Lady Appleby glanced reproachfully at her husband as he slipped into his place on the stand in Pall Mall. “We thought you wouldn’t get here at all. The streets have been closed for ages.”
The Assistant Commissioner laughed. “My dear, it’s one of those occasions on which I find it useful to be known to the police.” He looked at his watch. “And we still have a good deal of time on hand. Was the breakfast up to scratch?”
“Sir John – that breakfast was out of this world!” It was Mrs Harbot who replied – dropping, in order to do so, the binoculars with which she had been studying whatever of British institutions came within their field. “I think your London clubs are wonderful. But what I don’t figure out, Sir John, is why you’re here with us in these seats. I’d guess that a man high up with the police would be down there on a horse, with a uniform and a sword. Like the one going past now. Isn’t he beautiful? Would he be an Inspector?”
Appleby looked – and paused civilly, as if the question required some little skill to answer. “He’s a major, as a matter of fact, in the Brigade of Guards. The police, you know, require a bit of a helping hand on occasions of this sort.”
Mrs Harbot again surveyed the scene. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Sir John, if something marvellously unexpected happened?”
This, clearly, was a largeness of expectation with which Appleby found it hard to sympathise. “I’ll be quite content with what’s on the programme. I’ve had my share of the unexpected, as a matter of fact, during the small hours of this morning.”
Lady Appleby looked up quickly. “Is that why you didn’t come home?”
“Yes. A little encounter with the Lion and the Unicorn.”
Mrs Harbot’s eyes rounded. “The Lion and the Unicorn? Were they heralds or pursuivants – something like that?”
“Dear me, no. They were just a Lion and a Unicorn.”
“But doing something unexpected?”
Appleby looked doubtful. “That’s rather hard to answer. In a sense, their behaviour was quite conventional. They were fighting for the Crown.”
Mrs Harbot was horrified. “Not the crown that–”
“Dear me, no. The traditional crown of the ancient kingdom of Ruritania.”
Lady Appleby eyed her husband with frank scepticism. “Ruritania, John?”
“I’m calling it that.” And Appleby turned gravely to Mrs Harbot. “Even so, you must treat this as a most confidential communication. It is true that Ruritania – the country I am calling Ruritania – disappeared as an independent monarchy round about 1918. That is how its crown jewels came to be alienated. But if the facts that I am about to tell you became generally known, I assure you that the Chancelleries of Europe would be rocked to their foundations.”
Mrs Harbot smiled brilliantly. “If this isn’t just like Sherlock Holmes!”
“I hope you will continue to think so. But let me proceed.
“The offices and showrooms of the Jewellers’ Company,” Appleby began, “are just round the corner. You can see them from the card-room of this club. It was from there, indeed, that Colonel Busteed – one of our oldest members – saw the thing being installed late yesterday evening. It seemed a belated effort in the way of decoration, but it was all done with great speed and efficiency. A lorry with a tall extension-ladder drove up just after office hours, and within fifteen minutes an elaborate affair had been erected at the level of the mansard roof: an enormous coat of arms, flanked by two handsome beasts, pretty well as large as life and done very much in the round. Busteed concluded that the Jewellers had felt something more than the general scheme of decoration in the street was required, and that they had arranged for this imposing display pretty well at the eleventh hour. He thought no more about it – or no more about it just then. But he did happen to mention it to me as I was leaving the club. It was pretty well dusk by that time, but I caught a glimpse of the contraption myself as I turned the corner.
“As it happened, I had to pay a call at the Home Office, and coming out I ran into Lord Anchor. He is a distinguished elderly man, and among other things a former Master of the Jeweller’s Company. By way of making conversation, I said something about this last-moment embellishing of their building. To my surprise, he said he had never heard of it. Indeed, the old boy took quite a high line.”
“A high line?” Mrs Harbot was puzzled.
“He said that the greatest propriety had to be observed in using the royal coat of arms, or anything like it; and that if he had been consulted he would have vetoed the proposal at once. Well, I concluded that the other Jewellers had by-passed old Anchor in the matter, and that I had properly put my foot in it. So I endeavoured to escape. I didn’t get away, however, until I had heard a good deal more in the way of criticism of the Jewellers’ recent policies. For instance, there was this business of the Ruritanian regalia.”
Mrs Harbot sighed delightedly. “The crown jewels?”
“Precisely. The Jewellers were displaying them in a window, behind a steel grill, and Lord Anchor believed that this was likely to cause some resentment in émigré Ruritanian circles in this country. There was no doubt about the Company’s legal right to the jewels – the intrinsic value of which, indeed, was not very considerable. They had been handed over with the authority of the former royal family and its ministers as part-security for a loan that went west in the abortive counter-revolution of 1925. But there had been some sore feelings – even litigation – and Anchor felt that to make the ancient crown and so forth part of a topical display had been an error in tact. He pointed out that the beautiful young Grand Duchess Paulina, the claimant to the Ruritanian throne, was in London at this moment.”
“Isn’t that just too romantic?” Mrs Harbot was enthralled.
Appleby shook his head. “I assure you that I haven’t come to the romantic part yet. Anchor held forth for some time in this vein, and my impression was that the old chap was talking sense. I left him in a state of considerable indignation. But it was nothing to the state in which I found Colonel Busteed when, later in the evening, I came back to the club. It appeared that the Lion and the Unicorn were automata.”
“Automata?” It was Lady Appleby who was startled this time. “You mean they moved – were worked by machinery?”
“So Busteed had convinced himself. There are such things round about London at the moment, you know – and quite amusing some of them are. But the application of the principle to these particular heraldic symbols had apparently struck Busteed as grossly unsuitable. I wasn’t myself all that shocked; it seemed to me that the Lion and the Unicorn could bob or beck at each other harmlessly enough. I was surprised, however, when Busteed told me what the Lion did. It scratched.”
Mrs Harbot stared. “Scratched the Unicorn?”
“Not even that. The Lion scratched itself. Busteed had only glimpsed the phenomenon in the dusk on his way to dinner, but he was quite sure of it. I confess that I was a good deal puzzled. Busteed, although our great authority here on both port and Madeira, is a most abstemious man, and I found it hard to imagine that he had been other than quite sober.
“As it happened, I hadn’t much leisure to consider the matter, for I was simply eating a hasty late meal before going back for some hours’ work at the Yard. It was after midnight before the problem came into my head again – but when it did come, it came to stick. Lord Anchor’s ignorance and Colonel Busteed’s impression were both mildly surprising; taken together, they constituted something really odd. I ended by setting the telephone going and eventually tracked down the Jewellers’ secretary in his bed. My story was news to him. He had never heard of a proposal to put up any decoration of the sort I described. He suggested contacting his night-watchman at once.
“I had already tried ringing the Jewellers’ premises, and there had been no reply. It seemed clear that there was trouble, so I called out a car and came round with a couple of constables straight away. The street-lighting illuminated the lower part of the building clearly enough, but above the cornice it faded into darkness, so that there was no more than a vague blob to suggest what we were looking for. The car, however, had a powerful spotlight, and we had this focused in a matter of seconds. The coat of arms was there. But both the Lion and the Unicorn had gone.”
“Gone?” Mrs Harbot was perplexed. “I don’t see how automata could go.”
Appleby chuckled. “Augustly employed automata don’t scratch themselves either. But humans may be tempted to do so – particularly if constrained to maintain uncomfortable postures in unusual habiliments. I had no doubt that we were in the presence of an ingenious plot to gain access to the Jewellers’ building by the one vulnerable route – the windows in the mansard roof.
“There was an awkward pause while we waited for keys. When the secretary arrived with them he brought Lord Anchor as well – in high feather, it seemed to me, that the Company had run into a spot of trouble. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that it was the Ruritanian regalia that was the occasion of it. We hadn’t got far in our search of the building when we knew that he was right.
“From somewhere in the bowels of the place there came a muffled thumping and hollaring. I needn’t say that this was from the night-watchman, who had met the invasion of his territory with singularly little efficiency and been ignominiously locked up. But another sound was more commanding – and for some seconds thoroughly perplexing as well. I had a queer impression that it was something I had heard often enough – and yet never, so to speak, in this workaday world. The truth appeared when we burst into the main showroom of the place. A wide space had been cleared in the middle, the Ruritanian crown stood isolated on a table at the side, and before it the Lion and the Unicorn were at a ding-dong duel with sabres. It was first-class cinema stuff.”
“Of the Walt Disney sort?” Lady Appleby was again sceptical. “Animals fighting duels–”
“The Lion I recognised at once. Even with the headpiece of his bizarre disguise laid aside he was leonine – none other, in fact, than the venerable Count X, formerly Lord Chamberlain at the court of Ruritania. And the Unicorn, as it happened, I also knew. He was the dashing young Baron Y, youngest son of that almost legendary Ruritanian–”
“And they had fallen out?” Mrs Harbot was distressed. “Now, if that wasn’t just too bad! When they could have got clean away, too, with that wonderful old crown.”
Appleby shook his head. “It wasn’t precisely a falling out. Each of these noblemen had discovered that the other was pledged to recover the crown for the beautiful Grand Duchess. They had agreed therefore to join forces until the prize was actually in their grasp – and then to fight for the privilege of laying it at the feet of their adored mistress.”
“Sir John – if that wasn’t a chivalrous thing!”
“Indeed, yes. Well, it was the younger man who reacted the more quickly to the new situation. Dropping his sabre – the Jewellers, you know, have a mass of such things dating from the early history of their Company – the young Baron Y seized his country’s historic crown, evaded us, and dashed from the building. Still retaining his own weapon, the venerable Count X pursued him. We followed.”
Lady Appleby looked at her husband in what might have been either admiration or profound distrust. “The Lion, in fact, beat the Unicorn all round about the town?”
“Precisely, Judith – you express it very well. And the pursuit, as you will immediately realise, was much complicated by the state the streets had by this time assumed. Time being short, I will not describe it in detail. Suffice it that both noblemen eventually took refuge in their own Embassy. It is much to the credit of the present republican regime in Ruritania that they were admitted without hesitation… Do I hear a band?”
Mrs Harbot drew a deep breath. “And the crown? That is now in the hands of the Republic too?”
“By no means. The young Baron Y, with all his famous father’s happiness in such ticklish situations, secreted it as he fled. Look around you, my dear Mrs Harbot. Very tolerably colourable crowns of all sizes hang as thick as blackberries in the streets of this loyal city today. The young Baron has simply added to the display by climbing to the top of some lamp-post and depositing a real one. As soon as his escapade is composed with the authorities – which I can promise you will be in a few hours time – he will recover it, and thus claim the victory over his venerable countryman and rival.”
For a moment Mrs Harbot was almost awed. “But the Jewellers?”
“Lord Anchor has declared that he will put his foot down. The incident is to be declared closed, and no restitution of the crown will be demanded. The Grand Duchess, I don’t doubt, will be permitted to carry it off in triumph to her beautiful Californian home.”
Mrs Harbot was much affected. Lady Appleby regarded her with some compunction. “I must really explain that my husband is given to rather tall–”
But Appleby suddenly leant forward.
“They’re coming!” he said.