Cavalier Case Read Online Free PDF

promote a colourful tale, suggested that Lord Lackland had had a mistress who lived close by - the notorious Lady Isabella Clare - and that she had sent her own men to steal the body and give it secret burial.
    As Rupert Durham crushingly said: "Well, he would, wouldn't he? You know Aubrey - " Jemima was just beginning to know Aubrey. "He would have written for the Daily Exclusiv e if he'd been alive today. There's absolutely no proof that Isabella Clare was Decimus' mistress, and as for writing the Swan poem to a woman like that, the mind boggles. We've only got Aubrey's word for the whole thing, and he wanted to have a dig at Decimus, I believe. Didn't like the poetic halo round his head. He came up with the same kind of story, if less dramatic, about Decimus' rival, Falkland." And so the matter rested. Until the ghost-who-could-not-rest, the ghost of Decimus, returned to Lackland Court during the 1648 siege and guided the widowed Olivia to victory.
    According to tradition Decimus stepped out of the portrait to do so.
    "Yes, the portrait," said the present (and 18th) Lord Lackland to Jemima Shore. "As the story goes, he steps out of the big portrait at the head of the stairs. The Van Dyck. The finest version, or so we believe. What's more, we all think it's the original, and not the one at the N.P.G., even if Oliver Millar doesn't agree. Something ridiculous about the hands, the hand. I believe you know that picture," added Dan Lackland carelessly. Jemima nodded. She had not however recognised him from their previous odd little encounter, believing him to be familiar to her merely from his famous past as a tennis star.
    They were sitting in the coolly elegant surroundings of the Plantaganet Club. Enormous windows opened on the river. Even the factory chimneys on the bank opposite had the air of being composed tor the sake of the perfect modernist view. The fact that through another vast plate glass window before their eyes a tennis game was being played made such talk of a seventeenth-century ghost seem for a moment peculiarly bizarre.
    Counting the seventeenth century, there were in fact, thought Jemima, three levels of reality. For the surroundings of the Plantaganet oar, a high-ceilinged glass and mirrored area with huge purple kougainvilleas in white tubs (where on earth were they grown?), small tables adorned with pale pink button roses, and a barman in a bright pink jacket, bespoke the leisured luxury of another age; some ocean liner of the thirties, perhaps. The players, on the other hand, whether on the visible "Royal Court" behind the glass, or passing through the bar area on their way to other courts or back to the changing room, indicated both by their dress and their complexion a rougher or at least a sweatier way of life. And the pictures were all enormously blown-up photographs of tennis stars past and present—including, she noticed, Handsome Dan himself instantly recognisable by his thatch of blond hair, in younger days.
    The exact nature of Dan Lackland's involvement with the Planta-ganet was not quite clear to her. But he introduced Jemima to various members with some style as though he was in fact a form of host. These included various young or youngish women—her uncertainty about their age was due to the fact that tennis gear, with women as well as men, proved a remarkable disguise. The essentially schoolgirl- ish nature of such clothes could prove delusive: whether very short pale pink pleated skirts revealing brown thighs—did all members of the Planty have to have an all-the-year-round tan by law?—-or bright pink track suits concealing unsightly middle-aged spread. One way or another, it was impossible to guess the age of most of the women she met.
    Take the energetic girl—or woman—introduced to Jemima as Alix Carstairs, who appeared to run the Club: how old was she? Alix Carstairs sported a thick pigtail of auburn hair beneath her bright pink bandeau and her face, devoid of make-up, was