The Old Vengeful

'A— what?' Cathy regarded him incredulously.

'I haven't had my lunch, little girl,' Aske sighed. 'And I haven't had my tea, either.'

Cathy wilted slightly at little girl.

'You don't happen to have a thistle, by any chance?' inquired Aske, before Elizabeth could intervene.

'Cathy—'

'Would you like a glass of sherry, Mr Aske?' said Cathy icily.

This time it was Aske who wilted.

'It's all right, Cathy,' said Elizabeth. 'We've just come back from France, you see.'

'Or, to be exact, we've been thrown out—on our ears ... or maybe on some other part of our anatomy, eh?' Aske gave Elizabeth a rueful half-grin, ignoring Cathy Audley.

'Oh!' Cathy's ears pricked, and she turned to Elizabeth. 'Is that persona non grata? Daddy explained that to me just recently—'grata' agreeing with 'persona', he said.' She came back to Aske. 'Which means you've been caught red-handed, he said.'

Aske's mouth opened wordlessly.

'What did they catch you doing? Or shouldn't I ask?' Cathy over-fed his confusion before turning again to Elizabeth. 'Of course—Daddy was going to France, wasn't he! I even gave him some money to buy that smelly after-shave for Uncle dummy3

Jack, for Christmas— Paco—Paco—Paco . . . Paco—did they catch you doing something too, Elizabeth?'

'They didn't catch us doing anything, really,' said Elizabeth.

'Ah—now that is strictly true.' Aske had recovered his cool.

'But they did catch us doing nothing, and sometimes that's just as bad as being caught doing something.'

Cathy nodded seriously. 'That's like at school: if they ask you what you're doing, and you say 'nothing' they never believe you, they think you're doing something bad. Poor you!' She nodded again, sympathetically this time, then frowned suddenly. 'But where's Paul? I bet they didn't catch him!'

So Paul had made another conquest. But instinctively Elizabeth decided to leave his reputation intact.

'No, they didn't catch him, Cathy.' Anyway, there was an element of truth in that: Paul had always been way ahead of them in expecting the worst. 'He's gone to London.' Besides, there was another and more pressing matter. 'Hadn't we better go and meet the old gentleman?'

'Yes—' Cathy's answer was cut off by a sudden bleeping, muted but insistent, which seemed to come from inside her

'— oops! That means Mummy's puddings have to come out of the Aga!' She produced a slim pocket calculator from her smock. 'I got this for my birthday—it's jolly useful, because it reminds me of things . . . He's in the library, Elizabeth—just down the end of the passage there. Can you find your way while I take the puddings out of the oven?' She started to dummy3

turn away.

'What old gentleman?' Aske called after her.

'The one that knows all about Elizabeth's ship, Daddy says—

Daddy asked him to come, he says—' Cathy disappeared through a door in what was presumably the puddings'

direction.

Aske looked at Elizabeth. 'A disconcertingly precocious child, as well as a typical only child— persona non grata indeed!'

'She's probably learning Latin, that's all,' said Elizabeth defensively.

'A typical Audley child, more like. 'Grata' may agree with

'persona', but she doesn't agree with me, Miss Loftus. And who is this old gentleman who knows all about your ship?'

'I don't know—except that he has hair coming out of his ears and is apparently very polite.'

'Ah! Now that is a positive identification on both counts, if ever I heard one!' Aske perked up. 'Let us go and meet the great Professor Basil Wilson Wilder, Miss Loftus—down the passage, was it?'

Elizabeth followed him into the green-shaded gloom of the passage, the windows of which were half-obscured by the wisteria on the front of the house. There was no help for it, but she felt daunted by the prospect ahead, not so much because two elderly professors in one day were too many, as by the memory of Father's enraged correspondence with this dummy3

same Professor Wilder, both in public and in private, over the Vengeful renaming. The two men had never been friends aftgr an earlier Wilder review of From Trafalgar to Navarino, which had mildly disagreed with Father's assessment of Collingwood. But after the Vengeful letters even the mention of the Professor's name had been taboo.

Aske held the door open for her, courteous as ever.

It really was a library, not merely a room with books in it: it was as totally book-lined as the ante-rooms in Professor Belperron's apartment, except that the book-spines were much more colourful, and the room itself was beautiful, with its oak-beamed ceiling and intricately geometric Persian carpet on an unpolished stone-flagged floor,