"I don't understand," she said at last. "If Ruthven de Vere hated him-Henry St Clair-so much, why did he keep his things? And why leave them to us? I thought 'the contents of the room' would be something horrible, from the way you spoke."
"So did I, my dear, when I read that will. It was written as if the bequest were a trap-or a curse-with the annuity as bait. That was why I went to see Mr Ridley, de Vere's solicitor, on Arthur's behalf.
"By a fortunate coincidence-one of the few in this dark affair-Mr Ridley's father and mine had been friends; we had never met, but it gave me an opening. And I could tell from the outset that he hadn't liked de Vere, and was himself uneasy about the will.
"It was a cold day, and he had a fire burning in the grate in his office. Rather than speak to me across his desk, he invited me to take a chair by the fireside, and very soon we were talking like old friends.
"'I cant tell you what you most want to know,' he said, 'that is to say, the precise purpose behind the condition, because he didn't reveal it to me. But I'm afraid you're right in suspecting him of malign intent.'
"Then he asked me what I had made of the report of the inquest. I said I didn't even know there'd been an inquest into de Vere's death. And after a little self-inquisition, he told me everything he knew."
The mention of a fire had made Cordelia aware that she was shivering with cold. They locked up the room and hastened along the gloomy corridor to the sitting room at the other end, where the coals of an actual fire were still smouldering.
"After the separation," Theodore continued, once they had got a good blaze going, "de Vere kept up his accustomed round of dinners and grand receptions. He let it be known that Imogen had suddenly resolved to make a religious retreat, and wanted no further contact with the world. The boy was being privately educated in the country. De Vere was even heard to say, 'She has taken the veil'-profoundly disturbing, even in retrospect; I was glad not to have known it at the time. No doubt his chivalrous behaviour was much admired.
"So he went on for another decade or more, until people began to notice that he was not as charming or attentive as formerly; he seemed troubled, abstracted, preoccupied. It was rumoured around the City that de Vere was losing his grip; he was certainly losing money. By the time of Imogen's death-of which, according to Mr Ridley, he certainly knew-he had sold his interest in the bank, withdrawn entirely from society, and discharged all but three of his servants. His appearance, too, had altered profoundly. Once the epitome of elegance in all matters of dress and grooming, he now, in these last months of his life, received Mr Ridley at Belgrave Square in a crumpled suit, carpet slippers, and with a grease-stained dressing-gown draped about his shoulders. His white hair-which only recently had been iron-grey, and immaculately trimmed-was long and scanty; he had lost most of his teeth, and his face had fallen in upon itself. He was sixty-seven, and looked twenty years older.
"I asked Mr Ridley if he thought de Vere had been of sound mind when the will was drawn.
'"Sound,' I remember him saying-he made a steeple of his fingers, like this-sound, now that's a very broad church indeed. In the eyes of the law, yes: he knew the meanings of words; he knew exactly what he wanted, and he insisted on having it. Further than that I shouldn't like to go.'
"There was malice in him, Mr Ridley told me, malice but also fear, a morbid pressure of anxiety as palpable as the ill-will. De Vere had his chair hard against a wall, opposite the door, and all the time they talked, his eyes were darting about the room. And that was the last Mr Ridley saw of him until-as the executor-he received a note from the attending doctor, saying that de Vere had died in a fall from an upstairs window, and inviting him to step round.
"The room from which de Vere had fallen was the room containing everything that had once belonged to Henry St Clair.
"As de Vere's valet-though he cant have had much to do in the way of valeting-would later tell the inquest, St Clair's possessions had remained undisturbed, so far as anyone knew, in the upstairs boxroom until about a year before, when he had happened to see Mr de Vere unlocking the door. From then on, his master had visited the room more and more often until he was spending hours there every day, or rather night, for it was at night that he mainly went there, always with the door locked. Mr de Vere had made it clear from the outset that he was not to be disturbed during these visits. As to why he spent so much time in the room, or what he did there, the valet-whose name was William Lambert-could not say. Sometimes when he passed the door he would hear bumping and scraping noises, as if things were being dragged about, but mostly there was no sound at all.
"On the night of his death, de Vere had locked himself in the room at around ten o'clock. It was late in the autumn, a still, cold night. At about midnight William was dozing, fully clothed, in the attic on the next floor up-his master was in the habit of demanding refreshments in the small hours, and then sleeping very late-when he was woken by a splintering crash, followed by a thud in the area below. He ran downstairs and found Mr de Vere lying dead on the flagstones.
"The doctor, suspecting foul play, had the police summoned and the boxroom door forced. But there was no one within, no possible means of escape, and no sign of a struggle beyond the shattered window through which Ruthven de Vere had made his last exit. Closer examination suggested that he had run full tilt at the closed window, and dived head-first through the glass.
"According to the servants, he had not received a single visitor since the signing of the will. The maid and the housekeeper spent most of their time below stairs, and so the valet was the principal witness to the final weeks of de Vere's life. William told Mr Ridley privately that he had sometimes watched unobserved as his master approached the boxroom: it had seemed to him that de Vere was drawn to it almost against his will, like a man defeated by his craving for drink, or a murderer compelled, as popular belief has it, to return again and again to the scene of his crime. This never came out at the inquest, at which the coroner, for reasons best known to himself, cut short the valets halting attempts to characterise de Vere's mental state, and prevailed upon the jury to bring in a finding of death by misadventure.
"In Mr Ridley's view, the verdict should have been suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I pressed him further on the matter of de Vere's sanity at the time the will was drawn.
"'If you're thinking the terms might be challenged on that ground,' he replied, 'I can't hold out much hope. The man's instructions were precise; he questioned me closely about the effect of the wording; there was nothing capricious or repugnant-that is to say, inconsistent at law-in the terms he required. Speaking privately, I am sure his intention was malign, but it was also founded upon a delusion: namely, that in bequeathing Mr St Clair's effects to your nephew, he was visiting some sort of evil upon him and his descendants. So there's really nothing to object to: the intent to harm was no doubt real enough, but the danger is almost certainly phantasmal.'
"I asked why he had said almost certainly.
'"Professional caution, I suppose. One never quite knows… there are more things… I suppose I had wondered, whether the man might have concealed something dangerous amongst St Clair's effects. What sort of danger, you ask? Well, to cite another authority, it would cease to be a danger if we knew the answer to that. Most improbable, of course. A thousand to one the man was simply deranged. Of course, if you were to discover anything dangerous amongst the contents of that room, it would be a nice point, at law, whether the trust could require it to be left in situ. But if I were your nephew, I should accept the bequest, take the income, lock everything away securely, and think no more about it.'