A Mansion and its Murder Read Online Free Page A

you will have guessed that already. At the time of Mr Gladstone’s visit he was a shining figure who brought fun from time to time into my rather shadowy existence. By the time of the overheard family conference he was the only being in my family I loved, and for that reason the love was passionate, singleminded, overmastering. His visits to Blakemere were occasional, but as soon as I got the slightest hint that there was one in prospect I was afire with anticipation, and he never disappointed me. I was the first one he asked for, though he never needed to do that: I was lurking somewhere –behind one of the marble balustrades above the entrance hall, or peering through a crack in the open door leading to the Blue Salon. The moment he asked, I would fly to his arms – to be lifted aloft, kissed, asked what I was doing, asked who my new governess was, tickled, loved .
    The truthful answer to the question what I had been doing would have been ‘existing without you,’ but I was not mature enough to frame such an answer or to understand my emotional state. By the time I did understand it, Uncle Frank was gone forever. As it was, I told him such of my little doings as I thought might interest him, invented others, and generally took him over for the length of his visit. I now realise I could do that because there were few competing attractions, but at the time I only knew that he loved me, and that his visits transformed the gloomy vastness of Blakemere into a heaven.
    At the time of the Gladstone visit my most dearly dear uncle was still a favoured son, his eccentricities indulged because he represented the best hope of a male heir for Blakemere, and for Fearing’s Bank. By the time of the family conference, patience was wearing thin, and he was beginning to be regarded as a black sheep. But then, patience was not a family trait,and it was altogether in character that they should make him into what they feared he was becoming. Even my grandmother, wisest of the clan, was someone with strict standards, definite expectations, and with impatience for those who lived otherwise than as she would have wished. ‘Slack’ was a word she used often, and ‘not up to par’. Uncle Frank incurred these terrible judgments all too frequently. His debts were hardly enormous, were eminently settleable, granted the size of the family fortune, but they were as unacceptable to my grandmother as to everyone else at Blakemere. In 1884, he sat close to Grandpapa entertaining Mr Gladstone (no easy task, I imagine). By 1890, he was, metaphorically at least, below the salt, even out in the cold.
    ‘They want me to be a nine-to-five person,’ he told me one day when we were fishing together two miles down the River Whate but still within sight of the enormous pile that was Blakemere. ‘They want a glorified bank clerk. I’m damned if they’re going to get one in me.’
    One of the (many) attractions of Uncle Frank was that he swore in my presence.
    I nodded solemnly. ‘They should give you the wherewithal’ – (I loved words like that) – ‘to live the sort of life you want to live.’
    Uncle Frank let out one of his great laughs. ‘How right you are, little rabbit! But you’re biased, aren’t you – you and I being great chums. I don’t think anyone would agree with you up there. ’
    And he jerked his thumb in the direction of the great lump of masonry that we never seemed able to escape from.
    ‘I don’t suppose they would,’ I said firmly, dissociating myself from Blakemere, and from all it stood for. ‘But you mustn’t let them wear you down.’
    ‘Oh, they’ll wear me down in the long run,’ said Uncle Frank, making me very sad, because I had something of the same feeling. ‘So maybe I should have a really big fling before they bring me into line, eh?’
    I considered this.
    ‘Does that mean that in the end you’ll be forced to marry this Miss Coverdale?’
    ‘How did you hear about Miss Coverdale?’ he asked,