Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [106]
‘You can stay here if you like,’ Betty said.
She must have heard from the other servants that I had been the one who found the body.
‘Thank you, but we’ll both go.’
We filed into the room and stood in a line by the bed, Betty holding Henrietta’s hand, I James’s, with Charles alone in the middle. For a second time I looked down at that stern, wrinkled face under the nightcap. Somebody had put vases of gardenias and tuberoses from last night’s dinner table on either side of the bed. Their sickly smell helped to mask the scent of blood and decay. James’s hand tightened in mine. Henrietta started sobbing again, loudly and painfully. It was, I think, their first experience of death. As soon as we decently could, we took them back upstairs.
Strictly speaking, I suppose we should have emphasised the solemnity of the occasion by making them read the Bible or some devotional work, but when I fetched a book of fairy stories and started reading to them, Betty raised no objection. It would have taken more than spells and princesses to keep my mind from dwelling on Mr Blackstone and Daniel. After a gloomy lunch, Betty said I should go up and lie down for a couple of hours. I was reluctant to leave her on her own with them but the effects of a night without sleep were catching up with me and I knew I’d be no use to Celia unless I rested.
I hesitated on the landing outside my room, reluctant to open the door for fear of finding things disturbed again. Now I knew it had been invaded, it wasn’t my safe haven any more. There was a wooden ladder fixed to the wall that led upwards from the landing. I’d barely noticed it before, assuming that it was there to give workmen access to the roof. Today, for some reason, it seemed different. Sunlight caught the cobwebs trailing from its rungs and a waft of fresh air came from higher up. My eyes followed the ladder up to a square of blue sky. There shouldn’t have been a square of sky. It had never been there before. A trapdoor then, left open to the roof.
The ladder was a rough affair, two uprights nailed to the wall, narrow rungs of raw pine. I put my hands on the uprights, then my foot on the first rung. What I intended to do wasn’t wise, but I was too tired and angry for wisdom. I climbed up towards the square of blue until there were no more uprights to hold and my head came out into the warm sun while my hands felt the chill of the lead roof covering, still wet with dew. I pulled myself through somehow, with my skirts and petticoats bunching in the hatchway, and ended crouching in a kind of broad trough that ran behind the parapet of the house. After a while I stood upright and stared out over the battlements to the terrace with its white statues and formal gardens, the meadows and the Jersey cattle looking more golden than ever in the morning light, and beyond them, the heath. I could even pick out a string of horses walking across it in the distance and imagined Rancie in her stall with the black cat watching from the hayrack. The wish to have good, solid Amos Legge beside me was so sharp and sudden that it felt like pain. I put it out of my mind and looked left and right along the ramparts.
The view was similar in both directions, some yards of emptiness and then the solid brick base of a chim-neystack, narrowing the walkway. No sign of anybody. But when my eyes adjusted to the light there was a difference between left and right. Something small was lying at the base of the right-hand chimney stack. It looked like a dishcloth at first, until I recognised the green-and-grey stripes of the shawl I’d borrowed from Betty. I took a few steps and bent to pick it up. When it resisted, I tugged harder, thinking it had caught on something. It still wouldn’t budge and from behind the chimney stack came a little noise, halfway between a protest and a moan. There was nothing threatening about the sound, so I went round the chimney stack. The rest of the shawl was wrapped round a woman sitting with her back to the brickwork. She was clinging on to the shawl with her right hand and had the other arm