to which it led. He lifted the latch and pushed the door open. He had come up through a brick hatch projecting above the roof, backing on a sheer drop of fifty feet or so into the well of a courtyard. On either side of him the chimney-forested roofs stretched away in a gigantic rectangle. They were shallow and covered with lead, and the low coping that surrounded them offered no cover from the scourging talons of the wind. Inward, the mass of the rectangle was pierced by two wells, the one near the hatch oblong, its fellow, some distance off, a square. As far as Gently could see, he had the entire, blizzard-swept desert to himself. There was not a sign of Somerhayes.
Squinting his watering eyes, he set off stubbornly to make the round of the roofs. The wind, once he left the shelter of the hatch, pierced through his thick ulster like knives. A mad place to be… a dangerous place! If you lost your balance, you could be blown over the coping in a moment. And how did the man expect Gently to find him up here, amongst the chimney-stacks, hatches, sky-lights and whalebacks of lead? Or had he expected to be found… was this Somerhayes’s way of going to earth? Gently crouched by a stack for a moment. It could be that Somerhayes had cleverly got rid of him for an hour. A fine fool he would be, clinging up here to these chimneys and copings, while Somerhayes, down below…
But then, what could the fellow be up to?
He was halfway round before he spotted his quarry. By that time he had begun to feel that he would never thaw out again. His best trilby had blown away, his fingers were dead in their thick, wool-lined gloves, and his whole body felt shrunken and aching with cold. Then, as he rounded the coping at the corner of the square well, he saw the maddest thing of the whole mad interlude. At this point he had come to the back of the great triangular cornice that surmounted the columns of the portico at the front of the house. From this cornice was reared a flag- staff, and clinging to the flag-staff, his foot on the apex of the cornice, his body exposed to the full range of the blast, was Somerhayes. He did not turn as Gently rounded the corner. He was facing outwards, towards the wind, towards the distant, ice-flecked sea. And he was wearing nothing but the lounge suit he wore about the house. He had not even gloves on his blue, clutching fingers.
Incredulously, Gently plodded up a grey roof-back and down to the back of the cornice. The apex where Somerhayes was standing was a good twelve feet above the roof.
‘Hey!’ he shouted up. ‘Come down before you freeze solid!’
Somerhayes glanced down over his shoulder. ‘No… you come up, Mr Gently!’ he called back.
It was a palpable challenge, and Gently looked about him for some way to meet it. There was no ladder up the back of the cornice, but at some period a series of rough hand- and foot-holds had been chiselled into the stone, and these, though badly worn, appeared to be the means by which Somerhayes had reached his dizzy peak. Slowly, obstinately, Gently began to climb.
‘Use the flag-staff as a handrail… You’ll get stuck if you don’t.’
Gently grunted and felt across for it. Near the apex, the chiselled hollows were nearly worn away. By a final effort he got his arm round the staff where it cleared the apex, and by hugging it tight could just peer over into the airy gulf below.
‘What do you think of the view, Mr Gently?’
‘I can’t think of views when I’m being flayed to death!’
‘Look… the sea! And the Wind of God coming off it!’ Somerhayes raised his arm and pointed outward.
Gently blinked the water out of his eyes and looked. Directly below was the terrace with the cars, Repton’s artful drive snaking beautifully away from it into the gloomy grove of holm-oak. To the left extended the park and the lake, hemmed in with forbidding reefs of chestnut and oak, a driveway at the extremity stretching to the pale cupola of the folly elevated on its gentle knoll. And beyond this, over the regiments of trees, behind a strip of rough salt marsh and a white-fringed ribbon of beach, lay the iron-grey, iron-cold sea, its horizon scarcely to be distinguished from the iron-grey, iron-cold sky.
‘That way came the Northmen!’ exclaimed Somerhayes in a strange, ringing tone. ‘On a day like this, on a wind like this, in ships without decks they sailed that sea, Mr Gently. A thousand years ago one saw their dragon sails, and a few last descendants of those ships still sail the Northshire rivers. Go into any fishing village along this coast, and look, and look, and you will see the Northmen… We Feverells come of Norman stock, but whence came the Normans to set their standard in France?’
Gently screwed up his eyes and tried to get some cover behind the weather-roughened coping.
‘We must have degenerated a good deal since those days…’
‘But have we, Mr Gently, have we?’ The crazy fellow was ripping open the front of his shirt. ‘Look… this wind is no stranger to me. You shrink from it down there, but I can receive it with a bare bosom, steel to steel, element to element — and all I feel is its fire, scorching me as it scorched the conquerors who came here long ago. It is the world that has degenerated; we are still the men we once were.’
‘Come down,’ urged Gently. ‘Let’s talk about it in comfort.’
Somerhayes laughed, the sound of it whipping away on the lashing wind. ‘Look below!’ he cried. ‘Do you see those steps down there, immediately below, near where that constable is stamping his feet?’
Gently poked his head over.
‘There’s an answer, Mr Gently — I could have it in just two seconds.’
‘What answer is that?’
‘The answer to everything that troubles a mortal soul. See — it’s in my hand’ — he let himself swing out over the void — ‘five frozen fingers are all that hold the veil between myself and the perfect truth. Shall I accept it, Mr Gently? In your present knowledge, do you advise me to accept it? Or are there still some things which only I can tell you?’
Like a reversed weathercock he hung there, smiling down at the crouched Central Office man. With a sense of shock Gently realized that the nobleman meant what he was saying. In two seconds, he could be a lifeless heap on the steps beneath. A mis-move, a wrong word…
‘Come down,’ he repeated. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘But we can talk up here… Surely this is the ideal situation?’
‘It may be for you… Me, I’m just a bloody bourgeois. I’m going down — I’ll see you later on.’
‘Wait!’ exclaimed Somerhayes, swinging in again.
‘Sorry, I’ve had enough of it — see you when you get down.’
Deliberately, without looking back, he began feeling for the worn toe-holds. He could hear nothing except the moaning of the wind and the flap of the halyard against the flag-staff. Regaining the roof, he clambered over the shallow pent behind the cornice, and taking cover in the lee of the nearest stair-hatch, began to fumble with Dutt’s pipe. The seconds stole by. Resolutely he packed the tobacco, his fingers stiffened like claws. He was just scrabbling in his pocket for a match when there was a footfall on the lead beside him, and Somerhayes was standing there, something like reproach in his grey eyes.
‘Are you the man I took you for?’
Gently tried to keep the relief out of his brief shrug.
‘I felt sure I could depend on you…’
‘Cup your hands round this match, will you… It’s like trying to get a light in a wind tunnel.’
Somerhayes complied with a touch of disdain. His small, fine hands looked ugly from the savage exposure they had undergone. Gently got his pipe going after three attempts. For some reason, he was being particularly clumsy about it.
‘The winters you get in this godforsaken county!’
‘Our summers are correspondingly fine, Mr Gently.’
‘They’ve got a lot to make up for…Do people die young?’
‘On the contrary, this county is celebrated for longevity.’
Finally, the pipe was lit, and Gently, setting his back against the hatch-door, puffed it till the warming bowl softened the initial harshness of flavour. Somerhayes stood by him, ignoring the friendly shelter of the hatch.
‘You wanted to talk to me, Mr Gently?’
‘Mmn — just as you expected.’
‘Naturally, after my cousin had spoken to you-’
‘It’s up to you to clarify her somewhat onerous position.’
Somerhayes glanced at him with sarcasm. ‘You realized, then, that I should be able to?’
‘Otherwise, you wouldn’t have known enough to have advised her to make a clean breast, would you?’
Somerhayes nodded, looking away. ‘Perhaps I’ve mistaken you after all, Mr Gently…’
