A moment of silence

affectionate, which made it rather surprising that it should be followed by the sound of nimble, running feet.

A moment later Jack’s black head came bobbing quickly up the stairs. Dido stepped aside and the boy ran past her, turned into the dark passage and was instantly lost to view.

She stood alone for a minute, reflecting that perhaps her notion of hide-and-seek had not been so very far from the truth after all. And then there was a sound of much heavier feet and the colonel’s broad red face appeared.

‘Ah, Miss er…’ (Would it, Dido wondered, be only fair to inform him of her name, or was it allowable to leave him floundering with his ahs and ers for the rest of her visit?) ‘Ah yes, m’dear. Have you seen young Jack? Did he come by you?’

‘No,’ she replied on an impulse. ‘He did not come this way.’

‘Ah, very well, very well. It’s of no great consequence, y’know.’

He bowed and retreated. Dido turned into the narrow passage, only to hear Jack’s footsteps fading rapidly down the kitchen stairs.

She stood for a moment in the gloomy corridor, which smelt of dust and very old carpet, with just a suggestion of the roasting of long-forgotten joints from the kitchen. She shook her head. Before she came to Belsfield she had thought she was rather partial to puzzles and mysteries. She had a great regard for the work of such authors as Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, but lately she was beginning to suspect that her appetite for the unexplained was surfeiting.

She could not even begin upon the wildest surmise as to why a military gentleman of rather advanced years should be pursuing a young footman about the upper corridors of a house – nor why the said footman should be so determined upon escape. There was nothing in Dido’s experience to suggest a solution to that particular mystery.

She started back towards the gallery, then came to a standstill.

There was another painting hanging here upon the wall of the little passage. Hanging where no one could see it. Even when she strained her eyes she received no more than a vague impression of a very large green and brown landscape in a heavy, ornate frame.

Was it perhaps a bad painting, put out of the way so that it did not spoil the effect of the gallery?

Dido was exceedingly fond of bad paintings; they appealed to that part of her that her sister called ‘satirical’. After a little struggle, two broken fingernails and a bleeding thumb, she succeeded in unbolting and pushing back one of the heavy shutters that covered a window almost opposite to the picture.

Light fell in upon it.

It was most certainly not a bad painting. Dido was no connoisseur, but she was almost sure that it was better than anything else in the gallery. For a moment she forgot everything else and simply enjoyed looking at it.

 It must have been painted a little more than twenty years ago and it showed the Belsfield estate in all its grandeur and prosperity: the gardens, the elegant sweep of parkland, and even, in the distance, cattle grazing and corn in its stooks. The sun of late summer shone on a perfect day and so skilled had been the painter’s hand that there in that stuffy, cramped space she seemed almost to smell the ripening grain. It was a domain that any man would have been proud to possess. And Sir Edgar was proud; for there he was, pink- cheeked and proprietorial, in the shade of a fine large tree to the left of the foreground. There was no mistaking him for anything but the lord of this domain – with his confident stance and the marks of his status: his dog gazing up at him and his shotgun on his arm. His free hand rested on the back of an ornate iron bench upon which sat his lady, with young Richard, just a baby, in her lap.

The ruling character of the whole thing was pride, from the stance of the new father, to the magnificent scale and quality of the painting and the elaboration of curling scrolls and gilding on its frame.

And yet, here it was hidden away in this dark passageway. Why?

Dido frowned and chewed at the end of her pencil. It felt as if she was a little girl again and back in the schoolroom puzzling fruitlessly over long division. Her head hurt. Everything seemed dark and confusing.

Something in this picture had had to be hidden. But what? Not the landscape, nor the wife, surely. For all his tyranny, Sir Edgar was a conscientious landlord and an attentive husband. Could it be Richard that he wanted to hide?

And then, with the suddenness of that stiff old shutter swinging open (and without so much as a split nail) light poured in upon her mind.

She understood.

She ran back into the gallery and turned about and about until she was dizzy. The cracked and grainy Edgars and Annes and Elizabeths stared down in contempt of her slowness.

It was so very obvious to her now that she had been looking at the wrong thing in this gallery of portraits. She should have looked, not at the pictures themselves, but at the names beneath them. There they were, the holders of this estate, ranked down through history: Edgar after Edgar after Edgar.

But the latest Sir Edgar, to whom the tradition of his family was as essential as the air that he breathed and the blood that ran in his veins, had not given his son the family name: he was Richard, not Edgar.

Why?

Dido spun round with her hand to her mouth. Was it because he had come to suspect that the boy was not his son?

And was that why he had hidden away that proud portrait of fatherhood and inheritance?

Chapter Thirteen

…It is very shocking, Eliza. I am almost tempted to echo her ladyship and declare that one does not know what to think. But, truly, I think that it could be so. I cannot get it out of my head. That Sir Edgar and his lady should live with such a secret between them! And how wretched Mr Montague must be if he knows about it! I have passed a near sleepless night with thinking about it all – which I tell you, of course, on purpose that you may scold me and entreat me to have more care for my health.

It is a matter to which I must give a great deal more thought before I quite decide whether I believe or disbelieve it. However, it is not entirely without a brighter aspect. For I have at last succeeded in saying something which pleases Catherine. You see, of course the great advantage that there is to her in all this. The man she loves bears the stain of illegitimacy – though Catherine will naturally not allow that there is any stain and talks very stoutly of how he is not to be held accountable for the sins of others. But, since she does not expect her liberality to be shared by Francis and Margaret, she gleefully anticipates being soon relieved of the burden of their approval.

I, as you have probably guessed, am rather less happy, being a great deal less certain that if he is disinherited they can live on love alone. But this is not a serious worry for me because I do not believe that this discovery can explain anything beyond Sir Edgar’s dislike of Mr Montague. For, no matter how certain he may be of the young man’s fathering, he could never prove it, nor, I think, cut off the entail on such grounds. Catherine, however, is quite sure that this is the information Mr Montague received at the ball – the reason he describes himself as a poor man. She talks happily of cases she has read of in newspapers in which men have been able to deny fatherhood; but I think she is led astray by her strong desire to starve in the company of her beloved. Which starving, you must understand, will be accomplished in the most elegant manner possible and will never be accompanied by such unromantic expedients as old cloaks or the preservation of shoes with pattens.

Human nature is a very strange thing, is it not?

I make that highly original observation, not because I suppose that you need it to be pointed out to you, but purely for the purposes of composition, because the next thing which I particularly want to write about is a further illustration of its truth.

Colonel Walborough.

I apologise for running on so rapidly, but there is little time for writing and there are things which