The commentary meme
Aug. 12th, 2008 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafI finally did the commentary for Tell Beauty How She Blastethm otherwise known as the Wimsey AU of Doom...
It's
The original fic is here.
I disclaimed this at the time as ‘not a cheerful story’, and it isn’t; I’ve lost track of the number of people who said that it made them cry. I found it quite hard to write, not because it was difficult to work out any of the details, but because I really didn’t want to kill Harriet (or Peter); there was a long gap in composition after the war dream sequence (which I’m proud of, in its gruesome way). It was ultimately inspired by conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineveh_uk about the scarcity of Wimseyfic, in which the fatal sentence ‘if it was like Harry Potter fandom, it would be easy to find AU fic where Harriet dies in Strong Poison was uttered, and I found myself compelled to write it, to see what it would be like – though in the end I had to be prodded to finish it. I did enjoy writing pastiche Sayers, and I’m glad to have been moved to dig out the Ralegh poems that are referenced later on, as I only remembered one of them. I really must write something cheerful in this fandom (I have a plotbunny involving a crossover with Buchan’s Hannay-verse and spying, possibly including the incident where Peter masquerades as a German officer, but I’ve yet to work out how to go about it).
I also set my mood to ‘this may not make many friends’; ironically, this fic has inspired more people to friend me than anything else I have done on LJ by a very long chalk.
There were white roses on the bench, and in the dim light of the Old Bailey they looked almost ashen. Both trials in SP begin with a reference to roses on the bench; in the first trial they are red, ‘like splashes of blood’; in the retrial they are yellow. Here, though, they are white – suggesting Harriet’s innocence, but also suggestive of death in their ashen appearance. If this fic had a colour scheme, it would be cold whites and blues.
The prisoner was ashen, too, but composed. She knew what was coming, but she looked ahead, almost defiantly. Only the fact that she avoided looking at the Public Gallery might have been taken as a sign of emotion.
The Judge sat, grave and impartial, and waited courteously for the Jury to return.
The trial had not gone well for the defence.
This section is the most closely modelled on SP of any in the fic
*
“Harriet Deborah Vane, the sentence of the Court upon you is that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined. May the Lord have mercy on your soul." The Judge spoke regretfully; he was a kindly man and disliked sending anyone, not least a woman, to the gallows. The prisoner bowed her head, but gave no other sign of feeling. A few moments earlier she had said, almost numbly, “I didn’t kill him. I can see the strength of the case against me. But I didn’t.” No contrition, and no plea for mercy. Now she made no sound, and allowed herself to be led away. She still did not look at the Public Gallery.
The formula for pronouncing the death sentence is impressive, in it’s way, but I’m very glad it’s not heard in our courts anymore. I don’t see Harriet begging for mercy; she’s too tired and numb.
*
His mother assured him that he had not fainted, or indeed shown any display of feeling at all, but the fact remained that Wimsey remembered absolutely nothing of what followed, and he might have been unconscious, or have done anything at all, for all he knew. Only, on the street outside the court, he heard a rough male voice saying to someone else “She was a hard-faced bitch, wasn’t she? Dunno what they needed a second trial for,” and suddenly feeling rushed back, and he was pushing through the crowd, and for an insane second he genuinely believed that if he could only get his hands round that stupid, callous bastard’s neck, somehow everything would be all right – and someone had their hands on his arm and was shouting “For God’s sake, Peter – Peter!”
The audience in the first trial is hostile, on the whole, to Harriet; here it’s no different.
It was Charles, looking agitated and slightly sick. For a moment Peter, seeing the face of a friend, felt as if some light had broken into the darkness, and then he remembered what Charles had helped to do, and the darkness closed back in on him.
Charles Parker, of course, fouled the case up in the first place, Peter having been abroad at the time. He is a thoroughly decent chap, but his major fault is that he doesn’t understand women, especially those he thinks of as having advanced ideas – admittedly he falls heavily for Mary, despite her Communism and her attempted elopement, but he’s prejudiced against Ann Dorland in ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’, even though poor Ann has broken out much less spectacularly than Harriet (though I suppose her attempts at modern art are an aggravating factor). I think marriage to Mary would probably have improved Charles, but he’s got a lot to learn here.
Charles’s lips were moving, but somehow he couldn’t make out what he was saying. The buzz of the London street was blurred, too. Everything seemed so far away. And he was so cold.
Now his mother was taking his other arm, and saying something. That did begin to penetrate somehow “- I’ll take you home. You can phone Sir Impey and the solicitors from there. We can still appeal, you know, and how those fools in the jury, faces all like rabbits like in Alice, or was that dormice… and I’m sure the court of appeal will be more sensible.”
Wimsey said tonelessly “Yes, of course.” It seemed to be what she expected. But it wouldn’t do any good.
Somehow, whatever he looked at, all he could see was Harriet, sitting pale and composed in the dock. And now sitting, not in the remand but in the condemned cell. Still composed? He would stake his soul on it.
They would appeal against the conviction, and they would appeal against the sentence. And it would be no good.
It’s difficult to write a scene where a character is in an extreme emotional state without overdoing it… I tried to suggest it by sticking to Peter’s perspective, by the use of the past continuous, and Peter’s sense of cold and isolation (his wish to say what his mother wants to hear is, I think, characteristic of Peter, who his mother at one point recalls apologised for being a nuisance when suffering from shellshock) The Duchess is even less coherent than usual, but it’s not entirely surprising; Peter himself had refered to the trial in Alice in Harriet’s first trial.
*
Charles was saying “Damn it, I don’t like it either. But the evidence – you know I don’t want the innocent to hang, but if the evidence points in a particular way –”
“If you say you were only doing your duty, I’ll…”
“I was only doing my duty” said Charles, stubbornly, and before Peter knew quite what had happened his brother-in-law-elect was sprawling on the floor at his feet, looking up at him and rubbing his chin. Peter bent down to help him up.
“I – I’m sorry, Charles, but – why did you have to say that?”
Not a very good line, that, a bit pathetic – but never mind
“I thought it might help if you were angry with me.” Charles grimaced, and wiped blood off his lip. “I didn’t think you’d hit me quite that hard, though.”
Canonically, people keep underestimating Peter’s strength, though Charles should know better (or perhaps he’s underestimating what a mess Peter is currently in).
Wimsey stopped. It had helped, for a moment, but only because the roaring madness had blotted out the vision of Harriet. But Charles – no, he didn’t want to hurt Charles.
“I’m sorry, old man,” he said, and then “I don’t blame you.”
Charles looked partly relieved, and partly doubtful.
“Really.” Peter met his eyes. “I wish it hadn’t been you. But – any policeman would have done it.”
“I wish it hadn’t been me” Charles muttered, but he wasn’t sure whether or not Peter had heard him.
Is Peter too forgiving? He seems to accept the plausibility of the case against Harriet, even though it’s actually fairly dodgy if you put aside the prejudices of the day. And Charles – though he does try – is somewhat repressed and inclined to be judgmental (see the hysterical scene in Unnatural Death where he thinks he is going to meet Peter’s mistress and it turns out to be Miss Climpson). On the other hand, and unlike Helen Denver, he does have a concept of decency ‘which is not entirely negative’, and which he values in Peter. Peter certainly doesn’t seem to hold Charles’ misjudgement of Harriet against him in canon, though it’s more debatable how he’d have seen it if Harriet had been hanged. Charles starts behaving as an ally fairly rapidly in Strong Poison, helping Peter chase down various details, so I reckon Peter would have continued to see Charles as a friend, even though things would be extremely awkward. Charles is having serious doubts about his role in the lead up to the trial, anyway.
*
He went to see her, of course. This time he was taken to the cell, and sat facing her in the little vestibule they let visitors into, looking through the glass. He felt cold, and wondered if it was the room, or himself. He could not see further into the cell, but he knew – he had been told – that behind the vestibule was a bathroom, and behind that, a room with a bed and a table and a wardrobe.
There was a door behind the wardrobe, and behind that an empty cell, and beyond that another door opened onto the gallows.
Based on plans of the condemned cell at Holloway. The arrangement was intended to avoid the need to move the prisoner a long distance before execution, and as such is probably more merciful than the American ‘Death Row’ and ‘dead man walking’, but it’s extremely macabre, especially the business about the wardrobe. Previously, when Harriet was on remand, she saw visitors in the visiting area without glass between them, but condemned prisoners did not leave the execution complex.
“Harriet – I’m so sorry. I’ve failed you,” he began.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and he realised with terror that she sounded sincere. “You did your best. Thank you. I’m glad – I’m glad someone knows it wasn’t me.”
“I-”
“You know, that’s my one consolation. There are people who believe it wasn’t me. Not just one of my friends, either, but an outsider with an unprejudiced mind” she said, almost matter-of-factly. “That, and the fact that my parents didn’t live to see this. I don’t think I could have stood that. As it is – they saw me take my first, and were proud of me. They couldn’t very well be proud of me now.”
but an outsider with an unprejudiced mind – a direct hit in the solar plexus for Peter. Harriet, of course, doesn’t believe he’s really in love with her (understandably, in the circumstances)
“Yes, they could” said Wimsey, fiercely. “Anyone could be. I won’t let you talk like that. You’re a fine writer. You’re brave, and honest, and –and a bonny fechter.”
A reference to Alan Breck, an – extremely charismatic, if hot-tempered – character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Peter calls himself ‘a bonny fechter’ in have His Carcasse, ch 13, so Harriet’s next comment is arguably a bit of subtextual shippiness – except I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Alan Breck. He was the first fictional character I had a crush on, and that despite the pockmarks…
“I always liked Alan Breck,” she said, with the ghost of a smile. “But I don’t think I’m brave, not really. I mean – well, it could be worse. They tell me it doesn’t hurt much… And you’re right about the books. I have done my job to the best of my ability. Whatever else, I’m proud of that. But – God, I’m so tired. If it must be, I’d rather get it over with.”
*
He didn’t visit every day; other people wanted to see her, and he hardly had any claim on her. Sylvia, and Eilunned Price, even her agent, had a better.
Visiting rights are more restricted for condemned prisoners than they are for those on remand (who are, after all, still presumed to be innocent). Is Sylvia’s surname ever established? Sylvia generally seems to be referred to by her first name, and Eilunned with both. And are they a couple? (The latter’s open to speculation, but seems fairly plausible to me.)
“Well, the proofs for Death in the Pot are done, anyway,” she told him, when next he called. She was paler than ever, thin, shadowy about the eyes and hollow about the cheekbones, but still determinedly calm. “But it’s a pity. I had a splendid idea for a new book; the murderer would establish his alibi using the town hall clock. It’s a shame it’ll go to waste.”
This is, in fact, the story Harriet is working on in Have His Carcass, and she has problems with the clock which Wimsey attempts to help with there too. I’ve just noticed that I switched to calling Peter ‘Wimsey’ in these scenes – possibly because of the distance between him and Harriet, though I think it might have been better to stick to ‘Peter’ throughout.
“Could you make a short story of it?” said Wimsey, determined to match her collectedness.
“M-m. I’m having difficulty getting the clock idea to work, though. I don’t know enough about how that sort of clock would be controlled, and it’s quite hard to do any research here. Do you happen to know anything about town hall clocks?”
“I could try to find out. I’ve been little enough use to you otherwise.”
“Don’t say that” she said gently. “Please don’t say that. You really have helped – kept my mind occupied. That’s the only thing that does help. I asked the chaplain if he knew about clocks, but I think he was shocked that I could be thinking about writing detective stories at a time like this.”
“Bloody fool.”
“Ye-es. He was working up to try to persuade me to confess, I think – oh, don’t look like that, it’s only his job – and anyway, I couldn’t work out if he meant ‘confess to murder’ or ‘confess your sins’. I mean, I may not be a murderer, but I haven’t lived a blameless life by anyone’s standards.” She paused, and frowned. “What – oh yes, the chaplain. Anyway, it turned out that he knew Mr Boyes – Philip’s father, you know – and apparently he told him he wasn’t happy about the trial and that if I was innocent, he couldn’t imagine anything more distressing than being badgered to confess something I hadn’t done. He sounds as if he’s a good man. I never met him, of course, it would have been quite impossible, and I could never quite make out what he was like from what Philip said.”
The chaplain, of course, is supposed to prepare the prisoner to meet her God, which includes encouraging repentance. The situation is rather more complicated, pastorally, if the prisoner is actually innocent. We met the Rev’d Boyes earlier on in SP; he’s another of Sayers’ mild-mannered, likable country churchmen, and he tells Peter that he hopes that he can show Harriet is innocent. He has never actually met Harriet, partly because he disapproves of the relationship, and partly because Harriet, in the circumstances, doesn’t want to (which the Rev’d Boyes, IIRC, says ‘shows proper feeling’; I get the impression that he felt his son was treating her badly, and that she was less to blame for the immoral situation than he was – which in this case is true, but refreshing, given the double standard). Philip Boyes’ letter to his father, incidentally, implies that Harriet is also a vicar’s child (like Sayers herself), but in Busman’s Honeymoon he’s a doctor. Harriet’s past is strewn with flints (in Have His Carcass she seems to have grown up in a town, or at least Peter seems to think so and she doesn’t object, whereas by ‘BM’ she grew up in a Hertfordshire village), but in this case I’m going to put it down to PB’s monstrous egotism being such that he has got the wrong end of the stick. Incidentally, we note that Harriet respects other people’s right to do their jobs, even when it gets on her nerves.
“But the chaplain doesn’t know about clocks?”
“No. Could you find out for me? Only I’d sort of like to get this to work.” And here’s Harriet, sticking to her – and Sayer’s – creed that the most important thing is to find your job and do it well, whatever happens….
“All right, then” said Wimsey “But you’ll have to tell me a bit more about what you need…”
*
Miss Climpson, far away in Westmorland, continued to faithfully fight down an increasing sense of despair and to attempt to get into Mrs Wrayburn’s nurse’s confidence. The nurse, a bony, angular woman with a strict notion of duty and propriety, was not obliging. This is in fact the single point from which the AU departs – the canon nurse was a gossipy spiritualist, allowing Miss Climpson, somewhat against her religious scruples as a nose-bleedingly high Anglican, to fake a ghostly message which allowed her to search for Mrs Wrayburn’s will.
Wimsey found out more about clocks than even his usually insatiable curiosity wished to know. An indication of his desperate state of mind, given that canon elsewhere establishes that he’s quite capable of suddenly deciding to trace the course of his own drains. In the intervals of research, he attempted, frantically, to find wires to pull at the Home Office, in case the appeal against the conviction failed. He did not tell Harriet what he was doing, and still tried to persuade her that the appellate court might grant leave to appeal, that it was by no means certain yet, that there was still hope. Besides, he was not sure that she would like his interference. It was unfortunate that the Permanent Secretary was known to regard Bloomsbury as a nest of Communists and pacifists and probable traitors. The Home Secretary, on the other hand, was unlikely to take interference from an Old Etonian lord well; in any case the government was weak and could hardly be expected to court unpopularity by pardoning an unrepentant poisoner, especially one of advanced ideas. There had even been letters in the Times suggesting that this should encourage parents to keep their daughters away from Oxford.
If the novel was contemporary with publication, 1930, the Labour minority government under Ramsey MacDonald was still hanging on, and the home secretary was JR Clynes, a former (child) cotton worker from Oldham. That’s a pretty impressive career trajectory, incidentally, though not exceptional for that generation of Labour politicians. The government was in a very difficult position, with the economy in ruins and mass unemployment, and Macdonald and Snowdon committed to reducing spending and remaining on the Gold Standard – a policy which arguably made matters worse. The Permanent Secretary is ficticious.
The appellate court declined to allow an appeal, on the grounds that the case had been heard twice already.
I am not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that this is what they would have said in a case like this.
Remained only the appeal for mercy to the Home Secretary. Harriet agreed to the appeal being made, though Peter suspected her heart was not in it. A treacherous voice – his own – suggested to him that a quick death might, after all, be preferable to a lifetime in confinement, but he mentally shouted it down. If they could keep Harriet from the gallows, they might one day be able to prove her innocence.
Previously, Peter had said that he wanted to clear Harriet properly, and that she’d probably be better off hanged than having people say she got off on a technicality, but I think he might have changed his mind had it come to it.
*
“I’ve got the story finished,” she told him gravely. “Thank you for the help with the research. I thought of dedicating it to you, but I wasn’t sure if you’d like me to. It might be too much jam for the reporters, and I don’t want to cause you trouble. It wouldn’t be fair, after you tried so hard to help me.”
“Damn the reporters!” The wardress looked over disapprovingly, startled by his anger. “Harriet,” his voice was softer now, “I love you. I –“
“I thought you’d given that up” she said sadly. “It’s no good. And it never would have been any good, even if I were free. You don’t love me. You can’t possibly. You just think you do.”
Peter put his head in his hands. “I always seem to say the wrong thing, don’t I? When it matters. The apparently inexhaustible stream of piffle dries up, and there’s nothing left but ashes and broken bottles.”
I was thinking of ‘dust and broken bottles’, but for some reason typed ‘ashes’ instead. This is not a bad thing, entirely, as I think ‘dust and broken bottles’ is an unconscious memory of Mark Studdock’s realisation, in his repentance, that that it was he himself--nothing else in the whole universe--that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places, and whatever Peter would have thought of That Hideous Strength - Sayers disliked it, though she was something of a fan of the previous two volumes (Lewis had a strange talent for making people dislike the final volumes of his series, didn’t he?) – even a man of his rare talents couldn’t have read a book published in 1945 in 1930)..
“Don’t distress yourself” she said gently, and he thought, what a rotten egotist I am, expecting her to comfort me. “I’ll dedicate the story to you if you like. But don’t take it to heart, so. In two years you’ll only be sorry you didn’t stop them hanging the wrong person. And that will probably be bitter enough, so you had better forget all this stuff about love.”
I can’t recall any instance in canon where Peter fails to the extent that someone innocent is hanged, although there are a few instances where the accused escapes a trial (usually by being allowed to commit suicide, although in one of the short stories a (probable) murderer goes otherwise undetected because Peter chooses not to prove his theory).
She was growing steadily more remote from him, from the living world, further away at every meeting, as if the glass between them was ice thickening in a still-deepening frost. Even before the Home Secretary declined to strike down the sentence, he knew that she had made her peace with death. She no longer disturbed the Chaplain with appeals for apparently random information. She told Peter she had been reading Ralegh. Walter Ralegh, Elizabethan courtier, explorer – and ex-favourite on Elizabeth, who eventually had him executed. An obvious person for a lover of Elizabethan poetry to read in the condemned cell. Note also that Peter associates the distance between them with ice and cold; cold imagery is used throughout the fic.
<“Even such is time…?” Written by Walter Ralegh, in the Tower before his execution
“Yes. Although – I think I like the Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage better, if I could only manage to believe it.” Which you will find here; it contrasts the perfect but merciful judgement in heaven with the corrupt judgements of the earthly courts, where the innocent die and the guilty go free.
“No forg’d accusers bought and sold, no cause deferr’d, nor vain-spent journey… ?”
“Yes. Only I fear it’s more a case of ‘Go, since I needs must die, and give the world the lie’” From The Lie, also Ralegh, and a scathing attack on the corruption of – well, everything beneath the moon, really.
“All love’s but lust? Tell wit how much it wrangles?” Peter suspects a personal reference which Harriet didn’t intend; she’s not actually thinking about him at all, for fairly obvious reasons.
“I didn’t mean that in particular. I didn’t mean you.”
“Tell beauty how she blasteth” said Wimsey, quietly, but Harriet, lost in thought and murmuring “Stab at thee he that will, no stab thy soul can kill,” did not hear him. Once again, ‘The Lie’, and this is where the title comes from.
There was so little time left.
*
Peter called on Miss Climpson, back from the Lake country, the day before the execution. He took in very little of what was said. He remembered hearing his voice, sounding as courteous and light as ever, thank her for her efforts, assure her that he knew she had done all anyone could have done, and that he continued to value her intelligence and hard work.
It was, he thought, like hearing a not very interesting wireless announcement in the next room.
He remembered feeling cold. Once again, grief and emotional pain = cold
One thing, however, which she said before he left, struck home to him. “My dear Lord Peter, please forgive the impertinence, but you must not give way. You have been given such a marvellous talent, and you have helped so many people. You must not throw that away. Other people will need you.”
A corner of his long mouth lifted. “Ah, but that presupposes I have something left to give. I’ve bungled this, or not been clever enough. I’m getting old, Miss Climpson, and I fear the talent may be spent.” He thought, but did not say “What good is it if I couldn’t save her.” Even he could recognise that that was egotistical and absurd – and that recognising that made it no less true. But one could hardly say it. There was no-one to say such things to. I say it myself, but, ouch. Peter, feeling that he has finally found the one person he could be entirely honest with – because of her own honesty – has just lost her. On a side note, he picks up and reactivates the dead Biblical metaphor of the term ‘talent’, derived from the Parable of the Talents and originally meaning a coin.
*
The dreams had begun after the final appeal was denied. They were the old, familiar war dreams, as he had them at the end of most cases, but horribly changed, as if they had not been horrible enough before. He saw her in all of them. He saw her blown into pieces as a shell landed where he had been standing a moment before; she died slowly in his arms with her lungs burnt out by gas because he hadn’t realised there were pockets of the stuff hanging about in the shell holes; he ordered her over the top and watched her hang bleeding on the wire; she was buried in the earth and he could not find her. Sometimes they were both buried, earth pressing in upon them, damp and stifling, and he felt a moment of absolute freedom and joy when Bunter and Charles came and dug him out, but then they left her there to die in the icy rain, and however hard he fought, he couldn’t get away from them to save her.
He saw Harriet die, over and over again, and every time he knew it was his fault.
The responsibility dream again – in a particularly nasty form; Peter had flash-backdreams to the trenches in canon, most explicitly in Whose Body; they appear in a more surreal form and mixed up with the solution to the mystery in Busman’s Honeymoon. Peter’s subconscious is not very subtle, but then – pace Freud – the subconscious often isn’t.
*
He did not see her die in reality. She had said to him “If you really do like me even a little, for God’s sake promise me you won’t try to get permission to see it. I don’t think I could bear it if I knew someone who cared about me would see that.” So he promised. He would have done her any service, and now all that was left to him was to let her go alone to her death.
*
Peter would have said, had he been asked beforehand, that he did not know how he could live through the night before her execution. He had laughed, in what seemed like a previous existence, at the idea that a man could die of love – even though that younger self which had loved Barbara, in his suicidal bravery, had come near to proving that one could. Or Cathcart, blowing a hole in his guts and dying in a conservatory for his Manon Lescaut – he found that he could barely recall the woman’s real name, or her face, although he knew intellectually that she had been breathtaking.
In fact, Peter says in Busman’s Honeymoon that he can’t imagine how he would have got through the night. Cathcart is Mary Wimsey's fiance in Clouds of Witness, who kills himself because his mistress leaves him; the woman is actually called Simone Vonderaa, and the reference is to a French novel of the same name whose hero, a gallant young Frenchman, is destroyed by his love for a prostitute.
All an infernal bloody farce, though he couldn’t imagine who was laughing. “And give the world the lie.” What else could one do, when truth was defeated, and the world went on, not just indifferent but smug and pleased with its victory? But it seemed that it declined to give him satisfaction. Reference to ‘The Lie’, of course, and to duelling – to refuse someone satisfaction is to refuse to fight them
What a mess Cathcart had made of his death, in more than one sense, “If one kills oneself, one ought at least have the decency to leave things as tidy as possible for those who have to clear up afterwards,” Peter thought. He stared at his smooth, closed face in the glided mirror, and thought again of lifting the heavy vase and smashing it against the glass, breaking the image into a thousand fragments.
Earlier in SP, Peter, frustrated with the lack of progress in the case, contemplates smashing the mirror, but doesn’t, because it won’t do any good- Bunter will tidy it up, a replacement will be altered, and Harriet will still hang. It’s a fairly obvious symbol of the will to self-destruction, though, and underlines just how parlous Peter’s mental state is (he recalls in Busman’s Honeymoon that, previously, though he’d been able to enjoy life when things were happening, the minute they stopped ‘I don’t give a two straws if I go west tomorrow’. The situation he’s in here is worse). As Peter’s next comment shows, he is thinking about suicide rather than vandalism – but he can’t, at the moment, bring himself to articulate the thought.
He thought “Of course, Mother would be cut up.” He stared down at the flawless glazed surface of the vase, picked it up, and hefted it idly in his hands.
He could faintly hear Bunter moving about in the kitchen. There couldn’t possibly be anything he needed to do at this hour of the night, but Peter guessed the man was suffering too, if only vicariously. He put the vase down, and found he had made a decision: he had to get out of the flat. He would go for a drive – where didn’t matter, only away, and as fast as possible.
“Bunter? I’m going out for a drive.”
Bunter appeared with what was almost indecorous haste.
“Very good, my lord.” There was a shadow of fear in his eyes. “Will your lordship be requiring me?”
“What? Oh, yes, Bunter, you might as well come. Unless you’re too tired?”
“No, my lord” said Bunter emphatically, who would sooner have died than let his lordship out alone on this night.
The dawn rose cold and pale over the Fens, and far away in London they hanged Harriet Vane.
I’m very pleased with that sentence, grim though it is.
*
Peter’s health broke down entirely, for a while. He was almost as bad as his mother had ever seen him, and she carried him off to the Dower House without meeting any opposition from him. It was like the days just after they brought him home, before Bunter had taken over. And yet she was almost comforted. He was, after all, still here, even if all he did was sit by the fire shivering. (For he was finding it impossible to make decisions again, and that meant he couldn’t – She cut the thought off, hating herself.) He had got over the war, more or less, so surely he would get over this, too, if he could only hang on long enough. Peter’s shellshock is described in Uncle Paul’s biography and, in more vivid detail, in the Duchess’ own account in ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’; part of Peter’s illness is an ability to give orders, which the Duchess attributes to his feelings of guilt and responsibility, but which also looks to me like the apathy of crippling depression.
And indeed, he did improve. He went for walks in the coverts with Gerald, who had enough sense not to try and say anything, apart from the odd remark about the state of the estate, and he ate and drank more normally, although it was hard to say if he took much pleasure in it. He began to take an interest in the papers again, and even did the odd bit of detective work. Gerald, who had never understood his brother, stopped worrying about Peter and returned to fretting over Viscount St George, who always seemed to be in trouble at school. Mary and Charles pressed ahead with the plans for their wedding, which finally came off that February. Peter was Best Man, as had been agreed. He calmed Charles’ nerves, made a remarkably funny speech, teased the bridesmaids, who were an incongruous mix of County and Socialist Club, and put St George to bed to sleep off the champagne before the Duchess could see and be outraged.
Gerald means well, but although he loves his brother, he doesn’t understand him in the least. Mary’s wedding, incidentally, must have been an interesting occasion for all concerned.
Only his mother and Bunter noticed that, apart from that one occasion, he was still listless, his speech flat and dull. He spent a lot of time in the library at Denver, and almost gave up going to London. He always seemed to be cold, and for a while he talked vaguely of going to the south of France or to Italy, but nothing came of it. Although he seemed to be always tired, he could not be persuaded to go to bed early. Bunter, checking on him in the night, once found him muttering in his sleep. It sounded like one of his war dreams, but every now and then Bunter caught the desperate word ‘Harriet’.
Then one wet evening late in March, Peter went out driving alone and did not return.
In consideration of his recent ill health, the jury at the inquest had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of accidental death. Little weight should be attached to the fact, said the coroner, that the deceased had driven off an empty, straight stretch of road into a deep ditch. The weather, cold and wet, had been unsuitable for an open car, and the deceased, though a skilful driver, was given to speeding and had received several summonses for this offence. He was recovering from a period of illness – quite possibly, the family doctor had testified, connected with his war injuries, received in the course of very meritorious service. It was a tragic accident and a sad waste of a brilliant young man who had always striven to live up to the privileged life he had been given. The jury expressed its sympathy to the Wimsey family, and especially to the Dowager Duchess.
Even if the jury and the coroner might suspect that there was more to it than an accident, it seems to me to be plausible that they would bring in accidental death in order to spare the family. However, Peter has carefully chosen a method which looks like enough an accident to avoid unpleasantness and spare people’s feelings as much as possible. I am assuming that Peter is good enough with the car to be sure that he’d die.
*
There were white roses on the altar, and there had been white roses on the coffin, too, like snow that covers and softens an ugly landscape into something like beauty. The Dowager Duchess had put her foot down at Helen’s suggestion of hothouse lilies and orchids. Helen has, as is established elsewhere, neither sense nor taste, but merely a passionate devotion to what she thinks is correct. Peter is not a hothouse lily person, though the lily and orchid tribute organised by Bunter in The Nine Tailors was greatly admired by the villagers. Now I stop and think of it, though, I’m not sure where they’d have got white roses from in March. Drat! At any rate, the flowers echo the white roses on the bench. Snow rather than ash because of the association with ice and Peter’s grief, but also for its – potentially fatal – beauty.
It was all very neat and tidy, thought Charles, gloomily, at the funeral. After the burial, he went back to the church, and sat for a long time, trying to pray and staring at the guttering flame of the altar candle as if he hoped it would warm him.
Cold again… Charles has a long-standing interest in theology dating back to his time at college; he never speaks about his beliefs, but it seems reasonable to assume that he is a practicing Christian of some kind or other. He is also feeling extremely guilty here, with justification.
“I’m sorry,” he said aloud, though he couldn’t have said who he was addressing, and then shook himself. Whatever else, he shouldn’t leave Mary alone, particularly in her condition. He got up and went to look for his wife. Although it’s a fair bet that he was talking to Peter, or God, or possibly both at once…. Mary is pregnant, in a bid to have one bit of this fic not be totally depressing.
Odd, really, he thought as he left the church. Until now, he’d never have believed that having the right woman by your side could be the difference between a life that made sense and one that didn’t. But it began to seem as if it could.
AU! Charles is going to spend a lot of time ruminating on that, because it doesn’t really accord with his views on life. It will probably do him good… I don’t, incidentally, subscribe to the view that you need a successful romance to lead a meaningful life – but I do think that sometimes the right person can be what you need to help you do so.
It's
The original fic is here.
I disclaimed this at the time as ‘not a cheerful story’, and it isn’t; I’ve lost track of the number of people who said that it made them cry. I found it quite hard to write, not because it was difficult to work out any of the details, but because I really didn’t want to kill Harriet (or Peter); there was a long gap in composition after the war dream sequence (which I’m proud of, in its gruesome way). It was ultimately inspired by conversation with
nineveh_uk about the scarcity of Wimseyfic, in which the fatal sentence ‘if it was like Harry Potter fandom, it would be easy to find AU fic where Harriet dies in Strong Poison was uttered, and I found myself compelled to write it, to see what it would be like – though in the end I had to be prodded to finish it. I did enjoy writing pastiche Sayers, and I’m glad to have been moved to dig out the Ralegh poems that are referenced later on, as I only remembered one of them. I really must write something cheerful in this fandom (I have a plotbunny involving a crossover with Buchan’s Hannay-verse and spying, possibly including the incident where Peter masquerades as a German officer, but I’ve yet to work out how to go about it).I also set my mood to ‘this may not make many friends’; ironically, this fic has inspired more people to friend me than anything else I have done on LJ by a very long chalk.
There were white roses on the bench, and in the dim light of the Old Bailey they looked almost ashen. Both trials in SP begin with a reference to roses on the bench; in the first trial they are red, ‘like splashes of blood’; in the retrial they are yellow. Here, though, they are white – suggesting Harriet’s innocence, but also suggestive of death in their ashen appearance. If this fic had a colour scheme, it would be cold whites and blues.
The prisoner was ashen, too, but composed. She knew what was coming, but she looked ahead, almost defiantly. Only the fact that she avoided looking at the Public Gallery might have been taken as a sign of emotion.
The Judge sat, grave and impartial, and waited courteously for the Jury to return.
The trial had not gone well for the defence.
This section is the most closely modelled on SP of any in the fic
*
“Harriet Deborah Vane, the sentence of the Court upon you is that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined. May the Lord have mercy on your soul." The Judge spoke regretfully; he was a kindly man and disliked sending anyone, not least a woman, to the gallows. The prisoner bowed her head, but gave no other sign of feeling. A few moments earlier she had said, almost numbly, “I didn’t kill him. I can see the strength of the case against me. But I didn’t.” No contrition, and no plea for mercy. Now she made no sound, and allowed herself to be led away. She still did not look at the Public Gallery.
The formula for pronouncing the death sentence is impressive, in it’s way, but I’m very glad it’s not heard in our courts anymore. I don’t see Harriet begging for mercy; she’s too tired and numb.
*
His mother assured him that he had not fainted, or indeed shown any display of feeling at all, but the fact remained that Wimsey remembered absolutely nothing of what followed, and he might have been unconscious, or have done anything at all, for all he knew. Only, on the street outside the court, he heard a rough male voice saying to someone else “She was a hard-faced bitch, wasn’t she? Dunno what they needed a second trial for,” and suddenly feeling rushed back, and he was pushing through the crowd, and for an insane second he genuinely believed that if he could only get his hands round that stupid, callous bastard’s neck, somehow everything would be all right – and someone had their hands on his arm and was shouting “For God’s sake, Peter – Peter!”
The audience in the first trial is hostile, on the whole, to Harriet; here it’s no different.
It was Charles, looking agitated and slightly sick. For a moment Peter, seeing the face of a friend, felt as if some light had broken into the darkness, and then he remembered what Charles had helped to do, and the darkness closed back in on him.
Charles Parker, of course, fouled the case up in the first place, Peter having been abroad at the time. He is a thoroughly decent chap, but his major fault is that he doesn’t understand women, especially those he thinks of as having advanced ideas – admittedly he falls heavily for Mary, despite her Communism and her attempted elopement, but he’s prejudiced against Ann Dorland in ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’, even though poor Ann has broken out much less spectacularly than Harriet (though I suppose her attempts at modern art are an aggravating factor). I think marriage to Mary would probably have improved Charles, but he’s got a lot to learn here.
Charles’s lips were moving, but somehow he couldn’t make out what he was saying. The buzz of the London street was blurred, too. Everything seemed so far away. And he was so cold.
Now his mother was taking his other arm, and saying something. That did begin to penetrate somehow “- I’ll take you home. You can phone Sir Impey and the solicitors from there. We can still appeal, you know, and how those fools in the jury, faces all like rabbits like in Alice, or was that dormice… and I’m sure the court of appeal will be more sensible.”
Wimsey said tonelessly “Yes, of course.” It seemed to be what she expected. But it wouldn’t do any good.
Somehow, whatever he looked at, all he could see was Harriet, sitting pale and composed in the dock. And now sitting, not in the remand but in the condemned cell. Still composed? He would stake his soul on it.
They would appeal against the conviction, and they would appeal against the sentence. And it would be no good.
It’s difficult to write a scene where a character is in an extreme emotional state without overdoing it… I tried to suggest it by sticking to Peter’s perspective, by the use of the past continuous, and Peter’s sense of cold and isolation (his wish to say what his mother wants to hear is, I think, characteristic of Peter, who his mother at one point recalls apologised for being a nuisance when suffering from shellshock) The Duchess is even less coherent than usual, but it’s not entirely surprising; Peter himself had refered to the trial in Alice in Harriet’s first trial.
*
Charles was saying “Damn it, I don’t like it either. But the evidence – you know I don’t want the innocent to hang, but if the evidence points in a particular way –”
“If you say you were only doing your duty, I’ll…”
“I was only doing my duty” said Charles, stubbornly, and before Peter knew quite what had happened his brother-in-law-elect was sprawling on the floor at his feet, looking up at him and rubbing his chin. Peter bent down to help him up.
“I – I’m sorry, Charles, but – why did you have to say that?”
Not a very good line, that, a bit pathetic – but never mind
“I thought it might help if you were angry with me.” Charles grimaced, and wiped blood off his lip. “I didn’t think you’d hit me quite that hard, though.”
Canonically, people keep underestimating Peter’s strength, though Charles should know better (or perhaps he’s underestimating what a mess Peter is currently in).
Wimsey stopped. It had helped, for a moment, but only because the roaring madness had blotted out the vision of Harriet. But Charles – no, he didn’t want to hurt Charles.
“I’m sorry, old man,” he said, and then “I don’t blame you.”
Charles looked partly relieved, and partly doubtful.
“Really.” Peter met his eyes. “I wish it hadn’t been you. But – any policeman would have done it.”
“I wish it hadn’t been me” Charles muttered, but he wasn’t sure whether or not Peter had heard him.
Is Peter too forgiving? He seems to accept the plausibility of the case against Harriet, even though it’s actually fairly dodgy if you put aside the prejudices of the day. And Charles – though he does try – is somewhat repressed and inclined to be judgmental (see the hysterical scene in Unnatural Death where he thinks he is going to meet Peter’s mistress and it turns out to be Miss Climpson). On the other hand, and unlike Helen Denver, he does have a concept of decency ‘which is not entirely negative’, and which he values in Peter. Peter certainly doesn’t seem to hold Charles’ misjudgement of Harriet against him in canon, though it’s more debatable how he’d have seen it if Harriet had been hanged. Charles starts behaving as an ally fairly rapidly in Strong Poison, helping Peter chase down various details, so I reckon Peter would have continued to see Charles as a friend, even though things would be extremely awkward. Charles is having serious doubts about his role in the lead up to the trial, anyway.
*
He went to see her, of course. This time he was taken to the cell, and sat facing her in the little vestibule they let visitors into, looking through the glass. He felt cold, and wondered if it was the room, or himself. He could not see further into the cell, but he knew – he had been told – that behind the vestibule was a bathroom, and behind that, a room with a bed and a table and a wardrobe.
There was a door behind the wardrobe, and behind that an empty cell, and beyond that another door opened onto the gallows.
Based on plans of the condemned cell at Holloway. The arrangement was intended to avoid the need to move the prisoner a long distance before execution, and as such is probably more merciful than the American ‘Death Row’ and ‘dead man walking’, but it’s extremely macabre, especially the business about the wardrobe. Previously, when Harriet was on remand, she saw visitors in the visiting area without glass between them, but condemned prisoners did not leave the execution complex.
“Harriet – I’m so sorry. I’ve failed you,” he began.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and he realised with terror that she sounded sincere. “You did your best. Thank you. I’m glad – I’m glad someone knows it wasn’t me.”
“I-”
“You know, that’s my one consolation. There are people who believe it wasn’t me. Not just one of my friends, either, but an outsider with an unprejudiced mind” she said, almost matter-of-factly. “That, and the fact that my parents didn’t live to see this. I don’t think I could have stood that. As it is – they saw me take my first, and were proud of me. They couldn’t very well be proud of me now.”
but an outsider with an unprejudiced mind – a direct hit in the solar plexus for Peter. Harriet, of course, doesn’t believe he’s really in love with her (understandably, in the circumstances)
“Yes, they could” said Wimsey, fiercely. “Anyone could be. I won’t let you talk like that. You’re a fine writer. You’re brave, and honest, and –and a bonny fechter.”
A reference to Alan Breck, an – extremely charismatic, if hot-tempered – character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Peter calls himself ‘a bonny fechter’ in have His Carcasse, ch 13, so Harriet’s next comment is arguably a bit of subtextual shippiness – except I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Alan Breck. He was the first fictional character I had a crush on, and that despite the pockmarks…
“I always liked Alan Breck,” she said, with the ghost of a smile. “But I don’t think I’m brave, not really. I mean – well, it could be worse. They tell me it doesn’t hurt much… And you’re right about the books. I have done my job to the best of my ability. Whatever else, I’m proud of that. But – God, I’m so tired. If it must be, I’d rather get it over with.”
*
He didn’t visit every day; other people wanted to see her, and he hardly had any claim on her. Sylvia, and Eilunned Price, even her agent, had a better.
Visiting rights are more restricted for condemned prisoners than they are for those on remand (who are, after all, still presumed to be innocent). Is Sylvia’s surname ever established? Sylvia generally seems to be referred to by her first name, and Eilunned with both. And are they a couple? (The latter’s open to speculation, but seems fairly plausible to me.)
“Well, the proofs for Death in the Pot are done, anyway,” she told him, when next he called. She was paler than ever, thin, shadowy about the eyes and hollow about the cheekbones, but still determinedly calm. “But it’s a pity. I had a splendid idea for a new book; the murderer would establish his alibi using the town hall clock. It’s a shame it’ll go to waste.”
This is, in fact, the story Harriet is working on in Have His Carcass, and she has problems with the clock which Wimsey attempts to help with there too. I’ve just noticed that I switched to calling Peter ‘Wimsey’ in these scenes – possibly because of the distance between him and Harriet, though I think it might have been better to stick to ‘Peter’ throughout.
“Could you make a short story of it?” said Wimsey, determined to match her collectedness.
“M-m. I’m having difficulty getting the clock idea to work, though. I don’t know enough about how that sort of clock would be controlled, and it’s quite hard to do any research here. Do you happen to know anything about town hall clocks?”
“I could try to find out. I’ve been little enough use to you otherwise.”
“Don’t say that” she said gently. “Please don’t say that. You really have helped – kept my mind occupied. That’s the only thing that does help. I asked the chaplain if he knew about clocks, but I think he was shocked that I could be thinking about writing detective stories at a time like this.”
“Bloody fool.”
“Ye-es. He was working up to try to persuade me to confess, I think – oh, don’t look like that, it’s only his job – and anyway, I couldn’t work out if he meant ‘confess to murder’ or ‘confess your sins’. I mean, I may not be a murderer, but I haven’t lived a blameless life by anyone’s standards.” She paused, and frowned. “What – oh yes, the chaplain. Anyway, it turned out that he knew Mr Boyes – Philip’s father, you know – and apparently he told him he wasn’t happy about the trial and that if I was innocent, he couldn’t imagine anything more distressing than being badgered to confess something I hadn’t done. He sounds as if he’s a good man. I never met him, of course, it would have been quite impossible, and I could never quite make out what he was like from what Philip said.”
The chaplain, of course, is supposed to prepare the prisoner to meet her God, which includes encouraging repentance. The situation is rather more complicated, pastorally, if the prisoner is actually innocent. We met the Rev’d Boyes earlier on in SP; he’s another of Sayers’ mild-mannered, likable country churchmen, and he tells Peter that he hopes that he can show Harriet is innocent. He has never actually met Harriet, partly because he disapproves of the relationship, and partly because Harriet, in the circumstances, doesn’t want to (which the Rev’d Boyes, IIRC, says ‘shows proper feeling’; I get the impression that he felt his son was treating her badly, and that she was less to blame for the immoral situation than he was – which in this case is true, but refreshing, given the double standard). Philip Boyes’ letter to his father, incidentally, implies that Harriet is also a vicar’s child (like Sayers herself), but in Busman’s Honeymoon he’s a doctor. Harriet’s past is strewn with flints (in Have His Carcass she seems to have grown up in a town, or at least Peter seems to think so and she doesn’t object, whereas by ‘BM’ she grew up in a Hertfordshire village), but in this case I’m going to put it down to PB’s monstrous egotism being such that he has got the wrong end of the stick. Incidentally, we note that Harriet respects other people’s right to do their jobs, even when it gets on her nerves.
“But the chaplain doesn’t know about clocks?”
“No. Could you find out for me? Only I’d sort of like to get this to work.” And here’s Harriet, sticking to her – and Sayer’s – creed that the most important thing is to find your job and do it well, whatever happens….
“All right, then” said Wimsey “But you’ll have to tell me a bit more about what you need…”
*
Miss Climpson, far away in Westmorland, continued to faithfully fight down an increasing sense of despair and to attempt to get into Mrs Wrayburn’s nurse’s confidence. The nurse, a bony, angular woman with a strict notion of duty and propriety, was not obliging. This is in fact the single point from which the AU departs – the canon nurse was a gossipy spiritualist, allowing Miss Climpson, somewhat against her religious scruples as a nose-bleedingly high Anglican, to fake a ghostly message which allowed her to search for Mrs Wrayburn’s will.
Wimsey found out more about clocks than even his usually insatiable curiosity wished to know. An indication of his desperate state of mind, given that canon elsewhere establishes that he’s quite capable of suddenly deciding to trace the course of his own drains. In the intervals of research, he attempted, frantically, to find wires to pull at the Home Office, in case the appeal against the conviction failed. He did not tell Harriet what he was doing, and still tried to persuade her that the appellate court might grant leave to appeal, that it was by no means certain yet, that there was still hope. Besides, he was not sure that she would like his interference. It was unfortunate that the Permanent Secretary was known to regard Bloomsbury as a nest of Communists and pacifists and probable traitors. The Home Secretary, on the other hand, was unlikely to take interference from an Old Etonian lord well; in any case the government was weak and could hardly be expected to court unpopularity by pardoning an unrepentant poisoner, especially one of advanced ideas. There had even been letters in the Times suggesting that this should encourage parents to keep their daughters away from Oxford.
If the novel was contemporary with publication, 1930, the Labour minority government under Ramsey MacDonald was still hanging on, and the home secretary was JR Clynes, a former (child) cotton worker from Oldham. That’s a pretty impressive career trajectory, incidentally, though not exceptional for that generation of Labour politicians. The government was in a very difficult position, with the economy in ruins and mass unemployment, and Macdonald and Snowdon committed to reducing spending and remaining on the Gold Standard – a policy which arguably made matters worse. The Permanent Secretary is ficticious.
The appellate court declined to allow an appeal, on the grounds that the case had been heard twice already.
I am not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that this is what they would have said in a case like this.
Remained only the appeal for mercy to the Home Secretary. Harriet agreed to the appeal being made, though Peter suspected her heart was not in it. A treacherous voice – his own – suggested to him that a quick death might, after all, be preferable to a lifetime in confinement, but he mentally shouted it down. If they could keep Harriet from the gallows, they might one day be able to prove her innocence.
Previously, Peter had said that he wanted to clear Harriet properly, and that she’d probably be better off hanged than having people say she got off on a technicality, but I think he might have changed his mind had it come to it.
*
“I’ve got the story finished,” she told him gravely. “Thank you for the help with the research. I thought of dedicating it to you, but I wasn’t sure if you’d like me to. It might be too much jam for the reporters, and I don’t want to cause you trouble. It wouldn’t be fair, after you tried so hard to help me.”
“Damn the reporters!” The wardress looked over disapprovingly, startled by his anger. “Harriet,” his voice was softer now, “I love you. I –“
“I thought you’d given that up” she said sadly. “It’s no good. And it never would have been any good, even if I were free. You don’t love me. You can’t possibly. You just think you do.”
Peter put his head in his hands. “I always seem to say the wrong thing, don’t I? When it matters. The apparently inexhaustible stream of piffle dries up, and there’s nothing left but ashes and broken bottles.”
I was thinking of ‘dust and broken bottles’, but for some reason typed ‘ashes’ instead. This is not a bad thing, entirely, as I think ‘dust and broken bottles’ is an unconscious memory of Mark Studdock’s realisation, in his repentance, that that it was he himself--nothing else in the whole universe--that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places, and whatever Peter would have thought of That Hideous Strength - Sayers disliked it, though she was something of a fan of the previous two volumes (Lewis had a strange talent for making people dislike the final volumes of his series, didn’t he?) – even a man of his rare talents couldn’t have read a book published in 1945 in 1930)..
“Don’t distress yourself” she said gently, and he thought, what a rotten egotist I am, expecting her to comfort me. “I’ll dedicate the story to you if you like. But don’t take it to heart, so. In two years you’ll only be sorry you didn’t stop them hanging the wrong person. And that will probably be bitter enough, so you had better forget all this stuff about love.”
I can’t recall any instance in canon where Peter fails to the extent that someone innocent is hanged, although there are a few instances where the accused escapes a trial (usually by being allowed to commit suicide, although in one of the short stories a (probable) murderer goes otherwise undetected because Peter chooses not to prove his theory).
She was growing steadily more remote from him, from the living world, further away at every meeting, as if the glass between them was ice thickening in a still-deepening frost. Even before the Home Secretary declined to strike down the sentence, he knew that she had made her peace with death. She no longer disturbed the Chaplain with appeals for apparently random information. She told Peter she had been reading Ralegh. Walter Ralegh, Elizabethan courtier, explorer – and ex-favourite on Elizabeth, who eventually had him executed. An obvious person for a lover of Elizabethan poetry to read in the condemned cell. Note also that Peter associates the distance between them with ice and cold; cold imagery is used throughout the fic.
<“Even such is time…?” Written by Walter Ralegh, in the Tower before his execution
“Yes. Although – I think I like the Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage better, if I could only manage to believe it.” Which you will find here; it contrasts the perfect but merciful judgement in heaven with the corrupt judgements of the earthly courts, where the innocent die and the guilty go free.
“No forg’d accusers bought and sold, no cause deferr’d, nor vain-spent journey… ?”
“Yes. Only I fear it’s more a case of ‘Go, since I needs must die, and give the world the lie’” From The Lie, also Ralegh, and a scathing attack on the corruption of – well, everything beneath the moon, really.
“All love’s but lust? Tell wit how much it wrangles?” Peter suspects a personal reference which Harriet didn’t intend; she’s not actually thinking about him at all, for fairly obvious reasons.
“I didn’t mean that in particular. I didn’t mean you.”
“Tell beauty how she blasteth” said Wimsey, quietly, but Harriet, lost in thought and murmuring “Stab at thee he that will, no stab thy soul can kill,” did not hear him. Once again, ‘The Lie’, and this is where the title comes from.
There was so little time left.
*
Peter called on Miss Climpson, back from the Lake country, the day before the execution. He took in very little of what was said. He remembered hearing his voice, sounding as courteous and light as ever, thank her for her efforts, assure her that he knew she had done all anyone could have done, and that he continued to value her intelligence and hard work.
It was, he thought, like hearing a not very interesting wireless announcement in the next room.
He remembered feeling cold. Once again, grief and emotional pain = cold
One thing, however, which she said before he left, struck home to him. “My dear Lord Peter, please forgive the impertinence, but you must not give way. You have been given such a marvellous talent, and you have helped so many people. You must not throw that away. Other people will need you.”
A corner of his long mouth lifted. “Ah, but that presupposes I have something left to give. I’ve bungled this, or not been clever enough. I’m getting old, Miss Climpson, and I fear the talent may be spent.” He thought, but did not say “What good is it if I couldn’t save her.” Even he could recognise that that was egotistical and absurd – and that recognising that made it no less true. But one could hardly say it. There was no-one to say such things to. I say it myself, but, ouch. Peter, feeling that he has finally found the one person he could be entirely honest with – because of her own honesty – has just lost her. On a side note, he picks up and reactivates the dead Biblical metaphor of the term ‘talent’, derived from the Parable of the Talents and originally meaning a coin.
*
The dreams had begun after the final appeal was denied. They were the old, familiar war dreams, as he had them at the end of most cases, but horribly changed, as if they had not been horrible enough before. He saw her in all of them. He saw her blown into pieces as a shell landed where he had been standing a moment before; she died slowly in his arms with her lungs burnt out by gas because he hadn’t realised there were pockets of the stuff hanging about in the shell holes; he ordered her over the top and watched her hang bleeding on the wire; she was buried in the earth and he could not find her. Sometimes they were both buried, earth pressing in upon them, damp and stifling, and he felt a moment of absolute freedom and joy when Bunter and Charles came and dug him out, but then they left her there to die in the icy rain, and however hard he fought, he couldn’t get away from them to save her.
He saw Harriet die, over and over again, and every time he knew it was his fault.
The responsibility dream again – in a particularly nasty form; Peter had flash-backdreams to the trenches in canon, most explicitly in Whose Body; they appear in a more surreal form and mixed up with the solution to the mystery in Busman’s Honeymoon. Peter’s subconscious is not very subtle, but then – pace Freud – the subconscious often isn’t.
*
He did not see her die in reality. She had said to him “If you really do like me even a little, for God’s sake promise me you won’t try to get permission to see it. I don’t think I could bear it if I knew someone who cared about me would see that.” So he promised. He would have done her any service, and now all that was left to him was to let her go alone to her death.
*
Peter would have said, had he been asked beforehand, that he did not know how he could live through the night before her execution. He had laughed, in what seemed like a previous existence, at the idea that a man could die of love – even though that younger self which had loved Barbara, in his suicidal bravery, had come near to proving that one could. Or Cathcart, blowing a hole in his guts and dying in a conservatory for his Manon Lescaut – he found that he could barely recall the woman’s real name, or her face, although he knew intellectually that she had been breathtaking.
In fact, Peter says in Busman’s Honeymoon that he can’t imagine how he would have got through the night. Cathcart is Mary Wimsey's fiance in Clouds of Witness, who kills himself because his mistress leaves him; the woman is actually called Simone Vonderaa, and the reference is to a French novel of the same name whose hero, a gallant young Frenchman, is destroyed by his love for a prostitute.
All an infernal bloody farce, though he couldn’t imagine who was laughing. “And give the world the lie.” What else could one do, when truth was defeated, and the world went on, not just indifferent but smug and pleased with its victory? But it seemed that it declined to give him satisfaction. Reference to ‘The Lie’, of course, and to duelling – to refuse someone satisfaction is to refuse to fight them
What a mess Cathcart had made of his death, in more than one sense, “If one kills oneself, one ought at least have the decency to leave things as tidy as possible for those who have to clear up afterwards,” Peter thought. He stared at his smooth, closed face in the glided mirror, and thought again of lifting the heavy vase and smashing it against the glass, breaking the image into a thousand fragments.
Earlier in SP, Peter, frustrated with the lack of progress in the case, contemplates smashing the mirror, but doesn’t, because it won’t do any good- Bunter will tidy it up, a replacement will be altered, and Harriet will still hang. It’s a fairly obvious symbol of the will to self-destruction, though, and underlines just how parlous Peter’s mental state is (he recalls in Busman’s Honeymoon that, previously, though he’d been able to enjoy life when things were happening, the minute they stopped ‘I don’t give a two straws if I go west tomorrow’. The situation he’s in here is worse). As Peter’s next comment shows, he is thinking about suicide rather than vandalism – but he can’t, at the moment, bring himself to articulate the thought.
He thought “Of course, Mother would be cut up.” He stared down at the flawless glazed surface of the vase, picked it up, and hefted it idly in his hands.
He could faintly hear Bunter moving about in the kitchen. There couldn’t possibly be anything he needed to do at this hour of the night, but Peter guessed the man was suffering too, if only vicariously. He put the vase down, and found he had made a decision: he had to get out of the flat. He would go for a drive – where didn’t matter, only away, and as fast as possible.
“Bunter? I’m going out for a drive.”
Bunter appeared with what was almost indecorous haste.
“Very good, my lord.” There was a shadow of fear in his eyes. “Will your lordship be requiring me?”
“What? Oh, yes, Bunter, you might as well come. Unless you’re too tired?”
“No, my lord” said Bunter emphatically, who would sooner have died than let his lordship out alone on this night.
The dawn rose cold and pale over the Fens, and far away in London they hanged Harriet Vane.
I’m very pleased with that sentence, grim though it is.
*
Peter’s health broke down entirely, for a while. He was almost as bad as his mother had ever seen him, and she carried him off to the Dower House without meeting any opposition from him. It was like the days just after they brought him home, before Bunter had taken over. And yet she was almost comforted. He was, after all, still here, even if all he did was sit by the fire shivering. (For he was finding it impossible to make decisions again, and that meant he couldn’t – She cut the thought off, hating herself.) He had got over the war, more or less, so surely he would get over this, too, if he could only hang on long enough. Peter’s shellshock is described in Uncle Paul’s biography and, in more vivid detail, in the Duchess’ own account in ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’; part of Peter’s illness is an ability to give orders, which the Duchess attributes to his feelings of guilt and responsibility, but which also looks to me like the apathy of crippling depression.
And indeed, he did improve. He went for walks in the coverts with Gerald, who had enough sense not to try and say anything, apart from the odd remark about the state of the estate, and he ate and drank more normally, although it was hard to say if he took much pleasure in it. He began to take an interest in the papers again, and even did the odd bit of detective work. Gerald, who had never understood his brother, stopped worrying about Peter and returned to fretting over Viscount St George, who always seemed to be in trouble at school. Mary and Charles pressed ahead with the plans for their wedding, which finally came off that February. Peter was Best Man, as had been agreed. He calmed Charles’ nerves, made a remarkably funny speech, teased the bridesmaids, who were an incongruous mix of County and Socialist Club, and put St George to bed to sleep off the champagne before the Duchess could see and be outraged.
Gerald means well, but although he loves his brother, he doesn’t understand him in the least. Mary’s wedding, incidentally, must have been an interesting occasion for all concerned.
Only his mother and Bunter noticed that, apart from that one occasion, he was still listless, his speech flat and dull. He spent a lot of time in the library at Denver, and almost gave up going to London. He always seemed to be cold, and for a while he talked vaguely of going to the south of France or to Italy, but nothing came of it. Although he seemed to be always tired, he could not be persuaded to go to bed early. Bunter, checking on him in the night, once found him muttering in his sleep. It sounded like one of his war dreams, but every now and then Bunter caught the desperate word ‘Harriet’.
Then one wet evening late in March, Peter went out driving alone and did not return.
In consideration of his recent ill health, the jury at the inquest had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of accidental death. Little weight should be attached to the fact, said the coroner, that the deceased had driven off an empty, straight stretch of road into a deep ditch. The weather, cold and wet, had been unsuitable for an open car, and the deceased, though a skilful driver, was given to speeding and had received several summonses for this offence. He was recovering from a period of illness – quite possibly, the family doctor had testified, connected with his war injuries, received in the course of very meritorious service. It was a tragic accident and a sad waste of a brilliant young man who had always striven to live up to the privileged life he had been given. The jury expressed its sympathy to the Wimsey family, and especially to the Dowager Duchess.
Even if the jury and the coroner might suspect that there was more to it than an accident, it seems to me to be plausible that they would bring in accidental death in order to spare the family. However, Peter has carefully chosen a method which looks like enough an accident to avoid unpleasantness and spare people’s feelings as much as possible. I am assuming that Peter is good enough with the car to be sure that he’d die.
*
There were white roses on the altar, and there had been white roses on the coffin, too, like snow that covers and softens an ugly landscape into something like beauty. The Dowager Duchess had put her foot down at Helen’s suggestion of hothouse lilies and orchids. Helen has, as is established elsewhere, neither sense nor taste, but merely a passionate devotion to what she thinks is correct. Peter is not a hothouse lily person, though the lily and orchid tribute organised by Bunter in The Nine Tailors was greatly admired by the villagers. Now I stop and think of it, though, I’m not sure where they’d have got white roses from in March. Drat! At any rate, the flowers echo the white roses on the bench. Snow rather than ash because of the association with ice and Peter’s grief, but also for its – potentially fatal – beauty.
It was all very neat and tidy, thought Charles, gloomily, at the funeral. After the burial, he went back to the church, and sat for a long time, trying to pray and staring at the guttering flame of the altar candle as if he hoped it would warm him.
Cold again… Charles has a long-standing interest in theology dating back to his time at college; he never speaks about his beliefs, but it seems reasonable to assume that he is a practicing Christian of some kind or other. He is also feeling extremely guilty here, with justification.
“I’m sorry,” he said aloud, though he couldn’t have said who he was addressing, and then shook himself. Whatever else, he shouldn’t leave Mary alone, particularly in her condition. He got up and went to look for his wife. Although it’s a fair bet that he was talking to Peter, or God, or possibly both at once…. Mary is pregnant, in a bid to have one bit of this fic not be totally depressing.
Odd, really, he thought as he left the church. Until now, he’d never have believed that having the right woman by your side could be the difference between a life that made sense and one that didn’t. But it began to seem as if it could.
AU! Charles is going to spend a lot of time ruminating on that, because it doesn’t really accord with his views on life. It will probably do him good… I don’t, incidentally, subscribe to the view that you need a successful romance to lead a meaningful life – but I do think that sometimes the right person can be what you need to help you do so.