Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
The Reluctant Telling
Ihad not sent word.
Mainwaring had walked out of Lady Larkspur’s drawing room never intending to discuss the weekend at Everthorne Manor again. I was disinclined to give him the courtesy of preparation.
His chambers were on Bedford Row, in a tall, narrow house whose brass plate read Mainwaring, Cole & Abbott and whose stairs smelled of beeswax and old paper.
A clerk in his thirties looked up from a ledger as I entered and made the brief calculation, visible behind his eyes, that his caller was not a tradesman and was unlikely to be a debtor.
“Lord Everthorne, to see Mr. Mainwaring.”
The clerk’s pen paused. “Have you an appointment, my lord?”
“I have not.”
He rose from his desk with the slow care of a man who had already decided the answer would be no but was reluctant to deliver it to a titled gentleman. “Mr. Mainwaring is in chambers, my lord, but I do not believe he is at liberty—”
“Tell him I am here. Tell him I shall wait in his outer office—displeased with my shabby treatment—in full view of his clients, and that I shall do so until he is at liberty.”
The clerk weighed me, weighed his own employer, and took the matter upstairs. He was back within minutes and led me to the first-floor landing without speaking. My threat had achieved the effect I intended.
Mainwaring’s chambers occupied the front of the house. He was standing behind his desk when I entered, wearing the look of a man who hoped he would never have to pay a certain debt. His bad luck the debt had just walked in through his door.
He inclined his head and said, with creditable evenness, “Lord Everthorne. This is a surprise.” He’d kept his composure. I had to give him that.
“Is it?”
“You should have sent word.”
“That is precisely why I did not.”
He gestured to the chair across the desk as he took his own seat. I declined it. The chair was lower than his own—a small architectural courtesy of the profession. Instead, I crossed to the window and stood with my back to it, which placed him in the light and required him to look up at me.
“My lord, I cannot conceive what business —”
“Can you not?”
His mouth tightened.
“Twelve years ago, you attended a house party at Everthorne Manor that ended in a young woman’s ruin.”
He passed a hand across his face.
“You were invited because you were William’s friend at Oxford. You were either present in the conservatory when Emily Driscoll was violated or came upon the scene shortly after. You did not name the man responsible then or since. I propose that you supply it now.”
“I cannot tell you what I do not remember,” he said, in a different voice altogether—thinner, drier, the voice of a man who had retreated to a safe position.
“Somehow I find that difficult to fathom.”
Mainwaring pulled at his collar. “I have made a life in the years since that night, my lord. I have a wife. I have two children. I have clients who would be ill served by my disinterring matters that do not concern them.”
“Lydia Gray made a life in that same period of time. She was fifty-two years old when a carriage ran her down on Gower Street. What transpired at that house party is directly related to her death. I should be obliged if you would make some attempt to remember.”
Perspiration shone on his brow. “I cannot speak ill of the dead.”
“If you’re referring to my brother, he’s past offense.”
A long silence. He looked at his hands, at the inkwell, at the window past my shoulder.
“What is it you imagine I know?” he said at last.
“I do not imagine.”
He went grey beneath the careful coloring of his face and closed his eyes. When he opened them, something in him had given.
“You cannot use any of this,” he said. “You understand that. There is no court that will hear it. Your brother is gone. Your father is gone. Whatever I tell you will be of no value in any forum that signifies.”
“That is my concern. Not yours.”
He nodded slowly. He drew breath. And then he came to his feet and started to pace behind his desk.
“After dinner,” he said, “we went to the billiards room. William, myself, Croome, and Brookes. Croome died of fever in India in fifty-one. Brookes lives in Edinburgh and has not been seen south of the border in seven years. Your brother liked our company because we did not contradict him. I shall not pretend otherwise. We were three sycophants and an heir who were drunk before ten.”
“Go on.”
“It was William who proposed it. I want you to be clear about that. He said —” Mainwaring’s voice caught.
“He said there were housemaids at Everthorne Manor who would be grateful for our attention. He said it would be a kindness to them. I remember Croome laughing, Brookes laughing, and, God help me, I remember laughing as well.”
“Continue.”
“We left the billiards room together. We had agreed to find a housemaid who could be…persuaded. I cannot tell you who suggested we look in the conservatory. I did not arrive at the same time as them. I had drunk too much, and I had a need that the brandy had made urgent. I told the others I would catch them up. And then I went out to the garden to relieve myself.” He looked at me with something like appeal.
“I am not proud of this. I am telling it as it occurred.”
“Get to the point.”
“I had been there perhaps two minutes when I heard her scream. The conservatory, as you know, has a glass roof. The sound reached out of the building as if it were screaming. I came round the hedge, and I—” He shut his eyes again.
“I ran, Everthorne. I shall tell you the truth and not embellish it. I ran toward the screaming because I was three-and-twenty years old and I was drunk and I did not yet understand what I had been a party to. I thought, in the moment, that we had begun something which one of us must now stop.”
“You arrived at the conservatory.”
“I arrived at the same moment as three other men. Coming from the other side. From the direction of the smoking room, I believe.”
“Who?”
“Your father.”
I had expected this. I made my face show nothing.
“And the others?”
“An older gentleman whose name I never learned. Forties or fifties. Sober dress. Heavy build. He had the manner of a guest of standing—not a tradesman, not a servant—but I could not place him in the company. I do not know that I had been introduced to him. I had not, certainly, drunk with him.”
“Could you describe him further?”
“Thick across the shoulders. He spoke once, that I heard, and his accent was northern—perhaps Yorkshire, perhaps further. I am sorry. It is what I recall.”
“And the third man.”
Mainwaring hesitated. “The third was—peculiar. He was dressed in black, sober as a judge in chapel. White at the collar, I thought at first he was a clergyman, but I could not later remember any clergyman among the guests. He was younger than the other two—perhaps forty. Pale. Composed. He did not exclaim when he saw what was in the conservatory. He stepped past your father and went directly to the girl. I remember thinking that he must be a physician, but he carried no bag, and he did not—he did not behave as a physician would have done.”
“How did he behave?”
“He was efficient.” Mainwaring’s voice had dropped. “He took her by the shoulders. He spoke to her. I could not hear the words. He did not console her. He instructed her. The hysterics quieted within a minute. He looked, my lord, like a man who had done this work before.”
I held very still. The ache in my leg, which I had been ignoring since I crossed the threshold, reasserted itself with a sharp, small cruelty.
“Do you remember anything further of him?”
“Only that he and your father exchanged a look, a look of two men who knew each other well.”
“And Emily Driscoll.”
“She was on the floor when I came in. Her dress was torn from the shoulder. There was blood—on her, on the tiles—more blood than I had thought a—than I had thought possible.” His voice cracked. “She was crying out a name. I could not make it out. The sober man got to her before I could hear it.”
“Did she say my name?”
“No, my lord. She did not say your name. Of that, I am certain.”
I had not known I was holding my breath until I let it out.
“Where was William?”
“Not in the conservatory. I do not know where he had gone. He was found—by your father, I believe—somewhere in the upper part of the house, not long after. I did not see him again that night.”
“And me.”
“My lord?”
“Was I in the conservatory?”
He looked at me for a long moment. The question, he understood at last, was not rhetorical.
“You arrived,” he said carefully, “at some point after the rest of us. I cannot tell you how long after. It may have been five minutes. It may have been twenty. You came in through the garden door. You were—” He stopped.
“Drunk.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Conscious.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“In what condition was my coat?”
He looked at his hands. “I did not look at your coat, Everthorne. I am sorry. I was looking at the girl. I have spent twelve years wishing I had looked elsewhere, and I cannot tell you a single useful thing about you when you came in. I can tell you that your father saw you and that his face changed. That is all.”
We stood in the kind of silence that follows a confession in a Catholic church. I had not expected to receive this much. I had not expected it to be so little.
“What became of Emily?”
“Her father was sent for. Apparently, he’d gone to bed early.
He was not a well man. By breakfast, he’d taken a weeping Emily home.
By the end of that day, you’d been sent off in disgrace, and the rest of us had gone our separate ways.
I have not spoken her name aloud, my lord, since the day I left Everthorne.
I have not, in all candor, spoken yours either, until last week. ”
“Mainwaring.”
“My lord?”
“The sober man. If you ever recall his name, or a place where you might have seen him since—if anything reaches you that even resembles his face—you will write to me. You will not seek to verify it. You will not approach him. You will write to me, at Everthorne House in Mayfair, the same evening.”
He looked up. “Why?” He had aged five years in twenty minutes.
“Because he would not have arrived at that conservatory by accident.”
I left him there, behind his desk, in the pale light from the window. I did not shake his hand. I did not look back from the door.
I sat in the carriage for some minutes.
A clergyman who was not a clergyman. A man who had done such work before. A man who exchanged with my father the look of two men who knew each other well.
The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw, of Kent. One hundred and fifty pounds a year, paid quietly into Coutts.
It was a leap. It was the leap of a man who had spent years in a war reading terrain from too little evidence. I had been right more often than wrong. And I knew the shape of a thing being hidden when I saw it.
I would tell Lark on Monday. I would tell her all of it.
I gave the driver the direction home.