‘Yes, I’m sure she is. She’s good with everything. Jeffries has a very high regard for her, and he’s extremely difficult to please. Mr Stanton hopes she can be spared to come on a visit to London. There’s so much she would enjoy ...’
For only a moment his dark, almost scowling features relaxed. I despised myself for trying to charm him with praise of Jessica, to let him know that others, whose standards were different and more sophisticated, found her irresistible. But it was the truth. I wondered why I didn’t like her myself – perhaps because she didn’t like me.
‘There’s a great deal Jessica enjoys in London – the galleries and such ... She’s only been there twice, for short visits. My brother, her great-uncle, lived in London. His widow still lives there. But one hears such things about London these days – drugs and all the rest of it. Sickening, I think. It’s so easy for a young person to be – to be influenced. I wouldn’t like her to get it into her head to stay there.
‘With this to come back to? I don’t think so, Mr Tolson. Is it all right if I go on now?’
He would nod, and continue for a while with whatever he was doing at the desk. But I didn’t doubt that my presence was as irksome to him as his was unnerving to me. Perched on the ladder, my hands smeared with dust and cobwebs, I handled the brittle brown paper in those boxes, scanned the faded brown ink, and despaired of finding what Gerald hoped for. Indeed, there was almost a kind of malevolent disarray about the contents of the boxes – some would begin with the date stamped on the cover, and then skip ten years. Papers in others would bear no relation to the date on the box at all. I began to think, after a while, that someone in that house had been through the boxes before me. Each day they seemed to become more confused, the contents more wildly scattered. I had so far worked systematically along the boxes dated during the years I thought Margaretha van Huygens might have brought her precious dowry to Thirlbeck, and then I saw that this was too obvious a progress; it could be tracked and anticipated. So I began to select at random from those years, and I made a point of going only to the boxes whose undisturbed dust told me that they could not possibly have been recently handled. Then after two days of this, I came one morning to find that all the boxes in the row on which I had been working, and those on the shelves above and below, had been dusted.
Jeffries stopped by the open study door one morning as I was perched on the ladder. ‘Well, Miss Roswell, I’m glad to see you’re looking a bit cleaner this morning. Your skirt yesterday – really terrible. I thought at least I could make your job a bit pleasanter for you.’
‘You dusted the boxes, Jeffries?’
‘Yes – they were in a shocking state. Of course the Tolsons can’t possibly see to everything in a place of this size. A pity, isn’t it? Have you seen some of those rooms upstairs – nothing but dust sheets. Rather spooky, Miss Roswell, I think. And a little sad. One likes to see a house lived in, don’t you think?’ Then he added cheerfully: ‘Mr Stanton’s very bright this morning. I had difficulty persuading him to stay in bed. Soon be on our way back to London.’
Curiously, Gerald seemed in no particular hurry to return to London himself, nor was Askew impatient to leave. Both of them seemed to have fallen into their own pattern at Thirlbeck. Perhaps it was that Gerald was more tired than he had known, perhaps it was that Askew was beginning to face without fear his own past in this house. Askew even took his turn at the shelter from which the eagles were watched, and became almost as zealous as Nat Birkett in the attempt to block all invaders of this valley for the next months. It seemed to me that only the Condesa chafed under the restrictions of life at Thirlbeck. She did not openly complain, but at times I sensed a growing desperation in her as each day followed its by now established routine. I thought that she feared Askew’s seeming contentment in his surroundings; it might be difficult to pry him loose. ‘You should have guests, Roberto,’ she urged. ‘A little cocktail party. Gerald could manage that for an hour – not too tiring.’
Askew’s brow wrinkled. ‘Need we, Carlota? You’d find the county people rather dull around here, I think. In any case, I can’t remember anyone to ask. And they’ve all forgotten me, I’m sure. Perhaps ... if you’d really like it ...’
But nothing was arranged. They paid no calls outside Thirlbeck, hardly ever left the valley. No one came to call, or if they did, they didn’t get past the South Lodge. Tolson kept his grip on his whole little community, and might have gone so far as to give instructions at the South Lodge to tell anyone who called that Lord Askew was not at home. Since it was always Tolson or Jessica who answered the telephone, the same answer could have been given to those who telephoned. The doubt still nagged at me that Tolson wanted any of us here – even Askew himself. I remembered Nat’s words about Askew and Tolson. ‘His time is past. I’m the future.’
Time seemed almost suspended in those few weeks. We ourselves waited for Gerald to become stronger, and we didn’t seem to care what happened after that. How odd it was that I didn’t become excited any more as I moved among those beautiful furnishings in the ground floor rooms. The time of the auction would come, but it was not yet. The time to bring the people from Hardy’s would come, but it would wait a little longer. The picture which I now saw daily in the study was either a Rembrandt or it wasn’t. Time would reveal that also. And the room where the other pictures were stored was not even discussed. Gerald didn’t ask to see them – perhaps he feared what he would find there, and Askew acted as if he had forgotten about them. Sometimes I thought I sensed a kind of desperation of impatience in the Condesa – I watched her often as she stood and looked out across the lake, and the spring evenings grew longer. But she said nothing, and she would return to her needlework with that quiet grace of a woman who has schooled herself, against her own nature, in the art of waiting.
The telephone calls from Harry continued, but they were brief, and at less frequent intervals. And then there came one during which he said he was going to Australia. ‘Just for a day or two, luv.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Harry. No one goes to Australia for a day or two. What are you going to do there?’
‘Mind your own business, luv. That way I’ll never be able to blame you for talking out of school and letting some other bloke in on what Harry’s already got his eye on. Back in a week. See you – that is, unless you’ve decided to retire up there.’
‘No, we’ll be leaving in a few days.’
‘That’s good. Someone else might slip into your spot.’
‘What spot?’
‘Your spot at Hardy’s, stupid.’
‘I’ve been told by Hardy’s to stay. I’m to stay as long as Gerald does.’
‘Yes, there’s a good girl. You keep your eye on Gerald. Worth having around, he is. ’Bye, luv.’
‘Harry ...?’ But he was gone, was already a world away from me. Suddenly I was possessed of the Condesa’s sense of being trapped here. It had been a few weeks, only a few weeks. But I had fallen into step with all the others, and it was a slower pace. Tolson had long ago, at Askew’s insistence, produced the keys to the bookcases in the library. I searched there, as I did among the boxes, but with the same sense of futility. No diary, no book that I could identify as belonging to Margaretha van Huygens turned up, no list of her housewifely possessions. But in the mornings the sun came into that room – with the metal shutters thrown back it was a cheerful place, the jumble of furniture even making it seem cosy, as if they were not all works of art and should be accorded a graceful display. I enjoyed being there, sitting up on the ladder, taking down books, making notes that this or that might be of interest to the rare book specialists at Hardy’s. There were a few, mixed among the others, like the masterpieces of the furniture-maker’s art were mixed with the chintz sofas, that I began to suspect could be of more than usual interest – books in manuscript, illuminated, some of them. I had no idea where they might have come from, these beautiful things with their paintings on vellum pages, and their stately Latin
phrases. Askew had not given a picture of the Birketts as men of learning at the period when these books had come into being – before the time of printing when a book was a very rare thing, and very few people could read. I had a sense, as I touched them, that they had fairly recently been handled. They were dusty, but the dust was not something undisturbed for years. Perhaps Jessica had also found and enjoyed these treasures, trying out her Latin on them. As I carefully turned the pages trying to drag up for myself a phrase or two of Latin remembered from school, I wondered if I should go and talk to Gerald about them, or talk to Askew. Something held me back. I was beginning to get the same sense as Gerald had had on his first night at Thirlbeck, the sense that while all seemed on the surface to be all right, that much at Thirlbeck could be very wrong.
I found the Book of Hours on the top shelf of a case I had not previously been able to open – whose lock yielded only after I had eased its stiffness with fine sewing-machine oil I bought in Kesmere. No one had had this case open for many years; the dust was heavy and undisturbed. The Book of Hours had fallen down, or been pushed down, behind taller volumes. It was tiny and exquisite, this Horea, illuminating with those curiously medieval figures, the seven canonical offices of the day – my memory spelled them out as I turned those beautiful hand-wrought pages – Matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline. So beautifully executed, this book could have been made for a princess of many centuries ago. And so it might. I could not, from my very small knowledge of such things, know for what historic personage such a book had been designed and made. But it once had been given, and the name of the giver, or the receiver, was written in a faded but readable script. Juana Fernández de Córdoba, Mendoza, Soto y Alvarez.
And there, as I turned the pages, the brittle parchment sheet slipped out, and along with it, a page which held Vanessa’s writing.
I don’t remember how long I sat on top of that ladder. I do remember staring out at the lake, and back at the book, and the two sheets of paper. And finally, carefully closing the bookcase, I climbed down the ladder and went to the door. There was no one in the hall. When I reached the privacy of the Spanish Woman’s room, it was more than ever a sanctuary to me.
I sat there at the long table in the window alcove, and spread out the two pages – one a fine parchment, yellowed, with a flowing script in Spanish. The other was an ordinary piece of modern notepaper. Vanessa’s scrawling hand did not compare favourably with what she had translated – but no, not translated – Vanessa had no more than a tourist’s knowledge of Spanish. She had made a copy of the Spanish words, and the translation was written beneath.
Y este os enviamos, amada prima, nuestro retrato, por la mano de Domingo Teotocópulo, un espejo de conciencia, para que lo guardéis celosamente con fidelidad y de encargo hasta el día de la victoria final y en la eterna unión en Nuestro Señor Jesucristo y Nuestra Santa Madre Iglesia.
Yo, el Rey
Felipe
And this do we send unto you, beloved cousin, our likeness, by the hand of Domenico Theotokopoulos, a mirror of conscience, to keep close, in faith and in trust, until the day of the final victory and the eternal union in Christ and our Holy Mother Church.
I looked in awe at the hand which had signed it, because I had seen it before, recently, and it seemed burned into my brain.
I, the King
Felipe
It had been on a document, proudly framed and exhibited in the hall of the Casa Grande of San José, and the proudest possession, my father had said, of the Martinez family – the title deed of the lands of the hacienda containing the silver mines from which their one-time wealth had sprung, signed by Philip the Second of Spain, using the majestic title, I, the King, as all sovereigns of Spain had done in the days of her power and glory.
And here it was again, on a scrap of parchment, addressed to no one, undated, but I knew quite surely that it had been sent to the Spanish Woman, to hold her loyalty to the political mission on which she had been sent, a pawn in Philip’s hand.
Vanessa had found it – or someone else had found it – and Vanessa had copied it, and had it translated. How many years ago? Her handwriting looked younger – not quite the almost illegible scrawl it had become in her later, less patient years.
A devotional Book of Hours, a scrap of manuscript signed by Philip the Second of Spain. Beautiful, valuable. And Vanessa had known of them both.
But the vital importance of that translated message was in that name, the name of an ordinary painter of that time, one who had portrayed his patron in The Dream of Philip the Second, who was known not to have been greatly favoured by the King, but obviously used by him for this special commission. This likeness, this portrait, would have had to be quite small, or it never could have reached the Spanish Woman in secret. Domenico Theotokopoulos. By that name he had always been described in official documents. To the world who would now pay almost unimaginable sums of money if one of his pictures had been for sale, he would simply be known, as he had been to the Spaniards, as El Greco.
I grew weak at the thought that one of his canvases might exist here, in this house. And the thought that Vanessa herself had come across this slip of parchment in the Spanish Woman’s cherished book, the Book of Hours – Vanessa had found it, copied it, and had it translated. And told no one.
I looked wildly around the room, the dark agedness of the panelling, the huge bed, the sombre bed hangings. I thought of all this great house, and the many rooms in which I had never set foot. I thought of the room which guarded the pictures of Margaretha van Huygens. Was it possible that among them, alien to those Dutch landscapes and faces and still lifes, there existed a small portrait of a Spanish Hapsburg face, the face of Philip, archenemy of Elizabethan England, the face which must for ever be hidden by the Spanish Woman? Even though I had never seen the collection I doubted that it would be there. If it still existed, if it existed at all, if it had ever existed, it would be in some place where the Spanish Woman had hidden it.
And then I looked out on the calm, golden mirror of the tarn. It seemed to hold no fear, no mystery. But the Spanish Woman had taken to her death in that tarn the knowledge of a greater treasure than the enormous jewel she wore about her neck.
IV
That was the day at Thirlbeck when I opened doors I never had opened before. Until now a sense of good manners – perhaps misplaced considering the job I held – had kept me from prying into parts of the house where I would not normally have gone. And now I knew that in fact it was a slight apprehension about Tolson which had kept me back from this exploration; Askew would not have minded; he would have thought me dull for displaying so little curiosity in a house which encouraged it. Now I went and looked in the dust-sheeted rooms that I had never entered before, the rooms Jeffries had apparently not hesitated to enter. I drew back curtains which darkened these rooms, lifted dust sheets, saw the same heavy oak Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture which did not need the delicate care of the fine pieces of marquetry Tolson had gathered in the lower rooms. Often, along with the dust, there was the pervading smell of damp, the ominous smell of rooms too long closed, the crumbling brickwork and mortar in the fireplaces. There were some marvellous firebacks, and firedogs bearing the crest of the Birketts. There were a few pieces of pottery about, and some pewter. In some rooms, brocade or velvet curtains hung in damp-stained shreds. I opened presses and chests, and met only the softness of old curtains or bedcovers. There were no pictures, and few mirrors. In some rooms I saw fingerprints in the dust, a trail of footprints on the oak floors. On all the presses I opened the knobs had been wiped free of dust; there were fingermarks in the dust on the lids of the chests.
I seemed to follow a trail that someone had laid before me. It could have been Jessica, who walked the rooms of this house with loving familiarity; it could have been Jeffries, whose curiosity had obviously been greater than mine – perhaps Jessica herself had conducted him. But when I briefly opened the door of a room in the wing opposite
the one Gerald and I slept in, I realised that wherever I had gone in that house the perfume that was so strong in this room had been with me, quite a separate thing from the other smells of dust and damp – this a flowery scent, one the Condesa used during the day. I took a quick glance at the untidy splendour of the room she inhabited, a room, despite its fussy Victorian furnishings, on which she had indelibly stamped her personality. Her amber silk gown lay across a chair, a table with a swinging mirror was strewn with silver-topped bottles and jars which belonged to a crocodile fitted dressing case. Louis Vuitton luggage was stacked beside a mahogany wardrobe, one tiny-heeled slipper lay on its side alone in the middle of the floor. There were books and magazines about, flowers and foliage in a big vase on a table by the windows arranged with the careless grace that the Condesa had made into a high art. She even had her own polished silver tray of drinks, and beautiful cut-crystal glasses. And the perfume. By now I had come to think that the perfume wasn’t in each room because the Condesa had been there before me, but because it was unconsciously a background to this whole house. It was in the dining-room, the drawing-room, the library; it was something we breathed simply because she moved. It had impregnated these walls as if she had been here for ever, not just a few weeks.
It was strongly in the room Askew used, adjoining hers. But now I was realising I had no business looking in these two rooms, and I didn’t linger here. There was little to see. It was a large room, almost as grand as the Spanish Woman’s room, and almost as bare. There was a surprising severity to it. Two brushes on a table, a book, a pair of gloves – nothing else of a personal nature in sight. Unlike the Condesa’s room, it had the appearance of one belonging to a man who was passing through, a stranger who would spend only one night under this roof. None of his childhood or adolescence was visible here, no photographs, no trophies, nothing that declared that this man had been born in this house. I closed the door softly, remembering that nowhere I had moved had I yet seen any place that looked as if it had been used as a nursery or schoolroom.
The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets. Page 21
