Lord Mullion's Secret Read online

  10

  The four ladies had withdrawn, and the three gentlemen had addressed themselves to a second glass of port, when the dining-room door opened and Dr Atlay appeared. He was received by Lord Mullion cordially but in so entirely casual a manner that it was clear he was treated virtually as a member of the household, coming and going as he pleased. Lady Mullion had, indeed, mentioned to Honeybath that the vicar, who had various antiquarian interests, from time to time pursued his researches in the castle library. Perhaps he had been doing this now, or perhaps he had merely dropped in to deliver the parish magazine. His having gravitated in the direction he now had, however, suggested that he was not without the thought of material recruitment in his mind, and after accepting port he accepted a cigar as well. No doubt he had devoted a long day to pastoral cares, and was glad to become much a man of leisure at this late evening hour.

  ‘I have paid my respects in the drawing-room,’ he said, ‘and gather, Mr Honeybath, that you have made an early grand tour of the castle.’

  ‘Lady Mullion was good enough to do me a kind of private view.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it. There is much to remark, is there not?’

  ‘Armour rusting in his halls On the blood of Mullion calls,’ Cyprian said, reaching for a decanter. Cyprian, who at Cambridge regularly devoted two or three hours a week to his studies in English literature, was fond of coming forward with this sort of thing. ‘Not that the stuff does rust. A chap comes down from London twice a year and burnishes it and lacquers it so that you’d think we kept a staff of armourers in the dungeons. All part of the show.’

  ‘I imagine,’ Dr Atlay said, ‘that your guest was more interested in some of the less martial exhibits. The Zoffanys come to mind. You have seen them, Mr Honeybath?’

  ‘Not yet. There is a great deal to see, as you have remarked.’

  ‘There have been nabob Wyndowes, and Zoffany went to work on them in India. And then there are the Hilliards. I recall your mentioning that you would be interested in them.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Lady Mullion pointed them out to me in passing, but we didn’t pause on them.’

  ‘Take a dekko at them now, eh?’ Lord Mullion said, rising. ‘Jolly little things, I’ve always thought, and uncommonly valuable, they say. Have to keep them in the library now, under lock and key and so forth. So come along, all of you.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Dr Atlay said. ‘It’s some time since I took a look at them. And it’s longer still, I imagine, since Wyndowe did. Do you good, Wyndowe. It cannot be maintained that you are too well up on your ancestors.’

  Cyprian got to his feet, scowling – perhaps because the idea bored him, or perhaps because he disliked being addressed in the vicar’s semi-formal manner.

  So the gentlemen moved off in a body through the castle – Honeybath willingly enough, although he would perhaps have preferred to make the acquaintance of three unfamiliar Hilliards (and defunct Wyndowes) in more instructed company. At the library door they encountered Savine, who looked at them reproachfully. At the castle, after-dinner coffee was taken in the drawing-room. Perhaps Savine felt that it was growing cold there – or perhaps that the prescriptive interval had already passed beyond which the ladies ought not to be left to their own devices.

  ‘Reliable man, Savine,’ Lord Mullion said to Honeybath when the door had closed behind him. ‘Strong on security, and keeps everything under his own hand. He’s a great comfort to us all – eh, Cyprian?’

  ‘Regular nannie,’ Cyprian said sulkily. ‘He keeps a damned sight too much of an eye on things, if you ask me. If I drop into his pantry for something, he bloody well makes me feel I ought to be signing for it as if in some rotten club.’

  As by ‘something’ it was to be suspected that Lord Wyndowe meant whisky or brandy, this small demonstration a little lacked edification. His father, however, was, as usual, unruffled by what he no doubt regarded still as mere adolescent gracelessness. Being an heir in a place like this, Honeybath thought, must have its irritations and be conducive to mild frictions. Boosie as a rebel was more attractive than her brother.

  The library was a lofty and enormous room, none too well-lit at any time, and surely uncommonly chilly for much of the year. But Lord Mullion looked round it with complacency.

  ‘Martin moles around here a great deal,’ he said to Honeybath. ‘Martin’ was the Reverend Dr Atlay. ‘Turned up a good deal of soil lately, Martin – and the family skeletons along with it?’ Lord Mullion invited innocent laughter at this pleasantry, but it appeared to take the vicar a little aback.

  ‘There is work in progress, my dear Mullion,’ he said. ‘That is how a scholar would express the matter. And where family papers are abundant one never knows what one may turn up next. But I shall think twice before disinterring any skeletons. It is a disagreeable operation even in a churchyard. I should certainly not wish to undertake it rashly in a library.’

  ‘But what about making dry bones live, eh?’ It appeared to be with some further whimsical intention that Lord Mullion produced this biblical reference. ‘Plenty of theology,’ he continued, as if continuing this process of associative thinking. ‘But I’ve never much looked at it. I’ll leave that to Cyprian, when he decides to take holy orders. It’s a long time since an Earl of Mullion turned himself into a bishop as well. He might begin as your curate, Martin. Lowest rung of the ladder, you know. Learn the job from the bottom, like lads the business chaps perch on high stools in their counting-houses. Think it over, Cyprian.’

  Cyprian produced another of his scowls, for which Honeybath didn’t altogether blame him. The future owner of Castle Mullion clad in purple and lawn was as bizarre a notion as the archaic one of young gentlemen of less distinguished lineage perched in front of ledgers. Henry was a man of temperate habit (probably unlike his brother Sylvanus) but inclined, it seemed, to gamesomeness after his couple of glasses of port. He had also turned a little vague, and for a moment even seemed disorientated in his own library.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘I rather think–’

  ‘In the window embrasure, my dear Mullion.’ Dr Atlay had taken his host by the arm. ‘The showcase with the velvet cover, you know. The cover is to ward off any direct rays from the sun.’

  ‘To be sure – and here the little chaps are.’ Lord Mullion had whisked away the cover indicated to him. ‘Wonderful things in their way, and I can’t think how the fellow managed them. Paintbrushes like needles, he must have had. And the result, I don’t doubt, as authentic as the latest tiptop colour photography. But artistically in another street, of course.’

  ‘As a consequence of which,’ Cyprian said, ‘they’d fetch rather more than the family photograph album, or even the entire oeuvre of Great-aunt Camilla.’

  ‘Perfectly true, my dear boy.’ Lord Mullion had the air of treating this as a penetrating observation. ‘And another thing, you know. They’re painted on chicken-skin. Odd use for the stuff.’

  ‘Not these,’ Dr Atlay said. ‘As Honeybath could tell us, chicken-skin came later. Thin vellum mounted on card, if I remember aright. There is probably an account of the technique in Hilliard’s Arte of Limning, written round about 1600. Would that be correct, Honeybath?’

  ‘I don’t know about the date, but it has wonderful passages on the psychology of portraiture.’ Honeybath was studying the miniatures, which were only imperfectly revealed within their fastness, with a good deal of attention. ‘Are they all identified?’

  ‘The lady on the left,’ Atlay said, ‘is Lady Lucy Wyndowe, who was reckoned a great beauty in her time. In the middle is the third earl. The young man on the right we can’t pin down. I have always thought he rather resembles the Young Man in Deep Mourning in the Portland Collection, which is a very late work of Hilliard’s indeed. Remark the masterly effect of evanescence in the youth’s smile, as if he had been momentarily diverted from serious thought.’

  This sensitive observation was respectfully received, and Honeybath peered more closely. L
ord Mullion noticed this.

  ‘Get them out, eh?’ he said. ‘Just hold on. The key is with the plate, and so forth, in Savine’s safe.’

  ‘Honeybath’s closer inspection might better take place in daylight, and on a later occasion,’ Dr Atlay said. ‘And I am reminded that there is a hint of impatience in the drawing-room, at least on Miss Wyndowe’s part. She doesn’t precisely aim to display what Wyndowe calls her oeuvre. But it appears that several of her watercolours are hung somewhere in the castle, and she has taken it into her head, my dear Honeybath, that you should be conducted to them and, no doubt, offer an opinion on their merits. We can be confident that you can do that sort of thing very well.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Honeybath had to make an effort to attend to this, for other matters were on his mind. Nor did he much care for the tone of urbane patronage in the vicar’s last remark. ‘Miss Wyndowe did mention something of the kind to me.’

  ‘Then we’d better cut along,’ Lord Mullion said. The circumspect thing at the castle, one felt, was to attend promptly to Great-aunt Camilla’s whims while she was in circulation. ‘We can have a go at these little jossers another time. And I’ve remembered about the vellum. Stuck on playing-cards, they say. Old ones, it seems. Economical trick.’

  On this sober thought Lord Mullion led the way out of the library. Honeybath remained silent, and for the very good reason that for some minutes he had been uncertain whether to speak or not. The astonishing fact was that he suddenly found himself in a position of extreme delicacy. Lady Lucy Wyndowe was all right. The second earl was all right. But the miniature resembling the Young Man in Deep Mourning was all wrong. Honeybath had enjoyed no more than a glimpse of it. His sense of such matters, however, was by native endowment and long training almost preternaturally acute. He had realized instantly that what was on display within that little frame was an excellent reproduction of a Jacobean miniature and not an original. It wasn’t even a replica. It belonged, in fact, to that art of colour photography which Lord Mullion had so lately commended.

  It was in some desperation that Honeybath, on the way to join the ladies, chewed over this discovery. There came into his head Cyprian’s facetious remark about pawning the Mullion diamonds. Was it some rather similar activity that he had stumbled upon? He remembered a celebrated case in which professional thieves had successfully brought off a similar trick – and actually with a substantial oil painting. The substituted print had hung undetected for weeks or months in a great house owned by persons even more uninstructed in artistic matters than the Wyndowes, and by the time a competent eye had fallen upon it the original had passed securely into the possession of an unscrupulous collector. Something of the kind might well have happened here, and much less detectably with a minute object like an extremely valuable miniature. On the other hand there was the uncomfortable possibility that the theft (for it could scarcely be called other than that) had been what is known as an inside job. Honeybath was in a difficult moral position.

  It seemed to be his duty to communicate his awkward discovery to Henry at once – or almost at once, since it was certainly an occasion for the utmost confidentiality. But what if Henry himself was at the bottom of the thing? This staggering thought almost made Honeybath halt in his tracks. Had Henry been raising the wind in a quiet way – perhaps to meet some liability which he didn’t want to reveal to his family? If this were so – and presuming Lord Mullion to be the undisputed owner of the Hilliards, which was by no means certain – nothing positively criminal would, after all, be involved, and it wouldn’t be for Honeybath himself to meddle with his friend’s secret. But the idea was, of course, preposterous. The innocence of Lord Mullion – his innocence in every sense – was just not open to question. And he certainly wasn’t the kind of actor who could have pulled off a wholly deceptive part during the past quarter of an hour.

  So what about Cyprian, who was very much the sort of young man one might suspect of a precocious ability to run into considerable debt? Whether Cyprian was clever or not, Honeybath didn’t know. He was presumably one of nature’s non-starters on the intellectual side of Cambridge academic life. But that told one nothing at all; Honeybath knew that inexpugnably idle undergraduates often pack a great deal of ability behind a deceptive façade. It would be extremely sad if Cyprian were to prove to have been behaving with scandalous dishonesty in his own home.

  Then there was Dr Atlay, who knew a good deal about artistic matters and was fond of advertising the fact. Atlay seemed to have the run of the castle, and particularly of the library. And hadn’t he been a shade keen to cut short the inspection of the Hilliards? It was true that it was he who had referred to Honeybath’s probable interest in them in the first place. But hadn’t he ensured thereby that he would be present and in a position to control the situation as he had in fact done?

  That the ladies of the household were involved – so Honeybath told himself – was a suspicion too fantastic to be entertained. Yet he was a little inclined to wonder about Lady Patience Wyndowe – Patty, as he had come to think of her. Patty didn’t say much, but Honeybath had come to feel that there was something she was brooding over, and that this, whatever it was, had a character in some mysterious way requiring concealment from the rest of her family. Was it Patty who had a guilty secret? Honeybath was seriously entertaining this nebulous notion when something quite different started up in his mind. What about that man Savine? Honeybath, although his own family background was such that it had been quite natural that young Henry Wyndowe should be his fag, had never himself enjoyed the services of a butler; nor had his father done so. He regarded upper menservants as rather a sinister crowd. It was no doubt customary that your butler should have the wardenship of your silver in quite a big way, but it seemed mildly dotty to hand over to him the wardenship of three miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard. There had been a time within living memory when such things were scarcely regarded as significant works of art. But they must be uncommonly valuable now.

  Thus did Charles Honeybath, much like a detective in the latter part of a mystery story, turn hither and thither the swift mind (as Homer says) while surveying a field full of suspects. It will be remarked that he had rejected Lady Mullion for the role, and pretty well forgotten her younger daughter, the schoolgirl Boosie. But as the present chronicle, being veridical, enjoys all the unpredictability of history, it would be rash to base any hypothesis upon this circumstance.

  They had joined the ladies, who were engaged, in the distinctly grand drawing-room of Mullion Castle, in the unassuming activity of watching the nine o’clock news. The television set, indeed, peeped reticently out of a cupboard and could be banished behind a door in elegant linen-fold panelling, Lord Mullion having been advised that the exposure of such an object would militate against the Wednesday and Saturday visitors’ persuasion that they were in the presence of only the very highest sort of gracious living. Lady Mullion switched off the set at once.

  ‘Nothing but minor fatalities,’ she said briskly. ‘Motor coaches tumbling into yawning chasms. Fortunately there is nothing of the sort in the park, or we might be in trouble tomorrow. And in Nottingham a dog has been badly bitten by its demented owner. That young man with the spotty face hastened to the scene “to report” as they say. Only the dog was already in hospital. Charles, please help yourself to coffee.’

  Honeybath obeyed, not without a lurking feeling that he could have done with brandy as well, an indulgence which the continued presence of Miss Wyndowe presumably forbade. But perhaps when she had been yanked into her lift again there would be whisky before going to bed.

  The oeuvre immediately came under discussion, but there was fortunately no proposal that it should be at once exhibited in toto. In her own apartments Miss Wyndowe kept several portfolios of her drawings and watercolours, and these Mr Honeybath was to have the privilege of turning over on some convenient occasion when he took tea with her. At the moment the problem was to locate those actually hanging somewhere in the castl
e. Everybody was vague about this in a manner that scarcely suggested any lively regard for Great-aunt Camilla’s work. It was felt that one of the twice-weekly ladies (by which was meant Lord Mullion’s locally recruited guides) would know, and that most probably it would be Miss Kinder-Scout, who had made the pictures her special study. And then Cyprian came up with the suggestion that the elusive paintings might ‘be among the fish and things in that kitchen corridor’. This was perhaps awkwardly expressed, but nobody seemed embarrassed by it; nor did Miss Wyndowe herself evince any disapprobation at the idea. Honeybath felt at sea about the fish (which could scarcely be at sea themselves) and wondered whether, in the macabre fashion sometimes to be remarked in restaurants, the Mullion kitchens ran to aquarium-like receptacles in which there swam, in blissful ignorance of their fate, the second course in tomorrow’s dinner.