Gibbous House

by Ewan Lawrie

  Cullis cowered and shrank further away from the embodiment of authority.

  ‘Been at the old business, Cullis?’

  There was no need for words; the shake of the head was violent. Nonetheless, the detective seemed to discern some mendacity, for he delivered a sweeping, open-handed blow to the fellow’s head. Perhaps there was more to the ostler’s dental deficiencies than a poor diet.

  Maccabi, his face a mixture of nervousness and relief, let out, ‘So! A suspect!’

  Evidently the man had never encountered a representative of the law, much less been on the wrong side of it. Turner said nothing. Allan’s pen raced across the page, and he gave a curse as his ink ran out. His pen was some newfangled contraption, which he filled from a bottle of ink carried in his pocket.

  The detective uttered one word, eyebrows raised, to Maccabi: ‘Suspect?’

  Maccabi’s reply was immediate, but less effective for the stuttering: ‘I mean m-m-merely that the Cullises are known to you, sir, a-a-and could reasonably be assumed to be criminal characters, and th-th-thus under suspicion. I thought a falling out... ’

  His voice faded like the last of an echo.

  ‘Did you?’ Was the illuminating response.

  Most unfortunately his discomfort was assuaged by the arrival of the other players in the pantomime. The professor with his scuttling gait, behind the confidently striding Miss Pardoner and the gliding Mrs Gonderthwaite. The policeman offered a polite click of the heels by way of welcome. Then he turned to me. ‘The body may be removed, Mr Moffat. But only to the care of the coroner at Alnwick. The drayman and his cart are yet here for the purpose.’

  I was about to instruct Cullis to take care of his brother’s remains, but thought better of it, bidding Maccabi to see to it and thereby ensuring his being accompanied by the detective and, most likely, the d____ reporter to the pond. Any enquiry as to whence his guilty manner came could wait until another time.

  Cullis was dismissed by the professor to clean himself up – and place the horse’s hide in the usual place – and Mrs Gonderthwaite apparently found further tasks for herself in the ill-provisioned kitchen. I looked to my ward and enquired,‘Did you know of the professor’s talents as a taxidermist, Miss Pardoner?’

  The imp danced a little jig of frustration and ran a hand over his scalp, while scowling, as if he had been hoping to deny his pastime. Miss Pardoner, in her turn, denied him the opportunity.

  ‘Indeed I did and do, Mr Moffat. It is a fascinating art and the professor has been good enough to inculcate in me an appreciation of some of its mysteries.’

  I thought of the poor fellow in the gatehouse, but thought better of mentioning it just then. Perhaps I should have done so.

  ‘Do you leave the skinning of the beasts to such as Cullis?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. I am more than competent with a sharp enough knife.’

  It was not a comforting thought, but it was a fascinating one.

  ‘How fortunate that the shepherd was killed with a rock, in that case,’ I said.

  The professor cleared his throat and wondered, ‘Ah... the policeman has been open with his speculations then?’

  I supposed he had not, but saw no reason to apprise either of them of that fact.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I should hardly be surprised if he suspects Maccabi, the fellow should have embroidered an M on his breast pocket. He is surely guilty of something, of that I have no doubt.’

  A little scarlet appeared on Miss Pardoner’s cheek but she made no further reaction and I had to be satisfied with that. The professor, however, stiffened his spine and spoke with some gravity.

  ‘Mr Moffat, I have ever found Jedediah Maccabi to be the most honest, upright and diligent servant of the estate, I would doubt him capable of the least crime, save that of a surfeit of zeal in carrying out his duties.’

  I could not resist a sneer in the little man’s direction.

  ‘It is to be hoped, then, that his betters have not called upon him to perform any unsavoury duties, wouldn’t you agree?’

  I was pleased to note that this riposte deflated the man somewhat.

  I excused myself to both and set off to the front of the house, convinced of an opportunity to see Jedediah carted to arrest and ignominy in the company of a corpse. It was not to be. Constable Turner stood in the rear of the cart next to a shroud-covered form that I presumed to be my late employee. Maccabi stood on the threshold lamentably bare of shackles, chains or any restraint at all. The reporter was in animated discussion with Maccabi, who gave an urgent ‘Moffat’ at my approach. As I drew near, he turned to the journalist and informed him that he was not in a position to offer him board and lodging. Allan was implying that not to cooperate with him could prejudice any newspaper report he might concoct. Such threats must have had little effect on Maccabi, for he remained obdurate. For certain sure, I was unfazed by them and merely extended the house’s hospitality in the certainty that the reporter’s stay would – at the very least – prove diverting. At that moment the policeman called from the cart, saying that he intended to return and resolve the matter – if not before the day was out, then soon after. He gave me a long look before laying on the whip to little effect and the cart rolled away.

  The repeater watch showed one; it was a pleasant afternoon. I bade Maccabi see to the provision of a luncheon for myself and the reporter on the terrace outside the library. Maccabi seemed about to make some unwise remark, but closed his mouth and went about arranging the miracle of food production from Mrs Gonderthwaite’s domain. I turned to the reporter. ‘Well, Mr Allan, you are a strange fish to wash up on these shores, I think.’

  Despite my bantering tone, the man’s eyes narrowed to a sharp glare and his voice emerged sharper still.

  ‘What do you mean by that, Moffat?’

  He gave a consumptive little cough and spat gelidly to the side.

  ‘I simply meant that you are no Northumbrian.’

  I raised both eyebrows to convince him of my innocence of any guileful motive.

  ‘No, no. I am not, at that. I – I have been sometime abroad. My family are... Reynolds from Gainsborough... Lincolnshire. Edgar Allan is a professional name.’

  His accent bespoke the Americas, although he was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to disguise it. There seemed little of truth in anything he had said – perhaps that was to be expected of a newspaperman.

  We reached the terrace, covered with furniture of iron after the style of the Spanish rejeria or the iron-working fashions imported for St Paul’s or Hampton Court. I had little time for chairs and tables of this kind: the artful whorls and curlicues in the metal in no way made up for their impracticality and discomfort. I would have preferred banquettes of honest wood. Still, it was indeed a pleasant day and I motioned the reporter to a less fussy arrangement of four chairs and a table of rectangular, rather than the more common circular, shape.

  We sat, Allan almost recovered from my remark. He did seem to be a man with a past not quite behind him; a past he would most likely have looked for over his shoulder were he not hidden half a world away from it. I sat in a chair that offered a view of the lake.

  The reporter began patting the pockets of his coat, then withdrew a clay pipe. A further search produced a box of blackened metal about the size of a folded handkerchief.Allan opened it and withdrew a white-headed lucifer. He bent to the flagstones and ignited the match so as to avoid any harm to myself from stray sparks. I had never been a true smoker and I never will be such until the unlikely day that someone invents an affordable match that can be used in safety.

  Arabella Coble had enjoyed tobacco, although she never smoked in public. I did enjoy watching the pleasure she drew from the pipe quite as materially as she drew the smoke from it. The matches had been the end of the child, and Arabella’s decline began shortly afterward. She did not smoke again, but kept a similarly blackened box at her bedside in memory of her daughter. I buried it with her.

  The repo
rter let out a contented sigh and seemed for the first time relaxed in my company. His legs were stretched out before him, crossed at the ankle, and both he and his clothes cut a slightly less ridiculous figure in that pose.

  ‘A man with a smoke is ever in want of a drink, I find, Mr Allan,’ I said.

  I stood and entered the library via the French windows, and returned with an Armagnac, which someone had hidden behind a row of false spines whose books’ contents, had they existed, would have made interesting reading. The ‘books’ were of homologous design, as though for a private edition of some collection. All but one spine bore the legend: Collected Writings on Alcoholic Beverages and an appropriate volume number. On noting that the spines themselves were as new, the experimental hooking of a finger on the only title of exception revealed the Armagnac’s hiding place. It would have been an exceptionally captivating tome, purporting to be ‘Les Quarante Vertues d’Armagnac’ by one Cardinal Vital Dufour.

  The reporter started from a slumberous ease as I placed the glass on the iron table. He looked uncertain as to where he found himself and looked blankly as I wished him, ‘Good health, Mr Allan.’

  He blinked severally before replying, ‘Quite, and your own, Mr Moffat, though I think you more in need of the toast than I.’

  The man looked as pale as the worst consumptive and I laughed, thinking his humour both droll and macabre. Allan did not even smile, just drained his glass at a draught and replaced it upon the table.

  I offered to recharge his glass but he declined, staring pensively over his eye-glasses. Thinking to pass the time in conversation, I remarked on his unusual attire.

  ‘Manners do not maketh man, Moffat, but clothes,’ he said.

  He seemed unstruck by the question of what manner of man his own made him, while I replied, ‘I believe you may be correct, Mr Allan. A man is known for what he is by his dress; from the beggar in his rags to the emperor in his purple and all other stations in between, we are known by our buttoned and sewn signifiers.’

  He considered for a moment. ‘But I do believe we might consider more the physiognomy as the clue to character. I have made study of lower characters in Paris and... elsewhere. A noble forehead is rarely seen upon a villain, in my experience. Look to yourself.’

  It would have made a cat laugh, the nonsense the fellow spouted. Nevertheless, I did not expect him to react so to what I said in reply to it. ‘So, you would know a villain, if you found his corpse in another man’s finest clothes?’

  The man’s customary pallor was empurpled by some fit of apoplexy or rage and amid the choking he spluttered: ‘Damn him, Damn that Griswold.’ I watched the fellow recover himself with some interest, whilst considering what a truly peculiar fellow this Edgar Allan was.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  At last, Maccabi and Miss Pardoner arrived, bearing the necessities for luncheon en plein air, which were shortly revealed as a cold collation of meats and cheeses. I presumed, therefore, that Maccabi would not be joining us. Miss Pardoner needed no invitation and sat predictably close to the reporter, although I had stood to withdraw the chair next to mine.

  ‘Good day, once again, Miss Pardoner,’ I said, evenly.

  The reporter, clearly not having recovered himself sufficiently, merely grunted and airily waved a hand. To be sure, he still looked a little puce.

  ‘Good day, gentlemen. I trust these poor comestibles will satisfy? They are little enough – but the best that could be assembled.’

  In fact, they were the makings of a good, if simple, repast. The cheese was of a pan-European variety: the fashionably novel Roquefort, Parmesan, Emmental, Camembert and Cheddar. With the exception of this last, it was scarce credible that such cheeses could be found in Northumberland – much less in the kitchen of Gibbous House. They seemed bare of any mould, save of course the blue in the Roquefort. Many a London table would have been pleased to offer such.

  The cold meats were more prosaic by comparison, for the most part being the residue of some earlier roast. The ham hock had a suspicious silvering in the pink; that aside, the rolled beef appeared moist and the lamb looked as though some degree of shepherding had – after all – been done by the late Cullis. There was more of the blood sausage from breakfast, sliced cold, blackly crumbling around pellucid, glistening fat. There were freshly baked loaves, so hot as to steam despite the fine weather.

  Miss Pardoner made as if to serve. I waved her to her seat once more.

  Taking a knife to one of the loaves, I sliced thickly and placed two generous portions on a plate. Spurning the use of a cheese parer, since the cheese was indeed in a remarkable state of freshness, I took up the handles of the cheese wire and noted how much more effective it would be than a yellow scarf. Miss Pardoner laid a hand on mine. ‘Just Roquefort, sir. I find cheese so insipid. I prefer meat.’

  Her tone was innocent of any guile, although, perhaps inevitably, the corner of her mouth gave an infinitesimal twitch. I cut a generous portion of the blued cheese and placed it with a spatulate knife on her plate. The cheese itself glistened and I was reminded of beads of perspiration on a lover’s skin. Miss Pardoner declined the ham, asked for her beef to be from the rarer end of the joint and demanded a further two slices of the blood sausage than the two I had already apportioned.

  Mr Allan appeared yet to be in a funk and made no response when I gestured at him with cutlery and plate. Mine own selections reflected Miss Pardoner’s tastes and I found that a pleasing thought.

  Since both my ward and I had handled our cutlery with some efficiency I was quite despairing of a libation when Maccabi finally arrived with a decanter of something a little too pale to be claret. Still, I was grateful when he poured the three of us a glass, although I was sore tempted to upbraid him as he spilled a drop on the admittedly greying white of my shirt cuff. No matter, his own clothes would be on my back soon enough.

  Edgar Allan drained his glass before I had taken a sip, and held it forth for replenishment. Maccabi complied and departed with an indecipherable look at Miss Ellen Pardoner.

  Miss Pardoner addressed the reporter. ‘Are you quite yourself, sir?’

  His visage betrayed that something troubled him more than a little; his reply had the tone of a wistful child who has lost some shiny gewgaw. ‘I am quite sure I no longer know.’

  For myself, I was sure I no longer cared.

  Maccabi had had the courtesy to leave the decanter on the wrought-iron table; I removed the stopper and charged the reporter’s glass to no discernible reaction. Miss Pardoner de-clined the offer and I filled mine own glass with a little more care than Maccabi had. Miss Pardoner gave a polite, and unconvincing, cough as though asking my permission to speak. Her bold stare gave the lie to this semblance of propriety.

  ‘Mr Moffat. I wondered if you might care to discuss Miss Arabella Coble with me. I quite feel I know her. The late Mr Coble spoke of her fondly and often. You will forgive a young woman’s curiosity, I am sure.’

  I would have, that was indeed true. However, a young woman’s dissembling I would have – and did – find less forgivable. It seemed doubtful to me that my late wife had been held in any great affection by a man who had instructed his lawyers: ‘be in no doubt, I hold yourselves responsible should my great-niece be so misguided as to believe I hold her in any kind of affection’.

  Miss Pardoner’s request was merely a gambit of some kind. For that reason I chose to grant it, hoping to descry in what game she had made this opening.

  ‘She was a remarkable woman,’ I began. I regaled her with as affecting an account of the family life of persons of quality as had ever been invented – for publication or otherwise. Even the most blurred version of the truth should have, I supposed, shocked the woman to the core. There would come a time to tell Miss Ellen Pardoner about Arabella Coble: that time had not yet come. Though the reporter appeared insensible, it were too great a risk.

  Therefore I spoke at length, with as little regard for veracity as Mr Charles
Dickens himself – and perhaps with as much sentiment – regarding the paragon I claimed Arabella to have been. I should confess I limned myself in colours less dark than they should have been, but not too much so. A certain verisimilitude was necessary.

  So Miss Pardoner did not hear of forgery, deception or hurried departures by the light of moons, gibbous and otherwise. Nor did she hear of occasional forays into the life of the street on both our parts, although admittedly Arabella provided service more often than I, who was forced to remain contented with pecuniary matters and the provisioning of restful ease for tormented men.

  Nor did I mention the swindles, the glorious gulling of a minor earl whose climax earned a year’s living – and the dying of her daughter left alone that night with the lucifer box. The ending I gave the fantasy was equally unreal, recounting how Arabella had died bravely in my arms after suffering much.

  This last was true in so far as it went. My late wife had died raving and ravaged by syphilis with a curse for Alasdair Moffat on her lips.

  Miss Pardoner’s reaction was disconcerting at first. ‘Mr Moffat, you cannot surely imagine that I have not read it?’ The woman arched an eyebrow.

  I raised both of my own before charging myself with being doubly dull. In the first and less serious indictment: for not grasping that someone had left Miss Arabella Coble’s naïve scribblings for me to find – and in the second; for not taking pains to read it.

  My ward’s statement meant that there was something in the diary revealing of Arabella. How revealing remained to be seen; but since Alasdair Moffat could not have figured in its pages, something ripe must have lain in them to belie the fairy tale I myself had just spun about Miss Arabella Coble.

  ‘Ah, I see... Perhaps a grieving husband should be allowed a little gilding of mourning’s lily?’ I ventured.

  Miss Pardoner’s reply fell somewhere between the bray of an amused donkey and the snort of a particularly disdainful thoroughbred. Any subsequent badinage was prevented by the querulous voice of the reporter, who enquired, ‘Who... ahem... is Miss Arabella Coble?’