Death at the Chase Read Online Free PDF Page A

much.’
    ‘My poor father, Ayden Ashmore,’ Ashmore said, and paused.
    They were traversing, at the top of one wing of the house, a long gallery – a gallery indeed not all that long, yet answering respectably to one’s idea of this characteristic apartment in a Jacobean mansion. The portrait was that of a young man in his mid-twenties, and Appleby was less immediately struck by his features than by his attire.
    ‘In fancy dress?’ he ventured.
    ‘Nothing of the kind.’ Martyn Ashmore stared. ‘The portrait is by Haydon – Benjamin Robert Haydon.’
    ‘Haydon?’ It was Appleby’s turn to stare. ‘But Haydon painted Wordsworth! He even painted Keats, who died–’
    ‘Oh, no doubt. But he also painted gentlemen as well.’ Ashmore, as he achieved this magnificent piece of cross-purposes, shook his head sadly before the young man in his late-Georgian finery. ‘My poor father’s life was a tragedy.’
    ‘I am very sorry to hear it.’ Appleby, with improbable sums in his head, looked speculatively at his host. ‘At least he can scarcely have died young.’
    ‘He died in a hunting accident. It was in his ninety-ninth year, when he was already preparing for his small family celebration. It cut me up very much. I was a lad of eight at the time.’ Ashmore moved on. ‘Perhaps it is a shade surprising. But it just so happens that, in my family, there is a tradition of marrying a little late. May I invite your attention to this by Charles Jarvis? It is of my grandfather Silas.’
    ‘And Jarvis painted another of the English poets, Alexander Pope.’ Appleby recalled his reflections on the life rhythm of the tortoise. He had scarcely been wrong about its relevance to his new acquaintance.
    ‘Of course,’ Martyn Ashmore was saying, ‘Jarvis painted my grandfather when he was still an Eton boy. You can see that. My grandfather was born in 1720. He was known among his familiars, even to the end of his long life, as “Bubbles” Ashmore. It was the year, you know, of the South Sea Bubble.’
    ‘I suppose your grandfather married rather late in life too?’ Appleby followed up this harmless question with one which he felt even as he uttered it, to be impertinent. ‘And perhaps you may carry on the tradition?’
    ‘It’s a question which others are asking themselves.’ Ashmore, who seemed unoffended, produced a malicious chuckle as he said this. ‘But I think you mentioned the roof? There is a point of access to it above the front door. But I am afraid that it affords no very great extension of view.’
    Appleby found himself walking on – and presently descending some stairs and ascending others – in a meditative silence. About the Ashmores he was obliged, he supposed, to believe what he had been told. Perhaps Martyn Ashmore was a little embroidering or overstating the facts; perhaps he had even skipped a generation in his leapfrogging progress back to the age of Queen Anne; but notable longevity and a propensity to take up the task of procreation only at an advanced age no doubt ran in his family authentically enough. What was perplexing was the manner in which, while airing these matters, he seemed entirely to have dismissed both the dreadful personal history at which he had hinted and the sufficiently startling event of an hour ago – which he had declared to be only one in a series of such events with which that history continued to implicate him annually.
    Perhaps he had an iron nerve, so that what occasioned him a very natural anxiety in the immediate prospect he was at once able to banish from his mind as soon as he was assured of his next twelve months’ immunity. Or perhaps he simply suffered from some disorder of the memory, so that his mental life was subject to pathological discontinuities. If, after all, he had suffered what he had so briefly claimed to have suffered, and seen what he had equally briefly claimed to have seen, then he surely had some title to be a little off his head. And if