by May Woodward
‘Nothing. Only the hospital. A little.’
‘And how did your memory start to come back?’
‘It began with images… visions… which meant nothing, then. I had dreams of a tall, thin lady with bluey-grey hair, wearing an apron with a daisy-motif on the left breast. I know her now. Nanny Jude. And I saw people – working people – dancing around an old yew tree. One of the girls wore a kind of medieval tabard. May Day at Eardingstowe… the girl was dressed as St Laurey.’
Noon came and went. The sun shone at its highest and brightest in the brilliant, stained-glass window in Westminster Hall, sank and faded into amber. The questioning continued.
‘Think back, if you would, Mr Somerlee.’ Sir Berkeley had an indulgent smile on his face. ‘What was the name of your first nursemaid?’
Aubrey frowned; was he searching deep in a damaged memory for an answer?
‘Sally Dacres, sir. Her father was carpenter on the estate.’ He smiled. ‘When she came up to the nursery each day, she used to bring plums and sparrow-grass from the kitchen-garden, and always left the largest plum for herself.’
‘And Reverend Brookes, who was vicar of St Laurey’s for most of your childhood. Sir Richard had a particularly revolting nickname for the poor fellow.’
‘Indeed.’ Aubrey smirked. ‘I shall write it down, sir, and show you in private so that the gentlemen of the press remain oblivious.’
‘Where were you held captive, Mr Somerlee?’
‘In a castle. My captors were Serbs. I speak Serbo-Croat. Must have learned it from them, I suppose.’
‘Yes, we have established this,’ Sir Berkeley said. ‘Mr Visnijic from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy has already testified to this court that you do indeed have a reasonable command of this tongue.’
‘My gaolers used to talk about a free land for the Serbs.’ Aubrey looked distant. ‘And assassinating the Sultan of Turkey.’
‘How and when did you come to leave this anarchistic fortress?’
Aubrey hung his head, looking lost.
‘I don’t remember. I only remember the gentleman from the British Embassy coming to me in the hospital in Vienna. He asked me my name. Suddenly I remembered it was Aubrey Somerlee.’
‘Quite remarkable,’ said Sir Berkeley. ‘I don’t believe I can recollect so much detail about my earliest nursemaid.’ He sniffed, shaking his head and sipped his water.
Richard had been engrossed throughout the exchange. He leaned over the bench and whispered to his solicitor.
‘We did right paying for the best, Mr Boscawen. Berkeley’s making a nonsense of his story.’
‘Tell me, Mr Somerlee,’ Richard’s lawyer went on, ‘when was the summerhouse built in the grounds at Eardingstowe?’
Aubrey looked lost again; how bewildered must a man be – journeying back from the Valley of Death? He brightened, smiling.
‘There is no summerhouse! But we have a rotunda in the Paradise Garden. I don’t know when it was built…’
‘Heaven forbid,’ muttered the baronet. The end of the session was nigh, and the impostor had not so far been caught out. True – he had been unable to tell the court whereabouts in Eardingstowe the portrait of Pretty-boy Somerlee hung, but then, to be fair, Richard did not believe he could either. Thankfully, the Aubrey-fellow’s counsel looked a paltry cove – having waived his fee no doubt, because the high profile Somerlee case was an opportunity to get his insignificant name in the newspapers.
‘And there’s a stone circle and prehistoric cursus,’ Aubrey went on. ‘Up on the hill on the northern shore of the mere.’ He looked faraway as if picturing these treasured mementoes. ‘And a Temple of Victory by the ha-ha. It was built to commemorate the end of the Seven Years’ War.’
Richard took a swift glance at the itchy, eager scribbling of the pressmen in their notebooks. The story had gripped the nation’s and world’s imagination. The Queen and Prince of Wales were said to be following the drama unfolding at the Court of Common Pleas. President Grant was reading about the Aubrey Somerlee case in the newspaper over breakfast in the White House. On ranches in Brazil they had heard the name Somerlee. And family dirty linen would be aired in Ultima Thule.
Dear Lord… had Richard done the right thing? Maybe it would have been less damaging just to accept the Aubrey-fellow.
On the following day, Aubrey’s witnesses gave evidence. Among them was a hussar captain named Radlett.
‘On the evening before the Charge of the Light Brigade,’ he told the court, ‘I had a private conversation with Cornet Somerlee. We discussed death and the afterlife. We knew – as soldiers do, you see – that it might be our last night on earth. We were alone when we had this talk, he and I. There was not a soul near us. I am positive I have never spoken of this conversation with anyone. Yet this man,’ glancing at the litigant, ‘knew what Cornet Somerlee and I discussed that night.’
Sir Berkeley rose to cross-question.
‘Captain Radlett. You say this discourse was conducted in total privacy.’
‘Absolutely. I have never breathed a word.’
‘I’m quite sure,’ said the lawyer with a smile. ‘At what time in the evening was the conversation? Before or after dinner?’
‘Before.’
‘And where was Cornet Somerlee during and after dinner?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not sure…’
‘No indeed, Captain. Just because you have not breathed a word of this encounter, does not mean Cornet Somerlee did not! In fact, he had about ten hours between your conversation and the mustering of the troops next morning when he could have told the whole of Balaclava for all you know. Hah! He could have sent a telegram!’
Sir Berkeley flapped out his gown and sat down.
Throughout the day, Sir Berkeley went on to cut a swath through the cream of the British cavalry.
Major Mortlake moved the court to tears recounting the last time he’d seen Aubrey. The final certain sighting of him, in fact. The duo had been riding close by the Causeway on the return from the Don Cossack battery when a cluster of shells had gone off. Aubrey had vanished in the sulphuric residue which smothered the scene.
The major was adamant that this fellow could not possibly have known about their meeting with the rebel Polacks unless he’d been there that day; but Berkeley established that Mortlake had told God-knew-how many people of the anecdote to the extent that the Czar himself had likely heard it by now.
As the sun set and the close of the day beckoned, Aubrey’s counsel summoned his final witness.
‘I call Lady Markham.’
Richard drew in a sharp breath as his sister swept into court. Isabella spared him a brief glance only as she approached the witness-stand.
During the court’s noonday recess two days later, Richard took a walk along the Embankment. He thought he might go insane sitting in that stifling chamber – so many eyes watching his every move, his every nuance. Amathia had returned home to Somerset yesterday, unable to bear any longer the double discomforts of pregnancy and public scrutiny.
He watched the passing river-traffic as he sauntered. Great steamers and little wherries were churning water before them which glittered with sunshine. A different watercourse was this since Mr Bazalgette had built his sewer-system. Only a decade had passed since the Great Stink. Refuse, animal corpses, rotted foodstuffs, night-soil, government protocols… anything which could ming had found its way into the poor Thames. Westminster had ponged so even the politicians could not stand it and vacated the seat of government until something was done about it. Well, Richard smiled to himself, maybe London never would be fragrant like spring roses. But compared to what it had been before Mr Bazalgette’s engineering feat…
He tipped his top hat to other strollers he passed on the breezy waterside. ‘Why, that’s the bad baronet!’ he just caught a gentleman whispering to his lady c
ompanion.
Yes, doubtless in the drawing-rooms of the ton they were all gossiping about the maleficent Sir Dickon, eulogising Aubrey in middle-class parlours, and cocking a snook in low gin-palaces. Aubrey was a hero and an underdog; Somerlee the bounder who had snaffled the rightful inheritance of his brave kinsman who’d survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.
And there was his public face at stake, God damn it! Not just his parliamentary career… but Smoky Mountain. He’d sold thousands upon thousands of pounds’ worth of shares in that faraway fount of plenty… Without Richard’s discreet networking among the moneyed classes, investment in the mine might cease and the gold nuggets stay where they were. He was Roger Cormorant’s figurehead – upstanding, spotless, dependable…
Yes, he wished he’d never brought the lawsuit. He should have tacitly accepted the stranger. If he was the real Aubrey, wouldn’t he have been so relieved to be home among loved ones again that the small matter of the legacy could have waited? And, let’s face it… what harm, really, could a pseudo-Aubrey have done?
Too late it was now. Richard had ridden into the Valley of Death and had no way back.
THIRTY-ONE
Clemence galloped across a heath and wetlands which were buzzing with arthropodal life. Weeks of grinding legal argument in Somerlee versus Somerlee had left her yearning for the breezes of Somerset. She’d got away from London before facing the wham of the judge’s decision.
She rode over bronzed countryside still in flower despite the approach of autumn. Waysides and riverbanks were flecked with the lace, blush, lemon and ultramarine of cow parsley, ragged robin, silverweed and speedwell. The waterways were bubbling and vocal from recent rain.
Through a small gate she walked her horse and onto a twisting dirt-track. The path climbed the outlying slopes of the Quantocks. She remembered the way from her girlhood. The sangaree-coloured hackney she was riding was a local hireling and knew the route too.
She came out from the woodland onto a blustery hillside of flaxen gorse, bracken and heather, dotted pink with meadow saffron. The shifting air current tossed the leaves and rocked the branches of the few elderberry bushes which grew here. Pristine cloud raced overhead like the sails of superyachts. The keening of skylarks, stonechats, pipits and buzzards filled the warm air.
Will’s Neck rose ahead of her against the sky – zenith of the Quantocks and Eardingstowe demesne.
Will’s Neck. What an odd name. As a child, she had once asked the oldest tenant then living on Eardingstowe land who Will was. Wealas, he had told her, it truly was. The old Britons, then, the proto-landowners of hereabouts – and these uplands saw their last stand against the usurpers. Blood must once have darkened these brooks and winterbournes. It was as if the feathered airborne were the spirits of those slain cawing their jubilation at her misfortunes.
Clemence dismounted and tied her horse to the branch of an isolated rowan tree. She stepped onto a rock to look over the landscape. A scent of moss was in the wind. Her cloak was billowing westward. A beclouded sun beamed a violet and amber fan onto the dark ridge of Exmoor’s heights on the far skyline.
Holy Heaven, she wasn’t afraid any longer. Horizons as far as the eye could see – and she could ride and ride and ride. So, were her own demons dead at last – cast into the firmament with abandon? Blossoms sprouting again in the trampled soil of the Crimean battlefields?
She remounted and walked her cob around the summit path.
Sixteen years ago, Clemence had prayed and prayed for her brother’s return. Now, she almost wished this man was not Aubrey. If he was… what fresh pain must he be suffering as his loved ones denied him?
Every twist and turn of both sides’ cases she had followed. The man’s knowledge of the family and Eardingstowe. Things only a Somerlee could know. Or could they? Was there really anything he could not have learned from a former servant, say? Who knew what intimacies might be lying dormant in her father’s yellowing correspondence, which pretty-well anyone could get hold of if they knew where to look?
What about the reception which Aubrey’s brother-hussar, Captain Radlett’s testimony had received? How could anyone but the real Cornet Somerlee have known about this private discourse between two soldiers on the eve of the battle, demanded the newspapers?
But Clemence had. The last time she’d spoken to Aubrey that evening, he had told her what he and Radlett had said to each other. Even so, who might Clemence in turn have told? Few indeed, surely?
She approached a ring of rowan and thorn trees. The wind was so fierce on the most exposed face of the hillside they were swaying their limbs like pagan priests worshipping at an altar. Three Quantock deer shied back into the woods as the horsewoman drew near.
All those prayers answered at last. He was back. He was safe. She should fling her arms around him; clutch him so that he could never go away again.
But if he isn’t Aubrey? What if Dickon is right and he is committing a fraud against me, against all of us? Is he Aubrey? I don’t know. He was nineteen when I saw him last. His hair is dark like Aubrey’s was. He has bright, blue eyes…
Heaven knew what Lysithea thought of him. She wouldn’t say. But she’d seemed at ease in his company, laughing with him. And Isabella? Oh, Bella’s belief in him could have won him his case.
‘The pale blue poult de soie chinée parasol with the guipure fringe which I received for my fourteenth birthday? How could anyone but the real Aubrey have remembered this?’ Isabella had asked the Court of Common Pleas.
No. He cannot be Aubrey! The Aubrey I remember would not be so cavalier as to dredge up our past just to prove who he is. “Did you ever own up to Nanny Jude that it was you, not little John, who snaffled her currant buns that time, Carrie?” Honestly!
Yet if he is Aubrey… and I don’t make up for the love he has missed all these years? Can I take that chance?
Dear God, what if he is Cassandra’s elf-prince come to destroy the Somerlees?
Mr Horace Boscawen hurried out of the courtroom. Leaning against the brass-studded door behind him, the baronet’s solicitor took a few heavy breaths.
Richard had dashed off to Somerset the day before to attend the birth of his hoped-for son and heir… and as Lady Amathia had retired into her chamber, so His Honour Mr Justice Porteous had retired to his.
Boscawen waddled along the corridor formed by the screens which shut off the other law courts. He sought out a clerk.
‘I must send a telegram to Sir Richard urgently!’
Richard turned a page of a book he was not really reading. He eyed the clock in the Eardingstowe library.
‘Oh, my! How ghastly all this is,’ he said.
The sounds lately coming from the direction of the mistress’s boudoir had made him uneasy. He’d heard somewhere that females made that ruckus because the agony of childbirth was the Lord’s punishment for the first woman’s sin; men hadn’t got off much lighter; they had to live through the dreadful melodrama. Surely it couldn’t bode well? Or maybe she was doing it on purpose to scare him?
‘Thought for one frightful moment it was my playing you were objecting to!’ his friend Brandon Fanshawe ventured. ‘It’s a new piece I’ve not played before. Unpractised, see…’ He was sitting at the grand piano, proud centrepiece of the reading room.
‘No, you go on playing, Fanny. It’s a pleasant distraction. I was talking about this hateful business – begetting an heir!’ Richard went on. ‘Wish we didn’t have to. But,’ he intoned on a deep sigh, ‘Somerlees there’ve been at Eardingstowe since before the Roman occupation, and the ancestors will never forgive a fellow who lets the line die out.’
Brandon put his head down and picked out a few more bars. Curses… Richard had gone and put his foot in it. Brandon Fanshawe had been widowed two weeks ago and had no children at all. At least Richard had the girls, which were better than nothing.
Bran
don ceased playing as the sound of hurrying footsteps approached along the corridor. Both men turned to look.
‘Congratulations, Sir Richard!’ The midwife bustled in, still wiping her hands. ‘You’ve a healthy son. Hear him, bawling furiously!’
Sure enough, they could.
‘Ah, thank you, Mrs Birtles! The best news a man could hear.’
‘And Her Ladyship’s in fine fettle too, or as fine as might be expected after the ordeal.’
‘I am pleased to hear it. Please convey my intention to call on Her Ladyship as soon as she wishes.’
The woman departed. Richard breathed a long-drawn-out sigh.
‘My congratulations too, Dickon!’ Brandon said with a smile in his eye.
‘Thank you, Fanny. Amathia and I have decided on naming our first-born son Edmund, after my grandfather. We’ll make that Edmund Brandon if you’d care to be godfather, old friend?’
‘My pleasure. I think Beethoven’s Ode to Joy might be in order. May I?’
‘By all means, Fanny! Never so sweet will it have sounded!’
Brandon turned back to the keyboard.
Richard crossed to the bay-window. The slopes of the hills were blazing with flowering gorse. He could make out a pack of wild ponies. They looked as if they were racing the rolling sun-shadows towards the fold of the combe.
‘So, the Somerlees go on for one generation more, eh?’ he said. ‘I was getting worried! Might have seen the old place in the grubby hands of that impostor otherwise.’
‘Oh, Dickon, why can’t you just accept Aubrey? Everyone else does. It would make all our lives easier, you know.’
‘I suppose you were converted because he remembered how you once took him fly-fishing, were you?’
‘No! It’s simpler than that. I just like the man. He seems so genuine. So very plausible. So likeable, Dickon!’
‘He can steal the silver now if that’s what he came for, Fanny, for all I care,’ Richard said with a beam. ‘Well, I’ve announcements to make! Edmund Brandon Somerlee, born the twenty-ninth of September, 1870. Grand new entry for the family bible! Ring the bell would you and ask Flitcroft to fetch us a bottle of the best champagne,’ he said as he was already heading for the door. ‘And let them have a jug of cider or something downstairs…’