"Yes, sir."
"Did you see or hear anyone on the stairs?"
"No, sir."
"Did you stop on the ground floor?"
"No, sir."
"Did you go near the study?"
"No, sir." Luke's wide blue eyes were clear and unwavering.
"This visit Mrs. Falkland made to her friend who lives near the Strand. What have you been holding back about that?"
Luke's guard went up with a vengeance. "With respect, sir, I haven't been holding anything back."
"You know, you can't help her by concealing information. You can only make it appear more damning when it does come out—as it assuredly will in the end."
"I wouldn't presume to think Mrs. Falkland needs help from the likes of me, sir."
"Very pretty. But you don't believe a word of it, and nor do I."
Luke said nothing.
"My dear boy," said Julian, who was no more than five years older, "you must realize your secrecy about this episode invites the worst suspicions. You may be slandering Mrs. Falkland far more gravely by keeping silent than you could by speaking out."
"If I thought—" Luke stopped himself, shaking his head in bewilderment. "I just don't know, sir. You're cleverer than I am. I don't know what's right, and until I do, I must hold my tongue, even if I go to gaol for it."
"It won't come to that. I shouldn't like to make a martyr of you—you'd enjoy it far too much. Tell me, are you protecting Mrs. Falkland because you believe she's innocent, or because you're afraid she's guilty?"
Luke said slowly, "I believe she's innocent, sir. But to me it wouldn't make any difference."
"Your loyalty to her wouldn't change a jot, even if you knew she was a murderess?"
"I don't mean that, sir. But you see, I know she'd never do anything wrong. So if it turned out she'd killed anyone, I'd think—"
"Yes?"
"I'd think, sir, he must have deserved it."
*
Julian joined Sir Malcolm in the library and gave him an account of his interviews with Valere and Luke. "So you see," he finished, "my next steps are to question Mrs. Falkland about this mysterious visit to the sick friend, and to ask Martha why she took such an untoward interest in Alexander's comings and goings. I also want to speak with Eugene. In short, if you're returning to Hampstead, I should like to go with you."
Sir Malcolm was standing before the window and did not look around. "It's beginning already, isn't it? The revelations you warned me about—the skeletons poking their heads out of closets. Martha spying on Alexander, Luke keeping secrets about Belinda—" He shook his head. "I suppose it will only get worse from now on."
"You're difficult to please, Sir Malcolm. Earlier you fretted that we weren't making progress, and now you seem distressed because we are."
"I know." Sir Malcolm came away from the window with a rueful smile. "I beg you won't listen to me. Of course you may come back with me to Hampstead. Are we finished here?"
"Not quite. I thought we might make a brief tour of the house."
"By all means. Are you looking for anything in particular?"
"I'm gathering impressions about what I believe lies at the heart of this investigation: the mind and character—the soul, if you will—of Alexander Falkland." He stepped back, gazing around the library. "This room alone expresses a great deal about him. The Gothic style is the easiest in the world to reduce to satire. People build whole houses like marzipan castles, with rooms like stage sets in a pantomime. But this has substance as well as grace. It conveys something of the medieval world as it was, not merely as Walter Scott's worst imitators have imagined it."
He walked around the room, scanning the tall, glass-fronted bookshelves. Everywhere were volumes on law, political economy, and philosophy—beautifully bound and well-kept, ornaments in themselves. But there were also books in a lighter vein.
"The Monk
,
The Castle of Otranto, Melmoth the Wanderer
,
Frankenstein
—apparently someone in the house liked horror novels."
"Those were Alexander's. Belinda doesn't like novels much."
"No," mused Julian, "I suppose she wouldn't. She's prosaic, for all her ethereal look—the sort of woman who inspires poetry but doesn't read it. Whereas Alexander had, if anything, an excess of imagination. In all this room, nothing is so characteristic of him as this."
He went to a bookshelf in a corner, away from the direct light of the windows. Close examination revealed that books and shelves were an illusion—a mere painting on the wall.
"He seems to have delighted in this sort of effect. Imaginative, as I said. That may explain the political views he revealed in his letters to you. People of intense imagination are apt to sympathize with the poor and despised—they envision themselves in the same plight, and the picture is so real and horrifying, it impels them to action. I daresay that's why so many of our best poets have flirted with Radicalism: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth."
"You're a very imaginative young man yourself," Sir Malcolm pointed out, smiling.
"But neither political nor poetic," said Julian lightly. "Shall we move on?"
They had seen the entire ground floor: parlour, library, and study. Sir Malcolm suggested they visit the basement next. They went down the servants' stairs, which were concealed behind a door next to the study. Julian observed that they reached from the basement all the way to the attic. A conveniently clandestine route for the murderer, provided he did not encounter any of the servants on the stairs.
The front basement room was the kitchen. It boasted the latest combination boiler and coal-fired range, with a roasting jack that turned the meat by clockwork. Overhead, brilliantly burnished copper pots and kettles dangled from hooks. The servants' hall next door was large and airy for a basement room, with bright chintz curtains, pretty worktables for the women, and cribbage boards for the men. All in keeping with Alexander's reputation for treating his servants well.
They returned to the ground floor and moved toward the front of the hallway. On a table beside the street door was a salver overflowing with this season's visiting cards. Julian leafed through them, knowing he would see many of the oldest, most eminent names in the kingdom. To move in such circles was no slight achievement for the son of a landless baronet, of no very ancient or distinguished family. Having a beautiful wife must have helped, but still, the primary achievement was Alexander's.
They ascended Alexander's superb "flying staircase," springing up from the floor with no visible means of support. The steps were marble, the handrail of polished mahogany. The gilded wrought-iron balusters were adorned with angels ascending and descending. The walls above were pale blue and bare of ornamentation, to enhance the impression of Jacob's Ladder rising to the sky.
The first floor Julian knew already: the scene of Alexander's entertainments. The drawing room and music room were adjacent, with doors that could be thrown open to make them virtually a single room. They were furnished in the latest style, with dazzling yellow walls and curtains, black marble fireplaces, and striped scroll sofas. The supper room was Chinese. Its most striking feature was its shutters, which were delicately painted with oriental scenes. At night, by the flickering light of candles, they made the windows appear to overlook a moonlit Chinese landscape.
All these rooms were spacious, but Julian knew that, with eighty guests sidling in and out of groups, fetching glasses of negus, slipping onto balconies for breaths of air, no one would remain under any one person's observation for long. Little wonder that few of the guests could establish alibis for the entire period in which Alexander might have been killed.
The second floor was given over to bedrooms. Alexander's was surprisingly spartan; he seemed to have reserved his artistic feats for rooms other people would use. Yet he clearly valued comfort and convenience. He had gone to the expense of having running water laid on all the way to the top of the house, and his bath was equipped with an ingenious shower, as well as a frame to hold newspapers and breakfast dishes.
The spare bedroom, which had been Eugene's, was decorated in a Roman style, with wallpaper reminiscent of the paintings at Pompeii. Mrs. Falkland's bedroom was Greek, in shades of blue, white, and gold to complement her eyes, complexion, and hair. Even the dressing-table ornaments were classical: an ivory scent-bottle, a pottery vase, a bronze mirror mounted on a figurine of a goddess holding a dove. Above the bed was a lively marble frieze of a Greek hunting scene. The central figure was a beautiful young woman in drapery kilted up to her knees, with a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder.
"It's a compliment to Belinda," Sir Malcolm explained. "Diana, the goddess of the chase. You must know Belinda is a fearless rider to hounds."
Julian did know, but all the same he thought it a strange image for Alexander to place over his wife's bed. After all, Diana was a virgin goddess, who had once had her dogs tear a man to pieces for watching her while she bathed.
He looked around the room, his brows knit. "Don't you think it curious, Sir Malcolm, how little Mrs. Falkland's influence shows in this house, even here in her own room? A tenant in a set of furnished rooms leaves more of a mark than she has."
"She was glad to leave that sort of thing to Alexander. She admired his taste. Everyone did."
"No doubt."
"What's troubling you, Mr. Kestrel?"
"I was thinking that your son was a phenomenon, Sir Malcolm. And I was wondering what it was like for Mrs. Falkland, being a phenomenon's wife."
"She and Alexander were very happy!"
"How do you know?"
"You saw them together! There was nothing he wouldn't do for her. '
So
loving, he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly
.' That's how he was."
"It's tempting to quote back to you from the same play: '
These indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play.
'"
Sir Malcolm fairly bristled. "Why should you think my son was anything but genuine in his behaviour toward his wife?"
"I pray you won't take offence. I don't suggest that any particular thing about him wasn't genuine—only that it seems impossible that everything could have been. He was a mass of contradictions. He surrounded himself with fine furnishings, food, and servants, and yet wrote passionately about the sufferings of factory workers and accused felons. His library is made up of legal and philosophical works and horror novels. He made himself the darling of society's
corps elite,
yet he took as his particular friends a shy, awkward fellow like Clare, and David Adams, a man of business and a Jew."
"What are you trying to say?" asked Sir Malcolm, with something like fear in his eyes. "Where is all this leading us?"
Julian relented. "At the moment, I think it's leading us to luncheon. And, after that, to Hampstead."
7: Bad Blood
"Of course I know what you're thinking," said Eugene Talmadge.
"Do you?" Julian lounged back in his chair and surveyed him with lifted brows. "What a remarkable faculty. I usually find it enough of a task sorting out my own thoughts, let alone trying to read anyone else's."
Eugene stared. However he had expected their interview to begin, it was not like this.
"What is it you suppose I'm thinking?" Julian asked.
"The same thing everyone is."
"Evidently this talent you have for divining thoughts has a fairly wide reach. And for perhaps the first time in the history of human intellect, we find an entire population thinking precisely the same thing."
The boy flung up his head. "Sir Malcolm brought you here to ask me questions, not to laugh at me!"
"I have time for both," Julian assured him.
Eugene's eyes fairly started from their sockets. Shock, bewilderment, indignation struggled on his face. It was not a bad face, though unfinished—a rough sketch of the comely young man he might be in a few more years. Certainly the high, wide brow and expressive blue eyes were promising. More sleep and less tautly strung nerves would help; so would soap and water.
"Now then," said Julian, "what do you believe that everyone, including me, is thinking?"
"You may pretend you don't know if you like. But I think it's rather shabby. People might at least come out and admit it to my face. Bad blood, that's what they're saying. My father ran through all his money and cheated his friends at cards, and when they caught him at it, he cut his throat with a razor. So why shouldn't I have killed my sister's husband? He left me money, after all."
"Did you know he would?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I said I didn't."
Julian smiled. "Conversation with you is extremely restful, Mr. Talmadge. You not only read my mind—you make it up for me. I could nod off to sleep, and you could conduct this entire interview by yourself."
"I think you're extremely rude! And you're doing it on purpose!"
"Of course. One should never be rude except on purpose."
Eugene's defences dropped abruptly. He looked at Julian with shy curiosity. "Why?"
That one syllable told Julian more about Alexander Falkland than all his father's praise, his servants' loyalty, or his own eloquent letters. Alexander had been Eugene's brother-in-law and guardian for a year and a half, had lived under the same roof with him for months—and he had taught him nothing. Eugene's unkempt state, his skittishness, his ignorance of the most elementary rules of how one gentleman addresses another: they were all faults that brotherly guidance could have smoothed away. And no one was better able to give such guidance than Alexander, who had been the epitome of charm and taste. Everyone said Eugene had worshipped his brother-in-law. If that were true, how could Alexander have given so little back?
These thoughts washed over Julian swiftly, making no change in his face or manner. He answered, "Because one should never appear to do anything without intent. It's the secret of poise."