“Still, his missing me is entirely understandable.”
“Why didn’t he fire again?” I asked him. “You were standing there and he just walked away.”
“A single-fire rifle, perhaps?” suggested Doyle.
Lord Bob said, “Filthy sod spotted me chasing after him.”
“A single-shot rifle, maybe,” I said to Doyle, and I turned to Lord Bob. “But if it wasn’t, he had plenty of time to let off another shot before you got to him. And plenty of time to shoot you, if he wanted to.” I looked at the Great Man. “And, Harry, it was a handgun he used in Buffalo. A Colt forty-five, a semi-automatic. Cops found the slug and the spent cartridge. Why didn’t he empty the whole clip into your back?”
“Phil,” he said, “as I have explained to you countless times, I moved too quickly for him to attempt a second shot.”
“Seems to me,” I said, “if he was serious, he would’ve given it another try.”
Doyle took his pipe from his mouth and narrowed his eyes and he said, “You do realize, Mr. Beaumont, that even if these speculations of yours are correct, your own position remains essentially the same.”
“Sure,” I said. “Even if he’s just trying to spook Harry, I’ve still got to stop him. He could make a slip, and kill him by mistake. But the idea that he’s trying to shake him up, not kill him, that’s the only thing that gives me a sliver of hope. Because if I buy the idea that he really wants to kill Harry, I might as well pack up and go home. There’s no way that one man can stop him.”
“And,” Doyle said, “despite your doubts, you must proceed as though the man were in fact determined to effect Houdini’s death.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why I want to bring in the cops. Lord Purleigh and Harry disagree with me.”
Lord Bob leaned forward in his chair. “What do you think, Doyle?”
The Evening Post (continued)
Again, as I had before, I simply stood there. Sir David held the crop; I held still; so did Time.
Evy, I wish I could tell you that I drew upon some secret reservoir of courage; but in fact I was still functioning on another plane, in a dimension slightly out of step with this one, slightly behind it. I had not yet reached even the stage of disbelief. If he had hit me, I think that I should not have realized it until sometime the next day.
He didn’t hit me. He lowered the crop and grasped its ends in his hands. Slowly, the wickedness and the fury left his face. He drove them away, Evy, by an effort of will, an effort I could sense and could, from within my curious remoteness, very nearly admire. When he spoke, his voice was completely under control and laced with that familiar mocking irony. ‘A saint,’ he said lightly, ‘would turn the other cheek.’
I said, ‘A saint would have no need to.’
He reached up and touched the cheek. The marks of my fingers were stencilled bright red against the pale skin. ‘You are,’ he said, ‘a plucky young woman, Jane.’
‘And you, Sir David, are a boor.’ I said it without thinking; had I stopped to consider, had I remembered the wickedness I’d glimpsed, I should have said nothing, perhaps.
But he merely smiled again, then faintly shrugged. ‘We’ve done the introductions and exchanged the mutual appraisals. What do you say to our getting to know each other better?’
‘The others are waiting for you. May I have my crop?’
With a small bow, he presented it. He smiled. ‘We’re not finished, Jane. You know that, don’t you?’
‘They’ll be wondering why you’re late, Sir David.’
He smiled once more, looked deep into my eyes, or, rather, pretended to, and then, with another bow, turned and walked away.
And that, Evy, is the story of the fondling and the proposition.
But I do think I did that rather well, don’t you? ‘A saint would have no need to.’ Mrs Applewhite would have been proud of me, don’t you feel?
He alarmed me, though, I admit it. I saw, for a moment, the cruelty and the evil that lie beneath his surface. There is a great deal more of it, I think, than there is of surface. I wonder how many others have seen it.
But we move now from the swine to the horse. And the ghosts.
Cecily had given me directions to the stable, where a young groom saddled my mount, a gorgeous black gelding named Storm, and equipped me with a handful of sugar lumps to offer as bribes. The horse was lovely. Despite his name, and his size- above fifteen hands-he was a lamb, gentle and responsive; I scarcely used, scarcely needed, the reins. Initially, at any rate.
He and I sauntered out onto the grounds. For a while we drifted lazily along, following the footpath that ambles around the edge of the vast park of Maplewhite. Evy, how I wish I could convey to you the beauty of it all. No; not convey it; somehow present it, actually hand it over to you, physically, so that you might share it with me.
The sun was shining, gloriously. I sometimes believe that we poor English are allowed only a specific (and very small) number of bright, madly beautiful sunny days; and often it seems to me that I spent my entire allowance in childhood. Sunlight sweeps through all my early memories: streams through the lace curtains in the family parlour, dapples the rosebushes in Mrs Applewhite’s garden, rolls in from the flat blue sea at Sidmouth to wheel down that broad green ribbon of meadow along the cliff tops. But since the War, since my parents died, the days seem to have clouded over. The world has gone grey.
I speak here of meteorology, not sentiment. The weather was better then.
Today, however, was spectacular. The sky was a dome of blue, with only a few fluffy white clouds slowly sailing beneath it. Larks trilled. Thrushes and blackbirds flitted between the elms and the maples and the oaks. Squirrels scampered along the tree trunks and played hide and seek with me as I passed. To my left,
Maplewhite rose grey and stately from the lake of emerald grass, like a castle in a dream.
But dreams, in the end, must surrender to reality, and mine finally buckled under to the prickle and itch of the riding habit. Perfectly appropriate to any other day of the year, the black woollen habit hung on me this afternoon like a penitential suit of sacking. I began, as Mrs Applewhite would have put it, to glow. I began, in fact, to melt.
At the very moment that I was thanking Fortune for not flinging witnesses helter-skelter about the landscape, I saw, at some distance, two people strolling toward me on the path. I had put my spectacles in my pocket, for fear of losing them, and I couldn’t identify the two until I was nearly on top of them. They were Mr Houdini and Mr Beaumont.
In the larger scheme of things, I suppose it hardly matters that Mr Houdini and Mr Beaumont should observe my disarray. But, Evy, you know that I tend to live within the (much) smaller scheme of things; and of course it did matter. I resolved to confront the catastrophe with typical British fortitude: by denying it. This is not perspiration; this is dew.
We chatted a while, inconsequentially. Anxious to be away, I was somewhat abrupt, I suspect; but I doubt that Americans would notice this.
As soon as I was free, I made a run for the shade of the forest. Some twenty or thirty yards ahead, a small trail led off from the main path, into the trees, and I urged Storm onto it.
The smaller path hadn’t been used in some time. Our progress was slow and unpleasant. Brambles crowded in on us from either side. Spider webs as thick as shrouds stretched like great bats across the track. Gnarled muscular roots with flaking bark twisted from the earth and snaked along it.
At last we came to another, broader path in the looming forest; an ancient road, it seemed, roughly perpendicular to the track. I gave Storm-my brave unflinching mount-some sugar and then urged him to the left.
The forest was dark and silent. In light of what happened, you will claim that, now, retrospectively, I invent the silence. Forests, you will claim, are never silent, no matter what the poets say. Always, birds whistle and chirp, insects buzz and whine and whiz annoyingly about. But, truly, all I could hear was the dry whisper of Storm’s hooves as they moved through brown decaying leaves, and an occasional sharp crackle as they snapped a dead twig.
Beside the path ran a narrow brook, its water clear but tinted the colour of rust, as though some large creature had bled away its life upstream; and even the brook was soundless.
I’ve whimpered often enough about the noise and bustle of London, but I found this stillness unsettling. The trees, with their black, deformed trunks, seemed to grow taller, wider, blacker and more deformed, and to edge
