Hamlet Revenge! Read online

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  Hamlet, Revenge!

  First published in 1937

  Copyright: Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1937-2009

  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 2009 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

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

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842327372 9781842327371 Print

  0755118103 9780755118106 Pdf

  0755119797 9780755119790 Mobi

  0755120019 9780755120017 Epub

  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.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  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.

  PART ONE: PROLOGUE

  The actors are come hither my Lord…

  We’ll hear a play tomorrow.

  1

  When you spend a summer holiday in the Horton country you must not fail to make the ascent of Horton Hill. It is an easy climb and there is a wonderful view. The hill is at once a citadel and an outpost, dominating to the north the subtle rhythms of English downland into which it merges, and to the south a lowland country bounded in the distance by a silver ribbon of sea. The little market-town of King’s Horton, five miles away, is concealed in a fold of the downs; concealed too, save for a wisp of blue–grey smoke, is the nearby hamlet of Scamnum Ducis. And almost directly below, beyond a mellow pomp of lawn and garden and deer-park, stands all the arrogantly declared yet finally discreet magnificence of Scamnum Court. Perhaps it is not the very stateliest of the stately homes of England. But it is a big place: two counties away it has a sort of little brother in Blenheim Palace.

  And yet from the vantage-point of Horton Hill Scamnum looks strangely like a toy. The austere regularity of its façades, the improbable green of its surrounding turf, the perfection of its formal gardens bounded by the famous cliff-like hedges imitated from Schönbrunn – these things give some touch at once of fantasy and of restraint to what might easily have been a heavy and extravagant gesture after all. Here, Scamnum seems to say, is indeed the pride of great riches, but here, too, is the chastening severity of a classically minded age. Mr Addison, had he lived a few years longer, would have approved the rising pile; Mr Pope, though he went away to scoff in twenty annihilating couplets, came secretly to admire; and Dr Johnson, when he took tea with the third duke, put on his finest waistcoat. For what is this ordered immensity, this dry regularity of pilaster and parterre, but an assertion in material terms of a prime moral truth of the eighteenth century: that the grandeur of life consists in wealth subdued by decorum?

  Here, shortly, is the story of Scamnum and its owners.

  Thirty years before the birth of Shakespeare, Roger Crippen, living hard by the sign of the Falcon in Cheapside, had been one of Thomas Cromwell’s crew. A sharp man, uncommonly gifted in detecting a dubious ledger – or in concocting one when need drove – he had risen as the religious houses fell. His sons inherited his abilities; his grandsons grew up hard and sober in the tradition of finance. When Elizabeth ascended the throne Crippens already controlled houses in Paris and Amsterdam; when James travelled south Crippens stood as a power in the kingdom he had inherited.

  The Civil Wars came and the family declared for the King. At Horton Manor thousands of pounds’ worth of plate was melted down; and Humphrey Crippen, the third Baron Horton, was with Rupert when he broke the Roundhead horse at Naseby. But bankers must not be enthusiastic: Crippens too controlled tens of thousands of pounds that were flowing from Holland across the narrow seas to the city and the Parliament men – and during all the monetary embarrassments of the Protectorate they lost no penny. Meanwhile – themselves in ostentatious exile – they patiently financed the exiled court and at the Restoration the family of Crispin came home to a dukedom. Since the first grant of a gentleman’s arms to Roger Crippen there had passed just a hundred and thirty years.

  Crispin remained a banker’s name. And on banking, in the fullness of time, Scamnum Court was raised. Far more fed the Horton magnificence than the broad acres of pasture land to the north, the estate added to estate of rich arable to the south. ‘You can’t’, the present Duke would ambiguously remark, ‘keep a yacht on land’ – and the yacht, the great town house in Piccadilly, the Kincrae estate in Morayshire, the villa at Rapallo, Scamnum itself with its monstrous establishment (‘Run Scamnum with a gaggle of housemaids? Come, come!’ the Duke had exclaimed when he shut it down during the war) – these were but slight charges on the resources controlled by the descendants of Roger. For Crispin is behind the volcanic productivity of the Ruhr; Crispin drives railways through South America; in Australia one can ride across the Crispin sheep-station for days. If a picture is sold in Paris or a pelt in Siberia Crispin takes his toll; if you buy a bus or a theatre ticket in London, Crispin – somehow, somewhere – gets his share.

  And here, from the windy brow of Horton Hill, the wayfarer can look down on the crown of it all, his reflections dictated by his own philosophical or political or imaginative bias. There lies Scamnum, a treasure-house unguarded save by the marble gods and goddesses that stand patiently along its broad terraces, or crouch, narcissus-like, beside its ornamental waters – Scamnun unguarded and unspoiled, a symbol of orde
r, security, and the rule of law over this sleeping countryside. The great wing to the east is the picture-gallery: there hang the famous Horton Titian; Vermeer’s Aquarium, for which the last Duke paid a fortune in New York; the thundery little Rembrandt landscape which the present Duchess’ father, during his Dublin days, had got for ten shillings in a shabby bookshop by the Liffey – and for which, ten years later, he sent a flabbergasted bookseller a thousand pounds. And that answering wing to the west is the Orangery. Sometimes, of a summer night, they will hold a dance or a ball there – the long line of lofty windows flung open upon the dark. And a curious labourer and his lass, seeing the procession of cars sweep into the park, will climb the hill and stretch themselves in the clover to gaze down upon a world as remote as that other world of Vermeer’s picture – tiny figures, jewelled and magical, floating about the terraces in a medium of their own. Now and then, as the wind veers, wisps of music will float up the hill. It is strange music sometimes, and then the spell is unbroken, the magic unflawed. But sometimes it is a lilt familiar from gramophone or wireless – and man and girl are suddenly self-conscious and uneasy. And Scamnum in general has long understood the necessity of keeping its own hypnotic other world inviolate. Many a Duke of Horton has unbent at a farmers’ dinner, many a Duchess has gone laughing and chattering round Scamnum Ducis. But all have known that essentially they must contrive to be seen as from a long way off, that they have their tenure in remaining – remote, jewelled, and magical – a focus for the fantasy-life of thousands. We are all Duke or Duchess of Horton – this is the paradox – as long as the music remains sufficiently strange.

  From Horton summit it is possible to see something of Scamnum’s great main court and of its one architectural eccentricity. For here some nineteenth-century duke, a belated follower of the romantic revival, has grotesquely pitched a sizable monument of academic Gothic in the form of a raftered hall. As it stands it is something of a disreputable secret: the hill-top apart, you are aware of it only from certain inner windows of the house, and aware of it probably but to regret the famous fountain which it has obliterated. In the family it is known sometimes as Peter’s Folly, and more regularly – with that subdued irony which Crispins have assimilated with the aristocratic tradition – as the Banqueting Hall. It is a trifle damp, a trifle musty and there is painful stained-glass. No use has ever been found for it. Or rather none had been found until the Duchess had her idea, the idea which was unexpectedly to draw the attention of all England upon Scamnum and to bring streams of chars-à-bancs with eager sightseers to the foot of Horton Hill.

  Even now, strange events are preparing. But this flawless afternoon in June knows nothing of them yet: from the dovecot beyond the home orchard floats the drowsiest of all English sounds: the jackdaws wheel to the same lazy tempo above the elm walk; a bell in the distant stables chimes four; Scamnum slumbers. On the hill no tourist, field-glass in hand, disturbs the gently nibbling sheep or speculates on such activity as Scamnum reveals. There is no one to identify as the Duke the little knicker-bockered figure who has paused to speak to a gardener by the lily-pond; no one to recognize in the immaculately breeched and booted youth sauntering up from the stables Noel Yvon Meryon Gylby, a scion of the house; no one to guess that the tall figure strolling down the drive is his old tutor Giles Gott, the eminent Elizabethan scholar, or that the beautiful girl, looking thoughtfully after him from the terrace, is the Lady Elizabeth Crispin. Nobody knows that the restless man with the black box is not a photographer from the Queen but an American philologist. And nobody knows that the Rolls-Royce approaching the south lodge contains the Lord High Chancellor of England, come down to play a prank with his old friend Anne Dillon, the present Duchess of Horton.

  Scamnum, doubtless, is in the minds of many people at this moment. In Liverpool, serious young men are studying its ground-plan; in Berlin, a famous Kunsthistoriker is lecturing on its pictures; its ‘life’, brightly written up for an evening paper, is selling in the streets of Bradford and Morley and Leeds. Scamnum is always ‘Interest’: presently it is to be ‘News’.

  The Rolls-Royce swings under the odd little bridge joining the twin lodges and purrs up the drive.

  ‘And her Grace’, said Macdonald magnanimously, ‘can hae as muckle o’ roses for the Banqueting Ha’ as she cares to demaun’.’

  ‘Good,’ said the Duke, concealing the consciousness of a victory unexpectedly won. ‘And now, let me see’ – he consulted a scribbled envelope – ‘ah yes, sweet-peas. Enough sweet-peas to fill all the Ming bowls in the big drawing-room.’

  ‘The big drawing-room!’ Macdonald was aghast.

  ‘The big drawing-room, Macdonald. Big party this, you know. Quite an event.’

  ‘I’ll see tae’t,’ said Macdonald dourly.

  ‘And, um, just one other thing. Dinner is in the long gallery–’

  ‘The lang gallery!’

  ‘Come, come, Macdonald – a big dinner you know. Quite out of the ordinary. About a hundred and twenty people.’

  Macdonald reflected. ‘I’m thinking, wi’ great respect, it’ll be mair like the saloon o’ a liner than a nobleman’s daenner in ony guid contemporary taste I’ve heard tell o’.’

  Macdonald was one of the curiosities of Scamnum. ‘Have you met our pragmatical Scot?’ the Duchess would ask gaily – and the favoured visitor would be taken out and cautiously insinuated into the head gardener’s presence and conversation. Nevertheless, the Duke felt, Macdonald could be very trying.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said the Duke, unconsciously supporting himself on what had been the pivotal phrase of his celebrated speech in the House of Lords in 1908 – ‘be that as it may, Macdonald, the fact is – carnations.’

  ‘May it please your Grace,’ said Macdonald ominously, ‘I had a thocht it might be the carnations.’

  ‘Carnations. The long gallery is to have a single long table, and they’ve raked up thirty silver vases from the strong-room–’

  ‘Thirty,’ said Macdonald, as if scoring heavily.

  ‘To be filled with the red carnations–’

  ‘Horton,’ said Macdonald firmly, ‘it canna be!’

  When Macdonald resorted to this feudal and awful address – eminently proper, no doubt, in his own country – affairs were known to be critical. And the Duke had been expecting this crisis all afternoon.

  ‘It canna be,’ continued Macdonald with a heavy reasonableness. ‘Ye maun consider that if ye hae a hunnert and twenty folk tae daeriner in your lang gallery, I’m like tae hae a hunnert and twenty folk walking my green-hooses thereaufter. And ye maun consider that the demaun’s already excessive: a’ but a’ the public apartments and forty bedrooms – let alone what the upper servants get frae my laddies when my back’s turned! And it’s my opeenion,’ continued Macdonald, suddenly advancing from reasonableness to an extreme position, ‘that flu’ers hae no place in the hoose at a’ – Unner the sky and unner glause, wi’ their am guid roots below them, is the richt place for flu’ers.’

  ‘Come, come, my dear Macdonald–’

  ‘I’m no saying there’s no a way oot o’ the difficulty. Maybe your Grace is no acquaintet wi’ Mistress Hunter’s Wild Flu’ers o’ Shakespeare?’

  ‘I don’t know–’

  ‘No more ye need. It’s no a work o’ ony scholarly pretension. But it’s in the library and it might persuade her Grace–’

  ‘Come, come, Macdonald!’

  ‘–that Shakespeare’s wild flu’ers doon that lang table would be mair appropriate than my guid carnations. Do you see to that, your Grace, and I’ll set the lassies at the sooth lodge to get a’ that’s wanted fraw the woods… In thirty sil’er bowls too’ – added Macdonald enthusiastically – ‘it’ll be a real pretty sight!’

  The evasiveness of the Duke’s response revealed him as judiciously giving ground. ‘’Pon my soul, Macdonald, I didn’t know you were
a student of Shakespeare.’

  ‘Shakespeare, your Grace, was well instructed in the theory o’ gardening, and it becomes a guid gardener to be well instructed in Shakespeare. In this play that’s forrard the noo, there’s eleven images from gardening alone.’

  ‘Eleven – dear me!’

  ‘Aye, eleven. Weeds twa, violet, rose, canker twa, thorns, inoculate old stock, shake fruit frae tree, palm-tree, and cut off in bloom – the thing ya shouldna dae. It’s a’ in Professor Spurgeon’s new book.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the Duke incautiously, ‘Spurgeon – clever fellow.’

  ‘She’s a very talented leddy,’ said Macdonald.

  Powerful, precise, world-wide, the Crispin machine ground on. And did Macdonald, bringing this interview to a triumphant close, ponder in his metaphysical Scottish brain some deeper irony – conscious, amid all this familiar ducal ineffectiveness, of the lurking dominance of that steel-hard Crispin eye?

  Macdonald trudged down the drive to the south lodge.

  The Rolls stopped in its tracks. Lord Auldearn stood up behind his impassive chauffeur and made a dramatic gesture as Giles Gott advanced.

  ‘Barkloughly Castle call they this at hand?’

  Gott shook hands – with the bow one gives to a slight acquaintance who keeps the King’s conscience in his pock’ t. Then he laughed.

  ‘There stands the castle, by yon tuft of trees.’

  ‘Mann’d with three hundred men, as I have heard?’

  ‘Presently to be manned with about three hundred guests, as far as I can gather. In the Duchess’ hands the thing grows.’

  ‘Get in,’ said the Lord Chancellor with unconscious authority. And as the Rolls glided forward he sighed. ‘I was afraid it would turn into that sort of thing. Anne must always pick the out-size canvas. A mistake her father never made.’