Sally was a true daughter of her village, and resolute that nobody from Murreystone should even attempt to steal the thunder of a Plummergenite. When the time came to make her floral offering, the curtsey she swept would have turned Margot Fonteyn green with envy. She threw a beaming look of triumphant relief towards Miss Seeton, who had been so very kind; and she gasped with audible delight when Georgina, beaming back, exclaimed:
“Oh, thank you. What beautiful flowers—and such a lovely ribbon! Do you know, it almost exactly matches your frock?” So tiny was she that she hardly had to bend at all to hold the wide satin streamer against the skirt of Sally’s best dress. “It does!” She laughed with sheer pleasure. “Don’t you think it would make an absolutely perfect sash?” And those sparkling sapphire orbs made their appeal to the nearest person. To Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.
Teachers of art have, of necessity, an excellent eye for colour; Miss Seeton is one of the most truthful persons in England, if not the world. This combination of circumstance made it inevitable that, thus appealed to, Miss Seeton should bob a curtsey, smile a modest smile, and agree.
“Wonderful!” Georgina straightened, plucked a single flower from the bouquet, and handed the rest, with a grateful nod, to her lady-in-waiting. “This is just for now,” she said, presenting the flower to young Sally with a little bob and smile of her own. “You mustn’t go too far away,” she told the blushing infant, “while we all walk round, or I’ll lose you in the crowd, and I shouldn’t like that. And then, once we’ve seen everything, I’m going to let you have the ribbon to keep for your very own, if you’d like it. Would you?”
“Oh!” Sally almost dropped the flower in her excitement, and forgot all the etiquette she had ever known. “Oooh, Miss—I mean Mam—Princess—oh, yes, I would!”
“Then you mustn’t let me forget. Promise?” And Georgy Girl’s wink thrilled the hearts of many more than Sally.
Having been issued with regulation hard hats, the tour party moved off. Her Royal Highness, escorted by Dignity, was followed by Shoulders escorting the lady-in-waiting, who carried the bouquet—and Georgina’s set of earmuffs, until these should be required. A small huddle of lesser beings from both parties, the Power Station and the Palace, walked in the rear, their helmets on their heads, their muffs in their hands; and, caught up by Royal Command in that same huddle, ahead of everyone else—Press and Plummergen and Murreystone included—walked Sally and Miss Seeton.
As they walked, hearing Dignity’s running commentary in the near distance, Miss Seeton felt an overwhelming sense of power, harnessed but ready—should chance decree otherwise—to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Inevitable, of course, in such a place. The air hummed, the very walls seemed alive with some huge, invisible animal presence that whined, muted, muzzled, restrained: a wild animal, capable of terrible force, of horrific destruction if once—a fanciful notion—the beast broke its fetters, and ran free. To one of Miss Seeton’s generation, the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki spoke only too clearly of just what terror and horror there could be ...
And yet here, now, it seemed that terror and horror had—by a miracle of science she knew she could never hope to understand—given way to good. Electricity: light and heat and transport, power for industrial use, warmth and safety for people in their homes ...
Miss Seeton looked with bewildered approval on pipes and wires and metal tanks, on dials and switches, on rows of knobs and buttons, on ranks of television screens. She blinked at wall-mounted cabinets containing, so Dignity’s boom informed all within earshot, potassium iodate tablets; she smiled with the rest as Princess Georgina made fun of herself in huge earmuffs, and led the way, laughing, up narrow concrete stairs and through the huge Steam Turbine Hall, where the ever-present whine of the beast was drowned out by the roar of its even more monstrous parent, water-driven.
Dignity, earmuffs now removed, spoke in learned tones of boron steel and concrete shielding, of refuelling gantries and access pits. The princess heard that a tenth of London’s entire electricity supply would come from here. Red lights—the eyes of the beast—glowed as the party passed by; its warm breath blew from ducts and internal vents on the exposed faces of the intruders as they passed changing-rooms filled with white overalls, free from dust and contamination.
Tiled floors, ceilings, walls. Desks covered in paperwork; swivel chairs, the seats of power in more ways than one. From staircase windows, a glimpse of the cooling ponds outside; talk of band-screen-filtered salt water siphonically discharged, of local fishermen happy to eat, or to sell, what they had caught. Georgina made a little joke about sea-trout and salmon; with chuckles her words were repeated, ripples spreading across the whole company.
Before leaving the controlled area for the next part of the tour came the Radiation Check. “Do you think I’ll light up in the dark?” enquired Georgina, thrusting her hands happily into the spring-rubber slots of the cream enamelled metal box, huge and floor-standing, with its winking eyes of dull red, clear green. Smiling, she twirled in a slow pirouette, arms outstretched, as Dignity took it upon himself to run the scanning beam of the monitor, microphone-shaped, from head to dainty foot over her royal person, and pronounced her radiation-free.
The others followed in turn: Dignity, ministered to by Shoulders; the lady-in-waiting, scanned by—at her own regal request—Her Royal Highness Princess Georgina, after instruction from a proudly blushing Shoulders. Not a man in the party but would willingly have changed places with him as Georgina, allowing Lady Vaudine to pass on a steady green light, blew him a quick kiss of gratitude for having let her share the fun.
The second rankers came next, watched with much interest by Her Royal Highness, reluctant to rejoin Dignity and her bouquet as the queue snaked slowly on its way. She would love, she said, to try again. A brief, silent consultation, and she was permitted to operate the scanner upon the portly form of the Chief Physicist, the slender shape of the Electrical Engineer. “What would happen,” asked Her Royal Highness, “if there had been a leak?”
The crush, the chaos in the monitoring lobby grew greater as the rest of the tour—lesser beings, slower walkers—gradually arrived. Those waiting to be let pass outside milled about, crowding; those already outside pressed closer for their first glimpse of the princess. Sally and Miss Seeton, mindful of royal command, tried not to be swept aside: there were many taller, heavier, more self-important than they to make their importance known, and Sally uttered a little cry of vexation as the crowd surged past them.
Miss Seeton—indignant not for her own sake, but for Sally’s disappointment—took the child’s hand in hers, used her brolly as a pathfinder, and edged her way to the monitoring station, where a white-coated figure demonstrated the rubber slots, the cream-and-silver microphone.
“Hold my rose, please, Miss?”
Small Sally, on tiptoe, felt rubber clamp gently about her hands, saw green lights gleam. The microphone wafted up and down her infant frame, and she danced aside.
Miss Seeton handed back the rose, slipped her umbrella up her arm, and imitated Sally and the rest with the placing of her hands. Green, silent permission was granted.
The silver microphone sniffed the soles of the shoes one by one, trailed in a swooping zigzag up the stockinged legs, the tweed checks of the coat; swerved around the buckled belt, the neatly-buttoned breast—
And came screaming, whooping, clanging to a sudden halt just as it reached Miss Seeton’s face.
Everyone leaped as lights flashed, bells pealed, gongs deafened the ears. Every head turned to Miss Seeton where she stood, wide-eyed with dismay, trembling for the clamour she had wrought. With a clatter inaudible above the sound of the alarm, her umbrella slipped to the tiled floor and lay there, its golden handle seeming to blink as the redness above flickered on and off, on and off, on and off.
Dignity rushed to the rescue. “Switch it off at once!” Without waiting for the white coat to obey, he pressed levers down with shaking hands. The
clamour was stilled, the red eyes dulled. “You—you must have done it wrong.” Dignity mopped his brow: he did not dare—nobody dared—to glance in the direction of Georgina. “Let’s hope it isn’t ... you haven’t broken it. Try again. And carefully, this time!”
All eyes watched the monitor once more weave its upward, swooping path; all ears prepared for the clamour to begin again, though none believed that it would ...
It did.
“Oh, no,” breathed Miss Seeton: but nobody heard her. Dignity, now deathly pale instead of purple, kicked aside the umbrella, snatched the silver microphone from the white-sleeved hand, and turned it upon himself, first clicking the switches off, then on again.
Nothing.
Nothing, until it was held again to the collar of Miss Seeton’s red-and-black checked coat. Some, with less self-control than others, already had their fingers in their ears against the racket which ensued.
“Take your coat off, woman!” Dignity, overwrought, had no time to spare for the social niceties. Obediently, Miss Seeton began with trembling fingers to undo her buttons.
Dignity pressed the switch for silence, then beckoned to another minion. “The Geiger counter,” he commanded; and it was brought. Dignity gestured towards Miss Seeton as she stood revealed in her light tweed suit and discreet blouse, with her favourite yellow beads about her neck, her neat felt hat—even the proud cockscomb looked embarrassed—on her head, her leather gloves and bag invisible under sleeves which had slipped down her arms as the coat swung open.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick, tick tick tick tick tick-tickticktickticktick ...
“The necklace!” Dignity pushed aside the second white-coated assistant to spin Miss Seeton bodily round on the spot, fumbling with the catch of her necklace as the Geiger counter rattled out its warning. “The necklace ...”
With Cousin Flora’s beads well out of range, the Geiger counter was held once again to Miss Seeton’s neck.
Nothing.
“I’ve—I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life.” Indignant Dignity tossed the beads to one of the minions with instructions to measure their output properly.
“Great heavens!” He ordered a second measuring. He—everyone within sight—gaped.
“Great heavens—madam,” recalling his manners with an effort. “Do you realise that you have been walking about with two and a half thousand becquerels of radioactivity around your neck?”
“Good gracious,” was Miss Seeton’s weak, bewildered, and utterly helpless reply. “I’m—I’m really very sorry. Is it serious?”
Dignity rolled his eyes in speechless despair. It was one of the white-coated minions who replied. “Let’s say you shouldn’t wear those beads of yours for too long at any one time, Miss. The glass they’re made of is coloured with uranium salts—those yellow streaks, you see. There was quite a vogue for that sort of thing back in the Twenties, when folk didn’t realise how dangerous the stuff could be. You gave us quite a shock, I must say.”
“Good gracious,” gasped Miss Seeton again. “Oh, dear, I really must ...” And she began to explain that Cousin Flora had left her, as well as her dear cottage and a modest sum of money, the contents of that cottage, these including her personal possessions and, of course, her jewellery, which she only kept for best, and, naturally, in honour of the princess’s visit—
“Great heavens!” Dignity again went white. Never mind the confusion caused by this untoward occurrence; one could not with impunity ignore one’s guest of honour—especially one whose blood was of the bluest, and whose influence on those responsible for compiling the Honours List could be considerable.
“I must humbly beg your pardon, Your Royal Highness, for the interruption.” He thrust Miss Seeton and her apologies aside as he began to make his way back to where Georgina waited.
“But everything is now under control, Ma’am, and ...”
To where she was not waiting.
“Ma’am?”
Attention snapped away from Miss Seeton, darted about the room. The lady-in-waiting uttered a little squeak, then began to turn pale.
“Ma’am?”
Heads turned, searching back and forth. Was Georgina playing—the nation’s darling was surely not so foolish—a practical joke?
Surely not!
“Ma’am ...”
Dignity was pleading now. Lady Vaudine’s white lips parted in a whisper. Other voices, low at first, then louder, took up the cry.
There came, no matter how loud the crying, no reply.
No reply at all.
Her Royal Highness Princess Georgina had completely disappeared.
chapter
~ 11 ~
“SHE—SHE CAN’T have disappeared!” Dignity cast a frantic look at the lady-in-waiting. “She—she must be playing some—some trick on us ...”
For all the tension of the moment, Lady Vaudine Elliot visibly winced. “Her Royal Highness,” she said, with icy scorn, “does not”—her lip curled—“play tricks.” After her first white, stunned silence, Vaudine’s aristocratic training had come swiftly to her aid. Her voice did not shake as she echoed Dignity’s desperate words; and her head was high, her spine was straight as she went on: “Nor, let me assure you, is she given to—to disappearing whilst engaged on her official duties.”
Lady Vaudine’s voice did not shake—but her hands did. Dignity’s gaze was irresistibly drawn to them as, despite her ladyship’s air of studied calm, they writhed beneath their burden of Georgina’s earmuffs and bouquet ...
The bouquet! The child ... and the old woman with the child—the old woman who had caused so much commotion even before the princess’s arrival, and who had caused even more just before she—surely there could be no other possible word—disappeared ...
Dignity whirled to face Miss Seeton, who, though quite as puzzled as the rest by Georgina’s strange behaviour, had recovered herself sufficiently to begin the instinctive retrieval of her fallen brolly. “You!”
As he pointed a challenging finger, and uttered his one bitter syllable of blame, Miss Seeton, bending, jumped. She blinked. The umbrella clattered again from her grasp ...
“Leave that alone!” Dignity was now in full command of himself and, he hoped, of the situation. He glanced round for the security people, and found, to his relief, that they had forestalled his next instruction. They were closing in on Miss Seeton—not one of them under six feet tall, all of them broad-shouldered, narrow-eyed, menacing—and Miss Seeton, startled by their menace, was taking a few nervous steps backwards.
She had left, as ordered, her umbrella alone. One of the security team muttered sideways to his companions and left them to continue their closing action while he veered from his course to begin a cautious approach to the sinister gold-and-black shape on the floor. Miss Seeton, surrounded, uttered one muffled squeak, then was frozen into silence by the force of the multiple slit-eyed stare directed at her from high above her head ...
The security man neared the umbrella—held his breath—bent, warily, low ... peered at the handle. His scrutiny passed slowly, intently, from the handle to the spike; he leaned over and squinted, frowning, at the ferrule, then seemed to have reassured himself that the rubber did not conceal the muzzle of some custom-built weapon; and moved back to the handle once more. Taking a deep breath, he thrust one hand behind him, motioning everyone away ... while, with the other, he reached out for the exact centre of the umbrella, and picked it up. Smoothly, he rose to his feet ...
He rotated the umbrella three times before deciding that it might be safe to examine it in yet more detail. He held it to one eye—squinted down its length; he held it in the middle and twisted the handle to and fro, aiming the ferrule—for safety’s sake—at the floor.
Nothing happened. No explosion—no bullet—no swift steel blade. It seemed there was no bomb, no gun, no sword-stick concealed in the umbrella’s hollow steel shaft ...
It seemed: but seeming was not believing. Expert knowledge of the
ways of villains warned that the apparently harmless could even yet be something else. There was one check still to be made before the brolly’s innocence could truly be believed. As there came a long, thrilling sigh from the watching crowd, the security man signalled again for continued caution, then fumbled with the fastening strap and, with a resigned grunt, slid the steel ring slowly up the shaft to its connecting notch. The spokes sprang wide apart ... And the umbrella, in all its silken glory, was safely open.
Another sigh; murmurs of relief. It was no more than an umbrella, after all ...
But was the old woman who had dropped it no more than an old woman?
All heads turned, as they had turned before, towards Miss Seeton. Dwarfed among her captors, she was gradually coming to the realisation that, somehow, everyone thought everything that had happened was all her fault—as, indeed, one had to confess that much of it was. Dear Cousin Flora’s beads ...
Miss Seeton saw the turning heads, the accusing eyes—and blushed.
“Oh, dear,” said Miss Seeton. “I’m—I’m really very, very sorry ...”
“I’m really very sorry, sir.” Detective Constable Foxon was on his knees in front of Superintendent Brinton’s desk. “If you hang on a sec, I’ll just ...”
With a further hitch of his well-pressed trousers up and over his knees to spare the crease, he flopped back on his heels, leaned forwards, and began to pick up the bright white bullets which Brinton, in an unusually exasperated moment, had hurled at him. Since cellophane bags of sweets are aerodynamically unsound, the bullets had not gone far in their flight before falling to the floor; and Foxon, who realised that he had, perhaps, himself gone rather too far on this occasion, had come rushing from his chair to the rescue. The rasp of Brinton’s frenzied respiration was accompanied by a counterpoint of sharp plops as the peppermints were dropped, one by one, into the envelope Foxon held in his spare hand—the envelope which, as he saw his chief’s empurpled face fade slowly to reassuring red, he moved a little farther away with each dropping. As the plops grew louder, Brinton’s breathing grew calmer—or at any rate, by contrast, less noisy. Foxon, with an elaborately courteous cough, ventured to speak again.
Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18) Page 10