The Attenbury Emeralds (11 page)

‘“I wish you would, Arthur, I would be very grateful.”

‘“Wimsey, will you see to this matter for me?” Attenbury asked. “I’ll get you a banker’s draft when we know the exact sum.”

‘“I’ll be glad to, sir,” I said.

‘“And Peter?” said Claire Attenbury. “Your mother…your mother talks a good deal…”

‘“She does indeed,” I said. “But trust me for it – I don’t.”

‘And I didn’t, Harriet. I got the bauble back, though not from Mr Handley; I had it from his son. When I went to redeem it I found a timid and uncertain youngster in charge of the shop, and on asking for Handley himself I was told that he was dead. He had been struck down by a hit and run driver when crossing the road outside his house in Chiswick. His son was running the shop and trying to sell it as a going concern. He was still in a shaken state of mind about it, but he was able to find the transaction in his father’s records, and do the business with Attenbury’s banker’s draft. But when I asked him if the other emerald was still in hock he clammed up at once.

‘So I did the deed, and I kept my mouth shut. Such juicy gossip – my mother would have adored it! When the end of the engagement was announced in
The Times
the whole of London was seething with rumour and silly talk. Poor Attenbury came in for a good deal of stick, everyone saying he had discovered the Northerby family’s slender means, and was too mean himself to support the young couple. I thought it was dreadfully hard on him, when in fact he was being generous to the tune of thousands of quid. In effect, he was meeting Northerby’s debts for him. But I kept mum. You are the first person I have ever told about it. After all these years.’

‘I think I hear a note of sadness in your voice, Peter?’ Harriet looked quizzically at her husband.

‘Some faint regret,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not that until then I told my mother everything – what adult male-about-town could do that? But I realised that the tremendous fun I had been having, that wonderful sense of purpose that sleuthing around about emeralds had been giving me, came at a price. Any secret is a burden. It cuts you off, ever so slightly, from the people you are not telling it to.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ said Harriet thoughtfully. ‘And you were just feeling your way…’

‘And even now, I have to ask you, Harriet, not to mention any of this to anyone, and that is, of course, deeply illogical.’

‘You may trust me, Peter. Why do you call it illogical?’

‘Of course I trust you. But it’s a general principle. If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself. Enough of this, now, and so to bed?’

‘To bed, certainly. Just one thing – what has become of Charlotte? How is she now?’

‘She’s very how, I’m glad to say. She abandoned emeralds, diamonds and even pearls, and took her father’s affection in the form of racehorses. She runs a stud near Lambourn. She married one of her trainers, rather late – she must have been in her mid-thirties before she tied the knot. He’s a common fellow with a terrible accent, a warm heart, a wall eye and a shrewd eye for horses. I’ve won a few quid at Ascot, now and then, following his tip-offs.’

‘Good for Charlotte.’

‘She’s Charlie, these days,’ said Peter. ‘Good for her, indeed.’

He stretched out a hand to his wife. ‘Come, madam, come,’ he said.

9

‘Harriet,’ said Lord Peter one morning a few days later, ‘how’s the novel coming along?’

‘Not well,’ Harriet admitted. ‘It got so stuck I decided to take a breather, and revert to the book on Le Fanu for a week or so.’

‘I ought to feel jealous of the egregious Sheridan,’ said Peter. ‘Seeing that you flee to him for comfort, although he is dead. Alas, my love, you do me wrong…’

‘Don’t bother to be jealous, Peter. The brute was no help at all – he immediately got stuck himself. Frankly, I’m stalled until I can get some time in the London Library, or the British Museum. It’s a disadvantage of non-fiction that it requires an input of facts. It’s like a roaring monster – it gobbles facts as fast as I can discover them, and then refuses to budge until I feed it some more.’

‘And last week I kept you away from fact-finding by telling you an interminable tale of old unhappy far-off things. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’

‘I think you’ll have to,’ said Harriet. ‘Because your tale disappointed me. I thought it was going to arrive at the House of Lords, and a blazing public scandal, and it never got there. I shall return from the library at three, and will be glad to hear your explanation over tea. What shall you be doing today? Will tea for two suit you?’

‘Oh, I shall idle away the time in vacant or in pensive mood,’ said Lord Peter. ‘I’ve to try to match that missing teaspoon in the silver vaults. I’ll see you at four.’

Peter returned triumphant and punctual, bearing a silver teaspoon from the right maker, and the right assay office, and only two years off the right date to replace the missing one. Harriet, who felt sure that the lost teaspoon had gone into the rubbish somehow, and felt obscurely responsible, was glad to see it. Whoever was getting careless, it couldn’t have been Bunter.

‘While I was in Chancery Lane,’ said Peter, ‘I toddled over the viaduct and had a look at St Paul’s. There it is, Harriet, still standing in acres and acres of ruin – tottering walls, propped-up buildings, fields and fields of basements and foundations reduced to ground level and open to the sky. It’s a disgrace. Six years after the war, and nothing rebuilt. And yet, you know, it’s curiously beautiful. Come June, there will be buddleias and butterflies everywhere. And rampant wild flowers. Rosebay willow herb and goldenrod…the most valuable square mile in Europe, one would think, given over to wilderness. Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate…’

‘I suppose it won’t be left like that for ever,’ said Harriet, pouring the tea.

‘No, I suppose we shall recover from the war eventually,’ said Peter. ‘A time will come when there will be no more rationing; when there will be money to rebuild the City; when Coventry shall have a new cathedral, and my brother will have enough money to repair the roof at Bredon Hall.’

‘When Jack shall have Jill, Naught shall go ill,’ offered Harriet.

‘None of this is just round the corner,’ said Peter quietly. ‘We are on hard times. Our industries are smashed or bankrupt, our own farming has not fed us since the Corn Laws, we are in debt to the Americans to the tune of almost everything we own. We have liquidated all our foreign investments, and we have lost the jewel in the imperial crown, with independence for India.’

‘We won the war,’ said Harriet.

‘So we did. I predict that those who lost it will recover faster.’

‘I don’t spend much time with thoughts such as those,’ said Harriet. ‘Things are so vastly better than they were during the war. We are safe, Peter, and our children are safe, and we have each other, and enough coal for this nice fire we are sitting beside, and enough to eat. Have you forgotten the times when we could not have relied on any of these blessings?’

‘I accept rebuke,’ said Peter. ‘You are right.’

‘Before the war is never coming back,’ said Harriet. ‘It has become the land of lost content, a story-land. And talking of stories, you were going to tell me one. About the House of Lords, if you please.’

‘Well, that one is about a different Attenbury daughter. Diana.’

‘Did you say she was at finishing school when you were ferreting about in the family’s affairs before?’

‘She was indeed. I never met that young madam until she got herself into serious trouble.’

‘Another teaser. You are getting good at this, Peter.’

‘I have an excellent teacher.’

‘Thank you, my lord. Toast or muffins?’

‘Neither, thank you, Harriet. I was brought up never to talk with my mouth full. Of course, if there happened to be any butter…’

‘I’m afraid not, Peter. You have already eaten your seven ounces this week, and mine is in the fruit cake poised on that cake-stand.’

‘I do like a little bit of butter on my bread,’ said Peter ruefully. ‘To begin at the beginning. Diana was two years or so younger than Charlotte, and strikingly unlike her. I thought that the finishing school in Switzerland they sent her to had ruined her, but my mother said it was the other way round. They sent her there hoping to tame her a bit.’

‘A wild girl, twenties-style? Bobbed hair, sequined dresses, late nights?’

‘I don’t think her aged parents would have minded any of that. It was gambling and dodgy company that did the damage.’

‘Tell me all,’ said Harriet, pushing off her shoes, and curling her legs under her in the wide and deep armchair she was sitting in. ‘I am prepared to be shocked.’

‘The first thing to tell you about Diana is that she was dazzlingly beautiful. Not the tranquil, English rose sort of beauty, but dark and simmering. Lovely figure. Deep, smoky-looking eyes, creamy pale skin. Simply terrific.’

‘Your sort of girl?’

‘Heavens, no, I was terrified of her. One felt she was greedy – almost unbalanced. That she would snatch at anything, do anything. As indeed, she did.’

‘Couldn’t her noble parents control her via the purse-strings?’ asked Harriet.

‘No, in fact, they couldn’t. The girl had a wealthy godmother who had left her a chunk of money of her own. And said godmother, having herself been kept out of her inheritance till the age of thirty, had strong feelings about that sort of thing, and the money was in trust only until Diana reached eighteen. Which by December 1921 she had done. What with an allowance of a thousand a year from her father, Diana could do pretty much what she liked.’

‘Peter, in this vanished world of long ago, did one normally know this kind of thing about one’s friends and acquaintances?’ asked Harriet.

‘I’m sorry to tell you, Harriet, that one knew that sort of thing about their daughters. It affected their chances on the marriage market. Somehow the financial status and prospects of every debutante got around. Enough beauty might outweigh scant riches if the groom himself was wealthy. Impoverished young men had enough inside knowledge to avoid dancing too often with impoverished girls. The whole thing was rather sick-making really. Can you wonder that I opted out of it, and lay in wait for you?’

‘That’s another story, Peter. Stick to this one.’

‘Very well. During the few months when she was fast and loose on the London scene I heard rumours about Diana. Bumped into her once at a rather dodgy party in someone’s house in Chelsea. The rumours came both from talk about town, and from her mother, by way of my mother. The latter rumours were full of parental anxiety and distress. And veiled requests for help. Didn’t I have a friend who might be brave enough to take her on? I did not. It would have been a rotten deal for the friend in question, in spite of the ample funds. Besides, I was living like a hermit, stuck into book-collecting, and playing Bach to myself.

‘Talking of my mother, by the way, I’ve asked her round here for supper tonight, if that’s all right. She is sorting out family photographs. I wonder if Mrs Bunter would care to join us, rations permitting. I gather a bit of photographic expertise might be useful.’

‘I expect supper will stretch. I’ve just bought a new book by Elizabeth David, about Mediterranean food, and I found some spaghetti in Fortnum’s.’

‘I wonder if it can be good for us to think about food so much,’ said Peter.

‘It won’t do us much harm so long as there isn’t much food to think
about
,’ said Harriet. ‘What happened to the glamorous vamp, Diana?’

‘She got rescued. The Marquess of Writtle fell for her, lost his head over her, and they got engaged. And then married, within a month or two. Talk of London. He was much older than her, must have been in his fifties, and Diana was twenty-one. Nobody could work out if he knew she was damaged goods, but I think that was part of her charm, don’t you know? He had wasted his own youth on being staid and respectable, and he found her thrilling. He wasn’t bothered about money, he had stacks of it, and nothing much to spend it on apart from estate management. Don’t know if he even asked.

‘But the chief point of interest for us is jewels. As you know, Attenbury had that spectacular lot of emeralds that Charlotte had rejected. Writtle had oodles of diamonds. Diana didn’t mind being loaded with jewels, but she didn’t like the settings, and in particular she didn’t like the king-stone in the family emeralds. She said it was a horrid, dark sort of thing. Wouldn’t be seen dead in it.

‘Hello – I think that might be Mama arriving early. Have you noticed how often she does that these days? Awfully bad form.’ But he was smiling.

‘Nonsense, Peter,’ said Harriet, wriggling her feet back into her shoes, and getting up. ‘She can’t arrive too soon for me.’

The Dowager Duchess entered the room leaning heavily on Bunter’s arm, and audibly short of breath. ‘I’m early,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you have put in more stairs since you first had this house, Peter.’ She folded into the nearest chair, and Peter had to stoop over her to kiss her.

Harriet looked at her mother-in-law with concern. For eighty-five, she was tremendous; but she was bird-boned and rather stooped now, and ‘not for ever’ was her aura these days.

‘The tea will be cold, I’m afraid,’ said Harriet. ‘Shall I order some more?’

‘No, thank you, my dear. It’s rather late for tea, and a little early for drinks. I shall be quite all right for a while.’

‘We were talking about the Attenbury emeralds, Mama,’ said Peter, once his redoubtable parent was properly settled on enough cushions.

The Duchess perked up at once. ‘Which set?’ she enquired. ‘Before they were re-cut, or afterwards?’

‘Peter has been telling me all about them,’ said Harriet, ‘but he hasn’t mentioned their being re-cut yet. How and when and why was that done?’

‘Why do you want to know, dear?’ asked the Duchess. ‘Is Peter about to buy you some lovely emeralds of your own?’ Then she reflected that Harriet had needs-to-know of a rather special and recurring kind, and she said, ‘Or are you going to write about them?’