‘Oh, aye, I’m sure of it. I expect Murray will know where they are. I’ll try his phone again.’
Sinclair took out his mobile phone and made the call. Several seconds later he shook his head and said, ‘He’s still not answering.’
‘Should we go and look for him?’
Sinclair stood up. ‘I’d sooner go and look for those paintings. I’ll leave him a message to get in touch.’ When his call went to voicemail he said, ‘Murray, please call my mobile as soon as you get this. We could use your help.’ He put his phone away again. ‘Now, let’s go and see if we can find them. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I don’t recall seeing them in a while, so I expect they must still be hanging in the east wing.’
Tayte followed Sinclair to the back of the hall. ‘We’ll have to be careful then.’
‘Aye, careful as ever in the east wing, and more so the higher up we go. A mishap on the top floor could see you back down here again in no time at all.’
They checked the ground floor first, which was relatively easy-going as much of the flooring on this level, particularly at the heart of the house, was made of stone. Where the rooms they entered had wooden floorboards, as with the room Tayte had previously entered when he’d found Robert Christie’s tomb, they exercised all necessary caution. They came across only a handful of paintings, one or two of which were portraits of past family members, but none had been signed by Andrew Geddes.
They worked their way back to the main hallway and went up to the first floor, taking the corridor Tayte had previously used on the morning he’d gone exploring. He didn’t recall seeing any portraits in the rooms he’d looked in, but they checked them all again to be sure. When they came to the atrium they went straight on, now treading a path Tayte was unfamiliar with. Looking into the rooms in this area, he imagined they had once been bedrooms, and it was here that two paintings drew their attention. Both were portraits, hanging between windows that were too dirty to see through.
‘There,’ Sinclair said, pointing to the lower right-hand corner of the first canvas. ‘Andrew Geddes.’
Tayte had gone to the other painting. ‘Same here,’ he said, checking his footing on the floorboards as he stepped back to take them both in. One was of a seated, dark-haired woman wearing a deep red, empire-line dress, pensively looking up towards the right side of the image. The other was of a man in a green hunting cape, looking straight out of the picture. Neither were very large. Their condition appeared to be very good.
‘Can we take them down?’ Tayte asked.
‘Of course,’ Sinclair said, lifting the portrait of the man down for them to take a closer look. ‘They can stay down, too. I’ll have Murray put them up in the west wing where they’ll be safer.’
Tayte lifted the other painting down and they stood them side by side beneath one of the windows where the light was better. ‘Do you know who the subjects are?’
‘I’m almost certain the woman is Aileen Fraser,’ Sinclair said. ‘As for the man, I’m afraid I have no idea. Given the time period in which it was painted, and because it was one of the paintings bequeathed to Angus, I suppose it could be one of his brothers. If he spawned the Macrae bloodline, maybe that’s what all the fuss has been about.’
Tayte turned the paintings around. There were a few marks on the back, but nothing that resembled any kind of message. He wanted to take the canvases out of the frames to see if Sir Robert Christie had written anything on the back of them, but just as he was about to ask Sinclair if that would be okay, he checked his thinking. Then he began to shake his head.
‘Supposing there was a message inside one or all of the paintings left to Angus,’ he said. ‘How could he have known about it?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Sinclair said. ‘It would have to stand out in some way.’
‘Precisely,’ Tayte said. ‘And nothing here does. You said Angus was left three paintings.’
‘That’s right. Shall we see if we can find the other one?’
Tayte nodded. ‘I think we have to. If only to rule it out.’
They left the room, checking several others before moving up to the next floor, where they found a handful of other paintings, none of which were by Geddes. This floor was entirely new to Tayte, and the condition of the house in this section was by far the worst he had seen. There were the typical signs of peeling wall-coverings and flaking paintwork, but it was much worse here. The obvious neglect was further accentuated by entire sections of floor that were missing, giving clear views down into the rooms below.
‘We took up some of the boards on this floor before the rot got to them,’ Sinclair said by way of an explanation. ‘This section of the house has been out of use the longest, so we used the good boards to repair the rooms that were in use in the west wing.’
‘I see,’ Tayte said, opening a door that led into a dark and uninviting room.
‘If you can believe it,’ Sinclair continued, ‘once upon a time this used to be the master bedroom.’
Tayte shone his torch into the room, illuminating a large space that contained an old four-poster bed and a few items of bedroom furniture. There were also two more paintings here, although Tayte couldn’t make them out very well from where he was standing.
‘At least the floorboards are okay,’ he said as he stepped inside.
Sinclair scoffed. ‘Don’t you believe it.’
There were drawn curtains at the windows, which Tayte thought had once been a rich silky green colour. Now the moth-eaten cloth was pale and covered in years of dust and grime. He went further in, testing every floorboard before he trusted his weight to it. It all seemed sound enough, and although he was a heavy man, he figured that the four-poster bed had to be far heavier. It gave him confidence. He reached one of the tall curtains without incident, sensing that Sinclair wasn’t far behind him. He went to open it, thinking to let some natural light in, but as he pulled at it the entire pelmet and framework came crashing down around him with a thud that sent a plume of dust into the air.
Tayte coughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, throwing Sinclair a smile. ‘At least now we can see what we’re doing.’
Sinclair seemed more interested in how Tayte was than the old curtains. ‘Are you okay?’
Tayte nodded. ‘Luckily, it just missed me.’
He turned away from the window, back into the room, his eyes seeking out the paintings he’d seen. One was adjacent to the bed on his right. The other, to Tayte’s left, was much larger. It hung above a grand inglenook fireplace, over a smoke-blackened beam. They were both portraits. As before, one was of a man, the other was of a woman. The smaller portrait to the right was closest so they went to it first. It was a dark picture of a man in a black, almost indistinguishable coat, which highlighted his face and the white of his shirt collar.
‘I do know who this fine gentleman is,’ Sinclair said. ‘That’s Angus’s stepfather, Lachlan Fraser.’
‘It’s by Andrew Geddes,’ Tayte said as he began to scrutinise it. Then a sound outside the room distracted him. ‘Did you hear that?’ He tilted his head back towards the door, listening.
‘Hear what?’
Tayte went to the door and looked out along the corridor. ‘It sounded like a creaking floorboard.’
‘I can’t say I did,’ Sinclair said as he joined him. ‘Murray? Are you there?’ he called, but there was no answer. Turning back to Tayte, he said, ‘It’s a very old house, Mr Tayte. Given the state it’s in, I expect you heard another piece of plaster falling from the ceiling somewhere.’
‘It sounded just like a floorboard to me,’ Tayte said as they returned to Lachlan Fraser’s portrait.
Tayte carefully lifted the painting down and turned it around, hoping to find something on the back that might at least give them their next direction, but as before, there was nothing to suggest any kind of message. He propped it up against the wall, and he and Sinclair went over to the other painting. He recognised this portrait as that of Aileen Fraser, although she was older than she
appeared in the portrait he’d seen on the floor below. Standing on the stone hearth in front of the fireplace, both men had to crane their necks to look up at it. When Tayte’s eyes fell on the signature his chin dropped. There was no name, just three initials.
‘RJC,’ he said, turning to Sinclair.
Before Tayte had arrived at Drumarthen House, the initials would have meant little to anyone who saw them. Now, however, following his research into Sinclair’s four-times-great-grandfather, both he and Sinclair knew exactly whose initials they were.
‘Robert John Christie,’ Sinclair said, spelling it out. ‘It seems that Sir Robert was something of an artist himself.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Tayte said. ‘I saw plenty of books on art in the library you showed me. Maybe some of them belonged to him.’
‘It’s really quite good,’ Sinclair said. ‘Not that it’s a patch on the Geddes portraits, of course, but it’s a fine piece none the less. I’m sure I must have seen it before now, but there are so many paintings at Drumarthen—at least there were—that I don’t particularly recall it.’
‘He’s made an amateurish error with that book the subject’s hand is resting on,’ Tayte offered.
‘Yes, I can see that. It’s very much out of proportion with the rest of the image.’
‘I wonder when it was painted,’ Tayte said, stepping closer until he could read the book’s title. It didn’t escape his attention that the subject matter concerned India. ‘The History of British India Volume I by James Mill,’ he read out. ‘It’s almost as if the artist purposefully made the book too large just so he could fit the title in.’
He lifted one corner of the frame away from the wall, and as with so many paintings that had been hung at Drumarthen, the wall covering beneath it was far brighter than that which surrounded it, telling him that the painting had been hanging there for a long time. Perhaps since Angus Fraser inherited the house. He went over to the bed and looked back at the image. His eyes were immediately drawn to the book, the spine of which was red, black and gold, with gold lettering.
‘That book really does stand out,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it stands out more than the subject of the portrait. It’s good work, as you say, so why ruin it by detracting from it like that?’
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Sinclair said. ‘Do you suppose Sir Robert was trying to send his son a message via that book? Judging from Aileen’s apparent age, it could well have been painted close to Robert’s death.’
Tayte couldn’t be sure, but from where he was now standing by the bed in the former master bedroom, which would have been Angus Fraser’s bedroom, he couldn’t imagine a better place to hang a painting that was intended to grab Angus’s attention and send him a message.
‘I think it’s highly possible,’ he said, thinking that the error with the book had to be deliberate given the otherwise obvious skill of the artist. ‘The house came with a collection of old books, didn’t it?’
‘Aye,’ Sinclair said. ‘A considerable collection at that.’
‘Well then, let’s go and see if that book’s in your library.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The afternoon light was beginning to fade by the time Tayte and Sinclair entered Drumarthen’s makeshift library. As Tayte looked up at the high grey windows, he thought there could only be another hour of daylight left. Then half the house would be in darkness. With no electricity on the upper floors of the east wing, if their search for the Blood of Rajputana was to take them back there, he imagined that unless they went soon it would have to wait until morning. That would mean spending another night at the house, which was a prospect Tayte didn’t relish given there was every chance he would spend it under the same roof as a murderer.
Sinclair switched on the lights. ‘That’s better,’ he said, looking around at the shelves of books. ‘Now, where might a book about the history of British India be?’
Tayte went over to the first tall bookcase to his left and began to look. ‘Let’s take a side apiece,’ he said. ‘If we haven’t found it by the time we reach the other end of the room, we can use that ladder to check the books higher up.’
They each began to walk slowly along the bookcases. Tayte scanned the shelves on his side for any references to India or history in general. He passed a fiction section, and then the large number of books on art that he’d seen before. After that he came across several leather-bound titles on natural history, and others on poetry. As he drew closer to the back of the room, he hoped Sinclair was having better luck than he was, although his silence was far from encouraging.
The books on the far wall were not in the bookcases that had been saved and brought down from the original library. They were on shelves that had been crudely put up to accommodate the rest of the collection. When he reached the back of the room, Tayte also noticed that there were several cardboard boxes, presumably filled with books for which there was no shelf space left. He opened one and his hope lifted when he saw that it contained several old volumes of Ridpath’s History of the World, but there was nothing in there concerning British India. He opened another box, aware that behind him Sinclair was now climbing the ladder.
‘I think this is the section,’ Sinclair called. ‘There’s a number of books here about India.’
Tayte went to the bottom of the ladder and read out one of the titles from the section Sinclair was referring to. ‘A Handbook for India by John Murray.’ On the shelf above it he saw several volumes entitled The History of the British Empire in India by Edward Thornton. As Tayte’s eyes wandered further up he saw books on soldiering in British India and many more concerning the East India Company. A moment later, he noticed Sinclair reaching for a book which formed part of a row of similarly coloured red, black and gold spines.
‘Here it is,’ Sinclair said as he pulled one of the books out and passed it down to Tayte.
‘The History of British India Volume I by James Mill,’ Tayte read out. ‘It’s the same book.’
Sinclair reached the bottom of the ladder. ‘Aye, the exact same. The colouring on the spine is identical.’
Tayte opened the book, wondering whether there was something inside it that Sir Robert Christie meant his son to see all those years ago—something that might tell them what he’d done with the Blood of Rajputana.
‘There’s an inscription,’ Tayte said, pointing it out to Sinclair as soon as he turned the title page over. He felt his pulse quicken as he read it out. ‘To my beloved son. I regret that I could not be the father you deserved, but please know that my heart is with you, as it is with your mother. It lies at the heart of Drumarthen. Look for it there. RJC.’
At face value Tayte thought Robert Christie’s message was a sentimental one, letting his son, Angus, know that he loved him, and that even though he was dead, his presence could still be felt at Drumarthen if he chose to look for it. That was likely how anyone else who came to read the inscription would see it, but knowing what Tayte knew, he clearly saw it for what it was.
‘I think we can safely say that Robert’s reference to his heart is really another metaphor for the ruby,’ he said. ‘As it was in Jane Hardwick’s last letter. I’m not too sure about the next part, though. My heart is with you suggests that the ruby was with Angus at the house, but I’m confused as to why it would also be with Angus’s mother, Aileen.’
He began to wonder whether Aileen was also entombed at Drumarthen, if there was another sarcophagus yet to be discovered, but he quickly ruled that idea out. He’d seen all the family death and burial records in both Sinclair’s and Drummond’s research files. He clearly recalled that Aileen was buried in the Fraser family plot alongside her husband, Lachlan, far from Drumarthen.
Sinclair held his hand out. ‘Can I see it? I’d like to read it for myself.’
Tayte handed the book to Sinclair, who proceeded to read the inscription in silence. A moment later, he read out, ‘It lies at the heart of Drumarthen. If I hadn’t al
ready looked inside his sarcophagus I’d say he was referring to his tomb, but it can’t be that.’
‘The heart of Drumarthen . . .’ Tayte said, thinking. ‘The heart of the house . . . When we think about the heart of any house, it’s often the kitchen that comes to mind.’ He paused and began to smile to himself. ‘Or perhaps around the fireplace,’ he added, his tone bright. ‘At least, that’s where families from Robert Christie’s time would gather on cold evenings.’
Sinclair gave Tayte a knowing look. ‘The painting that led us to this book is hanging above a fireplace,’ he said, suddenly sharing Tayte’s enthusiasm.
Tayte nodded. ‘And it’s a painting of Angus’s mother, Aileen Fraser.’
‘As it is with your mother,’ Sinclair said, repeating the line from the inscription.
Tayte was keen to go and find out if they were right before the light faded. ‘I think we need to head back to the former master bedroom and take a good look at that fireplace,’ he said, feeling both excited to know that the Blood of Rajputana could be there, and at the same time fearful of what would happen if it was.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Back in Drumarthen’s former master bedroom, Tayte and Sinclair went to each of the tall windows and opened the remaining curtains, taking care this time to do so without bringing them all crashing down. Because the windows here were so large and so many, they soon had enough light to comfortably see by, despite the time of day and the overcast weather. They stood looking at the fireplace in silence for several seconds. The opening was around ten feet wide by five feet high. There were narrow stone seats at either end with recesses in the back wall to either side of the iron fireback, which bore the embossed image of two stags and a thistle. Before that was the fire basket and firedogs.
‘Let’s lift the basket out,’ Sinclair said. ‘Maybe there’s space enough to hide something beneath it.’
They each took an end and lifted the basket out on to the hearth along with the firedogs. The area beneath offered no encouragement. The flagstone base looked solid, giving no suggestion that any part of it could be lifted up to reveal a secret hidey-hole. They explored it further just the same, tapping at the stone and feeling along the cracks where one section met another.
Letters from the Dead (Jefferson Tayte Genealogical Mystery Book 7) Page 30
