Bentinck Place was as Eris had described it, a smart eighteenth-century terrace gone to twentieth-century seed, the design as impressive and the panoramic views as stunning as ever, but the structure well overdue for care and attention, with blackened frontages, rotting windows and rusting area railings.
I tried the only bell at number six that didn’t have a name listed beside it, but got no answer. Niall Esguard didn’t seem to be at home. These places usually have mews to the rear, however, and Bentinck Place was no exception. A high-walled cobbled lane plunged away down one side of the terrace, and I decided to check it before settling for the waiting game. It was just as well I did. Number six boasted a garage, the doors of which stood open to reveal a stylish old red Porsche with its bonnet up and its owner tinkering away while he sang along huskily to a country and western number on the radio.
I saw at once why Eris would have felt threatened by him. Even in an oil-smeared boiler suit he looked intimidating, cold hard eyes and a lean muscular frame conveying the unmistakable impression of somebody whose instinctive response to a problem was physical. Whether I posed a problem to him we were about to find out.
‘Niall Esguard?’
‘Who wants to know?’ The stare was what did it. That and the squaring of his shoulders. He wasn’t a man to be messed around and he believed in proclaiming the fact.
‘My name’s Ian Jarrett.’
‘So?’
‘I’m a friend of Eris Moberly.’
He stared at me for a second, then leaned into the car to turn off the radio. The silence seemed to deepen his deliberation as he stood erect and looked me up and down.
‘I believe you met her at the time of your uncle’s death last year.’
‘Moberly?’ he growled.
‘That’s right.’
‘Yes.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘I remember. The woman who took to visiting Uncle Milo just before the end. I ran into her at the hospital the night he died. Friend of yours, you say?’
‘She is, yes.’
‘Mm.’ Niall took a pack of Camels from his breast-pocket and lifted one out with his teeth, then added, ‘I’d choose them less highly strung if I were you.’
‘Would you really?’
‘Not that—’ He broke off to light the cigarette and savour the first drag. ‘Well, I never knew what her game was. Maybe you do.’
‘She’s missing.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘You haven’t seen her since, by any chance?’
‘No. She didn’t show up at the funeral. The hospital was it. Bit of a surprise, really. I had no idea Uncle Milo got such glamorous visitors out at Saffron House.’
‘Didn’t they tell you about her?’
‘No. She told me herself. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known.’
‘But you knew her name.’
‘She introduced herself. Like a lot of women do when they meet me.’
‘You and she don’t seem to tell it quite the same way.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means she told me what you said to her. About your uncle’s historical researches. And the inadvisability of giving him a helping hand.’
‘She told you wrong.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Pity we can’t check with her, then.’ He gave me a level stare. ‘That would settle it.’
‘What do you know about photographic history, Mr Esguard?’
‘What do you know about it?’
‘A little. Some original Fox Talbot negatives were auctioned recently. They fetched about ten thousand pounds each. For a genuine pre-Fox Talbot negative, you could be looking at ten times that.’
‘Bit of a downer there aren’t any, then. Fox Talbot started it all, didn’t he? That I do know.’
‘I have the impression your uncle thought otherwise.’
‘He thought otherwise about most things. A contrary bugger, old Milo. Liked people to think he had aces up his sleeve, even when it was empty. Specially when it was empty, now I look back. As big a con artist as he was a piss artist. I probably tried to warn your friend not to take him seriously. Maybe she misunderstood. Not that it matters now, with the old boy dead and gone. But he could spin a yarn, no question. He could spin one with the best.’
‘A yarn about your ancestor, Marian Esguard?’
Niall took a long deliberative drag on his cigarette, then said, ‘Never heard of her.’
‘Didn’t your uncle ever mention her?’
‘Might have. But it would have been in one ear and out the other.’ He shrugged. ‘I try not to store useless information.’
‘A cache of negatives left by a previously unknown photographer active twenty years before Fox Talbot could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, Mr Esguard, possibly more. I wouldn’t call that useless information.’
‘I would.’ He stepped closer and leaned against the end of a ladder hung horizontally along the garage wall, lowering his voice and cocking his head mock-confidentially. ‘Unless I had the negatives, of course.’
‘Which you don’t?’
‘How could I – when they don’t exist?’
‘Are you sure you haven’t seen Eris Moberly since the night you met at the hospital?’
‘Not really. I might have passed her in the street without recognizing her for all I know.’ He grinned. ‘You just can’t say, can you?’
‘I think you can.’
‘Are you threatening me, Mr … Jarrett?’ He was still grinning. ‘Or am I making the same mistake as Mrs Moberly?’
‘What mistake would that be?’
‘Reading too much into the things people say.’
‘I mean to find her. You can read as much as you like into that.’
‘But I don’t read much, see. I prefer …’ He pushed himself away from the ladder and glanced approvingly at the Porsche. ‘Getting my hands dirty.’
‘Dirty hands leave marks where they’ve been.’
‘Unless the marks are washed off.’ He looked at me through a plume of cigarette smoke, smiling faintly. ‘Look, I don’t want to be unhelpful. If Mrs Moberly is missing and you’re trying to find her, well, that’s …’ The smile broadened. ‘That’s admirable, I suppose. The trouble is, I haven’t a clue what she wanted out of Uncle Milo. And as for whether it has anything to do with her disappearance, well, your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Not quite, I suspect.’
‘Tell you what, though,’ he went on, unabashed. ‘If you’re so sure Uncle Milo comes into it, I could put you on to somebody who knew him a sight better than I did. Somebody who actually listened to the crazy stuff he used to churn out. Somebody your friend might have spoken to, come to that, if she was as interested in my family as you seem to think.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, my curiosity undeniably aroused. ‘And who might that be?’
Montagu Quisden-Neve was the proprietor of a shabby genteel second-hand bookshop called Bibliomaufry. It formed the cramped bookend of a terrace of army-surplus stores, launderettes and tattoo parlours, overshadowed by the retaining wall and soaring six-storey house-backs of one of Bath’s bulkier Georgian crescents. According to Niall Esguard, Quisden-Neve had hung on every contradictory word of his uncle’s photo-historical theories, before and after his move to Saffron House. He fancied himself as some sort of historian in his own right, apparently. So Niall had said, anyway. But I was aware that his priority might have been getting me off his back. I walked into Bibliomaufry that afternoon half expecting to find I’d been sent on a fool’s errand.
The place was a dusty maze of books, shelved, stacked, boxed and piled. A plump, red-faced fellow in the trousers and waistcoat of a three-piece tweed suit, set off by a custard-yellow shirt and blancmange-pink bow tie, was bundling some old copies of Punch in coarse string at a desk somewhere near the middle of the maze. He had thick grey hair, worn long, which made him look like the ageing roué he quite possibly was.
‘Mr Qu
isden-Neve?’
‘The very same,’ he replied, reddening still further as he fastened a knot in the string. ‘The genuine article, indeed.’
‘Niall Esguard said you might be able to help me.’
‘Really? With what? A leather-bound set of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, perhaps?’
‘I’m afraid not. It concerns his uncle.’
‘There you have the advantage of me. Who was Scott’s uncle?’
‘I’m talking about Milo Esguard.’
‘Ah. Poor Milo. I’m sorry.’ He pushed the Punch bundle to one side and grew suddenly solemn. ‘Not funny. I so often think I am, you know. But I find people seldom agree with me.’
‘A friend of mine’s gone missing. Her name’s Eris Moberly. She visited Milo Esguard several times during the weeks before his death.’
‘As did I.’
‘Anything you know might be valuable.’
‘Eris Moberly?’ He puffed at his cheeks thoughtfully, then slowly shook his head. ‘I really don’t think …’
‘Let me describe her.’ He listened patiently as I did so, but recognition didn’t seem to dawn. ‘Her friends are very worried about her,’ I concluded. ‘We fear she may have come to some harm.’
‘That’s good to hear, at any rate, in this dog-eat-dog society. If I disappeared, I frankly doubt anyone would bother to look for me. Other than my creditors, of course.’ He ventured a grin, but swiftly dropped it. ‘But then I’m not as well worth looking for as your friend sounds to be. More than a friend in your case, I take it. Excuse me, I don’t mean to pry. It’s just … your expression …’
‘What about it?’
‘Haunted is how I’d describe it. By love lost, or mislaid. In the shadows behind our eyes hides the past we run from, or else pursue. Don’t you find that, Mr …?’
‘Jarrett.’
‘Don’t you? Honestly? Who are you really looking for? The damsel disparue – or yourself?’
‘I’m looking for information, Mr Quisden-Neve. You either have some or you don’t.’
‘Yes.’ He gave a pained little smile. ‘And, alas, I don’t. Milo never mentioned an Eris Moberly to me.’
‘What about Marian Esguard?’
Quisden-Neve’s eyes sparkled with sudden alertness. ‘Marian Esguard. My, my, Mr Jarrett, there’s clearly more to this than I thought. Exactly where does the mysterious Marian come into the problem of your missing friend?’
‘I’m not sure. Except that she was the reason Eris went to see Milo in the first place.’
‘Really? In that case it’s still more unaccountable …’ He tailed off into silence and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then piloted his way through the book-stacks and past me to the door, where he slipped the bolt and turned the OPEN sign round to CLOSED. ‘I usually celebrate the end of a bookselling day – or non-selling, come to that – with a glass of claret. Care to join me, Mr Jarrett? Then you can tell me all about Eris Moberly.’
I didn’t tell him anything like all, of course, just enough to whet his appetite. We adjourned to his marginally less cluttered first-floor office, where he made a gulping assault on a ludicrously fine Pomerol while I related a carefully edited version of events. I claimed that Eris had shared her interest in Marian Esguard’s putative photographic achievements with me, without explaining how she’d first come to hear of them. I’d thought little of her visits to Milo until her disappearance had left me with few other clues to follow. And, just to test the water, I added that Eris had continued to come down to Bath, ostensibly to see Milo, after his death, which I’d only just found out about.
‘Fascinating,’ pronounced Quisden-Neve when I’d finished. ‘I really do wish Milo had introduced me to Mrs Moberly. Alas, he was a man who took pleasure in secrecy for its own sake. It was one of the reasons why he did so little to uncover the truth about Marian Esguard. He believed, on the basis of family rumour, and nothing more so far as I could ever discover, that she developed some sort of viable photographic technique twenty years or so before Daguerre and Fox Talbot. In case you’re wondering, however, I should make it clear that wasn’t why I first cultivated his acquaintance.’
‘Why did you, then?’
‘Because Marian was married to Joslyn Esguard, and Milo was a repository of information about the husband as well as the wife. The photography question didn’t interest me, not at first anyway, for the simple reason that I knew nothing about it. No, no, Joslyn Esguard was the lure for me.’ He paused theatrically.
‘Are you going to tell me why?’
‘In view of the romantic nature of your quest, I suppose I must. For some years I’ve been pursuing a more scholarly quest of my own, with a view to publication and – who knows? – bestsellerdom.’
‘A quest for what?’
‘The answer to the mystery contained in the chart on the wall behind you.’
I turned and looked at the wall behind Quisden-Neve’s office desk. Pinned up between a filing cabinet and a standard lamp was a large genealogical chart of the royal family from George I onwards, with as many fountain-penned additions and extensions as there were original printed entries, plus a spatter of asterisks, daggers and double daggers against various names, some of which were also boxed or underlined in red.
‘Shall I explain, Mr Jarrett?’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Haemophilia is what it’s all about. A hereditary disease which women can carry but only men can suffer from. As you may know, Queen Victoria was a carrier, as were two of her daughters, who, thanks to dynastic marriages, transmitted the disease to the Russian and Spanish royal families. One of Victoria’s sons was also a haemophiliac. A peculiarity of the disease, by the way, is that none of the sons of a haemophiliac man will inherit it, but all of his daughters will carry it. None of this was known in the last century, of course. The genetic basis of the disease only became clear more recently. Victoria and Albert married off their children in blissful ignorance of the hereditary, not to say historical, consequences.’
‘I don’t quite—’
‘Where did Victoria inherit the gene for haemophilia from, Mr Jarrett? That’s the question. Neither of her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had any family history of the disease. Victoria was their only child, but the Duchess had been married before and had borne her first husband a non-haemophiliac son and a daughter whose subsequent lineage proves she wasn’t a carrier. The chances of a mutant haemophiliac gene are about one in twenty-five thousand, on a par with being struck by lightning. Compare that with the absolute certainty that the daughter of a haemophiliac man will be a carrier.’
‘But you just said—’
‘The Duke of Kent wasn’t a haemophiliac. Quite so. That raises the interesting possibility that he wasn’t Victoria’s father. Sexual mores at the time of Victoria’s birth, especially among the aristocracy, were far from what we might term the Victorian ideal. Look at the chart. You’ll observe that George the Fourth’s only legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, died in November 1817, without issue. The cause of death was blood loss following the delivery of a stillborn son who, had he lived, would one day have been King of England. George was Prince Regent at that time, during his father’s mad final years. None of his eleven surviving siblings had any legitimate offspring, though the illegitimate kind were two a penny. The King was past caring, but all that child-bearing must have seemed a cruel waste of effort to the Queen in view of the heirless outcome. By the close of 1817 all her daughters and most of her daughters-in-law were past the menopause, with no living issue to show for it. Hopes for dynastic continuity thus rested on her three unmarried sons: the Dukes of Clarence, Kent and Cambridge. Dutifully disentangling themselves in advanced middle age from their respective irregular unions, they all contracted hasty marriages to promisingly fecund Continental heiresses and did their overdue best to head off the prospect of the crown passing from one elderly brother to another. Kent won the race, fathering Victoria by the widowed Duchess of
Leiningen, or at any rate seeming to. He was over fifty at the time and in poor shape. Significantly, even illegitimate offspring had previously been beyond him. Maybe his wife decided to improve his chances, so to speak. And maybe she had the misfortune to improve those chances with …’
‘A haemophiliac?’
‘Precisely. Which brings us to Joslyn Esguard.’
‘You’re saying Marian Esguard’s husband was a haemophiliac?’
‘If only it were that simple. That’s what I hoped to learn when I first approached Milo, but he was able more or less to rule it out. His grandfather never even hinted at such a thing, and there’s been no sign of the disease in the family in intervening generations.’
‘What made you think of Joslyn Esguard in the first place?’
‘Circumstantial evidence. When the idea occurred to me of basing a book on this apparently whimsical notion, which I’m certainly not the first to have entertained, I searched various archives for potential haemophiliac candidates and turned up a rather puzzling letter written by one Joslyn Esguard early in 1838 to Sir John Conroy, private secretary to the Duchess of Kent. Victoria was on the throne by then, her father was long dead and Conroy was rumoured to be rather more than a secretary to her mother. He’d previously been the Duke’s aide-de-camp. Somewhat reluctantly, I’d already ruled him out as a candidate in his own right, but there wasn’t much he wouldn’t have known about the affairs of his royal mistress – pun very much intended – hence my interest in his correspondence.’
‘What did the letter say?’
‘Oh, see for yourself.’ Quisden-Neve walked across to the filing cabinet, pulled open the bottom drawer, riffled through a bulging file and lifted out a flagged document. ‘This is a photocopy of the original.’ He passed it over for me to read. ‘Joslyn Esguard’s handwriting was scarcely copperplate, but I think you’ll get the gist of it.’ The writing was indeed a scrawl, but I could follow it easily enough. There wasn’t, after all, much to follow.
Gaunt’s Chase,
Dorset
Caught In the Light Page 11
