Arthur & George

understand more.’
    A sudden chill goes through Jean. ‘You are not, I hope, going to become a medium, dear Arthur.’ She has a picture of her beloved husband as an aged huckster going into trances and talking in funny voices. And of the new Lady Doyle being known as a huckster’s wife.
    ‘Oh no, I have no such powers. True mediums are very, very rare. They are often simple, humble people. Like Jesus Christ, for instance.’
    Jean ignores this comparison. ‘And what about morality, Arthur?’
    ‘Morality is unchanged. True morality, that is – which comes from the individual conscience and the love of God.’
    ‘I do not mean for you, Arthur. You know what I mean. If people – ordinary people – do not have the Church to tell them how to behave, then they will relapse into brutish squalor and self-interest.’
    ‘I do not see that as the alternative. Spiritists, true spiritists, are men and women of high moral calibre. I could name you several. And their morality is the higher because they are closer to an understanding of spiritual truth. If the ordinary person to whom you allude were to see proof of the spirit world at first hand, if he were to realize how close it is to us at all times, then brutishness and self-interest will lose their appeal. Make the truth apparent, and morality will take care of itself.’
    ‘Arthur, you are going too fast for me.’ More to the point, Jean feels a headache coming on; indeed, she fears, a migraine.
    ‘Of course. We have all our lives ahead of us. And then all of eternity together.’
    Jean smiles. She wonders what Touie will be doing for all of the eternity she and Arthur have together. Though of course the same problem will present itself, whether her Church turns out to be telling the truth, or those low-born mediums who so impress her husband-to-be.
    Arthur himself is far from getting a headache. Life is on the move again: first the Edalji case, and now Jean’s sudden interest in the things beneath that truly matter. He will soon be back to full gusto. On the doorstep he embraces his waiting girl and, for the first time since Touie’s death, finds himself reacting like a prospective bridegroom.

Anson
    Arthur told the cabby to drop him at the old lock-up next to the White Lion Hotel. The inn lay directly opposite the gates of Green Hall. It was an instinctive tactic, to arrive on foot. Overnight bag in hand, he followed the gently rising drive from the Lichfield Road, trying to make his shoe leather discreet on the gravel. As the house, slantingly lit by the frail late-afternoon sun, became plain before him, he stopped in a tree’s shade. Why should the methods of Dr Joseph Bell not persuade architecture to yield secrets, just as physiology did? So: 1820s, he guessed; white stucco; a pseudo-Greek façade; a solid portico with two pairs of unfluted Ionic columns; three windows on either side. Three storeys – and yet to his enquiring eye there was something suspicious about the third. Yes, he would bet Wood a forty-point start that there was not a single attic room behind that row of seven windows: a mere architectural trick to make the house taller and more impressive. Not that this fakery could be blamed on the current occupant. Peering beyond the house, across to the right, Doyle could make out a sunken rose garden, a tennis ground, a summer house flanked by a pair of young grafted hornbeams.
    What story did it all tell? One of money, breeding, taste, history, power. The family’s name had been made in the eighteenth century by Anson the circumnavigator, who had also laid down its first fortune – prize money from the capture of a Spanish galleon. His nephew had been raised to the viscountcy in 1806; promotion to the earldom followed in 1831. If this was the second son’s residence, and his elder brother held Shugborough, then the Ansons knew how to foster their inheritance.
    A few feet back from a second-floor window, Captain Anson called softly to his wife.
    ‘Blanche, the Great Detective is almost upon us. He is studying the driveway for the footprints of an enormous hound.’ Mrs Anson had rarely heard him so skittish. ‘Now, when he arrives, you are not to burble about his books.’
    ‘I, burble?’ She pretended more offence than she took.
    ‘He has already been burbled at across the length and breadth of the country. His supporters have burbled him to death. We are to be hospitable but not ingratiating.’
    Mrs Anson had been married long