Fool's Gold (A Lord Ambrose Mystery) Read online

  FOOL’S GOLD

  Jane Jakeman

  © Jane Jakeman 1998

  Jane Jakeman has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in1998 by Headline Book Publishing.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For J. Al. as always.

  And with great gratitude to Teresa C.

  And to a real-life Arabian foal,

  Zaraband Bint Nikita.

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  EPILOGUE

  Part One

  MAY, 1833

  CHAPTER 1

  I feared for Elisabeth, even before I got her first letter from Jesmond Place. I should have known then that a mad but cunning mind was at work, systematically, carefully, in a determined pursuit, willing to destroy everything and everyone in its way.

  Yet the train of events which was to lead to two deaths, and to an accusation of murder against an innocent woman, had begun much earlier, even before I proposed to open up the abandoned ballroom in my own house, Malfine.

  My mother, Eurydice, had died some twenty years previously. My father, apparently a stolid Englishman, had died also, having departed from his role as local squire and overseer of that tedious daily chronicle of trivia which some people account such a charming feature of country life. Quite suddenly after my mother’s death, he began to behave like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, something wild, absurd, yet pitiable. The comparison with a tragic hero is perhaps not so inappropriate as it might seem, since my mother had been Greek, and thus she represented his connection with a larger, stranger world, a world of terrible events and powerful feelings, of the kind that are not supposed even to exist in the middle of the placid English countryside.

  At any rate, my mother’s rooms had remained untouched since her death. Within those doors lay mementos of the past: the embroidered flounced skirts of her native Crete, the heavy velvet cloaks and corded silk dresses which my father had bought her, the gilded icons of her faith, and her fantastic jewelry made of misshapen baroque pearls and branching coral twigs, of Venetian enameling and Greek filigree.

  I had never opened those rooms. Neither I nor my sister Ariadne had wished to do so. There was no shortage of money for Ariadne to have new clothes more suited to her style and youth. As for the other jewelry—the solid pieces which my father had purchased for my mother in Bond Street—the necklaces, aigrettes and bracelets set with diamonds which were suited to the wife of a rich English peer, had been placed, each piece in its own secure leather case, in the care of Messrs. Hoare until Ariadne should come of age. This event had occurred several years previously, but my sister was still abroad at the time of which I write, and the most valuable part of her portion therefore lay in the safekeeping of a London banker.

  So the Greek inheritance lies shut away, except in so far as Ariadne and I carry it in our blood—I, in my dark skin and my damned rebellious disposition. In her, it is not so physically apparent; it lies perhaps deeper within, and will emerge later. At present, she is in all outward appearances a conventional English lady, traveling in the Levant with her husband.

  But in our great West Country estate of Malfine, not only my mother’s apartments remained shuttered and silent. On my return from Greece, I had a few rooms made habitable—a couple of bedrooms out of the forty or so, the library, a bedchamber fitted up for my sister should she desire to stay.

  Malfine’s great ballroom had not been used for three decades or more. My grandfather, old Hedger, had not approved of the vast expense of such flim-flammery anyway. The house, when he bought it, came complete with a ballroom so that it might fulfil the requirements of a rich man’s residence, as a gentleman’s library might come furnished with the complete leather-bound works of Plutarch, so many yards of leather bindings to fill the shelves. Both ballroom and books were suitable and appropriate attachments. There was no positive requirement to dance in the one or peruse the other!

  In the volumes on the library shelves at Malfine were still to be found the bookplates of the last member of the Danby family, who had ruled the district since the Middle Ages. Charles Danby, the most generous of spirits, had thought himself to be Kubla Khan and lavished everything on this house. It was his semi-fabulous castle in the air, his gorgeous earthly Jerusalem, until the dreams caved in and he sold it all, the land, the woods, the mansion itself from the white marble flight of steps at the entrance to the gilded lightning-conductors on the roof. He sold it cheap, for it was a forced sale, to my grandfather. The magnificent ballroom had just been completed, one of the greatest in the entire West Country, but my grandfather Hedger—this, you will gather, took place before the day when my family became ennobled—old Hedger, I say, had no desire for gallivanting about the floor cocking up first one leg and then the other, as he put it.

  But he never let anything go to waste or rack and ruin: one of his maxims was to always hold on to what you have. 1 know this is not a very elegant nor a well-turned phrase, and I daresay that there are many splendid heraldic mottoes which he might have had emblazoned on the shield which he purchased, but mere heraldry does not build houses, nor keep them standing, neither. So Hedger inspected his ballroom, and pronounced it fit for nincompoops yet an investment for his heirs.

  I think he had in mind both the gorgeous furnishings of the ballroom and the splendid setting it would provide for a great occasion—for entertaining royalty, say. And though he did not want to give any immediate opportunity for dancing and prancing, he always protected his investments. So he ordered special covers for the magnificent sprung parquet floor of fir and walnut, over which the Danbys and their friends had twirled in rose and almond silks. And overhead, above this dull baize covering, the Murano chandeliers, their glittering drops and links intricately assembled by Italian craftsmen who had traveled with them, hung swathed in canvas wrappers like great cocoons awaiting the hatching of some fantastic insects.

  My father had three or four times ordered the floor-covers rolled back, engaged musicians and cooks and torch-bearers, and given a ball for all the county, but these were rare occasions even during my mother’s lifetime. She was a shy, retiring woman, nervous of her English neighbors, and after her death, there were no more entertainments at Malfine.

  As for myself, I had returned from my ventures in Greece and withdrew into a kind of inner hermitage, hiding away in the great house like an animal that licks its wounds. Gradually however, the world outside had got some of its tentacles into my lair. Humanity began to impinge. My manservant, Belos, lived in the house. There was the groom who slept above the stables. And then, with the affair of the murders at Crawshay’s farmhouse, I had found myself inextricably entangled with life. Into the void came Elisabeth, brought out of that savage family to the safety of Malfine, and with her the child, Edmund Crawshay, to whom she had been governess. His parents were now dead and he had no one else in the world.

  This was
our household at the start of this story. But I became aware that the freedom of passion which had been the rallying cry and watchword of my youth had been restrained by iron social regimentations which were descending upon us. The conventions of proper society were threatening our lives.

  I obeyed convention in one respect: I sent the child to school, and he was happy there, which I found strange, yet he wished for no more than to do as his fellows, to play their games and dash about at their sports. A sad little fellow, yet there seemed nothing else that he desired—at least, nothing that could be got in this world.

  So far, at any rate, I had done what society required of me and more: I had fulfilled neighborly obligations to young Edmund and ensured that he should be educated according to the status of a gentleman. But with Elisabeth, the case was different. With Miss Elisabeth Anstruther, I found myself struck for the first time in my life by a curious kind of helplessness engendered by passion: I was smitten by that woman when first I clapped eyes on her, and could not free myself no matter how I tried—and the same seemed to hold true for her. Only, I was never sure of it.

  So we were linked together, like two birds on a chain. First one and then the other tried to find liberty, only to come fluttering lamely home again.

  It was in the great ballroom that we stood, Elisabeth and I, one early May morning. There was a pale yellow light, the cruel sunshine that exposes all complexions and all scars. The thick baize covering was still over the floor, muffling our steps as we walked across it. The sunlight now revealed shredding painted wallpaper, the slimy brownish tracks of rain-deluges over gilded plasterwork, the cobwebs and scuttling spiders on the heavy shutters which I had just pulled back.

  Our voices echoed beneath the domed ceiling. I remember them clearly—the dying drifts of sound, echoing into the height above us, and the words that we spoke. I remember them most clearly, for I was proposing marriage.

  And suffering rejection. A most unusual experience for me, for I was not much accustomed to refusal, although admittedly it had never before been marriage that I had proposed.

  “I brought you to this room,” I began, “because I wanted to ask you, in this place. Here you can see what I can give you—and what it would demand of you. If you wish, we can re-open the ballroom, re-gild the lily, re-silver the mirrors—and you would be the mistress of it, as of the rest of Malfine. I wish to offer you marriage, Elisabeth, and I must also offer you the life which honorably accompanies it.”

  She looked at me with her yellow eyes, her gaze catching directly into mine. She had always a remarkable directness of speech, as of gaze: it was what I had most admired about her when first we met, that and the bold sensuality of her strong, tall body and her pale face, with those topaz eyes, set perhaps almost too close together so that her face had a strange, narrow look.

  “Ambrose, you have lived out of the ways of the world since your return from Greece. Your wounds have healed, yet still you do not rejoin society, indeed, I believe you will never wish to do so. Perhaps it is because of your natural temperament, or perhaps your Greek blood alienates you from our ways. At all events, the last thing I would ask of you is that you should sacrifice your solitary way of life for an existence which you would find hateful—the country squire who must play host to all comers. Yes, in many ways I naturally desire to be your wife, that I freely admit, for there is no false pride between us. Yet I will never allow you to sacrifice yourself to marriage—for I perceive that you need your solitude still, and to marry is to step out and declare yourself joined with another being, in front of all the world, is it not?”

  “But I wish to take that step!”

  “No, not when you consider what may probably follow. Can you resign yourself to receiving the county families, to opening the house up for our children, for all the hundred and one social occasions that familial life would necessarily entail?”

  “I wish to attempt it, for your sake.”

  “And grow to hate me, as some Lady Lummocking pours tales of the parish pump into your ear and you fret to be in your library or the stables—or more probably to go again across the seas to some alien land!”

  “And fight again for a hopeless cause, you would say!”

  “Well, is it not true?”

  I was silent, loosening her long chestnut hair that I loved to caress. I remember exactly how it felt, springing with life as it curled down beneath my fingertips.

  I had to admit that I might never be free of a certain contagion, an infection for liberty, with which precious few Englishmen are afflicted. English society is in some ways anathema to me; the requirement to bow the knee to some dull and sozzled monarch, to mouth allegiance to a row of coroneted turnips, to chant along with my neighbors some applications for the safety of a crown for which I cared very little, addressing those prayers to an Almighty for Whom I cared even less—these mindless customs had always revolted me. Try though I would to suffer them for my Elisabeth’s sake, yet I knew that rebellion might break out within my imprisoned soul if it were “cabined, cribbed, confined.”

  In any case, she spoke very decisively at that time. “Ambrose, I will not have you, for your own sake. I will not cage you, to lead a life you do not desire in your heart, but which you will feel you must give me. And besides, there is another matter…”

  “If you are going to speak again of the difference—”

  “In our rank and wealth? Yes, I must speak of it, for you cannot pretend that it does not exist. How can you have, as a fit consort to rule this great house, a woman who has been a servant herself, who has been a penniless governess in a farmhouse? These things count for much in English society and cannot be easily set aside. There would be whispering and murmuring for the rest of our lives, behind our backs—and what of our children? Will people not say that it is all very well, that they are heirs to a great estate, but their mother was the daughter of a wine merchant—and mixed up in a most dubious scandal!”

  “Let them say it. There is no cause for shame in any of it.”

  “Yet you cannot persuade me that the views of the world count for nothing. I will, indeed I must, refuse you.”

  I will not dwell on this scene.

  It was not the end of the matter. We might have continued as we were, living in a few rooms in the great mansion of Malfine, with the great suite in which my mother had been installed still shut off. But we were to plunge deeper into the frets of living, into the tangling mesh and snarled wires of thought and feeling which communication with the outside world inevitably brings in its wake.

  The background to all this, the circumstances of Elisabeth’s removal to Jesmond Place, I must briefly sketch. The history which will be revealed in the following papers is now part of our story and that of Malfine itself. Yet it is a secret history: if some pious future age comes to marvel at this house and tell its story, our dead fears and passions will lie crumbling in some attic.

  For the present, this account of the real nature of certain events shall suffice. I say “the real nature of events”—I mean, the vile truth behind them.

  At the time, I begged Elisabeth not to go.

  I confess that this was no display of foresight as to the terrible enactments that were to occur at Jesmond Place, but rather the result of my own selfishness and my reluctance to give her up. Yet her insistence prevailed over mine, and at the time it seemed entirely right that it should.

  “I cannot and will not cling and fawn upon you,” she said. “I have always had a proud and independent spirit and would think it shame to soak up your wealth as if I were a sea-sponge!”

  “Dear Elisabeth,” I replied—we were now on the lawn under the cedar trees planted before Malfine was built, by that noble idiot who frivoled away all his wealth—“Dear Elisabeth, I find myself appallingly well-furnished! I am in the process of allowing my ancestral mansion to fall to bits, and have no extravagances except our small household and the maintenance of our stables. Edmund is no drain on my purse save for his
school fees and a modest supply of bug-bottles; you refuse to accept any gifts whatsoever. Apart from the compensation which I regularly have to make to my neighbors for the depredations caused by Zaraband’s taste for exotic flora, I am at virtually no expense to maintain the whole pack of you. As for Belos, he is the most discreet of menservants who ever served a master, for he appears to scrutinize all my household bills through a magnifying glass before allowing me to make any payments whatsoever, and seems content with a new suit of brown velvet once a year. I beg you, stay. You have no need to go earning your living again as a governess, subject to the whim of any country numbskulls with enough money to employ a French polisher for their tiny block-heads.”

  Did she listen to me?

  Well, what would you expect? She had already made inquiries of our neighbor, Lady Anderton. That personage had been informed that the Jesmonds, a family of quality not far distant, required some genteel female.

  To Jesmond Place, then, Elisabeth wished to depart. Her natural independence of spirit asserted itself: she could, she averred, earn her bread if she was turned out of Malfine in her petticoats, a thought which briefly caused us some merriment, but she took it more seriously than I thought. Not the petticoats, but the earning of her living.

  It was true that Jesmond Place appeared to offer many advantages. In fact, it was the post of companion to Lady Jesmond, and not a position as a children’s governess, that was offered. This lady, it seemed, suffered from a rather solitary existence, her husband being of a studious and scholarly temperament, leaving his wife to her own devices while he remained closeted with musty instruments and arcane literature.

  “And Lady Jesmond wishes me to teach her French,” Elisabeth said, when we were standing on the lawn, alter her first visit to the lady of the house to discuss the proposed enslavement. “I think she would prove an apt pupil. We tried a little and Lady Jesmond showed herself to have a good ear at the language; she is a quick and accurate mimic and can give me back a sound with uncanny accuracy. It is odd, though…”