Story #13: The Marquesan Tattoo Part I: "A Delivery Post-Mortem"
On the evening he murders his wife, a London timber merchant receives a mysterious portrait—a tale of Victorian horror in five parts.
The evening he murdered his wife, Rowan Wanamaker made a brief appearance in the R— Club library to fashion an alibi, then retired to his quarters for supper. Word of her death would not reach Pall Mall until morning, allowing the London timber merchant time to prepare for the pantomime theatre of a constabulary's inquiries.
Wanamaker built a fortune importing teak and exotic hardwoods from French Polynesia, muscling his way to extravagant wealth through both enterprise and marriage. Plantation by plantation, and bride by bride – of whom there had now been three – the timber merchant grew to be as respectfully loathed in the R— Club’s smoking rooms as he was in the provincial offices of colonial governors. Club members murmured grimly that Wanamaker accumulated his fortune through “the snatch and the match.” His late wife, thirty years his junior, the daughter of a shrewd Merseyside shipbuilder, had been felled by both.
At eleven o’clock punctually, the gentleman sent word to the club’s old footman that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, yet shortly after midnight, the timber merchant was surprised by a determined rapping at his door. He turned the lamp down by his desk and feigned being awoken.
The urgent knocks were not those of the constabulary, nor were they the pending, theatrical hysterics of a house maid. It was the old footman himself who disturbed the timber merchant with stammering, exaggerated apologies.
Together with a sturdy hall boy, the club’s two servants shouldered a parcel of striking dimensions that barely passed through the residential apartment doors. Wrapped in muslin and secured by rough twine, its scale was the width of a yard, then half again as tall. Even the hall boy recognized the likely dimensions of a canvas.
The painting’s provenance was a mystery. Wanamaker had neither commissioned it, nor could the staff account for its appearance at the tradesman’s entrance. The note that accompanied it came simply with the instruction to deliver the painting post-haste to Rowan Richard Wanamaker, Esq. The hall boy on night duty had discovered it and woken the porter. After a period of bickering belowstairs, the lot fell to the sleepy footman to disturb their club’s most volatile member.
“Came from the ether, sir,” the old footman explained. The hall boy nodded, his gaze held fast to the floor.
The painting’s mahogany frame had torn through a corner of its muslin protection. The servants waited for the man to consider it.
To Wanamaker, the packaging carried a faint, acrid smell of smoke — the surprise of it quickened a shudder in him.
“You are sure there is no additional invoice or documentation? There must be more—I insist.”
“No, sir. None.”
The timber merchant went silent, then sharply rapped the wooden frame with his knuckles.
“Well then, light the lamps and stand it closer to the fire so that I can view it.”
As the old footman reached to light the lamp, the hot brass fittings seared his hand. The servant gasped, breaching the club’s unspoken decorum. The outraged gentleman, who claimed to have been roused from deep sleep, had evidently extinguished the lamps only moments before. The servant was less struck by a gentleman’s casual lie than the pain of brass burned into flesh.
The hall boy, longing only to be rid of the man and return to the warmth of his bed, unveiled the painting as swiftly as he dared. After a long pause, the old footman, no more artistically inclined than the timber merchant, remarked that the oil painting’s quality was exceptional. Long ago, he’d mastered the art of flattering gentlemen.
Wanamaker ignored the man and studied the image in the pale lamplight. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
“It reeks of smoke, does it not?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say, sir. Lovely picture,” said the footman. “But you’d be cold-blooded not to see she’s beautiful.”
“I smell it, all right,” said the boy, anxiously. “But not on account of us in service. Never went near no fire of ours.”
Wanamaker made a note of the boy, then waved the two off with his fingertips. At the door, the old footman turned back.
“Mrs. Wanamaker, I believe, sir?”
Indeed, it was Mrs. Wanamaker — a full-length portrait of his murdered wife.
Looking forward to the next post after this extremely exciting beginning...a story one can't properly do justice to in reading in parts!!!
“Plantation by plantation, and bride by bride – of whom there had now been three – the timber merchant grew to be as respectfully loathed in the R— Club’s smoking rooms as he was in the provincial offices of colonial governors.” Now, that is a sentence.