Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

‘I hope so, Bess. Though I thought you might have shut up and fled the house in this heat.’

The girl stood back to let him into the dark hallway, and Mr Palmer felt, as he always did in this house, that he was disappearing into an ancient age. ‘Lord, he’ll never leave this place, sir. Can you imagine him being pushed around Bath in his chair and taking the waters?’

Mr Palmer had to confess he could not.

‘No, the old spider will stay here at the centre of his web, twitching his strings.’ It was said with a warmth and shake of the head that took all the offence out of the statement.

‘Any interesting visitors since I was last here, Bess?’

She wagged her finger at him as if he were a boy half her own age. ‘Now Mr Palmer, you always ask, and I always give you the same answer. Sir Gawen has visitors enough and they are interesting to him, and there let it lie. You shall find him in the upper parlour as ever. Shall I send the girl up with the decanter?’

Palmer nodded, and was beginning to climb the stairs when Bess spoke again. ‘Mr Palmer, what would you do if one day I said to you, “Such and such a man had visited, and such and such another”?’

Palmer considered for a moment. ‘I would suspect that revolution was in the streets and fear for the King himself, Bess.’ She looked pleased with the response and left him to announce himself.

The gentleman that Mr Palmer had come to see was seated in his usual place in the dark upper parlour of the house, by the window with his chair turned so he could see the carriages and people passing the entrance to the yard. He was curled forward in his chair, staring out, his thin white hair hanging loose and unpowdered around his ears and his skeletal hands, rather swollen at the joints, loose in his lap. Opposite him sat a young boy, apparently engaged in reading the paper aloud by whatever light could crawl through the grime on the window. Palmer’s knock had interrupted him. Sir Gawen turned towards the door, his great hook nose making his face seem more shrunken than ever by contrast.

‘Palmer!’ His voice was as cracked and lined as his face. ‘You may leave us now, Edward. Come back and read the rest when Mr Palmer has finished with me. Go on, go on!’ The boy jumped to his feet, crossed the bare floorboards and slipped through the door like a cat.

‘How did you know it was me, Sir Gawen?’ Palmer asked, as he took the seat the boy had just vacated. The hook nose followed him as he sat down and moved the paper to one side.

‘I have heard you climb the stairs twice every week at least for five years, my boy. How should I not know you?’ He chuckled, and looked out towards the street again. ‘Though you are one of only three men that Bess will allow to enter this room unannounced, so the odds were with me.’

‘Who are the other two?’

The old man laughed again. ‘Have you brought me another map, sir? Pass it over to me then, while we wait for our wine and let me see how you value my advice. Fetch me that glass from my desk.’

Palmer laid the map across the old gentleman’s knees, then went in search of the glass. It was a room that seemed to despise modern comforts, heavily panelled in black oak and apart from the desk and the two chairs by the window, almost entirely empty. Palmer had never seen Sir Gawen in any other room. During winter evenings he might sit by the fire, but in summer he was always by the window, always in the same attitude, always, it seemed, in the same black coat and not quite white cravat. Palmer wondered if the garments had done all the ageing they were capable of and had now, like their owner, reached a point of decrepitude that would prove immutable until death. The image of Sir Gawen among the fashionable crowd at Bath occurred again to Palmer as he passed him the magnifying glass.

‘What are you grinning at, boy?’

‘At my own private thoughts, Sir Gawen.’

The man gave a bark of laughter and lifted the glass and map. His eye swam in its own yellow bile, suddenly huge.

The maid came in with a tray in one hand and a little table folded under her other arm. As Sir Gawen examined his prize, Palmer assisted her in setting it up, told her quietly to leave them and poured the wine himself before sitting down again.

‘Well, well. Very fine. Now what have you to ask me? I know I must hand over some small part of my own private store for one of your little gifts. What do you wish to know? Old scandals in the French Court? I hear the Admiralty has come good at last, though a little late for Sandwich, and the treaty will be rather more advantageous to us than we first believed we could hope for.’

‘You are well informed.’

‘Of course, and you know I mention it to you because I am pleased with my present and have an old man’s vanity. I wish to show you how wise you were to give it to me.’ He laughed again.

‘I enquire on behalf of a friend.’

‘What friend?’

Palmer hesitated, then replied, ‘Gabriel Crowther.’

‘Ah! The anatomist who assisted you in eighty-one. Not state business then, if he has applied to you . No matter. On his behalf only, or is the harridan in the business too?’

‘Mrs Westerman is mentioned in his letter.’

‘Fine woman. Wish there were more harridans in the world. Bess is one, I tell her so to her face every day, and every day she tells me to thank God it is so, as no other would be able to manage with me. Where those two are and asking questions, you may be sure now there is blood in the water. Ask, and I shall answer for your sake and theirs.’

‘Thank you, Sir Gawen,’ Palmer said, glad the most difficult part of the interview was now at an end. He now only had to speak a word, then listen as attentively as he could. ‘Greta.’

The man smiled again, revealing his blackened gums, and tilted his head back. His right hand tapped smartly on his thigh. ‘Ahhh! Greta! The former Lord of half of Cumberland! Traitor and exile! How peculiar it is, the way one event leads to another. Pull at one strand only in history and all our world would be changed.’ He reached forward for his wine. ‘You know the story of his wife?’

‘No, sir.’

Sir Gawen took a great gulp of the liquor and wiped his lips with the back of his other hand. ‘Another harridan. If the Pretender had had ten like her, we might all be Catholics now, Palmer. Beautiful woman she was, by all accounts. Blonde hair, she wore very long in spite of the fashions, and a tendency to wear white. I saw her portrait once, and it was as near to being in love as I have ever been. When the news reached them at Gutherscale Hall that King George was after him in 1715, he could not make his mind up where to run. He thought to hide himself in the homes of his servants, but his wife, on hearing of this, threw her fan at him and said “Take that then! And give me your sword!”’ He shook his head. ‘“Take that!” she said. Naturally he had to go and join Foster and the other rebels then. Though if she had not thrown her fan, then Mr Crowther’s father would never have become rich, or a baron, then Mr Crowther would not have trained as an anatomist, would not have been able to help you in eighty-one, then who can say? Our late successes at sea might not have occurred and our nation might have lost more severely on this treaty coming. All that and much more because a woman threw a fan at her husband.’ He leaned ever further forward and beckoned Palmer towards him. When Palmer found his eyes were only an inch from Gawen’s own the old man grinned again. ‘See, Palmer? I am become a philosopher!’ Then he rocked back in his chair and giggled.

Palmer smiled. ‘Indeed you are, Sir Gawen.’

‘Pah! But all this is known. You do not come to me, Mr Palmer, to discover things you could read in a lending library. What else?’