After lunch, I took Bunny and Lady Bea on an extensive tour of the house, delighted by Lady Bea's superior knowledge of the various styles on display in the different rooms, being able to tell the original Elizabethan bits from the later Jacobean bits and the Victorian reproduction bits. I'd had no idea how much of the house was Jacobean, and before that afternoon didn't even know there was a real difference between the periods.
I left Lady Bea on the second floor, near her bedroom, and walked back to the keep with Bunny. His room, adjacent to mine, was a nearly-exact reverse image of my room; coming through the adjoining door, one got the bizarre sensation of stepping through Alice's looking-glass. We settled down with a couple of whiskeys for a good long gossip about mutual acquaintances and favourite queer haunts in London.
Bunny was particularly interested in hearing anything I had to tell him about Claude; but knowing Bunny's almost complete lack of discretion (he'd just told me a lot of things about people that I'm sure they wouldn't want known), I gave him an extremely Bowdlerized version of my rather extensive knowledge of the subject. Of course, Claude himself would probably tell Bunny everything I'd left out: he wasn't very talkative but always answered any question put to him with shattering candour.
I left him to take his afternoon nap, and went back to my own room to poke around in the corners in my usual settling-in way, thinking about redecorating it to my own taste, and otherwise wasting time until tea. I wondered if I should be doing more to entertain my guests, devising outings and pastimes and games and the like; but then, I always preferred my hosts to leave me to my own devices when I was visiting.
"Silenus!" I exclaimed when I found my friend from Hyacinth House in the drawing-room at tea, "When did you get here? Nobody told me."
"I came on the one-thirty train as I was expected to do," the old man smiled jovially at me, though there was the tiniest hint of reproach in his tone; he and Bunny and Lady Bea were meant to arrive together, but with the early arrival of the latter two, I'd quite forgotten that the former was still expected at the usual time. Silenus would never miss a train... and I suspect that if he was late, they'd have held it for him.
Lord Arthur Longueville, known to me and in his professional capacities as Mr. Arthur Silenus, used to run a shadow-department of the government, gleaning rather personal information from unofficial and quite unorthodox sources and using it as leverage to ensure people behaved in a manner beneficial to the government's aims--a spymaster, really, though he laughed at me when I used that word.
When he retired, he converted his private mansion into Hyacinth House, the exclusively gay hotel in St. James's Street where I and several other well-to-do queers make our temporary or permanent abodes; and he kept up his personal network of spies, but instead of utilizing his specialized information on behalf of the government, he now uses it to make London a safer place for our sort, preventing vice raids and discouraging legislation in Parliament.
Before becoming a spymaster, though, Silenus had been an amateur detective, resolving such mysteries as were frequently beyond the ken of the police. The professional police have very little access to people in so-called 'high life,' and crimes in those circles are difficult for an outsider to solve: though they don't actively impede the police, as a rule, the aristocracy and gentry are an instinctively clannish bunch. The second son of the 7th Duke of Gelford, however, has all the access to those circles one could possibly desire, and so was extremely successful in a spectacular string of jewel-theft, blackmail, and murder cases in Society.
He looked very different sitting in the drawing-room than he ever did in London: I'd always thought he resembled a Trafalgar Square pigeon, sort of gray and nondescript, sleek and plumpish with a small round head; but for the country he changed his character altogether--instead of misty gray, his tweeds were a rather loud brown and ivory with orange and blue flecks, and his small steel-rimmed spectacles had been replaced by large tortoise-shell frames that gave him a sort of wondering, goggle-eyed look. Instead of a city pigeon, he looked like a wood-owl.
I suppose, though, that Silenus would look like he was supposed to look wherever he was: if you encountered him in Jamaica, he'd look exactly like a colonial planter in white linen and a great big panama hat; encountered on the African veldt, he'd look like a big-game hunter in khaki and a pith helmet; so in an English country-house, of course he'd look like a bog-standard country gentleman--one would never expect to see a city pigeon in the Cotswolds, so he became an owl instead.
When Lady Bea came in, accompanied by Claude, I could see at once that she'd wasted no time in reestablishing mastery over the boy: he walked two paces behind her, did not look up from his shoes and did not speak unless addressed directly. I could also tell he was loving every minute of it. It takes all kinds to make a world.
After tea, I consulted Aunt Em about how much entertainment I should be providing my guests, and she backed up my previous assumption that very little in the way of planned activities was needed; I should, however, spend my time in the public rooms instead of my own rooms, in order to be available to anyone who might become unaccountably bored. So instead of going back to my room to loaf and lounge until it was time to dress for dinner, I parked myself in the library and took a stab at writing some letters.
"Your aunt is delightful," Silenus said from the depths of a wing-back chair by the fireplace, giving me something of a start: even in his loud tweeds, he'd simply blended in to the embroidered velvet upholstery, and I didn't see him there until he spoke.
"I gather she had quite a schoolroom pash for you," I smothered the tiny annoyance over being startled under a dollop of charm.
"Oh, all the young girls were in love with me, forty years ago. Something about me was especially appealing to prepubescent females. I never knew what it was, though my brother insisted it was a resemblance to Rossetti's illustrations for Tennyson's Galahad, and has been calling me Young Galahad ever since."
"How galling," I smiled, not seeing the resemblance, and making a mental note to find some forty-year-old photographs of Lord Arthur.
"He married an ugly and vicious woman, so I consider myself properly avenged by Fate," he smiled back, a crocodile's grin, "And if you're wondering where to find a photograph, I posed for a group Waterhouse exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886, I'm sure you have a catalogue on these shelves. I'm the third page-boy from the right, but it rather bears out my brother's opinion of my looks, so I don't usually admit to it."
"I need lessons on how not to broadcast my thoughts," I had reached the point where I was no longer surprised when people appeared to know exactly what I was thinking, especially Silenus who seemed always to know what I was going to think.
"Practice in a looking-glass," he advised, "That's what I did. The trick is to create a single expression, interested and pleasant but emotionally neutral, and then hold tight to it regardless of what you're doing or saying or thinking. Your face is made up of muscles, the same as any other part of your body; if you can learn a good batting stance at cricket, or how to sit a horse over a jump, you can learn an inscrutable facial expression."
"Oh!" I exclaimed, delighted by how simple it was. This was exactly what I loved about Silenus: he didn't just make fun of me, he taught me things I needed to know so I could correct my errors. I got up and went over to the shelves where I knew Royal Academy Exhibition catalogues are kept, and pulled 1886, finding him right away among a melee of Byzantine onlookers in a strangely bloodless martyrdom scene, "Well, you were quite the Pre-Raphaelite beauty, weren't you?"
"Not my favourite style of art, but we can't choose how we look, can we?"
"I'm told there are doctors in Switzerland who can," I said, repeating a bit of gossip I'd overheard recently that I thought was very interesting, about private clinics that could whittle down an ungainly nose to more button-like proportions, or tighten a dowager's face to look ten years younger, or inject you with monkey-glands to give you the energy of a child again.
This topic set us off on a feast of gossip about people who were suspected of having had such operations; and the best thing about gossiping with Silenus is that his gossip tended to be more factual than the usual rumours. I was always amazed at the depth and variety of information he collected about people, things you'd never think could be important but which could, with proper use, influence entire governments.
We chatted on until it was time to go dress for dinner, and while being put into my dinner-clothes I related everything Silenus told me in the library, and began practicing faces in the glass while he worked.
"What about this one?" I asked, my features arranged in a mask that I thought approximated intelligent interest.
"Like you just had a dose of cod-liver oil," he reported back.
"What about this one?" I tried another.
"Toothache," he pronounced. This was going to be harder than I'd thought.
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