by Jessica Mann
The Earl of Bessemer had died the previous year, leaving nothing to his daughters, or to anyone else, except debts. When the Queen sent for Artemis at Coburg, she spoke of his loss as a tragedy, and shed ready tears at the thought of Artemis and Clementine as orphans, but neither of the participants in that affecting scene could have believed their own words; certainly, Artemis expressed no grief for her father in her letters. It was the Queen, presumably at Clementine’s prompting, who had asked Vicky to bring Artemis to Coburg in her retinue, and the Queen then instructed her daughter to make sure that Artemis came to court at Berlin now that she was out of mourning for her estimable and ever-missed husband. Both the two younger women agreed obediently; but Artemis did not have a chance to ask the Queen to intercede for her with Prince Waldemar, who arrived at Coburg a couple of days before the end of the visit.
My brother is being especially – not to say unusually – agreeable towards me in the presence of the English royal party. Twice yesterday he joined me in the garden where I was sketching, and even admired my work, and enquired whether the Princess Royal intended to go out to paint again while she is in Coburg, and whether I should accompany her. I was able to inform him that it is intended to make an excursion tomorrow for the Prince Consort to show his daughter a spot of which he was fond as a boy, and I am to be in attendance. Waldemar then asked me many other details of the daily lives of the royal party. I daresay that I should be grateful for his attention – I assure you, it is no common event for him to honour me with his conversation.
The next letter was written before breakfast the next morning.
I take the opportunity of pouring out my heart to you here, dear Clementine, while it is safe for me to do so, for my letters from my husband’s houses are not safe. Dear sister, I so much regret that I have found no moment when I could try to warn Her Majesty or any other member of the Royal Family, of my fears, of what I fear may be done by Prince Waldemar and his friends. He speaks sometimes so wildly of ridding his country of a menace, that I dread how he may try to achieve his ends. When he is in the company of royalty he smiles and defers, but otherwise, he speaks in terms a criminal might use – indeed, I have seen him speaking to men who look like criminals. I am so afraid that he will perpetrate wild deeds that would be deplored even by members of his own political persuasion. It seems absurd to say so in our modern, sober times, but sometimes I fear for the Princess’s very life. I must dare to speak of this later in the morning, when I am to drive out with the royal party.
But the Prince Consort took a four-in-hand out alone. The Princess Royal had a headache, and decided to remain with her mother in the shade. Prince Albert was driving along a country road when his horses bolted at a level crossing.
Unimpeded by long skirts, as the Princess would have been, Prince Albert was able to jump out, and suffered only superficial cuts and bruises. The household at Coburg was cast into deep gloom, for the Queen could not bear anything unpleasant to happen to her dearest Albert, and Vicky was kept busy for the rest of the day, trying to distract her parents with her baby’s antics. Later Queen Victoria noted that he was her comfort, her darling, sweet little love, her cherub, and the blessing of his people.
Before the Prince Consort had been carried back to lie on his valet’s bed and have Dr Baly tend his sores, Artemis had met Prince Waldemar in the castle garden. He looked astonished, seizing her arm. He asked me with such excitement why I was here, had I not attended the Princess on the drive with her papa? When I explained that she was unwell, and had chosen to remain within doors, he seemed shocked and dismayed. I believed then that he felt true sympathy for her suffering. Now, dear sister, I have heard details of His Royal Highness’s mishap, and I cannot but recall the circumstances in which my husband died. It is all too easy to claim that horses were startled into bolting by a train whistle, all too easy to attribute bruises to a hard road. If HRH had been in the carriage, as had been intended – not to mention myself – what would not have happened? Who was waiting to watch the carriage overturn, and perhaps finish the work? Clementine, I fear that you will wonder whether I am quite in my senses – but I wonder so much whether Joachim’s death was what it seemed – whether, perhaps, another such death was to have occurred today. Alas, tomorrow, the royal parties disperse, and I return to Horn. In October we go to Drachenschloss. I shall not be able to write to you freely. But, dearest sister, I implore you, if I too should die, leaving unprotected my motherless child, remember what I say to you today.
Chapter Eleven
The little screen showed a middle-aged police constable. Tamara opened the door.
He was sorry to trouble her; hers was the only name that seemed to be available in the context. She had known the lady, according to the records.
‘What lady? What records?’
The lady was Margot Ellice, the records were those made by the police when she had been assaulted earlier in the week.
‘Yes, I know Margot Ellice,’ Tamara said patiently.
Margot Ellice was dead.
‘Dead? But she seemed all right yesterday. What happened? Anyway, why have you come to me?’
Jeremy Ellice was out of town, and though his sister may have known where to reach him, the fact was . . .
‘Yes, officer, I’m listening. Go on.’
The policeman had reached an age to dislike burdening a girl who might be his daughter with bad news. He suggested tea for Miss Hoyland, and sitting down.
Little does he know, she thought, how much tougher I am than he. ‘It’s all right. Really. And it is Dr Hoyland.’
Doctors are used to horrors. ‘There was a fire, you see, Miss, I mean, Doctor . . .’
No wonder this man had never achieved promotion. He wandered verbosely and periphrastically on. After a few minutes, Tamara said crisply:
‘Right. I see. There’s been a fire in Hampstead at the Ellices’ home, and Miss Ellice died in it. You don’t know where her brother is, his van’s not there, and the only name known in connection with them is mine. Is that it?’
That was it; and it did not seem worth protesting that she knew hardly more about the Ellices than the police did. Tamara rather thought, in any case, that she would prefer to hear from a slightly more competent officer what had actually happened.
‘Very mild for the time of year,’ the policeman volunteered, as he followed Tamara downstairs. She made the response due in that litany. ‘Should keep the street door closed, really, Miss, I mean, Doctor.’ He held it wide for her.
‘Somebody always seems to forget.’
‘It was unlocked when I came in.’
‘It doesn’t always close properly.’ She gave it a tug.
‘Too easy for intruders otherwise.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
Tamara could not face a predictable conversation all the way to Hampstead and said she would come in her own car. Yes, she knew the way; no, she was not too shocked to drive. Yes, she was really sure.
It was a clear, windy night, and the yellow street lights cast vivid moving shadows under flapping awnings and tossing trees, so that there always seemed to be movement in the corner of one’s vision.
That house could have been a fire trap, with all those books. Tamara had friends who were neurotic about fires and packed rope ladders in their luggage, though fire had not so far been one of her own particular fears; her own horrors came from less practical stimuli. But the picture in her mind of Margot Ellice killed by fumes and flames was painfully vivid.
It turned out that she had not been trapped in the basement as Tamara had imagined. The fire had started in the attic where the body was found.
There was a tiny back room that Tamara had not seen, which had contained, as far as could be told, a table and chair, a mattress filled with polyurethane foam, and some crates of books. The fire had been less disastrous than the police constable had implied, and was brought under control quite quickly, but not before the fumes from the burning mattress had
suffocated Margot Ellice. The damage to the lower floors of the house was considerable, but caused more by foam and water than by flame.
Tamara was directed to the mortuary, where she identified Margot Ellice’s body. She then supplied reams of information about herself, which was written down by hand to her dictation. She repeated that she had no idea where Jeremy Ellice might be, that she had known nothing about the fire, that she had been at work or at home all day; formalities had to be observed no matter how irrelevant they seemed. No, she did not know where Margot Ellice’s former husband was, or even what he was called, nor had she any notion about other next of kin. She had met Jeremy Ellice for the first time when she called on Margot the day before; about fifty, very thin, six feet, curly hair, black going grey and worn rather long, pale complexion, bushy dark eyebrows, very long fingers with a badly bruised nail on the right forefinger.
‘You seem to have noticed a lot of detail at the first meeting,’ the policeman commented.
When she was free, Tamara drove to the house, and parked as close to it as possible. There was not much to be seen from the outside. The fire had been concentrated at the back of the building. But when she wound her window down, the smell of burning, harsh and strangely unsettling, lingered in the night air.
Jeremy Ellice’s van slid into a parking space just before midnight; Tamara watched as he got out and unloaded some cardboard cartons, and carried them to his own front steps. She saw him pull out a key and try to unlock the door, and then step back, puzzled, to survey first the front door itself and then the front of the house. He tried the key in the lock again. Then he went into the front garden and peered through the window, first of the room on the ground floor, then through the railings down into the basement, though the house was dark and there was nothing he could see. He went back to the door and rang the bell several times and then hammered the knocker, shaking his head and glancing up and down the street. A man came out of the house next door and spoke to Jeremy, who listened without moving as the dressing-gowned arm fell soothingly across his shoulders, and gestures of hospitality were made with the other. Jeremy shook his head and went back to his van. Tamara heard him call something to his neighbour about going to the police station.
He had behaved exactly as one would have expected of an innocent man.
Chapter Twelve
Tamara’s mother, nothing if not efficient, had already found and installed a new housekeeper to look after Tamara’s grandfather, Count Losinsky. ‘She costs rather more than I earn, but it’s worth every penny until Margot is well again. I have a job on that I can’t possibly leave,’ Olga Hoyland had said.
Tamara was given the task of telling the expensive temporary helper that Margot was dead, and of persuading her to stay on until a permanent replacement was found. She went to the flat in West Kensington in her lunch hour. The temporary helper was brisk, brusque and very much on her dignity. As well as unpacking all the niceties of life that had been stored away since the death of Tamara’s grandmother, such as lace-edged tablecloths and crystal glasses, she had cleared every last item belonging to Margot Ellice out of the bedsitting room and bathroom. ‘You could hardly expect me to live with another woman’s things in the cupboards.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘And such things. Of course I’ve always wanted everything round me to be nice, and nicely kept. I’m funny that way.’
Agreeing, Tamara thought that the sycophancy of an employer desperate not to hear an employee give notice must exceed any creeping to a boss by a person wanting a job. It was worth it in this case, however. The woman was not to Tamara’s own liking, but her grandfather seemed happy enough, looking like a bed-ridden Father Christmas with his white beard neatly combed over the embroidered and monogrammed sheets, and with the old silk counterpane on the bed instead of the washable cover that Margot had rightly said was more convenient.
Neither he nor his nurse seemed particularly distressed to hear of Margot Ellice’s death, but, just as Tamara was leaving, the other woman said, with grievance in her voice, that she did not know what she was supposed to do now with Margot’s mail.
‘There will be executors, I presume. I can’t be expected to do anything.’
‘Of course not,’ Tamara agreed, wondering why not. ‘Shall I take it? I can pass it on to her brother.’
Not that there was very much; Margot’s mail consisted largely of ‘money-back’ offers and brochures from mail-order companies for which she must have sent off forms clipped from newspapers and filled in with her address. One ought perhaps to think of junk-mail as the lonely woman’s comfort, Tamara thought; nice to know it served some purpose. The only personal letter was in a stiff brown envelope with the letters DDR stamped on the back: German Democratic Republic. Tamara dropped everything else into a litter basket and read the contents of this envelope as she sat in the tube train on her way back to the office.
In reply to your letter of March 5th. ultimo . . . No apology for delay, and perhaps Margot was thought lucky to be given an answer at all, having evidently written to enquire about official records of Artemis von Horn’s life. No official records of it could be traced. However, the efficient listing of monuments in the disused graveyards of East Germany enabled the undersigned to provide the information that the name in which the enquirer was interested appeared on a memorial tablet in the burial ground of a church in the region of Suhl, formerly Thuringia. On it appeared the inscription:
Lady Artemis Bessemer, died September 3rd., 1863. Heinrich Joachim Sigismund Bolko Frederick, son of the above, died September 3rd., 1863.
Assuring the honoured lady of their best attention at all times they remained . . .
So Artemis and her son had died within two years of Joachim’s death. They had perished on the same day, and the grave had been marked with her maiden name, as though by that time the Horn family had refused to accept the validity of her morganatic marriage.
Had there been another carriage accident – so called? Had mother and son been incarcerated together in another unused closet until they died of hunger and thirst? It conjured up a horrible picture. But it was hard to believe that this woman who had feared for her own and her son’s life, had died naturally on the same day as he. It would be, Tamara thought, a pretty peculiar coincidence.
Chapter Thirteen
Mr Black’s mind was exercised by coincidence too.
Tamara’s name had popped up on some specially programmed computer, and she was summoned to Department E. Mr Black said severely, ‘When the names of my young people are associated with suspicious deaths, I need to know the reason why.’
‘Artemis von Horn’s death?’ Tamara’s mind was still fixed on the previous century. But she pulled herself together. This lion’s den was no place for historical speculation. It was a bleak cabin, furnished to match Mr Black’s ostensible civil service grade. If the filing cabinets had impregnable locks, if the window glass reflected external images to watchers outside the building and muffled sound waves from within it, if daily checks were made for recording devices and the cupboard in the corner contained a sophisticated paper destroyer, still a casual visitor would see no more than the type of room in which dull men pass dull hours between suburban train journeys.
Mr Black was not a dull man. Tamara had come to recognise him as devious, autocratic, subtle, but not boring. He was a patriot, and occasionally a poet.
‘Artemis von Horn? The family of the Horn Treasure?’ he asked.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. But are you concerned with the treasure?’
‘The exhibition is a political event. One has had to postulate all conceivable hitches. The name has been in my mind.’
‘The Germans really are sending it, then?’
‘It is to be the pièce de résistance.’
‘It will cause a good deal of excitement,’ Tamara said thoughtfully.
‘Of a less measured sort than this, I daresay.’ Mr Black’s forefinger pointed to a page of t
hat morning’s edition of a highbrow weekly. Thea Crawford’s drawings of the treasure illustrated an article of speculation by her husband. Tamara glanced down Sylvester’s analysis of the political implications of this cultural breach in the iron curtain. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Someone did see the treasure in this century!’ Sylvester quoted part of an account from the memoirs of a Prussian general who had been in attendance on the Kaiser in 1917, when he lived for a while at Drachenschloss with his military entourage, and insisted on being shown the castle’s secret treasure. ‘I wonder where it has been since the last war. It couldn’t have been left where it always was.’