A Corpse in Shining Armour (15 page)

Tabby reported all this with complete tranquillity. I think it had even made her feel at home to find that people could quarrel
every bit as fiercely in the country as in London.

‘Do you know where Violet lives?’

‘Two down from the public house. Keeps hens and sells eggs.’

‘I’m going to the big house tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘If there’s time when we get back, you and I will go and buy some eggs.’

‘But Polly brought a dozen…’ Then she looked at me and grinned.

‘I see. All right then.’

Reading and writing weren’t everything. Nor was deference.

Next morning Lady Brinkburn must have seen me walking down her drive, because she was already in the hall when a maid opened
the front door to me. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me and led me straight to the library. The journal was ready on
the sloping desk, with a chair drawn up to it.

‘Betty will be in soon with coffee, Miss Lane. Is there enough light for you here? We can draw the blind up higher, if you
like.’

The light was perfect, I assured her. She lingered. Now the moment had come, she seemed nervous about leaving me with the
journal.

‘Mr Carmichael has had to go on an errand into town,’ she said. ‘He won’t be back for an hour or so.’

Was that intended as reassurance to herself or me? I wondered if her librarian had taken himself off as a sign of his disapproval.

‘So I’ll leave you with it then,’ she said, and went.

The first page of the journal carried simply its title, in capitals and under-ruled:
Journal of a Continental Tour, 1816
. The year after the battle of Waterloo, the first year that British travellers had been able to visit Europe for pleasure,
after it had been closed to them for so many years by the Napoleonic wars. I decided to start at the beginning and read all
the way through instead of skipping straight to the part that mattered. I wanted to know more about the young bride Lady Brinkburn
had been twenty-three years ago. I turned the page.

16 March 1816, Rotterdam

We embarked at Newcastle yesterday morning, arriving late and almost losing the tide. The sailors managed to have our travelling
chariot taken on board quite easily, but there was a terrible pother with the fourgon that will carry all our luggage for
more than six months, as well as Edward and Suzy. The gangway shifted and for a while it appeared that it and all our belongings
were doomed to be an early tribute to Neptune. But the brave sailors pushed and pulled with a will and eventually we were
all safely on board, just in time. I was sad to say goodbye to the horses that had pulled our carriage, but God willing they
will be waiting for us when we return in the autumn. It was a turbulent crossing, although the sailors said we were making
faster than usual progress because of the strong wind from the west. Poor Suzy and C were overcome with mal de mer before
we were out of sight of the coast of England, and spent the entire voyage down below. I was mercifully unaffected and stood
at the rail with the spray from the waves bursting over my head, feeling a thundering in my ears and all through my body as
huge waves battered the oaken sides of our good ship.

The page was ornamented with a cloaked figure at the ship’s rail–presumably a self-portrait–and a ship wallowing in a
trough of sea with a wave rearing above the mainmast. Probably some artistic licence. On the next page they landed at Rotterdam,
secured rooms in a hotel that was
so spotlessly clean and orderly that one might have eaten dinner off the flagstones in the hall
and were met by a Mr Schwarz who was to be their guide for the first few weeks of their journey. So they’d decided to hire
guides as they went along, rather than take one with them. I knew a little about these Continental tours because one of the
many ways in which my late father managed to make enough money to keep us was by occasionally escorting rich young men around
the cultural sites of Europe, as a final gloss to their expensive educations. Mr Schwarz’s task would have been to smooth
the way for the young couple, advise them on the best hotels to stay, the art galleries, notable buildings and best views
and quite probably tell them what to think of them as well.

They had rested at Rotterdam for three days while Mr Schwarz went ahead with the fourgon containing the luggage, along with
Edward and Suzy (presumably valet and maid) to prepare things for them on the next stop of their journey towards Antwerp and
Brussels. It seemed that they were avoiding Paris and most of France; hardly surprising at a time when the majority of English
people still thought of it as a country of bloody revolution. The journey to Brussels, in easy stages, seemed to go smoothly,
apart from occasional worries like a hotel where the beds had fleas–
I told Mr Schwarz that it simply would not do and unless they replaced the mattress and bolsters as well as all the linen
we should move to another place
–and a lame horse–
I insisted on getting out of the carriage and walking the two miles to the staging post, rather than burden the poor creature
with my weight
.

As I turned the pages, I started to like the young Lady Brinkburn very much. Every night without fail, after what must have
been exhausting days of travel, she wrote a few lines at least in her journal and usually added a sketch. She had a good eye
for the unremarkable things as well as the approved sights–two women in shawls walking to market with baskets of root vegetables,
an old man leaning on a stick and drinking beer, even a line of washing blowing in the wind. The excitement of an intelligent
young woman, abroad for the first time, shone on every page of her journal. She was kind to people as well as animals. The
last stage into Antwerp had been a pouring wet one.
Our poor boy riding on the back of the coach was wet as a herring when we arrived, teeth chattering. I told Suzy to dry him
and wrap him in a blanket and I made him some tea with my little spirit lamp.
So their entourage had included a boy to ride on the back of their travelling carriage and help with the luggage, which would
have been below the dignity of Edward the valet. There was even a drawing of the boy on the Antwerp page, blanket wrapped,
with his steaming teacup. Every detail of the journey was there. Or almost every detail. Only one thing was missing: any sign
of affection for, or even interest in, her new husband.

Lord Brinkburn always appeared simply as ‘C’ for Cornelius, his first name. Usually, as in that first entry on the crossing,
when there was something wrong with him. At Antwerp, where they stayed for a week,
C brought low with a cold, so Mr Schwarz showed Suzy and me around the city on our own. I purchased a set of painted plates
and Suzy begged a small advance of her wages from me to buy a new lace cap with ribbons.
At Brussels, making the obligatory visit to the battlefield of Waterloo,
C angry because the man who was to have been our guide did not meet us, but fortunately an officer who had taken part in the
battle was also visiting and gave us a most vivid account of how our hero the Duke of Wellington defeated the French tyrant,
so C mollified.
A conscientious plan of the battlefield accompanied the entry. Although the new bride might be bashful about going into raptures
over her husband in a journal that friends and family might read, all this seemed unusually cool. Shouldn’t they, for instance,
have watched the occasional sunset together, walked together, shopped for luxuries for their home together? Come to think
of it, should a young woman on her honeymoon tour have been quite so assiduous about keeping up her journal every evening?

‘Lady Brinkburn says would you like some more coffee, Miss Lane?’

The maid had come into the library so softly that I didn’t notice until she was standing beside me. I’d let my coffee go cold
in its cup, hardly tasted. I said no thank you, waited while she took the tray away, then turned back to the journal, following
the Brinkburns’ leisurely progress across Europe.

From Brussels they went eastwards to Cologne, then up the Rhine Valley, sometimes making diversions and often stopping in
one place for days at a time. I was looking for something else in the journal now, and not finding it. Lady Brinkburn had
no great fondness for her husband, but had she met another man she liked better on their travels? That might explain, if anything
did, the preposterous story of the stranger in the night. If so, there was not the faintest trace of it in the journal. Mr
Schwarz, from her sketch of him, was fifty, had ears that stuck out and wore a
pince nez
on the sharp ridge of his nose. As arranged, he left them at the Swiss border where plump and cheerful Mr Lebrun took over
the management of the Alpine stage of their journey. Occasionally the Brinkburns would meet other travelling British parties
and go on excursions or picnics with them, but these associations lasted a week at most before they went their separate ways.

One thing that was clear, as they travelled over mountain passes and had to survive simpler accommodation than they’d experienced
so far, was how much Lady Brinkburn was growing up on the journey. The young bride, still in her early twenties, was learning
to manage people and events. One evening when they arrived tired at a mountain inn to find the cook incapably drunk and the
prospect of a bread-and-cheese supper looming:
I told Edward and the boy to carry the wretched cook into the yard and hold his head under the pump, then Suzy and I took
charge of his kitchen and succeeded in constructing some quite satisfactory omelettes, which Mr Lebrun pronounced as good
as any he’d ever eaten in France. Since the cook had managed to lose the keys to the wine cellar, we broached some bottles
from the store we keep for emergencies under the floor of our chariot and did well enough. In the morning, when the proprietor
presented his bill, I told him roundly that we’d no intention of paying anything for our dinner beyond the value of the eggs
and butter.
And where was Lord Brinkburn in all this? I imagined him lounging with his legs under the table, complaining of having to
wait for his dinner. Perhaps unfairly, I was beginning to dislike the man.

They spent some days at Geneva and made a daring foray into France, to see the glaciers at Chamonix. Then came the pages I’d
seen already, when Lord Brinkburn was taken ill and his wife had the happiest three weeks of her life, painting and botanising
in the Alpine meadows. Various new names occurred over the next few pages, but most of the men mentioned were travelling Britons
or guides, with no indication that her heart had been stirred by anything apart from lilies and gentians.

Once recovered, the party seemed intent on making up for lost time and hurried over the St Bernard Pass into Italy. Because
of the pace of travel, the journal entries were shorter, mostly just a few lines recording the more spectacular sights and
the miles travelled, with the occasional sketch. But once in Italy, they expanded again into whole pages. The Brinkburns had
rented a villa on the shores of Lake Como for most of July and the whole of August and Lady Brinkburn was enchanted with the
place.

It really is the most romantic of all possible dwellings, like something from a fairytale. Although it is a villa, most comfortably
and properly appointed, it is also a true castle. A small peninsula juts into the lake, crowned with the ruins of what must
have been a formidable small fortress three or four hundred years ago. Its walls are mostly crumbled into falls of stone down
the hillside, but the original round tower remains. The architect has most cleverly worked it into the design of the villa,
so that the room downstairs is a round sitting room looking out over the lake, so close to the water that one might almost
feel oneself afloat. Above it, a smaller room is fitted out as a bedchamber. It is not large and may have been intended for
a servant, but the minute I saw it I appropriated it as mine. (Suzy may sleep more spaciously in the main body of the villa.)
I have my drawing and writing things set out on a table by the window and a view of the lake that a soaring eagle might envy.

For the next few weeks, she didn’t tire of drawing and painting that castle from all angles: from the shore, from a rowing
boat on the lake, against the sunset, by moonlight. She wrote poems in her journal too, about the castle and the lake, much
influenced by Wordsworth and not as good as her drawings. Although the poems were full of fashionable melancholy, every page
of the journal suggested that Lady Brinkburn was enjoying those summer weeks by Lake Como. Small sketches of their household
practically danced from the margins: the maid Suzy with a basket of peaches, the boy from home grinning at the back of the
travelling coach, along with a smaller lad who might have been the child of one of their Italian servants, the Italian cook
waving a ladle–everything and everybody, in fact, but her new-wedded lord. That might have been because her lord was not
often there to be sketched. Soon after their arrival, he took off on his own for Milan, where he stayed for a week. When he
got back, some of his old university friends had arrived in a villa a few miles away, part of what seemed to be a British
migration to the shores of the lake. Reading between the lines, Lady Brinkburn didn’t much care for these old friends and
dryly recorded when C was off boating or driving with them. She made her own friends and established a new round of picnics,
lunch parties and sketching expeditions. Altogether, it seemed an enviably sunny interlude.

The breaking up of it was gradual at first. Some of her picnic friends began to turn their travelling chariots towards home.
It was mid August by now and the grouse moors were calling. The long summer days began to fray into rain and thunderstorms.
She loved the storms at first.

Here, the lightning often begins long before the rain. Last night after dinner I sat at the window of my little round drawing
room and watched pulse after pulse of white light flickering over the lake. The effect is quite beyond my powers of drawing.
No thunder was audible, but the air seemed so charged with electricity that I could feel the small hairs at the back of my
neck rising. A silk handkerchief became magnetised and clung to the sleeve of my dress. When I touched my paper-knife, a perceptible
shock ran up my fingers and along my arm. The phenomenon has a remarkable affect on one’s nervous organisation, as if waiting
anxiously for something but not knowing what. Later, when it was quite dark, the storm broke in earnest, with downpours of
rain so heavy that it looked like a second glass pane on the far side of my window, copper-coloured lightning forking down
to the water and tumultuous thunder. It is the most sublime of Nature’s effects, and I privileged to see it here from my window
suspended between land and water as the elements raged all round.