Lord Mullion's Secret (18 page)

‘Perfectly true. Charles. But at least her secret will be going to the grave with her. Nobody except you and me is ever going to think about those watercolours again. Or you and me and Bella Kinder-Scout. But I can have a word with her. A good soldier. Bella, as I said.'

‘Yes, of course.' Honeybath wondered whether this tolerably comfortable view of the matter really represented Henry's true mind, and whether he was as unaware as he appeared to be of anything dubious or unsatisfactory about the vagueness in which Miss Wyndowe's early history was apparently to be left in the interest of family decorum.

And by this time, surely, Mary had passed on to her husband Honeybath's bewildering discovery about the Hilliards. The puzzle about the watercolours had presumably been solved, but that other puzzle remained – as did the lesser puzzle of the recent perturbation of the Reverend Dr Martin Atlay. It was in vain that Honeybath told himself at this point that these matters were (precisely as was the affair of the watercolours, indeed) no business of his. His curiosity had been aroused and was unlikely to let him rest.

 

 

It proved to be Dr Hinkstone's opinion that his patient might get better, or might get worse, or might remain the same. As this assessment of the situation was (reasonably enough) offered with unflawed confidence it was received by the family as a triumph of diagnostic skill, and everybody settled down to wait on the event. Even Patty, who had expressed herself to Honeybath on their nocturnal occasion as not quite assured that the family doctor was altogether up-to-date, appeared satisfied. And Dr Hinkstone could at least not he judged to be of other than ripe experience in the field of clinical medicine, since he appeared almost as aged as either his patient or his patient's spiritual adviser, Dr Atlay. It was a part of the world, Honeybath thought, in which people decidedly hung on. Perhaps Miss Wyndowe was going to do just that.

As she was pronounced too ill to be moved into hospital and enjoy the full resources of scientific medicine, certain of these resources had to be imported into the castle. A couple of nurses arrived, and were followed by a good deal of equipment in the way of oxygen cylinders and the like, which could be regarded as reassuring if one chose to think that way. Mrs Trumper remained unglimpsed by Honeybath, but her status – or her sense of her status – in face of these changed circumstances gave rise to some anxiety. So did the problem of Mullion Castle as a show place overrun twice a week. It was a relief when the last of Wednesday's visitors were seen safely despatched beneath the portcullis, but at once the problem of Saturday loomed up. Could the castle simply be declared closed? Telephone calls were made, and difficulties appeared. Whole coach-loads of tourists were booked up in advance; there were contractual obligations to fulfil; matters of courtesy might even be conceived as involved. In such a situation it might remain true that an Englishman's house was his castle, but it didn't look as if an Englishman's castle was very securely his house. Lord Mullion was much worried by all this, and had finally to be persuaded that there would be no indecency in letting Saturday go ahead.

Thursday and Friday passed, with the situation remaining unchanged. Honeybath's professional engagement was treated as being obviously in abeyance, an attitude in which he fully concurred. You can't begin on the portrait of one lady in a household where another lady may presently be passing into a sphere in which no portraits are. Lady Mullion, indeed, had forgotten about the whole thing, and it was only with Patty that Honeybath discussed the matter. And Patty, incidentally, was very little in evidence. Honeybath didn't like to inquire whether she was spending much time in attendance in the sick-room, or whether she had other pressing concerns. He suspected that the latter proposition was true. And this drew his mind – very naturally indeed – in the direction of Swithin Gore. With Swithin he felt that he himself wanted, as it were, to have another go. Being sensitive to the feeling that he was an outsider given to vulgar curiosities, he reminded himself that he still owed this humble young retainer of the Mullions that apology over the unfortunate misapprehension into which he had fallen during the episode at the barn. With this firmly in his head, he took a little walk through the gardens and the park late on the Friday afternoon. It was too late to find Mr Pring's assistant still at work. And when he found himself on the outskirts of the village of Mullion he told himself that he was acting with commendable delicacy in this small obligation. It wouldn't be quite adequate to interrupt Swithin as he hoed and delved and shovelled manure. The proper thing would be to seek out the young man after working hours in his abode, thereby making the occasion a slightly more formal affair.

This sadly disingenuous reasoning set Honeybath inquiring around. Two rustics, tackled in the village street, professed never to have heard of Swithin Gore, but it was plain that the denial proceeded from a conviction that strangers should invariably be thwarted in any investigation into local affairs that they endeavoured to conduct. An old woman who was sitting by her doorstep knitting a stocking (and thus presenting edifying evidence of the continuing existence of an industrious poor) proved more communicative. Young Swithin Gore, being an orphan from his earliest days, poor heart, lodged with old Charlie Dew (not to be confused with the two other Dews, who were no kin to him, although each, as it happened, was a Charlie too) in the cottage next to the old forge. Honeybath found the old forge. The adjoining cottage seemed in fact to be two cottages. Or they were this in a half-hearted way, being structurally confused for a start, and having later developed a liability to tumble into one another. Surveying them, Honeybath felt a certain misgiving and even embarrassment. It was his vague urban impression that the agricultural classes of society were nowadays housed with something more than decency in modern dwellings with all proper conveniences laid on. But the scene before him, he felt, might have been graphically described by the poet Crabbe in one of his gloomier works (‘Inebriety', perhaps) towards the close of the eighteenth century. He wondered whether Henry could possibly be the landlord of such a tumbledown place. Perhaps Charlie Dew (this Charlie Dew) held it on one of those odd tenancies about which one read in the novels of Thomas Hardy, and could defy any suggestion of improvement or demolishment for life. Honeybath speculated on what Boosie (who had professed to have flirted with Swithin like mad) would think of it as a fit habitation for a future Prime Minister or Fellow of the Royal Society. But Boosie probably had no notion how or where Swithin lived. Patty certainly had.

At this point Honeybath ought perhaps to have told himself that he was committing an error in tact and ought to retreat. It came to him (for in such situations his mind functioned tolerably well) that Swithin Gore, being an ambitious lad, lived in even more unassuming quarters than his circumstances constrained him to, being concerned to save his pennies in the interest of future plans. He mightn't at all care to be run to earth in them by a virtual stranger from a more prosperous sphere of life. But Honeybath told himself that this was to allow too little to a certain openness and largeness he had sensed in the young man, and moreover represented a false and most bourgeois nicety on his own part. So he chose what he judged to be the less unpromising of the conjoined tenements before him, and knocked on the door.

There was no reply. He knocked again, with the same result. Whereupon – and now there was really no excuse for his behaviour – he pushed open the door and peered into the interior of the cottage. It was distinctly gloomy, and in fact the first report from it came not to his eyes but to his nose. The small room immediately before him was stuffy and smelly. It was stuffy because no window in it had been opened for a long time (nor, probably, could be opened if you tried) and the door was kept constantly shut; it was smelly (it had to be supposed) because of an old man who sat hunched over a dull fire toasting a piece of bacon on a fork. The old man and the bacon might be said to smell about fifty-fifty.

‘Good evening,' Honeybath said. ‘May I come in?'

‘Ur.'

Whether this was intended as a welcoming or as an unwelcoming noise it would have been impossible to say. The old man – presumably the authentic Charlie Dew – was peering round at Honeybath through small red-rimmed eyes. The room was smoky as well as smelly. Mr Dew seemed not to judge Honeybath of much interest, and returned composedly to his operation on the bacon. So Honeybath had to try again. He hesitated between ‘Can you tell me if Mr Gore is at home?' and ‘Is Swithin around?' Neither sounded at all right, so it was fortunate that Mr Dew – rather unexpectedly – opted for further communication himself.

‘Be un looking fer lad?' he asked.

‘Yes. I am, Mr Dew. They told me he lived here. My name is Honeybath.'

Mr Dew elevated the toasting bacon in air, and through the vacancy thus created spat into the fire. Honeybath was wondering whether this unpolished behaviour was designed to express strong disapproval of his visit when he realized that Mr Dew was actually pointing to the blackened ceiling of his dwelling.

‘Swithin.' he said, ‘be up wooden hill.'

This expression, although remarkable in its way, baffled Honeybath only for a moment. He was being told that Swithin was upstairs. He looked at Mr Dew's staircase – which wasn't a staircase as the expression is commonly understood, but wasn't exactly a ladder either. It might have been said to achieve a compromise between these two devices, since it was a fairly solid structure which, however, took off from the middle of the room and simply disappeared through a rectangular gap in the ceiling.

‘Then, if I may, I'll go up,' Honeybath said.

‘Ur.'

‘He hasn't, I suppose, got a visitor?' This alarming thought had come to Honeybath quite out of the blue.

‘Urr.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Urrr.'

Mr Dew had quite ceased to be in a communicative mood. Taking his chance, therefore, of pronounced embarrassment, Honeybath ascended to the attic region above. His head emerged not upon any sort of landing but on what was plainly Swithin's room itself. It was a long narrow room which must have extended over the full length of both cottages; it had three dormer windows and a further window in an end wall; there was in fact an agreeable effect of space. Honeybath registered this, and one or two other things as well, but what chiefly concerned him was the discovery that the room's owner was absent from it. Honeybath was actually standing in the room before confirming this observation – which thereupon disturbed him very much. He hadn't been actually remiss, since one can't knock for admittance on what is simply a hole in a ceiling. But here he was in what was now revealed to him as an impossibly intrusive situation. He took another glance round, and his sense of this was intensified, since there was a good deal in the room that spoke of Swithin Gore in what might be called an intimate manner. To most people, indeed, the focus of interest here would not have said much. But it spoke to Honeybath at once. On a table by the bedside, displayed in what was perhaps a tooth-mug, were some sprigs of wallflower.

‘Wait 'ee there,' Mr Dew suddenly called out from below. ‘Swithin I seen un. Be coming down road now.'

Honeybath had no inclination to obey this injunction, and he endeavoured to beat a hasty retreat. But an elderly man unhabituated to the particular exercise has some difficulty in lowering himself backwards through a hole in the floor. The consequence of this was that when Swithin entered Mr Dew's apartment below he was confronted by the lower part of Honeybath's person conducting itself in a manner appropriate to a detected burglar endeavouring to escape from a scene of crime.

‘Old un to see un,' Mr Dew said. ‘Honeytub, or summat like.'

This lavish interposition was of fortunate effect, since it enabled Swithin at once to apprise the situation.

‘I'm sorry I wasn't in,' he said. ‘Do go up, sir.'

These words, although uttered perhaps with politeness rather than cordiality, seemed to Honeybath civilized and comforting. He went up; Swithin followed him; Swithin promptly lowered a species of trapdoor over the aperture (which would otherwise have remained extremely dangerous), and an entire privacy was thus secured.

‘Mr Gore,' Honeybath said, ‘I've come to apologize for a very improper thing I said to you the other day. I said I didn't believe you about something, and I was quite wrong. I hope you will forgive me.'

‘Yes, certainly – and thank you.' Swithin, who had listened to Honeybath's speech with gravity but without discomfort or surprise, now removed from one of the room's two chairs a journal seemingly devoted to motorcycles, thereby implying an invitation to his guest to sit down. ‘I expect I was a bit upset. It was the old bastard who ought to have been getting the hiding, if you ask me, and not the girl he'd been messing around.' Swithin was plainly without any feeling of impropriety in aspersing in these terms the brother of his employers. ‘Of course there are plenty that think of a girl as fair game, and it can't be said that nature intended otherwise. But when it comes to an elderly man with the privileges of gentry in his pocket behaving like a goat or a laughing hyena, I call it a nasty thing.'

‘I quite agree with you.' It seemed to Honeybath that he had listened to a speech which – however many certificates Swithin had obtained at school – witnessed to the possession of considerable native endowments in this young man.

‘Not that a good word isn't spoken of him by many,' Swithin went on. ‘There's good employment at the dower house, and Mr Sylvanus is said to be a fair-minded man, who talks direct at you and is generous as well. He's like his brother in that. Do you know Lord Mullion well, sir?'

‘We were at school together. I've come to the castle to paint Lady Mullion's portrait. Portrait-painting is my job.'