The Ghost Writer (19 page)

'And then came the letter telling us that Ruthven de Vere had died, leaving his entire estate in trust to Arthur.

"It looked, at first glance, like belated repentance. But doubts very soon crept in. Nowhere in the will—which had been drawn up only weeks before de Vere's death—was Arthur acknowledged as his son: the income from the trust was left simply to Arthur Montague de Vere of Ashbourn House, Hurst Green, Sussex'. It was disturbing to learn that he had known where we lived. But the condition was far more so.

"In a nutshell: the income from the trust (about five hundred a year; the estate had been much depleted) would come to Arthur, provided that he agreed to take charge of the contents of a particular upstairs room in de Vere's house. The will did not specify what these contents were; I shall come to that in a moment. The income would continue so long as these contents were maintained, together and intact, at Arthur's principal place of residence'. If anything were to be removed, sold, abandoned, destroyed or given away, the income would go to a distant relative in the north of Scotland. Otherwise it would pass, on your fathers death, to his eldest child, and then to that child's eldest child—"

"—unto the third generation," said Cordelia softly.

Theodore looked at her with something like fear. "How could you know that?"

"Know what, uncle?"

"That those were the words of the will."

"I didn't. They just came to me, a while ago, when I was thinking about—something else. So what is to happen, at the third generation?"

"The trust descends to your eldest child. When that child dies, the income passes to the descendants of the remote relative in Scotland. As would already have happened if Arthur had not had children."

"And—the contents of the room?"

Theodore did not reply. Instead he moved towards a door in the panelling a few paces to the left of the portrait. Because of the arrangement of the stairwell, the landing extended quite some distance, from the window in the end wall to the entrance to the corridor which led to the girls' bedrooms. The door her uncle was now attempting to unlock stood immediately to the right of that entrance. This was the door to 'the storeroom; Cordelia passed it several times a day, but had long ago concluded that, since it was never opened, nothing of interest could be stored there.

The lock snapped over; the hinges groaned; her uncle pushed the door wide and ushered her in.

G
REY AFTERNOON LIGHT FILTERED THROUGH TWO VERY
grimy windows in the wall to her right. The room was perhaps fourteen feet by ten, but so crowded that it looked much smaller. The centre of the floor was taken up by various items of furniture, heaped against each other so as to make the most of the available space. A bedstead and a table, both standing on end, formed the backbone of the stack. From the doorway, Cordelia could make out the backs of two chairs, a wooden locker, a tin trunk, several other boxes, and various irregularly shaped bundles piled one on top of the other. Paintings hung from the picture rails all around the room, jostled together in no sort of order, some on board, some on canvas; below these, half-finished works, sheets of board, empty frames, rolls of canvas and other remnants stood propped against the walls, leaving a narrow aisle of dusty floorboards between them and the furniture piled in the centre of the room. The air was surprisingly dry, laden with odours of varnish and pigment, timber and canvas, leather and horsehair and traces of something sweet and aromatic that reminded her of a long-abandoned beehive.

"You see before you," said Theodore, "all the worldly goods of Henry St Clair. I took the liberty of opening the shutters this morning."

Cordelia took a few steps into the room. Dust lay thickly everywhere, stirring in small puffs as she moved, settling about her feet as she paused before a canvas depicting an expanse of tranquil waterway, stretching away into hazy distance, with several small boats in the foreground and the dim shapes of others farther off, a low green promontory or headland away to the right, and the great vault of the sky sweeping up from the far horizon, a dome of the palest blue, shot through with skeins and filaments of cloud. The artist had perfectly captured that quality of light which seems to float just above the surface of rippling water. Everything was held in suspension, even the foreground detail soft and blurred, yet somehow suggesting a delicacy of outline beyond the most exacting draughtsmanship.

"But this is beautiful, uncle. Why have you kept it locked away all these years?"

"We must come to that soon. But look around first."

The canvas beside it was very different. It showed a woodland path in dim, greenish moonlight, winding beneath tall, skeletal, overarching trees. About half-way along the path, a solitary figure, slightly hunched, was approaching. You could not quite decide whether it was man, woman, or child, or make out its features in the pale light, but its whole posture was expressive of profound unease, of someone trying to hurry without appearing to do so. Perhaps twenty yards further back, on the very edge of the path, something humped and hooded—or was it only a bush? or a small rocky outcrop about the height of a man?—seemed to be detaching itself from a thicket.

"
This
is his too?"

"I believe so."

Moving around the room, Cordelia saw at least a dozen landscapes strongly reminiscent of the tranquil waterway she had so admired. These, even at a cursory inspection, were the work of a man fascinated by the play of sunlight on water in all its manifold forms, not only liquid, but ice and frost, vapour and mist, haze and fog and every variety of cloud, a man in pursuit of some celestial vision in which air and fire, light and water were as one. But interspersed amongst them were at lea$t as many pictures which could only be described as works of darkness: as melancholy, even malignant in feeling as the daylit scenes were joyous, a world of dark woods and crumbling, labyrinthine ruins, fraught with insidious menace.

"Imogen told me that he painted those when his melancholia was at its blackest," said Theodore as she examined another moonlit scene. "He called them exorcisms."

This one showed a series of high stone arches, some complete, some partly collapsed, each framed by the one in front, receding into the far distance over rubble-strewn ground. Shattered remnants of whatever they had once supported lay all around; the light gleaming on the debris had a greenish, phosphorescent tinge. Cordelia could not look at it without feeling that she was being drawn vertiginously into the picture. Again she found it difficult to believe that the canvas next to it, a study of sunlight on a fog-bank at dawn, had come from the same hand. Even in that grey, wintry light, the luminosity of the fog was extraordinary.

"I don't understand," she said at last. "If Ruthven de Vere hated him—Henry St Clair—so much, why did he keep his things? And why leave them to us? I thought 'the contents of the room' would be something horrible, from the way you spoke."

"So did I, my dear, when I read that will. It was written as if the bequest were a trap—or a curse—with the annuity as bait. That was why I went to see Mr Ridley, de Vere's solicitor, on Arthur's behalf.

"By a fortunate coincidence—one of the few in this dark affair—Mr Ridley's father and mine had been friends; we had never met, but it gave me an opening. And I could tell from the outset that he hadn't liked de Vere, and was himself uneasy about the will.

"It was a cold day, and he had a fire burning in the grate in his office. Rather than speak to me across his desk, he invited me to take a chair by the fireside, and very soon we were talking like old friends.

"'I cant tell you what you most want to know,' he said, 'that is to say, the precise purpose behind the condition, because he didn't reveal it to me. But I'm afraid you're right in suspecting him of malign intent.'

"Then he asked me what I had made of the report of the inquest. I said I didn't even know there'd been an inquest into de Vere's death. And after a little self-inquisition, he told me everything he knew."

The mention of a fire had made Cordelia aware that she was shivering with cold. They locked up the room and hastened along the gloomy corridor to the sitting room at the other end, where the coals of an actual fire were still smouldering.

"After the separation," Theodore continued, once they had got a good blaze going, "de Vere kept up his accustomed round of dinners and grand receptions. He let it be known that Imogen had suddenly resolved to make a religious retreat, and wanted no further contact with the world. The boy was being privately educated in the country. De Vere was even heard to say, 'She has taken the veil'—profoundly disturbing, even in retrospect; I was glad not to have known it at the time. No doubt his chivalrous behaviour was much admired.

"So he went on for another decade or more, until people began to notice that he was not as charming or attentive as formerly; he seemed troubled, abstracted, preoccupied. It was rumoured around the City that de Vere was losing his grip; he was certainly losing money. By the time of Imogen's death—of which, according to Mr Ridley, he certainly knew—he had sold his interest in the bank, withdrawn entirely from society, and discharged all but three of his servants. His appearance, too, had altered profoundly. Once the epitome of elegance in all matters of dress and grooming, he now, in these last months of his life, received Mr Ridley at Belgrave Square in a crumpled suit, carpet slippers, and with a grease-stained dressing-gown draped about his shoulders. His white hair—which only recently had been iron-grey, and immaculately trimmed—was long and scanty; he had lost most of his teeth, and his face had fallen in upon itself. He was sixty-seven, and looked twenty years older.

"I asked Mr Ridley if he thought de Vere had been of sound mind when the will was drawn.

'"Sound,' I remember him saying—he made a steeple of his fingers, like this—sound, now that's a very broad church indeed. In the eyes of the law, yes: he knew the meanings of words; he knew exactly what he wanted, and he insisted on having it. Further than that I shouldn't like to go.'

"There was malice in him, Mr Ridley told me, malice but also fear, a morbid pressure of anxiety as palpable as the ill-will. De Vere had his chair hard against a wall, opposite the door, and all the time they talked, his eyes were darting about the room. And that was the last Mr Ridley saw of him until—as the executor—he received a note from the attending doctor, saying that de Vere had died in a fall from an upstairs window, and inviting him to step round.

"The room from which de Vere had fallen was the room containing everything that had once belonged to Henry St Clair.

"As de Vere's valet—though he cant have had much to do in the way of valeting—would later tell the inquest, St Clair's possessions had remained undisturbed, so far as anyone knew, in the upstairs boxroom until about a year before, when he had happened to see Mr de Vere unlocking the door. From then on, his master had visited the room more and more often until he was spending hours there every day, or rather night, for it was at night that he mainly went there, always with the door locked. Mr de Vere had made it clear from the outset that he was not to be disturbed during these visits. As to why he spent so much time in the room, or what he did there, the valet—whose name was William Lambert—could not say. Sometimes when he passed the door he would hear bumping and scraping noises, as if things were being dragged about, but mostly there was no sound at all.

"On the night of his death, de Vere had locked himself in the room at around ten o'clock. It was late in the autumn, a still, cold night. At about midnight William was dozing, fully clothed, in the attic on the next floor up—his master was in the habit of demanding refreshments in the small hours, and then sleeping very late—when he was woken by a splintering crash, followed by a thud in the area below. He ran downstairs and found Mr de Vere lying dead on the flagstones.

"The doctor, suspecting foul play, had the police summoned and the boxroom door forced. But there was no one within, no possible means of escape, and no sign of a struggle beyond the shattered window through which Ruthven de Vere had made his last exit. Closer examination suggested that he had run full tilt at the closed window, and dived head-first through the glass.

"According to the servants, he had not received a single visitor since the signing of the will. The maid and the housekeeper spent most of their time below stairs, and so the valet was the principal witness to the final weeks of de Vere's life. William told Mr Ridley privately that he had sometimes watched unobserved as his master approached the boxroom: it had seemed to him that de Vere was drawn to it almost against his will, like a man defeated by his craving for drink, or a murderer compelled, as popular belief has it, to return again and again to the scene of his crime. This never came out at the inquest, at which the coroner, for reasons best known to himself, cut short the valets halting attempts to characterise de Vere's mental state, and prevailed upon the jury to bring in a finding of death by misadventure.

"In Mr Ridley's view, the verdict should have been suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I pressed him further on the matter of de Vere's sanity at the time the will was drawn.

"'If you're thinking the terms might be challenged on that ground,' he replied, 'I can't hold out much hope. The man's instructions were precise; he questioned me closely about the effect of the wording; there was nothing capricious or repugnant—that is to say, inconsistent at law—in the terms he required. Speaking privately, I am sure his intention was malign, but it was also founded upon a delusion: namely, that in bequeathing Mr St Clair's effects to your nephew, he was visiting some sort of evil upon him and his descendants. So there's really nothing to object to: the intent to harm was no doubt real enough, but the danger is almost certainly phantasmal.'

"I asked why he had said almost certainly.

'"Professional caution, I suppose. One never quite knows ... there are more things ... I suppose I had wondered, whether the man might have concealed something dangerous amongst St Clair's effects. What sort of danger, you ask? Well, to cite another authority, it would cease to be a danger if we knew the answer to that. Most improbable, of course. A thousand to one the man was simply deranged. Of course, if you
were
to discover anything dangerous amongst the contents of that room, it would be a nice point, at law, whether the trust could require it to be left
in situ.
But if I were your nephew, I should accept the bequest, take the income, lock everything away securely, and think no more about it.'