Hide and Seek for Love (11 page)

He had arranged their breakfast in the way it always had been in what he spoke of as ‘the good old days'.

“I am sorry I am late,” said David, as he entered.

“I wondered what had happened to you, my Lord,” remarked Benina.

“I went to see Cosnet to tell him that he was to take over the garden.”

Cosnet was the man he had been told had hidden himself away so that he could keep his cottage and his son had secretly helped Nanny and looked after the horses.

“What I have arranged,” declared David serving himself eggs and bacon, “is that Cosnet will do what he can in the garden until I find him some more help.  Ben, his son, will groom the horses and run messages.”

Benina laughed.

“He will be kept busy.”

“I thought you would say that, Benina, as I just sent him on one that will meet with your approval.”

“What can that be?”

“I have told him to instruct the butcher to give the pensioners sufficient meat and sausages for three days and then to repeat the order until I tell him to stop.”

Benina clapped her hands together.

“Oh, my Lord, only
you
could have done anything so wonderful.  They will be so thrilled.”

“I only hope they will be and I have also told Ben to tell the grocer to give them bread, butter and cheese.  At least they will not starve.”

For a moment Benina could not speak and then she exclaimed,

“I did not think anyone with your name could be so marvellous!”

“It is what I will have to be in the future, whether I like it or not.  I just cannot have the Marquis of Inglestone going down in posterity as an evil monster!”

“That is just what I think your grandfather was.”

“Now, what we must convene, as soon as we have finished breakfast, is a Council of War.  So please will you tell Newman and Nanny to come to the study and you and I will be waiting for them there.”

Benina gave a little laugh.

“Everything is becoming more and more exciting.  I was beginning to think I was living in a backwater where nothing ever happened, except that Nanny and I grew older every minute.”

“Now you have to be young again!  And I think you are already making a good job of it.”

David looked at her as he spoke.

With the sun shining through the windows onto her golden hair, she looked ethereally lovely.

At the same time he was aware that her blue dress was the same one she had worn the day before and the day before that – it was patched and darned in several places.

However, he told himself it was too soon to worry about clothes as, if their next exploration was as dirty as it had been yesterday, it was clearly no use wearing anything decent.

David finished his second cup of coffee, and then set off to the study.

He sat down, as his grandfather had, at the beautiful Regency writing desk and he could not help thinking that the desk and its gold inkpot would bring in a considerable amount if sold to a collector in London.

Then he told himself firmly it was not his to sell, as it was entailed for future generations, but perhaps in their explorations in the next few days, they would find something not on the inventory.

Nanny and Newman entered the study and Nanny piped up,

“Now you're not to keep us for too long, my Lord, if you want a good luncheon.  I've got a chicken to pluck and that takes time!”

David smiled at her.

“I will not keep you long, Nanny.  It's just that I want us four to know what we are doing and not waste any unnecessary time about it.”

“If you're talking about a-finding all that money, it can't be found quick enough for my liking.”

“I am doing my best, Nanny.”

“Of course, he is,” said Benina almost indignantly.  “No one could have worked any harder than he and I did yesterday.”

“And a nice mess you made of yourselves!”

David held up his hand.

“Now listen to me, all of you.  First and foremost, everything we say in this room is a secret and known only to ourselves.  We must be careful of unwary words, or talking too loudly, so that the outside world does not find out what we are doing.”

He thought as he spoke of the dangers he had faced in India and how a whispered word out of place in
The Great
Game
could so easily end in the death of one of its members.

“We will be very careful,” Benina agreed softly.

“Now what we have to do is to search everywhere, but not to waste time by going to the most unlikely places.”

“That's good common sense,” remarked Nanny.

“What I want to ask you, Newman, is if you have any ideas where my grandfather might have concealed the money he brought back from the Bank?”

“I well remembers his Lordship going to the Bank,” replied Newman, “on the first of every month, but I'd no idea what he was going for, although I hoped it were for funds to pay our wages.”

“When he came back, what did he do?”

“That's difficult for me to answer, my Lord.  Usually he went in the morning and came back before luncheon.  I would be in the dining room getting things ready.”

He saw that David looked disappointed and added quickly,

“There were footmen in the hall until his Lordship sacked them, but we can't get in touch with them now.”

“Of course not and even if we did, we would have to explain why we are so interested in what my grandfather was carrying.”

Newman put his fingers up to his forehead.

“Now I thinks about it,” he said, “I've an idea that I seen him once going up the stairs with a parcel in his arms.  I can't be certain what sort of parcel it were. I just thinks as how he's going up to his bedroom and I expects I says to him, ‘luncheon'll be ready in five minutes, my Lord'.”

David was listening intently.

“That does sound as if what he brought back from the Bank might be on the first floor.”

“It seems sensible for him to hide it in his bedroom or somewhere close by,” suggested Benina.

“That's right,” Nanny agreed.  “If he was worrying about his precious money, he'd not want it to be out of his reach.”

“Very well, that's just what I wanted to know.  Now Miss Benina and I will start searching the first floor and when Newman has time, he can look at some of the rooms on the ground floor.  This is going to take time.”

“Of course it is,” came in Benina, “and I expect you realise that there is not only this room on the ground floor.”

She started to count on her fingers.

“There is the drawing room, the dining room, the ballroom, the refreshment room next to it, the music room, the Chapel and the library not to mention the tapestry room and the room where we have just had breakfast!”

David held up his hands.

“Now you are scaring me, but we will manage them all in time.  I am only trying to speed up what we have to do so we don't waste any time searching somewhere like the ballroom where I am certain no one would want to hide anything.”

“One never knows what people'll do when they're a bit funny in the head,” observed Nanny gloomily.

“You have forgotten the gun room, my Lord,” said Newman.  “It's big enough for a man to hide any amount of secrets in those cupboards and drawers.”

“I will leave that to you, Newman,” smiled David.  “Meanwhile Miss Benina and I are intending to work very hard and the only person who will not be concerned with looking for the money is Nanny.”

“I knows you'll do better if your tummies are full,” muttered Nanny, “and that's what they're a-going to be!”

“I am already looking forward to luncheon, Nanny.  Now come on, Benina, let's start work!”

“I was thinking what a lot of rooms we have to do, my Lord.”

Benina had not exaggerated.

David found that on the first floor there were not only the Master Suites and twelve Staterooms, there were fifteen other bedrooms as well as the picture gallery, the china room and a large room that contained the armour and the robes of each succeeding Marquis.

There was also, which David could not help lingering over, a room filled with stuffed wild animals and birds.

There were heads of tigers, black bears, stags and panthers and many weird and unusual stuffed birds.  They were exhibited on tables or hanging down from the ceiling.

“I call these fascinating,” David observed to Benina.

“I felt so too when I first saw them, my Lord, but these birds are not heavy enough to have coins inside them and I am sure you would not wish to open them up.”

“That would be sacrilege.  Let's go on.”

The picture gallery boasted pictures he knew were of inestimable value if they were put onto the open market and china that had been collected by early Marchionesses of Inglestone who had superbly good taste.

It was impossible not to linger over some Japanese china figurines and wonder at some of the early English models, which were very colourful.

“Come along, my Lord, you are wasting time,” said Benina when he had stopped for quite five minutes gazing at a cabinet full of Russian snuff boxes, ornamented with portraits of the Czars in enamel surrounded by diamonds.

They went into the Master Suite but David was not hopeful that there would be a special safe where his grandfather could have deposited his money.

Most private safes, he thought, were too small and the amount of money the Marquis had withdrawn from the Bank would not have fitted into any he had ever seen.

Anyway there was no safe to be found in the Master Suite.

They searched through the cupboards, the cabinets and the drawers and they even looked on top of the canopy over the bed.

There was no sign of even a sixpence anywhere.

They stopped for luncheon and ate hurriedly.

Actually they were both hungry as moving furniture about was much more tiring than even David had expected.

He had somehow suspected that his grandfather might have hidden some paper money behind the pictures in the picture gallery, but although some of them needed repair, there was no sign of any notes.

Also the Bank Manager had said that a great deal of the money his grandfather had taken away was in the form of golden guineas and they would require a large amount of space to conceal them.

They had finished most of the first floor by teatime, and there were still a number of ordinary bedrooms not yet investigated.

“Now what we are going to do,” David said as they took tea in the study, “is to go and look at the horses, and see if we can possibly go riding tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, could we ride?” asked Benina.

“I need exercise and fresh air after spending so long in those stuffy rooms that have not been opened for years.”

“They were rather smelly,” laughed Benina.  “And I suppose you know you have now got white hair!”

David turned round to look at himself in the mirror.

It was quite true!

The dust from the cupboards he had opened and the shelves he had inspected had fallen on his head and he now might have been a man nearing sixty.

“I tell you what I am going to do,” he suggested suddenly.  “I am going to swim in the lake.”

“Do you really think it's warm enough, my Lord?  I thought of swimming in the summer, but felt it might have annoyed his Lordship.  So I had to be content with carrying water upstairs to have a bath and I found it very tiring.”

“Now we will swim in the lake – and I will race you, so at least we are warmed up before we jump in.”

Benina thought this a splendid idea, so she hurried upstairs to find Nanny and ask for her best bathing dress.

“You've grown a bit since you last wore it,” Nanny said, “so I thinks it'll be a bit tight on you.”

“Tight or not, I cannot swim naked!”

However, they found that the bathing dress, although somewhat dilapidated like the rest of her clothes, fitted her perfectly as she had grown so thin.

Nanny gave her a big bath towel to throw over her shoulders.

She ran downstairs to find David, also with a towel over his shoulders, halfway down to the lake.

As she caught up with him, panting a little because she had run so quickly, he remarked,

“The last time I bathed in India it was even hotter in the water than it was outside!”

“I don't think you will say that now, my Lord.”

Actually the water in the lake was not too cold.

They were regarded angrily by a mallard duck, who collected all her babies and swam away indignantly to the other side of the lake.

David was surprised to find that Benina could swim well and strongly for a woman, as he was used to women in India wearing elegant bathing clothes, who could seldom do more than stand in the water up to their waists – hoping that the men would be lost in admiration for their elegant but
décolleté
costumes.

Benina not only swam beside him but also splashed him with water.

She laughed when he complained she was blinding him and he ducked her.

They enjoyed their swim and then wrapped in bath towels they walked back towards the house.

“I feel better after that, Benina, and if we can ride tomorrow, I shall feel better still.”

“Ben said it will not be too soon for the horses.  He has been so kind in looking after them.  If it had not been for him, they would have both died like the other two.”

“On my instructions he has been feeding them the finest oats and if we take them gently, I think it will be good for their legs.”

“And good for us too!” exclaimed Benina.  “I used to sneak out and ride whenever I could.  But I was always afraid that the Marquis would think that the horses were an extravagance, even after they had been put out to grass, and have them destroyed.”

“The more I hear about my grandfather, the more I am convinced he was completely and absolutely crazy.  In any well conducted country he would have been certified and put into an asylum!”