knowledge and the fear of all the terrible consequences which would follow. Dominic knew the suspicion, the close, crushing terrors which would haunt the house until the truth was known. He had seen it all before, lived through it, the relationships that crumble, the old wounds recalled, the ugly thoughts that would not be dismissed, the trust eaten away day by day.
It was hard to remember that there had also been new friendships gained, honor and kindness where he had not looked to find it. At the moment there was only the breaking apart.
Ramsay was giving instructions for the conduct of the funeral, and Dominic had not heard a word of it.