An Unmarried Lady

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An Unmarried Lady Page 14

by Willman, Anna


  The research in the library continued all week, with Elaine and Mr. Merrival working side by side, but there was a new strain in their interactions. Several times, Elaine started to say something and then drew back. Mr. Merrival seemed less inclined to conversation that did not touch directly on the task at hand. It seemed to Elaine as if the magic had gone from their friendship as suddenly as it had arrived, almost as if she were working side by side with a stranger.

  Every evening after dinner Mr. Merrival approached the Green Parlor with a request to meet with his Host. Every evening he was repulsed by Carney. He urged Charles to intercede for him, and when Charles refused, fell into what his friend called “a most unbecoming sulk”.

  “I’ll not tolerate this charade much longer!” James protested. “It is unbearable. The old man must see me. We have to set this right.”

  “You make too much of it, my dear. There is no harm being done. So you fancy the lady. It seems to me that she rather fancies you as well. It is all going precisely as the old rascal planned.”

  “Oh, she must not. It would be too cruel. It is enough that my case is hopeless, I would not have her suffer as well. Do you really think she cares for me? No, you must be wrong. Such a thing has never happened before.”

  “To the contrary, exactly such things happen every day. I am delighted that it has at last happened to you.”

  “You laugh, Charles, but truly this has gone long past the simple prank we imagined.”

  Indeed every minute he spent with Elaine, every conversation, every thought, confirmed his belief in her and his knowledge that he would never again encounter a woman so exactly suited to him. And every passing day confirmed his own unworthiness of her. This unforgivable charade, entered into as a joke of Shakespearean proportions, had become hateful to him in every aspect, but above all, because he knew it put her well beyond his reach forever. He both longed for the opportunity to tell her the truth and dreaded the moment when he must. And in the meantime, whenever they were together he took care to center all of his attention on the task at hand as they searched through the letters, hunting for the talisman.

  Two letters had been discovered that made reference to the talisman. The first and oldest letter to do so contained a detailed inventory of the gems embedded in it, totaling some forty-five large rubies, fourteen large diamonds and forty-two small sapphires of the purest blue. “It cannot be jewelry then,” Elaine commented. “So many large stones, it would be a monstrosity.”

  “There seems to be little doubt that a monstrosity of some sort is precisely what it is. No wonder the fair Kathryn was so eager to give it away.” Mr. Merrival replied.

  The second letter was a copy of one written by Elaine’s great-grandfather to his youngest brother, Captain James’ great-grandfather. It consisted of a long and angry tirade about the talisman’s disappearance. Once he had deciphered it, Mr. Merrival read it aloud to Elaine, who listened with growing interest.

  “ ‘Our brother Thomas’s recent death has been most untimely,’ ” James read, “ ‘for he died before I could make him tell me our father’s secret. It seems that before our father died he took into his head the most Absurd and Unjust Suspicion. His disordered mind was fastened upon preserving the talisman for Future Generations, and he often repeated to me that his greatest fear was that no sooner would I come into the inheritance than I would sell the damned thing to pay off my gaming debts. Well, now it seems that to prevent that from happening he devised some sort of hiding place for the thing whilst I was off on the Continent and you were away at school. He concealed it in the midst of a great many renovations he ordered to be done around both the house and gardens, so that it could be almost anywhere. He told Thomas, and no one else, where it could be found.

  “ ‘You know well, my brother, how stubborn and vainglorious our Thomas was. No one could ever persuade him to anything, and though I beat him with many blows and threatened even worse harm to him, still he would not reveal the hiding place to me. I offered money, too, but he paid no heed to that, but rushed off in a fit of bile, mounted that black stallion that was ever too strong for him, and, well, you know the rest. He hit the fence sideways, trying to pull the brute off, and perished without regaining consciousness.

  “ ‘Indeed, I fear our talisman is lost to us forever, for I have searched and searched to no avail. I even had Dobbs dismantle the gazebo father had caused to be built on the Great Lawn and also bade him to tear down the new wall coverings.

  “The injustice of father’s suspicions and the foolishness of his trusting Thomas – always his favorite, you will recall, from the time that snot-nosed little villain was so fond of spying upon you and me and reporting our every misdeed to Nanny – well the result of this folly is that the talisman is gone.’ “

  Mr. Merrival paused. “The letter continues in this vain for several more pages, but there seems to be no more useful information. Your poor great grandfather repeats himself frequently and expresses a strong sense of ill usage. No sign at all of the famous Howard sense of humor. Furthermore, it seems to me quite likely that his father was right in assuming that he intended to sell the thing, for he spends a full page estimating its monetary value and then asks his brother for money with which to pay off his debts of honor.”

  “At least we can now know how and when it first disappeared.” Elaine commented.

  “Yes we can,” Mr. Merrival said. “Our gr-, our guilty party is your great-great-grandfather, Edward Lambert Howard, for it appears he trusted to the wrong son, or at least to one who was, no matter how worthy, a clumsy horseman. Now, I wonder where he could have hidden it. Do you think it possible that he may have written down the location in addition to telling Thomas? He cannot have been unacquainted with his son’s deficiencies in horsemanship. Surely a prudent man must have prepared for the contingency of an accident. At the very least, have left a clue.”

  He thought a moment. “Wasn’t he the one who was painted here in the library?” He went over to the little nook, took down the small portrait, and brought it back to the table.

  Elaine watched him in silence for some minutes, her eyes troubled. “The portrait is much too small to conceal so many gems,” she said at last.

  “You’re right, of course, but I thought perhaps there might be a paper attached to the back, or hidden in the frame.” But though they examined it carefully, they could find nothing. Finally Mr. Merrival returned it to its place under the ornamental shelving of the nook.

  “Perhaps the portrait is only important because it is so easily identifiable as being here in the library. Perhaps it is this room that is important,” Elaine suggested.

  They looked around the room, considering possible hiding places. All four walls were covered with bookshelves extending from the floor to the ceiling, and while these, of course might have held any number of talismans tucked in behind the books, Elaine could assure Mr. Merrival that they had already removed every single book and had found nothing there. There were only three breaks in the shelving, at the doorway, the fireplace, and the single, highly ornamented nook, which was on the wall opposite to the doorway. There were two long oak reading tables in the room each with four high backed chairs ranged along the sides. It was at one of these tables that they had been sitting as they worked. There was a large ornate desk, also of oak, facing the door, situated squarely in front of the nook, with a chair behind it. There were two overstuffed armchairs in front of the fireplace.

  “The desk seems the most promising,” Elaine suggested, “for it may have a secret compartment as these old desks so often do. Yet surely others, my father and his father and grandfather before him, would have searched it most thoroughly already and found nothing.”

  “You are right. And the tables, too, have drawers in them and may well have secret compartments underneath, and yet it is impossible to imagine that they have not also been thoroughly examined and found wanting.”

  Nevertheless, they went through the room, checking the fur
niture, looking for hollow legs on the tables and hidden compartments to no avail. They took down the portrait again and searched the wall behind it carefully for a hidden device of some sort. They looked at the shelf above it and examined the ornamental trim. They looked at every inch of the mantelpiece above the fireplace and felt of the rough stones. Mr. Merrival would have peered up into the blackness of the chimney, but the coals were still glowing in the hearth and Elaine assured him that her stringent economy at Lynnfield had not extended so far as to neglect the cleaning of chimneys, at least not of those in rooms so frequently in use as the library. Nor could she believe that any parcel stored up the chimney would have survived this many generations.

  At last they resigned themselves to failure and reconnoitered once more at the table. They were finished with the letters, but now still had before them the documents, the stack of maps and sketches and the wooden box containing all of the smaller scraps of paper. They resolved to take up these tasks early on the next day and went down to join Libby at the Dower House for the day’s lessons.

  Later that afternoon, walking up from the Dower House after class, Elaine said in a quiet voice, “It is a curiosity to me that gentlemen who show every sign of being honorable and truthful in their dealings with one another, so often feel no hesitation in being shockingly untruthful to a mere female.”

  Mr. Merrival flushed and after a moment hesitation responded gravely, “And is it your experience that members of your sex are universally truthful?”

  “No, of course not, yet it seems to me that women prevaricate most often about little things, while gentlemen are untruthful about the larger things, things one might need to understand rightly in order to make important decisions effecting all of one’s life.”

  “Yet often it is the little things that matter the most. No, you wrong your sex, Miss Howard. It seems to me that in general women tell lies to avoid making someone else uncomfortable, while gentlemen merely wish to avoid discomfort for themselves.”

  “Well, perhaps in some degree, yet I am persuaded that some gentlemen may be untruthful out of purer motives than you will allow them. I believe they feel that they must protect us poor females from unpleasant truths, as if we were such fragile creatures that we could not be capable of bearing up under the weight of the truth.”

  “I cannot imagine that you ever found yourself unable to bear any weight, Miss Howard. Your courage and fortitude are most remarkable.”

  “And yet you are not truthful to me,” she said thoughtfully, and with a small and forlorn smile, she went up to change for dinner leaving him standing alone and aghast in the hallway.

  CHAPER TWELVE: In which the Masquerade is Exposed.

  Elaine and Mr. Merrival were both unusually quiet at dinner that night. Elaine complained of a slight headache and retired to her bedroom early, and Mr. Merrival sat before the fire with a grim cast to his expression, saying in response to his friend’s teasing queries only that he had much to think about.

  The next morning when they found themselves alone together in the library, she made no reference to their conversation of the previous afternoon but set right in to work on the remaining documents and sketches with a quiet manner that quite forestalled him from broaching the matter that lay so heavy between them.

  They found that they could dispose of the documents quite handily, for not one of them made any discernable reference to the talisman. The Captain having previously sorted out and explored those sketches that had the look of a map about them, Elaine undertook the task of going through the others, while Mr. Merrival began the more daunting chore of sorting through the numerous scraps of paper.

  The sketches had been done by a variety of artists, none of whom showed much talent either for artistic expression or accuracy of representation. Some were drawn on fine parchment, others on cheaper writing stock. Many of the drawings appeared to be rough sketches of furniture made for the purpose of showing a cabinet maker or carpenter what was wanted. There were sketches of everyday household items, none of which she recognized as being items located anywhere at Lynnfield: a sewing basket, a plant stand with a wilted looking philodendron drooping upon it, a rather ugly candelabra with a heart motif, a pair of old fashioned spectacles, and a lady’s glove with an embroidered cuff. There were two sketches of a cat, showing the head only, and with the almond eyes drawn in darkly with a firm charcoal line. There were, in addition, several drawings that appeared to have been done by children – including a picture of flowers in a tall vase that she recognized rather painfully as one she herself had drawn at an early age and given to her Papa. None of these sketches looked at all promising to Elaine, and she was about to signal defeat when she came upon a sketch of the library nook itself.

  She brought it to Mr. Merrival’s attention and they carried it over to compare it with the original. “This is a sketch for the carpenter. See, there are notes on the side, and there is a square drawn in where the painting will hang. How odd, for it had always seemed to me that the painting must have been added later, for the design of the shelving above and below places the painting rather higher on the wall than is customary for such a small work. But you can see from this sketch that it was intended that way.”

  “The writing is familiar,” Mr. Merrival commented and went looking through the letters to find the match. He soon pulled out one that had been penned by Elaine’s great- great grandfather. “Here it is. Well, this is no surprise after all, for we have already guessed that it was Edward Lambert who purchased the painting. Perhaps he was a tall man and that is why he had the painting situated as it is.”

  They searched the nook once again, checking the ornamentation on the shelf above the painting and inspecting the shelves below the painting, but there was nothing there to be found.

  “I did discover several antique books on those lower shelves which may prove to be quite valuable,” Elaine commented. “Perhaps this nook was created for the purpose of holding that sort of treasure and not for the talisman after all.”

  They put the sketch of the nook aside with the two letters referring to the talisman and went back to their researches. Elaine found nothing more of interest among the sketches and turned her attention to the small papers being perused by Mr. Merrival. They decided that she would look at those he had already viewed, in the hopes that a second pair of eyes might turn up something that the other had missed.

  As the week progressed, Anne or the Captain would come in from time to time and join them for a while, adding a third and fourth pair of eyes, but indeed, as Anne pointed out to them somewhat testily one day, these papers were inscribed with the merest of scrawls – sometimes a number, sometimes a word or two, sometimes only a meaningless swirl, a heart, a cross, or a circle, as if the penman were testing out the point of his pen, but seldom anything that communicated a complete thought. Elaine advised her sister to review the sketches, then, hoping she might see what they might have missed. The Captain had returned the maps as well, and Anne dedicated some considerable time to them also, even going to so far as to explore the rooms again.

  By the end of the week, they had been through the scraps of paper many times and had set aside no more than seven of the small pieces for consideration. They were of varying sizes, some consisting of no more than a small torn corner of parchment with a slight scrawl on it. Two of them were included simply because they bore the capital letter “T” on them. One of these had, in addition a large eye upon it; the other was simply the word “cat”, the “t” of which was enlarged, forming the capital “T” which had persuaded them to select it.

  “’T’ for talisman?” Anne asked? Why not ‘T’ for tail, or for tea, or Thomas?”

  “You are probably right and it is of no consequence, but we decided it was better to include them for now,” Elaine replied.

  Three of the papers were more promising in that they had the full word ‘Talisman’ written on them. Another paper had merely ‘talis’ but it was agreed that this was most li
kely an abbreviation and so was included. The seventh paper said “cat’s eyes” and was included only because of the drawing of an eye on one of the ‘T’ pages. When she saw it, Anne went to the stack of sketches and brought out the two cat drawings, which they all agreed must be reconsidered.

  “Perhaps the talisman is a statue of a cat with jeweled eyes,” Anne suggested.

  “It would have to be a very large cat to have room for so many large gems in its eyes, though perhaps jewels were also used for the claws and teeth and a collar,” Elaine mused.

  “Too large to hide easily, or indeed in any of the places we have so far considered,” Anne admitted.

  “Perhaps we are limited in our conjectures by our more sedate taste,” Mr. Merrival suggested. “We have been told that the item was gaudy in the extreme. The cat may be encrusted all over with the jewels – white diamonds for the fur, perhaps, with blue sapphires for the eyes, and rubies for the mouth, the claws and the collar.”

  “It would be smaller then, to be sure,” Anne agreed. But when they examined once more the inventory of stones, they could not be convinced that the jewels described were a close match to even the gaudiest of cats.

  Elaine brought the papers they had selected to her father to see if he had any other thoughts to contribute, but he thought a cat unlikely, unless it were a royal lion, and beyond that had nothing to add.

  They left it for a while then, turning their attention to the approaching Christmas Season. It was a tradition at Lynnfield to have a large celebration to which were invited all of their tenants, as well as the local gentry and prominent villagers. While the celebration had once included several days of feasting with hired entertainment of all sorts, including musicians and play actors, tumblers and jugglers, and puppet masters for the children, Elaine’s economies had reduced the scope of the festivities to just one great meal served on Christmas Eve to all the neighborhood gentry in the Great Hall of Lynnfield and, on Boxing Day, an open invitation to all Lynnfield tenants to enter the Hall from the terrace and partake of Christmas pudding and spiced ale and to receive a small gift of money. Not even the fact that the house was still in mourning for the son and erstwhile heir could be allowed to interfere with this duty to the Lynnfield community.

 

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