A Corpse in Shining Armour (13 page)

I stayed on the bench, alternately thinking and dozing, until the sky turned pale. There were no further disturbances other
than water voles plopping into the river and the white underside of a barn owl swooping soundlessly out of the woods. The
rowing boat didn’t come back.

‘I see some of your household enjoy rowing,’ I said.

On my way up the lawn at the hall for tea with Lady Brinkburn, I’d noticed a boat moored to the landing stage. As a social
occasion, our meeting could hardly have been more conventional. I’d been greeted at the door by a neatly dressed manservant
and led through to a drawing room overlooking the lawn that sloped down to the river. Lady Brinkburn was standing just inside
the doorway, smiling what looked like a perfectly genuine welcome. A King Charles spaniel slid down from a cushion and licked
my hand.

‘If you don’t care for dogs, don’t let him…’ she’d said.

‘I love dogs.’

‘His name’s Lovelace. Animals are such a comfort, aren’t they? Indian or China tea?’

Everything about the house and grounds radiated order and neatness, even cheerfulness. The maid who brought in the tea things
had given me a smile as if genuinely pleased to be taking trouble for a guest. There’d been nothing in her manner to suggest
either fear or mockery of her employer. Scared servants move awkwardly and look sidelong. Servants who despise their masters
have a satirical, slightly exaggerated way of moving and standing, like actors in a bad play. No sign of either at Brinkburn
Hall. We’d sipped tea and talked conventionally: how delightful to be by the river in summer, especially for an artist. Wasn’t
it difficult to sketch or paint the flow of water convincingly? How did Turner manage those marvellous rough seas? I launched
my seemingly innocent remark in the wake of these watery topics.

Lady Brinkburn smiled.

‘Sometimes if one of the gardener’s boys is not needed elsewhere I’ll have him row me up to the old bridge and back. If there’s
not a boy to spare, I sometimes lie on cushions in my little boat moored to the landing stage, look up at the sky and imagine
I’m floating along like the Lady of Shalott. Don’t you adore Tennyson? Such a talented young man.’

‘I prefer Shelley.’

‘My dear, such old-fashioned tastes for a young woman. You make me feel quite modern.’

She smiled, offered more tea. We were getting on well. I was getting nowhere. I might have been talking to a different woman
from the one in the churchyard. Even the oddness of her footwear was gone. Today her high-arched feet were sleek in white
silk stockings, encased in blue velvet house-shoes embroidered with silver cockle-shells. She was wearing white and blue silk,
with three stems of white sweet peas pinned to the shoulder. If there was anything unconventional about her manner or surroundings,
it was only that her dress and the furnishing of the room showed leanings towards the artistic. The room’s colour scheme of
soft green curtains, green and dusky pink upholstery and lighter pink cushions was unconventional but surprisingly restful.
A revolving bookcase in light wood was full of poetry books and novels. Her piano had music sheets scattered untidily over
the top of it, for use rather than effect. Not a detail came anywhere near eccentricity, let alone insanity.

She’d said we shouldn’t talk about the business of the churchyard wall, so that approach was closed to me. I’d decided, for
the present at any rate, not to refer to the matter of the ghostly warning. If somebody were trying to scare her, why should
I do his work for him? Still, I needed to find a way to break through this crust of politeness into whatever was happening
underneath. While thinking about it, I looked at a pottery trough on the windowsill, planted with things that looked something
like primroses, but with shiny leaves and strange-coloured flowers. Her eyes followed mine.

‘I see you’re admiring my auriculas.’

‘Auriculas, yes.’

I wasn’t admiring them. Their stiffness and their purple-brown petals, bordered with yellow, made them look like plants in
a waxworks. But a tenderness in her voice warned me to bite my tongue.

‘Would you care to see my greenhouse? That’s where I keep my collection.’

‘I should love to.’

The spaniel and I followed her, through a small dining room with a table set for one, into a corridor leading to the back
of the house. Clashing of crockery and a low murmur of voices came from the kitchen next door.

‘I hope you don’t mind coming out this way. It’s much quicker.’

She tried to turn a door handle. It resisted and she clicked her tongue impatiently.

‘Whiteley’s always locking things. It’s a positive mania with him.’

She felt in her pocket, produced a key and opened the door. We were in a cobbled courtyard at the back of the house. Various
outhouses stood round it, one more substantial than the rest.

‘Is that your dairy?’ I said.

‘Was. We don’t use it any more–so wasteful.’

She answered absently, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. I edged sideways so that we passed close to it. The door was shut
with an iron bar and a heavy padlock. The hasp and staple of the padlock gleamed with a film of new oil. We walked out of
the courtyard, along a path and into a free-standing greenhouse. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine. Raised benches
down both sides held hundreds of pots of the strange flowered plants. She led the way between them with the confidence of
somebody on her own territory, plunging a hand into the masses of pots to pick out those for my attention.

‘This one’s our own cross. You see, the border is much deeper than the others. And this one has the most extraordinary streaks
in the petals. If it breeds true, it could lead to most exciting developments.’

If it breeds true.
She’d said it without a trace of self-consciousness. At the end of the bench, somebody had set up a small painting area.
Brushes and a well-used box of watercolours stood on a board alongside an open sketchpad. I looked at the pad and gasped.

‘That’s beautiful.’

‘Do you really think so? I try to keep a record of all our new ones. It’s very amateur stuff, alas.’

It looked anything but amateur, the kind of beautifully detailed painting you might find in a book of flora, every line of
the petal clear and accurate. If she needed a certificate of sanity, she couldn’t produce anything much more convincing. We
walked back through the greenhouse. Next to the auriculas, I saw some old friends.

‘Saxifrages.’

‘Yes. I keep them to remember the Alps,’ she said.

We started talking then, not the constrained conversation of the drawing room, but as two people with a shared enthusiasm.
Did I know the Alps? Those amazing silenes that cling to the rocks like moss and suddenly cover themselves in pink flowers.

‘And those martagon lilies,’ I said. ‘The way they stand up on a ridge.’

‘Yes, like candelabra. And those white St Bruno’s lilies, whole slopes of them moving in the wind like waves.’

We stared at each other. I thought, ‘I like this woman,’ and wished I didn’t. From her eyes, I saw that she had her doubts
too. The enthusiasm was gradually fading away, and caution following, as if she thought: ‘Can I trust this woman?’ Without
saying anything, she led the way back to the drawing room. Instead of inviting me to sit down again, or giving me a polite
signal that it was time to go, she stood looking at me in a considering way. She seemed to come to a decision.

‘If you’re interested in Alpines, there’s something in the library you might care to see.’

The spaniel and I followed her out to the hall and along a gallery that looked as if it ran the length of the house. The walls
were hung with swords and battle-axes in patterns, paintings of stern men posing in court dress or riding wild-eyed horses.
She passed without looking at them.

‘My husband had these brought down from Northumberland. He said the boys should be reminded of their heritage.’

It was the first mention of husband and sons, thrown off casually in apology for the pictures.

At the far end of the gallery was a low rectangular plinth. The basket of flowers on it was too small for the plinth. I guessed
that, until very recently, that had been where Sir Gilbert Brinkburn’s armour had stood. She went past it without a second
glance, turned a corner and opened a door.

The greenish light of the library gave walking in there the feel of being submerged in a soothing warm sea. Olive-coloured
blinds, pulled half down over long windows, protected the books that covered most of the walls from floor to ceiling. In alcoves
between the bookcases, white marble busts and pots of flowers stood alternately on white pillars. There was no mustiness about
this library. The smell was wax polish, flowers, old leather. Lady Brinkburn led the way past busts of Shakespeare and Milton
to the far corner of the room. A slope-topped desk stood there with a straight chair in front of it. She pulled out a red
leather-covered volume from a shelf next to the desk, put it down on the sloping top and undid the faded tapes that held it
shut.

‘There are your martagons. The colours have faded, I’m afraid.’

The double-page spread was composed of handwritten paragraphs in small rounded script and pencil and watercolour sketches,
mostly of flowers. A train of mules, some with riders, others loaded with painting equipment and picnic things, walked across
the bottom of both pages, so beautifully observed that I couldn’t help smiling. When I looked up, she was smiling too but
nervously, as if my opinion mattered.

‘This is beautiful,’ I said. ‘Yours?’

She nodded.

‘I did it a long time ago, more than twenty years. Some of the sketches are very amateurish, I’m afraid.’

In comparison with her auricula painting, that might be true, but the pages had the vigour and freshness of a young woman’s
work.

‘Was it your first time in the Alps?’

‘First and only. I was almost mad with the beauty of it. The men would bring the mules round as soon as it got light and up
we’d go, through the pinewoods and on to the mountain pastures where they graze the cows. We’d be all day up there, no sound
but the streams and the cowbells.’

‘Were you travelling with your family?’

She gave me a sidelong look, not smiling now.

‘It was my honeymoon journey.’

Knowing how things had turned out, I didn’t know what to say to that. She touched one of the mules gently with her fingertip.

‘We stayed in Chamonix for three weeks. I truly believe they were the happiest weeks of my life.’

So they’d been happy once, this couple who’d spent most of their married life apart. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry
about that. I imagined them sitting on the grass together by some mountain stream, she sketching, he watching her with the
pride of a man newly wed.

‘My husband had managed to pick up some infection of the stomach,’ she said. ‘He was bedridden for the entire three weeks,
so I was able to do pretty much what I wanted.’

Another sidelong look, testing my reaction. She’d quite deliberately led me down a wrong path. She had something in mind,
I was sure of that, and the ruthless woman of the graveyard didn’t seem so far away any more.

‘Did you go on across the Alps to Italy?’ I said.

It was an innocent question on the face of it. Most people did. The encounter with the daemon lover had happened in Italy.

‘Yes, we spent most of the summer by Lake Como.’

Her face and voice were bland again. I looked at the book. The Alpine pages were only about halfway through.

‘And you kept up your journal for the whole journey?’

‘Of course. What else was there to do, all those hours in hotels?’

She turned a page. I admired her gentians. We agreed that no paint on earth, not even lapis lazuli, could match that heart-stopping
blue. She was playing for time, trying to come to a decision.

‘If you’re really interested, you’d be welcome to come back tomorrow and have a longer look at it,’ she said.

A sound came from the other end of the room, a creaking of wood.

‘Mr Carmichael, come down and be introduced,’ she said.

She was looking up towards a corner by the door. I followed her look and saw a man crouched at the top of a library ladder,
with his back braced against the corner, his head folded under the ceiling and a book on his bent knees. He managed to look
perfectly comfortable, as if that were a normal position for reading. I’d no idea he was there, but she must have known. He
looked down at us, unhurriedly replaced the book on the top shelf and climbed down the ladder, unfolding as he came. He was
tall and very slim, in his late twenties or early thirties. His dark hair, worn quite long, was pleasantly untidy, face clean-shaven,
eyes bright behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles.

‘Miss Lane, may I introduce Robert Carmichael. Mr Carmichael’s our librarian.’

‘A grander title than I deserve,’ he said, touching my hand. ‘I suppose I’m a kind of shepherd of books.’

His voice was low and pleasant.

‘Some of the family’s books have been shockingly neglected,’ Lady Brinkburn explained. ‘They’ve been buying them since Caxton
and never looking at them, let alone reading them. Mr Carmichael and I brought two carriage-loads of them down from Northumberland
and are doing what we can to repair the damage.’ She turned to him. ‘Miss Lane has been kind enough to take an interest in
my poor travel journal. I’ve invited her to come back tomorrow for a longer look.’

I thought he’d probably heard that anyway, perched up on his ladder. He nodded politely, but did not seem enthusiastic about
the idea.

‘I should love to read all of it,’ I said. ‘If you’re sure it’s not an intrusion.’

I put a little emphasis on the ‘all’ to let her know that I was aware of what was happening. I wasn’t sure if she caught the
implication, but he did. The look he gave me was both surprised and alarmed. She must have noticed it, because there was a
touch of defiance in her voice when she spoke to me.