Death at the Dolphin Read online

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Yes. Come in.’ His voice was a light tenor. Was there a faintly foreign inflection? A slight lisp, perhaps.

  As Peregrine approached, Mr Conducis looked fixedly at his guest’s hands.

  ‘You are well?’ he asked. ‘Recovered?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I can’t thank you enough, sir. As for – well, as for lending me these things – I really do feel – !’

  ‘Do they fit?’

  ‘Yes. Very well.’

  ‘That is all that is necessary.’

  ‘Except that after all they are yours,’ Peregrine said and tried a light laugh in order not to sound pompous.

  ‘I have told you. I am responsible. You might – ’ Mr Conducis’s voice faded but his lips soundlessly completed the sentence: ‘ – have been drowned.’

  ‘But honestly, sir!’ Peregrine launched himself on his little speech. ‘You’ve saved my life, you know. I would have just hung on by my fingers until they gave out and then – and then – well, finally and disgustingly drowned as you say.’

  Almost soundlessly Mr Conducis said: ‘I should have blamed myself.’

  ‘But why on earth! For a hole in The Dolphin stage?’

  ‘It is my property.’

  ‘Oh,’ Peregrine ejaculated before he could stop himself, ‘how splendid!’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I mean: how splendid to own it. It’s such an adorable little playhouse.’

  Mr Conducis looked at him without expression. ‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘Splendid? Adorable? You make a study of theatres, perhaps?’

  ‘Not really. I mean I’m not an expert. Good lord, no! But I earn my living in theatres and I am enormously attracted by old ones.’

  ‘Yes. Will you join me in a drink?’ Mr Conducis said in his wooden manner. ‘I am sure you will.’ He moved to a tray on a sidetable.

  ‘Your man has already given me a very strong and wonderfully restoring hot rum and lemon.’

  ‘I am sure that you will have another. The ingredients are here.’

  ‘A very small one, please,’ Peregrine said. There was a singing sensation in his veins and a slight thrumming in his ears but he still felt wonderful. Mr Conducis busied himself at the tray. He returned with a steaming and aromatic tumbler for Peregrine and something that he had poured out of a jug for himself. Could it be barley water?

  ‘Shall we sit down,’ he suggested. When they had done so he gave Peregrine a hurried, blank glance and said: ‘You wonder why I was at the theatre, perhaps. There is some question of demolishing it and building on the site. An idea that I have been turning over for some time. I wanted to refresh my memory. The agents told my man you were there.’ He put two fingers in a waistcoat pocket and Peregrine saw his own card had been withdrawn. It looked incredibly grubby.

  ‘You – you’re going to pull it down?’ he said and heard a horribly false jauntiness in his own unsteady voice. He took a pull at his rum. It was extremely strong.

  ‘You dislike the proposal,’ Mr Conducis observed, making it a statement rather than a question. ‘Have you any reason other than a general interest in such buildings?’

  If Peregrine had been absolutely sober and dressed in his own clothes it is probable that he would have mumbled something ineffectual and somehow or another made an exit from Mr Conducis’s house and from all further congress with its owner. He was a little removed however from his surroundings and the garments in which he found himself.

  He began to talk excitedly. He talked about The Dolphin and about how it must have looked after Mr Adolphus Ruby had gloriously tarted it up. He described how, before he fell into the well, he had imagined the house: clean, sparkling with lights from chandeliers, full, warm, buzzing and expectant. He said that it was the last of its kind and so well designed with such a surprisingly large stage that it would be possible to mount big productions there.

  He forgot about Mr Conducis and also about not drinking any more rum. He talked widely and distractedly.

  ‘Think what a thing it would be,’ Peregrine cried, ‘to do a season of Shakespeare’s comedies! Imagine Love’s Labour’s there. Perhaps one could have a barge – Yes. The Grey Dolphin – and people could take water to go to the play. When the play was about to begin we would run up a flag with a terribly intelligent dolphin on it. And we’d do them quickly and lightly and with elegance and O!’ cried Peregrine, ‘and with that little catch in the breath that never, never comes in the same way with any other playwright.’

  He was now walking about Mr Conducis’s library. He saw, without seeing, the tooled spines of collected editions and a picture that he would remember afterwards with astonishment. He waved his arms. He shouted.

  ‘There never was such a plan,’ shouted Peregrine. ‘Never in all London since Burbage moved the first theatre from Shoreditch to Southwark.’ He found himself near his drink and tossed it off. ‘And not too fancy,’ he said, ‘mind you. Not twee. God, no! Not a pastiche either. Just a good theatre doing the job it was meant to do. And doing the stuff that doesn’t belong to any bloody Method or Movement or Trend or Period or what-have-you. Mind that.’

  ‘You refer to Shakespeare again?’ said Mr Conducis’s voice. ‘If I follow you.’

  ‘Of course I do!’ Peregrine suddenly became fully aware of Mr Conducis. ‘Oh dear!’ he said.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit tight, sir. Not really tight but a bit uninhibited. I’m awfully sorry. I think perhaps I’d better take myself off and I’ll return all these things you’ve so kindly lent me. I’ll return them as soon as possible, of course. So, if you’ll forgive me –’

  ‘What do you do in the theatre?’

  ‘I direct plays and I’ve written two.’

  ‘I know nothing of the theatre,’ Mr Conducis said heavily. ‘You are reasonably successful?’

  ‘Well, sir, yes. I think so. It’s a jungle, of course. I’m not at all affluent but I make out. I’ve had as much work as I could cope with over the last three months and I think my mana’s going up. I hope so. Goodbye, sir.’

  He held out his hand. Mr Conducis, with an expression that really might have been described as one of horror, backed away from it.

  ‘Before you go,’ he said, ‘I have something that may be of interest to you. You can spare a moment?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It is in this room,’ Mr Conducis muttered and went to a bureau that must, Peregrine thought, be of fabulous distinction. He followed his host and watched him pull out a silky, exquisitely inlaid, drawer.

  ‘How lovely that is,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely?’ Mr Conducis echoed as he had echoed before. ‘You mean the bureau? Yes? It was found for me. I understand nothing of such matters. That is not what I wished to show you. Will you look at this? Shall we move to a table?’

  He had taken from the drawer a very small wooden Victorian hand-desk, extremely shabby, much stained, and Peregrine thought, of no particular distinction. A child’s possession perhaps. He laid it on a table under a window and motioned to a chair beside it. Peregrine now felt as if he was playing a part in somebody else’s dream. ‘But I’m all right,’ he thought. ‘I’m not really drunk. I’m in that pitiable but enviable condition when all things seem to work together for good.’

  He sat before the table and Mr Conducis, standing well away from him, opened the little desk, pressed inside with his white, flat thumb and revealed a false bottom. It was a commonplace device and Peregrine wondered if he was meant to exclaim at it. He saw that in the exposed cavity there was a packet no bigger than a half-herring and much the same shape. It was wrapped in discoloured yellowbrown silk and tied with a morsel of tarnished ribbon. Mr Conducis had a paper knife in his hand. ‘Everything he possesses,’ Peregrine thought, ‘is on museum-piece level. It’s stifling.’ His host used the paper knife as a sort of server, lifting the little silk packet out on its blade and, as it were, helping Peregrine to it like a wa
iter.

  It slid from the blade and with it, falling to one side, a discoloured card upon which it had lain. Peregrine, whose vision had turned swimmy, saw that this card was a menu and bore a date some six years past. The heading: ‘The Steam Yacht Kalliope. Off Villefranche. Gala Dinner’ floated tipsily into view with a flamboyant and illegible signature that was sprawled across it above a dozen others. A short white hand swiftly covered and then removed the card.

  ‘That is nothing,’ Mr Conducis said. ‘It is of no consequence.’ He went to the fire. A bluish flame sprang up and turned red. Mr Conducis returned.

  ‘It is the packet that may be of interest. Will you open it?’ he said.

  Peregrine pulled gingerly at the ribbon ends and turned back the silk wrapping.

  He had exposed a glove.

  A child’s glove. Stained as if by water it was the colour of old parchment and finely wrinkled like an old, old face. It had been elegantly embroidered with tiny roses in gold and scarlet. A gold tassel, now blackened and partly unravelled, was attached to the tapered gauntlet. It was the most heartrending object Peregrine had ever seen.

  Underneath it lay two pieces of folded paper, very much discoloured.

  ‘Will you read the papers?’ Mr Conducis invited. He had returned to the fireplace.

  Peregrine felt an extraordinary delicacy in touching the glove. ‘Cheverel,’ he thought. ‘It’s a cheverel glove. Has it gone brittle with age?’ No. To his fingertip it was flaccid: uncannily so as if it had only just died. He slipped the papers out from beneath it. They had split along the folds and were foxed and faded. He opened the larger with great care and it lay broken before him. He pulled himself together and managed to read it.

  This little glove and accompanying note were given to my Great-Great-Grandmother by her Beft Friend: a Mifs Or Mrs J. Hart. My dear Grandmother always infifted that it had belonged to the poet. N. B. mark infide gauntlet.

  M. E. 23 April 1830

  The accompanying note was no more than a slip of paper. The writing on it was much faded and so extraordinarily crabbed and tortuous that he thought at first it must be hieroglyphic and that he therefore would never make it out. Then it seemed to him that there was something almost familiar about it. And then, gradually, words began to emerge. Everything was quiet. He heard the fire settle. Someone crossed the room above the library. He heard his own heart thud.

  He read:

  Mayde by my father for my sonne on his XI birthedy and never worne butte ync

  Peregrine sat in a kind of trance and looked at the little glove and the documents. Mr Conducis had left the paper knife on the table. Peregrine slid the ivory tip into the gauntlet and very slowly lifted and turned it. There was the mark, in the same crabbed hand. ‘H. S.’

  ‘– But where –’ Peregrine heard his own voice saying, ‘– where did it come from? Whose is it?’

  ‘It is mine,’ Mr Conducis said and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But – where did you find it?’

  A long silence.

  ‘At sea.’

  ‘At sea?’

  ‘During a voyage six years ago. I bought it.’

  Peregrine looked at his host. How pale Mr Conducis was and how odd was his manner!

  He said: ‘The box – it is some kind of portable writing desk – was a family possession. The former owner did not discover the false bottom until – ’ He stopped.

  ‘Until – ?’ Peregrine said.

  ‘Until shortly before he died.’

  Peregrine said: ‘Has it been shown to an authority?’

  ‘No. I should, no doubt, get an opinion from some museum or perhaps from Sotheby’s.’

  His manner was so completely negative, so toneless that Peregrine wondered if by any extraordinary chance he did not understand the full implication. He was wondering how, without offence, he could find out when Mr Conducis continued.

  ‘I have not looked it all up but I understand the age of the boy at the time of his death is consistent with the evidence and that the grandfather was in fact a glover.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the initials inside the gauntlet do in fact correspond with the child’s initials.’

  ‘Yes. Hamnet Shakespeare.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Conducis.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mr Greenslade

  ‘I know that,’ Peregrine said. ‘You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quartocentenary it’s probably been stepped up. I know about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and “stol’n and surreptitious copies” and phoney “discovered” documents and all that carry-on. I know the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.’

  ‘Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, halfdrunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.’

  ‘I’m almost certain, not.’

  ‘His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.’

  ‘Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.’

  ‘Well, you’re the judge,’ said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of Venice Preserved. After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade, and looked up at Peregrine. ‘Could you make a drawing of it?’ he said.

  ‘I can try.’

  Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.

  ‘It looks OK,’ Jeremy said. ‘Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?’

  ‘Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.’

  ‘It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.’

  ‘But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘And who was M. E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the poet?’

  ‘Why ask me? You might remember that the great-great-grandmother was left it by a Mrs J. Hart. And that Joan Hart – ’

  ‘Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cock up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.’

  ‘I told you: I said so. I said: wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A. And he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank – I don’t know how you’d describe them – and shut up like a clam.’

  ‘Suspicious in itself!’ Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: ‘“I would I had been there”.’

  ‘Well, at that, “it would have much amazed you”.’

  ‘“Very like. Very like” What do we know about Conducis?’

  ‘I can’t remember with any accuracy,’ Peregrine said. ‘He’s an alltime-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.’

  ‘Where does he get his pelf?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? “Mystery Midas” it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.’

  ‘Unmarried?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘How did you part company?’

  ‘H
e just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr Conducis and the man said Mr Conducis was taking a call from New York and would “quite understand”. Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?’

  ‘I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?’

  ‘He’s “turning over the idea” in his mind.’

  ‘May it choke him,’ said Jeremy Jones.

  ‘Jer,’ Peregrine said. ‘You must go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of potpourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. O God, God when I think of what could be done with it.’

  ‘And this ghastly old Croesus – ’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  And they stared at each other with the companionable indignation and despair of two young men whose unfulfilled enthusiasms coincide.

  They had been at the same drama school together and had both decided that they were inclined by temperament, interest and ability to production rather than performance in the theatre. Jeremy finally settled for design and Peregrine for direction. They had worked together and apart in weekly and fortnightly repertory and had progressed to more distinguished provincial theatres and thence, precariously, to London. Each was now tolerably well-known as a coming man and both were occasionally subjected to nerve-racking longueurs of unemployment. At the present juncture Peregrine had just brought to an auspicious opening the current production at The Unicorn and had seen his own first play through a trial run out of London. Jeremy was contemplating a décor for a masque which he would submit to an international competition for theatrical design.