Dance to Your Daddy

'Twine your lovely head with flowers,

For their beauty is your own...'

Poets, even the least gifted of them, have extraordinary advantages, thought Dame Beatrice, when it comes to expressing their love-often, she reflected, insincerely.

Laura voiced these thoughts that same evening after Rosamund had been put to bed in the Stone House.

'The patient,' she stated, 'is rapt and starry-eyed. What have you been a-doin' of?'

'Allowing her to make the journey to Shaftesbury in company with a young poet, so-called,' Dame Beatrice replied. 'I fear she may have interpreted some of his words as personal compliments with erotic overtones, but, then, I believe they slept together last night.'

'Glad it's your responsibility, not mine. Incidentally, I don't notice any signs of nervous instability of the kind that I had envisaged.'

'There are none. The child needs a change of environment, that is all.'

'What was Cousin Romilly's object, then, in representing her as a candidate for the bin?'

'Oh, that was made clear. Go to bed. In the morning I will tell you all. How is Eiladh?'

'Flourishing, and no trouble to anybody. Liable to be ruined by spoiling, I'm afraid. I'm hardly allowed to do anything for her myself. Celestine and Zena have taken her over completely, and Hamish writes his weekly letter from school with extraordinary zest. He keeps begging me to put in for special weekend leave for him, so that he can come home and see her again, but, of course, I shall do nothing of the kind. The holidays come quite soon enough as it is, and he gets five weeks at Easter. I've tried to hound him into going with the school party to Brussels, but he's adamant. He's absolutely hooked on the baby.'

'I told you how it would be.'

'Yes, I know you did. I don't understand Hamish, and I never shall.'

CHAPTER SIX

SARABANDE-DANCING LEDGE

'...when you dance, I wish you

A wave o' the sea...'

The Winter's Tale.

(1)

Dame Beatrice had anticipated that repercussions would follow the abortive family gathering to which, for reasons which still seemed obscure, Romilly Lestrange had elected to invite his relatives. The repercussions which did follow, however, were not what she would have expected. They began in the morning succeeding the day on which she had introduced Rosamund into the Stone House, a move of which Laura did not altogether approve.

'She may be in fear of her life, and an escaped prisoner and all those things,' she said to Dame Beatrice when Rosamund, who seemed to favour plenty of sleep, was not up by a quarter to ten, 'but there's something all wrong about her.'

'Yes,' Dame Beatrice agreed, 'mixed up with all my sympathy for her orphan state, and the really great danger I believe her to be in, I have the feeling to which you allude. I will now tell you something interesting, trusting to your native sense of fair play to read nothing into the information which is not contained in the very slight evidence which is all I am able to give you.'

'All right,' said Laura. 'As a former student of history, I will try to keep an open mind. Does this (whatever it is) concern Rosamund?'

'That is where we have to keep an open mind. I simply do not know. However, this is the story, for what it is worth. I think I told you in my letter about the hole in the wall. This was a kind of squint intended not, as in a church, to give a view of the altar, but (as, thinking of you, I soon realised) to give a fair chance to a marksman in the adjoining room of putting a bullet into the head of anybody lying in the bed.'

'I don't understand why thinking of me should give you such an idea.'

'Do you not? I think our dear Robert would. Anyhow, when I also discovered that the bed was clamped to the floor so that it could not be moved, I thought that there was really no point in taking chances. I moved my pillows around so that my head was where whoever had arranged the bed had intended my feet to be, and prepared to sleep soundly.'

'Neat and practical. Don't tell me that, after these precautions, nothing happened?'

'Nothing of any consequence. However, I continued to exercise vigilance during the rest of my stay.'

'You stayed there another night, after finding out a thing like that?'

'For more than one reason. I was not quite ready to leave; also it did not seem likely that any bullet would be intended for me. The master of the house has not only designs (I believe) upon Rosamund's life, but he also fears for his own. As the room used to be his (if what he told me was true), he may have been the intended victim. To conclude, he now has had the hole screened off, not with the canvas-backed picture which had covered it when I was first shown into the room, but with a stout screen which proved to be a fixture.'

'You do see life when I'm not with you! Did you have a quiet night after all that?'

'Certainly, once the household had settled down.'

'Settled down? Then something did happen?'

'There was a certain amount of disturbance. Somebody thought he had heard the sound of a shot, but somebody else-Judith, I think it was-suggested that it might have been a car backfiring, and that the noise might have heralded the appearance of the two brothers Hubert and Willoughby Lestrange. Romilly went to investigate,