Frankly, she had better things to do than cow-tow to some obscure entertainer–he was no Elton John, after all–but a job was a job.
“She lived here, on and off, for years, I understand.”
“Where?” said Angela, who was becoming irritated at the woman’s perfunctory manner.
“I beg your pardon?”
“In what part of the house were her ladyship’s rooms?” Angela asked, pronouncing the words a good deal more carefully than necessary, as if she was speaking to someone whose mental capacities were suspect.
“We have a pamphlet that chronicles the history of the manor. Didn’t I give that to you?”
“Yes,” said Angela. “But it’s not terribly detailed. And it doesn’t say where Annabella’s rooms were.”
“Well, there are some old records in the office that I could. . .”
“How very nice of you to offer,” Angela interjected quickly. “That would be a great help. How very kind.”
The woman’s hair become tighter by a twist or two and her lips wiggled to form words with which to protest that she had meant to offer to get the books for them to peruse at their leisure, since they seemed to have all the time in the world and she did not, but memory of the way her manageress—a woman whose demeanor had never, in her experience, registered emotion—had driveled over the bespectacled man who, as she debated, sat staring out the window with a tiny cloud of meringue on his upper lip, urged circumspection.
“Yes. Of course. It may take a while.”
Angela smiled facetiously. “We’ll wait,” she said. “And if you’d arrange to have fresh tea sent in while you’re about it, we’d be most grateful.”
The woman found the words for which she’d been searching her brain and scraped them off her tongue, but so softly that no one else in the room could make them out. As she left, the door closed firmly behind her.
“I don’t want any more tea,” said Jeremy Ash before the echo died. “And I don’t want to be barbecued.” He spun away from the fire.
“Nor do I,” said Angela. “Tea, that is.”
“Then why did. . .?”
“Because she was getting up my nose, and needed to be put in her place.” She rose from her chair and, wetting the tip of her napkin on her tongue, smudged the meringue on Albert’s lip to oblivion. “People like that, honestly!”
“It was this room,” said Albert, when he regained use of his mouth.
“What was?”
“Where Lossburgh painted the picture.”
“How do you know?”
“The light.”
“What light?” said Angela. “They only had candles in those days.”
“The sun.” He nodded out the window. “And the snow.” He retrieved the much-troubled photo from the inside pocket of his overcoat and smoothed it out on the tea tray. “Would you go stand over there, please.” He pointed at a space roughly midway between the fireplace and the door.
Angela did as directed. “Here?”
Albert looked from her to the picture. “A little to the left.”
She moved to her left.
“No, the other left,” he said, indicating his left. “That way.”
She took two steps to her right. “Here?”
Albert held up the picture so he could take in both it and Angela at the same time. “Not quite.” He turned and looked at the french door. “Jeremy, can you see if those curtains will open a little wider?”
“Sure.” Jeremy Ash wheeled to the door and pulled first one then the other curtain aside, tying each in place with a tassel created for the purpose. “Like that?”
Albert’s eyes were locked on Angela as the soft, white light illumined her face, separating her more sharply from the darkness; and tracing upon her face a perfect replica of the shadows in the portrait cast by the metalwork of the windows through which the light shone. Exactly the light that Lossburgh had captured so perfectly in the portrait of himself as Robert Tiptoft.
“How tall are you?”
“Me?” said Angela. “Five foot seven, seven and a-half, thereabouts. Why?”
“That’s how tall Lossburgh was.”
“How could you possibly. . .”
“Look at this.”
He handed the photo to Jeremy Ash as the boy rolled within reach, and he held it up the better to compare it with Angela side-by-side. “That’s amazing!”
“Can I see?” said Angela. “Here Albert, you come stand here.” She tapped her foot on the parquet to mark the spot, and exchanged places with him.
“That’s unbelievable!” She looked from the window and its web of intersecting metalwork to the shadows on Albert’s face. “Hunch down an inch or two.”
Albert hunched.
“There! There. Hold that position. The light is exactly the same! And the pattern of shadows! Exactly!” The hand holding the photo dropped to her side. “Put you in blue silk pajamas and a beard, you could almost be Tiptoft—minus the glasses, of course.”
“Lossburgh,” Albert reminded.
“Lossburgh. Yes, of course. You know what I mean.”
“So this is where he painted the picture,” said Jeremy.
More to the point, thought Albert, it’s where, recalling Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton’s requiem, Harvest Lossburgh had died; where he’d been murdered.‘The very moment the portrait was completed, as a matter-of-fact. The story goes that he was found on the floor in front of his easel with a hole in his neck, and a paintbrush clutched in his hand.’
And then she had clutched her hand as if it held the paintbrush.
“‘The very moment the portrait was completed’,” Albert recited, looking down at his feet, as if half-expecting to find upon them the kind of slippers that would go with blue silk pajamas–perhaps turned up at the tip with little bells on. There was no helpful stain of blood on the floor, as there had been at Langar Chapel.
Odd. He’d have thought wood more likely to stain than stone. But, as he quickly reminded himself, he didn’t have a clue, really. Perhaps so blatant a testament to evil was more likely to prove ineradicable in a church.
“What?” said Jeremy Ash.
“Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton said Lossburgh had been killed when he finished the painting.”
“Meaning?”
“That someone was waiting for him to finish the painting before they killed him.”
“Annabella?” Angela ventured.
“She was the one who commissioned the painting,” said Albert, thinking out loud. “She was the one who made him paint it as if he was standing in Langar Chapel. She was the one who had him use himself as a model. She was the one who made him look across himself in that strange way.
“She was the one who wanted a portrait of Robert Tiptoft, even if it wasn’t Robert Tiptoft.”
“The founder of her family’s fortune,” said Angela.
The finder of King John’s fortune, Albert thought.
Jeremy sat up quickly. “She knew where it was!”
“Yes,” said Albert.
“Knew where what was?” asked Angela. “King John’s treasure?”
“Yes.”
“Then, that would explain why Charles the II elevated her; she paid him with the treasure!” Angela was almost breathless. “That makes sense.”
It did. But it’s not what happened. Charles the Second, according to theEncyclopedia Britannicaentry Albert had read in the library at Oxburgh Hall, even though a king, was not wealthy. In fact, said the encyclopedia, ‘throughout his reign he lived with the specter of financial ruin’; a condition never altered by the sudden infusion of capital from an unknown source. He had guided the nation into bankruptcy and died deeply in debt.
Think Albert. Think!
Esperanza had hinted that the painting was a clue. So it was; a clue to the hiding place of King John’s treasure. Had Lossburgh known that he was painting a clue? Not if Annabella Howe in real life was true to the picture forming of her in Albert’s
imagination. Unbidden, the bloody, somnambulant image of Lady Macbeth that had so troubled his dreams in the eighth grade sprang to mind.
A very troubled person.
Superimpose upon that image Annabella Howe, her bloody hands repaying poor Lossburgh, at the last stroke of his brush, with the thrust of her hair pin, thus eliminating any risk that he might comprehend his role in her little vignette. He was from Langar, after all; and no doubt familiar with the Foss stone. From there, when combined with the peculiarities of his commission, it would have only been a series of mental leaps and jumps to John’s treasure; to Larky and Welf and who knows who else?
Albert had figured it out. To his way of thinking, that meant pretty much anyone could.
“I want to be alone here for a while,” he said at last.
Jeremy Ash tossed a glance at Angela and jerked his head toward the door. “C’mon. Let’s see if there’s some cider in the bar.”
Angela didn’t want to leave Albert alone. She felt that, at long last, things were coming together. She wanted to be in on the denouement. “But. . . don’t you think. . .”
She had hoped that words would present themselves to a moving tongue. They didn’t. “I. . .’
“Well put,” said Jeremy Ash, stationing himself by the door. “C’mon. He’ll be all right.”
For several minutes after Angela’s perfume had faded from the atmosphere, Albert stood where Lossburgh had stood. He was no longer concerned with the man in the blue pajamas–he had learned what he’d been looking at. Now he was interested in the artist; Lossburgh, a popular painter of cows and horses, summoned from his home in Langar to Castle Combe by Annabella Scrope–owner, incidentally, of both places who, shortly thereafter, became Lady Howe—to paint a scene in which he was to portray himself as Robert Tiptoft standing in Langar Chapel.
Why had she imported a painter when so many were available in Castle Combe? Because only a painter familiar with Langar Chapel would do. Why not have the picture, since it represents Langar Chapel, paintedin Langar Chapel? Because everyone in Langar—or perhaps someone in particular—would then know it was being painted, and might wonder, as Albert had, why the subject was looking across himself so oddly, and thereby discover its riddle.
Wouldn’t everyone or someone in particular know anyway, when Lossburgh completed his commission and returned to Langar?
Not if he didn’t return.
He had been murdered by Annabella Scrope, very likely before the last stroke of his brush had congealed upon the canvas.
Albert unfolded the photo again and tilted his head at it. From the first time he saw the painting, he knew it had been trying to tell him something. Now he knew what it was. But that left one question still unanswered; why had Annabella gone to such trouble to have the painting made in the first place?
It wasn’t about the painting though, was it? It was about the code. It could as well have been a sequence of letters, an arrangement of symbols, a series of musical notes; all those things to which one would look if they were looking for a code.
But they wouldn’t look at a portrait of a man long dead by an obscure painter of quadrupeds.
“Why do people make codes?” Albert asked the miasma that had begun to enclose his brain. He hadn’t noticed his head was throbbing. He noticed now.
“You know that,” said a voice from the fog. A woman’s voice. Esperanza. The smell of her signature flower, probably something purple, whispered on the air.
“?”
Esperanza took shape on the retinas of his eyes, as if projected there from the shadows in his mind. She wore a reddish orange dress with which, clutched in one hand, she swept at the floor as she danced slowly, rhythmically toward him, her feet not quite touching the parquet. He couldn’t hear the music she heard, but he could sense it as it entered his blood. “You do. Codes keep secrets from the curious, but are defenseless against he who has the key.”
Simple, thought Albert. Why hadn’t he been able to produce such a flawless definition? “Annabella wanted to keep the secret from everyone,” he said.
“Especially?”
Albert knitted his brow. “King Charles the Second?”
“Si.”
“She didn’t have the jewels. She just wanted him to know she knew where they were.”
Esperanza spun in a long, slow circle, humming something he couldn’t define. “She was blackmailing him.”
“She was?”
“Por supuesto. In her hands the treasure was both a currency with which she could purchase what she most desired, and a weapon she could retain. ‘I will keep the location of the jewels secret—out of the hands of your enemies’ she would say—‘if you grant my wish.”
She waited.
“To be a Lady?”
Esperanza nodded. “She was a formidable woman, this one. I have known those of our sex who will stop at nothing to have their way. The whispers of such a woman is far more deadly than the sword of a male. Her blade is drawn stealthily from its sheath, and is as likely to skewer the heart or the mind as pierce the flesh.
“She was one such.”
“Have you ever met her. . .where you are?”
“Annabella?”
“Si,” said Albert. The lapse into Spanish surprised him and tasted Latin and mysterious on is tongue, like a taco.
“I would not want to, I think. That kind of woman is terrifying. One never knows where one stands with a woman whose soul is twisted.
“No, she is not here,” said Esperanza. “You are much too innocent for that.” She laughed and, spinning into the smoke and shadows, disappeared, trailing a final thought behind her like a vapor. “You know all these things.”
Albert wondered if he’d ever see her again. His instinct told him not.
When he emerged from the oak-paneled crysalis—in which, he imagined, wandered molecules startled from Lossburgh’s lungs on a cry that never came—the noises of the present dimension filtered into his consciousness; prominent among them was Angela’s voice, coming from a room to his left. The bar.
“Ah, there you are!” said Angela as he entered.
Within the confines of the room the air was equal parts smoke and the smell of alcohol with only a nod to oxygen. Albert sat on a stool between Angela, similarly seated on his right, and Jeremy Ash, in his wheelchair, on his left. He lit a cigarette and ordered a beer; both redundant.
“All done ruminating, then?”
“Thinking?”
“Yes,” said Angela, sipping her lime shandy. “Thinking.”
Albert nodded and sipped his beer, leaving a tidily-groomed mustache in the space formerly occupied by meringue.
“And?”
“Now I know.”
“Know what?” said Jeremy Ash with an ill-concealed grimace.
His legs must be hurting him again.
“Everything.”
“Ah! I’ve heard that before,” said Angela. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, holding her glass aloft, “I’d like to present to you a Man Who Knows Everything!”
“What man doesn’t?” said a woman with unnaturally black hair who sat with three companions amid a cluster of knees at a little round table for two near the window.
A convivial eruption of female laughter followed, punctuated by a comment, deliveredsotto voce, by a man two seats down from Angela. “And what woman won’t tell him he’s wrong?”
Besides Albert, no one else seemed to have heard. Probably for the best. He hung his head a bit in a way that made Angela wish she had cut herself off after one drink.
“I mean everything I wanted to know.”
“Sorry, Albert,” she said. “Just teasing.”
Albert knew teasing.
“You mean about the man in the blue pajamas?” said Jeremy, concealing another wince behind a sip of cider.
“Yes. That. . .and other things.”
“What kind of other things?”
What would happen, Albert wondered, if he troubled the
air with all he had learned? What good would come of it?
“Nothing important,” he said. He raised his eyes to the mirror behind the bar and saw the returning gaze of a man in his mid-forties with horn-rimmed glasses, close-cropped black hair, flecked with gray about the temples, a mustache of foam on his upper lip, and—he knew—a tiny mysterious island floating somewhere behind those pupiless eyes.
Angela leaned on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Do you know where the treasure is?”
Albert said nothing, but the man in the mirror, who was badly in need of a shave, smiled.
NEARLY THE END
Epilogue
“I wasthere!” said Henri Piemonte, shaking his rain-soaked copy ofLa Monde at his friend across the table. A pat of butter, melting atop his fresh croissant, attended developments with interest. “I should know. It was not natural.”
Augustus, the friend, flared his nostrils skeptically, and, by way of exclamation, arched an eyebrow as he stirred a fourth spoonful of sugar into his coffee.
Henri could not allow these aspersions to go unremarked. “No! But I was! It was just as this reporter . . .” he unfolded the paper to the review he’d been reading aloud, “this Stefan Regineaux. It was just as he said. Supernatural!”
“It was just music,” said Augustus whose nose, somehow, seemed to be crawling further and further up his face. It had been an unspoken understanding during the many years of their friendship that he was the more culturally refined of the two and he and his nose were not pleased that Henri was voicing an opinion on the subject of the concert he had attended, in his capacity as an usher no less!
“But no!” said Henri, almost leaping to his feet. “You would not say so had you been there.” And so, in layman’s terms, the warring factions of brain and heart converged on the battlefield of his tongue to express the wonder that had shaken his soul, and neither prevailed.
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 33
