“Yes! Those dark eyes, that skin, the black hair. Crime runs in their veins, doesn’t it?”
“No more than it does in the veins of Englishmen, Scandinavians, or…Faroe Islanders.”
“I hope you’re right.” But it was mere politeness.
However, the description tugged at my memory. “What was this nurse’s name?”
“Trevisan.”
“I met her, when Ronnie and I went to Bedlam—sorry, Bethlem—three years ago. Isn’t she Cornish?”
“Is she? Odd, I could have sworn she was Italian.”
The villainy of Mediterraneans knew no bounds.
I set down my cup of weak, half-drunk tea, and patted her hand, one of those meaningless gestures that seem to comfort some women. “Could I see your sister-in-law’s rooms?”
“They’ve been tidied,” Lady Dorothy said.
Well, I could only hope the overworked maid had taken a few short-cuts.
Chapter Five
I’M NOT SURE WHAT I expected of a madwoman’s apartment. Chaos, certainly. Clear signs of disintegration and terror. But either the maid had been particularly aggressive here, or I did not understand the impulses of lunacy.
Why had I never seen these rooms before? Had my brief visits coincided with times when Vivian was locked away? I’d always assumed that Ronnie’s disinclination to invite her Oxford friends home was rooted in a faint embarrassment over her living situation and her mother’s lack of intellectual gifts—but it could not have helped to know that a visitor might encounter an alarmingly erratic aunt.
Vivian’s small private sitting room, in the upper reaches of the wing, was light and airy, remarkably free of clutter compared to the stodgy, dim quarters below. Books were neatly confined to a set of shelves, the bottom two given over to a series of leather-bound sketch-books. A simple, flat-topped desk stood beneath one window, with cups holding drawing-pencils and ink pens. Two chairs and a settee were arranged before the fireplace with a small table at their centre. They were upholstered in a soft green-blue cloth that reminded me of the ocean, and could not have been more than eight or ten years old. The wallpaper, similarly new, had a design so subtle as to appear merely texture. Its colour was a sort of faded terra cotta, with stronger touches of the same near-orange in the room’s carpet and throw-pillows. Two carpets interrupted the polished wood of the floor, a small one under the desk, a larger one connecting the group of pieces in front of the fire—both of them thick, modern, and expensive.
The overall effect was somehow Mediterranean, redolent of clear skies, tile roofs, warm nights.
“Such a bare room,” Ronnie’s mother commented. “This happened after one of her first…fits. One afternoon she just started throwing things out of the windows, lamps and pictures crashing to the ground, and insisted that we have the stableboys up to carry out all the furniture. Every scrap of it, down to the walls and floor-boards. She slept on the bare floor that night, and the next morning came down with her gloves on and set off for Town. I was so concerned that I made her take one of the maids, to ‘help her carry things.’ When she came back that night, she began turning the rooms into…this.”
Lady Dorothy’s helpless gesture was a clear indication that, to her mind, these alien surroundings were proof positive of Vivian’s loss of reason.
“When would that have been?”
“During the War—can you imagine? It was difficult enough to repair what one had, much less purchase things this…unusual.”
“So this was after your husband died?”
“Not long after. Before the War, we lived in the central portion of the house, with Vivian. After…after he was gone, we moved over to this side so that Edward could return, just before Christmas in 1915. Vivian’s fit would have been a few months later. Weeks, perhaps? At any rate, we’d scarcely settled in when—poof! Out of the window things went, and in came this. Heaven knows what she paid for it all. But she had her own money—still does, for that matter, although Edward is of course the trustee.”
Of course.
I walked over to a cluster of seven nicely framed watercolours all of flowers, all by the same artist. “Are these hers?”
“She was so talented. Before the War, she used to take her paints out into the countryside. She’d be gone hours and hours—she’d wear a boy’s trousers and put her hair under a cap. Still does sometimes, when she’s home, though it makes Edward furious. I always thought it a sensible idea for a girl out alone like that, but never mind. She’d just walk, mostly, looking dreamily at the trees and hills, then stop for a while and do a sketch, sometimes a painting. She did an entire series of Selwick Hall itself—in the morning, at evening, in the winter. She had them framed on her bedroom wall, and they were the first things to be thrown out that day. I’ll never forget the sound as they hit the stones.” She shuddered, as if the shattering glass were also Vivian’s mind going to pieces. “I rescued what I could of them. I have them in a cupboard downstairs. Perhaps I should have them framed again, if…” If Vivian is not coming home.
Before her eyes could start welling up, we were interrupted by a tap at the door: the maid with a question from the cook. I seized the opportunity and urged Lady Dorothy to go and deal with the problem, firmly shutting the door behind them that I might return to my study of the room.
To my surprise, I liked the madwoman’s decor, very much. Which might mean I, too, was mad—although Holmes would no doubt have mentioned it. Or it could mean that Vivian Beaconsfield was mad only north-northwest. That when the wind was from the south, she knew her Axminster from her Art Deco.
Still, when the wind blowing through her mind was north-northwest, Lady Vivian was a woman who hurled her possessions from upper windows, assaulted her brother with a fireplace poker, and took a blade to her own wrists.
I began a methodical search of the rooms, from chair-cushions and floor-boards to picture-backs and the undersides of drawers. As always, it was less a matter of actively searching for something than it was letting the mind passively notice the details and patterns of this woman’s chosen surroundings.
She liked soft textures rather than smooth ones, indistinct patterns over sharp designs, and rich colours over pastels.
Her sketch-books drew me, and then drew me in. They amounted to visual journals, with labels on the front covers giving their dates. Some volumes spanned two years; others only months.
1910 and 1911 took up a disproportionate amount of shelf-space. January to May opened with drawings of winter landscapes and interior still-lifes, then abruptly gave way to startling splashes of colour and motion: a dance. This must have been her London Season, the time when the country’s chosen were trolled through Society in hopes of hooking a likely mate. To my surprise, it appeared that she’d enjoyed the process. Certainly there was pleasure behind the whirl of bright skirts on the pages.
However, as one looked more closely—and as the sequence continued in the June to October volume—the emphasis shifted, from skirts and gleaming candelabras to the faces of the onlookers: wrinkled old women and smooth young men, both with expressions that were avid, eager, and eventually oppressive.
One page, with a tiny date in the corner reading “9 July 1911,” was covered with disembodied hands, a nightmarish sea of grasping black-and-white fingers.
With trepidation, I turned the page—and was looking at the Dover cliffs receding off the back of a ferry.
She’d gone to Paris. Why did the verb fled come to mind? A few pages of desultory Parisian scenes followed, dutiful sketches of Versailles, the Tour Eiffel, booksellers along the Seine.