Ngaio Marsh - Death at the Dolphin

‘What do you do in the theatre?’

‘I direct plays and I’ve written two.’

‘I know nothing of the theatre,’ Mr Conducis said heavily. ‘You are reasonably successful?’

‘Well, sir, yes. I think so. It’s a jungle, of course. I’m not at all affluent but I make out. I’ve had as much work as I could cope with over the last three months and I think my mana’s going up. I hope so. Goodbye, sir.’

He held out his hand. Mr Conducis, with an expression that really might have been described as one of horror, backed away from it.

‘Before you go,’ he said, ‘I have something that may be of interest to you. You can spare a moment?’

‘Of course.’

‘It is in this room,’ Mr Conducis muttered and went to a bureau that must, Peregrine thought, be of fabulous distinction. He followed his host and watched him pull out a silky, exquisitely inlaid, drawer.

‘How lovely that is,’ he said.

‘Lovely?’ Mr Conducis echoed as he had echoed before. ‘You mean the bureau? Yes? It was found for me. I understand nothing of such matters. That is not what I wished to show you. Will you look at this? Shall we move to a table?’

He had taken from the drawer a very small wooden Victorian hand-desk, extremely shabby, much stained, and Peregrine thought, of no particular distinction. A child’s possession perhaps. He laid it on a table under a window and motioned to a chair beside it. Peregrine now felt as if he was playing a part in somebody else’s dream. ‘But I’m all right,’ he thought. ‘I’m not really drunk. I’m in that pitiable but enviable condition when all things seem to work together for good.’

He sat before the table and Mr Conducis, standing well away from him, opened the little desk, pressed inside with his white, flat thumb and revealed a false bottom. It was a commonplace device and Peregrine wondered if he was meant to exclaim at it. He saw that in the exposed cavity there was a packet no bigger than a half-herring and much the same shape. It was wrapped in discoloured yellow-brown silk and tied with a morsel of tarnished ribbon. Mr Conducis had a paper knife in his hand. ‘Everything he possesses,’ Peregrine thought, ‘is on museum-piece level. It’s stifling.’ His host used the paper knife as a sort of server, lifting the little silk packet out on its blade and, as it were, helping Peregrine to it like a waiter.

It slid from the blade and with it, falling to one side, a discoloured card upon which it had lain. Peregrine, whose vision had turned swimmy, saw that this card was a menu and bore a date some six years past. The heading: ‘The Steam Yacht Kalliope. Off Villefranche. Gala Dinner’ floated tipsily into view with a flamboyant and illegible signature that was sprawled across it above a dozen others. A short white hand swiftly covered and then removed the card.

‘That is nothing,’ Mr Conducis said. ‘It is of no consequence.’ He went to the fire. A bluish flame sprang up and turned red. Mr Conducis returned.

‘It is the packet that may be of interest. Will you open it?’ he said.

Peregrine pulled gingerly at the ribbon ends and turned back the silk wrapping.

He had exposed a glove.

A child’s glove. Stained as if by water it was the colour of old parchment and finely wrinkled like an old, old face. It had been elegantly embroidered with tiny roses in gold and scarlet. A gold tassel, now blackened and partly unravelled, was attached to the tapered gauntlet. It was the most heartrending object Peregrine had ever seen.

Underneath it lay two pieces of folded paper, very much discoloured.

‘Will you read the papers?’ Mr Conducis invited. He had returned to the fireplace.

Peregrine felt an extraordinary delicacy in touching the glove. ‘Cheverel,’ he thought. ‘It’s a cheverel glove. Has it gone brittle with age?’ No. To his fingertip it was flaccid: uncannily so as if it had only just died. He slipped the papers out from beneath it. They had split along the folds and were foxed and faded. He opened the larger with great care and it lay broken before him. He pulled himself together and managed to read it.

This little glove and accompanying note were given to my Great-Great-Grandmother by her Beft Friend: a Mifs Or Mrs J. Hart. My dear Grandmother always infifted that it had belonged to the poet. N. B. mark infide gauntlet.

M. E. 23 April 1830

The accompanying note was no more than a slip of paper. The writing on it was much faded and so extraordinarily crabbed and tortuous that he thought at first it must be hieroglyphic and that he therefore would never make it out. Then it seemed to him that there was something almost familiar about it. And then, gradually, words began to emerge. Everything was quiet. He heard the fire settle. Someone crossed the room above the library. He heard his own heart thud.

He read:

Mayde by my father for my sonne on his XI birthedy and never worne butte ync

Peregrine sat in a kind of trance and looked at the little glove and the documents. Mr Conducis had left the paper knife on the table. Peregrine slid the ivory tip into the gauntlet and very slowly lifted and turned it. There was the mark, in the same crabbed hand. ‘H.S.’

‘– But where –’ Peregrine heard his own voice saying, ‘– where did it come from? Whose is it?’

‘It is mine,’ Mr Conducis said and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. ‘Naturally.’

‘But – where did you find it?’

A long silence.

‘At sea.’

‘At sea?’

‘During a voyage six years ago. I bought it.’

Peregrine looked at his host. How pale Mr Conducis was and how odd was his manner!

He said: ‘The box – it is some kind of portable writing desk – was a family possession. The former owner did not discover the false bottom until –’ He stopped.

‘Until –?’ Peregrine said.

‘Until shortly before he died.’

Peregrine said: ‘Has it been shown to an authority?’

‘No. I should, no doubt, get an opinion from some museum or perhaps from Sotheby’s.’

His manner was so completely negative, so toneless that Peregrine wondered if by any extraordinary chance he did not understand the full implication. He was wondering how, without offence, he could find out when Mr Conducis continued.

‘I have not looked it all up but I understand the age of the boy at the time of his death is consistent with the evidence and that the grandfather was in fact a glover.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the initials inside the gauntlet do in fact correspond with the child’s initials.’

‘Yes. Hamnet Shakespeare.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr Conducis.

CHAPTER 2

Mr Greenslade

‘I know that,’ Peregrine said. ‘You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quarto-centenary it’s probably been stepped up. I know about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and “stol’n and surreptitious copies” and phoney “discovered” documents and all that carry-on. I know the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.’

‘Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, half-drunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.’

‘I’m almost certain, not.’

‘His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.’

‘Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.’

‘Well, you’re the judge,’ said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of Venice Preserved . After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade, and looked up at Peregrine. ‘Could you make a drawing of it?’ he said.