Touch Not The Cat (11 page)

Nicholas, who had adored his gentle mother, found himself, at her death, almost completely ignored by his father, and in turn bullied, deferred to, or encouraged in his growing wilfulness by a quickly changing series of tutors. What must have started as normal, healthy high spirits changed with this mishandling into wildness; and (one could read between Emma Ashley's disapproving lines) an affectionate nature, starved and repulsed, became sullen and intractable. Spoiled in the truest sense of the word, Nick Ashley had early succumbed to what his Aunt Emma called "corruption,"

though, from the veiled hints in the diaries, it was hard to gather whether this had been vice on the Gilles de Rais scale, or merely the sexual experimenting normal for a young gentleman of his time.

Nicholas' father fell ill when the young man was a few months short of twenty-two years old.

William Ashley, who was sixty-one, was thought to be dying, but was sufficiently in command of his senses to worry about who should succeed him. A marriage contract was hastily drawn up between Nicholas and the Lady Helen Colwall, younger daughter of the family then living at Ledworth Castle. It is not known what the betrothed couple thought of one another, but the very drawing up of the contract must have been a miracle of diplomacy, because—
vide
the virtuous Emma Ashley-Nicholas, with his father safely bedridden, was indulging himself with nightly "orgies" of illicit love.

"There's a tradition," our guide was saying, "that he used to meet them in the pavilion in the center of the maze. How they found the way in I don't know; his valet is supposed to have led them in, like girls being brought to the Grand Turk. His father must have known something about it, and there are stories of terrible quarrels, because William kept the pavilion sacred to Julia's memory, and most of his poems were written there. Well, Nicholas took it over. There are engravings showing it made over as a love nest, with a huge bed, and a big mirror let into the ceiling above it, and lots of silk curtains and shaded lamps, but I should think that was just a myth; it doesn't seem likely that Nick could have had the pavilion done up like that while William was still alive. . .

. Anyway, just a month before Nicholas was due to be married to Lady Helen, William Ashley died.

Nick had been keeping company with a girl from a nearby village, and this time he'd been a bit rash, because one of the girl's brothers was the Court gamekeeper, and on this particular night—the night after William died—the man was out after a poacher, and his brother was with him for company, when they saw their sister coming out of the maze. Well, they knew what that meant. They waited outside till Nick Ashley came out. Nobody knows what happened, whether they quarrelled with him, or just lay in wait and shot him down, but Nick Ashley was shot dead.

The brothers weren't ever caught. They took a ship from Bristol, and got clear away. The Ashley estate went to Nick's uncle —his father's brother. That was the Charles Ashley whose wife wrote the diaries."

She smiled. "And that's the only story I've got for you. It's certainly the only tragedy recorded at the Court. For a place as old as this, it's got a strange reputation for peacefulness.

There isn't even the breath of a ghost."

"Not even at the pavilion?" asked someone.

"Not that we know of. But they say that no one except the family—and of course gardeners and so on—has been there since. So perhaps the sad ghost of Wicked Nick haunts the maze to this day, but nobody meets him, and the family keep him dark."

Did we? I never remembered feeling anything but sympathy for poor Nick Ashley, bracketed, so to speak, between the melancholy William, and the pharisaically virtuous uncle and aunt who had inherited the place on his death. The young face in the picture showed weakness, rather than wickedness, and along with it a good deal of charm. And already, at eighteen, the painter had caught, in the expression of the long grey eyes, a look of settled unhappiness. The story made the legends of the maze and its

"orgies," the tilted love mirror, and the collection of pornography later locked in the Court library, appear in an altogether kindlier light.

"The portrait is by Stevens," the guide was saying, "but it was sold, and that's a copy. Now, the clock underneath it . . ."

Nick Ashley was dismissed, and everyone looked obediently at the French ormolu clock which stood below the portrait, its gently swinging internal organs winking through the glass. I noticed in passing that it was still ten minutes or so lag of the truth, but then my attention fixed itself with a click about eighteen inches to the right of the clock. When I had last been in this room there had been a small T'ang horse there, which, though it was damaged, was worth five or six hundred pounds in any market.

But it was not going to market, not again. It was not there.

There was nowhere else for it to stand in the library, except perhaps in the safety of one of the display tables. I looked with a flicker of worry at the space where it had been. If the Underhills had taken a fancy to it and moved it across into one of the rooms they rented, it was their responsibility, and perhaps they had no idea of its value.

The party was beginning to leave the library. As I followed them, I lingered to look inside the display tables; it was just possible that some careful hand had removed the little horse to the safety of velvet and glass. But no. And, now that I looked with attention, there were fresh shapes showing in unfaded velvet among the remaining objects of virtu. Here, too, things were missing. A little oval—that had surely been a miniature? And that irregular bit of dark green had held a Chinese jade seal carved with a lion dog.

"Please?" said the guide. I looked up with a start. She was standing by the open door, waiting for me. All the others had gone. I could hear them making their way, chattering like a crowd let out of school, down the staircase. "I have to lock up," said the girl.

"I'm so sorry," I said, "keeping you waiting. I was interested . . . You do it very well, the place comes alive. I've enjoyed it such a lot. Er, did you say lock up'? You mean you lock the rooms behind you each time as you go?"

"Oh yes. It's such a big, rambling place, and there are still a lot of valuable things here. We have to be very careful. All the rooms are locked except the ones that are being lived in. We open and shut them as we go through."

"The keys you use; who keeps them as a rule?"

She looked faintly surprised, but answered me readily enough. "I have to give them back to the people who live here. They're tenants; the family's abroad just now."

"Oh. Well, thanks very much," I said, and went thoughtfully out in the wake of the others.

Ashley, 1835

She was here at last.

The light step on the verandah, the hand on the door, the slight figure in the shabby cloak slipping quickly into the room, then shutting the door carefully behind her so that no faint sliver showed. The cloak, thrown aside, falling across the writing table where, year after year, his father had sat alone, writing those sterile verses to his love.

"My love."

Her hair, loosened from the hood, fell like rain, straight and dark, but full of rainbow lights from the candle. Her dress slipped to her knees. She stepped from it, and her hands went to the laces at her breast.

Outside, as if at a signal, a nightingale began to sing.

His thoughts spiralled. The light, the night, the nightingale.
O, she doth teach the torches to burn
bright!
Her breasts were bare now, her waist. Her petticoat followed her dress to the floor.

The room echoed with the nightingale's singing. That damned keeper, he remembered, had threatened to shoot the bird . . . Damned keeper, indeed. Her brother. My brother's keeper . . . He was getting light-headed.

"What are you laughing at, then, love?"

"I'll tell you afterwards. Here, my sweetest girl, come here to me."

.
. . the wild-goose chase . . .

—Romeo and Juliet,
II, iv

"Aren't you Miss Ashley?"

The voice, a woman's, and American, brought me out of my thoughts with a thump, and back to the sunlight of the courtyard, where I now saw a big American car parked in the shade on the other side of the yard. A man was just vanishing through the side door, carrying a suitcase; from his tailoring I guessed it was Mr. Underhill. I turned to greet the woman who had spoken. "Yes, I am. And you must be Mrs. Underhill?"

She was a woman in her middle forties, groomed to a high gloss with that combination American women have of know-how and sheer hard work and skilled use of materials. She was shortish, and without the hard work she might have been dumpy, but instead she was dainty, in a creaseless cream suit that might as well have borne its Fifth Avenue tag on the outside. A high-necked silk sweater hid her neck, and her face had the paled-off sunburn which afflicts Californians when they have been too long in sadder climates. Her skin was dry, with fine lines showing at eyes and mouth, and showed evidence of ceaseless care. The dark-brown lashes were a giveaway for the blond hair.

"I'm so glad to meet you." She put out a hand. "But Jeff and I feel awful that it had to be for this reason. It was terrible news about your father; I'm so sorry. We've both been so distressed for you.

Everybody says what a very fine person he was."

She talked on for a little while about Daddy, asked where I was staying, and seemed pleased when I said I planned to live for a while in the cottage by the lake. She had a gentle voice and manner that went with her Dresden-china appearance, and seemed to feel a genuine regret about my father, and a real concern for me.

"How did you know me?" I asked her. "Did Mr. Emerson tell you I was coming?"

"No, he didn't. I knew you from the picture in our bedroom."

My parents' room, of course. I said: "Is it so like? It isn't a very good one, and it was painted years ago."

She laughed. "Well, I can see you're not seventeen any more, but you're not that much older, are you?"

"I feel it. I'm twenty-two."

"Look, what are we standing out here for? Come right in, Jeff's dying to meet you, I know. He's just flown in from Houston, and he'll be home for a few days. Isn't that marvellous? It seems kind of strange inviting you into your own home, but come right on in."

Like us, the Underhills used a side door. We went in together. I said: "I didn't actually come over just to call. I was planning to do that this afternoon. I've been down at the cottage seeing what was needed, and then I came up here, and—" I laughed rather apologetically. "Actually I went round with the guided tour. It seems silly, but I was rather curious to see how they did it."

"Did you really? Well, fancy!" Her eyes danced. "So I needn't feel so bad at inviting you into your own home, when you've had to pay twenty-five cents to go the rounds. . . . And I have to tell you, Cathy and I have been around a couple of times ourselves. It was a good way to learn all the history, and boy, have you had some history! Kind of uncomfortable, some of it, but very interesting, and seeing everything right here in its own place beats the schoolbooks hollow." She paused at a corner. "We're in what they call the small drawing room; I don't have to tell you the way. You'll stay to lunch with us, won't you? Now"—as I made the ritual protest—"I won't take no for an answer. We have a light lunch, salad and such, and it couldn't be easier. In any case, we're having a guest already, so it's easy to stretch it." She smiled like someone with a secret that she knew would delight me. "Guess who it is? Your own cousin."

Any delight I felt was certainly tempered with questions and uneasy memories of last night in the churchyard, and, too, with some speculation about the gossip Mrs. Henderson had passed on to me. I said: "You mean Emory? How lovely!" with what was meant to sound like unmixed pleasure, but as Mrs. Underhill opened the drawing-room door and gestured me past her, I saw her eyeing me with her own brand of speculation, a slightly wary look, which, under the circumstances, was natural. One up to Mrs. Henderson and the village gossip, I thought: it was just such a look as might be given to the about-to-be-dispossessed Miss Ashley, whose privilege ticket back to the Court had been picked up by Miss Un derhill.

"Yes," she said, "Emory."

"Well, isn't that nice!" I said cheerfully. "I haven't seen him for ages. And of course I'd love to meet your daughter. Thank you, I'd like to stay, very much."

The "small drawing room" opened from the longer drawing room, from which it could be divided by a pair of tall doors. These were shut now, making a room about thirty feet by eighteen, with three long windows looking out on the strip of lawn and rose beds which was the terrace above the moat. The water-light moved prettily on the ceiling. They had hardly rearranged the room at all, I saw, and there were bowls of tulips and bluebells, and stands of cherry blossom which lighted the alcoves to beauty, and which must have been arranged by Mrs. Underhill herself.

"Let's sit down, shall we?" she said.

There was a fire of logs in the hearth. She motioned me to a seat near it in the corner of the big chesterfield, and took the other corner herself

"I gather," I said, "that you know my cousin quite wel?"

"Yes. He and Cathy—Cathy's my daughter—met a while back, and after they got acquainted they found there was this connection, that she was staying at Ashley Court. A real coincidence, you might say. Well, of course she asked him over, and he's visited her a few times. He's a real charmer, don't you think?"

"I've always thought so," I agreed, "and so's his twin. You've met James? And Francis, the youngest brother? No, well, he's been abroad a lot in the last few months. They used to live here with us, most of the time, when we were children; I expect Emory will have told you all about that." I hesitated fractionally, then hit the ball into the open field. "You know, I suppose, that the Court will belong to Emory's family now?"

She looked embarrassed, and made quite a little business of picking up a cigarette box, offering me one, then taking one herself and lighting it. "He did tell us something about the way things were left, but of course it was all seemingly in the future then. Your father was still a young man, as things go, and nobody ever thought of a tragedy like this." She seemed to be going to say more, then let it go. "It seems you had some ancestor who tied everything up so that it had to be inherited by a man. I can think of some ladies I know who'd be hell-bent on doing something about that right now . . ." She smiled, leaned across to tap ash off her cigarette, then looked up at me frankly. "I must say, Miss Ashley, it seems kind of tough to me. Isn't there anything that can be done?"