The Egyptian Coffin (A Lord Ambrose Mystery)
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THE EGYPTIAN COFFIN
Jane Jakeman
© Jane Jakeman 1997
Jane Jakeman has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1997 by Headline Book Publishing.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
To J.M. as always and to Explorer and Philosopher who never let me forget the really important things in life.
And with special thanks to Alex, Argo, and Mirage.
Table of Contents
PART I
MALFINE, 1831
ONE - The Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX - The Narrative of Miss Lilian Westmorland
PART II
THE GREAT LONDON
SEVEN - The Further Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
EIGHT - The Further Narrative of Miss Lilian Westmorland
PART III
EGYPT
NINE - The Further Narrative of Miss Lilian Westmorland
TEN - Letter from Lord Ambrose Malfine to Sholto Lawrence, Esquire
ELEVEN- The Further Narrative of Miss Lilian Westmorland
TWELVE
THIRTEEN - The Further Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
PART IV
THE ARABIAN LADY
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN - The Further Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
PART V
MALFINE
TWENTY - The Further Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO - The Concluding Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
TWENTY THREE - The Further Narrative of Miss Lilian Westmorland
TWENTY-FOUR - Unsigned Copy of a Letter from Lord Ambrose Malfine
APPENDIX
PART I
MALFINE, 1831
ONE - The Narrative of Lord Ambrose Malfine
When I finally relinquish my grip on life, I shall have done little to increase our family inheritance of Malfine. I appear to be a tough-sinewed sort of specimen, likely to stay firmly in this world in spite of all fortune’s attempts to mow me down beneath her iron wheels and hurtle me out into the next, but I confess that I have not made many additions to this great and crumbling estate, where I reside amidst the unswept marble halls and acres of tangled woodland which my father bequeathed to me. My grandfather and my father hustled about improving this world — at least, my father did so till madness overtook him — but I have not inherited their capacity for inordinate busybodying. I fear I should never have made that good and faithful servant of whom St. Matthew speaks, who doubled his master’s investment of five talents to ten. I am by temperament one of nature’s prodigals.
But there is one gift to posterity for which I am responsible, though my heirs many require some explanation of an extravagant and puzzling piece of their inheritance.
In the entrance hall of this great mansion of Malfine, in the heart of the English countryside, is a curious and exotic object, which generations as yet unborn may ponder over, if it remains undisturbed after my lifetime.
It is an Egyptian coffin.
For a coffin, it has some odd features.
Air-holes, for example.
I am looking at the coffin as I write these words, gazing into the hall through the open door of the library, where I sit at my customary table. The colours of the painted wood are still bright after two thousand years: red, peacock blues and greens, ochreous yellow. The lid of the coffin is in the form of a human being with a tranquil carved face, gentle and full lipped, and a headdress of lapis blue and gold. The swaddled body that would once have lain within was, I conjecture, protected by the scarab beetles, the winged creatures, necklets and collars, which adorn the surface of the coffin. Painted eyes and black shapes surround the base; creatures with jackal heads are busy with their peculiar task over the breast.
In the chaste black-and-white marble hallway of Malfine it is a fantastical apparition, I grant you, for the decoration of Malfine is decidedly in the cool classical style. The coffin speaks of dark old gods and strange lives, of doors broken down and bats fluttering suddenly away towards the black interiors of rocky tombs, of sand drifting till it buried the very entrances to that cavernous world.
In these papers my heirs may read a thumbnail sketch of the truth about that coffin. This will doubtless be very different from the tale they will have heard from some pious elderly relative or flattering parson, just as the real history of Malfine is very different from that which will no doubt be solemnly presented for public consumption.
The truth is that this great mansion was created by my grandfather, old Hedger, who made a fortune on the stocks in the time of the late King George the Good and Mad, of pious memory. My grandfather was too shrewd to lose his money in building mania, but by accident employed a genius for an architect. It was the young man’s first commission, so my grandfather got him cheap.
Before this talented fellow died of drink, to which some say he was driven by old Hedger’s contentiousness over the payment of fees, he set the house amongst sweeps and curves of lawn, with lakes and streams flowing around it, and created a white portico with a pillared facade and curving wings, so graceful and sweeping that it looks as if the whole great marble caboodle had just floated down from heaven and settled in the English countryside. This, sparsely furnished, was the inheritance which my grandfather passed to his son George.
George, my father, would no doubt have led a blameless, brainless, life, as did the surrounding country boobies, roaring to hounds and fathering children to chirrup away in the surrounding countryside like so many hedge-sparrows. Like the neighbouring squires, he would doubtless one day have expired of apoplexy when perusing the sins of government in the Morning Chronicle. He would, as did so many other affable country fellows, have diligently maintained the work of his father, keeping the vast acres of Malfine’s roof intact, and perhaps have even have made some modest additions, a conservatory, for example, to ruin the pure Palladian lines of the house. Or he might have married a lady of fashion, who would have employed some jobbing plasterer to stick topsyturvy wedding-cakes upon the ceilings.
My father did none of these virtuous things, though there are some classical statues dotting the grounds, which were acquired by him on the Grand Tour and sent back in crates from Pisa, Florence, and Rome. They are not, I believe, of any special artistic merit, but were purchased by my father on the advice of an agent, and are those which might be thought suitable to adorn the property of a gentleman of means — goddesses with their arms snapped clean off and scanty shreds of drapery, young men with arrows and lyres and stark-naked barnacles — that sort of thing.
Those are his contributions to the house — sculptures and a name, the name of Malfine, the result of the first time in his life when my father failed to conform. The first, but it was in a major respect, for he married my mother.
My mother, Eurydice, was an exotic flower transplanted to the English countryside. She was the daughter of a Cretan family, exiled when their castle was lost and their island captured by the Turks, a romantic history, but one which resulted in penury. All my mother had to bring to the marriage was her ancestral claim to the castle of Mala Fina, in Crete, and the wild peninsula on which it stands, a claim which I inherited. It is from that place that the present name of this English mansion derives: my father insisted, on calling the house and the barony which old Hedgers fin
ancial dealings had procured for him after our Greek inheritance, so that I should at any rate have something from that ancestry, even though that something be no more than a name and the crest, an outlandish wolf’s head, that goes with it.
Eurydice bore two children, myself and my sister, Ariadne, and died soon after the birth of my sister, leaving my father, that outwardly phlegmatic English squire so mad with grief that he nailed up the doors of her rooms with his own hands. He then sent my sister to be reared with relatives in London and allowed me to run wild in the grounds. He died very shortly afterwards of grieving and mad riding.
Of my own subsequent adventures in my mother’s country, I may tell the world anon; at present, let it merely be said that I volunteered to fight for the liberty of Greece in its revolution against the dominion of the Turks, that I was wounded and given up for dead, and that I was brought home, barely alive, to my silent and shuttered inheritance of Malfine, where I have slowly recovered my strength, though not my taste for society.
And since that time my only positively enduring acquisition, the only addition I have made to the mansion of my father and grandfather, has been, oddly enough, this Egyptian coffin.
They are quite fashionable, of course — Egyptian antiquities, as were Greek and Roman vases and marble sculptures a generation or two ago. Mr. Belzoni, the explorer, only recently created a fashion for Egypt with his “Egyptian Hall” in Piccadilly, to which an avid public thronged to see such things as Mummies Inside Their Tombs, and learned personages now collect stone reliefs carved with those strange calm-faced gods and goddesses, or heavy blind-eyed heads of dark serpentine or red porphyry. The trinkets of Egypt, too, beaded necklaces and tiny sky-blue figurines, adorn many a Cabinet of Curiosities. More ghoulish objects, pathetic bandage-wrapped creatures contracted into desiccation, have been sold as souvenirs to those visiting the Land of the Pharaohs, and brought back by travellers to excite sham horrors in those at home.
But the story of how this particular specimen was acquired must begin, not in that exotic and far-flung land where the coffin was made, but here, in this great house in a remote corner of England. The recounting of this narrative involves a tale of human wickedness such as I had hoped never to meet on British soil, expecting it to be outlawed and repugnant both to our justice and our conscience. But it was neither, as the reader of these documents will ultimately recognise.
We cannot foresee the future, whether our own or that of others, although there are those in Cairo who scry into a pool of ink and see reflections of the future passing in the blackness. In a room in the heart of the city the fortuneteller will look into a black mirror and see a man in his desert tent, the heat shimmering in stony grey waves below the glassy surface, “through a glass darkly.” But who can tell what the future may require of us? What provision should we make now for those faces that will peer at us through the glass of time?
It may be that a legal record of events will at some time be required and I have therefore placed with this narrative of mine some letters and records that will substantiate my evidence, should that ever be necessary in case the matter comes before a court of law. These papers include certain private letters of my own, including correspondence from one particular personage. She and I will be dust long before any other eyes read what we have written!
TWO
To a gusty September night last year I date the commencement of my entanglement with a piece of cruelty such as nightmares might conjecture, the record of which I have endeavoured to set down and preserve.
And Elisabeth, with her usual wit, discerned later the innermost reason for my placing these papers under seal — which reason is not that which I might give to the world, speaking of the need in this case for legalities and proofs, of the privacy of our correspondence and the like. No, she went straight to the heart of the matter, when she had read through these pages.
“But who killed him?” she asked.
It is now almost a year ago that the strange events described in these papers commenced; she and I were deliberating what we were to do with our lives — as if we truly possess the powers of controlling our affections and our fates! That evening is lodged within my memory as sharp as if it were an engraving. And it is limned in my mind in black and white — the colours of moonlight.
Malfine at night: we have been walking in the grounds. The great white portico, the columns and the steps, the lawns and the lake, all are beneath the clear moon of the fullest phase. In the woods, the creatures feel the first frost of winter. The candle shadows flicker in those parts of the house which are inhabited: the rest are left to moonshine and darkness in rooms where the great mirrors reflect only emptiness and no sleepers lie within the curtained beds.
We entered the house and made our way to the library, where a fire had been banked up. The watcher from the dark world outside would see lights and movement confined, so late at night, to this long room, where we are still talking, as we have been all evening, serious, intent, our voices low. Shadows pass and re-pass before the windows and quiet murmurings drift across the lawns.
We are pitting their wits against our passions. That is the cause of all our talk, and little difference it makes to our hearts. You, Elisabeth, you the cautious one, were willing to throw all prudence to the winds, for my sake. I, the temperamental and fiery soul — I, who once ran away to fight in a distant world for the sake of abstract concepts, of ideals, for freedom and honour — why, I have turned preacher, I counsel caution, for your sake!
“But do you want me to remain here? Here, at Malfine?”
Your tall form moves along the room as you speak. Your hair is loose and flowing around the shoulders, and your skirt of silver-grey cashmere swings heavily, silently, from side to side, like some pale soft-winged creature of the night, fluttering down the length of the room and then drawn back to the pool of light.
Staring into the fire, without turning my head, I say, in a low voice, “Of course, I want you to remain! You must not doubt that! But I fear it harms you.”
“Being with you cannot harm me. Leaving you — ah, that would be harm indeed.”
“I did wrong to ask you to come here. When that dreadful business at Crawshay’s farm was over — when the murderers were made known and you were free to go where you pleased — I should have let you go. The world could no longer suspect you of any guilt and you had no commitment to any person living, save for the natural bonds of family affection. But you are now alone and your reputation is damaged by living in this house with me.”
“Where would I have gone? My parents would not have taken me in, and my husband was dead. What care I for society? And you, Ambrose, surely what the world thinks is of little significance, caring as little as you do for gossip and tittle-tattle! No, I will stay here. Let our neighbours say what they please — let their tongues wag!”
“Yes, but my dearest Elisabeth, you should try to be reconciled with your family, for your own happiness — I know that you are deeply attached to your mother, and she will not countenance this present situation whereby you reside under my roof. You are living with a man to whom you are not married, a man, furthermore, from whom the whole county is estranged. And I cannot offer you marriage — there would be no honesty in such an offer from my lips. I was barely alive when I returned from Greece, and I have scarcely begun to live again. I do not know if I shall ever be fit to share my life with another human creature — at least, not for such a pledge as marriage implies — ‘as long as we both shall live.’ No, Elisabeth, for your own sake, I cannot propose marriage, cannot make you an offer as hollow and false as a cracked pitcher.”
You pace up and down again, your shadow brushing past the alcoves of leather-bound books, passing between the windows and the light of the candles. It is not the least of the attractions which you hold for me that the workings of your mind are often impenetrable, disguised behind your smooth and masklike beauty; you can keep your own counsel, you are a free and independent spirit. Some
times, as at that moment in the long library in Malfine, this knowledge can fill me with jealousy; sometimes, as then, I wondered if you were thinking of him, that dead husband whom once you must have loved and for whom you left your parents and your home.
Well, he is dead and gone, like the ghosts of my own past, and we two are alive and warm, your flesh and blood vibrant and feeling, part of this world, not of the next, not of the past.
Returning once more down the darkened length of the library, you put your hand on my shoulder. For a moment, we are diverted from the subject of our talk.
You were like a lovely moth in that pale, silently moving dress.
When I was a boy, I studied moths. It seems quite irrelevant, does it not, yet the topic is not so far removed from the subject of these papers, after all. In my youth, I used to run through Malfine woods at night in search of different species, following some light-winged creature fluttering ahead of me through the darkness and I knew all the old country names for moths. The Star Wort, the Lute String, the Ghost Moth that hovers above the grass on summer nights. The Cream Wave that flies through the Maytime woods. Have you ever seen the sepia filigree on the wings of a Pale-Shouldered Brocade?
What useless stuff I crammed my head with, when I was young!
And I kept silk-worms, and fed them on mulberry leaves. But moths, no, I could not breed them like the silkworms. I tried, once, collecting up the caterpillars and keeping them in a flask, but it is never successful, breeding them thus.
From a captive chrysalis, the adult moth will often emerge deformed.
*
On that night those images of my boyhood were overlaid by others, the thought of another child, pale and solemn. He sleeps now in a small chamber above me as I write, not one of those gloomy mirrored grand bedchambers but a room suitable and unfrightening for a little boy, and he has gone quietly to bed. He is a child who will never disobey, never go running through the woods at night. I long for some signs of spirit in this sad little creature. Whatever we decide for ourselves, we have young Edmund Crawshay, the heir to Crawshay’s farm, to consider.