The Angel of Hever Castle: A City of Mystery Christmas Novella

by Kim Wright

  “I’ll take you on a proper tour right after I clean up from breakfast,” she promised, pushing back her chair which made a rude scrape against the bare stone floor.

  “Everyone does not clean for himself?” Rayley asked, but as he glanced around the room, the answer was obvious. Any number of abandoned bowls sat waiting for someone to gather them, the last dregs of the porridge undoubtedly growing stickier and harder to clean with each passing minute. Rayley could only assume that one of the bowls was Trevor’s.

  “You must be joking,” Dorinda said, following his glance around the table with a quick, grim smile. “For even in an egalitarian society, the housework falls to the women.”

  ****

  Trevor ambled slowly over the rolling hills, the grass crunching beneath his feet. It was chilly in the morning, but if today followed the pattern of yesterday, the afternoon would prove tolerable. He wondered how many days were left before this gentle weather would give way to true winter.

  There was no doubt that LaRusse and Anne were inside the small stone gatehouse – he had seen them disappear there a few minutes earlier. The question was how close he dare venture before he risked attracting their attention. He seated himself uncomfortably on one of the large boulders which had pushed their way through the meadow ground, and, in case the spy was being spied upon himself, made a great show of extracting his notebook and pencil from beneath his coat. Exactly how a poet might look while working was an eternal mystery, but he stared out into the distance as if he were waiting for some grand inspiration.

  His eye fell on a rosebush by the side of the gatehouse. It still bore blossoms – at least four large white ones, the edges tinged with pink, and he wondered if it might be the same plant Geraldine had mentioned, a Christmas Rose. A flower capable of thriving under the least hospitable of conditions and he had a sudden urge to pluck this remarkable blossom, to press it and take it back to Emma. Dare he go so close to the gatehouse?

  But why not? he thought. I am a poet, after all, a man who seizes inspiration wherever he finds it.

  So he ventured closer to the bush and just as he was about to reach for the plump white rose, he was startled by the sound of Anne Arborton’s voice, coming through the open window.

  “You fancy her,” she was saying, her voice somehow managing to sound both scathing and desperate.

  “I assure you that I do not,” came LaRusse’s reply.

  “Then how do you explain….that?”

  They seemed preoccupied, so Trevor took the chance of tilting his head, stretching his neck, and looking through the window. Anne was pointing at a large canvas on an easel. From his odd angle, Trevor could not see the whole thing, but it was clearly a more complete rendition of the sketch they had viewed in Geraldine’s home two days earlier. A bare-breasted young woman with a cloth draped across one shoulder and over her lap.

  “I cannot explain it,” LaRusse said quietly, and something in his tone convinced Trevor that he spoke the truth. “I am as mystified as you. Except I might say that an artist…an artist does not always know what he is creating in the moment of its creation. He goes into a sort of trance born of the work and when he looks on it later, at times he is like a stranger who does not –“

  “That’s poppycock,” snapped the girl. “You pose me and yet you paint her.”

  LaRusse was silent for a moment and then picked up one of his artist rags to wipe his brow. “The subconscious mind –“ he began, but Anne was playing that womanly game all men know so well: demanding explanations then refusing to listen to them.

  “Precisely,” she said. “You desire her and part of your mind knows this, even if the other part does not. That is why you can force me to sit here, hour after hour, in this cold and dirty hovel, in this…this shameful condition, and the resultant portrait bears her face and not mine.”

  “No one is forcing you,” LaRusse said, suddenly as snappish as she. “Go if you wish. Go back to your mama.”

  “That bridge is burned,” Anne said, turning away from him and back toward the window. Trevor ducked down, hopefully out of her sight. “When I think of the promises you made…”

  “Promises I shall keep,” LaRusse said, his mood shifting yet again. Now he was back to the smooth lover, a man whose tone was as sweet as honey, as soft as velvet. “Your portrait shall hang in galleries all over Europe before we are done.”

  “What you mean is a portrait of my naked body with her face,” Anne said, and her voice held such hopelessness, such emptiness, that Trevor, still crouched beneath the window, closed his eyes.

  “I swear to you, my darling, it shall be corrected. Sit here, just now, and we shall begin again. And you must believe me. The artist does not always know his own work.”

  “Especially if he is drunk.”

  And at this a slap cut the air, accompanied by a startled cry from the girl, and it took all the willpower Trevor possessed not to reveal both his hiding place and his identity. He pressed his hand against the stone wall and swallowed, trying to gain control over his beating heart and his palm brushed against the rosebush, a thorn scratching the skin and bringing a sharp line of blood to the surface. He raised his palm to his mouth and sucked it.

  “Strike me if you will,” Anne said. “You can strike me morning and night if you wish, and yet it will not change the truth. That you brought me here on a sea of false promises, that you are a man who cannot hold his drink, who crashes about in a stupor and barks orders at people too afraid to challenge him. And it will not change the fact that the woman in that portrait, your own Angel of Hever, is not Anne Arborton. It is Dorinda Spencer.”

  Chapter Four

  After breakfast, such as it was, had been finished, and the dishes, such as they were, had been washed, Rayley followed Dorinda up to the high garret, lodged in one of the castle turrets, where she mixed her paints. In some ways, it was a logical location for the task, since the room had windows on both sides and thus suitable ventilation. But in other ways it was wretchedly impractical, for each morning the supplies had to be carried up the circular staircase that wound to the top of the turret, a treacherous ascent involving any number of worn and crumbling steps. Since there was no handrail, it would be impossibly dangerous to climb with one’s arms full, but Dorinda showed him, with significant pride, a rope and pulley system she had devised to raise the buckets of water needed for mixing.

  “It is ingenious,” he admitted, even while noting that half the water sloshed from the bucket to the stone floor below during the process.

  “My father was an engineer,” Dorinda said a bit breathlessly, struggling with one of the ropes. “He had no sons and taught me and my sister how to contrive any number of such machines.”

  “It doesn’t look very steady,” Rayley said. He didn’t wish to criticize the girl’s invention, and in fact he was filled with admiration for both her ingenuity and her pluck. It was hard to believe she had managed to transport the water by herself for so many days. But he also felt the need to point out that the pulley was screeching in protest as Dorinda pulled up the last bucket. It seemed a miracle the whole apparatus hadn’t come crashing down upon some unsuspecting colonist walking through the stairwell below.

  “It bears weight well enough,” she said with a shrug, and then motioned that he should follow her into the garret.

  What was even more surprising than the pulley was the fact that once they had climbed the circular staircase and entered the small room, Dorinda immediately set about mixing paints for LaRusse Chapman. Her own and then an entire second set, which were placed rather reverently aside for him to come and fetch later, at his leisure. When she noted Rayley’s disapproving frown, Dorinda merely laughed.

  “You find it odd that I would perform yet another task for LaRusse?”

  Rayley shrugged, making a concerted effort to look nonchalant. It would be a useful skill as a detective, this ability to appear relaxed when one was truly agitated, but he feared he had never fully gotten the k
nack. “LaRusse,” he finally said cautiously, “seems to inspire a great deal of loyalty among the members of the colony.” Particularly the women, he added in his own mind, but he refrained from speaking this last bit aloud.

  “But why shouldn’t this be the case?” Dorinda asked and her own nonchalance seemed utterly unfeigned. “He is the king of our kingless kingdom, the god of our godless universe.” She paused to place a jar of red-orange huge on the simple wooden shelf before adding “And he is my protector. A girl needs one.”

  “Even here?” Rayley said. “In utopia?”

  “A liberal man is just as eager to fuck as a conservative one.”

  Rayley was shocked. More than shocked. He was stunned, and for a moment he felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He paused in his own task of stirring some nondescript shade of blue and looked out the window at the fields far below. He had never heard that particular word spoken by a woman, not even a prostitute – and here it had been uttered by a girl of substance, a person of value, intelligent, and from a background which was financially comfortable enough to allow her to not only purchase kid gloves, but to cut the tips off them in the practice of her art. He felt the urge to throw both Dorinda and Anne across the back of Brown’s horses and carry them back to their homes, far away from this place, which seemed more corrupt with each passing hour.

  But Dorinda was clearly pleased with herself, and the two were silent as they put their paints on a pair of trays and carried them, jars holding every color of the rainbow, down the treacherous steps and to a room on the second level. This sunny space, which Dorinda informed him had been the childhood bedroom of Anne Boleyn herself, had now been converted into a studio. It had the best views of any room he had seen so far in the castle, that much was certain. An orchard on one side, the moat on another, a particularly well-composed angle on the meadows from the third. Strange that a daughter, especially a younger one, would have been given the best room in the house as her private chamber, Rayley mused, momentarily distracted from his moral outrage by the pleasantness of the setting. Was there something in Anne Boleyn that made her parents certain, even in girlhood, that she was the special one? The child destined for a great and dangerous future? The one whose rise would elevate the whole family?

  Following Dorinda’s lead, he set up his easel, poised a canvas on it, and selected one of his paints. From his peripheral vision he could see that she worked both quickly and well. Her horses looked like horses, her people like people, and her trees like trees. His own attempts, to no surprise, were an utter mess. He globbed a touch of blue in one corner, a dab of yellow in another, and then they both began to run until the bottom of the canvas was soon smeared in a rather depressing sea of green. He had mixed the paints too thin. But he found another, a color somewhere between pink and red and notably thicker than the others, and he managed to affix a splotch of it into the dead center of the canvas.

  “Your technique is… interesting,” came a voice from the corner. Rayley turned to see that they had been joined by a man he had met the evening before, a man who had introduced himself as John Paul, and who was now staring at Rayley’s canvas with a palpable contempt.

  “I studied in France,” Rayley said, silently thanking Geraldine for having the sense to predict such a muddle and for offering a way out.

  “France?” John Paul repeated.

  “Yes, Paris,” Rayley said mildly. “I was there last year.”

  From the spasm of envy which traveled across John Paul’s heavy face, it was obvious he had never been to France, and Rayley, of course, knew that his own trip had been on police business, not studying art under the tutelage of artistic masters. In fact, if he were to address the total humiliating truth, he would have had to confess that he had spent part of his time in Paris in captivity, languishing in a jail cell down by the river, but Dorinda and John Paul certainly didn’t need to know that. After staring at Rayley’s canvas for a few more moments of awkward silence, John Paul’s skepticism finally gave way to a sort of bewildered respect.

  “Impressionism,” he said softly, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “The French miracle of light”

  “The museums of Paris are where I first saw the technique,” Rayley said, and this much of the story was true. After merely twenty-four hours of subterfuge, he was relieved to be able to say something honest. It seemed as if he had been wading in a rushing river, and now for the first time since arriving at Hever Castle, he felt the sense of a solid stone beneath his feet. He would stand on this small stone of truth until he caught his bearings.

  “I was going to get ale from the cellar,” John Paul said. “I thought you might wish to come with me, Dorinda.”

  It was an odd request. A man would hardly take a girl with him to haul ale, not when there were so many other young blokes around better suited for the task. And then it occurred to Rayley that John Paul was one of the predatory types Dorinda had described, and that his desire to get the girl into the castle cellar had absolutely nothing to do with the transport of ale.

  “I didn’t know there was a cellar,” Rayley said. “So I take it that supplies at Hever are not as sparse as it appears?”

  John Paul flinched. A quick antagonism had sprung up between the two men, an almost instantaneous sense of competition, and Dorinda sensed it. She shook her head and turned back to her canvas. “I’ve just started working,” she said.

  “There is a cellar,” John Paul said, addressing Rayley although his eyes remained fixed on Dorinda, “but the contents are not raided on a daily basis. Only for special occasions. I take it you have forgotten what day this is?”

  “December 21?”

  “Not just that,” said John Paul. He was a burly fellow, and Rayley noted in a parenthetical way that his hands were large, with square stubby fingers. It was hard to imagine such appendages producing fine art…but then again his own fingers were long and thin, perfectly suited for delicate tasks, and all he had managed to create was this monstrosity now dripping grey paint to the floor, which he had furthermore blamed on the French. “It is the winter solstice,” John Paul went on. “The shortest day of the year.”

  “Which is,” Rayley said, “another way of saying it is the longest and darkest night.”

  “We are lucky to expect a full moon,” Dorinda said softly, her eyes still turned to her canvas. She had added a woman to her scene, a woman holding a child.

  “We do not celebrate the Christian holidays here at Hever,” John Paul said to Rayley. “They are oppressive, created by men, enforced by the restraints of the church. Instead we celebrate the true cycles of nature, and we mark each full moon with a revel. Tonight is special, for we have a full moon and the solstice in tandem so there will be a bonfire, singing, and dancing. And yes, some ale. Are you sure you won’t accompany me, Dorinda?”

  “Quite sure,” she said, using a slender paintbrush to give her half-realized child a blanket of blue.

  “And does LaRusse decree costumes for this solstice celebration?” Rayley asked. The question was meant ironically, but to his surprise Dorinda and John Paul both nodded, almost in unison.

  “Some wear them,” Dorinda said. “Of course, the show is better when there are a troop of actors in residence. They always manage so be gay and charming, no matter what challenges they face.” She turned from her canvas and looked straight at Rayley. “Are you the theatrical type, Mr. Abrams? Shall you dazzle me tonight by taking on an identity I would never expect?”

  “Perhaps,” Rayley said, and even though he knew her flirtatious banter was intended more to discourage John Paul than to encourage him, he still blushed. So the girl liked theatrical types, did she? He supposed he could come to the solstice disguised as a detective from Scotland Yard.

  ****

  “Good God, man, what is that?”

  “You evidently do not recognize great art.”

  “Evidently I do not,” said Trevor, glancing at Dorinda’s canvas as he claimed the room’
s only chair. “But I must say that one there in the corner seems a proper painting.”

  “What have you been doing all morning?” Rayley asked.

  “Picking roses,” Trevor said, indicating a white flower he had tucked into his lapel. “Christmas roses, to be precise. I hate this place.”

  “They may call them roses, but they really are a totally different flower,” Rayley said. “From an entirely different plant family, which is why they can continue to thrive even after the weather has turned too cold for real roses. Hellebore, I believe, or something very like it.”

  Trevor raised an eyebrow. “And you mention this, because?”

  “They’re highly toxic.”

  Now Trevor’s other eyebrow shot up to join the first. “I say, Abrams, you do manage to come up with the most unlikely pieces of information.”

  “I’ve been studying some with Tom. He knows he will need a complete knowledge of poisons, especially local ones, if he is ever to be taken on as an official Scotland Yard coroner, and he has been kind enough to pass a bit of his knowledge on to me.”

  “A fine thing,” Trevor said, aware that he felt an odd sting of…could it be jealousy? Rayley Abrams was his equal and right-hand man, and he had always considered himself the undisputed mentor of both Tom and Davy. The realization that Rayley and Tom had been working together was a surprise and he wondered why neither of them had discussed the matter with him.

  “I’ve also been eavesdropping,” Trevor added, changing the subject more for his own benefit than Rayley’s. Taking out his notebook to verify the details, he related the story of everything he had overheard in the gatehouse, including the mysterious portrait which Anne had claimed looked like another woman. When he got to the name ‘Dorinda Spencer,’ Rayley pushed away from the window and began to pace. And when Trevor finished by saying LaRusse had actually struck Anne, Rayley turned sharply on his heel to face Trevor, his own cheeks as red as if he was the one who had been slapped.