Lord Mullion's Secret (7 page)

‘Swithin Gore is very bright indeed, papa.' Patty had come out with this swiftly – and struck Honeybath as instantly surprised, and perhaps annoyed, that she had done so.

‘Agreed,' Boosie said. ‘I've flirted with Swithin like mad, and his heart is quite gorgeously adamant. He's amused, but he knows everything not to do or say. Which doesn't hold of all Eton and King's – or not in
my
experience.'

This extravagance didn't please young Lord Wyndowe, who said something crude about pig-tailed brats looking for kicks from clod-hoppers. Honeybath suspected it didn't please Patty either. It certainly didn't please her mother, who changed the subject.

‘I'm so glad, Mr Honeybath, that you have turned up today and not tomorrow. Wednesdays are terribly restless, and Saturdays are, too.'

‘Ah, yes, Charles!' Lord Mullion broke in. ‘I was going to tell you, wasn't I? The place is open to the public on those days, and at this time of year they pile in like mad. It's quite a problem. We can't hide in the attics, because that's where Prince Rupert lodged his officers and held his councils of war. There are maps on the walls and cannon-balls in the fireplaces and even plumed hats on the clothes pegs. So they all have to be shown, and we have to skulk where we can.'

‘Or be shown ourselves,' Boosie said.

‘Just so, my dear. I sometimes wish we'd remained papists for longer than we did, and had provided the castle with a clutch of priest's holes. They'd come in handy.' This was evidently one of Lord Mullion's well-worn jokes. ‘However, I think we can hide you away, Charles.'

‘Perhaps,' Cyprian said, ‘Mr Honeybath would like to pay at the turnstile and be taken round.'

For the first time since his arrival, Honeybath observed Lord Mullion to frown. Rightly or wrongly, he had regarded this sally of his son's as hinting insolence.

‘Don't be foolish, Cyprian. And, by the way, please don't do just that again yourself. Once or twice was a passable joke, but after that it involves a lack of consideration to the people who are good enough to help us run the thing.'

‘Very well, sir.' Cyprian, although not pleased at being publicly rebuked, looked at his father without resentment. Honeybath told himself that here was a household getting along with no more than moderate friction. If anyone went in for belligerency it was probably Boosie. And, indeed, Boosie had a fling now.

‘Cyprian,' she explained to Honeybath, ‘paid at the door, and attached himself to a party, and kept on asking silly questions. It was an old friend of the family, Miss Kinder-Scout, who was taking round that particular lot, and of course she knew Cyprian perfectly well. She must have been rather upset.'

‘It must certainly have been a little surprising.'

‘But he did something sillier still.' Lady Lucy Wyndowe (to give Boosie her proper name) seemed not a particularly tactful child, and she had a sisterly indictment to press home. ‘He'd taken care to leave his own silver cigarette case on a table in the library, and when he thought that Miss Kinder-Scout wasn't looking and that several visitors were, he put out a stealthy hand and pocketed the thing. One flinches from the thought of peering inside the head of anybody who could put on so idiotic a turn.'

‘It was an experiment in the psychology of crowd behaviour,' Cyprian said calmly. ‘You know what one reads about it. Half a dozen people see a silver-haired old gentleman being robbed, or a blind beggar being beaten up, or a girl being raped–'

‘Cyprian, dear,' Lady Mullion said.

‘Well, anything of that sort. And half a dozen people look on and do nothing about it, because some completely inhibitory mechanism takes charge. And that's what happened here.'

‘But not for long, as you perfectly well know,' Boosie said. ‘For Miss Kinder-Scout had seen you after all, and she'd had enough. So she called out in that rather loud voice she has: “Lord Wyndowe, I am glad to see you have found the cigarette case you mislaid.” And I suppose the party took you for a harmless family lunatic.'

‘We're pretty well furnished in that line already, aren't we?' Cyprian asked. Then he turned to his father. ‘By the way, sir, what are we going to do about providing Mr Honeybath with a studio?'

‘Excellent question.' Lord Mullion was plainly relieved that the late slightly unbecoming exchanges were over. ‘Only we mustn't hurry Honeybath into a decision about anything of that kind. Charles, I'm sure you'll want to get to know the place a bit for a start?'

‘Decidedly, Henry. And, Lady Mullion, you–'

‘Mary – please.'

‘And you, Mary, may have your own orders to give. I seem to remember Henry speaking of your portrait as being required for hanging on the other side of the fireplace from his. But I suspect he was being funny.'

‘Oh, definitely,' Lord Mullion said. ‘Or call it
une façon de parler
, Charles. I just felt we ought both to be done, you know.'

‘Quite so. And if the one portrait needn't control the other, then Mary can choose between various possibilities. A neutral background, for example, or a formal and traditional one–'

‘Marble pillars,' Boosie said. ‘improbably draped with velvet curtains and gold tassels? She won't want that.'

‘Or a favourite corner of a room, or the open air,' Honeybath concluded.

‘Under the castle chestnut tree the castle beauty stands,' Patty said. ‘I vote for that. Or I would if we had a chestnut tree – which I don't think we do. But what about a dress, Mr Honeybath? May my mother choose that?'

‘Ah, there we come on delicate ground.' Honeybath was well-acquainted with this sort of chatter, and believed himself to have a modest skill in treating it lightly. ‘But one can come to an accommodation with women in a way one often can't with men. Men have all those absurd and inflexible fancy-dresses that Virginia Woolf made fun of. Uniforms and mayoral gowns and doctoral robes. It would be all right if they didn't have complexions – often confoundedly pronounced complexions – as well. Monkey with the hue of the uniform and they treat you as if you were a fraudulent military tailor. Tackle the problem through the complexion and they accuse you of representing them either as dipsomaniac or at death's door. Be compliant and the critics laugh at you – and fairly enough. Painters are like policemen. Their lot is not a happy one.'

This little routine on the mysteries of art was well received, and stimulated the younger Wyndowes to various jocose suggestions. Cyprian expressed the hope that Honeybath wouldn't insist on his mother being paraded in all the Mullion diamonds, since this would result in the embarrassing disclosure that his father had been constrained to put them quietly up the spout. Boosie, who didn't approve of this flight of fancy, advanced one of her own – to the effect that her mother might be represented signing a cheque to pay off her brother's embarrassments of a different character at Cambridge and elsewhere. Lady Mullion, seeing the conversation thus veer again towards family pleasantry of an undesirable sort, rose and said firmly that they would take coffee on the terrace.

Castles are not properly provided with terraces, or not of a formally balustraded kind. But Mullion had been adorned with this amenity by filling in part of the moat on the south side. Lord Mullion went into a routine of his own about this. The moat, he explained, was quite bogus, after all. It had been dug out at the time the Wyndowes had been allowed to crenellate, and licence for that had come only when castles were pretty well finished, anyway. Even Prince Rupert hadn't been fool enough to think to hold Mullion; he had persuaded the sixth earl to cede it gracefully, and had followed this up by himself briskly winning several minor skirmishes in its neighbourhood. Boosie said that this hadn't amounted to much, and that extensive reading had brought her to the conclusion that the Cavaliers had been a pretty button-headed lot. Wily peers had gone with the other crowd, like the people over at Broughton Castle in the next county. Patty said that a family ought to stick by its own order, and a lively debate – this time blessedly impersonal – followed. Honeybath began to wonder whether the repose essential for the labours of artistic creation was going to be readily obtainable at Mullion Castle. But he was a man rather short of acquaintance among the spirited young, and was disposed to be well contented with his entertainment so far.

 

 

In the early afternoon Lady Mullion took Honeybath round the castle. It was a little tour made with a minimum of historical expatiation, and would probably have been regarded as inadequate by any of the hard-working ladies who performed the job on a professional basis on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But then one's friends, as distinct from one's customers, are not to be regarded as avid for their pennyworth of information. Faintly in Lady Mullion's attitude, too, there could be detected a feeling that there wasn't, after all, a great deal to show off. Mullion Castle was an interesting old place, and she had with a proper marital loyalty become extremely fond of it. But a medieval castle, even when it had been given an Elizabethan face-lift on one façade and some further Jacobean flourishes here and there, remained a slightly quaint place to live in. Honeybath felt a mild puzzle here until he recalled Lady Mullion's own background. The Wyndowes weren't all that in the way of ancientry, the original Sir Rufus Windy himself being very much a post-Conquest man. Even so, they were a whole lot older-established than Lady Mullion's own family, which had bobbed up only under Queen Anne. Then, however, it had bobbed up fast and far, and for many generations now had dwelt amid a Palladian magnificence unexcelled in England. So deep in Lady Mullion's mind was the thought that Mullion Castle was a kind of
cottage orné
in which it was rather fun to perch in a consciously modest way.

It was, however, clear to Honeybath that the small expedition, from which the rest of the household had absented itself, had been contrived for the purpose of introducing him less to his surroundings than to a closer acquaintance with Lady Mullion herself. His mission, or commission, being as it was, this was entirely sensible, and witnessed on the lady's part to a sound instinct as to what portrait-painting was about. It wasn't that she felt herself in any aggressive way as having a personality to exhibit. She knew perfectly well, indeed, that Honeybath's own personality was as important a constituent of the proposed exercise as her own. There was a rapport to establish, and this was as pleasant a way of establishing it as any offering.

‘There must have been a certain liveliness here at that time,' Lady Mullion said when they were examining some of the memorials of the brief tenancy of the castle by Prince Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine. ‘I never much care for being away from Mullion, but we do have a quiet time. I have to be glad that I'm not one who hungers after what they call scope.'

‘I suspect that you keep yourself fairly busy, Mary.'

‘Well, yes – in a sense. People sometimes think of this sort of life as all luxurious idleness. I glimpse it occasionally in the expressions of our dollar-a-time visitors. But there is hard work, in a way, in just keeping the thing going. And Henry would do anything to manage that. Perhaps it's something that the women of our sort feel less than the men – I suppose because the women have to pack their bags and hump it to a new home on marriage. Do you know, Charles? I have a recurrent dream in which the castle goes up in flames. That's very shocking in me, of course. But we all rush around with buckets and hoses, and it's tremendous fun. At least a happening, as they say.'

‘I doubt whether you'd actually much enjoy anything of the kind.' Honeybath had been a little startled by this harmless confidence. ‘But I do see the merit of a happening now and then.'

‘I believe I could make do with a ghost. Our vicar, Dr Atlay, whom you've met, says there is a ghost. Only it doesn't seem to care for the twentieth century, and hasn't been showing up. Once or twice I've imagined I was encountering it: a tall gliding figure in white. But it has turned out to be Great-aunt Camilla in one of her wandering moods.'

‘I hope you didn't reveal your disappointment to her.' Honeybath produced this slightly facetious response as preferable to silence and likely to keep the topic of the reclusive Miss Wyndowe alive. He felt, indeed, that Lady Mullion had introduced the ghost into her conversation by way of thus going on to speak of this aged relative. He was to be given his bearings on her.

‘It certainly mightn't be too cheering to be told one had been mistaken for a ghost. But Camilla is little unaccountable at the best of times, and might be gratified. She might even be prompted to the conclusion that she was a ghost. I am sure she will interest you, Charles. But should she say anything to offend you, you will remember that she is slightly strange.'

‘So I've gathered. Henry told me that at one time Miss Wyndowe was devoted to painting.'

‘Yes, indeed – although she gave it up long ago. As a young woman, I believe, she had serious thoughts of making a profession of it. She went to Paris to study – which was quite a dashing thing to do at that time – and then spent several months in Provence as the pupil of some artist she particularly admired. He advised her to continue her travels and make a thorough job of Italy. That may have been because he saw real promise in her, or because she was being a nuisance and he wanted to be rid of her. Neither explanation would surprise me.'

‘And she did go to Italy?'

‘Apparently not. She turned the idea down out of hand, on religious grounds.'

‘How very odd!'

‘Great-aunt Camilla was in those days a most convinced Protestant. She could put up with Catholicism in France, she said, because it is independent there and not really papistical. But she wouldn't enter territory which she believed to be wholly dominated by somebody she termed the so-called Bishop of Rome.'