‘It’s just I promised when I said we were coming to Oxford today.’
Edward suspected at once that this must have something to do with Sarah’s mother. He waited. Sarah was looking rather helplessly into the water. It was clear here and you could see right to the bottom.
‘Will you come and meet my mother, Edward? She’s very keen to meet you.’
Edward began eating his apple. ‘If you want me to come and meet your mother, of course I will. What sort of person is your mother?’
Sarah wondered if she could buy time by not explaining the likely turn of events to Edward. But she thought that wouldn’t be fair.
‘She’s curious, my mother, Edward, very curious. And I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but she’s quite ill. The doctors think she may have only a couple of years to live. And she’s in quite a lot of pain. As if,’ a bitter note crept into Sarah’s voice at this point, ‘it wasn’t bad enough my father having that stroke and dying two years ago. Two years and four months today.’
Edward wondered if he should put an arm round her for comfort.
‘My poor Sarah,’ he said, laying off his demolition of the apple for the moment, ‘I thought from what you said that your mother wasn’t very well, but I didn’t know about your father. I’m so sorry. Were you close to him?’
Sarah managed a little smile. ‘I was the last child, Edward, I was a girl, I was quick when I was little, very quick. I adored him. And I knew he adored me. I suspect, although he would never have said so, that I was his favourite.’
‘What did he die of? He can’t have been very old.’
‘He had a stroke and never recovered. The doctors couldn’t do anything about it. He’d been a teacher in the primary school up the road for years and years. It was so sweet, the teachers were so fond of him that they brought the older children to his funeral. All these lovely little children singing those sad hymns, it was so moving.’
Sarah suddenly realized that far from teasing out of Edward the facts of his parentage, she had merely given him her own. But she felt she hadn’t given him proper warning of his likely reception.
‘My mother, Edward,’ Sarah hesitated. Two enormous cows had plodded over to the side of the river and were inspecting them both.
‘Are these cows bothering you?’ said Edward suddenly, ‘We could move on if you like.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Cows don’t bother me,’ she said. ‘Anyway my mother will want to ask you a whole lot of questions about yourself and your parents and where you went to school and what you want to become later on.’
‘Will she indeed?’ said Edward. Sarah noticed he was growing rather tense. ‘Will you be there all the time, Sarah? You won’t go off to bake some scones or make the tea or something and leave me at your mother’s mercy?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to, Edward. Do you think you will be able to cope?’
‘Do you mean will I be able to speak, Sarah? God knows. I got so worried about ordering those tickets at Paddington this morning, I’d been practising for days. I’ll get worried about meeting your mother too.’
‘What will you say about your parents, Edward?’ Sarah had been dying to ask this question herself for a long time now. She hoped Edward wouldn’t mind, not here on the River Cherwell with a couple of cows for company and the spires of Oxford dreaming behind them.
There was a pause. Sarah didn’t know if Edward had been struck dumb at the prospect of her mother or if he didn’t know what to say. He flung the core of his apple angrily into the field and picked out another one.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, moodily. Sarah kept silent. She felt sure that whatever Edward’s answer was going to be, assuming one ever came, it would tell her a lot about the nature of his character and, perhaps, about his problems with speaking.
Edward drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Sarah wondered if he was going to meditate.
‘My p-p-parents are dead,’ he said finally. ‘They were killed in an accident along with my elder sister and my little b-b-brother.’ There was no attempt to keep the anger out of his voice.
‘How did it happen, Edward?’ said Sarah. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s so terrible losing parents.’ So very terrible, she realized, that even the thought of it had brought on the stammer which Edward struggled so hard to keep to at bay.
‘Train crash,’ he said. ‘We were all going to Bristol on a train. There was something wrong with the points. The carriages came off the line at about fifty miles an hour and rolled down a slope. I was buried beneath my parents and the remains of the carriage for hours. When the police pulled everyone out of the rubble I was unconscious beneath them. They say I didn’t speak for a week after that.’
‘My God,’ said Sarah, almost wishing she hadn’t been told this ghastly news. Perhaps she should ask her mother not to speak to Edward about his parents at all. ‘How frightful, Edward, how absolutely frightful. Your poor family, just wiped out in front of you.’
Edward began munching on his apple. The cows wandered off to another part of their field. A couple of rowing boats, going quite fast, sped past them on their return journey to Oxford.
‘So where do you live now, Edward?’ Sarah had a vision of Edward living on his own in some squalid boarding house where the food was terrible and he never tidied his room.
‘I live with my grandparents,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’re very good to me. Maybe you should come and meet them, Sarah. I’m sure they’d love to see you.’ Even in his sixties Edward knew his grandfather had an eye for a pretty girl. Sarah would enchant him. The thought seemed to cheer him up.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’d better think about getting back or we won’t have any time to look at Oxford at all.’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to review his knowledge of the Queen’s Inn investigation as his train carried him down to Calne and the beautiful Mrs Dauntsey. Murder Number One, her husband, poisoned at a feast, the poison probably administered at a drinks party in the rooms of the Treasurer of the Inn, the unpleasant Barton Somerville. Murder Number Two, Woodford Stewart, shot twice in the chest. Connections between the two? Both were retained for the prosecution in what would be one of the great fraud trials of the decade, that of Jeremiah Puncknowle and his associates. And both were benchers of their Inn of Court, though why that should make them liable to sudden and violent death Powerscourt didn’t know. He did know that Woodford Stewart had been elected two months before Dauntsey so they must have been the most junior members of the Inn’s governing body. And what of the missing Maxfield? Had he resurfaced to murder Dauntsey for his twenty thousand pounds? Then there was Porchester Newton, Dauntsey’s great rival in the election to the bench. He had disappeared shortly after Dauntsey’s death but was due to return the following week.
Had he, perhaps, returned in time to shoot Woodford Stewart and dump his body by the Temple Church? Powerscourt could think of lots of reasons why somebody might want to kill Dauntsey and Stewart individually. It was the connection that worried him, assuming the two deaths were linked. Surely it had to be professional, he said to himself, as the train rattled through a tunnel. He still didn’t know what to say to Mrs Dauntsey, how to bring up the very delicate subject he was travelling to Calne to raise.
As his cab rattled past the grey stone walls of the great house, Powerscourt remembered the covered furniture, the sofas under wraps, the floors covered with rough matting, the vast expanse of the great house that most people never saw, a forbidden kingdom for the dust and the shadows and the ghosts of Dauntseys past.
She was waiting for him, Elizabeth Dauntsey, still dressed in black that showed off her creamy skin. She smiled as she offered her hand to him.
‘Lord Powerscourt, how very pleasant to see you again. I trust you had a pleasant journey? Would you care for some tea, perhaps?’