Gladys?”
“I hope not,” Consuelo said. There was another silence. Then she added, almost reluctantly, “The girl has many moods and fancies, Kate. She’s a strange, whimsical creature, and sometimes quite… unpredictable.” She gave a little shrug. “Perhaps that’s why I have enjoyed her so much. She’s playful, she’s enchanting, like a child, like one of those birds. She raises my spirits. She brightens Blenheim’s gloom.”
She obviously raises the Duke’s spirits, too, Kate thought wryly. Aloud, she repeated Consuelo’s phrases. “Strange and whimsical. Like a child.”
“Yes, very like a child,” Consuelo said reflectively. “I’ve sometimes thought that Gladys lacks any sense of consequences, and that’s why she takes the risks she does. Like that horrible business with her nose, for instance. That paraffin injection.” She shuddered. “It might do very well for now, but I hate to think what will happen in another few years.”
No sense of consequences. “Is it possible, do you think,” Kate asked slowly, “that she might be… well, playing some sort of game with us?”
“A game?” Consuelo frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Kate confessed. “I’m just thinking out loud, I suppose. I was wondering whether Gladys might take pleasure in something… well, something childish, like hide-and-seek, perhaps.”
Consuelo stared at her incredulously. “But why would she do such a thing, Kate? She surely knows that we would be frantic.”
Kate said nothing. She could imagine any one of a half-dozen reasons, although she doubted that any of them would occur to Consuelo, who struck her as inexperienced and rather naive. Gladys might do it to make the Duke realize how much he loved her, or to teach him some sort of lesson. Or to make Northcote even more insanely jealous. Or even to mock her friend Consuelo.
The silence stretched out, filled with the raucous sounds of birds, an occasional sweet melody rising plaintively above the tuneless racket. At last Consuelo said, in a doubtful tone, “I suppose it’s possible, Kate. Once, when she and I were visiting Versailles together, she went off to Paris with her sister, without telling me.”
“I’m sure you must have been wild with worry,” Kate said.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Consuelo frowned. “But that was… well, it was a lark, in a way, and I’m sure her sister egged her on. They seized the opportunity of a moment. She couldn’t have done that here, of course. Where would she go? And how? It was night when she disappeared, and she was wearing evening dress. I just don’t see-”
“I’m probably wrong,” Kate said, not wanting to trouble Consuelo further. “Let’s not talk any more about it.”
But that did not mean that Kate and Beryl would not think about it. Or that Consuelo would not think about it, either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result.
This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.
Mr. Lawrence had been surprised by Charles’s request to borrow his son Ned for a fortnight or so. But having heard Ned’s urgent plea and Charles’s promise to keep an eye on the boy, he rather thought, on the whole, that the proposal presented no difficulty.
From Mr. Lawrence’s dithery response, Charles got the idea that the man himself was too good-natured to refuse any reasonable appeal, but that it was just as well that Ned’s mother was absent, for she would have been likely to have raised a strenuous objection which both Ned and his father would have had no choice but to honor. Charles surmised that, in the Lawrence household, the mother firmly ruled the roost, a fact which the father did not contest but the son deeply resented.
On the way back to Blenheim in the motorcar, Charles explained in some detail what was wanted of Ned and who among the servants the boy should observe most closely-Alfred, especially, the footman who had been at Welbeck around the time of the robbery there. He also mentioned Kitty, whose disappearance might or might not have some relevance, and gave Ned instructions for communicating with himself, or at a pinch, with Winston or Kate.
“I shall probably ask to see you this evening,” he said. “If questions are asked, you might say that I am an acquaintance of your father.” He smiled at the boy, who was trying, without success, to look confident and self- assured. “Lady Sheridan, Churchill, and I-all three of us will be looking out for you. You shan’t have any problems.”
Privately, Charles was not quite so confident. There were several potential problems, especially since the stakes were so high and the people with whom they were dealing were experienced and unprincipled. But of course, he reminded himself, all this business about a ring of thieves operating in Blenheim lay entirely in the realm of theoretical speculation. Sometimes, when one was reasoning backward (as Conan Doyle had put it in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories), one saw illicit activities where there were none, or invented criminal conspiracies where none existed-especially when one was beginning with a conjectured result. Charles had to admit that this might be one of those times, and that the whole thing was a fabrication of his too-vivid imagination, the sort of fantasy that Kate and Beryl Bardwell loved to create. Ned might search and search and come up empty-handed, simply because there was nothing to find.
“Whatever happens, I’m not afraid,” Ned said staunchly. He pushed the blond hair out of his eyes. “I only want to do a good job, that’s all. If there’s something secret going on below-stairs, I’ll ferret it out.”
“That’s the spirit,” Charles said approvingly. In many ways, Ned reminded him of Patrick, the boy whom he and Kate had taken to live with them. Like Ned, Patrick had many gifts, chief among which was his talent for working with horses. He was now riding as a jockey at George Lambton’s stables at Newmarket. ^3 Ned was more of an intellectual than Patrick, Charles thought, but the two boys had the same energetic spirit, the same eager willingness to please.
They had come to the Hensington Gate, where the lane to Blenheim intersected the Oxford-Woodstock Road. Charles pulled onto the grassy verge and stopped.
“I’ll leave you here,” he said. “Walk down the lane, and when you come to the East Gate, tell the porter that Mr. Stevens is expecting you. When you’re taken to Stevens, tell him that you are the young man recommended by Mr. Churchill. He will put you to work straightaway.”
“I will, sir,” Ned said, jumping out. “And don’t worry about me,” he added with a brash grin. “Compared to prying brasses off church walls, this should be easy.”
That brought a smile to Charles’s lips, and he was still smiling as he put the Panhard in gear and drove off down the lane, leaving Ned to come along behind him. But the smile had faded by the time he drove across the Grand Bridge toward the Column of Victory, parked the motor car, and stood, surveying the scene.
It was getting on to five in the afternoon, and threatening clouds were piling up in the western sky. There was no breeze, and the lake was quiet, its placid surface disturbed only by several flocks of ducks and geese, a half-dozen elegant white swans, and an old man in a yellow boat, rowing in the direction of the Fishery Cottage at the north end of the lake. Charles knew he was going to be late to tea, but it could not be helped, for he could not put off having a look at Rosamund’s Well any longer.
As an afterthought, he opened a compartment in the side of his motorcar and took out his camera bag and a small wooden box-a field collection kit he used when he was pursuing his natural history researches. It contained small glass vials, muslin bags, and celluloid envelopes, all for collecting specimens, as well as a hand lens, tweezers, needles, and a penknife. Carrying his gear, he walked down the slanting hill and along the lake shore,
