Intolerable Civility

Chapter Eleven: Blackmail

After Demery left for London, Cate found herself becoming more confident in her position as lady of the house. She explored the manor, in the process discovering which rooms had been renovated and which remained in a state of shabby disrepair. She even stole into Demery's study and looked curiously around. Nothing was renovated here. The walls were covered in peeling, faded paper and the furniture needed reupholstery and revarnishing. Dark squares on the wallpaper suggested the removal of dozens of small paintings. By their size and number, Cate thought they might have been landscapes. She did not think it right to open any of the desk drawers, but she did peer through the dim glass of the bookcase. It contained nothing more interesting than ledgers and rolls of parchment, though Demery always seemed to be reading a book. Cate wondered where his library was.

Later, Cate found both the missing paintings and the books.

The books were in a music room at the back of the house, haphazardly laid out on top of a locked piano, spilling from dusty trunks, and stacked in crooked piles on chairs. They were mostly old diaries, histories, or plays, some of which were in Italian or German. There was, however, a three-volume copy of The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker and, even more excitingly, a two-volume set of Sophia, which Cate's mother had never let her read because it was full of silly ideas. Cate took it to her room, brushed the dust off it, and enjoyed those silly ideas very much. When she went back down to the music room to return it two days later, she discovered a new case just arrived from a London bookbinder. She did not dare open it, but she wondered if she could write to Demery and suggest, if he was buying books, to not forget that novels made excellent additions to libraries.

In the end, she did not dare. Instead, she read Humphrey Clinker and deciphered the Italian plays and, when that joy passed, took to exploring the house again. She knew she was being unforgivably nosy, but she argued to herself that most of the house was not really private — Demery's room she did not go into, nor his study after the first time — and the rest of the place was mostly reception rooms or half-empty, long abandoned bedrooms. In one of them, Cate discovered chests full of old-fashioned men's clothes which must have belonged to Demery's Uncle Lewis. There was something rather fun about trying on frock coats thirty years out of date and wondering about the man who had once worn them. By their size and the lingering scent of snuff about them, Cate decided that Lewis must have been a sort of nice, fat, cheerful uncle, rather like her own Uncle Percival, who always seemed to have a linty biscuit or sticky coin in his pocket for Cate when he visited. She was perhaps more convinced in this idea of Uncle Lewis by the fact that Laurie had once described him as a vulgar old miser. Cate did not trust Laurie's opinion about anyone.

She was up in the attics when she discovered the missing paintings, which proved her wrong. They were piled in a stack by the wall, covered in a dust cloth. Cate uncovered them curiously. They were not landscapes after all, but prints of cartoons. The first in the stack was a crude ink drawing of a crying woman with her clothes being torn off by a grinning fox. There was something rather vile in the contrast between the fox's grin and the woman's scared eyes, but Cate supposed men sometimes liked to look at pictures of naked women. The second was a printed illustration of Captain Kimber's murder of the slave girl, with lascivious detail paid to the slave girl's naked body. Cate put that hastily aside. The third print involved two women together in bed, who at first Cate took to be sisters. When the truth of the situation dawned upon her, she found she needed to sit still for quite a long time to think about it. She had known that two men might end up together in bed — that, she suspected, was why her parents never talked much about Uncle Percival — but it had never occurred to her that two women might do the same, nor that a man might want a picture of it. It did not seem right to her that Uncle Lewis had had such a picture, and seemingly had had it displayed in his study, in full sight of everyone who entered. It seemed even more wrong to think of it in the company of the picture of the woman being attacked by the fox or the slave being lashed.