Joan Smith (2 page)

“You have to carry your hero for a mile over the wildest terrain in all of England. Devon, or possibly Cornwall. I have not quite settled on the locale. Which do you think more frightening, moors or rocks?”

“Moors. How much does my hero weigh?” I asked, wondering if this too must be put to the test.

“Sixteen stone. One hundred and sixty-eight pounds.”

“Who is the hero in real life?” I asked with some interest.

“Jeremy Welles, our local solicitor. He is a handsome fellow. I never
could
understand why he married that ugly patch of a wife, but he is to be a bachelor in our book, of course. He weighs sixteen stone; I asked him, in an innocent roundabout way so he would not know why I wished to know. If you can carry him across the meadow, I shall know it is all right, and if you cannot, then the hero must lose a good deal of weight while he is in prison. We can put the weight back on him before the book’s end. I would not want Gloria to be marrying a scarecrow in the last chapter.”

“I wager Gloria would not like it either.”

“I wonder if I should change Gloria’s hair color,” was my Aunt’s next irrelevant remark, while I wondered what was to be the pretext for me to carry Mr. Welles across a meadow. She was smiling fondly on my lionish locks. “I had her a blond-haired beauty, but as she is to be rather more vital than I originally intended, perhaps I shall brighten up her hair. And give her those strange yellow eyes you have got. Yes, I think Gloria may sparkle a little more than Debora.”

Debora was the young lady in search of the unknown, you will recall. It would not be at all difficult to sparkle more than that watering pot. I encouraged this scheme strongly. “Oh, but I do not want her brassy, Valerie,” she declared, when I mentioned that more backbone would not go amiss. “She must rely on FitzClement to rescue her in the end. It would not be at all the thing for her to rescue herself. There would be no romance in
that.”

I soon understood, from further discussion, that this Amazonian heroine was to decline into a rasher of vapors in the end, like Debora, which I thought a great pity. Already I had managed to change her hair and eyes, and had some hazy intention of doing a similar switch on her personality before the book was all written. For the meanwhile, there was a little zest added to the visit in having to perform these feats of strength and daring. I am not a lioness for nothing. If I cannot clamber up a trellis, pull open a window, stab a victim, and haul a sixteen-stone carcass across the moors, I will be much surprised. I confess the jumping of the tollbooth raises an unworthy premonition of a vapor. We shall see.

There is French blood from the days of the Normans in the Sinclair family. The name of the estate, Troy Fenners, is a corruption of
Trois Fenêtres,
which is presumably the number of windows in the original home. There are considerably more than that in the present building. I counted eighteen on the facade alone as we drove up to it.

But before we get through the park, let me say that the setting was ideally gothic. Mrs. Radcliffe might well have been describing the place in any of her gloomy word pictures. There were ancient oaks and elms to distribute the requisite tenebrous shadows, with a stand of willows to droop forlornly behind the house. The dark yews in front of the windows would do a good job of stealing light within, and the upper windows were being invaded by ivy to prevent a surfeit of daylight.

The soaring lancet windows, the battlements, gargoyles, finials, the aging stone, the general spooky atmosphere were very evident in daylight. When evening shadows stretched, the place would be enough to frighten a witch. The whole of it was blasted with antiquity.

Living in this house might well have incited my aunt to write her novels. It lacked only an uninhabited wing with mysteriously locked doors containing deep, dark secrets to be a perfect model of a haunted castle.

“Uninhabited wing? Why, no, I live in the whole place. There are no locked doors, but only a secret passage, and of course the oubliette in the cellar.”

“You mean—a dungeon?” I asked, enraptured,

“A horrid old place, full of mice and spiders, with irons and chains rusting in the walls. I would like to have it all cleaned up, made into something useful, but it seems a waste of good money.”

My aunt had plenty of good money, so the redoing of the oubliette must have been a passing whim, no more. Her staff, who lined up to welcome us, were distressingly modern and normal. There wasn’t a saturnine butler or a dour housekeeper in the lot. A squinting parlor maid was the closest we came to it, and she was not at all sneaky-looking, but only rather ugly. It was quite a disappointment.

The house was dark and gloomy, however, with a long-case clock that had a haunting way of wheezing, emitting quite a human sound before it struck the hour. I suspected that on a windy night the chimney would belch smoke and distort the wind to a nice eerie pitch. The stairway too creaked, and the ivy tapped mysteriously at my windowpane. The canopied bed was done up in funereally dark shades of green, while the clothespress was of the proper size to hide a body or two.

When I began putting my things away later, I discovered to my dismay that it held nothing but clothes hangers and two dry orange pomander balls, without a bit of scent left to them. They were as hard and brittle as porcelain. They rattled when shook, from the dried seeds within and the dried cloves outside. Soon the press contained my clothing too, not through my own efforts, but—joy of joys!—through the good offices of a servant assigned to my own particular service. It was the squinty-eyed girl who came tapping at my door, sent by Aunt Loo to tend me. I saw, all of a sudden, that the girl was not at all disfigured by her poor squinting eyes. If she proved a good worker, I would be finding her beautiful before too long. Her name, she told me, was Hester Pincombe, but she was commonly known as Pinny.

While Pinny performed for me those duties beneath a lioness, I went below to dine on a meal fit for my species. Aunt Loo’s cook did her proud; one did not eat at Troy Fenners—one dined. What a marvelous difference, and without Elleri and Marie there to count how many refills my plate and glass had too. I lost count of the latter myself, but I was by no means staggering when we retired to the paneled saloon. Aunt Loo, eager to get to her work, reverted to the matter of killing off our villain.

“I
do
like the notion of a dagger, dripping with blood, and perhaps dropping a few spots on your white gown, Gloria,” she began. So wrapped up was she in her melodrama that she assigned to me the heroine’s name. ‘‘When you climb up the gatehouse trellis for me, you must experiment and find the most convenient way of holding the dagger. The teeth would do, or stuck into your waistband, which means you must wear a suit, for these new empress gowns are not good for concealing or carrying a weapon at all.”

“The teeth, definitely, which means it must not be too large a dagger,” I advised.

“I have just the thing. I’ll get it and let you try if you can hold it in your mouth. Mrs. Brunton’s Laura was not at all credible in her adventures. I don’t mean Gloria to make such a cake of herself.”

I sat contemplating what would be a suitable gown for murder while she ran off to find the weapon. When she returned, she had not only a pretty bone-handled knife with a carved blade in one hand, but a bulky sheepdog of a man at her side, “This is Doctor Hill, Valerie. You have heard me speak of Walter. And this is my niece, Valerie Ford, Walter. She has agreed to come home with me and try out those feats you claimed to be impossible for a mere lady.”

“Miss Ford, a pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand as though I were a gentleman. I like shaking hands, much prefer it to the simpering curtsey usually practiced by my sex. You can tell something about a person by the grip of his hand. Dr. Hill had a firm, indeed a crushing, grip. But then he was a big man. I had to look
up
to him.

His general appearance was that of a country squire. There was no elegance at all in the man. His grizzled hair had been allowed to grow to a countrified length without aid of professional barbering. His outfit for an evening call was not the sort seen in finer homes, but a slightly spotted brown afternoon jacket and faun trousers, with dusty Hessians on his feet. He looked like someone’s father.

“Very happy to make your acquaintance, Dr. Hill. I would not have taken you for a medical man,” I added, for something to say.

“Just what I always tell him,” Aunt Loo laughed. “But he is one of the best. He had a very fashionable Harley Street practice before he retired here to Hampshire.”

“I could only tolerate London for a decade,” he confided. “Perhaps it was the address did me in. I ended up prescribing hartshorn and laudanum for bored ladies, so decided to gather up what few resources I had and return to the country to practice
real
medicine.”

“He means prescribe hartshorn and laudanum for
me,”
Loo translated. “I have a touch of rheumatism and a twinge of the migraine and insomnia from time to time. Not enough of anything to be interesting, but my maladies keep me amused.”

“You look too healthy ever to require my services,” the doctor said to me as he passed to reach the sofa. It was his professional way of mentioning he had noticed I was a little larger than most females.

“In the normal way, I don’t see a doctor for years at a time, but the activities my aunt has planned for me may provide you a patient,” I told him.

“I do not suggest jumping the tollbooth,” he said bluntly. “As for the rest of it, I come to see Lady Sinclair has found just what she requires—a lady to do the impossible.”

The discussion that ensued showed me Dr. Hill was a bosom bow of my aunt. He was privy to not only her alias of Mrs. Beaton, but to all the details of the forthcoming
Tenebrous Shadows.
He was even slipping into my aunt’s habit of calling me Gloria at one point in the discussion. He was a local man, who had kept his cottage in the neighborhood for a holiday retreat while practicing medicine in London. His association with the family went back into history and continued up to the present. He was aware of certain aspects of her domestic arrangements that she had failed to mention to me.

“Is Pierre not back yet?” he asked, after a half hour’s talk.

“Who is Pierre?” I asked.

“Why, he is my late husband’s cousin, my dear,” she told me. “He has been staying with me these six months. Pierre St. Clair, from the French side of the family. He was smuggled out of Paris as a very infant during the reign of terror, and raised on a farm in Normandy. He was schooled in a Jesuit seminary and sent to England last year to wait out this horrid business of Napoleon. When he goes back, he will be a
comte
or something of the sort, but meanwhile he calls himself plain Monsieur Pierre St. Clair. He is a pretty boy; he will be some company for you while I am writing during the day. I write in the morning while I am fresh. I used to lie in bed till noon, but Walter says this is much healthier for me, to be bent over a desk.”

“What I said, Miss Ford, is that it is good for your aunt to have a hobby, an interest in life. Well, the money does not go amiss either, for that matter.”

My surprised stare was due to a hint that money was required in this house of opulence. The doctor was sharp enough to notice it at once. “We can all use a little spare cash,” he added, then hastened on to change the subject. “So Mr. Sinclair has taken Pierre to Wight. He will like that. It will be a nice trip for the boy.”

“You never mentioned a word about Pierre St. Clair to us at home, Auntie,” I said.

“I was afraid your mama would dislike your coming when I had a young fellow staying here at the house. She is a trifle old-fashioned in her ways, and Pierre is French, to make it all the worse. He has found an English strain in his background now and insists he is English, but he is very French, and I did not like to mention him to your mama. He slipped my mind once we got back home and discussing my book. The other fellow we are speaking of is Welland Sinclair, the fellow you are going to murder for me.”

Dr.  Hill smiled at her strange way of speaking. “Mr. Sinclair is staying at the gatehouse, then,” I mentioned, knowing my victim’s lair by this time. “Is he also a cousin of your late husband?”

“Yes, some relation. He only came a month ago. He lives in Hereford, stays right at Tanglewood with Lord St. Regis. St. Regis wrote asking me if I had a private, quiet spot he could put up in. He is a scholar, Valerie, writing up a treatise on ghosts.”

A surprised laugh escaped my lips, at the incongruity of a scholarly ghost treatise. “On the occurrence of ghosts in English literature over the centuries,” Dr. Hill explained.

“Like Hamlet’s father,” I said, understanding the subject properly now.

“Exactly. Also in
Macbeth,
and something crops up in
Julius Caesar.
Shakespeare trafficked a good deal in ghosts. Young Sinclair has a thick volume of research he is working on. I think the lad works too hard. I am worried about his eyes. He won’t let me look at them, though he complains often enough.”

“Mr. Sinclair has to wear green glasses,” Loo said. “I don’t think it is good for him to do so much close work as he does. It would be a pity to lose them—his eyes I mean. I am losing the sight of
my
eyes. I can no longer thread a needle to save my life. It makes me
furious.
And I am going deaf too, or else the whole world has taken to whispering. Except for Walter. He always shouts up good and loud for me.”

“I shall prescribe you a tonic, my dear Louise. What you suffer from is not blindness and deafness, but only a fit of pique that you are no longer young.”

“Prescribe me a new pair of legs and set of teeth while you are about it,” she begged. “My body is worn out, plain falling apart. I wish I could get hold of a new one and start over again, with my brain intact. Do you think there is anything in this reincarnation, Walter?”