The China Governess Read online

  Here the stripped panelling was warmly gold and the pictures, mostly of the English school, were mellow and gentle in the afternoon light. Sepia Delft tiles surrounded the fireplace, their crudely drawn Biblical scenes in faded cyclamen blending with the pinkish pine, while above them, instead of a mantelshelf, there was an archway high enough to form a balcony with slender balusters and a tapestry-hung wall behind. As usual Nanny Broome’s pet name for it was extremely apt; there were treasures everywhere including a pair of cabinets in Italian marquetry, huge and splendid things, whose long serpentine glass shelves were covered with porcelain. The general effect was elegant and informed. Glass-topped specimen tables of various periods were scattered among velvet chairs and needlework covered settees and here and there a collector’s item, a tiny walnut harpsichord as graceful as a skiff, or a box in stumpwork old as the building itself. The whole place smelled of cedar, probably furniture polish, but pleasant and peppery and very evocative in the slightly airless silence. Through the windows the leaves dancing in the sunlight looked as if they must be making a noise, it was so quiet and still indoors.

  The tiles attracted Julia, who had just reached them when she heard the door catch move again and recollected with a shock that at least one of the visitors must know the house quite as well as did Mrs. Broome. There was only one hiding-place and she took it promptly, mounting the enclosed stairs which led up behind the panelling to the balcony. A curtain hung over the arched entrance, hiding her, and she sat down on the second step to wait until they left.

  ‘But the Victorians were tough and very interested in crime.’

  She did not recognize the voice and presumed that it was Toberman’s. ‘Here you are. These are the Staffordshire Murder Cottages and their incumbents. All this collection on the centre shelf.’ The aggressive, thrusting voice was not so much loud as penetrating. It reached her so clearly that the hidden girl assumed he must be within a few feet of her. Yet Mr. Campion’s laugh, which she recognized at once, seemed much farther away and she guessed that the two men were standing before the china cabinet on the far side of the room.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Mr. Campion said and sounded sincere. She could imagine his expression of innocent bewilderment, his pale eyes smiling lazily. He was not a particularly handsome man as she recalled him but a very attractive one with a strong streak of sensitive interest in his fellow men.

  ‘When you first mentioned the Murder Houses to me the other day I looked them up. It seemed such a macabre idea that I didn’t believe you,’ he went on frankly. ‘To my amazement there they were, illustrated in the text-books; pottery figures representing famous criminals of the nineteenth century and the houses they lived in. I was rather startled in my old-ladyish way. My hat! Imagine looking up from one’s fireside to see a replica of George Christie and Rillington Place on the mantelshelf.’

  Toberman laughed. ‘Perhaps not. But you’d rather like to see Maigret and his pipe, Poirot with a forefinger to his grey cells, or Nero Wolf with an orchid. Taste is swinging that way again. You ought to study this collection, Campion. Eustace will never part with it while he’s alive but one day it’ll be famous. There’s every Staffordshire crime-piece ever made in this cabinet, and that’s unique. The Van Hoyer Museum in New York hasn’t that very rare second version of Maria Marten’s Red Barn over there, nor the little Frederick George Manning – he was the criminal Dickens saw hanged on the roof of the gaol in Horsemonger Lane, by the way —’

  ‘Yet they have Miss Thyrza and her chair?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He seemed rather pleased about it. ‘The only other copy in the world. Eustace’s great grandfather, Terence Kinnit, bought up the moulds and destroyed the whole edition to prevent the perpetuation of the scandal of his murdering governess, but he couldn’t resist saving two copies, one for his own collection and one to grow into money to recover what the suppression cost him. As usual his judgement was sound. Miss Thyrza was forgotten and his grandson, that was the present Eustace’s father, sold the second copy to the Van Hoyer for the highest price ever paid for a single piece of Stafford.’

  ‘Really?’ The quiet man was gratifyingly impressed. ‘And the crime happened in this house, did it?’

  ‘The murder? Oh no. Terence moved here because of the murder. His restoration of this house took the minds of his neighbours off the other smaller building at the back of the village where the trouble took place. It was pulled down later. Here the lady is, Campion. Drooping over the fatal chair back. How do you like her?’

  Tucked away behind the curtain on the staircase, Julia could not see the speaker but she heard the faint twang of the thin glass as the cabinet’s doors were opened.

  On the other side of the room Mr. Campion was looking over Toberman’s shoulder as he took the portrait group from the shelf. It was a typical product of the factory, heavily glazed, brightly coloured and sincerely but ingenuously modelled, so that the overall effect was slightly comic. The chair was a cosy half-cylinder, quilted inside and coloured a fierce pink. The lady, in a long royal blue gown very tight in the waist and low over the shoulders, was draped beside it, her long black hair hanging across her face and breast. At her feet, two indeterminate shapes, possibly children, huddled together on a footstool.

  ‘It has very few flaws and that’s unusual for Stafford to begin with,’ Toberman said, turning the piece over in his short hands. He was a blue-chinned man in the thirties with wet eyes and a very full, dark-red mouth which suggested somehow that he was on the verge of tears. ‘It has a refreshingly direct, modern feeling, don’t you think? See the packing needle?’

  He pointed to a spot inside the chair’s curve where there was a small protuberance. Mr. Campion had taken it for a fault in the glazing but now that he came to examine it he saw the grey blade painted upon it. He glanced up in startled astonishment.

  ‘A packing needle! Was that the weapon? What a horribly practical and homely item. She simply wedged it, sticking out of the upholstery, I suppose? How very nasty.’

  ‘It worked,’ said Toberman cheerfully.

  ‘I imagine it would.’ Mr. Campion spoke dryly. ‘The chair must have become a Victorian version of the medieval “maiden”.’

  ‘You could call it that. But the “maiden” was an iron coffin lined with spikes, wasn’t it? The victim was pushed inside and the lid shut on him. In this instance there was only one spike, arranged to catch a man just below the left shoulderblade. The needle would be slightly thicker than a hatpin but made of steel and as strong as a stiletto. Either she pushed the fellow on to it from the front, or she went round the back of the chair as he was about to sit down, put her arms round his neck and pulled hard. That was what the prosecution suggested, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘When was this fruity little crime?’ Mr. Campion continued to be astonished. ‘I can’t think how but I seem to have missed it altogether.’

  ‘You don’t surprise me.’ Toberman was disparaging without being actually offensive. ‘Experts always develop pockets of ignorance. I notice it all the time. You’ve got an excuse here, though, because Terence Kinnit was an influential man and was able to hush the business up. There were two or three other sensational crimes in the same year – 1849 – also the young woman wasn’t hanged. The jury acquitted her but she committed suicide, so it was assumed that she was guilty after all and the public lost interest.’

  Mr. Campion made no comment and there was silence for a moment in the cedar-scented room. Presently Toberman put the group back and his guest stood looking at it through the glass.

  ‘Who are the little creatures in the foreground?’ he inquired.

  ‘Those are the cousins. Miss Haidée, Terence’s daughter, and Miss Emma, his sister’s child. Thyrza was their governess. They were much older than they’re shown there; the artist made them small to emphasize their unimportance. Emma was the eldest; she was just on sixteen. Haidée was a year or so younger. Thyrza herself was only twenty. The victim was the music master.
He used to ride out from the town once a week and there was an affair. Little Haidée found some letters, nosey little beast. She showed them to her cousin Emma who gave them back to Thyrza. Thyrza got the wind up in case the kid told her mother and tried to get the chap sacked, but without success. All this came out at the trial. The music master had fancied himself as a rural Don Juan and had talked about his conquests, so Miss Thyrza was practically forced to get rid of him or lose both her job and any hope of marrying well. Being an ingenious young woman she set about repairing the upholstery in the visitors’ chair with a nine-inch packing needle.’

  ‘Why did the jury acquit her?’ Mr. Campion appeared to be fascinated by the far-off crime.

  ‘Oh, I imagine she was young and beautiful and intelligent in the box, you know,’ Toberman said. ‘She insisted that the thing was an accident and of course, if it hadn’t been for the letters and the motive the man had given her by his boasting, it could easily have been one. What a splendidly unhealthy atmosphere there must have been in that schoolroom, eh Campion?’

  ‘Fearful. Why did she kill herself?’

  ‘No future.’ Toberman’s shrug lent a chill to the statement. ‘She came out of the assize court, drifted down the high road, found she had nowhere to go and pitched herself in a horsepond. There was nothing left for her at all, you see. The Victorians didn’t waste time and money getting discredited people to write newspaper confessions, and as an ex-employer old Terence Kinnit wouldn’t have stirred a finger. Kinnit philanthropy always has an end product.’

  The bitterness of the sneer in the hitherto casual voice was so unexpected that it sounded like a snarl in the quiet room. Mr. Campion stared at the speaker through his round spectacles. Toberman laughed, his full mouth disconcertingly unsteady and reproachful.

  ‘I’m the first of my family not to be grateful,’ he announced. ‘I used to be an angry young man and now I’m a moaning middle-aged one. I’m the last of the Tobermans and the first of them to see the Kinnits for what they must have been all the time – a bunch of natural sharks masquerading as patronizing amateurs.’ He broke off abruptly. ‘What I need is a drink,’ he said. ‘Whenever I get unpleasantly sober I clamber up on this boring old hobby horse. The Kinnits are a depressing family. Old Terence must have been typical. He got my great-grandfather out of his particular spot of bother. They used to spell bankrupt b . . . . . . t in those days and he lent his name and a great deal of his money to our Auction Rooms. We remained the auctioneers and the Kinnits kept their amateur status as connoisseurs who did a spot of genteel dealing on the side. That’s the Kinnit method; take in lame ducks, don’t ask too much about them but make devoted slaves of them ever after. Old Terence hadn’t asked for any reference when he took Thyrza on; that too emerged at the trial. She asked very little and he was sorry for her. You can hear every Kinnit who ever lived in that little phrase.’

  Mr. Campion turned away idly from the china cabinet and allowed his attention to be caught by a collection of enamelled buttons displayed in a glass-topped table little bigger than a dinner plate. When he spoke his tone was casual but the listening Julia, who had only his voice to go upon, realized that he had at last perceived the opening for which he had been waiting.

  ‘Which gets under your skin most? The patronage or the amateurism?’ he inquired with misleading fatuity.

  ‘The ruddy wealth!’ said Toberman, speaking the truth and being amused by it. ‘Terence Kinnit spent a fortune ruining this place in the biggest possible way – he panelled quite two square miles of wall space with pseudo-Tudor plywood for one thing – but it didn’t break him as it ought to have done, because he was able to pay for the lot by instructing us to auction off just a portion of the magnificent stuff he found and recognized in the ruins. The original builders had not only imported their skilled labour from Italy but their “garden ornaments” as well. Classic marbles, old boy, which are now in half the museums in Europe. No one recognized them but Terence. I’ve never forgiven his ghost for that!’ He took a deep breath and his dark eyes were briefly ingenuous. ‘And why did he do it in the first place?’ he demanded. ‘All because some silly little bit he’d taken into his house “out of generosity because she was cheap” had got him into a scandal which had to be smoke-screened. He bought the local folly and turned it into a palace to give the neighbours something else to talk about!’ He grinned and his sophistication returned. ‘You think I’ve got a chip on my shoulder don’t you? Well, so I have, and let me tell you I’ve got a cracking great right to it.’

  Mr. Campion coughed apologetically. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ he said hastily. ‘I had no idea you felt so strongly. I imagined that as you spent so much time at the Well House that you. . . .’

  ‘Thought myself one of them?’ Toberman sounded both irritated and ashamed. ‘I do, I suppose, when I’m not thinking. I like old Eustace. I ought to. The man has behaved like a rich uncle to me ever since I remember. Both he and Alison treat me as if I were a nephew and I use the Town house whenever I want to. Why shouldn’t I? Everybody else has. They’ve got a South African relation there now. . . . a humourless woman cousin and her female help. I’ve been “taken-in-and-done-for” like the rest of the outfit and I happen to resent it whilst being too darn lazy to do anything about it. Yet the whole thing is a paradox, because if anyone has a right to inherit from the Kinnits I have. At least I’m not a stray.’ Again the bitterness behind the contradictory outburst was quite remarkable. He noticed it himself for he flushed and smiled disarmingly.

  ‘Do I talk too much because I drink too much or the other way round? I never know,’ he said hastily. ‘We’ll go and hunt up some liquor in a moment. There usually is some alcohol concealed upon the premises if one organizes a search. Forgive me Campion, but I’m still reeling under the shock of a discovery I ought to have made twenty years ago. When it came to me the other day I was knocked out, not by its staggering obviousness, but by the fact that I of all people was the one person who knew about it and yet hadn’t recognized it in all that time. Hang it all, I saw it happen!’

  It was obvious, both to Mr. Campion and to Julia still concealed upon the other side of the room, that he was about to make a confidence and also that it was one he had become in the habit of making recently.

  ‘It was when the rumour first broke that young Timothy had landed the Laurell girl,’ he announced devastatingly. ‘I don’t know why, but that got me down in a very big way. Why should a man who is darn lucky to inherit one fortune suddenly have the nerve to marry another? I was thinking about the unfairness of it all when the blinding truth about that young man suddenly hit me between the eyes. Tell me, Campion, you’re a knowledgeable chap, who do you think he is?

  ‘Eustace Kinnit’s adopted son.’ Mr. Campion spoke cautiously, but Julia could hear that he was interested.

  ‘Everybody knows that, but you assumed he was also his own natural son, didn’t you? Either his own or his brother’s, the original Timothy’s? Everybody has always thought that.’

  Mr. Campion said nothing.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t,’ said Toberman. ‘That’s what Eustace let everyone believe, the romantic old so-and-so! That was the view of the whole of London and probably of the boy himself. Certainly that is what my old father thought. He told me about it before he died, as if it was some dreadful family secret, and I believed him, that was the extraordinary thing. I believed him although I was one who knew the truth if I’d been old enough to understand it then.’ The expression on his highly coloured face was wondering. ‘Imagine that!’ he said.

  The thin man’s pale eyes were misleadingly blank as he turned towards the speaker.

  ‘You suddenly remembered something about Tim Kinnit when you heard of the proposed engagement?’ he inquired, leading him gently back to the main subject.

  ‘Yes.’ The miraculous enlightenment of the moment of discovery was still fresh to Toberman. ‘I was having a drink with someone, Eckermann of the Brink Gallery as a matter of
fact. He mentioned the engagement and referred to the adoption and asked me which of the Kinnit brothers the boy really belonged to. I said “Oh, the younger one, the Timothy who was killed in Spain” and Eckerman said “Then young Timothy must be considerably over twenty-two mustn’t he?” This foxed me because I knew he wasn’t, and for the first time I worked it out and I realized that Timothy must have been born just about the beginning of the world war, long after the Spanish affair. And then I was puzzled because I could recall that year preceding the outbreak. I was ten and my people had the wind up after the Munich fiasco and I was pushed out of London and into the country down here. Eustace was ill. He was in hospital for seven or eight months and then he came down to recuperate. I remember him and I remember the war preparations here, the fire drill and the gas masks and the reception station for evacuees from the East End of London. Alison was in the thick of it – she would be! Eustace, being an invalid, pottered about in the library doing the paperwork and blubbing over the newspapers while I ran loose like a tolerated mongrel pup round his feet. As I was talking to Eckermann the other day I remembered an incident which had meant nothing to me as a child but which was, suddenly, utterly enlightening to my adult mind. The truth hit me like a bullet and I knew how young master Timothy, darling of all the Kinnits, Totham, Oxford, heiress-hunter and Success Boy came into the family. He was abandoned here by some slut of a slum mother, Campion. Eustace just scooped him up in a typically arrogant Kinnit way and gave him the name which happened to be uppermost in his mind – “Timothy Kinnit”, after his young brother killed in the Spanish war. After all it cost him nothing, and since the whole world was in flames at the time and no one’s chances of survival were worth a damn he didn’t appear to be risking very much.’ All the jealousy and resentment of a lifetime flickered in the small brown eyes as he confronted the other man with the statement.

  Mr. Campion’s little laugh sounded scandalized.