A Mansion and its Murder Read online

  ‘Don’t you ever see your mummy and daddy?’ they would ask.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I would reply stoutly, since it seemed to be the sort of thing to do, to have contact with your mother and father. When I grew slightly older my reply changed to: ‘Quite as much as I want to.’

  My father, Claudius Meyer Fearing, was in his own estimation caught in a cleft stick: he was neither banker nor country gentleman. Others felt he had constructed the cleft stick himself: he was unhappy at the Bank because he was not in overall charge, and he was unhappy at Blakemere for the same reason. He seemed temperamentally unable to subject himself to the rigorous preparation necessary to be a successful banker, and he mostly occupied himself with the pleasanter side of a country gentleman’s life – shooting, fishing, and agricultural events (he never completely mastered horsemanship, so he didn’t hunt). He was, at that time, something of a congenital malcontent, and one who could give himself wholeheartedly to nothing. When he saw me he was kind to me, inquired about my lessons, occasionally even played with me. If I was not in front of his eyes I was not in his mind. Even when he encountered me unexpectedly in the high, wide corridors of Blakemere he seemed to have to remind himself who I was.

  My mother had been married to provide an heir for Blakemere. She had, with some difficulty, produced me, and had then been told that she could have no more children. She had retreated into self-regard and self-pity (and self-a lot of other things as well), gradually making a sort of prison for herself – none the less a prison for being luxurious and undemanding. I could be as high-spirited, adventurous, demanding, or masterful as I wanted, but that would cut no ice with my mother. They were qualities admired in men, but they did not alter the fact that I was not, and could never be, a boy.

  ‘We have to think of the future.’

  I heard the words, spoken in my grandfather’s measured, I would now say pompous, tones, through a partially opened window in the library. I had retreated alone, to the little square courtyard just beside it, where I had marked out a hopping game. The library had a long, windowless wall just beside the courtyard, so if hopping palled I could play ball against it. When I heard the words I paused, then peeped round the corner, and edged along to where the window was. I stood beside it and peeked cautiously in. The bookcases in the library rose to the ceiling, and were filled with unread, unreadable leather tomes. It was only much later I realised that many of the books were literally unreadable: the upper shelves were mere painted books, in the trompe l’oeil manner. I was very surprised by this because I had never imagined my grandfather, then well dead, had a sense of humour.

  Along the long library table the family was ranged: Grandpapa, Grandmama, my father, my mother (wonder of wonders!), Aunt Jane, Aunt Sarah, my grandfather’s private secretary, Cousin Anselm who was a Father of Sons, and therefore of importance to the family firm, and my dear, dear uncle Francis – Uncle Frank, I always called him.

  Who was tipping himself backward in his chair, smiling, and stroking his lovely fair beard – short and rather sporty – his eye glinting as he smiled with the utmost complacency at the family Inquisition.

  ‘I’ve always rather gone for the idea of “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,”’ he said. Retribution was immediate and, for him, probably very satisfying.

  ‘Since you were a boy,’ thundered my grandpapa, ‘you have twisted the Scriptures for your own selfish ends.’

  ‘Twisted?’ said Uncle Frank, unperturbed. ‘I should have thought “Take no thought for the morrow” was pretty clear and explicit. It is a great satisfaction to me to be able to say that I never do.’

  ‘To call the Bank “evil” that has made the family fortunes – and that means your fortunes – is unforgivable. It is rank ingratitude.’

  Uncle Frank’s lovely fair eyebrows raised themselves satirically.

  ‘Nevertheless for me it is an evil, and I see no reason why I should regulate my conduct by any concern for its future.’

  My grandmother leant forward. She was by birth a Meyer, one of a prominent converted Jewish banking family. Her lean face was handsome still, her eyes alight with intelligence. She was, I am sure, much cleverer than my grandfather, though she constrained herself within the usual boundaries laid down for married women at the time.

  ‘Fearing’s Bank is one of the great financial institutions of this country,’ she said emphatically. ‘On it thousands of lives and livelihoods depend. It is time you faced up to your responsibilities, Francis. You have had time enough to sow your wild oats.’

  ‘The trouble is, I seem to have more wild oats than most to sow,’ smiled Frank.

  ‘Marriage will cure that.’

  Uncle Frank laughed out loud. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of. And to what end? Claud and Harriet have a daughter.’ (Here my mother sobbed.) ‘If you insist on sons, Clare and Alfred – at long last – have two, or is it three? There are’ – here he nodded in the direction of Anselm Fearing – ‘cousins. Not cousins galore, but cousins enough. Why should I be the sacrificial lamb?’

  ‘Because if you do not do as we insist, your debts will not be paid,’ said my grandfather fiercely. Uncle Frank gave a little chuckle. I had the feeling that this threat was not unexpected – was a traditional move in the family chess game.

  ‘That will look good in the newspapers, won’t it?’ Uncle Frank said mockingly. ‘“Banker’s son arrested for debt.” “Bankruptcy proceedings against Fearing’s Bank scion.” Well, at least it would rid you of a modicum of your stuffiness.’

  His mother leant forward.

  ‘You are forgetting, Francis, that there will come a time when we shall be forced to choose between paying your bills and letting you be disgraced publicly, and the latter will be the less painful alternative.’

  ‘But that time has hardly been reached yet, Mama,’ said Frank. I snatched another look: he was still wonderfully relaxed and genial – a soft toy surrounded by rigid dolls. ‘My debts, on the scale of younger son’s debts in general, are fairly modest: a European tour when one reaches one’s majority is traditional, though my tour had its untraditional side; my expeditions have mostly been small in scale and have benefited human knowledge; my London flat is hardly expensive in the family’s scale of expenditure. How can you sit in’ – he waved his hand around – ‘this place and talk about having to choose whether to pay a few quite reasonable bills for me?’

  ‘It’s not just a question of debts,’ said my grandfather. ‘Two children in the county—’

  ‘Wild oats. And like the gentlemen we aim to be I chose not to dispute the paternity.’

  ‘Scandals of a distasteful kind, infinite offense caused to respectable families in the neighbourhood—’

  ‘Turnips and stuffed shirts.’

  ‘You are not fit to tie their bootlaces,’ said my grandpapa, who had a grand way with clichés. ‘If you do not agree to marry, and marry sensibly and well, the alternative will be to give you a fixed allowance with the sternest warning that this you must manage yourself, and that no new debts will on any account be settled by me or by the Bank.’

  There was a silence while this was considered.

  ‘Oh? And what sort of sum were you thinking of for this allowance?’

  There was a further pause, intended to be impressive. ‘We were thinking of the sum of one thousand pounds per annum.’

  There was a great yelp of laughter, and the sound of a chair being pushed back.

  ‘I thought this was meant to be a serious discussion. I might as well be on my way. Pleasure calls!’

  ‘You can mock!’ said my grandfather’s weighty tones. ‘But think over what we have said, or it will be infinitely the worse for you. I cannot imagine what any man could have against marrying a sweet girl like one of the Coverdales, or one of the Blacketts.’

  ‘Mary Coverdale is a very pretty girl,’ came my uncle Frank’s voice from over by the door. ‘I know many pretty girls.’

  There was the sound of a
door slamming, then sounds of the family conference breaking up in what was the nearest the Fearings could get to disorder. I retreated to my hopping game, but I was mentally composing a new skipping rhyme:

  Sarah, Jane, and Clare and Mary,

  Auntie Mary is no fairy.

  I had never to my knowledge seen Mary Coverdale, and had no idea whether she was a large young lady. It didn’t sound like it, but truth had very little to do with my skipping games. I might in time find a better rhyme for Mary. My mother’s name, by the way, was Harriet, as you’ve heard, and the only reason I didn’t include her in the games was that the one rhyme I could think of for it was ‘chariot’, and that didn’t seem very fruitful.

  I was hopping lonely as a cloud in the little courtyard that bordered the blank wall of the library when to my surprise I saw my mother. More surprising still, she and my father were walking together down the wide lawns constructed from the endless carts of earth brought to the site before ever a stone of Blakemere was laid, to improve its position and to provide beauteous gardens stretching down to the River Whate. They were walking and talking. Together.

  My mother and my father never walked and talked together. They appeared together in public, at dinners and suchlike, when my mother did not cry off on grounds of poor health (that is, poor temper). On those occasions they had little to say to each other, in private still less. My mother, what is more, seldom left the house – seemed to dislike the open air. I watched, fascinated. After some minutes, as they seemed about to begin the descent to the river, my mother stopped, doubtless unwilling to contemplate the haul back up. They talked for a few moments longer. Then they paused, turned around toward the house, and saw me.

  My mother looked straight ahead. At me and through me. My father’s brow furrowed. Then they began talking again, and started off in my direction. Some yards away from the courtyard they paused again, my father making an earnest point. I was as sure as I could be that they were talking about me, but I went on hopping and jumping on my chalked squares on the courtyard. Then I heard my mother gulp, sob, and walk faster than was her wont in the direction of the East Door to the house.

  My father watched his unloved and unloving wife for a moment or two, then shrugged. Her departure seemed to lift a weight off his shoulders. The furrowed expression went from his face, and he started toward me with a smile.

  ‘And what are you up to, Sarah Jane?’

  ‘Hopping … Papa.’

  ‘So I see. And what is the idea of it?’

  I adopted a bored, explaining-the-obvious-to-adults tone.

  ‘Well, you hop on these squares, then you come down with both feet on these squares, and you mustn’t let your shoes touch the lines of the squares.’

  ‘I see. Like this?’ And he poised himself at the starting point and went through a rough approximation of my game. ‘Was that right?’

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Edging Toward the Abyss

  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 li
ved 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.