The Camelot Caper (16 page)

“Just a silly old rhyme.”

“What's the rhyme?” David persisted.

“The rhyme. Let's see, now; I think it goes something like this:

The two men contemplated one another across the candle flame like Druids over a fire; the blend of suspicion and duplicity in the two faces would have amused Jess at any other time.

“Very obscure,” said David. “Well. We'll find out tomorrow, won't we?”

“Right, right, right. Nighty night, Jessie. Going my way, Dave?”

Jess watched them go off down the corridor side by side, her cousin's slimmer shape beside David's ambling height. A turn in the corridor cut them off from her sight, and the retreating candle flame cast grotesque shadows back
against the wall. Then it vanished; the hall went dark; and Jess felt with frantic fingers for her light switch.

It was not until she started to undress that she realized what should have been obvious much earlier—that the tower room boasted no private bath. However, there was a screen, formerly a handsome Japanese design on oiled silk, now tattered and torn. Behind it were several objects which she recognized with amazement, and then a giggle. There was even water in the pitcher, and she was glad to see it; not even for clean teeth would she have ventured out into the dark corridor that night.

She extracted from her bag the most exotic of her nightgowns, wondering what uncensored impulse had prompted her to buy it; it had yards of material in the skirt and practically none in the bodice, and the material was all sheer. She hadn't had the nerve to wear it before. But tonight her morale needed all the help it could get.

There was no mirror in the room, but she viewed all of herself that was visible to her with satisfaction. The tap on the door caught her by surprise and, naturally, she did not have her robe. The door opened before she had time to find it, or to say anything; she froze in the mid
dle of the room, arms crossed over her top, while David sneaked in and closed the door. He turned, his fingers at his lips, and stayed in that position, staring.

“Well?” Jess said, after a while.

“Very well indeed,” David replied, and came toward her.

Jess scuttled away and found her robe on the floor by the bed. She struggled into it.

“Now stop that,” she snapped, evading his hands. “This is no time for—for that.”

“Any time is the time for that.”

“With that old man lying dead, practically next door—”

“For God's sake, don't be so Victorian.”

“What did you come here for?”

“I forget,” said David, reaching.

“David, don't. I mean it. I mean…”

The next few minutes were wordless, though not exactly silent. Eventually Jess freed her mouth long enough to say something about the lights; and David answered, indistinctly but with conviction, that he had no objection whatever to the lights. Presently the glaring ceiling bulb became only a mild distraction against her closed lids, then was not even noticed in the quivering darkness; and suddenly something brushed heavily against the leaded window
sixty feet off the ground and a ghastly high screech shattered Jessica's mood. She sprang up with an echoing scream, banged her forehead sharply on something, and found herself upright and shaking in the middle of the floor.

David was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her over the fingers which were covering his mouth and nose. His eyes were enormous, luminous with what looked like tears.

“David—what happened?”

David removed his hands and very delicately seized the tip of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He wriggled it. Tears overflowed his eyes and ran down his cheeks.

“Oh, David, you're hurt. What was that awful thing?”

David swiped at his wet cheeks with his shirt tail.

“It was,” he said, with enormous self-control, “an owl.”

“It couldn't have been! Oh…Then what are you crying about?”

“Have you never received a sharp blow right on the end of your nose? You have the hardest head I've ever felt.”

“I'm—I'm sorry.”

“So am I,” David made a dash for the window, flung it open, and hung out, breathing.
When he pulled his head back in, his color had subsided.

“That should do it. Though if you don't get some clothes on…”

Jess groped for the discarded robe, and David went on resignedly, “I can see that the atmosphere in this place is not conductive to—er—that, as you phrase it. The next interruption may be a skeletal hand. I came for the ring, actually. Get it for me.”

“David, are you thinking of that rhyme?” Jess reached for her purse. “You think it has some meaning?”

“The rhyme? He made it up, probably on the spur of the moment.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Am I,” David demanded of the air, “about to be wed to an illiterate? I thought America was full of Tolkien fans.”

“What kind of fans?”

“Do, please, stop saying, ‘What?' J. R. R. Tolkien, author of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
, one of the literary masterpieces of this century. I'll get you a copy; if you don't like it, I probably won't marry you after all. Cousin John's rhyme was inspired by one of the verses in the Ring trilogy. I expect that's what suggested it to him—
Ring
—ring, follow me?”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. The original goes:

“The parallels are pretty obvious.”

“Oh, gosh.” Jess sat down on the bed. “Well, then, why do you want the ring?”

“I don't, especially. I just want to be sure you haven't it—or to be more precise, I want to be sure Cousin John is sure you haven't. His ambiguous remarks meant something; if I didn't know him so well, I'd think he was trying to warn us. Let me think; it's such an effort keeping one step ahead of that twister….”

“But you told him already that you had the ring.”

“I know, I know. Maybe he didn't believe me. Maybe he'd rather steal it from me than from you. Maybe he wants to save himself the trouble of searching for it. Wait a minute….”

“Well, he's learned one thing, by your coming here,” Jess said. She shivered.

“That up until now you had the ring. But then why—good God, Jess, that was a warning! Tomorrow the will's going to be read. If, as your jolly cousin implies, the old man left the ring to someone, or some institution, the villains know I'll meekly hand it over to the lawyer like a good little citizen. After tomorrow, the ring will be in a safe, or bank, or someplace less accessible.”

“Good heavens! They'll try to steal it tonight!”

“I certainly would, if I were in their shoes.” David paced, chewing his knuckles. “Why did he warn us? Or did he? The more I think about this, the less I like it. Give me the ring, will you?”

She held it out to him with cowardly alacrity; and as he studied her, perched on the edge of the bed, her hair in tousled curls and her eyes wide with alarm, David's worried look softened into a smile.

“Come over here and hand it to me,” he said. “If I come to you, I may never leave.”

She came, with a rush that ended in his arms; as he rocked her back and forth she felt his laughter against her hair.

“We are obviously made for each other,” he said softly. “Mad, both of us, mad as hatters. Darling, in about three minutes I'm going to leave as conspicuously as possible. Cousin J. is
undoubtedly peeping through his keyhole, and we want to be sure he sees…what we want him to see.”

“And in the intervening three minutes?”

By actual count it was ten minutes later when David flung the door open and stamped off down the hall. Jess's mood was as feckless as his; she stood in the doorway trying not to laugh. At the corner he turned to blow her a kiss; then he bent over and dropped something that hit the floor with a musical ring; and David disappeared around the corner, cursing audibly. She heard him ringing and cursing all the way down the other hall—the hall that passed Cousin John's door. Jess grinned. Unable to resist, she tiptoed down her own corridor to the corner.

At first she saw nothing except blackness and heard only David's retreat; he was still in full theatrical bloom. Then she shrank back. A thin streak of yellow light had appeared on the wall of the corridor she faced.

The door that was opening opened toward her, so she could see nothing of the person within. But shortly the streak of light widened into a rectangle of yellow, with Cousin John's aristocratic features silhouetted, black and paper-sharp, upon it.

The explosion was not as loud as it seemed; it
merely resounded through the silent house like an atomic bomb—the crash of something heavy onto a hard surface, and a loud, cut-off shout.

It was its unexpectedness rather than its violence that paralyzed Jess for the first, important seconds. She could still see her cousin's profile, outthrust and listening, and she couldn't understand how he could be in his room, while David was…David! Suddenly she was running, her bare feet pattering on the wooden floor. She ran mindlessly, straight into the waiting arms of her cousin. His grasp tightened as she struggled, and she heard him laugh softly.

“Let me go,” she gasped.

“But you'll hurt yourself running round in the dark,” he said reasonably. “Calm yourself; then we'll trot down there together and see what's happened. Not that I'm not enjoying this, mind you…”

This remark quieted her more quickly than any other method; and after a moment he let her go. His eyes moved speculatively up and down her body as she stood in the light from his doorway, and she realized, flushing from toes to hair, that she had forgotten her robe.

When he had finished his inspection, he put one hand on his shirt front and bowed genteelly.

“For the first time I am moved to regret the
laws regarding consanguinity,” he said. “Now, then, Coz, shall we see what obstacle your clumsy fiancé has encountered? I do think he might have been more discreet. Admittedly, moral standards have relaxed, but a lady's reputation—”

“Shut up,” said Jess regrettably. She brushed past him, but he was right, she couldn't go quickly; once out of the light from his room, she couldn't see a thing. She heard his measured footsteps behind her; and then, as she stumbled over an object on the floor, his hands caught her shoulders and kept her erect.

“There's a light here somewhere,” he said easily. “Stand still, you little fool, or you'll brain yourself.”

The light went on, momentarily blinding her; then, with a cry, she fell to her knees beside David's prostrate body.

Standing between her aunt and her cousin in the narrow pew, Jess was reminded of the last church service she had attended in England. The contrast was extreme. There were no angelic voices here, soaring up into vast vaults of stone; only the frail, reedy voice of the minister reading, without much conviction, the words of the ancient Service for the Dead.

Dark and small and heavy as it was, the parish church of St. Ives—one of the thousands of obscure virgin saints—had an austere beauty. The tracery of the old windows was splendid, though the newer glass looked like something out of a suburban hall of the 1920s; and the devout ladies of the parish had a real gift for flower arranging. Jess doubted that anyone in the family had bothered about spe
cial flowers; she certainly hadn't. So the white and purple clusters that overflowed the vases by the altar were probably the regular weekly arrangements. They were all the more lovely for being ordinary, seasonal garden flowers, lilac of every imaginable shade for the most part; and the colors were certainly appropriate.

But the glory of the church, which would have redeemed uglier architecture than the sturdy fifteenth-century sandstone, was the wagon roof, with carved, painted beams and golden-haired angels.

Throughout the long day, with its depressing ceremonies, Jess's mind kept returning to those angels. They acted as a focal point on which her restless, worried imagination could settle, and find a kind of reassurance. They were ugly angels, really; stiff, badly carved, and recently repainted in colors as glaring as the original shades had been, cherry red, bright gold. What quality was it that redeemed this crude, local work and made it beautiful? For the angels were also beautiful angels. Beautiful, not because of the craftsmanship, but because of the certainty which had guided the craftsmen. Their belief formed their works: belief in God and in hell and in a specific devil, with horns and a tail—and in specific angels, whose golden hair was
not yellow, nor flaxen, nor blonde—but gold.

Jess doubted whether the same sort of faith moved any of the members of their party. Aunt Guinevere looked like a nun in unrelieved black, with her set features hidden behind a veil. Cousin John, as usual, was a model of propriety. He wore formal morning clothes, and his fair head bent solicitously over his mother's shrouded form as he supported her from the church. But once during the service, when the minister referred to the deceased's virtues as father and husband, he had caught Jess's eye and let his right lid droop in an unmistakable wink.

Jess literally hadn't known what to wear. She owned one black dress, which was backless and three inches short of her kneecap; it would not have been appropriate even if it had been in her suitcase instead of in a closet three thousand miles to the west. Borrowing or buying a dress was both hypocritical and impractical, so, in the end, she had settled for white, a simple straight shift which, at least, possessed sleeves, and a white lace scarf which she had brought with vague ideas of Roman churches later that summer. Studying herself in the wavy mirror in the parlor, she saw her eyes enormous and shadowed under the soft folds of lace, and guiltily
wiped off her bright lipstick. On second thought, she replaced it. She had no harsh feelings toward the old man who lay dead upstairs; neither did she feel grief, or guilt that she felt no grief. Let the villagers stare, and call her a cold, hard foreigner.

But the glances and murmured greetings were all friendly. There were many mourners, most of them contemporaries of her aunt's; there could not be many of the old man's friends still living. From the conglomerate of unfamiliar faces only one stood out: that of Mr. Simon Pendennis, who had a face like a wrinkled prune, a lean old body as straight as a lance, and a pair of wicked, lively, black eyes. He was a memorable figure; but she noticed him primarily because he was introduced as the family lawyer.

When they met at the church, Mr. Pendennis gave her a handclasp that made her flinch. She had barely had time to introduce David before they entered the building, and Mr. Pendennis's glance made it clear that he did not think much of David. Jess had to admit that her “fiancé” did not look propossessing. The black band pinned around his arm did little to counteract the color of his bright-blue suit; sartorial elegance, as she had noted, was not one of David's strong points. His appearance was not improved by the fading
bruises of his earlier encounters with Cousin John and Friend, and the clumsy bandage on his brow, fastened by her own fair and unskilled hands, completed the picture of a city tough.

When they settled down in the library after the funeral, Mr. Pendennis's eyes kept straying to David with fascinated distaste. Seating himself behind the heavy table, he drew a document from his breast pocket, slapped it down onto the mahogany, and announced that he had no intention of reading it.

“Sum it up, so you can all understand it,” he said, glaring at them with a lawyer's contempt for the laity. Jess had heard about beetling brows, but this was the first time she had ever seen any. She was finding it hard to concentrate on the will, so intrigued was she by the thick white clumps of hair over the lawyer's eyes.

No one objected, so the lawyer went on.

“Legacies to the servants,” he rumbled. “Fifty pounds. Not many servants left, heh? All debts to be paid, et cetera…The rest is simple enough. Perhaps too simple. I don't know how familiar you are with your grandfather's situation, Miss Tregarth—”

“I don't know anything about it,” Jess said. “I don't care, either.”

Mr. Pendennis put his fingers together.

“That is a most peculiar comment,” he said bluntly. “Why do you say that?”

Jess looked at her aunt, who looked coldly back; at her cousin, whose smile held more than its usual share of malice; at David, rumpled and disreputable, paler than usual and altogether wonderful.

“He didn't owe me anything that he could give me now,” she said steadily. “People owe children—all other people, but especially their children—some things. Love, perhaps, until they prove they don't deserve it. But not money. Not this way. I'd love to have had a grandfather; my mother's father died before I was born. I don't harbor any ill will at all. But I don't want his money. I'm sorry, I can't say it right….”

Unexpectedly, it was the old lawyer who responded, and, though his rocky features did not change, there was a milder gleam in the black eyes.

“I understand quite well. And, may I say, I respect you for your sentiments.”

Jess was so surprised and grateful that tears came to her eyes. It was the first softening emotion she had felt that day, and she was grateful to the lawyer for evoking it.

“Arthur Tregarth was a hard man,” the lawyer went on. “He was my old friend and my
old enemy, but no one could call him sentimental. And your father, my dear, was an impetuous, weak fool. We need not resurrect that long-past quarrel, but it was not to the credit of either participant. Your grandfather despised his son; but he did come to regret not knowing his granddaughter. That was why, with my knowledge and at my suggestion, he wrote to you. But his intention was to meet you, nothing more. There was no restitution he could have made, if he had wanted to. Do I make myself clear?”

“You mean there isn't any money,” Jess said. She was beginning to like Mr. Pendennis; he, too, believed in calling a spade a spade.

“Precisely,” the lawyer said calmly. “He left to you some small investments, which were his sole source of income except for an annuity which dies with him. They will not bring in more than two hundred pounds a year. The rest of the property goes to your cousin, who is the residuary legatee. That means—”

“I know. It means he gets everything that isn't specifically left to someone else.”

“In nonlegal language, that is approximately correct.”

The short silence was broken by Cousin John, who rose with his customary grace.

“Thank you, Mr. Pendennis. May I offer you a glass of sherry before you go?”

The lawyer grunted.

“At least you inherit some noble vintages,” he said, holding the slim glass up to the light.

“Four bottles of this left,” said Cousin John wryly. “The old gentleman—God rest his soul—calculated his demise quite accurately.”

“Drank most of it himself, did he?” Pendennis made an abrupt barking sound which was evidently meant to be a laugh. “Quite in character.”

Her cousin smiled; catching Jess's eye, he said, “Shocked, dear Coz, by our disrespect? Thought you Americans were more realistic. Darling Jess, why pretend? Our mutual ancestor was something of a bounder. When he inherited, the place was in flourishing condition. He sold most of the land and spent the capital in riotous living. Correct, Mr. Pendennis?”

“Quite accurate,” the old lawyer said calmly.

“Which means,” John continued, “that there's nothing left. I probably won't even be able to keep the house.”

David stirred.

“Will you have to sell the house to pay the death duties?”

“No,” the lawyer answered. “Mr. Tregarth made provision for that outlay. But there is, lit
erally, nothing left. I would myself advise John to sell, if he can find a buyer; the house is in need of repairs, and there is not enough land remaining to be productive.”

“No one would buy a moldering pile like this,” John said carelessly.

“No private individual, perhaps; but it might do as a hotel or institution of some sort.”

This optimistic suggestion seemed to annoy Cousin John; he scowled, and Jess, thinking she had seen another sign of his family feeling which he was embarrassed to own, said gently, “This seems to be a popular vacation area. Would it be possible for you to run the house as a hotel yourself?”

That was the wrong thing to say. Cousin John transferred his scowl to Jess and said curtly, “It would require a great deal of money to finance such a thing. Even supposing that I wanted to see the house so degraded.”

Jess caught the old lawyer's eye, and saw a gleam of frosty amusement which made her refrain from further comment. Suddenly she was aware, not of fear, but of a vast distaste. The dark, dusty library and the unspoken antagonism of her relatives repelled her; she felt a need for sunshine and fresh air.

“That seems to conclude our business,” Mr.
Pendennis said. “John, I'll just take that box with me, if you will put it into my car.”

“Box?” Cousin John repeated guilelessly.

“The box of artifacts. I'm sure your grandfather must have spoken of it. He told me years ago that he was leaving it to me.”

“Oh, of course. The objects he found in his digs.”

“The box is mentioned specifically in the will,” said Mr. Pendennis coldly.

“Of course, sir. Let me think…. Mother, what did we do with that box?”

Without speaking, Aunt Guinevere inclined her head and John went to the bookshelves on that side of the room.

The library was lined with bookshelves on three of its four sides, except for the spaces occupied by doors and by a cavernous fireplace. One section of shelving held, not books, but a miscellaneous collection of objects of stone and pottery. From the lowest shelf Cousin John lifted a large box, made of dullish metal. It was two feet long and about a foot deep, and Cousin John carried it as if it were heavy.

He deposited the box on the table in front of the lawyer, who had risen to his feet, and who now bent over the box with undisguised curiosity and eagerness.

“Have a look, sir,” said Cousin John gravely. “Make sure nothing is missing.”

The old lawyer glared at him.

“Nothing worth stealing, I daresay,” he mumbled. “Arthur always was a braggart. The prizes of his collection, indeed…. Still, we may as well have a look.”

The box was unlocked; its lid fell back at a touch of the old man's hand. The hand was actually trembling as it removed the first object and placed it tenderly on the table; Jess found the elderly lawyer's excitement rather pathetic.

The objects, as they came out of the box, did not seem like the sort of thing that would produce such rapt attention. Several chunks of broken pottery; a large scrap of rusted, blackened metal; three greenish lumps; a collection of bones; a bronze arrowhead.

When Jess looked up in some disgust from the collection, she was amazed to see that Mr. Pendennis had gone pale. She stood up and walked over to the table. At close range the miscellaneous collection looked even worse, but the lawyer stood staring at it with the expression of a man who has been dealt a stunning blow.

“So he did find something,” he muttered. “It's impossible! All these years…. But where?”

“What is it?” Jess asked. “What are these things?”

Pendennis merely shook his head dazedly. David, who had joined them at the table, picked up one of the chunks of metal which glowed with a brighter gleam than the rest.

“That looks like gold.”

“Yes.” The lawyer spoke carelessly, but his long gnarled fingers twitched, as if he were aching to snatch the fragment away from David. “A scrap, no more. Meaningless…. Ah—do you know anything about archaeology, Mr. er—um?”

“Not a thing,” David said guilelessly. “But I've got a pal who lectures on British prehistory at Cardiff.”

“I take it that these are the results of Grandfather's excavations,” Jess persisted. “They don't look very exciting, I must say. Are they worth anything?”

“Completely worthless,” said the lawyer firmly. “Although in a sense they did cost a great deal of money—thousands of pounds of what might have been your inheritance, Miss Tregarth.”

“Thousands of pounds! I didn't know digging up a lot of dirt could be so expensive.”

“You have the usual layman's ignorance,”
said Pendennis. “One doesn't simply go out with a spade and plunge in, you know. Nowadays all sorts of technical equipment is necessary, not only for the actual removal of the soil, but for treating and preserving the objects one finds, and for surveying preparatory to digging. Why, last year Arthur purchased one of these soil anomaly detectors, instruments which can indicate the existence of metal, or of filled-in trenches and postholes, under the soil. That alone cost—”