Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“I can guess.”

Elizabeth did not pursue the topic. I noticed how the other family members kept deliberately clear of us, as though making an arena for a fight. They must have guessed that Elizabeth would tackle me and consequently there was a sense of expectancy in the panelled room. They pretended to ignore us, fussing around Father Maltravers, but I knew they were all keenly alert to my confrontation with Elizabeth.

“Have you seen Mother’s will?” The question, like her earlier questions, was yet another probing attack.

“No.”

“There’s nothing in it for you.”

“I didn’t expect anything.” I spoke gently because I could sense the danger in Elizabeth’s mood. She had the Rossendale temper. I had it too, but I think the sea had taught me to control mine. Yet now, in Elizabeth’s bright eyes, I could see the anger brimming.

“She left you nothing, because you betrayed her.” My sister’s voice was loud enough to make the nearest relatives turn to watch us. All but Georgina who was solemnly counting her fingers. “She hated you,” Elizabeth went on, “which is why she left me the painting.”

The statement showed that Elizabeth had been unable to resist a full-scale assault. “Good,” I said carelessly, which only annoyed her more.

“So where is it?” she asked with a savage bitterness.

We’re twins, born eight minutes apart, and we hate each other. I can’t explain that. Charlie often said we were too much alike, as if that was the answer, but I can’t find the venom in my own soul to explain Elizabeth’s obsessive dislike of me. Nor do I think we are so much alike; I lack Elizabeth’s driving ambition. It was an astonishing ambition; so nakedly obvious as to be almost pitiful. She craved after a status in life which would reflect the past glories of our family; she wanted wealth, admiration and success, yet, like me, she had a knack of failure. I had accepted my lack of ambition, turning it into a wanderer’s life at sea, while Elizabeth just grew more bitter with every twist of malevolent fate. She had married well, and the marriage had soured. She had been born wealthy, and now she was poor, and that failure seemed to hurt her most of all.

“Where’s the painting?” she asked me again, and this time so loudly that everyone else in the room, even the uncomprehending Georgina, turned to watch us. Elizabeth’s husband, leaning against the far wall, seemed to sneer at me. Father Maltravers took a step forward, as though tempted to be a peacemaker, but the intensity in Elizabeth’s voice checked him. “Where’s the painting?” she asked me again.

“I’ll tell you once more,” I said, “and for the very last time, I do not know.”

“You’re a liar, John. You’re a snivelling little liar. You always were.” Elizabeth’s anger had snapped, torn from its mooring by my presence. She would be hating herself for thus losing her temper in public, but she was quite unable to control it. My silence in the face of her attack only made her anger more fierce. “I know you’re lying, John. I have proof.”

I still kept silent. So did the rest of the family. I doubt if any of them had expected to see me at the funeral and, when they did, they had doubtless half feared and half relished that this skeleton from the family’s crowded bone cupboard would make its ghoulish appearance. Now it had, and none of them wanted to stop its display. Elizabeth, sensing their support and my discomfiture, attacked once more. “You’d better run away again, John, before the police discover you’re back.”

“You’re hysterical.” My anger was like a gnawing bitch in my belly, but I was determined not to show it; yet, try as I might, I could not keep its venom from my voice. “Why don’t you go and lie down, or take a pill?”

“Damn you.” She twitched her wrist and the sticky sherry splashed up on to my face and on to the cheap black suit I’d bought in honour of the occasion. “Damn you,” she said again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

Sherry dripped from my chin on to my black tie. None of the relatives moved. They all agreed with Elizabeth. They thought I was the bastard who had made them poor. If it wasn’t for me then Stowey would still be in the family, the port would flow at Christmas, and there would be no importunate bank managers and no genteel shame of an old family driven into penury. I had not played their game, I wasn’t one of them, and so they all hated me.

So I didn’t stay for the funeral. I glanced at Georgina, but she was in a world of her own. Father Maltravers tried to detain me, but I brushed him aside and walked out, leaving the family in an embittered silence. I washed the sherry from my face in the hotel’s loo, collected my filthy oilskin jacket from its peg, then walked through the Devon rain to the village street. I dialled Charlie’s number on the public phone outside the Rossendale Arms, but there was no reply. I threw my sticky black tie into the gutter, then lit a pipe as I waited for the bus. The tooth suddenly began to ache again. I explored the pain with my tongue, wondering whether it truly was psychosomatic, but decided that no such sharp agony could be purely mental, not even if it was provoked by a lacerating homecoming.

Damn the family. I’d come home, and they did not want me. Above the thatched roofs of the village the green pastures curled up to the thick woods where, as a child, I’d learned the skills of stalking and killing. Charlie had taught me those skills. He’d grown up in one of my family’s tied cottages, but we had still become friends. We had become the best of friends. My mother, of course, had hated Charlie. She had called him a piece of village muck, a dirty little boy from an infamous family, but he had still become my best friend. He was still my closest friend; four years away had not changed that. I wanted to see him, but I wouldn’t wait for him. I wanted to be back at sea, riding the long winds in Sunflower . My family would accuse me of running away again, and in a sense they were right, but I wasn’t running from fear, just from them; my family.

And all because of a bloody painting.

It was a good painting, a very good painting. So good that it could have saved the family fortune.

My father’s death had been a financial disaster to the family, but my mother, with a single-minded fury, had fought to save Stowey and its estates. Her legal battles had been waged for ten years, and at the end she had won her campaign and the key to it was the painting.

The house had once been filled with fine pictures. The National Gallery in Washington DC has a slew of our Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, while a gallery in California has the pick of our Dutch interiors and the two good Constables that London’s National Gallery had been desperate to acquire, but too poor to pay for. One by one the walls of Stowey had been stripped to pay gambling debts or death duties, but on my father’s death there had been nothing of any value left.

Or hardly anything of value. There was a canvas which my mother swore was a Stubbs, but which Sothebys could not bring to auction as such. There was a Poussin, which probably wasn’t, but if it was then the old master had been having a bad day. There was a Constable drawing, which was undoubtedly genuine, but a Constable drawing doesn’t pay the revenue. The only recourse was to sell Stowey and its lands, but that was something my mother would not contemplate. Stowey had been in our family since the twelfth century.

But there was one undoubted treasure. An odd treasure for a house like Stowey, and a treasure which, strictly speaking, did not belong to the family, but rather to my mother. It was a Van Gogh.

The painting should have looked all wrong in the old house, as out of place as a drunken punk ensconced in a library, yet somehow it seemed perfect. It was a glorious, superb, demented canvas; one of the early sunflower paintings. It showed eight blossoms topping a half-glazed jar; an explosion of yellow paint touched by blue with poor Vincent’s childlike signature painted on the vase itself. On a summer’s day, when the sun blazoned Stowey’s mediaeval gardens with light, the painting seemed like a fragment of that brightness trapped and caught inside the house.