Unnatural death
Edition opening
Contents and reading sections
Unnatural Death
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Harper & Row, Publishers, New York
Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco
London, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto
WIMSEY, Peter Death Bredon, D.S.O.; _born_ 1890, _2nd son_ of Mortimer
Gerald Bredon Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and of Honoria Lucasta,
_daughter of_ Francis Delagardie of Bellingham Manor, Hants. _Married_
1935, Harriet Deborah Vane, _daughter of_ Henry Vane, M.D.; one _son_
(Bredon Delagardie Peter) _born_ 1936.
_Educated_: Eton College and Balliol College, (1st class honours),
Sch. of Mod. Hist. 1912; served with H.M. Forces 1914/18 (Major, Rifle
Brigade). _Author of_: “Notes on the Collecting of Incunabula,” “The
Murderer’s Vade-Medum,” etc. Recreations: Criminology; bibliophily;
music; cricket.
_Clubs_: Marlborough; Egotists’; Bellona. _Residences_: 110A,
Piccadilly, W.; Bredon Hall, Duke’s Denver, Norfolk.
_Arms_: Sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat crouched
as to spring, proper; motto: As my Whimsy takes me.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Communicated by
Paul Austin Delagardie
I am asked by Miss Sayers to fill up certain lacunae and correct a few
trifling errors of fact in her account of my nephew Peter’s career. I
shall do so with pleasure. To appear publicly in print is every man’s
ambition, and by acting as a kind of running footman to my nephew’s
triumph I shall only be showing a modesty suitable to my advanced age.
The Wimsey family is an ancient one—too ancient, if you ask me. The only
sensible thing Peter’s father ever did was to ally his exhausted stock
with the vigorous French-English strain of the Delagardies. Even so, my
nephew Gerald (the present Duke of Denver) is nothing but a beef-witted
English squire, and my niece Mary was flighty and foolish enough till
she married a policeman and settled down. Peter, I am glad to say, takes
after his mother and me. True, he is all nerves and nose—but that is
better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brother,
or a bundle of emotions like Gerald’s boy, Saint-George. He has at least
inherited the Delagardie brains, by way of safeguard to the unfortunate
Wimsey temperament.
Peter was born in 1890. His mother was being very much worried at the
time by her husband’s behaviour (Denver was always tiresome, though the
big scandal did not break out till the Jubilee year), and her anxieties
may have affected the boy. He was a colorless shrimp of a child, very
restless and mischievous, and always much too sharp for his age. He had
nothing of Gerald’s robust beauty, but he developed what I can best call
a kind of bodily cleverness, more skill than strength. He had a quick
eye for a ball and beautiful hands for a horse. He had the devil’s own
pluck, too: the intelligent sort of pluck that sees the risk before it
takes it. He suffered badly from nightmares as a child. To his father’s
consternation he grew up with a passion for books and music.
His early school-days were not happy. He was a fastidious child, and I
suppose it was natural that his school-fellows should call him “Flimsy”
and treat him as a kind of comic turn. And he might, in sheer
self-protection, have accepted the position and degenerated into a mere
licensed buffoon, if some games-master at Eton had not discovered that
he was a brilliant natural cricketer. After that, of course, all his
eccentricities were accepted as wit, and Gerald underwent the salutary
shock of seeing his despised younger brother become a bigger personality
than himself. By the time he reached the Sixth Form, Peter had contrived
to become the fashion—athlete, scholar, _arbiter elegantiarum—nec
pluribus impar_. Cricket had a great deal to do with it—plenty of Eton
men will remember the “Great Flim” and his performance against
Harrow—but I take credit to myself for introducing him to a good tailor,
showing him the way about Town, and teaching him to distinguish good
wine from bad. Denver bothered little about him—he had too many
entanglements of his own and in addition was taken up with Gerald, who
by this time was making a prize fool of himself at Oxford. As a matter
of fact Peter never got on with his father, he was a ruthless young
critic of the paternal misdemeanours, and his sympathy for his mother
had a destructive effect upon his sense of humour.
Denver, needless to say, was the last person to tolerate his own
failings in his offspring. It cost him a good deal of money to extricate
Gerald from the Oxford affair, and he was willing enough to turn his
other son over to me. Indeed, at the age of seventeen, Peter came to me
of his own accord. He was old for his age and exceedingly reasonable,
and I treated him as a man of the world. I established him in
trustworthy hands in Paris, instructing him to keep his affairs upon a
sound business footing and to see that they terminated with goodwill on
both sides and generosity on his. He fully justified my confidence. I
believe that no woman has ever found cause to complain of Peter’s
treatment; and two at least of them have since married royalty (rather
obscure royalties, I admit, but royalty of a sort). Here again, I insist
upon my due share of the credit; however good the material one has to
work upon it is ridiculous to leave any young man’s social education to
chance.
The Peter of this period was really charming, very frank, modest and
well-mannered, with a pretty, lively wit. In 1909 he went up with a
scholarship to read History at Balliol, and here, I must confess, he
became rather intolerable. The world was at his feet, and he began to
give himself airs. He acquired affectations, an exaggerated Oxford
manner and a monocle, and aired his opinions a good deal, both in and
out of the Union, though I will do him the justice to say that he never
attempted to patronise his mother or me. He was in his second year when
Denver broke his neck out hunting and Gerald succeeded to the title.
Gerald showed more sense of responsibility than I had expected in
dealing with the estate; his worst mistake was to marry his cousin
Helen, a scrawny, over-bred prude, all country from head to heel. She
and Peter loathed each other cordially; but he could always take refuge
with his mother at the Dower House.
And then, in his last year at Oxford, Peter fell in love with a child of
seventeen and instantly forgot everything he had ever been taught. He
treated that girl as if she was made of gossamer, and me as a hardened
old monster of depravity who had made him unfit to touch her delicate
purity. I won’t deny that they made an exquisite pair—all white and
gold—a prince and princess of moonlight, people said. Moonshine would
have been nearer the mark. What Peter was to do in twenty years’ time
with a wife who had neither brains nor character nobody but his mother
and myself ever troubled to ask, and he, of course, was completely
besotted. Happily, Barbara’s parents decided that she was too young to
marry; so Peter went in for his final Schools in the temper of a Sir
Eglamore achieving his first dragon; laid his First-Class Honours at his
lady’s feet like the dragon’s head, and settled down to a period of
virtuous probation.
Then came the War. Of course the young idiot was mad to get married
before he went. But his own honourable scruples made him mere wax in
other people’s hands. It was pointed out to him that if he came back
mutilated it would be very unfair to the girl. He hadn’t thought of
that, and rushed off in a frenzy of self-abnegation to release her from
the engagement. I had no hand in that; I was glad enough of the result,
but I couldn’t stomach the means.
He did very well in France; he made a good officer and the men liked
him. And then, if you please, he came back on leave with his captaincy
in ’16, to find the girl married—to a hard-bitten rake of a Major
Somebody, whom she had nursed in the V.A.D. hospital, and whose motto
with women was catch ’em quick and treat ’em rough. It was pretty
brutal; for the girl hadn’t had the nerve to tell Peter beforehand. They
got married in a hurry when they heard he was coming home, and all he
got on landing was a letter, announcing the _fait accompli_ and
reminding him that he had set her free himself.
I will say for Peter that he came straight to me and admitted that he
had been a fool. “All right,” said I, “you’ve had your lesson. Don’t go
and make a fool of yourself in the other direction.” So he went back to
his job with (I am sure) the fixed intention of getting killed; but all
he got was his majority and his D.S.O. for some recklessly good
intelligence work behind the German front. In 1918 he was blown up and
buried in a shell-hole near Caudry, and that left him with a bad nervous
breakdown, lasting, on and off, for two years. After that, he set
himself up in a flat in Piccadilly, with the man Bunter (who had been
his sergeant and was, and is, devoted to him), and started out to put
himself together again.
I don’t mind saying that I was prepared for almost anything. He had lost
all his beautiful frankness, he shut everybody out of his confidence,
including his mother and me, adopted an impenetrable frivolity of manner
and a dilettante pose, and became, in fact, the complete comedian. He
was wealthy and could do as he chose, and it gave me a certain amount of
sardonic entertainment to watch the efforts of post-war feminine London
to capture him. “It can’t,” said one solicitous matron, “be good for
poor Peter to live like a hermit.” “Madam,” said I, “if he did, it
wouldn’t be.” No; from that point of view he gave me no anxiety. But I
could not but think it dangerous that a man of his ability should have
no job to occupy his mind, and I told him so.
In 1921 came the business of the Attenbury Emeralds. That affair has
never been written up, but it made a good deal of noise, even at that
noisiest of periods. The trial of the thief was a series of red-hot
sensations, and the biggest sensation of the bunch was when Lord Peter
Wimsey walked into the witness-box as chief witness for the prosecution.
That was notoriety with a vengeance. Actually, to an experienced
intelligence officer, I don’t suppose the investigation had offered any
great difficulties; but a “noble sleuth” was something new in thrills.
Denver was furious; personally, I didn’t mind what Peter did, provided
he did something. I thought he seemed happier for the work, and I liked
the Scotland Yard man he had picked up during the run of the case.
Charles Parker is a quiet, sensible, well-bred fellow, and has been a
good friend and brother-in-law to Peter. He has the valuable quality of
being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.
The only trouble about Peter’s new hobby was that it had to be more than
a hobby, if it was to be any hobby for a gentleman. You cannot get
murderers hanged for your private entertainment. Peter’s intellect
pulled him one way and his nerves another, till I began to be afraid
they would pull him to pieces. At the end of every case we had the old
nightmares and shell-shock over again. And then Denver, of all
people—Denver, the crashing great booby, in the middle of his
fulminations against Peter’s degrading and notorious police activities,
must needs get himself indicted on a murder charge and stand his trial
in the House of Lords, amid a blaze of publicity which made all Peter’s
efforts in that direction look like damp squibs.
Peter pulled his brother out of that mess, and, to my relief, was human