Skeleton Key

by Robert Richardson

  They settled variously around the table, Maltravers regarding Susan’s burstingly pregnant form with misgiving as she lowered herself into a chair. The arrival of the third Penrose seemed alarmingly imminent and his knowledge of what to do in such circumstances was as limited as his understanding of how his car worked; a microscopic advance from nil. Susan had earlier said that the event was still two weeks away but such a further period of abdominal inflation seemed inconceivable. Had his own dismantled marriage produced children, Maltravers would have been better informed but, as it was, close encounters with prodigious female ripeness caused him unease. He fervently hoped that the infant would at least have the decency to wait until they had finished eating.

  With four—strictly speaking, four and a half—adults, two children, and a Golden Labrador puppy of excitable temperament occupying the kitchen, polite conversation became difficult and Maltravers joined Peter in further consideration of the uncompleted crossword.

  ‘In game, I am gen,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘Some reference to game birds perhaps? Grouse has six letters if that’s any help.’

  ‘Enigma Variations,’ Tess said from the other end of the table. ‘Pass the couscous please, darling.’

  Maltravers stared at her. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The couscous. It’s right by you.’

  ‘No, not that. How did Elgar suddenly get in here?’

  ‘It’s the answer,’ Tess said simply. Both men regarded her blankly. ‘The answer to the clue…in the crossword.’

  ‘We know where the clue is,’ Maltravers said. ‘But we don’t understand your reasoning.’

  ‘The words “In game” and “I am gen” are both anagrams of “Enigma”,’ she explained patiently. ‘So they’re both variations, aren’t they? Now can I have the couscous please?’

  Peter turned back to the crossword in surprise and filled in the solution as Maltravers passed the bowl across, looking wonderingly at Tess as though she had suddenly started speaking in fluent Greek.

  ‘Madam, I have known you in all meanings of the word for a long time,’ he said. ‘Now I find you can solve crossword clues. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in them before.’

  ‘Of course not. I can never understand why you waste your time with them. Thank you.’ Tess accepted the bowl and put her tongue out at him.

  ‘How do I love thee?’ Maltravers asked. ‘Let me count the ways. You’re marvellous in bed and now I find I can talk to you about crosswords afterwards. Children, you didn’t hear that.’

  Difficult questions from Timmy or Emma about earthy interpretations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning were averted by the wall-mounted telephone ringing next to where Peter was sitting. Occupied with his meal and further wrestling with the labyrinthine workings of Araucaria’s mind, Maltravers was only half aware of Peter’s end of the conversation, although he gathered that some manner of unlikely news was being imparted. Peter’s ‘You’re joking!’ followed by inquiries as to why and when something was to happen sounded vaguely interesting.

  ‘Who was that?’ Susan asked as he rang off.

  ‘Frank Dunham. He says that Lady Pembury wants Tom Bostock buried—and would you believe in the family vault?’

  ‘After all these years?’ Susan was visibly amazed. ‘What on earth’s come over her?’

  ‘Conscience, it seems.’

  Maltravers rapidly considered this exchange and found it wanting. Bodies, in his experience, were generally buried or become part of the smoke nuisance over crematoria reasonably soon after decease; leaving them lying around was inconvenient, untidy and unhygienic. But it seemed that the body of Tom Bostock—whoever he was—had remained undealt with for a period measurable in years. Surely someone should have stepped in and attended to its disposal before the latest Lady Pembury made it her business? He remained silent, awaiting enlightenment.

  ‘Well, the tourists won’t like it,’ Susan added.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen until after the house closes at the end of the season in October,’ Peter told her. ‘They’ll reprint the guidebook for next year and there’s no reason why they can’t still sell the postcards, unless Lady Pembury thinks even that’s out of order. Frankly, I’m not that surprised. Tom was a member of the family even if he was a bastard.’

  All in all, Maltravers found this raised more questions and afforded no answers. The references to Lady Pembury, tourists and guidebooks clearly appeared to locate matters in Edenbridge House—where they must also sell postcards—but none of this was helpful. And did Peter mean ‘bastard’ in the literal or pejorative sense? Whichever the case, a final resting place among the great and the good of the Pemburys in their private chapel in St Barbara’s seemed a curiously excessive gesture.

  ‘Surely it won’t be a proper funeral though?’ Susan queried.

  ‘Apparently that’s what her Ladyship wants,’ Peter replied. ‘She feels that the family owes a duty to old Tom—she’s concerned about his immortal soul. You know what she’s like.’

  Susan’s nod showed that she evidently did. ‘Well, it will be interesting to see how many mourners turn up…Gus, more of anything?’

  ‘Nothing more to eat, but a little explanation would be welcome,’ said Maltravers. ‘You do realise your conversation has had a rather Pinteresque quality don’t you? As I understand it, Lady Pembury wants to organise a funeral for someone who died some time ago. Right?’

  ‘He was hanged in 1778,’ said Peter.

  ‘That,’ Maltravers conceded, ‘is some time ago. What was the hold-up? Wouldn’t the coroner release the body?’

  ‘Haven’t you ever seen Tom Bostock when you’ve been here before?’ asked Susan.

  ‘From what I’ve just heard, I’m sure I’d remember if I had,’ Maltravers said with conviction. ‘Meeting a 200-year-old corpse would tend to stick in the memory.’

  Peter leaned back in his chair and pulled open the drawer of the stripped pine Welsh dresser behind him. He rummaged about for a moment then produced a thin booklet, flicked through the pages and handed it open to Maltravers.

  ‘Read that. It explains everything.’

  The booklet, called Capley: No Ordinary Town, was a potted history written by the editor of the local newspaper, and the page Peter offered Maltravers was part of the section on Edenbridge House and the Pemburys, illustrated with a picture of a full-size skeleton in an open coffin.

  ‘Undoubtedly the most unusual feature of the house is the skeleton of Tom Bostock in the cellar,’ he read. ‘He was born about 1750, the illegitimate son of the third Earl and the daughter of one of his tenant farmers, from whom he appears to have inherited a rebellious nature. Incensed at being denied the privileges afforded his legitimate half-brother, later the fourth Earl, he left Capley at about the age of fourteen to pursue a criminal life in London. He returned to the area some ten years later and became a notorious highwayman, terrorising the stagecoach traffic which then regularly passed through the town. There was little of the romance or glamour frequently associated with such activities about him and the fourth Earl, who had by then succeeded to the title, called him “an abominable ruffian and disgrace to the family name”.

  ‘Having escaped capture on a number of occasions, Bostock appears to have become remarkably foolhardy and was finally arrested in the Maid’s Head public house in Bellringer Street in June, 1778, where he was in bed with his mistress. Trapped in the room by the authorities, he leapt from the window but injured himself in his fall.

  ‘Tried and convicted at the Autumn Assizes, he was hanged in Capley Marketplace after which his body was placed in an iron cage by the side of the London road on the outskirts of the town as a warning to others. When only the skeleton remained, the fourth Earl claimed possession of it and, it was assumed at the time, had it buried. In fact he instructed that it be kept in the cellar of Edenbridge House and throughout his lifetime drank an annual toast over the coffin to the damnation of Tom Bostock’s soul. After the fourth Earl’s own death
, the family were in some embarrassment as to what they should do with the remains and in fact did nothing. The skeleton remained in its coffin in the cellar for nearly two centuries.

  ‘When Edenbridge House was opened to the public, it was decided to include the coffin and its contents as part of the guided tour. Despite the grisliness of the relic and the questionable conduct of the fourth Earl, Tom Bostock’s skeleton has proved a popular attraction at Edenbridge and the coloured postcard of him (see illustration) has consistently been the best seller in the tourists’ shop.

  ‘It is a strange irony that Tom Bostock, denied any rights in Edenbridge House in his lifetime, today enjoys more fame there than either his father or legitimate half-brother.’

  Maltravers finished reading and passed the booklet across the table to Tess.

  ‘What can a mere writer of fiction do against a story like that?’ he asked. ‘Oddly enough I’ve never been in the house—it’s usually been closed for the winter when I’ve been before—so I’ve never seen him. However, I must make a point of doing so before he disappears. But why does Lady Pembury want him buried all of a sudden?’

  ‘Lady Pembury comes from a family that always does the right thing,’ Peter explained. ‘Making money out of the dead they would consider tacky, and denying them a Christian burial is very bad form. She couldn’t do anything while the old man was alive, but now she is mistress of Edenbridge House and can follow her conscience.’

  ‘But of course we will wait until after the current tourist season is over,’ Maltravers remarked somewhat cynically. ‘Business before conscience. However, it’s all splendidly ridiculous and I may make a point of attending the…good Lord! It’s another anagram.’

  His attention had switched back to the crossword in the paper, still lying folded on the table in front of him.

  ‘Do you know that “Contaminated” can be reshuffled into “No admittance”? How very appropriate.’

  Maltravers had been about to say that he might attend Tom Bostock’s funeral for the novelty value of the occasion. When he eventually did so some months later, he was to experience a sense of sorrow he could not have imagined that summer afternoon.

  2

  The oboe poured a pure, plaintive top C through the Great Hall of Edenbridge House. It held for seven and a half quavers then the fine-spun thread of sound tumbled through B and A natural and wandered down in the minor key until it reached the C an octave below the first. The final two notes were repeated, then the instrument glided into the flowing theme of Greensleeves, the reedy, mellifluous notes placid as slow-moving water beneath overhanging leaf-laden trees.

  From his seat by one of the high windows, Maltravers gazed out into the gleaming evening. The music evoked a romantic legend of the past in which the manifest inconveniences—indeed, the downright nastinesses—of Tudor life were replaced by false but seductive images. A great Queen and her witty court (all stinking to high heaven in truth) and a cheerful population of country folk living contented merry lives and drinking good ale (in fact, generally starving and dying from revolting diseases) were conjured up by gentle melody. Maltravers was quite prepared to suspend knowledge of the reality and bask in the deception as dwindling twilight seeped through the graceful, oak-panelled, marble-floored hall with the six musicians gathered in a pool of electric yellow at one end.

  His pleasure was not shared by Lord Pembury, the possessor of an unrivalled private collection of original New Orleans jazz recordings, who found the proceedings tedious. He had only agreed to the concert taking place in the interests of Edenbridge Estates Ltd, with particular reference to the safari park scheme, which called for a number of prerequisites of which land, finance negotiated at suitable rates and appropriate livestock were but three; there was also the question of planning permission from Capley District Council. While the park would be on Pembury’s private property, he could not just replace the cows and fallow deer currently grazing there with much less docile beasts as it suited him. Ever mindful of the welfare of its ratepayers, the council would at least wish to ensure that security met required standards; people being chewed up by escaped lions was considered contrary to public health regulations. While totally above bribery and corruption—the family motto was ‘The sword never rusts’—the Earl had a prudent eye towards the right people. When the chairman of the council had tentatively suggested the use of Edenbridge House to stage a concert in aid of his appeal for a hospice for the dying, Lord Pembury had readily agreed. Looking after his father, whose pestiferous longevity had been painfully expensive, made him sympathetic to such an institution and he reasoned it could be advantageous to scratch the back of the town’s first citizen in the hope that the members of the planning committee might collectively scratch his in return. The result was that the dulcet melodies of Tanis and his sixteenth-century contemporaries were now being heard within the same walls that had once throbbed to the cornet of Louis Armstrong leading his band as they pounded out ‘Mamma Don’t Allow’ during a private concert four hundred years later. Maltravers found the contrast exquisite.

  The music faded into polite applause and well-bred murmurings of aesthetic appreciation (others had roared, stamped and leapt to their feet for Satchmo) and a man of alarming height, wearing a precariously balanced toupee as conspicuous as melted cheese poured over a cauliflower, stood up and began thanking everyone in sight. His chain of office identified him as the council chairman, a man who, Peter had told Maltravers earlier, had now abandoned his youthful Marxist convictions for secret hopes of at least an MBE. He earned several Brownie points with fulsome comments on the ‘great generosity of Lord and Lady Pembury’—a phrase Maltravers counted six times with slight variations—before Lady Pembury rewarded him with a somewhat strained smile and invited everyone through to the Long Gallery where wine and coffee were being served. Maltravers and the others joined the throng shuffling through corridors of understated, casual opulence.

  ‘I say, this is rather splendid,’ Maltravers observed as they entered the gallery. Nearly one hundred and fifty feet from end to end with windows all down one side facing floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the other, it was broken in the centre by an immense fireplace crafted from enough marble to provide tombstones for most of the population of Old Capley and topped with a larger-than-life statue of Charles II. Fruit, flowers and heraldic devices swept among the swirling plaster-work of the ceiling and the floor was covered along its centre with what was claimed to be the largest Indian carpet in the world.

  ‘Long enough to have a bowling alley in the back,’ Maltravers added approvingly. ‘I could get quite used to this sort of thing.’

  They collected their wine and went to look out of one of the windows from which they could see the long, double line of decorative chestnut trees marching down what had for centuries been the main entrance to Edenbridge House, now fallen into decayed disuse. What had formerly been the formidable approach to the might of the Pemburys, along which at least seven monarchs and their courtiers had travelled, looked neglected and strangely sad. Current plans had most of the area earmarked for a coach park.

  ‘Good evening, Peter,’ a voice said behind them.

  They turned towards a pale man of about thirty whose good looks would have been effeminate had it not been for an indisputably masculine construction of the jawline and an athletic leanness of body indicating muscular strength. Maltravers noticed the most fleeting expression of discomfort flicker across his face as his eyes caught Susan’s and she rather obviously turned her back on him and looked out of the window again.

  ‘Hello, Simon,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t realise you were here. This is Gus Maltravers and Tess Davy who are staying with us for a few days. Gus is filling in for Ian in the Town match tomorrow.’ He turned to Maltravers. ‘Lord Dunford, who will eventually inherit all this lot. But he answers to Simon.’

  The handshake Maltravers received from the slender fingers momentarily squeezed with crushing pressure and he frowned slightly
as he looked at Dunford’s albescent, symmetrical features.

  ‘Simon,’ he repeated, as though trying to link some connection in his mind. ‘And the Pembury family name is Hawkhurst…and so you must be Simon Hawkhurst who got a cricket Blue at Oxford and played for Middlesex for a couple of seasons. Am I right?’

  Dunford smiled. ‘I’m very flattered you remember. I didn’t use the title in those days.’

  ‘Peter, if this is the standard of your Estate team, you might have let me know,’ Maltravers said reproachfully. ‘I’d have thought twice about appearing in such company. At one time they were talking about Simon as an England opener.’

  ‘A long time ago,’ Dunford corrected. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. Most of the Estate side are like Peter here—all cross-bat swipes and beer guts.’

  He prodded Peter’s stomach, which gave under his fingers like a beach ball.

  ‘Susan, you’re feeding him too well.’

  The innocuous remark carried the finest edge of forced cordiality, underlined by Dunford’s uncertain glance at Susan’s back as he made it. She did not turn round but her shoulders stiffened as she drew in her breath as though controlling herself. Her ill manners and Dunford’s discomfort were becoming noticeably tangible.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure Alister and I can hold the rest of you together,’ Dunford added, hastily covering Susan’s resonant silence. Tess looked from one to the other, picking up vibrations and trying to identify them.