Mr. Hastings drew the team to a stop behind another coach, and we stepped down.
“Do ye want me to go with ye?” Munro asked.
I could have sworn he was relieved when I told him I was quite all right on my own. I would never have imagined that he would be uneasy in such surroundings.
The hound had no such hesitation, but bounded off. I suppose it was a dog’s paradise with abundant trees and bushes, and scents far different from the streets.
I had worn my split skirt and jacket with boots, my hair pulled back. I was not in the habit of wearing a black gown even if I owned one, which I did not.
My sister had declared me a heathen. “What will you wear when Aunt Antonia passes on?” she had once asked, quite serious.
I had promptly pointed out that our great-aunt would very likely outlive us both, hence no need to be concerned what we would wear.
However, in the remote possibility that wemightoutlive her, I had informed Linnie that I would wear gypsy clothes, bells about my wrists and ankles, and dance barefoot in the moonlight, as my friend Templeton had once described she wanted to be sent off. And I would set the torch myself to the funerary barge carrying my great-aunt’s body.
“There are times,” Linnie had declared in response, “when I am positively certain that we are not related at all.”
So there we were, my aunt and I for a Viking send-off, my sister for an impossibly boring interment in a crypt where the insects and rats would have their way, or possibly someone in the greater London Planning Department would decide decades later that her crypt had to be moved to make way for a rail station.
It did conjure up all sorts of images.
I navigated the pathway quite easily that led to a clearing with an enormous crypt in the center, surrounded by other monuments. The crypt was of the granite Gothic design with a wrought iron gate and quite old—a Lewiston ancestor by the inscription over the entrance.
The setting was peaceful, surrounded by trees, those family names, and the sad, drawn features of the woman who sat there.
She came every week since then, her housekeeper said, and brought flowers for the son she had lost. A son who had fallen in love with a young woman and fathered a child, and then was tragically murdered. And who, strangely enough, was buried in his mother’s family crypt.
I passed other Lewiston monuments that went back through at least three generations, and then slowly approached a woman dressed in grey who sat beside a simply carved headstone that read:
Stephen Christopher Lewiston
Beloved son
1860 to 1881
Not Matthews!
I couldn’t help but feel that I had somehow stumbled upon another piece of the puzzle that was Ellie Sutton’s death.
But what did it mean?
Twenty
I waitedat the edge of the clearing. I might be anxious to learn what I could, however, contrary to my sister’s declaration, I was not a heathen. Nor was I insensitive to other people’s grief.
My own experience with such things were my parents. Our mother first of‘wasting disease,’as the physician said at the time. To which our great-aunt called him a fool and highly incompetent. Still, that did nothing to ease the sense of loss of someone who had spent the last two years of her life confined to bed.
The other experience was with our father. The only thing I could say about that was that my sister and I were undoubtedly better off for it.
Cruel, I know, and Linnie has often reminded me of it. Nevertheless, I have no sympathy for someone who wasted the family fortunes, undoubtedly contributed to the death of our mother, and would have put my sister and me on the street if not for our great-aunt. Nor someone who then chose the coward’s way out of the debacle he had created by taking his own life.
With that said, I did believe that a person’s mourning was a private thing, and I didn’t want to intrude on Mrs. Matthews.
I waited, until the sun angled lower through the canopy of trees, with the distinctive sound of a hound in the distance.
“It is very peaceful here,” I commented.
Adelaide Matthews look up startled. She stared at me in confusion, her face pale and drawn.
