With a twinge of discomfort, Shand recalled Martha Mainprize’s relics. For he was being shown very much the same class of object now. Only whereas Martha’s possessions had been retrieved from dust and mildew in a cheap deal cupboard, these were preserved in a formidably locked steel receptacle, leather-sheathed and velvet lined. For a moment something naked in the contrast shocked him, and then he concentrated upon the exhibits. Again there was a diary – this one finely-tooled and residually fragrant – and again there were photographs. Some of the photographs were small and primitive, others large and primitive. The more modern included both snapshots and formal studio affairs. There were various views of places and buildings too.
‘My mother had the instinct of an annalist,’ Mrs Verity was saying in her Girton manner. ‘Whether in one medium or another, little was let pass unrecorded.’ She picked out one of the oldest of the larger photographs and handed it to Shand. The surface had darkened in some places and in others faded, so that for a moment it suggested only a messy confluence of chocolates, milk and plain. ‘The servants in 1871,’ Mrs Verity said. She seemed to be quoting from memory some inscription barely decipherable in a margin. ‘Martha Mainprize on the left in the back row.’ She made a gesture which closed the quotation and allowed her to continue in her own person. ‘So of course my mother knew. She knew everything. And of course I know. I must apologise, Professor, for having dissimulated. The record is only too clear about a number of things. Although some of the photographs, indeed, perplex me still.’
Shand had been regarding the stiffly posed group intently. There was a butler in the middle – in his early twenties the butler’s grandson had attained to a butler – and two or three outdoor servants had been brought in. So it was a socially imposing affair. And there could be no doubt about Martha Mainprize; on the strength of a photograph glimpsed in the humbler collection, Shand recognised her at once.
‘Martha Mainprize shortly before her death, with William aged five.’ Mrs Verity handed another photograph. ‘But I must make the tea, or Evans will be displeased.’ And Mrs Verity turned aside. The tea equipage which the decrepit parlourmaid had brought in was an elaborate affair, and ought to have been much beyond her strength. Mrs Verity absorbed herself with a silver kettle and fine china. Shand took a good look at William Mainprize aged five, and put the photograph down. There was something unnerving about this archive – and there had been something unnerving about one of Mrs Verity’s remarks on it. She had said that some of the photographs perplexed her still. He felt a sudden irrational conviction that further revelation lurked here – matters still mercifully screened from Walter Corderoy’s daughter, but the significance of which he himself, with his specialised knowledge, might discern instantly, and must be on his guard not to betray.
Obeying an impulse equally irrational, Shand thrust his hand into the pile of photographs as yet unexamined, and drew out one at random. It was of a stretch of landscape with some large structure in the middle. Before he had scrutinised this, before he had distinguished the stunted barred windows and the ugly octagonal tower, he knew what he was looking at. It was a prison. For a moment he lost his head, was on the point of crumpling the thing up and stuffing it into a pocket. Then he remembered that Mrs Verity knew what had befallen whom in Winchester Gaol; that this visit to her had been pointless, since she had nothing more to learn about the fate of her father’s bastard son. But he continued to look at the photograph, strangely disturbed. It was sufficiently surprising that Corderoy’s wronged wife should have assembled and preserved even those early memorials of her husband’s peasant mistress and their child. It was surely a fantastic morbidity to have added that last grim pendant to the collection.
Something had gone wrong with a little spirit lamp required for the tea-ritual, and Mrs Verity was detained by it a moment or two longer. The diary he could not venture to open, but he turned over some further photographs. There was William Mainprize as a junior schoolboy and as a senior one. In the second of these phases William ought to have turned gawky, but hadn’t. And in the next in the series – it must date from his malting-house days – he was a very handsome youth indeed. He was also undeniably his eminent father’s son. Shand picked up one further photograph. It had evidently been enlarged from a snapshot, and had something of an impromptu and even hurried air. The setting appeared to be a walled garden. A matronly lady was standing beside a rustic seat. Even in her elaborate costume – which might belong to the early 1890’s, Shand supposed – it was evident that she was pregnant. Beside her was the unmistakable figure of William Mainprize, now really grown-up. His arm was familiarly round her waist, but his gaze was over his shoulder and out of the picture. He might have been poised to bolt. It was a displeasingly furtive scene.
An appalled sense of revelation came to Shand. Here was something which the old woman now tinkling her teacups had failed to tumble to. And she must never, never do so! But as he was about to thrust the photograph back among the others he found that Mrs Verity was again standing beside him.
‘That one,’ she said. ‘I am perplexed, I own.’
‘Indeed?’ Even to his own ear, Shand’s casualness of response sounded absurdly bogus. ‘Probably it has drifted in accidentally and has no connection—’
‘I mean that I am perplexed as to whom my mother could have trusted to take it. A confidential servant, no doubt. But it was extremely rash. Perhaps it was what actually led to the discovery.’
‘The discovery?’ Shand was conscious of the odd fact that his face had gone cold. It was as if somebody had poured ether on it. Presumably, he thought with dismay, it was betraying a deadly pallor. And now Mrs Verity was looking at him.
‘We needn’t lose our heads,’ she said drily. ‘It will be a long time before your Mr Fawdry lays hands on that.’ And she pointed to the photograph.
‘It’s the only positive—?’
‘There is also the diary.’
‘Mrs Verity, ought you not—?’ Shand had glanced at the comfortable fire burning in the drawing-room grate. ‘Would it not be wise—?’
‘Certainly not, Professor. I am not of a mind to destroy any part of English literary history.’ Rather strangely, Mrs Verity smiled. ‘But I confess that, while I remain on earth, I am willing to sit on it.’
‘That is your mother?’ Shand had turned back to stare at the photograph.
‘Certainly it’s my mother. She was a remarkable woman, as I said.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Shand remembered the remark about Aeschylus. Clytemnestra, he dimly thought, didn’t have much of an edge on Walter Corderoy’s wife.
‘While my mother was still a young bride in his house, her husband seduced one of the servants, Martha Mainprize. My mother waited, and herself seduced the young man who had been the fruit of that seduction. It is possible that she proclaimed the fact – announced to her husband that she was carrying William Mainprize’s child. Certainly the young man was banished, as you know.’
‘And the tragedy darkened again, long after.’ Momentarily into Shand’s head came the image of his colleague the Casaubon Professor of Greek, chattering about protasis and epitasis. But this was at once ousted by something else: a simple summoning up and comparing of dates, such as his work required of him daily. His eyes turned to the pregnant woman in the photograph, and then back to Mrs Verity. And on her they rounded. For Mrs Verity – Lavinia Corderoy – was not Walter Corderoy’s daughter but his grand-daughter. And her actual father – Corderoy’s illegitimate son and the lover of Corderoy’s wife – lay in quicklime at Winchester.
But Mrs Verity, evidently for long cognizant of this remarkable parentage, was composedly pouring tea. She handed Shand his cup, turned round, and picked up a plate.
‘Ah,’ Mrs Verity said, ‘cucumber sandwiches.’