3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ She was wearing her usual black silk and widow’s cap and carrying an ebony walking cane. I stopped reading. She came over and looked at my book.

      ‘I don’t approve of Mr Shelley. If they must have poetry, Mr Pope is best. Mr Pope is sensible.’

      ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

      It was no part of my plan to be dismissed on my first morning. She turned to the children. At least they did not seem scared of her.

      ‘Have they been good, then? Have they been quiet and obedient?’

      Not the occasion either to discuss the educational theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

      ‘Yes, ma’am.’

      ‘You must keep them working hard. Henrietta, what’s fourteen minus seven plus nineteen?’

      She fired questions at them for several minutes and, from the nod she gave me, seemed reasonably satisfied. Yet, now and again, I caught her looking at me in a considering way. Perhaps it was only to do with my suspect taste in poetry, because at the end of it she simply wished me good morning and went with as little fuss as she’d arrived.

      Our dinner at half past two was shepherd’s pie and blancmange with bottled plums. In the afternoon I helped Henrietta and James cultivate their plots on the south side of the walled vegetable garden. Henrietta was wrapped in a brown cotton pinafore from neck to ankles to protect her dress. She said she hated gardening because it was dirty. Every time she saw a worm she screamed and one of the gardeners’ boys had to come running over to take it away. I liked the kitchen garden because it felt warm and secure inside its four high walls of rosy brick, with the vegetables growing in lush but orderly rows and the gardeners hoeing in between them in a slow rhythm that was probably much the same when Adam was a gardener.

      When the stable clock struck five it was time to take the children back to the schoolroom for their bread and milk and have them washed and changed for their summons downstairs. This time there was no sign of Sir Herbert. Lady Mandeville was on her sofa, Mrs Beedle and Celia sitting by the window sewing. A tall, dark-haired young man was standing looking out of the window with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets. From his manner of being at home and my memory of him in Calais, I knew he must be Celia’s brother. I stopped a few steps inside the doorway and bent down to straighten James’s collar, giving myself time to think. There was no reason to fear Stephen Mandeville would recognise me. As far as I remembered, he hadn’t even glanced my way in the hotel foyer and it had been dark at our second near-meeting on the deck of the steam packet. The question was whether Celia had said anything to him about seeing me at Calais. I glanced towards her, hoping for some signal, but caught Lady Mandeville’s eye instead. She nodded at me to come over to her.

      ‘Miss Lock, may I introduce my son Stephen. Stephen, Miss Lock, our new governess.’

      It was graceful in her, to introduce us properly. Her son’s response was equally graceful, a touch of the hand, a slight movement of the upper body that was an indication of a bow, though not as pronounced as it would have been to a lady. The dark eyes that met mine gave no indication that he remembered seeing me before. Celia glanced up from her sewing.

      ‘Miss Lock, do you sketch? Should you mind if I consulted you sometimes about my attempts?’

      Her anxious eyes answered my question. She hadn’t told her brother. I should be delighted, I said. Soon after that they went in to dinner and we were free to escape to the nursery quarters.

      The next day, Saturday, followed much the same pattern in the schoolroom. On Sunday we all went to church, the children travelling with their parents in the family carriage a mile across the park to the little Gothic church by the back gates, the rest of us walking in the sunshine. The family sat in their own screened pew up by the altar, at right angles to the rest of the congregation, so I had only a glimpse of Celia, solemn and dutiful in an oyster-coloured bonnet, and Sir Herbert looking stern, as if he were only there to make sure that God and the clergyman did their duty.

      After church, once the family had driven away in the carriage, there was a rare chance for the servants to linger in the sun and gossip. I strolled among the gravestones and round the old yew trees, catching the occasional scrap of conversation. There were quite a few complaints about being worked too hard, not only the usual burden, but something more.

      ‘… all the bedrooms opened and cleaned, even the ones they haven’t used for years …’

      ‘… bringing waiters in from London, just for the weekend. Where they’re going to put them all …’

      ‘So I said I didn’t think it was very respectful having a ball, with the poor old king not even buried yet.’

      ‘Well, he will be by then, won’t he?’

      ‘I think they’re going to announce an engagement for Miss Celia.’

      ‘They’d never go to all that trouble, would they?’

      I tried to hear more, but the women who were talking saw me and lowered their voices. I wandered away to look more closely at some of the gravestones. The oldest of them went back two hundred years or more and although they looked higgledy-piggledy, leaning at angles among the long grass and moon daisies, there was an order about them. Ordinary folk were on the outside, nearest the old stone wall that divided the churchyard from the grazing cattle, then upper servants at Mandeville Hall, still defined even in death by their service to the family, forty years a keeper, thirty years a faithful steward. Nearest the church, protected by a grove of yew trees, were the big table tombs of the Mandeville family themselves. I was reading the florid description of the virtues of the fifth baronet, as distinguished in his Piety and Familial Duty as in the high service of his Country, when I heard footsteps on the dry ground behind me.

      ‘He really was the worst villain of the lot of them,’ a man’s voice said over my shoulder. ‘Made a fortune selling bad meat to the army.’

      I turned round and saw Stephen Mandeville standing there smiling in grey cutaway jacket and white stock with a plain gold pin, tall hat in hand. I dare say my mouth dropped open. I’d assumed he’d gone back in the carriage with the rest of the family. He came and stood beside me.

      ‘I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’

      I tried to compose myself and answer him in the same light tone.

      ‘Not in the least. I suppose he had some good qualities.’

      ‘Not that I’ve heard of.’

      The irreverence for the family surprised me, until I remembered that they weren’t his ancestors. He strolled on to the next tomb and in politeness I had to follow him.

      ‘The carving on this one is thought to be quite fine, if you have a taste for cherubim.’

      To anyone watching – and I was quite sure that some of the servants would be watching – the son of the house was simply being polite and showing some of the family history to the new governess. I knew there was more to it than that.

      ‘I am glad that you’re here, Miss Lock. My sister needs a friend.’

      He said it simply in a quiet voice, unlike his bantering tone when he’d been talking about the tombs. I glanced up at him.

      ‘I’m sure Miss Mandeville has many friends.’

      ‘Not СКАЧАТЬ