A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  The page was ornamented with a cloaked figure at the ship’s rail–presumably a self-portrait–and a ship wallowing in a trough of sea with a wave rearing above the mainmast. Probably some artistic licence. On the next page they landed at Rotterdam, secured rooms in a hotel that was so spotlessly clean and orderly that one might have eaten dinner off the flagstones in the hall and were met by a Mr Schwarz who was to be their guide for the first few weeks of their journey. So they’d decided to hire guides as they went along, rather than take one with them. I knew a little about these Continental tours because one of the many ways in which my late father managed to make enough money to keep us was by occasionally escorting rich young men around the cultural sites of Europe, as a final gloss to their expensive educations. Mr Schwarz’s task would have been to smooth the way for the young couple, advise them on the best hotels to stay, the art galleries, notable buildings and best views and quite probably tell them what to think of them as well.

  They had rested at Rotterdam for three days while Mr Schwarz went ahead with the fourgon containing the luggage, along with Edward and Suzy (presumably valet and maid) to prepare things for them on the next stop of their journey towards Antwerp and Brussels. It seemed that they were avoiding Paris and most of France; hardly surprising at a time when the majority of English people still thought of it as a country of bloody revolution. The journey to Brussels, in easy stages, seemed to go smoothly, apart from occasional worries like a hotel where the beds had fleas–I told Mr Schwarz that it simply would not do and unless they replaced the mattress and bolsters as well as all the linen we should move to another place–and a lame horse–I insisted on getting out of the carriage and walking the two miles to the staging post, rather than burden the poor creature with my weight.

  As I turned the pages, I started to like the young Lady Brinkburn very much. Every night without fail, after what must have been exhausting days of travel, she wrote a few lines at least in her journal and usually added a sketch. She had a good eye for the unremarkable things as well as the approved sights–two women in shawls walking to market with baskets of root vegetables, an old man leaning on a stick and drinking beer, even a line of washing blowing in the wind. The excitement of an intelligent young woman, abroad for the first time, shone on every page of her journal. She was kind to people as well as animals. The last stage into Antwerp had been a pouring wet one. Our poor boy riding on the back of the coach was wet as a herring when we arrived, teeth chattering. I told Suzy to dry him and wrap him in a blanket and I made him some tea with my little spirit lamp. So their entourage had included a boy to ride on the back of their travelling carriage and help with the luggage, which would have been below the dignity of Edward the valet. There was even a drawing of the boy on the Antwerp page, blanket wrapped, with his steaming teacup. Every detail of the journey was there. Or almost every detail. Only one thing was missing: any sign of affection for, or even interest in, her new husband.

  Lord Brinkburn always appeared simply as ‘C’ for Cornelius, his first name. Usually, as in that first entry on the crossing, when there was something wrong with him. At Antwerp, where they stayed for a week, C brought low with a cold, so Mr Schwarz showed Suzy and me around the city on our own. I purchased a set of painted plates and Suzy begged a small advance of her wages from me to buy a new lace cap with ribbons. At Brussels, making the obligatory visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, C angry because the man who was to have been our guide did not meet us, but fortunately an officer who had taken part in the battle was also visiting and gave us a most vivid account of how our hero the Duke of Wellington defeated the French tyrant, so C mollified. A conscientious plan of the battlefield accompanied the entry. Although the new bride might be bashful about going into raptures over her husband in a journal that friends and family might read, all this seemed unusually cool. Shouldn’t they, for instance, have watched the occasional sunset together, walked together, shopped for luxuries for their home together? Come to think of it, should a young woman on her honeymoon tour have been quite so assiduous about keeping up her journal every evening?

  ‘Lady Brinkburn says would you like some more coffee, Miss Lane?’

  The maid had come into the library so softly that I didn’t notice until she was standing beside me. I’d let my coffee go cold in its cup, hardly tasted. I said no thank you, waited while she took the tray away, then turned back to the journal, following the Brinkburns’ leisurely progress across Europe.

  From Brussels they went eastwards to Cologne, then up the Rhine Valley, sometimes making diversions and often stopping in one place for days at a time. I was looking for something else in the journal now, and not finding it. Lady Brinkburn had no great fondness for her husband, but had she met another man she liked better on their travels? That might explain, if anything did, the preposterous story of the stranger in the night. If so, there was not the faintest trace of it in the journal. Mr Schwarz, from her sketch of him, was fifty, had ears that stuck out and wore a pince nez on the sharp ridge of his nose. As arranged, he left them at the Swiss border where plump and cheerful Mr Lebrun took over the management of the Alpine stage of their journey. Occasionally the Brinkburns would meet other travelling British parties and go on excursions or picnics with them, but these associations lasted a week at most before they went their separate ways.

  One thing that was clear, as they travelled over mountain passes and had to survive simpler accommodation than they’d experienced so far, was how much Lady Brinkburn was growing up on the journey. The young bride, still in her early twenties, was learning to manage people and events. One evening when they arrived tired at a mountain inn to find the cook incapably drunk and the prospect of a bread-and-cheese supper looming: I told Edward and the boy to carry the wretched cook into the yard and hold his head under the pump, then Suzy and I took charge of his kitchen and succeeded in constructing some quite satisfactory omelettes, which Mr Lebrun pronounced as good as any he’d ever eaten in France. Since the cook had managed to lose the keys to the wine cellar, we broached some bottles from the store we keep for emergencies under the floor of our chariot and did well enough. In the morning, when the proprietor presented his bill, I told him roundly that we’d no intention of paying anything for our dinner beyond the value of the eggs and butter. And where was Lord Brinkburn in all this? I imagined him lounging with his legs under the table, complaining of having to wait for his dinner. Perhaps unfairly, I was beginning to dislike the man.

  They spent some days at Geneva and made a daring foray into France, to see the glaciers at Chamonix. Then came the pages I’d seen already, when Lord Brinkburn was taken ill and his wife had the happiest three weeks of her life, painting and botanising in the Alpine meadows. Various new names occurred over the next few pages, but most of the men mentioned were travelling Britons or guides, with no indication that her heart had been stirred by anything apart from lilies and gentians.

  Once recovered, the party seemed intent on making up for lost time and hurried over the St Bernard Pass into Italy. Because of the pace of travel, the journal entries were shorter, mostly just a few lines recording the more spectacular sights and the miles travelled, with the occasional sketch. But once in Italy, they expanded again into whole pages. The Brinkburns had rented a villa on the shores of Lake Como for most of July and the whole of August and Lady Brinkburn was enchanted with the place.

  It really is the most romantic of all possible dwellings, like something from a fairytale. Although it is a villa, most comfortably and properly appointed, it is also a true castle. A small peninsula juts into the lake, crowned with the ruins of what must have been a formidable small fortress three or four hundred years ago. Its walls are mostly crumbled into falls of stone down the hillside, but the original round tower remains. The architect has most cleverly worked it into the design of the villa, so that the room downstairs is a round sitting room looking out over the lake, so close to the water that one might almost feel oneself afloat. Above it,
a smaller room is fitted out as a bedchamber. It is not large and may have been intended for a servant, but the minute I saw it I appropriated it as mine. (Suzy may sleep more spaciously in the main body of the villa.) I have my drawing and writing things set out on a table by the window and a view of the lake that a soaring eagle might envy.

  For the next few weeks, she didn’t tire of drawing and painting that castle from all angles: from the shore, from a rowing boat on the lake, against the sunset, by moonlight. She wrote poems in her journal too, about the castle and the lake, much influenced by Wordsworth and not as good as her drawings. Although the poems were full of fashionable melancholy, every page of the journal suggested that Lady Brinkburn was enjoying those summer weeks by Lake Como. Small sketches of their household practically danced from the margins: the maid Suzy with a basket of peaches, the boy from home grinning at the back of the travelling coach, along with a smaller lad who might have been the child of one of their Italian servants, the Italian cook waving a ladle–everything and everybody, in fact, but her new-wedded lord. That might have been because her lord was not often there to be sketched. Soon after their arrival, he took off on his own for Milan, where he stayed for a week. When he got back, some of his old university friends had arrived in a villa a few miles away, part of what seemed to be a British migration to the shores of the lake. Reading between the lines, Lady Brinkburn didn’t much care for these old friends and dryly recorded when C was off boating or driving with them. She made her own friends and established a new round of picnics, lunch parties and sketching expeditions. Altogether, it seemed an enviably sunny interlude.

  The breaking up of it was gradual at first. Some of her picnic friends began to turn their travelling chariots towards home. It was mid August by now and the grouse moors were calling. The long summer days began to fray into rain and thunderstorms. She loved the storms at first.

  Here, the lightning often begins long before the rain. Last night after dinner I sat at the window of my little round drawing room and watched pulse after pulse of white light flickering over the lake. The effect is quite beyond my powers of drawing. No thunder was audible, but the air seemed so charged with electricity that I could feel the small hairs at the back of my neck rising. A silk handkerchief became magnetised and clung to the sleeve of my dress. When I touched my paper-knife, a perceptible shock ran up my fingers and along my arm. The phenomenon has a remarkable affect on one’s nervous organisation, as if waiting anxiously for something but not knowing what. Later, when it was quite dark, the storm broke in earnest, with downpours of rain so heavy that it looked like a second glass pane on the far side of my window, copper-coloured lightning forking down to the water and tumultuous thunder. It is the most sublime of Nature’s effects, and I privileged to see it here from my window suspended between land and water as the elements raged all round.

  More of their holiday friends packed up and headed home. Lady Brinkburn began to acquire packing cases for some of the china and pictures she’d picked up on their travels. There were fewer sketching expeditions. Her journal entries began to take on a regretful tone about the people and places she would miss and the darkness and cold of an English winter in prospect, but there was still nothing to give any hint of what was to come. August 26 started as a normal day in the journal.

  Sky overcast, the heat heavy and oppressive. The Italian seamstress called this morning, about the alterations in my blue travelling costume. C has taken the carriage and gone to the Desmonds, where they are getting up a party to play bridge.

  A few more domestic details followed, then a later entry:

  Evening. C not back, so I had a light supper of poached chicken and fruit brought to me here in my drawing room. I have little appetite and my head is aching from the heat. I tried to sketch boats on the lake this afternoon, but could not get them to come right. Even now that the sun is going down, there is no sense of relief from the oppressive atmosphere. A storm is brewing, preceded by thunder echoing from the hills like a big bass drum. Now and then, distant lightning illuminates the undersides of the clouds on the far side of the lake with a sullen kind of glow, nothing like the bright pulses of previous storms I have witnessed from this window. I suppose it is Nature signalling the end of the summer.

  Unusually, there were no sketches on the page. I hesitated before turning it, knowing we must be very close now to the entry that mattered. Outside, two gardener’s boys were kneeling on the gravel drive, rooting out weeds invisible from where I was sitting. Further away in the fields, men and women were turning over lines of mown hay to dry in the sun. When I turned the thick paper it made a creaking noise that sounded loud in the library. There was just one line of writing on the double page. The hand was the familiar one that had led me all the way from Newcastle to Lake Como, but it slanted across the paper as if the writer lacked the strength or energy to hold the journal straight while she wrote.

  August 27

  This morning, Lord Brinkburn has told me something terrible, terrible.

  Nothing more. I turned the page. The next two pages were blank. The journal resumed, after a fashion, two weeks later when they were on the far side of the Alps and on the way home. But it was a different journal altogether, a mere record of miles travelled and hotels where the party stayed. No descriptions, no poetry, no sketches. The last entry recorded Arrived Brussels 5.30 p.m. After that, only more blank pages. Not a word about the return to England or whether the same horses were waiting. I felt as if the talented, resourceful young woman I’d been travelling with had suddenly died.

  A door opened. A man’s footsteps came across the floor. When I turned there was Robert Carmichael. My face must have shown my distress. He came and stood beside me. On an impulse, I moved to shut the journal, with some obscure idea of protecting her secret, even though I still didn’t know it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I read it some time ago, at Lady Brinkburn’s invitation.’

  His voice was quiet, with the same sense of loss that I was feeling. I turned back to the page with one line of writing, then forward again to Brussels, not knowing what to say.

  ‘You’re wondering if that page could have been inserted afterwards?’ he said.

  I hadn’t been, but the suggestion brought me back to my investigative senses. I thought about it.

  ‘I don’t think so, no. It would have been hard to tamper with the stitching of these pages, and you’d need silk yellowed with ageing, as this is. The binding is scuffed just as it would be from travelling.’

  ‘Books may be restitched and bindings changed,’ he suggested.

  He didn’t add, ‘…as I know very well’, but the suggestion was in the air. His work among the family’s books would have brought him into contact with the trade.

  ‘In that case, somebody did an expert job. Then there’s the question of the ink.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He was listening politely, head on one side. He’d thought of all this in advance.

  ‘If you look at that one sentence on the twenty-seventh and then the passage about the storm the day before, the ink is exactly the same colour and the same degree of fading,’ I said. ‘Those short entries at the end of the journal are in a variety of different inks, as they would be in different hotels.’

  ‘So you conclude…?’

  ‘I don’t conclude anything yet.’

  I closed the book and tied the tapes. He picked up the journal and slotted it into place on a shelf near the desk, among bound volumes of maps. I stood up, feeling wearier than was reasonable from a morning in a library.

  ‘I’m sorry to say Lady Brinkburn is indisposed,’ he said. ‘She has one of her headaches. She sends her apologies and hopes to meet you again soon. I hope you’ve been offered coffee.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘May I call the pony chaise for you?’

  ‘I’ll walk, thank you. I need the fresh air.’

  ‘In that case, perhaps you’d permit me to walk with
you, as far as the top of the drive at least.’

  It would have been rude to refuse. Had it been her decision or his that I shouldn’t talk to her after reading the journal? He escorted me to the hall and asked me to excuse him while he went to fetch his hat. It took him several minutes, long enough to talk to Lady Brinkburn, or perhaps I was being unfairly suspicious.

  At first Robert Carmichael didn’t attempt to talk as we walked up the drive together, leaving me to my thoughts. The amazing thing about the journal was how close it came to bearing out Lady Brinkburn’s story. All the elements were there: the storm, the tower, the husband’s absence, the shock in the morning so appalling that it had crushed the life out of her. Hearing the story for the first time, in Mr Disraeli’s voice with its hint of mockery, it had been so clearly a romantic woman’s fantasy that I hadn’t believed it for a moment. Now, that disbelief was wavering. I was sure that the journal was genuine and that the entries had been made at the time events were happening. Either Lady Brinkburn had gone mad quite suddenly, with nothing in the journal to give the slightest warning of it, or something terrible had happened in the course of that night and day beside Lake Como.

  ‘So what did you think of the journal?’ he said.

  ‘Fascinating. Observant and beautifully illustrated.’

  We were fencing with each other, and these were no more than opening moves. He made no attempt to follow up his question, so I tried one of my own.

  ‘Have you worked for Lady Brinkburn long?’

  ‘Longer than I care to admit. I was engaged as tutor to Miles when he was ill and away from school. When he went back, Lady Brinkburn asked me to stay and help with the library and tutor both boys in their holidays.’