Lord Mullion's Secret

by Michael Innes

  ‘A child!’ Lord Mullion was aghast.

  ‘Which, I suppose, would have had to be abandoned to foster-parents in Italy, or something of the kind. And that would be enough to send any woman mad.’

  ‘I simply don’t know where we’re getting to!’ Lord Mullion, whose bewilderment was without doubt totally unfeigned, looked almost wildly round the drawing-room – perhaps with the dim hope that Savine would call a halt to this disturbing episode by announcing dinner. ‘You don’t think, do you, that Atlay has such ideas in his head?’

  ‘I think it likely that he has a good deal of solid knowledge in his head. Everything that Camilla could tell him, in fact, during an extremely confidential relationship. Charles, would you agree?’

  ‘I’m rather new to the whole situation, Mary, and don’t think my impression can count for much.’ Honeybath paused on this, and judged it ignobly evasive. ‘But, yes – I suspect that Miss Wyndowe has told Atlay a great deal. But now Atlay has felt that he has something he must tell Miss Wyndowe – and particularly if, as is to be feared, she is near death. The real puzzle is there.’

  ‘Something he has just discovered, you mean?’ the harassed Lord Mullion demanded. ‘How could he have discovered something about Camilla she didn’t know herself?’

  ‘I can’t guess, Henry. But you’d better ask him. For Mary is quite right. There has come to be too much mystery blowing about your household.’

  ‘Well, of course, I’m quite intimate with Martin Atlay, as you’ll have observed. There’s even a family connection of sorts, although I’ve forgotten what it is. But it would still be dashed impertinent to ask him what private talk he’d been holding with another of his parishioners.’

  ‘Shall I do the asking for you?’

  ‘My dear Charles!’ It could be seen that Lord Mullion was far from offended by this suggestion.

  ‘A thoroughly good idea,’ Lady Mullion said with decision. ‘If Charles simply says, Henry, that you have asked him, as a very old friend, to have a quiet talk about these matters, Dr Atlay is unlikely to object. And some sort of clear-headed discussion may result.’

  If there was in this some hint of a doubt about the clarity of Lord Mullion’s own mind, it was now given no time to make its mark. For as Lord Wyndowe and his sisters entered at one end of the drawing-room Savine appeared at the other and called them all to dine. It was while they dined, as it happened, that Camilla Wyndowe died.

  18

  Having conducted a successful whirlwind courtship (achieved, indeed, within the narrow temporal bounds of our narrative) Swithin Gore was the happiest of men. Or he would have been the happiest of men if the stout strain of realism in him had not been keeping steadily in the picture the balancing fact that he was also the very junior assistant of the Earl of Mullion’s head gardener. The problem here was one that he felt couldn’t just be left to Patty, although Patty appeared to see it that way. And it was far from simplified by that rash appearance he had put in before Lord Mullion, since Lord Mullion’s immediate generosity of intent made him feel deceitful and treacherous whenever he thought of it. And now old Miss Wyndowe had died; Lord Mullion’s flag had been flown at half-mast on Saturday; it was Monday and the funeral was to be that afternoon.

  Swithin wouldn’t have supposed that the funeral was any business of his. But a puzzling thing had happened, and although he had decided that secret meetings with his beloved ought to be ruled out until Miss Wyndowe was decently buried (for it is to be observed that Swithin’s sense of the punctilios is anxious because uninstructed; although clever he is a very simply bred boy; it is all going to be very difficult in endless small ways) – although Swithin had decided this he had now been obliged to change his mind. And this is why he and Patty were now standing on either side of a rose-bed in the walled garden, with every appearance of consulting together about the last of the summer’s blooms.

  ‘Read it again,’ Swithin said. He had handed Patty a sheet of writing-paper. Patty did as she was told.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I see.’ She didn’t, however, look as if she did see. On the contrary, she looked puzzled and even a little wary.

  ‘If I died,’ Swithin said, ‘your brother wouldn’t turn out to help carry my coffin, would he?’

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t.’ Patty considered this reply. ‘Unless you’d made a will or something, specifically asking him to. He’d think you dotty, but he might prove to be there on the day.’

  ‘This chap’s dotty.’ Swithin pointed to the letter. ‘I don’t too much quarrel with the custom. Faithful old friends from the estate, and so forth. It’s a myth, but not so foul as a good many that now blow around. Still, I’d have thought it ought to be the older men, who dress like undertakers every Sunday, anyway. I haven’t even got the right clothes.’

  ‘You mustn’t think about clothes, Swithin. It’s absurd.’

  ‘Patty, I won’t have you teach me my manners. It wouldn’t work. And if one hasn’t got clothes, one’s bloody well entitled to think about them.’

  Patty handed back the letter. She considered indulging herself in the luxury of a row with Swithin. They’d had one or two already, and they’d ended in a breathless access of fresh happiness. She decided against this distraction for the time being.

  ‘And what does the chap mean,’ Swithin demanded, ‘by calling me his dear Swithin? “My dear Swithin”. I call it rather cheek.’

  ‘You are a member of his spiritual flock, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m nothing of the sort. I think I’m either a theist or a deist. Only I can never remember which is which.’

  ‘Why not be an agnostic?’ Patty was enchanted by this book-learning on the part of her lover. ‘I’m that.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be an agnostic too. But I won’t be an atheist. That’s intellectually untenable. It makes a positive assertion on no evidence whatever.’

  ‘So it does.’ Patty, whose vision of the self-educated would quite recently have been conditioned mainly by memories of E M Forster’s Leonard Bast, felt that she was learning about Swithin all the time. ‘But listen, Swithin! Dr Atlay’s letter isn’t about what you think. In fact, you’re jumping to a conclusion that isn’t written into it at all. I rather think you know that.’

  ‘Well, yes – I do. But it’s completely mysterious and rather worrying. I feel myself getting in a tighter and tighter corner with your lot. And a beastly false position, too.’ Swithin scowled, which was something he seldom did. It made him look rather like Cyprian. ‘What do you mean – jumping to a conclusion?’

  ‘Read it again. Aloud, this time.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ And Swithin read:

  My dear Swithin,

  It is very desirable that you should be present at Miss Wyndowe’s funeral tomorrow afternoon. If you go up to the castle a few minutes before three o’clock I shall myself be at the main entrance and looking out for you.

  After the service and interment there will be a gathering of the family and some others at the castle. It will be a kindness if you can make yourself available for that too.

  Yours sincerely,

  MARTIN ATLAY

  ‘So there,’ Patty said. ‘I don’t know how you can have read the thing as an order to turn up as a pall-bearer, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘I’m accustomed to read things as orders. They nearly always are. And what’s that stuff about my having to be at a gathering?’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly not another order – telling you to be on hand to help dish out the funeral baked meats. If it’s a mystery, the explanation must turn up quite soon.’

  ‘Patty, are you keeping something from me? Have you told your father about us, and does he want to take a closer look at me?’

  ‘No I haven’t – so it isn’t that. And I think you had better just do as you are told – or as what it will he a kindness if you can make yourself available to do.’ Patty paused. ‘It’s my guess that you’re going to have to accustom yourself to that sort
of talk.’

  ‘Patty, for Christ’s sake! Just what are you yattering about?’

  ‘I don’t really know. But some things have been beginning to come together in my head that I can’t decide whether I like or not. I know one thing that I do like – and that’s you, just as you are.’

  ‘But, Patty, I’m going to be a very successful man, with my name in Who’s Who, and my humble origins proudly unconcealed. Aren’t you going to like me then?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  At this point Swithin jumped across the rose-bed and there was an interlude. After this, however, he stood back and looked with some severity at his beloved.

  ‘It’s not altogether satisfactory,’ he said. ‘Something has come over you – and other people too, I think – that you won’t tell. What is it?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been looking at you rather a lot just lately.’

  ‘Have you, indeed?’ Swithin considered this. ‘And it makes your head swim?’ he added modestly.

  ‘Nothing of the sort. And that nice old painter has been looking at you too.’

  ‘So he has. He hunted me down and goggled at me a few evenings ago.’

  ‘I expect he wants to make a sketch of you, sitting on top of a haystack. In pastel, I think, to do justice to your gorgeous complexion and cornflower eyes and cornfield hair. He knows about you and me, all right. And he has taken to conferring with Dr Atlay in the most solemn way. Keep your eye on Dr Atlay, Swithin. He’s the man who knows all about my family. And particularly about poor Camilla. He was her confessor, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s only papists who have that.’

  ‘It’s nothing of the kind, you great ignorant brute.’ Having said this, Patty returned briefly into Swithin’s arms. ‘I don’t mean quite technically a confessor,’ she then resumed. ‘Camilla didn’t whisper to him through a little meat-safe thing that she’d been impatient with Mrs Trumper or stolen one of Boosie’s chocolate-creams. But I think he kept her conscience, after a fashion.’

  ‘Good heavens, Patty! Where on earth is all this taking us?’

  ‘Right up to lunch-time, I’d say.’ Patty had looked at her watch. ‘Just see that you do as you’re told this afternoon.’

  ‘Patty, if I’m to be shoved around–’

  ‘Do as you’re told, Swithin Gore. Toe the line, as Cyprian is fond of saying. I believe quite a number of people will be having to do that.’

  ‘Listen, Patty! I will not – repeat not – marry a kind of walking crossword puzzle. If you can’t–’

  ‘No, darling – no.’ Patty was suddenly resolute as well as troubled. ‘I just don’t want to muck anything, or get important matters wrong. We’ve got listening to do. I’ll see you in church. There will be quite good listening there, whether we’re agnostics or not. But afterwards too.’

  And Lady Patience Wyndowe – perhaps vindicating her Christian name – turned and ran from the rose-garden. Swithin (left alone, so it was entirely for his own benefit) scratched his head in an elaborate parody of rustic bewilderment. He smoothed that flowing cornfield of his hair. All in all, he wasn’t very pleased. There was coming to him – as was inevitable, since he was very far from dull – a glimmering perception that there had been something very much lacking in respectability about the circumstances of his birth. It was a great shock to him. For beneath everything that he had acquired for himself he had remained an honest working-class boy. He disliked the thought of any blot upon the short and simple annals of the Gores. And if Patty was troubled it was perhaps because, being quite bright too, she was very well aware of this.

  19

  The portcullis at Mullion Castle has the appearance of having been constructed quite as much for offensive as for defensive purposes. What impends over you as you pass beneath it is a series of lethal-looking downward-pointing spikes; what supports these in air is a mechanism of chains and windlasses alarmingly eroded by rust. Now, as long ago, one may feel, the contraption might be released, whether by accident or design – whereupon half a dozen innocent tourists (as formerly a besieging soldiery) would be instantly impaled, like so many cherries or olives on cocktail-sticks.

  It was under this minatory device that Lord Mullion, on returning from the funeral, chose to come abruptly to a halt and address Swithin.

  ‘Gore, I won’t pretend I don’t know why you are here in this seemingly unaccountable fashion. I gather you believe yourself to have come to an understanding with my elder daughter.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It seemed to Swithin that he mustn’t any longer address Lord Mullion as ‘my lord’. ‘And Patty believes it too.’

  ‘So I gather from her.’ Lord Mullion had to swallow ‘Patty’ as best he could. ‘Did she tell me this at your – dash it all! – instigation?’

  ‘No, sir. Of course I was going to tell you myself. Patty is a very headstrong girl. One of the troubles is going to be if she feels she must run me. When did she tell you about it?’

  ‘She chose for some reason the moment in which we were coming out of the churchyard. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand a great deal of what is going on.’

  ‘Neither do I, sir. I can’t see that my wanting to marry your daughter – which I know you must regard as absolutely monstrous – is any reason for bringing me in here now. I think Patty’s at the bottom of it.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind…Swithin.’ Lord Mullion had brought out this name with prodigious effort. ‘It’s the vicar. I don’t know what’s taken the fellow. He behaves as if he were stage-managing some confounded private theatricals. And I don’t like your “monstrous”, young man. I don’t regard your idea as monstrous at all. It’s quite obvious that my daughter is well worth marrying. But of course it’s unwise and indeed impossible. Anybody can see that.’

  ‘I’m very sorry that you think so.’ It was clear to Swithin that his future father-in-law (as he firmly thought of Lord Mullion) was in a state of considerable mental confusion. ‘I suppose you must feel that Patty has taken leave of her senses.’

  ‘Far from it.’ Lord Mullion gave Swithin a grimly appraising look. ‘I conceive that her senses may have been very active in the matter. And how the devil do you come to talk like a gentleman?’

  ‘I don’t.’ Swithin was genuinely indignant. ‘I’ve a strong local accent.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of how you handle your confounded vowels and consonants,’ Lord Mullion said rather crossly. He was conscious of not coping with this new family exigency too well. ‘Cyprian,’ he called out, seeing his son approaching, ‘come and look after Swithin Gore, will you. Tea and all that.’ And Lord Mullion led the way hastily into the castle.

  Cyprian approached cautiously. As with nearly everybody else, there had been building up in him for some time an obscure sense of untoward events to hand. This must have been considerably augmented by Swithin’s presence at the funeral and arrival at the castle now. As he came up he subjected Mr Pring’s insignificant assistant to what the object of these attentions was by this time becoming resigned to: being gazed at by eyes that were suddenly declaring themselves unsealed.

  ‘Hullo, Swithin,’ Cyprian said – doubtfully and experimentally.

  ‘Hullo, Cyprian.’

  Lord Wyndowe was taken aback – as he well might be by this sudden unmasking, as he may have conceived it, of the Gore batteries before the very walls of the castle. There was a short pause, while the two young men favoured one another with a cold stare.

  ‘We’ll go along to the drawing-room,’ Cyprian said abruptly. ‘There’s to be tea there, and God knows what as well. Perhaps it’s the reading of a will, or something. But there isn’t a lawyer, and Atlay seems to be in charge. There’s something frightful about Camilla Wyndowe, it seems. Or the old dotard Atlay thinks there is. Considering he has just buried her, it seems a bit soon to be parading her as a skeleton.’

  ‘I suppose she may afford some bones to pick.’

  Cyprian’s eyes widened on Swithin at this prompt repartee – m
uch as if he had expected no more than Mr Charlie Dew’s ‘Ur’ or ‘Urr’ or even ‘Urrr’ from so simple a son of the soil. But then, quite unexpectedly, he grinned broadly. And at this Swithin momentarily ceased to look stony, and a certain gleam of recognition passed between the two youths.

  ‘I say,’ Cyprian said, ‘it was good of you to bring back my tennis things the other day. I meant to thank you, but it went out of my head.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?’ Almost as he produced this mild irony, Swithin regretted it. Cyprian had been trying to say something accommodating or gracious, and he’d promptly snubbed him. Swithin told himself he wasn’t behaving well. Fate had suddenly pitched him into two totally unpredictable situations. The first was represented by Patty, and stretched immensely far back: several weeks back, in fact. The second was brand new, and consisted in the disconcerting circumstance that he was being regarded as some sort of byblow of the Wyndowes. The word came to him from eighteenth-century novels, which he’d once had a fit of reading in bulk. He didn’t like the word, and he didn’t like the thing either. And the penny had dropped with Patty, he was sure, and Patty was far from relishing whatever the stupid revelation was. His proper line was to receive it without fuss and then to maintain firmly that it made no difference to anything. It had been bloody silly suddenly to call Cyprian Cyprian simply because Cyprian had called Swithin Swithin. It was only the sillier in that – he now realized – he had been prompted to it partly because there was turning out to be something potentially attractive about Lord Wyndowe after all. Lord Wyndowe was clever in an obtrusively idle-seeming way, and Swithin, who had gone short of clever companionship all his days, immediately took to that. Lord Wyndowe had at least got hold of what was on the carpet bastardy-wise. The bewildered Lord Mullion didn’t seem yet to have caught up with this aspect of things. Or if he had, it was only in the dimmest fashion.