Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  His associate - Witheridge the barber - closed the door quietly and sidestepped into the shadows to await his master’s summons. “I’ve sedated her with lemon balm; my man here has bled her, of course,” the doctor continued. “She’s pale. Deathly pale. And nearly breathless with shock, but I have no doubt a good sleep will be a mighty palliative.

  “Terrible shock.”

  “Yes,” Lord Scrope agreed. He had returned from an unsuccessful hunt to find his home in an uproar. From fragments of testimony sobbed out by his overwrought female staff—there were no men at home at the time, worse luck—he was able to assemble a narrative of events which, though failing to satisfy logic in every particular, nevertheless presented a skeleton of facts: a housebreaker had gained access to the manor and, in attempting to abscond with a sack of family silver, had found it necessary—presumably to avoid detection— to secrete himself behind a drapery in the drawing room. From this position he had bounded when his nerve could stretch no further and had stabbed Lossburgh in the neck before flying out the window toward the terrace and gardens.

  Lossburgh had died on the spot—he was found clutching at his throat, a look of stark surprise frozen in his eyes—Lady Scrope had fainted, collapsing in the pool of the artist’s blood, where she was discovered by her maid not long thereafter.

  A tablecloth had been conscripted to serve as a sack and, stuffed with an assortment of silver and other portable items indifferently selected from nearby shelves and cabinets, had been found on the threshold letting onto the terrace.

  Apart from the burglar, nothing was missing.

  A servant had brought a bowl of water, in which the physician swished his fingers. “That portrait, your lordship; have you seen it?”

  The look with which he responded left no doubt that he had.

  “Mm,” said the doctor. “Unusual.”

  Lord Scrope agreed. “Emphatically.”

  “It is of himself. The artist?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor dried his hands. “Mm.”

  “He’s meant to be an ancestor of her ladyship’s, I understand. Robert Tiptoft, founder of her family’s fortune. No one knows what the fellow looked like.”

  “So, she had Lossburgh paint himself as a stand-in for this ancestor?” The doctor handed the towel to the bloodletter.

  “So it would seem. I could never make sense of the project. But Lady Annabella is a woman of—a woman of decided—a determined . . . ”

  The doctor had attended Lady Scrope-Howe in times of extremis.

  Once, in his youth, he had sailed to America and, about mid-Atlantic, encountered a hurricane of such force that it stripped all but the mainmast from the deck and nearly capsized the vessel.

  The experiences were not above comparison.

  “Yes,” he said.

  His lordship nodded.

  “The pose is—unconventional. Her idea?” It certainly hadn’t been the brainchild of the pedantic, unimaginative painter of cows.

  “No doubt. I never saw it ‘til just now,” said Lord Scrope. “She wouldn’t let me. Said it was for her grandchildren.”

  The comment raised the doctor’s eyebrows. “Grand-children? That’s still a few years away!”

  His lordship shrugged, a patented response to many of his wife’s activities. “Her fortune is her own, so she can do with it as she pleases.” He walked the doctor to the door, Witheridge following close behind. “Can’t imagine the old man would have been caught dead in that outfit.” He chuckled. “Still, she’ll be alright, you say?”

  “I have every reason to be confident of her full recovery, your lordship. Good day.”

  Oxburgh Hall, 1986

  For Albert, walking was a way to convey his fingers from one piano to the next. His response, therefore, to Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton’s suggestion during breakfast that he take a stroll around the grounds, was: “Stroll?”

  “A nice leisurely walk,” said the housekeeper, as if to define the phrase. “The lawns and gardens really are quite lovely. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can’t turn up a genealogy or family history that might help you appreciate the place. I know Americans aren’t typically interested in the past—always rushing forward, aren’t you? Still, you might find it entertaining.”

  Albert didn’t know that Americans weren’t interested in the past. Maybe that’s because it was full of dead people.

  And so, later that morning, at forty-six years of age, Albert took his first on-purpose stroll. It was Jeremy’s first stroll, as well, if being pushed along a path in a wheelchair could be called a stroll. Much to their mutual surprise, they were both enjoying it. So much so that, for several minutes, Jeremy hadn’t said a word. “This is nice,” he said at last, inhaling deeply. “You smell those flowers?”

  They had just past a row of bushes bursting with large yellow and pink blooms. Albert sniffed and a church full of elderly women came to mind. He said so.

  Jeremy shook his head silently. “If you say so. I wonder what kind they are.”

  There was more than one kind of woman?

  “Maybe they’re magnolias. I heard magnolias smell pretty strong. Or hydrangeas. You ever hear of a hydrangea?”

  Jeremy was talking about the flowers. “Yes,” said Albert. His mother had hydrangeas on the farm in Maine. Miss Bjork had died in the shadow of one. “That’s not what these are.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Yellow,” said Albert. “And pink.” That was an unequivocal statement for someone to whom colors never seemed quite static enough identify with absolute certainty.

  Jeremy was willing to accept that. “That’s what they smell like,” he said. “Yellow and pink.”

  They strolled a little further and drew to a stop at the edge of a lake. Or pond. Or river.

  There were no seagulls, so it wasn’t the ocean.

  There was a little island in the middle of the water, with a few trees on it. Weeping willows. That was Albert’s favorite tree. It was also the only one he knew for certain. That and apple trees. And pear trees. He knew those if it was the right time of year and they had fruit on them.

  “I like strolling,” said Jeremy.

  Albert liked it, too.

  The peace was stabbed by a sudden intake of breath. Albert could feel Jeremy Ash wincing. He patted his shoulder.

  “Your leg?”

  “How can somethin’ hurt that ain’t even there anymore?” Jeremy Ash demanded rhetorically. “I wish I had it back, just so I could scratch it.”

  The twinge or pang or whatever it was would pass in a minute or two. It always did. Albert waited; patted Jeremy Ash on the taut muscles of his shoulders some more and waited. Before long the boy relaxed, the tension drained from his aura and the air abandoned his lungs with a sigh.

  Albert sat down on the little slope of soft grass at Jeremy’s feet. “What do you think he was looking at,” he said when a little time had passed, “the man in the painting?”

  “That’s a swan,” said Jeremy Ash.

  This wasn’t the response Albert was expecting; not that he was sure what hewas expecting, but that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw Jeremy pointing at something on the lake. Albert was not surprised to find that it was a swan.

  There were swans on the lake in Boston Common. Some were made into boats you could get in and ride. This was smaller than that.

  “They bite.”

  “Swans have teeth?”

  “Well, pinch.”

  “Did you ever get pinched by a swan?”

  Suddenly Albert wasn’t sure. He had been chased by a large bird once, but maybe it was a goose. It wasn’t an ostrich or a turkey. Probably a goose. Maybe swans don’t pinch.

  “I think it was a goose.”

  “They pinch!” said Jeremy Ash.

  “Then that’s probably what it was,” said Albert. “A goose.”

  Jeremy Ash nodded toward the animal on the lake. “That’s a swan.”

  “Mm.”
/>   “It must have been something she wanted him to look at.”

  “The lady?”

  “Annabella,” Jeremy Ash affirmed. “If she had him paint the picture, she must have wanted him to look like he was looking at something.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  Jeremy Ash shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Albert was looking at the swan, because his eyes found interesting the way it bobbed and nodded its head, dipping his bill in the water and splashing itself with droplets that, caught by the sun, turned momentarily into diamonds, but he was thinking about the painting. “If we could find the room where it was painted, we could see what he was looking at.”

  Jeremy Ash didn’t think that likely. “That was about a billion years ago, A. Those old castles and things are all ruins now. Like the pyramids. Did you know they used to be white?”

  “The pyramids?” said Albert who had found, over the years, that conversation with Jeremy Ash was like a roller coaster ride—or what he imagined a roller coaster ride must be like. A kind of mental seatbelt was advisable and a well-timed question now and then could fix you, more or less, in space and time; at least until the next turning; which always took you the opposite of whichever way you were leaning.

  “Yeah. White plaster all over, with a little gold tip at the very top, shining in the sun.” He, too, was looking at the swan—which now and then flapped its wings and rose up until only the webbing of its feet danced lightly on the water—but his mind’s eye was upon those massive, blindingly-white walls rising from the parched desert into the bright blue sky, conjoining in those golden apexes as they startled to life at the sun’s first rays, reflecting brief, luminous fingers at their corresponding stars on Orion’s belt. Home.

  All Albert knew about the pyramids was that they were in Egypt, and they were very old. “They must have used a lot of paint.” He shuddered to think what Jackson Pollack would have perpetrated with so vast a canvas. “Painting,” he said, reminding himself what they had been talking about. “It wasn’t painted here. The background is all different.”

  Jeremy Ash didn’t find this a convincing argument. “Artists don’t always paint what they see with their eyes,” he said.

  Albert’s expression said, ‘They don’t?’

  The boy tapped his forehead. “Sometimes they paint what they see in their mind.”

  If that was the case, Albert thought, the paintings at the museum in London were troubling in the extreme.

  “Maybe he just made it up.”

  That may be with someone like Jackson Pollack, but Albert didn’t think it held true for Harvest Lossburgh. “He was a cow painter. Why would cow-painters need to make things up? There’s a cow, you paint it.”

  Jeremy thought about that. Cow painters might fall into a special category of artist. He didn’t say anything.

  “What if he was painting exactly what he was looking at,” said Albert. “What if he was wearing those blue pajamas and that cupcake paper, and he was looking in the wrong direction like that, because that’s where Anabella wanted him to look.”

  “If we could find that room . . .” Jeremy inhaled to reiterate his argument, but Albert plowed ahead. “If it still exists, then we could find out what he was looking at?”

  “Why does it matter, A? That was so long ago. Who cares what he was looking at?”

  Good question. Why did Albert care what Harvest Lossburgh was looking at while he was painting himself pretending to be Robert Tiptoft? But he did. He cared mightily, and he had no idea why. The world was full of other things to think about. He had a series of concerts coming up. He should think about that. He could think about Jeremy Ash, or Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton, or lunch, or whatever war was going on. There probably was one somewhere. Or that swan, preening and cavorting and celebrating its life. Or he could think about the swelling host of dead haunting the gallery hung on the inside of his eyelids.

  But he didn’t want to think about them.

  Maybe that was why he was curious about that strange painting. It was a harmless curiosity; a puzzle that had nothing to do with him. Whatever secrets his search might disinter, none would touch him or the dwindling population of those he cared about. No one would die in his arms. No one would threaten him. No one would lie to him; no one fear the truths those secrets revealed or send the world up in flames. It was an exercise to beguile his mind from its incessant dredging up of past.

  And that all made so much sense.

  And it was such a lie.

  He was becoming obsessed, and he knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “I know!” said Jeremy suddenly, startling the swan who seemed to notice for the first time that she was being watched, and turned her tail feathers toward them with a squawk of indignation. “He was looking at a mirror!”

  “He was?”

  “Must’ve been. He was painting a self-portrait, right?”

  Albert accepted this.

  “Then he must have been looking at himself,” Jeremy Ash deduced, “in a mirror.”

  It was so obvious. Of course he was looking at himself in a mirror, how else could be paint a self-portrait? “Of course.”

  “Mystery solved!” Jeremy Ash pronounced.

  Upon reflection, Albert didn’t think so. Why was the mirror not in front of him? It would be like sitting down at the piano and trying to read music taped to the wall off in the distance. “Why didn’t she put the mirror in front of him?”

  The swan twisted her long neck for a backward glance in which Jeremy read: ‘Well?’

  “She was weird,” he snapped. “Who cares?”

  ‘Who cares?’ was Jeremy’s response to most things he didn’t understand. Albert ignored him and resumed strolling in the direction of a boathouse further along the path, at which point they were joined by Balfour, emerging from the long, shrubbery-lined path to the house. His forehead was bejeweled with the sweat of his effort, which he mopped with a handkerchief.

  “Ah, Maestro!” he panted. “I’m so glad to have found you.”

  Albert hadn’t known he was missing.

  “There’s been a call for you - from London. A Mr. Huffsey?”

  “Huffy,” Jeremy corrected.

  “Huffy? Yes, that may have been the name. At all events, he wishes to speak with you.”

  There were very few people who Albert enjoyed speaking with: Jeremy Ash was one. And Heather-Angela, and Maylene and Cindy. It was a short list, and Huffy wasn’t on it. If there had been a list of people hedidn’t want to talk to, Huffy would have been on that; at the top.

  “He’ll call back.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Balfour. “But, if you’ll permit, he seemed most adamant.”

  Albert had never known Huffy to be anything but adamant. He was one of those finger-twitching individuals for whom everything was a crisis requiring Albert’s immediate attention.

  “He’s an adamant person.”

  “What did he want?” said Jeremy Ash.

  “He didn’t confide in me in any detail, master Ash,” said Balfour with a slight bow in the boy’s direction, “but I infer from his comments that the maestro visited a hospital recently and that they wished to confer with him regarding an x-ray they had made at the time.”

  Talk of hospitals and x-rays made Jeremy instantly nauseous.

  Chapter Eight

  October 13, 1216 - The Castle, Castle Combe, England

  “She will see you now,” said the maid with a curtsey. The Poitouese French in which she delivered the command evoked for Ralph de De Rodes an image of thick cream in a cool barrel so visceral he could almost dip his finger in and taste it. He tucked his helmet under his arm and, bending low, banged his head on the lentil anyway as he entered the queen’s bedchamber. He swore.

  Isabella laughed. “That is your reward for being so tall, Rodes.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said De Rodes who, already ruddy from his long ride from King’s Lynn, reddened some more. He
dabbed at his scalp and looked at his fingers to see if he was bleeding. “Height is a curse.”

  “So it would seem,” said Isabella as she brushed the hair of one of her numerous children, which one it was impossible to tell. She and the king had been blessed with five prospective contenders for the throne and, despite long acquaintance, they all seemed much the same to Ralph. It was even impossible to tell if the one on the receiving end of the queen’s present ministrations was a boy or girl, though its willing submission to grooming suggested female. “You have news from my husband?” She purposely said ‘from my husband’, and not ‘of my husband’.

  The shoulders of the tall, tired, newly-wounded warrior sagged like a field of dead sunflowers.

  The queen stood abruptly, relinquishing the child at hand to the care of one of her lady’s maids. “Leave us!” The command startled a flock of skirts into motion as her attendants hastened to obey, crushing, in their haste, the last remains of fragrance from the hyssop and lavender rushes carpeting the floor.

  Until the last woman left, Isabella stood at regal attention, her hands clutching one another; clinging to an emotional cliff. As soon as the lever settled into the latch she deflated to the edge of her bed and turned the full intensity of her remarkable blue eyes on the knight, to whom it seemed—though he towered over her—he was being looked down upon from a great height.

  Aware that he was the bearer of bad tidings, he had resolved to resist the sheer animal power of the beauty of this woman that had even corralled the randy old king to a fidelity of sorts. Determination failed. It was not for nothing she had won the old man’s hand and heart when she was little more than twelve, or that she had since come to be called Helena. He shook off a fleeting frisson of chivalry that suggested falling on his sword might be a nobler act than to bring tears to those eyes.

  Zig-zagging his way across miles and miles of open country, in peril of the rebellious barons at every crossroads and river shallows, he had wracked his brain for an arrangement of words with which to deliver the news. One horse had died under him and the one he had stolen to take its place now lay in the courtyard, its mighty heart struggling for life, much like its former master who lay beside a field in some obscure valley fifteen miles to the east, attempting, with porous hands, to staunch the blood oozing from the gash in his side. His struggle would soon be over.