The Angel of Hever Castle: A City of Mystery Christmas Novella Page 2

  “Poor Gage,” Tess murmured but she obediently got to her feet. “It seems he must do everything around here.”

  “We’ve tried a number of maids but no one suits him,” Geraldine said. “He is horribly shy, you know. I think it’s the goiter. He thinks people are staring at him, which, of course, they are…”

  The two older women disappeared from the room and Trevor, Rayley, and Emma waited for their voices to fade. Once they were sure Tess was truly gone, they pulled the paper from its tube and unrolled it on a table top then stood, shoulder to shoulder, gazing down at the image found there.

  It was a half-done sketch, showing the skill of the artist, just as Tess had claimed. But this was no ordinary portrait. A wide-eyed girl, evidently Anne Arborton, was seated on a rock gazing out at the viewer. Her gown had slipped from one shoulder, exposing a young and perfectly round breast. Over the other shoulder was the image of a faraway castle, perched on a hill. And printed at the top of the drawing was the title: The Angel of Hever Castle.

  “So he’s already had her,” Emma said, turning away from the table in disgust. “The girl’s future is ruined.”

  “Not necessarily,” Rayley said. “Painters must use live models for their nudes and those models must come from somewhere. Say what you wish about LaRusse, even this rough sketch shows he has talent. It is artistic in its composition, is it not?”

  “Perhaps so, but this isn’t art,” Trevor said, with resignation, for he hated winter travel. “It is someone’s daughter.”

  Chapter Two

  The countryside of Kent was largely composed of the last lingering remains of hops fields and apple orchards, as well as being clotted with sheep. As they rode, Trevor reached over and pulled a wayward apple from one of the trees and was surprised to find it still firm and relatively tasty, although the sweetness of the harvest season had long passed. Geraldine was right; the autumn of 1889 had brought a strangely extended expanse of fair weather, and he was relieved to note that no clouds were approaching from any direction.

  The sights, sounds, and smells of the farmland felt like a homecoming to Trevor, although he noticed with wry amusement that Rayley, who had been raised in the city, had crinkled his nose at the first whiff of the dung piles and had resolutely adjusted his scarf to cover his nostrils and mouth. Trevor had done precisely the same thing years ago, when he had first encountered the smokestacks of London.

  Within Scotland Yard, Trevor suspected that he and Rayley were often seen as twin halves of the same person – outcasts from the ranks of their fellow detectives based largely on their shared belief that forensics, not deduction, was the future of criminology . They were striving to be modern men in an antiquated system, constantly running headlong into the blockades of traditionalists, and their struggles had hastened the growth of their friendship. But it was times like this – one of them crunching apples and reveling in the country air while the other stayed tight and bundled on his horse, regarding every sheep with suspicion – that Trevor remembered how different they truly were.

  The afternoon before the two men had taken the rail to Edenbridge, the closest village to Hever, and had then spent an agreeable evening at the town’s only pub, which was located on the ground floor of the town’s only inn. They had been joined in their dinner by the Edenbridge constable, a ruddy-faced bloke named Billy Brown. Rural policemen often resented the interference of outsiders in local matters, and were more apt to be dismissive than impressed when that interference came under the auspices of Scotland Yard. But Brown had welcomed them literally with open arms, smacking each man’s back heartily in greeting. He seemed relieved that someone, somewhere, had taken an interest in the matter, and it was clear that what he called “those bloody shenanigans” at Hever Castle had rankled him for some time.

  “It’s not strictly under my jurisdiction, mind you,” he had said, and then he had blown decisively on the foaming top of his pint. “Properties of the Crown stand apart from all that. But crimes are being committed within those noble walls both left and right, make no mistake.”

  “We’re not here to clean up the place,” Trevor had reminded him. “More to rescue one particular girl, even though there is not the slightest evidence the child wants to be rescued. Presumably Anne Arborton is not being held against her will by LaRusse Chapman but is instead following him eagerly. That is why we cannot enter the gates as lawmen, but rather taking the form of fellow bohemians, a task I suspect Detective Abrams will be able to manage more convincingly than myself.”

  Rayley had smiled at this insult-inside-a-compliment and had taken a swig of his own ale, then winced. Country stuff, probably brewed no more than a stone’s throw away from the inn where they now sat, far stronger and more bitter than what the pubs served in London. “I wonder if they will accept us as freely as Mrs. Arborton predicted.”

  “Bring food,” Brown had advised with a growl. “And then they will accept you freely enough. I gather that they are all but starving out there.”

  And so Rayley and Trevor now journeyed laden down with every sort of foodstuff the shops of Edenbridge could offer. Bread, cheese, tea, ham, a jug of ale, and jars of jam, all rattling in their sacks along with brushes, paints, and the sticks of am unassembled easel. The painting tools had been borrowed from Geraldine, who was an enthusiastic but somewhat mercurial hobbyist. She had done a bit of everything at one time or another, including landscapes, and it had been decided that Rayley would pose as a painter. He had no particular abilities in that direction, but he did have the thin, serious face which the profession seemed to require, and Geraldine has assured him that if he claimed to paint “in the modern style” he could swipe colors on the canvas with abandon and no one was likely to detect his utter lack of talent.

  Trevor, in contrast, was masquerading as a poet, which meant that the only supplies he required was his little leather notebook and pencil, two items which were rarely out of his grasp anyway. He was convinced that his rapid rise at Scotland Yard was due to his insistence on taking copious notes at every crime scene and interview, and he supposed that when a man is scribbling away in a notebook it is impossible for an outsider to tell if he is creating a poem or constructing an accusation of murder. Still, he felt oddly fretful as he tossed the apple core aside and shifted his weight on the horse. Rayley noted his notable sigh and turned from his own horse.

  “Steady on, Welles. It is only the twentieth of the month and I wager we will be back at Gerry’s table before you know it, sampling her fine holiday lamb. Or is Gage serving goose this year?”

  “It’s not that. I’m just unsure if I can truly pass as a poet.”

  “Well, it’s not as if anyone actually knows what a poet looks like, is it?” Rayley asked amiably. “So that much should work in your favor. Ah, look there, Welles, for it would seem we have found ourselves already at Hever.”

  They had just crested a small hill and now were poised looking down on a lush meadow, with patches of green still evident here and there across the brown and grey. At the bottom of the hill lay Hever Castle. Emma had described it as a small one – insignificant, had she said ? – but to Trevor’s eye it was an impressive place of pleasing proportions, with two balanced turrets and a serene moat encircling its base of gray stone. A suitable birthplace for a queen who had been heralded for her grace more than for her morals.

  “Easy to see how this first view would dazzle an impressionable girl like Anne Arborton,” Rayley said. “She must have felt as if she was being carried away like a princess in a child’s fairy tale.”

  “True enough,” Trevor said. “The disrepair everyone has claimed the castle suffers is hardly evident from this vantage point. I suppose we shall see more signs of ruin as we approach.”

  “Some women are like that,” Rayley said, prodding his horse back into motion. “They look better from afar.”

  Trevor gave his own steed a gentle kick to the flanks. The horses had come courtesy of Brown’s own farm, since being a con
stable was no more than a part-time occupation in these small towns, and Trevor supposed he and Rayley had much to thank the man for. Who knows, perhaps in the process of retrieving Anne Arborton from her love nest, they might also find the sort of criminal evidence that would help Brown approach the Crown with a formal complaint on behalf of the village.

  As they neared the castle, Rayley saw two swans come into view, floating gently on the surface of the moat and he slowed his horse again to consider them.

  “Now that is quite lovely indeed,” Rayley said to Trevor, who had pulled up beside him. “They say swans mate for life, you know. An odd symbol for Hever, considering Anne Boleyn’s reputation for infidelity.”

  “Surely you don’t believe that,” Trevor said, his tone as sharp as if Rayley had condemned a personal friend. “The charges of adultery were trumped up so that Henry could be rid of her when she failed to give him a son.”

  “I meant no particular offense against the lady,” Rayley said. “After all, we are talking of a romance which soured more than three hundred years ago. Who among us living today can say if Queen Anne was unfairly accused?”

  “Well,” Trevor said, “at least she was thoroughly English.” His mind drifted back to the previous evening with Brown at the pub and how the man had insisted on calling the Boleyn family “the Bullens,” using their plain Kentish name rather than their affected French one. But the point was that Queen Anne’s family had been of farm stock, the salt of the earth, their roots as thoroughly British as those of the apple trees all around Trevor now. And that was what mattered at the end of the day.

  Rayley was surprised at Trevor’s reaction, for his friend was usually a bit of a prig. He would have assumed Trevor would be in greater sympathy with Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s devout but beleaguered first wife, who had been tossed aside for Boleyn. But of course, Trevor could also be a bit of a nationalist, so perhaps in his mind it was better to have an English-born whore on the throne than a foreign-born saint. The man could be morally confounding at times, very nearly self-contradictory. And it furthermore occurred to Rayley, as he and Trevor remained paused in silence gazing down upon the walls of Hever, that the painter LaRusse Chapman was much like the monarch Henry VIII – taking one woman after another for his use, callously abandoning each when she failed to met his needs.

  “Emma says it’s haunted,” Trevor said abruptly.

  “By Anne Boleyn?”

  “Precisely. Legend claims you can see her at night, on a bridge. That oak one there, I should imagine, that crosses the moat. The young King Henry came here to pay suit to her, you know. It is where he proposed marriage, and they say that after her beheading, her spirit returned here, presumably to a place where she had once been happy.”

  “Does her ghost still have its head?”

  The question pulled Trevor up short and he laughed. “There isn’t a ghost at all, Abrams, that’s just local superstition. You’re joking, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Rayley and just then the pair of swans disappeared from his sight, in sweet unison, beneath the heavy oaken bridge. And he could not have said why, but as he watched them a nervous shudder ran through his slender frame.

  Chapter Three

  The porridge was wretched. Thin, cold, with bits of grey clotted against the side of the black iron pot. Rayley scooped out a clump into a chipped bowl and selected a spoon from the cluster thrust into a drinking glass before looking around for a place to sit.

  Constable Brown had been right in his prediction that arriving at Hever with food would make them popular. The colonists – some twenty or so people, mostly young men – had fallen on their offerings without ceremony, ripping hunks of ham from the bone and dipping dirty fingers into the pots of jam. Trevor and Rayley had exchanged a glance of amazement at the melee, both of them wondering the same thing: How have these people managed to stay alive? And what sort of suffering will the coming winter bring them?

  It had not been difficult to pick LaRusse and Anne out of the crowd. He was apparently king of this group of paint-splattered gypsies, which made Anne his queen consort – at least for the time being. The others deferred to him, allowing LaRusse and Anne the head positions at the long table. It was clear that LaRusse came to the colony frequently and that the monies he collected for his London portraits were the main source of income for the place. It was also clear that his personal beliefs set the philosophy for the entire group, for as he had chewed his bread and sipped his tea, he had airily laid out the law of the land for the newcomers.

  Food, LaRusse had informed the silent Rayley and Trevor, was a gift of nature and could only be accepted if nature had willingly offered it up. That meant no meat, of course, and – since even plants were conscious beings in the world of Hever Castle – fruits and vegetables could not be yanked cruelly from their source. Fruit fallen to the ground, and thus freely released from the tree, was fine, as were eggs dropped from hens or vegetables gone fallow, including any wheat and hops gleaned from the recent harvests in nearby fields. It was hard to fathom how LaRusse managed to reconcile this preposterous philosophy with the fact he was now devouring everything Trevor and Rayley had brought – including ham rendered from a presumably unwilling pig. But evidently anything donated to the colony by the toil of others was the philosophical equivalent of manna falling from heaven and thus fair game.

  Anne had sat beside him during this grand speech, picking at her own bread and cheese. She was slender, silent, and pale, although not knowing the girl, Rayley had been unable to decide if such delicacy was her natural state or if she was already showing signs of strain from life in the colony. Yes, it was quite easy to see why she had come – the romantic promise of life within a castle, the thrill of serving as muse to an admittedly talented man who commanded an army of creatives, the chance to spit in the eye of London society, which could wrap a young girl in all sorts of restraints. But it was harder to imagine what might cause her to stay, for the reality of this dream seemed far less appealing than the fantasy. Pigs and chickens and sheep wandered among them as they ate, having entered through the front doors which LaRusse commanded must always stand open in symbolic greeting to the wayward traveler. The castle had been stripped bare of any ornamentation and most of its furniture, and the result was a cold, dark, and foul-smelling kingdom which was apparently ruled by a madman.

  But at least they had been accepted; no one had questioned, or indeed showed the slightest interest in their claims to be a wayfaring poet and a painter. They had debated the use of pseudonyms as they had ridden and rejected the idea, afraid they might slip up and draw attention by using their true names. But no one had asked for introductions either. Apparently people truly did come and go at Hever on a daily basis, without fuss or ceremony. The newcomers were presented with the stub of a candle and a single match and told to sleep anywhere they could find.

  This morning Trevor had risen early, with the first crowing of a cock that apparently resided out in the hall. He had gathered from the evening before that LaRusse liked to paint by the light of the sunrise and that he and Anne were in the habit of going to the gatehouse high at the top of the meadow to work. Trevor had dressed in the semi-darkness and departed with his little leather notebook under his arm, determined to assume his role as an early morning poet.

  Rayley, more reluctant to abandon the minimal comforts of his pallet, had risen and gone down to breakfast a half-hour later. Now, nudging a hen from a rickety chair so that he might claim her seat, he found himself beside a lovely young woman who was dressed in an oversized man’s shirt and trousers. While the rest of the colonists may have looked sullen and anemic, this girl was bursting with health and she looked at the bowl in Rayley’s hand and said, with some sympathy, “Our gruel is worthy of Dickens, is it not?”

  “There’s nothing else to eat?”

  “Not unless you have the time and inclination to follow around one of our chickens in hopes of an egg,” she said with a chuckle, then ex
tended a palm. “I am Dorinda Spencer.”

  Rayley gladly shared his own name as he shook her hand, noting that her gloves, while made of the finest kid and obviously expensive, were splattered with paint and the fingertips had been cut off, evidently to aid in her artwork. She glanced down at them, for the first time appearing a bit self-conscious. “I am a painter,” she said.

  “As am I.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Then you must come with me and I will show you where the paints are mixed. Where I mix them, perhaps I should say. Do you use white? Some within the colony are afraid of it.”

  “White paint?” Rayley said, aware he sounded a bit stupid.

  She nodded impatiently. “They say it is full of lead. Enough to addle the brain of anyone who uses it, which is where the notion first arose among polite society that all artists are barking mad. You hadn’t heard?”

  “I’ve been in France,” Rayley said weakly.

  “And they aren’t aware of the dangers of lead poisoning there? I suppose that explains why they paint those bright and airy landscapes, while British art remains so dark and gloomy. And perhaps it explains the general temperament of the French as well.” She chuckled, amused at her own small joke. “But I take care to mix beside an open window, you know, and I haven’t lost my mind yet.” She tossed the one thick dark braid which extended down her back and smiled, showing dimples so enchanting that Rayley was momentarily distracted from his investigation. “My parents would no doubt disagree with that last statement.”

  “Have you been here long? At Hever, I mean.”

  “Less than a month.”

  “Which explains while you still seem…”

  “Normal?”

  He smiled, bringing his spoon to his lips. The porridge was a bit more palatable in her company. “Yes,” Rayley said. “Show me where the paints are mixed. Show me anything you wish about the place, for I feel quite up in the air here, as if I have entered into another world.”