Charles Todd - A Duty to the Dead

But Mrs. Talbot wouldn’t hear of it. “Nonsense. Bring her here, Mattie.”

And in due course, Mattie returned with the laundress. She might have been young and pretty fourteen years ago, but hard work had toughened her skin and reddened her hands and taken away her youth.

Her name, Mattie informed us, was Daisy.

“Hallo, Daisy,” I said. “It’s kind of you to speak to us. We’re concerned about Lily Mercer. Did you know her?”

“She’s dead,” Daisy answered bluntly. She was clearly ill at ease.

“Yes, I know that. But as her family has left England, I’m hoping to find someone who can tell me a little about her.”

“We was employed here, when this house was let to visitors to London. That was when Mr. Horner owned it, and didn’t want to live here anymore. He said it was haunted by his wife’s ghost. Which is absurd, o’ course. But he believed it. And so we stayed on as staff, those that chose to stay, and went with the house, so to speak. When Mr. Horner died of his grief, the house was sold to Mrs. Talbot’s brother, and then she inherited it from him.”

“What happened to the rest of the staff?”

“Some stayed. Others gave in their notice.”

“Tell me about Lily?”

“There’s nothing to tell. She died here-” Her eyes slid toward Mrs. Talbot’s face. “And soon after, her family went away. Like you said.”

I tried another approach, but Daisy remained tight-lipped. I was surprised that she’d even admitted she knew Lily. I thought it likely that curiosity had got the better of her, and she was here to satisfy it. Or see if there was anything in it for herself?

“Speak up, Daisy, the lady and the gentleman want to hear what you have to say.”

But Daisy stuck to her story, and that was that.

We thanked Mrs. Talbot after she was dismissed, and Mattie came to see us to the door.

“Damn!” Peregrine said as it shut behind us.

The snow was a little thicker, but not intending to last. I thought the temperature had eased up a very little.

We were about to walk toward the corner in search of a cab when the tradesman’s door opened and closed quietly, and there was Daisy, a shawl thrown over her head, coming quickly toward us.

“Miss!”

I stopped, my hand on Peregrine’s arm. “Daisy?”

“Yes, Miss. I’m sorry, but we were all sworn to secrecy when Lily died. Mr. Horner didn’t want the story getting about, scaring off people wanting to let the house for the Season. I couldn’t tell Mrs. Talbot, could I?”

“No, of course not.” I looked around, searching for somewhere we could stand and talk without freezing to death. But there was no place except the square and we didn’t have a key.

“Did you like Lily?” I asked, trying to learn as much as possible while Daisy was in the mood to talk to us. But she hesitated, and I said, “There’s five pounds for you, as a reward for helping us.”

Her eyes lit with avarice. “Thank you, Miss, I could use the money.”

I took a five-pound note from my purse but held on to it.

Daisy said, her words coming quickly, “She didn’t just die here, did she? She was murdered. The staff had the evening off, except for Lily, who was set to looking after the little boys. But she was to meet the young man she was walking out with, and she wasn’t happy about missing him. Still, she went upstairs to see the lads to bed. It was the last time I saw her. She hadn’t come back down again, by the time I was leaving. Later we heard that one of the lads had killed her, that he’d used his pocketknife on her, mutilating her something fierce. But I don’t see how that can be, do you? A pocketknife? He must have come down to the kitchen for something larger. At any rate, the family left London sudden-like, and Mr. Horner paid off any of us that wanted to leave, but swore us all to secrecy. Bad for business, he said. That’s what murder was.” She finished, eyeing the five-pound note.

“What was Lily like?”

“She was always out for herself. Always looking to better herself. She’d study the photographs in the London Gazette, and carry herself like them, head up, back straight, and copy their style of clothes for her day off. Silk purse out o’ a sow’s ear, that’s what it was, and her telling me that my hands were too big and my fingers too thick. And how was I to help that, I ask you, when I was the laundress!” Her grievance might have been old but it was fresh. “She had a temper too.”

“Was Lily good to the children in her care?”

Daisy shrugged. “I can’t say. But I remember one of the lads leaned over the upstairs railing one day and called her a nasty name, and she told him he was a monster and God would see to him one day.”

I could feel Peregrine stirring beside me.

“Which one? Do you remember?”

“Lord if I know,” she said, “I was never abovestairs. We come home at eleven that night, as we was told to do, to be ready for church service the next morning, and there was police everywhere, and Mrs. Graham crying as if she’d never stop, and Mr. Graham was pacing, his face black as Satan, and I don’t know where the lads were, but I heard they’d been clapped up in their rooms. I came to the servants’ door to bring hot water to the housekeeper, and I could hear Mrs. Graham begging them not to take her son from her.”

Mr. Graham-Peregrine’s father-was long dead by that time. It must have been Robert who was pacing.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked.

“They said someone had cleaned away most of the blood before the police got there. That was strange, wasn’t it, but Mrs. Graham claimed she couldn’t have the poor girl seen like that, it was indecent and horrid. All I know is, there was three sheets missing, the next time I counted the wash, and I got the blame for ruining them and hiding it.”

“Did you go to the services for Lily? Did you see her family there? How did they take their daughter’s death?”

“There wasn’t no one but her mother, her sister, and her brother. There was no church service that I heard of. And I asked.” She was stamping her feet against the cold now, and casting anxious glances at the door behind her, as if half afraid someone would see her talking with us. “It was the talk of the servants’ hall. Everyone felt she didn’t deserve to be abandoned like she was, by her own family. I heard they went out to New Zealand before she was hardly cold. If it had been my daughter, now, I’d have had her ashes and taken her with me.”

“Perhaps they did,” I said. Part of the agreement with the Graham solicitor, to remove all traces of the girl, even a gravestone?

I couldn’t imagine such thoroughness to protect Peregrine, already in the asylum. It would make more sense if the murderer had been Arthur.

I gave the woman the five-pound note, and she bobbed her head, thanking me, and quietly opened the door. With a glance into the passage behind her, she said, “I said I didn’t know one boy from the other, and it’s true. But the one that killed her, he was the apple of his mother’s eye. It like to have killed her too.”

Waiting for a cab, Daisy’s voice echoed in my ears. “…He was the apple of his mother’s eye…”

Even under great stress, I couldn’t envision Mrs. Graham referring to her stepson in that fashion. But she had called Arthur her favorite.

Stop now, I told myself. Arthur’s dead, and what good will it do to bring down his reputation now? He can’t be punished, and if there’s judgment beyond the grave, he’s long since been judged.

But what about the man beside me? He would never have his freedom or his reputation restored.

Jonathan I could accept as a murderer. Wasn’t that odd? His callousness was only too evident, and for all I knew about murderers, that must count as one of the indications that a man could kill. But he was a soldier now, and bitter, and disillusioned. He might have been very different before the war.