Prince Of Secrets. Paula Marshall

was attached to yet another…and another… She tried to put them back exactly as she had found them, but it was difficult.

      There were also some very light Indian clubs, painted blue and silver, which she had seen jugglers use, and a silk top hat—but again, not of the kind which her husband would ever wear; indeed, as she looked inside it, it seemed designed not to be worn. There were sticks with brightly coloured feathers on them… There were a number of wooden and metal hoops, and a small pile of paper hats.

      The middle shelf held an assortment of strange boxes of different sizes and shapes—Dinah couldn’t imagine what their purpose was, even after she had examined them. One, in particular, was very beautiful.

      On the top shelf was a brown bowler hat of the kind which she had seen artisans wearing when, out for the day, they wished to imitate the gentry. Beside it was neatly arranged—everything was neat, as he always was—a pile of mufflers, some of wool, some of silk, and all of them shabby. There were also a pair of carefully folded brown and yellow check woollen trousers, a short brown woollen jacket and a pair of heavy boots. Doubled up beside them was a large doll with brilliantly painted red cheeks and a wide grin. Its wooden head was on a peg which fitted into a cloth body.

      Dinah felt like the lady in the story of Blubeard who had entered the forbidden room to discover strange and terrible things. There was nothing terrible about these things, but they were certainly strange. Memory teased her, until, suddenly, she knew that if she had not found the key to Cobie, she had certainly found the key to explain all these objects—they were the stock-in-trade of a stage magician.

      She had sat in drawing rooms when she had been a little girl, oohing and aahing and clapping her hands while the visiting conjuror or magician performed his tricks with paraphernalia similar to that which was so neatly laid out before her. The big doll was undoubtedly a ventriloquist’s dummy.

      What in the world was Cobie doing with them, hidden away as they were? She thought of him, grave, charming, always perfectly turned out, the complete patrician, remarkable for the excellence of his manners in a society where such things were highly valued. Nothing about him suggested that he would have a secret hoard of objects such as these—or be able to use them.

      Why? She gave them one last stare before she shut the cupboard door and manoeuvred it so that it locked again, even though imperfectly. What else was he concealing? Who was the man who used these strange toys, for their appearance told her that they had been used, that this was no private museum. What else lay hidden behind the locked cupboard doors of his room?

      And the odd clothing. What was that doing there? For the life of her she couldn’t visualise him wearing it. Then, when she shut the door of the room, a little frightened, as well as a little ashamed of having spied on him, memory struck.

      Before they had married he had visited her in her dreams. Now that she was his wife, and shared at least a part of his life with him, he had ceased to do so. But the memory of that recurring dream, almost forgotten, came back to her—as well as the strange visions which she sometimes had during and after their love-making.

      In the dream he had been quite unlike the civilised urbane man whom she and the world knew, the golden Apollo of the Prince of Wales’s set. He had been wild, feral, not even clean. His hair had been long, his face unshaven, and the hand he had extended to her had been grimy. She also remembered that he had never offered her his right hand in the dream, only his left. But he was right-handed, surely? Another puzzle.

      What was important, though, was that she could imagine that man being a magician, a conjuror. That man could be anything. But why had she seen him in such a guise? Why, occasionally, during their love-making, when it was at its wildest—as it had lately become—had she had flashes in which she had seen the wild man again?

      Could that man be carrying on a secret liaison with Susanna? She could imagine that man doing anything, anything at all. She would not like that man to know that she had been prowling curiously around his room, drawn there by the doubts that not only Violet had put in her head, but by his own conduct.

      Not that, if questioned by a barrister, she could have said exactly what it was about him that disturbed her, but because she knew that she was beginning to sense that the inwardness of him was quite different from the bland image which he showed to English society.

      She remembered what he had said to her before they were married. ‘Appearances often deceive, Dinah.’ All the way to Markendale, her mind worried at the problem which was Cobie Grant like a dog worrying a bone.

      But she was the magician’s true pupil because nothing showed.