The Detective Omnibus: "City of Gold and Shadows", "Flight of a Witch" and "Funeral of Figaro"

CHAPTER ONE

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Mr Stanforth came from behind his desk to meet his visitor in person, and settle her with ceremony into the client’s chair, though she was not a client, had no need whatever of a solicitor, and had come here in response to his telephoned request chiefly out of pure curiosity, of which she had a woman’s proper share. Mr Stanforth was not entirely what she had expected, but neither, she deduced from the covert glances he was using upon her like measuring instruments, was she quite matching up to his preconceived picture of her. He was small and nimble and immaculate in fine grey mohair, with a clever, froggish, mildly mischievous face, like a very well-turned-out troll from under some Scandinavian mountain. But towards her he was being punctilious in a way which seemed slightly out of character, as though he did not quite know how to approach her, even though it was he who had brought her here.

Her part was easy. She had only to sit back with perfect composure—something at which she was adept—and wait for him to find his way through the necessary preliminaries to the real business of this meeting. After all, he had initiated it. He must have some need of her; she had none of him. This could not even be a matter of learning something to her advantage. Her mind—and she was well aware that it was an elastic and enterprising mind—was quite open. Perhaps that was what baffled him about her. She should have been more concerned, more anxious to know what he had to confide, since he had invited her here for that very purpose.

‘Mademoiselle Rossignol, it’s very kind of you to spare me a little of your time…’

‘Miss will do,’ said Charlotte helpfully. ‘I’m almost completely English, you know, apart from the name, although I’ve lived most of my life in France. My father walked out on my mother when I was seven, so the English influence came out on top from then on.’ Her mother, flighty as a butterfly, had heaved a sigh of relief at getting rid of a whole entrenched family along with Maître Henri Rossignol, who still, perhaps, coloured Charlotte’s image of the law, and made Mr Stanforth incongruous, with his pricked ears and his mild, perilous, goatish hazel eyes.

‘That certainly makes things easier,’ he said heartily, and leaned across the monumental desk to offer her a cigarette and a light. He was just warming up; she knew the signs, knowing quite accurately the effect her looks had on most males of most ages. What she had was not beauty, and she had learned that early, and come to terms with it, being of a practical mind. But there was something more adventurous than beauty in her, a tendency to surge forward into situations somewhat risky in their ambiguity, a taste for accepting any challenge that offered, and a manner and a gait to match the proclivity. Angels might well have feared to tread where Charlotte habitually planted her size four sandals with zest and aplomb.

‘You must be wondering,’ said Mr Stanforth, approaching by inches, ‘why I asked you to come here like this. It was pure luck, my seeing that notice of your concert. There couldn’t be many Charlotte Rossignols who happen also to play the oboe. So I made enquiries at the hall. It was an opportunity for me. I hope you didn’t mind my asking you to come here. I would gladly have come to you, but I thought we could talk more freely here than in an hotel. Briefly, I need to ask you, my dear Miss Rossignol, if you have had any word within the last year from your great-uncle, Doctor Alan Morris.’

There was a moment of absolute silence and surprise. Her eyes had opened wide in wonder, and the light entered their long-lashed blackness and turned it to a dusky, flecked gold. Her small, delicate monkey-features quivered into childish candour, reassuring him that for all her formidable composure she was, indeed, no more than twenty-three. She had fine, white skin, not opaque and dull, but translucent and bright, with the vivid come-and-go of vibrant blood close beneath it; and she had beautiful hair, fine as an infant’s and black as jet, curving but not curling about a very shapely head, and cropped cunningly to underline the subtlety of the shaping. Oh, yes, there was a great deal of France there, whether she knew it or not. And her lips, opening to reply to his question, were long and mobile, eloquent even before she spoke, though she might sometimes go on to contradict what they had intimated.

‘Mr Stanforth,’ she said now, ‘I’ve never once in my life had any communication from my Great-Uncle Alan. I’ve never set eyes on him. I know quite a lot about his work and his reputation, and am quite proud of him, but I don’t expect ever to exchange one word with him. My mother was his niece, and the only daughter of his only sister, but she was as foot-loose as he, and when she married into France she never kept in touch with her English connections at all. I grew up detached. I’m sorry if it seems almost unnatural. It wasn’t out of any want of feeling. No, I’ve had no word ever from Doctor Morris. I should have been very astonished and concerned if I had. I should have taken it for granted there was something the matter.’

Mr Stanforth massaged his sharp jaw with one finger, and looked thoughtful.

‘Is there?’ asked Charlotte, making connections with her usual rash speed. ‘Something the matter?’

‘That’s exactly the trouble, we don’t really know. Naturally I hope not, and the probability is that we’re exercising ourselves over nothing. But the fact remains, we can’t be sure. I’m not surprised,’ he agreed, ‘that you’ve received no word from him, but it was just a chance.’

‘I’m sorry to be a disappointment. Was that the only reason you asked me to come?’ She was reasonably certain by then that it was merely a necessary preliminary to the real business he had with her.

‘Hardly, or I could have asked it over the telephone, and avoided imposing upon you. No, circumstances make it very desirable that we should have this talk, and continue in close touch afterwards, if you’re agreeable. I had better,’ said Mr Stanforth, philosophically accepting the fact of her total ignorance, ‘tell you exactly what the position is. I have acted for your great-uncle for more than twenty years now, and have often been left in charge of his affairs during his long absences abroad, on digs all over Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, everywhere that the Roman and Graeco-Roman power extended. You’re familiar with his subject, you know he is an authority, internationally known and universally respected. So naturally he travels a great deal, and is in demand as a consultant wherever Roman sites are being excavated. A year ago last October he planned a year’s tour in Turkey. It was approaching the end of the season, of course, but he intended to make a first flying visit to Aphrodisias, where some old friends of his were at work, and then to spend the winter on research in libraries and museums, and have the whole of the following summer for field work. He let his house in Chelsea furnished for the year, with the usual proviso that his own staff should remain to run it—he has a housekeeper who has been with him for years, and one daily maid. All quite in order, of course, he has done the same thing at least twice before. And of course no one expected to hear much from him during his sabbatical year, unless, as you say, something was wrong. But the trouble is that no one has heard anything from him even now that the year is over.’

‘Nearly six months over,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Quite an edgy matter for his tenants.’

‘Precisely! Finding accommodation in London is difficult in any circumstances, and this couple happen to be Australians who don’t intend to stay permanently, but are anxious to see their daughter through her physiotherapy training here, and take her back with them afterwards. It would suit them very well to have the tenancy of the house for at least another year. But without any instructions from Doctor Morris it’s difficult to know what to do.’

‘And what,’ she asked practically, ‘have you done about them so far?’

‘In the absence of any word from my client, I took the responsibility of renewing the tenancy for six months. They could hardly be expected to agree to less, and they’re excellent tenants.’

‘And now the six months is nearly up. And still no word! Yes, I see why I represented a last hope,’ she said. ‘Is this very unlike him?’

‘Very. He is a man who has deliberately avoided certain responsibilities in his life, and certain involvements, but those business obligations which do unavoidably devolve upon him he has always observed punctiliously. There are money matters, investments, tax affairs to be considered. It is, one might say, a conscious part of his policy of personal detachment to have all his affairs in scrupulous order, and so obviate pursuit and inconvenience of any kind. To be slipshod is to be hounded, which is the last thing he wants. No, I must say that things have now gone so far as to justify me in feeling considerable uneasiness about his continued absence.’

She gazed back at him in thoughtful silence for a moment, and shook her head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know… he’s a free agent, and he has confidence in you. At a pinch, he might very well feel safe enough in going ahead with what he’s doing, and leaving all the rest to you. Supposing he got excited about some new discoveries, for instance…’

‘During the winter months work would be at a standstill. In many places it couldn’t open up again before June, late May at the earliest.’

‘You ought, perhaps, to start official enquiries,’ she suggested hesitantly.

‘I already have, more than a month ago. I rather wish I’d taken the step earlier. The trail came to a dead end. One that might be perfectly normal, though it leaves us in complete uncertainty.’

‘How much do we know? I mean really know? Do we even know that he ever reached Turkey? Exactly what did they find?’

‘Oh, yes, he got to Istanbul, all right. He caught his flight from Heathrow on the 6th of October, the flight-list has been checked through. He claimed his reservation at the Hotel Gul Bejaze, and stayed there for three weeks. We even know just what he was doing, intensively, during that time. He took a piece of work with him to finish. He was commissioned to write one of a series of monographs on the settlements of Roman Britain, and he took the almost completed text with him when he left England. I knew of that from him before he left, for he was going to spend his last few days before the flight actually on the site, refreshing his memory on certain details. Well, he posted the finished text to his publishers from Istanbul about three weeks after he arrived there. The book has been out several months, of course, now. A few days after he mailed it, he telephoned his friend and colleague at Aphrodisias, in Anatolia, and called off his visit. He said he was afraid the delay over the book had lost him the opportunity of reaching the city in time to take part in any meaningful work, and promised to join the next summer’s dig in June.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘He didn’t. The day after that telephone call he paid his hotel bill and left by taxi for the main station. Attempts to trace one taxi in Istanbul, after a year and more, naturally fell flat. No one has heard from him since, no one knows where he is.’

It began to sound more serious than she had realised. ‘Who undertook these enquiries?’

‘The police, through their Turkish colleagues. Missing Persons has all the information available. But I’m afraid the trail was cold before I called them in, and we didn’t take it the length of broadcasting or advertising. One doesn’t want to set a public hue and cry in train after a perfectly rational and responsible person who knows very well what he’s about.’

‘He may still be that,’ she said. ‘There may be reasons for his silence, perfectly good reasons if we only knew them. And he may turn up at any moment with a simple explanation, and wonder what we’ve been worrying about.’

‘So I think, too. Though let’s admit that personal security has recently become distressingly tenuous all over the world, and the most innocent and uninvolved of people can still find himself made a pawn in all manner of dangerous games. And Turkey has its share of the modern virus. But urban guerillas don’t kidnap distinguished foreigners only to keep their exploit secret, hijackers can hardly help becoming news on the instant, and here there has been profound silence. I tell myself that silence is more likely to be a personal choice than an imposed one.’

‘There is such a thing as amnesia, I suppose,’ Charlotte said dubiously. ‘Illness or accident could have isolated him somewhere. I mean, if he did go off into the wilds of Anatolia, or somewhere remote like that—something might happen to him in some village, where he isn’t known.’

‘Villagers would be all the more anxious to get the responsibility for him off their hands. And there are quite a number of people in Turkey who do know him, people in his own field.’

They looked at each other for the first time with a long, speculative look, weighing up the possibilities honestly and in much the same terms. ‘You think, then,’ she said, ‘that this disappearance is more likely to be voluntary on his part. But in that case, all we have to do is wait, and when he chooses, he’ll reappear. And I take it the police still have his case more or less open, and will be looking out for news of him, in case there’s something more in it. There isn’t much more we can do, short of going off to Istanbul in person to try and find his tracks. And if, for some reason, he has really chosen to drop out for a while, he wouldn’t be grateful for too much fuss, would he?’

‘You state the position admirably. That’s exactly how we are situated—you and I both.’

‘I?’ she said, drawing back slightly into her crystalline, black-and-white reserve, and becoming in a breath notably more French. ‘I realise that I come into the picture as a relative, and I do feel natural interest and concern for my great-uncle. But I can’t feel that I have any more positive standing than that in the matter.’

‘You have a very positive standing, my dear young lady,’ said Mr Stanforth patiently, and perhaps a little patronisingly, too, for this was where money entered into the reckoning, and very young concert artists and music teachers with a living to make must surely react to the alluring image. ‘Let us suppose, just for one moment, that we are being over-optimistic, and that Doctor Morris will not reappear, as, of course, we hope and believe he will. If this situation goes on unchanged, then it may become necessary eventually, for legal reasons, to take steps to presume his death. That need not jeopardise his position if he should subsequently emerge from his limbo. But it would, meanwhile, regularise his affairs and ensure proper continuity, proper attention to investments, and so on. In short, Miss Rossignol, I’ve reached the point where I must have your approval and consent for whatever steps I take in protection of his financial affairs. Since your mother’s death you are his only remaining relative, apart from some distant cousins in Canada, several times removed. And Doctor Morris—a remarkable quirk in his otherwise orderly character, I may say—has always stubbornly refused to make a will. There are people,’ said the Norse troll, burning into sudden antagonistic fervour across his cavern-desk, ‘who hypnotise themselves into believing that they are going to live for ever.’ His client’s optimism and appetites, with equal suddenness, burned clear in opposition, and Charlotte had a vision of two principles in headlong collision, and chose to ally herself with her own kinsman, by intuition and once for all. ‘If we do not see him again—for we must take that possibility into account—you are his next of kin and his sole heiress. That is why I need to consult with you over anything I do, from now on, in his name.’

Charlotte had never in her life felt obliged to examine her relationships with anyone. Her mother, once rid of the armour-plated respectability of Maître Henri and his phalanx of parents, brothers and sisters, all devoted to the law, had married a happy-go-lucky literary exile from Leeds, as nearly as possible his opposite, and the half-English, half-French child had been absorbed into their slapdash household with the greatest enthusiasm and affection, and never given time to doubt or worry, surrounded as she was by joyous evidence of her own importance and value. There had never been too much money, but never less than enough. She had no vision of money as an independent power, or a formidable opponent. It was there to be used, insofar as you had it; and when you were short, you worked a little harder, and made good the deficiency. And foreseeing that necessity, you made sure that you knew something which could earn you money at need. It was as simple as that. She did not even know what it meant to adapt oneself to another person’s requirements for the sake of self-interest. All she had, to enable her to visualise Mr Stanforth’s view of her position, was a vivid imagination and a very acute intelligence. They helped her to understand him, and even, regretfully, to sympathise with him.

‘If you’re asking me,’ she said carefully,‘ to come into consultation and share responsibility for whatever decisions we have to make about Great-Uncle Alan’s affairs, of course I will, though I don’t claim to know anything about business and I probably shan’t be much help to you. I can’t even claim to know what he would want done, because I know almost nothing about him. But I don’t at all mind saying what I think I should want done in the circumstances. I don’t think, for instance, that I should want my death assumed and my property disposed of too soon, so we won’t go into that part of the affair just now, if you don’t mind. He’ll probably live to be a hundred, and make a will leaving whatever he’s got to his old college, and I shan’t mind at all. But I quite see that you need someone to come in on a practical issue like what to do about his tenants. I think you should extend the tenancy for another full year, if that’s what they would like. It would ensure the house being taken care of, and the staff maintained, since you say they’re good tenants. And even if Uncle Alan turns up within a month or two, he can hardly complain. It’s his own fault. And the inconvenience will be only slight, he can always take up residence at his college again until their time’s up.’

She made it sound very simple, as young people do; and she hadn’t yet considered the implications for herself, Mr Stanforth reflected cynically, or she would not so blithely dismiss the matter of the inheritance. It was not a fortune, but it was a respectable competence, thanks to royalties, which would continue for years yet, whether the doctor reappeared or remained in limbo. ‘I’m gratified,’ said Mr Stanforth, with only the mildest irony,‘ that your judgement agrees with mine. That is indeed what I had intended suggesting to you, and it disposes of the immediate problem.’

‘If you want me to keep in touch, and be available for consultation, of course I will.’

‘Thank you, that will ease my position considerably. And as you say, all we can do is wait, and continue to expect Doctor Morris to turn up in his own good time. May I ask what your own plans are? Do you intend to stay some time in England?’

‘I’m making my home here,’ she said. ‘I’m taking a teaching job in a new comprehensive school, but that won’t begin until the September term. That’s why I’m trying to fill up the gap with a few concerts, but of course I’m not good enough for the big dates, it will be mostly provincial engagements. I’ll let you have word of all my movements.’

‘That would be most kind and helpful.’

The interview seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. She picked up her handbag, and he rose from behind his desk to take a relieved and ceremonious farewell. But before they had reached the doorway she hesitated and halted.

‘You know what I would like? Could you let me have a list of all the books Uncle Alan’s written? If I’m going to be a stand-in for him, even temporarily, like this, I really need to know more about him, and that seems as good a way as any. They must surely convey something about him.’

Strange, he thought resignedly, she’s not at all interested in how much her kinsman’s worth, only, rather suddenly and rather late, in what he’s like. And at this stage, isn’t that rather an academic consideration? But he said politely: ‘Yes, of course. If you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few of his titles sent round to your hotel. This last one, the text he sent from Istanbul—the publishers took care of the proof-reading, of course—that one I believe I’ve got here. Take it with you, if you’d care to. Though it’s hardly the most riveting of his works. He found Aurae Phiala, it seems, rather an over-rated site in revisiting it.’

There was a large bookcase in the corner of his office, stocked mainly with leather-bound volumes; but the end of the lowest shelf was brightened by the clear colours of a number of paperbacks. He plucked one of them from its place and brought it to her. ‘The Roman Britain Library’, the jacket told her, and in larger print: ‘AURAE PHIALA’, and Alan Morris’s name, with a comet’s-tail of letters after it.

The cover was a fine, delicately-composed, atmospheric photograph of a shallow bowl of meadows beside the silver sweep of a river, the whole foreground patterned with a mesh of low walls in amber stone and rosy, fired brick and tile, with two broken pillars to carry the accented rhythms up into a sky feathered with light cloud. Charlotte gazed at it, fascinated. A landscape obviously planned, disciplined, tamed long, long since, and long since abandoned to the river, the seasons and the sky; and not a human soul in sight. A less cunning photographer might have felt the urge to place a single figure, perhaps close to the columns, to give life and scale. This one had understood that Aurae Phiala was dead, and immense, needing no meretricious human yardstick to give it proportion.

‘But it’s beautiful!’ she said, and voice and accent had become wholly French for one moment. ‘This is where he spent those last few days?’ she said. ‘Before he caught that flight into Turkey?’

‘Yes. He knew the site from many previous visits, though I think he had never organised a dig there himself. The curator is an old friend of his, a fellow-student, I believe. But less distinguished.’

‘So Uncle Alan would be with friends, when he stayed there? And he went straight from this place, to catch his plane?’

‘So I understand. It is an attractive picture,’ said Mr Stanforth, with patronising tolerance. ‘Wonderful what a first rate photographer can do with even unpromising material. But you’ll see what Doctor Morris has to say about the place.’

‘Where is it?’ she asked, still viewing the sunlit, fluted hollow with pleasure and wonder.

‘Somewhere on the Welsh border, I believe. The text and maps will show you exactly where. The name means something like “the bowl of the gentle wind”. Apparently an ideal climatic site. But you’ll discover all about the place if you read it.’

Clearly he hardly believed that she would stay the course. She wondered if he himself had survived it. She closed the little book between her palms, and put it away in her handbag. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I look forward to setting foot in my uncle’s field.’

She was not sure herself how much in earnest she was, at that stage; and if she had had any other agreeable reading matter to fill up her evening, she might never have started on Aurae Phiala at all. But she had no concert, and no engagement socially, since she knew hardly anyone in London, the small hotel in Earls Court was not productive of amusing company, and the television was surrounded by a handful of determined fans watching a very boring boxing match. Charlotte returned almost gladly to the recollection of her morning interview, and in retrospect it seemed to her far more strange and mysterious than while it was happening. She had never been brought face to face with her great-uncle, and never devoted any conscious thought to him. He became real and close only now that he had vanished.

Such a curious thing for an established and respected elderly gentleman to do, now that she came to consider it seriously. How old would he be now? Her grandmother, his elder sister, would have been seventy if she had been still living, and there were several years between them. Probably sixty-three or sixty-four, and according to the photographs she had seen in newspapers and geographical magazines, and his occasional appearances on television, he looked considerably younger than his age, and very fit indeed. Say a well-preserved sixty-four, highly sophisticated, speaking at least three languages, enough to get him out of trouble in most countries, and with a select if scattered network of friends and colleagues all across the Middle East, to lend him a hand if required. And on his last known move obviously still in full control of his actions. A taxi had dropped him and his luggage at the main railway station, he had walked in through the entrance with a porter in attendance; and that was that.

On the face of it, a man about whom the whole world knew, whose life was an open book—no, a succession of books. But what did she really know about him? She roamed back thoughtfully into childhood memories, hunting for the little clues her mother and grandmother had let fall about him, and the sum of them all was remarkably meagre. A handsome, confident man, who had managed to retain his friends without ever letting them get on to too intimate ground. No wife ever, and (as far as anyone knew!) no children anywhere, but all the same, his kinswomen had spoken of him tolerantly, even appreciatively, as an accomplished lady-killer, evading marriage adroitly but finding his fun wherever he went. An eye for the girls at sixty no less than at twenty; and silver-grey temples, blue eyes and a Turkish tan were even more dangerously attractive than youth. He played fair, though, her mother had said of him generously. Not with the husbands, perhaps, but with the ladies. They had to be more than willing, and as ready as he to part without hard feelings afterwards. Doubtful if he ever dented a heart; more than likely he gave quite a number of hearts a new lift after they’d imagined the ball was over for them.

It seemed she did, after all, know a few significant things about him. He lived as he chose, one foot in home comforts, the other shod for roaming. She understood now what Mr Stanforth had meant by describing him as a man who had deliberately evaded certain responsibilities and involvements, and even kept his affairs in scrupulous order mainly to avoid being badgered, or giving anyone a hold on him. And she thought suddenly, with a totally unexpected flash of dismay and sympathy: My God, you overdid it, didn’t you? You were so successful at it that in the end you could vanish without leaving a soul behind sufficiently concerned about you to kick up a fuss—only a solicitor worried about the legal hang-ups, and especially the money!

Sympathy, of course, might be misapplied here. For all she knew, so far from being lonely and deprived at this moment, he might well be taking his mild pleasures in his usual fashion, with some lady chanced upon by pure luck in the wilds of Anatolia. In which case he would surface again when it suited him. All the same, the image of his isolation remained with her, and made her feel uneasy and even guilty towards him.

So it was partly out of an illogical sense of obligation that she began to read his book on Aurae Phiala. Eighty or so acres of Midshire by the river Comer, close by the border of Wales. A recreation city, apparently, for the officers of the garrison at Silcaster, and the legions tramping the long course of Watling Street. The account he gave of it was detailed, detached and distinctly unenthusiastic. A place of historical interest in its small way, especially for its sudden death at the end of the fourth century, after the legions that were its life and its protection had been withdrawn. But otherwise a site very unlikely to repay much further examination, and hardly worth spending money on, while so many more promising sites waited their turn to snatch a crumb of the meagre and grudging funds available. In plan after plan and page after page, Doctor Morris amended the estimates even he had given in articles previously published, and disputed various claims made for Aurae Phiala by other authorities. Their aerial photographs he subjected to destructive scrutiny, the light crop lines they detected under the unbroken fields he dated several centuries later than the sacking of Aurae Phiala, the dark crop marks emerging so strongly in contrast he refused to consider as early Roman military lines, but set well back into pre-Roman settlement. (A light, sandy sub-soil, Charlotte learned, provided a first-class ground for crop-marks, since crops growing over ancient foundations tend to ripen and show yellow while the rest of the field is still green. And the crop marks that show dark instead of pale are likely to lie along the lines where timber walls stood, prior to the stone.)

In short, Doctor Morris was bored with Aurae Phiala, and succeeded in making it slightly boring for his readers. Charlotte found herself intrigued by his handling of some of his colleagues who took views different from his own. His deference, while he refuted their conclusions, was careful and considerate. Even, perhaps, a little cagey? She felt almost sorry for Professor M. L. Vaughan, who was obviously in the same rank as her self-confident great-uncle, and differed from him on almost every point.

She would have been completely convinced, but for that limpid, lovely photograph on the book’s cover, so serene, and pure, and gracious in its emptiness of man, a tragic landscape recognised and captured.

It was one of those cosmic accidents which are no accident, that the next day, when she called in at a bookshop to look for some more Morris titles, she should find on the same shelf the total output of Professor M. L. Vaughan; and among the rest his: Aurae Phiala: A Pleasure City of the Second Century A.D. She took it down and opened it at random, and the prose caught her by its incandescent fervour. He was Welsh, of course, by his name; this frontier site might be expected to excite him. But he wrote like a sceptic captured and moved against his will.

She bought another of her uncle’s books, but she bought, also, Professor Vaughan’s; and his was the one she began to read, in the train to a modest concert engagement in Sussex.

Experts do differ, of course, even experts of equal eminence. And yet they were writing about the same place, and both of them knew it intimately, and had known it for years. Every indication Alan Morris rejected, Professor Vaughan accepted and expounded. He gave the city not eighty or so acres of ground, but more like two hundred and twenty, he burned to have the funds to take up lovingly every acre of those two hundred and twenty, and tenderly brush away the dust of centuries from every artifact he expected to recover; and his expectations were high. It was all very odd, very attractive, very mystifying.

Charlotte got back into London rather late that night, and rather tired, but hooked beyond redemption upon Aurae Phiala. It was the last preoccupation of her kinsman before his exit from England, and it was a strangely appealing bone of contention between him and several of his peers. Charlotte lay stretched upon her bed, waiting to relax enough for her bath, reviewing her evening’s performance with merciless austerity—the oboe is a tyrannical instrument, and demands lofty standards—and confronting her odd, challenging, unknown English great-uncle, unexpectedly lost before she had ever become aware of him. He was beginning to threaten her personal security, her conviction of her own integrity. He was a ghost—a figure of speech, of course, she was in no doubt of his irrepressible re-emergence—whom she had to placate and exorcise.

She knew, then, that she was going to Aurae Phiala, to look at that charged, controversial, emotional ground-site for herself. It was a gesture without any wider significance, she knew that; she was exorcising and placating no one but herself. But at least she would be treading in his footsteps, and somewhere along the way a clearer picture of him might emerge. The move to Midshire even made economic sense; she had several modest school recitals in Birmingham and the Black Country during the next month, and it would be cheaper to move up there and find a furnished room somewhere, rather than spend the intervening time here in town.

She left by train for Comerbourne the next morning.