Cavalier Case (19 page)

"It's important to get all the details right. You see, I'm going to write all this up for the school magazine," she pronounced. "I'm a historian now like Aunt Zena." And like Dave Smith. And like Rupert Durham, for that matter. There are a good many of them about, one way and another, thought Jemima. All the same, much was to be forgiven Nell. That, at any rate, was Jemima Shore's conclusion, long afterwards, thinking back on the whole intricate web-like course of the Cavalier Case. Because it was Nell and Nell alone, like the child who called attention to the Emperor's obvious lack of clothes, who thought of asking the obvious question.

"Who is it?" asked Little Nell Meredith, future historian. She added in her faintly whining voice: "I mean, it must be someone. A crusader or something."

Thinking it over afterwards, Jemima felt fairly sure that she herself would not have acted as she did now if Nell had not put that— admittedly obvious—question. For it was a question which took her back to her obsession with Decimus. Now more than ever, with Cass vanished from her life, no Mr. Right on the horizon, let alone closer, the dark-eyed poet-in-the-portrait facing her (now singly occupied) bed had begun to haunt her dreams again. Alas, these dreams were no longer erotic as they had sometimes been during her reconciliation with Cass...

The dreams now owed more to the convolutions of her new investigation than to sex—or history. This was a phenomenon Jemima had encountered before in some of her previous investigations. It was not exactly a case of the solution being discovered in a dream—that would be far too neat a way of expressing it—and anyway it was never the full solution of the mystery which occurred to her in this manner; more a question of some detail or aspect of a case, hitherto confused or embedded deep in her mind, coming to the surface, as it were, in sleep. In the morning certain things were infinitely clearer than they had been the night before: as though the sands of the horizon had been reshaped under cover of darkness by some strange night wind, to lift up a new prominence.

Of course exactly the same process also took place with her television work: she would never forget waking up knowing what the first shot for the Sri Lankan brides programme should be (and it wasn't the one that Spike Thompson, the cameraman, thought it was going to be, either).

Two nights ago she had had a rather horrible dream about Decimus, which she knew simply tied in to the fact that his portrait faced her bed. Nevertheless it had upset her. So far as Jemima could remember, Decimus had stepped out of the portrait (like the Decimus Ghost was supposed to do at Lackland Court?) and as he did so, issued some command to the big dog beside him. At which the big dog—breed still unknown—had rushed at Midnight with his enormous teeth bared and begun savaging the beloved black cat, who had been lying curled in his familiar position at the bottom of Jemima's bed. Jemima had screamed and dived at the dog, trying desperately to protect her pet. At the same time she shouted at the poet: "Stop him, stop him, cant you see, he's going to kill him ..."

"I can't," replied Decimus. "I can't. You see, I've lost my fingers. And he held up his left hand, the one hidden in her picture (and in the National Gallery version but revealed at Lackland Court). She saw the mutilated white hand, but with a single finger—the forefinger—extra long and menacing in her dream, ending in a curving predatory fingernail. Jemima had woken up shaking, to find Midnight buffeting her face and shoulders, a furry claustrophobic presence, demanding in his own way to be let out of her bedroom. 

It was the sudden recollection of that dream which caused Jemima now to say, slowly, to Nell Meredith: "Nell, you can see the hands quite clearly, can't you?"

The girl nodded. She was once again kneeling by the graveside.

"Those phalanges, I think they are called, the bones of the fingers. How many bones, fingers really, are there on the left hand?"

Nell bent forward further—the skeleton had been once more covered in its polythene—as though to trace the outline.

"No, that's the right hand; the left. Do you see what I think I see? But contrast it with the right hand: they're absolutely different, aren't they? Look, Nell, and Charlotte—" 

Jemima herself knelt down and stared intently into the grave. After an instant, Charlotte, pushing Dessie also down on his knees as though they were in church, joined her. As Jemima knelt there, concentrating on the disarticulated bonework of the skeleton and wondering desperately if she was imagining what she saw (all the fingers missing? a kind of odd blunted bone structure in place of fingers?) she was aware of being joined by Zena Meredith, and then immediately afterwards by Dave Smith, who had both abandoned or been released by their respective groups.

Nell scrambled to her feet and grabbed Zena's hand. "Aunt Zena," she cried. "It's absolutely brilliant. Jemima says the fingers are missing, just like in the story you told me, do look—"

"Decimus?" The name itself was first pronounced by Zena in a soft, wondering voice. "Here? It can't be."

It was left to Dave Smith to exclaim, much less softly, much less wondermgly: "Yes, it bloody well can be. Do you realise who lived here? Christ, just let me look at this." He shoved Charlotte—and Dessie—roughly aside, knelt down himself, pulled back the polythene, and began to gaze intently into the earth. He put his own finger forward. "No phalanges, and even those metacarpals tapering away, Quite unlike the right hand. No other sign of disturbance. It can be, lt is, it bloody well must be," he muttered.

"Don't touch anything, Dave Smith." It was Zena again, now very fierce. "You've no right to touch anything. This is our history."

Charlotte, outraged at her treatment by Dave, and busily brushing down her pale blue spotted skirt, joined in. "If it is Decimus," she said firmly, "then we must get hold of Dan immediately. He is the head of the family."

But it was Gillian Gibson who had the last word. Really, Jemima reflected later, she was a very nice woman. Twisting a pair of navy blue fabric gloves in her hands, she spoke for the first time since the drama of the skeleton's discovery had began to unroll.

"Whoever it is," she began nervously but with the sound of proper determination in her voice, "I think we should all say a little prayer for him. For the repose of his soul. Wouldn't that be the right thing to do?"

Late That Night

That night Handsome Dan Meredith, the tennis player victorious in his tournament, came back to Lackland Court. And the Decimus Ghost came back too. Jemima Shore, alone in her four-postered bedroom which overlooked the forecourt, heard Dan Lackland's car. Or rather the car she thought was his. She did not see—or hear—the Decimus Ghost. Although the ghost took note of her presence.

When Jemima heard the noise of the car—it must have been nearly midnight—she went and looked out of the high embrasured window. The action was, as she knew in advance it would be, a mistake. The car was Dan's Mercedes, but it barely stopped to debouch the occupant of the passenger seat—Dan himself, leaping lightly out, easily visible in his white shirt and linen trousers. There was a quick kiss to the driver and he was running with equal lightness up the broad front steps. Did he glance up as he went at the words engraved on the front Porch? Love and Honour: the perfect motto for the successful tennis player.

The driver of the car, equally, with her great loose mane of red hair, was recognisable even at a glance as quick as Dan's parting kiss: Alix arstairs. Love and Honour? His tennis partner in the "friendly Hertfordshire match".' No doubt. Jemima went back to bed.

The four poster itself was much as it must have been in Cousin Tommy's day, with its thick tapestried hangings of a vaguely Jacobean nature: hardly original, but nevertheless they badly needed renovation. The sheets and pillowcases on the other hand were new, delicately shadowed with flowers, and edged with frills: Charlotte's taste. Either the stifling feel of the tapestried ceiling above her head—memories of Edgar Allan Poe's sinister story of a descending ceiling lurked in her mind—or the slight stiffness of the pretty new sheets, or maybe the tumultuous events of the day itself, prevented her from sleeping. She felt extraordinarily restless and strongly tempted to wander herself in the old creaking house, as Haygarth must once have done . . . Was the ghost abroad? A foolish thought. I
must
go to sleep, Jemima told herself. Who knows, perhaps a dream, another illuminating dream will come . . .

It would be foolish to pretend that by the time the Lackland Court party left Taynford Grange earlier that evening, all possible doubt concerning the identity of the newly discovered skeleton had been eliminated. That of course would be for various official processes to establish in the future: including, crucially, the approximate dating of the bones by the Home Office Pathologist. But so much could now be deduced from a skeleton, or parts thereof, as Jemima was aware, in view of modern technology, modern instruments, modern machines, that sooner or later not only the age and sex of the subject, but also the approximate dating
would
be known. And even, it was suggested by Zena (who like Dave Smith had done some research on the subject—for one of her books), the actual manner of death, had it been violent.

So that
if
the skeleton proved to be that of a mid-seventeenth-century male in his thirties, missing all the fingers on the left hand for many years before death but who had received wounds in his head and thigh at the point of death, 
then
the evidence of this being Decimus Meredith, 1st Viscount Lackland, a body already known to be missing, would surely be very strong. The wounds would be the final clincher "
Heaven's True Mourning
" being explicit about them: "...first still on his charger, reached by many hands, then, falling amid the hooves of his own horse, in his arm, in his very head." All this was before you got on to matters such as teeth and dentistry—it was explained that teeth (or the lack of them) and dentistry (of a sort) could help as far back as the seventeenth century.

That was Dave Smith's contribution, supplementing the information given by Zena. One of the weird effects of this dramatic discovery was to draw Dave Smith and Zena Meredith together into a new alliance of the knowledgeable. So that it was in fact from a combination of their two accounts—for once not in angry opposition—that Jemima pieced together the meaning of Dave's enigmatic exclamation at the graveside: "When you think who lived here!"

Later Jemima would see this as the vital element in the story—the strange historical link which gave her the solution to the Cavalier Case. But at the time Jemima merely cried out in shock: "Lady Isabella! I don't believe it." Then, feeling almost affronted in some way: "It's not true! What about that famous Puritan? Sir Bartleby Potter. Lady Manfred's elusive ghost, who was killed at the siege of Lackland.
He
lived here."

"Sure he was living here in 1648, but this wasn't Puritan country . . . ," began D. J. Smith, local historian. There was a smug suggestion of "I told you so" about him: for it was after all Dave (not Zena) who had all along held to the theory of Lady Isabella removing the body. Then Zena herself, future biographer of Decimus, took over, 't had the air of the lecture, something already prepared, or at least thought out.

'In 1645, the year in which Decimus was killed, this was Lady Isabella's house, or rather her husband's, her second husband, Sir Ludovic Broughton, the Royalist soldier who was killed himself the next year. She was married three times, you know, no, four, and despite what we may euphemistically call her hyperactivity, never had any children. So Bartleby Potter got hold of the house after Ludovic Broughton's death. Then he tried to marry Lady Isabella into the bargain, as well as trying his luck with Olivia. Both of them at the same time. They were both widows at that point. Rather tactless of him—but then Sir Bartlehy was probably not into tact where marriage was concerned. The real point was that they were also both of them heiresses, except Olivia had a son and Isabella didn't. Which of course made Isabella a more attractive proposition as a wife. Even to a Puritan. Money, you might say, made up for morals."

"No kid to inherit her loot," put in Dave.

Zena continued: "Lady Isabella simply said no. But it was Olivia who gave Sir Bartleby that famous brush-off about not subjecting her son to another man's corrective rod."

Jemima thought Dave Smith was working on some witticism on the subject of Lady Isabella and a man's corrective rod. Instead he contented himself with observing,  "Yeah, everyone wanted to marry Lady Izz, wouldn't you know it, big eyes, big tits and best of all, big bucks." 

This left Zena to plod on at some length through Lady Isabella's family tree, explaining just why she was an heiress—"the last of the ancient English family, no, not the Irish one as you might think . . . ," where Jemima frankly could not follow her.

One point, however, in all this was fully established. At the time of the Battle of Taynford, late in 1645, following the Battle of Edgehill, Lady Isabella Clare—either for convenience's sake or in tribute to her fortune, her maiden name was generally used for this much married lady—had unquestionably been living at Taynford Grange, home of her second husband, Sir Ludovic Broughton. It was then that D. J. Smith rose to the occasion.

"And all this time, hubby was away!" he shouted. "That's rich, isnt it? Plenty of local nookie up to the time of the battle for her and our Decimus. Romantic tryst-in-death, love you forever, you're mine not her's (the wife's) ever after."

Zena frowned; not so much at her new ally's choice of language, it turned out, as in genuine historical doubt.

"Ludovic Broughton? Are you quite certain? Surely he must have fought at Taynford?"

"No way, listen I just checked it out for the Cav. Celeb." (even this abbreviated reference passed without troubling Zena). "He was off with the King, probably just outside London at that point. Mind you, we could bring him back for the Cav. Celeb., and the King too, Charles I, that's always a good part, sort of small and stammering and terribly, terribly dignified, then with hubby around we get jealousy, cuckoldry. Take a few liberties—"