The Mourning Bells (17 page)

She scanned outward from the willow. The day was already getting quite warm, but it was cooler here under the branches. It was no wonder people wanted to be buried under trees. It was like stepping into a private, silent retreat where one could share a moment with God without interruption among the graves.

Violet tilted her head. That looked like a fairly recent grave in the distance, in a copse of yew trees just outside the reach of the willow’s arching branch. She walked between the randomly arranged markers under the willow tree and reached a winding gravel path that led to the copse. Yew trees were a common sight in graveyards. One medieval legend had it that yew thrived on corpses and then made excellent wood for making archers’ bows. Another story said that because the heartwood of the yew is red and the sapwood is white, the tree was symbolic of the blood and body of Christ.

Regardless, they made for enormous, majestic trees, even if they weren’t as graceful as the willow, which, of course, symbolized mourning. Violet certainly had to credit Brookwood’s planners for the care they took in landscaping. Or for finding a property that already contained a selection of cemetery-appropriate foliage.

She reached the fresh grave. It was inside a mostly empty gated enclosure, with only two other graves currently sharing the space. The grave had a temporary marker that indeed showed that this was where Miss Latham had been laid to rest, inside the Latham family enclosure.

Roger Blount was not here with her. Didn’t her obituary say that she would be buried next to him? Shouldn’t she be in the Blount crypt? Everything about this was very peculiar.

Well, it was none of her business if the Latham family had decided to bury their daughter with their kin at the last minute. It was certainly odd, though, that they would have gone so far as to have announced it in the newspaper, then chosen not to bury her with a prestigious family like the Blounts. Yes, it was very, very odd.

Violet glanced at the watch pinned to her dress. She still had plenty of time before the funeral, so she walked back to the chapel and asked a couple of gardeners if they knew where the Blount family crypt was. They both shrugged, so Violet proceeded to walk all the way back to the South station. With all of this exercise, perhaps tonight she could have a morsel of whatever pudding Mrs. Wren had planned for the family.

Violet went straight to Uriah Gedding’s office, where she found the man at his desk without his cat draped on him or demanding his attention. He looked up and said, “Ah, Mrs. Harper, how is the funeral business for you today?”

“Well, as I trust it is with you. Mr. Gedding, can you tell me where the Blount family crypt is?”

“Blount?” he asked. “I can’t possibly know personally where every corpse is buried in such a vast cemetery—”

“I understand that,” Violet said impatiently. “But you undoubtedly maintain records of when families purchase burial tracts. Can you please look in those records and let me know where the family plot of ground is? I’m sure such a family would have a fairly large area set aside.”

Gedding rose and went to a file cabinet, but before opening a drawer, he turned back to Violet. “Is there a problem regarding the family? Something that I can assist with?”

“No, I simply wish to visit Roger Blount’s grave. He is—was—second son to the Earl of Etchingham.”

He still didn’t open the file drawer. “As you know, Mrs. Harper, we are very sensitive to anything that might cause the public’s apprehension over burial here, so if there is some sort of trouble, I really must know about it.”

Would the man never pull on the oak handle and look for the information? Violet felt a faint pounding in her temples again. “Mr. Gedding, I have a funeral to conduct in the next few hours, and I simply wish to pay my respects to the young man, whom I remember seeing here at the station two weeks ago.”

“That’s all?” Gedding finally opened the drawer. “I’m sure I have the information somewhere here. Let me see . . .” He leafed through several papers in the middle of the drawer and pulled out the one he wanted. “Here we are. Section four, east of the double willow. Do you know where that is?”

Violet looked skyward. Had she really been that close? She left Gedding’s office and returned to the same location in the cemetery, this time moving to the right of the willow until she found the Blount family tomb. A full piece of Mrs. Wren’s dessert was in order after all of this activity.

The tomb was, unsurprisingly, an imposing Gothic masterpiece of sandstone and granite, resembling a mini-cathedral with its pointed arches and turrets, set in an elevated position in the cemetery. Violet wondered if the rise was natural or if the family had paid to have wagonloads of dirt brought in. She walked completely around the tomb, which was set on a large plot of pristinely maintained grass enclosed by a three-foot wall, like a green moat protecting the family members ensconced inside. It didn’t look as though it had been opened recently. She stepped out of the confines of the tomb and walked around the exterior of the wall, stopping periodically to gaze up at the magnificence that the Blount fortune had purchased.

At the rear of the exterior wall, Violet halted in her tracks, disbelieving what she saw. It was a grave with a newly installed headstone, inscribed:

Violet was dumbfounded. Not only was Blount buried all the way out here, instead of in the family tomb, but the wording on his headstone was puzzling. Did it suggest that Blount had done good deeds in his life . . . or bad? Most families selected comfort verses from the Psalms to adorn monuments for posterity. This one was enigmatic and highly unusual for a prominent family like the Blounts, who would want everything associated with them to appear respectable and proper.

Burying a family member outside the tomb and inscribing his stone so strangely was anything but respectable and proper. Lord Blount would have had to have committed the most heinous of crimes for the family to justify exiling his body, and there was no evidence that he had done anything other than drop dead after dinner one evening.

Was this why Miss Latham’s family hadn’t buried her next to him? Because he wasn’t actually in the tomb, or at least on the grounds of it? Had they decided that Miss Latham was better off in their own enclosure than relegated to an ignominious location next to Blount?

Violet was also puzzled that the heirs to an earldom would choose to purchase a plot at Brookwood at all instead of having their burials in a churchyard near their country estate. Unless they viewed Brookwood as fashionable. Maybe their estate was nearby in Surrey.

Violet leaned up against the Blount tomb’s outer wall, thinking through everything. She couldn’t come up with a single reason why Roger Blount should be buried this way. But she did know who would have the answer.

Perhaps it was time to pay a bereavement call on the Blount family.

 

Violet received her standard greeting from the Etchingham House butler after she twisted the front bell of the stately home whose windows were swathed in black crape: first, a critical glance at her working-class clothing, followed by a frown of disapproval that she was arriving at the front door and not the servants’ entrance, both concluded with a disdainful “Yes?”

Violet had experienced this so many times that she no longer took offense. She was also not cowed into entering by the basement servants’ door. It was her opinion that undertakers became part of a family for a short time and therefore deserved the privilege of entering by the front door.

Not that she was this family’s undertaker, but she wasn’t about to change her policy today.

To further put her in her place, the butler held Violet’s calling card like it was the tail of a dead mouse and told her to wait in the entrance hall without inviting her to be seated anywhere. She didn’t mind. With what she had to discuss, she might find herself quickly escorted out the door, anyway.

After a fifteen-minute wait—undoubtedly more of the butler’s doing—he returned and escorted her upstairs into a tiny study filled with collections. The walls were so full of deer heads she could barely see the blue wallpaper beneath. Tables groaned under the weight of glass-covered display cases full of stuffed grouse, pheasants, and ducks. A pair of shotguns hung above the door. The shelves of a wide bookcase contained not a single book but were instead crammed with pocket watches under domes on one shelf and silver spoons on another. A cluster of clocks occupied two entire shelves, all of them ticking, ringing, and bonging furiously, the cacophony not even remotely absorbed by the thick, somberly patterned carpet on the floor.

It even smelled like a museum in here, musty and pretentious. Violet didn’t consider herself to be claustrophobic, but this room made her long for the seaside air of Brighton, where her parents lived.

After several more minutes of waiting under the gaze of probably every avian species in existence, the door opened and a regal woman in mourning entered the room. Violet had expected to be seen by the earl or one of his sons, given the room she was seated in, but perhaps her placement was merely meant to make her uncomfortable.

“I am Lady Etchingham. I understand you are here about my son.” The woman was pale and tired-looking, but was not, in Violet’s estimation, grieving the way a mother suddenly losing a child should. She did not sit down, her silent signal that Violet’s visit was to be a short one.

“Yes, my lady. I am Violet Harper, an undertaker in Paddington.”

“So Chapman told me. I find it displeasing that you have entered my home, seeking trade when all of London knows our son was buried two weeks ago.” The countess crossed her arms across her black crape bodice and scowled. “Please state your business.”

Standing like that in the middle of the bird-choked room, the woman looked like a mongoose protecting her young from a snake.

“I was at Brookwood station when your son’s body arrived there, madam, and I wished to talk to you about it.”

Lady Etchingham pursed her lips, as if still considering whether Violet was there to steal from her or not. Finally, she relented, even if her invitation was ungracious. “Won’t you sit down?”

Violet found a spot on a leather chair that sat so high her feet did not touch the ground, even though she perched herself at the edge of the cushion.

“Forgive my intrusion, Lady Etchingham, but I have recently accompanied several bodies on the London Necropolis Railway down to Brookwood, and have noticed some oddities at the station on three separate occasions, the oddest being when your son arrived.”

Lady Etchingham sat straight in her chair, every bit the proud and stately countess. “What was so strange about my son?”

“He was met at the station by Miss Latham, did you know that?”

The countess’s lips were now a thin, nearly invisible line in her ashen face. “Miss Latham was his fiancée,” she said.

“So I read in the papers. Wasn’t she supposed to be buried next to your son? I was at Brookwood yesterday and noticed his unusual placement outside the family mausoleum. Would you be willing to tell me why he is located outside the walled area surrounding the tomb?”

Once again, Lady Etchingham did not directly answer Violet. “Why were you poking around the cemetery?”

Violet replied as vaguely as the countess had. “I am an undertaker. Burial places interest me.”

Lady Etchingham’s look was frosty. “And somehow your obsession with graves means I must answer ridiculous questions? This household has hardly entered its first period of mourning, and we are not taking visitors. I made an exception for you, Mrs. Harper, as I thought that as a funeral woman you might have been coming in some sort of comfort capacity. If you’re actually here under some pretense in order to secure gossip about my son, I’ll have you run out of London.”

That was certainly an interesting reaction. “My lady, I trade in funerals, not slander. Actually, I was wondering who the family undertaker is who prepared your son.”

“Of what importance is it? How could it possibly interest you?”

Violet chose her next words carefully. “When Miss Latham met your son’s body at the station, she seemed . . . distressed over his condition. I, too, was a bit shocked.”

“What do you mean?”

“In my estimation, he was not properly prepared.”

Lady Etchingham huffed. “As though the opinion of some stranger is of importance to us. It is obvious to me that you are seeking information so you can tattle to the newspapers some sort of salacious detail about my son’s death.”

“Why would you think I wish to tattle to others about Lord Blount?”

“Doesn’t everyone want to gossip about their betters? Especially when they find out—”

“Mother, are you in here?” came a deep male voice from outside the door. “I hear an undertaker came to see—Oh, pardon me for intruding.” A man of about thirty years of age entered, obviously Roger Blount’s older brother. He was stunningly handsome, with auburn hair in a longer, curling fashion that she’d never seen before on a man and sea-green eyes that invited a woman in for an unchaperoned swim. For a moment, Violet wondered why Margery Latham would have chosen Roger instead of this brother.

His lopsided grin suggested that he was well aware of the effect he had on women, and Violet immediately realized why Miss Latham might have shied away from him.