A Mansion and its Murder (3 page)

‘More or less,’ I conceded gracelessly. ‘But your feet touched the line lots of times.’

‘That’s because my feet are bigger than yours. These squares are for delicate little girls’ feet.’

If he had been Uncle Frank I would have offered to draw a bigger set of squares beside mine, but as he was my father I didn’t. We stood looking awkwardly at each other for a moment,
at a loss for words with each other, as we always were. I was preparing to start hopping again when Papa unexpectedly said, ‘What would you say, Sarah Jane, if one day all this were yours?’

‘All what?’

He waved grandly around.

‘All this – house – grounds—’

This, I perceived, was a big matter.

‘I’d say it was a very big house for a little girl.’

My father shook his head.

‘Oh, I’m thinking of far into the future. Of when you’re grown up.’

I considered further. Some faint breeze emanating from the women’s suffrage movement, then still in its infancy, must have found its way into my schoolroom, for eventually I said stoutly, ‘I expect I could run it as well as any
boy
.’

My father laughed. ‘Maybe you could, Sarah Jane. Maybe you could.’

‘But I would need to be much better taught than I am being at the moment.’

He looked at me hard, his forehead furrowed again.

‘It is a point to be considered. Maybe I should consult with your grandmama.’

And he resumed his walk back toward the East Door. 

I now realise that it was on that day that my parents first really accepted the notion that I might be the eventual heir of Blakemere and of Fearing’s Bank. It may even be that, as the family conference was breaking up, Grandpapa revealed the terms of his latest will for the first time. It would be nice to record that from that day my life changed, but it did not. My mother still ignored my existence, and my father still looked as if he couldn’t remember who I was if he came upon me unexpectedly.

But my governess of the moment was sent packing, and shortly afterward Miss Roxby arrived, and stayed with me until I was seventeen.

As my father walked away, I resumed my game, and thought no more of the matter. My mind was on Uncle Frank. How wonderful he had been, standing up to the combined weight and might of the rest of the family! ‘Outface’ was a word I had learnt recently, and I was sure he had outfaced them. A thousand pounds a year sounded an awful lot to my young ears, but it was clear that nobody – no young man of family – could be expected to live on it. It must have been not long after this that I informed a young friend that ‘No gentleman could be expected to live on less than five thousand a year.’ He was
the son of one of the under gardeners, and he reminded me of the remark quite often in later years.

I was sure my uncle Frank was right not to marry if he didn’t want to marry. Why should such a splendid man take a wife chosen for him by his family? Uncle Frank could have any woman he wanted, any woman in the world. I rather think the idea occurred to me that if he would only wait, say, ten years, he could have me.

My uncle Frank was the centre of my life. Perhaps you will have guessed that already. At the time of Mr Gladstone’s visit he was a shining figure who brought fun from time to time into my rather shadowy existence. By the time of the overheard family conference he was the only being in my family I loved, and for that reason the love was passionate, singleminded, overmastering. His visits to Blakemere were occasional, but as soon as I got the slightest hint that there was one in prospect I was afire with anticipation, and he never disappointed me. I was the first one he asked for, though he never needed to do that: I was lurking somewhere –
behind one of the marble balustrades above the entrance hall, or peering through a crack in the open door leading to the Blue Salon. The moment he asked, I would fly to his arms – to be lifted aloft, kissed, asked what I was doing, asked who my new governess was, tickled,
loved
.

The truthful answer to the question what I had been doing would have been ‘existing without you,’ but I was not mature enough to frame such an answer or to understand my emotional state. By the time I did understand it, Uncle Frank was gone forever. As it was, I told him such of my little doings as I thought might interest him, invented others, and generally took him over for the length of his visit. I now realise I could do that because there were few competing attractions, but at the time I only knew that he loved me, and that his visits transformed the gloomy vastness of Blakemere into a heaven.

At the time of the Gladstone visit my most dearly dear uncle was still a favoured son, his eccentricities indulged because he represented the best hope of a male heir for Blakemere, and for Fearing’s Bank. By the time of the family conference, patience was wearing thin, and he was beginning to be regarded as a black sheep. But then, patience was not a family trait,
and it was altogether in character that they should make him into what they feared he was becoming. Even my grandmother, wisest of the clan, was someone with strict standards, definite expectations, and with impatience for those who lived otherwise than as she would have wished. ‘Slack’ was a word she used often, and ‘not up to par’. Uncle Frank incurred these terrible judgments all too frequently. His debts were hardly enormous, were eminently settleable, granted the size of the family fortune, but they were as unacceptable to my grandmother as to everyone else at Blakemere. In 1884, he sat close to Grandpapa entertaining Mr Gladstone (no easy task, I imagine). By 1890, he was, metaphorically at least, below the salt, even out in the cold.

‘They want me to be a nine-to-five person,’ he told me one day when we were fishing together two miles down the River Whate but still within sight of the enormous pile that was Blakemere. ‘They want a glorified bank clerk. I’m damned if they’re going to get one in me.’

One of the (many) attractions of Uncle Frank was that he swore in my presence.

I nodded solemnly. ‘They should give you the wherewithal’ – (I loved words like that) – ‘to live the sort of life you want to live.’

Uncle Frank let out one of his great laughs. ‘How right you are, little rabbit! But you’re biased, aren’t you – you and I being great chums. I don’t think anyone would agree with you
up
there.
’

And he jerked his thumb in the direction of the great lump of masonry that we never seemed able to escape from.

‘I don’t suppose they would,’ I said firmly, dissociating myself from Blakemere, and from all it stood for. ‘But you mustn’t let them wear you down.’

‘Oh, they’ll wear me down in the long run,’ said Uncle Frank, making me very sad, because I had something of the same feeling. ‘So maybe I should have a really big fling before they bring me into line, eh?’

I considered this.

‘Does that mean that in the end you’ll be forced to marry this Miss Coverdale?’

‘How did
you
hear about Miss Coverdale?’ he asked, turning and looking at me, astonished.

‘I overheard,’ I said truthfully. ‘Does it?’

‘Miss Coverdale, Miss Blackett, Miss Waddington-Phipps, Miss This-or-That – what does it matter who? It may as well be Miss Coverdale as any other. Yes, I suppose so. They’ll
win in the end, and Blakemere will demand an heir, to prevent the dreadful fate of its falling into female hands.’

‘Yes, I overheard that, too.’

‘Do you mind?’ he asked, turning and looking into my face.

‘You having a son? Not at all. Daddy sort of asked me, and I had to say girls ought to be the same as boys, of course—’

‘Of
course
,’ Uncle Frank said gravely.

‘But really I can’t imagine anything more horrible than inheriting Blakemere, though I didn’t tell Papa that.’ I thought, and then added, ‘But I think you should marry who you want to marry.’

‘Not too easy, that, if you don’t care to marry at all. But if that is to be my fate, I rather think I’ll have a little fling first – no, a great big one!’

‘Another of your expeditions, do you mean?’

‘Another of them, yes. Crossing the Sahara. Or maybe the Gobi Desert.’

‘Are all expeditions terribly costly?’

‘Mine are! And this one will be terribly, terribly so. One day I’ll take you with me on one.’

The prospect thrilled me indescribably. ‘
Will you
? Across the Gobi Desert?’

‘Maybe not that. I don’t think the Gobi Desert is the sort of place for a lady to go to. We’ll stick to Europe. I’ll take you to Eastern Europe – Athens, Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest: places where the Ottomans used to hold sway.’

I frowned.

‘I thought an Ottoman was a funny sort of sofa.’

‘Turks, then. The emperors who rule from Constantinople, a vast Moslem empire.’

‘Moslem? Does that mean they are heretics?’

‘They are heretics to us, and we are heretics to them. Remember that.’

I considered the thought.

‘Do all religions consider other religions here – he-re—’

‘Heretical. Yes, I’m afraid so. It says very little for religious people, in my opinion. Before we in our family use words like that, we should remember that your grandmama’s father was a heretic before he … came over to Christianity.’

There was a strong implication, which I caught, that my great-grandfather had become a Christian for unworthy and self-interested motives, and that he would have done very much better to stay where he was as far as religion was concerned. This is one of my dear uncle Frank’s
opinions which has remained with me for life, though I have never ceased to be a Christian of sorts myself.

‘I don’t suppose,’ I said wistfully, as we gathered up our bait and tackle and started back to our marble prison, ‘that you will be able to send me letters from the Gobi Desert?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Uncle Frank gently. ‘Not even one of these picture postcards you are so fond of.’

‘What will I
do
, all those months when you’re away?’

‘Perhaps you could get Miss Roxby to plot a course across the Gobi Desert from Kanchow to Ulan Bator, at about twenty miles a day. Then you can stick pins into it every morning and imagine roughly where we are and roughly when we shall start back. But remember, Sarah Jane—’

‘Yes?’

‘Not a word to anyone till I set off. It’s a secret, little rabbit.’ We were rounding the below-stairs part of Blakemere, the prison’s dungeon, so to speak, but one from which delicious smells often emanated. ‘Twitch your nose, little rabbit.’

It was the reason for his nickname for me. That day the smell was wonderful.

‘How
lucky
you are, to eat something that
smells like that,’ I said. ‘In the nursery it will certainly be boiled mince and a milk pudding.’

It was. But I was nourishing in my childish bosom the secret which he had entrusted to me, so I ate it stoically. It was typical of Uncle Frank that he should lighten the burden of his absence by making it a delightful secret, typical of me that I should keep it faithfully. There was no one in the family I would want to entrust it to, and this made me congenitally mistrustful. For that reason it was seldom that I confided anything of importance to Beatrice or Miss Roxby, my new governess. Miss Roxby was well read for a governess. Her mother had imprudently married an actor, and had warned her against contracting an alliance based on personal attractions (unnecessarily, or so it seemed at the time). We neither of us found it easy to express emotions, though I had a great respect for her – and, eventually, she for me.

The double joy of a secret is that you can not only hug it to yourself while it is a secret, but when it comes out, you can reveal that you have known it all along. Providence, not generally kind to me during my childhood, gave me that second joy in good measure. I remember it as about a month after Frank’s leaving Blakemere that we heard from him, but perhaps it was
longer: he had, after all, an expedition to prepare. It was late in the day and Miss Roxby and I had just come in from some botanical excursion in a distant corner of the prison compound when my father and grandfather arrived back from a day at the Bank in London. Grandpapa, as was his custom, took up the evening post that was lying on a silver salver on the fat-legged marble table nearest the large double-doored entrance. He riffled through them, then brought one up close to his old eyes.

‘Your brother Frank’s writing,’ he spluttered to my father. ‘From Port Said.’

My father said nothing, but stood there waiting. I never quite knew what his attitude to his brother was. I did not see him often enough to have the information.

‘The damn fool! He’s got up another of his preposterous expeditions – to cross the Gobi Desert!’ said my grandfather in a voice of outrage.

‘Oh, I knew
that,
’ I said loudly. For once I was the centre of attention.

‘You knew?’ said my father.

‘Of course. From Kanchow to Ulan Bator.’ I turned to Miss Roxby. ‘He said you would help me to chart his progress.’

Miss Roxby blenched. I don’t think she was terribly well up in the Gobi Desert.

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone,’ demanded my father.

‘Who?’ I asked, to underline my solitary state. ‘Anyway, I thought everybody knew.’

I was a truthful child as a rule, but my probity had its limits. I turned from their gaze and toiled up the stairs with Miss Roxby. I did not tell them that Uncle Frank had said he might be willing to marry Miss Coverdale when he came home. This, I thought, was part of the secret I had been sworn to keep. Anyway, he might have changed his mind when he returned, and decided to wait for me.

Miss Roxby was nothing if not industrious. Within a week she had procured from among the unread volumes in the irrelevant library a large, dusty, and leather-bound tome with an unmanageable folding-out map of China and Mongolia. This was to be our Sacred Book for the next few months. From the letter from Port Said she had tried to calculate Uncle Frank’s likely date of arrival in Shanghai, so we could talk till then of his possible ports of call, before we discussed his overland route across the dreadfully inhospitable landscape – that slow,
painful journey of twenty miles a day to Ulan Bator.

The fact that all our calculations were grossly inaccurate does not lessen my gratitude to her: our discussions and fantasies were the one thing that lightened the burden of the long months of separation. As I sit here in the gatehouse, enjoying the long summer evenings, I remember fantasies I indulged in with particular pleasure. They included a romance for Uncle Frank, in the middle of the desert, with a Mongolian lady dressed in improbably bright clothing, facially somewhere between a Japanese geisha and an illustration in one of my books of Pokahontas. Uncle Frank also rescued other members of his expedition from terrible dangers, and repulsed single-handed marauding parties of Mongolians, eventually running up the Union Jack at the desert’s central point and claiming it for Queen Victoria. Thinking of the problems we have at the moment in India and various other parts of what used to be the Empire, it is perhaps fortunate that Uncle Frank refrained from prising Outer Mongolia from the grips of whoever then ruled it to add to them.

It was not summer but late autumn when Uncle Frank arrived home. There had been, as
always, no advance notice. He may have felt that any letter would only come by sea, like himself, so it could hardly arrive much before him, though in fact he later told me he had had a week in Cairo (‘sampling the fleshpots,’ he said, which made me wonder whether the Egyptians were cannibals) on the way home.

It was not surprising that I was the first to know of his return, since whenever I passed a window which looked out over the long drive that led to the Gatehouse and beyond that to the little country village of Melbury I scanned the rolling expanses of Fearing property for signs of Uncle Frank’s return. And when one day in early October I saw the carriage that plied between Melbury station and residences of consequence in the neighbourhood I knew at once that it contained my dear uncle. This was not childish intuition. I had been wrong a hundred times before, and eventually I had to be right. I left Miss Roxby’s side and tumbled down the marble staircase (each step better adapted to a fully fledged giant than to my by-now eleven-year-old legs), and positioned myself in a dismal alcove containing the sort of sinister potted plant that thrives on shadow. If he had known it was Uncle Frank arriving, Mr McKay would certainly
have been there in the echoing entrance hall, his face set in just the right blend of welcome and disapproval. As it was, there was just Robert, an underfootman, his face blank not from formality but from boredom.

This was not a time for coyness or for playing games. The moment I saw the weatherbeaten face below the panama hat, I rushed from my hiding place.

‘Uncle Frank! Uncle Frank!’

He swung me aloft, my beribboned hair knocking off his fine hat, and he kissed me and tickled me and roared his delight at seeing me again.

‘Sarah Jane! The only thing worth coming home for!’

That made me swell with delight and pride. When the boisterous part of the welcome was over, he put me down on the staircase, sat down beside me and looked at me closely.