Damsel in Distress

by Carola Dunn

  Phillip must be given something to do, however useless. And you never could tell, it might prove useful after all.

  “Buck up, old thing,” she said. “We’re not going to give up so easily.”

  “What can we do?”

  “The first thing is to go round the villages making enquiries about Cockneys, or other conspicuous strangers. Or Americans, come to think of it, though I doubt he’d risk letting anyone hear an American accent near the hiding place. Still, with luck we’ll be able to pinpoint a smallish area to search. I suppose it’s no good asking Fenella to help?”

  “The mater would want to know where she kept disappearing to. What’s more, she’d tell. She’s not much more than a child, in spite of that broken engagement.”

  “My mother’s going to be a problem, too,” Daisy reflected. “She’s bound to find out I’m here and she’ll want to know why I don’t stay at the Dower House, and if I do she’ll want to know where I keep disappearing to. Nor can you stay there without a risk of her catching the wrong sow by the ear.”

  For once Phillip was quick on the uptake. “You mean she’d think we were engaged?” he cried, aghast.

  “Or on the brink.” She continued the dispiriting list: “You can’t go home without all sorts of explanations. Neither of us can stay at Fairacres without … . Phillip, I’ve got an absolutely spiffing idea!”

  “What? What is it? Tell me!”

  “Not yet. Just be quiet and let me work it all out. There may be an insuperable flaw I haven’t seen yet. Hush.”

  7

  Edgar arrived in the dining room after the green pea soup, just as Daisy and Phillip started on lamb cutlets with parsleyed new potatoes and salad. He apologized for his lateness.

  “Very bad form when we have guests,” he said with a severity directed at himself.

  “Soup, my lord?” enquired the butler.

  “Yes, Lowecroft, if it’s still hot.” Gazing at Daisy and Phillip with a puzzled air, he went on, “Please, carry on, don’t wait for me. Odd, Geraldine’s not here to entertain you?”

  “She’s lunching with a friend in Worcester, I believe, Cousin Edgar.”

  “I rather thought I should be lunching alone. She must have omitted to tell me you were expected, Daisy. And you mother … ? Ah!” He rubbed his hands together as Ernest set a bowl before him. “There’s nothing like a soup made with new peas from one’s own gardens. It pains me to admit that school food, though of course nutritious, was not always toothsome.”

  Daisy had decided to tackle Edgar first. Geraldine would find it difficult to express her inevitable disapproval openly if her husband had already succumbed. Now he had given her a perfect opening.

  “There are so many things I miss about living in the country,” she said, trying to sound wistful. “The fruit and vegetables are one, of course. By the time they’ve been carted up to Covent Garden and sold to greengrocers and carted off again to the shops, they’re always a bit battered.”

  “My dear, I can very easily send you up a hamper of whatever’s in season now and then. I wish you had mentioned the matter sooner,” Edgar reproached her.

  “How frightfully kind of you, Cousin Edgar,” said Daisy, filled with guilt. “Lucy and I would enjoy fresh stuff no end. That’s another thing I miss,” she ploughed on gamely for Phillip’s sake. “Lucy often invites me for country weekends at her parents’, and I hate not being able to reciprocate. I’m afraid Mother’s not really in a position to entertain a crowd of young people.”

  Edgar blenched, but equally game—perhaps also equally guilt-ridden, as a usurper, however legal—he squared his shoulders. “You know, Daisy, Geraldine and I have frequently begged you to regard Fairacres as your home still. Naturally that must apply to inviting your friends to stay. A crowd?” he added with misgiving.

  “Just in a manner of speaking,” she hastened to assure him. “Half a dozen or so. I wouldn’t dream of trying to arrange formal dances or anything like that. Tennis and golf and bicycling and hiking … .”

  “Hiking?”

  “Oh, it’s a rather slangy term for tramping, going for long country walks. Gosh, Cousin Edgar, do you really mean I may invite a few people down?”

  It was only fair to allow him a chance to back out. For a moment it was touch and go and Phillip’s face took on a painfully anxious expression. Daisy had forbidden him to put his oar in, for fear of mucking things up. To her relief Edgar turned up trumps—to use another slang term and mix the odd metaphor.

  “Certainly,” he said bravely. “Er, which weekend were you thinking of? We shall have to consult Geraldine, I’m afraid … that is, of course.”

  “No time like the present. I don’t want to disrupt Cousin Geraldine’s plans for weekend guests, or put her out in any way. I’ll make all the arrangements and sort out menus with Cook and so on. Tomorrow?”

  Edgar’s jaw dropped. “T-tomorrow? Oh well, I suppose it’s best to get it over with. I mean, yes, by all means, why not tomorrow? As far as I know Geraldine has no particular plans for the next few days. Though she doesn’t always let me know in advance … .”

  “Oh, if she’s giving a luncheon or dinner party or anything, we’ll clear out of the way with a picnic, won’t we, Phillip?”

  “By Jove, yes! Don’t want to get in the way, dash it all. Awfully good of you, Lord Dalrymple, and all that.”

  Daisy gave her cousin’s hand a consoling pat. “Now, don’t you worry about a thing. I shall see to everything. I dare say you’ll hardly notice we’re here.”

  The utter disbelief in Edgar’s eyes almost made her giggle, but she meant what she said. His unwanted guests were going to be invited solely to spend every minute of daylight scouring the countryside.

  A gooseberry fool followed the cutlets. In spite of her persuasive exertions, Daisy thoroughly enjoyed the meal. At home she and Lucy subsisted largely on eggs, cheese, and sardines, for lack of both money and cooking skills. Her father had been fond of good food, and the prospect of several days of his cook’s creations was almost enough in itself to reconcile her to the ignoble wiles she had used on Edgar.

  Phillip’s patent relief removed the last qualms.

  Magnanimous in victory, she listened with every appearance of interest to Edgar’s lepidopteran blather. As pleased as any big game hunter, he had captured several caterpillars of Pyronia tithonus, the Gatekeeper butterfly. This afternoon he would prepare and furnish a tank in which to keep and study them until they pupated and hatched, when he intended to release them.

  “I’m glad you don’t spend your time massacring inoffensive creatures for the sake of displaying their remains,” Daisy told him.

  “It is their life-cycles that interest me,” he said a trifle pompously, then added with a disarming honesty, “Besides, I have never had the good fortune to come across a rare butterfly. The most casual collector can easily procure a specimen of the Gatekeeper.”

  Daisy pondered the irony of his snaring Gatekeepers on the very day he had proved himself so inadequate a gatekeeper. She had stormed the gates of Fairacres without firing a shot.

  She had to remind herself not to triumph too soon. Geraldine was a harder nut to crack than her defenceless husband, who was accustomed to facing the simpler stratagems of small boys. Daisy’s interview with her mother was bound to be difficult, too. To fortify herself for the battles ahead, she gratefully accepted a second helping of gooseberry fool.

  “When will Lady Dalrymple be back?” Daisy asked the butler as they left the dining room.

  “Her ladyship expected to return for tea, miss, at half past four.”

  “Not till tea-time?” exclaimed Phillip, agitated.

  Daisy gave him a warning glance. He was a pretty hopeless conspirator, especially as he was the one who insisted on secrecy.

  “It is awkward, Cousin Geraldine not knowing yet that Cousin Edgar has invited us to stay,” she said. “Lowecroft, I expect you heard Lord Dalrymple ask me to invite a few people to come to
Fairacres tomorrow for a few days? I’ll let you know the exact numbers as soon as I can, but perhaps you would like to begin preparations.”

  “Very good, miss.” The butler’s stolid face gave no hint of whether he had noticed and appreciated her brilliant wangling. “I shall speak to the housekeeper.”

  “Thanks. Mrs. Warden is still here, isn’t she? I’ll have a word with her later.”

  Conveniently, Edgar had asked them to excuse him if he took his postprandial coffee in his conservatory-insectarium. Daisy and Phillip went out to the terrace for theirs.

  “We can’t wait till tea-time,” Phillip fretted as soon as they were alone. “Tom Pearson and Binkie will have to arrange with their offices to be gone for a few days.”

  Tommy Pearson was a solicitor in his family’s firm. Binkie did something obscure (to Daisy) with stocks and shares in the City, like Phillip but with somewhat more success. All three, having gone straight from school into the Army, were in junior positions.

  “Did you telephone your office?” Daisy asked.

  “I rang up first thing this morning and said I couldn’t come in this week. They can give me the sack if they want, I don’t care. But Tom and Binkie won’t want to risk their jobs.”

  “Lucy will have to notify clients, too,” Daisy pointed out dryly, “and you’re jolly lucky I’m free at the moment. You’re right, though, we must notify them right away. We can’t wait for Geraldine’s say-so. Anyway, however livid she is with Edgar, she’s far too proper to rescind his invitation.” I hope, she added to herself.

  Phillip’s resolve wavered, his highly developed sense of social fitness momentarily coming to the fore. “It’s not at all the thing, inveigling an unwilling hostess into putting us up.”

  “It’s for Gloria,” she reminded him. “Come on, let’s decide how much we can safely say to the others to persuade them to come. Then you can wire Lucy and telephone the others while I go and deal with Mother.”

  “Right-ho.”

  “And you’d better ring up Fenella. Tell her it’s a house-party and we’re having a treasure-hunt. That will explain us haring about the countryside.”

  “She’ll want to join in,” Phillip objected.

  “Say she wouldn’t enjoy it; everyone’s older than she is.”

  “Oh, right-ho.”

  Half an hour later, Daisy wended her way across the park along the footpath leading directly to the Dower House. The afternoon sun was hot enough to make her regret that parasols, and even broad-brimmed straw hats, were out of fashion. She could practically feel the freckles appearing on her nose as she walked.

  In the green patches beneath the clumps of trees, pale amber Jersey cows clustered in the shade, their tails swishing against the flies. Elsewhere the grass was parched to a golden brown. The only moisture it had received for weeks must be dew at dawn, evaporating before it soaked in except where protected from the sun. Even the air smelled dry. Most years the park stayed lushly green all summer; Daisy could not recall ever seeing it dried up so early.

  Her footsteps kicked up puffs of dust. The sight lent weight to the scanty evidence that Phillip had really been confined in the midst of woodland.

  Which still left a lot of ground to be covered. Even if enquiries pinpointed a general area, Daisy had little hope of finding Gloria Arbuckle before her father paid the ransom. The crooks surely wouldn’t want to hang around for longer than necessary. But the searchers just might strike it lucky, and the quest would be worth the effort just to stop Phillip sinking into despair.

  It might even be quite amusing, rather like the treasurehunts so popular among young people at house-parties.

  She came to the gate in the high, neatly-trimmed beech hedge around the Dower House. The garden inside was equally neat and flourishing. One thing the Dowager Lady Dalrymple hadn’t grumbled about for some time was the young Welsh gardener Daisy had foisted on her. Owen Morgan was a hard worker who knew his stuff.

  Seeing him up a ladder picking cherries, she begged a handful and asked after his family before going on into the house.

  Her mother was in the sitting room, seated at the satinwood Sheraton bureau, writing a letter. Daisy regarded her oblivious back with fondness mingled with anticipated exasperation.

  A short, plumpish woman in her mid-fifties, the dowager viscountess was never happy without something to moan about. In her eyes, the charming and very comfortable Dower House was utterly inadequate. Its mere five bedrooms—not counting servants’ quarters—made guests other than family out of the question. Even her elder daughter Violet’s family could only be squeezed in with the greatest difficulty. It would be unbearably cramped if her younger daughter came to live with her, yet she strongly objected to Daisy’s working to support herself in London.

  Both daughters neglected her terribly, their rare visits always much too short. What she would say when she discovered Daisy was in Worcestershire but staying with the enemy up at the big house remained to be seen.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Lady Dalrymple started and swung round. “Good gracious, Daisy, what a horrid shock you gave me! I suppose it’s too much to expect you to give me a few hours’ notice if you mean to come down.”

  Daisy kissed her. “I hoped it would be a nice surprise.”

  “Of course I’m always glad to see you, dear, but I have the Waddells and Miss Reid coming to dinner and bridge tonight.”

  “I shan’t upset your numbers, or put you out in any way. Edgar and Geraldine have invited me and several friends to stay for a few days.”

  “Indeed! So now the encroaching parvenus are attempting to alienate my children from me? How could you accept?”

  “It was very kind of them. One can’t refuse all their olive branches, Mother. I’ll be able to pop in to see you now and then without upsetting your bridge evenings or your other engagements.”

  “If only you would learn to play bridge, Daisy. It’s very awkward not being able to call on you to make up a table.”

  Having sedulously avoided learning the game, Daisy had no intention of starting now. “I’d never meet your high standards,” she said. “I think my mind works the wrong way.”

  “You take after your father. He never did play well.” This, by an inevitable progression, called to mind another of the late viscount’s faults. “It’s a great pity he didn’t leave you better provided for, so that you would have no excuse to work.”

  Though she knew it was pointless, in defence of her father Daisy trotted out the old arguments. “You know he always assumed Gervaise would inherit Fairacres and give me a home and an allowance. And he was too shattered after Gervaise … afterwards to get around to making a new will at once. He was still comparatively young and healthy. He thought he had plenty of time.”

  “I can’t think why he went and succumbed to the ’flu,” the dowager fretted, as if her husband had deliberately died to inconvenience her. “If you only had the sense to get married, like Violet … .”

  “As a matter of fact,” Daisy said cautiously, “there’s a man I want you to meet.”

  Her mother brightened. “Who is he?” she asked eagerly. “He’ll be at your house-party, at Fairacres?”

  “No, actually … .”

  “I knew it. He’s unsuitable!” she lamented. “Since you will insist on working, you’re bound to mingle with hoi polloi. What is he? Some scruffy, penniless intellectual? A wealthy upstart with pretensions? Oh, Daisy, not a foreigner?”

  In comparison, a middle-class police detective just might come as a pleasant surprise, Daisy hoped. Let Mother worry for a few days. “You’ll find out when you meet him,” she said. “I was going to write and ask if this coming weekend would be convenient.”

  “Let me look in my diary. For you, yes, but I really cannot have a stranger staying in the house, especially if he’s not one of us. Besides, it’s quite impossible to entertain properly with only three indoor servants.”

  “He’s booking at the Wedge and Beetle
.”

  “Well, at least he has the decency not to thrust himself in where he’s not wanted.”

  “Mother! I don’t expect miracles of cordiality, but unless you promise to be polite, I shan’t bring him. We’ll get married quietly in a Registry Office and …”

  “My daughter marry in a Registry Office? Over my dead body!”

  “You wouldn’t know about it until afterwards,” Daisy pointed out. “Do be reasonable, Mother.”

  “Naturally I shall be polite,” the dowager sniffed. “I trust I am never otherwise. I can only hope seeing the bounder among well-bred people of your own class will make you see sense.”

  Daisy bit her tongue to hold back a futile retort. “Yes, well, I’d better be getting back,” she said. “I’ll drop by again tomorrow. Oh, by the way, Phillip Petrie sends his best regards.”

  “Phillip? Is he at Fairacres? You’d do well to marry Phillip,” her mother lamented. “The Petries are an excellent family.

  “Phillip may be neither scruffy nor an intellectual but he hasn’t a bean, and anyway, he’s in love with someone else. Cheerio, Mother. See you tomorrow.”

  Phillip was in love, Daisy reflected as she made her way back across the park, and he believed his beloved was in danger. Daisy could not help wondering whether he had unwittingly exaggerated Miss Arbuckle’s peril, or altogether misunderstood the situation. On this peaceful June day, the notion of a band of murderous thugs marauding about the countryside was awfully hard to credit.

  Still, he was afraid for his Gloria, and for some reason he had chosen Daisy to come to the rescue. She, in turn, wanted nothing more than to lay the burden on Alec’s broad and admirably competent shoulders. That expedient being ruled out, she’d have to do her best without him.

  She had set things in motion. With any luck, reinforcements would arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, she needed to prepare a plan of campaign.

  “Maps,” she said aloud. Her father had kept two inch to the mile Ordnance Survey maps of the county in the desk in his den. To judge by the lack of change in the parts of the house she had seen, they were very likely still in the same drawer. Ferreting them out would keep poor old Phillip occupied for a while.