The Old Contemptibles (21 page)

When she’d left the room, Melrose gazed after her. “Is that little girl from this area? She hasn’t a Cumbrian or Lancastrian accent at all.” He thought of the guttural stops and elided
l’
s of the regulars in the Old Contemptibles.

“No; her family’s from London. Well, what’s left of it. One aunt,” Crabbe said, “who is not, we understand, a very good sort.”

Madeline smiled slightly. “Aunt Tom. Hard to believe any woman would let herself be called ‘Aunt Tom.’ ”

“Thomasina, probably,” said Genevieve, absently, interested in little but the gold bracelet on her wrist.

“Why is it that Millie isn’t living with her aunt?”

Crabbe bit into his fortune cookie. “As I said, bad sort.”

What, Melrose wondered, did
that
mean? Prostitute? Terrorist? Moors-murderer?

“Millie didn’t want to go to her; she begged us to let her stay. We had no intention of doing so,” Genevieve was saying, “but
Adam
insisted.
Adam
thinks Millie is
grand.”
The emphasis made it clear that Genevieve thought neither of them so.

Madeline said, “The aunt apparently would have made the girl’s life hell because this person’s got no patience with . . . you-know.”

Since no one had mentioned a father, Melrose inferred that “you-know” was a sexual reference and that poor Millie was illegitimate.

“Beats her, the girl said. We did send her to stay with this Aunt Tom right after her mother’s, ah . . .” Crabbe looked down at his cup.

“Suicide,” said Genevieve impatiently. “Call it what it was.”

“Yes. And when she came back Adam insisted she come to us; there were, you know, bruises . . .”

“Horrible,” said Madeline. “We wanted to call police, but Millie got hysterical, even defended the woman, said she—Millie, I mean—had just had a bad fall. So we did nothing. And to think this aunt could do that after what the niece had been through.”

“Sex.” George offered his opinion abruptly. “ ‘Tom’ indeed. Victorian. Repressed. Pretty sister. Jealous. Dr. Viner knows. Tart?”

Melrose declined. He was more interested in finding Millie.

Which he did, after tea, when she was feeding hounds. As the cage of the kennel clicked shut behind, the raucous outcry he’d heard in the distance had died; hounds were gobbling down their glutinous feed and slurping at their water.

Mist had rolled in across the cobbled yard and covered their feet, Millie’s wellingtons squelching as she walked over to the wall to set down the empty buckets. For all the attention she paid, he might have been invisible. Then, with a feigned little start, she said, “Oh, hello,” as if she hadn’t noticed until that moment his approach through the rising ground mist.

“Don’t sound surprised. You knew I’d wonder just who I am, if I’m not what I say I am.”

She looked up at him, chewing at the inside of her mouth, as if now that he was here, she wasn’t too sure. “Oh,
I
don’t know that. I only know you’re not a book-cataloguer; you’re not really here to work on Mr. Holdsworth’s library.” Then she waited out the ensuing silence.

“Just how do you know that?”

“You told me.” She walked with her buckets through the door to the kennels. Hounds sounded as if they were rioting.

Melrose called after her, “What the devil’s that supposed to mean?”

She came out onto the cobbles and stared up at him. “If you
were
what you said, you’d have looked at my message, frowned, looked peculiar and read it out to everyone.” She shrugged. “But you made something up to say.”

He wouldn’t have minded so much being found out by Fellowes, or Madeline or
any
of them. But this eleven-year-old child with her witchy cat (Sorcerer had just emerged from the gloom) was really too much. “So you weren’t sure until then. Well, what would have happened if I
had
read it out?”

“I’d have said it’s a Chinese saying. Want to take a walk?” She was buttoning up an outgrown overcoat, short in the sleeves and not as long as her dress.

Melrose winced. “Are you sure you feel
safe,
walking about with a person who’s not what he says he is? I could be dangerous.”

“No more than anyone else around here. I want to show you something.”

 • • • 

“They told me it was an accident,” she said, as they stood on a small shelf of cliff surrounded by conifers that overlooked the foot of Wast Water. The three of them (Sorcerer making a third) had walked for perhaps ten minutes through the deeply wooded land and come out here, not far above the lake. “Come on,” Millie commanded, making her way down the rocks. Melrose followed.

It was not a cave, exactly, but another mass of lichen-covered rocks with the shelf above serving as a roof. Sphagnum moss dripped down from the rocks above. The overlapping flattish stones on which they stood, Millie pointing downward, were slippery with cladonia. “They said she slid and fell down onto the lake shore. See that sort of path?”

Not a path to walk down, certainly, more of a gully beside which ran a narrow beck. The path was an obstacle course of rock, roots, bracken and bog-myrtle. It would have been, as Millie was certainly smart enough to tell, hardly possible to
plunge
downward and into Wast Water. Too many things would have impeded the fall.

“Anyway, I tried it out. A person can’t.” Millie sat down and pulled up her knees.

“Tried
it? What on earth do you mean?”

“To fall. You can’t do it. I got some cuts, but that stump there stopped me after I’d gone a few feet.” She looked up at him. “Mum
was unhappy. She killed herself is what happened. You’d have to
walk
into that lake, anyway, to get deep enough.”

Melrose lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Millie.”

She was silent for a moment. “She found his body. I expect they told you that.”

“You mean Alex’s father.”

Millie nodded, her chin rubbing her knees. “Was that what made her unhappy?”

Melrose honestly thought she believed he knew. Because he wasn’t “who he said he was” and was therefore a mystery, he was fast gaining omniscience, perhaps, in her mind. “I didn’t know your mother; I can’t say; but something like that, finding someone you’re . . . fond of, dead. It could be terrible enough, I’d certainly think.”

“But it didn’t make Alex’s mother kill
herself.
Because it was years ago. Then maybe she didn’t care as much as mine did.”

Melrose said nothing; the coal-end of his cigarette as he dragged on it sparked the blue dusk. He looked up, suddenly; he thought he’d heard something like the crack of twigs. “What’s that?”

“What? I didn’t hear anything.”

“You must be deaf. It was loud as a pistol shot.”

“You’ve just got this big imagination. It’s from sitting here in this fog.” She sighed. “Alex knows his mum didn’t kill herself. All he wants is to find out who did.”

Melrose turned to her. “What do you mean? Why would he think someone actually killed his mother? And how do you know, Millie,
what
he thinks?”

She stared off toward Scafell, its eastern slope beginning to purple in the failing light, and asked, “Do you live with your mum?”

The question startled Melrose. In her mind, if you had a mother, you’d naturally live with her, no matter how old you were. “No. She’s dead.”

“Were you there?” Millie reached down to place her hand on the cat’s head, to still what was already stone-still.

“Yes.” He remembered the heavily curtained, medieval bed, his mother’s luminous skin, humorous eyes—as if this were only one more hurdle to get her jumper, Isis, across. The letter she had left with their firm of solicitors was not given him until he was thirty. It had taken him a long time to absorb its contents.

He looked down at Millie, who was looking up at him, her urgent
little frown suggesting she was desperate for details from someone who had, actually, been there. He told her about the room, and how his mother had looked, and remembering the barren look of the room, cluttered though it was, for three or four minutes told Millie what his mother had said to him, what he had said to her. Melrose invented the dialogue; they had said none of it. After the stroke, his mother had been unable to speak, but had managed to convey a great deal with her eyes. Pale golden hair, pale green eyes. He had tried to say something to her and could think of absolutely nothing to say.

Millie seemed somewhat comforted by this conversation between Melrose and his mother. They had even had a laugh together over the cats chasing each other across the bedclothes (or so Melrose told her). Millie wanted to know what color they were, the cats. Black, both of them, he said, looking at Sorcerer.

No one said anything about anybody’s father for a long while.

In the deepening night and silence, finally Melrose asked, “Was his father fond of Alex?”

She nodded.

Melrose thought for a moment. “Did they fight? I mean his mother and father?”

“Mrs. Callow said they did. So did Mr. Hawkes. He said he’d pass by the gatehouse and hear them. That’s where they lived, where Mr. Fellowes does now. Railing, Mr. Hawkes said. But you can’t believe much of what he says because he’s always drunk.”

“Where did Mr. Fellowes live, then?”

“Oh, I think in the village. I can’t remember. Anyway, Alex’s mum was always going off to London or somewhere.”

“Then where was Alex? Did he stay behind, here?”

She lowered her head, pulled at a tuft of dry grass. “Sometimes. If it hadn’t been for me he’d probably have run away. He hated them.”

“Even his father?”

“No, he liked him, but not as much as her. Did you see his picture? He was handsome, like Alex. They said she went to meet someone. You know.”

In the gloom, Melrose couldn’t see her face, but he knew what she was implying and that she didn’t know how to talk about it. Jane Holdsworth had had a lover? “You mean Hawkes and the cook talked about it?”

Millie shook her head.
“She
did.”

She,
of course, being the nemesis, Genevieve Holdsworth. Was there, Melrose wondered, any truth in this—that Jane had a lover? And would she sacrifice what would surely have been a fortune by involving herself with someone else?

“It’s time to go!” Millie jumped up.

“Time to go where?”

She didn’t answer, but turned and started her scramble up the rocks.

There was nothing to do but follow. He had been so absorbed in their talk he hadn’t realized that darkness had fallen.

“I’ve got to get back to cook. It’s already gone six. You go that way.” She pointed off to another stand of trees near the cliff’s verge. “Good-bye.”

“Wait a minute! Come back here! Where am I going?”

“To that big tree over there. Sorcerer knows.”

Sorcerer sat his ground, staring up at Melrose.

“Well, go on,
go
on!”

The cat turned and started through the trees.

It was dark, clouds scudding across the moon. In that way trees do in dreams, they seemed to take on human shapes—crooked backs, stretching arms, twiggy, skeletal fingers.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could have sworn that beech he’d just passed separated, divided.

A voice, not loud, but clear. “Just stop there.”

He turned slowly. “What—?”

The slim boy standing there who had been until now part of that tree—how could anyone stand that still?—had a gun in his hand.

“You must be Alex.”

“No. I’m not holding a conference in a tree house.”

Alex was already halfway up, and indicated, with a nod of his head, that Melrose should follow. Sorcerer flew up the ladder, his paws barely touching the wood.

Across the long field of bracken and bleached grass, Melrose could see the lights in the kitchen and on the first floor, where a figure moved before the window and then out of his line of vision. Madeline’s room, Melrose thought. He looked up the tall tree; Alex was sitting in the makeshift doorway beside Sorcerer. “Come on. Uncle George might be out there somewhere.”

Melrose gave in and grudgingly climbed the rotting ladder, sure it would give way under him. “What would George be grubbing about at night for? And what are you doing with a gun?”

“He’s laying drags, maybe.”

There was no fill-in on the gun. Melrose squeezed through the opening. He felt ridiculous. Still, as he looked round at the battered boards, the roof of tin, the few implements, such as bedding and books to make it habitable, he felt a wave of nostalgia.

“Besides,” said Alex, striking a match into flame and cupping his hands round a cigarette, “we can smoke up here.” He tossed a packet to Melrose.

“Great. Can we say swear words and look at dirty pictures, too?”

Alex grinned. “Sorry. Don’t have any. So you’re the librarian?” Alex looked him over as if to say his grandfather surely could have done better. He took a drag, exhaled slowly, studied the librarian.

“You know damned well I’m not if you’ve been talking to Millie.” Melrose took out his own silver case.

“Flash that about in the house and people’ll know you’re not some seedy book person.”

Must he take lessons from a
boy?
“I don’t ‘flash’ it about.” And then he remembered that this particular boy had only days before found his own mother dead in their house. He did not know what to say that would be at all affecting, considering the horror of such a discovery. So he smoked and looked at Alex. Handsome, indeed. Eyes so dark he could hardly distinguish the iris; dark hair, slightly long but that was probably because barbers weren’t always available in tree houses. It had just begun to curl above the cable-knitted sweater.

“Tell me what’s going on in the house. Millie has, some, but she can’t be hanging round the way you can. How are they taking it?” He’d lifted his chin slightly when his eyes had started to glisten, as if to keep any tears from spilling over.

“I’d say more angry than upset.”

“That’s what I thought the reaction would be. Even Madeline? Even her own sister?”