Cavalier Case (27 page)

"For my part, I thought that maybe Marcus—" Jemima admitted. "You see, the costume was the clue. Charlotte's tiny child-sized costume. The costume that would only fit her. Then there were the boots, the boots with their rubber soles, they were absolutely tiny too. Nell found Charlotte's costume and boots rummaging about in the back quarters; she was always terribly inquisitive about everything going on in her home that was not quite her home. She put various things together—including the familiar smell of the ghost leaning over her at night. The costume had the same smell of course. But then she got muddled. Do you realise it was the fact you both wear Diorissimo which actually muddled her? She had a very clear sense of a person, as one does, from the characteristic smell, except it was two people! I, of course, flirted with the idea of Marcus and his terribly strong hair lotion. Or even her father's Eau Sauvage."

"How strange! Do you know why we both wear it? Dan gave it to us both for Christmas. Lazy devil. Couldn't even think up two different brands of scent. Or maybe Alix bought it in the first place. I shall never wear it again," Zena ended firmly. "Never."

She went on: "Poor Marcus..." As usual the epithet "poor" was applied to her cousin. "I hardly think he's capable of a plan like that. And all for Dan's financial benefit too! He might do it for the good of the country or something ridiculously pompous like that. But not for the good of the family. Not enough love and too much honour, if you like." Zena seemed to be alluding to the family motto. She added: "He's terribly upright. Poor Marcus."

It was a sad epitaph on the cousin who had loved Zena so devotedly for so long, thought Jemima, to have a label of "terribly upright" placed upon him in terms of mild pity. She returned to the Cavalier Case.

"It was the motive which was missing with Marcus, however much he disapproved of your drunken old cousin, and it was the motive which finally gave me the answer. What people will do for love . . . more than they will ever do for themselves . . . Dan, whatever he had to gain, whatever ruthlessness he may display on the tennis court, would never finally have carried out such a plan for himself. That's where the discovery of the skeleton jolted me into a kind of vague recognition of the answer; what the beautiful pleasure-loving Lady Isabella did for love of Decimus, the midnight capture of his body; what submissive Charlotte did for love of Dan, the saving of his fortunes, as she saw it. Alix might play tennis with him—she
killed
for him." 

Jemima remembered her conversation with Cherry which had come back to her that night as she ran her mental "film": as Cherry happily propounded a combination of Zena and Charlotte, it was Jemima who had replied quite casually: "Oh no, Charlotte is an unreconstructed woman. She would do anything for Dan." And she had.

Jemima then related the rest of her guesses and conclusions to Zena—feeling that she must at least tell the whole story to one Meredith, a story she had already outlined (in all but that one particular about Dan) to the police. She told her, for example, how the interview with Babs had given her in the end one interesting bit of information, way beyond Babs' own malice concerning Charlotte and her reiterated scorn for Charlotte's "anything-to-please attitude." How Charlotte had told Dan her baby was going to be a boy—but it turned out not to be true (that baby was Louisa). So Charlotte, in her own way, could be quite manipulative if she wanted something badly enough.

Then Nell had revealed that Charlotte had quite often visited Lackland Court in the lifetime of the old Lord even if she wasn't noticeably welcome, at least according to Nell. "No brats" had been the ukase of Cousin Tommy and Charlotte had obeyed it: so there were other times when she arrived, free and alone. It must have been Charlotte's crucial secret night visit, the entrapment of Cousin Tommy, which had somehow become known or suspected by Haygarth after his death. Had Haygarth communicated his suspicions to Charlotte herself? That would never be known for sure. What was known for sure was that Charlotte had boldy decided that he was too dangerous to live.

"And she
was
bold, unbelievably bold," concluded Jemima. "I suppose one might even admire her. Except—"

"She fooled us all. Little Charlotte the wonderful manager. She was a wonderful manager, in a sense, right up till the end. The decision to go for Nell was a desperate one. But I suppose by that time—" And Zena in the same bleak voice quoted Macbeth: "I am in blood stepped in so far..." She added: "I believe that happens to people. They don't know when to stop."

"Even then she was lucky. Nell getting concussion, not remembering. She hit her with a croquet mallet, threw the head in the river the next day. After Charlotte told this to the police, they dredged it out. But of course she couldn't count on Nell not remembering forever. Remember how Charlotte insisted on sitting by Nell's bedside when she was unconscious? That must have been fairly traumatic for her. Nell must have been living on borrowed time." They neither of them wished to pursue the prospect of Nell's fate if she had recognised Charlotte as her attacker under less public circumstances. Fortunately the return of Rupert Durham, lollopping across the green sward of the cloisters (something strictly forbidden), interrupted them. Beneath his horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes flashed with excitement; his wild curly hair seemed to be animated by its own similarly enthusiastic electricity.

"By God, Becky, I feel like Professor Higgins. He's got it. I think he's got it."

"Darling, got what?" Zena, Jemima noticed, like all Rupert's inamoratas, had learned to live with his purely peripheral hold of people's actual Christian names. She leapt up, murky details of the Cavalier Case temporarily forgotten.

"Come on—" Rupert looked at her. "Olivia." (Now that was rather a nice mistake.) "You're just the one I need. The merry old Dean has just shown me a manuscript, what he called something of local interest, which turned up with an antiquarian bookseller in London, and has been offered back to the Cathedral—for a price. The idea is that since that absurdly rich Manfred woman bought the Taynford Globe and gave it back, she might buy anything for anyone in these parts. I need your expert eye. I've got a hunch about the handwriting."

Her expert eye? Jemima was astonished. Was this Rupert in the new guise of flatterer? For what could Zena, for all her admirable enthusiasm for history, contribute that Dr. Rupert Durham of Casey College, Cambridge, could not? But the answer was really very simple. The manuscript, so-called, was actually a holograph version of "
Heaven's True Mourning
"; and what Rupert needed to know from Zena was whether she recognised the handwriting. Since neither Zena nor Rupert returned to find Jemima on this occasion, leaving her first to attend evensong in the Cathedral—"Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," this time sung as it were in earnest—and then to drive back alone to London (where she had as a matter of fact a late-night date), it was two days later before a hectically excited Zena supplied her with the answer. And then the information came via a panted message on her machine.

"Olivia!" was the first word she heard: "It was Olivia all the time. Do you know, I always had a feeling . . . The style! It had to be a woman. So vivid. Quite unlike the sermons of that boring Chaplain." The phrases tumbled out.

Only by degrees did Jemima understand what Zena was telling her: that the original manuscript of "
Heaven's True Mourning
" had not only emerged from whatever source to which it had been covertly sold off by Cousin Tommy, but had also turned out to be written by Olivia Lackland herself. Not by the (male) Chaplain, as had been assumed by so many (male) scholars, but by that learned (female) scholar Olivia Viscountess Lackland, giving her own version of the family history. Including all those lavish tributes to her own modesty and virtue. Like Charlotte Lackland, there had been more to the submissive Olivia than met the eye. It was Zena who had instantly recognised the handwriting: that writing "exceeding good and fair for one who was the weaker vessel" which even Clarendon had praised.

"No wonder she never mentioned Lady Isabella," the message ended. "So that's one more mystery solved. Not such a boring wife after all," added Olivia's direct descendant.

There was only one other message on her machine, and that was from Rupert Durham.

"Zena, my love," it began—well, perhaps that was a pardonable mistake under the circumstances. "I thought I might take back possession of my portrait. You see, Olivia—no Zena" (was he learning?) "has taken rather a fancy to sleeping underneath its baleful glance. I hope you don't mind."

Jemima, thinking it over, found that she didn't mind. And when she learnt that the obliging Lady Manfred was indeed buying back the "
Heaven's True Mourning
" manuscript—no questions asked of the bookseller—and presenting it to the Lackland Court library, she felt genuinely happy. One day "
Heaven's True Mourning
" might even be edited by Rupert Durham, with a memoir of Olivia by Zena Meredith attached. This would be her first modest venture into non-fiction, in place of that biography of Decimus which was now forever abandoned in favour of yet another Zena Meredith historical novel,
The Swan and the Cavalier
. The unexpected alliance of Rupert and Zena, the historian and the historical novelist, Jemima decided, was the one positive result to come out of the Cavalier Case. She decided to tell Cherry that she had been quite wrong about Zena: it wasn't so much a man she needed as a historian! Rupert would at last woo Zena away from her claustrophobic family and when Rupert finally went on his way—as he always did—it was to be hoped that Zena would be independent enough not to return.

Cass rang up once more and he too left a message. But that was sometime later after Charlotte's trial and prison sentence—but on a charge of manslaughter. Mike Spain had been right: the full confession of Lady Lackland had been "too good to last." The expert barrister that Dan Lackland had honourably hired for his wife (by now his ex-wife) had made short work of such a suspect document in the hands of the police. Charlotte had retracted her confession entirely, on the grounds that she had been mad with sorrow at the time over the pregnancy of her husband's mistress and hardly known what she was saying. The impossibility of proving the death of the old Lord—for which there was no evidence except her confession—and the undoubted difficulty of proving the case regarding the butler led to some hard bargaining behind the scenes.

In all of this the evidence of Nell Meredith was of course crucial. On the one hand Nell would have to give evidence about her stepmother's attack, why she had been attacked, and also concerning those nocturnal ramblings of the "Cavalier Ghost." On the other hand, Nell was already a suspect witness with her flights of fancy concerning phantom Cavaliers—and nobody in the Meredith family, including for once her father and her mother in agreement, wanted her further mixed up in such a distressing event.

In the end Charlotte pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Haygarth, who had, it was revealed by her defence, plunged to his death accidentally in the dark. In Dan's absence, Charlotte, hearing a noise on the roof, had gone to investigate. Each had believed the other to be an intruder. They had struggled. Somehow Haygarth had fallen. Charlotte had not previously owned up to this, fearing to inculpate herself. It was a thin enough story (why had she not called Marcus, for example?) but the police, aware of the pitfalls of withdrawn confessions, did not press their case further. And the jury, much moved by Charlotte's piteous plight, now that she was divorced and abandoned, believed her. She did, after all, cut a small, frail, and infinitely vulnerable figure in the dock.

Cass' message concerned Charlotte's conviction. Like the jury, he seemed to feel sorry for her. But since there was one thing that Jemima had wanted to tell Cass one day, she rang him back.

"You know, Cass, in the end I saw the ghost," she said. "Isn't it strange? I don't expect you to believe me and it's not important whether you do or not. You see that last terrible night, just before the storm broke, I actually caught sight of the Decimus Ghost going down the staircase. Was it looking for the portrait which had been moved after centuries? Perhaps—but that's pure speculation. My sighting the ghost isn't speculation.

"How do I know?" she went on. "Because at first I thought it was Zena Meredith in her Decimus costume and I was rather surprised to see her, but I had, shall we say, other things on my mind. Afterwards I realised that Zena had unquestionably been on her horse outside, witnessed by the whole audience, at that point. She never went upstairs at all. And then there was the dog. That was the strangest thing of all. Kylie, the dog who had been hired to accompany Zena, bolted at the first sound of gunfire—so much for its training. But she had another dog with her—wait, I've just remembered this—she was holding its collar in her right hand, but Zena is left-handed. This was quite a different animal—much bigger, for one thing—and it was actually identical to the dog in the portrait. The Lackland portrait and my portrait. My portrait as was. Rupert Durham asked for it back. He's living with Zena Meredith now, you know: a Cavalier affair.
And
he's got that Dave Smith working for him on his programme: a thoroughly Cavalier affair."

"What rot!" Cass sounded quite angry; it was as though his jealousy for the poet who had captured Jemima's romantic fancy was still active. "Why can't you leave the subject of that phantom fellow alone, an intelligent woman like you? At least his picture is no longer overlooking your bed. That's good news."

"No one is overlooking my bed," replied Jemima carefully.

"I'm glad to hear it." Cass sounded relieved. He should not have done so. As a matter of fact there had been a profound and happy change in Jemima's personal life quite recently, one of those rapid transformations which can occur from time to time in the lives of persons who are young, urban and single. Oddly enough it had happened at one of Cy Fredericks' dinner parties, not normally famous for engendering romance among their participants—except of course where Cy himself was concerned.