Joan Smith (11 page)

I wanted to crown him with a candlestick. “No, no! Go along with them, Peter,” I begged.

“We will be having more enjoyments here alone together with each other.”

“No, please. It is not at all necessary to stay. I don’t mind being alone. I shall read the newspaper. I haven’t a notion what is passing in the world. I haven’t seen a paper since leaving home.”

“We shall reading the newspaper together,” he decided, arising to get only the one paper. He drew his chair up till it touched mine, opened the paper, and then leaned over to read my half.

“We insist you join us, Cousin,” Mr. Sinclair said, removing the paper from his fingers and handing it to me. “Miss Ford will have to do without your company for one evening. You are indispensable to the séance
.
”

Pierre rather liked the unusual idea of being indispensable to anything, I think. He arose with a laugh. “Very well. I go, then. You will tell me all the passings in the world when I return, Valerie.”

“That will be the obituary column you must read,” Mr. Sinclair mentioned over his shoulder as he turned to leave. “Lively entertainment for you.”

I kept the paper up before my eyes for a few moments after they left, in case anyone should return. It was not my plan to go to the window till they had had a few minutes to settle down. I did not peruse the obituary notices, but the social page. It was a London paper. The carryings on at St. James’s were not of much interest to me. I read with some trace of interest the gala parties going forth in the city, then turned my attention to the engagements. The words jumped off the page and hit me in the eye. Mr. and Mrs. Edward J. Milne were pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter Mary to Mr. Welland Sinclair, of Hereford, cousin to and second in line to the title of Lord St. Regis, of Tanglewood, also in Hereford.

I folded the paper carefully, found a pencil to circle the announcement, and laid it aside. Now I had an unexceptionable excuse to mention to Mr. Sinclair my great joy at his match. It did not say a single thing about Mary, other than the name of her parents. I was curious to hear the girl described.

When a suitable length of time had elapsed, I tiptoed down the hallway to ensure the door to the feather room was closed, indicating the stance was safely underway. I went out the side door, round to the window, and the ladder. I was careful to make a minimum of noise as I jiggled it into place, then climbed carefully up. A narrow band of light showed me my trick of leaving the curtains slightly open had not been detected. The séance had reached that stage where the heads were bent, the fingers splayed round the table’s edge, but they did not quite touch. This would be due to the smaller number of sitters.

After a moment, Madame’s head rose, then fell back. Her snorts and grunts were not audible through the windowpane. She opened her mouth to say some quiet words, then all the heads at the table suddenly rose from their respective chests, as though on ropes. They turned and looked toward a corner of the room. I could see only an edge of the apparition, but certainly the half of a face I saw looked remarkably like Uncle Edward, as I remembered him, and more particularly as I remembered seeing his portrait in the gallery. It was a pale, insubstantial, floating thing, not quite white, but slightly pink, like one of my aunt’s chiffon robes. If it was not a ghost, it was a very good imitation of one. It was floating, bobbing along quite merrily across the room. I pulled my eyes away from the apparition, with the greatest difficulty, to observe those at the table. Aunt Loo had gone into a complete trance, slumped forward on the table, her brindled hair catching the candlelight. Pierre was smiling in happy surprise, Dr. Hill looked astonished, Madame Franconi sat with glazed eyes, not even seeing the ghost, and Mr. Sinclair wore his green glasses as usual, robbing me of any reading of his expression. His head was stiffly erect, at attention.

My aunt’s collapse brought the séance to an abrupt end. As soon as Dr. Hill noticed her, he jumped up. Madame finally roused herself to attention, and simultaneously the others came to an awareness of Loo’s faint. There was a general hubbub of jumping up. The apparition, when I glanced back, was gone. There was chaos in the room, with arms raised, mouths open wide in exclamations of shock, but of course I witnessed only the visual aspects of the scene. I scooted down the ladder, tossed it into the bushes, and darted back into the house. Fearing movement in the hallway from the sitters, I entered by the kitchen door, causing some little alarm to the servants. I did not stop to make any explanations to them. I had to get myself reinstalled in the saloon before my absence was noticed.

I made it, but just barely. “What happened?” I asked, jumping up from the chair I had just jumped into a split second before.

“The ghost of the
oncle
Edward is appear,” Pierre told me, smiling brightly. “The most nice ghost. Very friendly. He do not hurt no ones, like my cousin says so.”

His simple explanation was soon overridden by the more vociferous exclamations of Aunt Loo and Mr
.
Sinclair, the former not much more substantial looking than the last-seen image of Edward. She was pale as a sheet. Madame Franconi too looked peaky. She went to the darkest corner of the room and sat down, her head leaning against the back of a wing chair. Welland hopped to pour her a glass of sherry, and held it to her lips. A touching scene. I took the cue and poured Auntie a glass, only to find when I got to her side that Dr. Hill had already handed her a glass of wine, so I drank up the other glass myself.

When the ghost chasers were restored by a couple of sherries, Madame allowed modestly that it had been a successful sitting. “I wonder if we are wise to move to the gatehouse tomorrow evening, Mr. Sinclair,” she said. “When the present location is so conducive to results, it is not wise to move.”

“I receive very strong emanations in the study at the gatehouse,” he insisted. “It is not Sir Edward, but my mama we wish to reach tomorrow evening. I hope we will be half so successful.”

“There is no saying. It took a while to get Sir Edward to come through. We cannot look for success with your mama so soon, I fear. If I had some token, some talisman of hers to draw her forth, it would be of help. Do you have a picture, something belonging to her? That locket you mentioned, for instance, with her likeness
....
”

“I always carry it with me, next my heart, but it has not got her likeness in it. It is a lock of my father’s hair.” He reached into some inner pocket and drew the trinket out.

Madame opened it and peered inside. “Is this lady not your mama—a likeness taken in her youth?”

“No, it is a friend,” he said, rather quickly, and closed the thing with a snap. “I shall give you the locket tomorrow before the s
é
ance. I would not want to be without it for a whole day.”

“Sweetheart?” Madame asked, a coy smile sitting uneasily on her swarthy, foreign face.

“You are a mind reader,” he answered, his white teeth flashing.

“Very pretty,” she complimented. Before many moments, she asked for her husband to be called, for she was tired and wanted to leave.

“I’ll offer you a lift, to save Lady Sinclair’s having her horses put to,” Dr. Hill offered. He reached into his pocket to look for his snuffbox and found it missing. “Must have dropped it in the feather room,” he mumbled, and went to look for it.

I paid little heed to their leave-taking, for I was most curious to get a look at the picture in Welland’s locket. He still held it in his hand, shaking it back and forth. When the party was diminished to Loo, Pierre, Welland and me, I picked up the newspaper.

“Read any interesting obituaries?” Mr. Sinclair asked.

“No, but one engagement announcement that might be of interest to you.”

“If it is another royal duke about to take the plunge, I am not at all interested.”

“It is not a royal anything. It is a plain Mr. Sinclair and plain Miss Mary Milne I am speaking about.”

“Is it in the paper?” he asked, startled out of his usual complacency. His hands reached for the paper. As I handed it to him, I relieved him of the locket, without his even noticing what I was about.

I opened it to see a bland, pretty, but slightly bovine countenance smiling at me. The girl had black curls, blue eyes, and an insipid smile. Distinction was the last word that would occur to anyone looking at it. Strangely, it was the word that came to mind in connection with Mr. Sinclair, especially on those occasions when he forgot his pose, straightened up his drooping shoulders, and ceased behaving like an invalid. After he had read the notice, he handed the paper back to me, and I returned his locket to him, and still he did not appear to realize that I had opened it. “Surprised?” I asked him.

“No, not particularly. Mary did not mention to me her parents were having it put in the papers, but it is the custom, of course.”

“When is the wedding to be? I did not notice a date. Does it say?”

I knew very well it did not but was careful not to display too vivid an interest in it. “July the tenth,” he answered, so automatically that it was obviously a familiar response, indicating the match was of long standing and long planning
.

“Your days are numbered, sir,” I said lightly.

“I can hardly wait. I am looking forward to my marriage with the greatest eagerness.”

“It is strange you should leave your home at such a time. I wager Mary—was not that the girl’s name?—is not well pleased with you.”

“She proved so much distraction I could not get my work completed with her in the neighborhood. St. Regis suggested I finish it off before the wedding. I must confess I now spend all my spare moments writing her letters.”

I doubt his chasing of Madame, and occasionally me, left him much free time. “Why do you not try if Madame can conjure up a vision of her?” I suggested.

Pierre was not happy at being left out of the conversation. “What a sorceress the Madame is!” he said, inserting himself between Mr. Sinclair and me. “Making the ghost pop out from us.”

“You pop out pretty well yourself,” Sinclair said, in his ironic mood, as he glanced down at his cousin.

“Like the corks of the wine bottle, popping out,” Pierre laughed, sliding an arm about my waist.

I lifted his fingers away and pushed him aside. “Little boys must watch their hands,” I told him.

“Otherwise big girls might slap them,” Sinclair added in a didactic way to Pierre.

Lady Sinclair arose with a weary sigh, gathering her chiffon skirts around her. She was still pale, distraught. “I am going to retire now, Valerie. This has been a most fatiguing experience. It is not at all late, however. Don’t let me break up your meeting. Please don’t feel you have to leave, Mr. Sinclair. My niece will be happy to entertain you and Pierre. Ask the servants for something to eat if you are hungry later on.”

“Best offer I’ve had all day,” Mr. Sinclair said, sitting down after having arisen to bow my aunt out of the room, and throwing one leg over the other. “What entertainment have you in mind, Valerie. Dancing, singing, wrestling match?”

“Strolling in the moonlight is fine entertainments,” Pierre suggested with a hopeful look.

“Strolling in the moonlight with you two would be my second choice of entertainment, after sticking my head in a guillotine. I too shall go to bed.”

“We’re not likely to get a better offer than that, Peter. I for one think we must take her up on it,” Welland said.

As he was being so playful, I did not hesitate a moment to reach out and remove his green glasses from his nose. I wished I had not. He had a pair of dancing brown eyes that could have seduced a statue. Long and thick lashes too, that any lady might envy.

After one bold, startled stare, the eyes fell to my feet. I took the misguided idea he was embarrassed. Ninnyhammer that I am! It was nothing of the sort. He was examining me in a leisurely fashion, not from head to toe, which I am accustomed to, but from toe to head, which is more insulting somehow. I felt remarkably like a prize milcher on display at the county fair.

“What do you know? Peter was right,” was his bland comment, when he had had his fill of staring.

“Would it be too much to ask what Pierre said?” I asked, turning to deliver a glare on Pierre, who had wandered off to pour more sherries, and was unaware that he was in bad odor with me.

“
Tres
vive,
as we English say,” Sinclair said. Then he set his head on one side and laughed, while those chocolate eyes continued to dart hither and thither all over my body.

I took a deep breath preparatory to delivering a setdown. He smiled musingly, his eyes resting on my swollen bosom. “And
tres grande,”
he added with a lecherous twinkle.

“Come now, Mr. Sinclair, we must speak English, for Peter’s benefit. You always insist upon it.”

“I find myself thinking in French when I am with you. A strange phenomenon too, for I hardly speak the bong-jaw fluently at all. But I see by your maidenly blushes I am embarrassing you, poor helpless flower that you are. I promise to behave like a dull old clod of an Englishman.”

“You are hard on Englishmen.
I
have not found them to behave with any particular dullness.”

“The English are very much naughty,” Pierre told us from his stand at the sherry table.

“Some of them are,” I agreed, “but one expects decent behavior from them when they are engaged at least.”

“It is wiser to wait till one is safely married,” Sinclair decided, after a little consideration, “but for me, that will not be till July, you know, and you are here
now.
I have never made a fetish of resisting temptation.”

“I would not have guessed it if you hadn’t told me!”

“Sherries,” Pierre announced, balancing three glasses rather precariously in one hand. “What good talks am I missing here?”

“You haven’t missed a thing, Peter,” I assured him, with studied ennui. “Mr. Sinclair was just telling me what a dull clod of an Englishman he is.”

“I too am dull English, like Jean Taureau. This is the new idiom.”