Grave Goods (Tamara Hoyland Book 3)

by Jessica Mann

  GRAVE GOODS

  Jessica Mann

  © Jessica Mann 1984

  Jessica Mann has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1984 by Macmillan London Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter One

  Blood was dripping from a cut on Margot Ellice’s forehead onto her attacker’s left hand, which was pressed over her nose and mouth. The man held an open clasp knife in his gloved right hand. Tamara Hoyland moved silently forward from the open doorway behind him, and chopped the side of her metal briefcase against his wrist. The knife clattered to the floor, and the man let go his hold of Margot Ellice, who slumped onto the sofa, gasping and moaning.

  As the man whirled to face her, Tamara kicked the knife away. A glance showed her a face masked by brown nylon above a tall, muscular body in jeans, sweat shirt and anorak, with a sheaf of paper folded into the anorak pocket. His right hand hung uselessly. Through the stocking Tamara could see the movements of the man’s eyes, but his quarrel, if he had one, was apparently not with her. He dashed for the door and was down the one flight of stairs and out into the street before Tamara had finished dialling the three slow numbers.

  The police found no witness prepared to admit seeing him, and the old block of flats had not been attended by a porter since the war. Bloodstained rubber gloves and a ruined stocking were found at the bottom of the lift shaft.

  Margot Ellice had thirteen stitches in the wound in her head and was kept in hospital overnight. Her employer and charge, Tamara’s bedridden grandfather, had heard nothing and was not told of the intruder into the apartment that had been his home for fifty years. Tamara’s mother, his only daughter, took unpaid leave from her work as a producer of schools’ radio programmes, to take care of him.

  Chapter Two

  Lady Artemis Bessemer was sold by her father to the Hereditary Prince of Horn in the autumn of 1858.

  A good first line. Margot Ellice read it aloud again, watching the girl’s face. It would take an imaginative leap on her part to believe that Artemis could have been literally unfree. Written all over Tamara Hoyland’s appearance was the label of her generation: a free woman, bound by no other individual, never trained to submit, or tend, or defer.

  Twenty years younger than I am, Margot thought, and a different species. I have more in common with poor Artemis than with this creature of liberty.

  Tamara Hoyland, who had come sick visiting, said, ‘She sounds rather a spiritless girl, your heroine.’

  ‘Unlike you,’ Jeremy Ellice said. He had brought Tamara down to the basement room, usually his own all-purpose sanctum, where he had installed his sister when she was discharged by the hospital. He was sitting on the end of the bed leafing through the evening paper. ‘There’s nothing in here about your spirited intervention on Margot’s behalf, Tamara.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ Tamara said.

  She takes that kind of thing for granted, Margot thought. In the world she has inherited it is natural for a girl to defend herself or her friends. No man would dare to attack her in the first place. Margot’s husband had assaulted her many times during the long years of her marriage, and had controlled her movements and her behaviour. Now that it was over, she could not be sure whether she had wasted so many miserable years serving him and nursing his odious and disgusting mother from fear, or from the residual sense of natural duty that her upbringing and education had inculcated.

  ‘I suppose a poor thing like Artemis Bessemer is unimaginable to you,’ Margot told Tamara.

  ‘Did she have to let herself be sold like a slave?’

  Jeremy was still reading aloud nuggets from the evening paper. ‘Treasures never before seen in the West go on show this weekend in London. This exhibition is the first of its kind to come from East Germany since the war.’

  ‘Artemis Bessemer had to live in Germany,’ Margot said.

  Tamara asked, ‘Couldn’t she have run away? Or even said she did not take this man to be her wedded husband?’

  ‘That’s what comes next,’ Margot said.

  It has to be understood that Artemis had literally no choice in the matter. She was as much at her father’s disposal as any of his chattels; his was both the power and the legal right to dispose of her. Nor did his behaviour seem especially deplorable to his contemporaries, for marriages were counters of trade and bargain, in which the preferences of the two parties might be of greater or lesser weight. Artemis’s father himself had made a businesslike marriage to the only child of a commoner who had made a fortune in India and come home to buy a title for himself and an Earl for his daughter. Neither the nabob nor Lady Bessemer had lived to see the final dissipation of that wealth. The Earl of Bessemer was in no position to provide a dowry for either of his daughters and was delighted when Joachim von Horn offered good money in exchange for one of them.

  It was a mésalliance. The penniless granddaughter of the nabob was not of equal rank with the Prince of Horn, even though on her father’s side she descended from the Plantagenet kings. She could not display the complete number of quarterings on her arms to satisfy the requirements of the higher German nobility for a ‘full and perfect marriage’. The Prince was willing to make a ‘left-handed’ marriage, what the English called morganatic. It was fully binding in that neither party was free to marry anyone else, and their children would be legitimate but without the right of succession to their father’s titles or entailed properties. Prince Joachim was twenty-eight and believed that this rule, along with many others, would be altered in his lifetime. The diarist Lutwige, who was staying in London at the time, recorded that the Prince declared to the Earl of Bessemer that he would not submit to mediaeval restrictions, and would help his countrymen to cast off similar shackles.

  Lord Bessemer was not interested in reform. He wanted the tangible reward. There is no reason to suppose that either man felt the least remorse. The Queen deplored their bargain. She wrote to her sister, Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe Langenburg, herself the wife of a German princeling, of ‘this CRUEL custom, that a lady who is eligible to marry ANY English nobleman is INSULTED by such treatment in Germany.’ During her life Queen Victoria was to record many disapproving remarks about morganatic marriages. She did not comment, however, on the businesslike nature of the transaction. The Queen’s own daughter, Vicky, was shortly to make a blatantly political alliance with Prince Frederick William of Prussia, but Vicky and Fritz obediently loved each other. They had known for several years that it was their duty to do so.

  The Prince Consort remonstrated with the Earl of Bessemer when they met at a banquet in the City of London. To Lord Bessemer Prince Albert was nothing but a foreign upstart. He replied with neither deference nor obedience, ‘My daughter’s affairs, sir, are not your Royal Highness’s, but mine.’

  The Queen wrote indignantly, ‘Dearest Albert was addressed most
disrespectfully by Ld. Bessemer, whom I have always DISLIKED.’ However, for the sake of the late Dowager Lady Bessemer, who was popular at court when Victoria was young, Artemis was kindly received at her presentations just before, and again just after, her marriage, which took place a few weeks before that of the Princess Royal and her Fritz. The Queen told Artemis that her English face would be welcome at the Prussian court, and noted in her diary, ‘The Prince of Horn has been wild in his youth, but the GOOD INFLUENCE of an English Lady will have wonderful results.’

  Artemis Bessemer was eighteen years old. Her fate had been precipitated by her having been so bold as to peep, and so rash as to be seen peeping, at the procession of guests on their way into dinner at Bessemer House in Belgrave Square.

  It is natural to stare at princes. When Joachim looked up and saw Artemis doing so through the balustrade of the staircase, she thought no more than that she had been detected in a breach of manners. She curtseyed and backed away. Although she had seldom met or even seen young men, Joachim made little impression, for he is not mentioned in her journal, but for him it was love, or perhaps desire, at first sight.

  Artemis and Clementine Bessemer had been brought up in Devonshire by their governess, a Mrs Lambert, a Prussian who had met, married and soon mourned a young English diplomat called Edwin Lambert. No flash of the charm that had captivated him in Berlin was visible when the young widow applied to become the governess of Lady Bessemer’s daughters. Nor did Lady Bessemer see, in the dowdy mouse before her, a woman who was capable of teaching her charges much more than the superficial accomplishments required by an upper class lady. But during their isolated years in the country, Artemis and Clementine became better educated than most of their contemporaries. They were grounded in Latin and Greek and classical mythology, in French and German, and in the natural sciences. They learnt little about religion, and took as their childish totem the goddess Artemis, or Diana, whose statue stood in an elegant grotto at Stockwell, their home in Devon. In their childhood journals, both girls mention the offerings that they made to her, and the treasures they hid inside the stone plinth on which she stood. They also took an informed interest in politics. Mrs Lambert’s own views, which would have disqualified her from employment in any genteel household if she had admitted to them, were agnostic and revolutionary; she disapproved of monarchy, and dreaded autocracy.

  All the same, Mrs Lambert knew that the Earl of Bessemer had the legal right to be an autocrat to his own children. They were careful to keep their true thoughts from him, and must have hidden their journals too. Clementine’s diary of those years survived in a trunk full of her papers. It is detailed and literate, and includes much abstract musing, perhaps because there were few events to record. Only once is any man other than the Earl himself and the village parson mentioned, when Mrs Lambert’s brother from Germany came to visit her. The two girls were not permitted to meet him but spied from behind hedges and walls as he walked with his sister. He was a tall man, with brown hair and eyes and very white teeth, Clementine wrote. When the girls asked Mrs Lambert to talk about him, she set an essay on the subject of Henry VIII instead. That Sunday, Artemis scandalised the Vicar by saying that the established church was the result of that King’s unbridled urges, and the Vicar said he would complain to the Earl. The girls’ intellectual awareness was not balanced by worldly knowledge, which, as it turned out, might have been of more use.

  They knew so little, in fact, that Artemis imagined it was worth trying to escape the fate her father had settled for her. If she had succeeded in running away, she might have ended up as a prostitute or a kitchen maid. The only work available to a lady, as a governess, would not have come her way. No employer would have taken on a girl who was young, beautiful and without references. Perhaps it was as well that her attempt at flight ended at the Great Western Railway Station, where she was trying to buy a ticket to Exeter with money that Mrs Lambert had lent her.

  Lord Bessemer sent Mrs Lambert and Clementine straight back to Devon. Without their company, Artemis was married in the private chapel at Belgrave Square to the Prince of Horn.

  Artemis von Horn was photographed before she left London, and painted after her marriage. One portrait still hangs in a German museum. She had a long face with high, wide cheek bones, a sharply pointed chin and semi-circular eyes, that are shown so violet-blue as to seem idealised; her golden hair has a pinkish tinge, her curved lips an expression of quizzical amusement. One can see, a century later, that if such a thing as love at first sight exists, it might be for a girl who looked like this.

  Prince Joachim paid for the trousseau, which included clothes of a kind that Artemis had never seen or imagined; maids and lady attendants arrived from Germany, and all that she could provide in return, as her father made clear, was her own compliant person. Even she could see why she was expected to think herself lucky.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Of course it’s a first draft,’ Margot Ellice said. ‘I wrote it like this to get everything straight in my mind. It’s meant to be an experiment in biography, like The Quest for Corvo. Narrative alternated with dramatic dialogue and quotations from my sources. I still have a lot of work to do, but I don’t feel up to it at the moment.’ Margot fingered the bandage swathing her head with a deprecatory finger, twitching her scabbed lips into as much of a smile as she could simulate.

  ‘The poor girl is still addled,’ Jeremy Ellice said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Tamara commented.

  ‘But it’s better today, isn’t it Margot?’ Jem said.

  Margot shrugged and said, ‘Time heals all wounds, I’m told.’

  ‘They said it wouldn’t leave a scar,’ Jeremy told Tamara.

  ‘Do they seem any closer to finding out who –?’

  ‘I don’t think they are even trying!’ Margot exclaimed. ‘So many people get mugged and robbed in central London, they go through the fingerprint and question process as though it was a meaningless ritual. They said I was lucky to get off so lightly.’

  ‘And your grandfather too,’ Jeremy Ellice said.

  ‘I feel bad about leaving him in the lurch,’ Margot said.

  ‘My mother is looking after him,’ Tamara said.

  ‘How can she get away? Her own work –’

  ‘She’s had to take unpaid leave.’

  ‘Surely there’s someone else?’

  ‘It isn’t easy, we are all so busy. I have had more than my leave allowance this year, my sister’s got the children to look after, my brother’s abroad . . . not that we’d be any good at it anyway. I don’t think my mother is either. Even if one has the inclination to care for the bedridden it takes a certain amount of skill – well, Margot, you’d know that.’

  The subject was a touchy one; Margot had spent her married life looking after her own disagreeable mother-in-law, and as soon as her services as an unpaid nurse and skivvy were not needed her husband had traded her in for a Mark II wife half her age. Her experience with caring for the old had made her a suitable choice of attendant for the old Count Losinsky, and she had needed a roof over her head and a salary at the time; but there was no suggestion that it was the type of work Margot Ellice would ever have chosen. Her childhood ambition had been to be a woman don. ‘She’s lucky to get the job,’ Jeremy Ellice had unfeelingly told the Hoylands, but they felt a guilty unease at exploiting her need.

  Tamara looked at Margot’s grey, powdery face and the stitched wound left exposed to heal on her forehead. ‘I still don’t know what actually happened, Margot. How did that man get into the flat? Had he forced his way in?’

  ‘He must have, I suppose. He was there when I got back from buying some food.’

  ‘What, you came upon him in the flat? How horrible for you.’

  ‘He was standing at the desk. It looked as though he was going through my papers. I was so silly – one doesn’t expect that kind of thing, after all – I must have subconsciously assumed he was someone with a right to be there. I
said something ridiculous, good morning or something like that, and . . . .’

  ‘He jumped you?’

  ‘Yes. And then you arrived.’

  ‘I hope the household insurance will cover your stuff,’ Tamara said.

  ‘I had nothing valuable anyway. No jewellery or anything. The man had some of my papers in his hand when I came in, he probably got away with those . . . it’s funny though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It almost looked as though he was searching for something in particular. It can’t possibly be true, I have nothing anyone could want to search for . . . I’m imagining it.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t sound like the usual sneak thief.’

  ‘Anyway, what could anyone want my old letters and bills for? He’d be welcome to them. The only thing I’d really be sorry to lose is the material I’m using for this book, and that’s all here at Jem’s place.’

  ‘I am sorry the man got away with anything at all.’

  ‘He might have got away with my life if it hadn’t been for you, Tamara.’

  ‘Look what I found for you,’ Jeremy said. ‘Several of the books on your list. Here’s the Reminiscences of Court and Diplomatic Life, by Lady Bloomfield, and the Letters of Lady Augusta Stanley, and the memoirs of some unpronounceable Prussian Princess. And I thought you might like something lighter to cheer you up, so I bought in a batch of thrillers.’

  ‘It will take more than that to . . . I don’t know when I’ll feel . . .’

  ‘Feeling rotten? We’ll leave you to have a sleep,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘No, wait, listen, Tamara, I want you to take the file with you, I want to know what you think, just the first part . . .’

  ‘It’s very good,’ Jeremy said. ‘I read it all yesterday.’

  ‘I am not an historian, Margot, I’m an archaeologist,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that, but you are a contemporary example of the type of woman I’m writing about, the woman who would have been at a man’s mercy a hundred years ago. A graduate. High up in the Civil Service-’