Account Rendered & Other Stories

by Marjorie Eccles

  It occurred to me William was not exactly looking as bowled over by my theories as I thought he would be, and I saw that, as usual, he’d got there before me. ‘I’ll admit the same thing did occur to me,’ he said, ‘but—that finial just happening to become conveniently loose enough for Lydia to push over? No, that won’t wash! it had probably been balanced there for ages, and some freak movement of the breeze finally toppled it. Mind you, I’m not saying it might not have given her the idea for a series of so-called accidents . . . poor old Benjie snuffing it, Grandpa’s revolver being fired and the spent bullet being found—’

  ‘It did,’ interrupted a sturdy voice behind us. We turned to see Lydia stomping out of the drawing-room, via the french windows. ‘Damn fool thing to have done—though it seemed a good idea at the time to try and make Marigold come to her senses where that pair was concerned. Did nobody any harm. Except old Benjie, of course—but that was a kindness. Should’ve been put out of his misery months ago, according to the vet, only Marigold wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘But the picture?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me, not that! You don’t believe I would’ve done anything that might hurt old Marigold? She wasn’t even in the garden when I fired that bullet—and I knew nothing on earth would make her touch that finny haddock.’

  I was convinced she was telling the truth. Lydia might have been foolish, but she would never have done anything that could actually have killed her sister. ‘No, I’m sorry I even thought it. Of course I don’t believe that.’ But I couldn’t help thinking her schemes had planted a more sinister intention in someone’s head.

  ‘I’ve had a look at that picture,’ William said. ‘From what I could see without touching it, I’d say it’s impossible to tell whether, the cord had simply rotted over the years and finally given up the ghost, or been helped on its way by being teased and pulled apart to the last strand. If it had been doctored, it had been cleverly done. What’s more, there’s not so much as a speck of dust on the picture.’

  Even in the best-regulated households, of which Melford House was certainly not one, and never had been, even in the days of a sufficiency of servants, this was unusual. As everyone knows, when a picture has been hanging in the same place for years, dust inevitably accumulates behind it, so this one had obviously been taken down and cleaned before it fell, which had to be suspicious in itself. ‘No fingerprints, then, not a shadow of proof,’ I said.

  And just supposing the cord had been tampered with, wasn’t that an incredibly haphazard way to try to murder someone? The picture could have fallen at any time, when Marigold had not been in bed—or even in the room—though perhaps that was just the point. If it hadn’t succeeded in killing her, it would just have been put down to another narrow escape. If it had succeeded, all well and good. Sooner or later, if these ‘mishaps’ continued, one of them had to be fatal.

  ‘There’ll have to be an inquest, won’t there, and I suppose there’s no doubt the verdict will be accidental death? That pair are going to get off scot-free.’

  ‘Well,’ said William. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  And, with the air of having saved the best until the last, he pulled a long envelope from his pocket. ‘When Marigold made the codicil to the will last week, she left this letter with my father, not to be opened until after her death. It follows on from certain enquiries she’d asked us to make.’

  If he expected to surprise us, he succeeded. ‘What enquiries?’ Lydia asked.

  ‘About Malcom Deering and his sister. You couldn’t understand, Lydia, why Marigold should be so taken in by Deering—but the truth was that she wasn’t. Right from the first, she suspected him—with good reason, as she explains in this letter. She asked us to instigate enquiries, though neither my father nor I knew just why, until we read this.’ He tapped the envelope and asked abruptly, ‘How much do you know, Aunt Lydia, about Marigold’s life when she lived in London?’

  It was some time before she answered, and when she did, I thought she had already guessed where his questions were leading. ‘More than enough. Rackety sort of company she kept, called themselves arty to justify acting as they pleased, without thought for anyone else.’

  ‘She had a particular friend called Gayton Bulmer?’

  ‘Friend! She actually told you about him?’

  ‘In this letter, yes.’

  ‘So you also know about—’ Lydia broke off, studied the carpet, then looked up. ‘Oh, well, water under the bridge now, but a terrible thing at the time. To have a baby and not be married . . . the shame, the disgrace.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Poor Marigold. You’re telling me they were blackmailing her over that?’

  ‘More than that. Deering was claiming he was that child.’

  ‘What!’ She gave a snort of derision. ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Well, as you know, the baby was given up for adoption . . . Nurse Wilcox, who, incidentally, is no more Deering’s stepsister than I am, but someone who nursed him just after the war in a hospital for nervous disorders, came across a photo of this Gayton Bulmer, and spotted what she thought was a quite extraordinary likeness to Malcolm Deering. She also found out that Marigold’s friendship with Bulmer had been rather more than that—’

  ‘Found out! By listening to village gossip, no doubt, and snooping around among Marigold’s private affairs, for I’ll tell you one thing—my sister never kept any photo of that rotter on display! Not when he’d damn near ruined her life—died just before the war, and good riddance!’

  ‘Be that as it may, Wilcox brought Deering here as her stepbrother, on the pretext of his nervous exhaustion due to the war. Marigold let them stay here at Melford House, dancing to her tune, giving them promises of more to come in her will, while she took steps to discover their backgrounds. She let them think she believed Deering’s claim to be her son, but, as she makes clear in this letter, she knew from the first that it was quite impossible.’

  ‘Of course she did!’ Lydia declared sturdily. ‘She had the baby adopted, but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten him. Always kept track of him. He joined the army when war broke out, and was killed in the western desert. Broke her heart.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘So why set up that business with the picture?’ I asked.

  ‘Yesterday morning, my father sent up details to Marigold of what our enquiry agent had established regarding Deering’s real identity. I believe she confronted them with what she now knew to be the truth, and they realized time had run out. They could have faced charges for attempting to get money by false pretences—but remember, they still believed they were to benefit from her will—so they had to get rid of her before she could revoke it.’

  ‘The portrait didn’t fall by accident, then,’ I said, hating to think of it.

  ‘If it had been prepared, it would take only a sharp tug when Marigold was sleeping to bring it down. Or—’

  ‘Or it could have been lifted down and Marigold clobbered with it,’ Lydia finished. ‘Especially, if she’d been given something to make her sleep like she did. Well, a post-mortem will soon find that out.’

  We fell silent, each of us unwilling to face the prospect ahead, though thankful that, one way or another, the two miscreants were not going to get away scot-free. Presently, Lydia left us to go and see to her horses, and William and I were alone. When he took my hand and pulled me to him, I didn’t object. In the circumstances, it was very good to feel the warmth and comfort of his arms around me.

  ‘And now,’ he announced masterfully, ‘about that ass Fergus. You’re not going to marry him, Vicky. I won’t let you.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t? And why not?’

  ‘Because you’re going to marry me. You’ve owed me that ever since you let me take all the blame for throwing those pebbles from the roof.’

  ‘In that case, it’s about time I paid my debt, isn’t it?’

  FRESCOES

  He fell in love the instant he saw her, though it wasn’t until muc
h later that he identified the exact moment.

  ‘You must be Andrew St John, the art expert from the Heritage people.’ A slight young woman with unkempt sandy hair, she put down her garden fork, scrambled to her feet and extended a grubby, unselfconscious hand.

  ‘I’ve come to look at the frescoes, yes. And you are Miss Landers?’

  ‘Oh, Meg, please.’ Despite the tatty old jeans, working-boots, deplorable T-shirt, and the hair, which looked as if she’d cut it herself with her gardening shears, he liked her at once. Her grip was firm, her eyes steady. Moreover, she’d pronounced his name correctly, ‘Sinjun’ and not ‘Saint John’. He was predisposed towards people who took the trouble to get it right, feeling they must take him more seriously, and believe him older than his open-faced appearance might at first lead them to do.

  ‘This is an amazing place.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Did you walk up the drive?’

  ‘The taxi left me at the main gates.’

  He’d been warned it was a long walk, but worth it for that first glimpse of the house, if the weather was fine, which it was, unseasonably so. A little heatwave had arrived suddenly, and might have made him regret the dismissal of the taxi, had the walk not been so magical. The neglected drive wound upwards through thick stands of cool woodland, with beeches showing the fresh green translucency of their young growth and groups of deer standing at a distance under their dappled shade. At one point, he had been stopped in his tracks by the sight of bluebells spreading as far as he could see, wave upon wave. The deep, mossy banks either side were massed with the pale, greenish clusters of late primroses. And then the trees opened out and the Palladian house was suddenly before him, much smaller than he’d expected: Margent House, built of the soft, creamy local sandstone two hundred and fifty years ago. At closer proximity, it could be seen that the stone was somewhat crumbling now at the edges, seemingly a metaphor for the whole house, which, he’d been told, was sinking fast through neglect into not so gentle decay.

  Meg Landers was now the sole owner of this.

  It had come to her as the last remaining member of the Cortis family, and she had immediately perceived the incredibly foolish notion of not only occupying it, but also restoring it to its former glory and one day opening house and garden to the public—with no other qualifications for such an optimistic undertaking than having been trained as a landscape gardener. She had, in point of fact, been pulling weeds when he’d appeared, no doubt in an attempt to reveal the original pattern of the once immaculate parterres, and hadn’t noticed him for several minutes. He had stood and watched her, unwilling to disturb the moment.

  She—the only living figure in the landscape—and the stillness of the hot afternoon, imparted a strange, dream-like quality to the whole place. Pale against the rising background of thick, forest trees, perfectly proportioned and symmetrical, the house stood as it had done for two and a half centuries; the heavy scent of some unseen rose hung on the air, rampant climbers weighed down broken pergolas. The empty basin of a large circular stone pool showed ancient, dried cracks under the sun, its fountain silent. A stone urn, long fallen from its pedestal, lay smashed among the weeds in the gravel. Bees droned. He could, for two pins, have sat down on one of the curlicued iron seats and slept.

  But Meg Landers had looked up and seen him and approached, anxious to forward the business in hand, and the dream was broken.

  ‘You think I’m a fool to want to keep this up, don’t you?’ she asked forthrightly a few minutes later, pausing at the great front door to unlace and remove her boots, revealing small feet in pink socks.

  ‘I think you may be deeply disappointed in the end, if you try.’

  ‘I might have known it, you’re like all the rest! But I know I can do it if I have faith.’ She sounded very young. There was a crusading light in her eyes.

  Andrew was perhaps five or six years older than she was, but he was a young man intent on cultivating his own gravitas. ‘Faith isn’t enough on its own,’ he reminded her, only wanting to prepare her, but colouring up in the face of her direct gaze, suddenly hearing himself. Sounding, and feeling, middle-aged.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘it all depends on you, then.’

  ‘The Heritage Foundation, not me.’

  ‘But they won’t give me money if I don’t agree to pull the orangery down—unless you recommend otherwise.’

  That was true. Only there were other problems with the house, besides that of the orangery, just as serious. His visit was a mere formality: he was the bearer of ill news.

  ‘I didn’t like your Mr Montgomery-Hines when he came to see me. He’s a pompous prat.’

  Andrew grinned spontaneously, and in a moment lost the air of importance he strove so hard to project. Very nearly, he congratulated her on her perception, almost told her that not liking Montgomery-Hines definitely put her on the side of the angels, but of course he didn’t. Still, she smiled back at him, showing she’d understood what he hadn’t said, anyway. The smile illuminated her. She had a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Her feet made no sound as she padded in front of him, leading him through a series of rooms where damp spread maps of unknown continents all over the walls, where parts of plaster cornices had fallen away from the ceilings and carpets were worn to the threads. Mice scuttled behind the wainscoting and there was a sweetish, fungoid odour of dry rot above the smell of the dust which lay thick everywhere. He wondered why she’d bothered to remove her boots.

  Watching him with small, sideways glances and noting his dismay, she said rather breathlessly, ‘Better to reserve judgement until after you’ve seen the frescoes.’

  The orangery was a Victorian addition, tacked on to the back of the house; a fussy building of no architectural merit that ruined the clean lines of the main house. It had a series of long windows on three sides, but still looked more like a chapel, or even a folly, than an orangery. Among other disasters, reported Montgomery-Hines, the roof timbers were riddled with woodworm, and Andrew immediately appreciated the extent of the problem: the Foundation didn’t have unlimited funds, and the amount of money necessary to restore this part of the place alone would knock the whole project on the head.

  ‘I thought it could eventually be used as a tearoom. Bring back the orange trees. You know,’ Meg was saying wistfully.

  His heart, not normally a volatile organ, leaped in sudden sympathy with her. But there was no point in raising her hopes. He began to look for the frescoes.

  She was going on to say something else, but he scarcely heard. Turning, his eyes had been drawn straight away to the shorter side of the orangery, the one which abutted on to the house, which until now had been behind him. In the centre of the wall was the wide, high, deeply recessed door through which they’d entered. He now saw that it was framed by the frescoes, seven in all, which occupied the rest of the wall.

  Each had its own painted border, but they were set closely. Together they made a great wall of living colour, vibrant and almost as fresh as the day they had been painted. Which was, he knew, some time during the summer of 1937, when the artist, Lillie Cortis, was twenty-two.

  ‘Incredible!’ he murmured, stunned, momentarily at a loss for anything more to say.

  ‘Aren’t they just?’

  They were incredible not only because of their intrinsic beauty, but also because, from studying what little was available of the work of Lillie Cortis before coming here, it was quite evident to Andrew that in these her art had taken on a new and important direction.

  Flashes of brilliance in her early work had been evident from the start, but, like many of her contemporaries, the young artist had spread her talents too thinly while in search of her own ‘voice’. Pencil sketches, watercolours, oils on canvas, woodcuts remained, but her death at such an early age had meant that not nearly enough had been left behind for the now eager Cortis collectors, especially since she’d had a reputation for carelessness and such disregard for her own w
ork that she quite often recklessly gave it away, forgot to sign it or lost track of what she’d done with it. Nevertheless, she’d achieved a certain posthumous fame. She was currently fashionable.

  And here, in front of him, was the glorious evidence that she had far exceeded anything she’d ever done before. Why had these frescoes never had the attention they certainly deserved?

  Well, it wasn’t only, he thought, answering his own question, that the climate of opinion of those days had needed to change before they could be evaluated and fully appreciated, though that was certainly true. She’d been too young to have built up a solid reputation before she died—and more significantly, the frescoes had remained in obscurity until now. No.one with sufficient authority to pronounce on their merit had ever examined them. Lillie Cortis had been tragically killed almost immediately after they had been completed, and this house had then gone to a distant cousin in Ireland who had not wanted it. It had remained unoccupied and been allowed to fall into near-ruin for over sixty years before the cousin had died and left it to Meg Larders.

  Gazing at the frescoes, Andrew had already made up his mind. Their excellent state of preservation proved that the school of thought which said that frescoes could not last in the British climate was entirely wrong. Mercifully the orangery, for all its decrepitude, had remained dry, and only a little restoration would be needed to make the panels as good as the day they were painted. They must never again be left to survive as best they could. Forget Montgomery-Hines and his woodworm. The orangery would cost a small fortune to repair, but it must be done, or failing that, pulled down and another building erected around the frescoes, for their protection.

  Andrew began to feel very excited.