The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Very well,” she said.

  He had really meant as much as she needed to know. He would sooner not have told her any of it, but the Decayed Gentlewoman was back at Ardachoil now and for all he knew, violent men might come after her again. He had to tell his aunt of the value of the picture and the risks attached to possessing it.

  But when he went on, it was to ask another question. “When Foster-Smith persuaded you to have the picture cleaned, did he give you any reason for it?”

  “None in particular,” she said, “except that it would be greatly improved. I had my doubts. I liked it as it was. But Phyllis and Dolly persuaded me that I was too conservative and that a man who wrote books on art must know much better than I did. No doubt they were right.”

  “Didn’t he ever drop any hint about who he thought the painter was?”

  She shook her head. “He did say he believed the woman in the painting might be a certain Arabella Hamilton, who spent some years of her life at the court of Charles I. A very unfortunate life, he said. Her husband was killed in the Civil War and the family estates were forfeited and she and her children had to flee abroad until the Commonwealth was over. It seems Willie had looked very carefully into the whole story. I cannot say I was particularly interested. However, as you know, our grandmother was a Hamilton and I won’t say there can’t have been any truth in it.”

  “He didn’t say there was a chance that the picture was extremely valuable?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Well now, listen,” Colin said, “there is a chance that it is. There’s a chance that when I was held up and my car was stolen, it was really the picture they were after, not the car.”

  She gave an exclamation of dismay. “But that’s terrible! Are you telling me that Willie… ? No, no, you can’t mean that! You’ll have gathered I’ve no high opinion of him, but I can’t see him as a man who would steal, who would connive at your being assaulted and left untended by the roadside. Why, that might easily have been murder!”

  “That’s one of the things I don’t want to talk about yet,” Colin said, “because I don’t know the truth of it myself. It’s possible he only handed on the information to someone else.”

  “To that woman?” she asked quickly.

  He stirred uneasily. “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “In that case,” she said with a certain sternness, “where does Ginny come into the affair?”

  “Oh, entirely by chance,” Colin answered promptly. “She happened to see the picture, recognized it—”

  “Now wait a minute!” Clara said crisply. “Do you take me for a fool? If the mother was involved in the theft, it can hardly have been by chance that the daughter became involved too.”

  “But it was,” he insisted. “Or put it like this— Ginny was the mistake they made. The slip between the cup and the lip. It never occurred to them there was any danger in letting her see the picture. They didn’t dream she’d recognize it after all these years. But she did and she immediately got in touch with me and—well, here we are.”

  She pursed her lips and did not reply.

  He went on persuasively, “If she’d been involved, Aunt Clara, why should she have brought it back to you?”

  “That’s a point, certainly,” she said. “It may be you’re right. But you’re in love with her, are you not?”

  “Yes, Aunt Clara.”

  “It’s possible that’s affected your judgement.”

  He smiled a little. “That’s a way of putting it.”

  “Oh, I’m serious,” she said gravely. “But I admit the girl’s made a far pleasanter impression on me than her mother ever did. You may be quite right about her. The question is, however, what are we to do about the picture?”

  “There are two things I want to do about it,” Colin said. “I want to talk to Foster-Smith and I want to talk over with a lawyer certain—well, points about the theft. And I’d be very grateful if meanwhile you’d do nothing at all except take it down again and hide it in a safe place.”

  “I see,” she said. “Yes, I dare say that might be best. But I shall have to talk it over first with Phyllis and Dolly, to see if they agree. And there’s a point you should perhaps consider, Colin. Sooner or later the police will have to hear about it all, unless the picture’s to remain in concealment for ever. You know this place and how well we all know each other’s business. The moment it’s seen hanging where it used to be by any of our neighbours, word will go straight to Sergeant Campbell, who naturally was informed of the theft at the time. And just what action he might be compelled to take, I’m afraid I cannot tell you.”

  “I know—that’s precisely why I want that talk with a lawyer,” Colin said. “You see, there’s something I haven’t explained yet. Ginny and I removed the picture without asking anyone’s permission. So it’s just possible, if you keep it, that you’ll find you’re guilty of resetting stolen property.”

  Her blue eyes opened wide. “We are? Resetting… But it’s our picture!”

  “Yes—there’s a bit of a problem about that, however. Let me explain.”

  He proceeded to tell her how Edmund Greer, by purchasing the picture in a sale held regularly in a place set aside for the purpose, the sale having begun and ended in the market and taken place between sunrise and sunset, had become its legal owner.

  Clara listened with deep attention. She did not interrupt, but as Colin went on, the normally ruddy tone of her complexion deepened to angry crimson.

  “A fine state of affairs!” she cried. “I’m sure there’s no such law as that in Scotland.”

  “I don’t believe there is,” Colin agreed. “All the same, in England the picture still belongs to Greer, unless we can prove his connection with the theft. And it was in England that Ginny and I—reappropriated it.”

  “You’re burglars, then?”

  “Well, I don’t know how Scots law regards a situation like this.”

  “And my sisters and I… Resetting! Yes, certainly you must see a lawyer!”

  As if she could not arrange quickly enough for him to see one, she set off quickly for home.

  It was dusk when they reached the house. The copper band along the horizon had darkened to bronze and the sea grown black. Dolly was flitting round from room to room, drawing the curtains. Phyllis was in the kitchen, cooking something for supper. Ginny was curled up in a chair by the fire in the little drawing-room, asleep.

  When Clara and Colin came in she started up, looked wildly round her, as if she could not think where she was, then laughed and sank back into the chair.

  “I’m sorry—I thought all this was part of a dream,” she said.

  Clara sat down stiffly on the opposite side of the fire.

  “Colin’s told me how you found the picture, Ginny,” she said. Her voice was far less warm than it had been before and Ginny, Colin saw, noticed it at once. Turning her head away, she looked down into the fire.

  “I understand there’s a possibility that it’s of considerable value,” Clara went on, “also that there are certain legal complications about its present ownership. In the circumstances, he’s advised us to keep it concealed for the time being. I’m quite ready to fall in with his wishes, but I shall have to explain to my sisters why it seems best to do this. I don’t think it’s necessary to tell them the whole story, however. I don’t intend to remind them that it was on the advice of Willie Foster-Smith that we sent the picture to Edinburgh to be cleaned, or that he was a friend of your mother.”

  Ginny did not reply, or look up.

  Sounding a little flustered, as if she were beginning to wish that she had not spoken so coldly, Clara added, “That’s what you’d wish yourself, isn’t it, my dear? What we all want is to keep the whole affair as quiet as possible.”

  “Do what you think best,” Ginny murmured expressionlessly.

  A moment later she glanced up at Colin. He found his heart thudding. There was such black anger in her eyes that he hardly knew the fa
ce that she had raised to him.

  There was nothing that he could say then. Clara was at the door, calling for Phyllis and Dolly. He made a slight gesture of helplessness. Ginny’s lips formed some word that he did not hear, then she looked down at the fire again. She went on staring into it all the time that Clara was telling her sisters a carefully edited version of the story that Colin had told her.

  It began with Ginny’s discovery of the picture in the saleroom. That it was more valuable than any of them had realized, Clara deduced simply from the fact that the bidding had gone unexpectedly high. Then she did her best, with some help from Colin, to explain the curious situation arising from the fact that a Mr. Greer had bought the picture in the open market, and how the discovery that they could not get it back by more conventional means had led Colin and Ginny to remove it without asking anyone’s permission.

  “And so for their sakes it seems advisable that we should let no one know of the return of the picture until we’ve had time to investigate the legal position,” Clara ended.

  By saying nothing about the original theft of the picture, she had avoided having to say anything about Willie Foster-Smith or Harriet, and Colin was just admiring the dexterity with which she had achieved this when, to his dismay, Dolly spoke up eagerly.

  “Do you know what I think, Clara? I think those men who held Colin up—”

  Before she could get any further, Phyllis came bursting in, “—were after the picture all the time—”

  “—not the car at all!” cried Dolly. “And you see, that means—”

  “—that they knew we had it!” Phyllis exclaimed.

  “And do you know how I think they knew that?” Dolly demanded. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement.

  “Yes, do you know?” Phyllis echoed her.

  “The bee man!” they both cried together.

  There was a silence. Clara put a hand to her head. For once, for just a moment, she had failed to follow her sisters’ thread of thought. Then her face cleared. As eagerly as the others, she exclaimed, “Yes, yes, of course, the bee man!”

  They all turned to look at Colin.

  Dolly began, “It was something we never really understood.”

  “Though we often discussed it,” said Phyllis.

  “At length,” said Clara.

  “It was that summer, you know, before that thing happened to you,” said Dolly. “We’d gone out together—”

  “—to Oban,” said Phyllis, “to do some shopping, only halfway there the car started giving trouble—”

  “—so we turned back,” said Clara.

  “And as soon as we turned in at the gate,” Dolly said, “the door burst open and out came—”

  “—a man!” they cried in unison.

  Dolly went on, “He was a bee man, with a black veil over his head and he waved to us and called out something and went running away down the road.”

  “He was after his swarm, you see,” said Phyllis.

  “Or so we thought,” said Clara.

  “And, of course, we followed,” said Dolly.

  “As fast as we could,” said Phyllis. “What fun it was!”

  “But he was too fast for us,” Clara said with a sigh. “We never saw him again.”

  “And then we realized,” Dolly added, “that a real bee man wouldn’t have been able to unlock the door to get in. So then we thought he must have been a burglar.”

  “Only there was nothing missing in the house,” said Phyllis.

  “So then we dismissed him from our minds,” said Clara.

  “But now I’m sure—quite, quite sure,” cried Dolly, “that whatever brought him, he saw that picture and made up his mind he had to have it.”

  There was a slight pause, then Phyllis observed thoughtfully, “An odd-looking man, was he not? I remember he seemed to lean backwards as he ran. You’d hardly think that a good way to run, but he was as swift as the wind.”

  “Swifter than these three old ladies, anyway,” Clara said.

  The sisters fell silent again and all looked expectantly at Colin.

  Rather cautiously, he said, “That’s very interesting. You may be right about him, Aunt Dolly. Did you ever find out how he got into the house?”

  “With a skeleton key, we supposed,” Dolly said. “Nothing was broken. And as long as we thought the man was only after his swarm, we didn’t at all mind his having come in.”

  “Indeed, we were grateful,” said Phyllis. “Suppose we’d come home to a kitchen swarming with bees.”

  “Well, I think I’d lock up and bolt the doors for the time being,” Colin said. “And I think you’d better let me take the picture down again and hide it somewhere.”

  They agreed to this, except that they insisted it should stay where it was for the evening.

  This it did, but as soon as the sisters had gone to bed, Colin took it down, made a parcel of it with some sacking and string and carried it up to the loft. If its hiding-place behind the water tank was unlikely to save it from Edmund Greer, if he ever came looking for it again, at least there was not much chance that Sergeant Campbell would hear of it as long as it was up there.

  Next morning, promising to visit his aunts’ solicitors in Edinburgh as soon as they could see him and to let the aunts know the results of the interview, Colin and Ginny set off again in Harriet’s car along the narrow, rough road round the loch.

  Its waters were dull and grey, reflecting thick clouds moving in from the west. The air was raw and cold with a taste of rain in it. Without any sunshine, the hills had lost the wonderful colours and clear outlines of yesterday and become grey, sullen-looking masses of rock with their summits lost in mist.

  Almost as sullen, Colin soon noticed, was Ginny’s face. For a long time she was quite silent. Once or twice, when Colin tried to talk to her, she gave no sign that she had even heard.

  “All right!” he exploded at last, suddenly becoming intensely angry himself. “Let’s talk about Foster-Smith. And your mother. And let’s not forget John Clitheroe. Let’s have it all out in the open. I’ll tell you what I think. I think Foster-Smith discovered the value of the picture. I think he told your mother about it. I think she told Greer. I think he came up to take a look at the picture, dressed in a bee veil, agreed with Foster-Smith about what it was, held me up and did everything else, including rigging the market overt business with the Lakes. And at the time of the sale he sent your mother off to Spain to protect her, in case it could ever be said that she ought to have recognized the picture.”

  He paused. There was no answer.

  There is nothing satisfying about conducting a quarrel with someone who will not answer, particularly if half your attention has to be given to driving a car along a difficult road. Colin began to think that he might as well lapse into a sulk himself. But there was still one thing on his mind that insisted on being said.

  “Ginny, I didn’t want to talk to Aunt Clara about your mother. But I had to tell her a good deal of the story—can’t you see that? For the aunts’ safety, now that they’ve got the picture back, they had to know the sort of man Greer is. And once I’d told Aunt Clara a little, she very quickly filled in the rest herself.”

  Still Ginny said nothing, but he heard her give a sigh, which was at least a response of a sort.

  A few minutes later she at last broke her silence, to speak in a soft, detached voice, as if she were discussing the weather with a stranger.

  “Colin, I know very little about the sort of work you do,” she said, “but doesn’t it ever happen to you that you collect a whole lot of data about something or other and then when you try to find a theory to explain things, you find there are several that seem to fit equally well?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “And what do you do then? Do you just pick one at random, because you like it, or do you try to find out a few more facts?”

  “All right, I see what you mean,” he answered. “Well, when we get to Edinburgh I’m going
looking for a few more facts. I’m going to call on Willie Foster-Smith. I got his address from Aunt Clara. Meanwhile, suppose you tell me the true facts about John Clitheroe.”

  “You’re quite right about him, he doesn’t exist,” she said in the same remote tone.

  “And—leaving out everything to do with the picture for the moment—it was through Foster-Smith you knew so much about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably know him yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then in God’s name,” he said desperately, “why didn’t you tell me so straight away?”

  “Because he’s quite friendly with your aunts and I didn’t think that would last if they knew he still saw my mother.”

  “But what has that got to do with me? I thought I was supposed to be trying to help you.”

  “Yes, but I can’t see any reason why you should know everything about me,“ she said, still as emotionless and mild.

  “Can’t you?” Colin was astonished at the violence that burst into his voice. “Let me tell you…”

  But then he decided not to tell her. Not like this and not just now.

  Ginny waited a moment, gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, as if she found his attitude most unreasonable, turned her head away, and looked out of the side-window of the car.

  After that Colin aped her withdrawal and when they talked it was like polite strangers.

  They reached Edinburgh in the early afternoon. The rain had been steady for the last hour and the city was wearing its bleakest face. Princes Street was a cold grey channel of wind.

  The human faces in the streets looked pinched and blue. It would have seemed that the spring had been forgotten and winter come back again but for the crocuses in the grass in Charlotte Square, which Colin had to circle three times before he found a parking space near to the offices of Massie, Davitt and Gunn, W.S.

  As Vickerman and Ogg to Ginny’s mother, so Massie, Davitt and Gunn to Colin’s aunts were names that stood for all the worldly good sense that they feared they lacked themselves. The names had been familiar to Colin all his life, but he had never yet had to pass through the dignified Adam doorway or make his way through the warren of offices concealed by the handsome stone front of the house.