Island of Bones

I.4

Their approach to Silverside Hall had been looked for, and when Harriet stepped out of the carriage she was at once greeted by a short, rather square woman of perhaps sixty years, who came very close to her on the gravel and shook her hand so heartily Harriet was afraid for her wrist.

‘Oh, Mrs Westerman! I am so glad you are come in time for our party tomorrow! I know you at once, you see. The papers have been so full of talk of your red hair, I swear I would know you in a crowd — and here you are! “The flame-haired widow”! I am delighted, delighted to welcome you to Silverside. I am Mrs Briggs, you know, and here is my home — yes, the view is pretty, and here is the Baron behind you, though of course we must address him as Mr Crowther, must we not? Welcome, sir, welcome!’

Harriet managed to smile and nod during this speech enough to satisfy her hostess while taking in some small part of her surroundings. The carriages had come to a halt in front of a noble building somewhat of the age and size of Caveley, though its granite frontage seemed to be built on a slightly grander scale and was of a darker stone. Glancing behind her, she could see beyond the backs of the horses to a steep open lawn edged with woodland that swept down to the lakeshore, complete with jetty and rowboat. The view across the water was indeed impressive, the lake like pewter below them, the wooded islands, then on the far shore a pleasing mix of fields and woodland lapping upwards to the sweep of the mountains beyond.

Having exchanged bows with Crowther, Mrs Briggs had moved on to the occupants descending from the other coach.

‘And here is Master Westerman! You will be a hero of the seas like your poor, brave father, I imagine, young sir! And this is your tutor — very good, very good. You have the air of a man who could walk the fells all day and eat a good dinner. Is that not so? I am glad to see it. Now, young Mr Westerman, I hope you will run about and make a great deal of noise while you are here. I insist on it. My children are all grown and gone and I hate to have the place so quiet. Remember, lots of noise! And you may take the rowboat on to the lake whenever you like. I insist on that also. Miriam!’

A young blonde maid bobbed down the steps behind her mistress, smiling broadly. ‘My dear, do show Master Westerman — Stephen, is it, my dear? Very good! Yes, yes, Ham, lead the horses round and have the luggage placed. My, what comfortable-looking carriages they are! Now, Miriam, do show this young man and his tutor — your name, sir? Quince? A fine name. I know several men of that name and nothing but good of them! — and Mr Quince to their rooms, and then I am sure Stephen would like to have a run about the place before we dine. Mrs Westerman, I shall show you to your rooms myself. What a pleasure it is to have the house full!’

And so, without having to trouble themselves to utter a word, the party were ushered into the house.

The lobby was a fine bright place — the walls painted cream and the stone flags broken with large carpets of Turkish design. Harriet thought she caught an expression of slight surprise in Crowther’s face.

‘Yes, my lord. My apologies — Mr Crowther. No doubt much has changed since your day. But when your father built the place, he was not building it for a family like mine. We seem to need a little more light, hence the changes you see. Though the library is still in the same quarter and we have only added to your father’s collection. Lor, how many books that gentleman had. We had to cram in ours any old way. Kittie!’

Another maid appeared. ‘Show Mr Crowther into the library, dear. There are some refreshments there, and your sister is waiting to meet you.’ Harriet discovered by the friendly pressure on her arm that she was not to go to the library with Crowther, but found herself propelled instead towards the elegant sweep of the staircase.

‘Now, Mrs Westerman, let me make you comfortable so you and I may have a dish of tea and something in your sitting room and get acquainted, if you will be my host! I wish to hear all about your journey. Lord, I hate to travel! I have scurried about Europe with my husband in our time, but I would not leave Silverside from one year end to the next if I had my way. But then I would never see my daughter and her children if I did not. Have you met Lady Hill in Town? She is my eldest child, though of course she would have mentioned it in one of her letters if she had made your acquaintance. .’

Mrs Briggs’s voice died away behind him as Crowther was led into the library. This room was indeed much as he remembered it from his childhood. The last day he had spent here had been the eve of his father’s funeral while his elder brother spent that night in Carlisle Prison before being sent for trial at the House of Lords. He had sat here a little while. When he went back to Keswick to complete the business of selling the house and land he had not returned to the house itself but had taken advantage of his lawyer’s hospitality in Keswick. He had told himself the arrangement was more convenient, but in truth when he had left the room to see his father buried he had sworn never to come back. Yet here he was — and the room, it seemed, had been waiting for him. Heavy drapes across the windows filtered out the sunlight leaving the space a cavern of shadows in tobacco browns and bottle greens. The old spiral staircase still stood in the middle of the far wall, giving access to the narrow runway that ran round the shelves of the upper level. He realised it was the one part of the house he had missed a little.

What light there was still seemed to fall in the same way — unhurried, as if it entered the library to rest. The considerable floorspace was scattered with armchairs and low tables. In the centre of the room were the promised refreshments. The wine decanter gleamed red; a clean glass stood next to it. There was a movement from one of the armchairs that sat with its back to him, and a thin hand extended, its fingers covered with jewels that echoed the wine sleeping in the decanter, and placed another glass, part-filled, on the table next to the first. There was a rustle of fabric and the lady stood. Crowther saw thin shoulders and hair swept up from the neck and powdered. Then, slowly, she turned.

Crowther would not have known the woman before him as his sister if they had passed on the London streets, yet as he looked at her, around her eyes, in the height of her cheekbones and slimness of her form, he saw something he recognised from the mirrors in his own house, or the reflections he caught in the glass of one of his preserving bottles. She could have been a statue, but the lines around her eyes and mouth were too delicate for any sculptor to have made. He felt her eyes travel slowly over him, and he made his bow. She dressed a little young. Suddenly her shoulders relaxed and she came towards him with her hands extended. Crowther fought the impulse to step backwards.

‘Charles!’ she said with apparent delight. ‘Or rather I shall call you Gabriel. I have so rarely heard either name in my mouth. I can swap them with ease.’

He set down his cane to take her hands. ‘Margaret. You look well.’

She gave a shrug. ‘Oh, I look old. You missed me at my bloom.’

‘I am sorry for that.’

‘Are you?’ She returned to her seat and perched on it, slightly pouting, and watched him settle himself opposite her. ‘I rather doubt it, but I give you credit for saying so.’

Crowther did not reply but poured wine for himself and drank it. It was very good and he remembered vaguely that Mr Briggs had had an interest in the import of liquors.

‘So, my lord, what do you think of our childhood home? This room excepted, it is all much changed.’ Her tone suggested she did not entirely approve. ‘Do you remember how Addie used this space to put on his little plays? When he came up from London I would beg to have a part. Did he ever recruit you?’

‘From time to time,’ Crowther said, studying her, ‘but I fear I was never much of a performer. I found the whole business humiliating.’ She gave a knowing smile at that which Crowther found irritating.

‘Have you reached that stage of life where one becomes terribly interested in one’s own past? Is that why you are here?’ she said.

‘I came because I was asked,’ Crowther replied.

‘Is it so simple to conjure you? I had no idea. You mean to say that if I had requested you come to me as a girl in Ireland, or as a young wife in Vienna, I would have had the pleasure of knowing my brother before now?’

Her voice was still light, the babble of the drawing room, but there was a brittleness there too. Crowther regarded her carefully.

‘I have never observed that my acquaintanceship gives much pleasure,’ he told her. ‘I cannot say, Margaret, if I would have come; the occasion did not arise. But it is possible I would not have done so unless the circumstances were extraordinary. We have never known each other; perhaps I would have thought it better to leave it so.’

The Vizegrafin lifted her hand to cover her lips as she drank, blinking rapidly. ‘And of course, I have never been able to offer the additional attraction of a mysterious corpse before now. You are honest, at least. I am not surprised. I knew when I was established in Ireland that you wanted nothing to do with any of us.’

‘Any of us?’

‘I mean my mother, my father, our brother or myself.’

Crowther leaned back in his chair. ‘Three of the persons you have mentioned were dead. It would have required some great spiritual intervention for me to have any commerce with them.’

She set the glass back a little sharply on the table. The coquette disappeared; her features seemed to sharpen and age. ‘They were somehow a great deal more dead to you than they were to me, Gabriel. You would not even do the duty of thinking about them. I did. I felt my losses. You cut them off from you like rotten wood, and myself with them.’

Crowther paused, looking into the air above them as if considering the question for the first time, then replied, ‘Yes. That is true.’

He heard his sister take a sharp breath and wondered how this scene had played in her imagination before he had opened the door. Had she expected him to be ashamed? Had she thought he would approach her on his knees, weeping in self-reproach the moment she put out her hands? If so, he felt a sudden burst of pleasure to have disappointed her. She continued: ‘I note you do not come to me in a penitent or sentimental mood. Good. I would not think better of you for it.’

Crowther realised he did not care very much what his sister thought of him. Part of his mind told him he should feel guilt, but he would not. He had made his decisions and would not now revel in feigned regret. ‘Do you feel I have wronged you so greatly, Margaret? You have always been well provided for, and as I said, you have never made the attempt to establish any communication with me.’

‘I was a child. It was your duty to write. And later in life. . Your pride is in our blood. You were born with it forming the spine of your character, as was I. How could I turn to someone who had so conclusively turned away from me?’

Crowther did not reply directly to this.

‘I hope your time with the O’Brien family was not unhappy.’

‘They were kind to me.’

‘I am glad of it.’ They were silent for a while until Crowther asked, ‘And your son is well?’

She watched him from under lowered lids. ‘You shall meet Felix at dinner. He is young and more idle than is good for him. I wish I had had more children, but I had already remained longer with my husband than I should have. My pride again. I did not wish to admit it to myself, let alone to the world at large, but the marriage was a mistake.’

Crowther dropped his hands to his lap, feeling tired and somewhat trapped. It was an emotion he knew well and associated strongly with rich women speaking of their disappointments. Why had he come here? If he had not seen his house being pointed out as a curiosity in Hartswood the day the express arrived, perhaps he would have resisted. If his sister had left the room now with a promise never to see him again, he would have been quite happy to let her go. When she spoke again, her voice had resumed the dancing cadence of the drawing room.

‘Who is this Mrs Westerman who has dragged you back out into the light again, Gabriel? Who has succeeded where so many before have failed? A Naval wife, is she not? Is she of good family?’

Crowther stood and retrieved his cane.

‘Her father had a parish in Norfolk, I believe.’ The Vizegrafin snorted into her glass, her eyes a little brighter. He thought women of her age should not wear so many rings. They made their fingers appear more clawlike and scrabbling. ‘And her husband was an extremely successful Commander until his murder in eighty-one. She has not your taste for fine jewellery, but if what I understand is correct, his prize money could purchase your husband’s estates twice over.’ His sister continued to sip her wine without looking at him, smiling. She knew she had needled him, and Crowther felt a surge of irritation that he had showed it.

‘I find the journey has wearied me more than I had thought,’ he said now. ‘We shall meet again at dinner.’

He had thought the conversation concluded and already moved towards the door when the Vizegrafin spoke again. ‘You still carry our father’s cane with you, Gabriel. Family must mean something to you.’

Crowther’s fingers twitched on the latch and he left the room.

‘Do you like it, my dear?’ Mrs Briggs asked.

Harriet’s private sitting room on the first floor in fact delighted her. It was a pretty chamber that managed to be tasteful without unnecessary fuss. The walls were papered and the Chinoiserie designs of peacock, peony and branch made the room light. The furniture was honey-coloured and on the little round table set in the window was a bowl of foxgloves. Mrs Briggs stepped into the room to adjust the fall of the stems. She seemed a little nervous now, for all her volubility on their arrival.

‘Quite lovely,’ Harriet replied, and Mrs Briggs flushed a little.

‘Fairy flowers, my mother always called these. She used to make tea for my father with them when his chest hurt him. All the marigolds in the garden have withered in this strange weather, but these flourish.’ She smiled at her guest and took her seat on one of the armchairs by the table. ‘But come, Mrs Westerman, take off your gloves and let us be comfortable.’

Harriet was happy to exchange the swaying carriage for the chair indicated, and within ten minutes of taking her place she found that she and her hostess were in the way of coming to a good understanding of each other. No matter how she had talked them into the house, Mrs Briggs was also an attentive and curious listener. Before Harriet could quite take measure of the way her own tongue was running on, she realised Mrs Briggs now knew as much about her home and household as her nearest neighbours, and rather more than they did about her husband’s death. The woman offered no homilies, she did not clutch her hand and offer to weep with her, and neither did she retreat into the language of euphemism when speaking of death. Harriet found she spoke with more freedom and feeling because of it. She finished her narration of the events of 1781 and lowered her head, rather shocked by her own openness. Perhaps Caveley had been pressing on her even more than she had imagined.

‘Oh, it is a horror and no mistaking it,’ Mrs Briggs said, shaking her grey curls. ‘I am glad the man who killed your husband died such a death, though I am sure you wish you could have struck the blow with your own hand. So many of our good men die before they see their children grown, while the fat and lazy lie all comfortable in their beds and when they rise cause nothing but trouble.’ She spoke with such conviction Harriet wondered if she herself had suffered such a loss, yet she knew Mr Briggs was alive and superintending some of his business interests abroad.

The question must have appeared on her face, for Mrs Briggs explained: ‘It was a sweetheart of my youth I lost, Mrs Westerman. And I thought I would never recover from it. He was killed in a brawl in a tavern in Manchester. Such a stupid, pointless death. Yet they all are, however much we try to dress them up.’

‘Indeed,’ Harriet replied.

‘Though of course I was only fifteen then, and recovered from my loss. I would not have such a fine house or fine view if I had married Ambrose Muncaster, apprentice butcher! No, Mr Briggs was only a clerk when I met him, but ambitious — very ambitious. Then came the first store and he began to import, and here we all are.’

Harriet stiffened slightly, expecting remarks on the healing power of time to follow and explanations of the various, secret destinies God has planned for us all. She was rather brutally spared. ‘But of course I was a great deal younger than you then, and had not his children before me as constant reminders of what was lost to us both.’

‘Is Mr Briggs still ambitious?’

Mrs Briggs threw up her hands. ‘Lord, yes! It is his nature and I cannot change it or wish it otherwise. I cannot expect a man to alter his character as soon as I feel I have money enough and want his company at home. Here we are as comfortable as can be, and in such a beautiful situation, good neighbours and good hunting, but he cannot stay here a month together, much as he cares for it and me, before he is as strung and twitchy as a rabbit smelling a fox. “John,” I say, when I see him gnawing his nails over the paper or standing up just to sit down again three times in a quarter of an hour, “you are a foolish old man and should learn to keep still, but I cannot change you, so off to Portugal with you. Send me long letters and I shall see you in six months.” Then he looks as delighted as a boy let off church, mumbles something about irrigation of the vines in the current season and away he goes.’

Harriet laughed. ‘And does he write you long letters?’

‘Oh, my dear, he does. So long I wonder he has any time to do his work at all. He is a fine man and I know I am blessed in him.’

Harriet was wondering as she spoke how she would describe Mrs Briggs in the letter to her sister she had half-formed in her head. The woman’s movements were birdlike in their quickness but so suffused with a lively good will that ‘birdlike’ would not quite do. Perhaps a magpie had that glint in its eye. She was still considering when she found Mrs Briggs was asking her a question.

‘But you were a traveller, were you not, Mrs Westerman, when you first married? Do you not miss the adventure of it, as my husband does when at home?’

It was the first time in years that anyone had had the perception to ask the question directly, and Harriet answered with immediate honesty. ‘Yes, I do. Very much. I think that is why I am here now.’

Mrs Briggs chuckled. ‘Indeed, that might well explain why you were so ready to uproot yourself and come charging up to visit us. Though do not mistake me, my dear.’ She looked suddenly nervous, her quick eyes searching Harriet’s face for any sign of offence. ‘I am only too glad to have you here. You seem just the sort of guest I like to have in my home, and the frank and open sort of person it is a pleasure to see every day.’ Though Harriet was smiling at her, thinking it impossible to be offended by Mrs Briggs, her hostess still seemed unsettled. ‘There I go, running on again and saying all sorts of things one should not say.’

‘Mrs Briggs! Why should you not say them? You are only far too kind to me, and I fear I shall disappoint you on further acquaintance.’

She beamed again. ‘I am sure you shall not.’ Then her face fell. ‘But not everyone is of your mind. The Vizegrafin seems to shudder every time I open my mouth. Then I become nervous and make everything worse. She makes me feel like the girl I was, with hardly a clean shawl to keep me decent. I was all charity school and rough hands in my youth, and I think the Vizegrafin can smell cheap soap on me still. My daughter is married to a Lord, and happily, and my son looks set to only add to the fortune he inherits, as he manages the business with his father now, bless them both — yet ladies like her can make me feel like hanging my head and slinking back to the scullery.’ Her shoulders slumped a little.

‘I am sorry to hear you say so,’ Harriet said, with a slight frown. ‘I imagined you and the Vizegrafin must be good friends for her to be staying here. She is not a comfortable person to dine with every day then, if I understand you?’

Mrs Briggs shook her head, her eyes still downcast. ‘To be frank with you, Mrs Westerman, I wonder why the woman ever came! Her son seems pleasant enough — I like him, in fact — though he becomes sulky whenever his mother is in the room. My son was the same at one time. But the Vizegrafin never seemed to like us a great deal when we met in Vienna. I invited her to come to Silverside, naturally, when we discovered our connection, but I never thought to hear from her after that. She seemed a little horrified to be associated with us. Then a year later a letter appears done up with as many seals as a quart of brandy — and there it is! She would be very glad to make a long visit if it were convenient and so on, then she followed on so swift after my reply she must have had her bags packed and the horse waiting at the door.’

‘You have not asked her about the circumstances?’

‘Goodness me, no, Mrs Westerman! But you have not met the lady. If you had done so, you would not ask the question. She can be all twittering and charm when she wishes, but she will put you properly in your corner if you don’t bend to her.’

Harriet rested her chin in her right hand, tapping at the fabric of her dress with her left. ‘Her brother is not known for his social graces either, I am afraid, though he inflicts his company on very few. And this body of yours, Mrs Briggs? Was it at the Vizegrafin’s suggestion that Crowther be summoned to investigate it, or your own notion?’

Mrs Briggs looked into the air. ‘How strange! I suppose it is “my body” in my husband’s absence. Yes, it was the Vizegrafin. All that we have done this summer is due to her. She decided that a summerhouse on the island was a delightful plan. Then she wished to be present when the tomb was opened, then suggested summoning Mr Crowther and yourself. Perhaps she has become bored with Mr Sturgess, our neighbour, driving her about and playing cards five hours in the day. Still, I wish I had had the idea for a summerhouse of some sort before my son Ambrose grew so old and upright, but perhaps his children shall play there.’

Harriet looked at her. ‘You named your son after your first love?’

Mrs Briggs nodded. ‘With Mr Briggs’s happy consent, my dear. They were friends as children and I think Ambrose would have been glad to see his namesake grown up so strong and well-established in life. We do what we can for the memory of our poor dear dead.’

‘And you wish to have the mystery of this extra body in the tomb revealed for the same reason?’

Mrs Briggs spoke slowly. ‘Well, I suppose he was someone’s son. I believe by the clothing the body is that of a man. I do not know what you might be able to find out. He is a long time gone, poor fellow, but these hills have long memories, the hills and the people. I have been here thirty years and am thought of as an out-comer still.’ She clapped her hands on her knees, and became brisk again. ‘You will most likely find nothing at all, but I am easier in my mind knowing an attempt will be made. Then we may say some prayers over the poor forgotten thing, and you may enjoy the air and exercise we offer. Now I must go and dress for dinner, and allow you to do the same. Miriam will have your clothes all laid out by now, and will help you if you need her.’ She stood and bustled out of the room and Harriet smiled after her, then began, with a grimace, to wonder how she should dress to meet the Vizegrafin, doubting if she had anything sufficient to the occasion.