Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Read online

Albert didn’t notice. All he saw was the Steinway concert grand in the middle of the room; not so much an instrument as a musical landscape of highly polished rock maple, the underside of its yawning top a mirror that, even in the subdued lighting, reflected row upon row of golden strings, cork mallets, and red velvet mute pads.

  “Marvelous, isn’t it?” said Balfour. “The Mistress had it imported from Vienna, especially for you.”

  “It’s nice,” said Albert, situating himself on the bench. “Do you mind if I play?”

  “Mind, sir!? I should be . . . I . . .” Balfour’s ears were watering. “No, sir. I shouldn’t mind at all.”

  Albert played a light arpeggio under the butler’s watchful eye. That’s all he did, touch a couple of keys—an augmented chord—in an off-handed way that suggested he was trying out the tone. But as the notes left the strings, they seemed somehow to wrap themselves around one another in a way that suggested the opening notes ofQuasi una fantasia,a portent, a prelude to something . . .

  “Thank you, Balfour,” said Albert without looking up from the keyboard. “You can go back to bed now.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Albert raised his eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I shall see that you’re not disturbed.” Balfour backed from the room. “There’s no one in this wing of the house, so play as long and as . . . as enthusiastically . . . as you wish.” And, with a broken heart, he closed the door quietly. Which is not to say he left. For a long time, he stood in the corridor, his forehead resting against the door, and listened, until something strange happened. His sponge was full, and his ears could hold no more.

  Slowly he walked toward the pathetic little island of light cast by the wall sconce in the entrance hall and up the stairs to his room, aware that something in his emotional entrails had been pierced. The wound would be fatal to something, just what remained to be seen.

  Albert wouldn’t have disagreed with those critics whose appraisals Balfour had silenced. He oftenfelt like plumbing, his fingers instinctively responding to something that emptied through him from somewhere else. But to sit in the presence of whatever that was, with his hands finding the keys to translate that hidden language, that was good. It was healing. And if he was plumbing, that was fine, he would strive to be plumbing without blockage. He would practice and practice and practice so that his ability would be equal to that creative impulse whenever it chose to pull his tap.

  Now, as he played, he thought about the man in the blue pajamas. About the eyes that looked the wrong way. Sad eyes. Eyes now long dead. Long, long dead, like Melissa Bjork, and Tewksbury, and the people in the apartment building that Professor Strickland had set afire, and Judge Antrim, Heather – whom he’d only met by proxy – and everyone from the past, and . . .

  So many dead and, for an hour or so, he played for them.

  Slowly he became aware that there was someone else in the room. He looked up, expecting that Balfour had returned, probably to tell him to quiet down. But it was a woman, barely visible, wrapped in shadow and staring at him with soft, dark eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone could hear me.”

  “I could,” said the woman.

  Albert detected an odd accent in the two simple words, one he couldn’t quite identify and, at the same time, a curious perfume. Crushed flowers?

  “Did I wake you.”

  “Yes” said the woman, so softly he strained to hear. ‘Joo did’, she said. She was Spanish.

  Albert, as far as he knew, had never seen a ghost before, which is what he suspected this was, given what Jeremy had said earlier. He was unsure what came next. “You’re the ghost,” he said. Best to begin with the obvious.

  “Am I?” said the woman. “I thoughtyou were.”

  Albert was not inclined to argue, he’d probably lose.

  “That music,” said the woman, gently tracing the nether reaches of the piano with her fingers, “it is like blood.”

  Albert had never thought of music as blood but, inasmuch as it was life, she was right. “Yes.”

  “One would not think it to look at you,” she said enigmatically.

  “Think what?”

  “What I’m thinking. The thoughts your music brings to mind.”

  Albert let his expression beg the question, but no answer was forthcoming. They looked at one another for a full half-minute, almost motionless, then she turned and dissipated into the shadows.

  So that’s a ghost, Albert thought.

  He decided it was time to go to bed. Who knew what else his playing might disturb?

  The ghost wasn’t sure what she’d seen.

  “The man in the blue pajamas?” said Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton as she cleared a space on the sideboard for the coffee urn, which was being carried in by a girl Albert hadn’t seen before; at least hadn’t noticed. He made an effort to notice her now. She was female, that much his initial instincts had gotten right. He couldn’t decide if she was tall or short; so much depended on what you compared her to. She was taller than the aspidistra, but shorter than the ceiling.

  Albert’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling. Who knew how high that was. Fifteen feet? A hundred? How tall was he? If he knew that, he might be able to imagine how many of him, stacked one atop the other, it would take to reach the ceiling.

  Mathematics.

  “How tall would you say I am?” he asked, without directing the question at either of the other three inhabitants of the room—Jeremy Ash, Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton, or the serving girl—by name.

  “You’re five-foot ten and a-half,” said Jeremy Ash with a mouthful of kippered herring, for which he’d acquired a taste since his arrival in England. “It’s on your passport.”

  Albert hadn’t taken his eyes off the ceiling. “About five of me, then,” he estimated aloud.

  Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton leveled a bemused look at Jeremy Ash, who shrugged, shook his head and resumed eating. “Don’t even try,” he advised.

  Five Alberts would be five times five-feet ten and a-half inches.

  Like almost everything else, math was not one of Albert’s strong suits, but it helped to reduce everything to musical terms, in this case, inches to whole notes. If there were twelve whole notes in a foot, and each inch added to that was another whole note, then five feet would have sixty whole notes. Ten and a half more would make seventy whole notes and a half note. Times five of him, would make - whatever seventy times five is plus five more half notes.

  He’d need a pencil.

  Why was he thinking how high the ceiling was? Something had nudged him onto this train of thought, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Anyway—knowledge being a good thing—it was nice to know the height of the ceiling.

  “He’s talking about that painting we saw in theCourtauld Gallery, the one that came from here.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the housekeeper, straightening the jam. Officially it’s titledThe Blue Robert, but hereabouts it’s called “Annabella’s Whimsy.”

  “Who’s that?” said Jeremy, only half-way curious. His attention had, for several seconds, been inclined to linger on the serving girl, about whom there were several things that commended themselves as objects of observation, not least of which was the little smile she flashed at him whenever their eyes met.

  Albert was reminded that he was the one who had asked the question that precipitated the housekeeper’s comment. He waited to hear how she would respond to Jeremy, it might help him to remember what he’d asked.

  “Lady Annabella Scrope-Howe; she had the portrait made.” The housekeeper made either a laughing or disapproving sound. “It is, ostensibly, of Robert Tiptoft, founder of her family fortune. But he had been dead and gone several centuries by the time she had the painting made and, as there is no known contemporary likeness of that gentleman, the artist was told to paint himself.”

  Albert wanted to make sure he understood what Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hami
lton had just told him. “So, the man in the pajamas is supposed to be Robert . . .”

  “Sir Robert Tiptoft,” said the housekeeper. “Yes.”

  “Who was dead when the picture was made?”

  “Yes,” she said, as her fingers busied themselves with some recalcitrant flowers. “And had been for the better part of three centuries.”

  Then what, thought Albert, had prompted Lady Annabella to have the painting—of a man whowasn’t Robert Tiptoft—painted? Without being aware of it, he had voiced the thought aloud, and was a little surprised when Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton replied. He wondered, for a fleeting moment, if she’d been reading his mind.

  “Nobody knows, for sure, sir. It’s one of those little mysteries that gather ‘round ancient families like the Scropes and the Bedingfelds, and places like this. Not unlike dust.” Her eyes briefly toured the room. “Makes one feel a part of it all, just by being here, don’t you find?”

  Albert was reminded what Lady had said in the museum, about the man in the picture. “But the real man—the artist—died?”

  Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton stopped what she was doing and looked at Albert in surprise. “Why, yes. As a matter of fact, he did. Harvest Lossburgh, a local fellow. One of those names you never forget. Painted mostly prize bulls and horses for the gentry, legend has it. He was murdered.”

  All of a sudden Jeremy was attentive, fearing that mention of the dreaded word would send Albert off again into a faint, but he showed not the least sign of inner turmoil. His brow had wrinkled slightly, forcing his horn-rimmed glasses down his nose a quarter-inch or so, but otherwise he seemed completely in control of whatever emotions the wretched subject elicited. In fact, he seemed almost thoughtful. Why was that? Jeremy wondered. A few days earlier the word had sent him to the hospital.

  The housekeeper continued. “The very moment the portrait was completed, as a matter-of-fact. The story goes that he was found on the floor in front of his easel, having been stabbed through the neck, back-to-front, with the paintbrush still in his hand.” She clutched her hand as if it held the paintbrush.

  “Dead,” said Albert.

  “Dead,” Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton affirmed.

  “Who killed him?” Jeremy demanded, stabbing the air with an imaginary knife.

  The housekeeper lifted the silver lid of a warming plate on the sideboard and rearranged the bacon in an orderly regiment. “Another of those little mysteries.”

  Albert didn’t think murder a little mystery. Especially not for the victim; even if he did paint cows. For one horrible moment he imagined a bovine canvas wandering the countryside festooned with the blotches to which he’d been subjected in the museum.

  It would have to put it down.

  “What if he killed himself?” Jeremy Ash wondered.

  This seemed, to Albert, an uncomfortable way to go about an already gruesome task. “Would someone stab themselves in the back of the neck?”

  Jeremy demonstrated that it was physically possible. Which it was. Still, such a feat of mild contortion in the face of death would, at the very least, make Harvest Lossburgh a very original thinker. Perhaps an artist has a lot of time to think while he’s painting cows.

  Chapter Seven

  The Manor House, Castle Combe, England. 1662

  “You’ve captured yourself to perfection, Mr. Lossburgh!”

  Lossburgh stepped back from his canvas, his gaze bouncing back and forth between the self-portrait and the image of himself in the mirror positioned awkwardly against the wall to the right, where his patroness had directed it should be placed.

  “Thank you, your ladyship,” said the painter, his voice tinged with hesitance. “I still don’t understand why . . .”

  “Let us refrain from further comment upon the subject, shall we?”

  Lady Annabella’s voluminous skirts, as she maneuvered through the little forest of artist’s paraphernalia, rustled like a murder of crows coming to roost on the branches of a dead tree. She stood behind him, studying the portrait over his shoulder.

  He felt her warm breath on his neck.

  “Really quite remarkable,” she said. “You have missed your calling, Mr. Lossburgh.” Her words, barely above a whisper, were spoken directly into his ear and made his blood rise and his forehead suddenly bead with perspiration. She may be six months gone—it seemed she was always, to some extent, with child—but her feminine allure was, if anything, augmented by the glow of her milky skin, the fullness of her breasts, signs of fecundity that overflowed the borders of his senses.

  “Have you ever painted a woman, Mr. Lossburgh?” she continued. Her fingers rested lightly on the edges of his ruff.

  Lossburgh swallowed deeply and tipped his brush toward the still-fresh canvas. “Beyond simple sketches, this is my first attempt at a human of either sex, ma’am. I must say, I surprise myself.” The ruff seemed to be tightening around his neck, the whole ridiculous costume of druid-blue silk embraced him in sweat.

  “Are you familiar with Reubens?” said Lady Annabella, speaking now in his left ear, her voice wet with a sensual conspiracy that stirred feelings completely foreign to him. He turned slightly to look at her, but she had already returned to his opposite side.

  “Yes, I know of him. He is . . . that is, his work is . . . excessive.” That wasn’t the word he was looking for, but it was the only one that came to mind.

  The woman giggled. “‘Excessive?’ Really? I’d have said he was a voluptuary, Mr. Lossburgh. His portrait ofVenus at the Mirror, for instance. . . “

  Lossburgh was scandalized. The painting to which she referred was, no doubt, the talk of fashionable salons in London—hotbeds of debauchery that they were—but to hear mention of it from the lips of a lady! He flushed an even deeper shade of crimson and began occupying himself with cleaning his brush. “Really, your ladyship, it is beyond my station, to say nothing of common etiquette, for me to so much as allude to such a, such a work, in the presence of a lady.”

  He was bending toward the little bouquet of brushes that protruded from a well in his paintbox. Lady Annabella leaned against him, allowing the full weight of her body to press upon his back and buttocks. He staggered slightly, stunned by the action but, at the same time, found her surprisingly light for one in such an advanced state. The little knoll of the next Lord Scrope laid its foot in the hollow of his back and gave a kick.

  “Seeing you have managed so singular a debut,” she whispered, her lips nearly brushing his trembling earlobe that seemed, of its own volition, to stretch toward them like a flower toward the sun, “I am almost persuaded to have you make a similar portrait of me.Lady Annabella Scrope, Venus of Wiltshire!”

  The suggestion shocked the painter bolt upright with such force that his female burden was flung from him toward the wall, from contact with which she was preserved by a last-minute grasp at a curtain framing the tapestry with which the wall was hung. Rather than flying at him in a fury, as he half-expected, she laughed merrily as she collected herself from near-catastrophe and sorted her skirts, an act that had her bent slightly toward him, daring him to divert his eyes from the private vista thus presented. His instinct was to offer her his hand and draw her out of the shadows to the accompaniment of his apologies, but he was constrained by the fear that such a gesture, however well-meant, might be construed as a liberty. She was clearly alright and did not require his assistance.

  “I beg your pardon, your ladyship! I was . . . I do not know what came over me . . . Please, please forgive me.”

  “I rather thinkI came over you,” said Lady Scrope. She stepped toward him, placed her hands on his sides, and looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “You find the prospect repugnant, Mr. Lossburgh?”

  “Your ladyship,” said Lossburgh, who had begun sweating profusely, much to the lady’s delight, “if someone should discover us . . .”

  “The door is locked,” said Annabella, her eyes searching his in a dance prescient with per
il.

  Lossburgh felt his Adam’s apple proclaim his discomfit as he swallowed again. Suddenly all the intimations, insinuations, and gossip he’d heard—and, as a gentleman, attempted to ignore—concerning his patroness tumbled over one another in his brain with cries of warning. Who else but the vixen she was reputed to be could have made such a suggestion? Who but a woman of indifferent morals would have placed herself in such a compromising position, or have so expertly drawn from his body its present response, completely overwhelming his will, mocking his determination to mute his own biology?

  She was, he knew, the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Sunderland and his kitchen maid, Martha Janes, but shehad married Sir John Howe, a Baronet and, whatever she had been, she was now his wife.

  This, he decided, was a momentary aberration; an atavistic impulse born of her maternal heritage erupting briefly through the veneer. Even the noblest of women in her condition were, he knew from personal experience—his wife had borne him seven live children—susceptible to emotional outbursts, to exhibitions of their feminine frailties and felt, sometimes desperately, the need for affirmation that impending motherhood had not robbed them of their desirability.

  But how did any of that account for her determination to have him paint such an oddly-positioned portrait, to paint across himself, as it were, his body and head turned one way, and his eyes another; forever staring at the mirror she had placed against the wall?

  As gracefully as possible, he extracted himself from her and, somewhat distractedly, was regarding his blushing visage in that curious mirror when the point of a thin, sharp object emerged unexpectedly from his throat, accompanied by an electric jolt at the base of his neck.A curious place for a hairpin, he thought as his Adam’s apple slowly ceased its animation.

  Lord Scrope stood abruptly as the door to his wife’s bedchamber opened and, after what seemed hours, the doctor emerged. His lordship had inhaled to speak, but the physician held up his hand. “She’s sleeping now. That’s the best thing.”