Puzzle of the Silver Persian (20 page)

The pride of the Hammond household hastily sent another spit ball. “Mind your own business,” he told the young man.

“I say—” began Leslie. But Candida, with the intellectual acumen of her sex, simply leaned over and took the magazine from Gerald’s lap.

“I’d like to look at this,” she said pleasantly. There was quiet for a few minutes, while the train slipped pleasantly along at sixty miles per hour. They had passed most of the suburbs now, and London’s horrible appendages of villas and cottages were thinning out.

Candida got well into an interesting story before she discovered that the latter pages of it had been torn out to make ammunition for Gerald. The Honorable Emily was still buried in her magazine, and Candida felt that she might as well try to follow her example. There was no use trying to chat with Leslie in front of this wide-eyed monster who faced them.

Indeed, when Reverson returned from a trip to the corridor bringing her a glass of water, Gerald piped up, “He’s sweet on you, isn’t he?”

“Little boys shouldn’t—”

“Well, he is! You can’t fool me, you can’t.” Gerald swung his legs and looked smug. “I don’t like girls,” he informed the group.

Nobody seemed inclined to encourage a further disclosure as to his tastes. The London sky had disappeared, and the sun shown through patches of cloud, beaming down here and there upon a wonderful soft green countryside, cut chess-board fashion into little irregular squares lined by hedges. Here and there a wooded hill swept past…

The Honorable Emily seemed visibly to expand. “Coming into Berkshire,” she announced.

Candida, in spite of the natural tension under which she rested, could not resist an exclamation. “How lovely it is!”

The Honorable Emily raised her eyebrows. “Wait until you see Cornwall,” she advised. But her eyes softened: Leslie could not help noticing that.

He leaned back and watched Candida covertly, wondering again as he had wondered so often these last few days just why it was that he had had eyes on the boat only for the shallower, more apparent charms of Rosemary Fraser. It wasn’t that Candida had lost some of her tanned, boyish healthiness, but that she had gained something more, something deeper. Leslie would rather look at her than at the farmlands of Berkshire.

The terrible Gerald cared little for sylvan beauty. “Dirty old backwoods,” he said. “We got farms ten times as big as these in America.”

The train cut across a roadway where a fine pair of white horses waited with a load of rails.

“See the big horses,” said Candida tactfully.

But she was no success as an arbitrator. “Dirty old horses,” said Gerald scornfully. “Call those horses? We got horses ten times as big as those.”

A conductor accepted the sheaf of tickets which the Honorable Emily had in readiness and passed on down the train. It was the signal for which the lady had been eagerly waiting.

For more than two hours poor Tobermory had been languishing in his box. Now that the conductor was out of sight, and no stop would be made until Plymouth was reached late in the afternoon, his mistress, as was her wont, opened his case in time to save it from being entirely chewed through and took the nervous and annoyed cat out on her lap.

He dug his claws ungratefully into her thigh and stalked down onto the cushions, curling up into a silver-gray ball of fur as soon as he had made certain that door and window were firmly shut against him.

The terrible Gerald showed interest. “Dirty ol’ cat,” he declared. “We got cats ten times as big—” He was edging forward.

“I firmly advise that you respect Tobermory’s privacy,” said the Honorable Emily sharply. Gerald slid back into his corner and stared morosely out of the window. They sped through the village of Pewsey.

“Dirty ol’ town,” said Gerald softly. As a matter of feet, he spoke the truth, but no one loved him the better for it.

The first call for luncheon was welcomed by everybody in the carriage, except Tobermory, who was forced to return temporarily to his case. The Honorable Emily, who still fancied that she had a knack with children, spoke kindly to Gerald.

“Hungry, little man?”

“Yaaa—” mimicked the child, “I’m hungry-little-man, you bet your life.” He led the way to the dining car.

His order, given in strident tones to the waiter before anyone else had spoken, was for pudding, pie, ice cream, and meringue glacé—all the desserts on the menu.

“You’d better have something a bit more—” began the Honorable Emily faintly.

But the terrible Gerald stared at her. “I guess I can have what I want,” he blurted out. “I guess my mother gave me money to pay for it. I guess—”

“But does your mother let you eat only sweet stuff?” he was asked.

He nodded. “My mother says that children’s natural ap-appetites should be encouraged. She read it in a book. She says it preserves the identity of character.”

He spoke the phrases as one word. The Honorable Emily shrugged her shoulders. She gave her attention to a bit of cold lamb, and luncheon proceeded in a silence broken only by the loud gulps of the child.

Candida had come to the table with a good appetite, but the sight of Gerald’s hasty absorption of pudding, pie, ice cream, and meringue made her pause. When he ordered a second round, and poured cream, sugar, and strawberry jam on his pudding, she rose hastily to her feet.

“I think I’d better—I mean, I’ll just have a walk through the train,” she said.

Leslie rose quickly, leaving most of his luncheon un-tasted. Food meant very little to Leslie Reverson these days. “I’ll go along,” he offered, and they passed on together.

Gerald spoke through a mouthful of meringue. “They’ve gone out to pet,” he announced. “Like they do in the movies, I know.”

The Honorable Emily sighed and thought that she might as well say nothing at all. She remembered that her nephew did not yet know that she had contracted to keep this child overnight at Dinsul and deliver him on the morrow to Tenton Hall.

There were dungeons somewhere cut into the solid rock underneath her ancestral home, and the Honorable Emily thought wistfully of what a good place they would be for Gerald to spend the night. “Preferably in chains,” she added.

Leslie and Candida stood in the vestibule, sharing a cigarette. The green-brown slopes of Aller Moor were flowing past. “King Alfred’s Fort,” pointed out the young Englishman, as proud as if he had laid every stone.

“Beautiful, all of it,” cried Candida ecstatically.

“You’ve seen nothing,” Leslie told her. “Wait until you get to Cornwall. Big black cliffs above the sea, with little gray stone fishing villages—” He grew tired of landscape. “We’ve got a ripping golf course not far from Dinsul, and tomorrow morning we’ll have a round. You play, of course.”

“A little,” Candida admitted.

“Well, I’m not so good myself,” Leslie said. “I’ll give you ten strokes—”

“I usually play with a five handicap,” Candida told him gently.

Leslie whistled, and his eyes widened admiringly. His own handicap was twelve.

“You’ll like it down in Cornwall,” he repeated. “You know, it’s very important that you do.”

“Why?” asked Candida.

His answer was unwittingly to justify the evil guess of Gerald Hammond by taking Candida Noring in his arms and kissing her rather inexpertly on the side of the mouth.

Candida pushed him away, breathing rather hard. She was surprised, more at herself for liking it than at Leslie. After a moment she said laughingly, “It’s a good thing for my honor that I didn’t tell you I play tennis and ride, as well as golf.”

Reverson looked blank at that. She took his arm. “Come on, let’s go back and rescue your aunt.”

They came into the dining car and had a long view of the terrible Gerald demolishing the last of another pudding. “And not a bit of cyanide in it, I’m afraid,” Leslie observed wistfully.

Candida said that he was heartless, but she gripped his arm a little more tightly.

It moved him to a tremendous act of self-sacrifice. “See here,” he suggested, “I’ve got an idea. You and aunt have a good get-together chat in our compartment, and I’ll take the demon-child into one of the other vacant ones for the rest of the trip. Manly influence and all that, you know.”

“I’ll try to make her like me,” promised Candida.

But Leslie found that he had bitten off a good deal more than could be chewed. Gerald showed no disinclination to leave the ladies, but when they were alone the boy began afresh upon the window with his diamond.

“I say, the conductor will object to that,” Leslie protested. “Not a very nice word you’ve scratched there…”

Gerald protruded his lower lip, and continued. “If you keep on I’ll take the bloody diamond away from you,” said Leslie.

Gerald left off his engraving and began to slam his heels against the seat. On a lucky inspiration he began to sing, in a shrill and quite tuneless soprano, a song almost recognizable as “The Big Bad Wolf.”

After half an hour of this, Leslie put down his newspaper. “I say, old chap, do you mind varying your repertoire?”

Gerald was growing a bit pettish. “Go to hell,” he said.

“Now see here! Hasn’t your mother taught you—”

“I live with my grandmother in Brooklyn, mostly,” Gerald said. “She lets me do what I please.” He cocked his head. “But I’ll be quiet if you’ll buy me some candy when the train stops.”

They were not far from Plymouth. “Bargain,” capitulated Reverson. Gerald left off his singing, and amused himself by scratching various parts of his anatomy in a noisy and vigorous fashion.

The train halted in Plymouth, and Leslie hurried off. He swung back aboard just as they began to move out of the station, rather out of breath.

“Where’s the candy?” demanded the youth.

Leslie handed him a small packet. Either from haste at the candy counter or from a latent sense of humor, he had brought Gerald a box of Muggles’ Digestive Yeast, chocolate covered. But if it was a practical joke it failed utterly, for the boy crammed several pieces into his mouth and chewed happily.

He was in an expansive mood. “You like girls, don’t you?” he inquired, as one man to another.

“Why, er—”

“You like that big Noring girl, anyway,” prodded Gerald.

And then Leslie Reverson lost his temper. “Speak respectfully of Miss Noring, or I’ll give you a caning that you wont forget for a fortnight!”

“Yaaaa,” came back Gerald. “Try it, that’s all. My father whipped me once, and I showed him, I did. I’ll bet he wishes he’d never touched me.”

“I’ll bet he wishes he’d never begotten you,” thought Reverson. Gerald finished the chocolate yeast, and they rode on across the river Tamar in silence. The hills and moors of the ancient Duchy of Cornwall, warmed by the rays of the afternoon sun, were around them—a different land entirely from the England they had left.

The Honorable Emily and Candida had been having, as Leslie had hoped, a very pleasant chat, during which the girl had learned something of her hostess’ almost fanatical love for Dinsul, their destination. “It will be Leslie’s when I die,” said the Honorable Emily. “The estate was unentailed, you see. But I wish you could have your first evening with us without the company of that dreadful child.”

The train slowed for Penzance, and the Honorable Emily began to fasten newspapers around Dicon’s cage again. Tobermory watched from his cushions, impassive and waiting… but he did not purr.

Then Leslie and the child joined them, and there was much business of struggling into overcoats and gathering up magazines.

“What a trip!” the Honorable Emily thought wearily.

There was a sound of horrible shrieking behind her, and she very nearly leaped through the glass of the carriage. She turned, and saw blood streaming from the back of Gerald Hammond’s hand.

Tobermory, arched and spitting, had backed into the farthest corner of the seat. His forepaws, talons extended, were held out like a boxer’s.

“Damn ol’ cat, he bit me!” howled Gerald. “I just touched his ol’ tail…”

Leslie and Candida smiled, and then the girl offered her handkerchief in a motherly gesture to bandage the wound. The Honorable Emily soothed Tobermory and put him safely away in his case.

“I warned you to respect Tobermory’s privacy,” she remarked sweetly. It was the only bright moment of the trip for the Honorable Emily. But there was to be another.

They alighted in an unbelievably dingy station. Then the Honorable Emily noticed a tall, spare man approaching. He had sandy hair and a determined expression of firm kindliness which the thin-rimmed pince-nez did not soften.

“Starling!” she called.

“Yes, my lady.” The headmaster shook hands with her, and then with Leslie Reverson.

“But, Starling, I don’t understand…”

“Master Leslie telegraphed me from Plymouth,” said the schoolmaster. “He suggested that it might be well for the young man to begin his school life at once.”

He beamed down at the terrible Gerald. “How do you do, Hammond?”

Hammond did not do very well. He refused to shake hands. “I’m not going to like your ol’ school,” he announced.

“I hope you are mistaken,” said Starling gently. “But let me point out that it is not at all necessary that you should.”

They departed, quietly and expeditiously.

“Leslie,” said his aunt, as she led the way toward where a uniformed chauffeur was waiting beside a somewhat moldy Buick limousine, “sometimes I actually have hopes for you.”

Leslie Reverson gripped Candida’s arm. “If I have just the proper inspiration,” he amended.

“Good-evening, Trewartha,” said the Honorable Emily to the driver. “And how is the tide?” The tall, red-faced Cornishman smiled widely.

“On the ebb, milady. But I knew you’d not wait, so I told the boatmen to be ready.”

They were driven through a mile or so of streets lined by houses that seemed cut out of the solid rock of Cornwall, and then along a winding and very vile road which skirted the shore of the bay.

Smells of pungent salt fish reached them, and the Honorable Emily sniffed eagerly. “Newlyn,” she observed. “We’re almost home.”

They sped on, rounded another curve of the cliffs, and then plunged down into a tiny fishing village with streets so narrow that the foot passengers and cyclists had to dodge into doorways so that the limousine could pass. They went on through the village and down to a stone pier.