The Riddle of the River Read online

  I looked at the inspector. He was staring thoughtfully at me.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘I will question Mr Julian Archer. We might as well see what he has in the way of an alibi.’

  1896

  A boy and his mother – a break with the past.

  Left behind: father, brother, old family servants. A white Tuscan villa, green slopes covered with cypresses, a sky always bright with Italian sunshine. A life of joyful security in familiar surroundings. But also, the paternal authority, the frustration, the rejection, the lack of interest, the incomprehension, the disapproval. Finished, all of that.

  In the future: uncertainty, doubt and anxiety. Endless fog and rain and storms, heavy grey stone buildings, iron railings around the areas. Chill winters and hard work. But also, support, admiration and appreciation, and practical, material assistance. At least, so Guglielmo had been promised.

  He shook the dust of Italy from his shoes, and stepped aboard the train.

  Tuesday, July 12th, 1898

  I sat at the beautifully decorated table, laden with porcelain, silver, crystal and flowers, playing my role to the hilt.

  My wedding ring had been left at home, my stays tightened a full inch more than usual, and a certain strand of hair left to curl along the side of my face instead of being treated as no more than a bother and pinned away as usual. My dress, also, had been selected with the greatest care. I wished to choose one which was both youthful and fashionable, but unfortunately today’s fashion seemed to make these two qualities become contradictory, the large sleeves and intricate decorations lending an air of poise and maturity to the female figure which was exactly what I desired to avoid. I hesitated between distinguished silk and innocent muslin, between roomy, gathered skirt and gored, shaped skirt, between waist-emphasising sash and close-fitting buttoned bodice, and it was only after several sessions of secretly reading Dumas that I realised that neither the elegant ladylike appearance nor the modest, girlish look were correct for the situation. Finally, I settled for adding a double garland of small silk rosebuds in green leaves to the front of my plain pink silk skirt, and chose a petticoat with a ten-inch lace border to go underneath it. I attached a similar garland to a wide-brimmed straw hat after having removed the feathers that had been sewn onto the band, and wore white boots at the risk of soiling them on muddy footpaths. My most unusual jewellery – the large pieces that I actually never wear – completed the ensemble, and I left the house feeling positively daring.

  The early evening was balmy, and I arrived to find the party gathered in the garden, the table having been set out-of-doors. The house was placed so near the river as to leave only a kind of swath, or band of garden between them, but a wooden bridge had been constructed leading to the odd little island that crowds into the narrow river just below the Silver Street bridge. Upon this island, a couple of youngsters could be perceived running about and hiding between the trees, calling to others whose heads hung dangerously out of the windows of a kind of large grange which stood along the road next to the house. This grange, which could easily have been turned into a residence nearly as large as the house itself, seemed to serve essentially as a playground. As I entered the main gate to the drive, a tall wooden structure which completely hid the goings-on within, I noticed a bicycle leaning against the half-open door of the grange, and a pile of balls, bats, kites, rafts, oars and other equipment for outdoor enjoyment just within. I looked around for Mrs Burke-Jones and found that she was already there, which was fortunate as I was counting on her to introduce me to the host and hostess. They were standing together near the table, nodding their heads, shaking hands, and addressing a few polite words to each guest.

  Mr Darwin looked at me penetratingly as he greeted me, and I supposed that in spite of my optimism, he must surely find my face familiar. However, he seemed uncertain how to place me, which suited my purpose well enough. I supposed there was a risk that he would realise who I was the very next time he saw me out walking with Arthur and the twins. But I put this thought away and contented myself with smilingly answering his quiet,

  ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Duncan.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you could come. We’ve heard so much about you,’ cried his wife, an energetic and very beautiful lady whose speech betrayed her American origins, although their echo was somewhat dimmed by years, if not decades of living on this side of the Atlantic. ‘I know you used to be a teacher. Such fascinating work, and so important to influence and educate the new generation. What made you stop?’

  I bit my tongue to remind myself that the word ‘marriage’ was forbidden, and murmured something anodyne about preferring privacy and wishing to work at home. However, she pressed me further, no doubt out of genuine interest, so that in the end I had to invent – with a hesitation due to the unpleasantness of lying but which she took for modesty – that I was an aspiring writer. Given that I was almost certain to meet the Darwins again in the future, I felt that I was running myself into difficulties. But there seemed nothing to do about it.

  I knew Mr Archer the moment he entered the gate. A tall figure followed him, and turned to close and latch the gate behind him; I recognised his son, the younger Mr Archer from Heffers. Seeing the two of them together, I noticed a similarity which had not struck me when I had briefly glimpsed the father in the half-darkness, standing on the garden steps of his house. Of an equal height, both men were well-built, with handsome, rather angular faces. The younger one, however, had an easy, pleasant manner which in his father seemed to take a sharper, more purposeful form; his smile was slightly toothy and carnivorous. I felt I did not like him very much.

  He has an alibi, I recalled to myself firmly. You are here to meet him and eventually learn more about Ivy. Not to prove that he is a murderer.

  Either because Mrs Burke-Jones had interceded, or purely by chance, I found myself seated at table upon the elder Mr Archer’s left. On my other side was a girl of fifteen looking sulky and uncomfortable in an obviously new dress, somewhat tight under the arms, and Julian Archer sat across from me, with Mrs Burke-Jones on one side and an unfamiliar middle-aged lady on the other. This lady had briefly been introduced to me as Mrs Darwin, not my hostess but another Mrs Darwin; it seemed that there were a number of Darwin sons, all married. There were five or six young people around the table; Darwins, it seemed, were also prolific reproducers, as, indeed, it seemed somehow natural that they should be. Mr Darwin sat at the head of the table, and his pretty wife at the foot.

  The conversation began by turning on the subject of sports, health, hygiene, exercise and costume. The members of the Darwin family were great exponents of the advantages of bicycle-riding, and the women of the family were experts on the new style of ‘bicycle-clothing’.

  ‘It’s all much more sensible than this stuff,’ said Gwen, the girl on my left, plucking disagreeably at her dinner gown, which was really a very beautiful and well-made dress, although it seemed to cause her acute annoyance.

  ‘Everyone, but everyone knows about the benefits of exercise,’ said Mrs Darwin. ‘There isn’t a soul in the world who doesn’t feel the better for a spin on a bicycle, or just a long walk.’

  ‘Except for me,’ said her husband. ‘I come home feeling like death and have to lie down for an hour with a cold compress.’

  She merely laughed.

  ‘The only annoying thing is that there are not more sports open to women,’ she continued. ‘We can paddle at the beach, and go on walking holidays and bicycle rides, and play tennis in a mild way. And I don’t say that this is not a marvellous improvement over the constricted lives our poor mothers and grandmothers were obliged to lead. But just think of all that men are able to do! Running races, weight-lifting, swimming, gymnastics – all those sports that we heard so much about two years ago, when they revived the Olympic games!’

  ‘Lifting weights does surprising things to the muscles,’ observed the other Mrs Darwin with a slight frown. ‘They get al
l hard. We wouldn’t want that happening to our daughters, now, would we? It’s hard enough to make them keep their hats on when they play tennis or run about on the beach!’

  ‘And there is a question of dignity,’ said Mr Darwin. ‘We don’t want to see women out of breath and excessively warm with messy hair and red faces.’

  ‘Who doesn’t want to? I do,’ murmured Gwen in an audible undertone. I felt a certain sympathy for her point of view, and recalled my own happy childhood in the country, of which many hours were spent gambolling freely with my sister in the sunny meadows, unobserved and uncommented. It seemed to me that faces reddened with effort, tangled, windblown hair and for that matter also bare feet and loud shrieks – in other words, the complete absence of attention paid to decorum – had been an essential ingredient of the sense of boundless freedom and joy connected with our escapades. But before I could open my mouth to express even a very subdued version of this feeling, I realised that the older Mr Archer, the object of my interest, was speaking.

  ‘As far as I am concerned,’ he was saying, ‘the noblest and most magnificent sport in the world is boating. And women may participate in it with no loss of the lovely beauty we all delight in.’

  ‘Boating can’t be much of a sport, then, if girls can do it,’ observed one of the Darwin boys.

  The modern headmistress in Mrs Burke-Jones could not resist such an opening.

  ‘My dear child,’ she said, ‘the natural superiority of men over women is a deep question; the reasons for which the whole of society appears to unanimously perceive this superiority are complex and interesting, and they are to be taken seriously. Surely no true man wishes to preserve a semblance of superiority simply by forbidding women to do what otherwise they would be fully capable of doing, in order to pretend to himself that he alone is capable – yet in a large measure that is exactly what society does, collectively speaking.’ And as the child looked confused by this somewhat theoretical discourse, she clarified her meaning by adding, ‘Before you reject any sport that girls are capable of doing in favour of one which you suppose they are not capable of, ask yourself honestly if they are truly incapable, or merely forbidden?’

  He stared at her silently, and Mr Archer intervened smoothly.

  ‘I assure you that boating is an extraordinary sport, with room for every kind of effort and every kind of ability.’ Warming to his theme, he continued, ‘A real sportsman will need every ounce of his athletic ability to master a light sailing-boat in rough weather, whereas in yachting, passengers may perform no other office than that of feeling the rush of the tangy sea air and admiring the splendour of the silver waves.’

  ‘That sounds beautiful,’ I said, gazing at him as he spoke. He turned to me, and smiled.

  ‘Have you never been on a yacht?’ he asked me eagerly.

  ‘No, never. The only boats I have ever been on are the ferries that cross the Channel going to France.’

  ‘An interesting ride, with many a pleasure waiting on the other side,’ he replied kindly. ‘But the sensation is utterly incomparable. You know nothing about yachting?’

  ‘I wish I did,’ I said, seizing eagerly upon this topic which appeared to be a kind of opening through which I might eventually reach the man himself.

  ‘There are splendid opportunities for an observer to become acquainted with the sport,’ he said. ‘Why, the two best regattas of the year are just coming up. You know which ones I mean?’

  ‘The Cowes Regatta!’ shouted several voices.

  ‘I have heard that spoken of,’ I said meekly.

  ‘Yes, the Cowes Regatta is in early August. And before that, the Kingstown Regatta, in Ireland. Why, that’s on the 20th of July, just a week from now! The best yachts in the world come to race there, and each year reveals astounding new tactics and new technology. It seems as though the progress will never end.’

  ‘Do you own a yacht? Are you a racer?’ asked one of the boys.

  ‘I own a yacht on which I spend many a delightful weekend,’ he replied, ‘but I do not race with it. I haven’t got the technique of these champions who spend much of the year in training.’

  ‘Training,’ said Mr Darwin, ‘pah. Training is the ruin of the true meaning of sport and sportsmanship. Winning in sports should be a brilliant combination of luck and talent – a gift from the gods. Not a matter of plodding strain to gain a tiny fraction of a second’s advantage each day.’

  ‘Yet nothing is more inspiring than that effort for advancement, for improvement, each tiny drop of which leads the entire world towards progress!’ exclaimed the elderly gentleman with emotion. ‘I admire the concept of sportsmanship you describe, but I do not think the search for new technology goes against it. The miracle of machinery is the key to progress.’

  ‘You’re talking about improving the boats, I take it,’ said Mr Darwin. ‘I suppose that’s necessary enough. I was talking about training the body; about these people who run every day, and hop and jump for hours to get their muscles to learn to run or swim faster than Nature intended them to.’

  ‘And yet it’s the training, and the work and the effort that go into any sport, whether technological or physical, that yield the astonishing results we see year by year,’ disagreed Mr Archer.

  ‘It’s Father’s favourite topic,’ said his son, exactly as Mr Darwin’s son said,

  ‘It’s Father’s pet grieve.’

  There was a general laugh, and Mr Darwin made a face in his beard.

  ‘Then why do you not engage in technology yourself?’ said Mrs Darwin politely. ‘Surely you could put together a team to improve your boat enough to race it?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr Julian Archer, ‘the answer to that is the story of the Archer family fortune. It puts us all in a very peculiar situation; I don’t believe there is another family in England like ours.’

  ‘Do tell it,’ said Gwen, perking up and looking up at the laughing gentleman opposite with the first sign of interest she had shown that evening.

  ‘Well, the story begins in the seventeenth century. We Archers are an old family; our genealogical tree goes back, with precision, a great deal farther than you might think; quite to the Middle Ages. The family was an important one, and a fabulously wealthy one, until the appearance of a certain James Oliver Archer in the year 1663. This young man, the eldest son of his father, grew up horrendously dissolute and ‘‘shewed Signs of destroying the Prosperity of the Archers and their Future with it”, as is written in his father’s diary, which still remains in our family’s possession. James’s father believed that the boy was evil because his mother was evil. She wasn’t English; he had married a Spanish woman with splendid black hair and a temper, and he lived to regret it. She ended up in an asylum, quite mad – one can almost sympathise, what with the combination of English weather and an English husband. At any rate, the father was convinced that James was growing up with bad blood, and that he would transmit that blood to all future Archers. And he determined to rescue the family fortune once and for all from such a risk. So he made a most remarkable will. The entire fortune was to be left to the eldest son in each generation, or failing sons, the eldest daughter and then her eldest son. But the Archer enjoying the inheritance should never, as long as the Archer family existed, be allowed to manage it himself. It would invariably lie in the hands of trustees, who themselves would name successive generations of new trustees, ‘‘always to be chosen Instructed and Worthy Men known for their Honesty and Temperance in all Things”. The Archers successively inherit the house, and various other properties that previous Archers managed to persuade their trustees to add to the estate; the farm, the yacht, the London flat. The costs of the upkeep of the estate, the servants, the labourers and so on, are entirely paid by the trustees. In fact, every single thing the Archer heir spends must be paid for by the trustees, on presentation of full accounts. Archers never have money in their pockets; no more than a couple of hundred a year as pocket money. Any more significant expense must be agre
ed with beforehand by the trustees. And if they overspend without warning, they’re liable to find themselves doing a stint in debtor’s prison. It’s happened – my great-grandfather spent a few months there, though both Grandfather and Father appear to have toed the line.’ He smiled at his father.

  ‘Yes, my Grandfather showed a bit of a streak of that evil Spanish blood,’ said the elder man. ‘He’d had to wait for the inheritance; his father died at ninety, and he himself was already well over sixty at the time. That didn’t make the trustees any more lenient with him! They knew he was an old rake and they meant to rein him in. They were all over eighty themselves.’

  ‘What had he been doing up until he inherited the money?’ asked Gwen.

  ‘Working for his living,’ replied Mr Archer. ‘The will provides for the education of all the Archer sons, but then they are supposed to find ‘‘an honest man’s Profession until such Time as their Father is deceased”.’

  ‘Did you have a profession?’

  ‘Certainly. I was trained as an engineer. I could have put together a team to turn my yacht into a racing yacht; I did, in fact, make the request. But the present trustees decreed that that was not a fit use of the family fortune.’

  ‘Oh, too bad,’ cried Gwen. ‘What do they think is a fit use?’

  ‘Increasing the fortune itself, of course!’ intervened the younger man with a laugh. ‘The fortune must continue to make a fortune. They invest it.’

  ‘As it happens, I have a good head for that type of thing as well,’ said his father. ‘I’ve had some successes in that line, and they take my advice now. It’s good to feel some control.’

  ‘Yes, Father’s made some interesting discoveries,’ added his son.

  ‘And what about you, then?’ asked Gwen. ‘You must have a profession too, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, indeed I do. A very bookish one, I fear,’ he told her. ‘Nothing to do with boats, technology or investments in the City.’