movement was different from the others'; she was lithe and carefully balanced, while they bounded unpredictably like rubber balls on rough-hewn stone.
The difference was (as he realized, watching them more keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and Fiona never did. This was a question not of native intelligence (Miss Matheson's tests and observations proved that much) but of emotional stance. Something in the girl's past had taught her, most forcefully, the importance of thinking things through.
'I ask you for a prediction, Mrs. Hackworth. Which one shall reach the moor first?'
At the sound of his voice, Mrs. Hackworth recomposed her face. 'This sounds like a letter to the etiquette columnist of the Times. If I try to flatter you by guessing that it will be your granddaughter, am I implicitly accusing her of impulsiveness?'
The Equity Lord smiled tolerantly. 'Let us set aside etiquette– a social convention not relevant to this enquiry- and be scientific.'
'Ah. If only my John were here.'
'I'm sure you could never be humiliated in my presence, Your Grace,' Mrs. Hackworth said. It was something she had to say, and he did not really hear it.
They turned back to the windows. When the girls had reached to within a stone's throw of the wall, they began to move toward it more purposefully. Elizabeth broke free from the group, ran forward, and was the first to touch the cool stones, followed a few paces later by Fiona. Nell was far behind, not having altered her steady stride.
'Elizabeth is a Duke's granddaughter, accustomed to having her way, and has no natural reticence; she surges to the fore and claims the goal as her birthright,' Finkle-McGraw explained. 'But she has not really thought about what she is doing.'
Elizabeth and Fiona both had their hands on the wall now, as if it were Home in a game of tag. But Nell had stopped and was turning her head from side to side, surveying the length of the wall as it clambered and tumbled over the increasingly rough shape of the land. After some time she held out one hand, pointing at a section of the wall a short distance away, and began to move toward it.
'Nell stands above the fray and thinks,' Finkle-McGraw said.
'To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting.'
Fiona and Elizabeth moved uncertainly, trailing their tiny pink hands across the damp stone, unable to see where Nell was leading them. Nell strode across the grass until she had reached a small declivity. She almost disappeared into it as she clambered down toward the foundation of the wall.
'An opening for drainage,' Finkle-McGraw explained. 'Please do not be concerned. I happened to ride that way this morning. The current is only ankle-deep, and the diameter of the culvert just right for eight-yearold girls. The passage is several meters long-more promising than threatening, I should hope.'
Fiona and Elizabeth moved cautiously, startled by Nell's discovery. All three of the girls disappeared into the cleft. A few moments later, a blaze of fiery red could be descried bouncing rapidly across the moor beyond the wall. Fiona clambered up a small outcropping of rocks that marked the beginning of the moor, and beckoned excitedly to her companions.
'The secret passage is found by Nell, but she is cautious and patient. Elizabeth is taken aback by her early impulsiveness-she feels foolish and perhaps even a bit sullen. Fiona-'
'Fiona sees a magical gateway to an enchanted kingdom, no doubt,' Mrs. Hackworth said, 'and even now is crestfallen to find that you have not stocked the premises with unicorns and dragons. She would not hesitate for a moment to fly down that tunnel. This world is not where my Fiona wants to live, Your Grace. She wants another world, where magic is everywhere, and stories come to life, and ...'
Her voice trailed away, and she cleared her throat uncomfortably. Lord Finkle-McGraw glanced at her and saw pain in her face, quickly masked. He understood the rest of her sentence without hearing it:
A pair of riders, a man and a woman, trotted up a gravel path that ran along the edge of the gardens, through a pair of wrought-iron gates in the stone wall, which opened for them. The man was Lord Finkle-McGraw's son Colin, the woman was his wife, and they had ridden out onto the moor to keep an eye on their daughter and her two little friends. Seeing that their supervision was no longer required, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth turned away from the window and drew instinctively closer to a fire burning in a stone fireplace the size of a garage.
Mrs. Hackworth sat down in a small rocker, and the Equity Lord chose an old and incongruously battered leather wing chair. A servant poured more tea. Mrs. Hackworth set the saucer and cup in her lap, guarding it with her hands, and collected herself.
'I have been desirous of making certain enquiries regarding my husband's whereabouts and activities, which have been a mystery to me almost since the moment he departed,' she said, 'and yet I was led to believe, from the very general and guarded statements he made to me, that the nature of those activities is secret, and that, if Your Grace has any knowledge of them-and that you do, is of course merely a convenient supposition on my part-you must treat that knowledge with flawless discretion. It goes without saying, I trust, that I would not use even my feeble powers of persuasion to induce you to violate the trust reposed in you by a higher power.'
'Let us take it as a given that both of us will do what is honourable,' Finkle-McGraw said with a reassuringly casual smile.
'Thank you. My husband continues to write me letters, every week or so, but they are extremely general, nonspecific, and perfunctory. But in recent months, these letters have become full of strange images and emotions. They are-bizarre. I have begun to fear for my husband's mental stability, and for the prospects of any undertaking that relies upon his good judgment. And while I would not hesitate to tolerate his absence for as long as is necessary for him to carry out his duties, the uncertainty has become most trying for me.'
'I am not wholly ignorant of the matter, and I do not think I am violating any trust when I say that you are not the only person who has been surprised by the duration of his absence,' Lord Finkle-McGraw said. 'Unless I am very much mistaken, those who conceived of his mission never imagined that it would last for so long. It may ease your suffering in some small degree to know that he is not thought to be in danger.'
Mrs. Hackworth smiled dutifully, and not for very long.
'Little Fiona seems to handle her father's absence well.'
'Oh, but to Fiona, he has never been gone,' Mrs. Hackworth said. 'It is the book, you see, that ractive book. When John gave it to her, just before he departed, he said that it was magic, and that he would talk to her through it. I know it's nonsense, of course, but she really believes that whenever she opens that book, her father reads her a story and even plays with her in an imaginary world, so that she hasn't really missed him at all. I haven't the heart to tell her that it's nothing more than a computerized media programme.'
'I am inclined to believe that, in this case, keeping her in ignorance is a very wise policy,' Finkle-McGraw said.
'It has served her well thus far. But as time goes on, she is more and more flighty and less disposed to concentrate on her schoolwork. She lives in a fantasy and is happy there. But when she learns that the fantasy is just that, I fear it will not go well for her.'
'She is hardly the first young lady to display signs of a vivid imagination,' the Equity Lord said. 'Sooner or later they seem to turn out all right.'
The three little explorers, and their two adult outriders, returned to the great house shortly. Lord Finkle- McGraw's desolate private moor was as alienated from the tastes of little girls as single malt whiskey, Gothic architecture, muted colors, and Bruckner symphonies. Once they had reached it and found that it was not equipped with pink unicorns, cotton candy vendors, teen idol bands, or fluorescent green water slides, they lost interest and began to gravitate toward the house-which in and of itself was far from Disneyland, but in which a practiced and assertive user like Elizabeth could find a few consolatory nuggets, such as a full-time kitchen staff, trained in (among many other, completely useless skills) the preparation of hot chocolate.
Having come as close to the subject of John Percival Hackworth's disappearance as they dared, and careened
