Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery Part 6

Relieved and pleased, for he was savouring the privilege of private access, he continued down the arcing avenues, taking the prescribed turns where they came, keeping his head bowed prayerfully. He had been to Hampton Court Maze once, on a school trip, and with some of his mates had gotten dizzingly lost, nearly panicked, amid green walls much taller than any towering adult. Only the directional shouting of their very cross teacher brought them stumbling, at last, from the exit. But a labyrinth was not a maze. It was designed not for puzzlement and perplexity but for contemplation and tranquility. It had a single exit and entrance and a single path, coiled though it be and mystifying in its seeming meanders. It was life's journey, of course-Dosh had said as much all those years ago at Chartres, though his eight-year-old mind hadn't taken it in. The centre of the labyrinth was the goal. The centre was Jerusalem, enlightenment, Christ consciousness, Atman-Brahman, what-have-you. As you walked the leafy purlieus, you moved tantalizingly close to the centre, then suddenly you veered away, but eventually, always, you arrived at the transfiguring centre.

And then, transfigured yourself, you returned to the world.

Right? Or left? No such decisions were necessary in a labyrinth. Tom walked on, conscious now of the counterpoint of his breath, heartbeat, and scrunching steps along the path, his mind slipping ineluctably to the visitation in the night. Now, away from his stuffy bedroom, away from Egges...o...b.. Hall and its mazy interior and moralistic carvings, in the still, fresh air of pre-dawn twilight, he felt the glimmerings of restoration-that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

G.o.d made us for joy, had He not? And mightn't there be a grace in an encounter, however fleeting? After all, how are we to understand our embodied existence? Mightn't desire simply be love trying to happen?

Or was he paving the road to h.e.l.l?

A soft sc.r.a.ping sound interrupted his thoughts, and he lifted his head again, this time towards the quadrant opposite, the apparent source. Was he really not alone? Had a living figure-no statue-been at the centre of the Labyrinth after all? Lucinda? Could it be? Is this why she had left his bed, and where she had come? The notion seemed wild, unlikely. And why would she conceal herself? Unless she shared his discomfiture. Tom p.r.i.c.ked up his ears and pressed forward. He had skirted the Labyrinth's centre once on his journey, glanced at the shadowy shape there; now he was doubled back, twisting away from the centre. The sound came again, closer this time. Was one of the children up early and larking about? Or both of them? Max and Miranda's heights, though greater than the hedge's, nevertheless made hunkering down easier, but he knew the game wouldn't endure without one of them giggling or whispering. Only random birdsong interrupted the quietude. He moved ahead, more cautiously, alert now to irregular sounds. If there was someone bent down scuttling along the path, he would run into him or her soon enough. There was only one way out of the Labyrinth: the way you came in.

He returned to his reverie with steely resolve not to be distracted: Or, he began again, was he simply rationalising? Mightn't there be danger, rather than grace, in his encounter with Lucinda, however fleeting?

Or-?

Another sc.r.a.pe, closer still, though, strangely, rather softer. Tom paused again, frowned. He was now on the arc farthest from the centre. On this soft summer morning, with the sun's touch drawing colour from the grey, staining the horizon tender pale pink, he sensed no sinister thing lurking in the Labyrinth's dark green lanes. Untroubled by concern, he felt more peeved that this sweet opportunity for thought and prayer was being soured by some mischief-maker. Of course, some animal could be the source. He was outdoors, he realised that. However manicured and tamed, these hedges weren't waxworks. As if to confirm his thought, before he could take another step forward, an extrusion of whiteness like cotton batting squeezed forth from under the foliage. A rabbit, Tom thought, with a flutter of relief, as the creature hunched on the pebbles. Where's your waistcoat and watch, old man? But the light was dim by the bottom of the hedge. It wasn't a rabbit. Those weren't rabbit ears. It was a cat, he realised. A very fat white cat.

The cat, as if hearing Tom's thoughts and highly offended, abruptly scampered across the pebbles and scrambled under the hedge opposite. Tom sighed, adjusted the crutch under his arm, set to continue, but, again, an unexpected noise gave him pause. No pebble sc.r.a.ping this time, but a rustling and thrashing, of twigs snapping and leaves tearing, somewhere on the opposite side of the Labyrinth.

A dog?

A rogue sheep?

It was then that Tom felt the first intimation of impending trouble. The crackle of disturbed foliage stopped almost as soon as it started, but the rest of nature seemed to rise up in sympathy. Protesting birds streaked noisily into the sky in a dark plume of distraction, scattering to the trees. A jackdaw sounded its high, squealing distress call. And then, as abruptly, a kind of restorative peace settled on the landscape, but a false one, Tom felt in his bones. Something or someone had surely violated the perfection of the topiary wall. Was he to encounter another creature, a more fearsome one than a cat, on the path to the centre? Or had some more fearsome creature retreated from the Labyrinth and padded silently away? Mind arrested from his own worries, concerned now that misadventure awaited, Tom limped his way more quickly along the coiled intestine of the Labyrinth. Glancing over the top of the penultimate ring, he thought he saw a blemish in the smooth topiary wall of the outermost ring, and when at last he looped around, he saw with sinking heart a dark scattering of leaves and bits of twig along the pale path ahead. In a moment, he was in front of the vandalisation itself, an ugly, ratted gash through the leafy wall. Someone-surely no animal would do this-had burrowed below its tidy tr.i.m.m.i.n.g to escape. Fear? Panic? A labyrinth was not a maze. There was no reason here for the claustrophobic dread some suffered at Hampton Court.

Or was it a deliberate desecration?

Tom looked over the hedge towards Egges...o...b..'s park, misting faintly as the sun, now half a crimson ball, stirred heat into the air. Here, at the farthest point from the entrance, the Labyrinth revealed its purchase on a soft mound that sloped gently to the lawn below, to the ha-ha, and to the purpled silhouette of majestic trees in the middle distance piercing the shimmering grey sky. Nearer, his eyes settled on an ancient oak the mighty limbs of which embraced a marvellous white tree house that glowed softly in the new light. And nearer still, the pinnacled bulk of Egges...o...b.. Hall, mullions turning to glittering diamonds. It was as magnificently timeless as it had been yesterday. Only unpeopled. Utterly unpeopled. No sound, no motion suggested anyone but himself in this arcadian landscape.

With new concern, he shifted awkwardly on his crutch. Though he had yet again swung to the farthest reaches of the eleven circuits, he had come a good distance. In a few short turns, he knew, he would be ushered into the Labyrinth's sacred heart, where, presumably-according to the most ardent fans of such things-he would experience a kind of rebirth, though the fanciful notion that a minotaur, half man, half beast, lay in waiting crept into his mind. He snorted at the absurdity. The sound was preternaturally loud in his ears. He continued on down the path, alert to other breaches to the peace of the Lord's day, but none came, for which he was grateful.

Around the last bend, the path straightened, resolving into a short corridor into the Labyrinth's green nucleus. A pale silhouette emerged from the black bath of shadow. The head's fine features and slim neck-more discernible now as he pushed forwards-seemed to drink in the dawn light and gleam gently, as if lit from within. The marble face wore none of the mournful piety typical of such statues; the posture suggested nothing of the torment to come. The sculptor-Roberto, presumably-had rendered, with sublime skill, the sweetness of mother and child bound in love. The chubby-limbed child fairly gurgled with bliss; the slim mother, her youthful body draped in cla.s.sic modesty, rejoiced at her son. Her upturned mouth, her delicate nose, her large, wide-set eyes were so finely rendered that she seemed less a symbolic representation of the feminine than a highly individuated woman, captured in a moment of pure maternal joy. He sighed a little, earlier trepidation vanished, affected not only by the loveliness of this exquisite representation of Madonna and Child, but by a stinging of his own loss. Mary had been his first adoptive mother's name. Had she ever held him like that? And what of his natural mother? Had she? Or had he been torn from her minutes after his birth? Liverpool: Marguerite had slipped him a clue to his natural parentage. Liverpool. How ... odd.

He put the thought aside and glanced past the statue to the bordering hedge, deeply scalloped here, each cool shadowy lunation embracing a rounded wooden bench, suited to rest after the journey, and to contemplation. He had thought centres of labyrinths ought best be holy absences, places to fill with one's own thoughts, and wondered a little at Lord Fairhaven's conspicuous expression of his Roman Catholicism. Was it even a good marketing strategy in a nation of nominal Protestants? But the sculpture held an irresistible power he was sure others felt. He turned his thoughts to Morning Prayer, the General Confession slipping easily onto his tongue: Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against Thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done ...

Tom paused in his recitation, the last words sinking like stones into his soul. "And we have done those things which we ought not to have done," he intoned again, his voice this time fallen to a murmur. He shifted his weight on his crutch and continued: And there is no health in us: But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.

Tom paused again, the severity of the avowal-there is no health in us-reminding him, with a ridiculous literalness, of his ankle. Twenty minutes of hobbling with crutches was wearing. He would sit to finish Morning Prayers.

He made to twist around to move to the nearest bench, one behind him, which sat in the deepest shadow. Six lunations, he counted as his eyes circled past, a rosette pattern. What delightful symmetry! His eyes fell first on a torch left on the ground, switched on still, its feeble light casting a pallid arc no match for the rising sun's. And then his gaze travelled to what seemed at first glance a large grey heap marring the perfection of the scene. Puzzled, fears rekindled that some creature had indeed penetrated the Labyrinth by defiling its boundary, he moved closer, steeling himself for some sort of unpleasant confrontation, and peered into the gloom at the base of the bench. It was no animal, but a man. Oliver, he realised with a shock when he peered closer, noting the rumple of red hair, the idiosyncratic needlework at the neck of his shirt. One arm was wedged against the base of the bench, the other flopped forwards, the kufi hat just beyond the reach of clawed fingers. Tom gazed upon the sight unbelievingly for the time it took another jackdaw to sound his alarm, battling a wave of nausea. Oliver fforde-Beckett, seventh Marquess of Morborne, wasn't sacked out, sleeping off some night of drunken debauchery. No snores, no guttural snorts, competed with the bird's call. Lord Morborne wasn't asleep at all.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

"Jane!"

" 'Morning, Tom!" Lady Kirkbride's arm lifted in a cheery wave as she jogged along the lawn, Bonzo loping in her wake.

"Jane!" Tom shouted again, urgently. She had disappeared behind a grove of trees and would soon vanish down the road to the Gatehouse and the village if she were not diverted. "Would you come over here?"

For a second he thought she hadn't heard, or was ignoring him, but she rounded the trees in short order and continued her run across the gra.s.s towards the Labyrinth.

"You're up early," she called, stopping near the Labyrinth gate, gasping a little as she caught her breath. Even at fifty feet, Tom could see her cheeks pink with exertion.

"Jane, there's been a ..." He hesitated. He needed to raise his voice to be heard, but he feared frightening anyone unnecessarily in the Hall, though sound had little chance against Egges...o...b..'s thick walls.

"... an accident."

"An ...? Oh, G.o.d. Are you all right, Tom?"

"It isn't me. It's-" He glanced again towards the Hall. "You'd better come here. But leave Bonzo outside the gate," he added as an afterthought. "And close it behind you."

Jane seemed to hesitate, but did as instructed. After a moment, she was moving quickly along one arc of the Labyrinth's path, then turning down another, as Tom had earlier, swinging by the centre, then swinging away from it. "This is maddening!" she called as she took the next turn at a run. "I'll be forever!"

"You're coming to a straight bit in a second. I'll meet you on the other side of it." Tom hobbled out of the centre and found Jane waiting across the width of the hedge, anxiety stamped on her face as she searched his.

"What is it? What's happened?"

"It's Lord Morborne ... Oliver-"

"Oh, no! What is it? He's here? Is he hurt badly?"

Tom slumped along the crutch. "No, Jane. It's much worse. I'm sorry I have to tell you ... that Lord Morborne is dead."

Her lips parted to form a strangulated how.

"I'm not quite sure. I'd only barely found him when I saw you pa.s.sing by. You don't happen to have your mobile with you?"

"No, I ..." She glanced in the Madonna's direction. "I've got to get over this d.a.m.ned hedge."

"Are you sure? You could-"

"If it were only a simple fence ..."

"If you push in a bit, I think I can reach you and lift you over." Tom studied the foliage. It was the girth of the hedge, rather more than its height, that made scaling it difficult. Jane had a pet.i.te figure. He judged her about five foot three. But even a man six foot one, as he was, would have no success vaulting over it, with or without a bandaged ankle. Her advantage to him was that she couldn't weigh more than eight stone.

"But your foot!"

"I'll be fine," he lied.

Jane raised a doubting eyebrow but pushed into the hedge, grimacing as the foliage stabbed at her bare legs.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not bad. Sweatpants would have been a better choice, if I'd known. It is dense. Hector won't be happy if I make a mess of his hedge."

"There's worse, I'm afraid." Tom leaned in as close as he could and put his arm under Jane's back. "Now, if you can ..." He suppressed a wince. "... lean back and elevate your feet a little while I've got hold of you. Quickly as you can so-"

"I see. Okay."

He could hear her legs thrashing through the foliage with sufficient momentum that he was able to thrust his other arm under her legs and lift her over. The sensation felt odd, tender: like carrying Lisbeth over the threshold of their first shared flat.

"Are you sure you're all right, Tom?" Jane brushed at her running shorts as he settled her on the path.

"My ankle will heal at any rate."

She gave him a wan smile and together they moved into the heart of the Labyrinth.

"Oh, Olly, how on earth ..." Tom could hear the catch in Jane's throat as they gazed down on the lifeless form of Lord Morborne. "That poor woman, Serena Knowlton, the one he's engaged to. And Georgie! Oh, and his mother!"

"Where is ... Lady ...?"

"She's Mrs. Quintero now. She lives in Panama. Her second husband is in shipping and hotels." She paused. "A heart attack, then? Is that ...?" She faltered, looked at him with anxious eyes.

Tom shook his head. "Jane, it's not a heart attack ... or an accident. You can't really see well in this shade-" It would be hours, he realised, before the summer sun moved through the skies to illuminate this particular petal in the rosette. "-but ... Jane, Jane!" he added with haste as she moved to bend for a closer examination. "It's not very pleasant. You don't want to-"

She ignored him, falling to her knees on the damp gra.s.s. "He's been strangled," she murmured in a tone of astonishment after a moment's examination.

He looked down on her vulnerable neck where her dark hair parted. He had not found probable cause quite so quickly, but he had been nursing the hope that the only violence done had been Oliver's body failing itself somehow: an aneurysm, a heart attack, a fatal stroke. But when he let his crutch drop and crouched by the body for a closer study, he could see even in the imperfect light the marked congestion of Oliver's face, the glazed, half-opened eyes red with blood, the tiny hemorrhages along his lids. A ribbon of blood oozed from his nostrils, coiled onto the gra.s.s, gleamed blackly. What violence could cause this? His answer came swiftly from a glance at Oliver's neck above his open collar: a demarcating raw redness. Revulsion battling pity, with slender hope, he had rested two fingers at the neck where a pulse should be, and wasn't.

"He can't be long dead." Jane rose shakily. "The blood hasn't dried completely."

Tom flicked a curious glance at her as he steadied her with his arm.

"When I was in service," she responded, "before I met Jamie ... well, even at the time I met Jamie, I found myself involved in some puzzling deaths ..." She trailed off, turning from Tom to look around the patch of shadowed lawn.

"I was doing a recce myself when I saw you running by," Tom said, making an inference from her gestures. "I couldn't see anything that looked a likely ..." The word was sickening to say. "... ligature."

Jane folded her arms across her chest as if she were suddenly cold. "I feel like the earth has shifted in its...o...b..t," she murmured, then straightened, as if finding a new resolve. "I'll tell Georgie and Hector. Hector can make the call to the police, I guess. Or I can. Will you-"

"I'll stay here. I'd like to say a short prayer."

"Of course. Let me join you, then you can help me back over the hedge."

"Actually, there is another way out, a quicker one. I should have thought of it earlier when you arrived."

Tom watched Jane emerge from the chrysalis of the hedge onto the adjoining lawn.

"Whoever made this breach," she said rising from a crouch and picking scrubby tangle from her hair and T-shirt, "has got to have a mark on him somewhere, don't you think? I do. Look." She twisted the underside of her forearm to reveal a thin red scratch.

"Yes, quite possibly." Or on her, he thought, if indeed it was a woman's head he'd seen earlier-if he'd seen a head at all, other than the Madonna's. The memory seemed long ago and like a dream now. He watched Jane veer to the right and break into a jog. She whistled. Bonzo joined her with joyous barking and together they disappeared down the mound.

Nature being indifferent to human tragedy, the morning swiftly restored itself to tranquility. Tom girded himself to return to the sad task of holding vigil over Lord Morborne's body, but his eyes were caught by the field of tiny diamonds scintillating before his eyes. The sun, now a lemony ball on the southeastern horizon, sent its rays glancing prettily off the drenching of dew on the tract of gra.s.s that glided down from the Labyrinth knoll, and for a moment-only a moment-Tom experienced a tiny unexpected fillip of joy. Lord, I my vows to Thee renew-the words of the hymn came to him like a gift-disperse my sins as morning dew, grant my first springs of thought and will, and with Thyself my spirit fill.

He glanced again at the sparkling and immaculate carpet when he noticed a blemish, a darkening of the lawn by the hedge itself. He realised quickly Jane was the cause. She had trampled the gra.s.s emerging from the hedge and ghosted a trail that disappeared northwest towards the Hall. But the sun, he noted, highlighted another track, this one running directly south, down the dew-covered mound. No, that wasn't quite right. At the bottom, he could clearly see the trail split in two: one path twisted west, vanishing into the growing brightness of Egges...o...b..'s south lawn; the other travelled east, towards a copse of trees, roughly in the direction of Abbotswick. Tom pressed the side of his hand to his brow and squinted at the sun, a golden ball now. Another hot day in the offing. Soon the dew would burn away and the trails vanish. He pinched his lips in indecision. These weren't paths trod by early-rising gardeners. This was the Lord's day. Gardeners were having a lie-in.

What he was about to do, he knew, was transgression of what would soon be declared a crime scene, but the opportunity would not come again. Tom tossed his crutch over the hedge, listened to the dull thump on the gra.s.s beyond, then bent to crawl through the breach in the hedge, as Jane had done, and, if the dew paths did not fib, two others, too, in recent hours. He poked his head into the scrubby tangle of branches, had a moment's self-doubt, then shouldered through on hands and knees, elevating his painful ankle so it didn't catch, pushing at the more resistant branches to protect his face. Emerging, feeling a.s.sailed, he brushed the few leaves and twigs that adhered, checked his shirt for tears, and retrieved his crutch. Gentle as the slope was, he narrowly avoided slipping and half skidded to the bottom where the trail diverged.

Which way, which way? Both tracks looked the same. Each was little more than a progression of iridescent skid marks along the gra.s.s. But the direction of the tracks was more expressive. The eastwards track suggested a connection to the world beyond Egges...o...b.. Park, to an intruder, perhaps, from Abbotswick or elsewhere, a stranger to Oliver. Someone deranged? Someone with some base motive? Had Oliver, for instance, been strangled for the contents of his pocketbook?

Tom turned his head to the west. A nasty shiver travelled his spine: The westwards track led to the peopled heart of the estate, to Egges...o...b.. Hall, where no one was a stranger to Lord Morborne.

He turned west. He told himself it was likely the shorter route, that by following it he might be rewarded with some useful nugget to present to investigators. He pushed from his mind the possibility that someone close to home, someone in Oliver's...o...b..t, might have taken his life.

He traced the scuffings along the shorn gra.s.s, feeling the cool dampness of the dew on the skin of his unshod foot, pa.s.sing the oak with the tree house and crossing the south lawn where yesterday half of Thornford had made merry. The confection of fanciful gables, towers and turrets, flaring an intense rose-pink, seemed yesterday a welcoming backdrop, exalted by the centuries, a mellow manifestation of an England timeless and unchanging. This morning it loomed over him, a lone figure in the landscape, as a spiky bulk, ma.s.sive and intense, shut to the world, animated only by the hard diamond glitter of sunshine on the window mullions as he pa.s.sed. He knew what manner of men had built this great thing-ambitious, fierce, restless, and unscrupulous men.

The dew path did not meander. Soon it took Tom around to the shaded west facade of Egges...o...b.. Hall, down to a walled yard with stacked outdoor tables, folded chairs and cafe umbrellas, and potted trees corralled to one side. The servants' and tradesmen's entrance of old, he surmised, but now refurbished, decorated, and signed to indicate the Egges...o...b.. tearoom, of which the yard was the outdoor patio, public lavatories, and souvenir shop within. His eyes went to the fresh stains, darkly wet on the dry grey stone steps. The shape of a shoe was now discernible. A woman's shoe, he was certain, noting the marks grow less distinct as he followed the trail across the yard to a gla.s.s-fronted door set into the far corner. It was slightly ajar, which startled him a little. Who had risen and been to this part of the house so early in the morning? Or had the door been left unlatched and unlocked all night? Surely Egges...o...b.. was alarmed? And yet he himself had exited by the front entrance with no trouble.

Tom pushed through the door and found himself in a tiled vestibule, dim and grey without benefit of electric light. To his right, he could see through another gla.s.s-fronted door into the souvenir shop, the china and the books slumbering in neat display. Over his right shoulder he glimpsed the tearoom, similarly grey and lifeless. More interesting, though, was the pa.s.sage straight ahead where a tracing of wet footprints vanished into shadow. He noted door frames, two on the left side of the pa.s.sage, but no welcoming light streamed forth onto the tiles from an open door. With trepidation, wondering what he would find if he burst in, he tried the k.n.o.b of the nearest one, but it resisted turning. He looked down the pa.s.sage to the next door, some ten feet away. A fresh green leaf caught his eye, squashed in a smear of damp on the floor between the two doors. He stepped around it and tried the next door. It, too, was locked or bolted. He glanced again at the leaf, set in the last of the footprints, puzzled at the abrupt termination of the trail. No stride could have taken a man or woman to this second door. Whoever had come this way had to be behind the first door, surely.

He moved to knock this time, but was arrested by a sudden dazzling burst of light. He blinked to see a woman in a navy b.u.t.ton-front tunic with a white ap.r.o.n around her waist standing in the doorway to the tearoom, chairs upturned on tables behind her, stripped of their covering cloths, naked and ugly in bright overhead lamps. She was, ludicrously, brandishing a rolling pin.

"Oh! It's you, Mr. Christmas." Ellen Gaunt cast him a severe frown. She was a plump woman with a full, high bust, and a deportment that seemed almost military.

"Mrs. Gaunt, I'm sorry to startle you. I-"

"We had a stranger wander in here last week so-"

"A man?"

"Yes."

"Oh." Tom frowned. "You haven't seen someone else here this morning? A woman, perhaps?"

"No, but I've been in the kitchen. I only came into the tearoom to fetch one of the larger coffeemakers, when I thought I saw someone lurking in the pa.s.sage."

"How long have you been here, if I might ask?"

Ellen didn't answer immediately. Small, sharp eyes seemed to a.s.sess him in some fashion. Then she turned to the watch on her wrist, affecting to study it. "Not more than an hour, I shouldn't think."

"That's very early."

Her lips formed into a thin line. "I like to make an early start. There's breakfast, but I have a lunch to prepare, too."

Tom couldn't help his eyes darting to her sensible black shoes. It was impossible these footprints along the corridor belonged to her. The trail would have led to the kitchen, which the rooms at this end evidently were not. And unless she was lying about her time in the Big House, the footprints would have dried and vanished. But to rea.s.sure himself, he asked: "And you arrived by way of ...?"

"Along the drive from the Gatehouse." She regarded him frostily and added, "Of course."

"Of course." Tom pinched his lips. "You didn't see anyone on the grounds?"

Ellen seemed to hesitate. "Lord Fairhaven, I think. He often goes out for a run early mornings. The light was poor, though."