Melrose tried to lighten the onslaught by offering up one or two examples of mild peer-madness among the nobility — better, at least, than Lord Lucan’s murderous tendencies. “I rather like old Poachy — Lord Ribbenpoach is his courtesy title; he’s heir to a dukedom or something. He’s a bit mad. Gets out in his own woods and poaches his own game. Or so they say.”
Charles Seaingham mentioned the trouble they’d had with poachers on their own land, probably as much to turn the conversation round as anything.
“A lot of you are mad —” began Bea Sleight. A murmur from the other end of the table suggested Agatha couldn’t agree more. “It’s all that inbreeding.”
“Oh, really,” said Melrose with a laugh. “All that gets us is look-alike noses and protruding teeth.” He heard Parmenger, down the table, apologize abruptly for spilt wine. They were on Stilton and port by now (Grace Seaingham refusing to stand on the tradition of the ladies’ retiring for this reverential act), and MacQuade, seeming to enjoy all of this immensely, passed the bottle to Melrose, who went on. “Pity that I shall die d.s.p.”
His aunt stopped eating long enough to say, with a kind of horror, “If you’ve not made a will, Melrose, you must do so immediately.”
Beatrice Sleight laughed. “He means ‘without children.’ ”
Grace Seaingham broke in: “I should think Mr. Plant’s title is strictly his own business.” She pushed back her dessert plate, untouched.
Melrose smiled his thanks to Grace, and said to Beatrice, “It appears to be your forte, bringing the peerage to heel. Glad I’m not one of them anymore.”
“You really fascinate me.”
Melrose sincerely hoped not.
“I’ve looked you up in Burke’s.”
“Already? I only just got here.”
Bea Sleight smiled. “Charles told us you were coming. You’re in all of them, aren’t you? Debrett’s and Burke’s and Landed Gentry.”
“You didn’t check the Almanach de Gotha?”
“I would do. Only it’s in French.”
“Pity.”
The subject of Melrose’s titles having arisen, Agatha was only too ready to tell the table, naming all the lost titles sadly and sonorously as if they were a lot of drowned babies: Baron Mountardry of Swaledale . . . fifteen hundreds . . . Viscount of Nitherwold, Ross and Cromarty . . . Clive D’ardry De Knopf, fourth Viscount . . .
She droned on. Melrose had the feeling he was listening to an announcer at the Royal Ascot calling off the names of the entries as they slipped into place at the starting gate: They’re off! It’s Viscount of Nitherwold leading. . . . Melrose yawned as the conversation was carried into the historical/political arena of the Wars of the Roses. He studied the pinkish white centerpiece — there were Christmas roses all over the house.
While the House of Lancaster and the House of York battled on around the table (Parmenger wasn’t adverse to fighting a war, even an old war, and championed, in his wonderfully perverse way, Richard III), Melrose talked gardening and roses with Lady St. Leger to get her mind off the remarks of Beatrice Sleight.
“Susan brought them,” she said, looking at the centerpiece. “Sweet of her. She’s quite the gardener, though one might not think it.” Lady St. Leger’s tone was wry. “Our own gardens at Meares are extensive. I used so much to like to get my own hands in the earth. But now —” She shrugged. “I don’t like formal gardens, do you?”
“No, but I can’t keep my gardener from trying to punish the hedges into all sorts of shapes.”
“Oh, dear. I do loathe topiaries. What an awful thing to do with hedges and bushes.”
“I’ll bet Aunt Betsy knows more about parks and pleasaunces than Miss Sleight ever will about peers,” said Tommy Whittaker, in a low voice.
His aunt smiled fondly. But Beatrice Sleight heard it. “I wouldn’t count on it, sweetie.”
Her eyes, sparked by candlelight, were quite vicious. Melrose began to think Susan Assington was right: they really ought to have a murder.
3
FIRST the piano, then the oboe. The others in the drawing room, where they had retired with their drinks and cigars, finally, had clearly had their fill of this musical mélange; besides Lady St. Leger, only Grace Seaingham had listened to Tom’s recital, sure proof of her saintliness.
Rather fascinated by her pale, madonnalike beauty, Melrose took his brandy over to sit beside her. “Thanks for rescuing me,” he said.
Grace Seaingham laughed. “I don’t think you need anyone to do that.” She looked toward Beatrice Sleight, who was doing everything she could to capture Parmenger’s attention. “We’ve known Bea for years. She can be rather awful.” But Grace Seaingham said this in a totally nonjudgmental way, as if they could all be fond of “awfulness” if only they’d try. “Do you know Freddie Parmenger? I mean, have you seen his work?”
“I’ve heard of him, yes. He’s got a show on in London, hasn’t he, at the Academy? I must admit to a total lack of grasp of modern art.”
“Oh, Freddie wouldn’t like that.” Her crystalline laughter rang out. “He doesn’t consider himself modern; he considers himself immortal.”
“Is he that arrogant?”
“Arrogance has nothing to do with art, does it? I mean art of the caliber of Freddie or Bill MacQuade. Though one could hardly fault him for vanity.” Her head inclined toward MacQuade, who smiled at her. Then her look turned to Parmenger, still in his chair, reading. “Look at him refusing to be social.”
Considering it was Bea Sleight he was refusing to be social with, Melrose could easily overlook Parmenger’s bad manners. Her pretense of interest in his book was quickly rebuffed, and she moved off like a dark cloud to the side of Charles Seaingham.
The look, the way she slipped her arm through his, answered the question of why she had been invited. And Melrose also saw that Grace Seaingham’s eyes were locked on the pair of them — Charles and Beatrice — with a look not of anger but of total bereavement.
He couldn’t stand that look on such a face and very quickly reverted to her comment on art. “Arrogance has nothing to do with it? You’re probably right. Do you allow artists then to operate on a different moral plane —?” Melrose was immediately sorry for such a gaffe.
She smiled slightly. “I don’t think my ‘allowance’ has anything to do with it, really. Anyway, my own morals probably wouldn’t bear scrutiny.”
To that surprising statement, Melrose could think of no reply.
Putting down her glass of silvery Sambuca, she said, “Would you excuse me, Mr. Plant. I’m just going to get my cape and go to chapel.”
“Your cape? You’re going outside? Is there no domestic chapel —?”
She laughed a bit at his distress. “To the Lady Chapel. Don’t worry: the walk’s covered. It’s only just outside the East Wing. There’s nothing in that wing, really, except my husband’s little study and the gun room. And at the far end, a solarium I had put in. Tomorrow I must show you round.”
He looked after her as she went to get her cloak, finding himself unaccountably irritated. He wondered, indeed, what it would be like being married to her. Would all of that goodness — and he didn’t doubt it was genuine — wash over and over one through the years, eroding, like the ocean, the coastal shelf of one’s outline?
• • •
“Despite what you must be thinking, Mr. Plant, I really don’t have a tin ear.”
Melrose smiled, surprised at Lady St. Leger’s rather impish look at him. “The marquess probably just needs a little practice.”
“Only a little? You’re as kind as I daresay you would be candid, were I a friend.” In her lap was an embroidery hoop. She was working an intricate design. “I’m sure everyone thinks I’ve forced Tom into these music lessons. Actually, it’s Tom who wants to take them. I can’t imagine what he has in mind. But I don’t mind playing along with it — please pardon that ghastly pun.”
“Both the pun and the piano, Lady St. Leger.”
>
With her eyes fixed on her needlework, she said, “But not the oboe.”
“Ah, no. I’m afraid not — but your nephew will no doubt find some appropriate outlet for his talents.”
“I certainly hope so. Unfortunately, he shows little inclination to do well in his schoolwork — except, apparently, in ancient history, for some reason. The headmaster of St. Jude’s —”
“St. Jude’s Grange? He doesn’t go there, does he?” Melrose was simply appalled.
“Why, yes.” She looked at him with bright eyes. “You know it then?”
Indeed he did, though he would sooner have admitted a connection with Mr. Squeers’s chamber-of-horrors. Not that St. Jude’s starved or beat the boys (and probably girls, now) except intellectually. St. Jude’s was one of the greatest anachronisms in the British Isles, where the lineage stretched back from the present lads to their great-great-great-great-grandfathers — an inescapable hand-me-down scholarship. It had high walls and bell towers, and Melrose, during his brief sojourn there, wouldn’t have been surprised to find a moat. But it was all facade. There were no keepers, no whip-crackers, no real teachers to speak of. He had been invited to lecture on the French Romantics, and the few freckled and spectacled lads who did attend his black-robed talk were having a simply marvelous time in the back row with rubber bands. The incredible thing about St. Jude’s was the way in which it had maintained its reputation for scholarship, when everyone knew that its graduates were only smart enough to count the money in their wallets. The only thing St. Jude’s had was an A-1 cricket team and a lot of rich, cricket-loving alumni. Melrose had let out a long breath when he had finally escaped from the school’s black-gowned, ivy-hung, crenelated-bell-towered, mullion-windowed atmosphere. He’d sooner be bricked in by Poe than spend a term there.
“I imagine you think me very old-fashioned, Mr. Plant,” said Lady St. Leger, who had been talking about young people in general and her great-nephew in particular.
“I’m rather old-fashioned myself,” said Melrose, setting aside the Italian liqueur which Grace Seaingham had suggested. She claimed it did wonders for the digestion, especially the coffee beans floating on top. Sambuca con Mosca, she called it.
Agatha, who always wanted to be in on anything new in the way of eating or drinking, thought it looked quite attractive and asked what the con Mosca meant.
“ ‘With flies,’ ” said Grace, without so much as a grimace. “It’s the coffee beans on top, you see.”
Melrose disliked syrupy liqueurs and was smoking a cigar to get the taste out of his mouth. They all seemed to have their favorites. Beatrice Sleight went in for the most violent-looking one — cranberry-colored; Grace Seaingham drank this crystal-clear stuff that seemed to suit her, Melrose thought. Agatha turned down the Sambuca “with flies” in favor of crème de violette.
Lady St. Leger was drinking far more sensibly and expensively with her Courvoisier. She was smoking the cigarette he had offered her, holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger in the manner of one who rarely smoked. “Well, it is possible that I overcompensate because Tom isn’t my own. His father, the tenth marquess, and his mother both died when he was ten and as I was their closest friend — or we were, I should say, but Rudolph is dead now.” Her eyes grew misty. They were an elusive, pearly gray, the shade of the Waterford crystal which held her cognac.
“Both at the same time?”
“Yes. They died of malaria in Kenya. They were great travelers.”
One would have to be, Melrose supposed, to be enticed by Kenya. Melrose thought longingly of Ardry End and riveted his eyes on Vivian, who was talking to Charles Seaingham. She winked and waved and did not even seem to care that he returned neither gesture.
“ . . . safari.”
Melrose turned to Elizabeth St. Leger. “I beg your pardon? Tom’s parents were on a . . . safari?” Melrose slid down in his chair, prepared for the worst.
“Yes. It was during that last one that they died.”
“He was ten? It must have been traumatic for him.” Melrose felt quite justified in disliking Tom’s parents intensely. To be run down, dead drunk, in an open car on a railroad track seemed eminently more honorable.
“It was hard on Tom. The loss of his father, especially, I think. So they left him to us.”
The young Marquess of Meares sounded like a bequest in a will. Melrose was almost beginning to sympathize with Beatrice Sleight’s opinion of the peerage.
“I felt they were sometimes — frivolous,” Lady St. Leger admitted, in a lowered voice.
To say the least, thought Melrose.
“That’s why I may be inclined to go a little far, to be a little too strict with Tom. I am very fond of Tom; he’s a good boy. The thing is, he’s got a name to live up to; one can’t just throw it over — oh, I do beg your pardon.”
She was, after all a lady. Melrose smiled inwardly, merely inclined his head outwardly in a royal pardon.
Quickly, she reverted to her plans for her nephew which included Christ Church College, Oxford, and a career in medicine, law, or if he must be a bit “bohemian” — and here she glanced at Parmenger and MacQuade, who hardly fit that description, Melrose thought — music or novel-writing for a while.
Poor Tom Whittaker. His life seemed to have been stamped, signed, sealed and about to be delivered up to the City, with, perhaps, a brief fling in some seamy Parisian street.
“You must think I’m much too strict.”
Melrose was a little surprised that Elizabeth St. Leger was quite serious in her wish that he endorse her actions regarding her nephew.
“I’m sure that’s not for me to say.” Seeing Agatha across the room, Melrose thought that over there was one who would be only too happy to say. “But I am inclined to feel one should live his life as he likes. As it’s the only one he has.”
“But that’s just what Tom’s parents did. Although I suppose I’ve no room to talk: Rudy — my husband — and I used to go on safari to Nairobi. I now think it’s ridiculous. No roughing it at all. Good heavens, they even dress for dinner on those jaunts into the jungle. And I think, now, hunting’s inhumane. The whole idea of fox-hunting, for example . . . Well . . . ” She shuddered.
“Your sympathies lie with the anti-hunters, then?”
“Yes, I must admit they do.”
“And what did you think of the New Forest foxhounds that were very nearly put down for killing those two deer. Because of the hunt saboteurs using horns and whistles to confuse hounds. Do you admire that sort of stratagem?”
She seemed a bit confused on that point. “You approve of blood sports, then, Mr. Plant?”
Melrose certainly didn’t, but he wasn’t up to continuing his discussion of the subject, especially seeing that Aunt Agatha was about to bear down on them.
“I shot an antelope once. Terrible.”
Was it mere coincidence that whenever Agatha approached, one thought of shooting something? Aunts or antelopes, it was all the same.
“Your nephew does not seem to me to be frivolous at all.” Tommy Whittaker had taken up a silent watch by the fire. “If anything, he’s much too serious for a lad of his age.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Mr. Plant. Tom is inclined to be like his parents. Except for his music — at least he takes that seriously —”
If only he wouldn’t, thought Melrose.
“ . . . he’s quite frivolous.”
Again, Melrose inclined his head, prepared to be wrong. But he doubted he was. “In any particular way?”
She brushed a bit of cigarette ash from her velvet gown. “He plays pool.” Her silvery eyes nearly pinned Melrose to his chair.
“Good heavens,” said Melrose, rising in the wake of Agatha’s arrival beside them. She settled into his vacant chair as if she’d nested there for years.
“Well, now, Betsy! I see you do embroidery too!”
Too? wondered Melrose, who had never seen Agatha with anything in her left hand bu
t a cup of tea or a fairy cake.
• • •
“I liked your book,” said Melrose to William MacQuade.
“My book?” The young man seemed mildly surprised.
Melrose smiled. “Skier. Surely you remember it. It won the Booker.”
MacQuade blushed. His thoughts had clearly been elsewhere, and from the direction of his gaze when Melrose moved up beside him, they had been on Grace Seaingham. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be modest.”
Melrose doubted he’d have to try; he seemed to be a very self-effacing person. Consistent, probably, with true talent — unlike the author of Exit an Earl. “Charles Seaingham certainly praised it. He seldom likes anything. But I shouldn’t put it that way; it makes him sound crotchety or merely iconoclastic, when he’s simply being truthful. Not much to like in the world of arts and letters these days. It’s pretty hard to come up to the mark with Seaingham. I think the last thing he liked was War and Peace.” Melrose had said it to defuse MacQuade’s embarrassment. Must play hell to be in love with the wife of a man who’s championed you.
MacQuade laughed. “He’s not quite that old!”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” MacQuade probably wished Seaingham was “that old”: the man was getting on into his late sixties, but his ascetic way of life seemed to be keeping him pretty damned healthy.
Unlike his wife, who had the transparent look of a person chronically ill. Her thinness, though attractive, was not that of a woman who wanted the silhouette of a fashion model. He remarked to MacQuade that she reminded Melrose a little of Wilkie Collins’s woman in white.
“Yes, she does,” said MacQuade, again coloring, as if he were afraid his companion could see straight into his brain. “She oughtn’t to be going out in this cold. He oughtn’t to allow it —” MacQuade’s irritation was gaining momentum.
Melrose tried to smooth this over by suggesting, “Well, if one is of a religious bent, and it is Christmas . . . ” Though, personally, he couldn’t imagine cloaking oneself up to dash out to chapel, even if it was only a few feet away and one were wearing ermine. “Have you known her — then — long?”
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