Appleby And Honeybath by Michael Innes

firmly, ‘I have no evidence that anything largely criminal has occurred at Grinton, although there have certainly been some policemen around. And I believe – although I am not sure that the police do – that somebody has died. But I do agree with you that the facts, meagre as they are, suggest little that can properly be gossiped about.’
    ‘Then, Sir John, we must find some other field of joint interest. There are the Grintons, who have so agreeably brought us together. But I suppose one doesn’t anatomize common friends when actually at their board.’
    ‘Well, no – I suppose not. Not Grintons present, but what about Grintons past? That would be fair enough, and I believe the family history might interest me. How about Magda’s knowledge of that? Did she strike you, when your pupil, as knowing much about her forbears?’
    ‘Not as much as I did.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘It is rather an amusing situation, which many college tutors must have encountered from time to time. You have positively to inform a girl that her great-grandfather was prime minister of Great Britain.’
    ‘Not quite that, surely.’
    ‘Well, no – but at dinner one is allowed a little picturesque exaggeration. Certainly a great-granduncle.’
    ‘Did you have to tell Magda just that?’
    ‘Of course not. I’m not aware of any Grinton as having made much mark on the public life of the country. There have been successful City Grintons from time to time, and one or two modest fortunes extorted from the West Indies. But it has been in literature and the arts, and to some extent in philosophy, that oddity has appeared in the family on certain rare occasions.’
    ‘Oddity, certainly.’ Appleby glanced towards Terence Grinton at the foot of the table. ‘Almost hard to believe. But my wife has told me as much, in a general way. She had oddities in her own family, and there is even some hitch-up with a Grinton oddity somewhere in its annals. And Grinton himself mentioned to me earlier today a certain Ambrose Grinton, of whose moral character he seemed not to think highly. Ambrose took up with artists, and collected rubbish from them.’
    ‘He also travelled in France and Italy, which Mr Grinton would certainly consider a dubious activity in itself I have read a little about Ambrose somewhere, and am not particularly curious about him. But I’d like to know more about Jonathan, Ambrose’s grandson, who flourished in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Jonathan collected men of letters – and their productions, no doubt, as well.’
    ‘Which is what gives you your interest in him.’ Appleby said this at a venture, but confidently. It was a fair guess that what Miss Arne had taught Magda Grinton at Somerville had been English literature. The lady was what is known, with a curious ambiguity of language, as an English scholar.
    ‘That is true. Jonathan Grinton belongs to a period in which the relations between writers and artists on the one hand and their patrons among the aristocracy and the gentry on the other was in a curious transitional phase. It is my impression that the writers were a little ahead of the artists and the musicians – and certainly of the actors – in point of social acceptance. But they were scarcely abreast with the French. Voltaire, indeed, could be humiliated and beaten in the street for the mere amusement of a group of nobles. But he belonged to a caste already secure of its rights and regarding itself virtually as an estate of the realm. When he came to England and visited Congreve he was disgusted to find a distinguished dramatist chiefly concerned to cut a figure as a fine gentleman.’
    Miss Arne, thus showing alarming signs of delivering the proem to a full-scale lecture, paused to address herself to what was probably the last dish of pheasant to appear at Grinton for many months. Appleby being silent and politely attentive, she then went on.
    ‘In the mid-eighteenth century we find Samuel Johnson, the son