Death of a Delft Blue

CHAPTER EIGHT

Concern about the Dispossessed

‘It occurs to me that you may care to investigate the matter with me. If so, send me a wire when to expect you.’

E. and H. Heron

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You think there’s some connection between Florian’s disappearance and this gathering of the clans, don’t you?’ said Laura, as they drove northwards on the following morning. ‘I mean, it isn’t only the old chap’s illness.’

‘I think that Professor Derde is an extremely worried man,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I esteem him very highly and I should like to help him. In what way I can do so is in doubt until I meet him again, but the least I can do is to go and see him. After all, he is an authority on the Aztecs of Mexico, is he not?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked Laura. Dame Beatrice waved a yellow explanatory hand.

‘Human sacrifices, dear child, appear to have been a feature of their religion.’

‘You mean that Florian’s dead?’

‘After death there is no other accident,’ pronounced Dame Beatrice. ‘That is what the Greeks thought, and I doubt whether there are many theologians today who would refuse to bear them out. I am always suspicious when persons who have what are sometimes called “expectations” vanish without trace. Why the Austrian and Italian papers, I wonder?’

‘I thought Florian’s expectations had gone overboard,’ said Laura. After lunching in Great Yarmouth, they arrived at Bernard van Zestien’s house at four o’clock, having stayed for a while on the front at Sheringham.

Derde met them at the door.

‘I’ve been looking down the drive for the past hour,’ he said. ‘I am so very glad to see you. It is good of you to come. An English tea is laid in the library. When you are refreshed, I will tell you all I know or can guess.’

The library was a spacious, handsome room with a carved overmantel attributed to Grinling Gibbons, (but more likely to have been the work of one of his pupils), a remarkable painted ceiling and windows which overlooked two sides of the park. The books were neither numerous nor noteworthy. In fact, two shelves were given over to modern novels, detective stories and tales of adventure, these to suit the taste, Dame Beatrice concluded, of Florian and Binnie.

A maid, with the flat features and small, intelligent eyes of so many of the East Anglian peasantry, served tea, at which the visitors were joined by Derde and Sweyn. The latter, it was soon clear, did not share his elder brother’s fears and anxieties.

‘Ten to one,’ he said, when tea had been cleared away and the party were seated round the fire, ‘Florian, having slipped across to Holland so that his portrait bust can be finished, merely is staying there because he intends to have the work photographed and to send copies of the photograph to the prospective publishers of his book.’

‘He is an author, then?’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘What is his line? Has he a special interest?’

‘He is preparing a work which describes the limestone caves and grottoes of the South Limburg province. I think that he also has chapters on the Cheddar Gorge in England, and those grottoes in Priddy and the Mendip Hills. So I think, but I doubt whether it is a very good book. In any case, although he calls himself an author, none of his work has, as yet, been published.’

‘But you do not know for certain whether or not he has left Holland?’

‘We do not know. We have no idea, and neither has our aunt Binnen. Cousin Opal looks wise but says little, except that he may be in the Dolomites.’

‘Why are you so worried about him, Professor?’ demanded Dame Beatrice, addressing Derde.

‘I hardly know. He is a foolish boy, very sure that he knows everything. All the same, if he had seen our notices in the newspapers, I am sure that he would have come to his granduncle’s bedside.’

‘What do you want me to do? He seems to have been thoughtless, but young people are like that. Is there nothing else you would like to tell me?’

Sweyn scowled at the toes of his shoes. Derde glanced at his brother and then said:

‘None of us likes his attitude towards his sister’s engagement.’

‘But I understood that the engagement had been broken off.’

‘I think Time will heal that little breach,’ said Sweyn, raising his head and fixing his light-coloured eyes on those of Dame Beatrice. Hers were as black as coals and her whole expression was non-committal.

‘It would do a great deal to relieve all our minds,’ said Derde, ‘if you would undertake to find Florian and persuade him to return to his duty. We would pursue the quest ourselves, but the University term begins very shortly and we must be in our places at least a week beforehand, for there is much to do at the beginning of a new College year.’

‘Yes, I see. May I have Miss Binnie Colwyn-Welch’s address? I believe she is in Scotland with her parents. I take it that the family reunion does not include them.’

Derde wrote down the address and then said:

‘I wonder how you guessed that we had not sent for Binnie and her parents?’

‘I concluded that Binnie’s parents would be too busy with the management of their hotels to come south again unless the news of Mr van Zestien’s health was even worse than it is, and Binnie would hardly come without them unless she was fully reconciled with Mr Bernardo Rose. That reconciliation, I gather, has not come about.’

‘It would, if only they could be brought together,’ said Sweyn. ‘You will like to visit my father after dinner? He will be pleased.’

They were taken to his room shortly after the meal was over. The old man’s breathing was a matter for concern and he seemed to find it difficult to speak. Fortunately there was very little he wanted to say. It was evident he had been told that Dame Beatrice had been asked to look for Florian.

‘Find him,’ he said, ‘and tell him that he is still a grandnephew of mine. He has done wrong, but please find him, if you can. I must punish him, but I love him very dearly.’

‘The Lord loveth whom He chasteneth,’ said Dame Beatrice absently. She took her leave, as she added, ‘We shall do our best, and will let you have news.’

She and Laura left North Norfolk immediately after breakfast on the following morning, lunched in Boston and dined and spent the night in Durham. Binnie’s parents not only owned but were the resident managers of a large hotel just north of Peebles on the road to Penicuik. It was their latest and most ambitious venture. Rooms for Laura and Dame Beatrice had been booked by telephone from Norfolk and Binnie herself was at the reception desk when they arrived. She greeted them effusively and begged them to stay ‘a good long time.’

‘But we’ve only booked for one night,’ said Laura, signing the book after Dame Beatrice had had it.

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’re not full. It would be so nice to have you for a bit. I could take you out and show you the countryside, you know. We could go in to Peebles sometimes. There’s a big hydro. there where there’s dancing and all kinds of entertainment. I know the manager. He’s an awfully nice person. I’m only looking after the office here because I get so bored doing nothing. Look here, let me show you your rooms and so forth, and then you must join me for a cocktail and tell me all that’s been happening since I saw you last. Mac, dear,’ she added to the porter, who had been hovering over the travellers’ luggage, ‘numbers seven and eight.’ The porter went off and Dame Beatrice followed. Laura would have done the same, but Binnie detained her. ‘I say,’ she muttered, ‘why have you come?’

‘You’d better ask Dame B.,’ returned Laura.

‘So there is something behind your visit! I guessed as much when we got Uncle Derde’s telephone message booking the rooms for you. Is it — well, you might as well tell me — is it anything to do with Bernardo?’

‘No,’ said Laura, ‘it is not.’

‘I haven’t heard from him since we broke it off, you know. I do wish he’d write. Of course, he’s proud and obstinate and he expects me to be the one to give in, and I always have, but this time I don’t see why I should. After all, he did hit poor Florian. I think he ought to climb down and offer me back the ring. I’d take it soon enough, if only he’d make the first move. It’s rotten here, with none of my friends, and Mummy and Daddy always so busy and, anyway, almost strangers to me.’

‘Hard luck,’ said Laura automatically. She got away and mounted the stairs. The porter was waiting to point out her room. Laura tipped him and walked over to the window. There was a fine view of the hills surrounding Peebles and Laura felt, with Binnie, that it was a pity to be making merely an overnight stay. She bathed and changed and then tapped on the door of number seven. Dame Beatrice was ready to go downstairs.

‘Binnie seems under the weather about her broken engagement,’ remarked Laura. ‘Which of them do you suppose ought to make the first move? Dashed if I would, if Gavin and I had a row of that sort, but perhaps she was a bit precipitate, chucking the ring at Bernardo like that. Of course, nobody wants to see a brother get manhandled, I suppose. All the same, she herself went for him later and blamed him for the broken engagement.’

‘Do you and our dear Robert ever quarrel?’ asked Dame Beatrice, interested because she had never thought of this before.

‘Oh, yes, of course we do. It isn’t healthy not to. We fight like fiends — literally — and then it always strikes us as funny and we begin to laugh. It’s ever such a good scrap while it lasts and we both enjoy it lots, but once you’ve laughed you’ve had it. Such a pity! I do love a really splendid maul.’

Dame Beatrice clucked sympathetically. Then she said,

‘I take it that Binnie knows nothing of Florian’s disappearance?’

‘I hardly think she does. She’s such a prattling, ingenuous little headache that she’d have babbled it out at once.’

Dame Beatrice agreed with this judgment and they went down to join Binnie in the cocktail lounge. She ordered, insisting that the drinks were on the house and therefore she would not have to pay for them, and then, when the drinks had been brought, she said:

‘Now, Dame Beatrice, do please tell me why you have come. Laura says it’s nothing to do with Bernardo, so I suppose it’s about Florian.’

‘What makes you think so?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Well, it couldn’t be about anybody else, unless Grand-uncle has gone and died, and I should have heard about that from Grandma Binnen or Uncle Derde, shouldn’t I?’

‘It is about Florian,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Your uncles would have come themselves, but it is imperative that they go up to their Universities quite soon, and so they felt that they could not spare the time for extensive travel.’

‘That’s a stock excuse of theirs if there’s any family hoo-ha on hand,’ said Binnie. ‘They’re typical dons. They simply loathe getting mixed up in anything except their own work. Uncle Sweyn is worse than Uncle Derde. Uncle D. does at least have some conscience about the family, but Uncle Sweyn is too utterly self-centred and unreliable.’

‘It is true that Professor Sweyn did not seem as concerned as Professor Derde,’ admitted Dame Beatrice.

‘Concerned? About Florian?’

‘Your brother appears to have given the family the slip. They would like to know where he is.’

‘Oh, but I know where he is. He’s in Holland, staying with Grandma Binnen and the awful aunts.’

‘He called on them, certainly, but left them for an unknown destination,’ said Laura.

‘And, in any case, they are now in England,’ added Dame Beatrice.

‘But he went over there to give a last sitting for that silly bust and that idiotic flower,’ exclaimed Binnie. ‘If he isn’t over here with the family, where is he? He hasn’t any friends over there and he hasn’t any money for lodgings. What does Granduncle van Zestien think about it?’

Laura glanced at Dame Beatrice, who replied:

‘He is ill and has taken your brother’s defection very badly.’

‘You mean he’s disinherited him,’ said Binnie, with another flash of the acumen she occasionally and unexpectedly displayed. ‘That’s the nub of it, isn’t it? Oh, well, that means Bernardo will be reinstated, so that the sooner I reinstate myself with Bernardo the better it will be for all concerned. I only wish I knew how to do it without actually climbing down.’

‘Well! The little gold-digger!’ exclaimed Laura, as she and her employer took their seats at a table for two at dinner. ‘Makes you wonder whether she chucked poor old Bernardo with an eye to settling down to housekeep for Florian, who hated the engagement anyway.’

Dame Beatrice did not play to this gambit. She appeared to be studying the menu. Neither did she return to the subject during dinner. They retired early and Laura was up at seven on the following morning and out of the hotel by half-past. It was her custom to take an early walk if the countryside seemed to justify this exercise. Upon her return she ran into Binnie, who was taking the air on the tennis courts which fronted her parents’ hotel.

‘Oh, hullo,’ said the daughter of the house. ‘Good-morning! Have you been for a walk? If you had let me know, I’d have come with you. I expect you’re ready for breakfast. Dame Beatrice had hers half-an-hour ago, and now she’s writing some letters or something. I’ve had my breakfast, too, but I can come and gossip to you while you have yours, if you like.’

‘I never talk at breakfast,’ said Laura, alarmed. ‘That’s why Dame B. and I always breakfast separately.’

Both these statements were divorced from the truth, but, to Laura’s relief, they were instrumental in fobbing off Binnie, who looked disappointed, and said moodily,

‘Oh, well, if you don’t want me, I’ll go into the office and type out the menu for lunch. You’re staying for lunch, I suppose?’

Truthfully, (this time), Laura replied that she had not the faintest idea. Thankfully she went in to breakfast, at which, famishingly hungry, she consumed fruit juice, porridge, poached egg on finnan haddie, bacon and fried potatoes, bannocks, butter, Dundee marmalade and three cups of coffee. Greatly restored, she joined Dame Beatrice, whom she discovered in the lounge, and asked when they were proposing to leave.

‘Not today, at any rate,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I have sent to Mr Bernardo Rose to join us here. Until I receive a reply from him, I am afraid that we are obliged to stay.’

‘Good-o,’ said Laura. ‘I like it here. I do wish we weren’t quite so supersaturated with Binnie, though. She gets on my nerves. All the same, there’s more in the wretched kid than meets the eye. Wish I could stand her, but I can’t.’

‘Not only punctuality, but also patience, is the politeness of princes, child.’

Bernardo arrived three days later, having made the journey (in one hop from his London home, as he expressed it) as soon as he could make arrangements about his work.

‘Work?’ said Laura. Binnie, who had openly flouted the young man when he arrived by pointedly handing over the register to the official receptionist, replied:

‘Oh, yes, he works for his father, my uncle Sigismund Rose. You met him and Auntie Maarte in Norfolk. They’re diamond merchants, same as Granduncle. That’s why I know Bernardo got my ring on the cheap, and that’s one of the reasons why I threw it back at him. I think people ought to pay for diamonds. Don’t you?’ she added, turning to Dame Beatrice.

Dame Beatrice replied that she had never looked at the matter in that light, but that she could see there was something in what Binnie said.

‘It’s not as though he couldn’t afford it,’ Binnie went on. ‘He’s got plenty of money. Of course, I’d be glad to marry into Granduncle’s fortune. I’m not saying I wouldn’t. And I would like…’ At this point she burst into tears.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Of course you would, and I think it will come about. Mr Bernardo is a reasonable young man.’

‘Although whether he’s picked the right girl,’ said Laura, ‘is anybody’s guess, and mine would probably be wrong. I hope so, anyway, for both their sakes.’

‘You do not think they would make a happy couple?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘I should think he’d murder Binnie long before the first baby came,’ said Laura. Bernardo joined them for cocktails. Binnie chose that evening to act as barmaid.

‘One sherry, (dry), one whisky undiluted, one lemon shandy because I never drink wine or spirits, and thank you miss,’ said Bernardo, smiling into the eyes of his erstwhile beloved.

‘Oh, Bernie darling!’ wailed Binnie, drooping towards him over the bar counter.

‘Now, now, come, come! You can’t do that there here,’ said Bernardo reasonably. ‘People will think I’ve refused to make an honest woman of you, or something.’

True to form, Binnie turned a hiccupping sob into a sudden giggle and handed him a small tray on which to place the drinks he had ordered. She poured them out, dried her eyes on the cloth which was used to wipe the bar counter and then drew some beer for herself and emptied the rest of the bottle of lemonade into it. She picked up the glass.

‘Morgen,’ she said.

‘Vanvond,’ contradicted Bernardo. Binnie gave a little shriek.

‘Zestien,’ she said. Bernardo looked pained.

‘Is that the hour or the room number?’ he enquired. ‘I ask because, as neither of us happens to be surnamed Zestien, (unlike our near relatives), I can only imagine that you mean Sixteen. Or is that, by any chance, your age? You certainly don’t look any more than that. And as for your behaviour…’ He smiled at her again, and took the glass out of her hand.

‘Oh, Bernie, is it really all on again?’ asked Binnie. For answer Bernardo felt in a pocket, drew out the engagement ring, took her left hand and slipped the sign and token of his intentions on to the required finger.

‘He’s a long time getting those drinks,’ said Laura.

‘I do not think it is time wasted, though,’ said Dame Beatrice, who, from her seat in the alcove they had chosen, could see the bar counter, whereas Laura could not. ‘An affecting little scene of reconciliation is taking place. Ah, here comes our cavalier now.’

‘With nods and becks and wreathéd smiles, too,’ said Laura, when he came within her orbit, ‘so I feel you must be right.’

‘So now?’ said Bernardo, when he had set down the drinks and seated himself. ‘Cheers! And on two counts. More important, the drinks themselves. Less important, (but I shall hope for your felicitations), my engagement appears to be on again. But let’s not worry about that. May I be allowed to know what lies behind your request that I should join you here?’

‘Well, you do know,’ replied Laura, grinning. ‘Dame B’s alter alias is The Marriage Mender.’

‘It does not fit with the general situation for you and Binnie to be estranged any longer,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She may need you badly in the foreseeable future. Her brother has disappeared, as, of course, you know.’

‘Disappeared? Oh, I wouldn’t let that worry you. I’lorian always was a melodramatic young ass. It’s just a stunt of his to attract attention to himself.’

‘Professor Derde van Zestien does not seem to think so. He is sufficiently worried to have asked us to look for him.’

‘Uncle Derde’s a spinsterish nit-wit. What does Uncle Sweyn think?’

‘He does not seem particularly concerned.’

‘Well, there you are, then. Are you going over to Holland, or what?’

‘We are going first to talk with Mrs Colwyn-Welch from whose house the disappearance took place. It was from her, of course, that the news came.’

‘Well, yes, it would be, and I must admit that it’s not like old Great-aunt Binnen to panic. When did you think of going? Look here, perhaps I can save you a journey. I’ve got to see a man in Amsterdam. I was over there a few days ago, but he wasn’t available, so it’s inevitable I go again soon. I could step up the time and be off the day after tomorrow. What do you think?’

‘Very kind and thoughtful of you,’ said Dame Beatrice, in her mellowest tones, ‘but I shall enjoy the trip — that is, if it proves necessary to go to Holland at all.’

Binnie, having found one of the staff who could look after the bar, came over and joined them. She placed both hands on the table so that the engagement ring could be seen without difficulty.

‘Do let me stand the next round,’ she said. “We’ve got two things to celebrate. One is the engagement being on again, and the other is that Dame Beatrice and darling Laura are going to find Florian and make him come home.’

‘Why should anyone bother?’ asked Bernardo.