Lord Mullion's Secret by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

sense of the term. So he did his best to respond to such observations as were offered to him.
    â€˜As you will see,’ Dr Atlay said, ‘we are particularly rich in monumental work of the Elizabethan period. May I ask if it is a special interest of yours?’
    â€˜It is, indeed – but chiefly in the painting of the period, as you may imagine. And I am much looking forward to seeing the Mullion Hilliards. But dear me!’ Honeybath had broken off, and was pointing to an ornate affair in the north aisle. ‘Nollekens, surely? It can’t be by anybody else.’
    â€˜Certainly Nollekens, and among the most distinguished of his works. Or so I have been told, although I must defer to your professional opinion, my dear sir. The reclining figure in classical drapery is, of course, a Countess of Mullion, and the medallion to which she points with upraised arm and extended index finger is naturally of her husband, the Earl. The weeping cherubs are much admired by our visitors. Remark how delicately their very tears are registered on the marble.’
    Honeybath obediently studied Nollekens’ blubbering brats. He had seen plenty of them before, and was rather fond of them. He read a long inscription enumerating the astounding virtues of the nobleman and his ‘afflicted and disconsolate’ wife. Then, guided by the vicar, he moved more or less systematically round the church. A Chinese gentleman, he reflected, unacquainted with the principles of the Christian religion or the purposes for which it built edifices like this one within which he found himself, would conjecture that here was a family mausoleum erected for the entombment of a line of persons who had richly merited a far more resplendent resting-place – and this less because of their inherited rank than of their unfailing eminence as models and exemplars to society as a whole. The Tudors in quaint verses, the Augustans in balanced and cadenced prose, and between these the Elizabethan lords of language and their intricately conceited Jacobean successors: all these celebrated, in words incised in marble, sundry Wyndowes as very paragons, marks, and cynosures of their time. Even the present earl’s grandfather, who had lived on into the year 1906, was described as having been solicitous for the welfare of the deserving poor; and his successor, Sylvanus Wyndowe, Lord Mullion, was commemorated not only as a Lord Lieutenant and a Knight of the Garter but also as a conscientious Chairman of the Mullion and Little Lintel Rural District Council. And then, after all this Rococo twiddliness and verbal orotundity, Honeybath noticed a small plaque which read simply: RUPERT WYNDOWE LORD WYNDOWE, followed by two dates from which it was to be inferred that Rupert Wyndowe Lord Wyndowe had survived only into his thirty-sixth year. He was that uncle of Henry’s, Honeybath recalled, who would have succeeded to the earldom had he not predeceased his father.
    â€˜Rupert’s memorial,’ he said to Dr Atlay, ‘is surely on the reticent side?’
    â€˜Indeed, yes. He might have been a mere vicar of the parish.’
    â€˜Dear me! Did he, in fact, take holy orders?’
    â€˜No. It was decidedly not a course of life that would have entered Rupert Wyndowe’s head. And that, perhaps, was just as well. It may have been injudicious of the late earl to commemorate his elder brother so ostentatiously sparely – if the expression is a permissible one. But Rupert’s short life had been far from uniformly edifying, I am sorry to say. The family would not, at the time, have regarded it as at all suitable for – as one might express it – window-dressing.’ Dr Atlay frowned, as if conscious that the lure of this somewhat laboured witticism (which had nothing classical about it) had led him into a minor impropriety. Rupert Wyndowe, after all, had been a close relative of the present earl, and ought not to be exhibited as