ALAN GOT A CALL FROM DEREK AS WE WERE SITTING IN FRONT OF the fire that evening, trying to ignore the storm outside. He took the call in his office, but came padding back into the parlor with the phone. “Derek wonders if I could run over to the museum tomorrow. They’re ready to begin sorting out the storeroom and would like my help. Will that upset any of your plans?”
“Not a bit, since I have no plans. And I’m dying to know what you find, besides. Still no chance I could help, I suppose?”
He shook his head, as I’d expected he would, and told Derek he’d meet him at nine o’clock.
“What will you be looking for?” I asked when he’d snapped off the phone.
“Your guess is as good as mine. First we’ll have to figure out what Bill’s system was, assuming he had one.”
“Oh, I know a little about that. Walter told me. Bill was sorting things by families, and within families by date. There are other piles for big-deal events, local and national, and of course those overlap with the family ones. It’s all fairly complicated and needs to be catalogued and cross-referenced, and as far as I could tell when I worked up there that one day, Bill hadn’t got around to doing much of that for the newer stuff.”
Alan groaned. “I was never meant for a librarian.”
“That’s why you need me. I’m good at that kind of thing.”
“Well, you needn’t be smug about it, my dear. Much as I’d appreciate your help, it can’t be allowed, and that’s that. So you can get on with Christmas preparations. There isn’t a mince pie in the house,” he added reproachfully.
“I know, I know. I like them, too. But we still have over a week. I might make a batch of cookies tomorrow. They’re easier than mince pies and all that fiddling around with tart pans. But then I think I’ll ask Jane if we can talk to one more person about Bill. There’s some woman, a widow of one of Bill’s friends from way back when. She might just know something.”
“You never know,” was Alan’s tepid comment as he got up to poke the fire and add another log.
Privately I was of the same opinion. In fact, I had decided that if I didn’t learn something of importance, some hint that I was looking in the right direction, I was going to give up the whole thing. Maybe Bill’s death had been the purest accident. Maybe he’d gone down in the cellar to deal with the rats. Maybe Walter was attacked by some kid in search of drug money, who trashed the museum out of pique when he didn’t find what he needed.
So it was in no very hopeful mood that I plodded across the back lawn on Monday morning. I was bringing a package of freshly baked butter cookies to share with Jane over coffee, but I nearly dropped them several times. The back garden was a bumpy, irregular mass of ice, almost impossible to walk on, and made worse by the twigs and small branches that littered the ground. I looked around and then decided not to. The place was a mess, and cleanup would take forever, but there was nothing to be done until the ice melted, and I might as well ignore what couldn’t be fixed right then.
Jane’s dogs greeted me eagerly as I walked through her back doorway.
“All right, kids, be good, now. These cookies aren’t for you.”
“Isn’t the cookies,” Jane said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. “Haven’t had their w-a-l-k today.”
The dogs recognized that particular word, even spelled out. Their whines and tail waggings became even more frantic.
“Not today,” said Jane firmly. “You’ve been out. That’s enough. SIT!”
Reluctantly, every sense a-quiver, they sat, reproach writ large in their eyes. I followed Jane into the kitchen and shut the door behind me. “I wouldn’t think even they could keep their equilibrium on that ice,” I said, sitting down at her kitchen table.
“They can’t. Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Legs splayed out like newborn colts,” she went on, chuckling. “Could barely stand up long enough to do what they went out for.”
“I’m not sure I can stand up long enough to do what I intended today, either. I’d thought about going to see that last woman on your list, the widow?”
“Leigh Burton. Yes.” Jane considered. “Bit of an iceberg, but she’ll talk, if you can get her going”
“Another Stanley?”
“No. He wants to talk about himself. She wants to talk about George.”
“That’d be her late husband.”
“And Bill’s best friend at Luftwich, though they had little enough in common. George’s parents were well off, had a country estate, all that. But the estate was near here. Suppose there were common roots, something of that sort.”
“Was Leigh from around here?”
“No. George met Leigh at Hurstpierpoint.”
“Hurstpierpoint? Isn’t that the public school near here? I thought it was a boys’ school.”
“Is. Always was. Leigh lived in the village, worked at her father’s tobacconists’ shop. Pretty girl.”
Jane said no more, but her tone of voice said it all. I could see Leigh Burton, or whatever her name had been before she married. A sweet, pretty girl, working where the boys would come for sweets and the occasional forbidden cigarette. Chocolate-box prettiness, probably, all pink and white complexion and blond curls, irresistible to an impressionable young man just beginning to appreciate the charms of the opposite sex.
I wondered what would have happened if their marriage had lasted beyond George’s youth.
“Was George—um—of an intellectual bent?”
“Smarter than she was, do you mean? Don’t need to pussyfoot with me, you know. Yes, he was. Wanted to go in for engineering. One reason he became a pilot. Got into the war earlier than Bill, talked him into asking for assignment to Luftwich.”
“They stayed close, then?”
“Like brothers.”
“Did they get in touch with each other after the war? After Bill came back home, I mean?”
“George never came back. Plane shot down during Normandy invasion. No survivors.”
I closed my eyes, reminded once more of how horrifically England had suffered in what was, to me, mostly a history lesson. “Bill must have been devastated when he found out.”
“Yes. Here’s your coffee.”
All right, so Jane didn’t want to talk about that part. The terrible shock of George’s death might have been the reason Bill refused to talk, ever, about his war experiences. He must have told Jane just enough for her to understand his pain, but she wasn’t willing to share it. Fair enough, unless it was relevant to our problem.
Probably it wasn’t, though. For now I’d let it go and concentrate on Mrs. Burton.
“So do you think the roads are too bad to try to see her today?” I pursued, after we’d each had more cookies than were good for us.
“Warming up,” Jane said, glancing out the window. “Hear the dripping? Streets probably clear by afternoon.”
“Where does she live, at Heatherwood House?”
“Not she. Inherited some money, bought herself a nice house. Stone’s throw away, just off the High Street.”
“Well, I don’t intend to go around throwing any stones today, or walking anywhere, either. Can you drive us, or give me directions?”
“Give you directions. Easy enough. Get on better by yourself. Leigh doesn’t like me.”
“Why not, for heaven’s sake?” Jane liked, and was liked by, almost everybody. She was that kind of person.
“George died. Bill lived.”
Sometimes Jane’s terse style hides a depth of insight into the human heart that is almost epic.
So Jane gave me directions and a phone number, and that afternoon, after a hasty lunch (Alan decided not to come home) and a call to make sure Mrs. Burton was home and would see me, I went off in search of information I had little hope of finding.
Her house, I discovered, deserved a better adjective than “nice.” It had probably been the home of a wealthy wool merchant, built perhaps a hundred years before mine, which would put it early in the 1500s sometime. It was a museum piece, lovingly restored and maintained in its half-timbered glory. I had passed it and admired it a hundred times without ever bothering to find out who lived inside. That inheritance must have been a handsome one, I mused as I rang the bell with something like awe.
I waited long enough, before the bell was answered, for my imagination to conjure up an anachronistic picture of a maid in cap and apron. Calling on memories of my favorite Agatha Christie books, I decided she would be wearing a neat flowered-print dress for daytime; black was for evening. Her name would be something like Florence—“faithful Florence.” She would drop me a small curtsy when she answered the door and would go off to see if the mistress was “at home.” Or perhaps she would have been told I was coming and would put me in the parlor to wait …
The door was opened by a tall, slender woman with steel-gray hair, wearing a blue wool dress and pearls. The pearls looked very expensive indeed, and the dress certainly had not come off the peg. It was cut with a high neck, perhaps to hide the wrinkles of age, but the face above the soft blue wool had the taut firmness that comes only from youth or excellent cosmetic surgery. She held a walking stick, with a finely wrought silver handle and ivory inlays in the ebony shaft.
“Mrs. Martin? I’m Leigh Burton. Do come in.”
I blinked away images of the maid and tried to adjust my other ideas as well. This woman had never in her life possessed chocolate-box prettiness. She would have been truly beautiful when she was young, perhaps a Diana Rigg type, with high cheekbones and an aristocratic bearing. She was still striking, even at eighty-whatever, and her accent was impeccable.
What in the world had she been doing in a tobacconist’s shop in the village of Hurstpierpoint sixty years or so ago? I was consumed with curiosity, but there was really no tactful way to ask.
I collected my scattered thoughts as she showed me into a drawing room—it was the only possible term for the room—that would have made any antique collector go weak at the knees. I’m no expert about fine furniture, never in my life having been able to afford it, but I’ve visited enough museums to know that some of these pieces belonged in one.
Curiouser and curiouser.
“May I offer you some sherry?” My hostess seated herself, somewhat stiffly, on a fragile chair I wouldn’t have dared touch, let alone sit in. The piecrust table next to it held a silver tray with a crystal decanter that was definitely not of recent manufacture, and two small, exquisite glasses. I was certain that they, unlike my sherry glasses, had not come from Marks and Spencer’s at five pounds the set.
“No, thank you. It’s a trifle early for me. But please …” I gestured at the tray.
Mrs. Burton gave me a wintry smile and folded her hands in her lap. I perceived that the offer had been a pro forma gesture, and also that she was not going to help me get started with my interview. Well, she hadn’t been all that cordial on the phone, either, but Jane had said that talking about George was one of Mrs. Burton’s favorite pastimes. So I’d let her talk about George.
“I do apologize for intruding on your time,” I began, “but as I said on the phone, I’m trying to write a book about the war, for Americans but from an English point of view. I’ve always felt that people of my generation didn’t really understand what it was like for you folks over here, even though we lived through it back in the States. And of course for the younger people it’s all something they read about in the history books.”
I stopped to draw breath. I was explaining too much. The more one tries to prop up a story, the more it sounds like the fabrication it is. Well, I was stuck with it now.
“So I thought I’d begin with some of the people in Sherebury and their stories. And Jane Langland told me of your personal tragedy, and I wondered if you might be willing to tell me about it. If it’s not too painful, of course.”
Another chilly smile. “It happened many, many years ago, Mrs. Martin. I am not so thin-skinned as all that. What do you want to know?”
“Well, really, anything you can tell me about Mr. Burton and Luftwich. I’m trying to get a feeling for the period, you see. Did you two meet at the base?”
Well, she wouldn’t know I knew better, would she? And it probably had nothing to do with my inquiry, but I couldn’t restrain my curiosity about her.
“Yes. Well. You’ll understand that some of my memories are apt to be rather vague. Don’t rely on me for exact details. But if it’s atmosphere you want …” She paused for a moment and then went on, and her voice took on a different quality, less brisk, warmer.