A MATTER OF GOBLINS

“You’re sure it’s uninhabited?” Sir John Appleby peered ahead rather apprehensively as the car moved slowly over the uneven track. “There isn’t a resident squire? The Pooles are one of those families that have entirely evaporated from the English scene?”

“How inquiring you turn when we have a small job of trespass on hand.” Lady Appleby pressed firmly on the accelerator. “I don’t know why even an eminent policeman need be so law-abiding. As for the Pooles, I believe there are plenty of them.”

“But not here? Look out for that cow.”

“Not here. I don’t know that Water Poole ought to be called uninhabited. That, to my mind, suggests ruins and generations of emptiness. But I understand that it’s certainly unoccupied and beginning to tumble to pieces. You’ll see for yourself.”

“You mean we’re to go in?”

“Of course. That’s always the real fun. There’ll be a window.”

Appleby groaned. “Judith my dear, I foresee it all. Indeed, it has happened again and again. We break in. We cover ourselves with dust and cobweb. We twist our ankles in rotting floorboards. And then the man comes.”

“Nonsense.”

“We hear him approaching with a sinister limp. He is simply some cottager told off to keep an eye on the place. But we are petrified. You are even more terror-struck than I am. Your bravado deserts you. Out of compassion for your pitiable condition, I consent to our hiding in a cupboard. And there the man finds us.”

“I never heard such rot. Such a thing has never happened to us. Or only once.”

“I rattle my small change loudly in my pocket and assume an air of jaunty patronage. The good old man–”

“The what?”

“That’s what he is. The good old man fails to hear the half-crowns. He is unaware of my manner, which I myself distinguish with piercing clarity as indistinguishable from that of numerous petty criminals of my acquaintance. But he does recognise both your accent and your clothes as virtually identical with those of the late squire’s dear old mother–”

“I think you’re abominable.”

“And so – in a humiliating sort of way – all is well, and we are shown round and offered a lot of inaccurate antiquarian information. As we leave, I give the good old man five shillings. He touches his hat respectfully – to you.”

“Then that’s all right.” Judith Appleby slowed down to avoid another cow. “It looks to me as if there has been a car along here already today.”

“I’d say there have been several.” Appleby picked up a map. “And that’s odd, for this certainly leads to the manor house and no further. And it’s curious, by the way, that a place of some apparent consequence should never have run to a better approach.”

“It may have been less primitive at one time. And, of course, they always had the river.” Judith pointed to a line of poplars in the middle distance. “It’s quite navigable from here to where it joins the Thames, and probably some of their heavy stuff used to come and go by water. But one of the fascinating things about Water Poole, I gather, is just its remarkable isolation. There’s really nothing for miles… And there it is.”

They had swung round a clump of beech trees still in their freshest green, and now the venerable Elizabethan house was directly in front of them. Involuntarily, they both exclaimed in dismay. Water Poole was a larger place than they had expected, and much more nearly ruinous. Approaching from this aspect, one might have supposed some labour of demolition to be in progress – had one not become aware at the same time of absolute solitude and silence.

The ground-plan of the building appeared to be the familiar Tudor H. And one of the end pavilions – it must in fact have constituted a stack of handsome rooms – had come down in a mass of rubble which spread far across the derelict open courtyard before them. Already the tumbled stone and plaster was in part overgrown with hemlock and thistle. And high up, incongruously reminiscent of bomb damage in a London square, they could see a single slice of an augustly panelled apartment, with swallows nesting under the narrow strip of ceiling that remained to it. Elsewhere the long grey façade, which for centuries had faced this empty landscape with a mellow confidence, was flaked and cracked and crumbling round gaping windows and below a broken balustrade. It had been a noble dwelling – and now its whole appearance was so forlorn and disgraced that Appleby had the feeling of having committed an unseemly intrusion. Even the hum of the car seemed an impertinence. The same impression must have come to Judith, for she slipped out of gear and switched off the engine. They glided forward silently into the embracing silence of the place. It was like a physical medium receiving them and covering them, as if they had been swimmers plunging without a ripple into a deep still lake.

“Somebody told me it was occupied during the war – shared by two families.” Unconsciously Judith had lowered her voice, as one might do in the presence of some meditating sage. “But it looks far too ruinous for that.”

“There’s plenty of it, and matters mayn’t be so bad on the other side.”

“But they’ve plainly let it go. Nobody is hoping ever to bring it to life again.” Judith stopped the car and they got out. “It’s enormous. And that’s made it too stiff a commitment for whatever Pooles remain.”

Appleby nodded. “Certainly it’s on the large side. Indeed, it’s more like one of the showplaces put up by Elizabeth’s great courtiers than a run-of-the-mill manor house. Who are these Pooles?”

“An old family, I believe, taking their name from this part of the shire, and giving it to the house when they built it. They met disaster in the Civil War; a father and two sons all killed at Naseby. Now, I imagine, they are impoverished, and quite insignificant as well. Shall we go ahead?” Judith, as she asked this question, was already in vigorous forward motion.

“There will be no harm in walking round the gardens.” Appleby put forward this proposition not very hopefully. “But undoubtedly it lays us open to misconception.”

“We might be taken for thieves?” Judith was amused. “I don’t see much that we could make away with.”

“There’s probably thousands of pounds’ worth of lead on the roof.” Appleby stopped suddenly. “I wonder if somebody has been after that? The ground suggests a good deal of recent coming and going. Or perhaps people help themselves to loads of that rubble. It could be useful in all sorts of ways. We’ll go round the house and down to the river.”

For some seconds they walked on without speaking. Even in the clear light and gentle warmth of this early morning in June there was something insistently depressing about Water Poole in its last long agony. They climbed by insecure and treacherous steps to a mouldering terrace fast disappearing under a lush growth of summer weeds. They passed between the side of the house and a large formal garden which was now mere wilderness. And presently they came to the river frontage. “Why,” Judith exclaimed, “it is better – ever so much better. It’s almost cheerful.”

“I don’t know that I’d go as far as that. But at least they’ve cut the grass. Odd, perhaps – but meritorious.”

On this side too the house was elevated behind a terrace, and between the terrace and the river lay a broad expanse of turf. This was not in good condition, but it had certainly been recently mown with some care. Judith looked at it in perplexity. “I suppose it’s a gallant attempt to make a decent show. But who’s to see it? No one would bring a sail up here, and its decidedly remote for canoes or punts… The fabric’s better, too.”

Appleby turned. The house as viewed from this angle was plainly in disastrous disrepair, but it bore no suggestion of falling to pieces. The terrace here was in tolerable order, the windows were either glazed or decently shuttered, and under a massive portico a stout oak door appeared firmly shut. Rather to his wife’s surprise, Appleby led the way across the grass and climbed a broad flight of steps that rose to the house between battered statues. “Weeded,” he said. “And they don’t tilt disconcertingly when you tread on them.” He stooped. “Patched up, after a fashion.” He reached the terrace, walked to the oak door and tried it. “Locked.” And this time, to Judith’s positive astonishment, he gave it an impatient rattle. “Shades of Dr Johnson’s father.”

“Dr Johnson’s father, John?”

“Don’t you remember? Every night old Michael Johnson went out and locked with great care the front door of a building which no longer had any back to it. Young Sam was afraid he was going off his head. Well, Water Poole has a back rather like that. So if we do want to go inside there’s no particular difficulty. We just go round to the other side again.”

“Then here goes – and I believe you’re quite as curious as I am.”

“It’s the place that’s curious – not me.” For a moment Appleby turned to glance again at the river. It was no more than a stream, but he judged it to hold promise of excellent trout. “And as for that lawn–” He broke off, and they returned to the back of the house in silence.

On this side the terrace half-obscured a basement floor of cellars and offices, and into these they walked without hindrance. For a time they wandered among flagged chambers and passages, either vaulted or with plaster ceilings most of which now lay on the floors. Here and there were vast fireplaces, cumbersome stone troughs, gloomy larders and pantries with massive slate shelves on a scale suggesting a morgue. Nothing movable was to be seen – except in one obscure recess a heap of brushwood disposed into a rough bed, with signs of a small fire nearby, as if a tramp of the more pronouncedly melancholic sort had recently chosen this congenial spot for temporary residence. It was clear that in modern times the house when occupied must have achieved more practicable domestic arrangements on the next floor. And to this the Applebys presently climbed. So far, it had all been most depressing, and Judith’s whole exploration appeared to hold every promise of ending in mere dismalness. Appleby endeavoured to enliven the proceedings by affecting to hear the threatening approach of the man. His wife however was not amused.

But upstairs it was different. The great hall was a stately place, with high mullioned windows looking towards the river, a fine linen-fold panelling which must have been older than the house itself, and an elaborately ribbed plaster vaulting with pendants. These last had mostly broken off, and the effect was oddly like one of those caves or grottos in which eighteenth-century gentlemen amused themselves by shooting down the stalactites. But to an eye failing to travel so high as this the impression was less of decay than of suspended animation. Here was the very heart of the house, and it still faintly beat. It seemed only to be awaiting some prompting occasion to pulse more strongly, until the place felt the quickening flood in all its enchanted limbs, and stirred and breathed again.

Judith paced the length of the hall from screen to dais, and there stood quite still, as if she were listening. When she came back her expression had changed. “It’s queer,” she said. “There’s something.”

“Something?”

“Don’t you feel it?” She smiled at him, faintly puzzled. “But of course you don’t. It’s not your line.”

“If you mean ghosts and what not, I didn’t know it was your line either.”

“Not quite ghosts. Unless – yes – a throng of ghosts. I have a feeling of time shutting up, telescoping. Our time and theirs. So that they were here – and have all gone away – only today or yesterday.”

Appleby was examining on the great carved screen a fine series of panels exhibiting the motive of an arch in perspective. “My dear girl, who are ‘they’?”

“I don’t know.” She laughed at her own absurdity. “Gentlemen adventurers bound for the Spanish Main. Cavaliers riding away to join Prince Rupert or the King. If we had been just a little earlier we might have seen them. They forded the river, I think, and rode away at dawn.”

“You ought to have gone in for historical novels, not for sculpture. But – talking of that – look at the chimney-piece. It’s rather good, in a florid way.”

They studied it for some minutes: an affair of Hermes-figures, dolphins and cupids, surmounted by an ornate heraldic carving. “It’s odd about names,” Judith said. “They don’t go in for a pool, but a pole.” She pointed to this element in the elaborate coat of arms that crowned the structure. “But what’s that piece of carving lower down? I’d say it’s been added later.”

“It’s another pole – chopped in two by a sword. What’s called an emblem, rather than heraldry proper. And there’s a motto. No – it’s simply a date. Can you see?”

“Yes.” There was clear sunlight in the hall, and Judith had no difficulty. What she read was:

 

ye 14 June

1645

 

Appleby thought for a moment. “Naseby, in fact. The Pooles were in no doubt about that battle’s being the end of them.”

“And this is the tenth.”

“The tenth?” He was at a loss.

“Of June. Four days to the anniversary. No wonder–” She broke off. “John, there’s somebody coming. There really is, this time.”

Appleby listened. There could be no doubt about the advancing footsteps. “Then we go through with it, as usual. Unless, of course, it’s not the man, but a ghost. One of Prince Rupert’s friends, say, who forgot some weapon – or some piece of finery – and has come back for it.”

“What nonsense we talk. But there is something queer.”

“I rather agree.”

They looked at each other for a moment in whimsical alarm, before turning expectantly to the far end of the hall, from which the sound came. In a dark doorway beyond the dais they glimpsed what for an instant might have been identified as a gleam of armour. And then they saw that it was human hair. Advancing upon them was a silver-haired clergyman. He was carrying in his arms a square wooden box; he walked gingerly to a window embrasure and set down his burden; then he turned to inspect the Applebys over the top of small and uncertainly poised steel-rimmed spectacles. “Good morning,” he said politely. “So you are before me, after all.”

Appleby took a hand from his trousers pocket – it was clear that no five shillings would be called for – and contrived a polite bow. “Good morning, sir. But I don’t think–”

“How quickly these things get about nowadays. I am most surprised. But, of course, your Society is always on the qui-vive – decidedly on the qui-vive.”

“I’m really afraid I don’t know what Society you are talking about.”

“Come, come – frankness, my dear sir, frankness.” The old clergyman shook his head disapprovingly, so that his silver locks shimmered in the thin clear sunlight which flooded the hall. “The lady and yourself indubitably come from the Society for Psychical Research.”

“You are wholly mistaken. If I come from anywhere, it’s from the Metropolitan Police. But my visit here is entirely private – and, I’m afraid, unauthorised. My wife” – and Appleby looked at Judith with some shade of malice – “is keenly interested in old houses.”

“We must get to work.” The old clergyman appeared to make very little of Appleby’s remarks. “But first let me introduce myself. My name is Buttery – Horace Buttery – and I have been the incumbent of this parish for many years.”

“How do you do.” Appleby presented Mr Buttery to Judith with appropriate formality. “I wonder if you will tell us what it is that you suppose to have got about?”

“I’m bound to say that I had come to regard it as a vanishing legend. For good or ill, these old stories are dying out.”

Mr Buttery advanced to the chimney-piece and peered up at the carving. “The date is about right, you must agree.”

“The date is certainly about right.” It was Judith who replied, and Appleby realised with misgiving that she was determined to probe the intentions or persuasions of the old parson before them. “Today is the tenth of June.”

“Quite so.” Mr Buttery, much gratified, nodded so vigorously that his spectacles appeared likely to fly from his nose. “But I have heard very little talk of it, you know, of recent years. Only now and then, and from the older cottagers. The younger people – and it is they, mark you, who are often out late at night, human nature being what it is – the younger people never report anything. Perhaps because they don’t expect anything – eh?” Mr Buttery glanced at Judith with an air of great acuteness. “But then, of course, I’m bound to say I didn’t expect anything myself. It was entirely a surprise. My mind, naturally, was entirely on the gamekeeper.”

“I beg your pardon?” Judith was puzzled.

“No matter, no matter.” Mr Buttery might have been supposed momentarily confused. “The point is that I have seen it with my own eyes. And so I feel bound to get to work.” He turned back to his wooden box. “As you do too. Well, our purposes are not the same, but there need be no conflict – no conflict at all. A great deal in our present ills, if you ask me, proceeds from this disastrous notion of a necessary conflict between religion and science. I have a very cogent sermon on the subject, and I find that there is unfailing interest in it, year by year. I am not without the thought, indeed, of printing it and sending a copy to the Bishop. Between you and me, it might do him good. But here we are, here we are.” Mr Buttery was now rummaging in his box. “Bell, book, candle – surely I didn’t forget the candle? No – here it is.”

Judith advanced and peered into the box. “You are proposing some sort of exorcism?”

“Precisely. Not that I consider the manifestation as serious.” Again Mr Buttery glanced up with an air of great acuteness – which had, somehow, the comical effect of exhibiting him as a very innocent man. “I am not at all sure that a single White Paternoster might not very adequately meet the case. Still, one ought to be on the safe side. My reading inclines me to the view that we are dealing with goblins. A really populous affair like this is commonly a matter of goblins. I have little doubt that we shall get the better of them.”

“Do I understand” – Appleby in his turn had come forward – “that you yourself have lately seen at Water Poole a considerable concourse of what you took to be disembodied spirits?”

“My dear sir, you are perfectly justified from your scientific point of view in beginning your inquiry in this purely objective fashion. But I am persuaded that you know very well what I saw here last night.”

“Can you put a name to it?”

“Of course I can. It was the Naseby Ball.”

“Exactly – the Naseby Ball. And – as you can imagine – we are extremely interested.” Appleby gave Judith a swift glance which might have been an injunction to accept without more ado the role of psychical researcher. “It would be invaluable if you were good enough to give us a full account of your experience.”

“By all means.” Mr Buttery picked up his bell, gave it what appeared to be an experimental tinkle, and then addressed himself courteously to meet this request. “The historical background of the legend is no doubt familiar to you. In the summer of 1645 Lady Elizabeth Poole – she was a daughter of the Earl of Warmington – gave a magnificent entertainment here at Water Poole. On any sober calculation, of course, it was no time for anything of the sort, and the ball was clearly intended as a gesture in the grand manner. The Pooles prized nothing more highly than their reputation for being both resourceful and gay – and indeed they are said to be so still. But it took this great aristocratic lady, perhaps, to light that particular beacon against the darkness that was then closing in on the King’s party.” Mr Buttery paused. “One admires it, does one not?”

“And remembers it.” Judith glanced down the hall as if attempting to picture the scene. “And that is the point, I imagine? Lady Elizabeth’s entertainment became legendary?”

“So it would appear. On the stroke of midnight, the story goes, a messenger arrived from Prince Rupert. He announced that Sir Thomas Fairfax was marching with the New Model army upon Northampton, and that in a few days a critical battle must be joined. The ball ended instantly with a loyal toast, there was a bustle of martial preparation, and at daybreak the gentlemen rode away.” Again Mr Buttery paused. “How vividly one sees it: the candles growing pale in the dawn, the women ashen under their paint and jewels, the men all assurance and arrogance and inflexibly maintained courtesy, but with thoughts only for their horses and weapons and accoutrements. Among those who departed were Richard Poole and his two sons. As you no doubt know, none of them came back.”

“And the family never recovered?”

Mr Buttery nodded his venerable head. “It is perhaps true to say that the family never completely recovered – although Pooles lived on, the unquestioned masters of this place, into the present century. In the Kaiser’s war the old history repeated itself after a fashion, for a father and two sons were killed, and the estate became impossibly burdened with debt. No Poole has lived here regularly since then. During the last war, when remote places were at a premium, Water Poole was let out and partially occupied for a time. But now it scarcely appears that it can ever be lived in again, and I am sorry to say that the shooting and fishing have been leased to some very unpleasant people – commercial folk, no doubt – from London. The present owner of the house is almost unknown to me. He is a young man in his early thirties – a Richard, as most of the lords of the manor have been christened – and I believe he has gone on the stage.”

“I wonder what Lady Elizabeth Poole would make of that? To think of one of her descendants become a common player would probably make her turn in her grave.” Judith looked at Mr Buttery with sudden indiscreet mischief. “But perhaps it’s that sort of thing that Lady Elizabeth is by way of doing – turning in her grave, or even rising from it on stated occasions to dance a pavane or a saraband?”

Mr. Buttery shook his head. “No, no, my dear madam. That is an error – I am bound to say a grave error.” He picked up his bell again and tinkled it, as if here was something in itself calling for the rite in which he proposed to engage. “We must not suppose that the souls of virtuous persons, or their bodies either, engage in any such pranks. We are not in any sense confronted with true apparitions. Goblins are the explanation. I have not the slightest doubt of it.”

“It is a most interesting supposition.” Appleby interposed this with gravity. “But just what do they explain? You haven’t yet told us that. We have only gathered, so far, that last night you witnessed something remarkable. How did it happen? Were you called out to it?”

“Not precisely.” For the third time Mr Buttery tinkled his bell, but on this occasion what appeared to prompt the action was mild discomfiture. “The fact is that, round about midnight, I was on the river. For purposes of meditation, and on a fine summer night, it may confidently be recommended.”

“Particularly when there is no moon?”

“Oh, most decidedly so. There is a great deal of distraction in a handsome moon.”

“I see.” Appleby felt constrained to conclude that – astonishing as the fact must seem – this reverend old parson’s nocturnal occasions were not unconnected with possessing himself of other’s people’s trout. Perhaps Mr Buttery was an instance of the shocking poverty of the rural clergy prompting to a life of crime. Perhaps he simply derived entertainment from outwitting, with arts learnt in boyhood, those unpleasant commercial people from London. “And being on the river, sir, you saw this spectral ball?”

“I did indeed.”

“I believe you said that the occurrence of something of the sort is a traditional belief among some of the older people in these parts. Perhaps you had been thinking of it yourself?”

“Decidedly not. My walk from the rectory to the river is by a path from which there is some view of the back of the house, and I could just dimly distinguish its outline against the sky. I recall simply reflecting how lonely and deserted it seemed.”

“There were no lights?”

“None. Anything of the sort would have attracted my attention and interest at once. For the astonishing spectacle which I saw later I was utterly unprepared. It came upon me, indeed, with the suddenness of a coup de théâtre.” Mr Buttery paused upon this phrase with some satisfaction. “I was dropping quietly – I may say very quietly – down the stream in my dinghy. My thoughts were occupied with – um – entirely other matters. In fact I was meditating” – Mr Buttery, who seemed to feel that verisimilitude and conviction called here for more specific statement, visibly paused for inspiration – “I was meditating upon the mutability of human affairs.”

“A very proper subject for reflection, sir. And then?”

“I came round the little bend that brings Water Poole into view. It was all lit up.”

“All?”

“Certainly this hall and its adjacent apartments. And there were lights on the terrace and – I think – the lawn. I was extremely startled.”

“Naturally. And what was your first thought?”

Mr Buttery considered. “It must appear very absurd now – but undoubtedly it was of my own situation. I was struck by the impropriety and – er – inexplicability of my dropping down, at that hour, upon some private occasion. And then I realised that there could be no private occasion. For Water Poole, as you have yourselves seen, is an empty shell. Indeed, there could be no natural explanation whatever. And as soon as I had made this reflection, I noticed the peculiar character of the light. It was not that of a normally illuminated mansion.”

“Have you ever seen this particular mansion lit up before?”

“Certainly – although it is now long ago. As you may notice, there is an old electrical installation of sorts. But the light last night was utterly different.”

Appleby had walked to a window and was looking out thoughtfully over the lawn and the stream beyond. “Can you describe it?” he asked.

“A low, soft, golden light. The effect was strikingly beautiful.”

“I see. And you have reason to believe that goblins command that sort of thing?” Appleby put this question with gravity. “I am myself inclined to think of goblins as restricted to glow-worms. But glow-worms would scarcely be equal to the job.”

“Decidedly not. Glow-worms could not possibly illuminate a large party of ladies and gentlemen.”

“And that was what you saw?”

“That was what I appeared to see. And I need scarcely remark that their costume was Caroline. It would not be correct to say that the effect was as of a canvas by Van Dyck – since, you see, from my point of view, it was all in miniature and in open air. But if you may suppose Van Dyck to have painted something in the manner of Watteau’s fêtes champêtres you have the impression exactly.” Mr Buttery smiled ingenuously over this triumph of precision. “I may perhaps be permitted to mention that I possess a great love of the visual arts.”

“No doubt.” Appleby was looking at the old clergyman in some perplexity. “Did you think to study this particular example at closer quarters?”

“I must confess that I did not. There they were – Caroline ladies and gentlemen strolling on the terrace and across the lawn. Behind them – here in this hall – I had an impression of dancing, and strains of music were definitely detectable. My mental state was peculiar. I recollected the circumstances of Lady Elizabeth’s ball but not, oddly enough, the legend of its periodical re-enactment. As is so frequently the case during an actual encounter with supernatural appearances, no thought of the supernatural formed itself clearly in my head. I accused myself of inebriety.”

“It is a thought that might come to anyone. But I am sure there was no justification for it.”

“Reflection shows me that there was not. It is true that I had ventured upon a glass of burgundy at dinner, followed by a little madeira. But I hardly consider–”

“Plainly it is not a supposition with which you need distress yourself.” Appleby contrived a stern glance at Judith, who was displaying some signs of amusement at this exhibition of her husband’s professional manner. “Did you think of anything else?”

“Certainly. I thought of those two Oxford ladies – learned and sensible women, they appear to have been – who believed themselves to have had an adventure with time at Versailles. You no doubt recall their story. They saw Marie Antoinette. It seemed possible that I had met a similar kink in the centuries and was back with the real Lady Elizabeth Poole.”

“I believe there’s decidedly something in that.” It was Judith who interposed, and she spoke with decision. “It goes with what I felt myself when I entered this hall. It goes with what I still feel.” She gave her husband a glance of some defiance. “Time has been squashed up like a concertina, and it’s only just expanding again to the dimensions familiar to us. I fancy that – ever so faintly – I can hear that music now. I fancy I can hear those people: the sound of their voices and the rustle of their silks. And I know I can smell them.”

“Smell them?” Appleby was positively startled by this primitive assertion.

“Yes, John. The powdered hair. The scents – their scents. And their mere seventeenth-century humanity too. Mr Buttery caught them and we just missed them. I’m sure of it.”

“I think Mr Buttery was not without a feeling that they might catch him.” Appleby offered this rather dryly. “Isn’t it so, sir?”

For a moment Mr Buttery looked quite startled. And then he blandly smiled. “I must confess to having been under that uneasiness. I should hate to be caught. By goblins, that is to say. Not unnaturally, they are particularly malevolently disposed to persons of my cloth.” He produced a box of matches and lit his candle. “But I fancy that we can get decidedly on top of them now.”

Mr Buttery was evidently about to open his campaign. Whether the manner of his announcing this constituted an invitation to participate was obscure, and Appleby appeared to feel that it was rather a tactful withdrawal that was indicated. The proper deportment for spectators during a ceremony of exorcism is not easy to hit upon impromptu, and his decision was perhaps occasioned merely by this. Judith, whose natural bent was for trying anything once, followed him from the hall with some reluctance. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” she presently asked.

“Part of it, at least – or part of it as he believes it to be. Presumably he simply turned his dinghy round and stole away. And now with daylight and the paraphernalia collected in that box he’s nerved himself to come back again. Or at least that’s the obvious picture. And I can’t think he’s making up that queer vision. Certainly you didn’t seem to think he was.”

Judith frowned. “I believe – I don’t know why – that all these people were here.”

“Did I say you ought to have become a historical novelist? Perhaps you ought to have become a detective. Would you care to be one now?”

“Assisting Scotland Yard?” She glanced at him cautiously, for it was not always easy to tell when John was being serious. “I don’t mind having a go.”

“Then just keep an eye on our reverend friend while I make another cast round the place.”

Judith was puzzled. “Does the old gentleman really need keeping an eye on?”

“I don’t quite know. He may be nothing more than an endearing clerical eccentric, much beloved by all the parish. But I have my doubts.”

“Very well. I expect he’ll relish a bit of an audience.” And Judith slipped back into the hall.

Water Poole would take some time to explore systematically, and Appleby contented himself for the moment with a prowl through some of the neighbouring rooms. The place was none of his business. He had been decidedly aware of this as Judith had driven him up to it, and he told himself that nothing had happened since to alter this basic fact. Even a policeman should be ready to admit that not everything enigmatical is necessarily nefarious. Even if Mr Buttery was a poacher, it was not a matter of which an Assistant Commissioner from Scotland Yard need take any very active notice. Nor ought he to concern himself with investigating an elaborate joke; to do so, indeed, was only to invite annoyance or ridicule. But yet…

He had paused in a large and gloomy chamber which had been converted at some period to the uses of a library. There were handsome shelves for many thousands of books, but they now harboured nothing but dust. Dust was thick on them, and thick on the floor. The sight was melancholy – but for Appleby it was finally and definitively informative. He stirred the dust with his toe. It was the first thick dust upon which he had come. One can’t, in a hurry, do anything much with an enormous empty library. So it had been left out. It had been left out of the joke. But the hall and one or two rooms around it had been dusted. They had been needed for the fun.

The joke…the fun. Appleby prowled on, dissatisfied. There was one very simple and very obvious explanation of Mr Buttery’s vision. Water Poole had been used for a fancy-dress ball. Or better perhaps, for a sort of theatrical party or green-room rag. The owner, young Richard Poole, was an actor. It seemed very probable that the old legend connected with his house had prompted him to organise what he conceived to be an appropriate entertainment there for his friends. This was at least a more tenable theory than Mr Buttery’s of a kink in time.

As for goblins – Appleby thought – they don’t drop cigarette ash. They don’t leave candle-wax on mantelpieces. They don’t – he had moved once more into the open air – presumably leave a lawn something the worse for wear. When Judith had imagined herself to be obscurely sensing presences in the house, she had merely been letting these and other prosaic evidences of the late party filter unnoticed into her imagination. A perfectly commonplace if rather elaborate joke…

But goblins disappear at dawn, and nobody sees them go. The cock crows, whereupon they fade and vanish. And something very like this had happened. Any sort of large party creates a good deal of litter; but the litter left by this party was so inconsiderable that a trained eye was required to perceive it. There had been a deliberate care taken to obliterate all traces of whatever proceedings had been going forward. The probability appeared to be that, but for the curious nocturnal habits of the local rector, nobody except the actual participants would have had any knowledge of the affair.

This was queer. It suggested that perhaps Richard Poole bore no responsibility in the matter. It was a joke unobtrusively perpetrated, followed by a careful – and astonishingly rapid – tidy-up. Why? Appleby shook his head as he found himself confronted with this tiresome little, yet perpetually fascinating, key-word of his profession. Why? There must be a reason. Probably it was a harmless reason. Perhaps it was a quite stupid and uninteresting reason, and any beguilement an explanation seemed to promise was no more than an effect of the romantic associations of this lonely and mouldering house. Still, explanation must be possible. There was a reason, if it could be found.

He had strolled down to the river again. It must, after all, be termed something more than a stream – for although narrow, it was quite deep and decidedly navigable. One could bring up a motor-boat – say one of those substantially powered house-boat affairs that were now so popular on the Thames itself… It struck him that he had seen no boathouse. Yet this was something which Water Poole must surely possess. The absence of anything of the sort intrigued him. He began to poke about.

There was certainly no boathouse on the bank – but the reason, when after some minutes’ search he found it, was interesting. An arm of the river – it was in fact a cut, but of evident antiquity and perhaps indeed as old as the mansion itself – passed clean under one wing of the house. Each end was secured by an iron grille which extended perhaps a couple of feet below the level of the water. That by which the cut emerged had quite clearly been undisturbed for generations. But at the entrance the state of affairs was different. The grille was rusty and bore every appearance of disuse – yet as Appleby peered at it he had his doubts. It was secured by an enormous padlock, plainly manufactured in early Victorian times – and on this too the rust was thick. Appleby however found it of considerable interest, and performed some complicated gymnastic manoeuvres in order to get a hand on it. When he rose and walked away he was softly whistling a melancholy little stave of his own composition. Judith would have marked the sign. His spirits were rising.

And then he found the motor cars. They had not exactly been concealed; they were simply parked on the farther side of an out-building which only one rather pertinaciously interested in Water Poole would have been likely to visit. Both were large cars, but one was a good deal more resplendent than the other. Perhaps it would presently be necessary to examine them with some care, but for the moment Appleby contented himself with feeling the radiators. That of the resplendent car was quite cold. The other was warm.

He turned and walked back thoughtfully in the direction of the house. He had almost reached it when he heard the sound of an engine behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder. An open car with a single occupant was approaching. He had just time to distinguish the figure as that of a young man when the car turned off the track and vanished round the outbuildings which Appleby had just left. He heard the engine stop. The suddenly restored silence brought him a curious sense of impending drama. The situation upon which he and Judith had stumbled had so far presented rather a meagre cast. It was possible, he thought, that the principal characters were now beginning to drop in.

Perhaps he should go back and welcome this particular accession. He hesitated, and then his eye fell upon one part of Water Poole which he had not yet explored. It was the totally ruined part, where something like a whole wing had come down. If, as seemed very probable, one of the new arrivals was the owner or some other accredited person, he himself had perhaps only a few minutes left for further investigation before receiving a stiff request to make himself scarce. This persuaded him to press forward, even at the expense of an uncomfortably dusty scramble. In a moment he was climbing over the mountain of rubble with which this part of the forecourt was filled.

As he progressed, he saw that even more of the house than he supposed had been gashed open when the end pavilion fell. A staircase, intact to the second storey and there breaking off in air, had the appearance of a hazardous fire-escape; below it was a tumble of stone, brick and splintered beams. Appleby surveyed this, stopped for a moment, and then quickened his forward scramble. An onlooker would have seen him vanish among the debris – and might have reflected that he remained invisible for rather a long time.

The principal characters were beginning to drop in. The phrase reiterated itself rather grimly in Appleby’s mind as he made his way back to the great hall. It was perhaps because he was walking in marked abstraction that, turning a corner of the building, he bumped straight into somebody approaching from the opposite direction. It was a lady. Fortunately she was substantially – indeed powerfully – built, and took the shock well. Appleby steadied her and apologised. “I am extremely sorry. It was careless of me. One doesn’t expect much traffic just here.”

“Pardon me.” The lady spoke with an accent that was unmistakably transatlantic. She was alarmed – but this by no means prevented her from being alarming. She was formidable – it might have been ventured almost professionally formidable, as if her everyday business was that of dominating large public meetings. And now she gave Appleby and Appleby’s clothes a rapidly appraising glance. “Would you,” she asked, “be the owner of this wonderful spot?”

“No, madam. I am not the owner.” Appleby’s glance was certainly not less searching than the American lady’s. “May I ask if you have just arrived here?”

“Just arrived?” It was discernible that the lady regarded this question as needing care. She eyed Appleby for a moment as if she were an accomplished chairman debating how to deal with a troublesome questioner in the body of the hall. “I guess so. Isn’t it just the most romantic house you could imagine?”

“It has considerable picturesque appeal, no doubt.”

The lady appeared to find this disconcerting. It was as if the body of the hall had produced something really awkward. “Why – I’d say it’s just out of this world.”

“I fear not.”

This was evidently more disconcerting still – the more so as Appleby’s tone might fairly have been described as sombre. The lady looked at him in some alarm. “And you say you’re not the owner? If that isn’t too bad.”

“Possibly so. My name is Appleby – Sir John Appleby.” He looked at the lady steadily. “I am an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.”

The lady gave what in a less massively built person would have been a jump. “Does that mean–?”

“It means Scotland Yard.” Appleby remarked with interest that at this information the lady turned quite pale. “May I ask your name?”

“Jones.” The lady made this announcement with large conviction. “Miss Jones.”

“And the name of this house?”

“Say?” The formidable Miss Jones was confused.

“Do you know it, or don’t you?”

“Why, it’s–” Miss Jones lamentably hesitated. “Of course I don’t.”

“Then, madam, why and how did you come here?” And Appleby paused. “Perhaps you simply saw the house from the highroad and decided to turn aside and have a look?”

“Just that.” Miss Jones, as if thus reminded that her business was with the visual scene, tilted her head and gave Water Poole a glance of unrestrained if somewhat hurried approval. “If it isn’t a sweet spot. Would it belong to a lord?” She transferred her gaze briskly to a wrist-watch and gave an exclamation of dismay. She might once more have been the busy committee-woman with a fresh engagement pressing. “But I must be getting along.”

“I am afraid not. It is unfortunately essential that you should remain. You will be kind enough to accompany me into the house and answer certain further questions.”

“Accompany a strange man into a lonely and deserted house!” Miss Jones’ tone spoke of the largest moral outrage. “I shall do nothing–”

“Here is my authority.” Appleby fished in a pocket, produced what was in fact a driving-licence, and with shameless resource held it momentarily before Miss Jones’ startled gaze. “This way, madam, if you please.”

“I call this outrageous.” Miss Jones delivered herself of her protest with energy. But she walked, nevertheless, in the direction which Appleby politely indicated.

Mr Buttery had either concluded or broken off his contest with the goblins. He and Judith were standing on one side of the fireplace, as if they had formed for the moment a defensive alliance. On the other side was the young man whom Appleby had lately seen drive up to the house; it was apparent that he had been in the hall for only a couple of minutes, and that the entrance of Appleby and Miss Jones was a complicating factor in a situation of which he was trying to take the measure. It was to Appleby that he addressed himself now. “Really, sir, I don’t get the hang of this at all. Mr Buttery I’m more or less prepared to see – although I can’t make head or tail of his talk at the moment. I have gathered before that he has rather a fondness for the place. But why you and these ladies–”

“We owe you a great many apologies.” Appleby was entirely bland. “May I take it that you are Mr Poole, and that my wife has made herself known to you? And may I now introduce you to Miss Jones, a lady who has performed the astonishing feat of noticing Water Poole from the highroad? We are all quite frankly trespassers, and of course we must take ourselves off. I have no doubt that you find our intrusion most vexatious.”

“I don’t know that I want to say that.” Richard Poole was willing to be mollified. “Of course one doesn’t very much welcome trippers. But it would be churlish to cut up rough at the appearance of people with an informed interest in the place. Particularly” – and he glanced sharply at Miss Jones – “if they are American visitors.”

“Miss Jones is certainly from the United States. She isn’t, by the way, already known to you?”

“Known to me?” The owner of Water Poole was startled. “Certainly not.”

“And you, madam?” Appleby turned and looked attentively at Miss Jones. “Do you know Mr Poole here by sight – or perhaps by name?”

There was a moment’s silence while Miss Jones subjected this question to her customary wary analysis. “I’m quite sure I never got acquainted with Mr Poole before. I don’t know many folk in this country.”

“That gets something clear.” Appleby indicated Mr Buttery. “And you don’t know this gentleman either?”

“One moment.” Richard Poole had stepped forward – slightly impatient, slightly perplexed. “Is there really a question of getting things clear? I am, after all, the owner of this place, and I’m not aware of anything of the sort.”

“I have no desire, I assure you, to express any impertinent curiosity.” Appleby’s mildness continued to be notable. “But it is true, you know, that Mr Buttery has had a most perplexing experience here.”

“To be sure he has.” Poole’s tone was politely amused. “Goblins and fairies at midnight – and as a consequence of his encounter with them he has been trying out some sort of exorcism. It isn’t one of my own interests, I’m afraid. But I don’t in the least object to his going right ahead.”

“You just can’t have been listening, Mr Poole, if you propose to treat the matter in that off-hand fashion.” Judith now took a hand in the conversation. “What Mr Buttery saw was a whole ball – call it the Naseby Ball.”

“Then I think he was uncommonly lucky.” Poole glanced whimsically at the venerable clergyman, clearly determined not to budge from his airy attitude. “It’s a spectacle that seems commonly to be reserved for the very old. And also, I must add, for the simplest classes of society. Gaffer Odgers of Poole Parva is the last ancient I heard of as having been favoured in that way.”

“You have never witnessed this legendary manifestation yourself?” Appleby had strolled to a window and now turned to study the young man in a full light.

“Of course not.”

“Nor taken any part in – well, occasioning it?”

“No. I’m not a medium, or anything of that sort.”

“You have never come and kept watch, even, at the appropriate season?”

“Good lord, no.” Poole was again determinedly amused. “I tell you I don’t take any interest in spooks.”

“Nor very much in Water Poole?” Appleby paused. “May I ask when you were here last?”

The young man hesitated. “Can that really be any business of yours? But the answer, if it interests you, is about eighteen months ago.”

“Why are you here today?”

This time Poole flushed. “Dash it all, sir, this is a bit too much.”

“On the contrary, it’s not nearly enough.” Quite suddenly, Appleby was no less grim than he had been with Miss Jones a little earlier. “Mr Buttery is an educated man in a responsible position. He gives a most circumstantial account of very odd goings-on here last night. And this morning you, sir, turn up for the first time in eighteen months. Do you ask me to believe that this is purely coincidental?”

“I don’t ask you to believe anything. I simply tell you to clear–” Richard Poole’s glance fell on Judith and he checked himself. “I must ask you to be good enough to withdraw from my house and land at once.”

“Possibly our introductions haven’t gone far enough.” Appleby produced a pocket-book. “May I give you my card?”

There was a moment’s silence while Poole took the slip of pasteboard and glanced at it. His flush died away and his manner became uncertain. “I don’t know what to say about this. I must have a minute to think.”

“By all means. And I feel bound to emphasise, Mr Poole, that – however it may be with your arrival here – mine is a matter of pure chance.”

“I don’t think I want to say anything.”

“As you please. But I think you have a story to tell, and that you had better tell it.” Appleby paused and looked at the young man gravely. “There is one circumstance, of which you may or may not be aware, which makes this queer business upon which my wife and I have stumbled extremely serious.”

Poole frowned. “You speak in riddles, so far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That may be so. At present, I don’t intend to divulge the circumstance to which I refer. But I solemnly assure you that it is something which makes all concealment on your part dangerous and in all probability impossible.”

The young man was impressed. “I still don’t know that I ought to say anything – without a solicitor and so forth. It occurs to me that I have been breaking the law. I hadn’t thought of it that way – and indeed the idea’s fantastic. Still, I may have been trying to get money by false pretences.” He looked at Appleby with a sudden odd naivety. “It’s devilish awkward.”

“It does sound as if it might be a shade uncomfortable.” Appleby was mildly sardonic. “But I still advise you to speak out, Mr Poole.”

“Very well. I will. You won’t believe a word of my story, I expect. But you shall have it.” Richard Poole glanced about him. “I don’t mind your wife – or, for that matter, Mr Buttery. But I really don’t see that this Miss – er – Jones–”

“Sure.” Miss Jones took this broad hint with alacrity. “Mr Poole’s affairs are no business of mine. If you’ll pardon me, I’ll be getting along.”

Appleby shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that.” He turned to Poole. “Do you think Miss Jones has simply strayed in on the party? There isn’t likely to be any place for her in your story?”

Poole stared. “I can’t think–” He stopped. “Unless–”

“Perhaps we had better take things in order.” Appleby glanced around the empty hall. “It’s a pity there’s nothing to sit down on except Mr Buttery’s box.”

“Dear me! I have been most remiss.” Mr Buttery pushed forward the box, and then found himself in some embarrassment as to which lady should have the offer of it.

“You’d better sit on it yourself.” Miss Jones eyed the clergyman searchingly. “How old are you?”

“How old, madam?” Mr Buttery was so surprised by this outrageous question that he did in fact sit down without more ado. “Sixty-eight.”

“You look ten years older. I suppose you drink. A pale-faced drinker, too. Do you know about your expectation of life? Remind me to let you have some statistics.” Miss Jones paused in this astonishing homily. “It ought to be more generally known–”

“That’s it.” Richard Poole was regarding the lady with a sort of horrified recognition. “She has a place in my story, after all.”

Appleby nodded. “I hardly supposed otherwise. But please begin.”

“It’s going to sound very queer.” Richard Poole put his hands in his trouser-pockets and paced nervously across the hall. “Perhaps you know that I’m an actor by profession? In other words, my regular concern is with illusion – with creating and sustaining one or another pleasurable illusion. And that is what, together with a group of friends, I set myself to do here last night. My motive was entirely benevolent and disinterested.”

Miss Jones gave a sardonic laugh. “What you call a charity matinée with an all-star cast?”

“We were none of us stars and it wasn’t a matinée. The curtain had to go up at night – and any old night wouldn’t do. It had to be a dark night. If too much had appeared – if the illusion had failed, you see – well, it would have been just too bad. As it was, only a very remarkable combination of circumstances made it possible.”

Appleby nodded. “Do I understand you to believe, Mr Poole, that this benevolent illusion did in fact pass off successfully?”

“I certainly supposed so. The only snag was its turning out that I might be suspected of having a motive that I’d never thought of. Quite suddenly, and out of the blue, I was presented with a totally unexpected moral issue. I failed to cope with it. It’s before me still.”

“I wonder.” Miss Jones, although she had the appearance of one who feels it desirable to keep her own counsel, allowed herself this enigmatical interjection with some emphasis. “But go on.”

“If you’ll keep quiet, madam, that’s just what I mean to do… I suppose we all have American cousins. I suppose even you are somebody’s cousin. And my cousin turned out to be Hiram Poole. It’s queer to think of a Poole being called Hiram – but there he was, complete with family tree. The genealogy was all quite accurate, and he actually had the thing hung up in his suite at Murray’s. Hiram is a very modest man. In fact he is quite pathologically shy and unassuming – which is an essential factor in my story. But he is excessively rich, and it wouldn’t occur to him not to put up in the best hotel in town. I found him there when I responded to his letter. I can’t say that I was summoned, since what he sent me might best be described as a mere diffident hint of his existence.

“It is essential that you should appreciate my lively feeling from the first that Hiram is an agreeable figure of considerable pathos. His money is of his own making, I gather, and has come from the manufacture of some nameless but certainly humble object of domestic utility. Might it be wash-tubs? Perhaps they are out of date. I just don’t know.

“It turned out that he had never been in Europe before, although making the trip had been a life’s dream with him. He had nerved himself to it now only because it was his last chance. Hiram is a dying man. He told me in a fashion that was entirely matter-of-fact that his doctors had given him only a few months to live. Well, that has increased the effect of pathos, I need hardly say. But it isn’t what has made poor old Hiram so attractive to me. He is thoroughly romantic, and this trip has been for him a purely romantic pilgrimage. That, to me, is appealing in itself. But he combines with it an elusive and wholly engaging sense of humour. Deep down in him there’s gaiety. I think that’s it.”

“Isn’t that a quality your family prides itself in?” Appleby had remembered Mr Buttery’s description of the Pooles. “That and resourcefulness?”

“Hiram would like that comment – because the great point about him is his family piety. It isn’t of course snobbish. Having identifiable ancestors in the thirteenth century would never occur to him as an occasion for giving himself airs. With him it’s rather something for a large wonder. And I soon saw that he had been hoping for some deep draught of it before he said goodbye.

“In the last few weeks Hiram and I have done a good many showplaces together. Have you ever been to the Tower of London? It’s perfectly horrible – the dungeon and torture chamber of England – but Hiram loved it. He told me about Pooles of whom I’d never heard who had come to a violent end there. We had an ecstatic day at Hampton Court. All that sort of thing. And now you must see, clearly enough, where all this is leading to.”

“To Water Poole.” It was Judith who replied. “You offered to get up a sort of historical pageant for him.”

“It was more than that. He has, as you can guess, a very strong feeling for Water Poole. But he hadn’t ventured down here. He hadn’t, I mean, made as much as a private trip to peep at the place. The notion of peeping would somehow offend his sense of delicacy. He was waiting for something. It was quite a while before I realised what it was.

“I did know that he had brought over from America with him a big County History published early in the present century, and the part dealing with Water Poole he had grangerised – I believe that’s the word – with all sorts of additional cuttings and engravings. But his information wasn’t very up to date – as presently appeared.

“I had asked him to lunch at my flat – I live just off Piccadilly – to meet one or two people who I thought would please him. It was a reasonable success, and he lingered with me after the others had gone. He had quite a lot to say in praise of the few old things I possess and keep lying about there; but nevertheless there was some undercurrent of disappointment that I didn’t at first catch hold of. But in the end Hiram brought out a remark that was entirely revealing. ‘This is certainly a pleasant apartment, Richard,’ he said. ‘But, all the same, you must find it wonderful when you can get away from London to Water Poole.’

“As you can see, there would have been only one honest reply to make. But for a moment I hesitated – it seemed so wicked to disillusion the old chap – and after that I was lost.”

There was a moment’s silence, broken by Judith. “And then you set about the business of what you call creating and sustaining a pleasurable illusion? You allowed it to be supposed that Water Poole is a going concern?”

“Just that. I won’t tell you how, in half an hour’s talk, I was hopelessly edged into it. Such a lamentable piece of weakness doesn’t make comfortable remembering. The crucial point was that I found Hiram to set tremendous store by the notion that I lived here. He called it keeping the flag flying, sticking to our guns, and that sort of thing. You see, he may have spent his life giving better and brighter wash-tubs to a great democracy, but at heart Hiram is an aristocrat. What made my position the more uncomfortable was the fact that there is nothing second-rate or silly about Hiram’s ideas. He would take no pleasure, for instance, in the contemplation of grand relations simply leading a fashionable life. But he liked his picture of the head of the family with his back to the ancestral wall, and holding out against the degeneracy of the modern world.

“Well, here I was in a false position, and there was only one factor which might possibly save me from disgrace. Hiram’s English visit was drawing to an end. And he was so shy – so reluctant to move in any sort of strange society – that he was quite unlikely to hear anything of the true situation here at Water Poole unless I told him myself. But of course there was a snag.” Richard Poole paused, and then appealed to Appleby. “You can see what it was?”

“It was hardly decent not to invite him here.”

“Exactly. When Hiram took his leave of me after that luncheon party it was impossible for me not to say something to that effect. To avoid it would have been utterly indecent. Of course I can see now things that I could have said. I might have declared that some theatrical tour was carrying me off to Brazil next morning. But no ingenuity of that sort came into my head. I did the only conceivably proper thing, and said that I hoped within the next few days to have some suggestion for his coming down to the old place. I could see that he was overjoyed. And as he went away he did, in his diffident fashion, say something quite positive. He would rather his visit didn’t take the form of an active social engagement. His health was as I knew it to be, and his remaining vitality was sufficient for spectatorship rather than intercourse. That gave me my idea.”

“Was it quite a new venture?” Appleby asked the question curiously. “Or are you in the habit of organising elaborate hoaxes?”

“I’ve never done anything of the sort before – and as a matter of fact it took some time to come to me. At first my only notion was of some procedure amounting to a confession, with the addition of anything I could think of to soften the blow. I’d have Hiram down, show him the place as it is, and say how much I hoped to get back one day. What prevented me from doing this was a scruple.”

“I’d call it the honest course to have pursued.”

“It would have been a sort of begging.” Richard Poole spoke with sudden heat. “Don’t you see? Hiram is a tremendously wealthy man. Showing him Water Poole in its decay would simply be asking him to put his hand in his pocket. I found I couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t believe him!” Once more the force of her emotions constrained Miss Jones to intervene. “And I shan’t believe another word he says. It is perfectly obvious that Mr Poole contrived some disgraceful mercenary plot against his relative – his distant relative-and that now he is perverting the whole matter.”

“Didn’t I say I’d meet with incredulity?” The owner of Water Poole appealed this time to Judith. “But that is the simple fact. I had reached a position at which it became a point of honour to exhibit this house as a going concern, standing in no need of the wash-tub millions. I had a good idea, by the way, to what purposes Hiram was proposing that those millions should in fact be devoted, for he had spoken to me, very briefly, of his philanthropic interests and – as he called them – testamentary dispositions. But that’s by the way. Here I was, thinking up some means of pleasing Hiram and getting myself out of a ridiculous scrape.

“Nothing at first came to me, and I let the matter rest for longer than I intended. Then I got a note from Hiram, telling me when he was due to sail for New York. He said nothing about Water Poole, of course, but in the circumstances this intimation of his departure could not be other than an implicit reproach. I was rather desperate. And then I noticed the date on which he was sailing.

“It was, as a matter of fact, today’s date – and at that I had my inspiration. I became a demon – perhaps Mr Buttery would say a goblin – of energy, and by that same evening I had got together a sort of committee of my closest friends. What had come to me was that, just at this time of the year, we could manage a sort of lightning revivification of Water Poole without raising any awkward curiosity in the neighbourhood. Anything observed, and anything talked about, would be put down at once to the lingering superstition that attaches to the place.

“Hiram, needless to say, knew the story of the first Naseby Ball, and I was sure that the notion of some species of commemoration would appeal to him. But I had an additional reason for making my party a costume affair. It was a matter of what you might call the psychology of successful illusion.

“My friends and myself were going to create the appearance of a house-party here at Water Poole, in such a way that Hiram could be asked to drop in on it and get the impression of that going concern. But in reality we should be actors putting on a show in a decayed theatre with crumbling scenery and unreliable props. For example, the whole business of lighting was going to be uncommonly tricky – probably there would have to be nothing but candles – and the project only looked remotely feasible because of that crucial fact of Hiram’s temperament: his diffidence, and his unwillingness to treat himself to more than one entranced glimpse of the ancestral home. Even so, the project was technically daunting, and I soon saw that our only chance was this: that our illusion should be of an illusion. If we were all confessedly engaged in creating a fiction, then the basic fiction – or the fiction within the fiction, so to speak – might be something we could get away with.”

“Your plan was undoubtedly a very clever one.” Appleby glanced at Richard Poole with what might have been reluctant admiration. “Did it occur to you that if your cousin detected the fraud it would be very much more painful for him than a frank statement of the truth?”

“It certainly did – which is why I determined not to fail. And I don’t think I did fail.” Poole turned a thoughtful eye on Miss Jones. “At least, that’s what I’ve been imagining.”

“It all went like clockwork?”

“Yes. We moved in with several vans just after dark. The decor had been planned in minute detail beforehand, and there wasn’t a hitch. When my cousin Hiram arrived, driving his own car, I was on the lookout for him, and got him straight round to the presentable side of the house. It was clear almost at once – an actor has a sense of these things – that we were successfully putting our show across. Mr Poole of Water Poole was giving one of his accustomed house-parties, and his guests, with others invited in for the evening, were indulging in a historically appropriate costume ball. My only fear was that Hiram, in his unassuming way, would ask if he might quietly make a tour of the whole house. He knows its history well; and there must be various rooms – some of them perhaps now in ruins – with associations of great interest to him. But of course Hiram would never have dreamed of giving even that amount of trouble. He stayed just over an hour, moving about quietly with me among the guests, accepting a few introductions, drinking a glass of champagne, and so on. And then he took his leave. The whole thing, which had been so terrifying in the prospect, proved astoundingly easy. Long before dawn – the early June dawn – we had folded our tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away.”

“But that wasn’t, in fact, all?” A sombre expression had returned to Appleby’s face. “And it would have been better if it had been?”

“Precisely.” Poole hesitated. “When Hiram left me it was plain that he was very much moved. Our imposture had been only too effective. It had been one of the deepest experiences of his life.”

“That must have been rather uncomfortable for you.”

“It was. He apologised for not stopping longer. He confessed that it had been a strain, and that he didn’t think he had better take any more. And then he brought out the astounding thing. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘there’s something I must tell you – in strict confidence.’

“We were standing beside his car. I felt instantly uneasy – partly because of an odd feeling that we were being overheard, and partly from sheer foreboding. I muttered something about respecting any confidence he cared to make.

“‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘To leave money out of the family – a family like our family – is utterly wrong. This night has been a revelation to me. You stand by the old ways, Richard – and I know enough about the economic difficulties of this country to know that it must be against tremendous odds.’ I could see his glance going back to the dark bulk of the house. ‘It’s magnificent, Richard. I can’t tell you. I can’t begin to speak. But you shall be my sole heir. God bless you. And goodbye.’ And with that Hiram climbed into his car and drove away. And now you have the whole story. Of course he will have to be told. I see that now. I’ve been a frightful ass, and I’m back pretty well where I started.”

There was a long silence. Richard Poole produced a silk handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Mr Buttery, as if he were some aged anthropoid of an imitative bent, promptly did the same. Appleby took a turn round the hall, and on coming back addressed its owner quietly. “And where do you suppose Hiram Poole to be now?”

“On board the Queen Mary, steaming for New York. He was to drive straight to London, change, and catch the boat train.”

“He was to change? Did he come here in fancy dress?”

“Yes. He had realised that it was the unnoticeable thing to do.”

“A black Caroline costume with a gold-embroidered cloak?”

“Yes.” Richard Poole’s eyes widened. “But I don’t see–”

“Your cousin is grey-haired, with a small scar on his chin?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am very sorry to say that he is not on board the Queen Mary. His dead body is lying at the bottom of the ruined staircase in this house.”

Miss Jones had fainted, been resuscitated, and at last accommodated on Mr Buttery’s box. Judith had driven off rapidly in her car. Richard Poole had identified his cousin’s body and was now back in the hall, looking pale and troubled. “It’s unbelievable,” he said.

“That is what you felt your tale was going to be.” Appleby spoke very seriously. “Hiram Poole has died, so to speak, at the end of a decidedly tall story put up by yourself. There are various possibilities. Some of them can’t be explored until we have a medical report. Others suggest themselves at once.”

“Such as?” The young man looked at him dully.

“You no doubt see for yourself that it would be easy to set your proceedings in a very damaging light. You are a poor man. You have admitted what it would be impossible long to conceal: that you brought this rich American cousin down to Water Poole and submitted him to a gross imposture. Your own story is that he was prompted by this fraud to declare his intention of making you his heir. It may very well be so. But one can conceive of other turns that the affair may have taken. It might be suggested that you were aware that you had already been constituted, at least in some degree, your cousin’s heir. It might be suggested that last night he penetrated to the nature of the charade in which you had involved him.”

“Stop!” Richard Poole’s face was bloodless. “You have no right to confront me with these insinuations. It is utterly irregular.”

“My dear sir, I have no official standing in this matter at all. I am speaking to you as a private citizen; and at the same time I am giving you, for your own benefit, an experienced view of certain lines of speculation which the officers who will investigate this business may be prompted to follow.”

“I see. Very well. Go on.”

“It is conceivable that Hiram Poole drove away more or less as you have claimed – but that he had his doubts. Suspicion grew on him; eventually he turned his car and came back to Water Poole; and what he found in the dawn was a derelict house, and his hopeful young heir pottering round clearing up a bit of litter. He wasn’t very pleased, and there may even have been a quarrel. So much for one hypothesis. We needn’t follow it further at the moment.”

“It sounds damnably convincing.” Richard Poole managed rather a harsh laugh.

“It has, as it happens, one weakness. It leaves something out. I think you claim to know certain particulars of Hiram’s existing testamentary dispositions? He had been proposing to leave his fortune to philanthropic organisations?”

“Yes – and to one such organisation in particular. The bulk of his estate was to go to a body advocating temperance reform. I remember thinking it odd in him. It didn’t really cohere with the kind of feelings and attitudes that Hiram revealed when he was over here. But there it was. Prohibition all over again: it was something like that, I gathered, that his money was to go to the support of.”

“Capital!”

Appleby turned in astonishment, to see Mr Buttery emphatically nodding his venerable head. “You approve of such an endeavour?”

“Certainly.” Mr Buttery was quite excited. “I declare Mr Poole’s cousin to have been most enlightened. The attempt to prohibit by law all use of alcoholic beverages is one which interests me very much. I think I can say that I approve of it. I regret that it has never made more headway on this side of the Atlantic.”

“Sir, let me say that you do honour to your calling.” Miss Jones had risen from the box, advanced upon the clergyman, and was now shaking him vigorously by the hand. She turned to Appleby and Richard Poole. “Thousands will take fresh heart when they hear of the noble declaration of this truly reverend old man!”

“Thank you, madam, thank you.” Mr Buttery – perhaps recalling that he had been termed a pale-faced drinker – appeared a little embarrassed by this unexpected effusion.

And Appleby was looking at him in surprise. “What about that burgundy and madeira? Would you propose, sir, that in framing their legislation our prohibitionists should insert a clause exempting the clergy?” He turned to Miss Jones. “I’m not quite certain that you and Mr Buttery are going to be at one in this matter, after all. But, for the moment, we have another sort of concern with it. May I take it, madam, that it would not be incorrect to assert that the urging of temperance reform constitutes your profession? Mr Poole, I think, has already had an inkling of it.”

“It has certainly been hovering in my head for some time.” Poole swung round to survey the American lady, and as he did so he produced a strained smile. “The rival charity – that’s what you are!”

Appleby nodded. “Exactly. Water Poole or water wagon – it might be expressed like that. Which was cousin Hiram’s fortune going to the support of?… And now perhaps Miss Jones will speak.”

“I am not Miss Jones.” The American lady had advanced to the middle of the hall, and her announcement was made with a very sufficient sense of drama. “Let there be no more subterfuge. I am not Miss Jones. I am Miss Brown.”

“Not, surely” – Richard Poole, despite his awkward situation, was prompted to a freak of humour – ”not, surely, the Miss Brown?”

“I guess so.” Miss Brown’s was a wholly modest acknowledgement. “I am Louisa Brown, Vice-President of the Daughters of Abstinence.”

“It sounds like William Blake.” Poole might have been slightly dazed. “Are they something in America?”

“Certainly. They constitute one of our leading temperance bodies, and the one to which the late Hiram Poole has bequeathed almost his entire fortune. And I have been acting as a guardian.”

“Why should Hiram require a guardian? I never heard such nonsense.”

“It’s a precaution we are accustomed to take with potential major benefactors. Particularly when they go overseas.” Miss Brown spoke with confidence. “Temptations are manifold. Haven’t we just heard that Mr Hiram Poole was seduced, in this very house, into drinking a glass of champagne? Disgusting! Revolting!”

This view of the hospitality of Water Poole appeared to strike the owner of the mansion as decidedly offensive. “As a self-appointed bodyguard, madam, you have been thoroughly inefficient. Hiram is dead, and when you get back to your own country I sincerely trust that all the other Daughters will give you a thoroughly bad time.”

“You haven’t got the picture quite right.” Appleby intervened dryly. “It wasn’t Miss Brown’s business to keep your cousin alive. Her guardianship consisted in ensuring that, if he died, it wasn’t with the wrong sort of last will and testament immediately behind him. It is a consideration in which there is food for thought. But we still haven’t had Miss Brown’s story. Will you please proceed?”

“I certainly will.” Miss Brown put her hands behind her back and eyed the three men before her as if they had been a large assembly of recalcitrant brewers or vintners. “It was well known to me that Mr Hiram Poole had these unwholesome interests in family history and a feudal past. So when upon his arrival in England he made the acquaintance of Mr Poole – this Mr Poole – I realised that the utmost vigilance would be required of me. As a matter of routine, I got to know all about Water Poole. I got to know all about Mr Richard Poole’s feelings for it – or lack of feelings for it.”

Richard Poole exploded. “The woman’s crazy!”

“For instance, I have in my file – it struck me as worth paying for – a letter from Mr Richard offering to sell this house for the purpose of what is called an approved school. He also had a project for turning the place over to a syndicate to run as a scientific pig farm.”

“Crazy?” Appleby looked rather grimly at the owner of Water Poole. “I’d be inclined to say myself that there’s method in her madness.”

“Madness in her method, if you ask me.” Poole was gloomy. “But go on, madam – go on.”

“Murray’s is an excellent hotel, and the servants don’t gossip. But it was a different matter with the firm from whom Mr Hiram hired a car, and I was soon in a position to know most of his movements a day or so in advance. That’s how it came about that, when he set out for Water Poole in his fancy dress last night, I was on the road in my own car a hundred yards behind.”

Appleby was looking at Miss Brown in admiration. “That was very efficient, I’m bound to say. And just what did you know about what was going forward?”

“I knew that Mr Richard had been dashing round the firms that provide stage furniture, and that he had been holding long meetings with large numbers of his theatrical friends. I think I may say that I had the greater part of the picture already in my head. When we got down here, of course, I let Mr Hiram get a good lead, and then I parked my own car and explored the ground. I guess I hadn’t got hold of the fancy-dress aspect of the affair, and the significance of that puzzled me a good deal. But the rest was clear enough. I saw that the moment to expose Mr Richard Poole had arrived.”

“You were probably right.” Appleby contributed this soberly. “And how did you propose to set about it?”

“I thought at first of simply walking in upon the feast and denouncing it – denouncing the imposture and denouncing the champagne. Then it occurred to me that I might, as a consequence, put myself in considerable personal danger. I might be thrown in the river and drowned, and the Daughters of Abstinence would never so much as know what had become of me.”

“Bless me!” Richard Poole stared. “The woman might believe herself to be on the banks of the Niger, not of the–”

“Mr Richard and his friends were flown with wine.” Miss Brown interrupted brusquely. “The expression is that of the great English poet Milton, justly celebrated for confining himself at the supper-table to a few olives and a glass of water. Any insolence, any outrage might be expected of them. I therefore skulked.”

“I bet you did.” Richard Poole breathed heavily.

“I was almost at Mr Richard’s elbow when Mr Hiram made the shameful speech.”

“The shameful speech?” For a moment Appleby was at sea.

“About making this dishonest and intemperate young man his heir. Then Mr Hiram drove off, and I hurried to my own car and followed. But he had a good lead and was driving very fast. It was many miles before I overtook him and signalled him to stop. He took no notice. I therefore passed him and edged him almost into the ditch. One sees it done on the movies. He stopped, but I found it very hard to open communication with him. I have an idea that he took me for a person of disreputable character.”

“You must remember it was in the dark.” Richard Poole produced this with obscure but massive irony. “And then?”

“It took what must have been hours – but at length I did contrive to explain to him the imposture to which he had been subjected. He refused to believe it. Finally I persuaded him to drive back to Water Poole. When we arrived, the place was already in darkness. I got out a torch and led him on a tour of inspection. It was then that he began to behave very queerly.”

“What do you mean?” Poole’s voice held real anxiety. “Was he very angry – or upset?”

“He wouldn’t speak. We went over almost the whole place with the aid of a torch he had brought from his car. And he wouldn’t speak a word to me. I thought it most discourteous. There was one particularly striking instance. We had glanced into a small pantry – one from which a staircase runs down to some of the cellars – and it simply reeked of spirits. No doubt it was your disgusting champagne and so on. I drew Mr Hiram’s attention to it as evidence of the depraved society into which his acquaintance with you had brought him. He simply stared at me without uttering a syllable. And then, when we had emerged again into the open air, we parted.”

“Parted?” Appleby was surprised. “In what circumstances?”

Miss Brown hesitated. “He told me to go away.”

 

Richard Poole laughed again – less harshly this time. “Hiram, you know, had very good taste. When he did speak, he said the sensible thing. He asked you to clear out. And you did?”

“I did.” Miss Brown flushed. “I considered that my good offices had been scorned, and that I had been personally insulted. I got into my car and drove away.”

“Leaving Hiram alone at Water Poole?”

“I guess so. Unless you were still here yourself, Mr Poole.”

Appleby looked up sharply. “Have you any reason, Miss Brown, to suppose anything of the sort?”

Miss Brown hesitated. “I can’t swear to Mr Poole here. But I did have a hunch that there was somebody lurking around.”

“I see. Now, when you left Water Poole, however much you may have felt personally insulted, you must have supposed your work there to be done. Mr Richard Poole was wholly discredited. May I ask you why, in these circumstances, you returned here this morning?”

“Because I was uneasy. Mr Hiram Poole was an old man, whom I knew to be in poor health. And I had left him here in the small hours, after subjecting him to painful disillusion. I returned in order to make quite sure that nothing had happened to him.”

“Well – it had.” Appleby uttered this shortly and then took one of his brief walks to a window. “In the ruined part of this house there is a staircase that mounts through two storeys and then goes on to end nowhere. From that hazardous eminence, some time in the small hours, Mr Hiram Poole was precipitated. And there are still a good many possibilities. For example, we don’t know – at least I don’t know – what was in the dead man’s mind. How did he take the revelation which it is agreed was made to him? Miss Brown, the only person to be in his company after the truth was revealed, quite failed to get any change out of him. That, at least, is her story. Suppose it to be true… Do you hear a car? It will be my wife with a doctor.”

“I am not in the habit of prevarication.”

“Very well. Your story is gospel, so far as it goes. But there may have been – indeed, if it is gospel, there must have been – a further and distinct act in the drama. Mr Richard Poole may have been lurking around – or he may have returned after you left, encountered his cousin, and become involved in some altercation with fatal consequences. In the circumstances it is a possible picture.” Appleby paused. “I mentioned the chance of Mr Richard’s being already, in some degree, Hiram Poole’s heir – and knowing it. On that, the actual truth must, of course, eventually become available. For what my own opinion is worth, it is slightly improbable. But one fact is admitted. As matters stood last night, and still stand now, the Daughters of Abstinence are very large beneficiaries under Hiram Poole’s will. And this bring us back to Miss Brown. Her story may not be gospel. It may be quite untrue.”

“I am not in the–”

“No doubt, madam. But there are tight corners in which the most inflexibly truthful persons find themselves a little inclined to stretch a point. Suppose that this investigation of the true state of Water Poole brought both Hiram Poole and yourself to the top of that staircase. He had been silent. You became vehement in your denunciation of Mr Richard. And then Hiram Poole did something which surprised you very much, but which in fact was thoroughly consonant with human nature. He cried a plague on both your houses.”

“He did what?” Miss Brown was both startled and at a loss.

“He declared that Richard should not have a penny of his. And then he said precisely the same thing about the Daughters of Abstinence.”

“He would never do such a thing.”

“I repeat that I think it extremely likely that he would. Your organisation had set a spy on him, and subjected him to an acute humiliation of which you, madam, cannot have the faintest imaginative understanding. So here is another sober possibility. Up there, at the top of that crazy staircase, this old man told you that your organisation would be struck out of his will tomorrow.”

Miss Brown was silent – and suddenly old and spectral. Richard Poole looked at her not unkindly and then turned to Appleby. “I must say you have considerable skill in making it uncomfortable for everybody in turn. Is there more to come? What about Mr Buttery?”

And Appleby nodded. “I’m coming to Mr Buttery now.”

“To me?” Over his steel-rimmed spectacles the clergyman looked at Appleby in naïve alarm. “I fear all this has been incomprehensible to me, and that I am unlikely to be able to assist. Here and there – on the goblin side of the thing – I am fairly clear. But all this of wills eludes me. Mr Poole, it seems, has told one story; this lady who keeps on changing her name has told another; and I suppose you, sir, must choose between them.”

Appleby shook his head. “That may be unnecessary. I have myself ventured some alternative hypotheses which are no doubt mutually exclusive. But the stories of Mr Poole and Miss Brown do not in themselves contradict each other. Both may have told as much of the truth as they know. And now it is up to you to tell the rest.”

Mr Buttery considered this injunction for a moment in silence. Then, disconcertingly, his venerable features assumed an expression of the deepest cunning. “I suppose,” he asked, “that what is called motive is of great importance in a matter of this sort?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“You were asking, for instance, why this lady returned to Water Poole when she did. Stress is put upon things like that?”

“Certainly it is.”

“Awkward. Troublesome. Vexatious.” And Mr Buttery shook his head. “If I myself had what might be termed a respectable motive–”

“Folk-lore.” Appleby was brisk. “Your own further investigations of Water Poole last night, sir, were prompted entirely by your interest in folk-lore. You were after the goblins, and nothing but the goblins. And now perhaps you can go ahead.”

“I don’t quite follow this.” Richard Poole was curious. “Am I to understand that Mr Buttery–”

“Mr Buttery is a great law-breaker.” Appleby announced this without any appearance of censure. “A little quiet poaching warms the cockles of his heart. But lately he has taken larger flight. He found, I think, a very tempting cellar, to be entered unobtrusively by a cut from the river. Perhaps he found some suitable implements and utensils as well. Anyway, he has been having great fun distilling illicit spirits. Hence the smell remarked by Miss Brown. And hence Mr Buttery’s own enthusiasm for Total Prohibition. He feels that if that came in he might go into business in a large way. But these are irrelevant matters–”

“Really irrelevant?” Mr Buttery was sharply hopeful.

“At least there is a very good chance of it. Last night, sir, you watched the goblins in some alarm until they packed up. And then you came to investigate. They are said, after all, to do terrible things in dairies. Perhaps they might have been behaving equally mischievously in your distillery.”

“I certainly waited in my dinghy until all was dark and silent again.” Mr Buttery now spoke with much placidity. “It was a tedious vigil. I was not however greatly surprised. For goblins, as you know, have a great reputation for keeping it up till dawn. Gradually their lights went out, and I was conscious of intermittent rumblings. Parties of them were returning to the nether world.”

“Or our vans were driving away.” Richard Poole was looking at the clergyman in some perplexity, as if finding it hard to gauge just how deep his eccentricity went.

“When at length I ventured to land they had all vanished – as our national poet puts it, following darkness like a dream. Or all, that is, except the Goblin King.”

“The Goblin King?” Miss Brown, whose spirits appeared to be a little revived, interrupted. “Do Goblins have that?”

“Certainly – and he is rather a fine personage. It is a mistake, you know, to suppose that goblins are dwarfs, or in any sense little people. I was not at all surprised to find that the Goblin King was a most distinguished figure, magnificently attired in black and gold.”

“Cousin Hiram!”

“With him he had an obscure familiar. I caught only glimpses, you know. As I remarked earlier, it is very dangerous for the clergy to get involved with goblins. So the utmost circumspection was necessary. The Goblin King had some species of lantern. I had to be very careful to keep out of its beam; and it was only from the oblique light coming from it that I could distinguish him at all. The familiar puzzled me. Could it have been Hecate? I am more inclined to suppose a minor Teutonic divinity. Possibly the Sow Goddess.” Mr Buttery looked ingenuously at Miss Brown. “Would that appear to you to be a tenable hypothesis?”

“I think you are a very wicked old man.” Miss Brown’s response, if not strictly relevant, was spirited.

“Presently however the familiar was banished. This was the only occasion upon which I actually heard the Goblin King speak. ‘Go away,’ he said. I was much struck by his tone of authority. Without more ado, the Sow Goddess – I am sure she was that – took her departure.”

Richard Poole looked wickedly at Miss Brown. “With more rumbling?”

“I should rather say with a purr. I am inclined to suppose some species of chariot. The Goblin King then withdrew to the house. In fact, he withdrew to this hall, and sat for a long time there in the window, quite still and silent. He appeared lost in sombre thought. When at last he stirred, it was because the dawn was breaking. He then began once more to explore the house. I felt that I had seen enough, and I slipped out to recover my dinghy. I was halfway across the lawn when I heard the laughter.”

“The laughter?” Richard Poole was startled.

“It came from high in air, and I knew at once that it was supernatural. Very cautiously I skirted the house – and suddenly I saw the Goblin King again, silhouetted against the dawn. He had climbed the ruined stair – climbed right to the top – and now he was looking down on all that part of Water Poole that is mere ruin. And he was laughing. I have never heard such laughter. It was, I say, supernatural – and yet all the gaiety and all the fun of the world we know seemed to be in it. I was astounded. I was strangely moved. Once more it pealed out – and then, quite abruptly, ceased. And the Goblin King had vanished.”

There was a long silence. At last Richard Poole spoke softly. “He had vanished?”

“Yes – following darkness. Following darkness like a dream. That was all.”

The silence renewed itself, until broken by Appleby. “Yes,” he said. “That – I am very glad indeed to say – was all.”

And Appleby and Judith drove away. He waited until they were on the highroad and then asked a question. “The doctor is quite sure?”

“Quite sure. It will be confirmed at the post-mortem. Hiram Poole was dead before he reached the ground. He died of the heart-failure that had threatened him for a long time.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that he died of laughter. It was appropriate enough, for the whole affair was comedy. Once or twice it looked like crime – but it proved to be comedy in the end. One can’t consider that Richard Poole was very culpable, and he told the truth as he knew it. So did that tiresome but perfectly honest temperance crusader… But of course there was more to it than that.”

“More to Hiram Poole’s death?” Judith nodded over the wheel. “Decidedly.”

“One can’t doubt that young Richard’s deception was something the discovery of which was very painful to him. Imagine him, sick and chill and tired, being haled around that derelict shrine – for it was that to him – in the small hours.”

“And by a Daughter of Abstinence, at that.”

“Quite. It must have been sheer nightmare. And any common man would simply have felt himself abominably cheated and betrayed.”

“Any common man would have suspected the very obvious mercenary motive.”

“Hiram had his dark hour, I don’t doubt, hunched there in a window of the hall. But he rose to the thing.”

“He rose to it.”

“The Pooles are still resourceful and gay. Hiram saw it like that, and his own laughter attested it. I take off my hat to him.”