We laid it back in its place and Johnny tapped nails back into position through the rim the thoughtful Hugo Stillingfleet had left for this purpose. The new nails sank in easily. We stood back and looked at each other uncertainly.
‘May he rest in peace and light perpetual shine upon him,’ said Diana quietly and clearly.
* * * *
But something was worrying me. We had worked out a solution of sorts to an intriguing puzzle, but I hadn’t heard that satisfying click as the last piece of the jigsaw falls into place. We had heard the truth, I was sure, from Stillingfleet, but had we heard the whole truth? I didn’t think so.
I went to look again at the Easton portraits. I remembered Nicholas had said he would like to interrogate them. Well, why not? I thought I knew the right questions to ask, and I thought Peter Lely and his unknown pupil had given their subjects a voice which could still be heard over the years. I had released something which had lain dormant but only just contained through the years, and now I believed it was calling out for resolution and justice. The Norfolk police weren’t interested in knowing who had committed infanticide and possibly a second murder all those years ago, but I was.
I managed to evade the hypnotic stare of Wicked William and concentrated first on the sunny opulence of the wedding portrait. Robert and Mary Even the names were reassuringly solid. Following the painter’s clues, I knew that this couple had married in the autumn; their betrothal, according to Stillingfleet, had been in the summer of 1662, and presumably Robert had been pursuing this heiress during the previous London season. At the very time Jayne Marston had been sent away to the country. Had he known the sorry story of his sister Comfort’s maid? It was a family with a reputation for large-heartedness in its dealings with its retainers. Yes, he would have known. He would have been concerned. But concerned, perhaps, for another reason.
Mary’s fortune had saved the family and guaranteed his position in society. Robert would not have welcomed any breath of scandal to do with the family his golden goose was about to marry into. ‘Of Quaker stock,’ Nicholas had said. I looked again at the heart-shaped face, framed by wispy golden tendrils, the modest dress, the tightly pursed lips, and I wondered about Mary.
‘Was it to avoid offending you?’ I murmured, ‘That Jayne and her child were done away with? Too inconvenient, too vocal. A servant, yes, but so intertwined with the family she had forgotten her place and was making herself a nuisance? Would it have ruined Robert’s schemes if you’d discovered that his brother had seduced a family maid?’
I couldn’t believe that.
‘And why did you flee?’ I asked, turning at last to William, ‘Why didn’t you just tough it out?’ An earldom, the king’s supporters back in power again - the future looked good for William Easton. What was he fleeing? Not a family scandal - there must have been something more.
The dark eyes taunted, enticed, seduced. I speculated again about the identity of the unknown painter and was struck by a devastating thought. A thought so obvious and yet so shocking I groped my way to a Chippendale chair and, against all the house rules, sat down on it. The painter’s message now screamed out at me. How could I not have seen it before?
I heard Nicholas leaving the library and called out to him.
‘Ellie? You OK?’ He hurried to join me.
‘We’ve got it all wrong, Nicholas!’ I said. ‘Come and have a look again at Wicked William. He’s been wrongly accused! It couldn’t have been him!’
I positioned Nicholas in front of the portrait. ‘Now, imagine you’re the painter. And that, of course, in the sixteen sixties, means you’re a man. The sitter is reacting to you. What do you see?’
‘Oh my God!’ said Nicholas. ‘I see it! And to think that all these years women have been averting their eyes thinking he was trying to seduce them. He wasn’t at all, was he?’
‘No. I’m not sure they had a word for it in Cavalier England, but this chap was gay and proud of it, as you’d say.’
‘I’m certain they didn’t have a word for it in north Norfolk! And it was a capital offence at the time. “Death without mercy”, according to the Articles passed by Parliament in sixteen sixty-one. He could, technically, have been executed if discovered.’
‘What if he were discovered?’ I speculated. ‘Caught in flagrante with a handsome young painter, let’s say?’
‘He’d have had to flee to somewhere more worldly - to France...to Italy... Poor old Stillingfleet, holding all this together! But this is just guesswork, Ellie.’
‘Oh yes. But look at his hand, Nick! Do you see the flower he’s holding?’
Nicholas peered at the tiny purple face.
‘Always assumed it was a violet, but it’s not, you know! It’s heartsease. Common little English flower. It’s got a lot of names - love-lies-bleeding, love-in-idleness, la pensée in French, wild pansy.’
‘Exactly! Pansy! A badge. The seventeenth-century equivalent of a pink ribbon. That’s what you’d call flaunting it! So how likely is it that he’d be spending time in London undoing a lady’s maid? Possible, I suppose - but I can’t see it! No. I think we’ve got to look elsewhere for the father of that little scrap in the coffin.’
Our eyes turned on Robert’s handsome countenance. I waved a hand at his line of progeny. ‘It’s pretty obvious in which direction his preferences lay!’ I said with more than a touch of bitterness. ‘And he had such a lot to lose if his puritan bride-to-be were to catch him with his hand up a maid’s skirt! Mary doesn’t look the understanding kind to me!’
I looked at the pair in disgust. Their faces had taken on a cast of smug respectability. Their innocent children, healthy and happy, had thrived perhaps at the expense of that other unwanted child.
Suddenly I found myself playing the role of judge in this case that would never come to court and I knew what was required of me. I knew the formula that would ensure undisturbed nights for Diana and Nicholas.
I spoke aloud to the portrait and to anyone else who was listening on the stairs. ‘Robert Easton, I find you guilty of infanticide,’ I said simply. ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’
‘Deus tute eum spectas,’ said Diana, who had come silently to join us. ‘God has seen him. God knows what he has done.’
* * * *
A week later Charles waved a postcard at me.
‘Not much in the post. It’s for you from some boyfriend of yours in Norfolk. A picture of a bloke in a periwig and it says, “Thank God! At last a quiet night! Eternally grateful, love, Nicholas.” What did you get up to in Norfolk, Ellie?’
<
* * * *
John Connolly
The Inkpot Monkey
Edgerton was suffering from writer’s block; it was, he quickly grew to realize, a most distressing complaint. A touch of influenza might lay a man up for a day or two, yet still his mind could continue its ruminations. Gout might leave him racked with pain, yet still his fingers could grasp a pen and turn pain to pennies. But this blockage, this barrier to all progress, had left Mr Edgerton a virtual cripple. His mind would not function, his hands would not write, and his bills would not be paid. In a career spanning the best part of two decades he had never before encountered such an obstacle to his vocation. He had, in that time, produced five moderately successful, if rather indifferent, novels; a book of memoirs that, in truth, owed more to invention than experience; and a collection of poetry that could most charitably be described as having stretched the capacities of free verse to the limits of their acceptability.
Mr Edgerton made his modest living from writing by the yard, based on the unstated belief that if he produced a sufficient quantity of material then something of quality was bound to creep in, if only in accordance with the law of averages. Journalism, ghostwriting, versifying, editorializing; nothing was beneath his limited capabilities.
Yet, for the past three months the closest he had come to a writing project was the construction of his weekly grocery list. A veritable t
undra of empty white pages stretched before him, the gleaming nib of his pen poised above them like a reluctant explorer. His mind was a blank, the creative juices sapped from it, leaving behind only a dried husk of frustration and bewilderment. He began to fear his writing desk, once his beloved companion but now reduced to the status of a faithless lover, and it pained him to look upon it. Paper, ink, desk, imagination, all had betrayed him, leaving him lost and alone.
To further complicate matters, Mr Edgerton’s wallet had begun to feel decidedly lightweight of late, and nothing will dampen a man’s ardour for life more than an empty pocket. Like a rodent gripped in the coils of a great constricting snake, he found that the more he struggled against his situation, the tighter the pressure upon him grew. Necessity, wrote Ovid, is the mother of invention. For Mr Edgerton, desperation was proving to be the father of despair.
And so, once again, Mr Edgerton found himself wandering the streets of the city, vainly hunting for inspiration like a hungry leech seeking blood. In time, he came to Charing Cross Road, but the miles of shelved books only depressed him further, especially since he could find none of his own among their number. Head down, he cut through Cecil Court and made his way into Covent Garden in the faint hope that the vibrancy of the markets might spur his sluggish subconscious into action. He was almost at the Magistrates’ Court when something caught his eye in the window of a small antique shop. There, partially hidden behind a framed portrait of General Gordon and a stuffed magpie, was a most remarkable inkpot.
It was silver, and about four inches tall, with a lacquered base adorned by Chinese characters. But what was most striking about it was the small, mummified monkey that perched upon its lid, its clawed toes clasped upon the rim and its dark eyes gleaming in the summer sunlight. It was obviously an infant of its species, perhaps even a foetus of some kind, for it was no more than three inches in height, and predominantly grey in colour, except for its face, which was blackened round the mouth as if the monkey had been sipping from its own inkpot. It really was a most ghastly creature, but Mr Edgerton had acquired the civilized man’s taste for the grotesque and he quickly made his way into the darkened shop to enquire about the nature of the item in question.
The owner of the business proved to be almost as distasteful in appearance as the creature that had attracted Mr Edgerton’s attention, as though the man were somehow father to the monkey. His teeth were too numerous for his mouth, his mouth too large for his face, and his head too great for his body. Combined with a pronounced stoop to his back, his aspect was that of one constantly on the verge of toppling over. He also smelled decidedly odd, and Mr Edgerton quickly concluded that he was probably in the habit of sleeping in his clothes, a deduction that briefly led the afflicted writer to an unwelcome speculation upon the nature of the body that lay concealed beneath the layers of unwashed clothing.
Nevertheless, the proprietor proved to be a veritable font of knowledge about the items in his possession, including the article that had brought Mr Edgerton into his presence. The mummified primate was, he informed the writer, an inkpot monkey, a creature of Chinese mythology. According to the myth, the monkey provided artistic inspiration in return for the residues of ink left in the bottom of the inkwell.
Mr Edgerton was a somewhat superstitious (and, it must be said, sentimental) man: he still wore, much to the amusement of his peers, his mother’s old charm bracelet, a rag-tag bauble of dubious taste that she found one day while walking upon the seashore and had subsequently bequeathed to him upon her death, along with a set of antique combs, now pawned, and a small sum of money, now spent. Among the items dangling from its links was a small gold monkey. It had always fascinated him as a child, and the discovery of a similar relic in the window of the antique store seemed to him nothing less than a sign from the Divine. As a man who was profoundly in need of inspiration from any source, and who had recently been considering opium or cheap gin as possible catalysts, he required no further convincing. He paid over money he could ill afford for the faint hope of redemption offered by the curiosity, and made his way back to his small apartments with the inkpot and its monkey tucked beneath his arm in a cloak of brown paper.
Mr Edgerton occupied a set of rooms above a tobacconist’s shop on Marylebone High Street, a recent development forced upon him by his straitened circumstances. Although Mr Edgerton did not himself partake of the noble weed, his walls were yellowed by the fumes that regularly wended their way between the cracks in the floorboards, and his clothing and furnishings reeked of assorted cigars, cigarettes, pipe tobaccos, and even the more eyewatering forms of snuff. His dwelling was, therefore, more than a little depressing, and would almost certainly have provided Mr Edgerton with the impetus necessary to improve his finances were he not so troubled by the absence of his muse. Indeed, he had few distractions, for most of his writer friends had deserted him. They had silently, if reluctantly, tolerated his modest success. Now, with the taint of failure upon him, they relished his discomfort from a suitably discreet distance.
That evening, Mr Edgerton sat at his desk once again and stared at the paper before him. And stared. And stared. Before him, the inkpot monkey squatted impassively, its eyes reflecting the lamplight and lending its mummified form an intimation of life that was both distracting and unsettling. Mr Edgerton poked at it tentatively with his pen, leaving a small black mark on its chest. Like most writers, he had a shallow knowledge of a great many largely useless matters. Among these was anthropology, a consequence of one of his earlier works, an evolutionary fantasy entitled The Monkey’s Uncle. (The Times had described it as ‘largely adequate, if inconsequential’. Mr Edgerton, grateful to be reviewed at all, was rather pleased.) Yet, despite searching through three reference volumes, Mr Edgerton had been unable to identify the origins of the inkpot monkey and had begun to take this as a bad omen.
After another unproductive hour had gone by, its tedium broken only by the spread of an occasional ink blot upon the paper, Mr Edgerton rose and determined to amuse himself by emptying, and then refilling, his pen. Still devoid of inspiration, he wondered if there was some part of the arcane ritual of fuelling one’s pen from the inkpot that he had somehow neglected to perform. He reached down and gently grasped the monkey in order to raise the lid, but something pricked his skin painfully. He drew back his hand immediately and examined the wounded digit. A small, deep cut lay across the pad of his index finger, and blood from the abrasion was running down the length of his pen and congregating at the nib, from which it dripped into the inkpot with soft, regular splashes. Mr Edgerton began to suck the offended member, meanwhile turning his attention to the monkey in an effort to ascertain the cause of his injury. The lamplight revealed a small raised ridge behind the creature’s neck, where a section of curved spine had burst through its tattered fur. A little of Mr Edgerton’s blood could be perceived on the yellowed pallor of the bone.
The unfortunate writer retrieved a small bandage from his medicine cabinet, then cleaned and bound his finger before resuming his seat at his desk. He regarded the monkey warily as he filled his pen, then put it to paper and began to write. At first, the familiarity of the act overcame any feelings of surprise at its sudden return, so that Mr Edgerton had dispensed with two pages of close script and was about to embark upon a third before he paused and looked in puzzlement first at his pen, then at the paper. He reread what he had written, the beginning of a tale of a man who sacrifices love at the altar of success, and found it more than satisfactory; it was, in fact, as fine as anything he had ever written, although he was baffled as to the source of his inspiration. Nevertheless, he shrugged and continued writing, grateful that his old talent had apparently woken from its torpor. He wrote long into the night, refilling his pen as required, and so bound up was he in his exertions that he failed entirely to notice that his wound had reopened and was dripping blood on to pen and page and, at those moments when he replenished his instrument, into the depths of the small Chinese inkpot.
And then, quite suddenly, Mr Edgerton felt the monkey move. It stretched wearily, as though waking from some long slumber, and its mouth opened in a wide yawn, displaying small blunt teeth. Alarmed, Mr Edgerton dropped the monkey and heard it emit a startled squeak as it landed on the desk. It lay there for a moment or two, then slowly raised itself on its haunches and regarded Mr Edgerton with a slightly hurt expression before ambling over to the inkpot and squatting down gently beside it. With its left hand, it raised the lid of the inkpot and waited patiently for Mr Edgerton to fill his pen. For a time, the bewildered writer was unable to move, so taken aback was he at this turn of events. Then, when it became clear that he had no other option but to begin writing or go mad, he reached for his pen and filled it from the well. The monkey watched him impassively until the reservoir was replenished and Mr Edgerton had begun to write, then promptly fell fast asleep.
The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology] Page 20
