his?”
“Yes,” said Cecily. “Everyone is in the drawing room.” Her aristocratic drawl had returned, but it lay over the strain in her voice like a first coat of paint, thin and transparent. “Mr. Beaumont asked me to show him around Maplewhite.” She was too young, maybe, to know that you never volunteer a lie. Or maybe too upset to remember.
Once again, Mrs. Allardyce didn’t seem to notice. “How fortunate for him,” she said, “to have you as a guide.” She patted Cecily’s forearm. “Well, dear, we’ll leave you to your tour. I’m sure we’ll see you later. Au revoir! And you too, Mr. Beaumont. Come along, Jane.”
“Mr. Beaumont?” Miss Turner had stepped closer to me.
I turned. Behind her, Mrs. Allardyce wobbled to a surprised halt.
Miss Turner’s uncanny blue eyes looked into mine and they were unwavering. She held herself straight, her back rigid. “I don’t recall much of what happened,” she said. She pressed her lips briefly together. “My fainting spell, this afternoon. But Mrs. Corneille told me that if you hadn’t been so quick to help, I should have injured myself. I wanted to thank you.
“No need to,” I said.
“There is,” she said, “and I do. And I apologize, once again, for causing you trouble.”
“No trouble. I’m glad you’re all right. Mrs. Corneille said your horse saw a snake?”
“Yes. It startled him. In any event, I thank you for your efforts.” She nodded once, as if pleased with herself for pulling something off, and then she nodded to Cecily. “Miss Fitzwilliam.”
“Come along, dear, come along,” said Mrs. Allardyce, and she swung her thick arm like a gaff into the crook of Miss Turner s elbow. She smiled again at Cecily, quickly, almost fiercely, and then she led Miss Turner off, toward the stairs.
As they disappeared around the corner, Cecily said, What a perfectly horrid little woman.”
I smiled. “Miss Turner?”
“No, silly. That awful Allardyce person. She’s a cousin of my mother’s. And what a positively sick-making idea that is.” Suddenly she turned to me. “She couldn’t have heard what I said, could she?”
“Mrs. Allardyce?”
“Miss Turner. What I said about…” She raised her eyebrows, took a deep breath, let it out in a weary sigh, “ You know…”
“About being a nymphomaniac?”
“ I am not — ' She heard herself squeal, glanced around, leaned toward me. “I am not a nymphomaniac,” she said between clenched teeth, and then she thumped me on the chest.
“I know,” I said. “And no, I don’t think she heard. And no, Mr. Houdini doesn’t think you’re a nymphomaniac either. No one thinks you’re a nymphomaniac. Except maybe you.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Look, Cecily. I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about Mr. Houdini. He won’t say anything.”
She canted her head thoughtfully to the side. “Do you think she’s prettier than I am?”
“Mrs. Allardyce?”
She made that almost-foot-stomping motion again. “No. Miss Turner.”
“She behaves better,” I said.
She tried to thump me again and I caught her wrist and held it. “See what I mean?” I said.
Her eyes were narrowed and she was staring at my hand. “Let me go, ” she said, her voice low and threatening. The rules of the game had been changed, and she didn’t like it.
“No more hitting,” I said.
She tossed her head back and she aimed her glance down along her cheekbones. “Or what?”
“Or we’ll talk to Daddy.”
“He won’t believe a word you say.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
She glared at me for a moment, and then her shoulders slumped and she scowled. I let go of her wrist. Wincing furiously, her mouth twisted open, she rubbed at the wrist as though she had been shackled for a lifetime to an overhead beam.
“I don’t know why I care what you think,” she said darkly, glowering up at me. She raised her head. “I’m sure I don’t care. After all, you’re only a servant, really, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“And why on earth should I care what a servant thinks?”
“No reason at all.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, and she wheeled about and stalked away. She whirled around the corner and I could hear her feet go stomping down the stairs.
I waited there in the hallway for a while, to give her time to find her drawl again.
On the walls, across the faded tapestries, plump naked people were still chasing each other in a refined way through the forest. Around the room, well-dressed people were gathered in clusters once again. No one seemed bothered by the idea that a sniper had shot at someone today. But maybe they were all rising above it. The English like to do that.
“Mr. Beaumont,” said Doyle, lumbering up from his seat at the coffee table to my right. “There you are. Please join us. Come and meet my friends.”
The table held platters of food, porcelain cups and saucers, a porcelain teapot, a silver coffeepot, a small silver cream pitcher, a small silver sugar bowl. There were six people sitting around all that. I knew four of them- Lady Purleigh, Cecily Fitzwilliam, Mrs. Allardyce, and Miss Turner. I didn’t know the woman in the wheelchair or the man sitting beside her.
“Mr. Phil Beaumont,” said Doyle, and held out his hand toward the woman, “this is my very good friend, the remarkable Madame Sosostris.”
Remarkable was right. The woman made Mrs. Allardyce look like a wood nymph. Probably she weighed as much as Doyle did, but she was half his height. Her body was draped in a gown of red and gold silk, like a medicine ball bundled in gift wrap. Her huge mane of white hair was swept back from her wide white forehead into a pompadour the size of an ornamental shrub. The hair fell in thick waves to her shoulders and cradled her white puffy face. Her bushy eyebrows and her long eyelashes were jet black, and so were the small sly eyes that glittered beneath them. And so was the starshaped beauty mark on her cheek, stuck there like a fly on a rice pudding.
She nodded to me the way a queen bee would nod to a drone. “So very charming to meet you,” she said. She spoke with an accent but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“And this,” said Doyle, “is Madame’s husband, a very kind and generous man. Mr. Dempsey.”
Mr. Dempsey was bony and angular and he probably weighed less, clothes and all, than one of his wife’s thighs. He was in his fifties, with sunken cheeks and sunken eyes and a thin bitter mouth. He wore a loose gray suit, a white shirt, a black bow tie, and a narrow black toupee that looked liked it had been oiled and then run over with a truck.
He unfolded himself out of the chair like a carpenter’s ruler and gave me a handful of knobby knuckles. “How do you do?” he said, and smiled painfully. His accent was American.
“Won’t you join us?” Lady Purleigh said, looking up at me from her chair. Beside her, Cecily Fitzwilliam raised her head and elaborately looked away.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’ve got to talk to Mr. Houdini.”
Lady Purleigh smiled pleasantly. She looked good again today, slim and elegant in a long white silk dress that made her gray blond hair seem even lighter in color. “You’re entirely too conscientious, Mr. Beaumont. I admire your energy but this is the weekend, after all. I do hope you’ll set aside some time to enjoy it.”
I smiled back at her. “I will. Thanks.” I nodded to Madame Sosostris and to Mr. Dempsey, and then to Doyle.
He nodded and lumbered back to rejoin his table. I strolled across the room to the table where the Great Man was sitting alone. He was writing something in a notebook, probably another letter to his wife.
“All by yourself, Harry?”
“I refuse to sit with that woman. You saw her hair?”
