Cavalier Case (22 page)

In particular the former Flowering Cherry had seen a film called
Working Girl.
It would not be fair to say that Cherry totally identified Jemima with the unsympathetic boss-woman role played by Sigourney Weaver in the film, any more than she totally identified herself with the Melanie Griffiths part of the secretary, an amalgam of innocent glamour and streetwise intelligence who gets to defeat her jealous boss, ending up with both her job and her man ... It would be fairer to say that Cherry, forgetting Jemima, simply identified herself with all the more positive aspects of the Melanie Griffiths character (and there were no negative aspects).

One of the first effects of this creative piece of self-identification was Cherry beating Jemima at tennis. Their singles at the Planty got off to a fine start when Cherry appeared in an abbreviated pink Planty tennis dress with a pie-frill of a skirt and—on her—a plunging neckline—"I think I bought the wrong size," she said complacently— which was surely cheating under
Working Girl
rules. Stuart Gibson, perspiring heavily at the bar as he swigged his eternal glass of iced water after a work-out with his new Under Secretary—a younger more upright version of Marcus Meredith—failed to notice Jemima but did take in Cherry. His Under Secretary took in both and began to make some appreciative
sotto voce
suggestions about mixed doubles. Cherry gave the Home Secretary a blatantly admiring glance—she was into power these days, she had told Jemima—but ignored the Under Secretary. Jemima ignored them both.

After that Cherry, tripping rapidly about the court looking like a bunny-girl in tennis shoes, revealed herself as a ruthless player with shots which had something of the power of Jane Manfred's, plus a great deal more mobility. After two sets—both 6-4 to Cherry—Jemima panted: "We must do this more often." The sub-text was: "You bet we must, but not until I've had a coaching or two with Costa." She was particularly infuriated by the failure of her famed accurate lob to dismay Cherry in the slightest; Cherry had simply raced to the back of the court, reached the ball with surprising ease and hit it back, accurately, over her head.

Discussion of the Cavalier Case—in discreetly lowered tones—in the bar area of the Planty after the game, found Cherry, similarly, with a new confidence. Maybe she even overdid it a little, like her wild smashes, most of which—they at least—had gone wide of the mark. For example, she threw out so many theories about the Cavalier Case and in so many combinations that in the end Jemima lost count of them. The wildest smash of all concerned Zena—Zena and Charlotte.

"They're having an affair, have been having an affair all along—this is the late eighties." This time Jemima had to burst out laughing.

"Look, honestly, Cherry, they're both straight, I assure you. At least I'm quite sure Charlotte is—it may be the late eighties for you, but Charlotte has eyes only for Dan, lives only to please him in the most unreconstructed way—and as for Zena, if your argument is that any unmarried woman of forty
must
be a lesbian, that's equally ridiculous. She's a bit of a mix-up if you like, too bound up in her own family, has a rather pointless on-off affair with her cousin, frightened of marriage even, but not gay. You might just as well say Zena's having an affair with
her
, her brother's girlfriend." Jemima nodded in the direction of Alix, too far away fortunately to hear.

Seeing Cherry prepared to discuss that one too, Jemima hastily transferred the discussion to the subject of the "Decimus" skeleton. Nell's accident had thoroughly overshadowed its discovery. Nevertheless "Decimus" information was filtering through by degrees, put together by various forensic experts under the auspices of the Home Office Pathologist. The fact that the Home Secretary himself had been present at the discovery of the skeleton had concentrated the official mind wonderfully on the subject—including the mind of the Police. After all nobody could be quite sure when Stuart Gibson, Prompted by Gillian Gibson with her kindly interest in a "proper Christian burial" for the unknown, would not choose to make yet another enquiry on the subject.

"You getting on with finding out about them, those damn bones?" He would ask this (not, of course, in his wife's hearing) in a tone which was really rather short-tempered for a man so normally bland. But then "those damn bones" had ruined the delivery of one of his finest "human face of the politician" speeches in recent years. So perhaps he was entitled to a little crossness.

The first thing known was that the skeleton was, as Dave Smith had pointed out, male. Within a few days it was also known that this male had been, like Decimus, approximately thirty years old when he died. Then chemical analysis of the nitrogen content of the bones made the skeleton itself over 300 years old, probably about 350 years.

The confirmation of the injuries suffered by this male before death were, to an outsider, even more surprising. There was the matter of the fingers of the left hand, severed so many years before their owner's death that the remaining bones had had time to waste and taper off into points (as Dave Smith had once more pointed out). Since Decimus' tiltyard accident had occurred in his rash youth, this too was a help towards identification. Then just before death, it was established, the thigh bone had been cut—presumably while the victim was still on horseback—following that, the lower arm and finally "fractures of the vault of the skull"—injuries sustained lying on the ground. All of which tied in closely enough with the account by the Rev. Thomas Meredith, in "
Heaven's True Mourning.
"

There was, however, no direct evidence to point to who placed Decimus in his unmarked grave and why. No clues, no plaque, certainly no love note which had miraculously survived three hundred years of interment; the survival of the skeleton and its fortuitous discovery was miracle enough. That put the onus back on the contemporary sources, of which there were two; Clarendon for all his eloquent tribute to Decimus on his death as "a gentleman of great hopes, of a gentle and winning disposition, and of very clear courage being silent on the subject of his body's disappearance.

"Heaven's True Mourning"
on the other hand was silent throughout on the subject of Lady Isabella Clare. But that was scarcely surprising; since Thomas Meredith was a clergyman, he would no doubt align himself heavily on the side of seventeenth-century family values. Indeed, the whole book emerged as a monument to the devotion, perfect wifeliness and ideal love of Olivia Lackland for her husband, a love fully and completely returned; so the presence of Lady Isabella in the story could only have constituted an awkward, nay gross, intrusion ... Thus "
Heaven's True Mourning
," whilst honest enough to recount the abduction of the body, took refuge in the tradition of Parliamentary vengeance. It was left to John Aubrey, bored by the subject of Olivia Lackland's wifely virtues (although he praised her learning), to relate with gusto the story of Lady Isabella's bodysnatching.

Balancing these two opposing accounts, you could at least say with some certainty that the discovery of the "Decimus" skeleton at Taynford Grange made the "
Heaven's True Mourning
" story rather unlikely, since the house had been a Royalist stronghold at the time, with Lady Isabella as chatelaine.

"Gutsy!" That was Cherry's verdict on Lady Isabella's behaviour. It was a historical word that might have endeared her to D. J. Smith, even if Cherry, her fancy turning towards Home Secretaries these days, would have had little use for Dave himself.

"The power of love," mused Jemima more tenderly; she was not giving up her romantic picture of Decimus without a struggle. Which of them had been his soul-mate, the learned, perfect Olivia, or the sexy, imperfect Isabella? And who inspired all those "Swan" poems? She was now inclined to transfer her custom to Isabella, especially since she was about to play the part.

Cherry paid no attention. "Now, Jemima, mind you play her as one strong lady," she went on. "It's rotten you've got that prune Zena Meredith as Decimus. All those soppy books full of fainting maidens! Handsome Dan would be so much more fun. Come to think of it, isn't lf a bit peculiar, a woman in drag? Are you sure that Zena isn't ..." 

"No, Cherry, it is not odd," replied Jemima firmly. "First of all it's a good old tradition, the principal boy. Then she doesn't have to speak. None of us speak. We're figures in a landscape. Look ..." She had an inspiration. "You can see for yourself. You can come to the rehearsal, I'll fix it. We're supposed to be having a rehearsal actually here at the Planty: sort of dress rehearsal before we ever get to Lackland Court, London being more convenient. But God knows if it's still on, and if it is, God knows who will now play the boy, Antony Decimus: that was going to be poor Little Nell's part."

"I'd love to meet Handsome Dan Meredith." It was good to know that Cherry had not changed altogether.

Ten days later, you could legitimately use the term "a bit peculiar" for the dress rehearsal of the Cavalier Celebration, thought Jemima. The club was deserted. Since there were no people, there were no flowers. It was the annual closure for staff holidays and renovation. If there were ghosts in the changing rooms and empty courts, they were the ghosts of the smart women and important men who generally inhabited them. But Adriana was in her villa on the Bosphorus and Stuart Gibson with his boys establishing family values on the lower slopes of the Cumbrian fells. You could not otherwise expect a highly modern and modernised club to be haunted: this was no Lackland Court.

All the same, the deserted courts did have their own special disconcerting atmosphere: if not exactly eerie, there was something unsettling about being there alone, particularly in Black Prince, the last of the four main courts. It was after seven when Jemima arrived (the rehearsal was due to begin at eight) and dusk was not yet approaching outside. Yet in Black Prince, to which Jemima had wandered out of idle curiosity to fill in time, the light was already quite bad. There were no windows here to the river, only a series of skylights. You would need the big arc lights overhead if you were planning to play tennis.

She had just decided to return to the bar area and have a drink or sort out her costume or both—an empty court in the evening was just a little too spooky to linger in—when the big lights in the 'Crecy' court next to her abruptly flared out. Jemima heard footsteps. Somebody had entered—two people. The couple, whoever they were, were standing quite close to the heavy green plastic partition between the two courts. She heard murmuring, then much louder and clearly audible, a man's voice.

"Don't do that, don't put your arms round my neck, don't even touch me. It's over. Can't you understand? It's over. You ..." There was a brief silence. "You
horrify
me." The voice was instantly recognisable. It was Dan's. But this was a Dan speaking in a way that jemima had certainly never heard before. Gone was the tender seducer, the charmer of the tennis court, the gracious host of Taynfordshire. Jemima froze. The depth of disgust expressed by his tone made Jemima try to imagine what he must look like—the fair, open Robert Redford face of Handsome Dan contorted with anger or sheer cold hatred.

Who on earth was he speaking to? It became imperative to find out. Jemima heard a sob, a muffled sob. Beyond the fact that it was a woman in 'Crecy'—which, where Dan was concerned, told her virtually nothing—there was no further clue to the sobber's identity. If the unknown woman did say anything further between sobs—Jemima thought she probably did—Jemima could not make out the words. She began to tiptoe towards the plastic partition; she intended to gaze through the small celluloid-covered window at the side which acted as a spy-hole when play was in progress.

When she reached the window however, Dan Lackland was alone on the court. The plastic curtain leading to 'Agincourt' and the 'Royal Court' was still twitching slightly as if someone had just left. Dan himself was gazing somberly out towards the river. After a moment, he himself walked in the direction of the exit.

Jemima waited a discreet moment, walked on into 'Agincourt', and inspecting the 'Royal Court' (where the rehearsal was to take place) through the spyhole, chose to enter when Dan was busily engaged in conversation with some man, the back of whose head she vaguely recognised. She joined the throng of Cavaliers, Cavaliers' molls, musketeers and musketeers' molls which made up the heterogeneous body of those in the Cavalier Celebration. The fact that there were numbers of women present made it further impossible to guess who the mysterious female, so coldly rebuffed by Dan, might be.

Alix Carstairs—the obvious candidate? Yes, but what could she have done to horrify Dan? For what it was worth, Alix looked rather more collected than she had done of late; she was wearing a rather pretty black dress with a plain, broad white lace collar, which set off her colouring, and a white cap; rather improbably in view of her age, she was to play Dame Alice, the old nurse who watched over the dying Decimus.

The most agitated person present was undoubtedly Jane Manfred. (Since she was not billed to appear in the Cavalier Celebration she was not wearing fancy dress; rather more usefully she had purchased most of the tickets sold, so far as Jemima could make out.) Jane Manfred's agitation was, however, entirely due to the non-arrival of the gourmet snacks which she had promised Dan to provide for the players.

"Why is the roulade so late?" she demanded. "The traffic is not heavy. " She might have been checking out the non-arrival of a royal personage at a gala.

"One will just have to eat cake, Charlotte's cakes." That was Marcus, looking suitably sober as Sir Bartleby Potter, the Puritan M.P. It was not clear whether he was making a joke or not, since Charlotte's elaborately decorated cakes were at present the only visible nourishment.

Fancy dress might not necessarily be a ludicrous garb for consenting adults but it certainly looked odd in the surroundings of a tennis club. These people might really be ghosts, so out of time were they in their costumes, in a decor in which tennis rackets and tennis balls or combinations thereof played such a prominent part. It occurred to Jemima that sooner or later the Lackland Court Country Club would take over the ancient mansion with its new atmosphere and its new demands. Then would the original inhabitants of the house—not only Decimus himself—come out to haunt it, drifting soundlessly in their velvet and lace on lawns now reverberating to cries such as "Good shot" and "Sorry partner?" A favourite line of Cass's—a cricket freak—came back to her: "O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago..." This Hornby would be a Cavalier soldier, this Barlow his grieving wife—or mistress.