Breaking the Circle, page 5
‘Good evening,’ she said, brightly. ‘I am Henrietta Plinlimmon.’
The large woman looked down a substantial nose, over the crest of her bust, and took in the archaeologist with an uninterested glare. ‘Are you?’ she said, then cocked her head, listening. She nodded once or twice, then smiled so briefly it was like a flash of cold lightning. ‘Ojigkwanong bids you welcome,’ she said.
‘Morning Star,’ Margaret said, bowing. ‘Your spirit guide, I assume?’
The woman’s bust almost took on a life of its own. ‘Are you trying to be clever, Miss Plinlimmon?’ she hissed. ‘Are you trying to be sarcastic?’
Margaret took a step backwards, to avoid the heaving whalebone and the flying Amontillado. ‘Not at all,’ she said, hurriedly. ‘A … friend of mine … studied the Algonquin and I remember him mentioning the name once … umm, at dinner. Yes.’ She smiled and the woman’s frown became less ferocious. There was no need to tell her at this juncture that there was a small room along the corridor from hers in University College inhabited by a small, intense man whose lifelong study was how names rose above the strictures of language and could be considered universal. Nothing he had written or divulged in his rather rambling lectures proved his point but, somehow, by being cheap to employ and generous with cigars, he had managed to keep his toehold. Sitting next to him at dinner was torture, both because of the boredom and the smell of old tobacco, but one did pick up some unconsidered trifles nonetheless. She certainly wouldn’t be telling this person that her pronunciation left rather a lot to be desired. Presumably, Morning Star was not picky.
The enormous woman took in a deep breath and Margaret feared she would actually levitate, presumably something relatively normal in this setting, but finally, she let her bust down and smiled again. ‘Fascinating. When Ojigkwanong has more time, I am sure he would love to chat. However, for now, my name is Mrs Olivia Bentwood. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Charmed, Mrs Brentwood.’ Margaret Murray was not normally hard of hearing, but there was some commotion behind her before the door swung in and a group of three motley characters walked in. One of them, a man in a blazer and a loud tie, clapped her on the back and nearly sent her flying.
‘Get it right, get it right,’ he yelled. ‘It’s Bentwood, like the chair. Ain’t it, Ollie?’
Mrs Bentwood breathed in again, this time with much quivering of the nostril. ‘Indeed, Mortimer. Thank you for the correction,’ and, refilling her glass to the brim, she moved off to the far side of the table and subsided into one of the more substantial chairs.
Margaret turned completely to face the new three people. The man who had slapped her on the back stepped forward and thrust out a hand, palm down, thumb out, making it almost impossible to shake. In her life as a woman in a man’s world, Margaret Murray had not a moment’s hesitation in labelling the man a misogynist and all-round pain in the derrière. His voice, though masked by the clearest case of mock-Cockney she had ever heard, had nevertheless been honed on the playing fields of Eton, or she was a Dutchman.
‘Mortimer, that’s me name,’ he crowed. ‘Ask me what me surname is, go on. Yer know yer want to.’
‘Henrietta Plinlimmon,’ Margaret murmured. ‘And I know who you are, Mr Mortimer. I believe you were at Eton with my brother, Henry Plinlimmon.’
The man’s hand dropped and he peered at her closely. ‘Knew I knew yer from somewhere,’ he snarled. ‘Got his nose, aintchya, poor cah.’ Taking one of Mrs Dunwoody’s best sherry glasses, he gave it a quick polish on his tie and filled it from a flask he took from an inside pocket.
Margaret took a deep, relieved breath. She hadn’t lost her touch when it came to dealing with the Mortimer Mortimers of this world, she was pleased to see. The next person through the door was more acceptable in any shipwreck than his ghastly predecessor. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, which surprised Margaret, because she had always read that Spiritualism was a dying art, as everyone grew older and no new blood joined. His face was that of a Botticelli angel and his voice was low and gentle.
‘Please forgive Mortimer, Miss Plinlimmon,’ he said, shaking her hand lightly before stepping back to a respectful distance. ‘He means well and of course he is a very cherished member of our group, being so adept. My word,’ he turned his eyes up in the accepted manner, ‘we have had such messages from the beyond whenever Mortimer is present. He is a conduit, you see, Miss Plinlimmon, a facilitator for the spirits. My own dear mama will descend through no other instrument.’
Margaret smiled encouragingly. She had thought for a moment that she might have a kindred spirit here, but clearly not.
‘I am Robert Grimes, Miss Plinlimmon. Welcome to our little Circle.’ With an almost imperceptible squeeze of her hand, he moved off down the room and took a chair next to Olivia Bentwood. Mortimer Mortimer, glowering balefully, sat one seat removed from him on his left.
That left the third member of the little group and Margaret Murray gave a gasp as she saw the woman, who could have been her double. She was small and slight, with hair on the very edge of being out of control of its pins. The only real difference was that this woman was dressed at the very height of fashion, with a short tailored jacket and a skirt just reaching the floor, allowing the toes of some gleaming patent leather pumps to just peep out. Margaret pulled ineffectually at the back of her short alpaca coat, knowing it to be at least five seasons out of date. She never bothered as a rule, but something about this veritable fashion plate made it seem important for the first time.
The woman stepped forward and grasped one of Margaret’s hands in both of her own. ‘My goodness!’ she breathed. ‘We could be twins! Did I hear your name was Plinlimmon? I’m trying to remember if dear Papa ever mentioned the name as being a Connection. Perhaps we could ask him tonight. He usually comes through, though he doesn’t always have a lot to say. Which is a shame, because he just knew so much, dear Papa.’
Margaret had a sudden horrible, sinking feeling. If dear Papa had been an academic, if she had ever met him, his family … ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she broke in. ‘Henrietta Plinlimmon. And you are …?’
‘Oh, goodness, so silly. I’ll forget my head next.’ Something about talk of heads made the woman put a hand up to her hair and push a recalcitrant pin into place under her small, fascinating hat. ‘Christina Plunkett. Of the Somerset Plunketts, you know. Are we related? It seems extraordinary if not.’
Margaret Murray took a leap of faith, her faith being in the fact that this woman was not half as bright as dear Papa. ‘I believe my great-great-grandmother was a Plunkett,’ she hazarded.
‘Well, there now,’ the woman said, smiling at Margaret Murray as if she had brought a rabbit out from a hat. ‘I knew we had to be Connected. I will look it up in Papa’s books when I get home, always assuming he can’t help us tonight. What was your great-great-grandmother’s other name?’
Margaret Murray thought fast, something she was very good at. She lowered her head and her voice. ‘There was a Rift,’ she said, darkly. She looked from left to right, suspiciously. ‘I believe it involved … the Gardener. Or Gamekeeper, recollections vary.’
Christina Plunkett jumped as though shot. ‘My poor dear,’ she carolled. ‘How very, very unfortunate! Perhaps we won’t ask Papa. He can be very prudish, even still. With the Company he must be keeping, it must be hard to keep up Standards.’
Margaret Murray made a note to herself to try not to catch this woman’s habit of speaking in Capitals. She had a strong feeling that it was not a habit that would go down well with Flinders Petrie, somehow.
She heard voices in the corridor outside again and the doorway filled with tweed. Two men stood there, dressed in one case for the grouse moor, in the other for a hard day sending miscreants to prison from the Bench. Behind them, Mrs Dunwoody was trying to make herself heard and finally she managed to muscle her way to the front and, with various twitterings, implied that everyone should sit.
Alexander Dunwoody’s chair was empty at the top of the table and Margaret wondered briefly how that worked when they tried to contact the great beyond. Did the members of the Circle on either side have to stretch across, or did they make the assumption that the hon. sec.’s shade filled the gap?
In fact, it was much more prosaic. Once everyone was in place and a short silence had been held for Muriel Fazakerley, Mortimer and Grimes popped out of their seats and removed the chair back to the fireside. Then everyone shuffled round and looked expectantly at Mrs Dunwoody, who coughed deprecatingly and took a strengthening swig of Amontillado.
‘Thank you all for coming at such short notice,’ she said. ‘Before we begin, I would like to introduce to you all Miss Henrietta Plinlimmon, who has taken the place of poor dear Muriel. I think you have all introduced yourselves except, perhaps …’ she gestured to the grouse moor tweeds to her left, ‘Colonel Carruthers.’
Margaret Murray could hardly suppress a laugh. He was so stereotypically a Colonel Carruthers, he might as well have been on stage in a West End farce. At least he wasn’t wearing mess dress.
On cue, he turned a worrying shade of puce and barked. ‘’Tmeetchya,’ which was presumably meant kindly.
‘And General Boothby.’
The Bench tweeds were worn by someone a little less crippled with shyness than the grouse moor ones. Their wearer was younger and actually quite good looking, once it was possible to overlook the walrus moustache which perched incongruously below a rather well-shaped nose. The grey eyes which looked into Margaret’s were frank and honest – possibly a rarer commodity than was a good idea in a magistrate’s court.
‘Good evening, my dear,’ he said. ‘Plinlimmon. That’s an unusual name.’
‘Yes,’ Margaret said, hurriedly. She had had enough genealogy for one evening. ‘Dies out with me, sadly. My brother is a monk.’
Everyone round the table looked a little disconcerted. But if nothing else, the newcomer was a little more interesting than Muriel Fazakerley and, General Boothby stroked his moustache reflectively, a damn sight easier on the eye.
‘So,’ Mrs Dunwoody rapped the table smartly with a small gavel, causing Margaret to have to bite the inside of her cheek to stop a laugh escaping, ‘to business. Shall we go round the table?’
She looked to her left and Colonel Carruthers, if possible, became a shade deeper purple and shook his head, holding his breath from anxiety. Margaret found herself hoping he had never found himself in combat – surely, it could not have ended well for any troops under his command.
‘Christina?’
‘Thank you, Agatha, I don’t think I have anything to bring up this evening,’ the woman said in cultured tones. ‘Except, of course, to express my sorrow and regret that Muriel passed to another plane so suddenly and before her time.’
‘It’s hardly your place to say whether it was before her time or not, is it?’ Olivia Bentwood’s bust glared at the woman.
‘Now, now, Olivia,’ twittered Mrs Dunwoody. ‘You will have your turn. Remember our Circle rules.’
Margaret had spent enough hours – more than enough, some would say – in meetings, and this one was just like all the others. Points of order. Rules of engagement. Far from being a dangerous job that Andrew Crawford had given her, she feared that if she did die, it would be from excessive boredom.
Mrs Bentwood subsided, muttering, and it was Robert Grimes’s turn. He looked up the table to Agatha Dunwoody and smiled his entrancing, Renaissance smile at her. ‘No, Agatha,’ he said. ‘Nothing for me, thank you. Except to join Christina, of course.’ He looked at his left-hand neighbour, willing her to cut in, but Olivia Bentwood was biding her time.
Reluctantly, and speaking as quietly as possible, the honorary hon. sec., said, ‘Olivia? Anything from you?’
The woman’s head came up and Margaret Murray was reminded of a trip to Madrid, when she had been persuaded to go to a bullfight. Once all the pomp and circumstance was over, when the matador, glorious in his suit of lights, had retired to await his re-entry, the bull had been revealed behind massive oaken gates. His head was down and he pawed the ground, slowly raising his massive horns and showing his red-rimmed, furious eyes to the crowd. Olivia Bentwood was that bull, to the life. Her pause was masterly in her judgement of its length. The room held its breath and Agatha Dunwoody had even opened her mouth to pass on to Mortimer Mortimer when, in a low rumble, the woman spoke.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, there is something from me. As you know, I was never very taken with Muriel Fazakerley. I am, I hope you all agree, not an unkind woman.’
The room was beyond silent. Margaret Murray had heard that crushing lack of sound only once before, when the tumbling blocks of a wall sectioning off a pharaoh’s tomb had fallen for the first time since they were placed there millennia before stopped crumbling, and the dead spoke with silent lips.
‘Muriel Fazakerley was Not Like Us.’
Mortimer Mortimer snorted.
‘I don’t include your faux persona in my assumptions, Mr Mortimer,’ Olivia Bentwood said smoothly, ‘so please, do not bother to interject. It was nothing to do with class, as it happens. It is to do with behaviour. Muriel Fazakerley, or Madame Ankhara as she liked to be known, was nothing but a fraud and a fake.’ She ignored the indrawn breaths; she was getting into her stride. ‘She used what tiny skill she may once have had to make money, to defraud the gullible, to demean our beliefs.’
At the top of the table, Agatha Dunwoody twittered on behalf of everyone. ‘One must live, Olivia,’ she said. ‘Muriel had to eat, to have shelter.’
‘Then she could have gone into service,’ the woman snapped. ‘Become a dressmaker. A milliner, even, though heaven knows she didn’t have the first clue how to dress. A cook. But what she should not have become was a common fortune teller. She might just as well have been with a travelling circus.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’ General Boothby broke in and, this time, Agatha Dunwoody did not stop him. ‘Poor old Mu did her best.’
‘Poor old Mu?’ Mortimer was on it like a dog with a bone. ‘Poor old Mu? Sounds as if you were rather more than Circle members, General.’
The general puffed out his moustache and smiled. ‘We did have a few … intimate moments, you might say,’ he agreed. ‘Though some time ago and …’ he harrumphed in a way that reminded Margaret that he was indeed a military gent, ‘strictly on a … currency footing.’
There was a sound from the direction of Colonel Carruthers that made everyone want to duck for cover. Some prehistoric memory in the hindbrain had them hardwired to recognize the sound of an erupting volcano and get out while the going was good.
Eventually, the generic noise became words. ‘D’ya mean you paid the woman? Paid her to …’ the old soldier was lost for words. ‘Paid her to …’
Christina Plunkett patted his hand and tried to calm him down. ‘Come now, Colonel. I’m sure the general didn’t mean to cause offence. He was probably just helping her out, over a sticky patch, something like that. Eh, General?’
Boothby laughed and crinkled the edges of his eyes. Margaret Murray realized that he was not the bluff, straightforward, veering-towards-handsome soldier he at first appeared, but an out-and-out rotter, in everything for the main chance. Things were getting rather more interesting.
‘Not really, Christina, but if that’s what the colonel would prefer, then that is indeed it. I gave poor old Mu some money, to tide her over. And in return, she …’
‘General Boothby!’ Olivia Bentwood’s voice made the windows rattle. ‘I was speaking! It was still my turn. And frankly, we don’t need to know the sordid details of your life outside this room. I think I speak for everyone?’
Around the table, heads nodded and the general leaned back, grinning under his moustache.
‘So, to conclude,’ Mrs Bentwood said, ‘I think what I want to say is this. We know nothing about Miss Plinlimmon, but I want her to know that I am watching her. If there is the slightest, the smallest hint of anything untoward in her behaviour, she will be removed from this Circle. With prejudice.’
‘I’ve often wondered what that means,’ Christina Plunkett mused.
‘You don’t need to know,’ Margaret said across the table. ‘Because Mrs Bentwood will not be removing me, with or without it. Because there is nothing about me to find out. I am certainly the most boring woman in this room.’ She chuckled. ‘If not in the world.’ She crossed her fingers in her lap as she spoke and looked up startled to find General Boothby watching her hands like a hawk. A small shiver went through her, but she smiled up at him as innocent as a newborn baby.
After that, the meeting was as boring as expected. Even Mortimer Mortimer had nothing to say and, after some biscuits as dry as the dust that lay on every level surface, the meeting broke up. Margaret scurried away and was soon ahead of the others, but even so, she listened for following feet. She made a mental note to ensure that someone met her in future. Andrew Crawford might cause talk. But Thomas, now … that would work.
The fire crackled in the grate. Everyone around the table knew that it was too late for fires, the evening too warm. But everyone knew that the spirits liked it, the spitting of the logs, the settling of the coal and, above all, the glow that filled the otherwise darkened room. The curtains were drawn and the shutters closed behind them. For minutes now, the only sound in that drawing room was the soft rise and fall of people breathing, people waiting for the moment, hoping for the impossible.
