3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
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they removed their jackets to expose faultless white linen shirt-fronts over their noble and so vulnerable breasts, shook hands with their seconds (who – not being heroes – were permitted a slight tremor of the fingers) then strode unconcernedly to the fatal line, as if … Oh, and any other nonsense you care to add. Write it for yourselves and thank the gods that no girl stays a twelve-year-old for ever. But that’s why I knew enough to imagine how it would have happened three days before, at very much this time in the morning. The two pistol shots, almost simultaneous. Then the frightened seabirds wheeling and crying – unless the seagulls on the Calais sands are so blasé by now that they are not in the least alarmed by duellists’ shots. A figure flat on the sand, the two seconds bending over him, the doctor opening his bag. A little further off, the survivor with his left arm over his eyes to shield out the dreadful sight, pistol pointed to the sand, anger drained out of him; ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’
‘It really is the most appalling nonsense,’ my father said. ‘I wish you would not read these things.’
Back to being twelve, and my father – who was so rarely angry with anything or anybody – much annoyed with me. I had just twirled into the room in my new satin shoes and a fantasy of being a princess carelessly mislaid at birth – trilling that I hoped one day men might fight a duel for love of me. He’d caught me in mid-twirl, plumped me down in a chair and talked to me seriously.
‘Some day another man besides myself and your brother will love you. But hear this, daughter, if he proves to be the kind of fool who thinks he can demonstrate that love by violently stealing the life of another human being, then he’s not the man for my Liberty.’
‘But if he were defending my honour, Papa …’
‘Honour’s important, yes. But there’s wise honour and foolish honour. I wish to say something serious to you now, and I know if your mother were alive she’d be in utter agreement with me. Are you listening?’
I nodded, looking down through gathering tears at my new satin shoes and knowing the gloss had gone from them forever. He seldom mentioned our mother, who’d died when I was six years old and Tom four, but when he did, it was always in connection with something that mattered very much.
‘If you ever – may the gods forbid – get yourself into the kind of scrape where your honour can be defended only by a man being killed for you, then you must live without honour. Do you understand?’
I said ‘yes’, as firmly as I could, hoping the tears would not fall. He crouched beside the chair and put two fingers under my chin, raising it so that my eyes were on a level with his.
‘Don’t cry, my darling. Only, duelling is wasteful, irrational nonsense and I’m sure when you think more deeply about it, you will be of the same opinion. Lecture over. Now, shall we go out and feed the goldfish in the fountain?’
So that’s how I knew, you see – knew for sure that I’d been told a black lie. It was there in my mind as I looked down at his body, although it didn’t take clear shape until I walked across the beach. The duel never happened. My father was dead, that was true enough, even though not a fibre of my mind or body believed it yet. But it was impossible that he died that way, no matter what the note said or what the couple at the morgue believed. I was as sure of that as the sun rising behind the point, turning the rim of sea to bright copper. That rim was closer now and the tide seemed to be on its way in. I followed my own footsteps back over the sand, making a slow curve to the line of fishermen’s cottages. It looked as if the people in them must have started their day’s work, because there was a figure in front of the cottages looking out to sea. It would be a fine day for him, I thought. The sky was clear blue, with only a little breeze ruffling my bonnet ribbons. When I got to the town I’d drink some coffee and plan what questions to ask and where to ask them. Who saw him? Who were his friends in Calais? Who brought his body to the morgue? Above all, who wrote that lying and anonymous note to me at Dover? Insolent as well as lying, because the unknown writer had added a command:
Remain where you are for the present and talk about it to nobody. People who are concerned on your behalf will come to you within two or three days.
As if I could read that and wait tamely like a dog told to stay.
The man I’d noticed was still standing by the cottages. Closer to, he didn’t look like a fisherman. His clothes were black, like a lawyer’s or doctor’s, and he was wearing a high-crowned hat. He was thin and standing very upright, not looking out to sea now but back along the sands towards the point. Almost, you might think, looking at me. But of course he had no reason to look at me. He was simply a gentleman admiring the sunrise. Something about the stiff way he was standing made me think he might be an invalid who slept badly and walked in the sea air for the sake of his health. Perhaps he came there every morning, in which case he might have been standing just there three days ago, watching whatever happened or did not happen. I raised my hand to him. Of course, that was over-familiar behaviour to a man I’d never met, but the rules of normal life didn’t apply any more. Either he didn’t see my gesture, or he did and was shocked by it, because he turned and walked away in the direction of the town, quite quickly for a supposed invalid. Strange that he should be in such a hurry after standing there so long, but then everything was strange now.
Two mornings before I’d woken up on a fine Sunday in the inn at Dover, with nothing in the world to cause me a moment’s anxiety. Nothing, that is, beyond whether my aunt might have sent one of her servants or even a tame curate to recapture me. It was a small side room, the cheapest they had, looking out over the stableyard of the larger hotel next door. I remember standing barefoot at the window with my woollen mantle round my shoulders, looking down at the sunlit yard and the grooms harnessing two glossy bays to a phaeton, feeling well satisfied with myself and the world in general. My escape from the dim, sour-faced house at Chalke Bissett had gone entirely to plan. Even before the servants were up I was on my way across the field footpath to the village, knowing the area well enough by then to guess that there’d be a farm cart taking fruit and vegetables into Salisbury. The driver said he’d take me there for a kiss, but I bargained him down to one shilling and insisted on sitting in the back, along with withy baskets full of strawberries and bunches of watercress.
From Salisbury, I took a succession of stage and mail coaches, much as I’d planned from the road book giving coach routes and times in my aunt’s small library. Her road book was out of date, like everything else in the house, so some of the times were wrong and I had to wait for hours in the street outside various inns, trying hard to be inconspicuous in my mantle that was too heavy for a warm June day and the battered leather travelling bag that I would not allow anybody else to carry because I was unsure how much to tip. Salisbury to Winchester took four hours and two changes of horses. At Winchester I managed to secure the last outside place in another coach that took me all the way across Hampshire.
It was a glorious evening, flying along on the top of the coach behind four fast horses with the scent of hay and honeysuckle in the air, haymakers out late with their scythes and rakes and the sun sinking in the west behind us, throwing their long shadows out over the shorn fields. I felt like singing, only it would have drawn the attention of the other outside passengers, a clerical-looking man with a cough and a farmer and his wife, loaded with packages that included a live duck in a basket with its head sticking out complacently, as if it too were enjoying the sweet air. We arrived at the changing point of Hartfordbridge in the early hours of the morning, when it was already getting light, so that spared me the worry and expense of a room in the inn. I simply sat on the edge of a horse trough, wrapped my mantle round me and ate the last slice of bread and butter I’d taken from my aunt’s kitchen.
From Hartfordbridge it was a long and expensive day’s journey into Kent and Tunbridge Wells. In this fashionable place, spending the night on the edge of a horse trough was out of the question, but luckily I’d made friends with a lady on the journey, travelling to meet her husband from a boat at Chatham. We shared a room and a large but lumpy double bed at a modest inn. Over a supper of cold beef pie