A Change of Heir (19 page)

He made his way, therefore, to the instrument. It stood in the locutorium, and so wasn’t as privately placed as he would have liked, but he must risk that. He got through, and was answered by Captain Fortescue.

‘Fortescue? This is Comberford speaking.’

‘Ah, good morning. I was thinking we ought to have another word soon. To tell the truth, Comberford, I’m not happy. Not happy at all.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’ Gadberry felt distinctly dashed.

‘About the new tenant at Stonesfield. Are you?’

‘As a matter of fact, I’m not thinking about–’

‘Perhaps I’d better run over and get your instructions. Is that what you have in mind?’

‘No, it isn’t. Not in the least. I’ve rung up to ask about Evadne. How is she?’

‘Evadne? Very well, thank you. Or rather, in considerable pain still. She’ll have to lie up for some days. Good of you to inquire. Goodbye.’

‘Fortescue – hold on!’ There was an agitation in the voice coming over the wire which puzzled Gadberry a good deal. ‘The fact is, I want to–’ Now Gadberry in his turn was agitated. ‘Look here, can I speak to her?’

‘Yes, of course. I mean, no. That’s to say, she’s been told she mustn’t try to get on her feet. Better not bring her to the telephone.’

‘Of course not.’ Gadberry felt ashamed of his thoughtlessness. ‘Will you just tell her I meant to come over and see her this afternoon, but now I find I have to go out with my aunt instead?’

‘I suppose so. That’s to say, certainly. Of course.’

‘Look, Fortescue! What I really – I mean to say – Well, I expect you have a notion of what’s in my head? Can I come over and talk to you soon?’

‘Yes, naturally. At any time. Perhaps towards the end of next week.’

‘But Fortescue–’

‘I’d say it needs thinking about, Comberford. There’s Mrs Minton, you know. I might be put in a delicate position. But the real fact is that Evadne–’ Fortescue’s voice hesitated. He appeared to be having one of his fits of maximum embarrassment. ‘You see, Evadne’s a–’ He broke off altogether.

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing, my dear fellow. Or not now.’

‘You were saying something about Evadne.’

‘Evadne? Oh, yes. Still in a good deal of discomfort. Frightfully nice of you to inquire. Goodbye.’

This time there was a click in the receiver. Captain Fortescue had hung up. Gadberry had a momentary vision of him at the other end of the line, mopping his brow with a large silk handkerchief. It was unsatisfactory and puzzling. But what he himself had to remember, of course, was the odd fact that, in the marriage market, he was a very big catch indeed. And Fortescue’s curious staving-off tactics were simply a reflection of his almost aggressive honesty. If his daughter married the heir of Bruton it wouldn’t be because her father had in any way angled for it.

Yes, that was it.

A distressing restlessness overtook Gadberry as the morning wore on. After his unproductive telephone conversation with Captain Fortescue he had made his way back to his own apartments with some idea of putting in a little overdue application to the
Memoirs
of Magnus Minton. If he was going to hang on – and the new world into which he had entered with Evadne made it essential that he should do so – he must maintain and strengthen his grip on the material upon which the whole colourability of his enterprise had been based. The very fact that he was now to be in constant association with two people who knew him to be an impostor was bound, he realised, to impose an additional strain on his nerve – however much, for their own ends, these two people were committed to supporting his imposture. He must do his daily prep.

This morning, however, he found it impossible to concentrate upon the endless domestic twaddle which constituted the greater part of these dreary manuscript journals. He thrust them away, and prowled broodingly round his so-called office. The prospect from its windows wasn’t inspiriting. Snow was still falling – and so thickly that there occurred to him for the first time the mildly alarming thought that the whole place might soon be cut off for days or weeks. Still, the falls were continuing to be only intermittent, and when he looked up at the sky he saw signs of a break in the clouds from which they were descending. Things might cheer up a little in the afternoon.

He didn’t want to smoke, and at this early hour he wouldn’t allow himself to drink. He had no impulse to settle down with an improving, or even with an entertaining, book. It suddenly came to him that the life he had planned for himself at Bruton – or rather that the real Comberford had planned for him – was an awkwardly empty one. He wouldn’t really ever get into the way of all that country gentleman stuff. Of course this made the transforming arrival of Evadne all the more miraculous, since in the mere contemplation of such a girl whose lifetimes could be passed in ecstasy.

Yet at the moment, somehow, even this wasn’t quite working. His restlessness was mounting, so that the room had become too small to contain it. He went into the corridor, and began a kind of caged up-and-down in that. It was a narrow corridor, and quite surprisingly long. The effect was claustrophobic – rather as in one of those interminable passages in the bowels of an ocean liner. On the one side were sparely spaced lancet windows so slit-like that one had to suppose them originally constructed with some defensive intention. On the other side was that succession of forbidding cells which had constituted the surprisingly extensive penal establishment of the monastery. Some of them were gained through apertures upon which there remained no more than the stump of a rusted iron hinge. Others had massive oaken doors, iron bound and with formidable bolts. These could hardly have survived, Gadberry imagined, since before the dissolution of these monstrous monkeries by Henry VIII. Presumably they had been restored by some eighteenth-century Minton, agreeably anxious to recreate the mediaeval amenities of his residence. There would be mad monks as well as bad ones, Gadberry supposed, and they would all alike have been encouraged, when undergoing incarceration, to bang themselves with stones and wallop themselves with nettles. The dimensions of the individual cells, he reflected, must have been calculated to give elbow room, and no more, to these and other vigorous expressions of the theory of mortification and penance. High up in its outer wall, each cell had a window, if it could be called that, about large enough to admit a bat, or conceivably a member of one of the smaller species of the Abbey’s owls. Apart from the abbot’s lodging, it was all at a marked remove from any other part of the Abbey. It didn’t seem to have been the idea that the howlings of the flagellated sinners should audibly counterpoint with the chantings of the righteous in the Abbey church and its ancillary oratories.

In such gloomy investigations and morbid reveries Gadberry found that he had wasted quite a lot of time. But in the interval, he noticed, external nature had a little cheered up. It had stopped snowing, and there was even a hint of struggling sunlight in the sky to the south. If anything, however, this only increased his restlessness, and it didn’t notably alleviate his morbidity of mind. From his bedroom window he could just glimpse the tower, and he presently found himself peering out at it in a compulsive way. He had never climbed it. Did Mrs Minton ever climb it? Was Miss Bostock, binoculars over her shoulder, climbing it now? Could Boulter be made to climb it? How hazardous was the climb with all this snow and ice around? None of these questions held any significance for anything that Gadberry was proposing to do. He had already settled pretty clearly with himself just where the boundary between fantasy and actuality lay in that particular direction. Still, he would go and have a look. There could be no harm in that.

He took his own field glasses. They had belonged to Great-uncle Magnus, and although bulky were superb. It was vaguely in his head that he wanted to determine just what, apart from hawks and hernshaws, Miss Bostock in her familiar eyrie could survey when similarly accommodated herself. He walked down to the calefactory for his gumboots and duffel coat, and went outside. There was a thin wind before which the surface snow was gently drifting. But it wasn’t blowing so as to add in any degree to the hazards of his climb.

The snow hadn’t ceased before obliterating every minor boundary. The big formal garden still stood between its forbidding walls of cypress, but the intricate geometry of its beds and paths was concealed beneath an unbroken texture of white. And so with the great parterre dropping in shallow terraces to the fishpond. And those peripheral parts of the vast complex of buildings that had been reduced to vestigial walls from which the whole ground-plan could still be traced: these had vanished too, so that the total spectacle appeared curiously contracted or reduced. It was as if Bruton Abbey, conscious of the approaching grip of an iron winter, was curling in upon itself for survival. The effect was also curiously disorienting. Small, familiar landmarks having vanished, you could unthinkingly stray around in a disconcerting manner. Gadberry remarked this. It didn’t occur to him as significant.

Nave and transepts, choir and Lady-chapel: in all of them the vaulting still stood – and with, above it, one didn’t know how many tons and tons of lead. The lead couldn’t conceivably go back beyond the Reformation; like much else about the Abbey, it must be the fruit of eighteenth-century eccentricity and eighteenth-century aristocratic affluence. But the vaulting had been set there by the first master builders; it had neither fallen down nor been quarried in. In his
Memoirs
, indeed, Magnus Minton had recorded his conviction – the issue of much research – that not so much as the materials of a single pigsty had ever been filched from Bruton Abbey. This was no doubt because the Mintons (who had been handed the place by Henry himself) had been quite as convinced as their future connections the Comberfords that
Hold Everything
is an excellent motto to possess. As a consequence, the place was pretty well unique in England. It was a circumstance of which Gadberry was becoming rather proud.

The clustered pillar at the north-east of the crossing had an extra girth, or rather bulge, only visible from the angle at which choir and north transept met. This allowed for a corkscrew staircase which was very dark but wholly safe. You wound your way up this, Gadberry found, for what appeared to be a very long climb indeed. This was not surprising, because when you eventually emerged in a vast, square chamber it was at a level already well above the clerestory. This had a flagged floor beneath and a raftered roof above – the latter evidently a work of pious restoration once more. Then there was another corkscrew staircase, this time much narrower, and with narrow windows at every second turn through which a whole countryside could already be glimpsed. From this you came into a second chamber, enormously high and brilliantly lit, since it was pierced on all four sides by windows which thrust staggeringly up and up through what could now be only a mere skin of stone. On one wall there was a narrow stone staircase, unguarded on its inner side, and steeply pitched so as to avoid being carried across the line of the window. It was here that you first needed a bit of nerve. Gadberry climbed cautiously – heights did a little worry him – and presently found himself, with rather staggering suddenness, in open air. He was standing on a broad, private snowfield of his own, which seemed to slope on every side from a shallow apex to a low parapet – a matter of crumbled walls rather than of contrived breastwork or crenellation – beyond which hung the absolute void. He was, he knew, a hundred and eighty feet in air – which was just half the height of the tower as it had originally stood.

He found himself looking round apprehensively for Miss Bostock. But that, of course, was absurd; there was nowhere here, as there had been nowhere on the way up, in which another human being could elude observation for an instant. This meant that the tower wasn’t really a very suitable place for treble murder, or even for double or single murder, since there was no obvious way of contriving lethal ambush. But he hadn’t come up here to go on elaborating that morbid sort of fantasy. Indeed, he hadn’t come up here for any very particular reason at all. But at least he could focus his field glasses and take a good look round.

The river had virtually disappeared, and he now understood the explanation of something which he had been vaguely aware of when at ground level. The Abbey was a quiet enough place, but that morning, somehow, it had seemed quieter still. And here was the reason. Normally the silence was faintly but perceptibly qualified by the flowing of the river itself. But the river was totally frozen over, and no sound came from whatever sluggish current continued to flow beneath the ice.

Because the Abbey stood by the river, and indeed spanned it, and because the dales rose in a gentle swell on either side, it was only up and down the valley of the Brut that one commanded a really distant prospect even from this height. Gadberry’s first impulse, inevitably, was to direct his glasses in the direction of that sacred dwelling in which his divine Evadne reposed like a pearl within its shell. Turning that way, then, as resistlessly as a compass-needle to the north, he gazed long and ardently at whatever was revealed. But the shrine, alas, lay hopelessly occluded behind the plantation that straddled the valley. He could only fancy that he just discerned a thin wisp of smoke from an invisible chimney. Perhaps, he thought tenderly, it came from some blessed fire kindled in his beloved’s bedroom. But then the image of her immaculate body lying there, cruelly maimed (for in such perfection even a fractured or sprained ankle must count as maiming) and patiently suffering: this vision was too much to bear; the marvellous clarity and definition of Great-uncle Magnus’ binoculars was suddenly impaired by a watery suffusion; Gadberry had to dry his tears before turning away and directing his curiosity in the other direction.

Now, of course, he was looking at the village of Bruton. It lay in no more than the middle distance, and the glasses brought it almost disconcertingly under his nose. The effect – as often when such an instrument is used from a height – was to make him turn giddy in a very alarming way. The gently sloping sheet of snow on which he stood seemed to heave and turn. For a wild moment he thought it had become precipitous, and that he was about to tumble down it into empty space. Then this disagreeable sensation passed. He saw that he was looking at a Bruton vicarage which was slowly stabilising itself, like a ship coming on an even keel amid some subsiding swell.