A Mansion and its Murder

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A Mansion and its Murder Page 7

by Robert Barnard


  ‘I think Richard should go and live with Bea South for a bit,’ I said to him, one day after tennis. ‘That way he would get a bit of love.’

  He looked at me mystified.

  ‘You remember Beatrice. I used to be always talking about her. She used to be an upper parlormaid here – she married the coachman at Tillyards about the time you married … your wife. She gave me love when I needed it.’ He hesitated, attracted by the idea, yet reluctant.

  ‘I wouldn’t want it thought it was in any way like putting him away in an asylum.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be. It would be just while he is a baby. Babies are often put out to nurse. Bea has a son, too – they would be together, and it might … help.’

  Uncle Frank thought about it, and two days later we rode over together and he broached the possibility to Bea. She would have agreed whatever her feelings were – she was loyal to the Fearings without being starry-eyed about them. What sensible person could be? In fact, she was delighted, as I knew she would be.

  Mary, when the idea was put to her, agreed with a shameful alacrity, though she made it clear that to her mind it was merely the prelude to the inevitable institutionalising of Richard. She was not, at this period, behaving at all wisely. I think the crash of her hopes had unsettled her calculating brain. I imagine she clung to the thought that she was still, in spite of everything, wife to a Fearing and mother to one. She did not realise just how empty such titles could be. She had only to look at my mother to understand that.

  I have no doubt she still had hopes of producing another heir.

  I think that thought was at the back of everyone’s mind. Indeed, it occasionally occurred to me, but I had other and less distasteful things to think about. The arrangements for Richard were first among them, and they involved several visits to Tillyards, which were a great delight. Uncle Frank accompanied me if he was at Blakemere, and he and Bea got on famously. He was less taken with Tom South, her husband.

  ‘Mark my words,’ he said, as we rode home one day, ‘she’ll have trouble with that one.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘He’s jealous of his own son. Can you imagine a man being that? And with another on the way, it won’t get any better.’

  Mrs Nealson took her dismissal with good grace, and expressed the wish to be of service in the future. She was probably in some sort of conspiracy. I never saw Uncle Frank’s reaction to this remark when it was repeated to him, as it surely was, but I was with him when, in one of the less cumbersome family carriages, and accompanied by Mrs Nealson, we took Richard over to the cottage on the edge of the Tillyards estate and handed him over to Bea. They took to each other at once, and Richard showed delight in having another baby around him. He was a placid, often listless baby, but he had the capacity to express spontaneous delight that never left him during his short life. As we slipped away, Mrs Nealson said it was ‘probably for the best’, and we both agreed with her, though for both of us it was only a short-term measure, and it was left to me to make sure that was what it was.

  It was no part of Uncle Frank’s plan (though it certainly was of Mary’s) that Richard should be shunted off to Bea’s cottage and forgotten. It was arranged from the start that Bea should bring him over once a fortnight to Blakemere.

  ‘Got to get him used to the monstrous pile,’ said Uncle Frank. ‘Poor little beast.’

  This pleased Bea, because it enabled her to renew friendships with the Blakemere staff formed while she worked here. It pleased me, because I could take charge of him while he was here, especially if Uncle Frank was away. It pleased Mary not at all, and she usually kept to her apartment while he was on his visit, causing much adverse comment below stairs.

  It was on one such visit, when Richard was about nine months old that I overheard a conversation between my grandfather and Uncle Frank. Well, overheard is a genteelism, because I eavesdropped; and conversation is another, because they were having a row. Uncle Frank had wheeled Richard in his magnificent perambulator with the new pneumatic tires – ordered before his birth, and apparently designed with a Brobdingnagian baby in mind – over to a clump of trees just reaching maturity at the brow of the slope leading down to the river. There they had paused, and unseen by Uncle Frank (he would have sped off, I felt sure, if he had noticed), Grandpapa came purposefully over from the terrace. I was reading in the summer sun some way away, but the moment they became engaged in conversation I stood up and slipped silently over till I could hide behind the trunk of a reasonably sturdy oak. Nothing at Blakemere, remember, was actually old. The conversation was already becoming warm in tone. I heard my grandfather first.

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t want to come between husband and wife.’

  ‘There’s nothing to come between.’

  Grandfather tugged at his moustaches.

  ‘You know what I mean. I would rather we could leave you to yourselves to sort out your difficulties.’

  Uncle Frank shrugged. ‘There are no difficulties. We understand each other perfectly.’

  ‘You know very well that is not the case. In fact, everyone in the house knows that relations between you are … not on a normal footing.

  ‘I should have thought they were pretty much the same footing as those of my brother Claudius and his wife.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ exploded my grandfather, almost tugging his moustaches off in his exasperation. ‘You know there is no question of Claud and Harriet providing Blakemere with an heir.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’

  ‘It has everything to do with everything. Your debts were paid, an allowance was given you for life, and in return you were to marry and provide Blakemere with an heir.’

  ‘How admirably you express our business arrangement, Papa,’ Uncle Frank said, with that irony which must have been so irritating. ‘It sounds like one in the Old Testament between God and a mere mortal. But you can’t play God, Father. You can’t order events just to suit your own plans. I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain.’ He pointed to the pram. ‘There’s your heir to Blakemere.’

  And, choking with rage, he set off with Richard down the hill to the river. Grandpapa was by now red with a combination of embarrassment and anger. He watched father and son for a moment, fuming, then turned and stumped back to the house. I kept myself on the furthest side of the oak, away from him, then, as he disappeared into the distance, I walked through the clump of trees to watch Uncle Frank.

  Miss Roxby and I were embarking on the novels of Sir Walter Scott and were reading The Bride of Lammermoor (the first of innumerable disappointments). Uncle Frank’s words reminded me of the story it was based on, and the words of poor mad Janet Dalrymple, as retailed in the Introduction, after she had stabbed the husband she had been forced to marry: ‘Tak up your bonny bridegroom.’ I was sure Uncle Frank intended no cruelty about the poor son he loved so much. But the sight of his moon face in the magnificent baby carriage must have pointed up with poignant clarity the overreaching blasphemy of my grandfather in trying to organise human events to suit his grand plan for the Fearing family and its bank. Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes. Something in Uncle Frank’s stance as he wheeled the perambulator toward the tranquility of the river suggested that he was hating himself for using his son to score a debating point off his father. He was quiet for several days after that, and very thoughtful.

  Not that this brought him peace. I overheard, and Miss Roxby overheard, and even Bea on her fortnightly visits to Blakemere overheard various members of the family making niggling remarks to him on the subject of the need for a new heir. Aunt Jane’s was the most indirect and genteel, as befitted her status as a maiden sister.

  ‘We all do hope you and dear Mary will be a family again soon,’ she said to him one day in the library when he was searching for a book to assuage his boredom. He merely grunted. Grandmama, I regret to say (for I respected her) was more trenchant.

  ‘It’s time you did yo
ur duty by Blakemere and did your duty as a husband,’ she said. She had for the moment taken on her husband’s order of priorities, I fear. Uncle Frank did not even honour this with a grunt. Any respect he had once had for his parents vanished at the time of his forced marriage.

  I am approaching the crucial event of my girlhood, the climax of this botched attempt to manipulate the strongest and most private human feeling. I shall find the telling difficult, for at the time I knew so little and understood even less. I walked yesterday, with my dogs Lizzie and Ernie bounding beside me, to the boarded-up blankness of Blakemere, thinking not of my duties at the present time, but of those long-ago days in 1893.

  It was almost funny, in these days of austerity, to look on the bloated facades of Blakemere. What on earth could be done with it today – what could the house be? It was not suitable for anything – and certainly not for a house. Even if Victorian architecture were to come back into fashion, Blakemere was only notable for magnificence. My great-grandfather and grandfather stinted on nothing except the architect. Taste and style had they none, and he had delivered them a building that was suitably tasteless and styleless.

  But in the context of the house’s heyday the magnificence was all. And thinking of my uncle’s marriage, its distastefulness to himself, I had to admit that many royal marriages at the time were contracted on a similar bases. Wasn’t May of Teck at around this time passed from one dead brother to the next living one like a parcel because she so obviously was cut out to make a formidable Queen (she had not then developed those kleptomaniac tendencies that today make her the terror of antique shop and stately home owners)? The magnificence of Blakemere made the Fearings see themselves as semi-royal, and behave accordingly.

  ‘The Bank’ everyone used to say in the hushed, reverent tones that royalty might use when they talked of ‘The Country.’ Blakemere was named in plump, proprietorial fashion, as royalty might name the finest of its palaces. My grandfather, pacing the spacious rooms, corridors, and staircases of Blakemere, thought of himself as a king – and no tinpot or parvenu king of a Balkan state, either, but the genuine royal article.

  That was one factor in the approaching combustion. The other was the unbridgeable gap between my grandparents’ insistence that Uncle Frank keep his side of the bargain, and Uncle Frank’s conviction that he already had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eruption

  The day before the eruption of the family volcano that was to change my whole life, and the lives of many of the other inmates of Blakemere, Uncle Frank arrived in the early evening. He went straight to his old bedroom. There was no longer any pretense of marital relations between him and Mary, and indeed even when they returned from honeymoon they had had separate bedrooms in their apartment. Now, apparently, he could not bear even to be so close to her. This much I had learnt from eavesdropping in the servants’ hall. Later on, Uncle Frank dined with the family. He was, I was told, rather morose, so I made no moves in his direction but rather waited on him to initiate some. At breakfast time there was a note from him, brought by Robert, begging a morning off lessons for me so that we could go over and see Richard and Bea.

  So he was not morose with me. I changed my dress, got into my coat, and we set off with delight.

  Unbeknownst to me things happened while we were away. People posted ‘o’er land and ocean without rest.’ A footman on horseback took the same route as us to Tillyards with an important message. Telegrams were sent elsewhere, summoning interested parties. Aunt Jane was taken in one of the house’s lesser carriages toward Wentwood, where she had a serious talk with Aunt Sarah. Relations between the two were perfectly friendly but not warm. This was probably due to Aunt Sarah’s ‘oddity’ (anything not perfectly orthodox in opinions and behaviour was counted odd, and atheism and an independent life certainly qualified as not perfectly orthodox, especially in a woman). Sarah’s ‘oddity’ probably also accounted for the fact that Aunt Jane’s mission was unsuccessful: she declined to be one of the party which was massing to bring Uncle Frank into line.

  We only became aware of this activity when we returned to Blakemere after a happy morning with Richard and with Bea’s little son Merlin. I had looked for any sign that contact with the assertive, lively boy was acting as a tonic to Richard’s listless brain, and in my depths of love for the boy I thought I saw some. Uncle Frank agreed, whether from conviction or to keep my spirits up I do not know. It was as we drove up to the Grand Entrance to Blakemere that he said, ‘Uh huh. Something’s up.’

  We were still half a mile away, and I could not see who was getting out of the carriage that was drawn up in the centre of that endless facade of sub-medieval castle.

  ‘It’s Anselm,’ explained Uncle Frank. ‘Anselm and Margaret. Anselm the Unreliable and Margaret the Unremarkable.’

  It was very naughty of Uncle Frank to speak of our relatives in this way, and I was delighted. Anselm Fearing was head of the younger branch of the Fearing family, son of Grandpapa’s younger brother. He was also father to Digby Fearing, who is currently running Fearing’s bank in my absence on more important matters, and running it very capably. It always amazes me how children can turn out so totally different from any of their parents or even grandparents. I have never had a moment of doubt about Digby’s probity, yet there hung about his father (and even at twelve I could sense it) an air of unreliability, of being only as honest as staying within the law required, of having an eye for an easy profit and a sharp deal.

  He was, of course, the father of that brood of male Fearings who were always spoken of as a sort of last resort, if the male Fearings descended from male Fearings descended from my grandfather should fail, and if I (as everyone I think expected) should decline the honour of becoming the head of the family. The moment Uncle Frank mentioned his name I realised that the family was assembling to put the maximum possible pressure on my uncle to patch up his marriage and (to put the matter in the sort of language that was being used at the time) to ‘try again.’ It puzzled me, this arrival of Cousin Anselm, because it was not in his interest, or that of his sons, that Frank should try again, and I wondered why he should join the forces arraigned against him. With hindsight, and greater knowledge of the man and his ways, I suspect that he was offered a substantial inducement to do so. He would be bound to prefer goodies then and there, and for him, over goodies in the future for his sons. Cousin Margaret was a doting mother who would want only the best for her children, but hers was not a voice that was ever listened to.

  ‘So the forces of attack are massing,’ said Uncle Frank in an odd voice. He thought about it, then rubbed his hands. ‘I rather think I am going to enjoy this.’

  ‘Poor Frank!’ I think now, and my eyes still fill with tears.

  He did not speak again till we drew up at the Entrance, but then he turned to me and spoke earnestly.

  ‘If I have to break with the family,’ he said, ‘see to it that Richard has all the love you can give him.’

  I nodded my promise – the promise that was to dominate my life for the next twenty-five years and more. But at the time the only thing I could think about was the dreadful gap that would be left in my life if Uncle Frank were to leave Blakemere forever. When we got inside, I ran to my room to have a brief sob. Then I put a brave face on it and went to have my dinner with Miss Roxby.

  In the course of the afternoon Cousin Margaret came to the schoolroom and sat in on a history lesson. I suppose she could not think of anything else to do. She was a dumpy, comfortable soul who let her life revolve around children. She stayed on to talk to Miss Roxby during my break. I went out onto the autumnal meadows, where the trees were starting to be tinged with yellow and brown. From there I watched Cousin Anselm walking up and down the terrace with a woman whose bonnet shielded her face. Anselm had the sort of droopy moustache that straggles down to the chin – a sort of moustache I always associate with fraudsters and murderers. It did nothing for his features: his weak mouth, insignificant nose, and wa
ndering eyes. At one point they turned to look at the river, and I realised the woman was Aunt Clare. I wondered what purpose her summoning could serve, beyond that of swelling the numbers. Perhaps it was thought that her romantic temperament, if it had survived fifteen years of marriage to a bad artist, would bring forth an eloquent defence of marriage, and a moving plea to Uncle Frank to make one last effort to right his foundering matrimonial barque.

  I was, of course, free of the whole house (so long as my legs would stand the marathon distances involved), and I went down to the kitchens to observe preparations. They were nothing special so far as I could see.

  ‘Just an ordinary family dinner,’ confirmed Mr McKay, and Mrs Needham nodded.

  An ordinary Fearing dinner would of course feed a small village for a month on 1946 rations, but I took the point. Dinner was not what all this was about. Later on, when the house’s thousand clocks told me the family would have finished sherry and gone in to eat, I went down and lurked outside the Green Dining Room, where the family ate when they were on their own, much less grand than the splendid banqueting hall used for honoured guests such as Mr Gladstone. A small staff was serving the fish course. Conversation was fairly general, but muted and stilted. Sir Thomas Coverdale’s goatee beard wiggled and he talked in hushed tones to Grandmama, while his wife (a showy woman, but nicer in my eyes) was finding it fairly hard going with Grandpapa. My father looked as if he were a thousand miles away. Uncle Frank stared at his baked cod as if it were something on a mortuary slab. Mary was sitting at the other end of the table, her rosebud mouth pursed, her eyes troubled and discontented. It was as if she, one of the central figures, had resigned herself to defeat before the battle had even started.

  An idea occurred to me. If the concerted attack on Uncle Frank was not to occur at dinner, it must be scheduled for later – probably over coffee and liqueurs in the sitting room. I walked demurely down the corridor, then, when I was out of sight, sped to the room in question – the dark crimson, high, horribly overfurnished room that the family used for what passed for every day. Coffee cups were already set out, also dishes with chocolates and tiny cakes, and several large bowls of fruit, more and less exotic, with plates and knives beside them. The blue velvet curtains were already drawn. I ran over to one of the windows, got behind the curtains, and opened it – a modest slit of an opening but sufficient for my purposes, I thought. Then I went upstairs, kissed Miss Roxby good night, and went to my room, ostensibly to go to bed.

 

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