A Change of Heir (13 page)

‘It carries an element of surprise, sir, I don’t doubt. But I understand that Miss Bostock was some way up in her branch of the constabulary. And she is, of course, a gentlewoman, although in reduced circumstances. Mrs Minton could not otherwise be expected to–’

‘Yes, of course. But what reduced the woman’s circumstances, if she was doing well as a female dick?’

‘It is not for me to gossip, sir.’

‘Oh, rot, Boulter.’

‘Well, sir, I admit that your position has become one in which you are entitled to any information which may affect the future good name of the family.’

‘That’s right, Boulter. The Comberford-Mintons-Mintons, and all that.’

‘Precisely, sir.’ Boulter gave Gadberry another odd look. ‘It is my impression, then, that Miss Bostock left the Force under a cloud.’

‘I’ll bet she did.’

‘I imagine it to have been a matter, sir, of injudicious collaboration in some enterprise not wholly without a criminal aspect. It is curious that Mrs Minton should then have taken her into employment. But Mrs Minton is a remarkable woman, a very remarkable woman, indeed. I am sure you will agree with me.’

‘Yes, Boulter, of course. So Miss Bostock was found out?’

‘Just that, sir. It is the common fate of fraud and imposition, one is thankful to say. As the proverb has it, the mills of the law grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.’

‘Isn’t it the mills of God?’

‘It is precisely the same thing, sir, if we are right-thinking people. But if I may make the suggestion, it would be reasonable that we should severally retire.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Gadberry found that he was speaking out of a kind of daze. This last information about Miss Bostock was striking him as quite disproportionally ominous. ‘But would you leave a message, Boulter, for whichever of the maids is about first? I’d like to be called early. I have…well, I have rather a lot of work to get through.’

‘Quite so, sir.’ Boulter’s tone indicated a respectful acknowledgement of the burdens that must now fall on the heir of Bruton. About his glance, however, there was still something that was distinctly uncomfortable. ‘I shall certainly see to it. Good night.’

It was long before Gadberry went to sleep that night. But as his thoughts were tedious and unprofitable to himself as they occurred, it is not likely that they would interest others. He did eventually pass into slumber – yet only to suffer – seemingly again and again, with no more than minor modifications – a dream by which he had not been troubled since his early days at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He was on-stage, and he kept drying up. His lines just wouldn’t come to him; he missed cue after cue; the prompter whispered to him in vain; his fellow actors performed prodigies of improvisation on his behalf, inventing whole loops of dialogue that should have enabled him to collect his scattered wits and take up the thread again. Yet it was all to no purpose. He had an uncertain notion that what he was involved in was a play of Shakespeare’s, but all that would come into his head was Shakespeare’s own words for his situation:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,

Who with his fear is put beside his part…

That was exactly it, and there he was in the middle of some incomprehensible action, which went on and on forever, with the curtain obstinately refusing to come down on it.

But suddenly the curtain
did
come down. Or rather it had become a different sort of curtain, and something quite familiar was happening to it. It was his bedroom curtain; a housemaid was drawing it back upon a wintry scene; the tray with his early-morning tea was already standing by his bedside.

Gadberry glanced at his watch, and saw that it was just seven o’clock. Boulter had taken him at his word. Then the housemaid turned round, and he saw that she was very young, very pretty, and at the same time somebody of so lowly a station on the Bruton domestic staff that he had never seen her before. Presumably she had to get up before anybody else. Her first job was probably to take tea to Boulter, just as she had now brought tea to him.

Making for the door, the young person quite distinguishably moderated her pace. Cautiously – but again
quite
distinguishably – she smiled at Gadberry. She was bright-eyed with the consciousness that here was a tremendous frolic. She was all for being grabbed, kissed, and for some moments tumbled more or less innocently on the bed before asserting her virginal status and escaping amid giggles from the room. Gadberry was mortified to find that he took no interest whatever in this wholesome proposal. He just hadn’t the heart for it. Yet only the evening before he had been able to indulge at least in a little harmless bath-time fantasy of this sort. Now he was only able to say ‘Thank you’ in an elderly sort of way and watch this delightful girl depart disappointed. It just showed how his darkening prospect was getting him down.

He drank his tea unnoticingly – although this matutinal amenity, being a service unprovided by Mrs Lapin, had been pleasing him a good deal.

Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part, and I am out,

Even to a full disgrace…

There, once more, was the tiresome Bard running obstinately in his head. But his own business was just to stop being an actor at all – or rather to get back to being one, however unsuccessful and unemployed, in a prosaic and ordinary sense. Only the other day he had read in some column of theatrical gossip in a newspaper that the proposal to take
The Rubbish Dump
to Moscow was believed to have been advanced a further stage. This information had disturbed him; had, indeed, filled him with a very uncomfortable sort of nostalgia. If he hadn’t been the prime occasion of that sombre masterpiece’s success he had at least received a good deal of favourable notice in it. There was a high probability that if it was really being cast for a foreign tour somebody much more reputable than Mr Norval Falsetto was trying to contact him now. And he had vanished! He had walked out of Mrs Lapin’s; he had walked through two hotels; and since then he had never walked again. Gadberry finished his tea, got out of bed, crossed the chilly room, and stared out gloomily over obliterating snows.

Just at the moment – it occurred to him – he couldn’t leave Bruton Abbey without leaving an actual physical trail behind him. Miss Bostock would be after him in no time. So, doubtless, would the thwarted and enraged Hon. Alethea, with whole leashes of bloodhounds at her command. Or the Hon. Anthea would send out her St Bernards, bearing little kegs of brandy by which he would be seduced and stupefied. Or Boulter – Gadberry checked himself in this idiotic reverie. Of course it didn’t matter two hoots of the Bruton owls what tracks littered the snow. He wasn’t in a murder story. Or he wasn’t in a murder story
yet
.

He shaved hastily, wondering what had put this last macabre consideration in his mind. It was something that had been said by Miss Bostock, although he couldn’t remember just what. Well, he had seen that horrible woman for the last time. Because he
was
bolting. That could be the only explanation of his having had himself called at this early hour. However persuasively Miss Bostock had asserted that he
couldn’t
get away; that, as soon as he was unmasked as an impostor, the police would run him down; that he had to stay and play the game out – and more or less as her creature, at that: whatever force there was in all this, he now knew he was going to make a run for it. He was going to be on an express train for the south before the household was tackling its breakfast. He was going to be on Mrs Lapin’s doorstep as George Gadberry by the time –

Gadberry broke off in the act of reaching for a suitcase. He mustn’t be precipitate. For instance, his position
vis-à-vis
the fiendish Bostock required thinking out. Hadn’t there been an element of bluff in her attitude the night before? When he did bolt, would she really set the police on him as an impostor? She’d have nothing to gain by doing so, since as an instrument of getting her claws on the Minton millions he would have become totally written off. And, again, if Boulter’s account of her past was true, the police mightn’t think highly of her information or assistance. Would she not be inclined simply to call it a day, and sit back on her present employment until some other opportunity of illicit enrichment presented itself?

If this was a correct reading of the situation then he could revert to his former plan. He must contrive to avoid anything in the nature of pursuit or inquiry by taking care to leave Bruton still as the authentic Nicholas Comberford – and as a Nicholas Comberford who had quite outrageously scorned the benefits proposed to be conferred on him. That this would be hard cheese on Aunt Prudence no longer worried him, for his sentiments towards her didn’t now get much beyond the plain fact that he disliked her very much. And if he wanted to give offence in a big way, so that his existence would indeed be expunged from the annals of Bruton forever, wasn’t the forthcoming grand luncheon party for the Shilbottles a perfect occasion for it?

Rather to his surprise, Gadberry was suddenly aware of a broadly grinning image of himself staring out of the shaving-mirror. It wasn’t a beautiful grin – but then beautiful thoughts weren’t occasioning it. Perhaps because he had been driven back for so long into a kind of defensive gloom, he found his mind cheerfully rioting in outrage. It was quite wrong to be envisaging with a fiendish glee sundry ways of horrifying Lord and Lady Arthur Shilbottle and their well-built daughters. But it was just this that he continued to do as he dressed. He wouldn’t go out with a whimper. He’d go out with a bang.

This proposal (so shocking that the reader ought to be told at once that it was never to fulfil itself) now made Gadberry restless. He had got up at this early hour to no purpose, since there would be plenty of time to pack a bag before the luncheon party. Being thus at a loose end, it suddenly came into his urban mind that it would be rather fun to go out and fool around in the snow. He’d dress himself suitably in knickerbockers, leggings, his deerstalker hat and the like (for he had by now acquired most of the props and costumes of a country gentleman) and walk down to the village and back before breakfast. It might be useful to look at the bus timetable outside the post office. Yes, he’d do that.

Getting out of Bruton Abbey required a certain perseverance and a good memory. After finding the cloisters one had to go through the abbot’s arch, the scriptorium, the monks’ arch, the strangers’ hall and the locutory – by which time one was within sight of the gatehouse. Gadberry achieved all this and finally came to what might quite simply be called the front door. Its large brass handle was being polished by the same young person with whom he had so lately had that abortive encounter in his bedroom. Planning the discomfiture of the Shilbottles had caused his spirits to rise enormously, so this second chance was providential. He grabbed the girl, kissed her handsomely, patted her affectionately on the behind, gave her a straight and honestly admiring look, laughed at her, let her laugh at him, and passed into the open air whistling. He felt happier than he had done for a long time.

It wasn’t as cold as he’d expected, and he remembered that one often got a rise in temperature after a heavy fall of snow. He pottered contentedly down the drive, projecting himself for the last time into the role of the young squire, and doing the proper rural things as he went along. He kept himself on the line of the drive without difficulty. The tracks of the Pollocks’ car and of Grimble’s fly had been almost wiped out by a further fall in the night, but as the drive ran between tremendous beech trees it wasn’t possible to go astray. On the lane beyond it was different, but of course it didn’t at all matter if he left it; even if he plunged into a deep drift it wasn’t likely that he would be struck insensible and perish.

The snow was criss-crossed with tracks of every sort, except that none of them save his own was human. He tried interpreting them as he went along. He had picked up quite a lot of information on such things, partly from the keepers and shepherds and partly from Captain Fortescue; and he found himself thinking that he would be quite sorry not to pick up more. The effect as of a cloven hoof, for example, didn’t, as some country-folk liked to believe, proceed from the passing of the Devil himself; it had simply been made by a hare moving fast. And there, going to and fro restlessly along the line of a half-buried hedge, was the track of a fox. But why should it do a kind of nocturnal sentry-go in that fashion? He didn’t know. He must ask Fortescue. He had an appointment, he remembered, with Fortescue later that morning. There wouldn’t now be much point in keeping it. Perhaps he would, all the same. Fortescue was quite a decent chap; it would be civil in a sense to say goodbye to him, even if it had better be done in not too explicit a manner.

But at the moment he would just drop down into the village of Bruton and then turn back. He was still cheerful, and he applied himself in that spirit to thinking about breakfast. Breakfasts at the Abbey were excellent. After them, he wasn’t very clear how he would feel about Mrs Lapin’s curiously spurious porridge. But better spurious porridge than a spurious personality, he told himself virtuously. He was whistling again – this time it was a hymn tune – as he walked past the church.

So far Gadberry’s walk had been through solitude. He hadn’t caught sight of another human being, and even the dumb creatures that had left all those tracks in the snow had retired from the scene for the day. There was nothing in sight except the snow itself, and a few drystone dykes half buried in it, with here and there a thorn tree looking as if it had strayed in from a dismal poem of the Romantic period. For some time, too, there hadn’t been a sound; silent was the flock in woolly fold, and no audible orisons came from the Reverend Mr Grimble as Gadberry rounded the side of the vicarage. But now this chilly stillness was suddenly shattered by first the throb and then the roar of a fast-moving motorcar. In another moment the vehicle – just to be glimpsed as of a rakishly sporting variety, had swung in from the crossroads at the farther end of the village, and then taken another turn which caused it to disappear among the straggling outbuildings of Mr Grimble’s dwelling.