The Attenbury Emeralds

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  She fought for the direction of her thoughts, and had so far succeeded that when Peter came in at about midday she was lost to the real world, and so reluctant to surface that she did not emerge from her study until an hour after the usual time for lunch. The two places set on the little breakfast table were both untouched. Peter was sitting at the window, with a copy of The Times in his hand.

  ‘Goodness!’ said Harriet. ‘You needn’t have waited for me. You must be starving, Peter.’

  But the moment he looked up and their eyes met she said, ‘What’s wrong? Was she horrible to talk to?’

  ‘The lady won’t see me,’ he said.

  ‘Can she refuse?’

  ‘Oh, yes. One of the few liberties remaining to an incarcerated prisoner is the right to accept or refuse a visitor.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You didn’t know? And there was I all those years ago taking comfort from the thought that you could have, and did not, refuse to see me. Such slender strands of hope were all I had.’

  ‘We’ve made up to each other for all that long ago,’ said Harriet crisply. ‘What’s wrong this morning?’

  ‘She refuses to see me, but says that she would see you,’ he said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Harriet, you absolutely don’t have to do it. She has no right, no claim in the matter at all. It isn’t in the least like that visit you made to Harwell; you had something personal to tell him – with this woman you have no connection at all.’

  ‘Hush, Peter,’ said Harriet softly. ‘You know that I will do it. Define for me exactly what the mission is.’

  ‘To talk her into saving her daughter’s skin, and just possibly her own, by hiring a good lawyer.’

  ‘A lawyer that you are paying for?’

  ‘No. The sort of lawyer she needs would cost the wages of three gardeners at Denver for several years. I will help her find the right man; but why should we pay for it when she has a huge sum of money at her own disposal if she will only see sense and sell her emerald?’

  Harriet observed, but did not comment on, the minting of a new currency: value determined by what it would pay for at Denver.

  Mrs DuBerris sat at one end of a scrubbed deal table, and Harriet at the other. She was, to her own surprise, rather distressed at her surroundings. Or perhaps her discomfort arose from her dislike of the other woman . . .

  ‘There is a good deal about your situation that I do not understand,’ she began.

  ‘That’s a bad start,’ said Mrs DuBerris calmly. ‘I cannot think of anyone better placed to understand me. You too have married above yourself – streets above yourself. How would you feel if you had been despised and rejected by your husband’s family? If you had been made to feel that he could have married you only as a result of some trick, some exploitation of his illness? If nothing had been done to assist his child; if you had been left to struggle in poverty for years? If his family had even got at the College of Arms to deny you the title that should have belonged to his wife?’

  Harriet considered that. ‘I shouldn’t have approved their conduct,’ she said, ‘but I could have got along with my own life, I think. I should have despised them in return.’

  ‘That’s it. I knew you would comprehend me.’

  ‘Remember that I came on the scene long after all this, and have only heard tell of what happened. But don’t I understand that the Attenburys – Lady Attenbury particularly – were kind to you?’

  Mrs DuBerris was suddenly suffused by rage. Fists clenched, eyes flashing, she practically spat the word. ‘Kind? Oh, yes, they were kind! If you call occasional invitations and gifts of cast-off clothes kindness. Everything they gave us I gave away again at once! It was intolerable, you understand, intolerable. Lady Attenbury should have compelled her brother to accept me, not merely wrung her hands at him and given me cups of tea. We needed money and a place in society, not hand-me-downs. And that was William’s right. It was his daughter’s right.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Harriet.

  ‘He was entitled to marry whom he chose!’ Mrs DuBerris continued. ‘And what was wrong with me? There’s many a vulgar chorus girl married into the aristocracy and prancing around playing the grand lady. They never asked, they never knew where I came from, they just assumed I was dirt because I was nursing common soldiers. How we hated them!’

  ‘But you had that emerald,’ said Harriet.

  ‘It was William’s plan. When he was dying. We were living in a squalid lodging house in Dover; I couldn’t safely get him any further, and his family wouldn’t come; wouldn’t help. We got cold letters. When the one came that told him he was disinherited we made a plan. Swap the emerald, and wait for the right moment for revenge. William knew the Attenburys well. He thought they lived beyond their means. He thought the time would come when they needed to sell their baubles. And then our day would come!’

  ‘But wouldn’t you be avenged on the wrong person? The Attenbury family weren’t the main offenders, surely, however little you liked their cast-off clothes.’

  ‘Oh, they all stick together, those toffs. We could have threatened the ruin of one branch of the family unless the other branch changed their tune.’

  ‘So you swapped the emeralds.’

  ‘That was easy, although that fool Northerby nearly spoiled it. No sooner had I swapped it than he lifted it. Couldn’t wait. Greedy bastard; he was supposed to be in it with me, and then he thought he could take it and cut me out. But it was my jewel he took. At first I thought he had wrecked the plan, but I just sat tight, and by and by your Lord Peter had got it back, and it was in the bank.’

  ‘How was it that William had one of the emeralds to give you?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘An old soldier gave it to him. His father had won it in a raffle, he said. He gave it in exchange for a new coat.’

  ‘I don’t understand you, though. You waited all those years, and you killed people – what was all that about?’

  ‘I wanted to choose my time to strike. The longer I had waited the more I had to lose if anyone saw it was the wrong stone in the Attenburys’ box. That wasn’t likely unless someone saw it who could read Persian. But that kept seeming possible. So I did what I had to do. For William; it was his idea. In his last few nights he was feverish, and he thought we could buy Fennybrook Hall, and eject the Attenburys, and live in it ourselves. And I thought if I waited and watched, I might manage to do that.’

  ‘You did it with the aid of a Mr Tipotenios, I understand. Who was that?’

  ‘An out-of-work actor. He borrowed a theatrical costumier’s suit. Not hard.’

  Harriet was coming to the firm conclusion that the woman she was talking to was mad. And that that would be her best defence.

  ‘You needn’t think you have got me to confess,’ said Mrs DuBerris. ‘Hearsay is not evidence, and this conversation would be your word against mine. I shall deny every word of it. And I haven’t been read my rights.’

  ‘Did you mean to incriminate your daughter? William’s daughter?’

  Mrs DuBerris shook her head.

  ‘But you have done. Someone will have to defend her from the obvious conclusion that she was your accomplice in murder. I am here, since you won’t see my husband, to persuade you, if I can, to hire a lawyer, for Ada’s sake if not for your own.’

  ‘I can’t . . .’

  ‘You must sell your emerald.’

  Silence.

  Harriet continued, ‘You may have felt justified all those years in keeping your jewel as a means of revenge, and living in poverty as a result; it’s another thing, surely, to hang on to it now, when any confusion is sorted out, and Ada risks a prison sentence for something she knew nothing about. Do you love your daughter, Mrs DuBerris, or is hatred all that you feel for anyone?’

  Mrs DuBerris gestured to the prison officer, looking at them through the grille, and the interview was abruptly at an end.

  ‘Failure,’ said Harriet to Peter when
she returned home. She recounted the interview as well as she could remember it.

  ‘And did you sympathise?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I allowed myself a moment’s complacency at the thought that I had never felt homicidal when being chipped at by Helen,’ said Harriet. ‘And then I remembered that I had my husband at my side when being snubbed and insulted. She was alone.’

  ‘I don’t think you needed me to avoid becoming murderous,’ said Peter. ‘And I don’t think a defence of insanity is an easy wicket. A plan devised and pursued for so many years is going to look to a jury more like wickedness than lunacy.’

  ‘Such a ramshackle and improbable plan,’ said Harriet. ‘And I need you for everything. But, Peter, it’s a bitter sort of irony, isn’t it, to realise that that woman has sold her soul, embittered her whole life, and become homicidal to get something that we have simply been landed with, and would so gladly be without!’

  Chapter 27

  ‘We seem to have averted the ruin of the Attenbury family,’ said Peter. ‘And we have ruins of our own to attend to. I can’t put off going to Denver a day longer.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Only if you would like to.’

  ‘As it happens I would like to; but I would expect to go with you whether I liked it or not, except in the face of an imperious conflict of duty.’

  ‘The duty is mine . . .’

  ‘With all your worldly goods you me endowed. Don’t you remember? If Duke’s Denver is yours, it’s mine.’

  ‘I’m not quite getting the hang of this, am I?’ he said wryly.

  ‘You are severely disorientated. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘That’s what I am afraid of,’ he said. ‘Keep me grounded, Harriet.’

  ‘Well, Your Grace, if a blackened ruin in Norfolk is not heavy enough to ground you, I probably can’t manage it. When are we leaving?’

  ‘If we went with the hour we could be there by lunchtime.’

  ‘Driving?’

  ‘Of course, driving. The trains take much longer, and one needs to be met at the station.’

  Harriet resigned herself.

  ‘Does Bunter come too?’ she asked.

  ‘Bunter has gone ahead,’ he said.

  The man who came out to meet them from the lodge, and to open the wrought-iron gates for them was Dick Jenkins, old Bill Jenkins’s younger son. Harriet remembered her first arrival here, newly married, out of her depth, being gravely greeted by Bill Jenkins, and that Peter had asked after his sons. Bill was dead now – how many generations of Jenkins had served the Duke? And how few could so continue? Grief and sadness ahead . . .

  As if the cosmos shared their dejection, a light drizzle began as they drove towards the house. Bunter came out to meet them holding an umbrella at the ready as they pulled up at the front door.

  ‘I have taken the liberty of booking a room for you and her ladyship at the Denver Arms,’ he said.

  ‘Is that necessary, Bunter?’ said Peter. ‘Isn’t the east wing undamaged?’

  ‘There is no water supply, my lord. The fire melted the lead pipework. And perhaps, when you look round . . .’

  ‘Lay on Macduff,’ said Peter, with unnecessary accuracy.

  The intact part of the house was structurally sound enough; anything wrong with it was wrong before the fire. But it was all looking sad and dirty. The smoke had penetrated nearly every room, and left a greasy film of soot on everything. And it smelled of smuts. As they walked round it became more and more depressing. The housekeeper, Mrs Farley, and Gerald’s butler Thomas joined them.

  ‘We are at a loss, Your Grace, as to how to clean many of these rooms,’ said Thomas. ‘I have cleaned the silver; and Mrs Farley has washed all the ceramics.’

  ‘I ceased to wash the curtains,’ Mrs Farley offered, ‘when the first pair we dealt with simply disintegrated.’

  ‘You washed things?’ Peter asked. ‘With no water?’

  ‘There is a water supply in the stable blocks, Your Grace,’ she answered.

  ‘Thank you for trying,’ Peter said. ‘But we shall need expert help to deal with this. We shall have to recruit some professional restorers.’

  ‘We didn’t know what to do, my lord,’ said Mrs Farley and promptly burst into tears. ‘All these lovely things, that we’ve looked after since I first came here when I was thirteen, as a kitchen maid . . .’

  Thomas said stiffly, ‘Control yourself, Farley!’

  Harriet intervened. The woman’s whole life’s work, she thought. She very briefly and lightly put an arm round Mrs Farley’s shoulder and said, ‘We shall make this liveable and bright again; it will be comfortable and clean, and not everything will prove to have been spoiled. You shall see; and you shall help us.’

  ‘Leave it all untouched for the moment,’ Peter said. ‘The insurance assessor is coming tomorrow, and when we have talked to him we shall have a plan.’

  ‘Of course, we need a plan of our own,’ he added, as they walked away towards the stable block, with Bunter following a step behind them.

  They ran to ground in the tack-room, where there was a table and chairs, and sat down to confer.

  ‘I shall be in the adjacent room when you need me, Your Grace,’ said Bunter.

  Harriet said, ‘Bunter, won’t you stay and help us? Anything we decide will involve you as much as anyone.’

  Bunter looked at Peter, who leaned over and drew out a third chair.

  ‘Gerald had seen to it that it was all heavily insured,’ Peter said. ‘We could have it put back as it was. Perhaps we should do that. But as to being able to run it as it was . . .’

  ‘If we put it back as it was it will be mostly fake,’ said Harriet. ‘Whereas every stone and beam that remains is genuine.’

  ‘Your most excellent opinion is?’

  ‘That we should keep what we have, and demolish what we have lost. Clear up the mess, and plant a garden in the outline of the burned-out walls.’

  Peter stared at her, thinking about it.

  She went on, ‘We would have a curious, beautiful house with ten bedrooms and an attic range. A library, a drawing-room, a hall, a truncated gallery, but a gallery all the same: a good-sized house, Peter, and plenty for a family our size. Less ruinous to run.’

  ‘Where does my mother live?’ he said.

  ‘There is easily room for an apartment for her and Franklin in the remaining house.’

  Peter gave her a quizzical look. ‘While Helen lives in greater splendour in the Dower House?’ he said.

  ‘Helen will enjoy that,’ said Harriet emphatically.

  ‘May I ask what you think, Bunter?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Her ladyship’s plan seems sound to me, my lord. Practical. If we need more space in the future, it would be possible to convert this stable block.’

  ‘So it would,’ said Peter. ‘Item one, decided, then. Item two: death duty. I think we can pay it if we sell off most of the land.’

  ‘Does that mean turning off an ancient tenantry?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Yes. Some of them will buy their holding from us. But of course, the future income from the land will be lost.’

  ‘What about the servants?’ Harriet asked. ‘Do we have to send them packing?’

  ‘The war has done a lot of the work for us,’ said Peter. ‘Most of the staff joined up, leaving just the older ones running the show. Only two of those who went have returned, both of them gardeners. We shall have to pension off most of them.’

  ‘That won’t be any fun,’ she said.

  ‘It will be like eating toads,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘If I may suggest, Your Grace,’ said Bunter.

  ‘Suggest by all means,’ Peter said.

  ‘Since I accompany you on your migrations you can dispense with Thomas. And I understand he would like to retire from serving the family to help his brother run a pub in King’s Lynn. But I think you should retain Mrs Farley, who seems an efficient sort of person.’
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  Peter said, ‘Fine. Fiat. Have you been interviewing the whole establishment, Bunter?’

  ‘I have, my lord. Here is a list, together with a note of what the people on it would like to have happen. They are quite realistic, Your Grace. They have little plans of their own.’

  ‘Whatever would we do without you, Bunter,’ Peter said.

  ‘There is a task which I cannot assist you with, Your Grace,’ said Bunter. ‘And that is to sort the pictures into those that you would wish to hang in the remaining house, and those that will have to be sent for sale. All of them will be familiar to your lordship from childhood; I cannot surmise which will be of sentimental value to you.’

  ‘Harriet shall help me choose,’ said Peter. ‘She will be living with the relicts.’

  When they returned to the house a message was handed to them by Thomas. A message from Charles. Peter went into the tack-room to the telephone and Harriet lingered in the pale afternoon sun, and stared at the house, seeing it marred, and imagining it mended.