‘Good lord!’ said Harriet. ‘How can it have been worth—’
‘I think it was a little on the high side,’ said Peter, ‘but not much. So they banged in a claim, and the insurers made ready to pay up.’
‘I always think,’ observed the Duchess, ‘that the whole thing was because poor Claire Attenbury was so very ill that summer. She was dead by Christmas. I still rather miss her, after all this time. Everyone in that family went to pieces without her. And you can’t say, well, she was spared knowing what became of the family, because she wasn’t spared the trial and the scandal, just unable to do anything about any of it.’
‘You’re offending the King of Hearts, Mama,’ said Peter sternly. ‘Running on like that.’
‘I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about, Peter,’ said the Duchess. ‘I haven’t said a thing about playing cards.’
‘He is referring to narrative advice in Alice in Wonderland,’ said Harriet. ‘Begin at the beginning, go on till you get to the end, and then stop. It’s quite good advice, but it rules out hopping around in a story.’
‘Good advice,’ said Peter. ‘Let’s push on then. Talk of insurance didn’t console Attenbury much; you remember what I was saying, Harriet, about these ancestral things being a kind of sacred trust. He came hammering on my door a couple of days after the loss asking for my help. A bit of a facer really – if I had found one jewel before, he seemed to think I would be able to find the whole necklace now. He had told “that Johnny at Scotland Yard” which is how he referred to Sugg; but now he was appealing to me.
‘I poured him a drink, and promised him that if I could think of anything to do, I would do it. Truth is, I couldn’t think of a single useful step I could take. I just tried to cheer him up a bit. Told him that such famous things would be too hot for a thief to handle, and that they would turn up somewhere…general sort of blether. Didn’t have much effect on him; he trotted away as gloomy as before. Couldn’t blame him. But I began to wonder, don’t you know, about Diana. She had to be uncommonly careless. So I used my secret weapon – Bunter. I sent him round to Writtle’s house to inveigle himself into the servants’ hall, and pick up a bit of gossip about their mistress.’
‘How does one inveigle Bunter?’ asked Harriet.
‘Oh, easily. One gives him a nice brace of pheasants from Denver, and sends him round with them and a cock and hen story about having more birds than one can possibly eat, and wondering if they would fancy helping out.’
‘Was that brace of pheasants a present from me, you wretched boy?’ asked the Duchess.
‘I expect so, Mama. Fraudulent conversion. But it made things easy, didn’t it, Bunter?’
For Bunter had just arrived bearing a tray of drinks, and with Mrs Bunter in tow.
‘It became easier, your ladyship,’ said Bunter, ‘when I indicated that since Lord Peter knew nothing whatever about the birds in question there was no need for the angel pie, or whatever Cook made with them, to reach the family’s table. They could perfectly well be eaten in the servants’ kitchen. At that point they sat me down with a nice slice of fruit cake, and became quite talkative.’
‘You are very shocking, the pair of you,’ said Harriet. ‘Not a scruple to choose between master and man. Sit down, Hope; if you do, perhaps Bunter will and we shall all be comfortable like the old friends we are. We are waiting eagerly to hear about the wicked Lady Diana.’
10
‘You would have to remember, my ladies,’ said Bunter, ‘that the Marquess of Writtle’s household was of the old sort. Almost Victorian. Family retainers, man and boy, woman and girl. They had served the Marquess’s uneventful father, and the Marquess himself all the remarkably boring years of his majority. Finding themselves with a wild young woman in charge was a severe shock. A ladyship who went out nearly every night without her husband, and came back at all hours! I was told at some length what the Marquess’s servants thought of his raising no objection.
‘On one occasion the mistress had come home bringing a crowd of noisy, rather intoxicated friends with her, who had put music on the gramophone and danced in the hall. The butler had tried to make them retire to the gallery, where he could shut a door on the uproar, but they had declined – they needed an uncarpeted floor on which to tango. By and by, I was told, the Marquess was roused from sleep by the raucous music, and appeared on the landing in his dressing-gown. The sleepy servants, trying to rustle up drinks and canapés in the middle of the night, expected him to read the Riot Act, and turn all the rowdy visitors out of the house; but he just stood there tapping his foot in time to the tune. In the morning all he had to say about it was, “Girls will be girls.”
‘“And that was bad enough,” Cook told me,’ Bunter continued, ‘but then she began to go out alone and not come back at all till the following day. “And, you’ll never believe this, Mr Bunter, she tried to borrow five pounds from the head footman. Just after we’d had our half-year salaries paid to us. He upped and left us, and I can’t blame him.”’
‘So with her mother ill and her husband doting, there were no brakes on Diana,’ said Peter. ‘I decided to try to find out who her set were – all these late night party-goers she was hanging out with. I went off for a night on the town myself.’
Harriet looked at her husband interrogatively. She would have liked to ask him if he had recovered from his nerves sufficiently to go gladly partying on the wilder shores of youth, but she was not sure if the question would be kind.
He picked up her glance immediately and said, ‘I took Bunter with me as a bodyguard. Lent him one of my flashier ties, and a silk cummerbund to doll up Moss Bros evening wear. I hadn’t yet the nerve to go on my own.’
‘Wasn’t that rather a lot to ask?’ said the Duchess.
Bunter said, ‘I should have been so concerned about his lordship had I been left at home, my lady, that it was easier for me to accompany him.’
‘I think I remember you grumbling about that cummerbund,’ said Peter. ‘You made a most awful fuss.’
‘It was,’ said Bunter, ‘a rather flamboyant article. I thought it made the wearer somewhat conspicuous.’
‘That’s the whole idea of cummerbunds,’ said Peter. ‘Nature of the beast.’
‘Wasn’t it a bit conspicuous to take a manservant out with you on the tiles?’ asked Harriet. ‘Was that done?’
‘No, it wouldn’t have been,’ said Peter. ‘Escaping the observation of the servants was part of the point of going out. But Bunter didn’t come with me as my man. We were not well known as yet anywhere about. People at large wouldn’t have recognised either of us. Bunter came with me in the role of a friend. A role he has always played to perfection.’
‘It does not require dissimulation, my lord,’ said Bunter.
‘Thank you,’ said Peter.
‘Would you listen to them,’ said Hope Bunter to Harriet. ‘Don’t they sound like a script by Noël Coward?’
‘Well, they are talking about the past,’ said Harriet. ‘Mother, did you want some help with photographs?’
‘It would be very kind, Hope,’ said the Duchess, ‘if you would look at some of these old things for me, and tell me if they can be improved somehow. I heard a talk on the Home Service about being able to get scratches off, and remove dust spots. And some of these ancestors are very dirty indeed…’
Hope laughed. ‘Let’s spread them out on the sofa table,’ she suggested, ‘and I’ll look at them properly.’
‘I think this one must be Grace,’ the Duchess began. ‘It looks High Victorian, don’t you think?’
‘Was that your first encounter with the rich at play, Bunter?’ asked Harriet. ‘Was it horribly shocking?’
‘It was not worse than talk in the servants’ hall had led me to expect, my lady,’ said Bunter. ‘Perhaps, on reflection, it was not so bad.’
‘It was horribly noisy, and horribly stuffy,’ said Peter. ‘That I do remember. Lots of drink, lots of smoke, dancing and smooching…
roulette and baccarat being played.’
‘How terrible,’ said Harriet. ‘I am not very shocked, however. Try harder.’
‘I would have said, my lady,’ said Bunter, ‘that the amount of money flowing to the coffers of the club management would have made you draw breath.’
‘I suppose one would have needed inside knowledge to be truly, deeply scandalised,’ said Peter. ‘One would have needed to know who could not afford to be there, who was bringing their father down in ruin and grief, and who should not have been dancing with whom. On the other hand, one didn’t need prior knowledge to see who had already had far too much to drink; nor to perceive that the cigarettes going from hand to hand didn’t smell of harmless tobacco.
‘We were on the trail of Diana, and at the first three places we didn’t find her. Then someone tipped us off that she and her party had just left, he thought to go to somewhere called the Hot Potato. He had been asked to go with them, but, he said, as he was on a winning streak here, he was damned if he would. Or if he wouldn’t, I thought, but we thanked him and jumped into a cab and asked for the Hot Potato. The cabbie was a bit unwilling. He took the liberty of suggesting two other places, where a pair of young gentlemen might have a good time without picking up trouble, if we knew what he meant…But when Bunter told him we were joining friends, he said, “If you say so, gov,” with a gawd help us look on his face.’
‘You see the present line of dukes are of the second creation,’ said the Duchess, from across the room. ‘That’s where the De’ath comes in.’
‘Were dukes made on the eighth day, or something?’ said Hope in astonishment.
‘It’s not the men,’ said the Duchess, ‘they’re just like anyone else. Or they are if one is lucky. It’s when the line fails: when the youngsters don’t do their duty, and produce heirs. The Wimsey line faltered when Lord Mortimer thought he was a fish, and went and lived as a hermit on a mudflat. You would have thought he might know that even fishes breed, but he died childless. Came up in a trawl net off Lowestoft. I always think that was so unkind to the trawler men! He should have known better; he must have given them a dreadful fright. There was no one left but cousin Grace, but luckily she married a distant Wimsey from a lesser line, and the Duke of Wellington arranged for the dukedom to go to him.’
‘The Duke of Wellington?’ asked Hope, sounding bemused.
‘Because he had carelessly allowed the real heir to be killed at Waterloo. Although I don’t see how the poor man could be expected to bear in mind the descent of titles in English families when the Prussians were so late, and he had the enemy to worry about…’
‘This picture of Grace is not a photograph, exactly,’ Hope said. ‘It’s a daguerreotype. I will have to re-photo-graph it, and touch up the negative. It can be done.’
‘So how deliciously lubricious was the Hot Potato when you got there?’ asked Harriet.
‘Surprising. Pretty much the same as the others, except for that news-hound Salcombe Hardy sitting in a dark corner pretending not to notice anything. We sat down at his table uninvited to assist his disguise. And then the couples on the dance floor parted, and gave space to a pair of rather wild tango dancers – tally ho! They were Lady Diana, and guess who?’
‘How could I guess?’ protested Harriet. ‘Our social spheres having been widely different.’
‘Come now,’ said Lord Peter, ‘you have certainly seen a spade, and more than once. But I grant you the guess was difficult. It was Reggie Northerby.’
‘Ho, ho!’ said Harriet, seeing that something was expected of her.
‘Absolutely ho ho,’ said Peter. ‘I was flabbergasted. I mean, I thought the fellow would have slunk off back to his family tea-garden with his tail between his legs after what had befallen him. And we knew, or thought we knew, he had been out of funds. Although the pawn money for the emerald would have lasted a normal man some time, this didn’t look like the kind of place to practise thrift. I suppose my jaw must have dropped drastically enough to draw attention to me because he spotted us, and at the end of the dance he came swanning over to our table, and said, “Hello, Wimsey! Didn’t expect to see you here, of all places. Out for a bit of fun, at last? Shall I introduce you to some lovely girls?”
‘I let him do that, since I wanted to know who they were. Most of the names didn’t mean anything to me, but they struck me as a dicey crowd, although one or two of the fellows surprised me later on, in the war. They were pretty quickly bored by me, and Diana in particular was a bit uncomfortable to see me, and she went off to the card table with Angela Shaden almost at once.
‘Someone in her party said, “My God, if she loses any more money tonight we won’t be welcome here tomorrow.”
‘And someone else said, “Don’t worry about her. She can leave her debts on the ticket with a name like hers.”
‘So I had a pretty clear picture. Bunter and I extricated ourselves and left.
‘I didn’t quite know what to do about it, mind. It was none of my business how the Marchioness of Writtle behaved. If Writtle himself wasn’t bothered…’
‘But he ought to have been bothered,’ said Harriet.
‘A few wastrels can desiccate an estate,’ the Duchess was saying to Hope. ‘Is that what I mean?’
‘Perhaps you meant devastate,’ suggested Hope gently.
‘Of course, dear. Now that is just what this fellow did to the cadet branch of the Delagardies. He brought a great lineage down to the auction rooms. He has a sneaky face, don’t you think?’
‘He can’t have been more than six or seven in this picture,’ protested Hope. ‘Surely that’s a bit young for a sneaky face?’
‘You don’t think people can be born sneaky?’ said the Duchess. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. It’s just that I happen to know what the little rat did to his family when he grew up.’
‘So did you do anything about the scandalous Diana?’ Harriet asked Peter.
‘Well, I would have done if my brother Gerald hadn’t scolded me so,’ said Peter.
‘Gerald? Where does Gerald come into it?’
‘He invited me to lunch with him in the House of Lords,’ said Peter. ‘I think it might have been the very next day.’
‘To scold you?’
‘To implore me to settle down and breed. Spare heir. You know all about that, Harriet. I’ve done my duty now, with your delectable assistance, but I wasn’t ready to do it then. It was much more fun to rile Gerald with hints of a lifetime of celibacy, or alternatively of debauchery being what I thought of. Even so, after the brandy Gerald took me to shake hands with the Lord Chancellor. Courtesy call sort of thing. So I got a close look at their lordships’ chamber. I prowled about a bit looking to see if I could spot any hidey-hole sort of place into which a necklace could have fallen, or any sticky-out thingies on which it could have caught; must have done it far too conspicuously, because the Chancellor asked me what I was doing. I told him.
‘“Yes, I heard about that,” he said. “But you won’t find anything, Wimsey. Our cleaners are very thorough, and they’ve had a good look. The necklace isn’t here.”
‘So I changed the subject. I asked him about the Woolsack. I told him I had heard that it wasn’t stuffed with wool, really, but with horse-hair which crackled when the Chancellor sat on it. He said he didn’t know; but it did creak a bit if he fidgeted when their lordships were boring. “Not that that happens very often…” he said. “Don’t quote me.”’
‘But you are quoting him,’ said Harriet.
‘What does it matter now?’ said Peter. ‘It’s alarming to think, really, how little the things that loomed at the time still matter years later. Sceptre and crown shall tumble down and all that.
‘Well, that very afternoon when the session began, it seems that he began prodding around on it, wondering if I was right. He pushed his fingers down the crack between the seat and the back-rest, and behold and lo! There was something stuffed down there – something hard and lumpy. So at the end
of the session – it was very late, well after midnight before they called “Who goes home?” – he got up and leaned down and prodded with his fingers again and brought up a paper packet which when opened displayed the wonderful Attenbury emeralds, all set about with fever trees – no, what am I saying? – all set about with Writtle diamonds. Sent round to Writtle’s place in Cavendish Square first thing in the morning. Presto! The Chancellor went around for days telling everybody that he would never have prodded his cushion but for a remark by young Wimsey.’
‘Very clever of you, Peter. But I thought this case was a source of notoriety for you rather than just fame. Where’s the shock, horror element?’
‘You are not shocked by this tale of a naughty world? Are you going to tell me that this is just what you expect from my sort of people?’
‘Your sort of people? They don’t sound at all like your sort of people,’ said Harriet, musing. ‘Except in being rich enough to pay for their vices. Having unthinkably more money than my sort of people rather exposes their taste, I suppose. You spent your money on incunabula, rather than on vice. But if you had been born poor and could have afforded neither books nor debauchery it couldn’t have been known which you would have preferred given a chance. I don’t think poorer people are more virtuous than richer ones; they just have a narrower choice of vices.’
‘Except gambling,’ said Peter. ‘Rich and poor alike, each in their own way, succumb to that.’
‘And that is how the deplorable Diana got into trouble.’
Wimsey 014 - The Attenbury Emeralds Page 10
