Ngaio Marsh

Tied Up in Tinsel

Dedication

For my Godson, Nicholas Dacres-Mannings when he grows up

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Characters

1 Halberds

2 Christmas Eve

3 Happy Christmas

4 The Tree and the Druid

5 Alleyn

6 Storm Rising

7 House Work

8 Moult

9 Post Mortem

10 Departure

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

Hilary Bill-Tasman | Of Halberds Manor, Landed proprietor
Staff at Halberds
Cuthbert | Steward
Mervyn | Head houseman
Nigel | Second houseman
Wilfred (Kittiwee) | Cook
Vincent | Gardener-chauffeur
Tom | Odd boy
Guests at Halberds
Troy Alleyn | Celebrated painter
Colonel Frederick Fleaton Forrester | Hilary’s uncle
Mrs Forrester | The Colonel’s wife
Alfred Moult | Colonel Forrester’s manservant
Mr Bert Smith | Authority on Antiques
Cressida Tottenham | Hilary’s fiancée
The Law
Major Marchbanks | Governor at The Vale
Superintendent Wrayburn | Downlow Police Force
Superintendent Roderick
Alleyn | CID
Detective-Inspector Fox | CID
Detective-Sergeant Thompson | Finger-print expert, CID
Detective-Sergeant Bailey | Photographer, CID
Sundry guests and constables

CHAPTER 1

Halberds

‘When my sire,’ said Hilary Bill-Tasman, joining the tips of his fingers, ‘was flung into penury by the Great Slump, he commenced Scrap-Merchant. You don’t mind my talking?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Thank you. When I so describe his activities I do not indulge in facezia. He went into partnership in a rag-and-bone way with my Uncle Bert Smith, who was already equipped with a horse and cart and the experience of a short lifetime. “Uncle”, by the way, is a courtesy title.’

‘Yes?’

‘You will meet him tomorrow. My sire, who was newly widowed, paid for his partnership by enlarging the business and bringing into it such items of family property as he had contrived to hide from his ravenous creditors. They included a Meissen bowl of considerable monetary though, in my opinion, little aesthetic value. My Uncle Bert, lacking expertise in the higher reaches of his profession, would no doubt have knocked off this and other heirlooms to the nearest fence. My father, however, provided him with such written authority as to clear him of any suspicion of chicanery and sent him to Bond Street, where he drove a bargain that made him blink.’

‘Splendid. Could you keep your hands as they are?’

‘I think so. They prospered. By the time I was five they had two carts and two horses and a tidy account in the bank. I congratulate you, by the way, upon making no allusion to Steptoe and Son. I rather judge my new acquaintances under that heading. My father developed an unsuspected flare for trade and, taking advantage of the Depression, bought in a low market and, after a period of acute anxiety, sold in a high one. There came a day when, wearing his best suit and the tie to which he had every right, he sold the last of his family possessions at an exorbitant price to King Farouk, with whom he was tolerably acquainted. It was a Venetian chandelier of unparalleled vulgarity.’

‘Fancy.’

‘This transaction led to most rewarding sequels, terminated only by His Majesty’s death, at which time my father had established a shop in South Molton Street while Uncle Bert presided over a fleet of carts and horses, maintaining his hold on the milieu that best suited him, but greatly increased his expertise.’

‘And you?’

‘I ? Until I was seven years old I lodged with my father and adopted uncle in a two-roomed apartment in Smalls Yard, Cheapjack Lane, E.C.4.’

‘Learning the business?’

‘You may say so. But also learning, after admittedly a somewhat piecemeal fashion, an appreciation of English literature, objets d’art and simple arithmetic. My father ordered my education. Each morning he gave me three tasks to be executed before evening when he and Uncle Bert returned from their labours. After supper he advanced my studies until I fell asleep.’

‘Poor little boy!’

‘You think so? So did my uncle and aunt. My father’s maternal connections. They are a Colonel and Mrs Forrester. You will meet them also tomorrow. They are called Fleaton and Bedelia Forrester but have always been known in the family at Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed, the facetious implication having been long forgotten.’

‘They intervened in your education?’

‘They did, indeed. Having got wind of my father’s activities they had themselves driven into the East End. Aunt Bed, then a vigorous young woman, beat on my locked door with her umbrella and when admitted gave vent to some very intemperate comments strongly but less violently seconded by her husband. They left in a rage and returned that evening with an offer.’

‘To take over your education?’

‘And me. In toto. At first my father said he’d see them damned first but in his heart he liked them very much. Since our lodging was to be demolished as an insanitary dwelling and new premises were difficult to find he yielded eventually, influenced I dare say, by threats of legal action and Child Welfare officers. Whatever the cause, I went, in the upshot, to live with Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed.’

‘Did you like it there?’

‘Yes. I didn’t lose touch with my father. He patched up his row with the Forresters and we exchanged frequent visits. By the time I was thirteen he was extremely affluent and able to pay for my education at his own old school, at which, fortunately he had put me down at birth. This relieved us to some extent from the burden of an overpowering obligation but I retain the liveliest sense of gratitude to Flea and Bed.’

‘I look forward to meeting them.’

‘They are held to be eccentric. I can’t see it myself, but you shall judge.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well – trifling departures from normal practice, perhaps. They never travel without green lined tropical umbrellas of a great age. These they open when they awake in the morning as they prefer their vernal shade to the direct light. And then they bring a great many of their valuables with them. All Aunt Bed’s jewels and Uncle Flea’s stocks and shares and one or two very nice objets d’art of which I wouldn’t at all mind having the disposal. They also bring a considerable amount of hard cash. In Uncle Flea’s old uniform case. He is on the reserve list.’

‘That is perhaps a little eccentric.’

‘You think so? You may be right. To resume. My education, from being conventional in form, was later expanded at my father’s instance, to include an immensely thorough training in the more scholarly aspects of the trade to which I succeeded. When he died I was already accepted as a leading European authority on the great period of Chinese Ceramics. Uncle Bert and I became very rich. Everything I’ve touched turned to gold, as they say. In short I was a “have” and not a “have-not”. To cap it all (really it was almost comical), I became a wildly successful gambler and won two quite princely non-taxable fortunes on the Pools. Uncle Bert inspired me in this instance.’

‘Lovely for you.’

‘Well – I like it. My wealth has enabled me to indulge my own eccentricities, which you may think as extreme as those of Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed.’

‘For instance?’

‘For instance, this house. And its staff. Particularly, you may think, its staff. Halberds belonged from Tudor times up to the first decade of the nineteenth century to my paternal forebears: the Bill-Tasmans. They were actually the leading family in these parts. The motto is, simply, “Unicus” which is as much as to say “peerless”. My ancestors interpreted it, literally, by refusing peerages and behaving as if they were royalty. You may think me arrogant,’ said Hilary, ‘but I assure you that compared to my forebears I am a violet by a mossy stone.’

‘Why did the family leave Halberds?’

‘My dear, because they were ruined. They put everything they had into the West Indies and were ruined, very properly I dare say, by the emancipation of slaves. The house was sold off but owing to its situation nobody really fancied it and as the Historic Trust was then in the womb of time, it suffered the ravages of desertion and fell into a sort of premature ruin.’

‘You bought it back?’

‘Two years ago.’

‘And restored it?’

‘And am in process of restoring it. Yes.’

‘At enormous cost?’

‘Indeed. But, I hope you agree, with judgment and style?’

‘Certainly. I have,’ said Troy Alleyn, ‘finished for the time being.’

Hilary got up and strolled round the easel to look at his portrait.

‘It is, of course, extremely exciting. I’m glad you are still to some extent what I think is called a figurative painter. I wouldn’t care to be reduced to a schizoid arrangement of geometrical propositions, however satisfying to the abstracted eye.’

‘No?’

‘No. The Royal Antiquarian Guild (The Rag as it is called) will no doubt think the portrait extremely avant garde. Shall we have our drinks? It’s half past twelve, I see.’

‘May I clean up, first?’

‘By all means. You may prefer to attend to your own tools, but if not, Mervyn, who you may recollect was a signwriter before he went to gaol, would, I’m sure, be delighted to clean your brushes.’

‘Lovely. In that case I shall merely clean myself.’

‘Join me here, when you’ve done so.’

Troy removed her smock and went upstairs and along a corridor to her deliciously warm room. She scrubbed her hands in the adoining bathroom, and brushed her short hair, staring as she did so out of the window.

Beyond a piecemeal domain, still in the hands of landscape gardeners, the moors were erected against a leaden sky. Their margins seemed to flow together under some kind of impersonal design. They bore their scrubby mantling with indifference and were, or so Troy thought, unnervingly detached. Between two dark curves the road to the prison briefly appeared. A light sleet was blown across the landscape.

Well, she thought, it lacks only the Hound of the Baskervilles, and I wouldn’t put it past him to set that up if it occurs to him to do so.

Immediately beneath her window lurched the wreckage of a conservatory that at some time had extended along the outer face of the east wing. Hilary had explained that it was soon to be demolished: at the moment it was an eyesore. The tops of seedling firs poked through shattered glass. Anonymous accumulations had silted up the interior. In one part the roof had completely fallen in. Hilary said that when next she visited Halberds she would look down upon lawns and a vista through cypress trees leading to a fountain with stone dolphins. Troy wondered just how successful these improvements would be in reducing the authority of those ominous hills.

Between the garden-to-be and the moor, on a ploughed slope, a scarecrow, that outlandish, commedia-dell’-arte-like survival, swivelled and gesticulated in the December wind.

A man came into view down below, wheeling a barrow and tilting his head against the wind. He wore a sou’wester and an oilskin cape.

Troy thought: That’s Vincent. That’s the gardener-chauffeur. And what was it about Vincent? Arsenic? Yes. And I suppose this must all be true. Or must it?

The scarecrow rocked madly on its base and a wisp or two of straw flew away in the sleety wind.

II

Troy had only been at Halberds for five days but already she accepted its cockeyed grandeur. After her arrival to paint his commissioned portrait, Hilary had thrown out one or two airy hints as to the bizarre nature of his staff. At first she had thought that he was going in for a not very funny kind of leg-pulling but she soon discovered her mistake.

At luncheon they were waited upon by Cuthbert, to whom Hilary had referred as his chief steward, and by Nigel, the second houseman.

Cuthbert was a baldish man of about sixty with a loud voice, big hands and downcast eyes. He performed his duties composedly as, indeed, did his assistant, but there was something watchful and at the same time colourless in their general behaviour. They didn’t shuffle, but one almost expected them to do so. One felt that it was necessary to remark that their manner was not furtive. How far these impressions were to be attributed to hindsight and how far to immediate observation, Troy was unable to determine but she reflected that after all it was a tricky business adapting oneself to a domestic staff entirely composed of murderers. Cuthbert, a head-waiter at the time, had murdered his wife’s lover, a handsome young commis. Because of extenuating circumstances, the death sentence, Hilary told her, had been commuted into a lifer which exemplary behaviour had reduced to eight years. ‘He is the most harmless of creatures,’ Hilary had said. ‘The commis called him a cuckold and spat in his face at a moment when he happened to be carving a wing-rib. He merely lashed out.’

Mervyn, the head houseman, once a signwriter, had, it emerged, been guilty of killing a burglar with a booby-trap. ‘Really,’ Hilary said, ‘it was going much too far to gaol him. He hadn’t meant to destroy anyone, you know, only to give an intruder pause if one should venture to break in. But he entirely misjudged the potential of an old-fashioned flat-iron balanced on a door-top. Mervyn became understandably warped by confinement and behaved so incontinently that he was transferred to The Vale.’

Two other homicides completed the indoor staff. The cook’s name was Wilfred. Among his fellows he was known as Kittiwee, being a lover of cats.

‘He actually trained as a chef. He is not,’ Hilary had told Troy, ‘one hundred per cent he-man. He was imprisoned under that heading but while serving his sentence attacked a warder who approached him when he was not in the mood. This disgusting man was known to be a cat-hater and to have practised some form of cruelty. Kittiwee’s onslaught was therefore doubly energetic and most unfortunately his victim struck his head against the cell wall and was killed. He himself served a painful extension of his sentence.’

Then there was the second houseman, Nigel, who in former years had been employed in the manufacture of horses for merry-go-rounds and on the creative side of the waxworks industry until he became a religious fanatic and unreliable.

‘He belonged to an extreme sect,’ Hilary had explained. ‘A monastic order of sorts, with some curious overtones. What with one thing and another the life put too heavy a strain upon Nigel. His wits turned and he murdered a person to whom he always refers as “a sinful lady”. He was sent to Broadmoor where, believe it or not, he recovered his senses.’

‘I hope he doesn’t think me sinful.’

‘No, no, I promise you. You are not at all the type and in any case he is now perfectly rational and composed except for weeping rather extravagantly when he remembers his crime. He has a gift for modelling. If we have a white Christmas I shall ask him to make a snowman for us.’

Finally, Hilary had continued, there was Vincent, the gardener. Later on, when the landscape specialists had completed their operations, there would be a full complement of outside staff. In the meantime there were casual labourers and Vincent.

‘And really,’ Hilary had said, ‘it is quite improper to refer to him as a homicide. There was some ridiculous misunderstanding over a fatal accident with an arsenical preparation for the control of fungi. This was followed by a gross misdirection to a more than usually idiotic jury and after a painful interval, by a successful appeal. Vincent,’ he had summed up, ‘is a much wronged person.’

‘How,’ Troy had asked, ‘did you come to engage your staff?’

‘Ah! A pertinent question. You see when I bought Halberds I determined not only to restore it but to keep it up in the manner to which it had been accustomed. I had no wish to rattle dismally in Halberds with a village trot or some unpredictable Neapolitan couple who would feed me on pasta for a fortnight and then flounce off without notice. On the other hand civilized household staff, especially in this vicinity, I found to be quite unobtainable. After some thought, I made an appointment to visit my neighbour-to-be, the Governor at The Vale. He is called Major Marchbanks.

‘I put my case to him. I had always understood that of all criminals, murderers are much the nicest to deal with. Murderers of a certain class, I mean. I discriminate. Thugs who shoot and bash policemen and so on are quite unsuitable and indeed would be unsafe. But your single-job man, prompted by a solitary and unprecedented upsurge of emotion under circumstances of extreme provocation, is usually well-behaved. Marchbanks supported me in this theory. After some deliberation I arranged with him that as suitable persons were released I should have the first refusal. It was, from their point of view, a form of rehabilitation. And being so rich, I can pay handsomely.’

‘But was there a ready supply?’

‘I had to wait for them, as it were, to fall in. For some time I lived very simply with only Cuthbert and Kittiwee, in four rooms of the east wing. But gradually the supply built up: The Vale was not the only source. The Scrubs and, in Nigel’s case, Broadmoor were also productive. In passing,’ Hilary had then pointed out, ‘I remind you that there is nothing original in my arrangements. The idea was canvassed in Victorian times by no less a person than Charles Dickens and considerably later, on a farcical level, by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. I have merely adopted it and carried it to its logical conclusion.’

‘I think,’ Troy had said, ‘it’s remotely possible that Rory, my husband, you know, may have been responsible for the arrest of one or even more, of your staff. Would they –?’

‘You need have no qualms. For one thing they don’t know of the relationship and for another they wouldn’t mind if they did. They bear no grudge as far as I can discern against the police. With the possible exception of Mervyn, the ex-signwriter, you recollect. He feels that since his booby-trap was directed against a class that the police are concerned to suppress, it was rather hard that he should suffer so grievous a penalty for removing one of them. But even he has taken against Counsel for the Prosecution and the jury rather than against the officers who arrested him.’

‘Big of him, I suppose,’ said Troy.

These conversations had taken place during the early sittings. Now, on the fifth day of her residence, Hilary and Troy had settled down to an oddly companionable relationship. The portrait prospered. She was working with unusual rapidity, and few misgivings. All was well.

‘I’m so glad,’ Hilary said, ‘that it suits you to stay for Christmas. I do wish your husband could have joined us. He might have found my arrangements of some interest.’

‘He’s on an extradition case in Australia.’

‘Your temporary loss,’ said Hilary neatly, ‘is my lasting gain. How shall we spend the afternoon? Another sitting? I am all yours.’

‘That would be grand. About an hour while the light lasts and then I’ll be under my own steam for a bit, I think.’

Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?

She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.

‘Look here,’ Troy said abruptly, ‘you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I assure you. No.’

‘OK,’ said Troy. ‘I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.’

‘But of course. I am enjoying myself,’ Hilary said, ‘inordinately.’

Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.

And as she thought of him he came in; wary-looking and dark about the jaw.

‘Excuse me,’ Mervyn said, and added ‘madam’ as if he’d just remembered to do so. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Thank you very much,’ Troy said. ‘Nothing. It’s all marvellous,’ and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.

‘I thought,’ Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, ‘you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.’

‘Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.’

‘Like you was cramped. Sort of.’

‘Well – not now.’

He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close behind her.

But he was only waiting with her smock which he held as if it were a valuable top-coat and he a trained manservant. She felt no touch of his hands as he helped her into it.

‘Thank you very much,’ Troy repeated and hoped she sounded definitive without being disagreeable.

‘Thank you, madam,’ Mervyn responded and as always when this sort of exchange cropped up, she repressed an impulse to ask: ‘For what?’

(For treating him like a manservant when I know he’s a booby-setting manslaughterer? thought Troy).

Mervyn withdrew, delicately closing the door after him.

Soon after that, Hilary came in and for an hour Troy worked on his portrait. By then the light had begun to fail. Her host having remarked that he expected a long-distance call from London, she said she would go for a walk. They had, she felt, seen enough of each other for the time being.

III

A roughish path crossed the waste that was to become something Hilary, no doubt, would think of as a pleasance. It led past the ruined conservatory to the ploughed field she had seen from her bedroom window.

Here was the scarecrow, a straw-stuffed antic groggily anchored in a hole it had enlarged with its own gyrations, lurching extravagantly in the north wind. It was clad in the wreckage of an Edwardian frockcoat and a pair of black trousers. Its billycock hat had been pulled down over the stuffed bag which formed its head. It was extended in the classic cruciform gesture and a pair of clownish gloves, tied to the ends of the crosspiece, flapped lamentably, as did the wild remnants of something that might once have been an opera cloak. Troy felt that Hilary himself had had a hand in its creation.

He had explained in detail to what lengths, and at what enormous expense of time and money, he had gone in the accurate restoration of Halberds. Portraits had been hunted down and repurchased, walls rehung in silk, panelling unveiled and ceilings restored by laborious stripping. Perhaps in some collection of foxed watercolours he had found a Victorian sketch of this steep field with a gesticulating scarecrow in the middle distance.

She skirted the field and climbed a steep slope. Now she was out on the moors and here at last was the sealed road. She followed it up to where it divided the hills.

She was now high above Halberds and looking down at it saw it was shaped like an E without the middle stroke and splendidly proportioned. An eighteenth-century picture of it hung in the library; remembering this, she was able to replace the desolation that surrounded the house with the terraces, walks, artificial hill, lake and vistas created, so Hilary had told her, by Capability Brown. She could make out her own room in the western façade with the hideous wreckage of a conservatory beneath it. Smoke plumed up wildly from several of the chimneys and she caught a whiff of burning wood. In the foreground Vincent, a foreshortened pigmy, trundled his barrow. In the background a bulldozer slowly laid out preliminaries for Hilary’s restorations. Troy could see where a hillock, topped by a folly and later destroyed by a bomb, had once risen beyond an elegant little lake. That was what the bulldozer was up to: scooping out a new lake and heaping the spoil into what would become a hillock. And a ‘Hilary’s Folly’ no doubt would ultimately crown the summit.

And no doubt, Troy thought, it will be very, very beautiful but there’s an intrinsic difference between “Here it still is” and “This is how it was” and all the monstrous accumulation of his super-scrap-markets, high antiques and football pools won’t do the trick for him.

She turned and took fifteen paces into the north wind.

It was as if a slide had clicked over in a projector and an entirely dissociated subject thrown on the screen. Troy now looked down into The Vale, as it was locally called, and her first thought was of the hopeless incongruity of this gentle word, for it stood not only for the valley but for the prison whose dry moats, barriers, watch-towers, yards, barracks and chimney-stacks were set out down below like a scale model of themselves for her to shudder at. Her husband sometimes referred to The Vale as ‘Heartbreak House’.

The wind was now fitfully laced with sleet and this steel-engraving of a view was shot across with slantwise drifts that were blown out as fast as they appeared.

Facing Troy was a road sign.

STEEP DESCENT

DANGEROUS CORNERS

ICE

CHANGE DOWN

As if to illustrate the warning, a covered van laboured up the road from Halberds, stopped beside her, clanked into bottom gear and ground its way down into The Vale. It disappeared round the first bend and was replaced by a man in a heavy macintosh and tweed hat, climbing towards her. He looked up and she saw a reddened face, a white moustache and blue eyes.

She had already decided to turn back but an obscure notion that it would be awkward to do so at once, made her pause. The man came up with her, raised his hat, gave her a conventional ‘Good evening’ and then hesitated. ‘Coming up rough,’ he said. He had a pleasant voice.

‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll beat a retreat, I think. I’ve come up from Halberds.’

‘Stiffish climb, isn’t it, but not as stiff as mine. Please forgive me, but you must be Hilary Bill-Tasman’s celebrated guest, mustn’t you? My name’s Marchbanks.’

‘Oh, yes. He told me –’

‘I come as far as this most evenings for the good of my wind and legs. To get out of the valley, you know.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Yes,’ said Major Marchbanks, ‘it’s rather a grim proposition, isn’t it? But I shouldn’t keep you standing about in this beastly wind. We’ll meet again, I hope, at the Christmas tree.’

‘I hope so, too,’ said Troy.

‘Rather a rum set-up at Halberds I expect you think, don’t you?’

‘Unusual, at least.’

‘Quite. Oh,’ Major Marchbanks said as if answering an unspoken query; ‘I’m all for it, you know. All for it.’

He lifted his wet hat again, flourished his stick and made off by the way he had come. Somewhere down in the prison a bell clanged.

Troy returned to Halberds.

She and Hilary had tea very cosily before a cedar-wood fire in a little room which, he said, had been his five-times-great-grandmother’s boudoir. Her portrait hung above the fire: a mischievous-looking old lady with a discernible resemblance to Hilary himself. The room was hung in apple-green watered silk with rose-embroidered curtains. It contained an exquisite screen, a French ormolu desk, some elegant chairs and a certain lavishness of porcelain amoretti.

‘I dare say,’ Hilary said through a mouthful of hot buttered muffin, ‘you think it an effeminate setting for a bachelor. It awaits its chatelaine.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. She is called Cressida Tottenham and she too arrives tomorrow. We think of announcing our engagement.’

‘What is she like?’ Troy asked. She had found that Hilary relished the direct approach.

‘Well – let me see. If one could taste her she would be salty with a faint rumour of citron.’

‘You make her sound like a grilled sole.’

‘All I can say to that is: she doesn’t look like one.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘Like somebody whom I hope you will very much want to paint.’

‘Oh-ho,’ said Troy. ‘Sits the wind in that quarter!’

‘Yes, it does and it’s blowing steady and strong. Wait until you see her and then tell me if you’ll accept another Bill-Tasman commission and a much more delectable one. Did you notice an empty panel in the north wall of the dining-room?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Reserved for Cressida Tottenham by Agatha Troy.’

‘I see.’

‘She really is a lovely creature,’ Hilary said with an obvious attempt at impartial assessment. ‘You just wait. She’s in the theatre, by the way. Well, I say in. She’s only just in. She went to an academy of sorts and thence into something she calls organic-expressivism. I have tried to point out that this is a bastard and meaningless term but she doesn’t seem to mind.’

‘What do they do?’

‘As far as I can make out they take off their clothes, which in Cressida’s case can do nothing but please, and cover their faces with pale green tendrils, which (again in her case) is a ludicrous waste of basic material. Harmful to the complexion.’

‘Puzzling.’

‘Unhappily Aunt Bed doesn’t quite approve of Cressida, who is Uncle Flea’s ward. Her father was a junior officer of Uncle Flea’s and was killed in occupied Germany when saving Uncle Flea’s life. So Uncle Flea felt he had an obligation and brought her up.’

‘I see,’ Troy said again.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘what I like about you, apart from your genius and your looks, is your lack of superfluous ornament. You are an important piece from a very good period. If it wasn’t for Cressida I should probably make advances to you myself.’

‘That really would throw me completely off my stroke,’ said Troy with some emphasis.

‘You prefer to maintain a detached relationship with your subjects?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I see your point, of course,’ said Hilary.

‘Good.’

He finished his muffin, damped his napkin with hot water, cleaned his fingers and walked over to the window. The rose-embroidered curtains were closed but he parted them and peered into the dark. ‘It’s snowing,’ he said. ‘Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed will have a romantic passage over the moors.’

‘Do you mean – are they coming tonight –?’

‘Ah, yes. I forgot to tell you. My long-distance call was from their housekeeper. They left before dawn and expect to arrive in time for dinner.’

‘A change in plans?’

‘They suddenly thought they would. They prepare themselves for a visit at least three days before the appointed time and yet they dislike the feeling of impending departure. So they resolved to cut it short. I shall take a rest. What about you?’

‘My walk has made me sleepy, I think. I will, too.’

‘That’s the north wind. It has a soporific effect upon newcomers. I’ll tell Nigel to call you at half past seven, shall I? Dinner at eight-thirty and the warning bell at a quarter past. Rest well,’ said Hilary, opening the door for her.

As she passed him she became acutely aware of his height and also of his smell which was partly Harris tweed and partly something much more exotic. ‘Rest well,’ he repeated and she knew he watched her as she went upstairs.

IV

She found Nigel in her bedroom. He had laid out her ruby-red silk dress and everything that went with it. Troy hoped that this ensemble had not struck him as being sinful.

He was now on his knees blowing needlessly at a brightly burning fire. Nigel was so blond that Troy was glad to see his eyes were not pink behind their prolific white lashes. He got to his feet and in a muted voice asked her if there would be anything else. He gazed at the floor and not at Troy, who said there was nothing else.

‘It’s going to be a wild night,’ Troy remarked trying to be natural but sounding, she feared, like a bit part in The Corsican Brothers.

‘That is as Heaven decrees, Mrs Alleyn,’ Nigel said severely and left her. She reminded herself of Hilary’s assurances that Nigel had recovered his sanity.

She took a bath, seething deliciously in resinous vapours and wondered how demoralizing this mode of living might become if prolonged. She decided (sinfully, as no doubt Nigel would have considered) that for the time being, at least, it tended to intensify her nicer ingredients. She drowsed before her fire, half-aware of the hush that comes upon a house when snow falls in the world outside. At half past seven, Nigel tapped at her door and she roused herself to dress. There was a cheval-glass in her room and she couldn’t help seeing that she looked well in her ruby dress.

Distant sounds of arrival broke the quietude. A car engine. A door slam. After a considerable interval, voices in the passage and an entry into the next room. A snappish, female voice, apparently on the threshold, shouted. ‘Not at all. Fiddle! Who says anything about being tired? We won’t dress. I said we won’t dress.’ An interval and then the voice again: ‘You don’t want Moult, do you? Moult! The Colonel doesn’t want you. Unpack later. I said he can unpack later.’

Uncle Flea, thought Troy, is deaf.

‘And don’t,’ shouted the voice, ‘keep fussing about the beard.’

A door closed. Someone walked away down the passage.

About the beard? Troy wondered. Could she have said beard?

For a minute or two nothing could be heard from the next room. Troy concluded that either Colonel or Mrs Fleaton Forrester had retired into the bathroom on the far side, a theory that was borne out by a man’s voice, coming as it were from behind Troy’s wardrobe, exclaiming: ‘B! About my beard!’ and receiving no audible reply.

Soon after this the Forresters could be heard to leave their apartment.

Troy thought she would give them a little while with Hilary before she joined them and she was still staring bemusedly into her fire when the warning bell, booty, so Hilary had told her, from Henry the Eighth’s sack of the monasteries, rang out in its tower over the stables. Troy wondered if it reminded Nigel of his conventual days before he had turned a little mad.

She shook herself out of her reverie and found her way downstairs and into the main hall, where Mervyn, on the look-out, directed her to the green boudoir. ‘We are not disturbing the library,’ Mervyn said with a meaningful smirk. ‘Madam.’

‘How very considerate,’ said Troy. He opened the boudoir door for her and she went in.

The Forresters stood in front of the fire with Hilary, who wore a plum-coloured smoking suit and a widish tie. Colonel Forrester was a surprised-looking old man with a pink-and-white complexion and a moustache. But no beard. He wore a hearing-aid.

Mrs Forrester looked, as she had sounded, formidable. She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun. Her skirt varied in length from midi to maxi and she clearly wore more than one flannel petticoat. Her top half was covered by woollen garments in varying shades of dull puce. She wore a double chain of what Troy suspected were superb natural pearls and a number of old-fashioned rings in which deposits of soap had accumulated. She carried a string bag containing a piece of anonymous knitting and her handkerchief.

Hilary performed the introductions. Colonel Forrester beamed and gave Troy a little bow. Mrs Forrester sharply nodded.

‘How do you find yourself?’ she said. ‘Cold?’

‘Not at all, thank you.’

‘I ask because you must spend much of your time in overheated studios painting from the Altogether, I said Painting From The Altogether.’

This habit of repetition in fortissimo, Troy discovered, was automatic with Mrs Forrester and was practised for the benefit of her husband, who now gently indicated that he wore his hearing-aid. To this she paid no attention.

‘She’s not painting me in the nude, darling Auntie,’ said Hilary, who was pouring drinks.

‘A pretty spectacle that would be.’

‘I think perhaps you base your theories about painters on Trilby and La Vie de Bohème.’

‘I saw Beerbohm Tree in Trilby,’ Colonel Forrester remembered. ‘He died backwards over a table. It was awfully good.’

There was a tap on the door, followed by the entrance of a man with an anxious face. Not only anxious but most distressingly disfigured, as if by some long-distant and extensive burn. The scars ran down to the mouth and dragged it askew.

‘Hullo, Moult,’ said Mrs Forrester.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,’ said the man to Hilary. ‘It was just to put the Colonel’s mind at ease, sir. It’s quite all right about the beard, sir.’

‘Oh good, Moult. Good. Good. Good,’ said Colonel Forrester.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the man and withdrew.

‘What is it about your beard, Uncle Flea?’ asked Hilary, to Troy’s immense relief.

‘The beard, old chap. I was afraid it might have been forgotten and then I was afraid it might have been messed up in the packing.’

‘Well, it hasn’t, Fred. I said it hasn’t.’

‘I know, so that’s all right.’

‘Are you going to be Father Christmas, Colonel?’ Troy ventured and he beamed delightedly and looked shy.

‘I knew you’d think so,’ he said. ‘But no, I’m a Druid. What do you make of that, now?’

‘You mean – you belong –?’

‘Not,’ Hilary intervened, ‘to some spurious Ancient Order wearing cotton-wool beards and making fools of themselves every second Tuesday.’

‘Oh, come, old boy,’ his uncle protested. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘Well, perhaps not. But no,’ Hilary continued, addressing himself to Troy, ‘at Halberds, St Nicholas or Santa Claus or whatever you like to call the Teutonic old person, is replaced by an ancient and more authentic figure: the great precursor of the Winter Solstice observances who bequeathed – consciously or not – so much of his lore to his Christian successors. The Druid, in fact.’

‘And the vicar doesn’t mind,’ Colonel Forrester earnestly interjected. ‘I promise you. The vicar doesn’t mind a bit.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ his wife observed with a cryptic snort.

‘He comes to the party even. So, you see, I shall be a Druid. I have been one each year since Hilary came to Halberds. There’s a tree and a kissing-bough you know, and, of course, quantities of mistletoe. All the children come: the children on the place and at The Vale and in the neighbouring districts. It’s a lovely party and I love doing it. Do you like dressing-up?’

He asked this so anxiously, like a character in Alice, that she hadn’t the heart to give anything less than an enthusiastic assent and almost expected him to say cosily that they must dress up together one of these days.

‘Uncle Flea’s a brilliant performer,’ Hilary said, ‘and his beard is the pièce de résistance. He has it made by Wig Creations. It wouldn’t disgrace King Lear. And then the wig itself! So different from the usual repellent falsity. You shall see.’

‘We’ve made some changes,’ said Colonel Forrester excitedly. ‘They’ve re-dressed it. The feller said he thought it was a bit on the long side and might make me look as if I’d opted out. One can’t be too careful.’

Hilary brought the drinks. Two of them were steaming and had slices of lemon in them.

‘Your rum toddies, Aunt Bed,’ he said. ‘Tell me if there’s not enough sugar.’

Mrs Forrester wrapped her handkerchief round her glass and sat down with it. ‘It seems all right,’ she said. ‘Did you put nutmeg in your uncle’s?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

‘You will think,’ said the colonel to Troy, ‘that rum toddies before dinner are funny things to drink but we make a point of putting them forward after a journey. Usually they are nightcaps.’

‘They smell delicious.’

‘Would you like one?’ Hilary asked her. ‘Instead of a White Lady.’

‘I think I’ll stick to the White Lady.’

‘So shall I. Well, my dears,’ Hilary said generally. ‘We are a small house-party this year. Only Cressida and Uncle Bert to come. They both arrive tomorrow.’

‘Are you still engaged to Cressida?’ asked his aunt.

‘Yes. The arrangement stands. I am in high hopes, Aunt Bed, that you will take more of a fancy to Cressida on second sight.’

‘It’s not second sight. It’s fiftieth sight. Or more.’

‘But you know what I mean. Second sight since we became engaged.’

‘What’s the odds?’ she replied ambiguously.

‘Well, Aunt Bed, I would have thought –’ Hilary broke off and rubbed his nose. ‘Well, anyway, Aunt Bed, considering I met her in your house.’

‘More’s the pity. I warned your uncle. I said I warned you, Fred.’

‘What about, B?’

‘Your gel! The Tottenham gel. Cressida.’

‘She’s not mine, B. You put things so oddly, my dear.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Hilary said. ‘I hope you change your mind, Auntie.’

‘One can but hope,’ she rejoined and turned to Troy. ‘Have you met Miss Tottenham?’

‘No.’

‘Hilary thinks she will go with the house. We’re still talking about Cressida,’ Mrs Forrester bawled at her husband.

‘I know you are. I heard.’

After this they sipped their drinks, Mrs Forrester making rather a noise with hers and blowing on it to cool it down.

‘The arrangements for Christmas Day,’ Hilary began after a pause, ‘are, I think, an improvement on last year. I’ve thought of a new entrance for you, Uncle Flea.’

‘Have you, though? Have you? Have you?’

‘From outside. Through the french windows behind the tree.’

‘Outside!’ Mrs Forrester barked. ‘Do I understand you, Hilary? Do you plan to put your uncle out on the terrace on a midwinter night – in a snowstorm. I said a snowstorm?’

‘It’ll only be for a moment, Aunt Bed.’

‘You have not forgotten, I suppose, that your uncle suffers from a circulatory complaint.’

‘I’ll be all right, B.’

‘I don’t like it, I said –’

‘But I assure you! And the undergarment is quilted.’

‘Pshaw! I said –’

‘No, but do listen!’

‘Don’t fuss, B. My boots are fur-lined. Go on, old boy. You were saying –?’

‘I’ve got a lovely tape-recording of sleighbells and snorting reindeer. Don’t interrupt, anybody. I’ve done my research and I’m convinced that there’s an overlap here between the Teutonic and the Druidical and if there’s not,’ Hilary said rapidly, ‘there ought to be. So. We’ll hear you shout “Whoa”, Uncle Flea, outside, to the reindeer, and then you’ll come in.’

‘I don’t shout very loud nowadays, old boy,’ he said worriedly. ‘Not the Pirbright note any more, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought of that. I’ve had the “whoa” added to the bells and snorts. Cuthbert did it. He has a stentorian voice.’

‘Good. Good.’

‘There will be thirty-one children and about a dozen parents. And the usual assortment of county and farmers. Outside hands and, of course, the staff.’

‘Warders?’ asked Mrs Forrester. ‘From That Place?’

‘Yes. From the married quarters. Two. Wives and families.’

‘Marchbanks?’

‘If he can get away. They have their own commitments. The chaplain cooks up something pretty joyless. Christmas,’ said Hilary acidly, ‘under maximum security. I imagine one can hardly hear the carols for the alarm bells.’

‘I suppose,’ said his aunt after a good suck at her toddy, ‘you all know what you’re about. I’m sure I don’t. I smell danger.’

‘That’s a dark saying, Auntie,’ remarked Hilary.

Cuthbert came in and announced dinner. It was true that he had a very loud voice.

CHAPTER 2

Christmas Eve

Before they went to bed they listened to the regional weather report. It said that snow was expected to fall through the night and into Christmas Eve but that it was unlikely to continue until Christmas Day itself. A warm front was approaching over the Atlantic Ocean.

‘I always think,’ Hilary remarked, ‘of a warm front as belonging to a décolleté Regency lady thrusting her opulent prow, as it were, into some consequential rout or ball and warming it up no end. The ball, I mean.’

‘No doubt,’ his aunt tartly rejoined, ‘Cressida will fulfil that questionable role at the coming function.’

‘Well, you know, darling, I rather think she may,’ said Hilary and kissed his aunt goodnight.

When Troy hung her red dress in her wardrobe that night she discovered that the recess in which it had been built must be flanked by a similar recess in the Forrester’s room so that the ancient wall that separated them had been in this section, removed and a thin partition separated their respective hanging cupboards.

Mrs Forrester, at this very moment, was evidently disposing of her own garments. Troy could hear the scrape of coathangers on the rail. She jumped violently when her own name was shouted, almost as it seemed, into her ear.

‘Troy! Odd sort of Christian name.’

Distantly, Colonel Forrester could be heard to say: ‘… no … understand … famous …’ His head, Troy thought was momentarily engulfed in some garment. Mrs Forrester sounded extremely cross.

‘You know what I think about it,’ she shouted and rattled the coathangers, ‘I said you know …’

Troy, reprehensibly, was riveted in her wardrobe.

‘… don’t trust …’ continued the voice. ‘Never have. You know that.’ A pause and a final shout: ‘… sooner it was left straight out to the murderers. Now!’ A final angry clash of coathangers and a bang of wardrobe doors.

Troy went to bed in a daze but whether this condition was engendered by the Lucullan dinner Hilary and Kittiwee had provided or by the juxtaposition of unusual circumstances in which she found herself, she was quite unable to determine.

She had thought she was sleepy when she got into bed but now she lay awake, listening to small noises made by the fire in her grate as it settled into glowing oblivion and to faint sighs and occasional buffets of the night wind outside. Well, Troy thought, this is a rum go and no mistake.

After a period of disjointed but sharp reflections she began to fancy she heard voices somewhere out in the dark. ‘I must be dozing, after all,’ Troy thought. A gust of wind rumbled in the chimney followed by a silence into which there intruded the wraith of a voice, belonging nowhere and diminished as if the sound had been turned off in a television dialogue and only the ghost of itself remained.

Now, positively, it was out there below her window: a man’s voice – two voices – engaged in indistinguishable talk.

Troy got out of bed and by the glow from her dying fire, went to her window and parted the curtains.

It was not as dark as she had expected. She looked out at a subject that might have inspired Jane Eyre to add another item to her portfolio. A rift had been blown in the clouds and the moon in its last quarter shone on a prospect of black shadows thrown across cadaverous passages of snow. In the background rose the moors and in the foreground, the shambles of broken glass beneath her window. Beyond this jogged two torchlights, the first of which cast a yellow circle on a white ground. The second bobbed about the side of a large wooden crate with the legend: ‘Musical instrument. Handle with Extreme Care’ stencilled across it. It seemed to be mounted on some kind of vehicle, a sledge, perhaps, since it made no noise.

The two men wore hooded oilskins that glinted as they moved. The leader gesticulated and pointed and then turned and leant into the wind. Troy saw that he had some kind of tow-rope over his shoulder. The second man placed his muffled hands against the rear end of the crate and braced himself. He tilted his head sideways and glanced up. For a moment she caught sight of his face. It was Nigel.

Although Troy had only had one look at Vincent, the non-poisoner-chauffeur-gardener, and that look from the top of a hill, she felt sure that the leader was he.

‘Hup!’ cried the disembodied voice and the ridiculous outfit moved off round the west wing in the direction of the main courtyard of Halberds. The moon was overrun by clouds.

Before she got back into bed Troy looked at a little Sèvres clock on her chimney-piece. She was greatly surprised to find that the hour was no later than ten past twelve.

At last she fell asleep and woke to the sound of opening curtains. A general pale glare was admitted.

‘Good morning, Nigel,’ said Troy.

‘Good morning,’ Nigel muttered, ‘madam.’

With downcast eyes he placed her morning tea-tray at her bedside.

‘Has there been a heavy fall of snow?’

‘Not to say heavy,’ he sighed, moving towards the door.

Troy said boldly: ‘It was coming down quite hard last night, wasn’t it? You must have been frozen pulling that sledge.’

He stopped. For the first time he lifted his gaze to her face. His almost colourless eyes stared through their white lashes like a doll’s.

‘I happened to look out,’ Troy explained and wondered why on earth she should feel frightened.

He stood motionless for a few seconds and then said ‘Yes?’ and moved to the door. Like an actor timing an exit line he added, ‘It’s a surprise,’ and left her.

The nature of the surprise became evident when Troy went down to breakfast.

A moderate snowfall had wrought its conventional change in a landscape that glittered in the thin sunshine. The moors had become interfolding arcs of white and blue, the trees wore their epaulettes with an obsequious air of conformity and the area under treatment by tractors was simplified as if a white dustsheet had been dropped over it.

The breakfast-room was in the west wing of Halberds. It opened off a passage that terminated in a door into the adjoining library. The library itself, being the foremost room of the west wing, commanded views on three sides.

Troy wanted to have a stare at her work. She went into the library and glowered at the portrait for some minutes, biting her thumb. Then she looked out of the windows that gave on to the courtyard. Here, already masked in snow and placed at dead centre, was a large rectangular object that Troy had no difficulty in recognizing since the stencilled legend on its side was not as yet obliterated.

And there, busy as ever, were Vincent and Nigel, shovelling snow from wheelbarrows and packing it round the case in the form of a flanking series of steps based on an under-structure of boxes and planks. Troy watched them for a moment or two and then went to the breakfast-room.

Hilary stood in the window supping porridge. He was alone.

‘Hullo, Hullo!’ he cried. ‘Have you seen the work in progress? Isn’t it exciting: the creative urge in full spate. Nigel has been inspired. I am so pleased, you can’t think.’

‘What are they making?’

‘A reproduction of my many-times-great-grandfather’s tomb. I’ve given Nigel photographs and of course he’s seen the original in the parish church. It’s a compliment and I couldn’t be more gratified. Such a change from waxworks and horses for roundabouts. The crate will represent the catafalque, you see, and the recumbent figure will be life-size. Really it’s extraordinarily nice of Nigel.’

‘I saw them towing the crate round the house at midnight.’

‘It appears he was suddenly inspired and roused Vincent up to assist him. The top of the crate was already beautifully covered by snow this morning. It’s so good for Nigel to become creative again. Rejoice with me and have some kedgeree or something. Don’t you adore having things to look forward to?’

Colonel and Mrs Forrester came in wearing that air of spurious domesticity peculiar to guests in a country house. The colonel was enchanted by Nigel’s activities and raved about them while his porridge congealed in its bowl. His wife recalled him to himself.

‘I dare say,’ she said with a baleful glance at Hilary, ‘it keeps them out of mischief.’ Troy was unable to determine what Mrs Forrester really thought about Hilary’s experiment with murderers.

‘Cressida and Uncle Bert,’ said Hilary, ‘are coming by the three-thirty at Downlow. I’m going to meet them unless, of course, I’m required in the library.’

‘Not if I may have a sitting this morning,’ said Troy.

‘The light will have changed, won’t it? Because of the snow?’

‘I expect it will. We’ll just have to see.’

‘What sort of portraits do you paint?’ Mrs Forrester demanded.

‘Extremely good ones,’ said her nephew pretty tartly. ‘You’re in distinguished company, Aunt Bedelia.’

To Troy’s intense amusement Mrs Forrester pulled a long, droll face and immediately afterwards tipped her a wink.

‘Hoity-toity,’ she said.

‘Not at all,’ Hilary huffily rejoined.

Troy said, ‘It’s hopeless asking what sort of things I paint because I’m no good at talking about my work. If you drive me into a corner I’ll come out with the most awful jabberwocky.’

And in a state of astonishment at herself Troy added like a shamefaced schoolgirl, ‘One paints as one must.’

After a considerable pause Hilary said: ‘How generous you are.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ Troy contradicted.

‘Well!’ Mrs Forrester said, ‘we shall see what we shall see.’

Hilary snorted.

‘I did some watercolours,’ Colonel Forrester remembered, ‘when I was at Eton. They weren’t very good but I did them, at least.’

‘That was something,’ his wife conceded and Troy found herself adding that you couldn’t say fairer than that.

They finished their breakfast in comparative silence and were about to leave the table when Cuthbert came in and bent over Hilary in a manner that recalled his own past as a head-waiter.

‘Yes, Cuthbert,’ Hilary asked, ‘what is it?’

‘The mistletoe, sir. It will be on the three-thirty and the person wonders if it could be collected at the station.’

‘I’ll collect it. It’s for the kissing-bough. Ask Vincent to have everything ready, will you?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Good.’

Hilary rubbed his hands with an exhilarated air and proposed to Troy that they resume their sittings. When the session was concluded, they went out into the sparkling morning to see how Nigel was getting on with his effigy.

It had advanced. The recumbent figure of a sixteenth-century Bill-Tasman was taking shape. Nigel’s mittened hands worked quickly. He slapped on fistfuls of snow and manipulated them into shape with a wooden spatula: a kitchen implement, Troy supposed. There was something frenetic in his devotion to his task. He didn’t so much as glance at his audience. Slap, slap, scoop, scoop, he went.

And now, for the first time, Troy encountered Wilfred, the cook, nicknamed Kittiwee.

He had come out of doors wearing his professional hat, checked trousers and snowy apron with an overcoat slung rather stylishly over his shoulders. He carried an enormous ladle and looked, Troy thought, as if he had materialized from a Happy Families playing card. Indeed, his round face, large eyes and wide mouth were comically in accord with such a notion.

When he saw Troy and Hilary he beamed upon them and raised a plump hand to his starched hat.

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Kittiwee. ‘Good morning, ladies.’

‘’Morning, Wilfred,’ Hilary rejoined. ‘Come out to lend a hand with the icing?’

Kittiwee laughed consumedly at this mildest of jokelets.

‘Indeed no, sir,’ he protested. ‘I wouldn’t dare. I just thought a ladle might assist the artist.’

Nigel thus indirectly appealed to merely shook his head without pausing in his task.

‘All going well in your department?’ Hilary asked.

‘Yes, thank you, sir. We’re doing nicely. The boy from Downlow is ever such a bright lad.’

‘Oh. Good. Good,’ Hilary said, rather hurriedly Troy thought. ‘What about those mince-pies?’

‘Ready for nibbles and wishes immediately after tea, sir, if you please,’ cried Kittiwee, gaily.

‘If they’re on the same level as the other things you’ve been giving us to eat,’ Troy said, ‘they’ll be the mince-pies of the century.’

It was hard to say who was the more delighted by this eulogy, Hilary or his cook.

Vincent came round the west wing wheeling another barrowful of snow. At close quarters he turned out to be a swarthy, thin man with a haggard expression in his eyes. He looked sidelong at Troy, tipped out his load and trundled off again. Kittiwee, explaining that he had only popped out for one second, embraced them all in the very widest of dimpled smiles and retired into the house.

A few minutes later Cuthbert came into the courtyard and boomingly proclaimed that luncheon was served.

II

Cressida Tottenham was blonde and extremely elegant. She was so elegant that her beauty seemed to be a second consideration: a kind of bonus, a gloss. She wore a sable hat. Sable framed her face, hung from her sleeves and topped her boots. When her outer garments were removed she appeared to be gloved rather than clad in the very ultimate of expensive simplicity.

Her eyes and her mouth slanted and she carried her head a little on one side. She was very composed and not loquacious. When she did talk she said: ‘you know’ with every second breath. She was not by any means the kind of subject that Troy liked to paint. This might turn out to be awkward: Hilary kept looking inquisitively at her as if to ask what she thought of Cressida.

To Mr Bert Smith, Troy took an instant fancy. He was a little man with an impertinent face, a bright eye and a strong out of date cockney habit of speech. He was smartly dressed in an aggressive countrified way. Troy judged him to be about seventy years old and in excellent health.

The encounter between the new arrivals and the Forresters was interesting. Colonel Forrester greeted Miss Tottenham with timid admiration calling her ‘Cressy-dear’.

Troy thought she detected a gently avuncular air, tempered perhaps by anxiety. The colonel’s meeting with Mr Smith was cordial to a degree. He shook hands with abandon. ‘How are you? How are you, my dear fellow?’ he repeatedly asked and with each enquiry broke into delighted laughter.

‘How’s the colonel, anyway?’ Mr Smith responded. ‘You’re looking lovely, I’ll say that for you. Fair caution, you are and no error. What’s all this they’re givin’ us abaht you dressing yourself up like Good King Thingummy? Wiv whiskers! Whiskers!’ Mr Smith turned upon Mrs Forrester and suddenly bellowed: ‘Blimey, ’e must be joking. At ’is age ! Whiskers!’

‘It’s my husband who’s deaf, Smith,’ Mrs Forrester pointed out, ‘not me. You’ve made that mistake before, you know.’

‘What am I thinking of,’ said Mr Smith, winking at Troy and slapping Colonel Forrester on the back. ‘Slip of the tongue, as the butcher said when he dropped it accidental in the tripe.’

‘Uncle Bert,’ Hilary said to Troy, ‘is a comedian manqué. He speaks nicely when he chooses. This is his “aren’t I a caution, I’m a cockney” act. He’s turning it on for Uncle Flea’s benefit. You always bring him out, Uncle Flea, don’t you?’

Miss Tottenham caught Troy’s eyes and slightly cast up her own.

‘Really?’ asked the enchanted colonel. ‘Do I really, though?’

Mr Smith quietened down after this exchange and they all went in to tea which had been set out in the dining-room and had none of the cosiness of Troy’s and Hilary’s tête-à-têtes by the boudoir fire. Indeed an air of constraint hung over the party which Cressida’s refusal to act as chatelaine did nothing to relieve.

‘You’re not asking me to do the pouring-out bit, darling, for God’s sake,’ Cressida said. ‘It’d, you know, frankly bore the pants off me. I’ve got, you know, a kind of thing against it. Not my scene. You know.’

Mrs Forrester stared fixedly at Cressida for some moments and then said: ‘Perhaps, Hilary, you would like me to perform.’

‘Darling Auntie, please do. It will be like old times, won’t it? When Uncle Bert used to come to Eaton Square after you’d made it up over my upbringing.’

‘That’s the ticket,’ Mr Smith agreed. ‘No hard feelings. Live and let live. That’s the story, missus, isn’t it?’

‘You’re a decent fellow in your own way, Smith,’ Mrs Forrester conceded. ‘We’ve learnt to understand each other, I dare say. What sort of tea do you like, Mrs Alleyn?’

Troy thought: I am among people who say what they think when they think it. Like children. This is a most unusual circumstance and might lead to anything.

She excepted Mr Smith from her blanket appraisal. Mr Smith, she considered, is a tricky little old man and what he really thinks about the company he keeps is nobody’s business but his.

‘How’s all the villains, ’Illy?’ he asked putting his head on one side and jauntily quizzing his muffin. ‘Still keepin’ their noses clean?’

‘Certainly, Uncle Bert, but do choose your words. I wouldn’t for the world Cuthbert or Mervyn heard you talking like that. One of them might walk in at any moment.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Smith, unmoved.

‘That yawning void over the fireplace,’ Cressida said. ‘Is that where you meant? You know, about my picture?’

‘Yes, my darling,’ Hilary responded. ‘As a matter of fact –’ he looked anxiously at Troy ’ – I’ve already ventured a tentative probe.’

Troy was saved the awkwardness of a reply by Cressida who said, ‘I’d rather it was the drawing-room. Not all mixed in with the soup and, you know, your far from groovy ancestors.’ She glanced discontentedly at a Lely, two Raeburns and a Winterhalter. ‘You know,’ she said.

Hilary turned rather pink: ‘We’ll have to see,’ he said.

Mervyn came in with the cook’s compliments and the mince-pies were ready when they were.

‘What is he on about?’ Cressida asked fretfully. ‘On top of tea? And anyway I abhor mincemeat.’

‘Darling I know. So, privately, do I. But it appears to be an authentic old custom. On taking one’s first bite,’ Hilary explained, ‘one makes a wish. The ceremony is held, by tradition, in the kitchen. One need only take a token nibble. It will give him so much pleasure.’

‘Are there still cats in the kitchen?’ Cressida asked. ‘There’s my thing about cats, remember.’

‘Mervyn,’ Hilary said, ‘ask Kittiwee to put Slyboots and Smartypants out, will you? He’ll understand.’

‘He’d better. I’m allergic,’ Cressida told Troy. ‘Cats send me. But totally. I’ve only got to catch the eye of a cat and I’m a psychotic wreck.’ She enlarged upon her theme. It would be tedious to record how many times she said Troy knew.

‘I should be pleased,’ Mrs Forrester said loudly, ‘to renew my acquaintance with Slyboots and Smartypants.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Cressida retorted, addressing herself to Mrs Forrester for the first time but not looking at her.

‘I so far agree with you, Hilary,’ said Mrs Forrester, ‘in your views on your staff as to consider the cook was well within his rights when he attacked the person who maltreated cats. Well within his right I consider he was, I said –’

‘Yes, Auntie, I know you did. Don’t we all! No, darling,’ Hilary said, anticipating his beloved. ‘You’re the adorable exception. Well, now. Shall we all go and mumble up our mince?’

In the kitchen they were received by Kittiwee with ceremony. He beamed and dimpled but Troy thought there was a look of glazed displeasure in his eyes. This impression became unmistakable when infuriated yowls broke out behind a door into the yard. Slyboots and Smartypants, thought Troy.

A red-cheeked boy sidled in through the door, shutting it quickly on a crescendo of feline indignation.

‘We’re sorry,’ Hilary said, ‘about the puss-cats, Wilfred.’

‘It takes all sorts, doesn’t it, sir?’ Kittiwee cryptically rejoined with a sidelong glance at Miss Tottenham. The boy, who was sucking his hand, looked resentfully through the window into the yard.

The mince-pies were set out on a lordly dish in the middle of the kitchen table. Troy saw with relief that they were small. Hilary explained that they must take their first bites in turn, making a wish as they did so.

Afterwards Troy was to remember them as they stood sheepishly round the table. She was to think of those few minutes as almost the last spell of general tranquillity that she experienced at Halberds.

‘You first, Auntie,’ Hilary invited.

‘Aloud?’ his aunt demanded. Rather hurriedly he assured her that her wish need not be articulate.

‘Just as well,’ she said. She seized her pie and took a prodigious bite out of it. As she munched she fixed her eyes upon Cressida Tottenham and suddenly Troy was alarmed. I know what she’s wishing, Troy thought. As well as if she were to bawl it out in our faces. She’s wishing the engagement will be broken. I’m sure of it.

Cressida herself came next. She made a great to-do over biting off the least possible amount and swallowing it as if it was medicine.

‘Did you wish?’ Colonel Forrester asked anxiously.

‘I forgot,’ she said and then screamed at the top of her voice. Fragments of mince-pie escaped her lovely lips.

Mr Smith let out a four-letter word and they all exclaimed. Cressida was pointing at the window into the yard. Two cats, a piebald and a tabby, sat on the outer sill, their faces slightly distorted by the glass, their eyes staring and their mouths opening and shutting in concerted meows.

‘My dear girl,’ Hilary said and made no attempt to disguise his exasperation.

‘My poor pussies,’ Kittiwee chimed in like a sort of alto to a leading baritone.

‘I can’t take CATS,’ Cressida positively yelled.

‘In which case,’ Mrs Forrester composedly observed, ‘you can take yourself out of the kitchen.’

‘No, no,’ pleaded the colonel. ‘No, B. No, no, no! Dear me! Look here!’

The cats now began to make excruciating noises with their claws on the window-pane. Troy, who liked cats and found them amusing, was almost sorry to see them abruptly cease this exercise, reverse themselves on the sill and disappear, tails up. Cressida, however, clapped her hands to her ears, screamed again and stamped her feet like an exotic dancer.

Mr Smith said drily: ‘No trouble!’

But Colonel Forrester gently comforted Cressida with a wandering account of a brother-officer whose abhorrence of felines in some mysterious way brought about a deterioration in the lustre of his accoutrements. It was an incomprehensible narrative but Cressida sat on a kitchen chair and stared at him and became quiet.

‘Never mind!’ Hilary said on a note of quiet despair. ‘As we were.’ He appealed to Troy: ‘Will you?’ he asked.

Troy applied herself to a mince-pie and as she did so there came into her mind a wish so ardent that she could almost have thought she spoke it aloud. Don’t, she found herself dottily wishing, let anything beastly happen. Please. She then complimented Kittiwee on his cooking.

Colonel Forrester followed Troy. ‘You would be surprised,’ he said, beaming at them, ‘if you knew about my wish. That you would.’ He shut his eyes and heartily attacked his pie. ‘Delicious!’ he said.

Mr Smith said: ‘How soft can you get!’ and ate the whole of his pie with evident and noisy relish.

Hilary brought up the rear and when they had thanked Kittiwee they left the kitchen. Cressida said angrily that she was going to take two aspirins and go to bed until dinner time. ‘And I don’t,’ she added, looking at her fiancé, ‘want to be disturbed.’

‘You need have no misgivings, my sweet,’ he rejoined and his aunt gave a laugh that might equally have been called a snort. ‘Your uncle and I,’ she said to Hilary, ‘will take the air, as usual, for ten minutes.’

‘But – Auntie – it’s too late. It’s dark and it may be snowing.’

‘We shall confine ourselves to the main courtyard. The wind is in the east, I believe.’

‘Very well,’ he agreed. ‘Uncle Bert, shall we have our business talk?’

‘Suits me,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Any time.’

Troy wanted to have a glower at her work and said as much. So they went their several ways.

As she walked through the hall and along the passage that led to the library, Troy was struck by the extreme quietude that was obtained indoors at Halberds. The floor was thickly carpeted. Occasional lamps cast a subdued light on the walls but they were far apart. Whatever form of central heating had been installed was almost too effective. She felt as if she moved through a steamed-up tunnel.

Here was the door into the library. It was slightly ajar. She opened it, took two steps and while the handle was still in her grasp was hit smartly on the head.

It was a light blow and was accompanied by the reek of turpentine. She was neither hurt nor frightened but so much taken by surprise that for a moment she was bereft of reasoning. Then she remembered there was a light switch inside the door and turned it on.

There was the library: warm, silent, smelling of leather, woodfires and paint. There was the portrait on its easel and the work bench with her familiar gear.

And there, on the carpet at her feet, the tin palette-can in which she put her oil and turpentine.

And down her face trickled a pungent little stream.

The first thing Troy did after making this discovery was to find the clean rag on her bench and wipe her face. Hilary, dimly lit on her easel, fixed her with an enigmatic stare. ‘And a nice party,’ she muttered, ‘you’ve let me in for, haven’t you?’

She turned back towards the door, which she found, to her surprise was now shut. A trickle of oil and turpentine made its sluggish way down the lacquer-red paint. But would the door swing to of its own accord? As if to answer her, it gave a little click and opened a couple of inches. She remembered that this was habitual with it. A faulty catch, she supposed.

But someone had shut it.

She waited for a moment, pulling herself together. Then she walked quickly to the door, opened it and repressed a scream. She was face to face with Mervyn.

This gave her a much greater shock than the knock on her head. She heard herself make a nightmarish little noise in her throat.

‘Was there anything, madam?’ he asked. His face was ashen.

‘Did you shut the door? Just now?’

‘No, madam.’

‘Come in, please.’

She thought he was going to refuse but he did come in, taking four steps and then stopping where the can still lay on the carpet.

‘It’s made a mess,’ Troy said.

‘Allow me, madam.’

He picked it up, walked over to the bench and put it down.

‘Look at the door,’ Troy said.

She knew at once that he had already seen it. She knew he had come into the room while she cleaned her face and had crept out again, shutting the door behind him.

‘The tin was on the top of the door,’ Troy said. ‘It fell on my head. A booby-trap.’

‘Not a very nice thing,’ he whispered.

‘No. A booby-trap.’

‘I never!’ Mervyn burst out. ‘My God, I never. My God, I swear I never.’

‘I can’t think – really – why you should.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed feverishly. ‘That’s dead right. Christ, why should I! Me!’

Troy began to wipe the trickle from the door. It came away cleanly, leaving hardly a trace.

Mervyn dragged a handkerchief from his pocket, dropped on his knees and violently attacked the stain on the string-coloured carpet.

‘I think plain turpentine might do it,’ Troy said.

He looked round wildly. She fetched him a bottle of turpentine from the bench.

‘Ta,’ he said and set to work again. The nape of his neck shone with sweat. He mumbled.

‘What?’ Troy asked. ‘What did you say?’

‘He’ll see. He notices everything. They’ll say I done it.’

‘Who?’

‘Everybody. That lot. Them.’

Troy heard herself saying: ‘Finish it off with soap and water and put down more mats.’ The carpet round her easel had, at her request, been protected by upside-down mats from the kitchen quarters.

He gazed up at her. He looked terrified and crafty like a sly child.

‘You won’t do me?’ he asked. ‘Madam? Honest? You won’t grass? Not that I done it, mind. I never. I’d be barmy, woon’t I? I never.’

‘All right, all right,’ Troy almost shouted. ‘Don’t let’s have all that again. You say you didn’t and I – as a matter of fact, I believe you.’

‘Gor’ bless you, lady.’

‘Yes, well, never mind all that. But if you didn’t,’ Troy said sombrely, ‘who on earth did?’

‘Ah! That’s different, ainnit? What say I know?’

‘You know!’

‘I got me own idea, ain’ I? Trying to put one acrost me. Got it in for all of us, that sod, excuse me for mentioning it.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It seems to me that I’m the one –’

‘Do me a favour. You! Lady – you’re just the mug, see? It’s me it was set up for. Use your loaf, lady.’

Mervyn sat back on his heels and stared wildly at Troy. His face which had reminded her of Kittiwee’s pastry now changed colour: he was blushing.

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’ll think of me, madam,’ he said carefully. ‘I forgot myself, I’m that put out.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘But I wish you’d just explain –’

He got to his feet and backed to the door, screwing the rag round his hand. ‘Oh madam, madam, madam,’ he implored. ‘I do wish you’d just use your loaf.’

And with that he left her.

It was not until she reached her room and set about washing the turpentine and oil out of her hair that Troy remembered Mervyn had gone to gaol for murdering someone with a booby-trap.

III

If Cressida had lost any ground at all with her intended over the affair of the cats it seemed to Troy that she made it up again and more during the course of the evening. She was the last to arrive in the main drawing-room where tonight, for the first time, they assembled before dinner.

She wore a metallic trousered garment so adhesive that her body might itself have been gilded like the two Quattrocento victories that trumpeted above the chimney-piece. When she moved, her dress, recalling Herrick, seemed to melt about her as if she were clad in molten gold. She looked immensely valuable and of course tremendously lovely. Troy heard Hilary catch his breath. Even Mrs Forrester gave a slight grunt while Mr Smith, very softly, produced a wolf whistle. The colonel said: ‘My dear, you are quite bewildering,’ which was, Troy thought, as apt a way of putting it as any other. But still, she had no wish to paint Cressida and again she was uneasily aware of Hilary’s questioning looks.

They had champagne cocktails that evening. Mervyn was in attendance under Cuthbert’s supervision and Troy was careful not to look at Mervyn. She was visited by a sense of detachment as if she hovered above the scene rather than moved through it. The beautiful room, the sense of ease, of unforced luxury, of a kind of aesthetic liberation, seemed to lose substance and validity and to become – what? Sterile?

‘I wonder,’ said Hilary at her elbow, ‘what that look means. An impertinent question, by the way, but of course you don’t have to give me an answer.’ And before she could do so he went on. ‘Cressida is lovely, don’t you think?’

‘I do indeed but you mustn’t ask me to paint her.’

‘I thought that was coming.’

‘It would be no good.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘It would give you no pleasure.’

‘Or perhaps too much,’ Hilary said. ‘Of a dangerous kind.’

Troy thought it better not to reply to this.

‘Well,’ Hilary said, ‘it shall be as it must be. Already I feel the breath of Signor Annigoni down the nape of my neck. Another champagne cocktail? Of course you will. Cuthbert!’

He stayed beside her, rather quiet for him, watching his fiancée, but, Troy felt, in some indefinable way, still communicating with her.

At dinner Hilary put Cressida in the chatelaine’s place and Troy thought how wonderfully she shone in it and how when they were married Hilary would like to show her off at much grander parties than this strange little assembly. Like a humanate version of his great possessions, she thought, and was uncomfortable in the notion.

Stimulated perhaps by champagne, Cressida was much more effervescent than usual. She and Hilary had a mock argument with amorous overtones. She began to tease him about the splendour of Halberds and then when he looked huffy added, ‘Not that I don’t devour every last bit of it. It sends the Tottenham blood seething in my veins like …’ She stopped and looked at Mrs Forrester, who over folded arms and with a magisterial frown steadily returned her gaze.

‘Anyway,’ Cressida said, waving a hand at Hilary, ‘I adore it all.’

Colonel Forrester suddenly passed his elderly, veined fingers across his eyes and mouth.

‘Darling!’ Hilary said and raised his glass to Cressida.

Mr Bert Smith also became a little flown with champagne. He talked of his and Hilary’s business affairs and Troy thought he must be quite as shrewd as he gave himself out to be. It was not at all surprising that he had got on in such a spectacular manner. She wondered if, in the firm of ‘Bill-Tasman and Smith Associates’ which was what their company seemed to be called, Mr Smith was perhaps the engine and Hilary the exquisite bodywork and upholstery.

Colonel Forrester listened to the high-powered talk with an air of wonderment. He was beside Troy and had asked to ‘take her in’ on his arm which she had found touching.

‘Do you follow all this?’ he asked her in a conspiratorial aside. He was wearing his hearing-aid.

‘Not very well. I’m an ass at business,’ she muttered and delighted him.

‘So am I! I know! So am I! But we have to pretend, don’t we?’

‘I daren’t. I’d give myself away, at once.’

‘But it’s awfully clever. All the brain-work, you know!’ he murmured, raising his brows and gazing at Troy. ‘Terrific! Phew! Don’t you agree?’

She nodded and he slyly bit his lip and hunched his shoulders.

‘We mustn’t let on we’re so muddly,’ said the colonel.

Troy thought: this is how he used to talk to thoroughly nice girls when he was an ensign fifty years ago. All gay and playful with ‘The Destiny Waltz’ swooning away on the bandstand and an occasional flutter in the conservatory. The chaperones thought he was just the job, no doubt. And she wondered if he proposed to Aunt Bed on a balcony at a regimental ball. But what the devil was Aunt Bed like in her springtide, Troy wondered, and was at a loss. A dasher, perhaps? A fine girl? A spanker?

‘… so I said: “Do me a favour, chum. You call it what you like: for my book you’re at the fiddle!” “Distinguished and important collection!” Yeah! So’s your old man! Nothing but a bunch of job-burgers, that lot.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Uncle Bert,’ said Hilary definitively and bent towards his aunt.

‘That’s a very nice grenade you’re wearing, Auntie darling,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember it, do I?’

‘Silver wedding,’ she said. ‘Your uncle. I don’t often get it out.’

It was a large diamond brooch pinned in a haphazard fashion to the black cardigan Mrs Forrester wore over her brown satin dress. Her pearls were slung about her neck and an increased complement of rings had been shoved down her fingers.

Mr Smith, his attention diverted from high finance, turned and contemplated her.

‘Got ’em all on, eh?’ he said. ‘Very nice, too. Here! Do you still cart all your stuff round with you? Is that right? In a tin box? Is that a fact?’

‘Pas,’ Mrs Forrester said, ‘devant les domestiques.’

‘How does the chorus go?’

Hilary intervened. ‘No, honestly, Aunt B,’ he protested throwing an agitated glance at Cuthbert, who was at the sideboard with his back turned.

‘Hilary,’ said Cressida, ‘that reminds me.’

‘Of what, my sweet?’ Hilary asked apprehensively.

‘It doesn’t really matter. I was just wondering about tomorrow. The party. The tree. It’s in the drawing-room isn’t it? I’ve been wondering, what’s the scene? You know? The stage-management and all that.’

It was the first time Troy had heard Cressida assume an air of authority about Halberds and she saw that Hilary was delighted. He embarked on a long explanation. The sleighbells, the tape-recorded sounds, the arrival of Colonel Forrester as a Druid through the french windows. The kissing-bough. The tree. The order of events. Colonel Forrester listened with the liveliest satisfaction.

This discussion took them through the rest of dinner. Cressida continued to fill out the role of hostess with considerable aplomb and before Mrs Forrester, who was gathering herself together, could do anything more about it, leant towards her and said: ‘Shall we, Aunt B?’ with a ravishing smile. It was the first time, Troy suspected, that she had ever addressed her future aunt-by-marriage in those terms. Mrs Forrester looked put out. She said: ‘I was going to, anyway,’ rose with alacrity and made for the door. Her husband got there first and opened it.

‘We shan’t stay long over our port,’ he confided, looking from his wife to Troy. ‘Hilary says there are any number of things to be done. The tree and the kissing-bough and all. Don’t you like, awfully,’ he said to Troy, ‘having things to look forward to?’

When the ladies reached the drawing-room it was to find Vincent, Nigel and the apple-cheeked boy in the very act of wheeling in through the french windows a fine Christmas tree lightly powdered with snow. It was housed in a green tub and mounted on the kind of trolley garage hands lie upon when working underneath a car. At the far end of the room a green canvas sheet had been spread over Hilary’s superb carpet and to the centre of this the tree was propelled.

Winter entered the room with the tree and laid its hand on their faces. Cressida cried out against it. The men shut the french windows and went away. A step-ladder and an enormous box of decorations had been left beside the tree.

From the central chandelier in the drawing-room someone – Nigel, perhaps – had hung the traditional kissing-bough, a bell-shaped structure made from mistletoe and holly with scarlet apples depending from it by tinsel cords. It was stuck about with scarlet candles. The room was filled with the heady smell of resinous greenery.

Troy was almost as keen on Christmas trees as Colonel Forrester himself and thought the evening might well be saved by their joint activities. Mrs Forrester eyed the tree with judicious approval and said there was nothing the matter with it.

‘There’s a Crib,’ she said. ‘I attend to that. I bought it in Oberammergau when Hilary was a pagan child of seven. He’s still a pagan of course, but he brings it out to oblige me. Though how he reconciles it with Fred in his heathen beard and that brazen affair on the chandelier is best known to himself. Still, there is the service. Half past ten in the chapel. Did he tell you?’

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘I didn’t even know there was a chapel.’

‘In the west wing. The parson from the prison takes it. High church, which Hilary likes. Do you consider him handsome?’

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘But he’s paintable.’

‘Ho,’ said Mrs Forrester.

Mervyn came in with the coffee and liqueurs. When he reached Troy he gave her a look of animal subservience that she found extremely disagreeable.

Cressida’s onset of hostess-like responsibility seemed to have been left behind in the dining-room. She stood in front of the fire jiggling her golden slipper on her toe and leaning a superb arm along the chimney-piece. She waited restively until Mervyn had gone and then said: ‘That man gives me the horrors.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Forrester.

‘He’s such a creep. They all are, if it comes to that. Oh yes, I know all about Hilly’s ideas and I grant you it’s one way out of the servant problem. I mean if we’re to keep Halberds up and all that, this lot is one way of doing it. Personally, I’d rather have Greeks or something. You know.’

‘You don’t see it, as Hilary says he does, from the murderer’s point-of-view?’ Mrs Forrester observed.

‘Oh, I know he’s on about all that,’ Cressida said, jiggling her slipper, ‘but, let’s face it, gracious living is what really turns him on. Me, too. You know?’

Mrs Forrester stared at her for several seconds and then, with an emphatic movement of her torso, directed herself at Troy. ‘How do you manage?’ she asked.

‘As best we can. My husband’s a policeman and his hours are enough to turn any self-respecting domestic into a psychotic wreck.’

‘A policeman?’ Cressida exclaimed and added, ‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Hilly told me. But he’s madly high-powered and famous, isn’t he?’

As there seemed to be no answer to this Troy did not attempt to make one.

‘Shouldn’t we be doing something about the tree?’ she asked Mrs Forrester.

‘Hilary likes to supervise. You should know that by now.’

‘Not exactly a jet-set scene, is it?’ Cressida said. ‘You know. Gaol-boss. Gaol-doctor. Warders. Chaplain. To say nothing of the gaol-kids. Oh, I forgot. A groovy shower of neighbours all very county and not one under the age of seventy. Hilarious. Let the bells chime.’

‘I am seventy years of age and my husband is seventy-three.’

‘There I go,’ Cressida said. ‘You know? The bottom.’ She burst out laughing and suddenly knelt at Mrs Forrester’s feet. She swung back the glossy burden of her hair and put her hands together. ‘I’m not as lethally awful as I make out,’ she said. ‘You’ve both been fantastic to me. Always. I’m grateful. Hilly will have to beat me like a gong. You know? Bang-bang. Then I’ll behave beautifully: Sweetie-pie, Aunt B, forgive me.’

Troy thought: Aunt Bed would have to be a Medusa to freeze her, and sure enough a smile twitched at the corners of Mrs Forrester’s mouth. ‘I suppose you’re no worse than the rest of your generation,’ she conceded. ‘You’re clean and neat: I’ll say that for you.’

‘As clean as a whistle and as neat as a new pin, aren’t I? Do you think I’ll adorn Hilly’s house, Aunt B?’

‘Oh, you’ll look nice,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘You may depend upon that. See you behave yourself.’

‘Behave myself,’ Cressida repeated. There was a pause. The fire crackled. A draught from somewhere up near the ceiling caused the kissing-bough to turn a little on its cord. In the dining-room, made distant by heavy walls and doors, Hilary’s laugh sounded. With a change of manner so marked as to be startling Cressida said: ‘Would you call me a sinful lady, Aunt Bedelia?’

‘What on earth are you talking about, child? What’s the matter with you?’

‘Quite a lot, it appears. Look.’

She opened her golden bag and took out a folded piece of paper. ‘I found it under my door when I went up to dress. I was saving it for Hilary,’ she said, ‘but you two may as well see it. Go on, please. Open it up. Read it. Both of you.’

Mrs Forrester stared at her for a moment, frowned and unfolded the paper. She held it away from her so that Troy could see what was printed on it in enormous capitals.

SINFUL LADY BEWARE

AN UNCHASTE WOMAN IS AN ABOMINATION.

HE SHALL NOT SUFFER THEE TO DWELL IN

HIS HOUSE.

‘What balderdash is this? Where did you get it?’

‘I told you. Under my door.’

Mrs Forrester made an abrupt movement as if to crush the paper but Cressida’s hand was laid over hers. ‘No, don’t,’ Cressida said, ‘I’m going to show it to Hilary. And I must say I hope it’ll change his mind about his ghastly Nigel.’

IV

When Hilary was shown the paper, which was as soon as the men came into the drawing-room, he turned very quiet. For what seemed a long time he stood with it in his hands, frowning at it and saying nothing. Mr Smith walked over to him, glanced at the paper and gave out a soft, protracted whistle. Colonel Forrester looked inquiringly from Hilary to his wife who shook her head at him. He then turned away to admire the tree and the kissing-bough.

‘Well, boy,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘I don’t know. Not, I think, what I am expected to make of it. Aunt Bed.’

‘Whatever anybody makes of it,’ Cressida pointed out, ‘it’s not the nicest kind of thing to find in one’s bedroom.’

Hilary broke into a strange apologia: tender, oblique, guarded. It was a horrid, silly thing to have happened, he told Cressida and she mustn’t let it trouble her. It wasn’t worth a second thought. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘up the chimney with it, vulgar little beast,’ and threw it on the fire. It blackened, its preposterous legend turned white and started out in momentary prominence, it was reduced to a wraith of itself and flew out of sight. ‘Gone! Gone! Gone!’ chanted Hilary rather wildly and spread his arms.

‘I don’t think you ought to have done that,’ Cressida said, ‘I think we ought to have kept it.’

‘That’s right,’ Mr Smith chimed in. ‘For dabs,’ he added.

This familiar departmental word startled Troy. Mr Smith grinned at her. ‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘Innit? What your good man calls routine, that is. Dabs. You oughter kep’ it, ’Illy.’

‘I think, Uncle Bert, I must be allowed to manage this ridiculous little incident in my own way.’

‘Hullo-ullo-ullo!’

‘I’m quite sure, Cressida darling, it’s merely an idiot-joke on somebody’s part. How I detest practical jokes!’ Hilary hurried on with an unconvincing return to his usual manner. He turned to Troy. ‘Don’t you?’

‘When they’re as unfunny as this. If this is one.’

‘Which I don’t for a moment believe,’ Cressida said. ‘Joke! It’s a deliberate insult. Or worse.’ She appealed to Mrs Forrester. ‘Isn’t it?’ she demanded.

‘I haven’t the remotest idea what it may be. What do you say to all this, Fred? I said what –’

She broke off. Her husband had gone to the far end of the room and was pacing out the distance from the french windows to the tree.

‘Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen – fifteen feet exactly,’ he was saying. ‘I shall have to walk fifteen feet. Who’s going to shut the french window after me? These things need to be worked out.’

‘Honestly, Hilly darling, I do not think it can be all shrugged off, you know, like a fun thing. When you yourself have said Nigel always refers to his victim as a sinful lady. It seems to me to be perfectly obvious he’s set his sights at me and I find it terrifying. You know, terrifying.’

‘But,’ Hilary said, ‘it isn’t. I promise you, my lovely child, it’s not at all terrifying. The circumstances are entirely different –’

‘I should hope so, considering she was a tart.’

‘– and of course I shall get to the bottom of it. It’s too preposterous. I shall put it before –’

‘You can’t put it before anybody. You’ve burnt it.’

‘Nigel is completely recovered.’

‘’Ere,’ Mr Smith said. ‘What say one of that lot’s got it in for ’im? What say it’s been done to discredit ’im? Planted? Spiteful, like?’

‘But they get on very well together.’

‘Not with the colonel’s chap. Not with Moult they don’t. No love lost there, I’ll take a fiver on it. I seen the way they look at ’im. And ’im at them.’

‘Nonsense, Smith,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Moult’s been with us for twenty years.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Oh Lord!’ Cressida said loudly and dropped into an armchair.

‘– and who’s going to read out the names?’ the colonel speculated. ‘I can’t wear my specs. They’d look silly.’

‘Fred!’

‘What, B?’

‘Come over here, I said come over here.’

‘Why? I’m working things out.’

‘You’re over-exciting yourself. Come here. It’s about Moult. I said it’s –’

The colonel, for him almost crossly, said: ‘You’ve interrupted my train of thought, B. What about Moult?’

As if in response to a heavily contrived cue and a shove from off-stage, the door opened and in came Moult himself, carrying a salver.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ Moult said to Hilary, ‘but I thought perhaps this might be urgent, sir. For the colonel, sir.’

‘What is it, Moult?’ the colonel asked quite testily.

Moult advanced the salver in his employer’s direction. Upon it lay an envelope addressed in capitals: ’COL FORRESTER.’

‘It was on the floor of your room, sir. By the door, sir. I thought it might be urgent,’ said Moult.

CHAPTER 3

Happy Christmas

When Colonel Forrester read the message on the paper he behaved in much the same way as his nephew before him. That is to say for some seconds he made no move and gave no sign of any particular emotion. Then he turned rather pink and said to Hilary: ‘Can I have a word with you, old boy?’ He folded the paper and his hands were unsteady.

‘Yes, of course –’ Hilary began when his aunt loudly interjected. ‘No!’

‘B, you must let me –’

‘No. If you’ve been made An Object,’ she said, ‘I want to know how, I said –’

‘I heard you. No, B. No, my dear. It’s not suitable.’

‘Nonsense. Fred, I insist –’ She broke off and in a completely changed voice said: ‘Sit down, Fred. Hilary!’

Hilary went quickly to his uncle. They helped him to the nearest chair. Mrs Forrester put her hand in his breast pocket and took out a small phial. ‘Brandy,’ she said and Hilary fetched it from the tray Mervyn had left in the room.

Mr Smith said to Troy: ‘It’s ’is ticker. He takes turns.’

He went to the far end of the room and opened a window. The North itself returned, stirring the tree and turning the kissing-bough.

Colonel Forrester sat with his eyes closed, his hair ruffled and his breath coming short. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ he whispered. ‘No need to fuss.’

‘Nobody’s fussing,’ his wife said. ‘You can shut that window, if you please, Smith.’

Cressida gave an elaborate and prolonged shiver. ‘Thank God for that, at least,’ she muttered to Troy who ignored her.

‘Better,’ said the colonel without opening his eyes. The others stood back.

The group printed an indelible image across Troy’s field of observation: an old man with closed eyes, fetching his breath short, Hilary, elegant in plum-coloured velvet and looking perturbed, Cressida lounging discontentedly and beautifully in a golden chair, Mrs Forrester, with folded arms a step or two removed from her husband and watchful of him. And coming round the Christmas tree, a little old cockney in a grand smoking jacket.

In its affluent setting and its air of dated formality the group might have served as subject-matter for some Edwardian problem-painter: Orchardson or, better still, the Hon. John Collier. And the title? ‘The Letter’. For there it lay where the colonel had dropped it, in exactly the right position on the carpet, the focal-point of the composition.

To complete the organization of this hopelessly obsolete canvas Mr Smith stopped short in his tracks, while Mrs Forrester, Hilary and Cressida turned their heads and looked, as he did, at the white paper on the carpet.

And then the still picture animated. The colonel opened his eyes. Mrs Forrester took five steps across the carpet and picked up the paper.

‘Aunt Bed – !’ Hilary protested but she shut him up with one of her looks.

The paper had fallen on its face. She reversed it and read and – a phenomenon that is distressing in the elderly – blushed to the roots of her hair.

‘Aunt Bed –?’

Her mouth shut like a trap. An extraordinary expression came into her face. Fury? Troy wondered. Fury certainly but something else? Could it possibly be some faint hint of gratification? Without a word she handed the paper to her nephew.

As Hilary read it his eyebrows rose. He opened his mouth, shut it, re-read the message, and then, to Troy’s utter amazement, made a stifled sound and covered his mouth. He stared wildly at her, seemed to pull himself together and in a trembling voice said: ‘This is – no – I mean – this is preposterous. My dear Aunt Bed!’

‘Don’t call me THAT!’ shouted his aunt.

‘I’m most dreadfully sorry. I always do – oh! Oh! I see.’

‘Fred. Are you better?’

‘I’m all right now, thank you, B. It was just one of my little goes. It wasn’t – that thing that brought it on, I do assure you. Hilly’s quite right, my dear. It is preposterous. I’m very angry, of course, on your account, but it is

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