Lord Mullion's Secret (16 page)

Honeybath picked up his belongings (and Cyprian's abandoned garments as well) and descended into the castle. He did so in a certain absence of mind, which even extended to his forgetting that it was an open day. No great ill-consequence ought to have succeeded upon this. Since the family made itself scarce on such occasions it was no doubt the convention that their house guests should do so too. But it was clearly no more than a custom to be abrogated at need, and there was no call whatever for anybody positively to scurry or cower. If Honeybath stumbled upon a group of sightseers he could simply glide past them unobtrusively, if necessary with a polite bow. This reassuring thought came to him in the moment that he did in fact hear, round a corner in front of him, the unmistakable tones of a guide holding forth to her flock. And a moment later Honeybath found himself engulfed in this small situation.

It was in a spot he was vaguely aware of as having visited before: a broad stone-flagged corridor which vanished on a gentle curve some way ahead. But the passage, although so far from narrow, was much congested, this particular party being so numerous that it would pretty well have filled the great hall of the castle itself – that being, indeed, the point at which it had been marshalled for its conducted tour. And all these people were in not particularly courteous motion, since their conductress was apparently addressing them at greater length than they desired or – probably – deserved. Honeybath was at once elbowed by two stout women manoeuvring to take photographs (which they had no business to be doing). He made way for them as well as he could, and this had the consequence of drawing him deeper into the mob. Between two rucksacks of the fashionable and formidable sort that tower high above the wearer's head he became aware that he was contemplating a pike of altogether improbable size, and that the pike appeared to be pursuing a perch. So he suddenly realized where he stood. This was the kitchen corridor, and the guide had halted all these gaping people for the purpose of giving them in some detail the history of the domestic offices they were about to visit.

Honeybath had no wish to view the kitchen; it was his simple aim to find his way to that soup and bread and cheese which had presumably emanated from it. But the castle was a confusing place, and he soon saw that he had lost himself and ought to retrace his steps. This was not altogether easy. He had now been edged directly beneath the regard of the guide. She was a grey-haired woman of severe appearance, and pinned on the lapel of her correspondingly severe tweed jacket was a little card reading MISS KINDER-SCOUT. Honeybath found this irrationally alarming. And he had also become aware that several serious American faces were turned his way and that he was being curiously regarded through several pairs of bizarrely shaped American spectacles. This puzzled him. Even if he were a little discomposed he couldn't, surely, have anything actually arresting about his appearance? But in fact – it dawned on him – he had, since he was carrying a travelling rug over which was draped a pair of brilliantly coloured and variegated silk pyjamas. And now one of the stout women was positively positioning herself to photograph him. It was to be presumed that she had identified him as Lord Mullion's valet.

Honeybath decided – foolishly, as it turned out – that he must make a resolute break for freedom. He raised a frankly minatory hand at the camera-woman, turned, and pushed his way out of the crush. Then he hurried back down the corridor. As he did so. and with what could only be called enhanced folly, he nervously bundled up the pyjamas and concealed them within the folds of the rug.

‘One moment, please!'

The words came from Miss Kinder-Scout, but to Honeybath's sense might have been uttered by what the poet Shelley describes as the dreaded voice of Demogorgon. He froze in his tracks.

‘It will be best,' Miss Kinder-Scout said (in fact quite calmly), ‘that we proceed as a party. It is something insisted upon by Lord Mullion's insurers. If anybody wishing to cut short his visit will kindly raise a hand, his convenience can, of course, be met at once.'

Honeybath felt unable to raise a hand – like a child at school who seeks to be ‘excused'. He felt even more unable to make his way up to Miss Kinder-Scout and explain himself as Charles Honeybath, RA, temporary limner in ordinary to the Earl of Mullion. He fell meekly into line at the tail of the mob.

It was in this state, already sadly demoralized, that a fresh charge of the unaccountable was, as it were, exploded under his nose. The party had moved on towards the kitchen, but had again been halted for some further explanatory word on the part of the untiring Miss Kinder-Scout. Honeybath found himself looking at the head of a basset-hound in blurry charcoal. He found himself looking at a pile of oily apples and grapes. And hanging between these he found himself looking at two familiar, watercolours. Or rather, they ought to have been familiar, but were not. He had certainly never seen these two little sketches of French river scenes before.

For a moment Honeybath felt that he must have gone quite mad, and was viewing nothing veridically there on the wall but merely a hallucination of his own conjuring up. But he was a man quick to rally in a moment of crisis, and he did so now.

‘Miss Kinder-Scout,' he said in a voice sufficiently loud to carry down the corridor, ‘I wonder whether you can tell me anything about these two interesting pictures?'

Miss Kinder-Scout, if slightly surprised, was gratified by this meritorious curiosity on the part of her late suspect, and she joined him at once.

‘My name is Honeybath,' Honeybath said in a lower tone. ‘Lord Mullion – whose guest I happen to be – has told me that you take a particular interest in the pictures, even the unimportant ones. Does anything strike you about those two watercolours by Miss Camilla Wyndowe?'

‘Nothing whatever.' Miss Kinder-Scout had adjusted herself to this new situation without difficulty. ‘Except that they are not those that hung there quite recently.'

‘That hung there last night, as it happens.'

‘How very odd! I have occasionally pointed out the two sketches hanging here as being of some interest, as painted by a member of the family. People like to be shown that sort of thing. Perhaps Mullion decided to change the family exhibits.'

‘It's extremely improbable, surely, that Henry would do anything of the kind.'

‘So it is. Perhaps it was Camilla herself.'

‘She does seem a little unpredictable. But it would be a most purposeless vagary, it seems to me.' Honeybath uttered this complete untruth (as it happened to be) unblushingly. He was coming to feel that Mullion Castle was a place, at least at present, where one ought to think twice before expressing one's true mind. ‘Don't you think, Miss Kinder-Scout?' he added politely.

‘I doubt whether it is my business to think about the matter at all. None of Miss Wyndowe's sketches can be of the slightest commercial value, and one brace of them is as good as another. From the point of view of security – which is my business here – the matter cannot be of the slightest consequence.' Miss Kinder-Scout pronounced this judgement very crisply indeed, but Honeybath was nevertheless not sure that she was expressing her true mind either. ‘And now,' she added, ‘I must shove this lot through, or the next lot will be breathing down our necks.'

Honeybath felt that he was dismissed. But at least he now had licence to withdraw without being shouted at. The memory of his late humiliation in this regard prompted him to take a slightly tart farewell of this bossy female.

‘Perhaps I ought to explain,' he said, ‘that I am not concealing some valuable object beneath this confounded rug. What is bundled up inside it is merely Lord Wyndowe's pyjama-suit.'

‘Indeed, Mr Honeybath?' Miss Kinder-Scout was not receiving this information well, and it had to be supposed that she thought such a state of affairs could be the consequence only of some unseemly frolic. ‘The last thing that Lord Wyndowe mislaid around the castle was a cigarette case. Not that he had mislaid it.'

‘Yes,' Honeybath said. ‘I heard about that.' And he made the best of his retreat. It involved the hazard of a further entanglement with Lord Mullion's customers, since it was in fact true that another group was following hard upon Miss Kinder-Scout's. The castle, unlike so many modern shops and offices, didn't firmly shut itself up during a luncheon interval. Honeybath was now considerably perturbed. He felt, perhaps needlessly, that the mere possession of Cyprian's rug and cast-off garments rendered him immediately conspicuous and ridiculous. And his situation, or his sense of it, was not improved by the absurd fact that he didn't know what refuge he was making for. The castle was now – to echo a feeble joke of Dr Atlay's – alarmingly Wyndoweless. He hadn't a notion in what direction lay the nooks in which the family and its servants had respectively ensconced themselves. He was in a nightmarish world of polyglot persons being herded through the place by half a dozen females part of whose job was to keep a sharp eye open for anomalous and suspicious characters.

This harassing phase of his experience, however, ended abruptly when he made one further desperate turn and found himself in momentary solitude before the door of the library. He paused to collect himself and take breath. As he did so the library door opened and Dr Atlay stood framed in it. The appearance of a familiar character who was virtually a member of the household ought to have been entirely reassuring. Yet this was by no means the case. The vicar, as if he had caught some instant infection from Honeybath himself, was in a state of marked agitation. He was as pale as a sheet before sheets had formed the bad habit of taking on delicate pastel shades, and he was now staring at Honeybath much as if he had been detected in the commission of some hideous crime.

Here was a more extraordinary circumstance. Honeybath's mind – disposed, as it was, to take flying leaps into conjecture which might be inspired or disastrous as the case proved to be – flew at once to that odd occasion in the library the evening before. He saw again in his mind's eye the little group standing in front of the showcase in which reposed the three Hilliard miniatures – or rather the two authentic Hilliard miniatures and the spurious one. He had judged it curious that Atlay, apparently well-informed on such matters, had failed to observe the fact that one young man had, so to speak, changed himself into quite another young man. Was it not – and the speculation had come to him before – conceivable that Atlay himself had perpetrated the substitution? Was it not equally conceivable that the man had now been all but detected in a repeat performance of the same atrocious perfidy? As he asked himself this shocking question Honeybath's acute visualizing faculty produced that kind of small flashback in slow motion favoured by television cameras when concerning themselves with athletic occasions. The bowler delivers the ball once more, and you decide for yourself whether the umpire has been justified in making that fatal gesture of dismissal from the crease. Atlay, Honeybath now saw, in the very moment of finding himself observed, had hastily thrust something into a pocket in his decorous clerical attire.

But now that wretched man controlled himself. He advanced upon Honeybath and shook hands – much as if the two men were Frenchmen or Germans given to this exercise upon every possible occasion.

‘Good morning,' Honeybath said. ‘You seem upset.'

‘Upset? Not at all. Or, rather, yes indeed.' Having had this surprising second thought, Dr Atlay paused for a moment. ‘The news is most upsetting, is it not? Dr Hinkstone has been sent for. He proved, unfortunately, to be out on his rounds. But he is expected any time now. Meanwhile, we must hope for the best.'

‘News? I haven't heard any news. Has somebody been taken ill?'

‘Ah! Well, it is only an hour ago that Mrs Trumper telephoned down to Lady Mullion. Mrs Trumper felt that Camilla Wyndowe ought not to be left alone. Fortunately she is a qualified nurse, and presumably knows what to do meantime. I suppose that some sort of seizure must be in question.'

‘I am very sorry to hear it.' For the moment, Honeybath's suspicions about Dr Atlay went out of his head. ‘When did this happen?'

‘Presumably in the night, but the details are unknown to me. I heard Patty Wyndowe say something about her great-aunt's having had one of her wandering fits. It may have overtaxed her strength.'

‘I see.' Honeybath was distressed to think that more decisive action on his own part might have cut short Miss Wyndowe's injudicious peregrinations. He refrained, however, from taking up this point with the vicar. He believed himself to have a shrewd notion of what Miss Wyndowe had been about, and that the less said about it for the present the better. He also felt rather strongly that it was with Henry that he ought to be trying to resolve such perplexities as beset him. ‘You must have known Miss Wyndowe,' he said, ‘for many years?'

‘Yes, indeed. She is an old lady, now, and it may be that we have to fear the worst.' Dr Atlay advanced this consideration with a kind of routine clerical unction. ‘It is hard to tell how her death would affect the matter.'

‘I beg your pardon?' Honeybath felt he had been offered a curiously inconsequent remark.

‘Various family matters and interests, I mean.' Dr Atlay, who had not really shed his mysterious initial agitation, produced this amplification in some confusion. ‘Camilla Wyndowe was the only child of the late Lord Sylvanus Wyndowe, who was himself one of only two children of Henry's grandfather, the twelfth earl. So Camilla may be a woman of some property. One cannot help thinking of these things at such a time, although assuredly one ought not to do so.'

‘I suppose not.' Honeybath didn't believe that Dr Atlay had in fact been thinking of this, and his former suspicions returned to him. But was it really rational to imagine that this almost venerable clergyman went round picking up unconsidered trifles in the houses of the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood? The idea was not unattractive in itself, answering to a strain of mild anticlericalism in Charles Honeybath. Yet when one considered it one had to acknowledge the notion as more painful than absurd – but as pretty absurd too. If Atlay were pursuing some dark design it was of a more arcane sort than pilfering costly trinkets. Having arrived at this not very illuminating conclusion, Honeybath glanced at his watch. ‘Dear me!' he said. ‘Can you tell me where on earth to find the Mullions? I was late for their luncheon yesterday, and mustn't be remiss in the same way today.'