Last Nocturne
Page 11
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure if it doesn’t look better with these holes.’
Matthew Grand had difficulty fending off the female contingent among the servants at the Wentworths’ London residence. Yes, Lady Caroline was in a fainting condition, but she was much better now and the less fuss the better. Yes, her stays had been loosened and no, not by him, by the lady herself, in the back of a cab. When the housekeeper had been restored with some sal volatile on hearing that news, Grand managed to shoo the other, lesser, females away, and finally, the affianced two were alone.
For a while, she lay prostrate, but very picturesque, on the chaise longue in the big bow window facing out into the street. Swagged nets preserved her modesty from the people parading up and down, for this was Cheyne Walk, and people who wanted to be seen by the right people, loved to walk between Cremorne Gardens at its end and the Physic Garden up the road, wearing just the right hats at just the right angle. On other days, Grand and Caroline had sat on this very chaise and laughed at their pretentions, but for now, she just wanted to lie down.
Grand pulled up a small stool and sat beside her, patting her hand and replacing handkerchiefs as hers became too sodden. He found it rather soporific and was in danger of dropping off as his own quiet murmurs became too much to withstand. Then, as he had hoped she would, Lady Caroline Wentworth rediscovered her backbone of old, Norman stock which had come over with the Conqueror and sat up. She gave a final sniff and a wipe of the eye and smiled at Grand, sitting there like a gnome on a toadstool.
‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘do let’s sit somewhere else. You look most uncomfortable.’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Once my left leg joined my right in sleep, I was fine. It was a bit uncomfy before that, I’ll agree.’ He struggled to his feet and was immediately assailed by pins and needles and leaped around the room like something being electrocuted. Finally, they subsided enough to allow him to sit down, opposite his light o’ love, opposite a small fire which, this still being May, the housekeeper refused to do without.
For a while, they sat in silence, broken finally by Grand.
‘Are you sure you recognized that man, Caro?’ he asked, gently.
‘Of course I am,’ she retorted. ‘I’m sorry I reacted like a fool, but it gave me a shock. There was something in the light behind him, it looked … well, it was a little sinister.’
‘He seemed to be the janitor,’ Grand pointed out.
‘Speak English, Matthew, do.’
‘The caretaker, then. Saunders knew who he was instantly.’
‘That makes no difference. It was clearly the same man. Without the beard. And the long hair.’ She looked at him, certainty becoming less certain. ‘And the hat. But apart from that, he was the living image.’
‘By that, you mean he was a man of indeterminate age and average build. That could be a hundred people. Look,’ he strode to the window and pulled back the curtain. ‘Look, there’s one. And there. And there. There’s even one out here who looks like that imbecile Wilde, and I would never have said that was possible, would you? And there’s one … and …’
‘Yes, Matthew,’ she said, coldly. ‘While you’re on your feet, ring for some tea, will you? Then sit down. Pulling at the curtains is so common.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He sat down and tried to look serious.
‘I will continue to say that the man was the same one. I don’t care how much you try to make me change my mind. But also, I heard that dreadful Wilde creature say something about a ghost. That’s probably why I got so faint. I am, as you know, of an extremely sensitive disposition.’ She looked at him with basilisk eyes, daring him to contradict her, but Matthew Grand was an officer of the Third Cavalry of the Potomac and, more than that, the son of a mother who brooked no argument, so he knew when to keep quiet.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He shut his lips tight in a smile of sorts and she would get no more out of him until the tea arrived.
Under the influence of Darjeeling and crumpets, she began to thaw a little and allowed him to sit on the rug with his head in her lap. Smoothing his hair, she murmured, ‘Are there such things as ghosts, Matthew, do you think?’
Matthew Grand had fought at Shiloh and had waded in mud and blood up to the knees. Part of him wanted to believe that those men so cruelly cut down had gone straight to a better place. But another wanted them to still be tied to earth, to be checking on their loved ones from whom they had been severed before their time. So, his answer in other company would have been equivocal. But here, there was only one answer.
‘No, of course not, darling.’
This turned out to be not the right choice.
‘I don’t think you’re right, Matthew. Mr Dunglas Home is very persuasive on the subject. Did you know, he can actually levitate out of one window and right back in in the room next door, having left his handkerchief on the roof as proof?’
Grand knew that name. ‘Is that Dan Home?’ he asked.
‘His name is Daniel, yes.’
Grand’s head was no longer in her lap and she brushed her skirts as if he was a shedding Pekingese.
‘Do you know him?’ she asked after a pause. ‘For a big country, Americans seem to huddle together in just the one state, as far as I can tell. You all seem to know one another.’
‘I can’t say as I know him so much as know of him. He tried the levitation lay at one of the house parties my sister was at.’
She gave a little moue of distaste. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use low language, Matthew,’ she murmured. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, he left the one room all right, then my brother-in-law took a pot-shot at him when he saw him hanging from the guttering. Thought he was a cat burglar. They get a lot of that in DC.’
‘That’s disgraceful! Shooting people!’
‘Well, that’s no worse than fleecing people, I suppose. Anyway, poor old Hamilton, he was in disgrace. Ruined the house party and they won’t get invited back again in a hurry.’
Caroline sat back and thought. She was a sensible woman beneath the fashionable veneer and could see that Grand was probably right. Even so, she was not ready to give up ghosts just yet.
‘Home notwithstanding, though,’ she said after a pause, ‘I think there must be something, mustn’t there? We don’t just’ – she threw her arms wide – ‘go?’
Something told him his head was welcome back in her lap and he snuggled up. ‘No, Caro,’ he said, reaching for her hand with his. ‘No. We don’t just go. But we don’t wander round art galleries scaring beautiful women with paintings of dead women either. Let’s not argue. Let’s let this one be a draw, shall we?’
After a minute, she started to stroke his hair and, after two minutes, he knew he was forgiven.
The supper room over the Adelphi was not far from the premises of Messrs Grand and Batchelor, in the shadow of Nelson’s Column and within a whistling piston’s distance of Charing Cross Station. It was late into the night by the time the other customers had left, and Gan Martin and Oscar Wilde sat each side of the forlorn-looking fireplace, each with a very large brandy and each with a small cigar.
‘I find your employers quite fascinating, Gan,’ Wilde said, his eyes momentarily bothered by the smoke. ‘Batchelor all Fleet Street and observation; Grand, a man of action trying to get out. You know he carries a gun, don’t you?’
‘Does he?’ Martin was horrified. ‘How do you know?’
‘The bulge in his waistcoat,’ Wilde said, ‘under his left armpit.’
‘How bizarre,’ Martin said. ‘Isn’t that against the law?’
‘No idea,’ Wilde said, stretching and yawning. ‘It’s all to do with his past, of course.’
‘His past?’
‘Didn’t you tell me he served in the American Civil War – Union army, and so on? I’ve never been to America, of course, and probably never will, but they are a different breed. Do you think you’ll stay with them, in the private enquiry business, I mean?’
‘You’ve read their files?’
‘My dear boy,’ Martin beamed, ‘I am their files. Remember old Bunbury at Magdalen? He’d have left soon after your first Tripos. Mind like a razor.’
‘Hmm,’ Wilde nodded, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth as he had seen post office boys do. ‘Had a thing for choirboys.’
‘Yes, yes, that; but apart from that. What the professor didn’t know about Euclid, you could engrave on a pinhead. I learned my categorization skills from him.’
‘Hanged himself, didn’t he?’ Wilde asked. ‘When it all came out?’
‘He did,’ Martin said. ‘Damned shame, really.’
‘Damned,’ agreed Wilde. ‘Tell me about Lady Caroline.’
‘Don’t know much about her, really. I believe her people know my people, but I’m keeping the details under wraps. People get a bit funny when they know one’s old man is a duke. And anyway, surely it isn’t quite done for someone in line for a title to be a sleuth.’ Martin blew smoke rings to the ceiling. ‘She’s definitely out of the top drawer, but damned odd behaviour at the Grosvenor, though. Seeing ghosts and all.’
‘What’s odd about that?’ Wilde asked.
Martin looked at him. ‘Er … I’m not sure I follow, Oscar.’
Wilde laughed. ‘Everyone follows Oscar – or they will, one day. Are you telling me you don’t believe?’
‘In what?’
Wilde whipped a box of lucifers from his pocket, struck one and held it under his chin, the shadow of his lips and nose thrown up onto his forehead. ‘In things that go bump in the night,’ he whispered.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. This is the age of reason. Look at that Alexander Bell chappie – a telephonic machine that links room to room, even house to house. That’s not the supernatural, Oscar, that’s science. And do put that match out, dear boy, you’re beginning to scorch.’
Wilde shook the flame out and threw the stub into the fire, which flamed once and returned to its sulk. ‘Tut, tut,’ he said. ‘And you a Greats man.’
‘I think we have to accept,’ Martin said, ‘that either Lady Caroline is as drunk as a skunk from time to time, as I am sure Mr Grand would say if he wasn’t engaged to the woman, or she is of a particularly nervous disposition.’
‘Or,’ Wilde’s cigar had gone out and he relit it with a fresh match, ‘she saw a ghost.’
‘Oscar,’ Martin threw his arms wide in exasperation, ‘there is no such thing.’
Wilde looked at him, a strange, almost sad look on his face. ‘You don’t know the story, then?’
‘What story?’
‘Do you believe in coincidences, Gan?’ Wilde asked.
‘That depends,’ Martin came back.
‘Spoken like a true Oxford graduate,’ Wilde smiled. ‘The Grosvenor gallery – a new venue, yes?’
‘Yes. I believe it was opened last year.’
‘On the site of …?’
‘Er …’
‘A plague burial ground. Hundreds of poor, demented souls driven half mad by an incurable disease, wandering in limbo to the solemn tolling of a bell; thrown in miserable heaps to rot in the stench of death.’
‘Dreadful,’ was the best Martin could manage.
‘It was, but what was more dreadful was what survived.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘No one is sure of his name,’ Wilde said, dropping his voice and leaning forward, his forearms on his thighs, ‘but he was an artist. Painted Cromwell before Lely got to him. He was buried there … or was he?’
‘What?’
‘He may have been taken on the dead cart. He may even have been dumped in the pit. But he wasn’t dead. Not when they shovelled the earth over him. They built over the burial ground, of course,’ Wilde went on, ‘a rather handsome, late Carolingian house, much smaller than the Grosvenor of today. One man working on it went mad. He was there late one night, finishing a doorway, when he saw … well, who knows what he saw? He never spoke a word of sense thereafter.’
‘So …?’
‘But it didn’t end there.’ Wilde was now in full flow and the fire chose the moment to flare up, making mad shapes of his springing hair, thrown in dancing shadows on the wall. ‘First, an architect fell ill with a mysterious disease that no one could identify. His flesh, they say, hung off him like cobwebs. A vicar staying on the premises went to bed one night – in a room in the west wing. When they found him in the morning, he was dead, his hair snowy white. He was thirty-three. And the look on his face …’
Wilde let the silence speak volumes.
‘The present owner …’
‘Sir Coutts Lindsay.’ Martin, of course, filled in the missing detail. Wilde went on hurriedly before he could furnish date of birth and all living relations.
‘He wasn’t sure he should open the gallery because of what he himself had witnessed. He lost no less than seventeen servants in his first year of occupancy. They all refused to stay. Whatever lingers in that house is there still. Was that what Lady Caroline saw?’ he asked Martin. ‘Something that you and I did not see? The ghost of an artist, long dead, a soul lost in purgatory, buried before his time?’
The clock struck eleven and Gan Martin jumped out of his skin, gripping his glass and dropping his cigar. When he could compose himself, he said, ‘Is that true, what you just told me?’
Wilde smiled. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Good heavens, Gan, what are you? Twelve? I just made it up.’
Martin shuddered and got up to leave, to the relief of the staff who were waiting to close up and go home.
Wilde got up too, brushing cigar ash from his waistcoat. ‘Or at least,’ he murmured to himself, ‘most of it.’
Eventually, every building falls silent. The people leave. The traffic outside slows to a trickle and then stops altogether. The wood expands, contracts with a crack and then sleeps. The mice in the wainscoting, home from foraging for crumbs, settle down with their latest brood and mumble their way into sleep.
Midnight strikes.
Then one.
This is the time when everything is at its quietest, approaching that time of night when sick men die and babies turn and grizzle in their sleep. The Grosvenor gallery was different, though. After an hour of silence, after the bobby in the street outside had tried the door handle for the last time on his rounds, a door creaked open. It was a door few knew about, high up in the rafters, in the hidden space above the lofty rooms. The room it hid had no light of its own. In the day, should that door ever open, it would share the beams of the sun that came through the adjustable skylights high above the art that hung on the walls far below, the art that could – and often did – divide the chattering classes. At night, on such a night as this, faint moonbeams penetrated only a few feet into the room, showing stacked canvases, leaning on each other like dominoes arrested in flight. In the shadows, a faint flickering movement caught the moonbeams but, had there been an observer, there would have been no way to tell quite what it was.
The Grosvenor gallery didn’t mind this movement in its terra incognita. If buildings can feel such things, it would have been disappointed if it didn’t have a ghost. This was the Grosvenor gallery, where art was hung for art’s sake alone, and anything that could happen, would happen.
A door below whispered shut. The soft slur of badger on canvas was audible to the keenest ear only. Then, a susurration of clothing, a hiss of breath, the sound of air compressing at the passage of a body; followed by silence.
Even the Grosvenor gallery must sleep a little. And it slept now, until the dawn.
SEVEN
‘I am appalled.’ James Whistler’s hair was wilder than ever that morning. ‘Absolutely appalled.’
Batchelor was alone in the office, wandering down the Memory Lane of cases past, now that he could, th
anks to Alexander Martin’s indefatigable filing system. He was still chuckling to himself over the malfeasance of the late Bishop of Bath and Wells when the whirlwind crashed through the door.
‘A problem, Mr Whistler?’ he asked.
The artist looked at the enquiry agent. ‘More than you can ever imagine,’ he smouldered.
Batchelor looked blank.
‘What, Mr Batchelor, I ask you, is the worst thing that can happen to an artist?’
‘Um …’ Not being of that persuasion, Batchelor was stuck for an answer.
‘To have his work vandalized!’ Whistler answered his own question just as Matthew Grand arrived, slipping off his top coat and hanging it on a hook, freshly installed at an ergonomically designated height from the floor.
‘Mr Whistler is appalled, Matthew,’ Batchelor said.
‘I can see that,’ Grand said. He adopted his best family physician persona. ‘What seems to be the trouble, Mr Whistler?’
‘My Nocturne,’ Whistler bellowed. ‘The one in blue and gold. It’s been ruined.’
‘Slashed?’ Grand asked.
‘Added to, taken away, what you will.’
Grand and Batchelor looked at each other. ‘I don’t think I understand,’ Batchelor said.
‘Of course you don’t!’ Whistler snapped. ‘Only true genius can see it. I am that painting. I spent hours, no, days – nights, that is – in the Cremorne. That canvas is part of my soul, the stars, the rushing noise when your breath ascends with the rockets, the gasp and release as it cascades and falls. The watchers, shadows on shadows, ghosts on ghosts, looking up at the sky …’ He came out of his reverie. ‘I didn’t paint any of that by accident. Every brushstroke, every angle, every line and dab of colour – I did not create a vision of brilliance to have it trashed by Ruskin.’
‘You think Ruskin’s behind this vandalism?’
‘Of course he is.’ Whistler stared around the room, glaring at Grand, at Batchelor, at the kettle in the corner on its spirit burner. ‘Who else could it be?’
The door opened and Gan Martin walked in. ‘Sorry I’m late, dears,’ he said, quickly swallowing his words when he saw they had clients in the room. He caught the fury on Whistler’s face and regretted his breezy entry. ‘Is something amiss?’