Sarah Caudwell - The Sirens Sang of Murder

“Oh, Professor Tamar,” she said, rather charmingly breathless, “Miss Derwent was on the telephone. She rang to ask if Mr. Cantrip was back in Chambers yet. And when I said he wasn’t, she asked about you — if I happened to know if you were in London at the moment. So of course I said you were and you’d probably be looking into Chambers sometime this morning. And she said, if I saw you, would I please ask you to ring her as soon as possible.”

The message perplexed me. I had no personal acquaintance with Clementine Derwent and could imagine no reason why she should wish to speak to me.

The telephone call which I made from Selena’s room a few minutes later afforded but little enlightenment. The matter, it seemed, was of some complexity, and could not satisfactorily be explained at a distance. Clementine’s office was in the Gray’s Inn Road, no more than five minutes’ walk away. If in the course of the day I could find time to visit her there, she would be most grateful.

Those who believe, as most members of Lincoln’s Inn are inclined to do, that any serious study of the law requires an atmosphere of dust and antiquity would have been unfavourably impressed by the offices of Messrs. Stingham and Grynne. The thickness of the carpets, the subtlety of the lighting, the freshness of the flowers arranged in cut-glass bowls — all these would have caused them grave doubts of the soundness of the advice provided there. On the other hand, these features did seem to indicate that a passable number of reasonably prosperous clients were not dissatisfied.

The room occupied by Clementine Derwent on the third floor of the building, though presumably not so large as those allotted to full partners in the firm, was nonetheless sufficiently spacious and well appointed, with a view eastwards to the domes and spires of the City, to be suggestive of rapid advancement. She rose to greet me, leaning across her desk to offer me her hand.

Her full-skirted cotton dress was drawn neatly in at the waist, and her glossy black hair was cut, I daresay at great expense, in a style of becoming softness. Neither of these measures could quite disguise her resemblance in face and figure — the former round, snub-nosed, good-humouredly pugnacious, the latter trim and muscular — to an engaging but undisciplined schoolboy. It would have seemed inapt to call her pretty — the epithets she brought to mind were those descriptive of a crisp eating apple.

A sensible, well-balanced young woman, one would have said at first sight, who would not readily allow any personal or professional difficulty to weigh so excessively on her mind as to interfere with sound sleep and healthy appetite. I was surprised, therefore, as she resumed her place at her desk, to observe in her unmistakable signs of tension and anxiety.

’Professor Tamar,” she said, with a nervous abruptness which I could not think characteristic of her, “I hope you don’t think it’s awfully peculiar of me to ask you round here. I’m a friend of Michael Cantrip, you see, and he’s talked a bit about you. I’ve got a problem that I hoped you might be willing to help with.”

My perplexity deepened, and did not diminish when she began to tell me of the existence and provisions of the Daffodil Settlement. It seemed tactless to mention, since she repeatedly stressed the confidentiality of the matter, that I was already aware of them. I would not have wished her to form an unfavourable view of Can-trip’s capacity for discretion.

“So you see,” she concluded, “if the worst comes to the worst — I mean if we can’t find the letter of wishes and can’t find out who the real settlor was — then we’re going to have to give the whole fund to the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave. It’s idiotic, of course, because no one ever meant them to get a penny of it, but it looks as if we’ll have no choice. And we’ve been advised by Chancery Counsel — well, by Canters, actually — that we’d better try and find out who they are. So I wondered if you’d be interested. I mean, you are a legal historian.”

I could scarcely forbear to smile, for the notion was of course absurd. The tracing of missing relatives, with all respect to the no doubt very estimable persons accustomed to undertake such enquiries, can hardly be regarded as a branch of Scholarship. Recalling, however, that Clementine, like Cantrip, had spent her formative years at Cambridge, where such distinctions are perhaps but imperfectly understood, I sought some way to explain without wounding her that such an investigation would be inappropriate to my academic standing and qualifications.

’I’m afraid,” she continued, “that my clients will want the fee to be calculated on a time-costed basis. Would you consider doing it for sixty pounds an hour?” I suppose that my expression indicated surprise. It had not occurred to me, such is my innocence in these matters, that she would offer any pecuniary inducement. She looked apologetic. “Plus expenses, of course. I’m sorry, I know it’s not terribly generous.”

I found myself obliged to reconsider the matter. By the modest standards of the unworldly Scholar, the offer seemed not ungenerous; and yet, were I now to decline it, she could not but think that my reason was the inadequacy of the financial reward. I could not endure to be suspected of so grasping and sordid a motive: I indicated that I would undertake the investigation on the terms she had proposed.

“Tell me,” I said, “is there anything you already know about the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave, or am I to begin, as it were, with a clean slate?”

The question unaccountably caused her to blush.

“Well, Sir Walter Palgrave himself was a judge, of course — end of the nineteenth century. I expect you know lots more than I do about him.” As a student chiefly of the mediaeval period, I could not truthfully claim any extensive knowledge of the Victorian judiciary, but I realised why the name had seemed faintly familiar. “I got a copy of his will from the Probate Registry. It looks from that as if he left six daughters, so the people we’re looking for are probably their children or grandchildren. But the will only gives their Christian names, so I’m afraid it doesn’t get us very far.”

“No matter,” I said, “it provides a starting point. You know nothing else that might be relevant?”

“Well’—she blushed again—“not officially. I mean, I haven’t told anyone else about it.” She hesitated. I adopted an expression, as I hoped, of sympathetic encouragement. “You see, a few months ago I got engaged. To a chap,” she added helpfully, as if supposing me unaware that when a young woman becomes engaged it is customarily to a young man. “He’s a solicitor as well — his name’s Peter. Well, one evening we happened to start talking about the way the law seems to run in families. You know — the same names keeping on cropping up in the law reports over a couple of centuries. So I asked him if there were any other lawyers in his family. And he said there wasn’t anyone close, but his grandmother had been a daughter of Sir Walter Palgrave.”

I began to understand her embarrassment. For a solicitor to continue to advise in a matter in which her prospective husband had a financial interest would be, I readily perceived, of dubious propriety.

“I suppose the Law Society would say that I either ought to chuck Peter or chuck handling the Daffodil Settlement. But I’m jolly well not going to chuck Peter, because he’s awfully nice. And Daffodil’s the biggest thing I’ve ever dealt with on my own, so I don’t want to chuck that either.”

It was a sad dilemma. A Victorian novelist, I daresay, could have done something very remarkable with the story of such a conflict between love, duty, and ambition. It seemed to me, all the same, not quite sufficient to account for the signs of tension and anxiety which I had observed in her. I inquired if she had told her fiancé of the problem.