“You’d never seen inside it. As a child, perhaps, you’d asked and been fobbed off—what did she say, family papers? You’d grown up with the fact that she rarely left the room, so I suppose it never occurred to you that there might be a reason for it, other than her peculiarity. How could you guess that anyone living in penury could be in possession of such a treasure as they were unwilling to let out of their sight? Well, of course, on that afternoon you saw. What was she doing? Disposing the contents round the room? Curtains drawn? Wearing the jewels perhaps—parure of emeralds, Siberian, and diamonds, Brazilian, displayed on a crumb-spattered shawl. Re-creating an era.”

“An unexceptionable pastime, my dear boy,” murmured Majendie.

“Thereafter she locked the door,” Brett went on, “not, as Mrs. Minelli thought, to keep out the Red peril, but to make sure no one else interrupted her as she counted out her treasures. She didn’t bother to hide them from you, there was no point in it. You saw them again, many times, came to know them by heart, in tiny detail, as a child knows a fairy story. In time, unawares, you grew to love them—at least one of them. But that you didn’t discover till too late. In the meantime your first thought was that the contents of the trunk would provide you with the capital you’d despaired of. If you stopped to think before you spoke, I suppose you concluded that she was madder than you’d realised, too mad to appreciate the value of the trunk. But you did speak. You explained its value—what a moment!—and suggested that she sell.

“Of course she wouldn’t. But how it must have shaken her to discover that you weren’t so stupid, that through those years of apparent submission you’d been daring to nourish ambition! Perhaps she also discovered with what virulence she hated you, though she may have known herself well enough to have recognised that already. You must have been surprised when she disclosed it. Callousness you’d met, as a child, contempt, when you were drunk—that is, more or less permanently, at home. Why did she let you become so familiar with the treasures, even when she knew you coveted them, when she’d gone to such lengths to keep their existence secret? It was as if she said, ‘Here, then, look your fill, babble it to the world. I’m not alarmed—who’s going to heed the boasting of a sot?’ And didn’t you find that true? Prince, bleeding poet. Scorn, derision, you knew, but not to be hated.”

“And what, would you say, was the cause of that hatred?” said Majendie. “One sees, of course, a certain—”