Ashenden (12 page)

“What on earth were you doing in the gun room?”

Thomas opened his mouth.

“And why was the gun room unlocked?”

“Mr. Hastings—” began Thomas.

“Never mind your excuses.” She would get to the bottom of
that
later. “Who saw the boys last?”

Edward had been gone for a couple of hours. Frederick had not been seen since early afternoon when Mademoiselle had brought the younger children back to the house.

“They was fighting earlier,” said Thomas. “In the river. Frederick almost drowned Edward, by all accounts.”

Mrs. Trimble caught her breath. It might be nothing, but on the other hand it might not, and it was her duty to imagine the worst in order to prevent it from happening. The brothers hated each other, and a gun in the hands of either of them didn’t bear thinking about. A little bird beat its wings against her rib cage. Heaven help her, but for such moments she lived.

“Search the outbuildings and when you’ve done with that, search the grounds. Get the bootboy to help you. Don’t forget the privies, the stables, and the wood store, and hurry up about it. Not a word to Benson or my lady.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Down in the servants’ hall it was female pandemonium. Mrs. Trimble dispatched Mademoiselle to look in the attics and Rose to the laundry, the dairy, and the maids’ quarters above. She sent Cook back to her preparations and toured the north pavilion herself.

Some still, quiet part of herself observed, from a distance, as she went through cupboards and stowing places and checked the rooms
upstairs where the mice gnawed behind the skirtings and distemper fell like snow. She had felt this detachment before, exploited it, and over the years it had earned her a reputation for being dependable in a crisis.

In truth, there had only ever been one crisis in Mrs. Trimble’s life; all others were pale imitations of it. That crisis had occurred three years into her marriage, when her husband went mad. Richard Trimble, a curate like her father, had never been the most robust of souls; she had known that when she married him, but she believed him to be a good, kind man, who needed the settled life she could provide, just as she needed to leave her family home and run her own household. At first his mental disturbance had taken the innocuous form of an excess of ordinary activity: an excess of reading, an excess of walking, an excess of words, followed by an excess of sleeping and an excess of silent brooding. Then he had taken leave of his senses altogether and she had recognized neither her husband nor a fellow human creature in the violence of his mind and his actions.

When they finally came for him, on a crisp October morning, it had taken three men to subdue him and bind him with leather straps. He’d been raving for days upstairs, unslept, crashing into the furniture, howling at the moon. The village children had taken to throwing stones at their door. The men had bound him and dragged him out, gagging him with another strap between his teeth, and she had watched at the parlor window, dry-mouthed, her bruises blackening, as if she were standing outside of herself. Then they had forced him into the back of a dark shuttered chaise and driven him away.

Up in the male servants’ quarters at Ashenden Park, searching for the missing boys, Mrs. Trimble was observing herself again with the same sense of detachment. There was a heavy odor of feet and unwashed bodies and she was trying to open a window, straining at the stuck sash, when she heard someone arrive below. Her first thought was that James had returned with the ice; then she looked down and saw a chaise draw up in front of the stable block.

Chipped paintwork spelled out a Reading address in garish letters and the horses were ill-matched and blowing. Hired, she thought. The driver took his time setting out the steps, as if the fare didn’t cover the service or the passenger didn’t merit it. Then he opened the door and a man stepped out into the early-evening sun.

He was of average height and build, perhaps thirty, no more, with a contained way of moving that spoke of uncertainty rather than anything studied or cultivated. Even from a story above, it was clear the impression the house was making on him. He stood and took it in, like you would absorb a blow, then looked up.

My word, there was a face.

For a moment, she could have sworn he met her eyes. The next he was reaching into the chaise and drawing out a large black portfolio fastened with ribbon.

The hired chaise and the package suggested a delivery. The face told a different story. All of which placed the visitor somewhere between tradesman’s entrance and front door. Somewhere uncomfortable. My lady’s guest, thought Mrs. Trimble. Here was a collision of emergencies. The bird beat harder under her rib cage as she left the window and hurried downstairs.

*  *  *

Mrs. Trimble greeted the visitor at the door on the lower story and ushered him up the side stairs. He had given his name, which she did not catch, said he had come from town to see her lady-ship, and kept hold of his portfolio. She noticed that his fingernails were edged in dirt, that his coat was not of the best quality, and that whoever had shaved him had done a poor job of it. Halfway up, she turned, caught his bold black eye, and blushed, which annoyed her.

The housekeeper sometimes wondered what her clergyman father, or Mr. Trimble himself, would have made of the immorality of the household where she earned her living. She couldn’t say that Mr. Wilmott hadn’t warned her. When the writer, Mr. Delgado, had made the first of his many visits, she had thought long and hard about handing in her notice. Over the years, she had fallen out of
the habit of praying, but it seemed a conscience was not so easily discarded. That was before she had met the 3rd Baronet and discovered that a spoiled, foolish woman who broke her marriage vows could still arouse her sympathies.

The writer, no gentleman to look at, had proved to have a certain sensibility or delicacy of manners. Whatever happened at night, before dawn he was always back in the room that had been made up for him. Never any trouble with housemaids being surprised drawing curtains or laying fires. This visitor, however, was a different matter altogether. She was at a loss what to do with him. The blue bedroom no longer seemed appropriate. Wherever he laid his head, she decided she would excuse Jane from her duties tomorrow morning.

When they came up the stairs into the central hall with its soaring staircase, she noticed the same uncertainty come over him that she had seen from the window. Worried about putting a foot wrong. Worried about being seen to worry about putting a foot wrong. Then he asked if there was somewhere he could leave his portfolio, saying that he’d “like to keep it a surprise for now,” and drawn into that small conspiracy against her will, she suggested the library.

Something about that suggestion shifted the balance between them. In the library he stood for a moment, then set the portfolio on a stand, stroking the black cover with the flat of his hand. Mrs. Trimble recognized ownership and ambition when she saw them and asked him to wait outside. After she had spoken to Benson over the yapping dog, her mind on the missing boys, and gone down the stairs, she realized that she had forgotten to ask the visitor whether there was news of the King.

*  *  *

When the housekeeper left, David Maurice went over to a window and stood looking out across the park. He was sensitive to light and the light was exceptional, a prize in itself. It sank into his eyes and from there into his bones. The chaise that had brought him from the staging post on the Bath Road had gone, along with its surly
driver. The land fell away in front of him and rose up to a gentle hill dotted with stands of trees, grazed by deer.

It was not entirely what he had expected. From time to time Georgiana hinted they were short of money. Easy enough to imagine creditors petitioning at the doors of a town house: you saw it all the time. Here it was a different story. Ashenden was substantial, solid and real. He hoped that meant he would be paid. The journey from London had been an extravagance, if uncomfortable.

The rich had their own ideas about poverty in any case. David Maurice knew what it was like to have nothing. It was turnip tops and ragged breeches; it was the sour stink of poteen and mildewed sod. It was bare-arsed children scrapping in the mud and his empty-handed father, staring into the fire until it went out. Once he had seen a woman eat a rat. Worse than that was the shrinking view, until all you could see ahead for yourself was more of the same. His father had wanted him to be a bricklayer like himself—“ye’ll need a trade”—as if that guaranteed someone would pay you a living wage, despite all evidence to the contrary. Still, they hadn’t always been poor and perhaps it was the better times his father had been thinking about or hoping for.

The lithograph had changed his fortunes. That was the story he told and it was almost as much of a fiction as the name he went by these days. The fact was by that time his fortunes had already changed, along with the rest of the family’s. When his father found regular employment at the new yard, there had been schooling of a kind for him and afterwards a placement at a bank, banking having replaced bricklaying in his father’s ambitions for his eldest son. Two dull years, and then the famous author had visited Cork.

The Scotsman had been mobbed. They were waving copies of his books under his nose and shouting passages from them. David Maurice (or McNorris as he was then) had leaned out of the first-floor window on Lee Street to sketch him. “You’ve caught him to the life,” said O’Keefe, passing. Later, he’d worked the sketch up to a portrait. His pencil always did what he told it to. Then he took it to the print shop and the print sold well enough for him to leave the bank and enroll at the art school.

David Maurice came away from the window and walked back into the library through streams of dust suspended in the slanting light. He was trespassing, he knew, but then his whole life was a trespass. The black portfolio, tied with black ribbon, was propped on the stand, which stood in front of a mahogany desk topped by an acreage of green tooled leather. On the walls were faces. He knew enough about these houses now to understand that this was one of the places they kept them, these frowning forefathers, in here along with the books and ledgers bound in calfskin. Or strung along some corridor or stairway. Above the fireplace was a red-cheeked man, three-quarter view, hiding his chin in his white neckcloth. You could see he was proud and acquisitive. Whether there was anything else to his interior life, the artist had not recorded it.

You painted what they paid you to paint. You drew what they wanted you to draw. Prints of famous people sold well. Those were the most important lessons he had learned as a working artist, along with the fact that exhibiting at the Royal Academy was the best way to attract patrons. He had not made enough money yet to be offended by the fact that some people called him a “society painter” and meant it as an insult.

Last winter he had drawn Delgado, lazing in one of his familiar poses, in the rooms they used to share. When he’d turned it up the other day among his papers, he could remember exactly what they had been talking about (politics), what the weather had been like (misty with a drizzling rain), and the smell of the Bengal cheroot his friend had been smoking. The sketch had been done off the cuff and he doubted Delgado even knew he had committed his likeness to paper, otherwise he would have somehow managed to get his hands on it. Delgado was one of the most charming and persuasive men he had ever met, but also probably the vainest. They no longer shared rooms and when they met it was at a distance, the betrayal between them. It had been Delgado who had recommended him to the Mores. Sometimes he wondered who had betrayed whom.

He was aware she had come into the room when he caught her
musk-rose scent, and all at once he could feel the heat prickling along his skin and up his neck into his hairline. He turned and their eyes met.

“They told me you’d arrived.”

“Lady More. Georgiana.” Some apology seemed necessary. “Forgive me for intruding. I was told to wait in the hall.”

“Never mind.” She made a remark about how warm it was, fanning herself, which wafted more of the intoxicant in his direction. “Perhaps you might care to refresh yourself with a swim after your journey. We shan’t dine for a while.” Her lips tucked themselves up at the corners of her mouth. “Or perhaps you can’t swim.”

As a boy he had once swum from Blackrock Castle to Little Island, quite some distance in tidal water. He did not think she would be interested in the exploit. “I shouldn’t want to squander a minute of your company.”

She stopped in front of the stand and stretched out a hand to touch the black cover of the portfolio with her fingertips. “Is that what I think it is?”

He nodded and realized he had undermined his own strategy.

“May I see it?”

“Later.”

“Are you teasing me?”

Was he teasing her? He did not know. All he knew was that he wanted to delay the moment.

“Very well, Mr. McBrush,” she said. “Later. After dinner.”

Mr. McBrush, Mr. O’Daub, or Painter was what she called him. She had seen through the pretense of the assumed “Maurice” straightaway, or it was possible that Delgado had talked about him and his lowly origins. He was careful with his voice and his vocabulary, but sometimes when he was with her, he could hear the vowels change in his mouth. Slips of the tongue.

Her eyes strayed to the portrait of the red-cheeked man over the fireplace. “What do you think of that picture, Painter?”

“Competent,” he said.

“Not up to your standard?”

“Perhaps it is a good likeness. I wouldn’t know.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“A hard man.” The vowels slid around.

She laughed, showing her biteable white throat. “Then it must be a good likeness. That’s my husband’s grandfather. He made a fortune in India. When he came home, they fined him for corruption, which was no more than he deserved. Then he married well for a second time and set about building Ashenden on the proceeds. As it turned out, he couldn’t afford to complete it. His son’s debts saw to that. And my husband has taken up where his father left off. What the pair of them have lost on the tables would have built a palace ten times over. Did I tell you my husband tried to sell the estate?”