Puzzle of the Silver Persian (23 page)

There was no bell and no knocker. She beat with the handle of her umbrella until Treves, the red-faced butler, appeared.

He took one look. “This is not a visiting day,” he said shortly. “Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday only…”

He prepared to close the door, but Miss Hildegarde Withers put her foot in it. “I don’t care what day it is,” she told him. “Take my name to your mistress. Say that Miss Withers is here.”

He stood back, murmuring polite apologies, and she entered the hall. She shivered—not because the place, like all English homes, was several degrees colder than a tomb, but because there was an unmistakable atmosphere, an aura, so to speak, of things ancient and done and forgotten. It was the feeling, she thought, that she might have received at Stonehenge on a March day.

The warmth of the Honorable Emily’s greeting did much to dispel her first impression. “Good of you to come,” said the Englishwoman. “And damned silly of me to ask you. I mean—to think it necessary, you understand. I’m not the nervous type, usually, but that message rather gave me the muley-grubs for a time.”

“Oh, yes, the message,” said Miss Withers. “I’d like to see it.”

“Afraid you mayn’t,” said the Honorable Emily. “I sent it off to Scotland Yard when I telegraphed you. But there was nothing much to see. Just a letter with a black border marked on it. Came yesterday afternoon, with the late mail. Postmarked London—and a very cruel and unkind message. Something about what a horrible laugh I have, and how the writer hoped I would laugh through hell… you can imagine.”

“I can indeed,” said Miss Withers dryly. “Let me see—yesterday, if I am not mistaken, was Saturday, the seventh of October. I don’t suppose that you happened to notice the postmark date on that letter?”

“I noticed it most particularly,” the Honorable Emily assured her. “It was dated two days after we left London to come down here—the fifth, to be exact. In case it makes any difference.”

It made a tremendous amount of difference to Miss Withers, but she nodded slowly. “Then it must have arrived about the same time you received my letter?”

“Yours came in the morning mail, the black-bordered one in the afternoon,” she was told. “But don’t let’s talk about it any more now. We have lunch in about an hour. Treves will show you to your room…”

Miss Withers noticed that her hostess was clad in a lounging robe which appeared to have been hastily slipped on. “Never mind about me,” she said. “Let your man take my bag upstairs, and I’ll wander around and absorb the atmosphere of your charming old place while you dress. After lunch will be time enough to talk about things.”

“Righto.” The Honorable Emily gestured widely. “Make yourself at home, my dear. It’s an old place, and the conveniences aren’t what they might be, but I love it. My family has owned Dinsul for heaven knows how many years.”

She dashed off, and, handing her bag to Treves, Miss Withers walked slowly down the great hall.

Room after room opened off it, each furnished with ancient and blackened pieces of oak and decorated with family portraits which stared down in unison and with a dignified disapproval upon the Yankee school teacher.

“Never mind,” she told herself after a time. “You have just as many ancestors as anybody else, and what’s more, I’ll wager that they were a more prepossessing lot than these besotted Cavaliers.”

She came past window after window, each of which looked out upon the sea. By craning her neck she could see the almost perpendicular cliffs beneath, and here and there a few trees clinging precariously to the slope, still green in this southerly latitude.

Then, at the end of the hall, she entered through wide double doors into what she knew must be a banquet hall. A refectory table at least thirty feet in length ran down the center. At one end was a raised balcony, doubtless for musicians, and around the walls was a painted hunting scene, still bright and cheerful, in which mounted lords and ladies chased deer, boar, stag, fox, rabbit, badger, and heaven knew what else, in a bewildering complexity.

Beneath the mural painting was a modest placard—“Please do not add your initials to the wall decorations”—which puzzled her a good deal.

She started suddenly as a cheerful young voice spoke up behind her. “Jolly, eh what?”

It was Leslie Reverson, in plus-fours. “Aunt said you were here,” he went on. “Shall I escort you round?”

She could only say yes. “What a delightful old place,” she told him.

“Think so? Seems a bit grim to me. I sometimes shiver at the thought of spending the rest of my life here, but you know the Honorable Emily. She’s all for the moated grange stuff, you know. And while I’m a Pendavid only on the distaff side, I’m the heir, you know.”

He led the way, chatting merrily, back down the hall, and then to a wide stone staircase. Halfway up he paused at a window and pointed upwards and out.

“St. Augustine’s Chair,” he informed her. “The legend is that the man or girl who sits there first will be top-dog in their married life.”

Miss Withers peered out and saw a niche in the granite cliff at the end of a narrow and steep pathway. “He’d deserve to be,” she commented. “If he lived.”

Leslie laughed. “Right you are. It is a giddy thing, isn’t it? That’s why we tell the tourists that the famous chair is a crotch in the stone down by the pier. They fight to sit in it, and go away as happy as if they’d found the real one.”

“Tourists?”
said Miss Withers.

“Oh, didn’t you know? Only way we can keep the old place going, you know. Three days a week we have open house, and the family retires into seclusion while the public tramps through—at half a crown a head.”

“I see,” said Miss Withers.

“Of course, there’s been a lot of remodeling done in the place,” Leslie went on. “We’re coming into what used to be the chapel of the old castle. It was a monastery after the kings of Cornwall died out, you know. Aunt had it rebuilt into her private apartment, some years back. But she couldn’t make it livable.”

Miss Withers shared his viewpoint, but for different reasons. This hulk of stone was not livable simply because it had been lived in too long.

Leslie led her aside, down a smaller hall. “This wing opens off the hall where your room is—and mine and all the guest rooms, for that matter. Aunt has it for her very own, you know. That’s the door of her sitting room, and there’s her bedroom.” He pointed to a door just beyond. “That little room was my own discovery,” he announced proudly. “When I came home from school I was full of romance and all that sort of rot. Hidden treasure and so forth. I paced off the hall and found that it was a good ten feet longer than the rooms opening off it. We had builders tear into the wall, and they found a secret room. It was all written up in
The Times
—the only occasion in my life when I got into the papers.”

Miss Withers admitted that she had not read of it. Leslie looked disappointed. “Oh, well, in the States, I suppose… but it was a great furor for a time, and it still brings the tourists. You see, the builders found a dried-up skeleton in the room, all covered with armor and gold lace and whatnot. There was an old story that in 14-something John of Pomeroy, a local baron, filched this place in the absence of Richard the First. When he heard that the King had returned to England, he knew that he’d be hanged for high treason, so he was supposed to have opened his veins and bled to death. Must have been true, for the armor and trappings bore the Pomeroy insignia. We gave the bones decent burial on the shore—but the real joke was discovering that Aunt had slept all her life next door to a walled-up skeleton in a secret room.”

“I can imagine how she felt,” Miss Withers told him.

“Of course. She was certainly delighted.”

“Delighted?”

“Yes, naturally. It’s hard enough to find a place to put bathrooms in a castle built with six-foot-thick walls, and here was one ready to hand.” He opened the door and displayed a neat and almost modern bath, complete even to a large gas heater near the tub. “Aunt does love to soak, you know.”

The door leading to the bedroom opened, and the Honorable Emily, neatly dressed in her characteristic baggy tweeds, appeared.

“Leslie, you may leave off the discussion of my personal habits and take our guest down to luncheon. And I suppose Treves is busy in the kitchen, so you’d better rap on Candida’s door.”

Candida seemed surprised and relieved to see the new member of the party.

They all of them went down together and, instead of losing themselves in the great dining hall, had a cosy and quite cheerful lunch in a little room which opened directly onto a balcony overlooking the sea.

Any misgivings Miss Withers might have had regarding ceremony and state were speedily dispelled. The butler served and waited.

“We have only Treves and his wife to cook,” the Honorable Emily informed her. “Women come up from the village once a week to clean, and we manage. Though it’s not easy in a place this size.”

Miss Withers agreed. “It’s because of the fact that we have almost no land tax to pay,” her hostess went on, “that we can keep Dinsul at all. At that, every shilling has to be saved to pay the death duties, you know. One of these days this place will come to Leslie, and I don’t want it to be sold to pay duties, like so many of our old homes in this country;”

“Now, Aunt!” said Leslie uncomfortably.

“Well, we must look ahead,” said the Honorable Emily. “One of these days my erratic heart will stop for good and all. I’ve known that for a long time. And a Pendavid belongs in Dinsul. I’m leaving it to you, but I’m going to make a change in my will so that in order to get anything you have to live here nine months of the year.”

The trend of the conversation was definitely gloomy, and Miss Withers aptly changed it by asking Candida how the golf game had come out.

“I’m afraid I was lucky,” said that young lady.

“She made a 76 to my 89,” Leslie cut in proudly. “And the Penzance course is no slouch, either.”

Candida gave him a motherly smiled. “It’s your wrist,” she pointed out. “You’re too nervous.”

The conversation lapsed, while Miss Withers picked at an excellent Cornish pasty composed of meat, onions, apples, potatoes, and she did not dare to guess what else.

Then Candida spoke. “You’re not down here for the trip,” she said. “We may as well break the ice. Do you think the police are any closer to an explanation of the things that happened on the boat and in London?”

“I do not,” said Miss Withers. “They’re trying the process of elimination.”

“What about yourself?” asked Leslie. “Getting warmer?”

“Do you know,” said Miss Withers solemnly, “I’ve made up my mind to one thing. The mystery has been enclosed by a great deal of fuss and feathers. But I think it is as solved as it ever needs to be. The murder cycle seems to be at an end, and those who have been killed seem very easily spared…”

Candida spoke quickly. “But Rosemary—?”

“Rosemary Fraser was not murdered,” said the school teacher shortly.

Candida gasped, and Leslie Reverson’s hand reached for hers under the table. He found it cold as ice and rubbed it.

“Cold hands—warm heart,” he whispered solemnly, and she laughed.

At that moment Treves arrived, announcing that Mr. Starling was on the telephone for his mistress. The Honorable Emily rose hastily.

“That Hammond child has no doubt set fire to Tenton Hall,” she observed.

But it was not as serious as all that. Starling’s voice was its usual crisp self.

“Excuse me, my lady, for troubling you. But there is a gentleman here in my library, a Mr. Hammond. He is very excited and seems a few sheets in the wind, if you’ll forgive the expression. He says he is the father of the pupil you brought me last Tuesday and insists upon taking him away. I’m not sure just what I ought to do.”

“Hm,” said the Honorable Emily. “I’m not sure either, Starling. What do you wish to do?”

“Give up the youngster and say, ‘Thank God!’” said Starling. “But his mother placed him in my care, through you. I understand the parents have separated, and I’m naturally hesitant—”

“I suggest that you go on hesitating,” said the Honorable Emily shortly. “Tell the man to come back tomorrow, and notify the mother.”

“Thank you, my lady. She’s in Paris, I understand. I’ll write her at once.” He rang off, and the Honorable Emily returned to her guests. “I can’t imagine what it means,” she said.

Miss Withers rose to her feet. “I can imagine,” she said. “You’ll have an irate father on your hands one of these days. Where is this school for boys?”

“Tenton Hall is a few miles this side of St. Ives—about six miles from Penzance,” she was told. “But why—”

“I’m going over there, that’s why,” Miss Withers announced. “Now, this very minute. Because I think I see a streak of light.”

“Why, I—of course.” The Honorable Emily started back for the telephone. “It’s low tide—I’ll ring up the man who drives for me and have him bring the limousine. Lucky that we have this under-water phone cable to shore.”

“You made fuss enough when I insisted on having it put in,” said Leslie. “Aunt, you’re weakening in spite of yourself. One of these days you’ll let me have a wireless installed.”

“Never!” insisted the Honorable Emily. “And now, you two children amuse yourselves as best you may while I try to catch up on the thousand business details that have accumulated during our trip to the States.”

She followed Miss Withers into the hall. “They make a nice couple,” she admitted, when she saw that the school teacher was looking back. “Of course, she’s a bit older than Leslie. But he needs someone with some stamina.”

“Napoleon was younger than Josephine,” Miss Withers reminded her. “I think it was Josephine. Although,” she added, “Napoleon didn’t need stamina, did he?”

An hour later she was closeted with Mr. Starling, of Tenton Hall. He read through the letter which the Honorable Emily had given her.

“So you want to see Gerald Hammond?” he inquired wonderingly. His tone implied that there was no accounting for taste. “Are you a relative, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” agreed Miss Withers cryptically. “A sort of aunt.”