Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 8

  “The Hall was completed in 1482, by Sir Edmund Bedingfeld, Master Ash,” said Balfour, not without a trace of pride, “and the family has been in residence ever since.”

  “That’s a long time,” said Jeremy instead of what he was thinking, which was ‘have you been with them the whole time?’

  “Indeed.”

  “Even before America was discovered,” said Jeremy, taking a thoughtful bite of shrimp and cream cheese sandwich, which is what it was. “That was 1492 when Columbus sailed ocean blue.”

  “That rhymes!” said Brigit. “Two and blue!”

  Widmerpool nodded approvingly, his cheeks bulging happily.

  “Mm,” said Jeremy, trying to squelch an uncharitable thought relative to his suspicions about Brigit’s intellect. At least she was pretty. “Any ghosts in the place?”

  “Oh, aye!” said Brigit, her eyes wide enough to fall into.

  “Miss Blake,” Balfour said—the weight of his tone sufficient to crush her momentary enthusiasm.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Sorry about what?” Jeremy wanted to know. “What were you gonna say? Thereis a ghost?”

  Widmerpool nodded and chewed at the same time, nearly choking himself.

  “Any house as old as the Hall,” Balfour said, “has many idiosyncrasies—sounds that occur as the result of changing temperatures and seasonal settlings—that may, to the over-active mind, suggest phantasmagoria. I, myself, have seen very little out of the ordinary.”

  “Very little?” said Jeremy Ash, who had forgotten to chew.

  “Tell him about Anna Maria!” Thoughtlessly Brigit put her hand on Jeremy’s knee, and removed it at once when he winced. “Oh, sorry, sir. So sorry!” she said, jumping up and brushing crumbs off herself. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Balf’r, sir. Sorry!” She collapsed to her knees and began sweeping the crumbs into her palm. Widmerpool held out a hand and helped her to her feet. “Tell him about Anna Maria.”

  Jeremy’s eyes begged to be told, but his ears were unsure.

  “Anna Maria is the sobriquet—nickname, if you will—of a kind of smudge that has been seen, from time to time, floating about the Hall. I have told the staff, and not once, I might add, that it is merely a miasma arising from the moat in certain seasons, but . . .”

  “Oh, go on, Mr. Balf’er. You seen ‘er yerself. You said so.”

  Balfour stood to his full height and swaddled himself in butlery rigor mortis. “Isaid,” he said, “that I saw the smudge. . .”

  “Ghost, you called it then. Din’t he Henry? Ghost you said!”

  “Apparition,” said Balfour, “and I said I could understand how, given indistinct light, and certain contortions in the motion of the air, it could be mistaken, by those of a susceptible turn of mind, as seeming not unlike a woman. Perhaps Spanish.”

  Jeremy Ash swallowed hard. He’d only asked about the ghost conversationally. He didn’t for a moment expect an answer in the affirmative. He swallowed again. “How could you tell she was Spanish?”

  “Certain elements of the smudge,” said Balfour, “tuned this way and that in the moonlight, in a darkened hallway, suggest accoutrements peculiar to Spanish women.”

  Jeremy didn’t want to know the answer to the next question. “Just . . .where, exactly did you see this smudge?”

  Bridgit was inhaling to answer when Balfour cut her short. “Really, Master Ash, you needn’t trouble yourself about it. There is no ghost. The phenomena is readily susceptible of rational explanation and . . .”

  “Right here in this room, we seen her!” said Brigit. “Din’t we Henry?”

  Widmerpool read Balfour more keenly. His head, which was bowed already, bowed some more and he seemed to be focusing his attention on his sandwich.

  “We did, even if he won’t say so.”

  “Here?” said Jeremy Ash weakly, squeezing the air out of the remains of the sandwich he held in his hands.

  “Master Ash, I assure you . . . ”

  “Right there, by the wardrobe!” said Brigit, pointing at the oak monstrosity looming in the corner on the opposite side of the room.

  If ever a piece of furniture was created to house the undead, Jeremy thought—trying not to think it—that was it.

  “Miss Blake!” Balfour said sharply. “You’d best go back about your duties at once. I shall wish to speak with you before you retire.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Brigit. “Sorry sir. I only thought as he should know how me an’ Widmerpool seen ‘er come out’ve the closet and walk, real slow and airy like . . .” She mimicked the ghost of the late Latin femme, tip-toeing in place and crooking her wrists as if she were about to strangle someone.

  “MissBlake! That is quite enough. Can’t you see you’re upsetting our guest? I really must apologize, Master Ash. There is simply no excuse . . .” As he spoke, he was shuttling the maid from the room. Once in the hall he could be heard whispering to her sharply and, a moment later, she burst into tears and fled down the stairs.

  Balfour returned. “Young ladies, as you are no doubt aware, are not disinclined to let their fancy get the better of them,” he said. “I’m afraid Miss Blake is very much a case in point.

  “Now, may I suggest we talk no more of . . . of the supernatural? You are no doubt fatigued after your journey up from London, and Widmerpool and I have much to do before we retire so . . .”

  He gestured at Widmerpool who hovered for a moment during which he seemed wracked with indecision as to whether he should eat the rest of the sandwich on which he’d made a good start, or return it to the plate.

  Balfour made a meaningful noise in the back of his throat and Widmerpool stuffed the remainder of the sandwich in his mouth and, nodding several times in the process, made his way to the door and down the hall. Balfour stopped on the threshold. “I don’t wish to intrude in matters of an intimate nature, sir, but do you require . . . that is . . .?”

  “Oh, no,” said Jeremy, who was trying mightily to keep his eyes from drifting toward the hulking wardrobe. “The Maestro and me got it down to a science.”

  “Very good,” Balfour replied, placing a gloved hand on the doorknob. The sound of relief in his voice was evident, and Jeremy didn’t blame him. “Should you require anything, please just give the bell a pull,” said Balfour, with a nod toward the rope-and-tassel arrangement hanging near the pillow on the newly-made bed.

  “I’ve seenUpstairs, Downstairs,” said Jeremy, with a good deal more airiness than he was feeling at the moment.

  Balfour smiled. “Very good, sir. Breakfast is served at 9:30.”

  Jeremy had forgotten that part ofUpstairs Downstairs. “You don’t eat ‘til nine!” Jeremy exclaimed, the Spanish ghost, for the moment, a distant abstraction.

  “9:30, sir. The family and house guests come down for breakfast at nine-thirty. The staff, of course, eat much earlier. Six thirty.”

  Jeremy Ash was relieved. “That’s where I’ll be. Him, too, probably,” he said with a jerk of his thumb in the direction of Albert’s room. “He starts practice at nine.”

  Balfour’s attention meandered dreamily across the hall. “One doesn’t think of an artist of his gifting as having to practice, does one? Of course, he must. How fortunate you are to be able to listen to him, day after day.”

  “Yeah. Right. We’ll talk again when he’s been at it for three or four hours. Then he’ll start to write. That’s when me and Mizz Gibson go shopping; even if we don’t need anything. ‘Weather be damned,’ she says.”

  Chapter Six

  Jeremy knocked on the door. Albert knew Jeremy’s knock; always three quick raps followed by a silent beat, then a last tap. He didn’t say ‘come in’, because Jeremy would come in anyway, and he did.

  “Did you know there’s a ghost in this place?” said the boy, shoving aside the door with his left hand and propelling his chair forward with the other. “A dead Spanish lady.”

  Ghosts held no particular fascination for Albert. Jeremy may as well have announce
d that a saxophonist or an encyclopedia salesman wandered Oxburgh Hall at odd hours. His mind, for some reason—as he transferred clothes from his suitcase to the bureau that loomed beside his bed—was fixated upon the painting of the man in his pajamas—a painting that had once hung on one of the walls somewhere in this building.

  Why was the man looking the wrong way?

  Even if the subject persisted in looking that way, why would the painter not have had him turn around? The painting came from an era when the world was all about appearance, conformity, and order. The eyes were an aberration.

  A jazz riff theRequiem.

  It didn’t fit.

  Most important, thought Albert, why should his brain care? Why did it insist on returning to the same subject over and over and over again? It had music to write. Why, now, was it exercising a mind of its own? The man in the pajamas was a long time ago. He was dead. So, too, was the painter. And everyone else who had been on the planet at the time.

  All gone.

  Like Melissa Bjork.

  “These are yours,” he said, throwing a pair of one-legged jeans at Jeremy.

  “How’d they get in there?” Jeremy wondered aloud, holding up the jeans and turning them this way and that. “The maid at the Cadogan packed for me, the girl with the ring in her nose. She must’ve seen the leg and figured they were yours. Mizz Gibson must’ve missed these when she was cuttin’ up my pants after the operation.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Hm?” said Albert distractedly.

  “You’ve taken those shorts out three times, and put ‘em back three times. What’s on your mind?”

  “The man in his pajamas,” said Albert, taking the shorts out again.

  “What about him?” said Jeremy, who was not really interested in the man in the painting, and would much rather have worked himself into a delicious fright over the ghost of the Spanish lady.

  He wheeled across the room and took charge of unpacking Albert’s suitcase as if he’d been asked to. Albert sat on the edge of the huge bed and leaned on one of the twisted wooden pillars that sprouted from each corner, forming a forest to support the heavy looking hand-sewn canopy that had once looked down upon the father of Henry the Eighth, and would soon look down upon Albert the Least. His eyes entertained themselves watching Jeremy take things from the suitcase and wheel them to the bureau or the wardrobe and fold or hang them neatly away, but conveyed nothing of the domestic exercise to his conscious brain, which was—as Jeremy discerned—otherwise occupied. Recent mention of ghosts brought an analogy to mind. “He’s haunting me.”

  “Who is?”

  “The man in the pajamas.”

  “Why?”

  Why?Wasn’t that a question to ask the haunter rather than the hauntee? “I can’t stop thinking about him. Why was he looking the wrong way?”

  “Who says he was?”

  Albert had an answer for this. In fact, he had two. “No one in the other pictures was looking the wrong way and,” he said, as Jeremy was inhaling to reply, “it doesn’t feel right.”

  Jeremy had no answer for that. “That painting came from here, right?”

  “That’s what Lady said.”

  “Then maybe that woman with the stiff lips knows.”

  Somehow Albert knew he was referring to Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton. She did seem to have stiff lips. In fact, she seemed stiff in general, reminding him of something he’d read about the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 - how the buildings, which were meant to be temporary structures, had been covered with something called staff that gave them the appearance of stone.

  His experience of women was that they had soft parts, both physically and emotionally—sometimes one or the other in great abundance. Not so the housekeeper. He imagined her crinkling as she walked. She didn’t, he was pretty sure, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. Perhaps, rather than going to bed at night, one of the servants hung her up in a closet—as Jeremy Ash was doing now to Albert’s shirts—so as not to crease the facade.

  “Maybe.”

  “You can ask her in the morning.”

  “Yes. I will. Or maybe you can.”

  “I’m gonna ask her about the Spanish ghost.You can ask her about the guy in his pajamas.”

  One of the things that drove Jeremy crazy about Albert was that he couldn’t take a hint. Nothing would induce the boy to come right out and say he was scared to go back to his bedroom, where he knew he’d sit staring at the wardrobe, waiting for the Spanish Lady to come out and suck his brains out through his nose or whatever dead Spanish ladies did, but he hurled hint after hint at the battlements surrounding Albert’s awareness, becoming increasingly frustrated as each splintered into dust and sifted into the moat that separated Albert from the world.

  Albert’s brain was completely in the thrall of the man in the blue pajamas.

  Mechanically, in a routine that had become a not unwelcome habit, Albert tended to Jeremy’s needs and put him to bed. He had sat a while at his bedside, at Jeremy’s request, to talk—which meant to listen—for a while. Then he had rung for tea. Then he had gotten water. Then he had helped him to the bathroom again. Then he had checked the wardrobe ‘to make sure nobody left nothin’ in there.’

  None of the hints made it through. Finally Jeremy gave up, which he knew he might as well have done much earlier. “G’night, A.”

  “Good-night,” said Albert, and he left the room.

  Outside, in the hall, an immense silence seemed to congeal around Albert, stopping him in his tracks. He listened. A brisk wind had risen and was pressing against the brittle windows which complained in creaks and groans. The water in the moat, so placid a few hours earlier, was lapping at the castle walls, as if trying to gain entry like the peasants of old at the threat of some Protestant invasion. The ticking of a clock somewhere in the deep, deep darkness carved regular little slices off the night. Albert’s brain left off obsessing for a moment, and, returning to its customary occupation, began to compose a melody for the rhythm of the seconds.

  His fingers needed a piano. Not the one in his bedroom, that would wake people up.

  He went downstairs and waded into the narcoleptic little halo of light cast by an electric sconce the sole purpose of which seemed to be to conserve energy. He felt his way along the wall toward ‘the last door but one on the north side.’

  North. Was he coming from the east, or the west? It would make a difference. He recollected, from a brief sojourn with the Cub Scouts when he was seven or eight, that moss grew on the north side of trees, which was a handy way to find your way around in a forest. The principle apparently didn’t apply to woodwork in general, as there was no moss in evidence. Perhaps there had been some on the massive, twisted posts on his bed, but he hadn’t noticed. He could go see, but even if there were, he’d have gotten all turned around by the time he got back down the winding stairs, so he’d still be where he was, wondering which way was north.

  What he needed was one of those ‘you are here’ signs he’d seen at the train station.

  He stood completely still, perhaps he would hear something that suggested north. What sound did north make? There were the northern lights, he’d seen them once, but they didn’t make any sound, and they were probably only in Maine anyway. Oxburgh Hall was a long way from Maine.

  Everything was a long way from Maine.

  The wind eddied and swirled from all directions, prompting a lot of inanimate objects to tell it to pipe down.

  Which way did wind come from? That would he a Helpful Thing to Know.

  “I thought I heard someone afoot,” said a voice behind him. Albert turned into a beam of light that nearly blinded him. He threw up a hand to shield his eyes. “Oh, sorry, sir,” said Balfour, for that’s who it was. He pointed the light at the floor. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “I was looking for the, for the . . .” He’d forgotten what Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton, whose name he remembered for some inexplicable reason
—had called the room. He mimed playing the piano.

  “Ah! The conservat’ry! You wish to play the piano!” Balfour had, in fact, been one of Albert’s most devoted fans since, years earlier, he’d first heard one of his pieces on the BBC, though he was doing everything in his power to maintain a decorum in their relationship that was suitable to his profession and their relative social standing. Nevertheless, he was intimately conversant with all the literature on the subject of the Maestro and fully aware of his eccentricities and what was regarded in the popular press as his unique perspective on and tenuous relationship with the world around him.

  There were also those critics, he was aware, who had interviewed Albert at length and concluded—after much frustration—that they were not in the presence of genius, but of a musical apparatus, like a pipe organ, an intellectual cipher whose atoms were constituted in such a way as to resonate to some otherworldly vibration; the way, he had read, that some people pick up radio stations with the fillings in their teeth, and that he had no more awareness of the music that flowed through him than a jukebox did of Willie Nelson or Bo Didley. He had been called retarded and an idiot savant with a brain too leaden to appreciate the gold that his fingers spun so effortlessly. This was not an opinion to which Balfour subscribed. He had heard the Maestro play, and not merely the notes, but the soul within them.

  “This way, sir,” said Balfour, leading the way with his flashlight. He pulled to a stop in front of a massive double pocket door, half of which he pulled aside revealing a dome of darkness at the outer boarders of which were windows or mirrors or some kind of glass that reflected the light from the flashlight.

  Balfour reached behind a large potted aspidistra on his left and flipped a switch. A couple of soft lights awoke from their slumber and blinked at the darkness.