The Ghost Writer

The Revenant
PART I

Though a Shbourn house stood only a few hundred yards from the village of Hurst Green, the surrounding woodland was so dense, and the trees so tall, that Cordelia had often imagined herself living deep in an enchanted forest. As a child, perched high above the lane in her favourite window-seat, she had dreamed away whole days as Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and other melancholy heroines of romance. No handsome prince had so far appeared, possibly because the sign at the village end of the lane made it look like a private drive. Just beyond the house, to the left, the lane diminished to a muddy footpath. It was, in fact, a right-of-way through the wood, but the villagers seldom used it, and not simply because of the mud. According to local legend, as Cordelia had later discovered, the house was not only unlucky, but troubled by the apparition of a veiled woman in black: the ghost of her own grandmother, Imogen de Vere.

It was a tall, tower-like stone house, perhaps a hundred years old, evidently built, as Cordelia's Aunt Una was fond of complaining, by someone with a passion for climbing stairs. From the rear of the house, the land sloped downwards, and from the upstairs windows you could look out across the garden and above the treetops, over green pastures and wooded hills. But at the front, there was only a narrow forecourt of gravel and then the lane, beyond which the trees grew even higher than the house. By the time she was sixteen, Cordelia had advanced from the window-seat to the sill of the second-floor sitting-room window, where she liked to read on summer afternoons. Aunt Una could never see her leaning against the frame of the open window, so close to the edge that she could look straight down the long vertical fall to the gravel below, without an involuntary squeak of dread. But Cordelia was not in the least afraid of heights.

About ghosts she was not so sure. When she was seven or eight, she and her sister Beatrice had spent many days happily playing at ghosts with the aid of a worn-out sheet begged from Mrs Green the housekeeper, creeping along gloomy corridors and lurking in empty rooms, sending one another into paroxysms of pleasurable terror, until one afternoon it occurred to Cordelia to surprise Beatrice by dressing up as Grandmama's ghost. All she could recall of Grandmama, who had died just before her fifth birthday, was a silent, veiled figure, sitting by the fireside or moving about the garden. It was not polite to mention the veil. As Aunt Una had privately explained, Grandmama always wore it because she had once been very ill, and light was bad for her skin.

Grandmama's room had not been disturbed since the day of her funeral. The door was always locked. But Cordelia had recently discovered that the keys to the bedroom doors were interchangeable. Thinking that her father was safely downstairs in the drawing-room, she stole into the room, which smelt strongly of camphor, and began opening chests and closets to see what she could find. In the bottom drawer of a clothes-press, she came upon Grandmama's black veil, neatly laid out all by itself. She lifted it out and pressed the cool material against her face, breathing in camphor, and some other medicinal smell, and a very faint fragrance of perfume. When she put it on, the front of the veil came right down to her waist, whilst the back-it went all around, like a headdress-almost touched the floor. She could still see, though dimly, but when she looked in the long mirror her face was quite invisible, and because of the angle it seemed as if the veil was hovering of its own accord.

Panic seized her, and she fled into the corridor, only to confront a huge, dark figure blocking the way to the stairs. Her own shriek was drowned by a hoarse yell of terror, booming and echoing around her as she tore at the constricting veil and saw that the dark figure was in fact her father. Worse than her own fear, worse even than the beating that followed, was the memory of that cry, and of his face, momentarily frozen in horror before rage came to his rescue. Later he told her that he was sorry to have beaten her; he had lost his temper, he said, seeing her in Grandmama's veil. Though he was usually very indulgent, Cordelia found the apology troubling; she knew she had been terribly wicked, and deserved her punishment, and it seemed to her that Papa was trying to convince her-and perhaps himself-that he had not been frightened. She knew that Papa, a soldier, was as brave as a lion; Aunt Una was always saying so, yet she dared not ask what had so alarmed him. There were no more games of ghosts, and she was plagued for many months by a nightmare in which she was pursued and finally cornered by a malevolent, shrouded figure, who appeared in many guises but always became, in the instant before she woke in terror, her grandmother in the act of raising her veil.

She was, at the same time, fascinated by the portrait-the only surviving likeness of Imogen de Vere-which had hung on the second-floor landing for as long as she could remember. It showed a woman of great beauty, apparently in her early twenties, though she must have been about thirty-five when it was painted, against a dark, indistinct background. Her face, lit from above, was partly in shadow, accentuating the darkness of her large, luminous eyes. She wore an emerald green gown, cut high at the neck; her heavy, copper-coloured hair was loosely pinned up, with a few escaped strands curling across her forehead. The artist (who had not signed his name to the portrait) had captured some elusive quality in her gaze-an intense serenity, or perhaps a serene intensity of feeling-which compelled your eyes to return again and again to hers.

Though Cordelia did not doubt that the woman in the picture was, or had become, her grandmother, she found it curiously difficult to associate the face that so compelled her imagination with the veiled figure of memory-or nightmare. By the time she was fully grown, Cordelia had only to pause in front of the picture to feel that she was resuming a wordless intimacy which had accompanied her all through her childhood. Somehow her sense of communion with the portrait had become entwined with her feeling for her lost mother, whom she had never known: Frances de Vere had died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to Beatrice. It was not a matter of physical resemblance, for the photograph on Cordelia's dressing-table was of a shy, fair-haired girl, smiling tentatively at the camera. She looked about sixteen years old, and had died before her twenty-fourth birthday.

Imogen de Vere herself had died when she was not much more than fifty. Over the years, Cordelia had gradually assembled fragments of her grandmothers history; she had deduced that Imogen must have separated from her husband at about the time of the onset of her illness, and with her only child Arthur (Cordelia's father) who was then twelve or thirteen years old, come to live at Ashbourn House with her cousin Theodore Ashbourn and his sister Una. The illness-a mysterious and virulent disease of the skin, which no doctor had ever been able to diagnose-had plainly been far more severe than Cordelia had once believed. Imogen de Vere had spent the last fifteen years of her life at Ashbourn, permanently veiled and in constant pain. She slept badly, and would roam about the house in the small hours. Uncle Theodore had sometimes seen her wandering the garden by moonlight; she seemed to find relief in movement, and had walked miles every day until her final illness. So it was hardly surprising that many of the inhabitants of Hurst Green would swear to having seen a veiled figure peering from an upstairs window, or gliding amongst the trees of Hurst Wood, long after Imogen de Vere had been laid to rest in the village churchyard.

On a chill, grey afternoon late in February, soon after her twenty-first birthday, Cordelia was standing in front of the portrait, lost in sombre reflection. Beatrice had declined, reasonably enough in view of the weather, to come out for a walk, but then a little later Cordelia had seen her disappearing along the lane in waterproof and Wellingtons. As children, they had played together constantly, but their intimacy had not survived the death of their father, who had fought unscathed through four years of war only to lose his life a month before the Armistice. Cordelia, who was then thirteen, had tried to comfort her sister, but Beatrice had refused all consolation. She would not speak of her father, or remain in the room if his name was even mentioned, and if she wept for him, she did so alone. Nor would she tolerate any inquiry as to her feelings, which seemed to alternate between listless apathy and a sullen, silent anger at everyone and everything around her.

Thus she had remained for many months, and it seemed to Cordelia that her sister had never entirely recovered; or at least, that relations between them had never been the same. Perhaps they had simply grown apart, even in small things: both, for example, were avid readers, but Cordelia would always set her book aside for a chance of conversation, whereas Beatrice, who read only novels, had become even less tolerant of interruptions. In the game of animal comparisons Cordelia liked to play in the privacy of her own imagination, her sister had always been a cat. Beatrice had inherited their mothers almond-shaped eyes; her face narrowed markedly to a small, determined chin, making her cheekbones look more prominent than they really were. Now, at nineteen, she was more than ever the cat that walks by itself: watchful, silent, aloof, disdainful of petting, the kind that will settle only on the lap of its own choosing. Cordelia had sometimes accused herself of clinging to a romantic ideal of sisterly intimacy; yet she could not shake off the feeling that a door had been closed against her at the time of Papa's death, and never reopened.

Beatrice would not concede that anything had altered between them, but there was something about the very adroitness with which she had learned to evade her sister's overtures that seemed to say: "You have wounded me very deeply, though you profess not to understand what you have done; so I will not quarrel; there would be no point; of course we shall stay friends, but I shall never completely trust you again. As for the door you accuse me of closing, you are quite mistaken; it is you who have closed it; or perhaps there never was a door, only a blank wall, which is no more than you deserve." Cordelia had racked her memory and her conscience; she had privately asked her aunt and uncle, whether they knew of anything she had done to offend her sister, but no, Beatrice had said nothing against her. "You must not take it personally," Uncle Theodore had said only recently. "Your sisters nature is very different from yours; she turns inward, away from others, as you turn towards them. I don't think she has ever got over your fathers death. You must not blame yourself for what is none of your fault."

His words came back to her as she stood on the chilly landing. The mention of her father-and a certain unease in Theodore's tired, kindly, slightly bloodshot eyes (a beagles, or a bloodhounds; she had never quite decided)-had stirred an old, obscure suspicion that his death was somehow the cause of the estrangement. As if summoned by Imogen de Vere's intent, shadowed gaze, her thoughts were drawn along a path from which she had always turned uneasily aside, as she had once avoided the corridor that led past Grandmama's bedroom.

Papa had blamed Beatrice for their mother's death. Not consciously, she felt sure; and perhaps "blame" was too strong. He would have been shocked, no doubt, if anyone had confronted him with the idea. But just as she had always known that she was Papa's favourite, so she had become aware of a certain constraint in his manner towards Beatrice. Whenever he came home on leave, the two girls would be allowed to wait, if they were not at school, at the front gate, and run along the lane to greet him as he appeared at the turning. Cordelia, being the elder, would always reach him first, and fling herself into his arms, and he would swing her high into the air and onto his shoulder. But with Beatrice he was never quite as spontaneous; sometimes he seemed almost to recoil for an instant, though the shrinking would be as swiftly checked, and it seemed to Cordelia that he never sought Beatrice out, whereas he would often come looking for her when he wanted a game (which was how he had caught her wearing Grandmama's veil that afternoon). Everyone else in the house, including Mrs Green, had made a special pet of Beatrice, and yet Cordelia had never felt any the less loved; on the contrary, she was proud to be included in a sort of adult conspiracy to spoil Beatrice (though nobody had put it quite like that), especially when Papa was away with his regiment. They had kept up the conspiracy through four anxious years of war, until the arrival of the letter from the War Office, the dark winter of grieving, and Beatrice's retreat into sullen, resentful silence.

The suspicion that her father had, however unconsciously, held Beatrice responsible for the loss of their mother, did not begin to trouble Cordelia until after his death. The more she struggled against the idea, the more firmly it took root, until she felt compelled to question her aunt. But instead of offering the hoped-for reassurance, Aunt Una had looked very grave, and talked of how deeply Papa had loved their mother, and how he had married her as soon as they had both turned twenty-one and no longer needed their parents' consent-though Grandmama, she added hastily, had given them her blessing; they had been married from Ashbourn House… and of course it had been a terrible blow to Papa, losing their mother so young, but Cordelia must always remember that he had loved both her and Beatrice very dearly, and try not to think such troubling thoughts.

Years later, she had learned from Uncle Theodore that the reason they had never seen their grandparents on Mama's side, and the reason Papa had never so much as mentioned them, was not because they were dead, but because they had never forgiven him for the death of their only daughter. They had blamed him, in other words, just as he had blamed Beatrice.

But why should Beatrice have turned against her, Cordelia, on account of their fathers death? For that was what had happened, she was sure of it. That subtle note of accusation… as if Cordelia had somehow betrayed her sister; but how? By having been his favourite? Or had Beatrice divined the reason behind Papas reserve and taken the burden of Mamas death upon herself?-and then assumed that Cordelia blamed her too? Such a heavy burden… but why should she assume that? And spurn all reassurance? It is not fair; why does she hate me so?

Cordelia again became conscious of her surroundings, realising that she had spoken the words aloud. The face of Imogen de Vere seemed to coalesce out of its dark background, glowing as if lit from within. "No, it is not fair," she imagined the portrait replying; "do you think it was fair that I lost my beauty overnight?" Of course not, any more than the loss of Papa had been fair; but knowing that half the families in the kingdom had lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers had not made their own loss any easier to bear. It had not been fair of Mama's parents to hold Papa responsible for her death. Or to refuse to acknowledge their own granddaughters because of it. "Unto the third generation…" But Papa had not sinned; and besides, the last of her belief-at least in the omnipotent God of the Scriptures-had died with him.

Aunt Una and Uncle Theodore had done their conscientious best, making sure that she and Beatrice had been christened and confirmed, but Cordelia felt that neither of them really believed. Even Mr Gathorne-Hyde, the present vicar, did not sound as if he believed his own sermons about God's mysterious ways and the gift of free will. A poisoned, maleficent gift, that allowed men to slaughter one another wholesale. Or a single child to starve. Beatrice had refused to enter a church since the day the War Office letter arrived. Yet Cordelia still occasionally attended. More often, she would slip into St Mary's when it was empty and stand for a while in the dim silence, which seemed to echo even when the church was completely still, breathing the smells of ancient timbers and stone, musty cassocks and snuffed candles and dried flowers, "hoping it might be so"-without even knowing what "it" might be.

Last autumn, she had gone with Uncle Theodore to visit Percival Thornton, the father of one of Papa's dead comrades. Robert Thornton had died only a few months before Arthur de Vere, and the families had kept in touch. Their visits, though inevitably painful, meant a great deal to Mr Thornton, a widower who lived quite alone. Each time they saw him, he looked thinner, greyer and more stooped; his grief was visibly consuming him. Roberts medals, brilliantly polished, were displayed in a mahogany case in the parlour; his dress uniform, immaculately brushed, hung beside his bed in his old room, and the house was crowded with photographs of Robert at every stage of his short life, most of them taken by Mr Thornton.

There was a settled ritual to these visits. They began with an inspection of various mementoes, followed by tea, which Cordelia always insisted on preparing, and then a stroll in the garden if the weather was fine. But on this occasion, it seemed to Cordelia that he was striving to conceal an unwonted, almost feverish anxiety. She noticed, too, that since their last visit his hands had become curiously blotched and stained. As they were finishing their tea, he asked, rather hesitantly, whether he might show them a photograph.

They were naturally expecting yet another portrait of Robert, but the picture he brought out showed only a vacant bench which stood against the hedge at the rear of Mr Thornton's garden, beside an ornamental fountain-a tiered array of stone dishes, each wider than the one above, with a cherub at the top, though the water had long ceased to flow: the dishes were filled with autumn leaves. Dappled sunlight, evidently filtering through the branches of an overhanging tree, was falling upon the bench.

Cordelia had moved over to sit on the arm of her uncles chair; Mr Thornton remained hovering on the other side. She could feel his agitation increasing as the seconds passed, and neither she nor Uncle Theodore could find anything to say.

"Don't you see him?" said Mr Thornton at last, in a voice of desolate appeal. A blotched and trembling finger indicated the end of the bench nearest the fountain. Peering more closely, Cordelia suddenly saw that if you took a semicircular splash of light, falling roughly where the head of a seated person might have been, to be the lower half of a human face, the confusing patchwork of light and shadow beneath could form the suggestion of a body-a man's body, if you took the shadows of (presumably) two vertical branches for legs

… and if you then went back to the "face", there were indistinct patches of shadow which would do for his mouth and nostrils, and yes, two faint specks of light more or less where his eyes ought to be… and below, glimpses of a collar, a shoulder, a lapel…

Robert Thornton, as she had last seen him nine years ago, in his officer's cap, uniform jacket, breeches and boots, materialised upon the bench. The back of her neck prickled; she glanced at her uncle, whose bewildered expression had not altered; then up at Mr Thornton's anxious, imploring face, and back to the picture.

The figure had vanished. There was nothing but the empty bench, and the dappled shadows of leaves and branches. Again she fixed her eyes upon the "face", but she could not summon the illusion a second time; it remained simply a patch of sunlight on the hedge. Something drew her gaze away from the picture, to the framed photographs ranged along the mantelpiece; there was a gap near the end to the left, where last time, she was sure, there had been a picture of Robert Thornton, in uniform, seated on this same bench.

She heard a quavering intake of breath. Mr Thornton's gaze had followed her own.

"It is true then. He was there." He was smiling, and tears were streaming down his cheeks.

"Yes," she said, unhesitatingly, though the figure-or rather the memory of the other photograph-had not returned, and Uncle Theodore was looking as bewildered as ever. "Yes, I am sure he was."

Cordelia stood up and embraced the old man, who was almost sobbing with joy and relief.

"I thought I should move… the other… so as not to influence you. It was his favourite place in the garden, you see," he added, beaming down at Uncle Theodore, who could plainly see nothing at all.

"It is Robert, uncle," said Cordelia, hastily resuming her place in order to indicate where the "face" had been, "here on the bench, by the fountain."

"Oh-er-yes, yes of course. I am sure I see him now. Tell me-er-when was this taken, Percival?"

"Last week, dear friend."

"Last week? I mean-er, how extraordinary; that is to say, how wonderful…"

"Yes," said the old man. "I had not quite dared to believe it until Cordelia saw him too. I feared I might be deluding myself. And after so long… I had almost given up hope."

He moved slowly across to a cabinet on the other side of the room, and returned with a file-box which he set before them. It was full of photographs. Looking through them, Cordelia saw with something like horror that they were all of the empty bench, all taken from the same angle, in every degree of brightness from full sunlight to near-darkness, hundreds and hundreds of them.

"I read about it here, you see." Mr Thornton, his eyes still wet with emotion, passed them a large book. Photographing the Invisible, Practical Studies in Spirit Photographs, Spirit Portraits and Other Rare Phenomena, by James Mclntyre. "The camera, as you see, can sometimes detect what the naked eye cannot." To Cordelia, leafing through the pages, it seemed that a great deal of what the camera had detected was plainly fraudulent: ghostly faces, conveniently shrouded in a sort of soap-bubble haze, floated behind group portraits, or bobbed about on staircases with no visible means of support. She could tell that her uncle was struggling to hide his scepticism. Yet her own illusion had been utterly lifelike. Despite knowing what had caused it, the memory was still so vivid that she understood Mr Thornton's reaction only too well.

"I do all my own developing now," he continued. "Mr Mclntyre says-or at least implies-that commercial developers are not always to be trusted. The Church, you know; they don't approve. And I had almost despaired, after so many attempts. But now… I am so happy, now you have seen him too."

Soon after, they went out into the garden. Though it was a mild, tranquil autumn day, Cordelia could not repress a slight shiver as they approached the now-celebrated bench. I don't think I could ever sit there again, she said to herself; it would seem-like trespass, or tempting fate. Yet why should I find it sinister? I should simply be delighted for poor Mr Thornton.

But as the extremity of their host's emotion subsided, she became aware that he was not as happy as he professed to be. His earlier anxiety reappeared; he asked them several times whether they were completely certain they had seen Robert in the photograph. With each repetition, Uncle Theodore's assurances sounded less convincing, her own more forced. Her spirits sank lower as the afternoon wore on, until the pressure of Mr Thornton's haunted, beseeching gaze became quite unbearable, and despite the warmth of their farewells, she left with the dismal feeling that their visit had done him more harm than good.

"I wish he had never seen that book!" she said passionately, as they were walking back to the station. "What he really wants is for Robert not to have died in the war; to have him back alive and warm and breathing, and he can't have that, and cant bear it, and the photograph only torments him."

"Indeed. But-er-how did you know, my dear, exactly what he wanted us to see?"

She explained about her illusion.

"I see-or rather, I didn't. So you think it was simply your memory of the other photograph?"

"I suppose it must have been," she replied uneasily, remembering that Mr Thornton had not actually brought out the earlier picture for comparison, "only just for that instant, I really did see Robert, sitting there in his uniform…"

Cordelia was startled out of her recollection by the awareness that Uncle Theodore was standing beside her on the landing, contemplating the portrait on which her own unseeing eyes had been fixed.

"I am so sorry, my dear. I did not mean to alarm you. You seemed so deep in thought, I didn't like to interrupt."

"No, I'm glad to be interrupted. I was remembering our last visit to poor Mr Thornton."

Uncle Theodore, when agitated, had a habit of running his hands through his thick, unruly silver-grey hair; today it was sticking out wildly in all directions. Small and wiry (at five feet seven, he was only a little above Cordelia's height), he had always looked years younger than his age. But today he seemed to be feeling the burden of his sixty-seven years; his face had taken on a greyish tinge, making the lines scored vertically down his cheek seem more than ever like fine scars or claw-marks. And there was a lurking indecision or anxiety in his bloodhound eyes that reminded her suddenly of Mr Thornton.

"Is something troubling you, uncle?" she asked, when he did not immediately reply.

"Not exactly-the fact is, my dear, I have something to say to you, and I don't know where to begin."

"Well," she smiled, "you should take the advice you always used to give me: begin at the beginning, and go on until you come to the end."

"Ah, the beginning…" he murmured, his eyes upon the face of Imogen de Vere. "Did you know" he continued, as if irrelevantly, "that your grandmother and I were once engaged to be married?"

"No, I didn't," said Cordelia, surprised.

"Ah. I thought perhaps Una might have said something."

"No, she hasn't."

I see.

He paused, as if seeking guidance from the portrait.

"As you know, I grew up mainly in Holland Park; we only came here for the summers, then. Her fathers house was only a few hundred yards from ours, but much grander. He was a City man-stocks and shares and directorships, all that sort of thing-and did very well out of it. Whereas we were in tea, as you know; perfectly comfortable, but by no means rich."

He lingered for a while on familiar ground, rehearsing the slow decline of the importing house founded by his grandfather, and the growth of the friendship between himself, his sister (Una was two years younger than Theodore), and Imogen Ward.

"Imogen and I were so slow to realise that we were in love-it was mutual-that I couldn't tell you when it began. We must have been eighteen or nineteen before anything was declared between us. But once we had spoken, we were quite certain-that is to say I was quite certain-that we would be married as soon as she had turned twenty-one.

"We knew that her father wouldn't like it. Horace Ward didn't approve of me, for a start; he thought, quite rightly, that I lacked ambition; and then, aside from the difference in wealth, he was violently opposed to marriage between cousins. We were second cousins, not first, and the relation was on our mothers' side, not his, but it made no difference. Any degree of relation was too much for him. From the day she first sounded him out, I was banned from their house, and she from ours, under threat of disinheritance. To do him justice, he was very fond of her; I think he genuinely believed that if he'd consented, he would have been making a sort of human sacrifice of his only daughter, for whom some princes mightn't have been good enough-quite apart from their habit of marrying their cousins. Anything she wanted was hers for the asking; anything except me."

Theodore was still speaking as if to the portrait of Imogen de Vere.

"Why must you be so reasonable, uncle?" said Cordelia tenderly. "He sounds absolutely horrible."

"It's a sort of failing, I suppose, always to see the other side. There are times when you should simply act… If I had known what I know now, I'd have waited, and asked her to run away with me on her twenty-first birthday. We went on meeting in secret, but inevitably, word got back to him; there were more scenes, and more threats… it was a terrible strain for her… until I began to fear that I really was ruining her life. In the end we agreed, Imogen and I, that I would go out to Calcutta as my father had hoped, to look after the business there, and stay two years, and then, if our feelings hadn't altered

… She had just turned twenty when I left.

"Her letter telling me that she was engaged to a forty-year-old banker named Ruthven de Vere arrived about three months before I was due to come home. I stayed for fifteen years."

He turned away from the portrait, towards the window at the head of the staircase, studying the wintry fields. Traces of last weeks snow still clung to the highest of the hilltops beyond.

"But uncle, I don't understand. How could she come to live with you, after all that?"

"Do you mean, because of the impropriety?"

"No, no, I mean, how could she accept, after what she'd done to you?"

"You mustn't be angry with her, my dear. Not on my account. She was seriously ill; both her parents were dead; de Vere had charge of all her money, what was left of it; she had nowhere else to turn. We'd kept in touch, you see. Another excess of reasonableness on my part; doubtless many would call it lack of spirit."

"I wouldn't. She was very lucky, to have such a generous spirit to turn to," said Cordelia, taking his arm. "But why did she leave her husband, just when she became ill? Did Papa ever see his father again? Why would Papa never speak of him? Or Aunt Una? Even you? Did you ever meet him? Ruthven de Vere, I mean?"

"No, my dear. You must remember, I was away in India until the year before-it happened; if my mother had lived longer, I wouldn't have been here at all. And Imogen's letters had been mostly about Arthur. I had heard that they had a grand house in Belgrave Square-it was one of the first in the square to be equipped with electric light-and entertained very elaborately, but she hardly mentioned any of that. Or her husband. I wrote, of course, to let her know I was back, and she replied that she would love to bring Arthur to see us, and how sorry she was to hear about my mother.

"That was the last I heard from her, until I got her wire…"

He turned back to the portrait, wincing at some painful memory.

"Why on earth did she marry him in the first place?" cried Cordelia angrily.

"Because she was in love with him, I presume. He was handsome, and cultivated, and charming, as even Una-who attended the wedding only at my insistence-was forced to concede. And a most attentive husband-everybody agreed about that-"

"Uncle, will you please stop trying to defend him? You don't believe a word you're saying. The way you said attentive' made my flesh crawl; you're only making me loathe him even more."

"My dear, you misunderstand me. I'm not defending him, I assure you, not in the least; only trying to show you how the marriage must have appeared in the eyes of the world. Even at the end."

"I don't care what the world thought, I want to know what really happened. Why he never saw Papa again. Why Papa never once mentioned him. Uncle, have you all been hiding something you think is too horrible for me to hear? I'm twenty-one now, I'm a grown woman. Besides, it couldn't be worse than some of the things I've imagined."

"Are you quite sure of that?" he asked quietly, his eyes still fixed upon the portrait. Something in his tone set her skin crawling again, though she tried not to show it, and for a little while neither of them spoke.

Struggling to reconcile her anger at the woman who had betrayed a true and faithful lover to marry for money (for surely she wouldn't have accepted de Vere if he'd been poor?) with the familiar face before her, Cordelia found that she simply could not do it. This woman-the Imogen the painter had seen and rendered with such compelling subtlety-was surely incapable of deceit, cruelty, or greed. She looked so… untouched, that was it… so entirely self-possessed

… that calm, accepting gaze that gave you the impression she understood exactly what was in your heart… a perfect stillness, yes, but living, vibrant, trembling on the edge of speech. "Thou still unravished bride of quietness": the words came to her unbidden; and with them the awareness that her anger had melted away.

"I see why you could not be angry with her," she said at last.

"I am glad you see that, my dear. It is a true likeness. His name was Henry St Clair-the painter, I mean."

"But you've always told me, uncle, that you didn't know who painted it."

"I said it was by an unknown artist, which was, and remains, true. But yes, I equivocated. When your dear father died, I resolved not to burden you with anything of-of which we must now speak-until it became necessary to do so. But now you are indeed twenty-one, and a grown woman, the necessity is upon us."

Once more he took counsel from the portrait.

"She met him-Henry St Clair-in a gallery in Bloomsbury. At a small exhibition of landscapes, including one of his, which she happened to be admiring while he was there. This is what she told me, you understand, on the one day we spoke of it. She described him very vividly: freckled and wind-burnt from a recent sketching tour-on foot, sleeping under trees; he couldn't afford so much as a bed in a village inn-slender, with one of those fresh, boyish faces that makes a man look years younger than he really is, brown eyes, curly brown hair which he wore quite long-a sort of animated brown study, she said, because he was wearing a brown velveteen jacket, somewhat paint-stained, and brown corduroy trousers.

"She bought the picture; they left the gallery together, and walked all the way up to the Heath, where they sat and talked for hours. That first afternoon, she said, was like emerging from a dark cavern into sunlight; there was a radiance about his personality… you needn't frown for my sake, my dear; I encouraged her to speak freely. He warned her that he was constitutionally vulnerable to melancholia, but throughout the time she knew him, he remained in this sunny, upland mood. And if it hadn't ended so appallingly, I would have been simply glad, I assure you… but I must not run ahead of myself.

"He had his studio above a restaurant in one of the back streets of Soho; I believe the family who ran it spoke almost no English. He told her he liked being surrounded by people talking in languages he couldn't understand; he found the noise of the kitchen cheering, and could eat downstairs for practically nothing. And after years of living hand to mouth, a modest legacy from a remote relative had-or so he assured her-lately freed him from the daily struggle for survival.

"The picture she bought-for two guineas; he would accept no more than the gallery's asking-price-was the first he had ever sold. He had been in London for several years, working relentlessly at his painting whenever he was not out earning his living (work, he said, had always been the best anodyne for his melancholia), never satisfied with what he produced, always striving to surpass himself. He had exhibited canvases before, during fits of enthusiasm, but had always removed them when the inevitable darkening of his mood followed, and his tendency towards merciless self-criticism regained the upper hand. But their-friendship was the word she insisted upon-their friendship, and the reprieve it brought from his despondency, gave him the impetus to work towards an exhibition of his own, and to begin the portrait you see before you.

"He had worked at portraiture as hard as he had worked at his landscapes, using various members of the restaurant-keeper's family for models, but every attempt before this had been painted over or scraped out. At first she worried about his devoting so much time to the picture, which obviously couldn't be shown. She came to his studio as often as she could, whenever her husband was-as she thought-safely occupied in the City. But as the weeks passed, she watched him becoming calmer, more confident, more assured, until, she said, the subtle transformation taking place in him became as absorbing as the progress of the portrait itself. Whilst he was working, they hardly exchanged a word, but those days of silent communion were, she said, amongst the happiest of her life-"

"It was not fair of her to say such things, to you of all people!" said Cordelia.

"Very little in life is fair. What Imogen Ward was to me, Henry St Clair was to her. We don't choose such attachments, my dear; they choose us. She came to me at the worst moment of her life; that was reward enough. I wanted, above all, to understand. And as you will shortly realise, there were things it was necessary for me to know.

"As to her relations with her husband; there was much that she withheld, but the truth was plain enough. Ruthven de Vere was not-or had not been-a cruel or negligent husband; on the contrary, he took enormous pride in her appearance; but there was an essential coldness at the heart of his regard; he valued her as a collector would value a rare and precious stone.

"It was clear that she had ceased to love him, and that matters between them had come to a crisis, long before she met Henry St Clair. De Vere, you see, had been her fathers protege in the City. Horace Ward trusted him entirely, and so the terms of the marriage settlement allowed him to do more or less what he liked with Imogen's fortune, and, a few years later, with everything that came to her under the terms of her fathers will. De Vere had always allowed her whatever she asked, but in such a way that almost everything she had ever bought was, at law, his property, even her clothes and jewels, as she discovered when she first asked him for a separation. If she left him, he assured her, she would leave with neither her money nor her son-in whom de Vere took very little interest; he seemed, she said, quite devoid of fatherly feeling, which made the threat even worse. And so she stayed.

"Until the day she met Henry St Clair, she had gone on playing her part with a sort of compliant indifference, waiting until Arthur would be old enough for her to leave. But from that day forward, she was playing for her life. When she was with St Clair, she never thought beyond the moment; away from him, her mind swarmed uncontrollably with plans, imaginings, hopes, longings, fears. Yet outwardly, as she knew from the compliments of her acquaintances, she had never looked more serene.

"Her husband, as she thought, suspected nothing. It was, she said, like tiptoeing around a sleeping gaoler, day after day, always managing to creep back into her cell before he stirred. Everything, she felt, must wait upon the completion of the portrait. Throughout that spring and summer, she was sustained by the conviction that if only St Clair could finish the picture before they were discovered, all would be well.

"In September, she was obliged to go away with her husband for a fortnight at some great country house. The day after their return to town-it was a Sunday, but she could wait no longer-she slipped away to the studio, where she found Henry St Clair contemplating the finished portrait. She was standing before the picture, with his arm about her waist, when something made her glance over her shoulder. Ruthven de Vere was standing in the doorway.

"She heard herself say, with perfect coolness, though she knew it was hopeless: 'Ruthven, this is Mr Henry St Clair, the artist, who as you see has just completed my portrait. I was keeping it as a surprise for you. Henry, my husband, Mr Ruthven de Vere.'

"St Clair stood paralysed. De Vere did not, by so much as the flicker of an eyebrow, acknowledge his presence. He offered his arm to Imogen as if they were quite alone. She allowed herself to be led from the room, down the narrow rickety stairs and out to a waiting cab, without another word being spoken.

"They reached Belgrave Square, still in silence. She had resolved to answer no questions, respond to no threats, volunteer nothing. But with Arthur-still only thirteen, though thankfully away at school-as hostage, her resolve soon crumbled. Besides, she was in fear of her life. If he had raved and ranted, she thought she could have resisted, but de Vere's constraint was terrifying. There was a sibilance about his speech that reminded her of steam escaping from an engine, and when his spittle touched her cheek, it burned like acid.

"That one glimpse from the doorway of the studio had fired a train of suspicion that burned through hours of question and accusation, towards an insane conclusion. They were alone in his study; he had ordered the servants to admit no one, and to remain below stairs. Treating every denial as an admission, he forced the date of her meeting St Clair back and back through the years until he had persuaded himself that they had been lovers before he, de Vere, had even met her; from whence it followed inexorably that Arthur was not his child.

"She had refused, until then, to admit that she and St Clair had been anything more than friends. Now she saw, too late, that her denials had spurred her husband toward the most dangerous delusion of all. In that extremity, she believed that the only way to save Arthur's life was to surrender her own: if her husband strangled her, or beat her to death, then surely the police would lock him up and Arthur would be safe.

"So she told him the truth-exactly what truth, she did not say, and I did not ask-expecting him to strike her down. Instead he grew quieter; but still he pressed and pressed for an admission that St Clair had been her lover throughout the marriage until, goaded past endurance, she said "No, but I wish he had been.

"He was standing over her as she spoke. She waited for the blow to fall, but without another word, he turned and walked out of the room, locking the door behind him.

"She rang repeatedly, but no one answered. Hours passed; she paced the room, rehearsing every imaginable horror. It was close on midnight before he returned.

'"I have decided,' he said, 'that you will leave this house tomorrow morning. You will take your son away from his school-he will no longer be welcome there-and do with him as you please. But there are conditions.'

'"First, you will sign over to me all of your property: every farthing not already assigned to me by your father; every jewel, every trinket, everything but the clothes you stand up in.

'"Second, you will sign a paper confessing to your adultery with St Clair.

"'Third, you will sign an undertaking never to see or communicate with St Clair again.

'"Fourth, you will undertake never to communicate with any of our mutual acquaintance. You will leave London and never return. I wish it to appear that you and your son have vanished from the face of the earth.

'"Defy me in any particular, and you will lose your son. I fear you have spoiled him, but it is not too late to remedy that. You will also be branded in court as an adulteress, and I will bring an action against St Clair for alienation of affection which will bankrupt him.'

"'Why should I trust you?' she asked. 'Since you intend to be merciless in every other respect, why not keep Arthur, and make my punishment even more cruel?'

'"Because as long as you have your son, you will live in fear of losing him. As you surely will, if you do not keep to the letter of our agreement. As for trust, you must rely upon my word as a gentleman-and hope that I will be more scrupulous than you have been about your marriage vows.'

"He had already prepared the papers. One by one he set them before her. She signed mechanically, fatalistically, scarcely bothering to read what he had written, and then declared that she would leave the house at once. But he insisted she remain that night, alone in her bedroom, to give her 'time for reflection. The bell, he said, had been disconnected, but she would find a cold supper waiting for her.

"Dizzy with fatigue and hunger, she dragged herself up to her room and bolted the door. There was also a connecting door between her bedroom and her husband's, opening into her room. It was locked already, but the key was missing.

"Despite her exhaustion, she had no intention of sleeping, but within minutes of eating her supper she felt overcome by an irresistible drowsiness. The food had been drugged. Fear lent her enough strength to drag a heavy chest across the connecting door. She collapsed onto her bed and sank into an abyss of darkness, from which she emerged the following morning with the sensation that her head was on fire. In the mirror she saw that her face and neck had turned a livid shade of purple.

"Her first thought was that her husband had exacted a terrible revenge. But the door into the corridor was still bolted on the inside; the chest stood where she had dragged it, blocking the connecting door; the window remained fastened on the inside, and from the sill to the area below was a sheer drop of thirty feet. The room was undisturbed, her pillow unmarked. Even if a corrosive spirit had somehow been introduced into the room, it could not have injured her so terribly without damaging the bedclothes.

"Then it occurred to her that she might have been poisoned as well as drugged. Apart from the burning sensation, she felt well enough, but how long would this last? Sick with horror, she dressed, put on a veil to hide her face, and despite her husband's threats, gathered up a few pieces of jewellery left to her by her mother, as well as all the money she had in her room.

"Thus far, she had not heard a sound from her husbands room, Listening at the other door, mustering the courage to open it and confront him-for surely he would be lurking outside-she became aware that the usual morning bustle was absent. Very quietly she undid the bolt and peeped out. The corridor was empty, the house completely still. All the way down to the front door she expected him to pounce, but no one appeared; for all the signs of life, the house might have been deserted, She let herself out into the street and secured a cab."

Theodore fell silent. He had become so absorbed in his own narrative that he continued to stare at, or rather through the portrait until Cordelia took his arm; then he turned slowly towards her like a man waking from a dream.

"I am very sorry, my dear. I fear I have said far more than I intended. The fact is, I was back in the drawing-room downstairs, thirty years ago, listening to Imogen. Even her voice was altered-by the illness, I mean-I had remembered it as a vibrant contralto; now she spoke in a hoarse, whispery monotone, all expression lost…"

"Uncle, why do you call it an illness? He must have poisoned her."

"I know, I know; and so your father always believed. But I asked a specialist privately, and he assured me there was nothing in nature that could produce such an effect. One man thought it might be Saint Anthony's Fire; another said it resembled a severe case of scalding, but her condition grew worse, not better, for weeks afterwards; we had a nurse here, all the time. Drugged or not, she would have woken instantly if she had been burnt… besides, there was no possibility of physical attack. No one could have got into that room."

"Uncle, why did you say physical attack' like that? Do you mean she might have been attacked in some other way?"

"Not unless you believe… but no, no… I think we must put it down to a rare and horribly malignant infection, brought on by the strain of events."

Cordelia wanted to ask what he had been going to say, but the recollection was plainly so distressing that she did not like to press him.

"And Henry St Clair?" she asked. "Did she see him again? I suppose she must have, when he brought the picture here."

"No, my dear, she did not. And it was not St Clair who brought it here. Which brings me to the part that concerns you."

Cordelia's feet were numb with cold; her breath was clouding the chill air, but she did not want to break the thread. Serene, untouched, untroubled, Imogen de Vere gazed back at her while Uncle Theodore collected his thoughts.

"Of course she was desperate to let him know what had happened. Against my advice, she wrote to him the day after she arrived here, but at my insistence she did not give him this address. De Vere knew nothing of me, and I feared that even this minor breach might bring him down upon us. I tried to get word of Henry St Clair by indirect means, but without result, and soon she was too ill for us to think of anything else.

"For at least two months-it seemed a lifetime-she was delirious with pain, for all the doctors could do for her. But as she began to convalesce, I could tell that anxiety about St Clair was preying upon her mind, and so I agreed to go up to London and seek him out.

"It was midwinter by then, bleak and dismal. I took a cab from Victoria and sat wishing I had never heard of Henry St Clair as we jolted and slithered through the frozen slush, and the streets grew darker and narrower. At the restaurant-which was dim and narrow, and smelt strongly of garlic-I was told that Mr St Clair had gone away, weeks ago, nobody knew where. I thought perhaps they were protecting him until, with the proprietors daughter acting as interpreter, I learned that all of St Clair's belongings, including the entire contents of his studio, had been carried off by the bailiffs. I spent the rest of the afternoon confirming what I feared. St Clair had been in debt to various moneylenders; the legacy he claimed to have received had evidently been only the latest in a series of loans. De Vere had bought up all of his debts and called them in, bankrupting St Clair and seizing everything he possessed, including the portrait."

"Then how did it come here?" asked Cordelia. "Did you buy it from him?"

"No, my dear, I did not. I attempted to trace St Clair, without success. Nothing more was ever heard of him; he simply vanished from sight. All I ever told Imogen-I should have said, by the way, that all she wanted was to know that he was alive and well; quite apart from the risk to Arthur, she knew by then that the disfigurement would be permanent… I told her that the restaurant people had lost his forwarding address. She never learned what de Vere had done.

"Your father, as you know, was privately tutored here. By the time he turned sixteen, he was already so well-grown that de Vere would not have dared touch him; and if Imogen hadn't made Arthur swear never to approach his father, I think there would have been some sort of reckoning.

"But I must come to the point. Imogen lived-that is to say endured-the rest of her life here, without once going beyond the parish boundaries. We never heard from de Vere, or any of her former acquaintances-it must indeed have seemed as if she had vanished from the face of the earth. At her own request, we placed neither a death nor a funeral notice in any of the newspapers. Your father's army friends knew that his mother had died, but if news of her passing ever reached her old circles, nothing came of it.

"Now of course poor Imogen had nothing to leave your father. He had his commission by then, but a junior officer's pay is small, and my own fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. The business was on its last legs. I had taken a mortgage on this house, and was paying the interest out of what remained of the principal. It looked as if we should soon have to sell up and move to something exceedingly modest. With your father's help, I managed to hold out for another year, but the ground was slipping from under us.

'And then came the letter telling us that Ruthven de Vere had died, leaving his entire estate in trust to Arthur.

"It looked, at first glance, like belated repentance. But doubts very soon crept in. Nowhere in the will-which had been drawn up only weeks before de Vere's death-was Arthur acknowledged as his son: the income from the trust was left simply to Arthur Montague de Vere of Ashbourn House, Hurst Green, Sussex'. It was disturbing to learn that he had known where we lived. But the condition was far more so.

"In a nutshell: the income from the trust (about five hundred a year; the estate had been much depleted) would come to Arthur, provided that he agreed to take charge of the contents of a particular upstairs room in de Vere's house. The will did not specify what these contents were; I shall come to that in a moment. The income would continue so long as these contents were maintained, together and intact, at Arthur's principal place of residence'. If anything were to be removed, sold, abandoned, destroyed or given away, the income would go to a distant relative in the north of Scotland. Otherwise it would pass, on your fathers death, to his eldest child, and then to that child's eldest child-"

"-unto the third generation," said Cordelia softly.

Theodore looked at her with something like fear. "How could you know that?"

"Know what, uncle?"

"That those were the words of the will."

"I didn't. They just came to me, a while ago, when I was thinking about-something else. So what is to happen, at the third generation?"

"The trust descends to your eldest child. When that child dies, the income passes to the descendants of the remote relative in Scotland. As would already have happened if Arthur had not had children."

"And-the contents of the room?"

Theodore did not reply. Instead he moved towards a door in the panelling a few paces to the left of the portrait. Because of the arrangement of the stairwell, the landing extended quite some distance, from the window in the end wall to the entrance to the corridor which led to the girls' bedrooms. The door her uncle was now attempting to unlock stood immediately to the right of that entrance. This was the door to 'the storeroom; Cordelia passed it several times a day, but had long ago concluded that, since it was never opened, nothing of interest could be stored there.

The lock snapped over; the hinges groaned; her uncle pushed the door wide and ushered her in.

Grey afternoon light filtered through two very grimy windows in the wall to her right. The room was perhaps fourteen feet by ten, but so crowded that it looked much smaller. The centre of the floor was taken up by various items of furniture, heaped against each other so as to make the most of the available space. A bedstead and a table, both standing on end, formed the backbone of the stack. From the doorway, Cordelia could make out the backs of two chairs, a wooden locker, a tin trunk, several other boxes, and various irregularly shaped bundles piled one on top of the other. Paintings hung from the picture rails all around the room, jostled together in no sort of order, some on board, some on canvas; below these, half-finished works, sheets of board, empty frames, rolls of canvas and other remnants stood propped against the walls, leaving a narrow aisle of dusty floorboards between them and the furniture piled in the centre of the room. The air was surprisingly dry, laden with odours of varnish and pigment, timber and canvas, leather and horsehair and traces of something sweet and aromatic that reminded her of a long-abandoned beehive.

"You see before you," said Theodore, "all the worldly goods of Henry St Clair. I took the liberty of opening the shutters this morning."

Cordelia took a few steps into the room. Dust lay thickly everywhere, stirring in small puffs as she moved, settling about her feet as she paused before a canvas depicting an expanse of tranquil waterway, stretching away into hazy distance, with several small boats in the foreground and the dim shapes of others farther off, a low green promontory or headland away to the right, and the great vault of the sky sweeping up from the far horizon, a dome of the palest blue, shot through with skeins and filaments of cloud. The artist had perfectly captured that quality of light which seems to float just above the surface of rippling water. Everything was held in suspension, even the foreground detail soft and blurred, yet somehow suggesting a delicacy of outline beyond the most exacting draughtsmanship.

"But this is beautiful, uncle. Why have you kept it locked away all these years?"

"We must come to that soon. But look around first."

The canvas beside it was very different. It showed a woodland path in dim, greenish moonlight, winding beneath tall, skeletal, overarching trees. About half-way along the path, a solitary figure, slightly hunched, was approaching. You could not quite decide whether it was man, woman, or child, or make out its features in the pale light, but its whole posture was expressive of profound unease, of someone trying to hurry without appearing to do so. Perhaps twenty yards further back, on the very edge of the path, something humped and hooded-or was it only a bush? or a small rocky outcrop about the height of a man?-seemed to be detaching itself from a thicket.

" This is his too?"

"I believe so."

Moving around the room, Cordelia saw at least a dozen landscapes strongly reminiscent of the tranquil waterway she had so admired. These, even at a cursory inspection, were the work of a man fascinated by the play of sunlight on water in all its manifold forms, not only liquid, but ice and frost, vapour and mist, haze and fog and every variety of cloud, a man in pursuit of some celestial vision in which air and fire, light and water were as one. But interspersed amongst them were at lea$t as many pictures which could only be described as works of darkness: as melancholy, even malignant in feeling as the daylit scenes were joyous, a world of dark woods and crumbling, labyrinthine ruins, fraught with insidious menace.

"Imogen told me that he painted those when his melancholia was at its blackest," said Theodore as she examined another moonlit scene. "He called them exorcisms."

This one showed a series of high stone arches, some complete, some partly collapsed, each framed by the one in front, receding into the far distance over rubble-strewn ground. Shattered remnants of whatever they had once supported lay all around; the light gleaming on the debris had a greenish, phosphorescent tinge. Cordelia could not look at it without feeling that she was being drawn vertiginously into the picture. Again she found it difficult to believe that the canvas next to it, a study of sunlight on a fog-bank at dawn, had come from the same hand. Even in that grey, wintry light, the luminosity of the fog was extraordinary.

"I don't understand," she said at last. "If Ruthven de Vere hated him-Henry St Clair-so much, why did he keep his things? And why leave them to us? I thought 'the contents of the room' would be something horrible, from the way you spoke."

"So did I, my dear, when I read that will. It was written as if the bequest were a trap-or a curse-with the annuity as bait. That was why I went to see Mr Ridley, de Vere's solicitor, on Arthur's behalf.

"By a fortunate coincidence-one of the few in this dark affair-Mr Ridley's father and mine had been friends; we had never met, but it gave me an opening. And I could tell from the outset that he hadn't liked de Vere, and was himself uneasy about the will.

"It was a cold day, and he had a fire burning in the grate in his office. Rather than speak to me across his desk, he invited me to take a chair by the fireside, and very soon we were talking like old friends.

"'I cant tell you what you most want to know,' he said, 'that is to say, the precise purpose behind the condition, because he didn't reveal it to me. But I'm afraid you're right in suspecting him of malign intent.'

"Then he asked me what I had made of the report of the inquest. I said I didn't even know there'd been an inquest into de Vere's death. And after a little self-inquisition, he told me everything he knew."

The mention of a fire had made Cordelia aware that she was shivering with cold. They locked up the room and hastened along the gloomy corridor to the sitting room at the other end, where the coals of an actual fire were still smouldering.

"After the separation," Theodore continued, once they had got a good blaze going, "de Vere kept up his accustomed round of dinners and grand receptions. He let it be known that Imogen had suddenly resolved to make a religious retreat, and wanted no further contact with the world. The boy was being privately educated in the country. De Vere was even heard to say, 'She has taken the veil'-profoundly disturbing, even in retrospect; I was glad not to have known it at the time. No doubt his chivalrous behaviour was much admired.

"So he went on for another decade or more, until people began to notice that he was not as charming or attentive as formerly; he seemed troubled, abstracted, preoccupied. It was rumoured around the City that de Vere was losing his grip; he was certainly losing money. By the time of Imogen's death-of which, according to Mr Ridley, he certainly knew-he had sold his interest in the bank, withdrawn entirely from society, and discharged all but three of his servants. His appearance, too, had altered profoundly. Once the epitome of elegance in all matters of dress and grooming, he now, in these last months of his life, received Mr Ridley at Belgrave Square in a crumpled suit, carpet slippers, and with a grease-stained dressing-gown draped about his shoulders. His white hair-which only recently had been iron-grey, and immaculately trimmed-was long and scanty; he had lost most of his teeth, and his face had fallen in upon itself. He was sixty-seven, and looked twenty years older.

"I asked Mr Ridley if he thought de Vere had been of sound mind when the will was drawn.

'"Sound,' I remember him saying-he made a steeple of his fingers, like this-sound, now that's a very broad church indeed. In the eyes of the law, yes: he knew the meanings of words; he knew exactly what he wanted, and he insisted on having it. Further than that I shouldn't like to go.'

"There was malice in him, Mr Ridley told me, malice but also fear, a morbid pressure of anxiety as palpable as the ill-will. De Vere had his chair hard against a wall, opposite the door, and all the time they talked, his eyes were darting about the room. And that was the last Mr Ridley saw of him until-as the executor-he received a note from the attending doctor, saying that de Vere had died in a fall from an upstairs window, and inviting him to step round.

"The room from which de Vere had fallen was the room containing everything that had once belonged to Henry St Clair.

"As de Vere's valet-though he cant have had much to do in the way of valeting-would later tell the inquest, St Clair's possessions had remained undisturbed, so far as anyone knew, in the upstairs boxroom until about a year before, when he had happened to see Mr de Vere unlocking the door. From then on, his master had visited the room more and more often until he was spending hours there every day, or rather night, for it was at night that he mainly went there, always with the door locked. Mr de Vere had made it clear from the outset that he was not to be disturbed during these visits. As to why he spent so much time in the room, or what he did there, the valet-whose name was William Lambert-could not say. Sometimes when he passed the door he would hear bumping and scraping noises, as if things were being dragged about, but mostly there was no sound at all.

"On the night of his death, de Vere had locked himself in the room at around ten o'clock. It was late in the autumn, a still, cold night. At about midnight William was dozing, fully clothed, in the attic on the next floor up-his master was in the habit of demanding refreshments in the small hours, and then sleeping very late-when he was woken by a splintering crash, followed by a thud in the area below. He ran downstairs and found Mr de Vere lying dead on the flagstones.

"The doctor, suspecting foul play, had the police summoned and the boxroom door forced. But there was no one within, no possible means of escape, and no sign of a struggle beyond the shattered window through which Ruthven de Vere had made his last exit. Closer examination suggested that he had run full tilt at the closed window, and dived head-first through the glass.

"According to the servants, he had not received a single visitor since the signing of the will. The maid and the housekeeper spent most of their time below stairs, and so the valet was the principal witness to the final weeks of de Vere's life. William told Mr Ridley privately that he had sometimes watched unobserved as his master approached the boxroom: it had seemed to him that de Vere was drawn to it almost against his will, like a man defeated by his craving for drink, or a murderer compelled, as popular belief has it, to return again and again to the scene of his crime. This never came out at the inquest, at which the coroner, for reasons best known to himself, cut short the valets halting attempts to characterise de Vere's mental state, and prevailed upon the jury to bring in a finding of death by misadventure.

"In Mr Ridley's view, the verdict should have been suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I pressed him further on the matter of de Vere's sanity at the time the will was drawn.

"'If you're thinking the terms might be challenged on that ground,' he replied, 'I can't hold out much hope. The man's instructions were precise; he questioned me closely about the effect of the wording; there was nothing capricious or repugnant-that is to say, inconsistent at law-in the terms he required. Speaking privately, I am sure his intention was malign, but it was also founded upon a delusion: namely, that in bequeathing Mr St Clair's effects to your nephew, he was visiting some sort of evil upon him and his descendants. So there's really nothing to object to: the intent to harm was no doubt real enough, but the danger is almost certainly phantasmal.'

"I asked why he had said almost certainly.

'"Professional caution, I suppose. One never quite knows… there are more things… I suppose I had wondered, whether the man might have concealed something dangerous amongst St Clair's effects. What sort of danger, you ask? Well, to cite another authority, it would cease to be a danger if we knew the answer to that. Most improbable, of course. A thousand to one the man was simply deranged. Of course, if you were to discover anything dangerous amongst the contents of that room, it would be a nice point, at law, whether the trust could require it to be left in situ. But if I were your nephew, I should accept the bequest, take the income, lock everything away securely, and think no more about it.'

"If we hadn't needed the money so badly," said Theodore, "your father would certainly have refused it. He loathed the idea of gratifying his own father, even in death, and insisted on having the entire income paid direct to me until you should reach the age of twenty-one; it is what we have lived on for the past seven years. I comforted myself with the thought that we were, in effect, recovering money that should have been Imogen's. But now that you are twenty-one, the income, and the responsibility, are yours alone."

"I should, like things to go on just as they are," said Cordelia without hesitation. "Only… you haven't said why you brought out the portrait, and left all the other pictures shut away,"

"Simply because I could not bear to think of her-her picture-locked away in the dark. As for the rest, it was your fathers preference."

"And, did you do as the lawyer suggested, look to see if he-I suppose I must call him my grandfather-had hidden something dangerous in the room?"

"Well, I watched while St Clair's belongings were brought up from the cart-your papa had taken you and your sister out for the day-and saw nothing sinister. But it was not my place to examine things closely."

Cordelia stirred the fire reflectively.

"I think I should like to bring some of the other pictures out," she said after a while. "Am I allowed to do that? Would the trust stop me? How would they know?"

"The trust is three elderly gentlemen in the City, Mr Ridley's successor, a Mr Weatherburn, acts on their behalf; Mr Ridley retired soon after I met him. You are supposed to write to Mr Weatherburn once a year and assure him that the conditions have not been breached. He or his representative may appear at any time and demand to see that everything is in order. In fact we have been visited only twice: once soon after everything had arrived here, and again after I wrote to tell them of your father's death. Once you have made your own decision, I imagine they will send someone down: there are papers you will have to sign. You could ask whoever they send."

"I have already decided, uncle; I will accept. But-just supposing I said I didn't want the money, what would happen to the pictures?"

"Everything would be taken away, and stored by the trust until your eldest child reached the age of twenty-one; then the same offer would be made to him. If he declined, the entire contents of the room would be burnt to ashes-that's the actual phrase-under the supervision of the trust. As will happen in any case, when the line dies out or upon the death of your eldest child."

"How horrible! That makes me even more determined to bring them-well, perhaps not the exorcisms, but all the others-into the light where people can admire them. And-what if Henry St Clair is still alive? How old would he be now?"

"About sixty, I suppose."

"Then-shouldn't we try to find out? I mean, they are his things, really; my grandfather stole them, just as he stole Imogen's money. Though of course, if we gave them back, we would lose the income, wouldn't we?"

"Not only that, my dear. In law, those pictures are the property of the trust; supposing we found St Clair and returned them to him, we should all be charged with theft."

"What an evil old man! I hate to think of him as my grandfather. I suppose that's how Papa felt, only worse… So there is nothing we can do, in the long run, to save the pictures from being burned."

"I fear not, my dear."

"And Beatrice?" said Cordelia after a pause. "How much should I tell her?"

"That is for you to decide."

"It will only make her dislike me more," said Cordelia despondently.

"I know," replied Theodore with unusual candour, "but we must do the best we can. I will tell her, if you like, that the administration of the trust that supports us-if you are quite sure about that-"

"Quite certain."

"-has passed to you as the eldest. She need know no more than that, until you decide otherwise."

"Thank you, uncle. Tell me-and please don't pretend-why do you think she dislikes me so?"

"Envy, I fear-don't tell your aunt I said so-she envies you your good nature, your affectionate disposition, and-to be entirely frank-your having been your father's favourite."

"I don't think my nature is as good as you make it out to be, uncle. But even if it were… it is not fair of her to blame me for that. I couldn't help being born first…"

She broke off, hearing again the echo of her complaint-so long ago, it seemed-upon the landing. Uncle Theodore leaned over and caressed her shoulder, but otherwise made no more reply than the portrait, and they sat for a long time in silence, watching the coals pulse and flicker while darkness gathered at the window.