Charles Todd - A Duty to the Dead

I went around the table without speaking. I was afraid to touch Peregrine, and the shared knowledge of war that had helped me deal with Ted Booker was no use to me here.

“Peregrine?” I spoke softly. “It’s Bess Crawford. What’s wrong?”

He started back as I spoke. “No, I won’t put my hands there-you can’t force-”

I looked from his staring eyes to the bloody entrails, and my heart turned over.

I hadn’t been there when Mrs. Graham found Lily Mercer. But I was seeing the scene now as Peregrine must have seen it.

“Peregrine-” I reached out for his arm, to turn him away, but he flung his arm out at me, knocking me halfway across the room, where I ended up next to a large basket of live chickens, their startled cackling adding to the nightmarish scene. This wasn’t a slim, dazed, and frightened fourteen-year-old. He was a fully grown man, and I was winded from the blow.

He was screaming, “No, don’t touch me! I won’t, I tell you, I won’t-!”

I had helped Ted Booker by taking part in his nightmare. I tried it now.

“But this is what you did, Peregrine. Do you hear me?” I said in a voice as near to that of Mrs. Graham as I could make it.

“ I didn’t touch her. I only wanted my knife-”

“You can’t have it. The police must take it. Look at what you did. Put your hands in her body, Peregrine, and touch what you have done! Your father would despise you, if he’d lived to see this. Here, hold out your hands, and I’ll show you how it feels to be ripped apart-”

He screamed and went on screaming, and then began beating at the front of his uniform, as if frantically trying to rub something off, his eyes wide with horror and revulsion. And he kept on beating at his chest before turning with such loathing in his face that I nearly fell back again into the basket of chickens.

“I hate you,” he said, no longer screaming, his voice cold and hard and young. “I have always hated you-”

He broke off, as if he’d been slapped, his head jerking.

And then to my astonishment, he began crying, silent tears of anguish rolling down his cheeks, and with a bravado I hadn’t thought possible, he reached out and buried his hands in the bloody mass.

“There,” he said. “I’m my father’s son, which is more than my brothers can say.”

I hurried to him, caught his hands, and with a cloth that hung from a hook by the table, I cleaned them as best I could. Then I made him dip them in a bucket of water standing beside a sheep’s carcass. I was crying myself now, tears of pity for a child who hadn’t been able to defend himself, tormented beyond bearing.

He seemed to shudder, and after a moment he said, “Bess?” As if he couldn’t see me there beside him. It was the first time he’d used my given name.

I dropped the cloth to the floor and took his arm.

“I’m here, Peregrine. It’s all right, come with me.”

He moved like a sleepwalker, and I led him like a little child back out into the shop. The butcher was standing there, hands to his sides, his expression one of pity mixed with horror.

I think he believed Peregrine was reliving some war experience, for he said to me in a low voice, “I’d not marry him, Miss. Not if I was you. Not in this state. He belongs in hospital, where they can see to him.”

I thanked him, telling him I would reconsider, and I led Peregrine out of the shop. The damp air clung to our faces as I guided him to the nearby side street, and we climbed the hill to the cathedral. It was the only quiet, empty place I could think of. We walked to the side door that I could see was open, on the south side, crossing the lawn wet with dew.

Inside it was cold and quite dark, the massive pillars almost ghostly sentinels against the windows. I found a bench in the back, and we sat down.

Peregrine was calmer now. As if the nightmare had receded and left him drained. I think I could have ordered him to jump from the squat tower and he’d have done it, his will destroyed.

We sat there for some time. I didn’t touch him, but I was close beside him, where he could sense my presence.

Gradually he seemed to recover. I could almost watch the progression of emotions. In the distance someone came in from another door, a woman, lifting the holly branches and fir boughs out of the vases by the altar and going off with them. I doubted she could see us here beneath the west doors. But I said nothing until she had come back for the vases and carried them away as well.

“Peregrine?”

“Where are we?” he whispered, looking at the cavernous nave and the long row of columns, the only light that small one in the altar and the rain-wet windows reflecting the dark day. “I don’t know this church.”

“Rochester Cathedral,” I replied. “Did you ever come here?”

He frowned. “Once. With my father. We saw Becket’s tomb-”

“That’s Canterbury.”

He didn’t answer. I thought perhaps he must have been very young at the time. His father hadn’t lived very long after Timothy’s birth. I could see them walking along together, man and child. Arthur would have been too young to accompany them. Peregrine would have still had his father to himself.

“Do you remember what happened in the-er-the shop where you waited for me?”

“There was someone who knew your family…”

“Yes. He’d have been curious about this uniform. He’s in my father’s regiment. And I couldn’t pass you off as a brother or a suitor, or he’d have known it was a lie.”

He turned to me, the first spark of the man I’d seen yet. “You don’t have suitors?”

I felt like laughing out loud. “Not at the moment, at least.”

“I’d forgot. You were in love with Arthur.”

“Hardly love.” Yet I could hear his laughter, remember the warmth in those blue, blue eyes, and still feel, sometimes, the touch of his hand, how it had seemed to open a world of happiness. No shadows, no secrets, just a good man, what people often called a natural leader, who had put aside his own pain to make the others in the ward believe they would all survive together.

“Well, then. You felt something. There was a softness in your voice when you spoke his name.” He paused. “It’s not there any longer.”

“No.” Which was the real Arthur? The dying man who gave others the gift of his spirit, or the devious man who had concealed the ugly crime of murder? Were they one and the same? How could they be? How could I care for one-and not the other?

I shook off that train of thought and went back to my probing. I wasn’t sure how far to press.

Then I remembered something that Daisy, the laundress in London, had said. “Someone had tried to clean away most of the blood-”

That hadn’t been what I needed to learn at the time, and so I had ignored the words. But now I began to see a picture of such hideous behavior that I felt ill.

Mrs. Graham had so terrified Peregrine that he had never really recovered from it-as much a victim of shock as Ted Booker cradling his dying brother in his arms. The dreams-

How could a woman commit such an act of betrayal? But there had been a choice. Peregrine-or her own son. And so she had destroyed her husband’s child with a cold and malicious trick.

And then she had displayed him to the London police and after that to everyone who mattered in Owlhurst-Inspector Gadd, the rector, Mr. Craig, Dr. Hadley, and Lady Parsons-to leave them in no doubt that Peregrine was a monstrous boy whom she had saved from prison but lost to the asylum. And all the while, the child who had really killed was safe at home with Robert Douglas.

He must have loved Mrs. Graham very much to allow himself to be used as he was-or perhaps it was his own child he was protecting, at any price?