Escapade (11 page)

She frowned. “What happened?”

“You’ve fainted,” said Mrs. Corneille.

Miss Turner looked at her. She raised her head from the bench, as though trying to sit up. Mrs. Corneille touched her shoulder gently. “Not just yet, Jane. Rest a moment.”

I stood up.

Mrs. Allardyce said to Miss Turner, “You gave us a
terrible
fright. What on
earth
—"

Mrs. Corneille turned and glanced back at her. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were narrowed and her lips were grim. Mrs. Allardyce shut her mouth.

Off to my right, two small black figures were running toward us, down the slope from the manor house. Servants.

I stepped over to the Great Man. Under my breath, I said, “Go back to the house with the rest of them. Wait for me in your room.”

“Phil—”

“Just do it, Harry. I’ll be back.” I set off in a run after Lord Bob.

I LOPED ALONG the walkway and then down the lawn toward the formal garden, following the trail of the motorcycle across the lush

green grass. The machine was parked beside a row of hedges at the garden’s far end, along the edge of the woods.

That was about right, I thought. The rifle shot had seemed to come from the forest somewhere near here.

Ahead of me there was a narrow path into the forest. I marched up to it, stopped, looked back toward the tall tree with the bronze-red leaves. One of the servants was leading the horse down the walkway, along the course I had just taken. Everyone else was walking in a loose group up the gentle green rise to the house. In the sunshine, under that clear blue sky, they looked like they were returning from some sultry summer picnic.

Right here, I thought. Right here is probably where he stood when he fired.

About a hundred and fifty yards from here to the tree. Not an easy shot, especially firing slightly uphill.

I glanced around. No repentant snipers down on their knees, begging me to run them in. No signed confession nailed to a tree. No empty cartridge anywhere. The mossy ground was still spongy from last night’s rain and there were footprints in it, but too many of them. Lord Bob had gone tramping through here.

The trail twisted down the hill for twenty or thirty yards until it ended at another path. This one was wider, almost a road, with a surface of crushed black stone. To the right it led up the hill, in the direction of the house, which was out of sight now. To the left it led down the hill and disappeared about forty yards away, behind the trees.

Lord Bob came around the bend in the road and stopped. I walked down the pathway, toward him.

“Beaumont,” he said. “Seen anyone?”

“No.”

“Look here,” he said. “You’re an American. How’s your woodcraft, eh? Following a trail, Fenimore Cooper, all that?”

“You mean broken branches, bent twigs?”

He brightened. “That’s it, yes.”

“No good at all.”

“Ah.”

“Where does this go?” I nodded down the path.

“Eh? Oh. Down to the river. No luck there. Went down that way myself just now. Nothing.” He looked around him, at the forest that seemed to go on for miles. “Bloody bastard could be anywhere.”

“What’s up here?” I nodded up the path.

He seemed puzzled by the question. “The manor, of course.”

“Could we take a look?”

He frowned. “You can’t be thinking a poacher would go that way?”

“Worth a look.”

He stared at me for a moment and frowned again. Probably wondering why a personal secretary was so interested in poachers. But he was a gentleman, and finally he shrugged. “Very well. Come along.”

The two of us trod up the gravel road. The earthen banks on either side of it grew higher until they rose above our heads. The road became a kind of narrow valley running between the steeply sloping ground and the tall trees climbing off the ridges up there. We ended at a tall, broad, double wooden door set into a wall of stone about fifteen feet high. I could see a green line of hedge beyond the top of the wall. We were beneath the level of the formal garden, and at its far side.

“What’s this?” I asked him, and nodded to the door.

“Freight tunnel,” he said. “Goes under the garden, into the house. Comes out near the kitchen. They used to bring goods this way. Barges on the river, horsecarts up the road here, and then down the tunnel to the house. Faster back then. Don’t use it nowadays.”

On the door to the right, at waist level and just where it joined the other door, there was a rusted lockplate with a large keyhole in its center. I bent forward and examined the keyhole. It looked like no one had used it in years. But I was no expert at locks. I glanced down. No tracks in the crushed stone, that I could see. But, as I had told Lord Bob, I was no expert at tracks.

I stood straight. “You have the key?”

In those white circles that surrounded them, his gray eyes blinked. “Not with me, no. Wouldn’t make any difference, though. Barred from the inside.”

I pressed against the door. It didn’t budge.

Lord Bob was frowning again. His aristocratic patience was beginning to unravel. Or maybe it was his Bolshevist patience. “What is it, exactly, you think you’re looking for?”

I pulled out my watch. Five minutes to one. “Could I meet you somewhere inside, in about an hour?”

“Whatever for?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got to talk to Mr. Houdini first. But it’s important.”

Yet another frown. Obviously I had overstepped some boundary that a secretary wasn’t supposed to step over. “Perhaps you could tell me,” he said, “what this is all about.”

“I sorry, but I can’t right now. An hour?”

A small sigh. He reached into his vest pocket, plucked out his watch, glanced at its face, looked up at me. “Very well. In one hour. In my study.”

“Where’s that?”

“Someone will show you.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“HARRY,” I said, “we’ve got to tell him.”

“But Phil—”

“I went back there,” I said. “Before I came here, I went back to that big tree. The one we were all standing under. There’s a hole in the trunk, Harry.” I reached into my pocket. “This was inside the hole. Good-sized slug, from something like a thirty-thirty. I worked out where all of us were standing. If he fired the rifle from where I think he did, this thing missed your head by about two inches.”

We were back in his room. He was sitting on the bed, his back against the headboard, his arms folded stubbornly across his chest. I was sitting in the chair by the writing desk.

“But Phil,” he said. “Lord Purleigh believes it was a poacher.”

“Lord Purleigh doesn’t know about Chin Soo.” I tossed the slug onto the bed.

He pretended not to notice it. “But it could have been a poacher.”

I shook my head. “The sound of the shot. It was sharp and clear. Not muffled. Whoever fired it, he fired right at the edge of the forest. Not inside it. He wasn’t aiming at a deer or a wild pig or some damn rogue elephant. He was aiming at you.”

He pressed his lips together and looked off.

I said, “I’m sorry, Harry, but it’s over. If you won’t tell him, I will.”

He looked back at me, surprised. “But you gave me your word.”

“I said I’d stay under cover as long as I worked for you. But if you don’t tell Lord Robert, I don’t work for you. I quit. I tell him myself, and the two of you do whatever you want, and meanwhile I’m on the train back to London.”

“But Phil—” His voice was cajoling.

“There’s something else, Harry. If he’d missed you by two inches in the other direction, he would’ve hit Mrs. Corneille. Maybe he’ll hit her next time. You can risk your own life as much as you want. That’s your privilege. That’s what you do for a living. But you’re not going to risk the life of anybody else.”

He inhaled slowly, deeply, and then he sighed. He nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. You are quite right, Phil. We must tell him.”

The Evening Post

Maplewhite, Devon

August 18

Dear Evangeline,

I’m losing my mind, I’ve become certain of it. I’ve also become certain, however, given this particular organ’s many obvious defects, that its loss will occasion hardship to no one. Least of all, perhaps, to myself.

I know that I promised you a ghost. I’m going to renege on that promise, or at any rate on that ghost. I don’t really want to talk or write or even think about him any longer. I’m sick of him, frankly. What he said and what he did, if in fact he actually said and did them, are things best forgotten. If not forever, then at least until I sort out the rest of it.

The rest of it?

You may well ask. Since breakfast, in addition to stumbling upon two additional ghosts, I’ve been fondled and propositioned; I’ve been badly bruised; I’ve been trapped, flopping and flailing, on a runaway horse; I’ve once again made an absolute fool of myself; and I’ve been peered at and prodded at by an Austrian psychoanalyst. And somehow I’ve misplaced an antique tortoise shell comb that I liked very much.

And, oh yes, mustn’t forget, I’ve been shot at.

The bullet wasn’t actually intended for me, or so at any rate I am assured. But certainly it deposited itself near enough to my person for me to have taken, at the time, a certain proprietary attitude regarding it. I felt rather cheated later, when I learned that this was mistaken.

Such are the ways of Devon. Of course, we seasoned travellers take all this in our stride. For, really, when you’ve seen one ghost, then in a sense you’ve seen them all, nest-ce pas? One is enough, surely, to prove the point; the presence of two (or three, or four, or four hundred) is simply redundant.

And what, come to that, do propositions and fondlings

ultimately signify? When you’ve experienced as much of the world as I have, Evy, when you’ve encountered, as I have, everything from the giddy heights of Knightsbridge to ... well, the giddy heights of Kensington, you realize that in the supreme scheme of things, the grand expanse of Time and Space, our passions and indeed our lives are, at bottom, puny little things.

And as for bullets—ah well, what are bullets, finally? How petty they are, how
common
, these little bits of lead whizzing through the air and crudely plunking themselves into nearby trees.

As for the comb, I probably did something silly with it while my attention was wandering. Misplaced it, perhaps. Or ate it.

I
am
rather upset about the comb.

I’m losing my mind, as I say. And
I don't care
. I refuse to keep playing the wide-eyed (if ageing) ingenue, even if that is the role for which, by general agreement, I am best equipped.

Enough. We shall begin this narrative where I ended the last.

I told you that I hadn’t slept at all last night, after seeing the first ghost. And I think I told you that I stopped writing to you because I’d heard the sound of something stirring in the Allardyce’s room. After folding up the letter and sealing it into an envelope, I eased myself off the bed, threw on my robe, and tiptoed over to the door that connects her room to mine. I was less than eager to confront her, still smarting with shame at my performance last night.

Sitting at the dressing table in her robe, her heavy body slumped, her arms slack along the arms of the chair, her hands limply dangling, she was staring at the mirror.

She wore no make-up. I’ve seen her like this before, of course, countless times: all the paints and polishes stripped away, all the oils and cosmetics. I had indeed seen her like this only a few hours before, while I was demonstrating my flair for hysteria. But this morning, for some reason, her face appeared curiously naked and vulnerable.

Vulnerable is perhaps the last label that I should normally attach to the broad back of the Allardyce. Perhaps it was the sunlight this morning. Outside, for the first time in weeks, the clouds were gone. A cold yellow shaft stretched across the room and struck her white round face like the beam from an electric torch.

I think I told you that she has no eyelashes and no eyebrows.

This morning, in that stony sunlight, their absence made her face look shocked, astonished, as though only a moment before she had glanced into the mirror and realized, all at once, that she had grown old, and stout, and alone.

For, at some time, however many years ago, before however many bonbons and muffins and buns, even the Allardyce must have been a small child. Once she must have chased butterflies across a meadow. Once she must have felt surprise: at a sunset, a rainbow, a sneeze. Once she must have giggled and squealed.

I don’t mean to say that I thought all this out, rationally or even consciously. What came over me, and it came over me within the course of merely a second or two, was a feeling of profound and infinite sadness for the losses she had sustained, whether by accident or by her own design (which of course would have been worse); and a sense that I had, up till now, in a way
betrayed
what was best in her by not recognizing the possibility of its existence; and betrayed, too, by doing so, what was best in me.

As I say, all this happened within only a second or two. And then she realized, abruptly, that I was there in the room, and she turned to me and frowned. Beneath her pale peeled forehead, her tiny black eyes puckered. ‘You nasty,
vulgar
little thing,’ she said.

Whatever it was I attempted to say, it came out as a hopeless stammer.

She drew her robe more tightly about herself. ‘Waking up
everyone
. Screaming and howling like some Irish
washerwoman.'

Shame burbled hot and thick to the surface of my face. ‘Yes,

I’m terribly sorry, I—’

‘It was a
dreadful
embarrassment. What must my friends
think
of me? When I awoke this morning, my
first
thought was that I should dismiss you.’

My own first thought was to spit in her beady little eye.

My next thought, less appealing but more rational (alas), was that this just would not do. The spitting, I mean. I reminded myself that I had been suffering this insufferable woman for a

purpose. After only one more year in her employ—assuming that both of us did in fact survive one more year—I should have saved exactly one hundred pounds, which will provide a cushion for me to sit upon while I make an attempt to decide what I shall do with this life of mine.