In Pale Battalions (47 page)

You may have been told my third husband died from a fall. It’s true. He did. He was drunk and upset at the time, upset because I’d just discovered him in bed with Leonora. Ask her yourself. She’ll say he attacked her, that she struck him with a heavy book in self-defence, that the blow may have caused the fall, that she said nothing for fear of being blamed for his death, that I have the bloodstained book to prove it. Well, I have the book. That much is true. You can see it if you wish. Not now. Later. If there was no resistance, of course, that would be quite another matter, wouldn’t it?

Tell me, is that the whisky or something else causing you to flush?

By the way, I’ve left the house to Walter Payne. He’s told me all about his plans for it. Some nonsense about a country club. It sounds entertainingly awful. If you’re thinking of contesting the will, I strongly advise you to think again. Mayhew can prove Leonora wasn’t legitimate and that’s what she believes anyway. You could tell her the truth, of course, if you think she’d welcome it. I leave that to you.

Why is it so dark? It can’t be evening yet. Not yet. Call Buss. No.

Better still, don’t.

I consulted a clairvoyant once. She said he was still alive. What do they know? If he were, he’d have come looking, wouldn’t he?

The comet was like a flaming dragon. Philip had once been to China, you know. Dragons dance in the streets there.

John talked about its course and what brought it back. I’d left a 316

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

light in my window. I pointed down to it and said I hadn’t realized he could see me from the observatory—if he cared to look. It wasn’t cold. It was a balmy night. But he was trembling.

They watched me often. It was my power over them. Strong young men with artistic fingers. Not like Ralph at all. The first time he took me, it was no better than rape. That’s what made it so . . . delicious.

Philip left the painting to haunt me. But I laid his ghost—many times.

Why didn’t he come? Last summer, once . . . I almost thought . . .

He’s won nothing. Nothing, you hear?

I read that Franklin died at Passchendaele. As good as putting a gun to his head. The fool.

He outwitted Ralph, not me. But how? How could Ralph let it happen? Miriam’s book is in the drawer. That’s her secret. That’s your answer.

four

After it was over, I sent Buss to phone the doctor. She’d closed Olivia’s eyes, but still, through the blank lids, I felt her watching me. The book was where she’d said, in the drawer of her bedside cabinet. There was no bloodstain. I suppose I’d known there wouldn’t be.” Then, for the first time, I understood Olivia. Perhaps, if the word meant anything to her, she had loved Ralph Mompesson. In everything else—at least until her powers began to wane—she had her way. But Mompesson’s murder wrecked her ambitions for what they might have achieved together and for that she held my father responsible. It was to serve her desire for revenge that I’d been taken to Meongate. I knew now why her hopes of luring my father from hiding were doomed from the first. I knew now why I’d borne the brunt of her frustrated need to be avenged upon him. I knew at last what had cursed my childhood.

“She was an irredeemably evil and cunning woman,” said Tony.

“Even at the end, she was more concerned with trying to make me believe you’d responded to Payne’s advances than with making her peace with the world she was about to leave.”

“I never saw the bloodstain, Tony. She told me there was one and I believed her. Now, when I think about it, I don’t suppose I had the strength to draw blood. If you’d asked me as she suggested . . .”

“Your answer would have seemed to incriminate you. That, of 318

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

course, was what she hoped would happen. But she’d revealed too much hatred for me to believe anything she said. That’s why I said nothing to you. It was the only way to defy her.”

“What did you do with the book?”

“It’s in the loft at home, tucked away in the suitcase where I keep my old uniform. I could have destroyed it, I suppose, but that too would have seemed a victory for her. So I kept it, safely hidden, against the day when you might want to tell me all that you’ve told me now.” Irony upon ironies. The book I’d feared Mayhew meant when he’d spoken of Olivia’s bequest to me, the book I’d hunted for in Winchester: all the time it had lain hidden in my own home. Tony had known its secret better than me. I should have guessed it had played no part in Payne’s death, that Olivia merely claimed it had, the better to suborn me. And so I would have guessed, but for the extent of her dominion over me. She had set out to crush me and had nearly succeeded, but Tony had been better than I deserved.

His long and faithful silence had sealed her defeat.

As I pondered what he’d revealed, I began to appreciate the cool-nerved subtlety of my patient, unassuming husband. “Tony Galloway,” I said. “All these years you’ve known exactly what’s been going on in my head—yet said nothing.” “I told you: I was waiting for you to speak.”

“You knew Olivia had disinherited me. That shocked outrage on my account was mere play-acting. And you knew I wouldn’t contest the will.”

“True,” he said with a smile.

“What did you think when you heard about the house in Fowey?”

“That Willis was your father. It seemed to make sense in view of Olivia’s insistence that he hadn’t died in the war.”

“But still you said nothing?”

“I didn’t force the issue because I hoped that after you’d been down there you might feel able to tell me the truth of your own ac-cord. And so you have, though the truth turns out to be somewhat different from what Olivia led me to expect. In a sense, that makes it all the better.” The following morning, after breakfast, we walked round the

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S

319

hotel garden in the clear, cold air of a new day, luxuriating in the intimacy our revelations had revived.

“When I walked round Meongate that first morning, in 1944,”

Tony said, “I sensed that fate, rather than a whim of military logis-tics, had brought me there. When I saw you in the orchard, the girl they’d whispered about in the village, I sensed it again: that you were my future. Perhaps that’s why, later, not telling you how much I knew seemed the only right thing to do.” “And now, Tony? What’s the right thing to do now? What do we tell our children?”

“That’s for you to say, Leonora. It always has been.”

Once again, I decided you should not be told. I justified my reluctance to speak by reasoning that you hadn’t known the people involved and would have no use for the tangled tale of a dead generation, that you were too young, too self-centred, too obsessed with the present. But none of that was the real reason. The truth was that sharing my past with Tony had bound us together. By sharing it with others, I feared our new-found rapport would once more fade.

That’s why Grace Fotheringham was introduced to you as nothing more than a former teacher of whom I was fond. That’s why I normally arranged for her to visit me when I knew you wouldn’t be at home.

The first such visit took place just before Easter 1968, a few weeks after I’d sought her out in London. I’d already written to her with the sordid truth about how Olivia had ousted her from East Dene: she’d taken the news philosophically. Now, when I recounted all that Tony had told me, she still seemed unmoved by Olivia’s malice, still strangely sympathetic towards the woman who’d tried to ruin her. The reason, I soon discovered, was that, unknown to me, she had the advantage of her in one vital, triumphant respect.

“Poor woman,” I remember her saying, shaking her head and gazing out the window at the daffodils waving their heads in the garden. “Poor foolish woman.”

“Grace!” I exclaimed. “How can you be so charitable?”

“Because she did it all for revenge, and revenge is the hardest taskmaster. I always pity those who allow themselves to be controlled by it. It sounds to me as if it consumed her in the end.”

320

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

I experienced then, as we sat over our tea cups in the conservatory, the sensation that Grace Fotheringham alone of Olivia’s victims had escaped her unscathed and spoke of her now with the compassion of one who was always her superior. It could have been, I knew, the schoolmistressly manner of a natural benevolence. But I sensed it was something more.

“There is an irony, isn’t there,” she continued, “in the thought of her waiting all those years for your father to reappear, when we now know she was waiting in vain?”

“Do you think she may have been right on one score at least?” I said. “That my father killed Ralph Mompesson? I know he denied it to Franklin, but mightn’t he have been trying to spare his friend’s feelings?”

Grace looked at me intently. “That’s what you want to believe, isn’t it? It’s what your mother believed, after all, and it’s what I believed too—at one time.”

“Until I told you Willis’s story?”

“No.” She looked away for a moment. “No, Leonora. I’ve known for a long time who really killed Ralph Mompesson. You see, Olivia tried to ruin me, it’s true, as her lover tried to ruin your family, but there was one man who was too clever for both of them, one man who came to my rescue just as he came to your mother’s. That man was Charter Gladwin.” “Charter?”

“Yes. As I told you, he gave me the capital to establish Marston College and I used to visit him every other Sunday, in his cottage near Robin Hood’s Bay. It was set among fields near the top of the cliffs, terribly exposed in winter. You could always hear the sea, and the gulls, and the wind rushing in the chimney, whatever the season, but inside it was cosy and welcoming, full of Charter’s mementoes of a long life. I looked forward to my visits to him as a fortnightly refuge from the cares of the world. I can still remember the smell of the logs burning on the fire there and the tang of the mackerel he’d grill in front of it.

“One Sunday, after I’d agreed to join him in a glass of rum, we talked about your mother. She was a favourite topic of ours: a friend to both of us. At some point, I said much what you’ve said now. As one who’d lived at Meongate at the time, did Charter think Leonora was right to believe that John killed Mompesson?

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S

321

“ ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘John didn’t kill him.’

“ ‘How can you be so sure?’ ” I asked.

“ ‘That’s very easy, my dear,’ he said. ‘I can be sure because I killed him myself.’ He smiled. ‘Yes. You may as well know. I shot Ralph Mompesson for his pains.’

“I was, as you may imagine, taken aback. Murder was the very last act I would have associated with dear old Charter. But, in his account of it, the concept changed in my mind. When Charter described how he’d come to kill Mompesson, it sounded the most natural thing in all the world.”

five

Ifirst met Mr. Ralph Eugene Mompesson in the summer of 1915, when Olivia began entertaining him at Meongate. I choose my words carefully, because I’m damn sure he’d been bedding her in London for months past. Not that I cared. If Edward hadn’t the sense to see the woman couldn’t stand comparison with my Miriam, that was his look-out. Live and let live, after all. I couldn’t claim a morally blameless youth, so I didn’t propose to start casting stones in my dotage.

Until the news came of John’s death in France at the end of April 1916, I didn’t think of Mompesson as anything more than the man Olivia kept to satisfy her in ways her husband never could. As such, he was somebody I could quite happily ignore. All that changed when I realized he had his sights set on Leonora. I watched him, watching her, as she played the piano of an evening, and I didn’t like what I read in his eyes. I’d see him walking the lawns, smoking his foul cheroots and looking at the house as if he was certain he would one day own it, and I knew that, sooner or later, he’d have to be faced.

My one advantage over him was my age. It made him discount me as a threat. Perhaps he should have been more curious about my past. Then he’d have known I was no stranger to his homeland. In 1863, I’d run the Unionist blockade of the Southern States. The risks were considerable, but the profit in Liverpool on a cargo of cotton made them worth taking. The exploit made me several enemies—and one firm friend: Wesley Maitland, then a struggling

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S

323

Georgia landowner, later an eminent senator. I wrote to my old friend in his retirement, asking him to dig up what he could about Mompesson—his past and his present. I wanted to know why he’d come to England and what he’d left behind. Before I moved against him, you see, I wanted to be sure of my ground.

Because of the war, communications with the States in 1916

were subject to all manner of delays. I knew I might have to wait many weeks for a reply, maybe months. Meanwhile, it was impera-tive that Mompesson should have no cause to suspect I was inquiring into his background. Accordingly, I cultivated my reputation as a harmless old idiot and bided my time, with what patience I could muster.

Old men don’t sleep well, especially when they have something on their mind. I was awake before dawn most mornings and that’s how, on Sunday, 11th June, I came to know that my grandson wasn’t dead after all. I heard a door close down the passage: it sounded as if it were Leonora’s. But the footsteps that came from that direction and passed my own door weren’t hers. They were too confoundedly masculine. If I’d thought about it longer, I’d have dismissed the idea that it might be Mompesson as nonsense—and unworthy nonsense at that—but I didn’t have time to think. I moved to the door and eased it open, just in time to see a male figure turning the corner in the passage, as if heading towards the back stairs. It wasn’t Mompesson. It was my grandson John, come back from the dead. I nearly cried out to him, but the words died in my throat. Then he was gone.