Lord Mullion's Secret Read online

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  Lord Mullion’s Secret

  First published in 1981

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1981-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121023 EAN: 9780755121021

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  1

  The Mullions were still quite comfortably off, although they no longer managed to pay their way in the entirely unobtrusive fashion they would have wished. Twice a week, and through the greater part of the year, they were obliged to turn Mullion Castle into a Stately Home. The disturbance was heralded shortly after breakfast, when Lord Mullion ascended to the leads and himself hoisted his personal standard above the battlements. He didn’t greatly care for thus announcing to the world that he was ‘in residence’, since it seemed to him that whether he was at Mullion or not was a private matter with which the world had nothing to do. This particular small ostentation, indeed, was perfectly orthodox among his peers, a clear majority of whom probably maintained the habit. But Lord Mullion was a retiring man, who had to be kept up to the mark in the matter by his wife. ‘Hang out our banners on the outward walls,’ Lady Mullion would instruct him as she finished her second cup of coffee. ‘The cry is still “They come”.’ And of course it was very desirable that they should come, since the reference was not to a hostile army but to the cars and char-a-bancs which would presently be bumping up the drive. So Lord Mullion did as he was told, consoling himself with the thought that his gesture could be construed as being, like Macbeth’s, one of defiance rather than of welcome.

  But Lord Mullion did on every occasion himself punctiliously welcome the small posse of gentlewomen – locally recruited and in reduced circumstances – upon whom he relied for the purpose of guiding visitors round the castle. It gratified tourists, he had been told, to entertain the vague belief that it was members of the Wyndowe family itself who were doing them this semi-menial service. Indeed, from time to time Lord Mullion afforded some solid ground for a persuasion of this sort by himself issuing entrance tickets at a small table placed beneath the portcullis. While thus occupied he quite readily forgot the mild indignity of the whole affair and welcomed his visitors with the same unaffected cordiality that he would have directed upon acquaintances of his own sort whom his wife had invited to luncheon. This duty performed, however, he would then retire with the rest of his household to what the shepherding ladies described as the ‘private wing’. As Mullion Castle was not particularly large (except for the moat, which was enormous), and as most of what there was of it was well worth seeing, this meant rather a cooped-up existence for two days out of seven. But the money flowed in and was not to be quarrelled with.

  On the whole it was only the servants who actively disapproved of being ‘open’ every Wednesday and Saturday. Like the family, they were kept out of sight, so there was no question of their picking up tips from the tourists, visitors, sightseers, or whatever the invading hordes were to be called. Even the teas on offer in the great tithe barn were served by respectable women from the two nearest villages, since Lady Mullion found this arrangement useful both as an engine of patronage and as a means of maintaining desirable friendly relations with that particular stratum of her neighbours. And the indoor staff did have a certain amount of extra work on the ‘open’ days. Strips of stout drugget had to be put down over valuable but perilously antique carpets, and various articles of furniture in similar condition had to be secured behind little rope barriers as in an old-fashioned picture gallery. Moreover there was a good deal of miscellaneous clearing up to do when the day’s traffic was over.

  Lady Mullion herself undertook one or two slightly vexatious tasks. She enjoyed deploying rather more in the way of floral arrangements than the household would normally have been content to accept (or the gardeners to supply). But the whole question of ‘being lived in’ was a tricky one. The char-a-banc people in particular – the Mullions had been assured – liked to feel that in every room they visited a normal routine of the most aristocratic sort had been going on only minutes before. Lord Mullion thought there was a great deal of good sense in this. Nothing was more depressing, he was accustomed to say, than those châteaux on the Loire where, in the middle of gardens and waterway
s still admirably maintained, stands an enormous untenanted house with no more than a few sticks of tables and chairs and mouldering beds scattered at random here and there. But just where did one stop in the creating of this effect – or of this illusion, as it sometimes was? If one laid out preparations for bacon and eggs in a modest way in the breakfast room was it sensible to have a dinner-table awaiting almost innumerable banqueters on display at the other end of the castle? How lavishly, Lady Mullion asked herself, ought one to spread around those rather boring periodicals devoted to the celebration of fashionable life and rural pursuits? Again, what about Henry’s cigars – so decidedly one among his few extravagances: ought the box to remain (open even) on his writing table in the library, or ought it to be shoved into a drawer? And then there were the photographs, family and other. The Mullions rather went in for these; they were perched in silver frames on little tables all over the place. Lord Mullion was a trifle vague about the several generations of Wyndowes thus on view, and only his wife could put a name to the army of relations, some in bath chairs and some in perambulators, thus patiently waiting to be recalled to mind. And there was the special case of the royal family. The Wyndowes happened to be among those of their kind who held the House of Windsor in high regard, and sundry exalted persons, sensible of the fact, had responded with the gracious bestowal of a signed photograph. Such exhibits meant much more to the majority of the ‘patrons’ (as Lord Mullion with a mild irony sometimes termed his customers) than did the portraits of even the most authentically Tudor Wyndowes. And there was something not quite agreeable about this.

  The problem of the photographs was a little exacerbated by the particular method of showing the castle which had been chosen by Lord Mullion. It had been explained to him by the experts in such enterprises that one can set about this in one of two ways. One can post, as it were, a sentinel or guard in every room and commanding every corridor, and allow one’s visitors either to wander at will or to follow at their own pace a route marked out by a series of directing arrows pinned up in appropriate places. Or one can gather the visitors in clumps, and send the successive clumps round at convenient intervals under the wardenship of an individual guide. Lord Mullion had plumped for the latter method. He had already benevolently determined that the job should be in the hands of those elderly women of good family but narrow means (a number of them actually kinswomen of a remote sort) who abounded in the neighbourhood. They might not be terribly well informed, or even ‘educated’ in the modern sense, and therefore be a little uncertain as to which had been Oliver Cromwell and which Thomas. But essentially they were in the know, and their poise and self-confidence, let alone the perfect amenity of their address, would be far from faltering even were they caught out by some tedious person who had been mugging up from his guide-book. And it had seemed to Lord Mullion that it would be less demeaning were these ladies to take round groups in a companionable and conversable way than simply to stand guard here and there over the family spoons and forks. But this did involve their having to answer impertinent questions about the occupants of the perambulators and bath chairs, or even to opine whether it might be that Lord and Lady Mullion were among those privileged occasionally to ‘stop by’ at Buckingham Palace.

  Of course nothing of all this really bothered the Mullions very much. They were confident people, amused rather than bewildered by the oddity of the times. What Lord Mullion called dismissively ‘the current drift in social legislation’ had to be admitted as variously vexatious. It could even be felt occasionally as lapping a little ominously against the walls of the castle, rather as if cannon balls were plopping into the moat. (Not that the moat could really be plopped into, since it was dry and a mass of daffodils.) But it would have taken a rumbling of the tumbrils across the inner ward of the castle itself to persuade these long-established persons that they were under any sort of threat. Having always shied away from anything other than landowning they were without any great fortune themselves. But a surprisingly high proportion of the total wealth of England belonged, if not to their friends, at least to people with whom it would be perfectly tolerable to sustain a nodding acquaintanceship. So it would be foolish to be flustered by the vagaries of one or another ephemeral political set-up. The char-a-bancs, like governments, came and went, while life in Mullion Castle and on its surrounding acres continued undisturbed.

  The contents of the ancient dwellings were substantially undisturbed too. During recent generations its owners had been spacing out their demise at intervals long enough to be decidedly advantageous from a financial point of view, so that death duties had been coped with without any disastrous dispersal of goods, chattels, heirlooms and paraphernalia. Some notable possessions had until recently even been less disturbed than the lawyers and insurance people had been quite happy about. Thus for a very long time the three Nicholas Hilliard miniatures had simply hung on a moth-eaten velvet panel in the drawing-room, from which they could be lifted and handed round for admiration and comment after a dinner-party. But about these prudence had at length prevailed. They were now disposed in a showcase cunningly anchored to the floor, and beneath a sheet of some transparent substance guaranteed to resist a sledgehammer. There were, of course, numerous other objects of considerable value on view. But few of them could simply have been slipped into a pocket – and the guides, moreover, were well aware of what it was particularly desirable to keep an eye on. The only notable theft to date had been of a walking-stick much prized by Lord Mullion as having at one time been the property (he believed – but nobody knew why) of the first Duke of Wellington.

  Shortly after the present chronicle opens, however, it was to be discovered that there had been a theft of a different character from Mullion Castle. On this occasion an object of considerable value was involved – and a great deal of perplexity as well.

  2

  Henry Wyndowe and Charles Honeybath had been schoolfellows, and now the first was a peer and the second a painter. Although painters (even Royal Academicians) are nothing like so grand as peers (or at least as peers of ancient creation), the two had remained more or less familiarly acquainted. Honeybath was the elder by several years, and as a consequence it had once been the future Lord Mullion’s business to tidy his study, toast his crumpets, get the mud off his rugger boots, and accept a ritual admonitory swipe on the behind from time to time. Lord Mullion looked back on this feudal servitude as if it had been a warmly affectionate relationship, and Honeybath, as happens with fagmasters, had been quite fond of young Wyndowe in a casual fashion. So they continued to meet – and not merely as a matter of chance encounter – during several decades. The intimacy had not developed, however, as a family affair. Honeybath had become a widower after only a few years of marriage, and had grown rather fonder of his club than of other men’s houses. He had never been a guest at Mullion Castle. Lord Mullion in fact knew more about Honeybath’s pictures than Honeybath did about Lord Mullion’s family. (The pictures, and particularly the portraits, were on annual display; the Wyndowes didn’t much go in for public occasions.) Lord Mullion wasn’t exactly a connoisseur. But he respected the arts in a general way, although his attention was inclined a little to wander when specific works of art were obtruded upon his notice – unless, indeed, dairy cattle or pedigree bulls were prominent in the composition. And even in a picture gallery Honeybath always took pleasure in meeting his one-time fag. This even held when Lord Mullion one day turned up unheralded at his Chelsea studio.

  The studio was no more than a studio, although a commodious one, and it was situated a couple of blocks away from Honeybath’s flat. Honeybath liked this arrangement. He liked the sense of closing a front door behind him five times a week and setting off to work like any other normal citizen. Correspondingly, he liked leaving his work behind him at the end of the day. If your painting-room was across the corridor or up an attic staircase you were under the temptation to dodge into it at all hours and take a lick at this or a dab at that. It was a habit pa
rticularly easy to fall into if you were a man without domestic ties, and in Honeybath’s experience good seldom came of it.

  Yet there was one disadvantage about this disposition of things. When you work, for the most part alone, in an isolated studio you are more vulnerable than in a dwelling with a household around you. There is nobody to say you are out, and you either have to receive casual callers with what civility you can muster or be suspected of ungraciously skulking in a cupboard until your importunate visitor has taken himself (or more probably herself) off again. And such people can he not only importunate but occasionally impertinent as well – behaving as if in a picture shop and poking around all over the place. It was even possible to suspect some of them as seeking evidences of what used to he called Bohemian life. But Lord Mullion was not in any category of this sort, so that Honeybath’s welcome was unforced and immediate.

  ‘My dear Henry,’ he said, ‘how delightful to see you!’

  ‘Can I come in, Charles? Is it perfectly convenient? I mean, are you painting somebody – one of the nobs, as it regularly seems to be nowadays?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. I’m simply messing around. So hang up your hat. And you’re a nob yourself, aren’t you’? Only nobs have hats any longer. Do you remember, Henry, the absurd things we had to wear even to walk down that High Street’? All gone, I’m told.’

  Honeybath and Lord Mullion had been ‘Charles’ and ‘Henry’ to one another ever since Honeybath’s last year at school, when they had found themselves by chance sentenced to improve their acquaintance with the French language and French manners throughout the Easter holidays in the same horrible French family. Only on returning to school they had become for a time ‘Honeybath’ and ‘Wyndowe’ again in deference to the moral code operative in the period. But Christian names had returned quite naturally after that.