The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets.

by Catherine Gaskin

  Gerald’s room, the first on a corridor that led off the gallery, was comfortable rather than imposing. It was stuffy – the windows and curtains closed. I thought the fire must have burned here all day – and an old-fashioned electric fire added its small warmth. It was furnished in a muddied, red-plush Victorian style, obviously a man’s room. ‘My father used it,’ Askew said. ‘He moved over here after my mother died. I suppose it was warmer than anywhere else. He brought his desk up here. I thought you’d find it more comfortable than most we have to offer, Gerald. Bathroom’s through here. Miss Roswell, I think Tolson means you to use this bathroom too – there’s a door from the passage. I don’t think there’s a bathroom nearer your room than this, but if there is, then obviously it isn’t usable just now.’

  Gerald waved airily. ‘Joanna will manage, Robert. At Hardy’s we bring them up to manage. And she’s been very well brought up. I saw to it myself. If there’s a chance of Joanna finding an old bit of pottery or something of the kind, she’d climb into one of those chimney flues of yours.’

  I felt my anger at Askew extend to Gerald also. Gerald didn’t have to make me appear such an earnest child. And yet, I supposed that was how I often did appear. I tossed his coat on to the bed, instead of hanging it as I would normally have done. ‘Not just now, Gerald ...’

  I was aware that I was tired and hungry, and despite two drinks and the relative warmth of this room, I was cold. I had probably sounded peevish, and so had let Gerald down. All at once it seemed an incredibly long time since we had left London that morning, and if I was tired, then Gerald must be more so. I glanced apologetically towards him, but he had chosen to pay no attention to my acidity. So I went and hung up his coat. Then I followed silently when Askew, after a few more words to Gerald, gestured to show me the way to my own room.

  We came out on the gallery above the hall again, and then turned off into another corridor, closer to the front of the house. Askew paused. ‘Let me see – yes, this is it. I haven’t had time since we returned to get to see all the rooms, and there are far too many of them. I’d better leave this door open so you won’t lose your way.’ It was yet another passage, a short one, with two doors opening off it at right angles to each other. Askew fumbled for a light switch, but there was none – only the light from the outer corridor showed the way. Even here, and all along the corridor we had left, was the same perfection of wood panelling and pointed arches above each door, the same carved cornices which were miniatures of those ones in the great hall. The passages were red-carpeted, and dusty; a few iron radiators had been spaced about but they didn’t give off any heat. There was no furniture, no pictures, no mirrors. It was like walking backwards in time into an age where such things, even with the rich, were rarities.

  Askew had opened the door facing the one we had come through, and was waiting for me to precede him. But there was a kind of involuntary stiffening of his body that warned me something had disturbed him.

  ‘I hadn’t remembered it quite like this.’ His tone was very low, as if he were talking to himself.

  It seemed an immense room – its size perhaps increased by the fact that only one light burned here – an absurdly modern lamp perched, like a hurried afterthought, on a stool by the bed. The shadows, therefore, were black and deep, and the glow from the leaping flames of two opposite fireplaces didn’t seem to bridge the darkness between them.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said softly. ‘Can you stand it? Perhaps I should ask Tolson ...’

  ‘Please, don’t.’ I moved past him, fascinated. It was a room of sombre magnificence. A huge four-poster bed hung with dark blue velvet curtains hardly impinged on its space. There was a long oak stretcher table in the big rectangle of windows, and a straight-backed chair at one end. Another tapestry-covered chair stood before one of the fireplaces, with a footstool beside it. There was a carved oak chest, and a tall clothes press flanking each side of the second fireplace. A few pieces of blue Delftware stood about as the room’s only ornaments; the biggest piece, a deep bowl, stood in the middle of the table. I moved towards it, and quite distinctly came the sad-sweet smell of last summer’s roses. The bowl was full of petals, and I couldn’t stop myself running my hand through them.

  Askew had advanced a little from the doorway with an awkward diffidence I wouldn’t have believed possible a few minutes ago. He noted my suitcase on the oak chest, and beside it, a bowl and jug of hot water, covered with a towel.

  ‘A bit primitive,’ he said. ‘Better use the bathroom ... I suppose the modernisations didn’t get this far. Only one electric light – and even that’s surface mounted.’

  I stared around the room again. It did not seem like a place just in this last hour disturbed from a period of long neglect. The wax polish on the table shone lustrously, as did the floor of wide oak plank. The Delft pieces had been recently dusted.

  Askew paused before one of the fireplaces, the one where the solitary chair stood, placing his hand on the brick. ‘I suppose Tolson’s right. It’s dry enough. The chimney probably has a common flue with one of the ones in the hall. Tolson keeps fires in the hall all year round, he told me, so I suppose a certain amount of heat reaches here. There are some cupboards – oh, yes, here.’ He was opening wide doors in the panelling, one each side of the fireplace – in the sheer size of the room and the dimness I hadn’t noticed how they broke the line of the wall, nor the carved wooden knobs to indicate the doors. ‘Shelves this side – hanging on this side.’ He shrugged and gestured at me. ‘Well, that’s about the extent of the comfort we have to offer you – some padded hangers that look as if they came from the village fête, and a sachet of lavender. It’s very English, isn’t it? I know I’m back in England when I see that.’

  ‘Yes ... it’s England.’ It was here, solid and real as the arms beaten into the fireback, and the crested firedogs, long hound-like creatures, similar to the dogs that followed Askew, their thin limbs bearing the same shield as the fireback.

  ‘Well,’ he said again, ‘I suppose it will do, though I wish Tolson could have managed something a bit less forbidding ...’

  ‘Do you think it’s forbidding, Lord Askew? I like it.’

  He glanced at me curiously. ‘Do you? Funny, I never expect young people ... Well, I’m afraid I don’t know so many young people any more.’ He cut short his own line of musing. ‘At least the rain has cleared for the night. Shall I draw the curtains? It would make it cosier for you.’

  ‘No – leave them, please. One gets enough of drawing curtains just for privacy in London. There can’t be anyone out there ...’

  ‘There shouldn’t be.’ We moved at the same time towards the windows. I realised now that this room was directly over the library, and it was about equal size, and shared the same oblong bay of leaded-glass windows that faced out across the lake and the valley. The wind had blown the clouds clear of the mountains, and an icy moonlight struck obliquely through, bathing the whole area where the table stood in pale light. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s snow on the mountain.’

  ‘That’s Great Birkeld – the highest around here. It catches all the weather. Quite often you can’t see it for days at a time because of cloud. The word “changeable” must have been invented for this country – mist, bright sun, pelting rain, clear moonlight – and in winter it can get so choked with snow. Tolson uses a Land Rover to get out of the valley. Heaven knows how the people stand it. I couldn’t, not any more. No wonder poor Carlota is bewildered.’

  Three of the dogs had now crossed the room to join him. He stood staring out at the tarn, and the moonlight turned his hair to bright silver. Before us, the valley was shadowed in part, magnificently highlighted in others, and the snow on Great Birkeld laid a kindly cover over its formidable rock slopes. I literally saw a gust of wind ripple along the surface of the lake, heard its moan about the building, felt a draught from some unsealed window in the big bay. Askew hunched his shoulders as if he were cold.

  ‘Mr Tolson called it th
e Spanish Woman’s room, Lord Askew. Why is it called that?’

  He looked at me, and then moved slowly back into the centre of the room. He took his time about answering. Two more dogs had now moved in from the passage, and were squatting before one of the fires. Even the huge size of them belonged here. Askew fidgeted for a while without attempting a reply, checked the hanging cupboard again as if he were counting the hangers, went over and put his hand in the jug of hot water, lighted the candle on the mantel and carried it to the oak chest, so that its flame lighted a small, wooden-framed mirror above.

  Then he came back to the window as if all the delays were exhausted.

  ‘The Spanish Woman ...’ He took a deep breath. ‘The Spanish Woman was the second Countess of Askew. It was a kind of derogatory term given to her in this household which didn’t welcome anyone both Catholic and Spanish. Her husband, the second Earl, was Catholic – many of the landowners still were Catholic, or were changing from Catholic to Protestant and back again according to who was on the throne. But this was Elizabeth’s reign, and the house and the title were relatively new. The second Earl was somehow implicated in the Babington plot against Queen Elizabeth, accused of plotting to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, and so he lost his head on Tower Hill. He was a relic of the Old Faith, rather a fanatic, I’d judge. He spent some years abroad before he inherited the title, in Italy and in Spain – at the court of Philip the Second. When the news came that his father was dead he was urged to start back home, but before he left he committed, at Philip’s urging, the supreme folly of marrying a Spanish bride. It may have been love – but much more likely it was politics. She was a noblewoman, distantly related to Philip, and of course Philip had never given up his hope of bringing England back to Catholicism. I wonder how well the second Earl weighed his choice. Of course, Philip was already preparing to send the Armada – it would be a great help to have a Catholic nobleman and a Spanish ally here in Cumberland. If Philip should successfully invade – or if Elizabeth should die and Mary have the throne – then he would have become one of the premier earls of England, instead of a minor Border Lord. And then, along with his Spanish bride came a dowry – some in kind, a large amount promised in cash. The cash, incidentally, never was sent. The Spanish bride journeyed with a few ladies to join her husband and was just in time to see him arrested and taken off for trial. Philip might have had other plans for his little protégée, another Catholic lord, perhaps. But in the little time she and her husband spent together she had become pregnant – pregnant with a possible male heir. And her husband’s brother, who would have succeeded if the marriage had been without issue, was Protestant.

  ‘The stories were spun about her during the years, how many true, one doesn’t know. It seems that her own servants were sent away, and she was left entirely alone – no friend but a young English serving boy from this household who had been with her husband on his travels and who spoke a little Spanish. How much hung on that pregnancy – with her brother-in-law probably hoping for a miscarriage, or the death of the mother and child at birth. There must have been precious little comfort or kindness for her. One imagines ... I’ve imagined ... how frightened she must have been, not knowing if Elizabeth’s commissioners were not riding North to question her, or if the next mouthful of food was poisoned. They say she took to walking as high and far on the Brantwick road as she could without danger – she never mounted a horse for fear of losing the child. “The Wanderer” was the name they gave her.’

  Suddenly he turned and motioned to me. ‘Look at the tarn down there – white and silver and innocent, isn’t it? Well, she drowned in the tarn. Some were prepared to swear that she had been murdered by her brother-in-law. Her body was never recovered, nor the body of her husband’s serving boy who rowed for her when she used the boat. If her body was ever recovered, it’s buried in an unmarked place. Poor, lost, lonely little Spanish Woman – poor little bitch.’

  It was the first time I had really liked him. Now I began to see the shy young boy of Gerald’s description, dreaming his dreams of a Spanish bride of nearly four hundred years ago. As he spoke I knew that the Spanish Woman had been a real person to him, not a dry family legend, repeated without thought. He had pictured her, “The Wanderer”, growing heavy with her child, a political pawn, probably longing for the sound of her own language, the dry fierce heat of the Spanish plains. She must have written her sad letters at this table here, have sat in that chair by the fire, the chair that had no companion. Then I shook my head; I was falling into the Earl’s mood. It was impossible that no one had disturbed the arrangement of this room in all these years, that new bed curtains had not been made, that that had really been her chair, with its footstool, suggesting that she had been a short, a small woman. How did we know? – and yet Askew thought he knew. Could there ever have been anyone so alone? The tarn, black or silver, reflecting the sky above it, had known her final loneliness.

  Beside me, Askew stirred, as if he really were waking from a dream. ‘You’ll be all right here? You’re sure? Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you – ’

  ‘I’m glad you did. She has to have some friends, doesn’t she? – the Spanish Woman?’

  His smile now thanked me for sharing his dream, for not shattering it by ridicule, for not being afraid of whatever small, harmless ghost might sit by that fire. And I was lost to that smile, as I was sure many women had been, and I began to understand very well the presence of the other Spanish woman, the modern beauty who had followed him to this remote, cold world, blocked by the mountains, torn at by wind and rain. It would be easy enough to follow Robert Birkett if he had asked it.

  ‘Come, dogs.’ They all rose as one and went with him. He gave me the same smile as he closed the door. I think he meant it.

  III

  Tolson hadn’t become so much the butler that he attempted to unpack for guests. I sorted my clothes between the two cupboards Askew had opened – the hanging cupboard had a wooden rod on which the padded hangers rested, and at the back were the stout old oak pegs which served as hooks, probably there from the time the room and the cupboards had been panelled. There was no piece of furniture with drawers, so I laid my underwear and accessories in the cupboard that contained the shelves. I wasn’t without a sense of clothes – no daughter of Vanessa’s could have been. I even had a touch of her flamboyance in that respect which Harry Peers found amusing and unexpected. ‘For a girl like you, Jo, I mean – ’ and left me to decide what he did mean. Unlike the Condesa, though, I dressed for the English climate; the long skirt was of brilliant orange quilted cotton, and I wore it with a yellow high-necked sweater, and tied about the waist was a long black sash I had bought for a few pounds in one of Hardy’s auctions of Victorian costume. I also wore the amber brooch which had been part of the contents of Vanessa’s handbag discovered in the snow on the day of the plane crash. I wore it for her, and with love, thinking of the day she had bought it at another of Hardy’s sales of minor jewellery years ago. ‘It shall be yours, my pet,’ she had promised, but I had never had the heart to remind her of the promise because the gold and amber had seemed so much a part of Vanessa’s personality. My thoughts slipped back to Hardy’s – the sash, the brooch. It was one of the diversions and delights of working there – to spend one’s lunch hour on the view days before the sales selecting the things one would like to buy for oneself, asking, as any member of the public could, what they thought a particular item would go for, and then watching the clock on the day of the sale to gauge when the lot number would come up, slipping up to the saleroom for a few minutes, and either getting the piece, or seeing it go beyond one’s price to someone with more money, or more determination. That was another of the disciplines one learned at Hardy’s – never to give way to the temptation to exceed the limit, to hold back the eagerness and the desire to possess. That had been Vanessa’s weakness, and she had often bought without knowing how she could resell at a profit. Sometimes, there was the excitement of bidding
with someone else’s money – for a client who couldn’t be present in person, or who didn’t want to be identified because their very interest in the object would push up the price among the dealers. And so they telephoned someone they knew on the staff, a price was set, and then the client would almost always say, ‘You can go a little over, but not too much.’ The nicety of discretion always came when one had to decide when too much was too much.

  Then I remembered sadly what Askew had said. ‘You can end up giving too much to a mere building.’

  The gong sounded for dinner, a hollow sound that came from a long way off. I wasn’t ready – I had slipped into the dreaming, dawdling habit that was too much my way. So I combed my hair quickly, and added a little more pale lipstick. It wasn’t a beautiful face that looked back at me from the mirror, not beautiful in the way Vanessa’s had been, or in the classic mould of that silken beauty downstairs at the library fire. It was a face that a hundred years ago might have been considered downright plain, but which now had come into fashion. ‘A twentieth-century face you’ve got, Jo,’ Harry had once said. From someone, perhaps my father, I had received the blessing of dark brows and lashes, looking odd with the light-coloured eyes, neither green nor grey nor blue. From Vanessa came the mouth, but wider than hers, and curving – perhaps to my detriment – to every mood. My mouth would always betray me – to laugh or to cry, and I never could control it very well. I made a mad sort of grimace at myself in the mirror for wasting time bothering about what couldn’t be changed, and then I hurried downstairs to answer the gong.