3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
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She was so soft and kind that I had to fight the temptation to lean on her and cry all over her rose mantle.
‘Oh, you poor darling. I suffer such headaches too. I have some powders in my room, if you’d let me …’
I straightened up, found my handkerchief and mopped my face.
‘No, it’s quite all right, thank you. I have … I have friends waiting outside. I am grateful for …’
And I simply fled, through the foyer, down the steps and out to the street. I couldn’t risk her kindness. It would break me down entirely.
I walked around until I’d composed myself, then began inquiring at the lodging houses and smaller, less expensive hostelries in the side streets. There was a different spirit to this part of the town, away from where the rich foreigners stayed. The narrow streets were shadowed, shutters closed, eyes looking out at me through doors that opened just a slit and then shut in my face. People here did not care for questions because Calais had so many secrets. Forty years ago those streets would have sheltered cloaked and hooded aristocrats, trying to escape from the guillotine, paying with their last jewels for the secrecy of the same brown-faced men who now looked at me with wary old eyes. Not much more than twenty years ago, in the late wars with Napoleon, spies from both sides would have come and gone there, buying more secrecy from the men of middle years who now leered from behind counters. Their many-times-great grandfathers had probably taken money from spies watching King Henry’s army before Agincourt. Whatever had happened to my father was only the latest in a long line of things that were never to be mentioned. A few people opened their doors and were polite, but always the answer was the same. They regretted, madame, that they had knowledge of no such man.
And yet my father must have stayed somewhere, or at the very least drunk wine or coffee somewhere. In his last letter, written from Paris, he’d said he expected to be collecting me from Chalke Bissett in a week. Allow two days for travelling from Paris to Calais, one day for crossing the Channel, the next to travel on to Chalke Bissett, that meant three days spare. Had he spent the time in Paris with his friends, or at Calais? Was it even true that he’d died on the Saturday, as I’d been told? How long had his body been lying in that terrible room? I was angry with myself for all the questions I had not asked and resolved to do better in future.
A clock struck two. There were roads straggling out of town with more lodging places along them, but they’d have to wait until later. I tried one more hostelry with the sign of a bottle over the door, was given the usual answer, and added another question: could they kindly give me directions to the burial ground? It was on the far side of the town. The sky was blue and the sun warm, seagulls crying, white sails in the Channel, all sizes from small scudding lighters to a great English man-o’-war. My lavender dress and bonnet were hardly funeral wear but my other clothes were on the far side of the Channel. My father wouldn’t mind. Too little care for one’s appearance is an incivility to others: too much is an offence to one’s intelligence.
Reverend Bateman’s expression as he waited for me by the grey chapel in its grove of wind-bent tamarisks showed that my appearance was an offence to him.
‘Are there no other mourners?’
‘None,’ I said.
An ancient carriage stopped at the gates, rectangular and tar-painted like a box for carrying fish, drawn by two raw-boned bays. They had nodding black plumes between the ears, as was fitting, but the plumes must have done service for many funerals in the sea breeze because most of the feathers had worn away and they were stick-like, converting the bays into sad unicorns. Two men in black slid off the box and another two unfolded from inside. The coffin came towards us on their shoulders. The black cloth covering it was so thin and worn that even the slight breeze threatened to blow it away and the bearers had to fight to hold it down.
I refuse even to remember the next half hour. It had nothing to do with my living father. He would have laughed at it. We had our five-pounds-sixteen-and-four-pence-worth of English funeral rites and that is all that can be said. Afterwards the four bearers and two men in gardener’s clothes whom I took to be gravediggers, stood around fidgeting. It seemed that I was required to tip them. As I handed over some coins, and Reverend Bateman studiously looked the other way, I realised that the thinnest of the bearers was the man from the mortuary. I’d been trying to work up the resolution to go back there with some of the questions I’d been too shocked to ask on the first visit. At least this spared me the journey.
‘Were you there when my father’s body was brought in?’
He gave a reluctant nod.
‘I was as well,’ said one of the others, a fat man in a black tricorne hat with a nose like a fistful of crushed mulberries.
‘Who brought him in?’
They looked at each other.
‘Friends,’ said the thin one.
‘Did they leave their names?’
A double headshake.
‘How many?’
‘Two,’ said the fat one.
‘Or three,’ said the thin one.
‘What did they look like?’
An exchange of glances over my head.
‘English gentlemen,’ said the fat one.
‘Young, old, fair, dark?’
‘Not so very young,’ said the fat one.
‘Not old,’ said the thin one. ‘Not particularly dark or fair that we noticed.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘They said they’d be back soon to make the funeral arrangements.’
‘And did they come back?’
Another double headshake.
‘What day was it that they brought him in?’
‘Three days ago. Saturday,’ the fat one said.
‘Saturday, early in the morning,’ the thin one confirmed.
Behind them, the gravediggers were shovelling the earth over my father’s coffin. It was sandy and slid off their spades with a hissing sound. Reverend Bateman was looking at his watch, annoyed that I should be talking to the men, all the more so because he clearly didn’t understand more than a word or two of French.
‘I have an appointment back in town. I don’t wish to hurry you, but we should be going.’
He clearly expected to escort me back. It was a courtesy of a kind, I suppose, but an unwanted one.
‘Thank you, but I shall stay here for a while. I am grateful to you.’
I offered him my hand. He shook it coldly and walked off. The four bearers nodded to me and followed him. The raw-boned unicorns lumbered their box-like carriage away. Reverend Bateman assumed, of course, that I wanted to be alone at my father’s grave, but I was discovering that grief does not necessarily show itself in the way people expect. I did indeed want to be on my own, but that was because I needed to think about what the bearers had said. Most of it supported the black lie. Two or three nameless gentlemen arriving with a shot corpse – that might be how things were done after a duel. Either it had happened that way, or the two of them had been well paid to say it did. But wasn’t it odd – even by the standards of duellists – that the supposed friends who brought his body to the morgue didn’t return as promised to make his funeral arrangements?
I began walking to the graveyard gates as I thought about it. I suppose I had my eyes on the ground because when I looked up the figure was quite close, walking towards me. At first I took him for one of the bearers, because he was dressed entirely in black. But no, this man was elderly and a gentleman, although not a wealthy one. His jacket was frayed at the cuffs, his stock clean and neatly folded but of old and threadbare cotton, not stiff linen, and his tall black hat was in need of brushing. A mourner, I thought; probably come