Death at Rottingdean Read Online Free

“But I’m sure you and Caroline Kipling would get on famously. She has a new baby, a boy, I understand, just over a month old.”
    And then he stopped and turned to her, stricken, and she saw in his sherry-brown eyes what she knew was in his heart: an overwhelming sadness at the loss of their own child, and at the awful knowledge that there could never be a son, at least not her son, to fulfill the obligations of his lineage.

3
    At Brighton, the lanes remain much as they were in the eighteenth
century, when goods were landed on the beach and carried
straight up for sale and distribution from shops and inns
among the winding alleys and narrow courtyards. The Old
Ship Hotel nearby has changed little since the days of George
IV’s coronation in 1821, when it was the scene of an admirable
bit of smuggling opportunism. While the town celebrated
elsewhere, the free-traders took advantage of the empty streets
and moved tubs of spirits out of the pub stables completely
unobserved. Today it’s one of the town’s better hotels, with
an air more of smugness than smugglers.
    â€”RICHARD PLATT Smugglers’ Britain
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    C harles turned away from Kate with an inward groan, cursing himself for his thoughtlessness. What a way to begin their holiday—by reminding her of her terrible loss, the very loss he had brought her here to forget! Kate had been wonderfully brave in the months since her illness and miscarriage, but he knew she needed to be away from everything—away from that huge, cold London house, even away from Bishop’s Keep, where they had dreamed together of the children they would have.
    Now that dream was dead, and to ease Kate’s heart, he had arranged this month-long holiday in a peaceful village on the south coast of England, where he could spend every moment with her, helping her forget, helping her heal the loss for which she seemed to carry such a dreadful burden of responsibility and guilt.
    These were topics he found difficult to discuss. But then, Charles, like most of the men he knew, could not speak easily about the things that were closest to him. On their wedding night, Kate had run her finger over one of the wide scars on his bare chest. When she asked about it, he said only that he had been in a tight spot in the Sudan, and gently silenced her. She had understood that it was a matter he did not wish to discuss, and though they slept in each other’s arms every night, she never mentioned the scars again. The moment never arose when he could tell her how it was that he had lived and all of his men had died, that he had been rewarded with a knighthood for his bravery, while their courage was forgotten, and how sad he still felt about these things. In fact, he had been in India to convey his condolences to the parents of his young sergeant, when Rudyard Kipling, then the eager new assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, had heard a rumor of the affair and sought him out. He could not talk of it to Kipling, either.
    They now were entering Brighton. It was Saturday, and the bright autumn sunshine, as always, had lured hundreds of day-trippers from the city on the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway. Working-class families dressed in their best, they came to listen to a concert on the lawns near the Metropole Hotels, or stroll along the sea-front promenade and laugh at the banjo-playing blackface minstrels in their striped blazers and straw boaters. They joined the crowds visiting West Pier and the Aquarium and the new Palace Pier, scheduled to open the next year. Or they rode in horse-drawn buses to the neighboring seaside resorts of Rottingdean and Hove, or boarded a paddle-wheeled pleasure-steamer for a trip to the Isle of Wight. Brighton had its own fine Society, of course, led by the Duchess of Fife (who was frequently visited by her father, the Prince of Wales) and the two wealthy Sassoon brothers, both bankers. The Brighton season