The Dark Clue by James Wilson

apiece to escort me safely to the nearest cab stand.
    I had already started back towards them when, at last, I heard the door opening behind me. I turned and saw a handsome, dark-haired, sturdily built woman of sixty or so, wearing a plain grey dress and a white apron. Her eyes stared past me towardsthe crowd at the gate. Her sallow, heavy-featured face wore an expression of infinite, exasperated sadness, such as you might see on a nurse who discovers her charges, yet again, doing something they know is wrong. To my astonishment, that look alone was enough to restore order: the two opposing factions melted away without a word, and the boys, as if suddenly released from captivity, scampered at full tilt down the street.
    â€˜Mrs. Booth?’ I said.
    She turned towards me. She inclined her head slightly, but did not smile.
    â€˜I am Marian Halcombe,’ I said. ‘I believe Lady Eastlake wrote to you …?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. There was a rural lilt to her voice, but its tone was perfectly neutral, neither friendly nor unfriendly. ‘Will you please come in, Miss Halcombe?’
    The hall was so poky and dark that I could see almost nothing, and had to rely on the bobbing beacon of Mrs. Booth’s apron string to guide me. But the little parlour she led me into was pleasant enough, with a lively fire burning in the grate, and a strange-looking tailless cat stretched on the rug before it. A canary chirruped in its cage in the window, and a stout grandfather clock ticked soothingly by the door, as if Time, too, had been caught and tamed, and put in a corner to add his voice to the domestic chorus.
    â€˜Please sit down,’ said Mrs. Booth, ‘while I fetch the tea.’ She was immediately gone again, and a moment later I heard her clumping down into the basement. I rose, and looked about me. The room was, for the most part, quite unexceptional, and such as you might expect to find in the housekeeper’s quarters of any well-run large house: neat cupboards, with white-painted panelled doors, flanked the fireplace; a cavalcade of china milkmaids, led by a Macready toby jug, marched across the mantel-shelf; and on the chimney breast above hung a water-colour of a church and some miniatures in oval frames.
    It was only when I turned back towards the hall that I noticed something unusual. Two oil-paintings, stacked one behind the other and half covered by a sheet, leant against the wall between door and window. Seeing the corner of a gilt frame, and a whirl of leaden colour, I was overcome with curiosity, and immediatelybent down and lifted the cloth. The images that greeted me were so terrible, and yet so vague, that they seemed to have been conjured from a nightmare. The first showed a wild, grey-green sea stirred into an implacable fury; in the foreground, indistinct figures clung desperately to a queer, serpentine lump of wreckage which rose from the spume like a sea-monster, and, further off, a cutter sailed to their rescue. The second, behind it, was perhaps the same scene the following day: a crowd gathered on the shore, dumbstruck at the frightful proof of nature’s destructive power littered all about them; while on the horizon, lit by an ulcerous, unforgiving yellow sun, a disabled ship with two masts gone was just visible through the haze. Their impact – at least on me – was almost physical, and somewhat as I imagine the effect of mesmerism to be; I lost all thought of where I was, or what I was doing there, and was still staring when Mrs. Booth re-entered.
    â€˜Ah, yes,’ she said, colouring slightly. ‘Those are his. He gave them to me.’
    â€˜What, Mr. Turner!’ I exclaimed. I must have sounded, I fear, more amazed than I should have done – partly because the only Turner I could remember seeing was the stately engraving in the hall at Brompton Grove of
London from Greenwich Park
, showing a tranquil classical landscape with a distant view of