Alan Hunter: Landed Gently

‘He just wants you to marry Brass?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s all he wants!’

‘Badly enough to have done… what he may have done?’

‘Yes… to have done it three times over!’

She was crying again now, not tempestuously but with a heart-rending bitterness, crying with wide-open eyes over which the tears flooded before falling.

‘You see — I made a mess of it for everyone — everyone who had to do with me! My husband — he’s dead. Earle… he loved me. And now, because of that, Henry — Henry too! There’s a curse on this family. We did wrong, we are being punished. It will be best when there are no more Feverells on the face of the earth…’

Very quietly Gently rose and replaced his chair where it belonged.

‘Where did your cousin say I’d find him, Mrs Page?’ he enquired.

‘He said he’d be in the hall — he said he’d be waiting for you there!’

Gently nodded and took his hat. ‘I won’t keep him waiting any longer. Your cousin, Mrs Page, has a wonderful sense of theatre.’

Outside it was dusk, and in the great hall more than dusk; when Gently entered by the north-east door to the gallery, he noticed with an ironical hunch of a shoulder that only the night-light by the main door had been switched on. But of course, he had to understand everything! In a case like this mere facts were the province of the Sir Dayneses and the Dysons. He, Gently, was required to relive the crime, he was the selected repository for the spiritual remains of the last of the Feverells… and wasn’t he playing the game, making his entry where Somerhayes had made it on the night of the drama? Wasn’t he pat on cue for the final, majestic scene?

He stopped behind the first pillar, nearly opposite to the door. Yes, this undoubtedly would be where Somerhayes had taken his stand. From here you could see without being seen. You would have been out of sight of Johnson, coming in by the south-east door. You would have escaped a glance from Mrs Page, crossing and recrossing the landing between the marble portal and the north-west door. But you, you could see everything. The hall, the stairs, the landing, the galleries, they were all overlooked from this lurking-place. You could, for instance, have seen Lieutenant Earle, if he had been standing in the precise centre of the top stair, where Somerhayes was standing now…

‘Quite right, Mr Gently!’

The sixth baron’s voice came softly to him down the hall, a sort of mocking commentary to his thoughts.

‘Actually, I stood a little nearer to the pillar, but not enough to make a significant difference.’

Gently grunted and made the adjustment. He wasn’t above taking stage-directions! Now, he could see rather less of the hall below, but a good deal more of the landing ahead. Without hurrying himself, he went over every detail of the view thus presented.

‘That pillar there, flanking the portico…’

‘Yes, Mr Gently?’

‘The one on the left-hand side… would you mind standing beside it for a minute?’

Somerhayes didn’t move to it directly. He seemed to be pondering over the direction. But eventually, with what may have been a shrug, he turned from the stairs and pressed himself in beside the pillar.

‘Now just stay there, will you?’

Gently plodded down to the landing, and having reached it, stood for some minutes with his back to the north-west door. Then he crossed the landing, negotiated the south gallery, and spent a similar period at the spot where Johnson had emerged. Somerhayes watched these manoeuvres without a word.

‘All right — that’s everything!’ Gently returned to the landing, hands in pockets. ‘Personally, I’d sooner talk by that library fire of yours, but I wouldn’t want to spoil a good production over a trifle like that. Whose cue is it — yours or mine?’

‘Yours, Mr Gently.’ Somerhayes sounded a little piqued.

‘Good — because I’ve got a lot to say — and I hope I’ve understood this business the way you wanted me to!’

Somerhayes made a frigid motion with his head and took up his position at the top of the stairs again. Gently, huddled in his ulster, paced up and down the twilit landing behind him.

‘In the first place it wasn’t a crime of passion — that’s what I’m supposed to know, isn’t it?’

Somerhayes said nothing, but stood looking out into the hall beneath.

‘It looks like that, and that may be the case for the prosecution — but between you and me, it’s something quite different! Because you don’t love your cousin in a possessive way, do you? It’s brotherly love, a kinsman’s love, a love that wants to see her married, not to a decadent aristocrat, but to one of the world’s creators — a man, shall we say, strong in the flow of history. She’s the last possible flame of the torch of Feverell. You want to attach her, and the Feverell blood, to an aristocrat of the new world succeeding your own. And by doing that, you want to serve this man; you want to ensure his future and the success of his genius.

‘Prompt me where I go wrong — you know the picture better than I do!’

Somerhayes didn’t move. ‘I was sure,’ he murmured, ‘I was sure I could depend on you, Mr Gently…’

‘All this you had planned when you walked out of the House of Lords. That was the old world, the Lords, the old world of privilege and greed and suppression and social injustice. Oh, it had its leavening of progressives, its top-dressing of socialism; but you had looked deeper, hadn’t you? You had seen its essential corruption. You saw it as an old soldier with a historic death-rattle in its throat, and you knew, though it could still wave its sword and utter threats, that it was doomed as surely as jingoism and the satanic mills! So you turned your back, and left the dead to bury the dead. You took your courage in both hands, you faced the situation of being of a tainted race, and you applied your energy, money and affection to the service of a prophet of the new world — Leslie Brass.

‘Out of your ruins, he could rise. From your extinction, his erection. Though you had come into this life ignobly in the eyes of history, yet in those same eyes you would leave it truly ennobled! Am I right so far? Have I got the authentic text?’

‘Yes!’ breathed Somerhayes. ‘You have the authentic text!’

‘There was only one flaw in the plan — your cousin and Brass were unattached romantically. Mrs Page, for various reasons, was still guarding herself from contact with men, and Brass, though he may amuse himself with women, was apparently not in the market for a wife. Yet it was critically necessary for these two to come together. You would have done your duty to neither by simply splitting the inheritance between them. Brass, to succeed, needed Mrs Page’s management — and she needed him to provide a sheet-anchor! So you tried to help the matter on. You willed your estate to your cousin. Brass, cognisant of this, was supposed to open his campaign.

‘That was how the matter stood when Earle came into the reckoning. You had put your last card on the table, and you were waiting for game to be called. The affair stood at its crisis. You could afford no intervention. And then, out of the sheer perversity of fate, Earle appeared with his single trump-card!

‘What could you do? What could you possibly do? Nothing, except watch, and perhaps pray that your cousin would resist the young man. And she tried to resist him. She put up a struggle. And you watched, and waited, and pretended to see nothing.’

Gently paused in his stride to look at the slender figure silhouetted against the dimly lit hall.

‘At what point did you decide to kill him?’

‘I don’t know.’ Somerhayes’s voice was almost too low to catch.