Page 59 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

‘But your new man,’ she said.

He had taken on another factotum, a young man called Truman Smith, whom Nina had not met.

‘Oh, he’s fine as far as he goes. But Decius knows my mind better than I know it myself.Truman hasn’t learned everything about me yet.’

‘I don’t suppose a lifetime would be enough to learn everything about you,’ she said.

He looked pleased. ‘Oh, I’m not so complicated,’ he deflected modestly. ‘I tell you what, if you come to Portsmouth with me, Truman can squire you around the sights.’

‘You’ll need him with you, surely?’

‘Not all the time. Will you come, then?’

‘Of course I will.’ The hunting season was virtually over, and she had no important engagements ahead. It was a small enough thing to do to make him happy – and he had been as careful around her lately as if she had been an eggshell and likely to shatter. This might put them on a steadier footing.

Under the table, Trump sighed. ‘Do you think I should take Trump, or should I ask Bobby to look after him?’ she said.

‘You’ll be outside a lot,’ he said. ‘I think you could take him, if you wanted. He’d be company for you when I’m busy.’

‘Trump and Truman. I’ll be well looked-after,’ she said.

Sebastian did not go home at once. He felt too wretched – not only still suffering from the shock of the incident, and the pain of his wound, but the unhappy reflection of how he had behaved at the inquest. He told himself that he had spoken only the truth and that there had been no injustice done: he had been defending himself against a murderous attack, and Jack Hubert’s death had been an accident. Thus far the law of the land had been served. But the inspector had known there was more to it than that, and Sebastian had withheld a deeper truth. If the inspector cared to follow it up and he was found out, Sebastian could be charged with contempt of court.

The deeper truth, he told himself, was Dory’s secret, and what she had told him in confidence he had no right to reveal. He’d had no choice but to dissemble. But he felt sullied by the whole experience, by having come here at all, by what he had seen of Shoddy Jack, by the horrible, ridiculous, lethal scuffle, by the unpleasant farce of the inquest. He had ‘got off’, and he felt the lesser man for it. So he stayed on at the Grand, and licked his wounds, and mourned his lost integrity.

There was no insouciant stranger lurking in the lobby when he went down, and when he ventured outside he did not find himself followed. The inspector, he concluded, had called off his dogs. So Sebastian was able to walk along the promenade and through the town unwatched. The weather was fine and breezy, sunny but cool, the sky high and veined with cloud, the sea restless. Exercise and fresh air gradually restored his equilibrium. The horrible memories retreated a step; the knife wound seemed to be healing cleanly.

He still had a problem to wrestle with: how would he tell Dory? His pulse quickened at the thought that she was now free, that if she wished she could accept his proposal of marriage, and he longed more than anything to see her and talk to her without subterfuge. In his more lyrical moments he imagined a golden future of companionship and conversation, trust and affection – all he had ever wanted. But the fact remained that he had indirectly been the cause of her husband’s death, and what would her delicate conscience make of that? He knew her to be a principled woman. The idea that he could lose her over that sickened him. So he walked the streets of Brighton, stared unseeingly into shop windows and at the vista of the shore and the waves, and fretted at the problem, like a horse at a tether.

Archaeologists tended to be energetic people, and when Giles proposed a walk to look at the motte, there were no abstainers in their ranks. Lord Denham thought it would be too far for his lady, and Kitty suggested that Lady Denham might like a gentle stroll around the gardens, while Richard offered his lordship a mount to ride around the farms to look at the cattle and discuss his dairy plans. Thus everyone was suited and Giles was free to go off with his own friends – Max Wolski, John and Mabel Portwine, Talbot and Mary Arthur, and Andrew and Jane Lawrence.

With the dogs ranging about them, they walked up the hill and then along the crest, chatting about what was going on at Knossos in Crete. In 1894 Arthur Evans, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and a keen archaeologist, had bought a quarter of the Knossos site with an option on the rest. The native owners would not sell to an individual, so he had set up the Cretan Exploration Fund, on the same lines as the Palestine Exploration Fund, without telling them that he was the only contributor. But in 1894 Crete had been part of the dying Ottoman Empire, rife with intersectional violence and religious purges, and it had not been possible to start excavating the site.

A stable government had finally been established in 1899, and Evans had then bought the rest of the site through the Fund – which by then had other contributors. In March 1900 he had started his excavations. Every year had brought news of the extraordinary things discovered, evidences of an ancient civilisation, which he had dubbed Minoan, after the Greek myth of Minos. There were so many wall paintings and mosaics of bulls and bull-leapers he concluded the myths were based on fact and the Minoans had worshipped the bull aspect of Poseidon, placating him with displays of bull-leaping.

But now, in 1905, he had announced the excavation finished, and he was having the walls of what he had called the Throne Room – because of a throne-like stone chair it contained – repainted by a father-and-son team of Swiss artists. Giles’s friends were divided over the wisdom of the move.

‘It’s vandalism, plain and simple,’ Talbot Arthur said, shaking his head. ‘I think the poor fellow’s brain must be touched.’

‘But he’s basing the paintings on archaeological evidence,’ said Jane Lawrence.

‘Which he himself provided,’ said Talbot. ‘With no oversight from his peers. And the man’s a hopeless romantic. As well get Alma-Tadema to paint the whole thing.’

‘Well, I for one love Alma-Tadema’s paintings, and I find it very helpful to see what ancient sites may have looked like.’

‘May have looked like.’

‘Always with that caveat,’ Jane said. ‘You are such a purist, Tal!’

‘How can one not be? Archaeology is a science. There’s no room for interpretation.’

There was an outcry at that. ‘Oh, come!’ said Giles. ‘When you only have a fragment of something you must interpret, or all you have is a fragment. Most of what we think we know about the ancient world is interpretation of one sort or another.’

‘That’s not our business,’ said Talbot. ‘As archaeologists we present the fragments for academic inspection. What academics do afterwards is their responsibility.’

‘Arthur Evans never got over the death of his wife,’ Mabel Portwine said, with a sigh. ‘So tragic. He was terribly in love with her.’

Max Wolski raised his eyebrows. ‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’