Lord Mullion's Secret (10 page)

‘But you didn't' – it occurred to him to ask, recalling Lady Mullion's account of the matter – ‘think to go on to Italy?'

‘Most certainly not!' This was snapped out by Miss Wyndowe with so sudden a vehemence that Honeybath was startled. He had thoughtlessly stumbled, he supposed, on the dangerous territory of the old lady's religious fanaticism.

‘Or ever thought,' he continued hastily, ‘to travel in the Far East? I have myself always regretted never having visited Japan.'

‘Japan? Decidedly not! The sanitary conditions there are certain to be deplorable. And that held of Italy, at least at that time. My maid, Pipton, who accompanied me in France, had been briefly in Italy with my cousin, Parthenope Wyndowe. The conditions, Pipton said, were atrocious, and such as we should not think to face. And
that
, Mr Honeybath, was the occasion of my not venturing further than Provence.'

‘It was very prudent, no doubt.' These bizarre considerations, he reflected, seemed to have little to do with a maniacal disapproval of the so-called Bishop of Rome. But Miss Wyndowe was really a muddled old soul, although in some ways she had to be regarded as sharp enough. It certainly wouldn't do to challenge her on minor inconsistencies revealed in these autobiographical ramblings. So he cast round for a radical change of subject which should take him, as it were, to the end of his innings with Great-aunt Camilla. Some more sustained attention on the part of his hostess seemed to him a little overdue. Perhaps she was acting on the assumption that her aged kinswoman would particularly enjoy a long colloquy with a fellow artist.

‘This part of the country,' he said, ‘always seems to me particularly beautiful at the present time of year. I had a delightful drive down this morning, on secondary roads for the most part. One sees much more of one's surroundings that way.'

‘Is that why you were late for luncheon at the castle?'

‘Well, no.' Honeybath was a shade disconcerted that Miss Wyndowe should have been told about his small failure as a punctilious guest, and suspected that her informant had been young Cyprian, who might even have adorned his tale with a little ludicrous fiction. ‘What happened was that I ran out of petrol. Or, rather, I imagined I had.'

‘Imagined you had? How very peculiar!'

‘It does sound odd.' Honeybath considered embarking on a description of little green and red lights, but reflected that such gadgets didn't belong to Miss Wyndowe's period. ‘However, I was rescued by one of Henry's gardeners, an obliging lad called Swithin Gore.' Swithin, as one whom he had unjustly aspersed, was still running in Honeybath's head.

‘Gore? I don't think I know him.' Miss Wyndowe appeared to consider this remark with care. ‘But he may be the boy who used to look after my donkey-cart, and who has received some promotion since then. Do you use a donkey cart, Mr Honeybath? As you know, the Queen enjoys driving one. Only they call hers a donkey carriage.'

‘Is that so?' This information struck Honeybath as improbable, until it occurred to him that the sovereign thus augustly invoked had probably enjoyed this mode of conveyance at Osborne or Balmoral rather a long time ago.

‘And – now I come to think of it – there have been Gores on the estate over a number of generations. I seem to recall an Abel Gore. One might imagine him to have been some sort of bull.'

‘The boy who coped with my car wasn't at all like a bull.' It had taken Honeybath a moment to catch up with the sense of Miss Wyndowe's remark, which revealed a process of mind as peculiar as had yet come from her. He wondered whether she was adept at advanced crossword puzzles. ‘As a matter of fact, when I first glanced at him I supposed he might be Cyprian. But that had something to do with what he happened to be carrying.'

‘And also an Ammon Gore.' Miss Wyndowe was pursuing her own line of thought. ‘Or was it Mammon? The lower classes were formerly prone to make an uninstructed use of scriptural names. But I think it was Ammon. The Ammonites were the children of Lot. His wife, you will recall, was of a retrospective habit, and was turned into a pillar of salt as a result. The notion of a pillar of salt is elusive, but some sort of stalagmite may have given rise to the conception. Can you tell me, Mr Honeybath, whether there are stalagmites in the Holy Land? It is on record as flowing with milk and honey – but not, so far as I know, with carbonate of lime.'

Honeybath felt that this was getting beyond him. He wondered whether it represented a form of witty conversation fashionable at dinner-tables in this aged person's youth. Or was it some kind of family joke that hadn't been explained to him? This last speculation, which really had very little sense to it, at least confirmed the fact that he had a strong impulse to be bewildered by Great-aunt Camilla. He remembered Lady Mullion's saying, on an impulse, that she felt her husband's kinswoman as suggesting that some mystery attached to her; that she had a secret. Might it be that at least she had a past – which was not quite the same idea, but came close to it? The oddity of her conversation seemed not entirely a matter of senility or mental decay. It had too much intermittent point to it for that. Was it, conceivably, in part a defensive mechanism; something left over from a period in which an evasive inconsequence was useful to her? This notion, if not without subtlety, was rather unpersuasive as well, and Honeybath abandoned such idle speculation. During the rest of dinner he talked in the main with Lady Mullion. But on several occasions when conversation among the small party grew more general, and Miss Wyndowe contributed to it with a kind of random liberality, it struck him that a good deal of the effect she created proceeded from nothing more remarkable than a singularly patchy memory. This seemed to hold alike over the near and the remote past. If her memory was to be regarded as a route-map of the large areas of experience she had traversed in her eighty years (or whatever exactly they might be) then there were blank spaces scattered indifferently all over it. This, of course, was a rash conclusion to think to arrive at with any confidence on so short an acquaintance with the old creature as his at present was. Her mind might well reveal more extravagant contours on a better knowledge of her. Indeed, he had been as good as warned that it was so. But at least she was far from boring. Honeybath caught himself as being almost sorry, after all, that he hadn't been invited to set up his easel in front of her.

 

 

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?'