Escapade

Chapter Ten

I ripped my hand from my pocket and I sprinted toward Miss Turner. Just as her leg slipped over the saddle, I caught her shoulders with my left arm and I scooped my right arm up beneath her knees. She sagged into the crooks of my elbows, her head lolling, her arms loosely swinging. I carried her over to the bench and laid her out on it and I squatted down beside her. I was looking for the bullet wound. I couldn’t find it.

I sensed the people crowding around me. Mrs. Corneille, Mrs. Allardyce, Lord Bob. I searched for the Great Man, found him standing just behind me. He looked puzzled, maybe even worried, but he was alive and unwounded. There hadn’t been a second shot.

Miss Turner was breathing but her face was white. I put my hand against her forehead. Cold and damp. I put my fingertips against her wrist and felt for her pulse. It was there, fluttering like the wings of a wounded bird.

Mrs. Corneille said “Is she…?”

I said, “I think she’s just fainted.”

“A bloody poacher!” growled Lord Bob. “Filthy sod!” His beetle brows were lowered and a bright furious red was glowing beneath the gray dust that coated his face. He snapped his goggles down over his eyes, leaving two rings of indented flesh on his forehead. “I’ll show the swine!”

He scurried off to the motorcycle, a flurry of tweed. I turned back to Miss Turner. I heard the howl of the motorcycle behind me as I unknotted the tie at her throat. Lord Bob, revving up the machine.

“Mr. Beaumont!” said Mrs. Allardyce.

The motorcycle exploded away with a roar of engine and a clatter of gravel.

“She needs air,” I said. I unbuttoned the first two buttons of her blouse. Lightly, I tapped Miss Turner’s cheek. Nothing from her. I noticed that her skin was as soft as a child’s. I ignored that.

“May I?” Mrs. Corneille. She was beside me now, on my right. Her shiny black hair swung forward like a silk curtain as she leaned toward Miss Turner. I could smell her perfume. I ignored that too.

She took Miss Turner’s right hand between hers and rubbed it gently.

I tapped the cheek again. “Miss Turner?”

She took a deep staggered breath and her lids snapped back and those dazzling blue eyes looked at me.

Twice now in less than twelve hours I had been the first thing a young woman saw when she came back to earth. Miss Turner didn’t seem any more thrilled than Cecily Fitzwilliam had seemed last night.

She frowned. “What happened?”

“You’ve fainted,” said Mrs. Corneille.

Miss Turner looked at her. She raised her head from the bench, as though trying to sit up. Mrs. Corneille touched her shoulder gently. “Not just yet, Jane. Rest a moment.”

I stood up.

Mrs. Allardyce said to Miss Turner, “You gave us a terrible fright. What on earth — "

Mrs. Corneille turned and glanced back at her. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were narrowed and her lips were grim. Mrs. Allardyce shut her mouth.

Off to my right, two small black figures were running toward us, down the slope from the manor house. Servants.

I stepped over to the Great Man. Under my breath, I said, “Go back to the house with the rest of them. Wait for me in your room.”

“Phil-”

“Just do it, Harry. I’ll be back.” I set off in a run after Lord Bob.

I loped along the walkway and then down the lawn toward the formal garden, following the trail of the motorcycle across the lush green grass. The machine was parked beside a row of hedges at the garden’s far end, along the edge of the woods.

That was about right, I thought. The rifle shot had seemed to come from the forest somewhere near here.

Ahead of me there was a narrow path into the forest. I marched up to it, stopped, looked back toward the tall tree with the bronze-red leaves. One of the servants was leading the horse down the walkway, along the course I had just taken. Everyone else was walking in a loose group up the gentle green rise to the house. In the sunshine, under that clear blue sky, they looked like they were returning from some sultry summer picnic.

Right here, I thought. Right here is probably where he stood when he fired.

About a hundred and fifty yards from here to the tree. Not an easy shot, especially firing slightly uphill.

I glanced around. No repentant snipers down on their knees, begging me to run them in. No signed confession nailed to a tree. No empty cartridge anywhere. The mossy ground was still spongy from last night’s rain and there were footprints in it, but too many of them. Lord Bob had gone tramping through here.

The trail twisted down the hill for twenty or thirty yards until it ended at another path. This one was wider, almost a road, with a surface of crushed black stone. To the right it led up the hill, in the direction of the house, which was out of sight now. To the left it led down the hill and disappeared about forty yards away, behind the trees.

Lord Bob came around the bend in the road and stopped. I walked down the pathway, toward him.

“Beaumont,” he said. “Seen anyone?”

“No.”

“Look here,” he said. “You’re an American. How’s your woodcraft, eh? Following a trail, Fenimore Cooper, all that?”

“You mean broken branches, bent twigs?”

He brightened. “That’s it, yes.”

“No good at all.”

“Ah.”

“Where does this go?” I nodded down the path.

“Eh? Oh. Down to the river. No luck there. Went down that way myself just now. Nothing.” He looked around him, at the forest that seemed to go on for miles. “Bloody bastard could be anywhere.”

“What’s up here?” I nodded up the path.

He seemed puzzled by the question. “The manor, of course.”

“Could we take a look?”

He frowned. “You can’t be thinking a poacher would go that way?”

“Worth a look.”

He stared at me for a moment and frowned again. Probably wondering why a personal secretary was so interested in poachers. But he was a gentleman, and finally he shrugged. “Very well. Come along.”

The two of us trod up the gravel road. The earthen banks on either side of it grew higher until they rose above our heads. The road became a kind of narrow valley running between the steeply sloping ground and the tall trees climbing off the ridges up there. We ended at a tall, broad, double wooden door set into a wall of stone about fifteen feet high. I could see a green line of hedge beyond the top of the wall. We were beneath the level of the formal garden, and at its far side.

“What’s this?” I asked him, and nodded to the door.

“Freight tunnel,” he said. “Goes under the garden, into the house. Comes out near the kitchen. They used to bring goods this way. Barges on the river, horsecarts up the road here, and then down the tunnel to the house. Faster back then. Don’t use it nowadays.”

On the door to the right, at waist level and just where it joined the other door, there was a rusted lockplate with a large keyhole in its center. I bent forward and examined the keyhole. It looked like no one had used it in years. But I was no expert at locks. I glanced down. No tracks in the crushed stone, that I could see. But, as I had told Lord Bob, I was no expert at tracks.

I stood straight. “You have the key?”

In those white circles that surrounded them, his gray eyes blinked. “Not with me, no. Wouldn’t make any difference, though. Barred from the inside.”

I pressed against the door. It didn’t budge.

Lord Bob was frowning again. His aristocratic patience was beginning to unravel. Or maybe it was his Bolshevist patience. “What is it, exactly, you think you’re looking for?”

I pulled out my watch. Five minutes to one. “Could I meet you somewhere inside, in about an hour?”

“Whatever for?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got to talk to Mr. Houdini first. But it’s important.”

Yet another frown. Obviously I had overstepped some boundary that a secretary wasn’t supposed to step over. “Perhaps you could tell me,” he said, “what this is all about.”

“I sorry, but I can’t right now. An hour?”

A small sigh. He reached into his vest pocket, plucked out his watch, glanced at its face, looked up at me. “Very well. In one hour. In my study.”

“Where’s that?”

“Someone will show you.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“HARRY,” I said, “we’ve got to tell him.”

“But Phil-”

“I went back there,” I said. “Before I came here, I went back to that big tree. The one we were all standing under. There’s a hole in the trunk, Harry.” I reached into my pocket. “This was inside the hole. Good-sized slug, from something like a thirty-thirty. I worked out where all of us were standing. If he fired the rifle from where I think he did, this thing missed your head by about two inches.”

We were back in his room. He was sitting on the bed, his back against the headboard, his arms folded stubbornly across his chest. I was sitting in the chair by the writing desk.

“But Phil,” he said. “Lord Purleigh believes it was a poacher.”

“Lord Purleigh doesn’t know about Chin Soo.” I tossed the slug onto the bed.

He pretended not to notice it. “But it could have been a poacher.”

I shook my head. “The sound of the shot. It was sharp and clear. Not muffled. Whoever fired it, he fired right at the edge of the forest. Not inside it. He wasn’t aiming at a deer or a wild pig or some damn rogue elephant. He was aiming at you.”

He pressed his lips together and looked off.

I said, “I’m sorry, Harry, but it’s over. If you won’t tell him, I will.”

He looked back at me, surprised. “But you gave me your word.”

“I said I’d stay under cover as long as I worked for you. But if you don’t tell Lord Robert, I don’t work for you. I quit. I tell him myself, and the two of you do whatever you want, and meanwhile I’m on the train back to London.”

“But Phil-” His voice was cajoling.

“There’s something else, Harry. If he’d missed you by two inches in the other direction, he would’ve hit Mrs. Corneille. Maybe he’ll hit her next time. You can risk your own life as much as you want. That’s your privilege. That’s what you do for a living. But you’re not going to risk the life of anybody else.”

He inhaled slowly, deeply, and then he sighed. He nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. You are quite right, Phil. We must tell him.”

The Evening Post

Maplewhite, Devon

August 18

Dear Evangeline,

I’m losing my mind, I’ve become certain of it. I’ve also become certain, however, given this particular organ’s many obvious defects, that its loss will occasion hardship to no one. Least of all, perhaps, to myself.

I know that I promised you a ghost. I’m going to renege on that promise, or at any rate on that ghost. I don’t really want to talk or write or even think about him any longer. I’m sick of him, frankly. What he said and what he did, if in fact he actually said and did them, are things best forgotten. If not forever, then at least until I sort out the rest of it.

The rest of it?

You may well ask. Since breakfast, in addition to stumbling upon two additional ghosts, I’ve been fondled and propositioned; I’ve been badly bruised; I’ve been trapped, flopping and flailing, on a runaway horse; I’ve once again made an absolute fool of myself; and I’ve been peered at and prodded at by an Austrian psychoanalyst. And somehow I’ve misplaced an antique tortoise shell comb that I liked very much.

And, oh yes, mustn’t forget, I’ve been shot at.

The bullet wasn’t actually intended for me, or so at any rate I am assured. But certainly it deposited itself near enough to my person for me to have taken, at the time, a certain proprietary attitude regarding it. I felt rather cheated later, when I learned that this was mistaken.

Such are the ways of Devon. Of course, we seasoned travellers take all this in our stride. For, really, when you’ve seen one ghost, then in a sense you’ve seen them all, nest-ce pas? One is enough, surely, to prove the point; the presence of two (or three, or four, or four hundred) is simply redundant.

And what, come to that, do propositions and fondlings ultimately signify? When you’ve experienced as much of the world as I have, Evy, when you’ve encountered, as I have, everything from the giddy heights of Knightsbridge to… well, the giddy heights of Kensington, you realize that in the supreme scheme of things, the grand expanse of Time and Space, our passions and indeed our lives are, at bottom, puny little things.

And as for bullets-ah well, what are bullets, finally? How petty they are, how common, these little bits of lead whizzing through the air and crudely plunking themselves into nearby trees.

As for the comb, I probably did something silly with it while my attention was wandering. Misplaced it, perhaps. Or ate it.

I am rather upset about the comb.

I’m losing my mind, as I say. And I don't care. I refuse to keep playing the wide-eyed (if ageing) ingenue, even if that is the role for which, by general agreement, I am best equipped.

Enough. We shall begin this narrative where I ended the last.

I told you that I hadn’t slept at all last night, after seeing the first ghost. And I think I told you that I stopped writing to you because I’d heard the sound of something stirring in the Allardyce’s room. After folding up the letter and sealing it into an envelope, I eased myself off the bed, threw on my robe, and tiptoed over to the door that connects her room to mine. I was less than eager to confront her, still smarting with shame at my performance last night.

Sitting at the dressing table in her robe, her heavy body slumped, her arms slack along the arms of the chair, her hands limply dangling, she was staring at the mirror.

She wore no make-up. I’ve seen her like this before, of course, countless times: all the paints and polishes stripped away, all the oils and cosmetics. I had indeed seen her like this only a few hours before, while I was demonstrating my flair for hysteria. But this morning, for some reason, her face appeared curiously naked and vulnerable.

Vulnerable is perhaps the last label that I should normally attach to the broad back of the Allardyce. Perhaps it was the sunlight this morning. Outside, for the first time in weeks, the clouds were gone. A cold yellow shaft stretched across the room and struck her white round face like the beam from an electric torch.

I think I told you that she has no eyelashes and no eyebrows.

This morning, in that stony sunlight, their absence made her face look shocked, astonished, as though only a moment before she had glanced into the mirror and realized, all at once, that she had grown old, and stout, and alone.

For, at some time, however many years ago, before however many bonbons and muffins and buns, even the Allardyce must have been a small child. Once she must have chased butterflies across a meadow. Once she must have felt surprise: at a sunset, a rainbow, a sneeze. Once she must have giggled and squealed.

I don’t mean to say that I thought all this out, rationally or even consciously. What came over me, and it came over me within the course of merely a second or two, was a feeling of profound and infinite sadness for the losses she had sustained, whether by accident or by her own design (which of course would have been worse); and a sense that I had, up till now, in a way betrayed what was best in her by not recognizing the possibility of its existence; and betrayed, too, by doing so, what was best in me.

As I say, all this happened within only a second or two. And then she realized, abruptly, that I was there in the room, and she turned to me and frowned. Beneath her pale peeled forehead, her tiny black eyes puckered. ‘You nasty, vulgar little thing,’ she said.

Whatever it was I attempted to say, it came out as a hopeless stammer.

She drew her robe more tightly about herself. ‘Waking up everyone. Screaming and howling like some Irish washerwoman.'

Shame burbled hot and thick to the surface of my face. ‘Yes,

I’m terribly sorry, I-’

‘It was a dreadful embarrassment. What must my friends think of me? When I awoke this morning, my first thought was that I should dismiss you.’

My own first thought was to spit in her beady little eye.

My next thought, less appealing but more rational (alas), was that this just would not do. The spitting, I mean. I reminded myself that I had been suffering this insufferable woman for a purpose. After only one more year in her employ-assuming that both of us did in fact survive one more year-I should have saved exactly one hundred pounds, which will provide a cushion for me to sit upon while I make an attempt to decide what I shall do with this life of mine.

I suppose I could have spat in her eye anyway. And perhaps struck her in the mouth with a Meissen snuffbox. Both notions were enormously tempting. I could have left her outstretched on the floor like a beached whale, packed my luggage, begged a ride down to the railway station, caught the first train back to London.

But I remembered the months I had spent without employment, the cramped cold meals in my tiny room, the hunger and the humiliations and the murderous London solitude that scorches the soul.

Thus calculation doth make cowards of us all.

I said nothing to the Allardyce. She, for several long seconds, said nothing to me. For my part, I was too proud to beg for my position; and yet, despite my pride, too craven to throw it in her face. She, I think, was deliberately prolonging the moment, to impress upon us both the dimensions of her power.

‘I am, however,’ she said at last, ‘and with quite a few misgivings, going to give you one more chance. I am going to make allowances for your youth and your obvious ignorance. But I warn you. If you do not do as I say, from this moment on, you will be dismissed immediately. And I shall see to it that no one of decent family has anything further to do with you. You do understand me?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She narrowed her spitless eyes and pursed her unbruised mouth. ‘It is customary,’ she said, ‘when someone has been good enough to show us a kindness, that we thank them for it.’

This too? I thought.

‘Thank you, Mrs Allardyce,’ I said, and privately I wondered how much spittle I could accumulate over the course of a year.

But the Allardyce was not finished with me, not yet. ‘There will be no more nonsense about ghosts,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour last night was inexcusable. And your treatment of Sir David was particularly offensive. You will apologize to him as soon as possible.’

Earlier this morning, in the midst of my performance, Sir David Merridale had pretended to comfort me by stroking me in a manner that was designed less to calm my nerves-Evy, I know this-than to arouse his own. I had been rude to him, yes; but the man had taken deliberate advantage of my distress. If the Allardyce had sat up all night contriving one single act which would disgust and enrage me, it would have been exactly this, my apologizing to him.

But I swallowed my pride, the few wretched shreds of it that remained, and I nodded. Mrs Applewhite, that staunch believer in principle, would have retched.

‘Very well,’ the Allardyce said. ‘You may go and dress.’

Breakfast was not quite the torment I had anticipated. I had been dreading it: confronting in daylight the people who had witnessed my lamp-lit hysteria. If not for the Allardyce, however, I believe that no one would have said a word. Even Mrs Corneille acted as though it never happened, despite my having spent a shaky half-hour in her room. She merely smiled at me pleasantly, and nodded in my direction.

Sir David smiled his ironic, knowing smile at me, but Sir David is forever smiling his ironic, knowing smile at me.

Mr Houdini and his secretary, Mr Beaumont, incidentally, never arrived. Despite their legendary get-up-and-go, Americans evidently prefer to lie-down-and-stay.

We ate in the conservatory, an airy room with a view of the lawns and, below us, the formal garden. The meal was an informal affair; we helped ourselves to eggs, bacon, kidneys, etc., from silver chafing-dishes on the sideboard.

I wasn’t hungry-those shreds of pride had caught in my throat and I could swallow very little else. I said nothing. Afterward, the Allardyce, her face and her good humour restored, talked at length about a mindless musical comedy to which she had towed me the month before. Lord Robert waxed ecstatic about some new motor bicycle he had purchased.

The Honourable Cecily surprised me by turning in my direction and asking me if I rode. Caught off guard, flustered, I could only reply, like a perfect idiot, ‘A motor bicycle, you mean?’ She smiled sweetly and said, ‘No, no. Do you ride?"

I said that I once had, with great pleasure, but not for many years. She surprised me once again by offering me her own horse. ‘But I’ve no proper riding clothes,’ I said.

She shrugged lightly, and lightly glanced over my drab cotton frock. ‘My cousin left hers here. They’d fit you, I expect.’

Surprised by this unexpected generosity, and wondering what had prompted it, I nearly stammered again. ‘That’s extremely kind of you,’ I managed to say. ‘Yes, then. Thank you. I’d love to. If you’re quite sure you don’t mind?’

‘Not at all,’ she said in her plummy tones.

The Allardyce spoke.

‘Jane, dear,’ she said sweetly, ‘I don’t really feel that riding is a good idea. After all that excitement last night, I shouldn’t want you to tire yourself.’

Beneath this feigned concern, of course, was a determination to demonstrate her authority anew by refusing me something which I clearly desired. I felt anger wash through me, and then caution, and then shame, and I looked down at my plate without seeing it.

‘Eh?’ said Lord Robert. ‘Which excitement is that?’

‘Oh, you didn’t know?’ brightly said the Allardyce. ‘Poor Jane had a frightful nightmare last night. She persuaded herself that she’d seen your famous ghost, and she felt compelled, poor dear, to wake up everyone within earshot.’

I looked at Lord Robert and saw that he was staring at me. He had gone as pale as a-well, he had gone quite a deadly shade of pale, Evy. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again and said to me, nearly in a whisper, “You saw Lord Reginald?” He cleared his throat.

I was a bit surprised at his reaction and I could only stutter, ‘I, no, Lord Robert, I-’

‘Robert, dear,’ said Lady Purleigh, smiling up at him from the opposite end of the table. ‘It was a nightmare. Only that.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A nightmare. I’m very sorry, Lord Purleigh, that I disturbed your guests.’ My voice was raspy and not at all my own.

Mrs Corneille sat across from me, and she was staring at the Allardyce, her lips compressed. To her left sat Dr Auerbach, the psychoanalyst, who was watching me with his eyes wide in psychiatric interest behind his pince-nez spectacles.

The skin of my face was hot again, and as taut as a sausage casing.

Lord Robert’s face had gone from white back to its usual brick red, and suddenly he ginned at me. ‘A nightmare. Well, ’course, it was a nightmare. ’Course it was. Hah hah. Nothing to be ashamed of. Happens to the best of us, eh? Don’t give it another thought.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Riding, that’s the ticket. Best thing in the world for you. Good fresh air. Healthy exercise. You take Cecily’s horse, like she says. Damn good idea, Cecily.’

He turned to the Allardyce. ‘Best thing in the world for her, Marjorie, trust me.’

Coming from her host, this was for the Allardyce less a suggestion than a command. Blinking her eyelids, she smiled sweetly. ‘Well, of course, Robert. If you really think so.’

Is it possible, do you think, that she is secretly a creature from some other world, Mars or Venus, obliged to disguise her true feelings in order to masquerade as a creature of this one?

Said Cecily, ‘She could take Storm for a run while we all go into the village.’

And Mrs Corneille, bless her, said, ‘But perhaps Jane would enjoy a trip into the village. Wouldn’t you like to come with us, Jane?’

‘I would, yes,’ I said. ‘But some other time? If I could? If you don’t mind, I’d really love to go riding.’

She smiled beneath those finely arched eyebrows of hers. ‘As you like.’

‘Best thing for you,’ said Lord Robert. ‘Cecily, take Miss Turner upstairs, why don’t you, and fit her out, eh?’

I glanced around the table. Sir David was still smiling knowingly. Dr Auerbach was still eyeing me with professional curiosity.

As I left with Cecily, enormously relieved to be going, another thought occurred to me: it is quite rude not to remove one’s back from the room when people are about to discuss one behind it.

Cecily has her own suite in the West Wing of the manor, a small sitting room and a boudoir with an attached dressing room. Everything everywhere was perfect, of course, and French-the mahogany armoire, the elegant Empire bed, the Louis XIV chairs in crimson velvet. And the clothes crowding her cupboards, the silk and satin and velvet and lace and… etc. Envy is so tiresome, don’t you think?

Cecily lay on an upholstered camelback sofa in the sitting room, leafing through a Vogue magazine, while her maid, Constance, helped me locate the cousin’s clothes. They smelled faintly of Chanel (of course) and they fitted me really rather well, I must say. When I looked into the tall looking glass in the dressing room, I was surprised and absurdly pleased. The cut of the jacket with its trimly tucked sides was immensely flattering, minimizing that awful chest of mine and emphasizing my waist, which is, no matter how currently unfashionable, one of the few decent features I possess. (And please don’t tell me otherwise.) I spent, I confess, a moment or two swirling like a dervish before the glass, admiring my fatuous smiling self over my shoulder.

When I returned to the sitting room, carrying the riding crop in one hand and the bowler in my other, Cecily closed the magazine and languidly laid it on the coffee table. She looked me over and frowned, as though for some reason displeased.

I stopped walking. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ Lightly, athletically, she swung her long legs off the sofa and stood. She was wearing a dress of cream-coloured linen, simple but elegant, with short sleeves and a low waist and a hem that fell to just beneath her pert perfect knees. Opalescent silk stockings, also, and beige leather pumps. She looked smashing, as always.

She removed a cigarette from a black lacquered Chinese box on the coffee table and put it between her lips. She looked over at me again. ‘It suits you,’ she said. ‘The jacket.’ With a small gold lighter she lighted her cigarette.

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Yes,’ she said, exhaling smoke. ‘You’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

She merely smiled her superior smile and shrugged her slender shoulders. ‘It’s only that you seem so much… I don’t know, really… healthier in that outfit.’

Fatter, I assumed she meant; and perhaps I frowned.

But she smiled again, less rigidly. ‘I mean to say, she said, that you do look really quite lovely.’

I thought that was very sweet of her, and I thanked her: flushing, of course, like a schoolgirl.

Together we marched from her room through several corridors and down several stairways and through several more corridors until we arrived, rather breathless, at the Great Hall, where the going-to-town contingent had assembled: Lady Purleigh, Mrs Corneille, Dr Auerbach, and Sir David. Lady Purleigh said something gracious about me and my plundered finery, and again I blushed and gushed; very becomingly, I’m sure. And then, as the others began to trickle out into the sunshine, the Allardyce towed me aside and growled, under her minty breath, ‘Time for your apologies, young lady.’

She wheeled her bulk around and whinnied, ‘Oh, Sir David? May we speak with you for just a moment, please?’

Sir David turned and then strolled over to us, smiling that odious ironic smile.

‘Sir David,’ mooed the Allardyce, ‘Jane has something most important she wishes to say to you.’ She smiled at me sweetly: once again attempting, and with the same crashing lack of success, to impersonate a human being. ‘Now don’t overtire yourself today, dear,’ she said. And then she waddled off, leaving me alone with my bowler and my riding crop and Sir David. I felt rather as a sacrificial goat must feel when it has been staked out amidst the brambles, beneath the roaring sun.

‘I must say, Jane,’ said Sir David, ‘you look ravishing in that outfit.’ He smiled, as though ravishing, word and deed, had been much on his mind of late.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘A fine riding crop,’ he said, stroking his moustache. ‘May I see it?’

I gave it to him. He thwacked it very lightly against the palm of his left hand, then looked up at me knowingly. ‘Nice spring to it. Stiff and yet supple.’

I felt the skin of my face begin to stiffen and singe. ‘I am sure it will prove adequate,’ I said.

He smiled at my blush; my blush deepened; his smile widened. ‘Oh, I’m quite sure it will,’ he said, tapping the crop rhythmically against his palm. ‘You had something to say to me?’

‘Yes. I wanted to apologize for my behaviour of last night. I was rude.’

There. It was done. In a year’s time, the Allardyce would be richer by half a pint of spittle.

Still smiling, still tapping the crop, he said, ‘You’ve ridden before, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d have thought so. You’ve a splendid seat, I fancy.’

And then, his glance holding mine, his eyebrow raised speculatively, he lowered the crop to my side and moved it, in a lickerish, leathery caress, up along my hip.

I was so startled that I merely stood there.

He took that as acceptance: he stepped forward, his lips still smiling, but parting now. I slapped him full across the face, as hard as I could.

I suspect that I was as surprised by this as he was. And he was stunned. His head snapped up and his face went white. And it went wicked, Evy: his eyes narrowed to dark shining slits and his thick lips snapped back from his teeth. And then, backhanded, so swiftly I could hear it hiss, he raised the riding crop.

(to be continued)