Free A Mansion and its Murder by Robert Barnard Page B

one was imported to graze on Blakemere’s grassy expanses, so there was no question of my noticing.
    I got no whisper of it when Mrs Nealson first brought the matter out into the open. I think I may have heard of a joint visit to the nursery by Dr Morris and Dr Petherbridge, but I thought this was merely routine – high-level routine, certainly, but that would have been in keeping with all Grandpapa’s other dealings during the pregnancy and the lying-in.
    My uncle Frank was summoned home from Paris, and this time he came.
    The news, the awful news, gradually seeped down to me.
    Richard was not responding as a baby of six weeks should – not observing, not reacting. In a word – and it was a word that began to bewhispered around even below stairs – he was ‘backward’. Worse than that, he was what we today would call retarded. Under their breaths the servants used the word ‘idiot’.
    I was never told whether this was due to something either of the doctors had done during the delivery, and I made no inquiries later on when I was in a position to. To what end? And it would have seemed too much like trying to attribute blame. How could I want to put blame on anyone for the condition of a boy, a man, who was so much happier and nicer than anyone else at Blakemere?
    The medical men came fairly frequently, together or separately, for several weeks after that. I think, like most professional people, they had an aversion to delivering bad news with any brutal suddenness: doing it by dribs and drabs is much more beneficial financially. Certainly Mary was a long time taking the news in: she went on feeding the quiet, plump little bundle, and seemed to think that his condition might be reversed by treatment – an operation, or a course of the waters.
    When the truth was revealed to her, her world fell apart. The fact that it was an unlovely world, a piece of self-glorification andself-aggrandisement, did not make its shattering any the less appalling. She continued feeding Richard, but she otherwise preferred not to see him. Any nursing, cradling, cuddling he got came from his father, or from me, or from one of the women paid to take care of him, who felt their importance suddenly diminished. It bound me still more tightly to Uncle Frank that the confirmation that his son was mentally retarded did not shake by one iota the love that he felt for him.
    ‘It’s obvious that sooner or later he will have to be put in an institution,’ I heard Mary say one day to her husband. ‘Best for him if it’s sooner.’
    She said ‘him’ as if she wanted to say ‘it.’ They were on the terrace, and I saw Uncle Frank’s face darken, and he strode off without a word down to the meadows.
    I think if he could have chosen, Uncle Frank would have been much more at Blakemere from then on. But it was not to be thought of: Blakemere contained his wife, and everything she did from the time of the doctors’ final pronouncement jangled his nerves and outraged his feelings of justice and decency. The poor little mite had in effect lost both parents.
    ‘I think Richard should go and live with BeaSouth for a bit,’ I said to him, one day after tennis. ‘That way he would get a bit of love.’
    He looked at me mystified.
    ‘You remember Beatrice. I used to be always talking about her. She used to be an upper parlormaid here – she married the coachman at Tillyards about the time you married … your wife. She gave me love when I needed it.’ He hesitated, attracted by the idea, yet reluctant.
    ‘I wouldn’t want it thought it was in any way like putting him away in an asylum.’
    ‘It wouldn’t be. It would be just while he is a baby. Babies are often put out to nurse. Bea has a son, too – they would be together, and it might … help.’
    Uncle Frank thought about it, and two days later we rode over together and he broached the possibility to Bea. She would have agreed whatever her feelings were – she was loyal to the Fearings