Lord Mullion's Secret (15 page)

‘I know it sounds silly. But, for a start, this can't have happened long ago. Henry and the children are not much interested in these things, and might notice nothing amiss for quite a long time. And that goes, in a way, for those women who take people round. They declare this or that to be tremendously interesting, but they don't really
look
themselves. But I am rather fond of the Hilliards, and do look at them quite often. All three were certainly undisturbed only a few days ago. And then, you know, you turn up. So it's almost as if somebody had decided, rather hurriedly, that the real miniature must be kept out of your sight, and took a chance that you wouldn't, during your stay, detect that any funny business had taken place.' Lady Mullion paused, and looked searchingly at Honeybath. ‘Can you make anything of that?'

‘Absolutely not, Mary dear. It seems to me to make no sense at all.'

‘I am quite sure that most people would agree with you.' Lady Mullion produced this slightly ambiguous remark with continued gravity. ‘The question is, what do we do now? And I'm rather glad you said nothing last night.'

‘I'm uneasy about that, actually. But you will understand, Mary, that I saw various rather awkward possibilities.'

‘Quite so – and they remain awkward. So for the moment I think you and I will keep this to ourselves.'

‘Very well.' Honeybath couldn't help feeling slightly surprised by this decision – excluding, as it appeared to do, even Henry from a knowledge of the affair. ‘But there is one thing I ought to point out. If the Hilliards are insured and a claim has eventually to be made, it might be awkward if it transpired that you and I had kept the loss under our hats for any length of time.'

‘I have no doubt that is true. Nevertheless, I'd like to think it over for a few days.' For the first time, Lady Mullion hesitated. ‘I have to think of Henry,' she then said. ‘You mayn't know this, but he has an almost pathological dislike of scandal.'

‘As a matter of fact, I've had a glimpse of that.' Honeybath was a good deal perplexed by the final turn this conversation had taken. He had a sense of bewilderments gathering all around him at Mullion Castle. But was it possible that they were, so to speak, only so many facets of a single master bewilderment? He had just arrived at this obscure idea when Lady Mullion looked at her watch.

‘Good heavens!' she said. ‘There will be a first coachload in fifteen minutes. I simply must find Patty and set her to those Mermaids.'

 

 

Because she was briskly busy, and perhaps also because she was a little upset, Lady Mullion neglected to suggest to Honeybath anything in the nature of what her husband had facetiously called a lurking-hole. It was improbable that the family really hid themselves in cupboards when the public began to pour in. Their retreat must be to quarters at least reasonably commodious somewhere in the castle. But nothing, as it happened, had been said to Honeybath about this.

He could, of course, with perfect propriety retire to his bedroom (which by this time he was able to locate with confidence). It would already have been scurried through by a housemaid – probably the elderly woman who had brought him tea and pulled up his blinds at eight o'clock. He really did have correspondence to attend to, and the various pieces of professional equipment with which he hoped soon to be getting busy required a certain amount of sorting through. But the morning was fine and already very warm, and he thought it might be pleasant to wander out into the gardens for an hour or so. Two considerations, however, restrained him here. The first was the knowledge that the gardens, too, would soon be full of visitors, or so he supposed, since he had gathered that it was possible to ‘do' this particular aspect of spacious living for a lesser fee than was required to view the interior of the castle. He felt no disinclination to thus mingling with the herd. But it did occur to him that if he did so he might be mistaken for Lord Mullion, and in consequence stared at, photographed, and even accosted. This was an idea demonstrably absurd, and he realized that it was the second consideration that really deterred him. This one, looked at fairly, was pretty silly too. In the gardens there might be gardeners, and one of them might be young Swithin Gore. If he encountered Swithin he would have to speak to him. There was no rational reason why he should not do this. Indeed, he knew that he must seek Swithin out quite soon for the honourable purpose of apologizing to him over his own improper suspicion of the previous afternoon. But he felt that Swithin needed a little thinking out first. Why he felt this he didn't know. He was, perhaps, dimly conscious that he had (like the reader) some odd ideas lurking in his head about the young man.

In this exigency he thought of his late perch beneath that fluttering flag. The view from up there had been exceedingly attractive, and it might be pleasant to settle himself before it with a sketch-book until it seemed desirable to find out what happened on visiting days about that soup and bread and cheese.

He put this plan into operation, first providing himself with what materials it required, and presently found himself in a solitude shared only with a few pigeons that had strayed upwards from the manorial dovecot. He decided that they were collar-doves and perhaps nowadays to be regarded as a pest. They were pretty creatures, all the same, and it was a pity that nothing much could be done about them with a pencil on dry paper. So he settled himself down in a reasonably comfortable coign of the masonry and plumped for the church tower as the pivot of an unassuming sketch of the park. It was just visible beyond a grove of oaks. Within a few minutes he was entirely absorbed in initial problems. of perspective – so much that it was with a start of surprise that he presently found himself to be no longer alone. Lord Wyndowe had appeared on the leads, and was now standing behind the artist, apparently studying his work. Honeybath put down his pencil.

‘Good morning, Cyprian,' he said. ‘Are you taking refuge up here too?'

‘Good morning, sir. More or less that.' Cyprian advanced to the battlements and peered over them. ‘Bloody buses rolling up, all right,' he said. ‘The motor cars are mostly people on their own. The buses – coaches, they call them – are all fixed up with a firm in London. You have to get on one of the major tourist itineraries, and then you're OK. But there's the hell of a rake-off.'

‘I see.' It was a shade reluctantly that Honeybath transferred his attention from the church tower to the heir of the Mullions. Cyprian had not appeared at breakfast – a circumstance consonant with the fact that he was now still wearing pyjamas and a dressing-gown. But this state of the case obtained only for a few moments. Cyprian was carrying a rug, which he now spread out on the sloping roof before stripping himself of both dressing-gown and pyjamas, tossing these garments at random round him, and stretching himself supine beneath the warm sun.

‘Business of keeping bronzed and fit,' he said. ‘I'm what would have been called a hearty in your time. Just look at my flat tummy. What do you think of it?'

‘It seems perfectly in order, Cyprian.'

‘Yes – but is it going to last after I've finished up with all that bloody rowing? Or am I booked for a flabby middle age?'

‘It depends on what you do with yourself, I suppose.'

‘How right you are! Why don't you strip off too? This place is made for sun-bathing. Nothing to goggle at you except those blameless birds.'

Honeybath refrained from falling in with this suggestion. He took no exception to sharing his solitude with a naked young man, and even felt a certain attraction in the idea of transferring his professional attentions from the church tower to a recumbent male nude. But establishing a kind of mini-colony of nudists thus beneath the ancestral Mullion flag made no appeal to him. In addition to which he was not without a certain self-consciousness about his own flabby middle age.

‘Do you mean,' he asked, ‘that you're beginning to wonder about a career for yourself?'

‘Well, about a course of life, you might say. My father says that running this place oughtn't to be a full-time job in itself. Or not any longer, he says. Changing times, and so on.'

‘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.

 

 

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.