Chapter Nine
We offered to help Clarice find her way to her next location, but she said she was on her way back to her room. It was on the same corridor as the dining room so she was confident she could find her own way without any trouble.
We left her playing and started to walk towards the long gallery, where we might, we thought, see something in the wan morning light that we’d missed in the evening gloom.
As we neared the stairs we could hear voices coming from inside the Bridgewaters’ room. It was Patience and Dotty and, though their voices weren’t raised, they were definitely not happy.
‘. . . you and I both know he did it,’ said Patience. ‘Robert knows, too, and he’s going to go to JB unless Gran comes clean and gives it back.’
‘He wouldn’t. Oh, Speedy, he couldn’t.’
‘He can and he will. Can’t you intercede? I don’t want to see Gran fall from favour any more than you do, and God knows I can’t bear to see Robert getting the upper hand in anything. Can’t you just persuade him to give it back?’
There was movement within the room and it sounded as though one or both of them might be heading for the door, so we hurried on.
As we entered the long gallery, we saw Wilson, bending forwards and examining a chronometer in its polished wooden case.
He looked up as we entered. ‘Hello again, ladies. Have you seen this?’
We moved closer and I tried my best to feign interest in the clock.
Lady Hardcastle’s interest appeared to be genuine. ‘I was hoping JB might talk about it when we were in here yesterday.’
‘Me, too – that’s why I came back. This one is British.
1861. One of only twenty made by this company to this specification.
It was accurate to within a second a month.
Can you imagine? When it was new, a captain could sail from Liverpool to New York and his chronometer would only be out by one second.
I can’t do the navigational calculations, but I’d bet his reckoning of his position would be out by yards rather than miles. ’
Suddenly I wasn’t having to feign interest. ‘It’s an important instrument, then?’
‘One might argue that John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer in the 1700s was what enabled Britannia to rule the waves,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘That and a complete disregard for anyone else’s rights and sovereignty, obviously.’
Wilson gave a puzzled frown. ‘I suppose when you put it like that . . .’
‘It’s a beautiful thing, though,’ I said. ‘The clock, not the Empire.’
He was on safer ground. ‘Beautiful indeed. I had a client asking about one last year but we couldn’t find one for sale. I wish I’d known JB then – we might have been able to do a deal.’
‘Does he sell his pieces?’ asked Lady Hardcastle. ‘I got the feeling he wasn’t that sort of collector. He seems to be building the collection with a purpose – selling items off after he’d taken such pains to acquire them doesn’t seem like him at all.’
‘No, you’re probably right. So many of my clients are interested only in the monetary value of their collections. I forget that some of them actually want the pieces for their own sake. I confess I’m a bit baffled by posh people. No offence.’
‘None taken, dear. I’m a bit baffled by many of us, too.’
‘I mean, it’s wonderful that there are people about with money to burn – I depend on them for my living – but so many of them are so .
. . odd. I suppose once you have that much money you struggle to find things to spend it on.
Now you’ve said it, though, JB really is a proper enthusiast. These things, these hundreds – maybe thousands – of pounds’ worth of things all mean something to him. ’
Lady Hardcastle nodded. ‘I think they do. It’s a very focused collection.’
‘What’s his obsession with the sea?’
‘He told us once over dinner at his London home. It seems he read Moby-Dick as a young man and it very much captured his imagination. When he found out he was born the day the book was published in America, he decided they must be linked in some way. He developed a fascination with anything to do with whaling, and then with maritime history generally.’
‘Then I’d never have persuaded him to part with the chronometer even if I had known him.
This one was owned by the captain of a steamship that almost took the record for the fastest Atlantic crossing three years running.
Oddly, I think there’s something rather romantic about being an almost record holder. ’
‘I agree. We British do love an underdog.’
We all looked at the chronometer a little more. I was still a tiny bit uncertain what more we could learn from staring at it, but the other two seemed to be enjoying themselves.
‘Do you have a hankering for the sea?’ I asked Wilson.
He gave that puzzled frown again. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you went out all afternoon to stare at it yesterday, even though it was getting a bit blowy. It seems like the sort of thing someone who shared JB’s romantic notions of seafaring might do.’
‘Ah, yes, I see what you mean. But no, I don’t.
I have an Englishman’s sentimental idea of our scepter’d isle and all that – a precious stone set in the silver sea – but I have no desire to set sail.
I just wanted some time to think, away from that ghastly tick Everett.
He’d created such a poisonous atmosphere and I needed to clear my head.
I’m trying to secure something for JB and I needed to think my plan through without any distractions. ’
‘How exciting,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Have you been JB’s antiquities consultant long?’
‘Not long, no. We met last October. A pal of mine introduced us. JB heard that some charts once owned by a Nantucket whaling captain had come on the market and my pal suggested I might be the man to get hold of them for him. We missed the boat on that one, as it were, but I did find him a couple of diaries and a rather nice telescope, so we kept in touch and I look out for things he might like. I’ve let him know about a few but he’s not been interested.
Now, though, I have a lead on a ship’s bell salvaged from a trading ship that sank in the Gulf of Maine in 1782 during the War of Independence, so he invited me to join him this weekend. Fingers crossed, eh?’
‘Fingers crossed, indeed,’ I said.
‘At least, that’s what I thought I was here for until I found out he’d also invited Miss Thacker.’
‘Ah,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘the fair Lily. I can’t see why he wouldn’t want to mix business with a little mischief. A man who built an entire collection inspired by his love of a book must have some romance in his soul.’
‘I’m sure he means well, but I could do without being thrown into the company of random women.’
‘I think she’s rather charming,’ I said.
‘She’s delightful, but I’d much prefer to make my own matches. I’m quite capable of meeting suitable women without help, no matter how well-meaning the helper might be.’
‘I don’t believe JB will mess you about,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘His matchmaking is just a little fun, I think – Lily is here to do some research for the photographs JB wants, after all. He might be a romantic mischief-maker, but he’s a barely reformed robber baron at heart.’
Wilson smiled. ‘I need all the robber barons and capitalist exploiters of the bourgeoisie I can get my hands on – they pay my rent. But I do wonder what blackness lurks in their souls. No one ever got rich by being kind and selfless. If you ask me, there’s always something wicked lurking beneath their oh-so-proper facades. Present company excepted, of course.’
Lady Hardcastle grinned. ‘Oh, you have no idea of the wickedness and depravity that lurks beneath my facade, dear. I terrify even myself, sometimes.’
Secrets had been my stock in trade for my entire adult life, and I liked to imagine I had learned to handle them with suitable professionalism.
Despite my professed facility for keeping and managing secrets, there remained an odd feeling of disconnection when dealing with people who were involved in something but were not privy to the full details, as though we were living in two separate worlds with two separate versions of the same events.
And so it was an odd experience to be among a group of friends who had suffered a loss – even if the lost one wasn’t someone who would be greatly missed – and who thought his death was a medical tragedy, when we knew he had been murdered.
To them it was sad but was ‘just one of those things’.
Death comes to us all in the end.
To us it was a wicked crime whose perpetrator was in our midst. Like us, that perpetrator was in on the secret and we were living in that separate world where that one tiny piece of knowledge changed everything.
All of them, including – we presumed – the killer, had made it to lunch. The ‘heigh ho, what can one do?’ mood of the breakfast table was fading in favour of a certain snippy impatience.
It was Sidwell-Plant who gave voice to the reason for the change of atmosphere.
‘I mean, it’s not as though we weren’t expecting to stay until Monday morning anyway, and an extra day would ordinarily be a treat.
I, for one, could do with a long weekend away from the office.
But we have to stay. That blasted storm destroyed the boat and now we’re stranded on the island rather than idly passing a few pleasant days here by choice. ’
I couldn’t help but think that a more mature response would have been simply to accept that things couldn’t be changed and to try to make the best of it. Perhaps that was the Stoic in me.
‘Could be worse, old chap,’ said Bridgewater. ‘Could be you lying dead in the storeroom rather than Dreadful Edgar.’
‘Granville!’ said Dorothy. ‘Do at least try to show a little respect. Think of poor Clarice.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Clarice. ‘I’ve called him worse and I’m not sorry to be shot of him.’
Patience was sitting next to me. Under her breath, she said, ‘I’d be just as happy if it were either of them.’