Death of a Delft Blue

‘So go, please,’ said Binnen, getting up. ‘We have had enough. You were right to come, and now you are right (and merciful) to leave.’

‘Seems to have been an odd sort of conversation,’ said Laura, when Dame Beatrice reported it to her that evening. ‘What did you make of it, if anything? Ruby must be mad, of course. That’s evident. Equally evident that Opal is, too.’

‘Is it? Ruby is slightly unhinged, no doubt, but I think that Opal is like Hamlet, in one respect.’

‘I see what you mean. All that north-by-west stuff. I suppose it couldn’t have been much fun for them, being interned, you know.’

‘We don’t know that Opal was interned.’

‘What?’

‘It seems to me most unlikely.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, to begin with, she seems to know a good deal about Derbyshire.’

‘You mean she spent the war years in England?’

‘Ask yourself, child. The Netherlander have lived too long on the borders of Germany not to know what the Nazis were up to. I don’t know whether they expected their country to be overrun, but I should think children of English parentage were sent out of the country as soon as there seemed any doubt.’

‘Well, where do we go from here? In other words, Binnen is sticking up for her daughters for all she’s worth, I take it — making excuses for their mental state and all that.’

‘Well, what else can she do?’ argued Dame Beatrice reasonably. ‘I have no daughters, but, if I had had them, I would have stood up for them through thick and thin.’

‘To change the subject, that last expression reminds me of the professors,’ said Laura. ‘What does through thick and thin really mean?’

‘According to an authority I trust, which is the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, written by the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D., the expression originated with Dryden, and it means through good report; through soggy mud and stones only thinly covered with dust. Butler, according to the same authority, records in Hudibras, that

Through perils both of wind and limb

She followed him through thick and thin.’

‘I haven’t read Hudibras,’ said Laura, ‘but that doesn’t rhyme.’

‘Again we are at one. I have not read it, either, and I agree that it does not rhyme.’

‘So back we go, and to Derbyshire. To do what, exactly?’

‘I hardly think that to go into Derbyshire would be helpful at the moment. North Norfolk would be my goal.’

‘Do you really think we can get anything else there?’

‘I certainly think we should leave Derbyshire to Robert.’

‘Are you going to tackle old Mr van Zestien again?’

‘No, but I think I might question young Mr Colwyn-Welch again.’

‘About the poisoned chocolate-cream?’

‘Among other things, yes.’

‘What other things?’

‘Barrel-organs, I suppose,’ said Dame Beatrice vaguely.

CHAPTER TWENTY

North Norfolk Again

‘He that shall resolutely excite his faculties… may set at defiance the morning mist and the evening damp, the blasts of the east and the clouds of the south.’

Doctor Johnson

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Time being no longer of the essence, Dame Beatrice and Laura spent the better part of a week in Holland before returning home. They toured the country between Apeldoorn and Arnhem and visited the national park and game reserve, the Airborne Cemetery at Oosterbeek, (where Dutch children tend the flowers on the graves of the English dead), the Open Air Museum at Arnhem and the Belvedere of Hijmegen.

‘Well,’ said Laura, when they had boarded the boat bound for Harwich, ‘we’ve done ourselves proud. And now — to the work!’

George met them at Harwich with the car and drove them to the tall house in Kensington. There was a pile of correspondence about Dame Beatrice’s London clinic for Laura to tackle, and a formidable list of appointments for Dame Beatrice herself, so that, for the next day or two, both were kept extremely busy.

There was no word from Gavin, so they assumed that no further progress had been made at the Derbyshire end. Laura took down Dame Beatrice’s brief notes on the latest visit to Amsterdam and expanded them into a