by Joan Smith
The smile, denoting that they had, faded from Sir Ludwig’s face as he spotted the satinwood cabinet sitting where it shouldn’t. “What’s that thing doing down here? Where’s the mahogany cabinet?” he asked, darting an accusing eye to me. I sat with my lips closed and let Annie do the explaining.
“It’s stuck off in the study. I had this one carted down as it was always a great favorite of Ruth’s. I don’t see why you must go sticking it off in the attics and fill the house up with lumber.”
“I want this taken out,” he said, but was diverted from more attack by an eagerness to get on with an account of his visit. He waited only to order tea before doing so. Despite the German name, the family consumed the customary English gallon of tea apiece each day. He took up a seat beside me and opened his budget.
“We can dismiss the notion that you are Miss Smith,” was his opening remark. I hardly knew whether this were good or bad. “Her description does not sound like you in the least. We had one from Mrs. Lantry, the housekeeper. Miss Smith was an older woman—at least thirty from the way she was described, and she had a mole on her left cheek.”
“It might have been a patch made to resemble a mole, for purposes of disguise,” I mentioned.
“No, no, we have completely abandoned the idea you are Miss Smith. There were other things—wrinkles, crowsfeet, a crooked tooth.”
“Good God, she sounds more like fifty than thirty. How did Mr. Morley come to describe her as a youngish woman of elegance?”
“I fancy it was the clothing led him astray. Miss Smith is not described as ugly, however. The mole was not disfiguring. We had to pose several questions before it came up at all, and the teeth were not markedly crooked. Under repeated questioning, Mrs. Lantry mentioned that one jutted a little forward, and the wrinkles and crowsfeet were spoken of as beginning. There were enough little differences that we are convinced she is not you.”
“What of her character reference? Was it a French address?”
“No, the last employer was from Scotland, actually. A Mrs. Knightsbridge at Edinburgh. We saw her letter.”
The image of those Scottish highlands and sheep loomed in my mind. Scotland sounded significant. I frowned over the name Knightsbridge. It rang some little bell. I disliked the name intuitively. “What did the letter say?”
“It said, apparently, just what Miss Smith had already said. She was hired as companion to Mrs. Knightsbridge. The lady is director of some small museum in Edinburgh, the Knightsbridge Museum, founded by her husband. A hobby for the wife, I suppose. The two women were active in tending to the place. Mrs. Lantry says this Miss Smith was very knowledgeable about art.”
“We knew art had something to do with it. It always keeps cropping up.”
“It has cropped up higher than that. Gwynne was with me, as you know. He busied himself looking around while I quizzed the woman, and he claims two valuable paintings are missing from the Grafton collection. A portrait of a woman by Titian, and some religious painting by Hans Memling—I forget the name of it. The latter he might conceivably have traded as he was getting into the Italian school in a big way, but not the Titian. And,” he raised a finger to stop me from speaking, as he had more news to impart, “more interesting still, our mysterious Miss Smith claimed one of the works hanging there was a forgery. Now, the way that came up is as follows. Gwynne had been there before of course and particularly admired a small work attributed to Giorgione. Not positively identified—the fellow hasn’t got more than a handful actually verified as his work, but this one was a likely applicant. He asked to see it, and found it had been hung in a little saloon, out of the main collection. After a single glance at it, he asked Mrs. Lantry if the original had been sold and a copy made. It had not, or not with the family’s knowledge, at least. When Morley finally arrived—he was out when we got there—he said no, the painting had been sent to London for some expert to examine, but it was declared not to be a Giorgione, thus its exclusion from the collection. Gwynne is ready to swear the picture presently there is not the one he saw a year ago.”
“Did Morley take it to London himself for examination?”
“No, Uxbridge took it. It was away three weeks—plenty of time for a copy to have been made, and even ‘aged’ with a coat of dark varnish or some such thing. Uxbridge also arranged for the sale of the two paintings—the Titian and Hans Memling. Told Morley they were not up to the standards of the rest of the collection. The price got for them was mentioned, and Gwynne says it is a ridiculously small figure. Now it seems to me that if Miss Smith was going to point out to Morley he was being duped when he got back from his visit, it is Miss Smith and not Miss Grafton who was the one Uxbridge actually wanted to be rid of.”
“You have decided Uxbridge is the villain, have you?”
“Oh yes, sight unseen. He must be. He has been cheating the Grafton estate. Gwynne says there is not a doubt of it, and he has warned Morley to beware of any further dealings with the fellow. Uxbridge lives at Shaftesbury. We went along to his place to pump him, but he is away on business. In London for an unspecified period of time, we were told.”
“I wonder if it was wise to warn him you are on to him.”
“I wonder too, but I was overwhelmingly eager to get a look at him, and he would have learned from Morley soon enough that he was under suspicion. Morley is in the boughs over the affair, and has run off this very day to a magistrate to press charges. He fears—you know what a worrier he is—that he will end up in the dock himself for negligence in the matter. It came out after a good deal of frowning and nail-biting that this is not the first intimation he has had that Uxbridge is suspicious. There were enquiries from the chap who purchased the two paintings that were sold. Rather pressing enquiries I take it from Morley’s state, but Uxbridge talked his concern away. Said it was standard procedure, to make enquiries, I mean.”
I listened to all of this, then asked, “Has Morley received any demand for payment in the kidnapping of his niece? Whoever abducted her has had ample time to get her and himself safely hidden.”
“No, he hasn’t. It begins to look as though he’s mistaken about kidnapping being the motive.”
“Yes, silencing Miss Smith is more like it.”
“I shouldn’t forget Miss Grafton is a great heiress,” Abbie joined in. “The house was luxurious. She must be rich as Croesus, and someone must inherit all that if she is dead. I wonder who would be the heir.”
“Morley,” Sir Ludwig answered. “Must be. He is her closest relative by a long shot.”
“Oh dear, I am convinced he would not want the worry of it,” I said.
“If you could have seen him, close to tears, you would know he is innocent,” Ludwig assured me. “He couldn’t be that good an actor.”
“So it seems Miss Smith’s arrival at the Grafton home worried someone enough he had to be rid of her. Uxbridge is the one who was tampering with the collection, so it must be Uxbridge we are looking for. A close neighbor, he might have engineered it easily enough, but what has he done with the two women? Three weeks tomorrow since they have been missing. It begins to look . . .”
“Yes, it looks as though they are long buried,” Sir Ludwig said bluntly. “And if that is the case, Uxbridge has probably got himself clean out of the country.”
“In which case we will never discover what happened to Miss Grafton and Miss Smith!” I frowned over this, then began to wonder how I fit into this puzzle. I seemed to be an extra piece. The plot was complete without me. I soon realized Sir Ludwig was scanning the same riddle.
“There was no mention of any other young lady in the case,” he said, regarding me closely. Then he hunched his shoulders and said with enthusiasm, “So, let’s hear your news.” He looked at me expectantly.
My eyes flew guiltily to the satinwood cabinet, but I soon realized it was more important news he waited to hear. His eager, expectant face said so. Impossible he had learned of my attack at the chapel!
“Who was t
he man enquiring after you at the rectory?” he went on, to make his point clear.
I looked at him stupidly. “What do you mean? I heard nothing of that.”
“Why, Mulliner told us when we went to pick up your gown that a gentleman had been asking after you this morning. I made sure he had been here long since. A middle-aged fellow he said, a gentleman, came to the door claiming he had heard your story as far away as Bath, and had come to enquire after you. His daughter, it seems, had taken off towards the end of November. The family suspected a runaway match with a captain, but as nothing was ever heard from the couple, he began to wonder if you might be she. The name, incidentally, was Miss Smith,” he added ironically.
“Another Banbury tale, then! No man came here.”
“Now that is very odd, for Mulliner told him your description, and he said it sounded like his daughter, and he was coming here immediately to see you.”
“He didn’t come,” I said. Then I gave a sudden lurch of intuition. Oh but he had come—had hit me instead of talking to me. Ludwig’s eyes were examining me closely, missing nothing of my reasoning.
The tea was upon us. I decided first I would wait and tell Sir Ludwig my tale in private, but as privacy seemed hours away, I could contain it no longer. I told the story, and he jumped to his feet, upsetting the tea over his knees and the carpet.
“I told you to behave!” he shouted, as though I were seven years old.
“I did behave! All I did was to go out for a walk in the park, and I ran away as soon as I knew someone was there.”
“It was the fellow who was asking after you at Mulliner’s.”
Annie was furious with me. “Do you mean to tell me, Rose Trelawney, that you have got another crack on the head and didn’t tell me!” she shrieked. She too hopped up, rescuing her tea before it hit the carpet, though the green silk got a splatter. She descended on me like a vulture, her claws scratching at my scalp for evidence of the attack. She was delighted when she found it. “Ah, this is a dandy one,” she told Ludwig, who had then to add his fingers to my hair to feel for himself. Abbie could not be left out of such good sport, and she too came to admire my acquisition.
“If you don’t mind!” I said, shaking them all out of my hair and trying to retrieve it into its bun. The effort was unsuccessful. It was tumbled well and good about my ears, and there it stayed till our meeting was over, being frequently disturbed by Annie, who couldn’t get enough of feeling the bump.
“For God’s sake leave the girl alone,” Kessler shouted at her, then proceeded thinking aloud in a milder tone. “All hogwash, then, this tale of a runaway match,” he said, with, I thought, a certain note of satisfaction. “It was Uxbridge, or someone working for him.”
“It can’t be that. I have nothing to do with the Grafton affair,” I reminded him.
“Who could it have been?” Abbie wondered. “If you’re not mixed up with the Grafton business, why would anyone want to hurt you?”
“I must be mixed up in some other mess,” I suggested.
“It was your captain come after you,” Annie told me. “You have given him the slip, minx, and he is jealous you’re here with Lud. Ha, and if Lud ain’t scowling at me like a Turk.”
“I wonder if the captain’s name was Ivor,” he said, looking at me with a question.
I hadn’t a notion, but to tell the truth, it sounded as rational as anything else, except that it was supposedly my father who enquired at Mulliner’s, and my captain who knocked me on the head. We discussed all manner of improbable imbroglios in which I was mixed up, till Sir Ludwig brought us to attention, just at the point where Annie had me switching my affections from a captain to a colonel.
“This is nonsense. There are too many similarities in the Grafton affair and Rose’s for them not to be connected. The art, and the time and place. The fellow needed some story to account for his enquiry and invented a captain and a runaway bride.” On only one point we were in agreement. There existed no doubt in anyone’s mind that the boot of which I had had a glimpse belonged to a gentleman who said he had come from Bath.
I was handed my bordeaux gown picked up in the village and told by my host to put it on for dinner. This gave rise to an immediate desire to leave it for another occasion, but in the end I was so curious to see how it looked that I did put it on. It fit well enough, but was a hard color to wear, and not the optimum choice for me. It made me look older, I thought. Also it was just a trifle snug, revealing somewhat more precise details of my anatomy than I usually paraded in public. When both Sir Ludwig and Annie showered me with compliments, I was sure it was in the worst of taste, but still it was no worse than the navy bombazine. I really didn’t feel it merited such attention as Kessler was granting it, especially from the waist up. Half a dozen times I caught him surveying it closely, and took the notion he was looking right through it. He wore an unaccustomed little smile, and looked sheepish when I twice caught him out at it.
After dinner, the subject of the satinwood cabinet came to the fore, and we all settled in for a battle royal. “Let’s get this thing out of here before we sit down,” Sir Ludwig suggested with a challenging look in my direction.
Annie’s blue eyes snapped. She walked forward and placed her little body before it, with her arms outstretched to protect it. “Ruth always liked it, and it must stay,” she declared in dramatic accents.
“Mama could never stand the sight of it, as it was a gift from Cousin Valerie. That is precisely the reason it was taken upstairs.”
“Who was Valerie?” I asked, hoping to divert them.
“My father’s first fiancée, who married another cousin and gave this cabinet as a wedding gift.”
“She had excellent taste,” I said, walking to the cabinet to point out the panels.
“She had the poor taste to break an engagement with my father,” Ludwig countered.
“I do not refer to judgment, Sir Ludwig, but aesthetic taste merely,” I answered discreetly, wishing to conciliate him. “These pietra-dura panels are exquisitely done, are they not?” I pointed hopefully to reproductions of scenes from classical antiquity, a brace of columns set amidst Hellenic shrubbery, a rendering of Venus on a pedestal.
“Was this your idea?” he asked in an accusing tone.
“It was my idea!” Annie insisted, “and you’re quite wrong about Valerie. She gave Ruth a silver teapot, which Ruth in spite promptly put on the kitchen table for the servants. There it sits to this very day, black as the ace of spades, for no one ever polishes it.”
“I think the cabinet is lovely,” I pressed on. “It lightens the air of this room remarkably. The Kent cabinet was so very dark and heavy.”
“I like furniture dark and heavy,” Ludwig asserted with a mulish set to his jaw. “Substantial,” he added, by way of explanation.
“What do you think, Abbie?” I asked, for he was fond of his sister.
“I think it’s ugly,” she disappointed me by saying. “The other is worse though,” she added to her brother.
Kessler continued to observe the thing as best he could through Annie’s body. She added nothing to its beauty I can tell you. “It’s too small, too flimsy,” he complained, tossing up his hands in disdain. “It makes the rest of the room look old and heavy.”
Noticing his eyes flickering to the draperies, I took a deep breath and adopted a voice as disinterested as I could make it. “With lighter draperies—rose or gold, perhaps—the cabinet would look less outstanding, less out of place, I mean.”
He seemed to be regarding the effects of that deep breath on my body. I thought at first he wasn’t listening at all, but he soon answered, “Yes, but we don’t have pink or yellow draperies. We have green.”
“I didn’t say pink or yellow. I said rose or gold.”
“A rose by any other name is usually pink,” he insisted.
“I always did hate those old dark green curtains,” Abbie said, glancing at them. No more than her brother, I don’t believe she even
realized they were green till the discussion’s beginning.
“We’ll put up new curtains when we change the carpet,” Annie said, darting forward from the cabinet. “It can all be done in time for the New Year’s party.”
“I don’t plan to have the annual party this year,” Ludwig said.
All talking of furniture was deflected to a tirade from the two regular female residents upon this announcement. I had to hold in all my regret. Worried looks to myself told me I was the cause of canceling the party. I hastened on to assure them all I had no objection to it.
“Everyone will be gawking at you and asking questions,” Ludwig told me. I took the idea he would have liked pretty well to have the party, which informed me it was a long-standing tradition, for in general he was not much of a party goer. Even fewer people than usual had been coming lately. I had discovered from little comments let drop accidentally that this was in deference to my being amongst them, but I would not have objected to company. I was more of an excuse than a reason in Kessler’s thinking.
“I can stay abovestairs if that is all that’s stopping you,” I offered magnanimously, having, I must own, not the least intention of missing a moment of the do.
“Oh everyone will want to see you, Rose,” Annie assured me. “The party will be the best ever, with you to show to everyone. We never had such an interesting guest before. We had Lud’s cousin that had been in debtor’s prison once, but he was a dull dog after all. All the excitement occurred after he had left and taken a dozen place settings of silver with him. Pity the bump will be all gone down. Maybe we could give you a little tap . . .”
“You see what I mean,” Ludwig hastened in, trying to drown her out. “You would have a stream of guests in your boudoir, feeling your bump and giving it a twin.”
“Ha, and then there was the year Marion got drunk!” Annie rambled on, smiling broadly. “Cast up her accounts all over the . . .”
“Never mind, Annie!” Ludwig said in a grim voice.