Lady Dorothy’s helpless gesture was a clear indication that, to her mind, these alien surroundings were proof positive of Vivian’s loss of reason.
“When would that have been?”
“During the War—can you imagine? It was difficult enough to repair what one had, much less purchase things this…unusual.”
“So this was after your husband died?”
“Not long after. Before the War, we lived in the central portion of the house, with Vivian. After…after he was gone, we moved over to this side so that Edward could return, just before Christmas in 1915. Vivian’s fit would have been a few months later. Weeks, perhaps? At any rate, we’d scarcely settled in when—poof! Out of the window things went, and in came this. Heaven knows what she paid for it all. But she had her own money—still does, for that matter, although Edward is of course the trustee.”
Of course.
I walked over to a cluster of seven nicely framed watercolours all of flowers, all by the same artist. “Are these hers?”
“She was so talented. Before the War, she used to take her paints out into the countryside. She’d be gone hours and hours—she’d wear a boy’s trousers and put her hair under a cap. Still does sometimes, when she’s home, though it makes Edward furious. I always thought it a sensible idea for a girl out alone like that, but never mind. She’d just walk, mostly, looking dreamily at the trees and hills, then stop for a while and do a sketch, sometimes a painting. She did an entire series of Selwick Hall itself—in the morning, at evening, in the winter. She had them framed on her bedroom wall, and they were the first things to be thrown out that day. I’ll never forget the sound as they hit the stones.” She shuddered, as if the shattering glass were also Vivian’s mind going to pieces. “I rescued what I could of them. I have them in a cupboard downstairs. Perhaps I should have them framed again, if…” If Vivian is not coming home.
Before her eyes could start welling up, we were interrupted by a tap at the door: the maid with a question from the cook. I seized the opportunity and urged Lady Dorothy to go and deal with the problem, firmly shutting the door behind them that I might return to my study of the room.
To my surprise, I liked the madwoman’s decor, very much. Which might mean I, too, was mad—although Holmes would no doubt have mentioned it. Or it could mean that Vivian Beaconsfield was mad only north-northwest. That when the wind was from the south, she knew her Axminster from her Art Deco.
Still, when the wind blowing through her mind was north-northwest, Lady Vivian was a woman who hurled her possessions from upper windows, assaulted her brother with a fireplace poker, and took a blade to her own wrists.
I began a methodical search of the rooms, from chair-cushions and floor-boards to picture-backs and the undersides of drawers. As always, it was less a matter of actively searching for something than it was letting the mind passively notice the details and patterns of this woman’s chosen surroundings.
She liked soft textures rather than smooth ones, indistinct patterns over sharp designs, and rich colours over pastels.
Her sketch-books drew me, and then drew me in. They amounted to visual journals, with labels on the front covers giving their dates. Some volumes spanned two years; others only months.
1910 and 1911 took up a disproportionate amount of shelf-space. January to May opened with drawings of winter landscapes and interior still-lifes, then abruptly gave way to startling splashes of colour and motion: a dance. This must have been her London Season, the time when the country’s chosen were trolled through Society in hopes of hooking a likely mate. To my surprise, it appeared that she’d enjoyed the process. Certainly there was pleasure behind the whirl of bright skirts on the pages.
However, as one looked more closely—and as the sequence continued in the June to October volume—the emphasis shifted, from skirts and gleaming candelabras to the faces of the onlookers: wrinkled old women and smooth young men, both with expressions that were avid, eager, and eventually oppressive.
One page, with a tiny date in the corner reading “9 July 1911,” was covered with disembodied hands, a nightmarish sea of grasping black-and-white fingers.
With trepidation, I turned the page—and was looking at the Dover cliffs receding off the back of a ferry.
She’d gone to Paris. Why did the verb fled come to mind? A few pages of desultory Parisian scenes followed, dutiful sketches of Versailles, the Tour Eiffel, booksellers along the Seine.
Then the sun came up.
In September, to judge by the wealth of late-summer produce in her drawings of outdoor markets, she’d gone south: Nîmes and Avignon, Nice and Florence, Rome and Ravenna and Venice. She’d either spent longer in that last, or been particularly fascinated by the canals, for there were dozens of small studies that experimented with the reflections of towers, flags, and passing gondolas.
It was startling to turn the page to a drawing of a man who could only be English, walking with his dog across a winter field that could only be Selwick.
The following pages were of him as well, and when one showed his face, I knew who it was: Ronnie’s father, the artist’s brother, Thomas Beaconsfield. He’d died before Ronnie and I met, but I recognised him from a photograph Ronnie kept on her desk. That face had also been a recurring theme throughout the sketch-journals, going back to Vivian’s childhood. In all those images, her affection shone clear.
But it occurred to me that I had seen few of her older brother, Edward, the current Marquess. I pulled down one of the earlier volumes, labelled 1902, and indeed, there were only two that might have been he. I supposed that, being sixteen when Vivian was born, Edward had been off to University when his sister was tiny—plus, as Ronnie had told me, the heir preferred city lights to country pastures. Vivian had probably spent only brief holidays with Edward before he returned to Selwick after their brother’s death. By which time the madness was creeping up around her.
Hers had been a typically protected childhood. Most of the figures in her earliest sketches were women of the household, with the occasional shift to groups of men working in the fields or stables. Children appeared sometimes, particularly one dark-haired girl who, to judge by the dates on the sketch-books, was a year or two older than Vivian. A friend? Or a companion, assigned the task of making sure the small, blonde daughter of the family did not get into trouble as she wandered the hills with her pencils?
I put the 1902 book back on its shelf (for a child of eleven, her drawings seemed remarkably sophisticated) and pulled down the last book on the shelf.
This one had no label, although as with earlier volumes, the occasional more detailed drawing would have a date in its corner. Here was Ronnie, startlingly like she’d been when I first laid eyes on her. Several pages of wintry branches followed, with attempts to capture the look of ice. Then came a finished sketch from what would prove to be her brother’s last home leave: Thomas Beaconsfield, wearing a Captain’s uniform, stood behind his seated wife, hands on her shoulders. 12 February 1915. He had died the following summer.
I wondered if Ronnie knew the image existed.
The next pages continued wintry landscapes: snowdrops peeping out of leaves; bits of flaming log in a fireplace; a cat burrowed into pillows. The page after that was missing: torn out along the seam. I tried to think if I had seen any other missing pages, and thought not—although I hadn’t studied every volume. Had some extreme of self-criticism led Vivian to remove this one? The pages that followed did suggest she’d been pushing herself to try something new: details dropped away, leaving quick, thin lines that at first glance were mere marks on a page, but soon emerged as studies of objects captured in a fast twist of the hand. As if someone had shown her a book on Japanese ink drawing—only these were faint, almost pointillist tracks of graphite that suggested an unfurling leaf, a blossom, a clutch of newborn chicks.
Then another page went missing, thi
s one methodically picked away down to the fold.
After that second gap, an entire season had passed before Vivian took up her pencil again, to sketch a distant and solitary figure scything in a field. Then three acorns on the ground, so detailed that had they been in colour, the hand might have been tempted to pick them up. Two women in a large kitchen, backs turned as they worked on some project—the shape of the tins lying to one side suggested a Christmas pudding. And finally, another polished rendering, this one of Ronnie and her mother, before the fire. Ronnie appeared to be reading something aloud; Lady Dorothy was bent over some needle-work. The fire was lively, the scene speaking eloquently of love and warmth and survival.
This one was dated: 9 December 1915. It was also signed: Vivian Marie Beaconsfield.
I frowned. Her framed watercolours were signed, but I could not recall seeing a name on any of the other drawings. Did she intend this as a finished piece, to go on the wall? If so, why was it still here? I turned the page, finding a curled leaf, snow atop a twig, and a shiny conker—none of them signed. After the conker came one final torn-out page, and after that: nothing. The remainder of the book held only blank pages.
Ronnie had told me that Vivian stopped drawing when her beloved brother was killed, but clearly she had not. True, she’d picked up her pencils less often, but with no less commitment to the process. Looking at those final pages, I could see no sign of what had to be building up in her mind. That single dead leaf, that lonely twig, might in themselves seem ominous, but not when compared with the preceding years of similar drawings.
Sometime around Christmas 1915, Vivian Beaconsfield had laid down her pencils, closed her last journal, and ceased drawing. A few weeks later, she flung her possessions out of the windows and stripped her rooms to the walls. And a few months after that, she had attacked her surviving brother and gone into care, beginning the cycle that finally delivered her to the gates of Bedlam.
The afternoon was drawing in, and I felt I’d exhausted the possibilities of the sitting room. I returned the undated sketch-book to the shelf, straightened the spines again, and went into the adjoining bedroom. It, too, was a bright space, with ivory curtains hooked back from the window. The bed was made up, the water carafe on the table filled—did the maid still come every day to tend to Vivian’s empty quarters?
However, unlike the lightly furnished sitting room, this space was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. The bed-cover was lace-work over a creamy linen coverlet. The small wooden tables on either side looked German, each with an electric lamp with blown-glass bases and damask silk shades. A closely woven oval carpet next to the bed looked to be Turkish or Greek, as were the two pillows atop the coverlet.
But it was the wall facing the bed that drew the attention. Ceiling to floor, side to side, the wall was one enormous collage of shiny and curious objects, broken only by the mirrored dressing table set against its centre. All the objects were neatly hung and perfectly tidy within their allotted space, but the mix was idiosyncratic to an extreme: a curly twig here, a pyramid of buttons threaded through a hat-pin there, and between them a nosegay of long-dried flowers tucked into an infant’s embroidered shoe. Six tiny, perfectly framed paintings of a rock—different views of the same rock, and hung with a compulsive’s precision. There were scraps of cloth, a dog’s collar, and a broken roof-slate on which was painted a track of bare foot-prints, like a miniature beach at low tide. I counted five masks—two Venetian, two African, and an oddity made from a turtle shell. A cameo depicted the Roman Colosseum; half a dozen silk flowers of different design and colour were scattered about. There were a dozen or so keys, modern to Medieval, from thumbnail-sized to as long as my hand, and as many antique photograph portraits of various sizes, some framed and others held up with a push-pin. One wizened object that might have been a plum lay inside an intricately worked straw basket three inches high; to its left, a bow tied of exquisitely delicate lace; to its right, a long, thin mirror with a gilded frame.
Dizzying, baffling, glorious: mad? I lay down on Vivian’s bed, curious about what she would see from there, and found it oddly…composed. I removed my glasses to let the individual identities blur, and realised that if one imagined the objects as dots of paint, it made a modernistic, yet oddly comforting, overall impression. With two small flaws.
I put on my glasses and went to look. Yes, there were two places where things had been removed—one the size of my palm, the other of my outstretched hand. Both left tiny brass nails protruding from the wallpaper, suggesting that whatever had been there was considerably lighter than the slate or the mirror.
I tore my gaze away, to continue my search through drawers and under mattresses and carpets, atop curtains and under the stone sill outside the window. There was no clutter in her drawers and wardrobe, and all the clothing, somewhat out of date, smelt of cedar shavings or moth-balls. The colours I found there were every bit as subtle as in her sitting room, and their fabric as pleasing to the touch. She liked velvet, and silk, and loose-knitted merino. And belts—she had quite a collection of new-looking belts. Perhaps to compensate for an institutional weight loss? Hanging on a hook, so as to avoid wrinkles, was a pale green evening dress, again rather out of date, that I guessed she’d intended to wear to her brother’s birthday celebration. But there was also an assortment of male clothing—made to fit a short, slim figure.
Perhaps the maid had been instructed to provide Vivian with the means to go wandering through the hills again, in the gentle disguise of her childhood.
Other than that, wardrobe and drawers held nothing of interest. As I left the room, I paused to study the display.
The wall was mad, and therefore worrying. But it was also compelling, and therefore equally worrying.
No, I thought, turning away: Holmes would surely have let me know if my grip on reason was slipping.
Chapter Six
SHERLOCK HOLMES LOOKED AT THE books and musical pages spread over his table in the Reading Room, and realised that in ninety minutes, he had taken in not a single word.
Two weeks they’d had this time: two weeks and one day since Mrs Hudson’s case finished and she’d fled to Monte Carlo. Before that, he and Russell had nearly three weeks of calm between storms—although prior to that it was difficult to remember a time without demands.
Amusing to think that in his Baker Street days, boredom often drove him to a drugged stupor. When he’d…married (interesting how, four and a half years on, the word still fit poorly in the mind) he had anticipated a life peaceably divided between his Sussex bees and her Oxford books, with the occasional piquant outing to the world of crime. Indeed, that’s what they had, more or less, for the first two and a half years—until an acquaintance had called them to service, in August 1923. They had not stopped running since, racketing about the world, getting shot and taken hostage, with any number of threats thrown in their direction. During the past two years they’d had…what? Ten quiet days at the end of 1923? After that, a handful of days here and there (mostly there) until the two weeks, and then three weeks, this past spring. They might have had two entire months to themselves during the autumn of 1924, but for Watson’s little problem.
So much for retirement.
Still, it was probably all to the best—for him, at least. Lack of a challenge had always eaten at his spirit and his health. When he’d met Russell in 1915, he’d been on a downward spiral to the grave. At the current rate, he was going to live well into his second century.
Russell was a different question.
For her, the detecting life was less a demand than a choice. The young woman was quite capable of making a different life for herself—any number of different lives, come to that. Had she never encountered him on the Downs that afternoon, she would today be happily battling herself into a position of authority in the University, if not the Government. Marriage, normalcy—children, even: nothing was beyond her.
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Instead, Russell had chosen to follow the path he offered.
She was content, he knew that. But he had also seen her eyes following the carefree young people the other night. He told himself that the slight softening of her eyes and mouth had been amusement, not wistfulness. He wished he could be sure of it.
He looked down at the books, and wondered if there had been a reason his musical studies had nudged him into the question of Johann Sebastian Bach’s argument between formal and natural art. Or, one might say, between logic and passion, deliberation and mania…
Pah. He slapped shut the aged volume, drawing looks of scandal from all around, and abandoned his table and his studies in favour of a missing Bedlamite.
Chapter Seven
HAD SELWICK HALL NOT BEEN tucked into the far reaches of the county, I might have turned down Lady Dorothy’s offer to stop there the night, in favour of returning to London. But I did want to speak with the servants, and I had no wish to tramp the lanes to the station after dark.
So I accepted, expecting a quiet meal before the fire with Ronnie’s lonely mother. Instead, it seemed, we were to dine in grandeur at the Marquess’ table. I’d met the man once or twice, most recently at Ronnie’s wedding, and thought him an unfortunate product of the system of aristocratic privilege. Dining with him was not an enticing prospect.
However, it was difficult to refuse, since I’d brought one of those long, all-purpose skirts that (with a borrowed shawl) could pass as “dressing for dinner.” And I did have questions for him. If I remembered his habits correctly, he might take enough wine to simplify that task—assuming I could control my own intake in his presence.
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