Cavalier Case (3 page)

There was time for Decimus to be laid down, for the frightful wounds to be tended by "clouts" or bandages of linen. There was time for Decimus to embrace his sorrowing and exhausted wife, still weak from the strain of bearing the much desired son and heir. Most of Jemima's knowledge derived from that memoir of the poet "lately dead" by an anonymous author, most probably the Lackland chaplain, entitled
"Heaven's True Mourning" or "The Cruel Death of the Most Noble Viscount Lackland.
" According to this account, Decimus gave Olivia certain last commands concerning his son; he also gave her commands concerning his burial.

Just before ten o'clock Decimus died. The slow booming of the Lackland chapel bell marked the event. That was significant because everyone in the village and around would have known that the Lord was dead.

No doubt Decimus' last commands concerning the boy were carried out by the admirable Olivia. The instructions for his burial, on the other hand, in the family vault in the chapel, had definitely not been carried out.

That was because sometime in the night, under cover of darkness, while the desolated Lackland servants slept and no watch was kept on the corpse - No, Jemima stopped. That was not quite right.

It was Olivia Lackland who had collapsed and been carried away. But there had been a watch kept and she should have remembered that because she found the thought of this particular character so poignant. There had been one person in the room lit only by black candles, Alice, the old nurse, who had in fact been Decimus' own etnurse. The poet had been the fifteenth child and the tenth son of Sir Marcus Meredith and his City-heiress wife—hence the commemorative Latin name Decimus. He had also been the only boy to survive; Alice must have done well by him. Decimus! You could not imagine such a name being bestowed on a baby today, at any rate not being a tenth child. Admittedly the Merediths had ended up with a mere four children—out of fifteen—since two of their five girls had also died in infancy.

So Dame Alice knelt alone by the great bed draped in its black velvet hangings; plenty of those available in the early seventeenth century when Death was never further away than the threshold of the room. According to
"Heaven's True Mourning,
" Decimus had been laid in the bed in which his own mother had recently died, as his life slowly bled away. That "pious and revered daughter of a City- merchant who brought honour as well as fortune" to the family name, in the words of the memorial, had preceded her single surviving son by only a few weeks. "She led the way, he followed trustingly as when he was a child."

At some time, then, in the night, when the black candles had burnt low, in that "dead of night when men most easily give up their souls to God," robbers had come silently and secretly to Lackland Court. They had found their way without difficulty through the Great Chamber: with the King's cause so heavily defeated that day, and the Lord dying, they had not thought to put guards.

Perhaps Alice slept on her watch, wearied by the long day of horror and its tragic climax. For when she awoke the body was gone. The heavy black coverlet was torn aside, and the corpse was vanished. The old woman had some story of men-at-arms, knights, black knights, visions of the devil, but surely these were merely unhappy visions as she slept. The body of Decimus Lord Lackland had never been found.

It had in fact never been seen again since that night, not his bones, not his skeleton, no trace. The coffin alone had been placed in the family vault: sadly and symbolically empty. The tablet above it had in sonorous and long-winded Latin recorded the capture of the body "and yet his soul they could not take" - ('
Sed animam non rapture posse..
.) And even that tablet had not been destined to rest very long in place. The chapel, which was much older than the house itself, had been very badly damaged by mortars during the siege of Lackland Court three years later. In a reverse of the usual pious story of miraculous preservation it was the chapel which had burnt and the house which had emerged virtually unscathed. (The Parliamentarian excuse for pounding the house of God was the fact that ammunition and troops were stored there, something hotly denied by the Royalists.) In the eighteenth century the chapel had been allowed to become a suitably ivy-clad folly; the tablet, Jemima believed, had been removed to Taynford Cathedral.

Returning to the abduction of the body, who could have done such a thing? The Roundheads - the Parliamentarian army, as Jemima must learn to call them - were naturally blamed as they were blamed for every desecration. Was it their need to extinguish the legend as well as the life of the Cavalier hero which had led to such a gross deed against the dead? Contemporary sources were either unhelpful or contradictory on the subject, according to Rupert, and Jemima, having checked them for herself, agreed.

Clarendon, for example, in his long eulogy of the character of the poet and his wife, elected not to mention the disappearance of his corpse. "
Heaven's True Mourning
," while suggesting that the deed was an act of vengeance on the part of the Parliamentarians, on a par with the impiety of those who would five years later kill King Charles the First, had nevertheless not named those personally responsible. Wicked John Aubrey on the other hand, ever one to promote a colourful tale, suggested that Lord Lackland had had a mistress who lived close by - the notorious Lady Isabella Clare - and that she had sent her own men to steal the body and give it secret burial.

As Rupert Durham crushingly said: "Well, he would, wouldn't he? You know Aubrey - " Jemima was just beginning to know Aubrey. "He would have written for the
Daily Exclusiv
e if he'd been alive today. There's absolutely no proof that Isabella Clare was Decimus' mistress, and as for writing the Swan poem to a woman like that, the mind boggles. We've only got Aubrey's word for the whole thing, and he wanted to have a dig at Decimus, I believe. Didn't like the poetic halo round his head. He came up with the same kind of story, if less dramatic, about Decimus' rival, Falkland." And so the matter rested. Until the ghost-who-could-not-rest, the ghost of Decimus, returned to Lackland Court during the 1648 siege and guided the widowed Olivia to victory.

According to tradition Decimus stepped out of the portrait to do so.

"Yes, the portrait," said the present (and 18th) Lord Lackland to Jemima Shore. "As the story goes, he steps out of the big portrait at the head of the stairs. The Van Dyck. The finest version, or so we believe. What's more, we all think it's the original, and not the one at the N.P.G., even if Oliver Millar doesn't agree. Something ridiculous about the hands, the hand. I believe you know that picture," added Dan Lackland carelessly. Jemima nodded. She had not however recognised him from their previous odd little encounter, believing him to be familiar to her merely from his famous past as a tennis star.

They were sitting in the coolly elegant surroundings of the Plantaganet Club. Enormous windows opened on the river. Even the factory chimneys on the bank opposite had the air of being composed tor the sake of the perfect modernist view. The fact that through another vast plate glass window before their eyes a tennis game was being played made such talk of a seventeenth-century ghost seem for a moment peculiarly bizarre.

Counting the seventeenth century, there were in fact, thought Jemima, three levels of reality. For the surroundings of the Plantaganet oar, a high-ceilinged glass and mirrored area with huge purple kougainvilleas in white tubs (where on earth were they grown?), small tables adorned with pale pink button roses, and a barman in a bright pink jacket, bespoke the leisured luxury of another age; some ocean liner of the thirties, perhaps. The players, on the other hand, whether on the visible "Royal Court" behind the glass, or passing through the bar area on their way to other courts or back to the changing room, indicated both by their dress and their complexion a rougher or at least a sweatier way of life. And the pictures were all enormously blown-up photographs of tennis stars past and present—including, she noticed, Handsome Dan himself instantly recognisable by his thatch of blond hair, in younger days.

The exact nature of Dan Lackland's involvement with the Planta-ganet was not quite clear to her. But he introduced Jemima to various members with some style as though he was in fact a form of host. These included various young or youngish women—her uncertainty about their age was due to the fact that tennis gear, with women as well as men, proved a remarkable disguise. The essentially schoolgirl- ish nature of such clothes could prove delusive: whether very short pale pink pleated skirts revealing brown thighs—did all members of the Planty have to have an all-the-year-round tan by law?—-or bright pink track suits concealing unsightly middle-aged spread. One way or another, it was impossible to guess the age of most of the women she met.

Take the energetic girl—or woman—introduced to Jemima as Alix Carstairs, who appeared to run the Club: how old was she? Alix Carstairs sported a thick pigtail of auburn hair beneath her bright pink bandeau and her face, devoid of make-up, was prettily freckled; she might have been any age between twenty-two and forty-two. As she gazed at Jemima, she had the bold bright eyes of some kind of bird; not necessarily a friendly bird, although her demeanour was extremely polite. On learning that Jemima liked to play tennis, Alix Carstairs urged her to come and play a trial game on spec: "To see if you like us."

But the sub-text was, thought Jemima, "And to see if we like you; which I, Alix, may not necessarily do." Charlotte Lackland, on the other hand, Dan Lackland's wife—his second wife, according to the reference books—was extremely friendly and as a result Jemima warmed to her. Charlotte's slight figure—she couldn't have been much more than five foot—coupled with her long straight fair hair tied by a ribbon in a ponytail, and her round blue eyes, made her age once again difficult to guess. Didn't she have—according to the reference books again—three children? But she was gazing at her husband with those round blue eyes as though she was a child herself.

It came as a further surprise to Jemima therefore to discover that sweet little Charlotte, improbably mother of three, also ran a well-known
patisserie
called eponymously Charlotte's Cakes (whose proverbially charming girl assistants were generally nicknamed, doubtless incorrectly, Charlotte's Tarts). She had been taking part in some form of tournament:

"We were slaughtered," she groaned. "It's true, darling. I'm going to take my serve right back to Costa next week and see if anything can be done about it, otherwise—"

But Dan Lackland hardly seemed to hear her, and soon Charlotte wandered off.

For a moment, Jemima tracked her progress amid the flower-decorated tables; most of the members either kissed or were kissed by her. Then Jemima's attention was caught by a man at the bar. He was gulping down what looked like iced water (but was perhaps a vodka tonic) and dressed, despite his considerable bulk, in a track suit— bright pink like the barman's coat—which was emblazoned with the crossed capital P's of the Plantaganet: to Jemima, with her present bent towards history, they had the look of two crossed swords with large hilts.

She looked again. The wringing wet and curly hair, and a face not much less rubicund than the track suit, the unfamiliar gear, had prevented her from immediately recognising—yes, it was . . . The new Home Secretary. Stuart Gibson. So that was indeed iced water, since he was a self-proclaimed teetotaller as well as health freak. Jemima glanced round and saw the one man conspicuous not so much by his neat dark suit but by the fact that he was ostentatiously doing nothing. That must be the Home Secretary's detective. And who was, - r rather who had been the Home Secretary's opponent? Medium height, stocky build, distinctly hunched: in his conventional white shorts and zipped-up blue jacket, he looked to be in his forties.

"That's my cousin Marcus." Lord Lackland had evidently read her thoughts. "Gibson's P.P.S. Playing tennis against the boss goes with the job."

"If he's as good as you are - " began Jemima politely to make up for her wandering attention. Then she perceived that in some way the subject of his cousin was inimical to Handsome Dan; his expression had clouded: piqued vanity perhaps because a pretty woman had looked at another man? "He's not likely to be as good as me since he had polio as a boy," Lord Lackland replied quite shortly. "But he's pretty good all the same, gets around the court at the most amazing speed. Stout fellow, Marcus." Jemima felt abashed. She hastened to return to the third - or rather the first - reality of the seventeenth century.

"So Decimus - the ghost - does step out of the portrait! Just as it says in '
Heaven's True Mourning
.' The memorial." Jemima hoped that this proof that she had done her homework would start the soothing process. Now for the question, the crucial question which had brought her so eagerly to the Plantaganet Club, the question on which the future of this particular episode in the "Ghosts and Ourselves" series might well depend.

Jemima sipped her Planty Punch (which was actually a nonalcoholic mixture of fruit juices, beloved of the Yuppies who used the Club for its healthful pink froth).

"By the way, have you seen the ghost, Lord Lackland?" she asked casually, following the question with a smile, as though the answer to it hardly mattered. But her precise tone, even the sheer sweetness of her slightly cat-like smile, might have been recognised by those she had interviewed on television in that famous hard-hitting programme about women's treatment in the Trade Union movement - "Sisters or Brothers?"

"Call me Dan, for God's sake! I've hardly got used to this Lord Lackland bit. I keep looking round nervously for poor old Cousin Tommy when I hear the name!"

"Dan then!
Much
nicer. And I'm of course Jemima." She smiled again, looking more cat-like than ever. "I just wondered if you'd ever seen the ghost yourself."

Handsome Dan drank from a glass that looked as if it contained whiskey.

"Ah, Jemima - what a pretty name that is, by the way. Do you know, I had an ancestress called Jemima, said to have been the daughter of James II, hence the name. It was originally a form of James. But you knew that." Jemima didn't. "I hope to God she wasn't," he went on. "His daughter, I mean. Not one's favourite monarch to put it mildly. Where was I? The ghost. Ah. Jemima, I see you don't yet know everything about the Decimus Ghost. Which is what we generally call him. Or it. But somehow him seems right."