Charles Todd - A Duty to the Dead

The door of my room didn’t lock. I’d never given that a thought until now. Colder than the cold of the flat, I turned and went back to my bed, shoving a chair under the knob of the door. I huddled in the bedclothes, listening for snoring that would tell me he was asleep.

T HE NEXT THINGI knew, a watery sunlight shone through the curtains and splashed across my bed.

I sat up with a start, dressed hastily, and removed the chair from my door.

Peregrine Graham was asleep across the threshold of the outer door, and the instant he heard me, he opened his eyes and stared at me as if he hardly knew me.

“I’m awake.”

“I’m cold. I want my tea. Will you let me prepare it?”

“Go ahead.”

I busied myself with the tea things, then said, “You’ve got yourself a small problem. There’s no food in the flat. We’ll both starve.”

“I’ve considered that. You’ll go and buy what we need. If you call the police or in any way betray my whereabouts, I’ll kill Mrs. Hennessey. If she’s out, I’ll shoot the first three people I see on the street, and then myself. I’m a murderer. What can they do to me? A man can only hang once.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking me or not.

“Your family will be hurt-it will bring up all the old gossip and make their lives a misery.”

“Except for Arthur, who is dead and beyond hurting, I don’t really care.”

“That’s a vicious thing to say-”

He rose from his bedding, then faced me, taller, malevolent. “My stepmother treated me worse than an animal. She slept with her cousin before and after my father’s death. I don’t know if any of my half brothers are related to me. What do I owe any of them?”

“Her cousin-”

“Robert Douglas. He was always decent to me, I give him that-but he did nothing to protect me.”

Well, I thought, that certainly explains a good deal…if it’s true.

He saw the surprise in my face, and added, “I should have thought you’d guessed. You must have seen them together. You must have seen the resemblance between Timothy and Robert, if not Jonathan.”

But I’d thought they favored their mother…I said as much.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he responded impatiently. “But you haven’t lived with them and watched as I did when we were young. Look at their hands, they’re his, and the way their hair grows. The way their upper lips curl when they say words like church or children.”

It sounded more like obsession than observation, and he must have sensed my disbelief, because he went on earnestly, persuasively.

“I had no idea until one day I caught them in bed together. I was a child, I didn’t know what that meant. But that evening I was locked in my room and seldom allowed to join the family again until we were taken to London.”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. The only confirmation I had was the ease with which Robert came and went in that house, and his familiar attitude toward Mrs. Graham. But of course they were cousins-

“You have a devious mind for someone the world claims is half-witted.”

“I was told often enough that I was slow, stupid. I had trouble concentrating, and Jonathan took pleasure in taunting me about it. Mr. Appleby-our tutor-did nothing to stop him. I’d be tongue-tied with anger, and I must have seemed dull and belligerent and unable to learn. But in the asylum, I saw how half-witted children behaved, and I knew I wasn’t like them. Still, I’d been told the alternative was hanging, and I stayed in that God-bereft place and held my tongue. Literally. They thought after a time that I was mute, that it was the shock of what I’d done, or where I was. They got used to not hearing my voice from one month to the next.”

I hadn’t heard him speak when he arrived or as he left my care. Only in the privacy of the sickroom had he talked to me. And then not in the beginning.

The teakettle began singing merrily, jolting both of us. I made the tea, and while it steeped, I said, “Surely you remember what you did that sent you to the asylum.”

“My memory isn’t clear. Some of it was shock. Some of it was the nightmare of being taken from London directly to the asylum and never going home again. I was kept at the rectory until arrangements were made. I was dazed, confused, frightened out of my wits. I do remember being led away from something too ghastly to look at anymore. I could smell the blood on my hands and feel the stiffness of it on my shirt. And I remember vomiting on the stairs as we started down them. Robert took me away and tried to clean my face and hands, then shut me up somewhere. They were amazed to find me asleep on the floor when they came back for me. I remember they were shocked that I could sleep after what I’d done. I remember all that, but not what happened in that room-only in my dreams does it come back again, and for years I’d wake up screaming. I also remember standing in the drawing room of the London house, and my stepmother was telling someone-a policeman, I think-that she blamed herself for allowing me to accompany the family to London. She said that shutting me away in my room had made me resentful and angry, and twisted something in me, but she had thought London might be good for me. She’d wanted me to see a doctor there. It was the first I’d heard of it. She said-I can hear her voice now-that I’d killed the woman the way I’d have liked to kill her. That she’d found the pocketknife that my father had left me buried deep in her pillow one night, and never spoken of it.”

I felt cold, despite the tea. Peregrine was mad…however lucid he might seem at times.

But what was the difference between this man and Ted Booker? My conscience wanted to know. You were sympathetic enough to the soldier…

I tried to think of something else to talk about, something to take his mind off killing.

“Did you know where you were in London? Did you know the house where all this happened?” I was sure he couldn’t tell me.

“We were to spend the autumn in London. A month. My stepmother had friends there, relatives. We went up by train, and I was allowed to look out the window as long as I didn’t speak to anyone. The house in London seemed small after Owlhurst. But Timothy and Jonathan shared a room, and Arthur and I were put together. Robert took them to the zoo, but I stayed behind because I might make a scene. I was never allowed to see people, and my tutor told me that I was different and mustn’t make a fuss when I was told to stay in my room. He said people would stare at me and be unkind. I didn’t want to be stared at. And so they went to the Tower, and Arthur told me afterward about the cannon and the ravens. Everything was the same, I’d come to London but I might as well have stayed at home. There was an upstairs maid. She was pert, teasing, when no one else was about. I didn’t like her and told her so to her face. My stepmother put me in a room by myself, as punishment. One night there was a dinner party, and my stepmother went, taking Robert with her. I wasn’t well, I hadn’t been since I was put in the room alone. My head swam, and my stomach was queer. I remember lying on the floor, because it was cold, and it felt good. The rest is hazy, a botched jumble of images.”

He rubbed his face with his hands, scrubbing at it. I could hear several days’ growth of beard rasping against his palms, and his voice came through his fingers in an odd sort of echo that made it sound like someone else’s.

“That’s why it haunts me. I can’t make sense of things. What happened when, and who was there.”

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t kill that young woman?” I thought he was hoping to win me over with a lie.