Honeybath's Haven by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

most careful calculations, she was able to declare, and was assured there would be a substantial profit. But her trustees remained obdurate. These are grim times, Mr Honeybath, grim times indeed. The late Sir Adrian Munden, although not a man of good family, fell little short of being what you and I would call a nabob. But here was plain penury confronting his widow.’
    â€˜How very shocking.’ Honeybath, who had perfected a technique of offering composing remarks to tiresome sitters for whom the times were out of joint, offered this absurd untruth unblushingly. But the train was now slowing down to make its first halt at Didcot, and he felt a strong impulse to gather together his belongings and make a dash for freedom. But he reflected that Mr Gaunt’s was possibly only a partial view of society at Hanwell Court; that he belonged, as it might be brutally put, to a lunatic fringe of the place. Honeybath was, moreover, a man commendably curious about his fellow-mortals in their inexhaustible variety, and he told himself it was extravagant to suppose that by merely venturing once more within the curtilage of Hanwell he would put himself in any danger of being locked up. He resolved to see the day’s venture through.
    â€˜Ah, Didcot!’ he said. ‘An uninspiring gateway to the Berkshire Downs, is it not? But I believe ours is the next stop.’
    â€˜It is, indeed. May I ask, Mr Honeybath, if you have good trustees?’
    â€˜I have not, as it happens, had any occasion to consider the point so far.’ Honeybath offered this slightly evasive reply on a note of sudden gloom. Everybody ends up, he supposed, by being bossed around. Or everybody whose condition is such that there is money to be had out of the bossing. ‘May I offer you my Burlington Magazine ?’ he asked. ‘I notice an interesting article on what is to be gathered of the later history of armour from Gervase Markham’s Souldier’s Accidence .’
    â€˜Thank you. Thank you very much,’ Mr Gaunt said politely. ‘It is a subject a little aside from my own field of research. But it is always wise to broaden one’s view.’
    And Mr Gaunt, blessedly, absorbed himself in a purely defensive scene of things for the rest of the journey.

 
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    The traveller who approaches Hanwell Court by the main drive has the advantage of first viewing the mansion disposed beyond a gigantic repoussoir known to art historians as the Poseidon urging the Sea-Monster to attack Laomedon . The monster has three heads, each with gaping jaws, and these must have spewed water once upon a time, since the whole group is perched within an enormous scallop shell which must have served as the basin of the fountain when it was a fountain in its native Italy. The entire ensemble is now perched on a squat pedestal some twelve feet high. The god straddles the monster, with arms flung up in the conventional pose of a huntsman unleashing hounds. Viewed from the rear (for the statue faces the house lying in a shallow valley beyond) the uninstructed might conjecture that Poseidon is in fact his brother Zeus, and that the business on hand is the directing of a thunderbolt against some race of overweening mortals in the magnificent architectural performance below.
    Honeybath’s brochure contained the information that Hanwell Court had been completed, as to its main part, in the year 1702. What is immediately presented to the eye contemplating the main facade is six very tall windows on either side of a very tall front door. Above these are thirteen windows apparently equally tall (and in fact, therefore, rather taller), the middle one being a third as broad as the others. And above these again are thirteen squat little windows beneath an oppressive cornice and an elegant balustrade. A visiting Martian might suppose the entire edifice designed for the occupation of a dozen or so giants who had enslaved a local population of