‘Gee-ORGE!’ she cried, finding speech. ‘Yes, I know, I know. But listen.’
‘Are you intoxicated?’
‘Of course I’m not. What a dashed silly idea. Much shaken, but sober to the gills. Listen, Aunt Connie. You know those impostors? Impostors A, B, and C? Well, things are getting hot. Impostor A has just laid Baxter out cold with a knock-out drop.’
‘What! I don’t understand.’
‘Well, I can’t make it any simpler. That is the bedrock fact. Impostor A has just slipped Baxter a Mickey Finn. And what I’m driving at is, that if these birds are starting to express themselves like this, it means something. It means that tonight’s the night. It signifies that whatever dirty work they are contemplating springing on this community will be sprung before tomorrow’s sun has risen. Ah!’ said Lord Bosham, with animation, as the gong boomed out below. ‘Dinner, and not before I was ready for it. Let’s go. But mark this, Aunt Connie, and mark it well — the moment we rise from the table, I get my good old gun, and I lurk! I don’t know what’s up, and you don’t know what’s up, but that something is up sticks out a mile, and I intend to lurk like a two-year-old. Well, I mean to say, dash it,’ said Lord Bosham, with honest heat, ‘we can’t have this sort of thing, what? If impostors are to be allowed to go chucking their weight about as if they’d bought the place, matters have come to a pretty pass!’
19
At twenty minutes past nine, the Duke of Dunstable, who had dined off a tray in his room, was still there, waiting for his coffee and liqueur. He felt replete, for he was a good trencherman and had done himself well, but he was enjoying none of that sensation of mental peace which should accompany repletion. Each moment that passed found him more worried and fretful. The failure of Rupert Baxter to report for duty was affecting him much as their god’s unresponsiveness once affected the priests of Baal. Here it was getting on for goodness knew what hour, and not a sign of him. It would have pained the efficient young secretary, now lying on his bed with both hands pressed to his temples in a well-meant but unsuccessful attempt to keep his head from splitting in half, could he have known the black thoughts his employer was thinking of him.
The opening of the door, followed by the entry of Beach bearing a tray containing coffee and a generous glass of brandy, caused the Duke to brighten for an instant, but the frown returned to his brow as he saw that the butler was not alone. The last thing he wanted at a time like this was a visitor.
‘Good evening, my dear fellow. I wonder if you could spare me a moment?’
It was about half-way through dinner that the thought had occurred to Lord Ickenham that there might be an easier and more agreeable method than that which he had planned of obtaining from the Duke the money which he was, as it were, holding in trust for Polly. He had not developed any weak scruples about borrowing it on the lines originally laid down, but the almost complete absence of conversation at the dinner-table had given him time to reflect, and the result of this reflection had been to breed misgivings.
Success in the campaign which he had sketched out would depend — he had to face it —largely on the effectiveness of his nephew Pongo’s performance of the part assigned to him, and he feared lest Pongo, when it came to the pinch, might prove a broken reed. You tell a young man to stand on a lawn and sing the ‘Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond’, and the first thing you know he has forgotten the tune or gone speechless with stage fright. Far better, it seemed to him, to try what a simple, straightforward appeal to the Duke’s better feelings would do — and, if that failed, to have recourse to the equally simple and straightforward Mickey Finn.
That glass of brandy there would make an admirable receptacle for the sedative, and he had taken the precaution, while tapping Mr Pott’s store, to help himself to a couple of the magic tablets, one of which still nestled in his waistcoat pocket.
‘It’s about that money you won from that man — Pott is his name, I believe — this evening,’ he went on.
The Duke grunted guardedly.
‘I have been talking to him, and he is most distressed about it.’
The Duke grunted again, scornfully this time, and it seemed to Lord Ickenham that an odd sort of echo came from the bathroom. He put it down to some trick of the acoustics.
‘Yes, most distressed. It seems that in a sense the money was not his to gamble with.’
‘Hey?’ The Duke seemed interested. ‘What do you mean? Robbed a till or something, did he?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that. He is a man of the most scrupulous honesty. But it was a sum which he had been saving up for his daughter’s wedding portion. And now it has gone.’
‘What do you expect me to do about it?’
‘You wouldn’t feel inclined to give it back?’
‘Give it back?’
‘It would be a fine, generous, heart-stirring action.’
‘It would be a fine, potty, fatheaded action,’ corrected the Duke warmly. ‘Give it back, indeed! I never heard of such a thing.’
‘He is much distressed.’
‘Let him be.’
It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any. With a dreamy look in his eye, he took the tablet from his pocket and palmed it thoughtfully.
‘It would be a pity if his daughter were not able to get married,’ he said.
‘Why?’ said the Duke, a stout bachelor.
‘She is engaged to a fine young poet.’
‘Then,’ said the Duke, his face beginning to purple — the Dunstables did not easily forget — ‘she’s jolly well out of it. Don’t talk to me about poets! The scum of the earth.’
‘So you won’t give the money back?’
‘No.’
‘Reflect,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘It is here, in this room — is it not?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘I was only thinking that there it was — handy — and all you would have to do would be to go to the drawer … or cupboard….’
He paused expectantly. The Duke maintained a quiet reserve.
‘I wish you would reconsider.’
‘Well, I won’t.’
‘The quality of mercy,’ said Lord Ickenham, deciding that he could not do better than follow the tested methods of Horace’s Pekinese breeder, ‘is not strained —’
‘The what isn’t?’
‘The quality of mercy. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed —’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,’ explained Lord Ickenham. ‘Never heard such rot in my life,’ said the Duke. ‘I think you’re potty. Anyhow, you’ll have to go now. I’m expecting my secretary at any moment for an important conference. You haven’t seen him anywhere, have you?’
‘I had a few words with him before dinner, but I have not seen him since. He is probably amusing himself somewhere.’
‘I’ll amuse him, when I see him.’
‘No doubt he has been unable to tear himself away from the fascinations of the backgammon board or the halma table. Young blood!’
‘Young blood be blowed.’
‘Ah, that will be he, no doubt.’
‘Eh?’
‘Someone knocked.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
The Duke went to the door and opened it. Lord Ickenham stretched a hand over the brandy glass and opened it. The Duke came back.
‘Nobody there.’
‘Ah, then I was mistaken. Well, if you really wish me to go, I will be leaving you. If you don’t feel like making the splendid gesture I proposed, there is no more to be said. Good night, my dear fellow,’ said Lord Ickenham, and withdrew.
It was perhaps a minute after he had taken his departure that Mr Pott entered the corridor.
Of all the residents of Blandings Castle who had been d
oing a bit of intensive thinking during dinner — and there were several — Claude Pott was the one who had been thinking hardest. And the result of his thoughts had been to send him hastening to the Duke’s room. It was his hope that he would be able to persuade him to play a hand or two of a game called Slippery Joe.
The evening’s disaster had left Mr Pott not only out of pocket and humiliated, but full of the liveliest suspicion. How the miracle had been accomplished, he was unable to say, but the more he brooded over the Duke’s triumph, the more convinced did he become that he had been cheated and hornswoggled. Honest men, he told himself, did not beat him at Persian Monarchs, and he blamed himself for having selected a game at which it was possible, apparently, for an unscrupulous opponent to put something over. Slippery Joe was open to no such objection. Years of experience had taught him that at Slippery Joe he could always deal himself an unbeatable hand.
He was just about to turn the corner leading to the Garden Suite, hoping for the best, when the Duke came round it, travelling well, and ran into him.
For some moments after Lord Ickenham had left him, the Duke of Dunstable had remained where he sat, frowning peevishly. Then he had risen. Distasteful and even degrading though it might be to go running about after secretaries, there seemed nothing for it but to institute a search for the missing Baxter. He hastened out, and the first thing he knew he was colliding with the frightful feller.
Then he saw that it was not the frightful feller, after all, but another feller, equally frightful — the chap with the wedding-portion daughter, to wit — a man for whom, since listening to Lord Ickenham’s remarks, he had come to feel a vivid dislike. He was not fond of many people, but the people of whom he was least fond were those who wanted to get money out of him.
‘Gah!’ he said, disentangling himself.
Mr Pott smiled an ingratiating smile. It was only a sketchy one, for he had had to assemble it in a hurry, but such as it was he let the Duke have it.
‘Hullo, your Grace,’ he said.
‘Go to hell,’ said the Duke and, these brief civilities concluded, stumped off and was lost to sight.
And simultaneously a thought came to Mr Pott like a full-blown rose, flushing his brow.
Until this moment, Mr Pott’s only desire had been to recover his lost money through the medium of a game of Slippery Joe. He now saw that there was a simpler and less elaborate way of arriving at the happy ending. Somewhere in the Duke’s room there was three hundred pounds morally belonging to himself, and the Duke’s room was now unoccupied. To go in and help himself would be to avoid a lot of tedious preliminaries.
Though stout of build, he could move quickly when the occasion called for speed. He bounced along the passage like a rubber ball. Only when he had reached his destination did he find that he need not have hurried. Preoccupied the Duke might have been, but he had not been too preoccupied to remember to lock his door.
The situation was one that might have baffled many men, and for an instant it baffled Mr Pott completely. Then, his native ingenuity asserting itself, he bethought him that the door was not the only means of access to the room. There were french windows, and it was just possible that on a balmy evening like this the Duke might have left them open. Reaching the lawn after a brisk run, rosy and puffing, he discovered that he had not.
This time, Mr Pott accepted defeat. He knew men in London who would have made short work of those windows. They would have produced a bit of bent wire and opened them as if they had been a sardine tin, laughing lightly the while. But he had no skill in that direction. Rueful but resigned, with some of the feelings of Moses gazing at the Promised Land from the summit of Mount Pisgah, he put an eye to the glass and peered through. There was the dear old room, all ready and waiting, but for practical purposes it might have been a hundred miles away. And presently he saw the door open and the Duke came in.
And he was turning away with a sigh, a beaten man, when from somewhere close at hand a voice in the night began to sing the ‘Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond’. And scarcely had the haunting refrain ceased to annoy the birds roosting in the trees, when the french windows flew open and the Duke of Dunstable, shooting out like a projectile, went whizzing across the lawn, crying ‘Hey!’ as he did so. To Mr Pott, the thing had been just a song, but to the Duke it seemed to have carried a deeper message.
And such was indeed the case. The interpretation which he had placed upon that sudden burst of melody was that it was Baxter who stood warbling without, and that this was his way of trying to attract his employer’s attention. Why Baxter should sing outside his room, instead of walking straight in, was a problem which he found himself at the moment unable to solve. He presumed that the man must have some good reason for a course of conduct which at first glance seemed merely eccentric. Possibly, he reflected, complications had arisen, rendering it necessary for him to communicate with headquarters in this oblique and secret society fashion. He could vaguely recall having read in his boyhood stories in which people in such circumstances had imitated the hoot of the night-owl.
‘Hey!’ he called, trying to combine the conflicting tasks of shouting and speaking in a cautious undertone. ‘Here! Hi! Hey! Where are you, dash it?’
For his efforts to establish contact with the vocalist were being oddly frustrated. Instead of standing still and delivering his report, the other seemed to be receding into the distance. When the ‘Bonny Banks’ broke out again, it was from somewhere at the farther end of the lawn. With a muffled oath, the Duke galloped in that direction like the man in the poem who followed the Gleam, and Mr Pott, always an excellent opportunist, slid in through the french windows.
He had scarcely done so, when he heard footsteps. Somebody was approaching across the grass, and approaching so rapidly that there was no time to be lost if an embarrassing encounter was to be avoided. With great presence of mind he dived into the bathroom. And as he closed the door, Lord Ickenham came in.
Lord Ickenham was feeling well pleased. The artistry of his nephew’s performance had enchanted him. He had not supposed that the boy had it in him to carry the thing through with such bravura. At the best he had hoped for a timid piping, and that full-throated baying, a cross between a bloodhound on the trail and a Scotsman celebrating New Year’s Eve, had been as unexpected as it was agreeable. Technical defects there may have been in Pongo’s vocalization, but he had certainly brought the Duke out of the room like a cork out of a bottle. Lord Ickenham could not remember ever having seen a duke move quicker.
And he was just settling down to a swift and intensive search for the wedding portion, when his activities were arrested. From behind the bathroom door, freezing him in his tracks, there came the sharp, piercing scream of a human being in distress. The next moment, Mr Pott staggered out, slamming the door behind him.
‘Mustard!’ cried Lord Ickenham, completely at a loss.
‘Coo!’ said Mr Pott, and in a lifetime liberally punctuated by that ejaculation he had never said it with stronger emphasis.
Normally, Claude Pott was rather a reserved man. He lived in a world in which if you showed your feelings, you lost money. But there were some things which could break down his poise, and one of these was the discovery that he was closeted in a small bathroom with the largest pig he had ever encountered.
For an instant, after he had entered his hiding-place, the Empress had been just an aroma in the darkness. If Mr Pott had felt that it was a bit stuffy in here, that was all he had felt. Then something cold and moist pressed itself against his dangling hand, and the truth came home to him.
‘Mustard, my dear fellow!’
‘Cor!’ said Mr Pott.
He was shaking in every limb. It is not easy for a man who weighs nearly two hundred pounds to quiver like an aspen, but he managed to do it. His mind was in a whirl, from which emerged one coherent thought — that he wanted a drink. An imperious desire for a quick restorative swept over him, and suddenly he perceived that there was relief in sigh
t — if only a small relief. That glass of brandy on the table would be of little real use to him. What he really needed was a brimming bucketful. But it would at least be a step in the right direction.
‘Mustard! Stop!’
Lord Ickenham’s warning cry came too late. The lethal draught had already passed down Mr Pott’s throat, and even as he shook his head appreciatively the glass fell to the floor and he followed it. If twenty pigs had bitten Claude Pott simultaneously in twenty different places, he could not have succumbed more completely.
It was with a sympathetic eye and a tut-tut-ing tongue that Lord Ickenham bent over the remains. There was nothing, he knew, to be done. Only Time, the great healer, could make Claude Pott once more the Claude Pott of happier days. He rose, wondering how best to dispose of the body, and as he did so a voice spoke behind him.
‘Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo!’ it said, and in the words there was an unmistakable note of rebuke.
Faithfully and well Lord Bosham had followed out his policy of lurking, as outlined to his Aunt Constance before dinner. He was now standing in the window, his gun comfortably poised.
‘What ho, what ho, what ho, what ho, what ho, what, what?’ he added, and paused for a reply.
This Lord Ickenham was not able to give. Man of iron nerve though he was, he could be taken aback. The sudden appearance of Horace Davenport earlier in the evening had done it. The equally sudden appearance of Lord Bosham did it again. He found himself at a loss for words, and it was Lord Bosham who eventually resumed the conversation.
‘Well, I’m dashed!’ he said, still speaking with that strong note of reproof. ‘Here’s a nice state of things! So you’ve put it across poor old Pott now, have you? It’s a bit thick. We engage detectives at enormous expense, and as fast as we get them in you bowl them over with knock-out drops.’
He paused, struggling with his feelings. It was plain that he could not trust himself to say what he really thought about it all. His eye roamed the room, and lit up as it rested on the door of the cupboard.