Lord Mullion's Secret Read online

  ‘I suppose that when you inherit Mullion you might sell up and emigrate.’ Honeybath had resigned himself to conversation – but not too graciously, as the tone of this remark betrayed. ‘People in your position sometimes do.’

  ‘My position is very satisfactory in a way.’ As if to support this contention, Cyprian stretched himself lazily on his rug, and then turned over upon his satisfactorily flat tummy. ‘I like it here,’ he said into the rug, ‘and I’m damned well not going to be turfed out in a hurry. Having all this, and making one thing and another pay, and owning the power to have chaps toe the line when you feel that way: all that’s not too bad, it seems to me. But would one somehow run to seed at it? That’s the question.’

  ‘Again, it would be up to you.’ Honeybath had realized that this young man was in a sense offering him his confidence and even seeking his advice.

  ‘Yes, I know. But making a career out of waiting to inherit something can be bloody debilitating, if you ask me. And it doesn’t much matter whether what you’re going to inherit is much or little. Just knowing you’ll never go without tomorrow’s dinner is demoralizing in itself. Look at my Uncle Sylvanus. You ran into him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Honeybath recalled that Henry seemed to regard his brother as a potential misleader of youth. It looked as if Cyprian were disposed to see him as an awful warning.

  ‘Just knowing he was all-right-Jack for life mucked up his army career, if you ask me. And now he’s merely an idle old rake – however many foxes he chases. And look how I’m being bloody idle myself now. Here’s you, Honeybath, pursuing your honourable profession and all that here on this roof. And here’s me yattering at you.’

  ‘I’m very interested in what you say, Cyprian. It seems to me that your father probably delegates a good deal of the running of the estate, and that if you took to it vigorously it might be a very full-time job after all. How do you get on with the people involved?’

  ‘Not too well, I suppose. I think they hate me, mostly. Particularly the young men about the place. It’s that business of toeing the line, no doubt. And they think I’m after their girls.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Cyprian had turned over again, and now sat up with a wicked grin while reaching for his dressing-gown. ‘They think it’s unfair competition. Not that they don’t often have more money in their pockets than I have. It’s really all that rot about being a gentleman, isn’t it? It can turn a wench’s head in the most convenient – or inconvenient – way. One simply hasn’t room to help oneself. I think there’s something to be said for Boosie’s notions of everybody being on a level.’

  ‘I doubt whether you think anything of the kind, Cyprian.’ Honeybath found himself not wholly attracted by what he had now been listening to. ‘Really and truly, you’d no more give up your position at Mullion than your father would. You’d fight for it, if it came to a pinch.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Cyprian had now donned his dressing-gown, and the rather artificial bad boy’s grin had vanished. ‘I’d perform enormities, like all my rotten ancestors. Cut my grandmother’s throat in the church.’

  ‘I hardly think a grandmother is likely to enter the equation.’

  ‘I suppose not. I’m sorry I interrupted you when you were busy. It’s the idleness syndrome: an urge to impede other people’s labours.’ Cyprian seemed genuinely to be feeling that he had thoughtlessly trespassed on the patience of his parents’ guest. ‘I’ll see you at lunch-time, sir. I expect you’ll have done a marvellous sketch by then.’

  Upon this gracious speech Lord Wyndowe departed. He had left pyjama-tops, pyjama-bottoms and rug – Honeybath noticed – just where he had chucked them down.

  14

  Honeybath continued with his sketch – but now it was without quite managing to concentrate upon it, or at least to treat it seriously. He provided his middle distance with three cows. It was, he seemed to recall, Dr Atlay’s Reverend William Gilpin who had favoured this number of cattle in a park as calculated to animate a picturesque composition without irritating it. Honeybath, however, presented his cows according to a classical convention: two facing one way and the third the other, as is proper in a representation of the Three Graces. For their convenience he added a cow-house in the Gothic taste. And then he found himself sketching in his margin, and from memory, the Honourable Sylvanus Wyndowe – who had divested himself of all clothing and was sprawling on a rug. Sylvanus didn’t look at all nice. Honeybath turned back to his park and tried to rescue it as a little capriccio or veduta ideata. But these learned terms failed to make it look at all nice either, and he crumpled up the whole thing and told himself he had wasted a morning.

  Was he going to waste no end of mornings trying to paint a portrait of Henry’s wife while distracted by a sense that in the current Mullion scene there lurked more than met the eye? He told himself that what was important from his own point of view was his finding the Wyndowes a congenial family. Lady Mullion and her daughters were delightful, and he didn’t really find it difficult to like the possibly wayward Cyprian either. Even Sylvanus – who probably wouldn’t be much around – was rather likeable although no doubt variously to be disapproved of. As for Great-aunt Camilla, who mingled a dotty existence in the past with a certain sharpness of observation in the present, he judged her to be at least an interesting study, provided she didn’t turn up too often in the small hours. But if the Wyndowes were an agreeable crowd it was, of course, all the more disturbing that small unaccountable things were happening in the midst of them.

  Honeybath picked up his belongings (and Cyprian’s abandoned garments as well) and descended into the castle. He did so in a certain absence of mind, which even extended to his forgetting that it was an open day. No great ill-consequence ought to have succeeded upon this. Since the family made itself scarce on such occasions it was no doubt the convention that their house guests should do so too. But it was clearly no more than a custom to be abrogated at need, and there was no call whatever for anybody positively to scurry or cower. If Honeybath stumbled upon a group of sightseers he could simply glide past them unobtrusively, if necessary with a polite bow. This reassuring thought came to him in the moment that he did in fact hear, round a corner in front of him, the unmistakable tones of a guide holding forth to her flock. And a moment later Honeybath found himself engulfed in this small situation.

  It was in a spot he was vaguely aware of as having visited before: a broad stone-flagged corridor which vanished on a gentle curve some way ahead. But the passage, although so far from narrow, was much congested, this particular party being so numerous that it would pretty well have filled the great hall of the castle itself – that being, indeed, the point at which it had been marshalled for its conducted tour. And all these people were in not particularly courteous motion, since their conductress was apparently addressing them at greater length than they desired or – probably – deserved. Honeybath was at once elbowed by two stout women manoeuvring to take photographs (which they had no business to be doing). He made way for them as well as he could, and this had the consequence of drawing him deeper into the mob. Between two rucksacks of the fashionable and formidable sort that tower high above the wearer’s head he became aware that he was contemplating a pike of altogether improbable size, and that the pike appeared to be pursuing a perch. So he suddenly realized where he stood. This was the kitchen corridor, and the guide had halted all these gaping people for the purpose of giving them in some detail the history of the domestic offices they were about to visit.

  Honeybath had no wish to view the kitchen; it was his simple aim to find his way to that soup and bread and cheese which had presumably emanated from it. But the castle was a confusing place, and he soon saw that he had lost himself and ought to retrace his steps. This was not altogether easy. He had now been edged directly beneath the regard of the guide. She was a grey-haired woman of severe appearance, and pinned on the lapel of her correspondingly severe tweed j
acket was a little card reading MISS KINDER-SCOUT. Honeybath found this irrationally alarming. And he had also become aware that several serious American faces were turned his way and that he was being curiously regarded through several pairs of bizarrely shaped American spectacles. This puzzled him. Even if he were a little discomposed he couldn’t, surely, have anything actually arresting about his appearance? But in fact – it dawned on him – he had, since he was carrying a travelling rug over which was draped a pair of brilliantly coloured and variegated silk pyjamas. And now one of the stout women was positively positioning herself to photograph him. It was to be presumed that she had identified him as Lord Mullion’s valet.

  Honeybath decided – foolishly, as it turned out – that he must make a resolute break for freedom. He raised a frankly minatory hand at the camera-woman, turned, and pushed his way out of the crush. Then he hurried back down the corridor. As he did so. and with what could only be called enhanced folly, he nervously bundled up the pyjamas and concealed them within the folds of the rug.

  ‘One moment, please!’

  The words came from Miss Kinder-Scout, but to Honeybath’s sense might have been uttered by what the poet Shelley describes as the dreaded voice of Demogorgon. He froze in his tracks.

  ‘It will be best,’ Miss Kinder-Scout said (in fact quite calmly), ‘that we proceed as a party. It is something insisted upon by Lord Mullion’s insurers. If anybody wishing to cut short his visit will kindly raise a hand, his convenience can, of course, be met at once.’

  Honeybath felt unable to raise a hand – like a child at school who seeks to be ‘excused’. He felt even more unable to make his way up to Miss Kinder-Scout and explain himself as Charles Honeybath, RA, temporary limner in ordinary to the Earl of Mullion. He fell meekly into line at the tail of the mob.

  It was in this state, already sadly demoralized, that a fresh charge of the unaccountable was, as it were, exploded under his nose. The party had moved on towards the kitchen, but had again been halted for some further explanatory word on the part of the untiring Miss Kinder-Scout. Honeybath found himself looking at the head of a basset-hound in blurry charcoal. He found himself looking at a pile of oily apples and grapes. And hanging between these he found himself looking at two familiar, watercolours. Or rather, they ought to have been familiar, but were not. He had certainly never seen these two little sketches of French river scenes before.

  For a moment Honeybath felt that he must have gone quite mad, and was viewing nothing veridically there on the wall but merely a hallucination of his own conjuring up. But he was a man quick to rally in a moment of crisis, and he did so now.

  ‘Miss Kinder-Scout,’ he said in a voice sufficiently loud to carry down the corridor, ‘I wonder whether you can tell me anything about these two interesting pictures?’

  Miss Kinder-Scout, if slightly surprised, was gratified by this meritorious curiosity on the part of her late suspect, and she joined him at once.

  ‘My name is Honeybath,’ Honeybath said in a lower tone. ‘Lord Mullion – whose guest I happen to be – has told me that you take a particular interest in the pictures, even the unimportant ones. Does anything strike you about those two watercolours by Miss Camilla Wyndowe?’

  ‘Nothing whatever.’ Miss Kinder-Scout had adjusted herself to this new situation without difficulty. ‘Except that they are not those that hung there quite recently.’

  ‘That hung there last night, as it happens.’

  ‘How very odd! I have occasionally pointed out the two sketches hanging here as being of some interest, as painted by a member of the family. People like to be shown that sort of thing. Perhaps Mullion decided to change the family exhibits.’

  ‘It’s extremely improbable, surely, that Henry would do anything of the kind.’

  ‘So it is. Perhaps it was Camilla herself.’

  ‘She does seem a little unpredictable. But it would be a most purposeless vagary, it seems to me.’ Honeybath uttered this complete untruth (as it happened to be) unblushingly. He was coming to feel that Mullion Castle was a place, at least at present, where one ought to think twice before expressing one’s true mind. ‘Don’t you think, Miss Kinder-Scout?’ he added politely.

  ‘I doubt whether it is my business to think about the matter at all. None of Miss Wyndowe’s sketches can be of the slightest commercial value, and one brace of them is as good as another. From the point of view of security – which is my business here – the matter cannot be of the slightest consequence.’ Miss Kinder-Scout pronounced this judgement very crisply indeed, but Honeybath was nevertheless not sure that she was expressing her true mind either. ‘And now,’ she added, ‘I must shove this lot through, or the next lot will be breathing down our necks.’

  Honeybath felt that he was dismissed. But at least he now had licence to withdraw without being shouted at. The memory of his late humiliation in this regard prompted him to take a slightly tart farewell of this bossy female.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to explain,’ he said, ‘that I am not concealing some valuable object beneath this confounded rug. What is bundled up inside it is merely Lord Wyndowe’s pyjama-suit.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Honeybath?’ Miss Kinder-Scout was not receiving this information well, and it had to be supposed that she thought such a state of affairs could be the consequence only of some unseemly frolic. ‘The last thing that Lord Wyndowe mislaid around the castle was a cigarette case. Not that he had mislaid it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Honeybath said. ‘I heard about that.’ And he made the best of his retreat. It involved the hazard of a further entanglement with Lord Mullion’s customers, since it was in fact true that another group was following hard upon Miss Kinder-Scout’s. The castle, unlike so many modern shops and offices, didn’t firmly shut itself up during a luncheon interval. Honeybath was now considerably perturbed. He felt, perhaps needlessly, that the mere possession of Cyprian’s rug and cast-off garments rendered him immediately conspicuous and ridiculous. And his situation, or his sense of it, was not improved by the absurd fact that he didn’t know what refuge he was making for. The castle was now – to echo a feeble joke of Dr Atlay’s – alarmingly Wyndoweless. He hadn’t a notion in what direction lay the nooks in which the family and its servants had respectively ensconced themselves. He was in a nightmarish world of polyglot persons being herded through the place by half a dozen females part of whose job was to keep a sharp eye open for anomalous and suspicious characters.

  This harassing phase of his experience, however, ended abruptly when he made one further desperate turn and found himself in momentary solitude before the door of the library. He paused to collect himself and take breath. As he did so the library door opened and Dr Atlay stood framed in it. The appearance of a familiar character who was virtually a member of the household ought to have been entirely reassuring. Yet this was by no means the case. The vicar, as if he had caught some instant infection from Honeybath himself, was in a state of marked agitation. He was as pale as a sheet before sheets had formed the bad habit of taking on delicate pastel shades, and he was now staring at Honeybath much as if he had been detected in the commission of some hideous crime.

  Here was a more extraordinary circumstance. Honeybath’s mind – disposed, as it was, to take flying leaps into conjecture which might be inspired or disastrous as the case proved to be – flew at once to that odd occasion in the library the evening before. He saw again in his mind’s eye the little group standing in front of the showcase in which reposed the three Hilliard miniatures – or rather the two authentic Hilliard miniatures and the spurious one. He had judged it curious that Atlay, apparently well-informed on such matters, had failed to observe the fact that one young man had, so to speak, changed himself into quite another young man. Was it not – and the speculation had come to him before – conceivable that Atlay himself had perpetrated the substitution? Was it not equally conceivable that the man had now been all but detected in a repeat performance of the same atrocious perfidy? As he asked himsel
f this shocking question Honeybath’s acute visualizing faculty produced that kind of small flashback in slow motion favoured by television cameras when concerning themselves with athletic occasions. The bowler delivers the ball once more, and you decide for yourself whether the umpire has been justified in making that fatal gesture of dismissal from the crease. Atlay, Honeybath now saw, in the very moment of finding himself observed, had hastily thrust something into a pocket in his decorous clerical attire.

  But now that wretched man controlled himself. He advanced upon Honeybath and shook hands – much as if the two men were Frenchmen or Germans given to this exercise upon every possible occasion.

  ‘Good morning,’ Honeybath said. ‘You seem upset.’

  ‘Upset? Not at all. Or, rather, yes indeed.’ Having had this surprising second thought, Dr Atlay paused for a moment. ‘The news is most upsetting, is it not? Dr Hinkstone has been sent for. He proved, unfortunately, to be out on his rounds. But he is expected any time now. Meanwhile, we must hope for the best.’

  ‘News? I haven’t heard any news. Has somebody been taken ill?’

  ‘Ah! Well, it is only an hour ago that Mrs Trumper telephoned down to Lady Mullion. Mrs Trumper felt that Camilla Wyndowe ought not to be left alone. Fortunately she is a qualified nurse, and presumably knows what to do meantime. I suppose that some sort of seizure must be in question.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear it.’ For the moment, Honeybath’s suspicions about Dr Atlay went out of his head. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Presumably in the night, but the details are unknown to me. I heard Patty Wyndowe say something about her great-aunt’s having had one of her wandering fits. It may have overtaxed her strength.’

  ‘I see.’ Honeybath was distressed to think that more decisive action on his own part might have cut short Miss Wyndowe’s injudicious peregrinations. He refrained, however, from taking up this point with the vicar. He believed himself to have a shrewd notion of what Miss Wyndowe had been about, and that the less said about it for the present the better. He also felt rather strongly that it was with Henry that he ought to be trying to resolve such perplexities as beset him. ‘You must have known Miss Wyndowe,’ he said, ‘for many years?’