Lord Mullion's Secret Read online

  It was, however, clear to Honeybath that the small expedition, from which the rest of the household had absented itself, had been contrived for the purpose of introducing him less to his surroundings than to a closer acquaintance with Lady Mullion herself. His mission, or commission, being as it was, this was entirely sensible, and witnessed on the lady’s part to a sound instinct as to what portrait-painting was about. It wasn’t that she felt herself in any aggressive way as having a personality to exhibit. She knew perfectly well, indeed, that Honeybath’s own personality was as important a constituent of the proposed exercise as her own. There was a rapport to establish, and this was as pleasant a way of establishing it as any offering.

  ‘There must have been a certain liveliness here at that time,’ Lady Mullion said when they were examining some of the memorials of the brief tenancy of the castle by Prince Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine. ‘I never much care for being away from Mullion, but we do have a quiet time. I have to be glad that I’m not one who hungers after what they call scope.’

  ‘I suspect that you keep yourself fairly busy, Mary.’

  ‘Well, yes – in a sense. People sometimes think of this sort of life as all luxurious idleness. I glimpse it occasionally in the expressions of our dollar-a-time visitors. But there is hard work, in a way, in just keeping the thing going. And Henry would do anything to manage that. Perhaps it’s something that the women of our sort feel less than the men – I suppose because the women have to pack their bags and hump it to a new home on marriage. Do you know, Charles? I have a recurrent dream in which the castle goes up in flames. That’s very shocking in me, of course. But we all rush around with buckets and hoses, and it’s tremendous fun. At least a happening, as they say.’

  ‘I doubt whether you’d actually much enjoy anything of the kind.’ Honeybath had been a little startled by this harmless confidence. ‘But I do see the merit of a happening now and then.’

  ‘I believe I could make do with a ghost. Our vicar, Dr Atlay, whom you’ve met, says there is a ghost. Only it doesn’t seem to care for the twentieth century, and hasn’t been showing up. Once or twice I’ve imagined I was encountering it: a tall gliding figure in white. But it has turned out to be Great-aunt Camilla in one of her wandering moods.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t reveal your disappointment to her.’ Honeybath produced this slightly facetious response as preferable to silence and likely to keep the topic of the reclusive Miss Wyndowe alive. He felt, indeed, that Lady Mullion had introduced the ghost into her conversation by way of thus going on to speak of this aged relative. He was to be given his bearings on her.

  ‘It certainly mightn’t be too cheering to be told one had been mistaken for a ghost. But Camilla is little unaccountable at the best of times, and might be gratified. She might even be prompted to the conclusion that she was a ghost. I am sure she will interest you, Charles. But should she say anything to offend you, you will remember that she is slightly strange.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered. Henry told me that at one time Miss Wyndowe was devoted to painting.’

  ‘Yes, indeed – although she gave it up long ago. As a young woman, I believe, she had serious thoughts of making a profession of it. She went to Paris to study – which was quite a dashing thing to do at that time – and then spent several months in Provence as the pupil of some artist she particularly admired. He advised her to continue her travels and make a thorough job of Italy. That may have been because he saw real promise in her, or because she was being a nuisance and he wanted to be rid of her. Neither explanation would surprise me.’

  ‘And she did go to Italy?’

  ‘Apparently not. She turned the idea down out of hand, on religious grounds.’

  ‘How very odd!’

  ‘Great-aunt Camilla was in those days a most convinced Protestant. She could put up with Catholicism in France, she said, because it is independent there and not really papistical. But she wouldn’t enter territory which she believed to be wholly dominated by somebody she termed the so-called Bishop of Rome.’

  ‘Miss Wyndowe sounds like one who knows her own mind. But it seems sad that she should have deprived herself of the Uffizi and the Sistine Chapel on such rigidly doctrinal lines.’

  ‘She might have tolerated the Uffizi if a magic carpet could have transported her there. But she would certainly have pictured the Sistine Chapel as thronged with cardinals and with the Pope sitting in the middle of them.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Honeybath was amused by this conception. ‘I wonder what she would have thought of the Archbishop of Canterbury having a little tête-à-tête with His Holiness bang in front of that Last Judgement.’

  ‘You must ask her.’

  ‘Would it not be injudicious to advance upon religious topics when conversing with her?’

  ‘My dear Charles, it is impossible to be either judicious or injudicious with Camilla Wyndowe. Because you never know what will take her how.’ Lady Mullion paused upon this brisk locution. ‘She’s mysterious,’ she suddenly added.

  ‘You fill me with curiosity. But mysterious in what sense?’

  ‘I haven’t expressed myself too well. There’s no mystery-mongering to her. It’s simply that I’ve always felt that some mystery attaches to her. She has a secret. Or she is somebody’s secret. Something like that.’

  ‘I’d like to see some of this remarkable lady’s paintings.’

  ‘She might be persuaded to produce a portfolio of them. We have two or three of them framed and hung up, for that matter. I imagine they don’t quite rank with the Hilliards. They may be in one of the service corridors, along with people’s favourite horses and dogs, and things of that kind. You will find, by the way, that the castle is simply jam-packed with junk. When Cyprian makes that silly joke about the pawned family diamonds he often adds that our fortunes will be retrieved by the discovery of some enormously valuable Chinese vases in a potting shed. Hasten the day – although I don’t really believe it.’ Lady Mullion glanced at her watch. ‘It’s time for tea, Charles. If tea doesn’t – as it does Henry – bore you.’

  ‘By no means. I look forward to it all day, and now it will recruit me for a little stroll outside afterwards. The rain seems over and gone.’ Honeybath was not unused to being a solitary guest in country houses, and knew the various approved ways of making oneself scarce at appropriate times. One announced the need to attend to one’s correspondence, or an urge to take a turn in the park or explore the village.

  ‘They ring a bell at half past seven,’ Lady Mullion said comprehendingly. ‘To give time for that black tie. And at eight o’clock Camilla, if she feels like it, comes down in her lift. A kind of dea ex machina.’

  ‘To reveal the truth of things and generally clear matters up?’

  ‘Possibly, I suppose. But it hasn’t happened yet.’

  8

  Honeybath’s stroll through the park by which Mullion Castle was now surrounded prolonged itself beyond his first intention, but he felt that his time was his own until the moment came to think of that black tie. After the rain it was a flawless late afternoon to which the earlier downpour had lent the enchantment of a sparkle of moisture scattered like Constable’s snow over the scene. Francis Kilvert, he felt, that superb landscape painter manqué, might have done justice to it in his incomparable diary. Many of Kilvert’s favourite effects were on view: in the distance bluish hills; nearer at hand the shadows of great trees elongating themselves on the grass; numerous contented kine; here and there less numerous rustics making their unassuming way home after the labours of the day; the glint and murmur of a half-hidden stream. Presently would come still Evening on, and Twilight gray would in her sober livery all things clothe. All in all, it was a peaceful scene, admirably adapted to mild literary musings of this sort.

  Honeybath paused to admire a noble barn. It stood on a spot, some hundred yards ahead, on the verge of arable land into which the park here merged without any notable boundary. It was an antique barn, speaking pe
rhaps of monastic opulence long ago. Now, no doubt, it was Lord Mullion’s property. Honeybath advanced again, resolved to take a closer view of this venerable pile in its spacious and tranquil setting. Then, abruptly, he came once more to a halt, for the general decorum of the scene had been suddenly and most hideously disturbed. Moments before, the air had held nothing but a solemn stillness tempered by the soft susurration of the wind in the trees. Now from the interior of the barn there was issuing a howling and wailing as of some living creature in atrocious pain. And it was accompanied by a sound, metronomic in its regularity, which powerfully rekindled in Honeybath his worst memories of Draconian prefectorial attentions during his earlier years at school. In short, within the barn somebody was receiving an uncommonly vigorous walloping.

  Charles Honeybath was not the man hastily to intrude upon any episode of unseemly violence. If an irate farmer were chastising some urchin caught stealing turnips the incident, although distressing and contrary to the liberal and humanitarian spirit of the age, was no business of his. But it was clearly not an urchin that was involved. The dire screeching and yelling – perhaps, as often in such cases, pitched a little in excess of actual need – was issuing, he felt sure, from a female throat. Chivalrously aroused, Honeybath hastened into the barn. A shocking spectacle met his eyes. On a bale of hay there was sitting a powerful male character belonging obviously to the lower reaches of rustic society. Across his knees he held down a young female who was not precisely a child. And he was at choice intervals belabouring her person, appropriately exposed, not indeed with any instrument of correction whether improvised or other, but with a bare hand as large and heavy as a ham.

  ‘You scoundrel, stop that instantly!’ Honeybath, although profoundly shocked, found himself adequately articulate at once. ‘Desist!’ he added, as if to make his meaning more abundantly clear.

  The rural executioner, thus adjured, raised his arm again in air – and there maintained it immobile for a moment, as if himself poised between astonishment and augmented rage. Whereupon his victim, profiting smartly from this brief indecision, wriggled free and made a dash past Honeybath for liberty, pulling a scanty skirt down to her knees as she ran. Although but briefly glimpsed, she was revealed to Honeybath as an ungainly trollop in her latest teens, or possibly even a little older than that. This circumstance, although it perhaps enhanced the high impropriety of what had been going on, in fact a little relieved Honeybath’s mind. Even as the man jumped to his feet and pursued the escaping young woman with a shout of rage, he arrived at the swift perception that this was a family affair. It was a father who had thus been so vigorously correcting his child. Perhaps he even had some legal entitlement to such drastic behaviour: it must depend on his daughter’s actual age. Both of them were now half-way across the nearest field, and the man was waving his arms less with a suggestion of further castigation than of a labourer herding an escaped heifer in some desired direction. Parent and child were in fact on their way home.

  Honeybath, who had at least a reading man’s knowledge of the mores of rural society, felt little doubt as to the prompting occasion of what he had interrupted. So clear was he about this that he looked about him for a second and probably younger man. Even as he did so he heard a sound behind him, turned round, and found himself confronting Swithin Gore. Where Swithin had bobbed up from he didn’t know, but it seemed a rational inference that it was from some hastily achieved hiding place under the hay at the other end of the barn. What Honeybath had stumbled upon – or what the outraged parent had stumbled upon perhaps only minutes before – was an episode of youthful incontinence somewhat in the spirit of Tom Jones.

  ‘Just what have you been up to?’ Honeybath demanded. Being extremely displeased, he spoke with a sternness wholly unwarranted by his standing in the affair. He had, after all, no title whatever to set himself up as a censor of this youth’s morals, however deplorable they might have revealed themselves to be. But earlier that day he had taken a liking to his highly competent rescuer, and now he was oddly disappointed in the estimate he had formed of him.

  ‘Up to?’ Swithin repeated coldly. ‘I was walking past. I don’t say I didn’t know what was going on, or liked what followed. But I have to keep my place.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Honeybath must have been very upset to make this rash remark. And Swithin was very upset too; in fact he was angry, confused, and humiliated. And now he said nothing more. He gave Honeybath a single brief icy look which the painter was to remember. And then he walked away.

  In this uncomfortable moment Honeybath again became aware that he was not alone. With much the same effect that Swithin had given of appearing from nowhere, a middle-aged man was now standing just inside the barn door. His complexion was sanguine – so brilliantly so, indeed, that Honeybath’s first confused impression had been of some threatening incendiary disaster within the building. For a brief instant the newcomer appeared disconcerted and uncertain of his ground. Then, hard upon this, he rapidly disposed his features on lines of the most theatrically emphatic ferocity.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ he bellowed.

  Not unnaturally, Honeybath was disconcerted in his turn – and not the less so from an immediate conviction that here was another Wyndowe. The resemblance, indeed, to the members of the family already known to him was subtle, almost fugitive, rather than pronounced. But here was territory to which Honeybath carried a professional eye, and he had no doubt about the matter whatever. At the same time he was fleetingly aware of an elusive element of déjà vu in the perception, and this he might have identified had not another idea instantly occurred to him. The violent character had bellowed. In fact, he had roared. He must be Henry’s younger brother, Sylvanus Wyndowe.

  ‘Too much damned trespassing around these days,’ Mr Wyndowe continued in a voice still pitched as if to carry across a parade ground. ‘Snooping, as well. A confounded little Paul Pry. No bloody business of yours, what local people may be up to.’

  Honeybath might have said something chilling like ‘I happen, sir, to be Lord Mullion’s guest.’ But for the moment he said nothing at all, being entirely occupied in essaying some interpretation of Sylvanus Wyndowe’s behaviour and comportment. Sylvanus might have been said to be blustering – except that he couldn’t be felt as subject to the sort of failure in self-confidence which is the common prompting to anything of the kind. While offering his string of disobliging remarks he had been engaged, with gestures perfectly composed, in brushing down his well-worn tweeds and removing straws from his hair. Yes, actually that! And what he was flicking from those Savile Row garments was nothing more nor less than hay seeds! Upon this there could be only one rational conclusion. It was Sylvanus Wyndowe, and not his brother’s gardener’s boy, who had been constrained to dive into ignominious hiding when interrupted by that outraged parent in the prosecution of a low amour. Honeybath knew that he ought to be very shocked by this discovery. But it was a state of affairs so ludicrous that he quite failed for the moment to conjure up this correct response. He was chiefly conscious of dismay that he had done Swithin Gore wrong.

  ‘Sir,’ he managed to say with dignity, ‘it may well be that I have intruded. But I am happy to say that my intervention at least cut short the most barbarous behaviour to a young woman on the part of one of those “local people” you have referred to.’

  ‘Belting the little bitch, wasn’t he?’ With disconcerting abruptness, Sylvanus had switched from fury to merriment. The effect was of a wild hilarity caught up and magnified by some public address system. ‘Good heavens, man, you can’t stop that sort of thing! It’s immemorial in a peasantry. You can have a fellow up before a whole bench of beaks who are your own best neighbours, and complain that he has been larruping his brats like hell within the hearing of your maiden aunt. They’ll do no more than admonish the brute – and for your pains you’ll find yourself ill-regarded in half a dozen villages around you. Did you ever read Kilvert’s Diary?’

  ‘Mor
e than once, most certainly.’ Honeybath was startled by this telepathic cropping up of a work that had been in his own head not half an hour before.

  ‘Milk-and-water sort of parson, although damned agreeable in his own way. But he quite takes for granted his parishioners lamming into their brats like mad. Even offers to lend a hand once, if I remember aright.’

  ‘There was a slight strain of morbidity in Kilvert, no doubt.’ Honeybath, although much displeased by this brazen talk on the part of a profligate wretch such as he judged Sylvanus Wyndowe to be, had to acknowledge that he was a man of education. ‘But common decency,’ he added grimly, ‘requires that we shouldn’t ourselves precipitate such behaviour.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ It was quite clear that Sylvanus in fact did. Indeed, it was possible to suspect that he might have been detected as blushing, had his customary hue not been such as to render anything of the sort indetectable. ‘And confound your impudence,’ Sylvanus added, with a return to his earlier manner.

  ‘Confound your own, sir!’ It was with a not unreasonable warmth that Honeybath delivered this just retort. But he recalled that here was his host’s brother, whom it was very possible that he would later be constrained to meet within a family circle. It seemed judicious, therefore, to try to conclude this unfortunate encounter on some note of tolerable amenity. ‘But I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘Only you wouldn’t, would you, think to treat your own children in that fashion?’

  ‘God damn it, sir, I’d touch up my own boy from time to time on due occasion given – supposing I had a boy, that is. Nothing but womenfolk in my house, curse it. A wife and three daughters, sir! Admirable, all of them. Delightful in every way. But the bloody place is Petticoat Hall, all the same.’

  Honeybath was not quite sure how to receive this extraordinary communication. It revealed, he reflected, a morbidity precisely opposite to that attributable to Francis Kilvert, who had been for petticoats all the time, and the younger the better. In an odd way he was beginning to find Sylvanus Wyndowe, the Mullion roarer, not unattractive. If he had a tendency to make culpable assignations with rustic wenches in barns, it was perhaps prompted by a dumb desire to provide himself with a belated male issue even on the wrong side of the blanket – or the tump of hay. This, although undeniably flagitious, was something human in its way. Sylvanus, as a younger brother, had presumably no broad acres to be inherited. But his sense of the grievousness of being denied a son and heir was demonstrably genuine and burdensome, all the same. Honeybath, in fact, felt for him, and wished that their first encounter had not been of so signally unfortunate a character.