Lord Mullion's Secret

by Michael Innes

  Patty was even more lightly clad than he was – not an untoward circumstance in the case of a young woman who, on a warm summer night, has jumped straight out of bed. Honeybath was immediately sensible of the impropriety of the confrontation, and cast round for words with which to excuse himself. To Patty, naturally, no such nonsense occurred.

  ‘Hullo, Mr Honeybath,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got lost, have you?’

  ‘Well, yes – I have in a way.’ It struck Honeybath that Patty might have forgotten that he had been put in a bedroom with its own bathroom opening off it, and might be supposing that he had gone wandering off in search of a loo. ‘I haven’t been sleep-walking, or anything of that sort. But I rather think your Great-aunt has. She paid me an odd kind of visit, and I felt I’d better follow her up. I’m afraid that my tumbling around in that clumsy way must have awakened you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was thinking about something.’ Momentarily, Patty gave the impression of still being a good deal more interested in whatever she had been meditating than in the state of affairs that had interrupted her. ‘But where is Camilla now?’

  ‘Well, I heard her lift. So I suppose she must have returned to her own part of the house. Is this habit of hers supposed to be altogether safe? Your mother offered me a kind of warning about it. But I was a little alarmed, all the same.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. But our doctor says there’s no real danger: or not on such familiar ground. But Mrs Trumper will be upset. She looks after Camilla up there, you know, and is very vigilant. But the poor soul has to sleep, after all. I’d better go up and see.’

  ‘Perhaps you better had. Shall I come with you, Patty?’

  ‘No, I think not. The arrival of a male might alarm them both. But it’s chilly out here. Stay in my room, Mr Honeybath, until I’ve seen that all is well, and then I’ll return you to base. It is a confusing place, Mullion, I’m afraid. You can nip into my bed if you’re shivering.’

  Honeybath accepted this proposal, at least in part, and not without the disturbing thought that he had involved himself in a situation recalling that of Mr Pickwick and the middle-aged lady in the double-bedded room. The night was much too warm for shivering, and he supposed that Patty had not been able to resist making a little fun of him. They went into her room; she pulled on a dressing-gown, and then departed with the sort of reassuring smile and nod that might be offered to a small boy who has to be left alone for a few minutes on a railway platform. Honeybath took no exception to this further mild mischief. He was coming to form a good opinion of Lady Patience Wyndowe.

  There was a comfortable chintz-covered chair, in which he settled down now with as much unconcern as if the room belonged to a daughter of his own. He found himself wondering about fathers and daughters. Did they commonly establish a really confidential relationship? To which parent did a girl commonly first take her troubles, and to which parent a boy? It was something he knew nothing about. You could keep your eyes open for an answer, he supposed, when reading novels – or you could if you believed that novelists have all that to tell in a reliable way about human nature. But he rather doubted whether they had. Did even Cervantes tell you as much about Don Quixote de la Mancha as Velazquez told you, much more economically, about a whole phalanx of Spanish royalty and nobility?

  Honeybath sat up in his chair, having realized that this was so muddled a question that it must have drifted into his head only when he was on the brink of falling asleep. It would be very absurd if Patty came back and found that he had dropped off into an elderly gentleman’s nap. And it was about Patty that he had really been thinking. For some reason that he couldn’t pin down, he was strongly persuaded that she had on her mind a problem more commanding than that constituted by the erratic behaviour of Great-aunt Camilla. Would she take anything of the kind to her father – seeking the wisdom of his riper years? It was this specific question, lurking in his head, that had prompted him to ask himself the conundrum in general terms.

  He couldn’t recall that he had ever before thus sat in a young woman’s bedroom in the small hours, and as he now took his bearings in it he had a feeling that he mustn’t in any sense poke around. But he could look around, and this he did with the idea of possibly finding out a little more about Patty’s character. That she was a perfectly sensible girl was evident from the way she had handled the present situation. He had already decided that she had a clear head, and he wondered whether it contained much in the way of brains as well. The Wyndowes as a family had never much gone in for intellectual pursuits, nor had they made any mark in the public life of the country; in fact it might fairly be said that nobody had ever heard of them. In this they were by no means singular among the English aristocracy. But Patty’s mother belonged to a different tradition. There had been plenty of brains there for many generations, at least of the quality that takes people possessed of the springboard of rank and wealth pretty far. Lady Mullion belonged here; she was, at least, a woman of character; and it might not have been quite fairly that she had placed herself among those who feel no need for ‘scope’. Lady Patience might be like that.

  There were a few pictures on the walls. They had the appearance of having been picked out of the general Wyndowe clutter of such things by the exercise of a good deal of taste, and included a couple of William Ward’s engravings after George Morland, a small aquatint probably by Sandby, and a tiny watercolour of a cottage and a tree and a boat which could only be by John Varley. All this told one no more than that Patty had predictably rural tastes, and the same impression was rendered by a row of books on a shelf sufficiently close to Honeybath to be scanned from where he sat. There were juvenile works about small girls and their four-footed friends, grown-up works on botany and gardening, more than a dozen anthologies of English and French poetry, and a number of fat volumes of a self-improving kind, typified by Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. It was Honeybath’s overriding impression that Patty had been very correctly educated, although not quite in the way that she deserved. There was nothing else to be particularly remarked in the room, unless it was a diminutive vase on an otherwise bare bedside table in which had been stuck two or three unimpressive sprigs of wallflower. (Honeybath was not in a position to attribute any significance to this.)

  The door opened and Patty appeared again. It struck Honeybath as he got to his feet that she had been absent for quite a long time.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Not until we’ve talked a little. I’ll perch on the bed.’

  Honeybath sat down again. Patty had spoken in rather a commanding way, and he supposed that she had something serious to say about the mission she had just accomplished.

  ‘Is the old lady safely tucked away?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes – safe and sound. But she only got there some time after I did, and Mrs Trumper had woken up and was in a bit of a stew. I calmed her down. Goodness knows how far afield Camilla had been. But she’s probably asleep by now.’

  ‘Wasn’t she asleep all the time?’

  ‘Either that, I suppose, or in some sort of trance or state of general dottiness. Isn’t there something called a fugue, that means bolting after something you want without knowing it, and even having forgotten who you are? I’ve read about that somewhere, but I don’t believe Dr Hinkstone has. He’s our GP, and a bit old-fashioned, it seems to me. But he’s probably right when he says the main thing is not to badger her.’

  ‘I see.’ Honeybath reflected that something of the comfortable Wyndowe vagueness sounded in these remarks.

  ‘Cyprian says that something nasty must have happened to her in the woodshed when she was a kid, and that little Martin Atlay was probably the villain of the piece.’

  ‘Little–? Oh, you mean the vicar.’

  ‘Yes, of course. He’s been a man-and-boy character around these parts since the middle ages. He’s even older than he seems – and probably one of our innumerable distant relations, who picked up the family living as a perk. Don’t you
think the Church of England is an extraordinary institution?’

  ‘I believe I do.’ Honeybath was beginning to find this conversation odd. ‘Dr Atlay certainly seems interested in your family history. Your father told me to consult him if I ever wanted to find my way around it.’

  ‘You’re not likely to do that, I suppose.’ Patty had settled back on her pillows as if this were really the start of a sustained chat. ‘Did Dr Atlay have a great deal to say when you were sheltering in the church?’

  ‘He was variously informative.’

  ‘Did he blow off about what he called the grand principle of subordination?’

  ‘He certainly did.’ Honeybath was surprised. ‘Is it an obsession of his?’

  ‘Something like that. What do you think?’

  ‘About just what, Patty?’

  ‘Gentle and simple, and so on. Class and privilege, and different social habits and assumptions and kinds and levels of education. Everything of that sort.’ Patty paused for long enough to afford Honeybath a sudden inkling of the nature of her present mystery. ‘Do you approve of all that?’

  ‘In a general way, no.’ It seemed to Honeybath that here was yet another delicate situation confronting him – unexpectedly, and at what must now be near dawn. He realized, too, that he was being consulted by this young woman, still almost a stranger to him, in a fashion that might readily flatter his vanity. He must not, on this abruptly emerging territory, be led into producing facile or irresponsible remarks. ‘But for a start,’ he said, ‘what are essentially class differences have never for long been successfully ironed out of any civilized society – which doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be agreeable if they could be. But they do go awfully deep into human nature, Patty. Some primitive people seem at a first glance to have managed, or retained, an egalitarian set-up or ready-made communist Utopia. But scrutiny often shows them to be rigidly hierarchical, after all. Take marriage, for instance. It turns out that you can marry only within, or only outside, a set band of relationships.’

  ‘You mean it would be a terrible thing if I married the vet’s son?’

  ‘Come, come, Patty. This is serious, or I suspect it is. And I don’t believe that the vet has a son – or, if he has, that you’ve ever set eyes on him.’

  ‘Perfectly true. I was only–’

  ‘Put it this way.’ Honeybath paused to choose his words. ‘Think of foreign marriages: marrying, say, a Frenchman or a German. It’s something that happens rather more frequently in your class than in others – under influences and assumptions that go right back, I suppose, into a feudal age. But if it’s wise to think twice about any marriage, then it’s wise to think three times about a foreign one. That’s because difficulties that seem trivial and unimportant when one falls in love can turn out to be pretty formidable, after all.’

  ‘And the vet’s son would require thinking about four times?’ Henry’s elder daughter had fired up as she asked this. ‘And perhaps it should be five times if–’

  ‘Patty, dear, stop counting. And realize that I’ve been talking only in the most general way – and saying what any elderly man like me would be likely to say. But on any specific situation that turned up I’d have absolutely no title to say a word.’

  ‘It comes to being on one’s own?’

  ‘That’s a very hard question, indeed.’

  ‘So you don’t know whether Boosie or I ought to consult old Dr Atlay about the vet’s son? He’s supposed to be our spiritual adviser.’

  ‘I do know that neither of you is remotely likely to do anything of the kind, so I needn’t pronounce upon the matter. But I’m grateful to your great-aunt for getting us off to a good start together, Patty. We must talk again. But now you have a second old person to see back to bed.’

  ‘Oh, dear – how boring I’ve been!’ It was unaffectedly and not defensively that Patty said this as she jumped to the floor and led the way from her room. She was undoubtedly, Honeybath thought a very nice child. His eye fell momentarily on the wallflowers as he followed her into the corridor.

  12

  On the following morning Honeybath accompanied Lord Mullion to the roof of the castle, and then in a rather gingerly fashion along a kind of catwalk between the battlements on one hand and a steeply pitched expanse of lead on the other. The owner of this perilous perch appeared not quite easy in his mind. But whether this was because he was still not reconciled to the flag-hoisting ritual, or was prompted by some other occasion, did not at present appear.

  ‘Octavo ramparts and quarto crenulations,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘A joke of my brother Sylvanus. He’s rather fond of making fun of the old place. And a reading man, who picks up odd things of that kind.’

  ‘Your brother wouldn’t have struck me as likely to be bookish. An outdoor type, surely. He gives an impression’ – Honeybath paused to find suitable words – ‘of uncommon physical vitality.’

  ‘Yes, to be sure. Sylvanus is very much the fox-hunting man, but I’m afraid he doesn’t altogether confine himself to foxes and folios.’ Lord Mullion chuckled a little half heartedly at this scarcely arcane witticism. ‘Ah here we are! The flag spends the night in this locker. There’s a Union flag, too, for public junketings, and a Royal Standard just in case the lady comes to tea. Her great-grandfather came and had some pheasants shot for him once – or so we’ve been told. Just hold on to this cord, Charles, like a good fellow.’ With this slight assistance from Honeybath the flag was hoisted, and as it took the breeze was surveyed by Lord Mullion with ill-concealed complacency. ‘The battlements turn up on that, too,’ he said. ‘Fair enough, since they must have cost the devil of a lot of money in their time. “Gules, a Chief Crenelle, Argent”. My father made me learn it as a boy. Must mean something, I suppose.’

  Honeybath agreed that it must. There was, he thought, something innocently disingenuous in Henry’s throw-away attitude to these heraldic mysteries.

  ‘The flag looks very well,’ he said. ‘And what a magnificent view!’

  ‘Five counties, I believe. But on the east there, it’s still our own land that closes the vista.’ Lord Mullion’s blameless self-satisfaction had increased. ‘Boosie says you can get telescopes that work like penny-in-the-slot machines; and that if we had a couple up here we’d net quite a bit extra from the visitors. There’s the dower house, by the way, beyond that line of beeches. Pleasant little Georgian affair, and suits Sylvanus and his lot down to the ground. Not that I’d exactly mourn if he was a good deal further off.’ Lord Mullion broke off for a moment, as if surprised at having come out with so unbrotherly a remark. But when Honeybath said nothing he went on. ‘The fact is, Charles, that Mary and I don’t feel he’s too good an influence on Cyprian. The home paddock not the right place to sow wild oats, eh?’

  Honeybath might have said, ‘Nor the home barn, either.’ But although forthright candour is the proper thing with a former schoolfellow, it doesn’t extend to gossip about his close relations. He mustn’t, on the other hand, suggest to Henry that he was reluctant to receive confidences.

  ‘Your boy seems all right to me,’ he said. ‘You’re not seriously worried about him, are you? If he has his fling in rather a pronounced way, you know, it’s entirely your own fault.’

  ‘Entirely my fault?’ Lord Mullion was dismayed.

  ‘But not in a way you can help, Henry. The mere fact of your being a peer puts him at a degree of risk well beyond – what shall I say? – the vet’s son.’

  ‘The vet’s son?’ Lord Mullion was understandably bewildered. ‘I don’t know that the vet–’

  ‘That’s only a manner of speaking, and you know what I mean. Did you read what the Head Man – the new one, whom I haven’t met – was saying the other day? He has to control stiffer sanctions than any other headmaster simply because he has so many arrogant and over-privileged little brutes on his hands. Those weren’t exactly his words. But, again, you get the idea. You mustn’t expect young Lord Wyndowe to teach Sunday School.’

&nbs
p; ‘As the vet’s boy is likely to do?’ This idea amused Lord Mullion, and he cheered up a bit. Yet as he and Honeybath walked back across the leads after their welcoming signal to the day’s visitors he reassumed a worried look. ‘One just doesn’t want scandal, does one?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose not.’ Honeybath was surprised. Having been at school with Henry Wyndowe, and being fairly well acquainted with sundry similar persons in a general way, didn’t – he told himself – prevent his being occasionally quite at sea with the whole class of society they represented. Perhaps he had a vaguely Regency vision of the aristocracy, and saw them as exceptionally endowed to take scandal, family and otherwise, unregardingly and in their stride. Yet here was Henry disposed, it seemed, to lose sleep over what the neighbours would say – this in the most suburban manner. But now there came oddly into Honeybath’s head that grimly reticent plaque in Mullion parish church: RUPERT WYNDOWE LORD WYNDOWE. Perhaps the Wyndowes, although they had been (to Boosie’s disapproval) Cavaliers and not Roundheads, preserved a strong puritan tradition. Or merely a Victorian one. Anthony Trollope’s younger Duke of Omnium, after all, had been singularly prone to distress over misdemeanours in his family.

  Here was a point at which Honeybath ought to have let this particular topic lapse. But he was one who possessed a more than average share of curiosity (as artists of all sorts, indeed, are likely to do) and he saw no reason why he should not a little catechize his former fag. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘suppose I discovered that your grandfather had habitually cheated at cards. And suppose I published the fact in some rubbishy biography or volume of memoirs. Would you be tremendously upset?’