The American Boy (29 page)

He ran on in a similar vein for much of the day. There came a moment when Miss Carswall and Mrs Frant were out of the room; I was waiting for the boys to bring down their books; and Mr Carswall was enlarging upon his plans for the dinner party to Mrs Lee. Mrs Lee was his ideal interlocutor for she rarely said anything of significance but knew to perfection when to insert into the flow of someone else's words those little phrases of assent and interest that are so agreeable and encouraging to the other party.

“I have half a mind to invite Mrs Johnson, too,” Carswall said in his harsh, carrying voice. “After all, it was she who was kind to Edgar. It would be a very proper attention, too: she is a cousin of the Ruispidges, as well as a neighbour. And it would look most odd if we did not ask her, particularly if she is still staying at Clearland.”

Mrs Lee cleared her throat loudly, an action so unusually emphatic that he stared at her in surprise. “I do not know whether you are aware of a certain unhappy circumstance in Mrs Johnson's early life, sir,” she said in a low tone. “It might be prudent to consider the wisdom of such an invitation very carefully.”

“What? Speak plainly, madam. I cannot understand you if you talk in riddles.”

Mrs Lee drew back in her chair, and the features of her face trembled. But her voice was perfectly steady, though even quieter than before, so quiet I had to strain to hear it: “You must be the best judge, sir. It was merely that I wondered whether you were aware that, before Mrs Johnson's marriage, there was – or rather it was believed that there was – what they call an understanding between her and Mr Henry Frant.”

Mr Noak was due to arrive on Monday, the 3rd January. The Ruispidges had been invited to dinner the following day. The weather continued very cold – as I have mentioned, it was an exceptionally cold winter that year.

I cannot say that we were a cheerful household. By his very nature, Mr Carswall engendered a domestic strain that affected us all, even the boys, even the servants. Now, after the exchange I had overheard in the library, I knew of another, more specific source of discord. I watched and said nothing. I noted that Mrs Frant avoided an open breach with Mr Carswall but rarely spoke to him or allowed herself to be alone with him. Once I glimpsed an expression of despair on her face when I came across her walking in the garden and believing herself unobserved. One evening I heard the sound of sobbing as I passed her door.

The boys and I were happiest outside. Sometimes we went down to the lake and skated on the ice. I had grown up in the Fens, where the combination of cold winters and an inexhaustible supply of water made skating an acquirement one picked up almost as soon as the ability to walk. The boys lacked this early training, and gave me undeserved credit for my skill on the ice.

One afternoon I saw Miss Carswall and Mrs Frant watching us from the bank. At the time I was skating slowly on the far side of the lake, with a boy attached to either hand. I released Edgar, in order to raise my hat to the ladies. His arms flailed, his body twisted to and fro, but he kept his balance. Vanity prompted me to abandon my charges, and to skate across the lake at speed, and with many graceful pirouettes, on the spurious errand of discovering whether there was anything we might do for our visitors.

“How I envy you,” Mrs Frant said with unusual animation. “To travel so quickly, to be so free.”

“I'm sure it is capital exercise,” put in Miss Carswall. “Look at the boys – their cheeks are as red as pippins.”

“Better than dancing, even,” Mrs Frant continued. “It must be like gliding through another element, like flying.”

“I am sure there are more skates at the house,” Miss Carswall said. “I wonder if we might find pairs that would fit us.”

Her cousin gave a little shudder.

“You need not look like that,” Miss Carswall said with a laugh. “One cannot always have new things. Besides, I believe Mr Cranmere's family were all excessively well bred.”

As she spoke, she twisted her face into a painfully genteel expression. Mrs Frant and I burst out laughing.

“But how would we learn?” Mrs Frant objected. “It must be very difficult.”

“We might have a chair brought down, if you wished,” I suggested. “Then I could push you on it across the ice.”

“But I do not want to be pushed,” she said with a smile. “I want to skate by myself. I'm sure my cousin does, too.”

“Then if you would permit me, I could teach you, as I have been teaching the boys.” I looked from one to the other. “Though it is largely a matter of teaching oneself. The principal difficulty at the beginning is that of retaining one's balance. Once one has the trick of that, the rest will follow.”

As if to illustrate my point, the boys were now zigzagging across the frozen water towards us. Their progress was slow, and no one would have called it elegant, but progress it was.

Miss Carswall took a gloved hand from her muff and laid it on her cousin's sleeve. “Oh, pray let us try it, Sophie. I am sure the boys and Mr Shield will make sure we come to no harm.”

The ladies' skating lessons began that very afternoon. Chivalry dictated that I should take them by the hand, just as I had the boys, one on my left, one on my right. There we were in the very dry, very cold air, with no sound but the hissing and scraping of the blades beneath us, the panting of our breath and the occasional bursts of laughter. Physical exertion can act as a form of intoxication, as can excitement; and sometimes it seemed to me that I was doubly drunk.

Mrs Frant fell twice, Miss Carswall five times. In order to help a lady up, I had to put my arm around her, to feel her weight. I cannot deny that I enjoyed these upsets, and I suspect that Miss Carswall fell more often than she needed. In sum, the hours we spent together on the ice were peculiarly intimate – not indecorous, but on the other hand not something that was discussed in Mr Carswall's hearing.

In the intervals of skating, the boys continued their hunt for the monks' treasure. They ranged over the park, exploring every nook and cranny they could find. They tried excavation in one of the kitchen gardens but the head gardener did not share their antiquarian enthusiasm and in any case the ground was too hard for their spades.

The treasure hunters had high hopes of a shell grotto on the shore of the lake. It was in the form of a short, barrel-vaulted tunnel ending in an apse, where stood a ghostly statue of Aphrodite. Moisture dripped through the roof and glittered on the shells that studded the interior. When one held up a lantern, it was as though one confronted a beautiful and almost naked woman in a cold cave of sparkling diamonds. The boys' hopes were dashed when Mr Carswall, overhearing their excited conversation on the subject, told them that according to the estate records the grotto had been constructed on Mr Cranmere's orders not fifteen years before.

During this period Sir George Ruispidge and his brother were frequent visitors. Usually, but not always, they rode or drove over together. They came on the slightest pretext – to inquire yet again after Edgar's ankle; to return a borrowed volume; to bring a newspaper newly arrived from London. The brothers' manner towards me did not encourage undue familiarity.

On one occasion they came down to the lake. Sir George stayed on the bank but Captain Ruispidge requested the loan of my skates and soon showed himself an able performer on the ice. He took my place beside the ladies, and I fancied he exerted himself to be agreeable, more so than mere courtesy required.

All this time, I continued to turn over in my mind the events of the last few weeks that might suggest that Henry Frant was still alive. The intelligence from Mrs Lee concerning a former understanding between him and Mrs Johnson had naturally aroused my suspicions. Mrs Johnson denied visiting London recently, but there was reason to believe that she might have done so on at least one occasion. Finally, I considered the man I had glimpsed at the window of Grange Cottage.

Puzzling and even suspicious as these circumstances were, could I deduce from them that Mrs Johnson was sheltering her former lover? The more I subjected the possibility to rational analysis, the less plausible it seemed. In the first place, a youthful attachment, however ardent, was no guarantee of a present one, as my own experience showed. In the second place, if Henry Frant were still alive, surely he would avoid Monkshill-park, where so many people who knew him intimately had gathered?

If Frant had contrived his own murder, it must have been with the intention of creating a new life for himself somewhere, under a new name. In order to do that with any security, it would be necessary for him to flee abroad. He was a man who had lived too much in the world to be safe from discovery anywhere in his native country.

One morning, when the boys were examining the ruins of the monks' grange, my eyes wandered to Mrs Johnson's cottage. The boys were absorbed in a game of make-believe so I sauntered across to the palings and through the gate. The house and garden seemed even more forlorn and unloved than on my last visit. The shutters were across the ground-floor windows. No smoke came from the chimneys. Mrs Johnson was still at Clearland-court, and even her servant had gone.

I walked round the house. At the back was a small stable and a row of outhouses. As I walked back through the yard, I noticed a footprint frozen in the patch of mud by the pump. Judging by the size, it was a man's.

I returned to the park. I knew there were a dozen perfectly innocent explanations for that footprint. Yet the sight of it was enough to feed that state of uncertainty that had become so uncomfortably familiar to me.

When I reached the ruins, the boys were no longer there. I walked up the slope, shouting for them. I had nearly reached the lake, approaching it from the east, when I heard an answering call from the edge of the wood between the water and Flaxern Parva. Mindful of the mantraps, I ran and slid across the ice to the west bank of the lake. I found the boys not among the trees but in a defile that cut into the flank of the ridge perhaps fifty yards from the lake.

The defile's mouth was angled away from the lake and faced north towards the dark mass of the woods. It was connected by a path to the track running round the shores of the lake. Both the path and the defile's entrance were partly obscured by a heap of stones, loose earth and several fallen trees, one of them a sweet chestnut of considerable size. The boys were digging like a pair of badgers into the pile of spoil around the uprooted trees. My anger evaporated.

“I do not think you will find the treasure there,” I observed mildly.

“Why not, sir?” Edgar said. “One could hide anything here.”

“It is a most capital spot,” Charlie put in loyally.

“That may be so. But I don't think the monks would have done. The chestnut can't have been lying there for more than a month or two. Look, it still has some of its leaves.”

Edgar paused in his labours. He was as filthy as a gypsy. “There's also that doorway, sir.” He pointed to a stone archway that closed off the far end of the defile. “Does it not look older than the Crusades?”

“It most probably leads to an ice-house,” I said.

“Perhaps it does now,” he said. “But who is to say what was there before?”

I scrambled over the débris towards it, with the boys frisking after me. The door within the archway was in two leaves, constructed of stout oak and strengthened with iron. Charlie took the handle and rattled it. The door hardly moved in its frame.

“Perhaps there's another entrance,” Charlie suggested.

“We'll go round the hill until we find it,” Edgar said. “I'll race you.”

The boys cantered out of the defile and were soon out of my sight. I followed more slowly. As I rounded the spur of the ridge that concealed the mouth of the defile from the lake, I saw on the path below a man and a woman, arm in arm, walking slowly with their heads close together in the direction of the shell grotto and the obelisk. With a lurch of unhappiness, I recognised them as Captain Jack Ruispidge and Sophia Frant.

On Monday afternoon, Mr Noak arrived from Cheltenham in a hired chaise. Carswall made much of him – in truth, I believe he was becoming bored in the country and welcomed the stimulus of company; he was not a man who took easily to life in a retired situation.

With Mr Noak came Salutation Harmwell; and on the same day Mrs Kerridge appeared in a new gown. Perhaps, Miss Carswall murmured to me, the two circumstances were not entirely unconnected.

The following morning, Charlie came to me after breakfast, begging that the start of our morning lessons might be deferred.

“Mrs Kerridge has an errand at the ice-house, sir, and says Edgar and I may come as well. And you too, if you wish. I am sure the Romans and the Greeks had ice-houses, so it would be most instructive. May we, sir? It would not take above twenty minutes.”

I knew the expedition would take at least forty minutes, perhaps an hour, but the morning was fine and the prospect of a walk was tempting. So the three of us met Mrs Kerridge in the side hall. We found Harmwell in attendance, carrying the basket and a lantern.

“Mr Harmwell is most interested in the construction of ice-houses and wishes to inspect ours,” Mrs Kerridge explained. “And if he comes it will save me having to find a gardener. Besides, they speak so strangely in these parts I can scarce understand a word they say.”

Harmwell's presence solved a minor mystery: why Mrs Kerridge, a lady's maid who was fully aware of the dignity of her position, had volunteered to run an errand for the cook. The boys and I took the lead, while the other two followed more slowly, deep in conversation. We turned left at the obelisk and took the path leading to the western side of the lake. After the shell grotto we climbed the gentle slope to the defile in which the ice-house lay. The boys ran ahead and rattled the handle of the door.