An Accidental Shroud (26 page)

The sheets were covered with large, black, decorative-looking handwriting, the lines double spaced. Mayo flicked through them, then began to read carefully, passing each page to her as he finished.

The first one was headed: This is a true account of how I came to be the rightful owner of a work of art in the form of a spray of honeysuckle, made in the workshops of Carl Fabergé and left to me by my dear aunt and godmother, Lilian Courtenay. I will try and describe, as she told it to me, how it came into her possession and what happened to it later.

The account which followed began with the story of Naomi's aunt, a pretty and fun-loving ex-chorus girl who, in her late twenties and approaching the hump as far as her dancing days were concerned, had accepted the marriage proposal of a comfortably-off widower called William Charlton, who'd been an occasional lover of hers, in fact, for some time before his wife died. Giving up her stage career without too many pangs, she went off to live comfortably with him in his house in Streatham, until suddenly he died, leaving her in something of a quandary: according to the lawyers, his business had for some time been gently sliding downhill, and would have ended in bankruptcy sooner or later. As it was, Lilian was left with a pile of debts which she was fortunately able to pay off with insurances and the sale of the business, a wardrobe full of fashionable clothes, the house in Streatham and no income. Always resourceful, she changed her home into a boarding house, finding she could accommodate two or three lodgers at a time, mostly short-term lettings to theatricals.

Occasionally, she had people who stayed longer. One of these was an old man, a Russian émigré called Anton Svetskov, who arrived in London, via Austria, just before the war. He stayed with her for two years, his money slowly running out, growing more and more doddery, talking constantly about St Petersburg and the Imperial court, where he'd been a minor official, full of stories of his connections with the Romanovs, of their great palaces and their untold wealth, of how they spent money like water while the Russian peasants starved.

She took these stories with a pinch of salt, but she was sorry for the old fellow and let him talk. She would invite him into her sitting room to hear her play and sing, and he taught her to make Russian tea. The day inevitably came when he couldn't pay his rent, but she let him stay on out of the kindness of her heart. He ate nothing much, and after all, his room was a tiny boxroom: he was very little trouble.

Svetskov died in the same month the war started. When she was clearing out his room, Lilian found a trunk of rather dreadful old clothes, fit only for burning, some sepia photographs which meant nothing to her, and an ivory-coloured box.

The old humbug! was her first thought when she opened it. Here she'd been, keeping the old man, knowing him to be sad and lonely, thinking him penniless, when all the time he'd been sitting on this obviously extremely valuable object! Had he simply forgotten he had it? It was possible, it had been buried at the bottom of the trunk under those old clothes, and he'd been almost senile when he died. Or had he meant her to have it, for what she'd done for him? After all, she'd kept him and been kind to him, without any thought or hope of repayment, and he didn't have one single friend or relative that she knew of to leave anything to. In the circumstances, she'd no compunction about keeping the Fabergé for herself. It had '
ФAБEPKE
' stamped in the white satin lining of the lid, which Svetskov had told her was 'Fabergé' in the Cyrillic script; she'd had to listen to more stories from Svetskov about the fabulous jewelled eggs and other Fabergé artefacts than she could remember.

She'd realized immediately that the flower must be worth a lot of money, especially when she'd had the letter that was also inside the box translated, which meant that maybe the old man's stories of his illustrious connections hadn't all been figments of his imagination, but she'd no idea how much it was really worth.

During the years that followed, she would look at it and tell herself that she was a fool to leave it lying there, but she couldn't bring herself to sell it. There was something that stopped her, something about its tragic history, and some fear of bad luck if she profited from it. Svetskov, for all his talk, had been a nobody at the court, he couldn't have come by it honestly, it must have been looted. Like many theatrical people, she was very superstitious. If she'd been in need of money, it might have been a different story, but she'd always made a comfortable living from her lodgers. She kept the flower until she was in her mid-sixties and dying of cancer, when she sent for Naomi, who was young, very hard up, and who wouldn't, she thought, have the same feelings about the piece that she had. She gave it to her, relating its history and advising her to sell it for what she could get.

Naomi had felt no better about the object than her aunt had done.
I couldn't have sold it and profited by it, either, she wrote. I didn't want to keep it, but I didn't know what else to do. Just at that time, for various reasons, I packed in my design course in Birmingham and went back to live and work at home in Lavenstock, selling my pieces wherever I could, mostly to George Fontenoy and his son, Nigel. Eventually, Nigel and I became lovers, and I told him about the Fabergé flower, which he offered to keep in his safe. I suppose I was very naive, letting him do that, but not so naive as to trust him with the Tsar's letter, as well
.

Abigail, hearing George at the door, sprang up to take the tray from him. He let her pour the weak liquid and hand out the thin, delicate cups and signalled to her to carry on reading when she'd done so, while he sat back and sipped his tea and waited for them to finish.

When Nigel discovered I was pregnant he wanted to marry me
, Abigail read.
But I had all my life in front of me, I couldn't bear the thought of being tied down, and having to live in Lavenstock forever. In the end, I told him I was leaving, and that I wanted my Fabergé flower back. We had a bitter quarrel but he refused to give it up, so I had no choice but to leave it. Flow could I ever have proved it was mine, without expensive litigation? And anyway, part of me was glad to be rid of it, the money didn't matter. I had a strong feeling that the flower brought bad luck. I told Nigel he was welcome to it, it was his as far as I was concerned, and much good may it do him
.

It was all rubbish, Abigail was about to say, that sort of superstitious nonsense, when she looked up and caught George's expression. 'Read the last page,' he told her. Mayo, having already finished, passed it to Abigail and lifted his teacup, the contents of which were now cool enough to allow him to drink deeply, disposing of it without offence to their host, while Abigail read to the end of the long screed, right up to Naomi's large, scrawled signature.

'You'll notice she's given me permission to do as I wish with it,' George said, 'perhaps sell it and give the proceeds to charity. She seems to have thought that doing so might break its influence, and perhaps it will. Taking these things lightly is apt to rebound. Beautiful work of art though it is, it has a tainted history. It's brought nothing but grief and sorrow to everybody concerned with it.' A little French clock on the mantel busily measured off the seconds and a puff of gas blew from a lump of coal. 'She wasn't being fair. His reasons weren't entirely mercenary. He was a perfectionist, Nigel, I daresay he couldn't bear to think of that lovely thing only half complete without its true history. He was never in a position where he needed to sell it, so he hung on to it in the hope that some day Naomi would let him have the letter.'

Mayo felt it would be invidious to point out that the flower had never been Nigel's to part with. If he'd done so, would both he and Naomi have escaped being the last links in the long line of chance happenings, the randomness of fate which had finally landed on them as victims?

When they left, George came to the door with them, opening it on to the desolation of the garden. The great cedar had gone, and the smaller trees which had come down with it, but the rhododendrons were still flat and the whole garden was carpeted with a debris of small branches, twigs and round, scented cones, filling the air with a resiny tang.

'What a mess!' George looked at the dereliction, more bewildered by it than by anything that had happened. Then his brow cleared. 'Christine will have it seen to. What would we all do without Christine?'

Mayo put his key in the ignition. The traffic was heavy. Friday, people speeding home to spend the weekend with their loved ones. 'What are you doing this weekend, Abigail?'

She pulled a face. 'I'd better tackle some of the dust that's accumulated at home! And get some fresh air – there's a hill behind the cottage I haven't yet climbed.' And she smiled, a small, inward-turning smile with a hint of radiance, just for herself – and surely the man who could make her look like that? 'And you, sir?'

'Me?' Stabbed with an absurd jealousy, Mayo shrugged. 'I don't know.' Then, suddenly, he did. There was the letter from Alex, resting even now in his breast pocket, a talisman lying next to his heart. Like a schoolboy with his first love letter, he'd read and reread it, until it was already frayed on the creases. She was driving home with Lois on Wednesday. And maybe, his hopeful heart said, home would mean his home, at last, for both of them – his flat, 21a, Camberley Street. She'd be there always, they'd never disagree again, she'd be waiting for him every time he got home. Hallelujah!

The sheer lunacy of such thoughts pulled him up short. The vision of Alex as some idealized wife in an apron, a hot meal simmering in the oven, her career on the back burner ... He came to earth, and laughed.

He knew suddenly that he'd never had any intention of waiting until Wednesday. He looked at his watch. There'd be a lot to do – the flat to make respectable before his fastidious young woman arrived – his clocks would need their weekly winding, otherwise they'd all run down and be out of synch and throw temper tantrums like prima donnas. And after that, there was a long drive before him. He'd better get a move on.