by Joan Smith
“Is this all? You travel light,” he said. Original! We took our leave of Mulliner and were out into the cold night, with the snow still on the ground. It reminded me of that other night, the night I had come to Wickey, except that it was not snowing now. There was a carriage and four horses waiting. Job horses, from the looks of them. They did not do justice to the smart carriage.
“My nags will be forwarded from Guildford,” he said, as he caught me out examining the team. “I’m on my way home from London. I heard about your strange story at the inn where I stopped for dinner. In fact, I heard an intimation of it even as far away as Alton. Odd no one has come for you, when the tale is pretty broadly circulated. One assumes it has traveled in circles, and not only eastwards.”
“Yes, the whole affair is very odd,” I answered curtly, and entered the door, to pull a fur rug over my knees and feel the welcome warmth of heated bricks.
“No idea at all how this might have come about?” he asked, in a spirit of civil conversation.
“None. I should not have stayed where I was if I had had a better place to go.”
“You came to cuffs with Mulliner, I take it?”
“His housekeeper is very kind.”
“Wickey’s a darling. Did she tell you anything about me?”
“She said you have a sister who requires a governess. I doubt I’ll prove a satisfactory one.”
“I consider it a very temporary arrangement only. There isn’t room at the rectory for a guest. Actually I had half decided to send Abbie to a ladies’ seminary to put the final bit of polish on her before her coming out, but as you are so accomplished in French, you might make yourself useful in that area while you are with us.”
“I shall be happy to,” I answered, smothering down all my anger at ‘making myself useful’ to a set of rude country bumpkins.
“She will be happy to brush you up on your ciphering, a sphere in which I understand your own skills are lacking,” he went on. “Abbie has a very German head on her shoulders. Keen on the sciences and mathematics. And she looks more German than myself, Miss Smith. My great-grandfather—as you appeared curious in my bearing a German name I mention it—was from Germany. He married an Englishwoman, however, and settled here a hundred or so years ago. All that remains of Germany is the name.”
“I think something of the manner lingers,” I disagreed politely. I don’t know what he understood by the remark, but I meant to infer there was a Prussian abruptness and love of authority still in evidence.
“Quite possibly,” he answered, unfazed.
We fell silent till we approached that area where I had been reborn, like Paul on the way to Damascus. “This must be where it happened,” I mentioned, to break the heavy silence.
He pulled down the window, hollered to his coachman, and the horses jingled to a halt. “Right here?” he asked.
“I believe that is the bunch of trees I remember going around in circles above me. There are none for some distance except these. This must be the spot.”
“What, you were actually lying on the ground?”
“Yes, in that ditch over there.”
He descended to view the place, and I too got out, unaided. “Were you hurt?”
“I had a bump on the head. I thought perhaps a branch hit me.”
There was no sign of a large branch fallen, but it could have been picked up to use as firewood by a poor farmer. I had often seen them do it at home. I could even see the fustian jacket of a nameless phantom, on a nameless road somewhere in the foggy landscape of my past. Odd, useless bits of this sort surfaced regularly, but never anything of the least use. I mentioned the stage’s passing at an appropriate hour, and the theory that I had asked to be put down from it.
“Why the devil would you do that? There’s nothing within half a mile of here but Gwynne’s place. Half a mile onwards, Theodore Gwynne’s home. The name mean anything to you?”
“No, who is he?”
“A retired merchant from the city. A bachelor. We’ll call on him and see if any bells ring. In fact, I want him to have a look at a painting I picked up at Sotheby’s in London. It is called, optimistically I fear, a Vermeer. My father was used to do a spot of collecting. I usually pick up a clinker myself, but at the price this one was going for, I risked it.”
“I should like to see it.”
“You’re interested in art?”
“Very much so, but not the Dutch genre school in particular.”
“You remember all that, do you?” he asked, frowning.
“I remember irrelevant things.”
“Who is to say they are irrelevant? You mentioned liking painting, missing your brushes you said as well. You alit here, and Gwynne is a fanatic on the subject of art. There must be some connection. We’ll call on him tomorrow. Why, it begins to look as though we’ve solved your case already, Miss Smith. Odd no one thought of Gwynne living so close by.”
“I was headed in the other direction. I mean—I decided to go that way. I don’t actually know where I was on my way to.”
“No one in Wickey seemed to know a thing about you, or to have been expecting you. You were likely headed to Gwynne’s, all right. If you are known in artistic circles at all, Theo will know all about you. Come, we’ll get back in the carriage. You have been ill.”
On this occasion, Sir Ludwig held the door for me, rather impatiently to be sure, in a way that caused me to stop and look back down the road behind me, just to show him I was not impressed with his performance. “Remember something?” he asked.
“Yes, I am remembering how cold it was that night, almost like home.”
“Home? The storm must have already started when you left your home, then. You can’t be from very far away.” But that wasn’t the feeling I had. I seemed to recall cold winds blowing in from long ago and far away, blowing across hills, stony crops. Cornwall?
“We’ll start investigating right away. Mulliner ought to have done it earlier,” he said, taking my arm and propelling me into the carriage, still impatient.
I had again the sensation I didn’t want any enquiries made, but I said nothing. Half a mile farther on, he pointed out the window. “That’s Gwynne’s place there. A little late to call on him tonight. He keeps early hours.”
It was not later than nine, and the building was well lit on the ground floor, giving the lie to this speech. I understood it to mean Sir Ludwig wished to get on home after a trip from London, and I was hardly in a mood for visiting myself. Another mile of silence and the carriage turned off the main road, up through a pair of stone pillars, along a quarter of a mile of snow-crusted pebbles, with a park around us, whose features were indistinguishable in the darkness. Only the welcome sight of lit windows was to be seen, looming suddenly ahead as we rounded a turn in the road.
There was a fingernail of moon, enough to give a dim view of a large building of stone. It had a vaguely Classical feeling about it, with a few Corinthian columns to add to the illusion. It was only an illusion, the windows bore traces of Baroque, particularly in the second story where bulges of concrete protruded, yet it was too severely geometrical in other details to qualify as Baroque. A heavy-handed Germanic effort at elegance, I decided. The doorway in the distance had all the lack of joie de vivre to be expected of a Schloss. In my experience, the Germans do not excel in a doorway. They have mastered the window, even improved on it, but from old Schloss Langenburg to newish Schloss Fasanerie, one looks in vain for an exceptional doorway. The Italians have mastered it, and when they fail they at least throw up a row of columns to conceal the lack. The French hide it in the architecture, but do it with style. The English make a great thing of it, but the Germans give you a door that opens excellently without making one welcome. I never met a German yet who wouldn’t give you an argument on the subject, and I was in no mood for an argument, so said nothing.
I stood regarding the house for some little time, with that old feeling coming over me, the feeling that I had been here befo
re. Then a little laugh escaped me as I looked up and saw the clock in the central portion, embedded in the Mansard roof of the smaller top story, that did not extend to the building’s edge. Schloss Ludwigsburg, of course! It was a sort of inferior copy of the famous home in Württemberg. “Are you related to that Ludwig?” I asked.
“No. My great-grandfather was an admirer of the German style, however, and had his architect copy a few features. My father in turn had the roof raised in emulation of the original. And I added the clock myself. What was it tipped you off? It is not that good a copy of the original.”
“No, and the whole approach quite different. It must have been the clock. And of course the doorway,” I added as we approached the entrance, a rounded arch, with the door recessed under it. It was a little finer than I expected at close range. Some effort at embellishment had been made, an ugly crest imbedded in concrete, with a rounded overhang above. Shabby actually, but the door opened well. Not a squeak or squawk.
Inside we were not so opulent as our prototype. No moulded walls or ceilings, no cupids frolicking around miniature urns. Plain old English plaster and wood and paper, with the entrance floor courtesy of Connemara, Ireland. Furniture an eclectic blend accumulated over the generations, I assumed, by persons of very differing taste. Rather a pity to have a heavy Kent commode weighing some several hundred pounds as the focal point of the room, when there were more elegant and finer periods represented, but then arrival was early for rearranging Sir Ludwig’s furnishings. It would come in time, no doubt, if I were fated to remain long at Granhurst. Certainly the elegant Chippendale gilt mirror gave the impression of a canary perched on an elephant’s back, hung as it was too close above the Kent commode. As to hiding that long-case clock in a corner!
“We’ll have tea,” he said, interrupting my plans. I wanted a glass of decent wine and had hoped I might obtain one here, but then, with Sir Ludwig, I was fortunate he had not told me I would have a mug of beer. He left, to make a fresh toilette I supposed, certainly his mussed shirt collar stood in need of replacement. This gave me freedom to look around the Green Saloon. Hunter-green draperies—only a German would have such poor taste, and with no silk under-hangings to lighten the oppression. The carpet had wine-colored roses on a salmon-pink ground, also not to my taste, but mercifully so well worn it need not distress the room much longer.
The pictures on the walls goodish, but none of them my favorites. Stubbs and one grossly inferior Gainsborough. The latter gentleman ought not to have tackled animals. He made them look so very human, a sweet little girl kitten flirting with a boy spaniel. He should have stuck to his lovely lace trees and graceful ladies. The kitten lacked only a skirt and the rearrangement of ears to qualify for a lady.
I was standing back from the Gainsborough with these thoughts going through my head when I heard the whisper of a silken skirt at the door, and turned to find the raddled old face of a woman staring up at me, curiosity fairly leaping from blue eyes as sharp as a lynx’s. She was very old, in her seventies at least, with wrinkles to which no one but Hogarth could have done justice. She belonged at the latter end of the Rake’s Progress, this one.
Soon Sir Ludwig lounged up behind her, making me realize how very tiny the lady was. Next to a midget. Also making me realize he had not taken time to change his shirt. No clothes-horses in the family, to judge by these two specimens.
“Cousin, allow me to present Miss Smith,” he said, wearing a wary expression.
“Ah good, you’ve got a gel to put a rein on Abbie at last!” the dame shouted by way of welcome. “You’ll never guess what the minx has been up to, Lud. Sneaked off into Wickey to get a look at that woman that lost her mind and is putting up with Mulliner. The creature was indisposed. They say she gives herself terrific airs.”
“Actually it is her memory she lost, Cousin. Her temper too has the habit of going astray,” he added, with a flicker of a dark eye towards me.
“Temper—ha, she has plenty of that I hear. They say she pulled little Tommy Green’s ear nearly off his head for giving her some sauce.”
“Before you regale us with more second-hand tales of goings-on at the rectory, let me make you known to Miss Smith. This is my late mother’s cousin, Miss Smith. Miss Annie Enns. And Cousin, Miss Smith is the young lady who has been staying with Mulliner.”
“You never mean you’ve brought her here!” Annie shouted. “We’ll all be murdered in our beds.” Then she turned to me. “Not to say I mean you will do it yourself, my dear, for no one has called you a murderess yet, but it is clear as a candle in the window someone was out to kill you. Can I see the bump on your head?”
“It has gone down,” I told her, too astonished to show the degree of umbrage the occasion demanded. Never in all my life had I met anyone quite so outspoken as this.
“All down? What a pity. I would have liked very well to see it. But that is the way, good things never last a minute. If it had been a spot or freckles, it would hang on forever. Have you remembered who did it?” she asked with greedy interest.
“No, I don’t think anyone tried to kill me. I fell, very likely.”
“You don’t look that gawky a creature to me, my dear. A great ladder of a girl to be sure, but you seem well formed and agile. Lud now, he was always so ungainly he couldn’t cross a room without upsetting a chair.”
I hadn’t moved an inch since her entry, but then snap decisions were clearly her speciality. Ludwig saved the day. “Order us some tea, love,” he commanded in his usual imperative style. There was no affection on the syllable ‘love.’
She left, with a fearful glance over her shoulder at me, as though I meant to sneak up and give her a knock on the head. I felt like it. “Forgive her,” Sir Ludwig said. “She meant no harm. Annie becomes very old.”
“It is quite all right,” I said in a failing voice, and walked to the sofa. Green plush—ugh!
“Odd, you know, that remark you made about Schloss Ludwigsburg. I have been thinking of that. Have you seen it?” he asked.
“Well, I think I have, but it may have been no more than a picture. Still, I seem to remember rain—standing in the rain looking at it. I don’t know.” These pictures, sometimes even moving pictures, darted into and out of my head so fast there was no pinning them down.
“Your speaking French so well and having been to Germany—it suggests a background of travel. Do you remember other places—foreign places?”
“Sometimes when I am in a warm room, I seem to think of olive trees, but I don’t know what it may indicate.” My eyes were always drawn to a picture; at this point I happened to glance at the Gainsborough.
“Do you know the artist of that?” he asked, jerking his head towards it.
“Of course. In fact, Gainsborough repeats himself. He uses that little dog in another picture—a portrait of a gentleman farmer sprawling over his gun. I don’t recall the title, or where I saw it.”
“You seem to know a good deal about art. Perhaps you’d like to look at my Vermeer while we await tea?”
“I am eager to see it.”
It had been placed in the hallway, and was brought in now and unwrapped. What a disappointment! To think that Vermeer, that exquisite craftsman, had done this bad scene was ridiculous. It was from an earlier period, the drawing and design not nearly so well done as Vermeer’s, the colors muddier. “Do you like it?” he asked.
“No. I dislike especially that it was sold to you as a Vermeer. Surely they wouldn’t pull such a stunt on you at Sotheby’s. It has an excellent reputation.”
“It wasn’t exactly sold as a Vermeer, though the name certainly arose. I paid very little for it.”
“One can pick up a real Vermeer cheaply. He is underestimated at the moment. Not popular at all. What did you pay?”
“A little under a hundred pounds.”
“If you like it, it will not go amiss in some quiet corner of a study.”
“What makes you so sure it isn’t a Vermeer?”
&
nbsp; “He would never paint anything so unbalanced. His paintings are models of proportion, composition. The window there on the right with the sun streaming through needs some counterbalance on the other side. It has none. You may rest assured Vermeer would have provided you a bright balance on the other side, a white blouse, a brass pot, or a mirror picking up the sunshine. And he would have rendered the sunshine more realistically, too.”
He pushed the painting aside, just as Miss Annie entered in front of a servant carrying a tea tray. “Bought another picture, have you, Lud?” she asked with interest. “What have we got this time? Bah, another homely Dutch woman holding a jug. I hope you don’t mean to stick her in my room. Here, I’ve brought you a nice cup of tea, Miss Smith. Do you remember what tea is? It’s for drinking, in these things we call cups.” She lifted a cup and held it up to me for viewing and recalling.
“Thank you,” I said in a very weak voice.
“Ho, you’ll catch back on to things in no time.” Then she added in a perfectly audible aside to Sir Ludwig, “I daresay it is all a hum she pulled the little McKay boy’s ear off. She seems as sane as you or me.” Then she turned back to me, smiling away. “Well, Miss Smith, I’ll give you lessons myself and teach you all sorts of things. I’m sorry I was rude to you before. It will be great fun, having a looney with us. We are very dull here. Lud never has a word to say for himself from week’s end to week’s end.”
This pleasant remark nudged him into speech. “Has Abbie gone to bed?” he asked, to divert her stream of insults.
“Yes, she’s biting her nails again. I gave her a good spanking and sent her to bed. She ain’t talking to me, thank God. She’ll be glad to see you, Miss Smith. When did you remember your name, eh?”
“I didn’t. Mr. Mulliner decided on the name.”
“Ah, he would, the old stick. Smith—what a lack of imagination. I shall call you Miss Trelawney. Isn’t that a grand name? I have been wishing I knew someone to call Miss Trelawney. It breathes of romance, and you are romantical, having such a history. Rose Trelawney we’ll call her, eh Lud?”