It seemed extraordinary that a young girl who had lived her life in the country and had not had the advantage of highly qualified teachers should know so much.
After they had moved from the conventions concerning death to the strange religions to be found in Africa and other undeveloped parts of the world, the Marquis asked Mimosa,
“How can it be possible, Lady Mimosa, that you should know so much about subjects that are certainly not appreciated by other members of your sex?”
Mimosa looked surprised.
“Is that true?” she asked. “I have found them fascinating, but then I have always wanted to travel as Papa did when he was a young man, being fortunate enough to go with his Regiment to India and to other places in the East, but I have had to travel in my mind.”
“I suppose that what you are actually telling me is that you have travelled through the books you have read,” the Marquis said.
“Exactly!” Mimosa agreed. “Grandpapa had a very large and comprehensive library, although I am sure not as big as you have here. It included a great number of books about other countries because my great-grandfather was in his way an explorer.”
“I thought young ladies only read novelettes,” Charles teased.
“I have read some,” Mimosa replied, “but I find them very dull compared to accounts of a European disguised as a pilgrim who managed to sneak into Mecca knowing that he was in danger of losing his life or of another man who visited Tibet and saw the Dalai Lama.”
This meant they were all talking again about the strange hidden places in the world, which it was impossible for anybody to visit except in disguise.
They inevitably had a fascination for those who longed to seek the unknown and to explore the secrets that were strictly forbidden to any outsider.
“That is what we ought to be doing, Charles,” the Marquis said, “instead of boring ourselves with the commonplace.”
Mimosa clasped her hands together.
“I am sure that you could find a way to go to Mecca if you wished to,” she said, “and be present at the dance of the Dervishes, but the only proper reason for doing so would be to enable you to write a book about them for those unable to even think of going there.”
“I thought there would be a snag!” the Marquis exclaimed. “If there is one thing I have no wish to do, it is to write a book!”
“Why not?” Mimosa asked him. “Think how much the people who stayed at home would appreciate your personal report on what happened at Waterloo or at the other battles in which you took part – Vittoria, for instance.”
The Marquis looked at her in surprise.
“Who told you I was at Vittoria?” he asked.
“Your valet was telling Jimmy and me how brave you were and how you saved several men’s lives by bringing them back to your lines after dark.”
The Marquis looked embarrassed.
“Henson should keep his mouth shut,” he growled, “and I shall tell him so.”
“If you do that, it will be very unkind,” Mimosa said. “Jimmy had asked him about the battles you fought in and, because he knew how interested we were, he told us what we wanted to know.”
She looked worried and added,
“Please – I would not wish to get him into any – trouble.”
The Marquis smiled.
“I promise you he will not do that. Henson is a law unto himself, which you will soon discover if you stay here long enough. I don’t suppose that I could stop him talking if I tried!”
“If you refuse to write a book,” Charles intervened, “perhaps Henson should do it for you.”
They all laughed at this and the Marquis thought that unexpectedly he had found dinner an amusing meal and very different from what he had expected.
When Mimosa, who was by now very tired, excused herself and retired to bed, the two friends were left alone and the Marquis said,
“I expect you have remembered that I owe you a fiver!”
“Of course,” Charles replied, “and I am expecting you to pay up, but I had no idea that I was betting on a certainty.”
“It seems extraordinary,” the Marquis said, “that out of the blue, just when I was complaining about the boredom and monotony of the countryside, this should happen.”
“I was thinking about it at dinner,” Charles answered, “and I would never have imagined and most certainly would have betted against finding a young girl as intelligent as Lady Mimosa!”
“She is certainly original,” the Marquis remarked, “and far too young, little more than a child, for this sort of thing.”
There was silence.
Then he added as if he spoke to himself,
“I suppose it really is true what she has told us and she has not imagined the whole drama?”
“I might have thought so,” Charles replied, “if I had not actually seen Norton Field and also remembered some of his unpleasant habits which I would not mention in front of his cousin.”
“What are they?” the Marquis asked.
“Well, for one thing,” Charles replied, “he frequents the type of house of pleasure of which you and I would not cross the threshold!”
The Marquis raised his eyebrows and Charles continued,
“You know the ones I mean, which cater for exotic types of vice that we both find abominable.”
The Marquis nodded.
“Apart from that, I remember hearing that he encourages the younger members of the Club when they first join to drink too much and then to gamble, with him of course, for high stakes and he is inevitably the winner!”
“If you can prove that,” the Marquis said angrily, “I will have him thrown out of the Club. It is the sort of behaviour that should not be tolerated at White’s!”
“It’s difficult to prevent or to prove,” Charles said, “but I am certain that I am right in thinking that Norton Field is a very unpleasant character and it does not surprise me that he has made up his mind to succeed to his uncle’s place in the world.”
“Do you really think that he would go so far as murdering little Jimmy in order to do so?” the Marquis asked.
“I think that you will find he is too devious to kill him in an obvious manner, such as shooting him, which he could quite easily do at any time. He might try drowning him, but only if it could be made to look like an accident.”
The Marquis was silent before he said,
“I see what you mean, Charles. He is being quite subtle, a stone falling off the roof might happen to anybody and a man-trap is set for animals, not for human beings. But why should he, if indeed it was Norton Field, go into the child’s room the other night?”
“I should imagine that he intended to kidnap him!”
The Marquis sat up in his chair.
“That never struck me! I was thinking perhaps that he intended to strangle him while he slept or smother him with the pillows until he stopped breathing.”
“I am quite certain,” Charles interposed, “that Norton Field is too clever to do anything that might cast suspicion on him personally, that would prevent him, as he plans, from becoming the fifth Earl.”
He paused as if thinking it out before he went on,
“An incriminating corpse is very difficult to explain away. When somebody disappears, there is always the supposition that they may have run away and, when eventually they are found dead, then it can always be attributed to their being lost on the moors or freezing to death in a snowstorm or being accidentally knocked down in a thick fog.”
“You have certainly thought it out in detail,” the Marquis commented.
“I think that is what we have to do,” Charles replied. “I don’t believe for one moment that Norton Field will come bursting in upon us brandishing pistols or swords. It would make it justifiable for you to shoot him in self-defence or in an effort to protect Jimmy.”
“I agree,” the Marquis murmured.
“He will be far more subtle,” Charles continued, “and that is where we wil
l have to start thinking along quite different lines from the way you tackled an enemy in the past who at least wore a uniform by which you could identify him.”
“Dammit all!” the Marquis exclaimed. “You are making it sound amazingly difficult.”
He rose as he spoke to stand in front of the mantelpiece.
“I cannot believe,” he said, “that it is impossible for me to protect one small boy from the grasping murderous clutches of a man who covets his title.”
“That sounds very nice on the surface,” Charles replied, “but are you really prepared to guard young Jimmy twenty-four hours round the clock for months, perhaps for years on end?”
“No, of course not!” the Marquis answered. “We have already discussed that and we have to force Norton Field out into the open.”
“That is agreed, but how?” Charles asked. “And how can we guess, or rather how can you guess, how his twisted and, as you quite frankly said, deranged mind will work? What will he do to destroy the boy by some means which will make it impossible for anyone to accuse him of murder?”
The Marquis walked across the room and back before he answered.
Then he said,
“I am going to sleep on this, Charles, and in the morning, we will put our heads together as we used to do in Spain and Portugal. We must think how we would act if it was us who were outside this house while our objective the boy was inside.”
Charles smiled.
“That is a problem which should keep you awake for a few hours tonight. I shall be very surprised however if you come up with anything very constructive by breakfast time.”
“I will take a bet with you on that,” the Marquis said. “I will think of something that will act as a bait to Norton Field, even if it means that I have a completely sleepless night!”
“Very well,” Charles said. “I will take you, but first you have to pay me the money I am already owed.”
The Marquis laughed.
“You are determined not to let me forget those five golden sovereigns,” he said, “but I assure you, Charles, I am not a defaulter!”
“I will make sure of that!” Charles said and they were both laughing as they went up the stairs.
At the same time, when he went to his room, Charles Toddington was thinking how one young girl had managed, by appearing at exactly the right moment, to change the Marquis from a gloomy, dissatisfied, restless young man into someone who was, to put it simply, very much alive and alert.
*
As Charles predicted, the Marquis found himself unable to sleep and lay, staring blindly into the darkness, thinking out first one plan and then another.
He was far too intelligent not to realise that it was going to be very difficult.
He knew Charles was right when he said that Norton Field was not going to do anything that was obvious or so dangerous from his point of view as to kill Jimmy by any ordinary means.
It was quite impossible, however many men guarded him, to prevent the boy from being shot down in the open, but for Norton Field to be in the vicinity when that happened would, he knew, result in a number of people accusing him, whether they could prove it or not, of murder.
‘What can we do? What the devil can we do?’ the Marquis asked himself again and again.
If it was a question of the child being kidnapped, that, he supposed, might have been comparatively easy in his grandfather’s house, which he gathered from Henson when he questioned him while he was dressing for dinner was a large rambling building.
A number of ancient servants slept in one wing while the centre block was occupied by the family when they were in residence.
There had been until tonight only Lady Mimosa and Jimmy in a house which was very easy to break into, and if, as Mimosa had feared, Norton Field had managed to spirit the boy away, it was doubtful if there would have been any chance of his being caught.
The Marquis thought that having abducted him he would then have taken him miles away from his home, perhaps to the North, perhaps to the South.
It might have been several months later before the boy’s body would be found in some ditch.
There would be nothing to connect his death with his cousin, Norton Field, who in the meantime would have been seen in London at his Club and associating with his disreputable friends.
‘That is something I must not allow to happen,’ the Marquis thought.
He decided that tomorrow he would move Jimmy even nearer to him than he was at the moment.
Perhaps it would be best for the boy to sleep in a dressing room that was part of the Master suite.
As it was, on the second floor it would be impossible for Norton Field to approach him from a window and, if he was in the next door room, the Marquis, being a very light sleeper, would hear the slightest movement or the opening of a door.
‘That is what I will do,’ he decided.
Then because the night was passing, he forced himself to try to sleep and for a moment to forget Jimmy.
*
The Marquis was awakened by Henson rushing hastily into his room and pulling back the curtains in a noisy manner that was very unlike his usual quiet movements.
As he did so, he called out,
“My Lord! Are you awake, my Lord?”
The Marquis sat up in bed.
“What has happened?”
He knew before the man spoke that it was something serious and in fact he almost anticipated the answer.
“’Is young Lordship’s gone and ’er Ladyship too, both disappeared, my Lord!”
“What do you mean – disappeared?” the Marquis demanded.
“The ’ouse was broken into last night by the door in the inner courtyard.”
The Marquis stared at his valet in disbelief.
The inner courtyard was part of the old house that had been left untouched when the rest of the building had been restored and practically rebuilt at the beginning of the last century by his grandfather.
The rooms round the inner courtyard were small and were used mostly for storage, although there was an office for his secretary, which naturally was closed at night.
“Tell me exactly what has happened!” the Marquis said getting out of bed.
“The lock ’ad been drilled away, my Lord, in a quite expert fashion and it’s doubtful if we’d ever ’ave known until much later in the day that somebody had broken in in such a manner, if it ’adn’t been for ’er Ladyship’s dog.”
“Her Ladyship’s dog?” the Marquis repeated. “How does he come into it?”
“I hears ’im whinin’ and scratchin’ at the door, my Lord, when I comes along the corridor early to see if ’is young Lordship wants anythin’. I expects ’im to be awake although it wasn’t yet seven o’clock. But when I peeps in through the door, ’e isn’t there!”
“I cannot believe it,” the Marquis said beneath his breath, but he did not interrupt as Henson went on,
“It was then I ’ears the dog whinin’ and scratchin’ next door, and when I looks in I finds ’er Ladyship’s gone as well!”
Now the Marquis was dressing himself and while they were still talking Henson brought his clothes for him from the wardrobe.
“When I opens the door, my Lord,” the valet went on, “the dog shot past me into the passage and with ’is nose down starts to run until ’e reaches the backstairs. I follows ’im, thinkin’ as ’ow he might lead me to ’er Ladyship and ’e goes twistin’ round the corridors until, to my surprise, ’e reaches the door in the inner courtyard.”
The Marquis was by now pulling on his riding breeches and then he walked to the dressing table and opened a drawer of it to find a cravat to tie round his neck.
“The door was closed, my Lord,” Henson continued, “but I sees at once that the lock’s been bored away.”
“What did you do then?” the Marquis asked.
“The dog wanted to go outside, my Lord, but I thought it would be a mistake to let ’im out and lose ’im in case ’e went sea
rchin’ for ’er Ladyship. I dragged ’im back with me and shut ’im up in ’er bedroom, where ’e’s barkin’ the place down!”
“Quite right, Henson,” the Marquis approved, “that was very intelligent of you. I feel the dog will be our only hope of finding out where her Ladyship and her brother have been taken.”
His voice was hard with anger as he told himself it was his fault that this had happened and he should have thought of it sooner.
Then he said sharply,
“Go and wake Major Toddington and tell him to get dressed quickly. Tell him I have gone to the stables to order the horses.”
Knowing that he had received an order that had to be obeyed immediately, Henson disappeared and the Marquis put on his riding boots without his valet’s help.
He shrugged himself into a riding jacket and would have left the room, but, as he reached the passage, he turned back and, opening a drawer of a table by his bed, took out a pistol.
The drawer also contained a dog’s lead that he used for his own dogs and, carrying it in his hand, he went down the passage to Mimosa’s room.
He could hear Hunter whining and scratching as he did so and, as he opened the door, it was with difficulty that he prevented the dog from pushing past him, obviously desperate to find his Mistress.
Having attached the lead to Hunter’s collar, he looked at Mimosa’s bed.
The first thing he noticed was that it was very tumbled, the second was that he was almost sure a blanket had been pulled off it, which would account for the extremely untidy state in which the rest of the bedclothes had been left.
As if to confirm what he was thinking, he walked into Jimmy’s room next door and found his bed in exactly the same condition.
It was obvious that the kidnappers had entered the room and gagged and bound their victims before they could properly wake up and then wrapping them in blankets because they were wearing only their nightclothes had carried them away.
It seemed incredible, absolutely incredible, that this should have happened in his own house while he was sleeping only a few doors away.
Now he knew he was up against a far more wily adversary than he had previously imagined.
Although he would never have admitted it, the Marquis was for the moment not so confident of his own infallibility as he had been in the past.
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