The Murder Stone Read online

  “I have no answer to that. But I can assure you that this responsibility is yours and must be regarded as a binding charge. He was absolutely adamant on that score.”

  “But surely not right away—not while the war is going on?” She couldn’t begin to imagine how she would manage to dig up the stone—it most certainly weighed more than the elderly gardener and the coachman put together! There was no one else who could be spared for such work—help was short as it was. And how could she arrange for it to travel to Scotland, when petrol and tires were so dear? It was an enormous undertaking, and one she couldn’t face just now.

  “At your earliest convenience, of course.” Branscombe’s tone indicated disapproval of using war as an excuse.

  Francesca was about to protest, but the solicitor sat waiting for her to agree to the terms of the Codicil, as if her grandfather’s unfathomable anxiety had invaded him as well. She nodded and was relieved when he finally seemed to be satisfied.

  He set aside the thick sheets of the will. “I have already taken it upon myself to send a Death Notice to the Times. And I’ve ordered the grave to be opened, and instructed the rector that the services are to be held on Friday of this week. If that’s agreeable . . .”

  Whether it was or not, she couldn’t do much about it. Men arranged such matters, as a rule. And all the cousins were dead. . . .

  There were other papers in the box labeled HATTON in a fine antique copperplate. Most likely Branscombe the Elder’s hand. “What else is in there? Besides the will?” More surprises? Other secrets?

  “Our family has always handled the legal affairs of your family,” Branscombe reminded her with satisfaction, glancing at the contents. He plucked out several folded documents. “Here we have your great-grandfather Thomas’s will, and this is Francis Hatton’s grandfather George’s. He fought at Waterloo with the great Duke of Wellington. His grandfather Frederick was with Cumberland at Culloden. Amazing history, is it not?” A reminder that she would be expected to leave her own affairs with the firm that had mounted guard over it for generations.

  On the papers she could see the faded handwriting. A family’s continuity preserved in old ink . . . It was a heritage she had been taught to revere. The Hattons had always served their country well. She, the only girl in a family of six cousins, had been expected to do the same. It was why she had volunteered to serve with the Red Cross in London.

  “All quite regular and in order.” Branscombe returned the documents to the box with affection, as if he counted them old friends. “Ah. There’s also a letter here that your grandfather deposited with the firm—”

  “May I see it?”

  “I know of no reason why you mayn’t. As heir . . .” He lifted it out of the box and passed it across the desk to her.

  Curious, she examined it. It was wrapped in a piece of parchment on which was inscribed over the seal in her grandfather’s beautiful hand, “To be held and not acted upon.”

  Before Branscombe could stop her, she broke the brittle wax under the writing and drew out a letter. There was no envelope, only the single fragile page.

  It read, “May you and yours rot in hell then. It is no more than you deserve!”

  There was no signature.

  What in God’s name, she thought, shocked, had her grandfather done to be cursed like this?

  And on the heels of it—

  If he hadn’t given credence to such a savage indictment, why had Francis Hatton sent this letter to his solicitor for safekeeping?

  CHAPTER 3

  After the letter had been returned to the box, Branscombe rose and went to summon the servants to hear their bequests. Francesca watched their tired, drawn faces as they filed into the room.

  They had loved and admired her grandfather. His death had been difficult for them, and before he had breathed his last, each of them had come to the darkened room to file past his bed, their eyes wet with tears.

  Francis Hatton, she knew, would have preferred to meet Death standing, head high, those dark green eyes undaunted by Fate. She had done her best to restore a little of his self-respect. She had bathed his hands and face with lavender-scented toilet water and sprinkled a little over the bed to disguise the sour smell of age and sickness, the last indignity for a man whose pride had been as fierce as his will.

  She had longed to believe, as she spoke each name aloud, that he’d known his servants were there and how they were grieving. She knew too well they had believed that he would go on forever, a stalwart man who had always been their bulwark as well as hers. . . .

  That night, as the nurse slept soundly, he had drifted into the final darkness, his hand clasped in his granddaughter’s. She had held back her tears, talking softly to him until his breathing ceased, and then for another half an hour, until the hand in hers grew cold.

  Leaving Exeter, they drove home up the Valley, Francesca Hatton at the wheel of the family car with Mrs. Lane, the housekeeper, while the rest of the staff—the coachman, the man who kept up the outbuildings and the park, the woman who helped Mrs. Lane with heavier chores such as ironing and turning the beds—traveled in the family carriage behind.

  The Valley narrowed as it drew toward its source, a river winding its way between the rolling hills and the road following as best it could. Sometimes a ford carried them to the other bank of the Exe, and sometimes a bridge carried them back.

  You would think, traveling along this road, Francesca told herself, that no one lived here. The rounded, ridgelike hills rose from the water, sometimes blotting out the autumn sun, and the only creatures for miles were sheep or cattle where the grass was greenest, and a fox sunning itself on an outcrop of rock. The horses had gone to war, like the men who had once worked this land and cared for the animals and the houses that sometimes stood over the crests out of sight from the road. Women and elderly men did the heavy work on farms now, or it wasn’t done at all.

  From time to time where the hills dipped, late afternoon sun threw long golden beams across the water and through the trees on her right, spears of light. Prehistoric, she thought. Before Time began and Man had come trudging up this Valley. Somehow deserted—

  And now that her grandfather was dead, it was. Deserted by the remarkable spirit that had made this emptiness her home and seemingly held the life of the Valley in the palm of a powerful and graceful hand.

  She hadn’t realized just how much she had loved Francis Hatton. Not even in his last illness. Or rather the final heartbreak—for no mere illness could have struck him down so ruthlessly as the deaths of the cousins.

  Beside her, Mrs. Lane said in a voice still thick with tears, “I don’t know how we shall get along without him!”

  “We shall have to try,” Francesca answered the housekeeper, in an effort to offer comfort. I’m the head of the household now. Such as it is. It’s my duty. . . .

  “Yes, Miss Francesca. But it won’t be the same. First the five lads, and now Himself.”

  “Well. We must go on. He’d want that. We aren’t the only family in England to suffer—”

  “No . . .”

  But one could tell, Francesca thought, that Mrs. Lane believed that the Hattons had carried the heaviest burden.

  “Did you know,” she asked, suddenly reminded, “that my grandfather owned land in other parts of the country?”

  “No, Miss.” The finality of the word indicated that Mrs. Lane didn’t care. Like so many of the Valley’s inhabitants, her universe was here. The rest of England might as well be across the Channel.

  Silence fell between them.

  Behind them the carriage rumbled over the rough, winding road like a ship wallowing in the sea. Mr. Branscombe had pressed Francesca to stay the night in Exeter, but she had chosen to travel home with her grandfather’s servants. Hers . . . Hers, now. She must remember that.

  Below the road the Exe ran like a tangled ribbon, meandering of its own will, sometimes dark in the heavy shadow of trees, sometimes bright with slanting sunlight.
A pretty, secretive river that cleft the hills, dividing neighbor from neighbor. Most of them preferred it that way.

  When the funeral was over, Francesca told herself, she must return to London and her duties there, interrupted by her grandfather’s illness and death. He would expect it.

  But she had little heart left for meeting troop trains on their way to the ports, offering men hardly older than boys tea and buns, pretending to be cheerful, happy for them as they went off to glory fighting the Hun. She had also stood on the same drafty station platforms in the depths of the night when the wounded came through, carriage after carriage of them. No flags or tea or pretty smiling faces greeted those unheralded trains. The Red Cross came to them to see to bandages and offer water, to press cold, frightened hands, and to light cigarettes for those able to smoke. It was a bloody, barbarous business, walking through the carriages where so many lay in torment. And to think that these were the survivors. There were no trains for the dead. They were buried where they fell.

  It had exhausted her, the suffering she had witnessed. She could face anything but that stoic suffering.

  And the war that was to be finished by Christmas, 1914—the war that had swept away her five cousins in the madness of enlistments—was dragging on into its third year of stalemate and death, with no end in sight.

  Her grandfather’s illness had come at a time when she would have given anything, done anything, to escape her duties. But the summons home had been bittersweet, and all she could do yet again was to sit and watch another man’s silent suffering.

  I must be careful what I wish for. . . .

  At first Francis Hatton could speak, although with some difficulty. She had looked forward to those brief conversations, and they had sustained her. Too soon, he had slipped into rambling monologues, leaving her behind. And finally that dreadful dark silence had engulfed him. Trapping his indomitable spirit in a slowly dying body. She had found it unbearable—

  The horses clattered past the bridge and turned from the main road into the gates of River’s End.

  Francesca sat forward, looking out at the small stone gatehouse where Wiggins used to live with his wife. Empty now and locked. Both had died when she was fourteen and never been replaced. Their daughter, Ellen, had cooked for the household until last year, when she had gone to live with her own daughter, war-widowed in Cornwall. Continuity . . .

  Ahead the house was hidden by trees, but the road looped up the hill toward it as if confident of finding it in the end. And the old horses pulling the carriage just behind the motorcar knew their way, sensing home and oats and a blanket for the night.

  The coachman, Bill Trelawny, had been with her grandfather for as long as she could remember, his back stooped now with age, but his hands on the reins still sure. He had taken Francis Hatton’s death the hardest. A man of few words, Bill had come sometimes in the evening to stand dumbly by the bed, such anguish in his eyes that Francesca had realized he would have happily died in her grandfather’s place if God had asked it.

  At the breast of the hill the drive widened into a loop, and the uncompromising shape of her grandfather’s house rose with authority, like the man, gray stone pointed with white, chimney pots lined like soldiers across the roofs. Hers . . .

  When the servants had been settled over their late tea, Francesca took the motorcar and drove herself (much to the horror of Bill—the coachman still tended to treat her as Mr. Hatton’s little granddaughter) to the church in what passed as a village but was in fact no more than a hamlet. Hurley had come into being to serve the needs of medieval drovers and carters who had passed up the Valley, and it owed its church to a benevolent Hatton in the sixteenth century whose eldest son had served with Drake and come home safely from savaging the Great Armada. Francesca had always wondered why the church had been consecrated to St. Mary Magdalene, the repentant sinner. An odd choice if it had truly been built to celebrate a valiant captain’s survival.

  Small, stone, with a belfry barely worthy of the name, the building boasted nothing of special importance—no rood screen, no marble knights and ladies in the ambulatory, and only a single brass, which it had actually inherited from an earlier church in Somerset.

  Francesca had stepped over the long memorial brass set in the flagstones on her way to the Hatton pew every Sunday she had attended church services here. The only time she could remember looking at it closely was when the cousins had attempted to duplicate the spectacular armor the figure wore. Otherwise she’d passed by what everyone in Hurley simply referred to as the Somerset Brass, without giving it a second thought.

  But now this name had taken on a new meaning.

  Do you wish to keep the properties in Somerset and Essex?

  She walked down the aisle, her heels echoing in the autumn silence, and stopped to look down at the figure.

  Early armor. The time of the Edwards, Simon and the cousins had decided, eagerly examining each detail. That wonderful chain mail. The sword in its elegant belt. The spurred, steel-clad feet. A man of some standing, to merit a memorial nearly as long as he must have been tall in life.

  She knelt on the chill stone floor, and tried to read the Latin that bordered the figure. Tracing the incised letters with her fingers, she could make out part of the inscription. Something about peace . . .

  The door of the church scraped open, and Francesca looked over her shoulder to see the rector just stepping into the shaft of sunlight that pointed, like an accusing finger, in her direction.

  “Miss Hatton!” William Stevens exclaimed, shocked to find her on her knees in the middle of the church. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Good afternoon— No, I’ve just come to look at the brass. I don’t think I’ve ever really examined it before. Can you read the words here?”

  He came toward her, limping. He had been wounded at Mons, his face raked and part of a foot cut away by shrapnel as he ministered to the wounded and the dying. A man of perhaps thirty-two, old for the shredding flail of war. And sent here to a secure and undemanding living while he healed in spirit as well as flesh. There were whispers that he walked the churchyard late at night, talking to the dead. Francesca thought perhaps he simply found it hard to sleep without dreaming.

  “It’s Medieval Latin,” he was saying. “I’m no scholar. I’ve often wondered myself how it should best be translated. See, there’s an abbreviation. I know that much. And that word is peace—and there is the word for sin . . .”

  “I expect he lived a rather brutal life,” she observed. “And needed whatever forgiveness he could find.”

  “Most likely. At a guess, it reads, ‘For the sins of my youth, I have paid. God accept my soul and grant it peace.’ ” He grinned. “It depends on where you start deciphering it. But it’s a prayer we could all make.”

  “It’s always been called the Somerset Brass. Do you know why?”

  “Not really. But I’ve heard that this church was scraped together from bits and pieces languishing elsewhere. Your grandfather could have told us, I’m sure. The flagstones in the choir are said to be from a convent in London. The brass here is from Somerset—and that baptismal font from Essex.”

  “Essex—” she echoed.

  “Yes. A good many villages vanished in the plague years, you know. People died, houses and churches fell to rack and ruin. And of course not much later there was Henry the Eighth letting Cromwell loose on the monasteries. I shouldn’t be surprised if these things were rescued and brought here by the founding family to give the sanctuary some air of age. A baptismal font was not a common thing, you see—in the old days, it gave a church status to have the right to baptize. A mark of religious significance.”

  “I didn’t know that.” She rose, dusting her hands and the front of her skirt. “But why Somerset—and Essex? Did the Valley have ties with such places?”

  “Lord, no, not to my knowledge. Although, as I said, whoever gave us the church may have done.”

  He paused, as if no
t wanting to change the subject until she was ready. “About Friday—”

  “The funeral.” Francesca sighed. “I understand Mr. Branscombe has made all the arrangements.”

  “But you may change whatever you like,” Stevens assured her. “I don’t expect—given the war—that we shall see a great throng here for the service. What’s important is that it should please you.”

  “That’s kind.” Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. “I should like to be sure the music includes his favorite hymns—”

  “I’d thought of that, and believe I’ve managed to do rather well.” Stevens’s scarred face smiled, giving the sinister set of its lines in repose a warmer appearance.

  “Thank you.” Looking around her, Francesca said, “We have no memorials to my cousins, do we? I’d thought my grandfather would have seen to that.”

  “Your grandfather had a difficult time coming to terms with their loss. Especially young Harry. I don’t think he needed reminders in brass or stone. Would you care to see to it?”

  “Yes. By all means. Would black marble be out of place here, do you think? Black for mourning . . .”

  “The church is gloomy, too dark perhaps for black. White is also the color of mourning. And of youth dying before its time.”

  “Yes,” she said again, thinking about it. “I like that choice. I’ll see to it—afterward.” Looking into the troubled brown eyes, she added impulsively, “You were in the war. Was it very terrible? I’ve seen the wounded in London, and that’s grim enough. I can’t imagine being on a battlefield, and knowing that death was coming—watching the men beside me drop and not move again—” She faltered, and then confessed, “I wonder about my cousins, you see. No one told us how they died—the letters only said that they’d been brave and didn’t suffer. Which is a lie if I ever heard one!”

  “Some of the men suffered terribly.” Stevens answered her with bitter honesty. “Screaming in pain, or lying there in silence, which is somehow worse, trying to be—brave about it. But sometimes it’s quick enough. With no time for thought or grief or pain. They may be the lucky ones.”