Cavalier Case (20 page)

"No, no, we can't do that. It didn't happen like that." But Zena's tone was patient as to an over-eager child. "Decimus!" she went on. "Here! So it was true. He did love her. That awful red-haired trollop."

"All we know so far," corrected Dave, "is that she loved him. He had no say in this body-snatching bit, did he?" Zena paid no attention.

"This changes my whole book, my whole approach," Zena went on dreamily. "
A Study in Love and Honour
," she murmured, "that was going to be the sub-title of my biography—but it would have rather a different connotation, wouldn't it, if all the time Decimus was betraying Olivia, as the gossips suggested ..." Zena looked round, as though expecting to see John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys, or some other seventeenth-century gossip writer instead of two twentieth-century families—her own and the Smiths. "The three of them, his death, Isabella's daring in taking the body—if true ... I have to say that it would all make the most wonderful story . . . After all, historical fiction can do things . . . Love and Honour," she murmured again. To Jemima, it already sounded like the title of Zena Meredith's next historical novel.

"I saw this mini-series called something like that. It was great. She was an aristocrat in the French Revolution and he was the local guillotiner—sent to chop off her head, but instead he fell in love ..." That was Nell. She was interrupted by Dave at his most cheerful,

"Plenty of good fiction in history—" he began. But this time he had gone altogether too far.

Not in my history. And in
my
fiction, there's plenty of good history as well." Zena's sharpest tone had returned. The temporary alliance was over.

As Jemima tossed and turned—and maybe slept fitfully—the creaking silence of Lackland Court was disturbed by more than one door being gently eased open. The first door was that of Nell Meredith on the upper floor and she was able to open it very quietly since it was not entirely closed when she went to bed.

Nell was frightened. She thought that after all it was no fun being at Lackland Court for all its grandeur, now that Cousin Tommy and Haygarth were both dead. Daddy was always away and anyway Daddy—but that was a subject she didn't want to think about. Daddy not loving her, Daddy
never
loving her, Daddy loving the others, especially Dessie. And the other thing, the horrible thing. Better after all to get back to Mum and home. Mum was really stupid the way she behaved to Daddy, even Nell could see that, all those ghastly scenes, who needed it? Not Daddy. But at least Mum wasn't frightening.  Even if girls at school would laugh at it, you could feel safe in that awful flat with its dreadful bunnies and whatever. No one would get you there.

At Lackland Court Nell no longer felt safe. She was frightened that someone was trying to get her as they had got Haygarth. Not the ghost—Nell no longer believed in the ghost as a ghost and wished she had not spouted all that silly childish rubbish to that ghastly woman from the
Daily Clueless
, everyone would tease her about it next term in school. (Everyone at school read Little Mary's column in the
Clueless
even if they read nothing else their whole lives.)

The ghost was a person—a person who might kill you if they knew what you knew.

Nell also wished she had never talked to Jemima Shore Investigator about her suspicions. That too could be dangerous. She hadn't said very much, had she? She couldn't have. Because she hadn't realised then what she now realised ... it was the costume actually. That odd costume she had found, the Cavalier costume which shouldnt have been there.

At least she hadn't, strictly speaking, found it, because it wasn't strictly speaking hidden, it was just in among all the other costumes, which was quite a brilliant way of hiding it.

And Nell wasn't supposed to be checking through all the costumes either, which is why she had to do it secretly, late at night, knowing where the baskets were. The reason she did it, (she had to do it secretly because no one would understand, no one ever did, just a boring cry of "Oh Nell, you look fine"), she did it because her costume as Antony Decimus, the young Cavalier, was just embarrassing it was so tight across her chest and showing all her legs. She hated them ever since she had overheard Daddy, Daddy! the traitor, horrible, treacherous Daddy, saying one night to Cousin Marcus, even more horrible Cousin Marcus, in the dining room when she was prowling about, "What a pity that my eldest daughter hasn't got her mother's legs! The one good thing you could say about Babs, she did have the most fantastically sexy legs. And Nell hasn't inherited them." That was Daddy.

"Poor Little Nell. I can never understand why girls like that will wear mini-skirts. It looks grotesque." That was Cousin Marcus.

So Nell was looking for another costume, maybe she would even decide to be a girl after all, not a boy, depending what was available, make boring Decimus have a daughter, not a son—why not? Dave Smith was making it all up anyway, the boy she was supposed to play had been a baby—and she found the list from Leaviss, the costumiers. And then there was this strange costume not on the list. And she started to try it on. And she was very surprised by something. And the boots. The boots really clinched it. And then, suddenly, the
other
thing fitted, the thing she told Jemima, everything fitted. This evening. Nell thought about everything that happened. Everything she knew. And Nell became very frightened.

She was going to escape, go back to Mum, she had some money, she had been given money for the fete and luckily had had no time to spend it, what with all the excitement. She would get out of the house as quietly as possible, hitchhike to London (or even perhaps to Taynford station for an early train), one way or another get to Mum's flat, and be
safe
.

"Wait," thought Nell. "I know what I'll do. I'll leave a note. Yes I will. That makes it even safer. Something about being homesick and needing to get back to Mum. Not that anyone cares
what
I do, but sooner or later, they'll find it. That way the
person
won't suspect—" She wrote the note in the laborious childish handwriting which, like many of Nell's characteristics, was the despair of her expensive school, and fastened it to her pillow with a safety pin, rummaged out from among her somewhat tattered wardrobe. Then she took off her torn cotton nightie and put on a pair of jeans.

Nell went carefully down the first flight of stairs from the top floor, something she had practised, although luckily boring bossy Nuala was away. Jemima, still wooing sleep and half-embraced by it, did not hear her.

The person who was the ghost did hear her. That was the second door which opened at Lackland Court that night. The person who was the ghost decided to follow Little Nell.

"I should go straight out, get away," thought Nell to herself. "Make a dash for it." But already her courage was waning just a little—not because of the darkened house, so familiar to her from her nighttime prowlings, but because of the whole idea of leaving Lackland Court, losing it forever and going back to boring old Mum. As her courage waned, so commonsense (or was it?) returned. What she suspected, had suddenly
known
, could it be true?

It was at this point that Nell decided to have just one more look at the Cavalier costume . . . Just to make sure. She passed, a small silent wraith, into the deserted back quarters of the house.

At a discreet distance, the person who was the ghost (but very far, at present, from being dressed as such) went after her.

It was some time after that, that Jemima, awake once more and furious with her wakefulness, decided to act on her own kind of impulse. It was perhaps a decision she would not have made had it not been for insomnia
and
witnessing Dan's return
and
suddenly thinking all over again about Cass, which she hardly wanted to do, better to brood about Lady Isabella Clare, best of all to let thoughts of investigation take over.

She got out of bed—unlike the chaste teenager Nell, Jemima always slept naked—and pulled on the baggy navy blue cotton jumper and white knee-length Bermuda shorts which she had brought to play tennis in the next day on the old Lackland grass court (shortly to be swept away). It was her intention to make her way up onto the roof. The air was still balmy as it had been at the fete—and the Home Secretary had acted the genial Duncan. 

Earlier that evening Jemima had been in the Long Gallery with Zena and Marcus while Charlotte put the over-excited children to bed—what ghouls children were! Here were three blond cherubs gloating over the discovery of a skeleton. Young Penny Smith, that further member of the egregious tribe, who sometimes acted as nursemaid in Nuala's absence, had not turned up to help her. Penny had sent instead a message via yet another even younger Smith that the news about the discovery of the body—
sic
—had greatly upset her, and under the circumstances she would be staying home with her Mum instead of spending the night alone—
sic
once more—at Lackland Court.

This message did at least have the effect of uniting all the Merediths present in a universal condemnation of all the Smiths, Zena concentrating on Dave (their brief alliance quite forgotten), Charlotte on the defaulting Penny, and Marcus, for some reason, reserving his ire for Cathy the girl gardener.

"We should really look at the Smith situation," he said at one point. I believe their influence in the village is considerable, and not necessarily for the good. That's the trouble with a family which doesn't have family values." Jemima thought privately that the Smiths probably
did
have family values—they certainly displayed family unity—but they were unfortunately just not the kind of family values Marcus Meredith had in mind.

Anyway," concluded Marcus rather huffily, "I will not have Cathy Smith calling me Marcus. I will not have it." He turned away and,kneeling down, started feeling for the key to the spiral staircase which led to the roof. His physical deformity, which he concealed so well in his well-cut conventional suits, was startlingly apparent in this position. At their feet, he might have been some latterday Quasimodo. For the first time—it was a distasteful thought—Jemima wondered how much of Zena's rejection of Marcus was due to sheer lack of physical attraction. One did not have to delve into the depths of incest to realize that Zena had been brought up with a paradigm of the healthy athletic male before her eyes in the shape of her brother. Maybe poor Marcus—as he was so often described—had never quite measured up?

Then Jemima noted exactly where Marcus found the key—by the skirting under one of the imposing floor-length portraits of bygone Merediths. It was in fact a portrait of the Chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Meredith, the presumed author of "
Heaven's True Mourning
." She also noted exactly where Marcus put the key back, a moment later, having changed his mind about an expedition to the roof. "Ever since poor old Havgarth took his header, one hasn't felt quite the same about the roof"

"Oh Marcus, you're so pompous!" exclaimed Zena in that tone, half-way between irritation and affection, which she seemed to reserve for her cousin. At the same time she shot Jemima a questioning glance as though to say: Was it a header? Did he take it? In short, to remind her of her mission.

"I believe Marcus used to rather fancy Cathy," put in Charlotte brightly. "There was a time when he always used to be lurking about the gardens. When she first started here."

"What were you after, Markie?" went on Zena in her teasing voice. "Conversations about old-fashioned roses? Or was it family values? 

All the same, despite the teasing, Jemima had the impression that, perversely, Zena was just a little bit annoyed. In a rather whey-faced style, Cathy Smith was really quite pretty. Zena might not find Marcus' devotion totally acceptable—because she did not fancy him—but she was not necessarily prepared to let him go. For some reason Jemima's mind leapt to her conversation with Marcus in Taynford: how he had himself "madly fancied" Babs in the old days, and how it was Zena who had insisted on Dan marrying her: "I have to say she probably thought Babs wouldn't be a rival." Maybe Zena, consciously or unconsciously, had had more than one motive in bringing about the match: no rival with brother Dan—and an end to the possibility of Marcus going after her.

What a contradictory character Zena was! Her relationship with her family veered from the independence which made her appeal for an investigation "whatever you find," to an obsession with them which focussed so many of her thoughts—perhaps too many—on her brother and involved her in an endless but presumably unconsummated relationship with her own first cousin. Perhaps it was an obsession with her own family history which was at the root of the whole thing—she could not or did not want to get away from these Merediths, then or now.

At this point Jemima, feeling her way through the darkened gallery, was taking, had she but known it, much the same route that the ghost used to take in the old days, and was even employing the same method of guidance by counting off the vast pictures. (Although unlike the ghost, Jemima forgot to allow for the heavy oak chest in mid-wall and bumped into it. Again unlike the ghost, Jemima had paused to admire the portrait of Decimus, lit up at the head of the stairs; she gave the dog in the picture a firm look.) It was by counting and calculating that Jemima finally reached the significant portrait of the Rev. Thomas Meredith, as lugubrious and correct in his white bands and long dark robe as Marcus Meredith M.P. ever was in his twentieth-century dark suit. She found the key quite easily. But the door was not in fact locked: Marcus, riled by the thought of Cathy Smith, must have forgotten to lock it before replacing the key.

The gallery seemed quite eerily dark to Jemima because the moon had risen sometime after she had gone to bed. The garden outside lay bathed in cold white light, enormous shapes of hedges and topiary seen quite clearly, while inside the gallery, in contrast, it was difficult to discern anything. It was also very warm. These long windows were evidently never opened. The moon must be right above the house, since no shafts of silver were streaming in through the long windows to bisect the floor.