“Mrs. Sheridan.”
“Exactly. I think we should tell our Ariadne what the bounder’s about and see whether she’s got any muck to rake up on him.” Jonty stretched, yawned, and rolled out of the bed, almost as easily as he’d done a dozen years before. “I’m sure if there’s a whiff of scandal to be traced in the air, then she can sniff it out.”
“Fight fire with fire?” Orlando looked worried. “Doesn’t that risk the whole conflagration getting out of hand?”
“It may be the only thing that sort of man understands. With any luck, she’ll turn over a stone and out will crawl a secret marriage or an act of such despicability that no one would believe a word he had to say against us.” Jonty nodded, as if the whole matter were signed and sealed. “They’d think he was just trying to get his own back.”
“They won’t think that anyway, by any marvellous chance? You know, him making a parry at the slur to his college’s reputation? And getting his revenge in for us having whipped the Woodville Ward from under his snotty nose?” Orlando sounded hopeful, although not convinced.
“That would be asking for too much, I fear. I think we should prepare to get our retaliation in first, as my old rugby teacher at school always used to say.” Jonty kissed his friend’s brow and reached for their dressing gowns, slinging Orlando’s onto the bed in an intentionally messy heap.
Orlando eased his frame from the comforts of mattress and eiderdown, stretching and scratching, the normal morning routine. The nights were getting nippy and they’d both slipped back into pyjamas after their romantic exertions; it was one of the occasions where practicality had to take precedence over romance. Now woolly and slightly pragmatic dressing gowns had to be worn, even for a trip to the toilet. They might delude themselves that it wasn’t to frighten their housekeeper with the sight of a slightly underdressed male, but it was more a case of thinning blood and an increasing awareness of the cold.
“Tell me one thing and one thing only.” Orlando caught Jonty’s hand just as he was about to slip out of the door. “I trust you implicitly. Always have done. Things will be all right, won’t they?”
“Absolutely fine.” Jonty gave his friend a parting kiss and set off to perform his ablutions, trying to look more confident than he felt.
Orlando had barely left for the department, ready to give some impenetrable lecture, when Jonty took himself and a piece of toast to his study. Best to strike before duties down at St. Bride’s started to eat the day away. He picked up the telephone receiver and asked to be put through to his sister, while he snaffled the last bite and wiped away the stray crumbs that always seemed to follow him about.
“Is that Forsythia Cottage?”
“Lavinia?” It had to be her, given the stentorian tones in which the question had been asked.
“Jonty!” His sister’s voice was getting more and more like their mother’s every day. “If you’re after your partner in crime, he’s not here. Surprisingly enough, we choose to send him to school on weekdays.”
“Oh, ha-ha. I do understand the domestic requirements of the average household, old girl.” It made a change for him to be ringing the Broads’ home without the primary intention of speaking to Georgie, though. “I wanted to talk to you, actually.”
“Hmm. I don’t like the sound of that.” Lavinia’s choice of words may have sounded grumpy, but she was evidently in good humour, the sudden softness in tone giving that much away. “It takes me back to when you were just a boy, and were after a loan of five bob until pocket money day.”
“You read me like a book.” Jonty settled back in his chair. If it was going to be as easy as borrowing five bob, he could afford to relax. “As you guessed, I’m after a favour. Information, though, not money.”
“Oh.” Lavinia sounded as if that was a worse prospect. “Information about what?”
“About whom, actually. A lady called Helen Phillips who died in a yachting accident off the Scilly Isles in July 1872.”
“Am I supposed to remember that far back in any sort of detail? I was only . . . well, never you mind how old I was. Just a child,” Lavinia protested with a laugh.
Jonty knew exactly how old his sister had been then, but he didn’t pursue the subject. He never used to tease her too much when he wanted five bob, so why change a winning stratagem? “I don’t expect you to remember. I’d just like you to go and do some digging for me. I can’t get away from Cambridge until next weekend to apply the spade myself.”
“I’m surprised Orlando’s letting you out of his sight before his lecture’s written and given. Barely a fortnight away, isn’t it?”
“And don’t I know it. Got your frock sorted yet?”
“Of course. My milliner says it makes me look ten years younger.” Lavinia giggled. “Don’t you dare say anything, pest. Shall I bring the fruits of my investigative labours up to Cambridge with me?”
“The case is far too urgent for that, Mistress Mischief. Can you get amongst it and report back as soon as possible? I’ll pay you back any half-crowns still owing.”
“With interest, I hope.” Lavinia sighed, the laughter gone from her voice, replaced by wistfulness. “This is where we miss Mama, isn’t it? She’d have said straightaway, ‘Oh, Helen Phillips. She left her husband and children for another man. Such a scandal.’”
Jonty almost dropped the earpiece. “Has the old girl been sending down angels to whisper in your ear? You have no idea how near the truth that is. Scary.”
“You’re making me shiver, you horrible boy. Tell me more.”
“Helen Phillips might just have done that very thing. Only her children were kept in the dark about it for years, being told she’d died. They didn’t find out until their father passed on. We think.”
“You think? You and Orlando don’t know? You’re losing your touch. I’ll have to report this to Georgie; he’ll be most disappointed to think his uncle has feet of clay.”
That was too close to the truth to be amusing. “Don’t snitch on us just yet. The trouble is that the people in the case don’t know—well, didn’t know—and didn’t want to take the appropriate steps to establish the truth once and for all. That’s why we need you. Anything about Helen Phillips, especially about her background and whether she mysteriously appeared, as if wafted down from heaven, twenty years before she was killed. If the name Priestland turns up in connection to the case, we’re on a winner.”
“Don’t want a lot, do you? Still, I think I have an inkling about what to do. There’s a chap at The Times on the editorial team who had a big crush on me when I was eighteen. I heard that!” Lavinia almost pierced Jonty’s eardrums. “How dare you snigger? I have a good mind not to do your dirty work for you.”
“Georgie would be terribly disappointed if you had the chance to be in on a case and didn’t take it.” Getting retaliation in first; it worked on the rugby pitch and it appeared to work off it.
“Hmm. This is going to cost you more than my son’s good will. A dozen roses at least.”
“Done. Now, about your paramour at The Times. Does your husband know you have a fancy man?”
“Oh hush. You know I’ve never had eyes for anyone but Ralph. Been smitten with him ever since we were seven and he used to throw frogs at me. Poor Freddie, that’s the editor, was heartbroken that he couldn’t win me away, no matter how many small amphibians he waggled in my direction.”
Jonty resisted making any sort of saucy pun about what people waggled at each other when courting and how he’d never heard them called “small amphibians” before. One had to be careful with Lavinia, given that her marriage hadn’t started on the best of notes, and the consummation of the same had only happened after many years of frustration. And the intervention of a dollop of wisdom from Ariadne Sheridan. Even though Lavinia was now a mother of two, no one wanted to bring memories of earlier days to the surface.
“Anyway,” Lavinia rattled on, not having inherited her mother’s telepathic skill at identifying when Jonty was
having smutty thoughts, “he can probably find the back issues of the paper and see if the story’s reported there. He’s got a nose for scandal and if he can’t produce something there and then, he’ll no doubt have an idea about how he can give me more solid verification.”
I bet he will, Jonty thought, but didn’t dare say that either. He’d have to see how he could work the words “solid verification” into the conversation next time he and Orlando were in bed. “Whatever you turn up may well be vital.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“When you come up for Orlando’s lecture. I’d rather tell you face-to-face, as parts of the case border on the slanderous and I’m never sure the operator isn’t listening in. All will be revealed.”
“I’ll be in touch. Love to Signor Artigiano del Rame.” Lavinia put the phone down abruptly.
Maybe the editor chappie at The Times would turn out to have improved with age; Jonty just hoped he wouldn’t prove so attractive that he gave Lavinia any ideas. She was at a funny age, but then again, she’d always been at a funny age. So long as this Freddie bloke didn’t shake any small amphibians at her, then all should be well.
Potential murderesses, twins, triplets, vicars, and shipwrecks had to take second place to Othello and vector analysis for the rest of the day. Man couldn’t live by investigation alone. Either their usual work or their sleuthing would have felt wrong as a lifetime’s sole occupation, the former too prosaic and the latter too hedonistic. And a pleasant discussion of developments and ideas—mathematical, literary, and investigatory—over dinner made for the best of entertainment.
Once they’d disposed of whether Iago was envious of Othello or of Desdemona, whether vector analysis had any practical application to the Isle of Wight ferry, and whether Mrs. Ward’s rabbit with prunes had been better than the Sunday roast, they turned to Bresnan’s commission.
“Did you contact Willshire?” Jonty ate the last of his fruit salad, slightly lifted the bowl, as though he was about to lick out the last of the cream, then clearly resisted the temptation. Perhaps he thought his mother was still watching from some heavenly height.
“Of course I did.” Orlando had saved a small piece of pear, with which he scooped out the last soupçon of creamy, fruity liquid. “If I say I’ll do something, I do it.”
“One seems a little touchy, does one not?” Jonty rose, gestured for Orlando to come to the drawing room where they could sit together on the sofa, then put his arm around his shoulders. “Tell Uncle Jonty all. Handkerchiefs fresh and ready to be supplied.”
“Idiot.” Orlando sighed. “It’s nothing, really. Just some talk down at the department about how the counterclaim for Owens’s protégé is unlikely to succeed unless he can produce a darn sight more evidence that he was stolen from. I think hoping that the miserable swine would have no cause to put pressure on us is a vain hope.”
“We definitely need some nice little juicy bit of something or other we can hold over Owens’s head. His own sword of Damocles.”
“And have you made any progress on locating such a miraculous thing?” Orlando resisted the temptation to say that the more he thought about it, the more it seemed that such an eye-for-an-eye approach was hardly in keeping with Jonty’s principles. They could argue the toss on that front after the business was sorted, and absolution found. A man had to be pragmatic at times like this.
“I’ve taken step one. We’re having lunch with Ariadne Sheridan tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’ve checked your Tuesday commitments and you have time for both food and gossip. We’ll throw ourselves on her mercy. And I’ve set another hound running too, if I can be so crude about my own sister.”
“I’ll tell her. Then she’ll have your guts for garters.” It was an idle threat; Orlando might have snitched to Lavinia when they were younger, but not now that she’d become the matriarchal Stewart figure. Jonty would know that. “What job have you asked the poor girl to do?”
“She’s on the trail of Helen Phillips and whether she’s who we think she is. I have enormous confidence that she’ll be a bobby-dazzler and come back with a hatful of information.”
“Brilliant idea!” Orlando gave Jonty a huge, smacking kiss. “I should have thought of that myself, but you’ve outfoxed me. Well done.”
“Thank you. If that’s what I get for ringing my sister, what reward will I qualify for if I make a real breakthrough?”
“Make one and you might find out.”
“And do you have something to report that requires comparable recompense?” Jonty puckered up his lips but only met thin air.
“I hardly think my poor piece of progress deserves even holding hands, let alone a kiss. Willshire said he’d find out about Mitchell and get back to me.”
“That’s a start. At least you can be sure he’ll come back and with the correct answer, too. Reliable, like my Lavinia.” Jonty kissed Orlando’s cheek anyway. “Now, if I want to play ‘throwing ourselves on Mrs. Sheridan’s mercy’ tomorrow, and then detectives on the weekend, I need to prepare some work on Twelfth Night.”
“I should be glad you said that. I’ve been worrying about how I could get time off from matters domestic to get on with my lecture this evening.” Orlando sighed. “Now I don’t have to bother.”
“It sounds like you were hoping I wouldn’t let you go and do your work.” Jonty pulled Orlando towards the dining room door. “Come on. I’ll ask Mrs. Ward to serve coffee in our studies, so you can get your head down. An hour, that’s what we’ll confine ourselves to, and then we’ll have an early night.”
“Early night?”
“No, not early night. Really, can you think of nothing but sex? A proper early night, and I’ll read to you from one of those long-winded textbooks you so love. It’s been a long time since I did that.”
“Ah.” Orlando beamed. “That’s a positive incentive to get another page or two written.”
“Just don’t refer to the delights of the double bed in your lecture. The vice-chancellor would faint.”
Ariadne Sheridan would never have been described as beautiful, or even pretty, even in her youth; her attractiveness lay in her formidable intellect and her warmth of heart. She’d been surrogate mother to many a lost and lonely St. Bride’s undergraduate, Jonty included, and had created a happy and purposeful life. Especially now that she’d managed to astonish the whole university by marrying—for love, no less—in her late forties.
She’d taken to the role of wife and hostess with the same calm competency she’d applied to every other part of her life. She’d been chatelaine of the St. Bride’s lodge for years, of course, looking after her brother when he’d been master, up until her marriage to Dr. Sheridan, when she’d temporarily deserted the place in favour of gracing Apostles’ college. When, during the war, her brother, then master of St. Bride’s, succumbed to the aftereffects of a fall down a college staircase, the vacancy at the master’s lodge had created a gulf at the heart of the college and in Ariadne’s breast. Both of them had been as inconsolable in grief as any wife who’d lost her man on the front.
Jonty admired the way in which Robert Sheridan had comforted his wife and filled the gap at St. Bride’s, restoring order and bringing consolation and healing to his adopted institution. Not least because he’d brought Ariadne back with him. Now she was as much a part of St. Bride’s again as the choir stalls in the chapel and the black currant stains on the wainscoting in the hall. And now that the postwar pieces were being picked up, she had time to catch, dig for, poke at, or in any other way generally annoy any planarian worms which took her fancy.
Today she had two less vermiform creatures at her dinner table and was plying them with lemonade, pie, salad, and Bakewell tarts. Ariadne had always taken the denizens of St. Bride’s under her wing, even if her interest, always officially maternal, was more so now that she had her very own red-blooded male to frolic with.
Still, no doubt the contrast of light and dark, solemn and capricious, logica
l and intuitive, at either side of her would be something an intelligent woman would appreciate.
“Thank you for arranging all this at short notice.” Orlando, glass of lemonade in hand, looked as awkward as an undergraduate.
“You make me sound like the family solicitor or something equally stuffy. You’re old friends. You could knock on my door in the middle of the night, and I’d find a cup of tea for you. And cake.” Mrs. Sheridan offered one of the succulent little tarts to Jonty, who rarely refused fodder.
“Thank you, but I’ll take one when I’ve had my salad. Have to earn the privilege.” He considered the pastries, debating whether he could break all rules of proper Stewart meal etiquette and take pudding first. “And maybe they’ll have to wait until after we’ve explained what we’ve come about. It’s rather a delicate, not to say awkward, matter, isn’t it, Professor Coppersmith?”
Orlando looked longingly at the cakes on the plate. Maybe he thought the answer to the question lay among the egg and jam? “If I say it concerns Dr. Owens, I think that shows just how difficult it is.”
“Owens?” Mrs. Sheridan almost upset the lemonade jug in her consternation. “That—that—don’t tell the chaplain I used these words, but that filthy, lecherous, grubby, plagiaristic swine?”
“That’s a mild way of putting it.” Jonty grinned. “The very same.”
“What’s he done now? Is it this plagiarism case? It’s the talk of the university.”
“I’m afraid so,” Orlando said, laying down knife and fork. He gave a précis of what had gone on at his meeting, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of it was supposed to be strictly confidential. He didn’t skimp on the details of the conversation he’d had with Owens afterwards. Words used and meanings implied.
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