In some nightmare parody of a normal social call, the ladies insisted that he seated himself in the tattered old armchair by the fireplace, and he was glad to rest his aching leg. They sat together on the small chaise opposite, and looked at him in the candlelight. Nobody seemed to want to be the first to speak. The house was very quiet again; he could hear an owl hooting outside in the wood.
Miss Constantine shuddered. ‘Un gufo,’ she said softly. ‘My mother would remind us that it’s said to be a harbinger of death, in Italy. But of course it isn’t; it’s just a harmless owl. People are the real monsters, not animals.’
Cecilia was back a few moments later, bearing a heavy tray. ‘Mrs Pritty is indomitable,’ she told them, setting it down on a side table. ‘She will wake her brother and send him in the dog cart to fetch Jem Kersey from his cottage, and together, they will go into the village to rouse the constable. She thinks that he will come back here with them to guard the house, but send someone for the magistrate from Debenbridge. All this will take several hours, of course, and we must be patient. I did not tell her, by the way, that the body is Lord Pallant. I thought it best that we should not claim to know – that it was just an intruder we surprised. After all, we have not seen his face. Though I saw the gold signet ring on his hand and recognised it, so I for one have no doubts.’
Beatrice moved over to her and began to pour tea and brandy, and pass out cups and glasses. ‘Miss Macintyre, I wish you would explain how all this came to pass. How could you possibly know that such a crazy thing as this was going to happen? I feel as though I am about to run mad and cannot properly understand what people are saying to me, as in a nightmare.Whyis there a dead man in my room?’
Euphemia took a health swig of brandy before she answered. ‘You do not have quite all the pieces of the puzzle, my dear Beatrice. I know you had all largely put what happened on our first night here from your minds, but I could not. Iwasawake when I heard the creak – which we must assume now to have been the secret panel either opening or closing – and the more I thought on it, the more I felt that I had seen something, too, when I came out onto the landing. A dark crack in the wall, a deeper shadow: at any rate, something that I could not easily explain away. But I could find no trace of any secret entrance there, nor could I conjecture why such a thing should have happened. Not until I saw the Vermeer on the wall in your mother’s sitting room, Major.’
He choked on his brandy. ‘The Vermeer…? Oh, the little blue and yellow painting of the young woman?’
She laughed. ‘Goodness me, yes. The very valuable little blue and yellow painting that Mrs Albery had given her simply because she had a fondness for it. As you know, girls, we searched downstairs to see if there might be another such here, but found nothing of any importance. Yet still the idea persisted in my mind – that a person who had bought one great work of art might easily have acquired another. And when I scoured the rest of the house on my own, because I knew there were other pictures here and there on the upstairs walls that we had not properly looked at, I foundthathanging in an obscure corner of your chamber, my dear.’ She rose, and turned the heavy gilded frame with reverent hands. ‘It’s a late self-portrait, and you should know that we are privileged to look upon it.’
Even Alistair could see that it was extraordinary. It seemed lit from within. A tired, weathered old man looked out at them with a direct gaze, every wrinkle and mark of time portrayed with unflinching honesty. He was wrapped in velvet robes trimmed with fur, beautifully recreated, but it was the wise old face that held the attention.
Miss Macintyre smiled on it, as if it were a loved one. ‘And when I found it, I thought I had discovered the intruder’s motive at last. It must be, I thought, someone who came here in Mrs Albery’s lifetime and had the opportunity to see it and recognise its worth – therefore likely a member of your family, Major, or Lord Pallant, whose own sister told us he visited frequently, or one of the former indoor servants. It could have been the old lady’s doctor, I suppose, but he has recently died, has he not, and was in any case an elderly man? I dismissed the Bartrums when it became plain to me that you had not the least idea what you already had. I didn’t imagine you’d recognise a Rembrandt under your nose, if you didn’t know a Vermeer that you live with every day, and I doubted a heedless young maidservant would either. That essentially left His Lordship, whom I believed to be sharp-eyed, capable of anything, and certainly desperate for money.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, inclining his head gravely. ‘I am glad my entire family’s abysmal ignorance of art and culture absolves us of any evil intent.’ He wasn’t drunk, but he felt as though he were. He’d better switch from brandy to tea, or he’d be giggling in front of the magistrate, which was bound to look bad and raise questions.
‘But now that we know there is a secret passage,’ Cecilia objected, ‘we must realise that there was nothing to stop Lord Pallant – or anybody else who was aware of its existence; it makes one shiver from head to toe to discover ourselves to have been so vulnerable all this time without knowing it – coming and taking the painting at any time after Mrs Albery’s death. Why wait till we arrived, when one of us might easily occupy the rooms, as indeed Bea did? And having senselessly waited, why come once, that first night, andnottake it?’
‘I considered that, of course,’ the old governess said. ‘And for a while, I thought as you do, Cecilia. It was a puzzle and I had no clue to it. But then I realised, perhaps there is an inventory of the goods in the house, or at least he might fear there was. And even if there is not, Mrs Pritty is nobody’s fool; she’d be sure to notice if a painting vanished from under her care, from her late mistress’s own chamber, even if she had no idea of its value; she’s worked here most of her life and misses nothing. No. I thought that the visit on our first night was made in a spirit of reckless daring to see if it was still here, still in place. And it was.’
Bea said in stunned tones, ‘So we don’t know – and perhaps we never will – if when you were searching downstairs for him, he had already left the way he came – or if he was hiding in my room, in the darkness, listening to you whispering to each other and setting your silly trap with the vase, listening to me breathing… Good God!’
Miss Macintyre said soberly, ‘It’s quite true. Thank heaven he left you unharmed. For all we know, it wasn’t his first midnight excursion into the house. He could have come here often and prowled about in the dark in this place his family once owned and lost. Do you not think that His Lordship was just the sort of man who would enjoy the danger of a clandestine visit, and relish even more the sense of superiority that came from knowing something that everyone else in the world did not? Imagine him standing here chuckling silently to himself; he may even have been watching us through some spyhole in the panelling as we ran about like a pair of fools looking for burglars and finding none. And then, of course, he could relax, as he thought, because he could see that we knew nothing.’
‘Yes. Because he thought if he married you, Ceci, and his brother married Bianca, and… so on, he would gain possession of the painting, along with everything else,’ Beatrice said slowly. ‘There was no need to steal it when it would, or so he thought, soon be his anyway. A wife’s possessions belong to her husband, as does a woman herself.’
‘Precisely, Beatrice. But last night, that possibility of great wealth was taken from him utterly by Cecilia. He not only lost the hope of her hand and her fortune, but the painting too. And I thought he was the sort of man who simply could not endure such an affront to his pride. I suppose that we will never know now if he had any other more sinister purpose in mind in coming here at dead of night when we were supposedly all sleeping – but at any rate, he would not be cheated of the painting. I stayed up all last night – luckily, I am able to nap during the day, so it was no great hardship to me – and again tonight. I was convinced both that there was a secret entrance we had not been able to find because it locked from the inside, and that he would find himself compelled to use it sooner or later. It is excessively gratifying to be correct on both counts.’
‘And of course you had your pistol, ma’am,’ the Major said. ‘And it was loaded. And you are a sharpshooter.’
She scoffed. ‘Hardly, at that little distance. Anyone could have done it, with sufficient practice. And as I’m sure you’ll agree, sir, there is no earthly point in a pistol that is not loaded. What was I to do, throw it at him? But I am to be a foolish old lady, if you please, who in her panic, shot the horrid burglar down by the merest chance. We must have no more talk of sharpshooters. Let us agree to tell the magistrate a story he will understand and readily accept. You – out walking, as is your nightly habit – saw a sinister figure and followed, fearing for the safety of a houseful of helpless women; I am terrified of burglars, as timid old ladies often are, and kept a gun of my dear father’s for that purpose; we have not the least idea who the dreadful robber could possibly be. It will cause a little bustle, no doubt, when his identity is discovered, but it is a coherent story and nobody will have any cause to doubt it. Hewashere, disguised, in the middle of the night, and his purpose could only have been sinister. The whole county will agree that he is no great loss.’
‘“A houseful of helpless women”,’ Alistair repeated with a wry smile. ‘Thank God it was not so.’ He could not look at Cecilia in that moment. He thought that Miss Macintyre at least suspected with some justice that Pallant had had another darker intention in mind beside burglary, and the idea of it chilled him to the bone. The wicked Baron could have done anything his twisted mind could devise, and then escaped with his loot, and nobody would ever have been any the wiser. He could have left one or more or all of the Constantines dead. It was a truly appalling thing to contemplate. But he would not say it aloud and make it real. If Cecilia and her sister had not thought of it yet, he could only be glad.
‘The worst of it,’ said his love with a faint, brave smile, ‘is that we will have to wake Bianca presently, before the authorities arrive. Nobody who does not know her would believe she slept through all this. A gunshot right outside her bedroom. A dead man in Bea’s chamber. And I daresay she will be most annoyed that she missed all the excitement.’
‘Probably best if she does not tell the magistrate that,’ he responded in the same effortfully light tone. ‘I fear he might not understand her bloodthirsty sentiments. It’s Marjoram, you know, and he harbours some sadly antiquated ideas abouttheladiesthat would be shaken to their foundations by a better acquaintance with all of you. Let us not disillusion him if we can help it.’ And then he began to laugh helplessly. ‘He has had enough of the duty, not being as young as he was, and asked me to consider taking it over. Thank God I have not yet done so. That would not mend matters in the least – a man shot in your house and the local magistrate here to witness it in highly suspicious circumstances.’
They were all weary, Alistair not least among them, but a short while later, he roused himself to say, ‘Since this is the hour of the night for confidences, I should tell you all that my nocturnal ramblings are not entirely taken for exercise.’ He knew that Cecilia had stiffened, and could guess why, so he went on quickly, wishing he had thought to tell her before, unsure why he hadn’t, ‘I daresay you have heard the tale of the so-called Dutch invasion. What can happen once can happen twice, so there is a system of watchers along this eastern coast, just in case, and beacons set ready in case of such an emergency. There is not so much danger here, the authorities have judged, since we have no deep-water port, and the French undoubtedly have other matters to worry about just now. But still… we watch. I do, here, and others too. And the militia are not so very far away, to the south and to the north, holding themselves in readiness for a signal.’
Miss Macintyre said quietly, ‘We should have realised as much, I suppose, Major. The world seems very far away here, and our petty concerns loom large, but much greater events are moving, are they not? In some manner, the future of the world, or our part of it, is being decided, just across the sea, if not today, then tomorrow, or soon.’
It was a sobering thought, and effectively killed all further conversation. The night passed slowly, with little further commotion for a long while, except when the youngest Miss Constantine was roused with an astonishing amount of difficulty and had to be told the tale all over again. Another small diversion was caused when Mrs Pritty ushered in the village constable, who looked at the body, shook his head wordlessly at the horrid sight, and went away to stand guard outside; Alistair took him and Jem Kersey down to the stable to show them the entrance to the secret stair, and left them there, peering down into the void and exclaiming at it in wonder.
It seemed a long while before Marjoram arrived in his gig, and longer still before he’d taken everyone’s statements and said that the Major was free to go. The magistrate kindly offered to take him home, saying that it was more or less on his way and he must be weary, and Alistair accepted, little though he wanted to spend any more time in the garrulous old man’s company. It would seem unnatural to refuse, he thought, and it might after all be useful for them to have a little private speech together just now.
Dawn was breaking in quiet splendour as they drove through the empty lanes; rabbits scurried away from under the gig’s wheels, and birds sang lustily in every hedge and bush. It was another lovely late-spring morning, and it seemed impossible that violent death or wicked intentions could exist in such a pristine world as this.
Marjoram said, with a sidelong glance, ‘Did you really not know that the body was His Lordship? You didn’t seem terribly shocked when his poor face was revealed, Major, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
Alistair was glad to be able to tell the truth, or at least mostly the truth. ‘Well, I have witnessed such sights often enough before, you know, and far worse. I’ve seen friends die, or hideously wounded… But no, I did not know whom I was following. I’d have challenged him outside the house, discovered his identity and kept the Constantines out of it, if I were not handicapped by this bloody useless leg of mine. I thought his purpose must be sinister, whoever he was, as anyone would have done, and after the events in your barn two nights ago, Pallant was bound to spring to mind in that connection. After he fell and things were calmer, I saw that flashy gold ring of his, so I had little doubt of who it was. But I did not tell the ladies. No need to distress them further.’No need to overdo it, either, he thought, and prudently shut up.
‘I thought they bore up with remarkable resilience,’ Marjoram said, almost as though even he occasionally suspected that women were not always the feeble creatures that conventional masculine wisdom said they must be. ‘Especially the old lady. A few tears, but no vapours. I’ll wager she’s still in shock, and will collapse a little later, but then, she has people to look after her. So no need to worry too much about her. It was a lucky shot, of course, as you and I can agree. Bless the old dear, she might as easily have but a bullet in you, or the damn painting, or herself. I don’t suppose it has sunk in with any of them yet that His Lordship might have had another purpose in mind as well as theft. Shocking, quite shocking. Not a gent who liked to be told nay, he wasn’t. Nor was he accustomed to it, least of all in public. It’s a bad business, for sure, but it could have been a deal worse. Yes, a good deal worse, Major, and no mistake.’
‘I expect women said no to him often enough, and he didn’t listen,’ Alistair replied grimly, leaving Marjoram’s useful but wrong-headed assumptions unchallenged. ‘But he won’t be doing that any more. He’s done all the damage he can in this life.’
