A Mansion and its Murder Read online

  ‘I overheard,’ I said truthfully. ‘Does it?’

  ‘Miss Coverdale, Miss Blackett, Miss Waddington-Phipps, Miss This-or-That – what does it matter who? It may as well be Miss Coverdale as any other. Yes, I suppose so. They’ll win in the end, and Blakemere will demand an heir, to prevent the dreadful fate of its falling into female hands.’

  ‘Yes, I overheard that, too.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, turning and looking into my face.

  ‘You having a son? Not at all. Daddy sort of asked me, and I had to say girls ought to be the same as boys, of course—’

  ‘Of course,’ Uncle Frank said gravely.

  ‘But really I can’t imagine anything more horrible than inheriting Blakemere, though I didn’t tell Papa that.’ I thought, and then added, ‘But I think you should marry who you want to marry.’

  ‘Not too easy, that, if you don’t care to marry at all. But if that is to be my fate, I rather think I’ll have a little fling first – no, a great big one!’

  ‘Another of your expeditions, do you mean?’

  ‘Another of them, yes. Crossing the Sahara. Or maybe the Gobi Desert.’

  ‘Are all expeditions terribly costly?’

  ‘Mine are! And this one will be terribly, terribly so. One day I’ll take you with me on one.’

  The prospect thrilled me indescribably. ‘Will you? Across the Gobi Desert?’

  ‘Maybe not that. I don’t think the Gobi Desert is the sort of place for a lady to go to. We’ll stick to Europe. I’ll take you to Eastern Europe – Athens, Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest: places where the Ottomans used to hold sway.’

  I frowned.

  ‘I thought an Ottoman was a funny sort of sofa.’

  ‘Turks, then. The emperors who rule from Constantinople, a vast Moslem empire.’

  ‘Moslem? Does that mean they are heretics?’

  ‘They are heretics to us, and we are heretics to them. Remember that.’

  I considered the thought.

  ‘Do all religions consider other religions here – he-re—’

  ‘Heretical. Yes, I’m afraid so. It says very little for religious people, in my opinion. Before we in our family use words like that, we should remember that your grandmama’s father was a heretic before he … came over to Christianity.’

  There was a strong implication, which I caught, that my great-grandfather had become a Christian for unworthy and self-interested motives, and that he would have done very much better to stay where he was as far as religion was concerned. This is one of my dear uncle Frank’s opinions which has remained with me for life, though I have never ceased to be a Christian of sorts myself.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ I said wistfully, as we gathered up our bait and tackle and started back to our marble prison, ‘that you will be able to send me letters from the Gobi Desert?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Uncle Frank gently. ‘Not even one of these picture postcards you are so fond of.’

  ‘What will I do, all those months when you’re away?’

  ‘Perhaps you could get Miss Roxby to plot a course across the Gobi Desert from Kanchow to Ulan Bator, at about twenty miles a day. Then you can stick pins into it every morning and imagine roughly where we are and roughly when we shall start back. But remember, Sarah Jane—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Not a word to anyone till I set off. It’s a secret, little rabbit.’ We were rounding the below-stairs part of Blakemere, the prison’s dungeon, so to speak, but one from which delicious smells often emanated. ‘Twitch your nose, little rabbit.’

  It was the reason for his nickname for me. That day the smell was wonderful.

  ‘How lucky you are, to eat something that smells like that,’ I said. ‘In the nursery it will certainly be boiled mince and a milk pudding.’

  It was. But I was nourishing in my childish bosom the secret which he had entrusted to me, so I ate it stoically. It was typical of Uncle Frank that he should lighten the burden of his absence by making it a delightful secret, typical of me that I should keep it faithfully. There was no one in the family I would want to entrust it to, and this made me congenitally mistrustful. For that reason it was seldom that I confided anything of importance to Beatrice or Miss Roxby, my new governess. Miss Roxby was well read for a governess. Her mother had imprudently married an actor, and had warned her against contracting an alliance based on personal attractions (unnecessarily, or so it seemed at the time). We neither of us found it easy to express emotions, though I had a great respect for her – and, eventually, she for me.

  The double joy of a secret is that you can not only hug it to yourself while it is a secret, but when it comes out, you can reveal that you have known it all along. Providence, not generally kind to me during my childhood, gave me that second joy in good measure. I remember it as about a month after Frank’s leaving Blakemere that we heard from him, but perhaps it was longer: he had, after all, an expedition to prepare. It was late in the day and Miss Roxby and I had just come in from some botanical excursion in a distant corner of the prison compound when my father and grandfather arrived back from a day at the Bank in London. Grandpapa, as was his custom, took up the evening post that was lying on a silver salver on the fat-legged marble table nearest the large double-doored entrance. He riffled through them, then brought one up close to his old eyes.

  ‘Your brother Frank’s writing,’ he spluttered to my father. ‘From Port Said.’

  My father said nothing, but stood there waiting. I never quite knew what his attitude to his brother was. I did not see him often enough to have the information.

  ‘The damn fool! He’s got up another of his preposterous expeditions – to cross the Gobi Desert!’ said my grandfather in a voice of outrage.

  ‘Oh, I knew that,’ I said loudly. For once I was the centre of attention.

  ‘You knew?’ said my father.

  ‘Of course. From Kanchow to Ulan Bator.’ I turned to Miss Roxby. ‘He said you would help me to chart his progress.’

  Miss Roxby blenched. I don’t think she was terribly well up in the Gobi Desert.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone,’ demanded my father.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, to underline my solitary state. ‘Anyway, I thought everybody knew.’

  I was a truthful child as a rule, but my probity had its limits. I turned from their gaze and toiled up the stairs with Miss Roxby. I did not tell them that Uncle Frank had said he might be willing to marry Miss Coverdale when he came home. This, I thought, was part of the secret I had been sworn to keep. Anyway, he might have changed his mind when he returned, and decided to wait for me.

  Miss Roxby was nothing if not industrious. Within a week she had procured from among the unread volumes in the irrelevant library a large, dusty, and leather-bound tome with an unmanageable folding-out map of China and Mongolia. This was to be our Sacred Book for the next few months. From the letter from Port Said she had tried to calculate Uncle Frank’s likely date of arrival in Shanghai, so we could talk till then of his possible ports of call, before we discussed his overland route across the dreadfully inhospitable landscape – that slow, painful journey of twenty miles a day to Ulan Bator.

  The fact that all our calculations were grossly inaccurate does not lessen my gratitude to her: our discussions and fantasies were the one thing that lightened the burden of the long months of separation. As I sit here in the gatehouse, enjoying the long summer evenings, I remember fantasies I indulged in with particular pleasure. They included a romance for Uncle Frank, in the middle of the desert, with a Mongolian lady dressed in improbably bright clothing, facially somewhere between a Japanese geisha and an illustration in one of my books of Pokahontas. Uncle Frank also rescued other members of his expedition from terrible dangers, and repulsed single-handed marauding parties of Mongolians, eventually running up the Union Jack at the desert’s central point and claiming it for Queen Victoria. Thinking of the problems we have at the moment in India and various other part
s of what used to be the Empire, it is perhaps fortunate that Uncle Frank refrained from prising Outer Mongolia from the grips of whoever then ruled it to add to them.

  It was not summer but late autumn when Uncle Frank arrived home. There had been, as always, no advance notice. He may have felt that any letter would only come by sea, like himself, so it could hardly arrive much before him, though in fact he later told me he had had a week in Cairo (‘sampling the fleshpots,’ he said, which made me wonder whether the Egyptians were cannibals) on the way home.

  It was not surprising that I was the first to know of his return, since whenever I passed a window which looked out over the long drive that led to the Gatehouse and beyond that to the little country village of Melbury I scanned the rolling expanses of Fearing property for signs of Uncle Frank’s return. And when one day in early October I saw the carriage that plied between Melbury station and residences of consequence in the neighbourhood I knew at once that it contained my dear uncle. This was not childish intuition. I had been wrong a hundred times before, and eventually I had to be right. I left Miss Roxby’s side and tumbled down the marble staircase (each step better adapted to a fully fledged giant than to my by-now eleven-year-old legs), and positioned myself in a dismal alcove containing the sort of sinister potted plant that thrives on shadow. If he had known it was Uncle Frank arriving, Mr McKay would certainly have been there in the echoing entrance hall, his face set in just the right blend of welcome and disapproval. As it was, there was just Robert, an underfootman, his face blank not from formality but from boredom.

  This was not a time for coyness or for playing games. The moment I saw the weatherbeaten face below the panama hat, I rushed from my hiding place.

  ‘Uncle Frank! Uncle Frank!’

  He swung me aloft, my beribboned hair knocking off his fine hat, and he kissed me and tickled me and roared his delight at seeing me again.

  ‘Sarah Jane! The only thing worth coming home for!’

  That made me swell with delight and pride. When the boisterous part of the welcome was over, he put me down on the staircase, sat down beside me and looked at me closely.

  ‘How you’ve grown. You’ll soon be a full-sized rabbit. I won’t be able to swing you up in my arms much longer.’

  ‘I shall be a young lady,’ I said roguishly, ‘and it won’t be proper for you to swing me up.’

  ‘How true. The dignity of young ladies must be preserved. Be glad you’re not a Chinese lady who has to walk a respectful distance behind her menfolk.’

  ‘Does she really? I thought that was only in books. It can’t make for stimulating conversation. Anyway, I don’t have any menfolk.’

  ‘You have me. And I’ve never noticed you being particularly respectful of me.’

  ‘Would you want me to be?’

  He laughed, throwing his head back. ‘You know, come to think of it, I don’t think I would like that at all.’

  ‘Be careful you don’t take cold, Sarah Jane,’ my governess said quietly from two steps above us. And the stair was rather chilly through my dress and light undergarments. Uncle Frank stood up and turned around.

  ‘How right you are, Miss – er, Roxby, isn’t it?’ He looked at her quizzically and appraisingly (I can see the expression now, and can analyse it, though I could not have done so then. He was wondering whether she was an ally or a foe). ‘I trust your charge has grown in knowledge and wisdom as much as she has grown in stature during my absence?’

  I giggled. ‘She had increased her knowledge of Outer Mongolia quite prodigiously,’ said Miss Roxby gravely. ‘But I hope she has learnt a lot of other useful things as well.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it. Ah well, now for the difficult bit,’ said Uncle Frank, his shoulders shrugging underneath his magnificent travelling coat. ‘Pleasant things never last, do they? But one who has braved the present-day descendants of Ghengis Khan should not shrink from being taken back into the bosom of his family, should he?’

  And he kissed me again, shook hands ceremoniously with Miss Roxby, and took himself off into the gloomy body of the house. I heard no whoops of joy at his return.

  In the next few days I went to great lengths to find out what was going on – about my uncle Frank’s debts, his way of life, above all about his proposed marriage. This was not easy: Miss Roxby kept better surveillance over me than my earlier governesses, and the family did not have the aristocratic insouciance that would have allowed them to have family rows in front of the servants (of whom Miss Roxby was certainly one). This meant that my play times were spent in tracking down members of the family who might be consulting together about the Frank problem. Alas, in the daytime they never were, or if they were, it was in totally inaccessible or unguessable parts of the house, which had many such. When I saw Uncle Frank with the family his manner was always nonchalant, uncowed. In fact, he almost seemed to be tormenting them.

  ‘What is a gay bachelor to do on a dull November day in the country?’ he would say to his mother. ‘I must teach one of the footmen to play billiards.’

  His mother compressed her lips, sensible enough not to point out that if he did what the family wanted him to, he wouldn’t be a bachelor at all.

  ‘What you should do with me, you know, is lock me up in a small, obscure room in this rotten pile,’ I heard him say to my father, ‘and have the servants bring me some basic meals three times a day, and then you’d be rid of all the worry and expense of me. You could give it out I’d lost my reason. The mad brother in the attic – I have rather a fancy for the role. And the whole county would believe it. They would believe any rumour about me, provided it was bad enough. Maybe after a while I could get out, roam the house by the light of a candle and burn it down. Take more than a candle to do that, though, I would imagine.’

  There was no reply to this from my father. I think he was in two minds about the family’s determination to get Uncle Frank married. Quite apart from the prospect of my inheriting Blakemere, there was the possibility of Mama dying and of his marrying again and fathering a son (though on reflection I don’t think Papa was particularly philoprogenitive).

  But the most memorable example of Frank’s teasing his family occurred one morning when Miss Roxby and I were proceeding downstairs (a major operation in itself) to go out for our walk, needing some fresh air between Arithmetic and French. We looked down, hearing voices, and we saw Frank encountering his father in the entrance hall. My uncle was smartly and rather formally dressed, the carriage drawn up outside the door.

  ‘Must pay my respects to the neighbours now I’m home again,’ he said cheerily. ‘They’ll expect to hear my account of remote parts.’

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ said Grandpapa.

  ‘I’ve always been on excellent terms with the … Blacketts,’ said Uncle Frank over his shoulder as he made his exit to the waiting carriage.

  Grandpapa’s face fell. He knew he was being played with, but he’d hoped that his son was visiting the Coverdales. But I knew, and I knew because Miss Roxby knew, and Miss Roxby knew because her best friend was governess at the Blacketts, that Mary Coverdale’s best friend was Violet Blackett, and if she was to be found anywhere during the day away from her own home, it would be Matton Hall, the Blacketts’ country seat.

  As the carriage drove away, as jaunty in its motion as Uncle Frank’s own walk, I felt a tear come into my eye at the thought that he had been defeated. Now, nearly sixty years later, he seems in my memory to have been walking to his doom.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The China Rose

  I could barely contain my impatience for Uncle Frank’s return from his visit to the Blacketts’. I calculated the distance, the likely length of the visit, and I could only hope that his return would coincide with one of the free half-hours I was allowed during the day. For the rest of the time I gave what attention I could to the French pluperfect tense and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Alas, the mid-afternoon break passed without any sign of Uncle Frank, and so did the
break at the end of the day’s lessons. I was reduced to asking Mr McKay if he had returned, to be told that he had not.

  My nursery supper consisted of Irish stew (very superior Irish stew, but I often wondered if the Irish ever ate anything else, because I never heard of any other dish originating in that country), and a very boring trifle. After it, I was at liberty for an hour, and normally I would have read, for I was developing a taste for novels that has never left me. However, I resisted the call of Under Two Flags or A Study in Scarlet, for there was a stronger pull on me. I went and stood inside the doorway of a little upstairs sitting room called the Peacock Room (nasty birds, nasty room). It was gaudy but never used, like so much of the house, and merely the dumping place for the less prestigious pictures, statuary, and furniture the family had accumulated.

  It was cold there, but I stood steadfastly in the shadow as the family dinner hour approached, prepared to fade into the darkness if the footsteps along the corridor were my father’s, or my aunt Jane’s, or to slip out and pull him in if they were my uncle Frank’s.

  When at last he came, hurrying because he was late, but looking wonderfully handsome in his evening clothes, I materialised before his surprised eyes in the corridor and pulled him into the dim shadows of the Peacock Room.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘Well what, little rabbit?’

  ‘You know very well, Uncle Frank, so please don’t play games.’

  ‘I know nothing at all of what you’re talking about, and I’m late for dinner.’

  ‘You never mind being late for dinner. Did you meet Mary Coverdale on your visit to the Blacketts?’

  (You will perceive I was rather a bossy and peremptory child. I have had traces of these traits all my life, or so people tell me.)

  ‘Mary Coverdale … Mary Coverdale …’ Uncle Frank stroked his light-brown beard, his eyes twinkling. ‘Yes, now you mention it, I think there was someone of that name.’