Page 71 of Lies in Little Sutherland
I thought back.It had been four months ago, so hardly a long time, everything considered, but it felt like a lifetime.“She knew about Wilkins.That he was Uncle Herbert’s son with the maid from before Uncle Herbert married Aunt Roz.”
Christopher didn’t answer, and I added, “Until then, Uncle Herbert hadn’t known that Wilkins existed.”
“But she also reminded him that it had happened again,” Christopher said, his face disconsolate.
I nodded.“Yes, she did.And when I asked him, Uncle Herbert said that Aunt Roz knew all about that.Otherwise, I would have been tempted to tell her.”
I loved my uncle, and I owed him for taking me in and taking care of me since age eleven.But my aunt was my mother’s sister, so I owed her more.
“Wait—” I squinted at him.“Are you telling me that your mum doesn’t know?He lied to me?”
“I’m sure Mum knows,” Christopher said hollowly.His hands were clasped between his knees, and he was staring at them, fixedly.“I know, too.I’ve known since July.”
“When you were sitting on the ground outside the study window,” I said, putting two and two together.“They talked about it.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t we hear it?Crispin and I?”
“They’d finished by the time you arrived outside the window,” Christopher said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.I opened my mouth to ask him to clarify, but then I closed it again, and really thought about it.Christopher was concerned about Crispin, that Crispin might have killed Hughes, Morrison, and Doctor Meadows.
And Alfie, I suppose, although Alfie was probably only dead now because he knew something about Doctor Meadows’s killer.Not like the other three, who had been murdered—or so I suspected—because of something that had happened twenty-three years ago, when Crispin was a baby, and when Hughes and Morrison had switched places.
And then I thought about that afternoon four months ago, of coming around the corner of Beckwith Place beside Crispin, with the sun shining down on us and the bees buzzing, and seeing Christopher on the grass underneath the study window, with tears streaking his cheeks and a look of horror on his face when he had seen us—no, when he had seenCrispin—approach.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
Christopher didn’t answer, just looked miserable, and I added, “His brother’s wife?Why would your father do that?”
Bedding the maid and begetting Wilkins as a callow youth was one thing.Bedding his sister-in-law while his own wife was enceinte—Christopher was born barely two months before Crispin—was another matter entirely.
“I expect she asked him to,” Christopher muttered.
I stared at him, appalled.“Who?Aunt Roz?”
She would have been in her first trimester when Crispin was conceived—perhaps feeling poorly, perhaps nauseated and disinclined to intimacy—but that was no reason to send her husband to someone else.
You wouldn’t find me doing something like that.If I were suffering with my husband’s spawn, and he wanted to get frisky, he had better just hold that thought until I felt better, or he’d find himself without both wife and child.
The fact that Crispin’s face popped into my head at this juncture doesn’t even deserve a mention.It was only because it was something he would do, I told myself, and there was certainly no other reason for it.
“Not Mum,” Christopher said with a snort.“Mum would never.I meant Aunt Charlotte.”
“Aunt Charlotte asked your father to bed?”
“I assume she would have done.Or perhaps she did ask Mum.It might have been a mutual decision.”
I stared at him, the way I would have stared at someone who was leaping around the courtyard with bells on his shoes and a crown of flowers on his head.Someone who had taken leave of his senses.“Whatever are you blathering about, Christopher?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”Christopher asked.“Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Harold had been married for several years by then.Mum had Francis and Robbie, and was having me.Aunt Charlotte had no one.Uncle Harold wanted an heir?—”
“And you think Aunt Charlotte asked your father to give her one?And your mum agreed?”
Christopher shrugged as if it didn’t matter, when I knew full well that it did.“Keep it in the family, no?”
I sat back and thought about it.“I suppose there might be something to that.I can understand Aunt Charlotte’s side of it, at any rate.Uncle Harold must have been impatient.And it’s never the husband’s fault, is it?If she couldn’t provide him with an heir, he’d simply get rid of her, and find himself a different wife.”
