Caught in the Light (25 page)

"I... I don't.. ."

"Are you quite well?"

"I'm not... not sure."

"Did you come here to see me?"

"No." I began to recover my composure. "Of course not."

"Why, then, may I ask?"

"I don't think it's any of your business."

"I must beg to differ with you there, Mrs. Moberly." He stepped closer and lowered his voice. "It would no more be in my interests than it would be in yours to have friend Niall come across you roaming the streets. He is still anxious to find you, remember. I frankly fail to understand what you can be thinking of."

"Another world."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'd be happy to take your advice and leave the city straight away, actually." An idea had come to me. "Any chance of a lift?"

"You don't have a car?"

"It's in a lay-by, out beyond Corston."

Quisden-Neve frowned. "You walked in from there, I suppose."

"As a matter of fact, I think I must have done."

His frown deepened. He glanced at his watch. "This really is ..." Then he sighed, evidently conceding a pragmatic point to himself. My presence in Bath really was a problem he could do without. "Very well. My car's just round the corner. I suppose I have little choice but to act as your chauffeur. Shall we?" He led the way along the north side of the square, setting the stiffish pace of someone who suddenly felt conspicuous.

His car, a flashy old Jag going to seed at about the same rate as its owner, was just round the corner, in Gay Street. He moved a dusty stack of Illustrated London News to make room for me in the passenger seat, then we were away, back round Queen Square and out along the Bristol road.

"Your husband should take better care of you, Mrs. Moberly," he said as we flashed past Weston church and the terraces of Victorian housing that had long since replaced the surrounding cottages. "Wandering around the countryside is no occupation for a lady like you."

"You don't know what I'm like."

"True enough. But even so '

"Sold my pictures yet?"

"If you mean the Esguard negatives, I don't recall saying I was going to sell them."

"You still have them, then?"

"I see no profit in discussing the subject. Your best course of action is to forget about them altogether and to avoid visiting Bath."

"What if I can't?"

He looked at me askance. "Try harder."

"Why weren't there any more?"

"What exactly do you mean?"

"I mean, why was 1817 the beginning and end of it?"

"Perhaps it wasn't." He grinned his eager collector's grin. "Perhaps she carried on the work, wherever she went after leaving her husband."

"And where might that have been?"

He shrugged. "Who can say?"

"Lawrence Byfield spoke of going abroad."

"It would have been the obvious thing to do, but He suddenly stamped on the brakes and skidded to a halt. A car behind us blared its horn, then overtook noisily, the driver shouting and gesturing at us. But Quisden-Neve didn't even notice. "Just a moment," he said, staring at me. "You know about Byfield?"

"Apparently."

"So Milo told you everything."

"What if he did?"

"Did he tell you where they went?"

"Did he tell you?"

"Of course not. Otherwise There was more blaring of horns. This time Quisden-Neve did notice. He drove on. "I had Mile's solemn assurance that I was the only person he'd ever told about Byfield. He only told me because he was too ill to carry on ferreting about looking for clues as to where Byfield and Marian might have gone, assuming they did run off together, which wasn't by any means certain. I agreed to conduct enquiries on his behalf on the strict understanding that the information would go no further." He slapped the steering wheel in irritation. "Milo didn't play fair with me, he really didn't."

"Perhaps you didn't play fair with him."

"On the contrary. I didn't explain my parallel interest in Byfield to him, it's true, but then why should I have done? It was scarcely germane to the issue."

"What is your "parallel interest"?"

"Nothing that need concern you. Let us return to what Byfield spoke of doing. How is anyone, even Milo, to know? He had the name, passed down from Barrington, as a candidate for the role of Marian's lover. The name and nothing more. Yet you seem to be implying he knew what might have been in Byfield's mind and hence in Marian's."

"I'm implying nothing." We were through Corston now and in sight of Stantonbury Hill. "The lay-by's just round this next bend. You'd better slow down."

"Why don't we both slow down?" He eased his foot off the accelerator and turned to give me what I think he intended to be a reassuring smile. "I for one am always willing to be open-minded about situations where co-operation may be genuinely and mutually beneficial."

"I thought you wanted me out of Bath."

"I recommended it." We rounded the bend and saw the car in the lay-by ahead. Quisden-Neve pulled in behind and turned off the engine. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then said, "If you know where they may have gone, Mrs. Moberly, I'd be prepared to offer you a share in the proceeds in exchange for the information."

"What proceeds?"

"The negatives, if proved to be genuine, will fetch a small fortune at auction, boosted by publicity, of course. My book will bring in a lot of that."

"Your book?"

"About Marian Esguard. And how she ties in with another research interest of mine. If she ties in. I have to trace her movements, and hence Byfield's, after 1817 to nail it down. If you could point me in the right direction ..."

"I can't."

"Are you sure?"

"If Milo knew, he didn't tell me."

Quisden-Neve clicked his tongue. "A pity."

"So perhaps you'll excuse me." I turned to open the door. As I did so, Quisden-Neve grasped me firmly by the elbow. I looked back at him levelly. "I don't think we have anything else to say to each other."

"I disagree, Mrs. Moberly. There's a great deal of money at stake here."

"I'm not interested."

"Come, come. We're all interested in money. But greed can sometimes blind us to the need to share it with others if any is to be made at all. I'm offering you what would effectively be a partnership."

"Thanks, but no thanks."

"Don't rush into the decision. And don't make the mistake of supposing it's straightforward."

"It feels straightforward to me."

"You're forgetting the muscular Niall. If you won't help me, I may be compelled to help him."

"We made a deal about that."

"Overtaken by events." He grinned. "Returning to Bath really was rather foolish, you know."

"Let go of me."

He did so. But his grin remained. "Enjoy the rest of the holiday with your husband, Mrs. Moberly. And think about what I've said.

Give me a call early in the New Year. You still have my card?"

"You won't be hearing from me." I opened the door and climbed out.

"In that case," he called after me, 'you'll be hearing from me."

I slammed the door and caught one last glimpse of his grinning face through the windscreen. Then he started up, pulled out into the road in a raking U-turn and sped away. I watched him go as the realization seeped into me that he meant exactly what he'd said. He sensed I knew more about Marian than I was willing to reveal. And I wouldn't be rid of him until he'd found out how much.

I suppose that was when another realization dawned on me. I couldn't go on as I was. There was just too much crowding in around me, too much of everything for my mind to hold. I had to find a way out, just as Marian had back in the autumn of 1817. I had to run where no-one could follow.

I got into the car and looked at the map. Midford lay a few miles south of Bath, an easy evening's journey for the sake of a social gathering. I drove to it by as circuitous a route as I could manage, avoiding Bath itself. The village didn't amount to much: a pub and assorted cottages huddled in the shadow of a disused railway viaduct. That wouldn't have been there in 1817, of course. It was hard to imagine what would. I asked in the pub, however, and got immediate recognition of the name Midford Grange.

"Take the turning for Combe Hay and it's first on the right. They're doing it up nice, so they say. You thinking of buying one of the flats?"

I implied I was and drove round to take a look. The Grange was a middling country house of steep gables and tall chimneys, partly obscured by scaffolding, set in neglected grounds bounded by a crumbling wall and rook-infested woodland. An estate agent's board proclaimed its imminent conversion into six stylish self-contained country apartments. In the grey winter light, it looked cold and dismal. But Marian would have come there, as I knew I had to, by night and the glow of welcoming lamps.

I drove back to the hotel, had something to eat, then slept for two soothing hours. I felt calm now, and absolutely certain about what I had to do. I collected Conrad from the stables on schedule and let him talk me through his day over tea at the hotel, as darkness fell.

Then he took himself off for a bath before dinner, leaving me by the lounge fireside. But I didn't stay there for long.

Nobody paid me any attention as I walked out to the car and drove away. I was at Midford within twenty minutes. Already, nightfall was having its effect. The village felt different somehow, more remote, more watchful. I parked at the pub, put on the thorn proof coat from the boot, took the torch and crowbar from Conrad's toolkit, and walked round under the viaduct and down the lane to the Grange. The gates were closed and padlocked, but several stretches of the boundary wall were semi-ruinous. I scrambled over one into the thin end of the wood, and hacked my way through to the edge of the lawn surrounding the house.

The building was even darker than the starless sky, a slab of solid inky black. Plastic sheeting was flapping somewhere in the wind. There was no sign of life, least of all the life of times long past. But I knew Marian too well to doubt she'd come to me if I gave her the chance. I crossed the lawn and trailed the torch beam round the scaffolded section of the house to the source of the flapping: a run of new ground-floor windows not yet glazed, shrouded against the weather. One corner of the plastic sheet had worked itself loose. I loosened it further with the crowbar, then clambered in over the sill.

I was in a small square high-ceilinged room, plastered and floor-boarded and fancily corniced, smelling of wood and cement and newness. I walked out into a hallway and into the next room. It was larger and rectangular, with a fireplace and French windows at the far end. It looked as if the builders had done a fair job of sweeping away all traces of the original design. I switched off the torch and let the darkness soak into my eyes. Nothing happened. The smell didn't alter. The plastic sheeting still flapped. The present held me firm. A sudden fear gripped me that I might have lost Marian for ever. It was a fear that felt like grief, like a surge of pain. I closed my eyes and took a long, deep breath.

"Do you think it possible that the gravity of your manner deters potential dancing partners, Marian?"

Barrington's voice, low and simpering, came to me a fraction of a second before I opened my eyes and started back in amazement at the life and colour and noise that had suddenly filled and somehow enlarged the room. Chandeliers ran the length of the ceiling, ablaze with candlelight. The walls were covered with vast gilt-framed oil paintings of old men in wigs and hunting dogs and sloe-eyed ladies in sylvan settings. Between them pairs of dancers performed their measured steps and gestures, facing each other in the long ways formation I had often seen before. The ladies' gowns shimmered and the gentlemen's shoes clipped on the polished floor. At the far end of the room, on a dais set up before the French windows, an orchestra played. Liveried servants and those sitting out the dance lined the walls. Glancing round, I could see the eager sparkle in the dancers' eyes and sense the pleasure and the care they were taking. The gentlemen wore black or maroon tailed coats, with fancy waistcoats and paler breeches; the ladies elaborate ball gowns with puff sleeves, jewelled bandeaux and long white gloves. I was aware that my own gown was relatively plain and darker than most. But I was also aware that I had chosen it with more of a mind to travelling than to dancing.

"Ignoring those who choose to speak to you could, of course, be equally effective."

I looked round to confront Barrington's narrow-eyed gaze. A peacock would have envied him his waistcoat, though possibly not the tightness of its fit. "I do beg your pardon," I said. "My mind was quite elsewhere."

"Evidently. And where, may I ask, was it dwelling?"

"I really am ... not sure."

"Perhaps you are pining for dear Jose."

"Perhaps so," I responded, paying him back smile for smile.

"He can be a neglectful fellow, he really can." Barrington stepped closer and lowered his voice. "I would not leave my wife to languish in my brother's house. Of that you may be certain."

"But Jose has so many more demands upon his time than you." Seeing Barrington cock his eyebrow, I added, "So he tells me."

"I look upon you as my sister, Marian. It is only fair to tell you that Jose is not so busy as he sometimes claims."

"You must be mistaken, Barrington. If he were not, why would he so often have to exile himself from Gaunt's Chase?"

"I think you are intelligent enough to know why. Indeed, I think you are quite possibly the most intelligent woman I have ever met."

"I could almost believe you mean to flatter me."

"Not at all. I state the simple truth. For evidence, I need look no further than your experiments with the camera obscura."

I glanced away. "Jose does not wish those to be spoken of."

"But Jose is not here." Barrington paused and we both pretended to watch the dancing. Then he said, "And he has no jurisdiction over what I permit to be done under my own roof. I could obtain whatever equipment you need."

"Why might you do that?"

"Because I am a more considerate fellow than you suppose." He took my arm, prompting me to look round at him. "And because I have an open mind where scientific enquiry is concerned. There are many, my brother among them, who believe women should confine their energies to childbirth, embroidery and the occasional quadrille."