The Skull Beneath the Skin (11 page)

“Thank you, but I’d rather do my own.”

Apart from the fact that the few clothes she had brought could be hung up in minutes and she preferred to do these things for herself, Cordelia had no intention of letting other eyes see the scene-of-crime kit. She had already noticed with relief that the bottom drawer of the cabinet had a key.

She followed Clarissa into her bedroom. It was twice as large as her own and very different in style; here opulence and
extravagance replaced lightness and simplicity. The room was dominated by the bed, a mahogany half-tester with canopy, cover and side curtains of crimson damask. The head and footboard were elaborately carved with cherubs and swags of flowers, the whole surmounted by a countess’s coronet. Cordelia wondered whether the original owner, thrusting his way upwards through the Victorian social hierarchy, had commissioned it to honour a particularly important guest. On either side of the bed was a small, bow-fronted chest and across its foot a carved and buttoned chaise longue. The dressing table was set between the two tall windows from which, between the looped curtains, Cordelia saw only an expanse of blue, untroubled sea. Two ponderous wardrobes covered the opposite wall. There were low chairs and a screen of Berlin woolwork before the marble fireplace in which a small pile of sticks had already been laid. Ambrose Gorringe’s chief guest was to have the luxury of a real fire. She wondered whether some housemaid would creep in in the early hours to light it, as had her Victorian counterpart when the long-dead countess stirred in her magnificent bed.

The room was very untidy. Clothes, wraps, tissue paper and plastic bags were flung across the chaise longue and the bed, and the top of the dressing table was a jumble of bottles and jars. A woman was walking about, calmly and uncensoriously gathering up the clothes over her arm. Clarissa Lisle said: “This is my dresser, Miss Tolgarth. Tolly, meet Miss Cordelia Gray. She’s come to help with my correspondence. Just an experiment. She won’t be in anyone’s way. If she wants anything done, look after her, will you?”

It wasn’t, thought Cordelia, an auspicious introduction. The woman neither smiled nor spoke, but Cordelia didn’t feel that the steady gaze which met her own held any resentment.
It didn’t even hold curiosity. She was a heavily busted, rather sturdy woman with a face that looked older than her body, and with remarkably elegant legs. Their shape was enhanced by very fine stockings and high-heeled court shoes, an incongruous touch of vanity which emphasized the plainness of the high-necked black dress, its only ornament a gold cross on a chain. Her dark hair, parted in the middle and drawn back into a bun at the nape of the neck, was already streaked with grey and there were lines deep as clefts across the forehead and at the ends of the wide mouth. It was a strong, secretive face, not, Cordelia thought, the face of a woman willingly subservient.

When she had disappeared into the bathroom, Clarissa said: “I suppose we’ll have to talk, but it can’t be now. Munter has set lunch in the dining room. It’s ridiculous on a day like this. We ought to be in the sun. I’ve told him that we shall eat on the terrace, but that means he’ll see that we don’t get it until one-thirty so we may as well make a quick tour of the castle. Is your room comfortable?”

“Very, thank you.”

“I suppose I’d better give you some letters to type just to allay suspicion. There are one or two that need answering. You may as well do some work while you’re here. You can type, I suppose?”

“Yes, I can type. But that’s not why I’m here.”

“I know why you’re here. I was the one who wanted you. And I still want you. But we’ll talk about that tonight. There won’t be a chance until then. Charles Cottringham and the other principals are coming across after lunch for a run-through of one or two scenes and they won’t be gone until after tea. You’ve met my stepson haven’t you, Simon Lessing?”

“Yes, we were introduced on the boat.”

“Find him, will you, and tell him there’s time for him to have a swim before lunch. There’s no point in his trailing round the castle with us. You’ll probably find him hiding in his room. It’s two down from your own.”

Cordelia thought that the message could more suitably have come from Clarissa. But she reminded herself that she was supposed to be a secretary-companion, whatever that meant, and that the job probably included running errands. She knocked on Simon’s door. He didn’t call out but, after what seemed an inordinate delay, the door slowly opened and his apprehensive face appeared. He blushed when he saw who it was. She gave him Clarissa’s message, suitably edited, and he managed a smile and a whispered, “Thank you” before quickly closing the door. Cordelia felt rather sorry for him. It couldn’t be altogether easy, having Clarissa as a stepmother. She wasn’t sure that it would be any easier having her as a client. For the first time she felt some of her euphoria drain away. The castle and the island were even lovelier than she had pictured. The weather was glorious and no change threatened in this balmy resurgence of summer. It promised to be a weekend of comfort, even of luxury. And, above all, the envelope in her pocket confirmed that the job was real, that she would pit her brain and her wits against a human adversary at last. Why then should she have to struggle against a sudden and overwhelming conviction that her task was doomed to disaster?

“And now,” announced Clarissa leading the way down the staircase and across the great hall, “we’ll end with a visit to Ambrose’s private chamber of horrors.”

The tour of the castle had been hurried and incomplete. Cordelia sensed that the sun-warmed terrace beckoned and that the thoughts of the party were less on Ambrose’s treasures than on their pre-luncheon sherry. But there were treasures, and she promised herself that if she had the chance she would enjoy later and at leisure what was a small but comprehensive museum of the artistic achievements and spirit of Victoria’s long reign. The tour had been too rushed. Her mind was a confusion of form and colour; porcelain, pictures, glass and silver jostled for place: pottery exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, jasper, Grecian ware, terracotta, majolica; cabinets of painted Wedgwood dishes and delicate pâte-surpâte made by M.–L. Solon for Minton; part of a Coalport dinner service presented by Queen Victoria to the Emperor of Russia and decorated with English and Russian Orders surrounding the Russian royal crown and eagles.

Clarissa had floated on ahead waving her arms and producing a stream of doubtfully accurate information. Ivo had lingered when he was allowed to and had said little. Roma stumped behind them with an expression of careful uninterest and from time to time made an acid comment about the misery and exploitation of the poor represented by these glittering monuments to wealth and privilege. Cordelia felt some sympathy with her. Sister Magdalen, who had taught nineteenth-century history at the Convent, hadn’t shared the views of some of the sisters that since the pleasures of the world were to be rejected so might some of its vicarious sorrows, and had attempted to instil a social sense into her privileged pupils. Cordelia couldn’t see a picture of that pudding-faced matriarch with her plain, discontented-looking children around her without seeing also the wan, aching-eyed seamstresses working their eighteen-hour day, the factory children half asleep at their looms, the bobbin lace-makers bent double over their cushions, and the steaming tenements of the East End.

Cordelia had found more to interest her than to admire in Ambrose’s collection of pictures. Everything that she most disliked in high Victorian art was here, the strained eroticism, the careful naturalism which had nothing to do with nature, the vapid anecdotal pictures and the debased religiosity. But he did have a Sickert and a Whistler. As they passed along the gallery Roma said to her: “There’s a William Dyce in my room called
The Shell Gatherers
. Not badly painted, rather good, in fact. A crinolined group of ladies examining their finds on a Kentish beach. But what’s the reality? A group of overfed, overclad, bored and sexually frustrated upper-class females with nothing to do with their time but collect shells to make their useless shell boxes, paint insipid watercolours, entertain the gentlemen after dinner at
the pianoforte, and wait for a man to give status and purpose to their lives.”

It was while she and Roma were standing in front of a Holman Hunt, neither of them finding anything to say, that Ambrose had come up to them.

“Not perhaps one of his best. The Victorians may have got their money from the dark satanic mills but they had a passionate craving for beauty. It was their tragedy that, unlike us, they understood only too well how far they fell short of achieving it.”

The tour was now almost at an end. Clarissa led them down a tiled passageway to Ambrose’s business room. Here, apparently, was the promised Chamber of Horrors.

It was a smaller room than most in the castle and looked out over the lawn which faced the eastern entrance. One wall was hung with a framed collection of Victorian popular gallows literature, the crudely printed and illustrated broadsheets which were sold to the mob after a notable trial or execution. Roma seemed particularly interested in them. Murderers, looking remarkably slim and elegant in their breeches, sat penning their last confessions under the high barred window of the condemned cell, listened in the chapel at Newgate to their last sermons with their coffins placed at hand, or drooped from the rope end as the robed Chaplain stood, his book in hand. Cordelia disliked the pictures of hanging and moved to join Ambrose and Ivo who were examining a wall shelf of Staffordshire figures. Ambrose identified his favourites.

“Meet my notorious murderers and murderesses. That pair are the infamous Maria and Frederick Manning, hanged in November 1847 in front of Horsemongers Lane Gaol before a riotous crowd of fifty thousand. Charles Dickens saw the execution and he wrote afterwards that the behaviour of the crowd was so indescribable that he thought he was living in a
city of devils. Maria wore black satin for her part in the entertainment, a choice which did absolutely nothing for its subsequent fashionable appeal. The gentleman appropriately clad in a shooting jacket is William Corder aiming his pistol at poor Maria Marten. Notice the Red Barn in the background. He might have got away with it if her mother hadn’t repeatedly dreamed that her daughter’s body was buried there. He was hanged at Bury St. Edmunds in 1828, also in front of a large and appreciative audience. The lady next to him in the bonnet and carrying a black bag is Kate Webster. The bag contains the head of her mistress whom she beat to death, cut into pieces and boiled in the kitchen boiler. She is said to have gone round the local shops offering cheap dripping for sale. She was turned off, as they used to say, in July 1879.”

Leaving the business room, they paused at two elegant rosewood display cases which stood one each side of the door. The left-hand one contained a clutter of small objects which were all neatly labelled: a doll and a solitaire set with small coloured marbles, both of which had belonged to the Queen as a child; a fan; early Christmas cards; scent bottles in crystal, silver gilt and enamel; and a collection of small silver objects, waist hook, chatelaine, prayer-book and posy-holder. But it was the right-hand case which drew their eyes. Here were less agreeable mementos, an extension of Ambrose’s museum of crime. He explained:

“That tag end of rope is part of the executioner’s rope which hanged Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner, in November 1892. The stained linen nightdress with the
broderie anglaise
frills was worn by Constance Kent. It’s not the nightdress she had on when she slit the throat of her small stepbrother but it has a certain interest all the same. That pair of handcuffs with the key were used on young
Courvoisier who murdered his master, Lord William Russell, in 1840. The spectacles are a pair which belonged to Dr. Crippen. As he was hanged in November 1910 he’s really nine years out of my period but I couldn’t resist them.”

Ivo asked, “And the marble of a baby’s arm?”

“That hasn’t any criminal interest as far as I know. It should be in Memento Mori or in the other cabinet but I hadn’t time to rearrange the exhibits. But it doesn’t look out of place among the props of murder. The man who sold it to me would approve. He told me that he kept imagining that the limb was oozing blood.”

Clarissa hadn’t spoken and, glancing at her, Cordelia saw that her eyes were fixed on the marble with a mixture of fear and revulsion which none of the other exhibits had evoked. The arm, a chubby replica in white marble, lay on a purple cushion bound with cord. Cordelia herself thought it an unpleasant object, sentimental and morbid, useless and undecorative, and to that extent not untypical of the minor art of its age. Clarissa said: “But it’s perfectly hateful! It’s disgusting! Where on earth did you pick it up, Ambrose?”

“In London. A man I know. It may be the only extant copy of one of the limbs of the royal children made for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, said to be by Mary Thornycroft. This one could be poor Pussy, the Princess Royal. It’s either that or a memorial piece. And if you dislike it, Clarissa, you should see the Osborne collection. They look like the remnants of a holocaust, as if the Prince Consort had descended on the royal nursery with a machete, as he may well have been tempted to do, poor man.”

Clarissa said: “It’s repulsive! What on earth possessed you, Ambrose? Get rid of it.”

“Certainly not. It may be unique. I regard it as an interesting addition to my minor Victoriana.”

Roma said: “I’ve seen the Osborne pieces. I find them repulsive too. But they throw an interesting light on the Victorian mind, the Queen’s in particular.”

“Well, this throws an interesting light on Ambrose’s mind.”

Ivo said quietly: “As a piece of marble, it’s rather well done. It’s the association you find unpleasant, perhaps. The death or mutilation of a child is always distressing, don’t you think, Clarissa?”

But Clarissa appeared not to have heard. She turned away and said: “For God’s sake don’t start arguing about it. Just get rid of it, Ambrose. And now I need a drink and my lunch.”