The Dark Clue (16 page)

‘I am writing a life of Turner.' She did not reply at once, so I added: ‘The artist?'

‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,' she said. ‘I knew all of them, in the Third Earl's time. Chantrey, Carew, Phillips, Haste, Constable …'

This was more than I had dared to hope; and, scarce able to believe my luck, I began: ‘What was …?' At that exact moment, however – to my extreme annoyance – one of the two widows leaned towards me, scowling; and in a stern tone – as if she had
caught me red-handed trying to make off with something that was rightfully hers – said:

‘Are you talking about Turner?'

‘Yes,' I said. I held her gaze for what seemed the minimum demanded by good manners, and then turned back decisively to the woman opposite. ‘What was he like?'

‘Oh,' she said – and I suppose, by now, I should have come to expect her next words – ‘he was a funny little man. Ruddy face' – she paddled her fingers against her own cheek – ‘and always carried a big umbrella. You'd never have thought he was an artist, to look at him. More like . .. more like a . ..'

She pondered a moment, and the hesitation was fatal; for it allowed Widow A to recharge her conversational guns, and – at the very instant my companion concluded,
‘like a sea captain'
– to boom:

‘We saw
The Fighting Temeraire,
at the Academy, in ‘thirty-nine'; and then, as if I might be disinclined to believe this startling intelligence on the strength of her word alone, she turned to her sister and shouted: ‘Didn't we?'

‘What?' yelled Widow B.

‘See
The Fighting Temeraire!

‘What!?' repeated her poor sister, who must have been completely deaf; for even the students on the roof heard the commotion, and one of them banged on the door with a mittened hand and bellowed: ‘Hoi! Less noise there below!' His fellows promptly erupted into stifled laughter, and I confess that I was suddenly possessed by a kind of desperate hilarity myself, and had to avoid catching the eye of my new friend opposite, for fear I might join them.

Widow A finally gave up on her sister, and fixed me with a gimlet eye. ‘It was of particular interest to us,' she said, in the same accusing tone (which I was beginning to realize was her normal manner of address), ‘for our father served with Nelson, in just such a ship as that.'

‘Really?' I said. ‘How fascinating.' And so, indeed, it might have been, in other circumstances; but at that instant, and in that place, it seemed nothing but a monstrous imposition, and I felt my temper rising. Once again, though, fate came to my assistance; for the young draughtsman – with a discreet wink in my
direction, which said, as clearly as if he had spoken the words,
Leave this to me
– removed his hat, and held out his hand to Widow A, and said:

‘Well, now,
there's
a thing – I'm in the ship-building business myself, in a small way; and it's an honour to make your acquaintance.'

In less than a minute, he had charmed both the sisters into submission – though one could not have heard what he said, and the other could barely have understood it, since the ships
he
talked of had nothing to do with the romantic old man-of-war in Turner's painting, and everything to do with the modern steamboat tugging it to its doom. And my companion, too, was touched by his spell, if only obliquely – for, seeing our fellow-passengers engrossed in a conversation of their own, she seemed visibly to relax a little, and to be more willing to talk frankly to me.

‘Yes, it was altogether different, in those days,' she said, settling back in her seat.

‘Petworth House, you mean?'

She nodded. ‘Liberty Hall. People would come and go as they pleased, and there'd always be a bed for them, and a meal, and a room for them to work in, if they wished.'

‘Were they all artists, then?'

‘Many of them.
The greatest patron in England
, the Third Earl, that's what I heard say. And with the finest collection. I wouldn't know, myself, though I liked to creep into the gallery, and look at the statues. It was quite a thing, for a fourteen-year-old girl, to see a marble man with no clothes on.'

I glanced at the widows, but they showed no sign of having heard. I wanted to ask her how she came to be there, at such an age; but since it was clear that she was not a member of the family (and to assume that she was would have been a kind of mirror-image condescension, as bad as the thing it reflected), and the only other probable explanation was that she had been a servant, I could not think of a way to frame the question without the risk of insulting her. Instead, I said:

‘And was Turner there a great deal?'

‘Oh, yes; his lordship gave him the use of the Old Library, as his studio; and Turner' – it suddenly struck me that she said
‘Turner', rather than ‘Mr. Turner', which seemed curious, when the man she was talking of was a guest in her master's house – ‘Turner shut himself away there, all morning sometimes; and no-one was allowed to disturb him, save his lordship himself.' She smiled, and laughed softly. ‘One time, I heard, Sir Francis -'

‘Sir Francis?'

‘Chantrey. The sculptor?'

‘Oh, yes,' I said.

‘Well, he decided to play a trick on Turner; and he imitated his lordship's footsteps in the corridor, and his special knock on the door, and did it so wonderfully well that Turner was deceived, and admitted him.'

‘And what happened?' I said, impatiently. It was galling to find that even now, when I had supposed I was beginning to understand Turner, I could not guess the answer for myself. It all depended
which
Turner you believed in – the suspicious recluse, jealous of his privacy, or the hearty good fellow described by Gudgeon? The one would surely have resented such a prank; the other, equally surely, would have slapped his thigh, and made light of it.

‘Oh, he took it in good part, and laughed when he saw his mistake,' said my companion. ‘He and Sir Francis were old friends, so I believe, and liked to tease each other. There was much merriment about it that evening at dinner, you may be sure.'

A point,
I thought,
to Gudgeon.
I smiled and said: ‘That's an illuminating story. Do you suppose the colonel will remember more, and be able to tell me?'

‘He might.' She hesitated, and clenched and unclenched her jaw before going on grimly: ‘But he's not like his father.'

‘In what way?'

‘He's very shy. And has a terrible temper on him.' She paused, as if her own words had surprised her. ‘Well, so did his father, come to that. But… but the colonel doesn't
love
like his father. That's the difference.'

‘Love what, or whom?' I said.

‘Everything,' she muttered, flushing slightly; and then, more confidently: ‘His people.'

‘Why, you make him sound like a monarch!' I said, laughing.

‘And so he was!' she cried. ‘Wasn't there a French king once, they called the Sun King?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Louis XIV.'

‘That is how the Third Earl was,' she said. ‘He was our Sun.'

We had reached the top of the hill now, and could feel the horses gaining speed, and hear the harness jingling freely again, as it eased about their shoulders. My companion glanced out of the window, but I kept my eyes on her face, in the hope that she would return to her subject. She seemed to think she had said enough, however, and after a long silence I decided I must prompt her, or risk losing her attention altogether.

‘Louis was a despot,' I said.

‘Hm?' She turned sharply, like a straying animal suddenly recalled by a tug on its rope.

‘A tyrant,' I said. ‘He ruled by fear. Hundreds died building his palace. I take it you don't mean -'

‘Oh, no!' she said. She seemed genuinely shocked, and frowned, and looked this way and that, casting about for a way to explain what she meant. At length she said: ‘All I meant was, the sun
shines
on you, don't it? That's what his lordship did, he shone on us all. Even the animals; for he doted on his dogs and horses and cattle, and loved to have them about him, and you could fall over a sow on your way to the kitchen garden, or even see her galloping through one of the rooms, and all her little ones behind her.' She smiled, and her eyes hazed with recollection, and she lowered her heavy eyelids to brush the moisture from them. ‘And the people, too. They'd play cricket on his lawn, and walk in his park as if it were their own – Lord! you should have seen them, sometimes – the boys'd scratch their names on his walls and windows, and he'd say nothing about it.'

‘Truly?' I said; for I could not conceive of any landowner I know willingly suffering such behaviour – and, indeed, would not tolerate it myself, at Limmeridge.

She nodded. ‘And every year he'd mark his birthday with a great feast for the poor. Once, when he was past eighty, it could not be held at the usual time, because he was ill; and so he arranged a fete in the park the next May. Four thousand tickets were given, but many more came; and the old man could not
bear that any should go hungry outside his gates, and went himself, and ordered the barriers taken down, so that all could enter. I've heard six thousand were fed that day – think of it! six thousand! – even our Saviour did not feed so many. I was there, and I know I shall never see such a sight again – a great half-circle of tables spread before the house, and carts full of plum puddings and loaves, piled like ammunition, and an endless army of men marching back and forth, carrying sides of mutton and beef on hurdles. And his lordship forever slipping in and out of his room, for the pleasure of looking upon it all, and reflecting what he had done.'

‘Magnificent,' I began, ‘but -'

‘Yes, magnificent,' she said, so swept up now in the torrent of memory and feeling that she could not contain herself, but must rush on. ‘And he provided houses for the poor, and a doctor; and brought gas to the town, twenty years before they had it in Midhurst…'

‘Like the sun, indeed,' I murmured.

‘What?' she said, almost snappishly. Then, as if she had just caught my meaning, she laughed, and said: ‘Oh, yes, I had not thought of that!'

‘But a hard example', I said, returning to my theme, ‘for an ordinary mortal to follow.'

‘What, his son, you mean?'

I nodded; and, in truth, I did feel sorry for the colonel; for only an angel could avoid being unfavourably compared with such a splendid figure, and only a saint bear it without rancour. Before I could speak, however, the woman shook her head fiercely, and said:

‘Oh, I shouldn't waste your sympathy on him.'

‘Why?' I said. ‘What has he done?'

‘He began as he meant to go on,' she said, ‘by putting me out of my place, and scores with me. For no worse offence than that we were employed by his lordship. Truly, you wouldn't think they were of the same race, let alone the same family.'

And suddenly, a question which had only been fluttering at the edge of my mind until now, like a half-seen moth, sprang into consciousness.

‘Why is he only a colonel, if his father was an earl?'

‘Because he is a bastard,' she said venomously.

I tried to press her further, but she evaded my every inquiry, and at length lapsed into silence. Only once, when we had stopped some time later at a lonely little tollhouse (much like the cottage in a fairy tale, with diamond-paned windows, and a tall chimney) by a country bridge, did she venture another remark; pointing to a deep scar in the valley, where a team of navvies was at work, she said:

‘There! That's where Petworth station is going to be. That's how well Colonel Wyndham likes humanity!'

The guidebook mentioned three hotels in Petworth; and I had decided in advance, out of a childish fancy, that I should put up in the first of them that I saw. This proved to be the Swan Commercial Inn, a long, white, nondescript building of uncertain age – distinguished only by a great picture of its namesake fixed over the central first-floor window – which overlooked the little market square where the coach set us down. It was not, I had to own, the romantic hostelry I had envisaged – even as I looked at it, I felt I could see within, to the too-bright dining room, and the smoking room full of stale air and stale travelling salesmen; but I kept to my resolve, and having bade a grateful farewell to the draughtsman, and a fond one to my companion, I crossed the street, and went inside.

It was, if anything, drearier than I had imagined, with a dingy hall smelling of sour beer, and I approached the girl behind the desk, to ask for a room, with a sinking heart. Once again, however, luck was on my side; for she told me that all their beds were taken, and directed me to the Angel, where she was sure I should be accommodated to my satisfaction.

She was right, for the Angel turned out to be an ancient, lopsided, timber-framed inn, with arthritic joints and drooping eaves, yet clean and well kept within, with bright scrubbed floor-tiles, and a welcoming fire in the hall. I was greeted by an old man in a stiff leather apron, who gravely took down from the rack behind him a key big enough to secure the Tower of London, and led me upstairs to a neat little room, with coals ready-laid in the fireplace, and a casement overlooking a row of quaint houses. And when he had gone, I sat on the bed, and listened
to the breathy stir and thud of a herd of cattle being driven through the street below, and thanked my own good angel for bringing me here, and wondered how many travellers over the years had had the same thought, and thanked their own.

I soon had another reason to be grateful that I had ended up at the Angel; but I was not to discover that for an hour or two more, and shall come to it in its rightful place.

Nothing prepares you for Petworth House. You leave the market square by a dingy cobbled alley, lined with small shops and taverns that offer no hint of what is to come, and all at once – there it is! a mass of roofs and chimneys, of kitchens and stables and coach-houses, coiled around the northern edge of the town like a giant serpent that, having set out to crush the whole place in its embrace, has tired and fallen asleep before it could accomplish its aim.