Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (4 page)

“Yes.”

“His second wife was Charlotte. Charlotte had been married to Frederick’s younger brother, Anthony. Charlotte and Anthony produced Dominic.”

“Anthony had died?”

“No. Frederick essentially stole his brother’s wife—or so gossip has it. Frederick and Charlotte produced Lucy.”

“Ah.”

“It was a great scandal at the time, Jamie tells me. Brother against brother. House of Morborne torn apart. Custody battles. Libel suits. Shock-horror headlines. I was barely out of diapers living in Canada so I had no idea.”

Tom realised he had some idea, but only flotsam and jetsam from Internet sifting for information on St. Nicholas’s church roof fund benefactors, the Leaping Lords. He was sure the words
bigamous marriage
and
High Court
had flitted past his tired eyes in Wikipedia’s entry on the Marquesses of Morborne. Several scenes of the lengthy melodrama were set in the West Indies. He said, however, “I have no memory of it. I was too young, too, I expect. This must have been—”

“Close to thirty years ago. Charlotte was quite the society beauty then. All the men wanted her.”

“So Oliver and Georgina’s aunt became their stepmother.”

“And Dominic’s mother became his aunt—as well as his mother. And not very good in either role, I gather. Of course, I hear all this from the Allan side, where Charlotte, now the Dowager Marchioness of Morborne, is portrayed as ruthless and manipulative and so forth. I’ve never met the woman, actually.”

“It has the makings of Jacobean drama.”

Tom glanced towards the terrace to see Lucinda and Dominic slip through the French doors into the shadow of the Hall, ushered by Marguerite. “I don’t wish to be intrusive, but would I be correct in thinking that Lucinda’s presence wasn’t expected this weekend?”

“I don’t think so. No one’s mentioned it, anyway. I thought she was in the south of France. She usually is this time of year, staying with Charlotte. I doubt she comes down to Eggescombe much at all. Hector and Georgina really only have the place to themselves for two weeks in August and at Christmas and Easter.”

Tom regarded her thoughtfully, detecting diplomacy in her response. Jane caught his look and let loose a little puff of laughter. “The fact is—and you may as well be prepared—Hector is not fond of his wife’s family. He’s been very abrupt with Oliver, who showed up here about the time Jamie and I did—”

“I noticed a bit of an atmosphere between them when we were at the airfield this morning.”

“—I think Hector thinks Lucy takes too much after her mother.”

“What does Lady Lucinda do?”

“We’re not sure. She’s sort of a … ‘party planner’ when the mood strikes.”

“And Dominic?”

“He’s an art consultant and private dealer. He had a handful of very rich clients—and I think he has a share in a gallery in St. James’s, too. I don’t really know him—or Lucy—that well. You see, there’s a sort of division among the siblings—no surprise given their parents’ behaviours. Olly and Georgie versus Lucy and Dominic, and we—the Allans—see more of the first pair since their mother is Jamie’s aunt.” Jane laughed again. “See what you have to look forward to this weekend, Tom? Lucy arriving uninvited likely means some pot is about to be stirred!”

Tom wished he could share the laugh, but now he sensed himself being drawn unwillingly into some family unpleasantness. “It’s very kind of Lady Fairhaven to ask Miranda and me to stay, but …”

“Yes?”

“Is it her place to do so? Georgina is mistress of Eggescombe, is she not?”

“We argue about that sometimes, Jamie and I.”

“You do?”

“I’m joking. Georgie is mistress of Eggescombe and has been since Hector’s father died ten years ago. But Marve … well, Marguerite lives down here and is very involved in managing the estate, so I think she forgets herself a little when Georgie comes down—which isn’t often. Georgie”—Jane frowned a little—“doesn’t really care for the country.”

“I’m not sure that answers my question. I don’t want to put Lady Fairhaven out—Georgina, Lady Fairhaven—by staying here.”

“I wouldn’t worry. Even though I know Marve gets up Georgie’s nose, I think she’s not unhappy for Marve to do the organising. Georgie often has migraines—or at least,” Jane added dryly, “she does at Eggescombe.”

“Migraines? Jane, perhaps I should beg off.”

“Oh, don’t. Marve loves company, and she is genuinely concerned for your health. Georgina will welcome you to stay. She will, really. She’ll be utterly gracious. Very”—Jane slipped from her Canadian accent into poshspeak—“prop
ah
. Perhaps the only fforde-Beckett who is,” she added, her tone thoughtful.

At that moment, the black onyx beside them flickered into
a facsimile of life, a bouncy logo—belonging to some smart media production company—rolling grandly across its screen. Music sounded, too. Haydn’s
Creation
. Tom recognised the notes of the first movement, “Representation of Chaos.” “The Heavens are telling the glory of God,” he murmured to himself and glanced into the sky, which held but the glory of a single rook.

“Shouldn’t be long now.” Jane followed his glance. “I should say I’m glad for myself that you’ll stay the weekend. I remembered your saying in an email that your housekeeper thought she had spotted my long-lost brother-in-law on Dartmoor.”

“Someone Mrs. Prowse knows, actually.”

“I thought—oh, I know it’s unlikely—I might have a chance to—”

“Make some enquiries?”

“
Snoop around
, I was going to say, but yours is more elegant. Yes, see if I could at least find some leads to John—Sebastian, as you call him.”

The man Tom knew as Sebastian John was the Honourable John Sebastian Hamilton Allan, third son of the Earl of Kinross, Jamie’s father. Sebastian had been verger at St. Nicholas’s in Thornford Regis, living incognito, in flight from his family, but had vanished from the village fifteen months earlier.

“It’s odd that he mightn’t be living all that far away from his cousins,” Tom remarked.

“But Georgie’s hardly here at all. Hector comes down more often on estate business, or constituency business—he’s local Conservative Party constituency chairman—but I’m not sure he’d pay much attention to anything other.”

“But the dowager countess lives here all year.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Jane murmured speculatively, casting her eyes up the lawn towards the Hall. Tom looked, too, to see Marguerite slip back out onto the terrace, bending to say a word to one of the guests, a large Irish setter loping along in her wake.

“I wonder …,” Jane began, then paused, as if she had another thought. “Still, as you described John the last time we met, his appearance is very different. He was a skinny teenager when I first knew him. And I’m not sure the last time Marve would have seen John. Her connection to him, after all, is through her son’s marriage to Georgina. Oh.” She turned back to the screen, which burst into a shifting panorama of blue and hazy white as the sound of Haydn’s
Creation
dropped in volume. “Here we go.”

Tom shivered slightly at the next view, a portion of the frame of the very airplane door from which he’d leapt not an hour earlier. A second later the camera beheld the sky again; so gorgeously brilliant was it that it seemed more true than the genuine article. Tom craned his neck towards the pallid rendition hanging over them. No sight, no sound proclaimed the airplane’s presence, so high was it over the county. He glanced around for Miranda, but could only trust his daughter had parked herself elsewhere, because a sudden shift in colour on the screen reclaimed his attention, a riot of rich red. Ten men—Tom counted as the camera quickly panned—were standing along the fuselage in a line, arms behind one another’s hips like a row of chorus girls, mouths stretched in cheeky grins. Tom laughed, enjoying the echo of laughter elsewhere in the crowd. The men’s jumpsuits were identical, the crimson
of coronation robes, while the parachute straps crossing their chests were white with rows of black dots, like the very robes’ traditional ermine trim. Puzzling was the gold-and-red confection at the top of each helmet.

“What—?” Tom began but Jane anticipated him:

“Coronets.”

Tom laughed louder. “They really are good sports.”

“They really are quite silly.” Marguerite had reinserted herself into their company along with the red setter. “But good sports, too, I agree. Lucy and Dominic will be staying over, by the way,” she said, addressing Jane. “I asked Mrs. Gaunt to prepare rooms for them. And Tom, you’ll be in the Opium Bedroom, on the ground floor. No stairs. And your daughter on the nursery floor, with Max. Smile, Hector, darling.” She turned to the screen as others gathered around to watch.

“Olly looks peeved, too,” Jane remarked as the camera moved down the line to decorous clapping on the ground, a caption appearing under each man with his name and title.

It was obvious the cameraman was chivvying the two into better humour, for as the camera pulled back
HECTOR, EARL OF FAIRHAVEN
(said the caption), allowed a tight smile to crease his face behind his visor, though the smile didn’t lift to his eyes. Similarly,
OLIVER, MARQUESS OF MORBORNE
, let a short, sharp smirk shift his cheeks for the grace of a second.

“Ah, Jamie
is
a camera.” Jane read out her husband’s name and title: “James, Viscount Kirkbride. There it is, strapped to his forehead.” The picture on the screen dissolved unexpectedly into a view of a tall man in ordinary dress holding a camera and waving before taking an extravagant bow. The caption read
DENNIS PAPNORTH, COMMON AS MUCK
. “See,” Jane said,
as laughter again rippled across the lawn, “Jamie is filming
him
.”

“Smoothly done, the transition from one camera to another,” Tom remarked. “How—?”

“There’s a little man set up in the library with some sort of magical electronic board,” Marguerite answered as the lords offered a collective thumbs-up and broke muster, heading for the airplane’s open door. “They’re off.”

Jamie leapt first. The view on the big screen switched from a hazy impression of Devon’s chessboard landscape and a startling shot of the earth’s very roundedness to a smear of feathery white. Ice blue lasted for a moment, followed in quick succession by flashes of wispy cloud, the underside of the airplane, and finally a jumble of nine men tumbling from the airplane’s great maw, each speeding like a crimson bullet towards Jamie’s camera. The effect was so vivid, viewers on lawn and terrace—Tom included—gasped and instinctively leaned away. The raucous beat of some rock music replaced the Haydn as—the camera view was from the airplane now—the lords began a kind of aerial ballet, twisting and turning in swift choreographed sequences, grasping and ungrasping one another’s limbs to form ever-changing patterns. Rather like watching the formation of giant red snowflakes, Tom decided, as the mesmerising configurations changed again and again. In a quarter at the top of the TV screen, the Jamie-cam view offered a more abstract version of the same sequences, arms and legs and concentrated faces behind plastic visors gliding past as if the troposphere were a lovely place for a swim. Tom was about to voice his wonder at their skill and professionalism when the airplane camera caught a certain wonkiness in
the smooth and pleasing patterning. At first he thought the skydivers were all about to break off—they had less than a minute for their free-fall display—and deploy their parachutes, but instead one of them broke from the rhythm of glancing grabs and held on to another man, pulling him close, raising his arm and—as the Jamie-cam made clearer—attempting to drive it towards the other man’s stomach. A murmur rose from the crowd, as the two engaged in an aerial ballet of their own, pushing and tugging at each other.
Is this part of the show?
Tom recognised the stupidity of the thought when an arm, now giant on the screen, pushed in between the two figures, as if to peel them apart. Two enormous scowling faces, each behind a plastic shield, turned to the screen.

“It’s Hector and Olly.” Jane’s hand went to her mouth. Somewhere someone screamed. “What are they
doing
?”

“They’re fighting like schoolboys. At twenty thousand feet in the air!” Marguerite gasped, adding, “Bonzo!” to quell the barking dog.

The top corner of the screen showed the airplane camera’s view. As Hector and Oliver grappled and Jamie struggled to part them, the others abandoned formation. Deploying chutes was now critical, and in a twinkling the whole screen exploded with seven crimson blossoms. Seconds were eternities, and after an eternity Hector and Oliver, figures in the corner screen, broke apart. Instantly, the whole screen again filled with crimson from two blossoming parachutes.

“Oh, thank God!” Jane cried as Jamie’s camera picked out the rigging of his open canopy, the suspended figure of the second man drifting by gently in nearby view—Oliver, Tom thought, judging by the slimmer figure. A collective sigh of
relief sounded all around them. Then suddenly the sighs turned to perplexed and frightened mutterings. On the TV, cascading from view, as if into a hole in the screen, a figure dangled from the end of a tangle of lines themselves connected to little more than a flapping crimson flag.

“The chute didn’t open!” someone cried.

“Oh, God.” Jane’s hand went again to her face as they watched the figure, growing tinier now, seem to struggle to disentangle the lines.

“Who is it?” Tom muttered, cold with horror.

“I think it’s Hector.” Marguerite’s voice was steely, disbelieving, but Tom noted her knuckles whiten as her hands gripped the edge of his trolley.

“Jamie, turn your camera away. I can’t stand this,” Jane pleaded. “Just turn all the cameras
off
!”

“Hector, for heaven’s sake, deploy the emergency chute.” Marguerite stared at the screen. “The emergency chute! He was always such a bloody-minded child.”

And they watched in growing horror as the crippled parachute with its human cargo plummeted, fluttering, towards the earth’s heartless embrace, disappearing into a tiny red dot.