And then in an addendum dated some weeks later:
On several occasions, I went to the asylum to offer pastoral care to Peregrine Graham, and I was told that the doctors had determined that it was best if he continued the regimen of care they had devised, and that the chaplain at the asylum would see to the lad’s spiritual needs. I have no such faith in Mr. Newcome, and although I spoke to Mrs. Graham about this, she told me that the London police had told her that Peregrine shouldn’t have visitors of any sort. I left it there, though I was very distressed. The other Graham boys have seemed to come through this nightmare with few scars, but Arthur was very subdued when first he came home from London. Some time afterward, he was sent away to school, and I saw him only on holidays.
I thumbed through some twenty ensuing pages, but there was nothing more about Peregrine Graham.
I was disappointed that the rector had only been able to describe events as he was told them by the Grahams, but his remark about Arthur cut me to the quick. Subdued…
Peregrine read the sections again. “I don’t recall much about any of this, I was half sick and too dazed to take in what was happening to me.”
“Had you been sedated-given anything to calm you?”
“I don’t know, I hardly remember my conversations with the police. My stepmother brought me a cup of sweet tea that made me drowsy. Still, I can recall that Inspector Gadd was very kind. He asked me why I had done such a thing, and then again, what Lily had done to me that made me want to harm her. I could only stare at him, but he didn’t shout as the London police did. He put his hand on my knee, and told me not to worry, that I would be all right. But I wasn’t, was I?”
I was nearly sure that Peregrine had been drugged. To keep him quiet on the journey to London, and while he was there, so he wouldn’t trouble anyone. But then why take him? There had been the excuse of seeing a doctor, but nothing had come of it. I was left with the only logical answer. If he was left at home alone with only the servants, someone might have discovered that the public view of Peregrine Graham was not the real truth.
Whatever my feelings about Mrs. Graham, this was a horrible supposition, that she would have treated her stepson so cruelly. But then I remembered something else-something Peregrine had told me.
He had found his stepmother in bed with her cousin Robert Douglas.
I sat back in my chair.
“My good God,” I whispered.
Peregrine looked at me. “What is it?”
“I-it’s nothing. Just-look, I need to be by myself for a while. Do you mind?”
“I’d like to take these to my room and read the passage again. Is that all right?”
“Yes, of course. I’m tired, Peregrine, that’s all.”
I thought he saw through me, but he turned and went to his room, and I sat there staring out the window, not seeing the traffic in and out of the shops, not seeing the sun fade behind gray clouds, looking inward at something rather terrible.
Peregrine believed that Jonathan or Timothy-or both-were the sons of the liaison between Mrs. Graham and her cousin Robert Douglas.
Was Timothy’s clubfoot the mark of that liaison? I had no idea if a clubfoot was a result of inbreeding. But it might be, for all I knew. It might also run in families.
I tried to picture each of the sons in turn. That got me nowhere. I hadn’t been looking for indications of their ancestry when I was speaking to them face-to-face. But even if they weren’t Robert’s offspring, Mrs. Graham might have been so frightened that Peregrine would tell his father what he’d seen, she’d done her best to destroy his credibility. And what better way to do that than by indicating he wasn’t really right in the head? However cruel that was, it would be nothing to what she might have done years later to protect her own child and blame Peregrine for a crime he hadn’t committed.
Everyone agreed she had been terribly distressed by the death of Lily Mercer-and she’d paid the girl’s family handsomely to leave England. Would she have felt so strongly about protecting Peregrine, or gone to such lengths to hide what had been done? She had kept him out of prison, not from kindness but because his brothers would have suffered the shame of being related to a murderer. And I hardly thought Mrs. Graham was the first person to send an unwanted family member to an asylum. Little better than a prison in some ways, it could at least provoke a measure of sympathy for the family of the afflicted.
I thought about the young Prince John who had had seizures, and how he’d been removed from the public eye very quietly, until he’d been nearly forgotten. Mrs. Graham had succeeded in doing much the same with Peregrine.
I was still trying to understand the full impact of my thinking when there was a knock at the door. It was Peregrine, and he held one of the rector’s journals in his hand.
“I think you ought to read this,” he said, and walked into my room.
I took the book and carried it to the window, reluctant to turn up the lamp. Peregrine followed me and pointed to an entry some years after the murder of Lily Mercer.
I read it quickly, and then again.
Inspector Gadd died this morning in spite of everything the doctor could do to save him. He had gone very early to one of the outlying farms to investigate a rash of small fires and other destruction that had been plaguing Herbert Meadowes for several weeks. The inspector had hoped to catch the culprit in the act, and was lying in wait for him. He must have seen the culprit and given chase, but as he tried to climb the stile, a blood vessel in his brain burst from the effort he was making, and he died where he fell. Meadowes found him there some hours later. God be with him, he was a good man.
I turned to Peregrine. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with your situation?”
“None. Except that I know Jonathan boasted that he’d raided Herbert Meadowes’s henhouse for eggs, and not been caught. “He thought it was a fox,” he told me, “I’m as sly as a fox.” And Arthur had said, “That’s not brave. You must give him a fair chance to catch you. You must do it three times.” This was in London.”