Thieves Break In Page 5

  The Vicar knew all of the village urchins as well as all of the children whose families worked on the two great local estates, Morgan Mallowan and Datchworth Castle. He had seen them line the road, wide-eyed, when the Earl and Countess had swept through Wallwood in their silver Rolls-Royce, swathed to the ears in ermine, bound for the opening of Parliament. The Vicar had seen the children close-huddled by the gates of the Castle on a summer evening, watching in vicarious delight as huge cars rumbled past bearing white-tied gents and bejeweled ladies to the parties which, even at a subdued wartime level, presented heights of spine-tingling glamour to those for whom serious luxury would have been a new pair of shoes. But in the eyes of young Bertie Crumper the Vicar had discerned a crucial difference from the excited wonder of his peers. Something in the wideness of the gaze; something in the open, unsmiling mouth. The boy was one of those who worshiped.

  The Vicar had made this diagnosis the previous summer. As he knew very well that people’s lives are shaped by what they worship, he had hoped for the boy’s sake that when Bertie’s soul elected its object of veneration, that object would prove worthy, and would lead the child in the paths of righteousness. Or at least, out of serious trouble. But today his mind was altogether too busy to ponder Bertie Crumper.

  He was as ready as he could be, and so was the church. The florists (there seemed to be about two dozen of them) had arrived at dawn and transformed his humble village church into the anteroom to paradise. Sir Harold, father of the bride, had descended upon the church shortly after the florists had finished, beamed his approval, tipped them all generously, and—to the Vicar’s intense relief—shooed them off the premises.

  “Everything under control, Vicar?” he had boomed from the doorway, having rid the church of aliens.

  “I believe so, Sir Harold.” Then, as a kindness to the Baronet, who was unfailingly pleasant and unendingly generous to the church, Mr. Collins added, “It looks quite wonderful.”

  Sir Harold emitted a bark of laughter. “Well, the girl wanted flowers, and flowers she got.” He rolled a rueful eye toward the Vicar. “She also got everything else she wanted.”

  Collins smiled. “Well, a girl is only a bride once,” he said excusingly, although privately he agreed with his wife that this level of extravagance was probably inexcusable.

  “Thank God for that!” the Baronet replied, drawing a genuine laugh from the Vicar. “Well, I’d better get back to the house. Clarissa’s screaming for a report on the flowers, and Lady Bebb will kill me if I’m not there when the Banners arrive. Mrs. Banner, that’s the groom’s mum, is pretty frail, you know. Lady Bebb’s in a pother about it.”

  He departed with a wave, and the Vicar returned to his own preparations, hoping for Sir Harold’s sake that the bride’s “screaming” was only hyperbole. Winston Collins’s opinion of Clarissa was not high. A stunning beauty, of course. Huge, glittering smile. But the smile was a stretching of beautiful lips over perfect white teeth. It did not extend to her eyes. Evidently John Banner had not noticed. Or perhaps Banner, rich beyond the dreams of avarice and utterly middle class, cared more about allying himself to the old blood of the Bebberidge-Thorpes than having an amiable wife.

  Who knows, Collins reflected, they might be made for each other. This thought made it possible for him to contemplate his duty for that day with a shade less guilt. It was hard enough, even with the most pleasant of bridal couples, to read the Prayer Book wedding service without a tinge of unease. All those pious promises about leading a specifically Christian life sailed right over the heads of most twentieth-century souls, who didn’t understand the language of half of the vows they were making and wouldn’t mean to follow them if they did.

  Between his scrupulous conscience and his desire that the wedding should proceed without the slightest hitch—for the sake not of the bride but of her far more likable father—the Vicar’s mind had no more time for the village children, who with intuitive good timing were beginning to gather about the church.

  They were careful to stay out of the way; they knew their boundaries well, the older ones officiously restraining the younger ones. Most of them stood in the church-yard, between the graves but not on them. From this vantage point they had an excellent view of all the arriving cars and also of the elegant occupants as they emerged from their vehicles (assisted by their chauffeurs) and trod gingerly up the gravel path to the church door. The children giggled surreptitiously over the dowagers’ hats, oohed with admiration at the young swells and young ladies, and generally enjoyed themselves so much that not one of them noticed that Bertie Crumper was not among them.

  Bertie had discovered a small open window in the storage room behind the vestry. Wriggling cautiously through it, he had discovered with joy that the door from the little room to the vestry had been left open. This attempt on the Vicar’s part to alleviate the growing warmth of the summer morning was seen by Bertie as nothing less than a divine invitation. Waiting in cautious silence behind a stack of boxes, he heard the Vicar’s prayer with the servers, and the soft rustle of their robes as they filed out of the vestry into the church. He peered from his hiding place, ascertained the coast was clear, and crept over to the faded purple curtain that covered an old opening in the wall on the church side of the vestry. With the stealth of a stalking cat he pushed the curtain slowly to one side, inch by inch, until he could see the middle of the church, with all the gentry in the pews. If he moved a bit to his left and looked right, he could see the Vicar standing up by the altar. The posh bloke next to Mr. Collins looked too old to be the groom, but Bertie couldn’t figure out who else he could be. Suddenly the music changed, and Bertie heard the wedding march. He moved to the right and peered leftward down the aisle to the church door. Almost in silhouette, framed against the bright sunlight, stood a tall couple, who as Bertie watched began to walk down the aisle in a measured pace. As they moved away from the light in the doorway, Bertie was able to recognize Sir Harold but he spared him a mere half a glance.

  Bertie had seen Clarissa Bebberidge-Thorpe before, of course. He knew she was beautiful. But he’d never seen her this close. And he’d never seen her clothed from head to foot in sparkling white, white roses in her hair and lace all around her like a cloud. As she moved gracefully toward the altar, her brilliant smile lighting up the onlookers like a second sun, Bertie recognized dimly that here was the rightful queen of this fairyland. She was coming into it, claiming it. A tiny rustle of awe accompanied her as she walked, telling Bertie that she was also claiming the fairyland’s inhabitants. They were her subjects. With every step she took, he could feel her power growing stronger.

  As she reached the altar, she turned her perfect face upon the man she was about to marry and allowed the smile to rest on him, a regal gift. But the heart she enslaved in that moment was not that of her bridegroom.

  Chapter 7

  THURSDAY, THE DAY AFTER ROB HILLMAN’S DEATH

  About Seven in the Evening

  Paddington Station was an old, familiar friend. It was she herself who had changed. On the positive side, she knew where she was going. She was much more self-assured. And there was no denying that it was pleasant to have money. As an ordinary graduate student she had lugged her own bags, hoisted them up into a second-class carriage, and struggled down the aisle with them to find a seat. This time she had paid a porter to carry them and hand them over to the guard in the luggage car.

  No; luggage van, she reminded herself. She was vain about her ability to speak British, a language that differed in slight but significant ways from American, but she was out of practice. What I need, she decided, is an Oxford accent to talk to. That’ll bring it back in a trice.

  But the moment the thought occurred to her, she realized that she didn’t want to talk to anybody, least of all a stranger, regardless of accent. There was a leaden weight the size of a fist somewhere between her heart and her stomach; it had been there since she had picked up the phone to hear her uncle’s voice, dull with
shock, and in the background her aunt’s sobbing.

  Rob. Dead.

  Impossible.

  Everything else had been blotted out. The insiders’ tour of Oxford she had promised the people from St. Margaret’s. The lunches and teas she’d arranged with old college friends who were still living there. Even the pleasures that hadn’t yet happened—the punting, the Ashmolean—with Rob. Instead, her first appointment in Oxford would be at the police station with an Inspector—no, a Chief Inspector—by the name of Lamp. Lamp. A lamp unto my feet. My eyes? Let thy word be a lamp unto my—what was the damn verse. She couldn’t remember.

  Rob. Dead. Like her father.

  When her father had died, it had been Rob who met her at JFK and held her while she cried all the way back to Texas.

  There had been nobody to hold her on the flight to London. Her mother, of course, had gone to be with her aunt and uncle. Kathryn felt alone now in a way she had never been before.

  She mounted the steps into the first-class carriage and moved slowly down the narrow corridor that ran the length of it, looking into the compartments as she passed them. She was assessing the desirability of the occupants as traveling companions in case she was unable to find a compartment that was empty. In the first one, three gray-suited businessmen were chatting in a desultory manner. City gents, she thought, and was faintly pleased at the readiness with which the British term resurfaced in her mind. The next compartment contained a young woman with two children—rare in first class—though a subtle quality in their seemingly casual clothes signaled to the experienced eye that here was a family who could well afford luxury. The occupants of the third compartment were more conventional; two fifty-somethings in skirts of well-worn summer tweed, twin sets, and yes, Kathryn verified with a discreet glance, there were the requisite pearls. County ladies, she noted. I’m traveling with the great clichés of the English class system.

  Suddenly her steps halted. She had come abreast of the fourth compartment. There a reddish-blond man in his mid-thirties was talking animatedly to someone Kathryn didn’t bother to notice. She caught her breath. It couldn’t be. On second thought, maybe it could. A firstclass carriage from Paddington was an entirely plausible place to happen upon a prominent British actor. Just then he laughed at something said by his companion, and he looked so beautiful, Kathryn felt a pang in her heart despite the lead weight. It had to be him. The finely chiseled (Fiennely chiseled?) profile, the pointed nose a fraction too long, the chin a couple of microns too small, the freckles— freckles?

  As if he sensed her presence, the redheaded man turned his head and looked directly at her, the laughter still lingering on his face. There was no disguising the fact she had been staring at him. Kathryn felt her cheeks go hot.

  “I—I—beg your pardon,” she stammered, realizing her mistake. It wasn’t her second-favorite actor, after all. She plunged hastily down the narrow corridor, no longer looking for an empty compartment, seeking merely to distance herself from her embarrassment.

  A teddibly, teddibly upper-class accent called after her. “I say, don’t run off like that!”

  She turned. It wasn’t the gorgeous redhead; it was the other person from that compartment, who turned out to be another wonderful-looking man approximately Kathryn’s age. Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered but athletically trim, he had smoky brown skin that accentuated the brightness of his teeth, and that rare beauty that Kathryn had noticed before in her Eurasian friends at Oxford. He wore the right clothes for a gentleman (in the old sense of the word) coming into the city for the day, but he wore them haphazardly; his shirttail was untidy if not quite untucked, and his jacket, although the correct size, hung on him as though it hadn’t made up its mind whether it planned to stay there or to move to some more stable location.

  No normal woman would have given a damn. He was as handsome as he was big, and his smile would have melted a misanthropic lesbian.

  Kathryn still had the stammers. “I—I—I’m so sorry, I know I was staring quite rudely, but I thought, I thought your, uh, friend was—”

  “He’s used to it,” he assured her, waving away her apology with a dismissive hand. His smile, impossibly, got warmer. “What he’s not used to is the person doing the rude staring being a stunning brunette. What would I have to say to get you to join us?”

  Kathryn’s cheeks were warming again, but this time the sensation was considerably more pleasant. She hesitated only two seconds.

  “I think you just said it,” she admitted, and retraced her steps.

  The man with the red hair sat very tall in his seat, and there radiated from him a palpable energy, an intensity which at that moment focused on Kathryn with a rueful twinkle in his eye.

  “Happens all the time,” he told her. His accent was as posh as his friend’s. “They pause, they stare, they think, ‘My God, it’s the Oscar Bafta Golden Globe–winning—’ ” He shook his head mournfully. “And then they notice the damned polka-dots.”

  They were hard not to notice, actually; his fair skin was liberally dusted with freckles, from the roots of his red-gold hair to the open neck of his blue shirt. But the blue was the next thing that caught Kathryn’s attention, for his eyes were a shade somewhere between the pigeon’s egg of his shirt and the royal of his blazer.

  The freckles, the thin face, the elegant drape of the blue clothes and the self-deprecating humor, the red hair and the energy that hummed from him like an electric current, combined to create the most vividly attractive man Kathryn had ever beheld. She knew that by any sane standards his friend was better-looking, and furthermore, Eurasian good looks had always gotten to her in a very serious way. But it didn’t matter. The truth was irresistibly drawn from her as she sank, a trifle weak-kneed, into the seat opposite him.

  “I like the damned polka dots.”

  It was his turn to blush, a tinge of crimson creeping up under the orange freckles, but he pretended not to believe her.

  “You like the polka dots?” he asked incredulously. “Does insanity run in your family?”

  “Do polka dots run in yours?” she countered.

  “Only since m’father went to Ireland to find a wife.”

  “The ones in England were all hiding?”

  “I think he just fancied a bride from over the water.”

  “Does that run in your family?”

  “Hasn’t so far, but I think I hear it trotting down the track to the starting gates.”

  Minutes earlier, Kathryn would not have believed that she could laugh, but she did, and it felt surprisingly good. Both men laughed with her. Then the freckled one leaned forward and extended a hand as thin and elegant as the rest of him.

  “Christopher Mallowan, please call me Kit. And this is Will Tandulkar.”

  Will had been standing in the doorway of the compartment ever since he had waved Kathryn into it, as though reluctant to break the line of vision between his friend and the American beauty. But as his name was pronounced, he stepped between them to return to his seat, dropped into it, and held out a hand.

  Kathryn took it, saying, “Hello, Will. Run your last name past me again?”

  “Tan-dul-kar. It’s Indian.”

  “That much,” she nodded sagely, “I had sort of guessed. She turned back to Kit and asked him, also, to repeat his last name.

  “It’s a bit unusual,” he acknowledged, “but basically one just says ‘Allen’ with an ‘M’ in front of it.”

  Will asked Kathryn what she was doing “in our green and pleasant land.”

  She studied him a moment, wondering whether the snippet of Blake was meant to impress or test her, or if the man naturally and spontaneously sprinkled his speech with scraps of poetry.

  Taking no chances, she replied, “That’s a brave phrase for someone sitting on a train that’s shortly going to be chugging past the dark satanic mills of Didcot.” This speech efficiently conveyed to both her listeners two facts: she was familiar with William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” and
she knew that the Paddington to Oxford train went past Didcot and its nuclear power station.

  “Touché!” cried Kit, applauding.

  Will clapped one hand to his chest as if in pain, raised the other in a fencer’s gesture, and acknowledged, “A hit! A very palpable hit!”

  Kathryn knew instantly that a hit was precisely what she had made, and was grateful. She liked Will both for his quotations and for his clowning, but nothing and no one could divert her interest from his redheaded friend. It took willpower to ignore Kit and keep her gaze on the beautiful Mr. Tandulkar, but she didn’t want to be humiliatingly obvious.

  “To answer your question,” she said as she forcibly closed a solid door in her mind against her grief, “I am brought to this green and pleasant land by the Dreaming Spires. My church in New Jersey is sending over a herd of Anglophiles and I volunteered to show them around Oxford, since so often American tourists get dumped in the middle of Cornmarket and are told to get on with it, then they wander cluelessly around in the noise and traffic wondering why anybody would bother to come to such a place.”

  “That’s right!” Kit leaned forward again to eye her with fervent approval. “Oxford hides.”

  “Yes! And you have to know where to find it,” she responded. “Those little islands of the Middle Ages, tucked away down cobbled alleyways. Oxford is like a scattering of emeralds, set in—” She hesitated, hunting for a sufficiently distasteful word.

  “Plastic,” Kit supplied.

  “Yes! Amid great, grinding noise.”

  “Exactly.”

  They regarded each other with immense satisfaction.

  It was not that Kathryn had forgotten her cousin’s death at the first sight of an attractive man. On the contrary, it was precisely because of that unbearable ache that her response to the redheaded stranger was so powerful. The ghost, the grief, the pain suffocated her; her emotions were crying out for relief, desperate for more pleasant sensations. Even as she rushed into this blessed relief, a fraction of her brain was remembering with cold-blooded clarity a little-known fact she had been taught in her seminary’s pastoral counseling course: one of the most common reactions to bereavement is increased sexual drive.