Sold to Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 19)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Though it does sound frightfully disparaging to call it paperwork,” her ladyship concluded. “Rude. When everything’s so interesting, and so old—and all so beautifully written, even if we couldn’t read half of it. Besides, there’s parchment as well, isn’t there?”

  Miss Seeton’s twinkle over the last mouthful of plummy crumbs hinted at her appreciation of the wordplay; and she did more than hint that, like her guest, she would welcome a second cup of tea. She suspected that studying documents—of whatever vintage—would always make one feel dusty. And thirsty. Not to mention the sad deterioration of so much of the fabric—always excepting the chest, of course ...

  “Yes, it’s a magnificent piece of work.” Meg Colveden had slipped, with Miss Seeton’s smiling nod across the teapot, from her chair back to the chest in the middle of the floor. Her fingers again caressed the carved wood, the curlicues and ornamentation of rusting metal that must, in its prime, have looked so proud. “The lid fits so closely to the bottom. It’s pretty well an airtight seal, I think. The robe and the coronet cap have almost no moth, and they’re hardly faded at all—it’s only the cheaper costumes that haven’t survived so well. And unless you’ve been busy with the vacuum cleaner, which I’m sure you haven’t because it might cause goodness knows what damage, there’s very little dust, considering.”

  She ran an admiring finger around the lower lip of the chest and tilted the lid back to inspect the inside bite.

  “Our forebears,” agreed Miss Seeton, “certainly enjoyed great practical—”

  “Oh!” Miss Seeton jumped. Lady Colveden, normally the essence of courtesy, ignored her. “Oh, my goodness—Miss Seeton, do look. Wouldn’t you say,” she said, peering at the inner surface of the lid, “this fancy carving round the edge is really letters?”

  Miss Seeton hopped down from the table. In her turn, she knelt on the floor and peered. She jumped up, hurried to the window, and twisted the curtains out of the way.

  In the brighter light, there could be no doubt. She and Lady Colveden, side by side, stared at the letters around the inner edge of the lid; and marvelled.

  “That’s not English,” said her ladyship at last. “Apart from the names, I mean. It looks like Latin, though I suppose it could always be some sort of historical French.”

  “Fils is French for son, of course.” Miss Seeton frowned. “Fil, fils ... and fille is daughter—filia ... but I do agree that this is Latin. The dear vicar would be able to tell us for certain, but ...”

  “Molly Treeves wouldn’t thank us for dragging her brother out of bed,” supplied her ladyship. “Even if it is only just across the road, knowing how colds always go to his chest if he’s not really careful. She’ll have the phone off the hook and visitors banned until his temperature’s been normal for forty-eight hours—I know Molly of old. We’re on our own with this, Miss Seeton.”

  “Hoc,” read Miss Seeton aloud, in a doubtful tone, and with decidedly shaky pronunciation. “Hoc op fiebat Ao Dni—that must be Anno Domini—goodness ...” At the long list of capitals, she hesitated. “Anno Domini,” she continued, leaving a prudent blank, “ex suptu Adelardi Hedgebote filii Adelard fil Florentius fil Adelard fil Bennet viri Adeline filia et hered Adelard Turbary quoru aniabus propicietur De.”

  “M,” said Lady Colveden, “is a thousand, I remember that—and isn’t C a hundred?”

  Pencil and paper were fetched. After much calculation, it was triumphantly decided that MCCCCCXXV could be translated into 1525. As to the rest of the inscription, without a dictionary it was impossible to translate it fully, although one or two words did seem familiar to both ladies from their school-days.

  “Hic, haec, hoc,” chanted Lady Colveden. “This. I’d no idea I still remembered it.”

  “And op is probably opus—musical, you know,” murmured Miss Seeton as she scribbled. “This work,” she announced after a pause, “something in the year of Our Lord 1525 ...”

  “Dates from?” suggested Lady Colveden. “Belongs to? That long list of names is virtually a pedigree for your box. Almost as if half the family was ... well, trying to stake its claim to spite the other half.”

  Miss Seeton thought back to the auction: to the Relentless Raconteur’s dispiriting tale of the Tweedle Twins, and the Green Plastic Mac, and the ultimate bequest to the Cats’ Home. “I fear,” she said, “that you may be right. If, of course,” she added as common sense prevailed, “all this is—can be—authentic. But surely it can’t?”

  “Authentic?” Lady Colveden was once more examining the heavy parchment with its ornate, impenetrable script and the boxed, beribboned seal at the lower edge. “I just don’t know, Miss Seeton. I somehow find it awfully hard to think this isn’t real. It looks far too ... well made to be just another theatrical prop.”

  “As dear Nigel said of the coronet,” said Miss Seeton.

  “And the robe.” Lady Colveden stroked the crimson velvet with a gentle hand. “It sounds so fantastic, doesn’t it? I mean—that note ...” Her ladyship, the wife of a mere baronet, couldn’t help sounding impressed as she unfolded the paper again. “Benedicta Adeline Florence Pottipole, second Duchess of Estover and daughter of Bennet the fourth duke ... Miss Seeton, you’re right. Can we really believe in all this?”

  Miss Seeton, after a pause, admitted that, like her friend, she simply had no idea. “Since the crowning of King George the Third,” she recalled wistfully.

  “A long-lost dukedom—if that’s what it is—I’ve never heard of the family or the title, though I certainly don’t claim to know Debrett by heart from cover to cover—but the idea is almost irresistible, isn’t it?”

  Miss Seeton pulled herself together. “Which was, perhaps, the intention. To be irresistible, I mean, which one gathers is how confidence tricksters achieve their success. Except that ...” She sighed. The romance of more than two centuries appealed to her red plebeian blood just as strongly as ever it could to the Colveden blue. “Except that if this is a—a confidence trick—even a practical joke—it seems to have been remarkably ... well prepared. To have falsified the documents and the costumes is surely all that most—most reasonable, as it were, charlatans would bother to do. But to take the trouble to inscribe this—this legend inside the lid, where it is far from obvious ... Considerable care, I would suggest, has been taken with every detail to—to give an appearance of verisimilitude ...”

  “To an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative?” Lady Colveden smiled. “Oh, I agree. To my inexpert eyes, the whole ... arrangement looks utterly convincing, with the obviously fake stage props in contrast to what seem to be the genuine things—the coronet, the robe, the marriage lines, the parchment and seal ... But then any hoaxer worth his or her salt would, wouldn’t they? Take proper care. And of course, if it is a hoax, who did it?”

  “And for what purpose?” A pucker appeared between Miss Seeton’s brows. “One finds it hard to imagine why—or, indeed, how—such a scheme, whatever it might be, could have been set in motion—whether two hundred years ago in the Georgian era, or more recently—on the off chance that an ordinary bystander such as myself, making a simple mistake at an auction, should find the chest, and act upon its contents. If such was in fact the intention. Except, of course, that I have as yet no idea how to, so I haven’t.”

  In this one brief speech, Miss Seeton accidentally contrived to convey the very essence of her singular being. She found it hard to imagine? The quality of Miss Seeton’s imagination, or lack of it, has been for years a topic more than moot for discussion among those into whose professional ambit she and her umbrella have unwittingly strayed. An ordinary bystander? Bystander—of her own choice, and in her own eyes—yes ... perhaps, if the point is stretched: but ordinary? Imaginations of rather more ordinary quality than Miss Seeton’s understandably boggle here. A simple mistake? Where Miss Seeton is concerned, mistakes may well abound, but they—and their aftermaths—are very seldom simple ...

  Lady Colveden allowed nothing to show in
her face as she replied that, though Miss Seeton might have no idea what to do next, she believed she had one or two suggestions. “The first thing,” she enlarged, as Miss Seeton begged her to continue, “is to find the previous owner of your box—well, one of the first. Of course it’s going to be an enormous help to have everything translated, papers and all, but that will take time, and we—you—don’t want to let the trail go cold, do you?” Miss Seeton shook her head. Lady Colveden smiled. “Candell and Inchpin are only a quarter of an hour away, so I would suggest a preliminary trip to Brettenden, and a word with the head clerk or someone, as soon as you can. The catalogue only has the basic description, but they’ll have the rest in the files, I should think, though you could sketch it, just in case they haven’t ...”

  Privately her ladyship felt it unlikely the sale-room staff would need their memories refreshed: one glimpse of the umbrella should be enough: yet one could never be absolutely sure. “Who entered the box in the auction? Where did it come from? They might not have owned it, you see—they could have been acting for friends, or relations. Or doing it to spite them,” she added cheerfully.

  “The provenance,” said Miss Seeton, who sometimes surprised herself with the extent of her knowledge—although when one considered the time one was able to spend reading, since one’s retirement, and the many most informative programmes on the television and wireless, it was, perhaps, not so very surprising after all.

  “Fine arts people like Sothenhams insist on goodness knows how much written information before they’ll handle a piece, I know—almost a pedigree—but I doubt if Candell and Inchpin are quite so thorough. Or need to be, in many cases,” added her ladyship loyally. Large London establishments couldn’t possibly match the intimate, personal knowledge of their clients—should that be customers?—possessed by local firms, which might be smaller but which had decided advantages.

  “Such as,” she concluded, “knowing not just who’s put up what for sale, but sometimes even why, as well. And if they don’t know, they can hazard a good guess. And it doesn’t always have to be money—not exactly. There were quite a number of Deceased’s Effects that day, weren’t there?”

  “Some descendant of the Pottipoles,” suggested Miss Seeton, “ignorant of his—or her—inheritance, and lacking sufficient curiosity to have the box opened before sending it to be sold ...”

  “His,” repeated Lady Colveden thoughtfully, “or hers. You could have hit the nail right on the head, Miss Seeton. Assuming it’s not a hoax, then from what Benedicta wrote the dukedom can descend through either the male or the female line, which could make it tricky. There’s no law, you know, that says wives have to change their surnames when they marry. Nearly all of them do, though it’s less likely they will if there’s a title or estate in the family that would otherwise be lost—but you can’t be sure, even then. They might assume the title and take the husband’s surname to keep him happy, as Benedicta seems to have done—but would her descendants necessarily do the same?”

  She laughed suddenly, her cheeks turning pink. “Oh, dear—I’m sorry, Miss Seeton. You can tell who’s married to a magistrate, can’t you?”

  “The points you raise,” returned Miss Seeton, “are surely pertinent. Which is no more than I would expect, having asked the advice of an expert—”

  “Goodness, I’m no genealogist! Nor’s George, if it comes to that, though I agree he knows something about the law—but a justice of the peace doesn’t deal with peerage claims. They’re dealt with by the House of Lords, I think, once the College of Heralds has done the preliminary checking—not that it’s come to the Lords yet, and if it does I don’t envy them. Imagine how complicated two hundred years of distaff and collateral inheritance would be! But until there’s been some preliminary checking in Brettenden ...”

  Her ladyship paused. She smiled enquiringly at Miss Seeton. Miss Seeton smiled back, though behind the smile her eyes held a hesitant gleam.

  Lady Colveden nodded: her earlier instinct had not failed her. The little art teacher, charmed by the romance of the situation in which she found herself—romantic indeed, and for once, in the nature of true romance, how very, very different from many of the situations into which she so frequently stumbled—would prefer to enjoy the excitement of the chase (so to speak) alone, yet felt morally obliged to offer a share in that excitement to those who had rendered her some assistance.

  “It all sounds tremendous fun, Miss Seeton—almost like a real-life detective story, or a crossword puzzle. Such a challenge—and so interesting. I’d love,” said her ladyship, “to invite myself along to help, if you’d let me, but with so much happening at home—George and Nigel on the rampage, for one thing—unless you desperately need me, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m afraid I’ll really have to leave you to it for now. Though I’d be fascinated to hear whatever you manage to find out,” she added, as hesitancy gave way to a guilty delight in Miss Seeton’s still-smiling eyes. “Candell and Inchpin might tell you whoever-it-is lives miles away, and this is hardly the weather for riding a bike,” she said with a speaking look out of the window. “I’m sure I could leave people to their own devices for long enough to give you a lift in the car—or Nigel would, if I had a committee—but that’s the second stage.” She smiled again. “The first, Miss Seeton, is up to you! Shall you start this afternoon?”

  Miss Seeton’s glance had followed that of her guest, and she now shook her head. “I don’t think so. The bus, as you know, doesn’t run today ... and I would, in any case, be glad of—of one final chance just to—to peep at the contents of the chest.” She gave a faint sigh. “Before having to hand them back to their rightful owners. If, that is,” she added quickly, “you do not consider this would be too great a—an impertinence on my part. I should not wish to be thought of as—as prying into matters that were none of my concern. Private family papers ...”

  Blushing, she tailed into silence. Lady Colveden blinked then hurried to reassure her. “Miss Seeton! Nobody in their right mind could call you impertinent or prying—and as for the rightful owner, it’s you. Didn’t you pay for the chest fair and square in open auction? Possession is nine-tenths of the law—just ask George. Or perhaps,” she said with another glance at the steady downpour outside, “you’d better not. I wouldn’t like to say what sort of mood he’s in just now, and you need peace and quiet to enjoy a nice legal argument—but if it will make you any happier about things, I’ll be terribly rude and invite myself to a picnic lunch, if I may, and we can look through everything properly. I’ve been longing,” confessed her ladyship with a twinkle, “for a good excuse ...”

  And Miss Seeton, relieved by the encouragement of the magistrate’s wife quite as much as by the promise of her presence, twinkled back.

  “Everything” proved so intriguing that lunch was followed by tea and biscuits at an hour neither of the ladies could believe she had reached, and which they promptly forgot again as they plunged back into their historical research with the clearing of the cups. Slowly, with frequent recourse to Miss Seeton’s lamentably inadequate library of reference books, the two ladies read letters, and checked dates, and studied fashions; and began to guess at something of the history of Benedicta, nee Hedgebote, Duchess of Estover. A runaway match (they guessed, under age) with Actor Pottipole; her family’s disapproval, their ostracism of the young couple; Benedicta’s early death—in childbed (Lady Colveden) or from the plague (Miss Seeton); her husband’s heart-broken decision to lock away all mementoes of their life together ... and their descendants’ failure, generation upon generation, to realise the importance of these mementoes.

  “And if it isn’t true,” said Lady Colveden happily, “it makes a marvellous story anyway, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” agreed Miss Seeton with a sigh.

  It was Nigel’s tactful telephone call, just before supper, that finally woke his mother to the passage of an entire day in the perusal of the Estover inheritance, and brought her leaping to her feet bab
bling with horror of men in her kitchen, and burned saucepans, and smashed plates, and indigestion remedies.

  She drove off in her little blue Hillman with Miss Seeton waving from the lighted window, more than half willing to believe her ladyship’s affirmation that she’d had more fun in the past few hours than she would have thought possible. She’d bought things at auction on several occasions and had never made such a fascinating find: she’d be looking out for old oak chests everywhere she went, after today.

  “And tomorrow, remember, you must come to supper—Nigel will fetch you—and tell us what happens at Candells. And whether you want either of us to give you a lift to—to wherever you need to go.”

  Which left Miss Seeton nodding and smiling in her wake, grateful for her good fortune in having such kind and helpful friends. Noblesse, where the Colvedens were concerned, could always be relied on to oblige.

  chapter

  ~ 17 ~

  NEXT MORNING’S CUSTOMARY deluge was easing all too slowly into drizzle as Miss Seeton, with her umbrella over her head and a new pair of galoshes over her outdoor shoes, hurried from the high-street bus stop in the direction of Candell & Inchpin. Spiteful gusts of wind drove still-heavy drops of rain into her face, and whipped the skirts of her waterproof coat about her legs. Miss Seeton tilted her brolly against the most consistent blasts, and made her way along the pavement as best she could with her head down, and her handbag bumping rapidly at her side.