For the Good of the State

But, for this moment, Panin would have to wait!

‘The house—?’ She tried to take another look at his picture, but it didn’t seem to do her any good. ‘Or the barn?’ She abandoned his identification in favour of the barn. ‘David loves the barn—he says there’s nothing like it in the whole of Southern England.’ She favoured him with another loving smile. ‘You know about architecture, do you, Sir Thomas? But, of course, you must do, mustn’t you—in order not to understand it, I mean?’

He had to say something intelligent now, for God’s sake! ‘All that fine ashlar… better than the house itself!’ That was a fact, anyway: the porch in which Mrs Audley was standing had been added at a later date, but there was nothing unusual about that. But such stonework as he could see behind the wisteria which covered the house was far rougher than that of the barn. ‘But it’s that archway to the barn I really can’t understand, Mrs Audley.’

As he gestured towards the barn doors, one of them quivered, and then began to swing outwards towards them.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘The archway—of course!’ Mrs Audley gave him another tick, quite oblivious of the opening doors. “That’s what all the experts notice first—the man from Country Life was very taken with it, last year —particularly with the defaced stones on each side, where the coats-of-arms have been cut away. He thought that might have been done not long after the battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485.‘

She blinked at him, with sudden embarrassment, as though aware just too late that she had insulted him by unnecessarily adding the date to the battle. ’Henry Tudor gave the Honour of Horley to the Wilmots, after the Stokeseys had been killed at Bosworth. And the Wilmots had always hated the Stokeseys—at least, since Barnet and Tewkesbury.‘ This time she didn’t supply the date, but offered him the names of another two battles from the Wars of the Roses with another blink, as though they were two recent parliamentary by-elections.

‘Is that so?’ Tom was torn between the barn doors, which were now just outside his range of vision, and the dates of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in a civil war which had never particularly interested him, because it had not been distinguished by any good sieges. But it wouldn’t do to disappoint her—

Damn! he couldn’t resist those barn doors any more (which had to be not later than mid-fifteenth century now, and were even more inexplicable)—

The same small boy was poking his head out of the gap between the heavy doors, only now he could see that little face more clearly: enormous horn-rimmed spectacles, metal-braced teeth, and head encased in its baseball cap, which bore the legend ‘ Forget—

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Hell’, superimposed on the red-white-and-blue starred flag of the Confederate States of America; and, as he observed the tiny apparition, it succeeded in squeezing itself through the gap only to trip on its own feet, to sprawl in the gravel.

Barnet… and bloody Tewkesbury — ?

‘What is it, darling?’ Mrs Audley addressed her son, at her feet, as he searched blindly for his spectacles, which had jumped off his little nose, to fall just short of Tom’s feet.

‘Here—’ Tom bent to retrieve the spectacles, but failed to complete his sentence as he observed the long blonde plait which had fallen out of the baseball cap. Instead, he thought Christ! I’m slipping! I can’t tell the little girls from the little boys now!

‘Thank you.’ Little Miss Audley pushed her spectacles back on to her face quickly, and gave Tom half-a-second’s half-blind acknowledgement before offering her mother another pair of spectacles, which she had been carrying in her hand. ‘Your glasses, Mummy.’

‘What, darling?’ Mrs Audley gazed vaguely at her daughter for another half-second, and then accepted what was being offered to her. ‘Oh—thank you, Cathy dear!’

Miss Audley turned back to Tom. ‘Thank you.’

‘Not at all.’ Tom searched for something to say. She might be anything from eleven to fourteen, but now that they were both wearing spectacles each was a dead ringer for the other, straight up-and-down and flat as a board, and blonde, yet wholly feminine with it: how could he have failed to see! ‘Miss Audley —?’

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘My daughter, Sir Thomas,’ answered Mrs Audley. ‘Cathy.’ She nodded at the child. ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, Cathy.’

Cathy Audley gave Tom a fearsomely precocious doubting frown, as baffled as any of her elders and betters, as she offered him her hand.

Smart girl, thought Tom. ‘Miss Audley.’ But to hell with her.

‘Your husband is expecting me, Mrs Audley, I believe?’

After having re-examined his identification through her thick-lensed spectacles, Mrs Audley looked at him properly at last. ‘Yes, Sir Thomas… Cathy, go and tell your father that Sir Thomas has arrived.’

‘Yes, Mother.’ Cathy focused properly on him again also, but again registered doubt. ‘Sir Thomas… Ark-Arken-?’ She began to retreat backwards towards the gap in the barn doors. ‘Arken-what?’

‘ Shaw,’ completed Tom. ‘Like in “certain”.’

She grinned at him as she slid into the gap. ‘Or “George Bernard”?

Or “Tripoli”?’

Tom frowned. Tripoli—! But by then she had vanished again.

‘I’m sorry, Sir Thomas,’ said Mrs Audley, shaking her head.

‘Sometimes she’s grown up. But sometimes she says things no one but her father understands—I’m sorry!’

‘Don’t be.’ Tripoli? wondered Tom. ‘She’s delightful, Mrs Audley

—like your house.’ Tripoli? he thought again. Exactly like the house! ‘But what did she mean by “Tripoli”?’

She shook her head again. ‘Heaven only knows! I certainly don’t!’