A Change of Heir (16 page)

Gadberry of course knew that he wasn’t going to kill anybody. He just wouldn’t know how to begin. But – he remembered – when Macbeth felt like that, Lady Macbeth showed him just how, and then tidied up the job herself. The result had been to leave Macbeth very awkwardly out on a limb; he’d had to spend the rest of his days wading through blood and so forth in a highly disagreeable manner. It would be the same in his own case. Once Miss Bostock had done the deed (and he had no disposition to believe she wouldn’t be perfectly fit for it) he would be helplessly in her hands for keeps. If she was brought to justice he would be brought to justice too. No court would believe that they hadn’t been tightly bound together in the planning and carrying out of an ingenious and intricate crime.

He walked on – in the opposite direction, this time, to that which had taken him to the village before breakfast. Captain Fortescue’s house lay about two miles away, just beyond the only sizable plantation the landscape boasted. Why he should be continuing to make his way there he just didn’t know. His appointment with Fortescue was now meaningless. What he did understand, oddly enough, was precisely what he ought to be doing at this moment. He ought to be retracing his steps to the Abbey. For only one rational course remained to him. It was to make his way instantly into the presence of Mrs Minton and confess to the whole thing. There was quite a chance that she wouldn’t prosecute, wouldn’t hand him over to the police. Family pride was her ruling passion. She might shrink from exposing that pride to the ridicule that would attend a public exhibition of the manner in which she had been duped. She might simply let him clear out, and then cook up some story to account for his so abruptly vanishing from the Bruton picture.

But Gadberry found that he was walking on. The sunshine for which he had expressed some hopes to Miss Bostock seemed very far from breaking through. The obliterating snows lay everywhere, in some mysterious fashion both dazzling and lustreless, under a sky like a livid lid. He walked for half a mile, and then turned and looked at the Abbey. He had been climbing slightly, and he could now see the River Brut winding its way into the great complex of buildings and then out again. It looked narrower than usual, presumably because it was starting to freeze from its banks inward, and had the appearance of a line scrawled across a virgin sheet of paper by a thick pencil which might have been represented by the Abbey tower. The tower was now a mere stump or stub compared with its former self. It was said to have been the tallest in England, rivalling even the great spires in height. From this point his eye seemed on a level with its crumbled summit. He wondered whether Miss Bostock had returned to her observation-post there, and was at this moment taking advantage of his having turned round to study through her binoculars the expression of consternation which he could feel had settled on his face.

Those proud towers
– he found he was saying to himself –
to swift destruction doomed.
The words must be coming to him out of some dreary old poem. And they didn’t really apply. For the towers – and there were several, since a fifteenth-century abbot had added one to his lodging, and a nineteenth-century Minton had done the same to the gatehouse – the towers would continue where they were for several further centuries. It was he who was doomed to swift destruction, should he ever return among them. For that, he suddenly realised, was his appalling situation.
He couldn’t go back
. His nerve had deserted him. And here he was, a picturesquely fated creature, out in the snow.

To swift destruction doomed
. Because his temperament was, after all, theatrical, Gadberry repeated the words to himself with gloomy relish. And the persuasion accompanying them – that he simply could not set foot in Bruton Abbey again – ought to have passed in a matter of seconds or minutes. It ought to have represented no more than another quick flare-up of panic, which would depart leaving him harassed indeed but not helpless. Only this time it didn’t seem to be working that way. There had suddenly come upon him a settled conviction that he could
not
return to the ghastly mess that he had contrived for himself.

He had about fifteen pounds in his pockets. He was dressed in clothes which, although new, expensive, and congruous with the rural solitudes through which he was at present moving, would look not quite right on Mrs Lapin’s doorstep. He had nowhere any other possessions in the world – except behind him in the Abbey, where he had probably been signed up as heir to the whole place within the last ten minutes.
In vain, in vain
, he told himself. He recalled with astonishment his light-hearted plan to quit after some episode of freakish clowning at the expense of the innocuous if no doubt boring Shilbottles. Between him and any such nonsense there now lay the grim shadow of Mrs Minton’s fiend-like companion.

Three miles beyond Fortescue’s house ran the high road. If he trudged on there he might pick up a lift that would take him quite a long way – even into Leeds, a comfortingly large and anonymous sort of city. There he could take breath and think, before presumably spending an uncomfortably appreciable part of that fifteen pounds on a second-class railway ticket to London.

So Gadberry trudged on. There wasn’t another moving creature in sight. In a field on his right, indeed, quite a lot of sheep had for some reason been left to make what they could of their cheerless environment. But the sheep simply stayed put. They seemed entirely contented. Every now and then they made noises expressive of nothing in particular. Gadberry envied them their humble lot.

He had come to a point at which the dale rose in a short swell on his left, dipped to an invisible hollow, and then rose again steeply to a considerable height. On this latter surface the snow was marked with a vaguely familiar species of zigzag lines. He glanced at these without interest, and hurried on. It was starting to snow again: first in large, spectacular flakes which would have looked well on a Christmas card, and then in very small ones which plainly meant business. He turned up his collar. It was while he was in the act of doing this that he heard a cry.

‘
Help! Oh, please, help!
’

Gadberry stopped in his tracks. What was astonishing was not the suddenness of the appeal, but the thing done to him by an indefinable quality in the appealing voice. Had he paused to think, he might have said that the Vale profound was overflowing with the sound, or that a voice so thrilling ne’er was heard in spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird. As it was, he scrambled over the snow-covered dyke beside him without pausing for a moment. The voice had been a girl’s, and it had instantly declared itself as of magical beauty. Gadberry plunged towards it like a man whose fate has caught up with him.

Philosophically regarded, there can be little doubt that what had taken place was an event of considerable psychological complexity. It will be recalled that Gadberry was a young man markedly susceptible to female charm, but that by constitution he was one fondly overcome by this intermittently and violently rather than in a settled and diurnal manner. A frolic such as he had indulged in that morning with the little housemaid was really something to which he had, so to speak, to address his mind; it was more or less the right thing to be doing as a regular part of what one owed to being alive and healthy and twenty-seven years old. But this catastrophic business was another matter, and it came along rarely. That it had come along now was partly the consequence (as in the next thirty seconds he was overwhelmingly to see) of a single absolutely objective fact. But it undoubtedly had an origin, too, in his own present depressed and disordered situation. For a long time he had been hearing nothing but voices that were either boring or disagreeable or ominous or downright threatening. And now, suddenly, there was this.

The girl lay in a flurry of snow and a glory of golden hair. His first impulse was to look away from her, quite dazzled – so it was from the fur hat which had tumbled from her head that he first realised she was no country wench. Nor do country wenches dress in anoraks above – or, below, in slacks tailored with an inspiration to make the head swim. And they don’t, for that matter, lie around in a tangle of skis.

‘Oh, thank goodness!’ The girl got this out with a gasp, so that he realised like a stab of pain that she was in pain herself. He knelt down beside her. But, as he did so, his glance went to the ski-tracks on the slope above.

‘You ought to have the kind that flick off when you tumble,’ he said. ‘They’re much the best for beginners.’ He spoke almost roughly – which made it surprising that he had simply gathered the girl in his arms. ‘And it was stupid, anyway. The snow’s all wrong.’

‘That’s what Daddy said. But I did so want to practise. I’m going to Switzerland next week. It’s terribly kind of you to help me.’ The girl moved in Gadberry’s grasp, but it wasn’t precisely a movement of disengagement. ‘I’m afraid my ankle hurts rather. Had I better try to stand up?’

‘We must get the skis off first. Which ankle is it?’

‘It’s…it’s the left. Always been a bit wobbly since my pony did a roll on it…
ow
!’

‘I’m frightfully sorry. I’ll be terribly careful.’ To his horror, Gadberry found that he had been fumbling at one of the skis while still unable to take his gaze from the girl’s face. She was the most radiantly beautiful person he had ever seen.

‘Isn’t it sickening?’ the girl said. ‘What if I can’t go? To Switzerland, I mean. Of course, I’ve only been home for a week. But life’s so boring here. I say – do you mind my asking? Are you by any chance Mr Comberford?’

‘Yes, I am.’ So strangely are we formed that Gadberry gave this reply without the slightest consciousness of duplicity. In this situation, somehow, he
was
Nicholas Comberford. ‘Who are you?’

‘Evadne. Evadne Fortescue.’

Although Gadberry had lately judging both Alethea and Anthea to be absurd and affected names, he now had no such impression about Evadne. It was a lovely name in itself. And the cadence it formed with ‘Fortescue’ was exquisite.

‘There’s a tremendous girl in an Elizabethan play called Evadne,’ he said. ‘I once–’ Oddly enough, although now again Nicholas Comberford, he was about to say ‘I once acted in it’. But he checked himself in time. ‘I once knew another Evadne,’ he said. ‘But she wasn’t remotely as beautiful as you are.’

Although still in evident pain, Miss Fortescue laughed. She also blushed – or at least Gadberry persuaded himself that she did so. And now she did draw away.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But don’t be absurd, all the same, Mr Comberford. And now I must manage to get home. It’s not very far. I’m sure I can hobble.’

‘I’ll come with you, of course. In fact, I’m on my way to call on your father now.’

‘How very odd!’

‘Odd?’ Gadberry was puzzled.

‘The coincidence, I mean. That you should be coming to see Daddy, and that I should take a tumble like this, pretty well straight in your path.’

‘Well, yes – I suppose so.’ Gadberry had got the skis off, and was now laying them down on the snow. ‘We’ll have to abandon these for the time being. Now then’ – and he stooped over Evadne Fortescue – ‘here goes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m going to carry you, of course. It’s no distance.’

‘But you can’t possibly! I’m frightfully heavy. In fact I’m most disgustingly fat.’ Miss Fortescue paused. ‘You’ll see,’ she added.

‘There!’ Gadberry had swung her up into his arms. As he had expected, she was neither too heavy nor too light. At every point, so to speak, there was precisely as much of her as there ought to be. Not that he made this calculation in any carnal spirit. On the contrary, a kind of blazing innocence surrounded his instantaneous and utterly fateful relationship with this divinity. He suddenly remembered the childish episode of that morning, when he had hugged, kissed and playfully smacked the little housemaid. He laughed aloud at its complete absurdity.

‘What are you laughing at?’ The ravishing Evadne, although nestled in his arms, spoke suspiciously. ‘I suppose you think I’ve been an absolute idiot…ow!’ She had winced and exclaimed as Gadberry took a first cautious forward step. ‘It
does
rather hurt. I expect it will have to be set, or something.’

‘I’m sure they’ll put it right in no time. And I’ll try to go frightfully carefully.’

‘Can you really manage? You must be terribly strong.’

Gadberry laughed again. His face was very close to Evadne’s. And his muscles were, in fact, in very good trim. He was naturally quite a stalwart as well as a personable young man, and a country life had been adding agreeably to these graces. Really and truly, he wasn’t a bad match for Evadne Fortescue. He felt very happy. So, presumably, did Evadne, for she now let her head drop on his shoulder with a gentle sigh. She might almost have been passing into a mild swoon.

‘I’m terribly lucky to have found you,’ she murmured. ‘It’s been like meeting a knight-errant. You know? Sir Galahad, or somebody like that.’

Sir Galahad Gadberry
. . . With infinite care – because his head was swimming a little – Gadberry lifted his precious burden over the dyke. Then he bore her triumphantly through the thickly falling snow.

The Misses Shilbottle – Hon. Alethea and Hon. Anthea – were very nice girls. Perhaps it would have been more logical to say that they were a very nice girl, since one was quite as indistinguishable from the other as the diabolical Miss Bostock had averred. Breadth of pelvis was perhaps their most striking feature; if you were simply concerned to embark on steady breeding in a no-trouble way then a Shilbottle would be a tiptop buy. In addition to large, frank, wholesome bodies they had large, frank, wholesome laughs. They talked about hunting (to Mrs Minton’s disapproval) and hunt balls, about beagles, about harriers, about point-to-points, about the pursuit of otters, about the shooting of pheasants, partridges and grouse, about the extricating of trout, salmon and other fishes from the flood. Some centuries ago – Gadberry reflected – they would have talked about bear-baiting or badger-baiting or cock-fighting in the same jolly way. They weren’t Gadberry’s idea of a bedfellow any more than the tweedy and bony Lord and Lady Arthur were his idea of parents-in-law. But he was delighted with them, all the same. The plain fact that they were resolved to have a shot at the heir of Bruton, and severally to accept triumph and defeat in a sporting family spirit – with perhaps, he dimly felt, a flyer staked on the result: this didn’t disconcert him in the least. Indeed, he was quite prepared to adore them, since all women ought to be adored. And he hadn’t, needless to say, the slightest difficulty in dividing his favours equally and courteously between them, any more than he had difficulty in listening respectfully to their father, or offering their mother the sort of deference proper to an American heiress who has married a marquis’ younger son.