Escapade

by Walter Satterthwait

  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)

  Chapter Eleven

  "LET ME SEE,” said Lord Bob, “if I understand you.”

  We were in his study, a large room on the ground floor. It smelled of new flowers and old money. It had probably always smelled of old money, but the smell of flowers came from a tall vase of red roses on Lord Bob’s desk. The desk was big enough to make the vase look like a tiny skiff floating on a lake of cherry-wood.

  The Great Man and I were sitting in red padded leather chairs studded with brass tacks. On the dark paneled walls hung framed etchings of elegant hunting dogs. Beyond the casement window hung a postcard view of green grass and distant trees.

  Lord Bob was staring at me as though I had just offered him a bite of tarantula sandwich. “You’re not a personal secretary,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “You work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, in America.”

  “Right.”

  He stroked his mustache. “It was a Pinkerton spy, wasn’t it, broke the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania?”

  I nodded. “James McParlan.”

  “And it was Pinkertons got sent in to protect those blacklegs in Homestead. Big workers’ strike against that Scottish swine, Carnegie.”

  “Right.”

  “Armed thugs. Capitalist mercenaries.”

  I nodded. “We don’t do that anymore.”

  His furry eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “Oh? Work for the labor unions now, do you?”

  “Right now I work for Harry.” I shrugged. “You don’t like the Pinkertons, Lord Purleigh.” He didn’t ask me to call him Bob. “That’s your privilege. But I’m not here to clobber steelworkers. I’m here to protect Harry.”

  Lord Bob scowled. He turned to the Great Man. “You’ve retained Beaumont here—” He looked back to me. “It is Beaumont? You’re not traveling under some sort of. . .” He paused, searching for the word, or maybe for a nasty equivalent. “Alias?”

  I said. “No.”

  Back to the Great Man. “You’ve retained Beaumont because someone is attempting to kill you?”

  The Great Man frowned. “It was not actually an idea of my own. I believed, personally, that I could deal with the matter myself. But my dear wife, Bess, was concerned. She worries about me, you see. And after what happened in Philadelphia, she insisted I hire someone who might be able to guarantee my safety.”

  Lord Bob was looking puzzled. “What was it,” he said, “that happened in Philadelphia?”

  “I was staying in a hotel. The Ardmore. Chin Soo entered my suite in disguise, dressed as the room service waiter. He attempted to kill me. Or the person he believed to be me. In fact, he nearly killed a member of the Philadelphia Police Department. A Sergeant Monahan.”

  “Lanahan,” I said.

  Lord Bob frowned at me. So did the Great Man—he didn’t like being corrected any more than he liked being interrupted. “Whoever he was,” he said, “he was masquerading as me. It was a trap, you see. The police were there to apprehend and arrest Chin Soo.”

  “Which they failed to do,” said Lord Bob.

  “Yes. He escaped down a fire escape.”

  Lord Bob stroked his mustache. “And so you employed the Pinkertons. In the form of Beaumont.”

  “Yes. As I said, it was my wife’s idea.”

  That was true. But it was obvious that Lord Bob didn’t like the Pinkertons, and probably the Great Man didn’t mind putting some distance between himself and me.

  Still stroking his mustache, Lord Bob nodded. “This Chin Soo person. He’s a disgruntled magician, you say?”

  “A rival, yes.”

  “Takes his rivalries damn seriously, I must say.”

  “The man is deranged. Completely demented. He claims that I stole my coffin escape from him. This is total nonsense, of course.

  I was performing the coffin escape years ago, while Chin Soo was still catching bullets in second-rate vaudeville houses.”

  “Catching bullets?” said Lord Bob. His bushy eyebrows floated up his forehead.

  The Great Man shrugged dismissively. “With his teeth.”

  The eyebrows dipped. “Good Lord.”

  The Great Man shrugged again. “It is dangerous, yes, to some extent, but it is merely a trick.”

  “And you honestly believe that this chap would follow you all the way from America?”

  I said, “I got a wire from my agency while we were in Paris. A man who was probably Chin Soo bought a ticket on the La Paloma. It arrived in Rotterdam last Monday.”

  Lord Bob looked at me. “Why didn’t your chaps notify the Dutch police?”

  “They did. The guy never got off the boat. He disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “No one knows what Chin Soo looks like. He wears make-up on stage. No one knows what his real name is. Chin Soo’s a stage name. We’re pretty sure he’s not Chinese. And we know he’s good at disguises. When he came for Harry at the Ardmore, he made himself up to look like an Italian.”

  Lord Bob frowned.

  “He’s smart and he’s determined,” I said, “and right now there’s no way at all to locate him.” .

  “How d’you expect to capture him, then?”

  “That’s not my job. My job is to keep Harry alive. Which is why getting him out of London, coming to Devon, seemed like a pretty good idea. There wasn’t supposed to be any publicity.” I glanced at the Great Man, who blinked and glanced away. “I thought it’d be safe. I was wrong. Chin Soo must’ve seen that article in the London Times. ”

  Lord Bob stroked his mustache again. “But you can’t know that

  it was your Chin Soo who fired the shot this afternoon.”

  “Whoever he was, he missed Harry by about two inches. That’s good enough for me.”

  “But you can’t be certain, can you. Not absolutely.”

  “I’ll only be certain about anything when Chin Soo’s in jail. Or when Harry’s dead. But in the meantime, seems to me, all your other guests are in danger.”

  He frowned at me again. He was doing a lot of frowning today, most of it at me. He sat back in his chair and put his elbows on its arms and he steepled his hands together beneath his chin. “And what is it you propose we do?”

  “Harry and I can leave. Go back to London. That’s one possibility. That way, at least your other guests aren’t in danger. And that’s what gets my vote.”

  “But Houdini’s the only one this chap wants to kill. Eh?”

  “If he’s trying to kill Harry, he could miss him and hit someone else. He could’ve hit Mrs. Corneille this afternoon.”

  He nodded. Reluctantly. “Fair enough. But you’re putting people in danger wherever you go, eh? Isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. It’s something I’m not too happy about. I’d like to have another twenty men working with me. But Harry wants to keep this thing simple. Only one man. Me.”

  Lord Bob turned to the Great Man. “And why is that?”

  “The more people who become involved,” he said, “the greater the likelihood that the press will learn of it. My entire career is based upon the remarkable dangers into which I place myself. If it should be thought that I was frightened by a mere individual, another magician, and an inferior magician at that—”

  “Got you,” said Lord Bob. “Got you. Well, look here, old man, naturally if you’d like to leave, no one at Maplewhite would hold it against you. Entirely up to you.”

  The Great Man bobbed his head lightly toward Lord Bob. “I am sorry, Lord Robert, but I disagree. It is up to you, entirely. But so long, of course, as you and Lady Purleigh wish my presence, I should prefer to remain.”

  “Goe
s without saying,” Lord Bob said. “Welcome as long as you like.” He grinned. “No jumping ship, eh? Stout fellow.”

  He turned back to me, without the grin. “You’re welcome as well, of course. In the circumstances.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So you remain here,” he said to the Great Man. “That’s settled. What now?”

  I said, “We tell all the other guests what’s going on.”

  Lord Bob glared at me.

  I said, “They’ve got a right to know the score—to know what the situation is. If they want to stay, fine.”

  He glanced down at his desktop and thought for a moment. At last, he said, “We could tell ’em all at tea time, I suppose.”

  “Next,” I said, “we tell the local police. Have them mount a guard on this place.”

  He looked across the desk at me and he snorted so hard that his mustache flapped. “Got an inflated idea, I see, of the local constabulary’s resources. Their competence, too.”

  “Anything’s better than nothing.”

  “Not in this case. Met the Superintendent a time or two, over in Amberly. Honniwell. A nincompoop. And Constable Dubbins, down in the village, he’s a buffoon, plain and simple. Besides, even if they were geniuses, both of’em, they haven’t got enough people to watch over us here. Simple as that.”

  “What about the police in London?” I asked him. “Couldn’t they send someone down here?”

  He shook his head. “Too busy up there. Your sort of work— breaking strikes, bullying workers. Even if they could spare some of their thugs, they wouldn’t be able to get ’em here till tomorrow, at the earliest. And all the guests are leaving tomorrow, eh? Not much point in that, is there.”

  He paused. “Tell you what. I’ll have MacGregor get some of the tenants together. The local farmers. Have them search the grounds. They’re good lads, all of’em. Know the country like the back of their hands. If Chin Soo’s anywhere about, they’ll flush him out.”

  I said, “They’re not cops, Lord Purleigh.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Yes?” Lord Bob called out.

  The door opened and the butler stood there, looking as magnificent and as blank and expressionless as he had looked last night. “Forgive me for disturbing you, milord.”