‘Hudson. White is the partner,’ Harriet said a little distractedly. The last thing she had any time for at this moment was a quarrel between the women at Silverside. She and Crowther had hardly been given a chance to speak to one another. Then she thought of the unanswered summons of Mr Askew and sighed. ‘One moment, Ham.’
She opened the door into the office once more. Crowther was still examining the wounds on Mr Askew’s hand. ‘You’re going,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question.
‘I am. Will you join me?’
He shook his head without looking at her. ‘No, I shall spend a little more time here, then perhaps ask that man to break the door down into Mr Askew’s apartments. I shall join you at Silverside later.’
The door closed and he was alone.
Mrs Briggs might have been keeping a close watch, but it was Felix who first appeared as Ham brought the carriage to a halt on the gravel path outside the house.
‘Mrs Westerman!’ he said, handing her down. ‘I went to the vicarage to see Sophia, but I was not allowed into the house. Miss Scales said she would not see me.’ He made his eyes wide and pleading. ‘She said she was not seeing anyone, but that was not true! Mr Postlethwaite was allowed to pay his respects, and Mr Sturgess. It is only myself she will not see.’
‘Does that surprise you, Felix?’ Harriet said rather impatiently and tried to move past him, but he laid his hand on her arm.
‘She wanted to see me before,’ he said, his grip tightening. Harriet looked at him — a child, she thought. That poor girl has married a spoiled child with an ugly temper, and now she will be saddled with him till he drinks himself to death or a boar catches up with him. Or a murder of crows. Perhaps it would have been better if the marriage had been kept secret; at least then Miss Hurst might have had the chance to make another choice.
‘She wanted to see you when her father went missing; she hoped to see you, no doubt, when her father was found murdered. Perhaps she thinks your visit unforgivably late.’
‘But she is my wife!’
‘She was your wife then too, Felix. And your wife when you left her with that monstrous father of hers and ran away to England with your mother.’ He turned pale, as if she had struck him, but did not release her arm. ‘Now let me go.’
Ham cleared his throat. He was standing at Harriet’s elbow and looking rather sternly at Felix. He rolled his great shoulders. Felix lifted his hand from her arm, and Harriet walked briskly into the house.
Mr Askew’s apartments showed him to have been an orderly sort of man. There were a pair of armchairs round the fireplace in red leather and a number of well-stocked bookcases. The room was dominated, however, by Mr Askew’s worktable on which he produced his plans of the surrounding countryside. Inks and stone for grinding them lay next to an astrolabe in a walnut case. The table had large candlesticks at each end, and though they were burned to stubs, Crowther could see Mr Askew used beeswax candles to work with. Again he had a rather painful sense of fellow feeling.
Of the portrait that Crowther had glanced at there was no sign. Rifling through the man’s desk he found a great many cuttings from the newspapers advertising or reporting on his various entertainments, and boasting of the number of visitors of quality from many European countries whom he had welcomed into his museum. It had not been so when Crowther was a child. No one came here then, and the town had been miserable and poor. He picked up the astrolabe, which was beautifully made, and considered his father. The land he had bought he had used purely to create the wealth Crowther now enjoyed. He had cut down the timber, worked the last deposits he could from the mines and invested the profits elsewhere, where it could do no good for these people. For that, they had made him a peer of the realm. Mr Askew may have been an awkward man at times, but he had brought visitors and their money into Keswick, he had unpicked the history and geography of the area and made it available to his fellow men. Crowther had sneered at him, and now he lay dead among his exhibits, another bloody story among so many others.
Crowther closed his eyes briefly and put down the astrolabe. If Mr Askew’s married sister permitted it, he would buy the instrument himself and place it on his own worktable to remind him. He remembered that Harriet had purchased a violin from the estate of another man who had died violently. Perhaps they deserved the reputation as carrion birds that some were keen to give them.
The notebooks Crowther found were full only of sketch maps and measurements. Mr Askew, it seemed, had not kept a journal of his thoughts. There was no note, no letter. Crowther leaned back in the chair and half-closed his eyes. He was trying to recall, in each detail, the portrait of James Westerman, Harriet’s late husband, that hung in the drawing room in Caveley. It was a sort of exercise before he made an attempt on recalling the glimpsed portrait of Lord Greta. The oil of Captain Westerman showed him in a version of Captain’s undress uniform — a vigorous, handsome man, with the sea churning behind him. It was painted, Mrs Westerman had told him, just before their marriage and shortly after he had achieved the rank of Captain. His barge bobbed off a little to the left in reference to his new position; he had his sword in front of him like a cane. The painter had given the impression of intelligence and humour to his expression. Crowther wondered briefly what the same painter would make of his own angular, ageing self. Would he be painted with a knife in his hand? Darkness behind him, his face made even more haggard by the candlelight by which he always worked? Well, such were his signs. Just as the barge, hat and sword were those of the late Captain.
Crowther opened his eyes again. He saw Mr Askew in front of him as he glanced up; the portrait had been almost life-size, and by the way Mr Askew had held it, it seemed he and Greta were looking at each other, turned slightly away from the viewer, one arm forward. A profile, and what were the signifiers there? A ring. The landscape behind him. On the waistcoat, an elaborate chatelaine. Crowther saw it, placed his hand on his forehead and thought. He had seen it before.
He stood up so quickly that Mr Askew’s chair tipped over behind him.
V.5
London, the same day. Office of Mr Palmer in the Admiralty Building, Whitehall
Mr Palmer saw a great deal of correspondence cross his desk at the Admiralty; however, it was unusual to find an envelope addressed to him personally. His rather shadow-strewn professional career meant he was hardly acknowledged to be what he was, a man of growing influence and stature in that place. Usually those who wished to communicate with him did so in person or via some intermediary, rather than committing themselves to paper. Yet here was an express with his name plainly written on it, handed to him as the late afternoon began to settle into twilight. His first action on receiving the packet was to check the seal for signs of tampering, then having reassured himself on that point, he closed the door to his outer office where his clerks were busily at work and returned to his desk.
It might have been supposed that Mr Palmer would have had to find work elsewhere when the government of Lord North collapsed in the wake of the Yorktown fiasco, or when Earl Sandwich was replaced as 1st Lord of the Admiralty by Howe. He had not doubted the security of his position long. He knew too many secrets, secrets too old and varied to be spurned by any man of sense, and the new 1st Lord was wise enough to aim to win the favour of Mr Palmer rather than estrange him.
He opened the letter and looked first at the upright signature with which it was concluded. The look of suspicion left his face and was replaced with a smile. He turned back to the beginning of the letter and began to read. The smile became a frown. After some moments he set the paper down and turned his chair to examine the view behind him. It showed a busy courtyard in the heart of the capital, and beyond it the Mall. The heat of the summer had thinned out the Quality in Town and left the streets to men of business who could not afford to retreat to country air, and the poor who, with increasing desperation, dragged themselves up and down the streets trying to find enough citizens to buy their wares. The city stank
and sweltered. The concert halls were growing dusty, the opera houses shut up. Only the pleasure gardens still gathered a crowd to walk in the evening and seek some cool in the shade of the trees, though the turf was yellowed and the musicians panted as they played. Mr Palmer saw little of what passed outside his window, however, and after a period of contemplation he stood and took up his coat.
He folded the letter into his pocket and passed through his outer office and down the main stairway. His clerks noticed his passing, but did not question it. Mr Palmer was forever coming and going with that look of concentration puckering the skin around his eyes.
Mr Palmer’s destination was a modest house located off Whitehall and within five minutes’ walk of his own office; however, it was almost an hour after leaving his office that he arrived there. He had spent some little time amongst the archives, then had made a brief stop at his own residence before coming here. It was not a place where one called without a gift of some kind. The gentleman who lived there had a taste for the antique and Mr Palmer had fetched from his rooms a reserved item from a portfolio of ancient maps. This portfolio he had bought at considerable expense some five years previously, and he had done so with the express intent of offering it piecemeal to the gentleman in Craig’s Court,
The windows on the upper storey seemed oddly set, so the house had a hunkered, mistrustful look, like an old man peering sideways under lowered lids. His knock was answered promptly though by a clean-looking young woman, who greeted him with a smile of recognition.
‘Mr Palmer! He will be glad to see you.’
‘I hope so, Bess. Though I thought you might have shut up and fled the house in this heat.’
The girl stood back to let him into the dark hallway, and Mr Palmer felt, as he always did in this house, that he was disappearing into an ancient age. ‘Lord, he’ll never leave this place, sir. Can you imagine him being pushed around Bath in his chair and taking the waters?’
Mr Palmer had to confess he could not.
‘No, the old spider will stay here at the centre of his web, twitching his strings.’ It was said with a warmth and shake of the head that took all the offence out of the statement.
‘Any interesting visitors since I was last here, Bess?’
She wagged her finger at him as if he were a boy half her own age. ‘Now Mr Palmer, you always ask, and I always give you the same answer. Sir Gawen has visitors enough and they are interesting to him, and there let it lie. You shall find him in the upper parlour as ever. Shall I send the girl up with the decanter?’
Palmer nodded, and was beginning to climb the stairs when Bess spoke again. ‘Mr Palmer, what would you do if one day I said to you, “Such and such a man had visited, and such and such another”?’
Palmer considered for a moment. ‘I would suspect that revolution was in the streets and fear for the King himself, Bess.’ She looked pleased with the response and left him to announce himself.
The gentleman that Mr Palmer had come to see was seated in his usual place in the dark upper parlour of the house, by the window with his chair turned so he could see the carriages and people passing the entrance to the yard. He was curled forward in his chair, staring out, his thin white hair hanging loose and unpowdered around his ears and his skeletal hands, rather swollen at the joints, loose in his lap. Opposite him sat a young boy, apparently engaged in reading the paper aloud by whatever light could crawl through the grime on the window. Palmer’s knock had interrupted him. Sir Gawen turned towards the door, his great hook nose making his face seem more shrunken than ever by contrast.
‘Palmer!’ His voice was as cracked and lined as his face. ‘You may leave us now, Edward. Come back and read the rest when Mr Palmer has finished with me. Go on, go on!’ The boy jumped to his feet, crossed the bare floorboards and slipped through the door like a cat.
‘How did you know it was me, Sir Gawen?’ Palmer asked, as he took the seat the boy had just vacated. The hook nose followed him as he sat down and moved the paper to one side.
‘I have heard you climb the stairs twice every week at least for five years, my boy. How should I not know you?’ He chuckled, and looked out towards the street again. ‘Though you are one of only three men that Bess will allow to enter this room unannounced, so the odds were with me.’
‘Who are the other two?’
The old man laughed again. ‘Have you brought me another map, sir? Pass it over to me then, while we wait for our wine and let me see how you value my advice. Fetch me that glass from my desk.’
Palmer laid the map across the old gentleman’s knees, then went in search of the glass. It was a room that seemed to despise modern comforts, heavily panelled in black oak and apart from the desk and the two chairs by the window, almost entirely empty. Palmer had never seen Sir Gawen in any other room. During winter evenings he might sit by the fire, but in summer he was always by the window, always in the same attitude, always, it seemed, in the same black coat and not quite white cravat. Palmer wondered if the garments had done all the ageing they were capable of and had now, like their owner, reached a point of decrepitude that would prove immutable until death. The image of Sir Gawen among the fashionable crowd at Bath occurred again to Palmer as he passed him the magnifying glass.
‘What are you grinning at, boy?’
‘At my own private thoughts, Sir Gawen.’
The man gave a bark of laughter and lifted the glass and map. His eye swam in its own yellow bile, suddenly huge.
The maid came in with a tray in one hand and a little table folded under her other arm. As Sir Gawen examined his prize, Palmer assisted her in setting it up, told her quietly to leave them and poured the wine himself before sitting down again.
‘Well, well. Very fine. Now what have you to ask me? I know I must hand over some small part of my own private store for one of your little gifts. What do you wish to know? Old scandals in the French Court? I hear the Admiralty has come good at last, though a little late for Sandwich, and the treaty will be rather more advantageous to us than we first believed we could hope for.’
‘You are well informed.’
‘Of course, and you know I mention it to you because I am pleased with my present and have an old man’s vanity. I wish to show you how wise you were to give it to me.’ He laughed again.
‘I enquire on behalf of a friend.’
‘What friend?’
Palmer hesitated, then replied, ‘Gabriel Crowther.’
‘Ah! The anatomist who assisted you in eighty-one. Not state business then, if he has applied to you. No matter. On his behalf only, or is the harridan in the business too?’
‘Mrs Westerman is mentioned in his letter.’
‘Fine woman. Wish there were more harridans in the world. Bess is one, I tell her so to her face every day, and every day she tells me to thank God it is so, as no other would be able to manage with me. Where those two are and asking questions, you may be sure now there is blood in the water. Ask, and I shall answer for your sake and theirs.’
‘Thank you, Sir Gawen,’ Palmer said, glad the most difficult part of the interview was now at an end. He now only had to speak a word, then listen as attentively as he could. ‘Greta.’
The man smiled again, revealing his blackened gums, and tilted his head back. His right hand tapped smartly on his thigh. ‘Ahhh! Greta! The former Lord of half of Cumberland! Traitor and exile! How peculiar it is, the way one event leads to another. Pull at one strand only in history and all our world would be changed.’ He reached forward for his wine. ‘You know the story of his wife?’
‘No, sir.’
Sir Gawen took a great gulp of the liquor and wiped his lips with the back of his other hand. ‘Another harridan. If the Pretender had had ten like her, we might all be Catholics now, Palmer. Beautiful woman she was, by all accounts. Blonde hair, she wore very long in spite of the fashions, and a tendency to wear white. I saw her portrait once, and it was as near to being in love as I have ever been. When the news reach
ed them at Gutherscale Hall that King George was after him in 1715, he could not make his mind up where to run. He thought to hide himself in the homes of his servants, but his wife, on hearing of this, threw her fan at him and said “Take that then! And give me your sword!”’ He shook his head. ‘“Take that!” she said. Naturally he had to go and join Foster and the other rebels then. Though if she had not thrown her fan, then Mr Crowther’s father would never have become rich, or a baron, then Mr Crowther would not have trained as an anatomist, would not have been able to help you in eighty-one, then who can say? Our late successes at sea might not have occurred and our nation might have lost more severely on this treaty coming. All that and much more because a woman threw a fan at her husband.’ He leaned ever further forward and beckoned Palmer towards him. When Palmer found his eyes were only an inch from Gawen’s own the old man grinned again. ‘See, Palmer? I am become a philosopher!’ Then he rocked back in his chair and giggled.
Palmer smiled. ‘Indeed you are, Sir Gawen.’
‘Pah! But all this is known. You do not come to me, Mr Palmer, to discover things you could read in a lending library. What else?’
Mr Palmer took a more delicate swallow of his own wine and filled both their glasses. ‘Mr Crowther and Mrs Westerman wish to discover what they can of Lord Greta’s escape, and his life on the continent, and also the betrayal of his brother to the government.’
Sir Gawen’s face became rather still. ‘Do they, do they indeed? So they are in blood again, but old blood. Old blood.’ He tapped his fingers on the map. ‘You know this is the finest present you have given me since you started visiting me, Palmer?’ The latter nodded. ‘Naturally you do. Yet you give it in order to seek information for your friends, not for some crowning scheme of your own, or for your King.’ He picked up his wine again and tilted it from side to side, letting the liquid reach almost to the brim before letting it fall back. ‘Some of the guilty went unpunished in eighty-one, did they not? Do you sacrifice this treasure to make amends?’ The glass tilted the other way. ‘Or do you see, Mr Palmer, the advantage in putting these two rather unusual personages in your debt again?’
Island of Bones caw-3 Page 34