by Gary Dolman
“This is taken from Sir Hugh Lowther’s coat-of-arms, I presume?” Atticus asked, nodding at a beautifully detailed crest set against the paintwork of the carriage door.
“It’s the Lowther family crest, yes, sir,” replied James, touching the brim of his hat. He pulled the front of his cape-coat to one side and bared an identical device embroidered onto the breast of his jacket. It was a white dragon.
“The colonel uses it for his household livery too.”
“Dragon, passant, argent,” murmured Atticus.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“White dragon, passant – it’s the heraldry of the crest. Do you see that the dragon is walking to the left with its right forepaw raised? One cannot live in Harrogate and not be fascinated by the subject of heraldry.”
Lucie coughed suddenly.
“The motto is interesting too,” Atticus continued: “Magistratus indicat virum – The office shows the man.”
He grunted thoughtfully.
“I’m not sure I wholly agree with the words, though.”
“No, sir,” said the footman.
After a moment Atticus said, “James, we have come all the way up from Yorkshire today. We’ve been sitting for hours and hours in all manner of cramped railway carriages, so while we recover ourselves,” he glanced back at the still-stationary train, “and whilst we wait for the porter to fetch us our trunks and our bicycles, pray, what can you tell us about Sir Hugh Lowther?”
The shadow of what might have been panic jolted the laughter from the footman’s face. He hesitated.
“I’m not at all sure it would be my place to make comment about the colonel, begging your pardon, Mr Fox.”
“Oh, come now, James,” Lucie purred. “My husband isn’t asking for your opinion of Colonel Lowther, only for a little bit about him as a gentleman. It would be a great help to us.”
James looked at her dubiously, but his resolve had clearly broken.
“Aye, well… I suppose as you’ve asked me directly, and as my orders are to render you every assistance, I could try.”
He stood straight and tall, almost as if he might have been back on the regimental parade ground at Spital Tongues.
“Well, first off I should say that Sir Hugh Lowther is a soldier in every proper sense of the word – a very fine and valiant, first-line soldier and the colonel of the ‘Fighting Fifth.’ That is the Fifth Regiment of Foot, ma’am, or the Northumberland Fusiliers, as they’re called these days. He has fought with the greatest honour all around the Empire, just like his father and his grandfather before him, and I can truly say that he’s the bravest man I have ever known.
“I served with him in the Fighting Fifth, myself. That was back in the fifties, during the Indian Rebellion.”
He paused, a smile lingering again on his lips, lost suddenly in his own recollections.
“I could tell you a tale or two about that.
“Sir Hugh is all but retired from the army now though. He has been since his father, Sir Douglas Lowther, fell ill a twelvemonth or so ago. Sir Hugh is his only son, you understand, and he had to take over the estate. He also has interests in a number of coal mines and iron works across Northumberland and he owns one of the big tanneries in Hexham. As you might imagine, he is a rich man, a very wealthy man indeed.”
“Shields Tower is a large estate then?” Atticus asked.
“Aye, sir, it’s a very large estate; several thousand acres in total, mainly tenanted out except for the home farm which is called Shields Tower Farm. Sir Hugh isn’t especially interested in the management of the estate and he leaves the running of it pretty well entirely to a land steward, a grand gentleman by the name of John Lawson. Besides, with all his other interests, he’s kept very busy. I declare we see less of him now than we did when he was away fighting with the regiment.”
“Does he have any family?” asked Lucie. “A wife or children?”
“Oh aye, Mrs Fox, aye he does. He has a son; Master Arthur, or Master Artie as we all generally call him, a tall, strapping, young gentleman of twenty-one, and a very beautiful daughter; Miss Jennifer, who is Master Artie’s younger half-sister.”
“Half-sister; so Sir Hugh has been married more than once?”
James nodded.
“Yes, ma’am, he’s been married twice now. Lady Igraine, the first Lady Lowther, vanished one day from the Great Whin Sill, a huge ridge that stretches across the county as far as the coast at Bamburgh. It was around a year after Master Artie was born. She was presumed to have got lost and perished on the moors, though they never found her body.”
In spite of the heat of the day, he shivered under his heavy cape-coat.
“It can be awful bleak up there. There are supposed to be wolves on the fells… and worse.”
His gaze drifted past them, towards the steep hillside beyond the village and he shivered again.
Atticus and Lucie glanced at each other and waited in respectful silence until James’ss thoughts returned once more to the here and now.
“Sir Hugh married a young widow soon afterwards. Lady Victoria Lowther died in childbirth whilst bearing Miss Jennifer.”
“Oh poor Sir Hugh; how very unfortunate he’s been,” Lucie exclaimed. “Losing not just one, but two wives. I’m very sorry for him. But Lady Igraine, what a beautiful, romantic name that is.”
“Aye it is, ma’am, it’s a very beautiful and romantic name for a very beautiful and romantic lady. We all utterly adored her. I had the honour to serve as her footman in my younger days. She was vivacious and charming and full of passion, with never a day of sadness or a day of sickness in all of her tragically short life.”
“It’s a very unusual name too.” Atticus tapped his fingertips thoughtfully on his chin. “Arthurian, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
“You’re quite right, Mr Fox, it is. You see, there are many old legends about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table hereabouts. Sewingshields Castle, up on the moors not far from here, was the site of one of King Arthur’s castles and his final resting place. Many people locally are named for characters from the Arthurian tales and Igraine was the name of King Arthur’s mammy.”
“That’s it,” Atticus exclaimed. “Igraine was the wife of King Uther Pendragon, King Arthur’s father.”
“Which is why Lady Igraine Lowther named her son Arthur I presume?” Lucie added.
“Exactly, Mrs Fox. She insisted on it by all accounts, even though Sir Hugh wanted to call him Douglas after his own father and the colonel usually gets his way. But Arthur did seem so natural and fitting.”
“Didn’t Sir Hugh’s father mind?”
“Not at all, Mr Fox. Sir Douglas adored Lady Igraine and with him she could do no wrong. He thought her the most beautiful woman in Christendom.”
He chuckled.
“He always used to say that she was lovely enough to eat.”
His grin froze.
“Aye, he was right too. Lady Igraine was born here, in Bardon Mill village, but she left to become a singer and a dancer in Newcastle. That’s where Sir Hugh first met her – in the Theatre Royal there. She was very beautiful, with long, dark auburn hair and a kind of wildness, a bit o’ mischief in her eyes that meant he fell instantly in love with her. We all did in fact, meaning no disrespect to the colonel.”
“There must have been some who considered it a rather unsuitable marriage though,” Lucie ventured. “That he married beneath himself perhaps?”
“Aye, and that’s right enough; a canny few did but the colonel would hear nothing of it. He said he was fated to be with her and married her anyway, in the great Abbey at Hexham.”
He nodded past them. “And at last, here are your trunks and bicycles.”
James chuckled as he glanced significantly once more at the slope leading up to the village of Bardon Mill and the much steeper hills beyond.
“If I might be so bold, Mr and Mrs Fox, the lanes of Tynedale will require some rather strenuous pedalling.�
��
The carriage swayed slightly on its big, iron leaf springs as the trunks were loaded and the heavy bicycles were passed up to the roof, and it rocked again as James clambered up to join his companion up front.
“All set, Mr Grey,” he said, and the coachman duly urged the team into a brisk trot. They glided through the open gates of the station yard towards the village itself. Dozens of children seemed to have appeared from nowhere along the road and they stood shyly in front of the low, heather-thatched cottages that flanked it to watch as the elegant coach-and-four swept past. Lucie, feeling rather grand, smiled and waved to them through the windows and almost immediately, the whole village seemed to be waving back.
The four bays leaned into their harnesses as the lane steepened and they soon left the long ribbon of houses and the village pottery works with its tall, square chimneys far below. Green hedgerows became dry stone walls and lush meadows, bleak grassy moorland and scrubby trees hunched permanently from the wind.
Lucie was utterly entranced.
“Atticus, isn’t this the most romantic place you’ve ever seen? You can almost imagine King Arthur and his gallant knights galloping across the fells.”
Atticus grunted.
“Oh, and is that the castle James mentioned, Sewingshields Castle, over there?” She pressed a finger against the glass of the carriage window. Atticus leaned across her and looked. A cluster of low, stone ruins were pressed into the grass of the moors just below them.
Then a tiny hatch slid open in the roof above and they looked up to see James’ss earnest face framed in the square.
“I beg your pardon, Mr and Mrs Fox, but to your left you can see the remains of the old Roman fortress of Chesterholm. There were a canny few Roman forts built around here with it being so close to Hadrian’s Wall an’ all. There’s another up on the Wall itself, called Housesteads. It’s much more complete.” He sounded like a sixpenny tour guide.
“Thank you, James.” In spite of her words, disappointment dampened Lucie’s tone. After a moment she admitted: “We thought it might have been Sewingshields Castle.”
“No, ma’am,” the footman explained patiently, “Sewingshields is up on the high moors beyond the Wall. If you ever wanted to go there, it’s out to the north-east of Shields Tower and a little way east of the Broomlee Lough, which is one of the small lakes there are around here.”
Lucie smiled, thanked him and settled back into the plump, buttoned-leather of the seat.
Chapter 7
He steps forward to where the short, sheep-grazed turf drops away sheer in front of him. With a soldier’s instinct, he senses the point at which the jagged lines of the edge would be broken by his silhouette and he stops. It would not do to be spied from the black carriage creeping steadily along the road below.
There is a woman in there, a beautiful, dainty woman with long, dark hair. She has captivated him through his field glasses. In fact, she has even put him in mind of his own Lady, sleeping as she is in the womb of the rock beyond the Wall.
Looking down, the steep hillside is not quite sheer. It is terraced, striped like the belly of a nursing mother as the thin soil has slumped away into lines of scars. He has a sudden, overwhelming urge to scream, to leap down them as if they are some gigantic stairway, to fall on the men on that carriage and carry her away.
He closes his eyes tight shut and fights to quell the impulse. There will be time enough for that in the days to come.
His breathing is ragged. His pulse is racing so that his mind feels strangely light, as if he is drunk or the dizzying drop is drawing him down. He is drunk – drunk on the elation of the kill.
The second part of his gift has been made and sealed, and all the Fates, even Verthandi, even Urth, have been fulsome in their praise of him.
The hatch in the carriage roof slid open once more and Atticus and Lucie Fox glanced up again into James’ss face.
“We’re approaching Shields Tower now, Mr and Mrs Fox; you can see it ower the estate walls on Mr Fox’s side.”
They looked.
Butted to the end of a long, perfectly straight avenue of neatly clipped yew trees, Shields Tower was not at all as they had speculated it might be during the long hours journeying north. True, it was built just below the high moors, just out of the teeth of the Northumbrian wind, but it was neither grim, ancient fortress, nor modern gothic re-creation. This was a classical country house such as those they knew from Yorkshire, with two elegant wings flanking a larger central portion in the Palladian style.
To the south, the dark curve of a carriageway led off to a cluster of low buildings, which were almost certainly the stable block and carriage house; to the north were only the high moors.
As the coach clattered out of the avenue and into the wide turning-circle in front of the house, the two leaves of the doors slowly parted and a tail-coated butler stepped through. He stood dutifully, waiting for James to bow them down the carriage steps and then bowed himself as they approached.
“Good day, sir; good day, madam,” he greeted them crisply.
“Good day to you. We are Mr and Mrs Atticus Fox of Harrogate.”
Atticus held out another of their calling cards, which the butler took and regarded impassively for a moment.
“Quite so, sir; welcome to Shields Tower. Sir Hugh is expecting you, of course. Please, follow me.”
The broad, Geordie accent seemed somehow at odds with his impeccable, formal dress and affected, somewhat pompous manner.
Atticus and Lucie followed him through the doors, through an immensely long archway and then both gasped in awe.
The splendour of the approach had in no way hinted at this. Rather than a sumptuous and modern interior, they found themselves instead inside a vast and ancient hall. Walls of brute, heavy stone towered high above them up to a vaulted ceiling domed around a large, glass oculus.
Directly in front of them, a wide stone stairway climbed to a galleried, first floor landing, and by the foot of this stairway was a dais of rough, black stone on which stood an exquisitely detailed, limestone sculpture of three mythological figures. The statues seemed almost to glow with a golden aura as light streamed onto them from a large rose window set high into the wall of the tower above their heads. The afternoon sun caught the stained glass perfectly, illuminating the vivid yellow of the Lowther coat of arms and contrasting it sharply with its device of an inverted triangle of six black rings.
“Or, six annulets in pile, sable,” remarked Atticus instinctively, looking round to the source of the light. “And another crest above it, which as we know is dragon passant, argent.”
“Indeed, sir. If you and the lady would care to be seated in here I will fetch you some tea and dainty-cakes. I shall inform Sir Hugh that you have arrived directly upon his return.”
The butler showed them through the hall into a large and spacious library, two walls of which were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of all manner of books. A third wall was given to a large portrait of some gallant military officer.
Lucie settled herself happily into one of several comfortable, leather reading chairs whilst Atticus scrutinised the bookshelves.
“These are mostly military books,” he murmured after a while. “Historical battles and regimental histories, descriptions of arms and armour, that sort of thing. There are quite a number of books and poems on Arthurian legend too. Exactly what we might have expected, I suppose, given what has James told us about Sir Hugh.”
“Is there anything else, anything that might interest me while we wait?” Lucie asked. “War doesn’t interest me in the least and I’m much too tired for poetry.”
Atticus shrugged and scanned the rows of titles.
“What about this one?” he said after a moment. “It’s called Herbal Physic.”
He pulled a good-sized volume down from its shelf and opened the front cover.
“‘To my darling Jennifer on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday,’” he read. “‘From y
our adoring father, H.D.L.’ This might be the very ticket; it says it is: ‘a guide to the preparation of medicines to cure most ailments from commonly found plants together with easy recipes for sleeping draughts, banes and poisons.’”
“Charming,” observed Lucie drily, reaching up and plucking it from his grip.
It was then that Colonel Sir Hugh Lowther burst into the room. He was followed by the butler clearly struggling to maintain his affectation as he scurried along in his wake carrying a glittering, silver tea service.
Even in the generous space of the library Sir Hugh seemed formidable, like the dragon passant of his crest. He was well above middle height and broad in proportion, with piercing blue eyes, greying dark hair and large, bristling whiskers. Somehow he seemed to fill every inch of the room with his presence.
“My dears, Fox,” he roared. “Welcome to Shields Tower and thank you for coming all this way so promptly – Good God in Heaven!”
He stopped short, standing open-mouthed for several seconds as he stared between Lucie and the book on her lap. Then he remembered himself.
“I do beg your pardon, ma’am, please forgive me. I was just a little taken aback, that’s all. I was… I was expecting two gentlemen, do you see: ‘A. & L. Fox.’ Never mind, never mind. I am Colonel Sir Hugh Lowther, Fifth of Foot; how do you do?”
He bowed, formally and stiff-backed to Lucie who stood and curtsied elegantly in response and offered his large, tanned right hand to Atticus. It was covered in thick, black hairs.
“We are very well, Sir Hugh, thank you.” Atticus grasped the hand and bowed as he felt his own being suddenly crushed. “I am Atticus Fox and this is my wife and my fellow investigatrix Mrs Lucie Fox. How do you do, sir?”
“Never better, never better, I thank you.”
Sir Hugh hesitated as he glanced sideways at Lucie. “Blow me, but I’m not sure that this is woman’s work, Fox. Investigating a killing, and particularly one as, forgive me, bloody and gory and damnably perplexing as this, is surely a task you’d only give to a man?”
