Death of a Delft Blue mb-37

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘It is not flawed,’ said Dame Beatrice equably. ‘Moreover, it is not for sale.’

  ‘The first bulbs,’ said Binnen anxiously, ‘date from about the year 1560. They were experimental and, of course, all were tulips.’

  ‘There was speculation in bulbs at one time,’ said Derde, nobly backing up his aunt. ‘And, another thing, we used to divide off the bulb-fields by hedges, but these impeded mechanisation and so are disappearing.’

  ‘Bulbs are to be sold by auction,’ announced the Jewish grandmother, scornfully. ‘No commercial savvy has anybody in bulbs. All are cheated. All auctions are cheat. Somebody runs up and then backs down. Fake buying!’

  ‘But, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, ‘you couldn’t sell all those millions of bulbs any other way than by auction.’

  ‘I,’ responded his relative, ‘would be having all those silly little bulbs through my fingers.’

  ‘Like the pea-shucks, eh?’ retorted Bernardo.

  ‘You know, Aunt Rebekah,’ said Derde, desperately, ‘there is State control of the bulb-fields. All diseased bulbs are weeded out and destroyed. The auctions are perfectly fair, I can assure you.’

  ‘Mrs Gavin,’ put in Sweyn, ‘has been telling me about the British rune-stones, particularly in relation to a story which she is prepared to lend me, and which I want very much to read.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura, accepting the ball which had been lobbed to her. ‘It’s a story by M. R. James, once Provost of Eton, called Casting the Runes. I don’t know that it has much bearing upon the subject,’ she added, ‘because the runes don’t appear to have been, so to speak, the official ones.’

  ‘One never knows,’ said Sweyn cheerfully. ‘The story has its origin in magical practices, no doubt. The word “runes” means mystery, secret, secrecy.’

  ‘The festival of flowers is well worth seeing,’ said Binnen. ‘The growers do not need the flowers, only the bulbs. They are glad to have the flowers used in the festival. The floats are miraculous.’

  ‘So is the Three Arts Ball,’ said the immaculate Jewish daughter, making her voice heard almost for the first time. ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘Barbarity!’ said her mother. ‘One talks of the morals of ostriches!’

  ‘Do ostriches have morals, Grandmamma?’ enquired her handsome grandson, in a dangerously interested and solicitous voice.

  ‘In West Friesland,’ said Binnen, still sounding anxious, ‘are tulips and irises, on a nice, heavy clay soil. Straw and fine peat…’

  ‘I am telling you Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are living 1900 b.c., Christian date,’ shrieked Rebekah, completely ignoring Binnen, and joining in the conversation between Sweyn and Laura.

  ‘And I,’ said Sweyn, impassively, ‘am telling, not you, dear Aunt Rebekah, but Mrs Gavin, that Jacob slept on a pillar of stone and dreamed of angels. Why not an early type of rune-stone? We know that the runic alphabet was based on a script invented or inherited by a North Etruscan people in the second or first century b.c., and it could be…’

  ‘What is this second or first, cart before horse, century?’ demanded Rebekah, speaking with venom tempered by a kind of unwilling respect. Sweyn patiently informed her that, for instance, 4000 b.c. was long before 1000 b.c.

  ‘So this dating is all phooey? No?’ was Rebekah’s comment.

  ‘It is a convenience, that’s all,’ explained Sweyn.

  ‘When I am needing a convenience, I am going to the ladies’ cloakroom, isn’t it?’ demanded Rebekah.

  This unanswerable query provoked an outburst of ‘cover-up’ talk from the rest of the table. Sweyn told Laura loudly that in the thirteenth century a Danish legal document called the Codex Runicus had been compiled and that at about the same time a prayer-book had been written in runes for the benefit of a Danish notable of the era who was not conversant with Latin.

  Laura responded with a rather vague reference to the Breeches Bible and realised, too late, that she had perpetrated a gaffe, but her face was partially saved by Binnen, who, equally unfortunately, took the opportunity to inform all and sundry that in September compost and stable manure were spread on the bulb-fields.

  ‘For heavens’ sake!’ shouted Binnie’s brother, the blue-eyed Florian, who, up to this point, had conversed little and that only with his Aunt Opal, who, to his apparent fury, had been given him as a dinner-partner and to whom he had been, on the whole, extremely rude. ‘Can’t we get away from ordure?’

  ‘Yes, we can,’ said Lord Byron, rising from his chair. ‘We can, indeed. I have the honour to inform you all that Binnie and I propose to be married in the near future. We invite you all to the wedding and will let you know the date as soon as possible.’

  If Bernardo’s idea had been to change the subject, he succeeded admirably. Every woman of his family and connections, with the exception of Binnie, contributed an opinion, a congratulation or, in the case of Grandmother Rebekah, a denunciation.

  ‘You are to marry this C. of E. chit?’ she yelled. ‘No, not! I have promised you this twenty months to Aaron Lomberg for his daughter Rachel!’

  ‘You should have told me, Grandmamma,’ said Bernardo, ‘and then I would have told you that my tastes do not lie in the direction of Rachel Lomberg. She is a nice girl and I shall always regard her with brotherly affection, but…’

  ‘You are marrying for money, you think!’ screamed Rebekah. ‘Let me tell you that you are not! Bernard’s money will never go to this little Miss Prim and Proper! If anybody gets it, it will be divided.’

  ‘English as she is spoke by Grandmamma,’ muttered Bernardo to Binnie. ‘Listen, darling,’ he added, addressing his aged relative, ‘I have never supposed that any of the van Zestien money would go to little Binnie, but, if I married Rachel Lomberg, none of it would go to me, either. And Aaron Lomberg has six sons, remember. Why do you think my dear mamma insisted on calling me Bernardo? The old man is tickled to death to have a namesake. What says my cousin Florian? Binnie, my dear, let’s leave the table and seek romance beside the waters of comfort, otherwise one of the canals of Amsterdam, for they flow more quietly than ever flowed the Don.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to,’ said Binnie, with her accustomed giggle. There ensued a short silence, broken, as the door closed behind the couple, by noisy whoops of distress and fury from Grandmother Rebekah. Then everybody began to speak, except for Laura. Her attention had been caught by the expression on the face of Binnie’s brother Florian when Bernardo had addressed him.

  It was a face of remarkable beauty. Florian was fair-haired, fair-skinned and looked incredibly young and pure unless and until he smiled. His smile added years to his appearance, and a devil, instead of an angel, flashed out and his hyacinth-blue eyes became cat-like slits of Satanic wickedness. Laura had never seen such an evil and fascinating change in anybody, for, upon the receipt of Bernardo’s announcement of the engagement, Florian had suddenly smiled. Of Bernardo’s pointed question with regard to the testamentary depositions of his grandfather, he had taken no notice at all.

  ‘The Aztecs,’ said Professor Derde gallantly, ‘followed cults common to primitive civilisations everywhere. They were nature worshippers and their religion embraced corn goddesses, the rain god and the Lady of the Turquoise Skirt. She was the protector and deity of rivers and lakes. Older cults appear to have envisaged the Seven-Snake goddess of crops and corn, but—’

  ‘I am not for these goddesses,’ moaned Rebekah, suspending her more spectacular evidences of grief and rage in favour of a milder form of protest. ‘Religion belongs to the men.’

  Nobody disputed this point, neither was she given time to elaborate upon it, for Dame Beatrice at once remarked that Picasso’s preoccupation with bulls was connected less with the corrida than with a folk-memory which took him back to the days of the later Roman empire and the Mithraic sacrifices.

  The professors leapt upon this red-herring with relief, alacrity and tremendous gusto. Even the so-far almost silent Petra and Binnen’s young
er daughter Ruby joined in, and so, to Laura’s surprise, did Florian, his extraordinary beauty restored, the wolfish smile gone, his strange eyes deeply blue again and as innocent as those of a young child.

  ‘Oh, for a picture or a portrait bust!’ said Opal, looking into his face.

  ‘Yes,’ said his grandmother Binnen, ‘I think Florian must sit for his portrait. Except for snapshots, we have had no picture of him since he was five.’

  ‘His head should be cast in bronze,’ said Opal, eagerly.

  ‘In pure gold, you mean,’ said Florian, smiling again and with the same evil effect. Rebekah pricked up her ears.

  ‘Who could afford?’ she demanded.

  ‘Runes were often inscribed on metal,’ said Sweyn, hastily. ‘They were incised on the blades of swords. The swords of the Northmen were well adapted for inscriptions, for they were long and fairly broad, and the last phase of the Runic script, being sharply angular, was pre-eminently suitable…’

  At this point Rebekah rose from the table and announced that she must go. She, her daughter and Bernardo were catching a plane in the morning back to London. Their departure broke up the party. This, Laura thought, was as well. Runes, bulbs and the Aztecs seemed inexhaustible subjects of conversation. Derde’s last reference was to Tlaloc, the rain-god. When, escorted by the professors, Dame Beatrice and Laura reached the street, the rain, as though invoked, was pouring down. Derde appeared to be gratified by this.

  ‘I have known it happen before,’ he mildly stated. ‘There is more in these ancient religions than some people think.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Scottish Air on a Barrel-Organ

  ‘I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking,

  Lasses a’lilting before dawn o’ day;

  But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning,

  The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.’

  Jane Elliot

  « ^ »

  Well!’ said Laura when she and Dame Beatrice were again in their own hotel. ‘I wonder what it would have been like if ghastly old Rebekah and her daughter hadn’t gatecrashed the party?’

  ‘But I don’t think they did gate-crash it, child. I think somebody invited them. How else could they have known that the dinner was to take place? They had come from England, remember. Besides, I liked Rebekah. There is always something to be said for those who call a spade a damned shovel.’

  ‘The daughter didn’t seem to think they would be welcomed, anyhow, and I don’t believe they were. Who would have invited them?’

  ‘Professor Derde and Professor Sweyn, presumably. It was their party. I should imagine that Rebekah and her daughter came over with Bernardo especially for the dinner.’

  ‘Lord Byron set the cat among the pigeons with his last announcement, didn’t he? I could hear the bird flapping its wings, especially where young Florian was concerned.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, if I understand your metaphor aright. What did you make of the professors?’

  ‘Nice, but dull. Foreigners get very solemn and informative, I always think, don’t you?’

  ‘The Dutch and the Germans are often clumsy riders when they mount their hobby-horses, but then, so are some of the English. By the way, your reference to the bird flapping its wings makes me wonder whether any member of the family (including the two young people themselves) is really happy about Mr Bernardo’s announcement of the engagement.’

  ‘Money comes into it, I suppose. It’s going to be a marriage of convenience to keep all the lolly together. If it isn’t a vulgar speculation, (although I’m pretty certain it is), I wonder how much the respective grandmothers have to leave? We know Grandmother Colwyn-Welch’s money is in bulbs, but we don’t know anything about Grandmother Rebekah, beyond the fact that she takes empty pea-shucks back to the greengrocer. I wish I had that sort of nerve.’

  ‘There remains, of course, old Mr Bernard van Zestien. I wonder whether he knows of the engagement?’

  ‘Almost bound to, I should think. After all, Binnie is not only his grandniece; she and her brother live with him.’

  ‘Did you form any impression of the brother?’

  ‘Not much of one, except that he’s handsome and vulpine. I was pretty well tied up with the rune-stones, you know. What did he have to talk about?’

  ‘Modern painting and modern poetry. He heartily despises both, to the distress of his aunt Opal, who is a devotee, it seems, of the poets who were writing at the beginning of, or during, the 1914 war. According to Florian, however, the only painter of note was Rubens, (he drew a spirited picture of a voluptuous lady on the tablecloth), and the only poets were Spanish ones. He quoted, at some length, from the sixteenth-century poet Garcilaso de la Vega — in Spanish, of course. Opal begged him to translate, but he did not.’

  ‘Loathsome little brute! But I suppose they all like to show off at that age. This sketching on the tablecloth appears to be a bit of a family foible. From Professor Sweyn I got the runic alphabet from the second century onwards, and an extremely romantic picture of the Devil all done in a kind of strapwork, as though his limbs and things were long tongues. What about the aunts?’

  ‘Aunt Petra Rose was almost without utterance and ate little, and Aunt Ruby Colwyn-Welch, also almost speechless, obviously preferred the pleasures of the table to the more refined commitments of civilised intercourse. Her sister’s remarks I have, to some extent, described.’

  ‘Well and truly under their mother’s thumb, from what I saw of them.’

  ‘They live a very secluded life, I imagine. I got Professor Derde to talk about the Aztecs, and, in the family tradition, he sketched on the tablecloth the god Quetzalcoatl in his symbolic form of a feathered snake.’

  ‘Why pick on him, I wonder? Quetzalcoatl, I mean.’

  ‘He is the god of learning and of the priesthood.’

  ‘Oh, I see. By the way, how much longer are we staying in Amsterdam?’

  ‘We still have the Rijksmuseum to visit. Then we can go on to Maastricht and Valkenburg, unless you wish to spend more time at Zandvoort.’

  ‘No, I’ve had plenty of swimming. If there’s time at the end, I would rather like Delft, though.’

  ‘Good. We leave Amsterdam, then, the day after tomorrow.’

  At breakfast on the following morning a note was brought to Dame Beatrice. She read it and passed it over to Laura.

  ‘Hired a barrel-organ? And will we walk along the banks of the Herengracht Canal until we reach Wester Kerk and Raadhuis Straat, there to be prepared to listen lo a piece of music which will bring nostalgia to Mrs Gavin?’ said Laura, incredulity in her voice. ‘Some assignment! Has it any bearing on last night’s dinner-party, do you suppose?’

  ‘As it is signed by Binnie, whose engagement may not be to the family’s taste or in its interests, I well think that it might.’

  ‘An excuse to see you again, I should imagine,’ said Laura. ‘And, if I may offer the remark without giving offence, I can’t see the reason for it. Nobody’s been murdered, I take it?’

  ‘It seems less than likely. Nevertheless, I suggest that we fall in with the young woman’s wishes and…’

  ‘Make tracks for the Herengracht Canal? Excellent. I should like the opportunity of playing a barrel-organ, especially in public. It will be quite an experience, and something to tell Hamish, who is quite sickeningly toffee-nosed these days since he went into long trousers and learned the small guitar. What do we do? Take a cab and then walk the rest of the way?’

  ‘I think so. We can drive along the Amstel past the Grand Theatre and as far as the Dam, I hope. Raadhuis Straat is a broad turning near the post-office. When we have finished breakfast, perhaps you can suggest to the hall porter that we should like to hire a vehicle.’

  The barrel-organ turned out to be only nominally in the possession of Binnie and her brother. Its owners were jealously guarding it, taking it in turns to supervise the musical renderings and shake the collecting box.

  Binnie greeted
Dame Beatrice and Laura rapturously. Florian met them with gracefulness but also with some reserve. Both abandoned the barrel-organ to its owners in order to talk to the newcomers.

  ‘This is marvellous! So glad you could come!’ cried Binnie. ‘We did want Mrs Gavin to hear this particular tune. I’m partly Scottish myself, you see. Bernie hasn’t that advantage, I’m afraid. Oh, but I mustn’t talk about Bernie in front of Florian. He doesn’t like him.’

  Florian grunted and dug his heel into a patch of oil in the roadway.

  ‘I wonder why they can’t keep the streets clean?’ he said. Binnie gave a little scream, and told him that Holland was the cleanest country in Europe, with the exception, perhaps, of Switzerland, although even of that she was not too sure. ‘Now, listen!’ she added, with dramatic emphasis. ‘I know the order of these tunes by heart, and I’m certain Mrs Gavin’s one comes after the one they’re playing now.’

  A lively dance tune came to an end. The man with the collecting box made his rounds among the crowd which the sounds of the street-organ had caused to gather at the corner of Raadhuis Straat. Then Florian returned to the instrument and took over the iron wheel, two feet in diameter, which brought to life the concordance of pipes, drums and cymbals behind the mechanical figures which beat time or affected to play the instruments. These last made up the orchestra hidden behind the carved and painted forefront of the barrel-organ.

  It seemed to Laura to be hard and concentrated work to turn the wheel and Florian soon abandoned the effort. Laura was wondering how her own wrists and muscles would stand the strain — since she was anxious to try her strength and skill — when the doleful tune of The Lament for Flodden greeted the alien air of the city.

  Laura began to hum, reminding herself, as she did so, of Jane Elliot’s simple words of mourning for young fellows taken from the lanes and the sheep-folds to fight on the Scottish Border. There was sorrow, too, and pity and understanding for the girls they had left behind them — the girls who would never again hear jesting and be teased, coaxed and wooed; who would never again play hide-and-seek among the haystacks with their bucolic swains.