Lord Mullion's Secret (11 page)

‘The lady on the left,' Atlay said, ‘is Lady Lucy Wyndowe, who was reckoned a great beauty in her time. In the middle is the third earl. The young man on the right we can't pin down. I have always thought he rather resembles the
Young Man in Deep
Mourning
in the Portland Collection, which is a very late work of Hilliard's indeed. Remark the masterly effect of evanescence in the youth's smile, as if he had been momentarily diverted from serious thought.'

This sensitive observation was respectfully received, and Honeybath peered more closely. Lord Mullion noticed this.

‘Get them out, eh?' he said. ‘Just hold on. The key is with the plate, and so forth, in Savine's safe.'

‘Honeybath's closer inspection might better take place in daylight, and on a later occasion,' Dr Atlay said. ‘And I am reminded that there is a hint of impatience in the drawing-room, at least on Miss Wyndowe's part. She doesn't precisely aim to display what Wyndowe calls her
oeuvre
. But it appears that several of her watercolours are hung somewhere in the castle, and she has taken it into her head, my dear Honeybath, that you should be conducted to them and, no doubt, offer an opinion on their merits. We can be confident that you can do that sort of thing very well.'

‘Ah, yes.' Honeybath had to make an effort to attend to this, for other matters were on his mind. Nor did he much care for the tone of urbane patronage in the vicar's last remark. ‘Miss Wyndowe did mention something of the kind to me.'

‘Then we'd better cut along,' Lord Mullion said. The circumspect thing at the castle, one felt, was to attend promptly to Great-aunt Camilla's whims while she was in circulation. ‘We can have a go at these little jossers another time. And I've remembered about the vellum. Stuck on playing-cards, they say. Old ones, it seems. Economical trick.'

On this sober thought Lord Mullion led the way out of the library. Honeybath remained silent, and for the very good reason that for some minutes he had been uncertain whether to speak or not. The astonishing fact was that he suddenly found himself in a position of extreme delicacy. Lady Lucy Wyndowe was all right. The second earl was all right. But the miniature resembling the
Young Man in Deep
Mourning
was all wrong. Honeybath had enjoyed no more than a glimpse of it. His sense of such matters, however, was by native endowment and long training almost preternaturally acute. He had realized instantly that what was on display within that little frame was an excellent reproduction of a Jacobean miniature and not an original. It wasn't even a replica. It belonged, in fact, to that art of colour photography which Lord Mullion had so lately commended.

It was in some desperation that Honeybath, on the way to join the ladies, chewed over this discovery. There came into his head Cyprian's facetious remark about pawning the Mullion diamonds. Was it some rather similar activity that he had stumbled upon? He remembered a celebrated case in which professional thieves had successfully brought off a similar trick – and actually with a substantial oil painting. The substituted print had hung undetected for weeks or months in a great house owned by persons even more uninstructed in artistic matters than the Wyndowes, and by the time a competent eye had fallen upon it the original had passed securely into the possession of an unscrupulous collector. Something of the kind might well have happened here, and much less detectably with a minute object like an extremely valuable miniature. On the other hand there was the uncomfortable possibility that the theft (for it could scarcely be called other than that) had been what is known as an inside job. Honeybath was in a difficult moral position.

It seemed to be his duty to communicate his awkward discovery to Henry at once – or almost at once, since it was certainly an occasion for the utmost confidentiality. But what if Henry himself was at the bottom of the thing? This staggering thought almost made Honeybath halt in his tracks. Had Henry been raising the wind in a quiet way – perhaps to meet some liability which he didn't want to reveal to his family? If this were so – and presuming Lord Mullion to be the undisputed owner of the Hilliards, which was by no means certain – nothing positively criminal would, after all, be involved, and it wouldn't be for Honeybath himself to meddle with his friend's secret. But the idea was, of course, preposterous. The innocence of Lord Mullion – his innocence in every sense – was just not open to question. And he certainly wasn't the kind of actor who could have pulled off a wholly deceptive part during the past quarter of an hour.

So what about Cyprian, who was very much the sort of young man one might suspect of a precocious ability to run into considerable debt? Whether Cyprian was clever or not, Honeybath didn't know. He was presumably one of nature's non-starters on the intellectual side of Cambridge academic life. But that told one nothing at all; Honeybath knew that inexpugnably idle undergraduates often pack a great deal of ability behind a deceptive façade. It would be extremely sad if Cyprian were to prove to have been behaving with scandalous dishonesty in his own home.

Then there was Dr Atlay, who knew a good deal about artistic matters and was fond of advertising the fact. Atlay seemed to have the run of the castle, and particularly of the library. And hadn't he been a shade keen to cut short the inspection of the Hilliards? It was true that it was he who had referred to Honeybath's probable interest in them in the first place. But hadn't he ensured thereby that he would be present and in a position to control the situation as he had in fact done?

That the ladies of the household were involved – so Honeybath told himself – was a suspicion too fantastic to be entertained. Yet he was a little inclined to wonder about Lady Patience Wyndowe – Patty, as he had come to think of her. Patty didn't say much, but Honeybath had come to feel that there was something she was brooding over, and that this, whatever it was, had a character in some mysterious way requiring concealment from the rest of her family. Was it Patty who had a guilty secret? Honeybath was seriously entertaining this nebulous notion when something quite different started up in his mind.
What about that man Savine?
Honeybath, although his own family background was such that it had been quite natural that young Henry Wyndowe should be his fag, had never himself enjoyed the services of a butler; nor had his father done so. He regarded upper menservants as rather a sinister crowd. It was no doubt customary that your butler should have the wardenship of your silver in quite a big way, but it seemed mildly dotty to hand over to him the wardenship of three miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard. There had been a time within living memory when such things were scarcely regarded as significant works of art. But they must be uncommonly valuable now.

Thus did Charles Honeybath, much like a detective in the latter part of a mystery story, turn hither and thither the swift mind (as Homer says) while surveying a field full of suspects. It will be remarked that he had rejected Lady Mullion for the role, and pretty well forgotten her younger daughter, the schoolgirl Boosie. But as the present chronicle, being veridical, enjoys all the unpredictability of history, it would be rash to base any hypothesis upon this circumstance.

They had joined the ladies, who were engaged, in the distinctly grand drawing-room of Mullion Castle, in the unassuming activity of watching the nine o'clock news. The television set, indeed, peeped reticently out of a cupboard and could be banished behind a door in elegant linen-fold panelling, Lord Mullion having been advised that the exposure of such an object would militate against the Wednesday and Saturday visitors' persuasion that they were in the presence of only the very highest sort of gracious living. Lady Mullion switched off the set at once.

‘Nothing but minor fatalities,' she said briskly. ‘Motor coaches tumbling into yawning chasms. Fortunately there is nothing of the sort in the park, or we might be in trouble tomorrow. And in Nottingham a dog has been badly bitten by its demented owner. That young man with the spotty face hastened to the scene “to report” as they say. Only the dog was already in hospital. Charles, please help yourself to coffee.'

Honeybath obeyed, not without a lurking feeling that he could have done with brandy as well, an indulgence which the continued presence of Miss Wyndowe presumably forbade. But perhaps when she had been yanked into her lift again there would be whisky before going to bed.

The
oeuvre
immediately came under discussion, but there was fortunately no proposal that it should be at once exhibited
in toto
. In her own apartments Miss Wyndowe kept several portfolios of her drawings and watercolours, and these Mr Honeybath was to have the privilege of turning over on some convenient occasion when he took tea with her. At the moment the problem was to locate those actually hanging somewhere in the castle. Everybody was vague about this in a manner that scarcely suggested any lively regard for Great-aunt Camilla's work. It was felt that one of the twice-weekly ladies (by which was meant Lord Mullion's locally recruited guides) would know, and that most probably it would be Miss Kinder-Scout, who had made the pictures her special study. And then Cyprian came up with the suggestion that the elusive paintings might ‘be among the fish and things in that kitchen corridor'. This was perhaps awkwardly expressed, but nobody seemed embarrassed by it; nor did Miss Wyndowe herself evince any disapprobation at the idea. Honeybath felt at sea about the fish (which could scarcely be at sea themselves) and wondered whether, in the macabre fashion sometimes to be remarked in restaurants, the Mullion kitchens ran to aquarium-like receptacles in which there swam, in blissful ignorance of their fate, the second course in tomorrow's dinner.

The fish proved to inhabit individual glass cases, and to be stuffed. But did one stuff fish? Was such a branch of taxidermy feasible? Honeybath had often wondered, and never found out. Perhaps the fish in their glass cases were faithful replicas, executed in plaster or wax, of actual fish which had fallen to the skill of angling Wyndowes long ago. There was conceivably a special branch of sculpture devoted to such creation, or it might simply be a side-line profitably pursued by the skilled assistants of Madame Tussaud.

These were absurd speculations, such as ought not to have deflected Honeybath either from further perpending his late anxieties or from exhibiting a civil zeal in the hunt for Great-aunt Camilla's pictures. His companions, however, now felt that they were hot on the scent. The kitchen corridor was a broad, stone-flagged thoroughfare, and followed a gentle curve which must have been dictated by one of the external walls of the castle. On one side hung the fish. On the other, frame hard against frame in the fashion favoured by collectors long ago, hung hundreds rather than scores of small pictures of the most various sort. Sporting prints predominated, but there was no end of portrait heads, architectural and topographical sketches, stormy seascapes, an aphrodisiac nudes, the offerings of laborious schoolchildren in the way of painfully ‘shaded' cylinders and cubes, woolly alphabets and nebulous scriptural scenes executed in embroidery by persons in the same defenceless phase of life, illuminated testimonials of respect and esteem from well-affected tenants and their wretched labourers, royal warrants and commissions appointing sundry loyal subjects (styled ‘cousins' for the nonce) to do this or that round about the empire, rent-rolls and dairy-books and cellar-books, fragments of which had struck some earlier Lord Mullion as being of keen antiquarian or historical interest. A catalogue of all this could have been almost indefinitely prolonged, and the only common denominator that could be extracted from the lot was that of mediocrity or near-mediocrity. Here and there it might have been possible to pick out the equivalent of Cyprian's piece of Chinese porcelain lurking in a potting shed. Honeybath, for example, believed himself to have briefly glimpsed a representation in oils of an obstinately static horse-race which might have been by John, or by John F, or by John N Sartorius, and which might conceivably be flogged to an artistically minded Emir or Sheik for several hundred (or even thousand) pounds. But the total effect was not inspiring, and it could hardly be supposed that Miss Wyndowe would be too pleased to find the labours of her brush or pencil jostling in such company.

This thought appeared to occur to Lord Mullion.

‘Fascinating part of the place, this,' he said heartily. ‘They all come along here, you know – the visiting crowd, I mean – on their way to the kitchen. The kitchen is supposed to be a great feature of the castle, being so extremely medieval and so forth with all those spits and ovens and tables made out of entire oak trees and the like. But our clients can scarcely be dragged away from the corridor. Bella Kinder-Scout was remarking on the fact to me only the other day.'

Great-aunt Camilla seemed unimpressed by this, or indeed by anything else. She had made her way down the corridor assisted by both Cyprian and her multipedous device. She looked, or was contriving to look, extremely tired – which was a state in which her quite dippy component seemed likely to gain the ascendant. In this condition she was liable to say anything under the sun. Honeybath felt that the present expedition had been sadly misconceived. His own attention wandered back to the stuffed or sculptured fish, which were at least not wholly remote from Nature's family. He remarked the interesting fact that they were nearly all positioned in the same way, facing from left to right as one looked at them. This is the artist's immemorial resource for setting his creations within the tide of time: face to the right and you are moving into the future; turn your head and you are glancing back into the past. It is a psychologically obscure but nevertheless powerful symbolism, and Honeybath was meditating upon it in a professional manner when he was arrested by a sudden shout from Lord Wyndowe. The moment was one, although he had no notion of the fact, pregnant for the future of the Wyndowe family.