The Portuguese Escape (20 page)

‘They've got to go all round by the Chiado,' Julia said —she was driving very fast indeed, taking her turns with careful skill; nevertheless the two priests in the back were constantly ricochetting off one another. ‘We ought to be all right,' she said, in her slow, tranquillising tones.

‘Yes, but they were after us, damn them! They must have been keeping a round-the-clock watch on the Mon-signor's house. I can't think how they missed us—six minutes sooner, and we were done.'

‘The level-crossing, I expect,' Julia said.

‘Oh,
that's
why you came round by the by-pass! You thrice-blessed girl!' Hugh Torrens said, slapping his hand down hard on her knee, shining silken close beside his in the faint light from the dashboard.

Julia made no response. She was fully engaged in slinging her rather large car safely round a last corner—they passed now along a street which Torrens recognised. She pulled up on the left, hooted three times, leapt out and ran across to the great double gates of the Duke of Ericeira's stables; even as she reached them there came the dull clanking sound of heavy bolts being withdrawn, and one of the massive portals began to swing open. Julia nipped back and got into the car; she had placed it skilfully, and as the second big leaf of the high doors swung back the machine shot into the huge cobbled stable-yard. She switched off lights and engine instantly and ran over to the great gates, adjuring Fausto as she went—‘Come— close everything. But softly, softly; do not make a clamour with your bolts.' Noiselessly they eased the immense irons home into place; Fausto fastened a gigantic padlock, pocketed the key, and began a cheerful remark to Julia— ‘The Menina sees that I did not keep her waiting.'

‘
Não falar
,' Julia hissed at him—'
Por favor
, silence, Fausto. You did very well,' she whispered to him then; ‘but silence for a few moments.' She tiptoed back across the cobbles towards the others, who had got out of the car and were standing by it; Torrens had removed the suitcases from the boot, which he closed, like the car doors, without a sound. Then they all stood in that open court, so
strangely large in the middle of a city, listening. Julia stole a glance at Father Antal, but the moon was almost down, and a solitary electric bulb burning over the servants' entrance at the back of the house only cast a faint light immediately below it; all she saw was the silhouette of a small man in an overcoat, clutching an out-size brief-case. There was complete silence in the street outside, at that hour. They stood so for two minutes, three, four.

‘We've diddled them,' Julia murmured. ‘Let's go in.'

‘No, wait; isn't that a car?' Torrens said—listening again, Julia too heard, faint and some distance away, a car's engine. The note altered, then grew louder— ‘Changing down at the corner,' Julia whispered. The sound approached very gradually—a car was evidently being driven extremely slowly along the street. But it did not stop, and presently the noise of the engine died away altogether.

‘They must have spotted you at the Zoo and followed you home, or put two and two together somehow,' Torrens said—‘and so they were just taking a look at this place.'

‘Well they've drawn a blank,' Julia said. ‘Now let's come in and you get something to eat; it's five-and-twenty to one!'

Torrens never forgot that meal in the Ericeira palace in the small hours. Fausto was horrified at the bare idea of guests coming in at the back door, and wished to send them all out into the street again to make a proper entrance, but Julia over-ruled him in rapid friendly Portuguese; as a compromise she sent him in to fetch old Manoel, the night-watchman, to escort them through into the front part of the house. While he was gone she greeted the Monsignor and Father Antal in French—‘I have treated you very brusquely so far, I am afraid, but chauffeurs are not really expected to talk!'

‘Chauffeurs as good as you, Miss Probyn, do better than talk—your driving is a poem in itself,' Subercaseaux replied at once; the Hungarian bowed, but said nothing. Then Manoel came shuffling out and led them in, through stone-flagged passages with
azulejos
on the walls: they caught glimpses of vaulted recesses piled high with wine
barrels, with billets of chopped wood, with
mata
, the fragrant heathy prickly undershrub always used in Lisbon for kindling fires, with masses of the deep-green lopped-off boughs of
Pinus pinaster
, throughout Portugal the fuel habitually used for baking bread. They passed the open door of the vast kitchen, where a chef in a high white cap stood before an enormous range; oval
azulejo
plaques of hams, fish, and game—hares, partridges, wild duck, quail —stared down, astonishingly life-like, from its walls. At last through a final door they emerged into the hall, where Elidio, bowing, awaited them—he almost gasped with horror at the sight of Major Torrens carrying the Monsignor's suitcases, and fairly snatched them from his hands; an underling bore them away, while Elidio grumbled at Manoel in Portuguese for having let such a thing occur.

Then they were seated in the vast dining-room at one end of the long table. Elidio held out a chair for Julia, and a footman brought cups of hot consommé, and a big rack of Melba toast. The chef had obviously decided, that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, so there were omelettes all round, followed by an enormous
whole
cold turkey, which Elidio displayed to Julia before taking it to carve at the sideboard—also Chippendale, Torrens noticed, and at least fourteen feet in length. Only Julia and the Major partook of the turkey, since it was Friday; but there was salad, and red wine and white wine; both light, flowery, delicious. No one spoke much at first; in the soft light from the three big silver candelabras on the shining table Julia studied the face of the Hungarian. It was square-set, with the usual Central European prominence of lips and cheek-bones, but what she noticed was how rugged it was—the brow channelled with thought, round the mouth lines begotten of determination or courage, over all a strong expression of calm and benevolence. He really did look to be a splendid person; worthy even of Hetta's unbounded admiration, the girl thought. And at that moment Father Antal raised his deep-set eyes to hers, smiled at her, and said in French—

‘This is very good. Merci, Mademoiselle.'

‘Does Hetta make omelettes as well as the chef does?' Julia asked, smiling.

‘Oh, you know my little Hetta? Yes, she makes wonderful omelettes—though not often at one o'clock in the morning! How is she getting on, here?'

‘Beginning to swim,' Julia said—the priest smiled.

‘I must see her before I leave,' he said—he turned to Torrens. ‘This can be arranged?'

‘Well, really, I don't know—' he was beginning, when Julia intervened.

‘Oh yes, Father, easily. The Duke, your host, is a great admirer of hers—in fact he has already suggested that she should join us at Gralheira.'

‘Is our host a Duke? Which?' Father Antal asked calmly—and Julia was struck suddenly by his complete tranquillity and incuriosity on being whisked off in the middle of the night without having the faintest idea, obviously, of where he was going, or to whom.

‘The Duke of Ericeira,' she said.

‘Ah yes. A great supporter of Catholic Action.' Father Antal, it seemed, could place Dukes all right—Catholic ones anyhow.

But Torrens, having been set worrying again, apparently could not stop.

‘Julia, we ought to tell the Duke about this,' he said in a lowered tone, leaning towards her.

‘About what?'

‘All this business tonight, and that car coming past the house. It means that there's a certain element of risk about his having them.'

‘Well it's too late now,' Julia said flatly. ‘They're here —and if you think the Duke will change his mind because of a vague risk, or
any
risk, you're greatly mistaken. Stop fussing, Hugh, and eat your turkey. Do you want coffee?'

‘My God, no!'

‘Oh, very well.' She put the same question to the two priests, but they did not want coffee either—‘No coffee,' she told Elidio. The manservant, looking disappointed that he might not serve coffee at one-thirty a.m., when most of the household was leaving at ten that same morning, muttered a question in Julia's ear.

‘Hugh, Elidio wants to know if you're sleeping here too, or if you want a taxi fetched?'

‘Good God!' Major Torrens exploded—' What a place! A taxi, please.' And in a taxi he presently drove away, while Julia and the two priests, the latter escorted by Elidio, climbed the shadowy staircase and betook themselves to bed.

The main road from São Pedro do Sul, like all Portuguese main roads nowadays, is broad, and faultlessly surfaced with tarmac. Where it passes through a cutting the banks are planted with the horrible mesembryanthemum; elsewhere it is often bordered with neat little hedges, just high enough to obscure the view—every few kilometres a trim house stands back from it, built to accommodate the road-menders. But after several miles a small side-road turns up a valley to the north-east, through pinewoods which could make one imagine oneself in Scotland—especially when the mists from the Serra behind hang low over them—were it not for the fact that the banks, sandy like the road itself, are here draped with the dark foliage and brilliant blue flowers of
Lithospermum
, which English enthusiasts grow laboriously in their rock-gardens. In spring, if you were to leave the road and wander through the woods towards one of the many streams coming down off the Serra, the chances are that you would come on clumps of
Narcissus cyclamineus
, the exquisite little wild daffodil whose pale petals turn back and upwards like those of a cyclamen.

Presently, however, the pinewoods cease and cultivation begins: fields of arable, well-tended olive-orchards, terraced vineyards on south-facing slopes; the whole, as the road climbs, with an ever-increasing aspect of the tidiness that wealth and good husbandry bring: the motorist in England entering the Dukeries gets much the same impression. At last, on the right, one encounters a high demesne wall of grey stone with the formal, grey-green, plumed shapes of great cypresses rising behind it, and finally an enormous house, more formal even than the cypresses—rich with pediments over the windows, with sculptured swags, with all the splendour and glory of a baroque mansion of the best period in northern Portugal. A tall wrought-iron gate, between stone pillars bearing
armorial shields, opens from the countrified little road onto a driveway which, skirting a courtyard surrounded by less ornamental buildings, leads up to the big front door, approached by a flight of wide shallow stone steps; beyond, open to the south and the sun, extends the great knot-garden of geometrical patterns of dwarf clipped box hedges with gravel walks between.

Strangely enough, this is the Portuguese idea of the sort of garden appropriate to a great house. It involves almost as much work as lawns and herbaceous borders, and is not nearly so pretty, but it is the local conception, and is practically inevitable as an adjunct to houses of a certain period and status. In fact the knot-garden at Gralheira had an added attraction: the house stood so high that its low parapet commanded a remarkable view over the rolling country of Beira Alta—small fertile fields, pink-and-white villages, patches of pinewood—stretching away farther and farther, fainter and fainter, to the dusty pallor of the sand-dunes along the coast near Aveiro, and the dim, barely visible blue line of the Atlantic.

Up this small road, to this house, there passed in the course of that Saturday a considerable number of cars, from the station-wagon with the chef and a selection of servants to the two Daimlers with the Duke, Dona Maria Francisca, Luzia and Father Antal in one and Nanny, the secretary, and Mgr Subercaseaux in the other, Elidio sitting beside the chauffeur. Very much later Julia also drove up it; later still, long after dark, the unhappy Dom Pedro, chilly and cross, bounced along it in the Land-Rover.

Julia had asked to see the Duke early that morning; she knew that he always took his coffee and rolls well before nine o'clock. In his study she reported to him the events of the night before—as she expected, they left him quite unmoved. ‘
Raison de plus
for taking them away,' he said calmly; while she was still in the room he rang up the police of the quarter and arranged for a couple of men to be on duty in the street that morning, to check on any cars parked there. This done, he turned to her.

‘Had you not better drive up with us?'

‘Duke, if you don't mind I'd rather follow you later in
my own car—I've got several things to see to this morning. I've packed, and I can leave this house while the police are still about; if I find I'm being followed I shall garage my car and come on some other way.'

The Duke smiled.

‘How shall you ascertain whether you are being followed or not?'

‘Oh, pull up beside the point policeman in Alcobac, a or Leiria or somewhere and fiddle with my engine,' Julia said airily. ‘I shall soon see if another car stops and hangs about.'

‘You are very resourceful!' the Duke said. ‘Very well— I am sure you are perfectly able to take care of yourself, but do
take
care.'

‘Indeed I will—I don't want to cause you any extra bother. It is so frightfully good of you to take all this on anyhow.'

‘On the contrary, it is at once a privilege and a pleasure,' said the Duke in his measured tones, and Julia knew that he meant what he said.

Her main reason for wishing to be independent and drive up to Gralheira alone was that she wanted to see Torrens and find out how he was, and whether he had slept—she had never seen him in such a nervous state as the night before, and she was worried on his account. Moreover, on her way downstairs to see the Duke a servant had intercepted her to take a telephone call on the extension outside the chapel—this was from Atherley, who asked if she wouldn't come round to the Chancery and tell him ‘how everything was going', before she went away to bury herself ‘in your ducal province'. Julia, remembering Father Antal's expressed wish to see Hetta, and thinking that Atherley could probably arrange this, promised to look in at the Rua São Domingos à Lapa before she left. Richard told her that the Major had intimated that he might be coming along too. ‘Oh well, I suppose there's some ghastly waiting-room full of
Punches
and
The Illustrated London News
where he and I can talk quietly, isn't there?' she said.