"Your father, as you know, was privately tutored here. By the time he turned sixteen, he was already so well-grown that de Vere would not have dared touch him; and if Imogen hadn't made Arthur swear never to approach his father, I think there would have been some sort of reckoning.
"But I must come to the point. Imogen lived-that is to say endured-the rest of her life here, without once going beyond the parish boundaries. We never heard from de Vere, or any of her former acquaintances-it must indeed have seemed as if she had vanished from the face of the earth. At her own request, we placed neither a death nor a funeral notice in any of the newspapers. Your father's army friends knew that his mother had died, but if news of her passing ever reached her old circles, nothing came of it.
"Now of course poor Imogen had nothing to leave your father. He had his commission by then, but a junior officer's pay is small, and my own fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. The business was on its last legs. I had taken a mortgage on this house, and was paying the interest out of what remained of the principal. It looked as if we should soon have to sell up and move to something exceedingly modest. With your father's help, I managed to hold out for another year, but the ground was slipping from under us.
'And then came the letter telling us that Ruthven de Vere had died, leaving his entire estate in trust to Arthur.
"It looked, at first glance, like belated repentance. But doubts very soon crept in. Nowhere in the will-which had been drawn up only weeks before de Vere's death-was Arthur acknowledged as his son: the income from the trust was left simply to Arthur Montague de Vere of Ashbourn House, Hurst Green, Sussex'. It was disturbing to learn that he had known where we lived. But the condition was far more so.
"In a nutshelclass="underline" the income from the trust (about five hundred a year; the estate had been much depleted) would come to Arthur, provided that he agreed to take charge of the contents of a particular upstairs room in de Vere's house. The will did not specify what these contents were; I shall come to that in a moment. The income would continue so long as these contents were maintained, together and intact, at Arthur's principal place of residence'. If anything were to be removed, sold, abandoned, destroyed or given away, the income would go to a distant relative in the north of Scotland. Otherwise it would pass, on your fathers death, to his eldest child, and then to that child's eldest child-"
"-unto the third generation," said Cordelia softly.
Theodore looked at her with something like fear. "How could you know that?"
"Know what, uncle?"
"That those were the words of the will."
"I didn't. They just came to me, a while ago, when I was thinking about-something else. So what is to happen, at the third generation?"
"The trust descends to your eldest child. When that child dies, the income passes to the descendants of the remote relative in Scotland. As would already have happened if Arthur had not had children."
"And-the contents of the room?"
Theodore did not reply. Instead he moved towards a door in the panelling a few paces to the left of the portrait. Because of the arrangement of the stairwell, the landing extended quite some distance, from the window in the end wall to the entrance to the corridor which led to the girls' bedrooms. The door her uncle was now attempting to unlock stood immediately to the right of that entrance. This was the door to 'the storeroom; Cordelia passed it several times a day, but had long ago concluded that, since it was never opened, nothing of interest could be stored there.
The lock snapped over; the hinges groaned; her uncle pushed the door wide and ushered her in.
Grey afternoon light filtered through two very grimy windows in the wall to her right. The room was perhaps fourteen feet by ten, but so crowded that it looked much smaller. The centre of the floor was taken up by various items of furniture, heaped against each other so as to make the most of the available space. A bedstead and a table, both standing on end, formed the backbone of the stack. From the doorway, Cordelia could make out the backs of two chairs, a wooden locker, a tin trunk, several other boxes, and various irregularly shaped bundles piled one on top of the other. Paintings hung from the picture rails all around the room, jostled together in no sort of order, some on board, some on canvas; below these, half-finished works, sheets of board, empty frames, rolls of canvas and other remnants stood propped against the walls, leaving a narrow aisle of dusty floorboards between them and the furniture piled in the centre of the room. The air was surprisingly dry, laden with odours of varnish and pigment, timber and canvas, leather and horsehair and traces of something sweet and aromatic that reminded her of a long-abandoned beehive.
"You see before you," said Theodore, "all the worldly goods of Henry St Clair. I took the liberty of opening the shutters this morning."
Cordelia took a few steps into the room. Dust lay thickly everywhere, stirring in small puffs as she moved, settling about her feet as she paused before a canvas depicting an expanse of tranquil waterway, stretching away into hazy distance, with several small boats in the foreground and the dim shapes of others farther off, a low green promontory or headland away to the right, and the great vault of the sky sweeping up from the far horizon, a dome of the palest blue, shot through with skeins and filaments of cloud. The artist had perfectly captured that quality of light which seems to float just above the surface of rippling water. Everything was held in suspension, even the foreground detail soft and blurred, yet somehow suggesting a delicacy of outline beyond the most exacting draughtsmanship.
"But this is beautiful, uncle. Why have you kept it locked away all these years?"
"We must come to that soon. But look around first."
The canvas beside it was very different. It showed a woodland path in dim, greenish moonlight, winding beneath tall, skeletal, overarching trees. About half-way along the path, a solitary figure, slightly hunched, was approaching. You could not quite decide whether it was man, woman, or child, or make out its features in the pale light, but its whole posture was expressive of profound unease, of someone trying to hurry without appearing to do so. Perhaps twenty yards further back, on the very edge of the path, something humped and hooded-or was it only a bush? or a small rocky outcrop about the height of a man?-seemed to be detaching itself from a thicket.
" This is his too?"
"I believe so."
Moving around the room, Cordelia saw at least a dozen landscapes strongly reminiscent of the tranquil waterway she had so admired. These, even at a cursory inspection, were the work of a man fascinated by the play of sunlight on water in all its manifold forms, not only liquid, but ice and frost, vapour and mist, haze and fog and every variety of cloud, a man in pursuit of some celestial vision in which air and fire, light and water were as one. But interspersed amongst them were at lea$t as many pictures which could only be described as works of darkness: as melancholy, even malignant in feeling as the daylit scenes were joyous, a world of dark woods and crumbling, labyrinthine ruins, fraught with insidious menace.
"Imogen told me that he painted those when his melancholia was at its blackest," said Theodore as she examined another moonlit scene. "He called them exorcisms."
This one showed a series of high stone arches, some complete, some partly collapsed, each framed by the one in front, receding into the far distance over rubble-strewn ground. Shattered remnants of whatever they had once supported lay all around; the light gleaming on the debris had a greenish, phosphorescent tinge. Cordelia could not look at it without feeling that she was being drawn vertiginously into the picture. Again she found it difficult to believe that the canvas next to it, a study of sunlight on a fog-bank at dawn, had come from the same hand. Even in that grey, wintry light, the luminosity of the fog was extraordinary.