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

by Catherine Gaskin

  Yes, it sounded like Vanessa – not to pay the electricity bill. It sounded like my father, too, who had a strange passion for old cars, a passion that he could now afford to indulge, his one indulgence I had thought it, when I had seen the three vintage models he maintained at San José, and which had excited such reverence and a sort of awe among the tourists who thronged Taxco. I could remember the two occasions he had driven me and several of the Martinez children to Taxco, and each time, in the main square, an American had wanted to buy the car. And looking at Jonathan Roswell, the way he dressed, the tourists might have been excused for thinking perhaps he needed the money. Yes, the Bentley would have been a joy he would have hated to leave behind. And he had said nothing about that, either.

  I dragged myself back to Tolson’s presence. He stood there, frowning, remembering, no doubt, the electricity bill, and all the wine and champagne they had drunk together that summer and autumn they had all been here. Gypsies ... And Tolson’s values were so deeply rooted in place and family. His loyalty was hardly to the man, Askew, but his idea of what the lords of Thirlbeck should be. And in his fashion, Askew had turned into a gypsy too. Did he blame Vanessa and my father for that? Well, he would never say so.

  ‘Was the place – the house – like this when my mother was here?’

  ‘Like this? Like what?’

  ‘All the furniture about? All the good pieces?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘She would have enjoyed them. I hope she saw them.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her, Miss Roswell?’

  I drew in my breath. Hard to believe the whole world didn’t know that Vanessa Roswell was dead. But then, would someone like Tolson read the names of passengers killed in an air crash? Not likely. Who remembered names? Not at all likely unless it concerned Thirlbeck.

  ‘She died a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It was a barely polite formula, not an offer of sympathy.

  ‘But was it like this?’

  ‘You mean the furniture? I really don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I had put most of it into one room when the requisition order came from the Ministry. I couldn’t have a lot of strangers smashing up these things. Some of it was too big to move. Your mother might have seen them. I don’t know. I was busy. I didn’t have time to find out what pleased or didn’t please her. She spent a good deal of time here. She didn’t like the lodge very much. She was a poor housekeeper – not able to manage on the rations. Mr Roswell was ... artistic, wasn’t he? He painted. Terrible daubs, I seem to remember. He actually gave Lord Askew one – as if he thought he would hang it.’

  ‘Were the others hung then, Mr Tolson?’

  ‘Others? What others?’

  ‘There were more than the – the Rembrandt. Lord Askew said his grandmother brought over a lot of Dutch pictures. Perhaps I should look at them. My father’s picture might be among them. I would like to see it.’

  ‘I don’t remember seeing it after Lord Askew left. Perhaps he got rid of it. But the other pictures are put away. In safety. It doesn’t do to leave things about. I didn’t leave them about when the Ministry was coming in. Those people, they get a few drinks, and they start putting holes in things. No, I can’t remember whether your mother saw the pictures. Why should I? She came and went. It wasn’t important.’

  Then without another word he turned on his heel and walked across the hall. Unbelievingly I listened to the sighing squeal of the green-baize door. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could be so deliberately rude. Tolson was a law unto himself. He cared for nothing beyond Thirlbeck. He had not cared for Vanessa and Jonathan Roswell; they had been a bad influence on the Earl. He saw things in very simple clear terms, Tolson did. He had been one of the few people my mother had never charmed. I wonder if she had cared – or even noticed. She appeared not to have thought anything at Thirlbeck important enough ever to speak of it later.

  And that was what was wrong.

  It was while I was having tea with Gerald in his room that the next shock came. I told him nothing of the conversation with Tolson about Vanessa – why worry him with more detail of a situation which neither of us could explain nor fully understand. So I said nothing except to report on the muddle of the papers in the study, and then see Gerald’s shrug of acceptance.

  ‘Well, I didn’t think you’d turn up anything in a few minutes. That would be too much to hope, after the way they’ve managed to neglect or hide away all these beautiful things. I continue to hope, though, that somewhere there exists an inventory of what came with Margaretha van Huygens ... she didn’t come penniless, and in those days people set store by a dowry. If she was the sort of housewife I imagine her to be, there would even be a list of linen ... And the Birketts don’t impress me as being very much different from other people when it comes to throwing out old papers. Can’t be bothered to file them properly, but still never getting around to burning them. Well, maybe we’ll see if we can’t get someone from Hardy’s on to it ...’

  I had been wandering around the room as he talked, looking at the things that Robert Birkett’s father had gathered into this, the final room to which he had retreated in the last years of his life. There were a few photographs in faded brown tints. I paused before the photograph of an elderly woman, dressed in black, with lace collar and a lace cap, vaguely reminiscent of the later photographs of Queen Victoria. In her arms she held an infant, who wore robes of lace that trailed from her arms and fell over the darkness of her dress. Standing behind her was a young woman, slender and fair, dressed in unbecoming clothes, who seemed to cast a long and anxious look at the camera, trying not to mind that it was not in her arms the baby lay. ‘Robert’s christening, I should imagine,’ Gerald commented. ‘Grandmother van Huygens very definitely ruled the roost, I’d say.’ And I thought what a strangely lonely little group it was. There was none of the bursting vitality of the large family groups of the Edwardian twilight, no aunts or uncles for the little infant, no cousins seated at the feet of their grandmother. How very alone Robert Birkett had been.

  ‘And this?’ I said. ‘Would this be Lord Askew and his father?’

  ‘I imagine so. It looks like a small edition of the boy who turned up at Eton – and already carrying a cricket bat. Father seems a bit camera shy, wouldn’t you say? Handsome, though, as Robert still is. I wonder where Robert found anyone to play cricket with?’

  ‘Tolson and his brother, I expect,’ I said promptly. ‘And anyone else of about that age who lived on the estate. That was something the gentry and workers were allowed to do then, so long as the workers’ children remembered to call him Lord Birkett when they bowled him out – he would have been Viscount Birkett then, wouldn’t he?’ I moved on. ‘And what’s this . . .?’

  ‘I wondered when you’d come to it,’ Gerald said. ‘Aren’t they charming? Can you see if any of them are initialled or dated? My eyes ... Almost certainly by Nicholas Hilliard, I’d say, and most likely he made the frames also, since he was a goldsmith as well as a miniaturist. I wonder what else there might be tucked away? I’ve a feeling, Jo, that there’s a great deal below the surface, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. But dear God, that painting down there – if it turns out to be a forgery, I think I’ll regret ever having set foot in this place ...’ And he returned to his preoccupation with what concerned him most.

  And I gazed in fascination at the four tiny oval portraits, none of them more than two inches high, encircled by a gold frame of highly skilled and intricate workmanship, surmounted by golden loops in the form of a bow studded with small diamonds, obviously meant to be worn with a chain or pinned to a gown. A man – dark, bearded, possibly flattered by the artist into a kind of lean handsomeness – and three golden-haired children, two girls and a young boy. They all wore the ruffs of the Tudor period, and the quality of each portrait, showing the family likeness, but each having its individual character, was extraordinarily high. Gerald’s guess of Hilliard as the a
rtist could very well be right. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I asked Jessica. They’re the third Earl of Askew – I suppose that makes him the villain of the poor Spanish Woman’s story – and his children.’

  ‘There’s one missing.’ The four miniatures had been gathered into one group and framed together, the loops above them pinned on to a background of faded crimson velvet. There was space for a fifth, and as I looked closer, it was possible to see the faint oval of slightly darker red on the exposed velvet.

  ‘The Countess, I suppose. Jessica said she didn’t know what had become of it. It has been that way ever since she remembered.’

  ‘Yes.’ I was suddenly possessed of impatience. When Gerald offered his cigarette case, I shook my head. ‘If you’ve finished I think I’d better take the tea things down. Are you going to rest a little longer, or would you like to take a walk?’

  He shook his head, his eyebrows raised questioningly, indicating with a glance the rain that pelted against the window, the spring day changed again and the light beginning to fade. ‘Not now.’

  ‘All right – I’ll take these down. See you before dinner – unless you need me for something?’

  He shook his head and went and opened the door for me to pass through with the tray. ‘Thank you, Jo.’

  I left the tray on the long table in the hall – I didn’t quite possess the courage to penetrate into Tolson’s domain behind the baize door. And then I went hurrying back to the Spanish Woman’s room. The scent of the potpourri greeted me; the fires burned in both fireplaces. I had the strong impression that Jessica had very recently been there. It was reasonable; someone would have to tend the fires once they were lighted, but why did I feel her presence like a light current of air? I went to the cupboard where I had laid my few things on the shelves, and I took from my handbag another of the things that had been in Vanessa’s own handbag when they had found it among the scattered wreckage on that mountainside. I had carried it with me to Mexico, and looked at it often. There was something about the tiny, perfectly painted face that had reminded me of Vanessa, but I had never shown it to my father, because then I had believed it had been a recent and important acquisition of Vanessa’s – some lucky, chance find which she had snapped up, knowing or guessing it was a Hilliard, and knowing what kind of prices such miniatures now brought. I had imagined that she had discovered the miniature during her stay in Switzerland. Vaguely like Vanessa, yes – this lady had rather wild red-gold hair, she was wearing a gown of dark blue, with a small ruff about her neck, and a single ornament, a bluish unset stone hanging from a gold chain about her neck. In the short time Gerald and I had been together in Switzerland I had never shown it to him, either. The contents of Vanessa’s handbag had been almost too evocative of pain even to look at, much less discuss. But I had kept it with me, and all the other jumbled miscellany of her possessions, thankful that these few things had survived.

  I carried the miniature to the end of the table and sat down, studying it now with an intentness uncalled for before. When the bag had been thrown from the plane it had hit the ground with sufficient force to tear the leather on one side. Inside, zipped in an inner compartment, the miniature had had the protection of its soft surrounds, and a little leather pouch which must have been made for it. But still, the force of the impact had broken one side of the delicate filigree of the gold frame, and the glass had cracked diagonally across its face. I placed it on the table and put the fragment of the frame where it belonged: I sat and stared at it, fingering the tiny loop of diamonds above it. I knew now that Vanessa had not found it on her trip to Switzerland, nor had she chanced upon it anywhere else. In every respect it was the companion piece to the miniatures in the frame in Gerald’s room. I knew if I had carried it there it would have fitted perfectly the oval of slightly darker red, the vacant space in the frame.

  Attached to the little diamond loop was a small white tag, held there by a piece of fine red string, identical to the price tags Vanessa used for small items in her shop. And a number – the price, I had supposed – scrawled in Vanessa’s writing on the tag.

  Had she taken it from here in the days when she had known Thirlbeck? Had she really stolen this, and even Tolson had not dared to accuse her to me? Gypsies, he had said. People who were light of passage. Had he been implying that she had been light-fingered, as well? And had she, after all these years, finally been hoping to sell it – to sell it out of England where there was less chance of its identity and its real owner being discovered? It was a new side of Vanessa perhaps revealed, and one I was too frightened to examine closely. I didn’t believe what I was now thinking, and yet what else was I to believe?

  The wind moaned softly in the chimneys, and the rain lashed with sharper fingers at the windows. I looked up, and the whole valley was blotted out, just the last point of the tarn still visible. Those giant masses of Brantwick and Great Birkeld, shapes that in only two days had become like known companions to me, had disappeared; the icy draught from the ill-fitting window found me once more. I shivered in the last light of an April day. And then, although I did not hear the car on the gravel below, the sudden uproar among the pack of wolfhounds somewhere down there told me that Robert Birkett had returned to Thirlbeck.

  I put the miniature back in its pouch. It was probable that I would never know truly how Vanessa had come by it – I really didn’t want to know. I wished I had a more secure hiding place than my own handbag for it. From that moment I knew I didn’t quite trust the all-invasive presence of the little golden-haired girl who slipped through these rooms on soft feet. If I stayed at Thirlbeck much longer I was certain that Jessica would find it, and I couldn’t bear that Vanessa’s long-held secret should now, at this time, be violated.

  IV

  It is strange how quickly one becomes used to the unusual. Gerald and I went through the ritual of drinks in the library before dinner, dinner itself, and coffee afterwards in the drawing-room, and our eyes hardly ever strayed to what was exhibited before us. Gerald had entered into a strictly professional mood, his afternoon rest had seemed to restore him. Neither of us was haunted by the thought of Vanessa here all those years ago; we were both used to the eternal presence, and gentle presence, I was learning, of the wolfhounds. In the vastness of those rooms, even their great size seemed to scale. In Askew’s company they were supremely content, asking nothing but to lie, as best their size would allow, close to him, and close to the fire. Only in very general terms did Gerald refer to the auction; the painting was not mentioned. I assume that Askew believed that Gerald had accepted it as it was purported to be, and no thought of the problem over the authentication to come troubled him. It was a quiet evening, even a dull one; the Condesa stitched at her needlework frame, we listened to the news on the radio, and went up to bed. As we climbed the stairs, much earlier than the night before, Gerald and I could hear Askew’s voice as he spoke to Tolson. And then, again as it had been the night before, we heard the ring of metal on metal as shutters slammed shut.

  I paused briefly at Gerald’s door. ‘Good night, dear Jo. Sleep well.’

  ‘Sleep well ...’ And once again I felt the urge to kiss him, to offer some thanks for what he was, and had been to me. But I was not Vanessa, who would have done it spontaneously, so I moved on. I called over my shoulder. ‘All right if I take a bath? I won’t disturb you ...’

  And his acknowledging wave was the answer I got.

  After my bath I sat by the fire for some time, savouring the last of the ten cigarettes of the day. I was drowsy from wine, well fed, comfortable in this room that at first had seemed to overwhelm by its size. I noted the bed turned down, the three hot-water bottles in place, the fires well banked, and I told myself I was a fool for resenting and mistrusting Jessica’s presence. Someone had to do these things. Because the doer was intelligent and imaginative, there was no reason to mistrust her. In this mellow mood, even the presence of the Hilliard miniature in Vanessa’s handbag had other explanations.
She had found it, as I had first thought. She had discovered it somewhere, and known where it truly belonged. If she had ever completed that flight to London she would have been on her way back here, to Thirlbeck, or in some other fashion she would have been in touch with Askew, and the miniature would have been returned to its proper place. When I stubbed out the butt of the cigarette, I went finally to stand by the windows again. Once more the scene had changed. The rain was gone, the wind had died; just the caps of Brantwick and Great Birkeld were now mist-shrouded. In the valley the moon was beginning to highlight all the ridges, to deepen the folds. Directly opposite the house, on the sheer slope of Great Birkeld, the icy stream of the beck, from which the house took its name, tumbled down in a thin sliver of water, over the silvered rocks. It seemed to go underground before it entered the tarn; I could see no disturbance of the still water. Everything was still, no wind in the chimneys, no movement of the feathering twigs of the beeches and oaks. And even as I watched, the mist moved higher and higher on the raw slopes of the two great shapes that dominated this enclosed world. In any other part of England I would have guessed that the morning would be fair and clear. I had learned, even in so short a space of time, not to predict such a thing for this country within a country. I turned back to bed, leaving the curtains undrawn, liking what the moonlight did to the room.

  And if in bed I thought I saw the same shadow as the night before, the small, quiet shadow, perhaps of a young woman heavy with child, then it disturbed me no more than it had before. If Thirlbeck had a ghost she had no malice to those who wished her well. And the wine had been very good, and warming, and I was easily, and deeply, asleep.

  It was all the more of a shock, then, to wake as if an arm had tugged me rudely from that sleep. I lay for a second frozen with fright. A look around the room revealed nothing unusual, but the sense of urgency still persisted; I was sitting bolt upright, shivering and wondering why I was awake. I could never have described the force that impelled me from the bed. There was no shape by the dying fire, there was no sound in all the great house. No dog barked on a distant farm, no leaf stirred. But something was wrong.