Joan Smith Read online

  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 me
an. 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?”

  He smiled apologetically to me, but it was clearly his habit to humor Aunt Loo. He entered willingly into a discussion of this possibility, while I sat deciding how I would like to come back, if I got another whirl out of life. A man, I thought. Definitely as a man. Too many feminine qualities irked me; being coy and dainty, being backward in speaking to strangers, especially male strangers, having to wear skirts and ride sidesaddle. Yes, I would like to be a man, but with my present size and strength. When I tuned back into the conversation of the oldsters, the subject had changed.

  “We shall have a session tomorrow night,” Aunt Loo was saying. “Will you speak to the Franconis for me, Walter, or shall I write them a note?”

  “I am going to the village. I’ll arrange it. What hour would you like to have the sitting?”

  “After dinner, ninish would suit me. If Pierre and Mr. Sinclair are back, they will join us. Pierre is not very good at it, but Mr. Sinclair shows a surprising flair. I am sure Valerie would like to try it as well.”

  A “sitting” conveyed to me having one’s portrait taken, but this was obviously not the sort of sitting being spoken of here. I put the question to Dr. Hill. “A séance,” he confessed, not without a trace of shame. “Your aunt has taken up an interest in spiritualism. There are a pair in the village who seem to have a knack for it. Franconi is their name—a man and his wife. She is the medium.”

  “Medium what?” I asked, my confusion becoming deeper. Auntie had mentioned spiritualism at home, to explain her funny gowns, but had not expanded on it when she encountered Papa’s scowl and Mama’s dumfounded frown. I thought she had her fortune read from time to time—something of the sort.

  “Medium for contacting Edward,” she told me. “Madam Franconi is trying to get in touch with Edward for me, my late husband, you remember, dear. Such a relief to know I can still talk to him. It is a wonderful thing. Do not judge it out of hand. Just think, if you could talk to your grandmother, or some dear departed one.”

  “I don’t remember Grandma Ford. I don’t have any dear departed ones yet.”

  “How very uninteresting the young are after all,” she said sadly to Walter.

  “But I would like to be reincarnated,” I added, to placate her.

  “Yes, that is an interesting alternative, but there is no saying you would come back as a human being, Valerie. You might very well come back as a mouse or a bird or anything. I wonder if Valerie was not a lion or tiger in her last incarnation, Walter! Doesn’t she have the traces of it still? And Madame was saying just before I left that there will sometimes be a carry-over. She is quite sure Lady Morgan used to be a mouse, for besides looking quite like one, she is petrified of cats. Imagine!”

  Walter smiled sheepishly, for a medical man to be countenancing such unscientific stuff. “There is no harm in it,” he told me. “It amuses us oldsters, who have little enough to keep us occupied.”

  “Never apologize for your beliefs, Walter,” Loo commanded, her brindled head sitting back at a haughty angle, while her blue eyes snapped. “Valerie is a child. We are older, and wiser. She is not required to believe, neither are we required to apologize for believing. Let her try a sitting. If nothing comes of it, she need not try again.”

  “You need not try at all, if it does not interest you,” he told me.

  “I’ll try it. I’ll try anything once,” I answered without hesitation. It was a custom I followed in my life to accept all new experiences that were offered. Whoever would have thought snails or oysters would taste so delicious, for instance, to look at them? Till I jumped into the lake, I never thought I would like swimming either, but I adore it. One would not have believed kissing Arthur Crombie would be at all satisfactory with that moustache, but it was very nice. I am all for trying new things. Except perhaps jumping over the toll-booth. I have still some reservations on that point.

  Dr. Hill prescribed a glass of wine and an early retirement for us after the exhaustion of our travels, then left to allow us to fill the prescription.

  “He seems very nice,” I told her when we were alone.

  “He is the oldest friend I have in Hampshire. He was Edward’s good friend when we got married. He married some cousin of Edward’s first wife. Edward was best man at the wedding, which was well before my time. Walter would have been our best man as well, except that we got married at Bath, where we met. I was there with Grandmother Ford, Valerie. I wonder if there is any chance of contacting her tomorrow night.”

  “We shall see.”

  It would be misleading to say I had grave doubts on that score. I hadn’t a doubt in the world it was all a bag of moonshine, but the experience would be interesting. I would try it—once.

  Chapter Three

  In the morning, I tried another new experience: sleeping in till nine o’clock and having cocoa in bed. It was marvelous. I mean to try it every day while I am here at Troy Fenners. My aunt was locked up in her scriptorium when I came down for breakfast. I sat at the table alone, but before two eggs were consumed, I was joined by Pierre St. Clair. He was a perfect little Napoleon of a man in so far as height goes, but not nearly so bellicose. In fact, he was charming, and not bad-looking either, barring his small stature. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned, elegant in the extreme, stopping just a shadow short of being foppish. He advanced toward me at a leisurely waddle, caused by the outward turning of his toes.

  “I hear you are the Miss Ford,” he said, performing a polite bow at the side of my chair.

  “You must be the Pierre St. Clair,” I replied, offering him my hand. I mean to be quite insistent in future on always shaking everyone’s hand instead of curtseying. At twenty-one, I think I might take this privilege to myself without appearing brash.

  The Pierre did not seem to know what to make of my gesture. He put his other hand over mine, and stood there, smiling and nodding for several seconds, while my eggs turned cold. “Won’t you have a chair, Mr. St. Clair?” I suggested.

  “I have many chairs,” he smiled, looking around the table where he had, to be sure, a choice of eleven. Still, he was strangely reluctant to select one.

  “Do sit down. Have you had breakfast?” I asked.

  “I have had the coffee. I shall have more the coffee, to keep you companies.”

  “How nice.”

  “You will pour me the coffee,” he said, but in a polite, deferential tone.

  After a brief consideration, I gave in and poured. “Also of the cream and sugar,” was his next suggestion.

  “Help yourself,” I said, nodding toward them. One can humor a foreigner only so far.

  “Yes, very help yourself,” he agreed, sitting down beside me and adding an unconscionable quantity of cream and sugar to his cup. “I am happied to make you welcome to Trois Fenêtres,” he went on.

  “I am happy to be here.”

  “I also. Tante Louise is the charming hostess, when she is here. Maybe I adopt her to me.”

  “Plan to make a long stay of it, do you?”

  “Only for the coffee. Tante Louise is not the true aunt, you understood. She is the cousin.”

  “She is my aunt.”

  “She is my cousin.”

  “Quite.”

  “Precisely. The Sinclair, you comprehend, is the St. Clair, in bastardized English. Mr. Sinclair, he tells me this. I meet many
bastardized St. Clairs at Wight. It is the island where I am gone with Mr. Welland Sinclair.”

  “Yes, so I understand.”

  “It is not difficult to comprehend. They are all my cousins. I have many English cousins. I too am very English. In France, I am took always for an English.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have that difficulty in England, Mr. St. Clair.”

  “Call me Sinclair. It is better. When at Rome, do like the Italians do, as we say in English.”

  “Yes, we say that all the time.”

  “The coffee, he is too very much sweet,” was his next attempt at communication.

  “He is darling, isn’t he?”

  “Too sweet darling,” he decided, shoving the cup away. “I am to be the friend companion to show the Trois Fenêtres at you. Tante Louise, she tells me so. Yes?”

  “Wasn’t that sly of her? Shall I try to speak French, Mr. St. Clair? It might be easier for you.”

  “But no absolutely! Speaking the French becomes very difficult to me. I speak the English best. I think to stay absolutely at England now on, with Tante Louise.”

  “Lucky Tante Louise.”

  “Lucky Pierre also too. I am very much at the home here. My chap friend, Welland Sinclair, who is my cousin you recall—he tells me every day I am more English. No one guesses but that for my name, so I call me Peter Sinclair in the future. You also will call me Peter Sinclair, please you.”

  “I shall be very happy to, Peter Sinclair.”

  “Good. Now stop eating, or you become too gross. We walk.”

  “I haven’t finished my breakfast.”

  “Tante Louise, she wants that I show you the horse for jumping something. I don’t know what it is. A very big she horse.”

  “My tollbooth-jumping mount! Excellent, I’ll go with you.” I hopped up, eager to see my mount, and wondering where Aunt Loo had got hold of it so early.

  “Mon Dieu!” Pierre (sorry, Peter) exclaimed as I arose to tower above him. “Comme c’est une grande fille!”