Free Lord Mullion's Secret by Michael Innes

time. I have to be glad that I’m not one who hungers after what they call scope.’
    â€˜I suspect that you keep yourself fairly busy, Mary.’
    â€˜Well, yes – in a sense. People sometimes think of this sort of life as all luxurious idleness. I glimpse it occasionally in the expressions of our dollar-a-time visitors. But there is hard work, in a way, in just keeping the thing going. And Henry would do anything to manage that. Perhaps it’s something that the women of our sort feel less than the men – I suppose because the women have to pack their bags and hump it to a new home on marriage. Do you know, Charles? I have a recurrent dream in which the castle goes up in flames. That’s very shocking in me, of course. But we all rush around with buckets and hoses, and it’s tremendous fun. At least a happening, as they say.’
    â€˜I doubt whether you’d actually much enjoy anything of the kind.’ Honeybath had been a little startled by this harmless confidence. ‘But I do see the merit of a happening now and then.’
    â€˜I believe I could make do with a ghost. Our vicar, Dr Atlay, whom you’ve met, says there is a ghost. Only it doesn’t seem to care for the twentieth century, and hasn’t been showing up. Once or twice I’ve imagined I was encountering it: a tall gliding figure in white. But it has turned out to be Great-aunt Camilla in one of her wandering moods.’
    â€˜I hope you didn’t reveal your disappointment to her.’ Honeybath produced this slightly facetious response as preferable to silence and likely to keep the topic of the reclusive Miss Wyndowe alive. He felt, indeed, that Lady Mullion had introduced the ghost into her conversation by way of thus going on to speak of this aged relative. He was to be given his bearings on her.
    â€˜It certainly mightn’t be too cheering to be told one had been mistaken for a ghost. But Camilla is little unaccountable at the best of times, and might be gratified. She might even be prompted to the conclusion that she was a ghost. I am sure she will interest you, Charles. But should she say anything to offend you, you will remember that she is slightly strange.’
    â€˜So I’ve gathered. Henry told me that at one time Miss Wyndowe was devoted to painting.’
    â€˜Yes, indeed – although she gave it up long ago. As a young woman, I believe, she had serious thoughts of making a profession of it. She went to Paris to study – which was quite a dashing thing to do at that time – and then spent several months in Provence as the pupil of some artist she particularly admired. He advised her to continue her travels and make a thorough job of Italy. That may have been because he saw real promise in her, or because she was being a nuisance and he wanted to be rid of her. Neither explanation would surprise me.’
    â€˜And she did go to Italy?’
    â€˜Apparently not. She turned the idea down out of hand, on religious grounds.’
    â€˜How very odd!’
    â€˜Great-aunt Camilla was in those days a most convinced Protestant. She could put up with Catholicism in France, she said, because it is independent there and not really papistical. But she wouldn’t enter territory which she believed to be wholly dominated by somebody she termed the so-called Bishop of Rome.’
    â€˜Miss Wyndowe sounds like one who knows her own mind. But it seems sad that she should have deprived herself of the Uffizi and the Sistine Chapel on such rigidly doctrinal lines.’
    â€˜She might have tolerated the Uffizi if a magic carpet could have transported her there. But she would certainly have pictured the Sistine Chapel as thronged with cardinals and with the Pope sitting in the middle of them.’
    â€˜Dear me!’ Honeybath was amused by this conception. ‘I wonder what she would have thought of the Archbishop of Canterbury having a little tête-à-tête