Page 31 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

‘I have to go to Portsmouth on business,’ Mr Cowling said, sitting down at the breakfast table with a plate of kedgeree. ‘Would you like to come with me? It would make a nice little change for you, before the London season starts.’

Nina heard the slightly wistful tone in his voice and before she looked up from her eggs and bacon was able to assemble her expression into something receptive.

‘Portsmouth?’ she queried.

‘We could stay at the Queens – that’s a nice hotel. And there are things for you to see while I’m busy. There’s a cathedral, and the dockyard where you can walk along the ramparts – that’s nice on a fine day. And there’s Nelson’s flagship, the Victory – she’s moored there.’

‘It would be interesting to see the very spot where Nelson fell,’ Nina said. Like every English child she had learned about Nelson and Trafalgar at school, along with Wellington and Waterloo: the high points in all of history.

Mr Cowling shook his head. ‘I’m not sure you can still go on board – she’s in very poor condition.

The King was talking about it when I saw him last. She’s all but rotted away – the Admiralty won’t fork out to maintain the poor old girl.

They wanted to scrap her last year, but the King wouldn’t allow it.

He said it was a damned disgrace that she’d been let go so badly, especially with it being a hundred years this year since Trafalgar. ’

‘Of course – 1805,’ Nina said. ‘Will there be special celebrations?’

‘The King’s all for it.’

‘With a special holiday for school children?’ Nina suggested.

‘I think the twenty-first of October is a Saturday this year. But still . . .’ He ate some kedgeree.

‘The King hopes a big celebration might raise some money for restoration, but she’d still need maintaining year by year, and where’s that to come from?

So you’d better have a look at her while she’s still afloat. ’

‘But you haven’t said why you’re going to Portsmouth.’

‘Oh, a business opportunity’s come up.’

‘Another glove factory?’

‘A potted-meat company.’

‘Potted meat?’

‘And fish paste. They sell it in porcelain jars, sealed with butter. You might have seen it on the shelves in grocers’ shops. Feltham’s.’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve never eaten it, though.’

‘Well, it’s a good little family business that’s failing for lack of investment.

The owner, James Feltham, is getting on and wants to retire, and he’s two sons, neither of ’em very keen on meat and fish pastes.

They’d like to sell the whole thing and share the money, and good luck to ’em.

You can’t run a business properly if your heart’s not in it. ’

‘So what would you be buying?’

‘They’ve a factory on the Camber in Portsmouth, and a shop in the town.

They started up with fish paste and potted shrimps because it’s right where the fishing fleet comes in, and then James Feltham’s dad married a chicken farmer’s daughter from the West Country and they went into potted chicken as well.

’ He looked to see if she was really interested, and she nodded encouragingly.

‘What I’m thinking, you see, is that this is something we could export all over the world, same as we do the jam. ’

‘Oh, that’s what caught your interest,’ Nina said. ‘I was wondering how fish paste fitted into your schemes.’

‘Aye, well, it’s a similar problem. We couldn’t export the jam in glass jars, and in the same way, they couldn’t export the paste in porcelain jars: too heavy, and sealing with butter wouldn’t do on a long voyage to hot countries.

So they never got the business any further.

But if we were to put it into sterilised glass jars, with a sealed metal lid – well, the globe’s the limit!

It’d increase home sales too. It’s nice for a picnic in a sandwich, or on toast for your tea.

If we get the costs down, so it’s in reach of ordinary working folk, we could have it on every table, in every larder. A household name.’

‘Like Harvey’s jam.’

‘Exactly.’ He looked pleased that she had understood. ‘And the middling folk, too – they can’t afford foie gras and caviar, but in a nice, dainty glass jar with a pretty label, they won’t mind having potted chicken or sardine paste on their table instead.’

‘You sound as if your mind is made up to buy it,’ Nina said.

‘Well, I have to look at the books first, see what condition it’s in. I wish to God I had Decius with me for this, but I can’t spare him from the London office yet.’

‘But your new man,’ she said.

He had taken on another factotum, a young man called Truman Smith, whom Nina had not met.

‘Oh, he’s fine as far as he goes. But Decius knows my mind better than I know it myself.Truman hasn’t learned everything about me yet.’

‘I don’t suppose a lifetime would be enough to learn everything about you,’ she said.

He looked pleased. ‘Oh, I’m not so complicated,’ he deflected modestly. ‘I tell you what, if you come to Portsmouth with me, Truman can squire you around the sights.’

‘You’ll need him with you, surely?’

‘Not all the time. Will you come, then?’

‘Of course I will.’ The hunting season was virtually over, and she had no important engagements ahead. It was a small enough thing to do to make him happy – and he had been as careful around her lately as if she had been an eggshell and likely to shatter. This might put them on a steadier footing.

Under the table, Trump sighed. ‘Do you think I should take Trump, or should I ask Bobby to look after him?’ she said.

‘You’ll be outside a lot,’ he said. ‘I think you could take him, if you wanted. He’d be company for you when I’m busy.’

‘Trump and Truman. I’ll be well looked-after,’ she said.

Sebastian did not go home at once. He felt too wretched – not only still suffering from the shock of the incident, and the pain of his wound, but the unhappy reflection of how he had behaved at the inquest. He told himself that he had spoken only the truth and that there had been no injustice done: he had been defending himself against a murderous attack, and Jack Hubert’s death had been an accident.

Thus far the law of the land had been served.

But the inspector had known there was more to it than that, and Sebastian had withheld a deeper truth.

If the inspector cared to follow it up and he was found out, Sebastian could be charged with contempt of court.

The deeper truth, he told himself, was Dory’s secret, and what she had told him in confidence he had no right to reveal.

He’d had no choice but to dissemble. But he felt sullied by the whole experience, by having come here at all, by what he had seen of Shoddy Jack, by the horrible, ridiculous, lethal scuffle, by the unpleasant farce of the inquest. He had ‘got off’, and he felt the lesser man for it.

So he stayed on at the Grand, and licked his wounds, and mourned his lost integrity.

There was no insouciant stranger lurking in the lobby when he went down, and when he ventured outside he did not find himself followed.

The inspector, he concluded, had called off his dogs.

So Sebastian was able to walk along the promenade and through the town unwatched.

The weather was fine and breezy, sunny but cool, the sky high and veined with cloud, the sea restless.

Exercise and fresh air gradually restored his equilibrium.

The horrible memories retreated a step; the knife wound seemed to be healing cleanly.

He still had a problem to wrestle with: how would he tell Dory?

His pulse quickened at the thought that she was now free, that if she wished she could accept his proposal of marriage, and he longed more than anything to see her and talk to her without subterfuge.

In his more lyrical moments he imagined a golden future of companionship and conversation, trust and affection – all he had ever wanted.

But the fact remained that he had indirectly been the cause of her husband’s death, and what would her delicate conscience make of that?

He knew her to be a principled woman. The idea that he could lose her over that sickened him.

So he walked the streets of Brighton, stared unseeingly into shop windows and at the vista of the shore and the waves, and fretted at the problem, like a horse at a tether.

Archaeologists tended to be energetic people, and when Giles proposed a walk to look at the motte, there were no abstainers in their ranks.

Lord Denham thought it would be too far for his lady, and Kitty suggested that Lady Denham might like a gentle stroll around the gardens, while Richard offered his lordship a mount to ride around the farms to look at the cattle and discuss his dairy plans.

Thus everyone was suited and Giles was free to go off with his own friends – Max Wolski, John and Mabel Portwine, Talbot and Mary Arthur, and Andrew and Jane Lawrence.

With the dogs ranging about them, they walked up the hill and then along the crest, chatting about what was going on at Knossos in Crete.

In 1894 Arthur Evans, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and a keen archaeologist, had bought a quarter of the Knossos site with an option on the rest. The native owners would not sell to an individual, so he had set up the Cretan Exploration Fund, on the same lines as the Palestine Exploration Fund, without telling them that he was the only contributor.

But in 1894 Crete had been part of the dying Ottoman Empire, rife with intersectional violence and religious purges, and it had not been possible to start excavating the site.