Brat waited, trying to analyse the sound of the words while they still hung in the air.
"Hazard?" he said at length.
"The snags and bunkers in the difficult business of coming back. It must have taken some nerve, all things considered. What moved you to it, Brat-homesickness?"
This was the first frank question he had been asked, and he suddenly liked Ashby the better for it.
"Not exactly. A realisation that my place was here, after all." He felt that that had a self-righteous sound, and added: "I mean, that my place in the world was here."
This was succeeded by another silence. Brat went on looking at books and hoped that he was not going to like young Ashby. That would be an unforeseen complication. It was bad enough not to be able to face the person he was supplanting, now that he was left alone in a room with him; but to find himself liking that person would make the situation intolerable.
It was Bee who broke the silence.
"I think we should have offered the poor little man a drink," she said, coming in. "However, it's too late now. He can get one from his 'contact' at the White Hart."
"The Bell, I suspect," Simon said.
"Why the Bell?"
"Our Lana frequents that in preference to the White Hart."
"Ah, well. The sooner everyone knows the sooner the fuss will be over." She smiled at Brat to take any sting from the words. "Let's go and look at the horses, shall we? Have you any riding clothes with you, Brat?"
"Not any that Latchetts would recognise as riding clothes," Brat said, noticing how thankfully she seized on the excuse not to call him Patrick.
"Come up with me," Simon said, "and I'll find you something."
"Good," said Bee, looking pleased with him. "I'll collect Eleanor."
"Did you like being given the old night nursery?" Simon asked, preceding Brat upstairs.
"Very much."
"Same old paper, I suppose you noticed."
"Yes."
"Do you remember the night we had an Ivanhoe-Hereward battle?"
"No; I don't remember that."
"No. Of course you wouldn't."
Again the words hung on the silence, teasing Brat's ear with an echo of their tone.
He followed young Ashby into the room he had shared with his brother, and noticed that there was no suggestion in the room that it had ever been shared by another person. It was, on the contrary, very much Simon's own room; being furnished with his possessions to an extent that made it as much a sitting-room as a bedroom. Shelves of books, rows of silver cups, framed sketches of horses on the walls, easy chairs, and a small desk with a telephone extension on it.
Brat moved over to the window while Simon rummaged among his clothes for appropriate garments. The window, as he knew, looked over the stables, but a green hedge of lilac and laburnum trees hid the buildings from view. Above them, in the middle distance, rose the tower of Clare church. On Sunday, he supposed, he would be taken to service there. Another hazard. Hazard had been an odd word for young Ashby to choose, surely?
Simon emerged from the cupboard with breeches and a tweed coat.
"I think these ought to do," he said, throwing them on the bed. "I'll find you a shirt." He opened a drawer of the chest which held his dressing mirror and toilet things. The chest stood by the window, and Brat, still uneasy in Ashby's vicinity, moved over to the fire-place and began to look at the silver cups on the mantelpiece. All of them were prizes for horsemanship, and they ranged from a hurdle race at the local point-to-point to Olympia. All of them except one were of a date too late to have concerned Patrick Ashby; the exception being a small and humble chalice that had been awarded to Simon Ashby on «Patience» for being the winner of the juvenile jumping class at the Bures Agricultural Show in the year before Patrick Ashby committed suicide.
Simon, looking round and seeing the small cup in Brat's hand, smiled and said: "I took that from you, if you remember."
"From me?" Brat said, unprepared.
"You would have won on Old Harry if I hadn't done you out of it by doing a perfect second round."
"Oh, yes," Brat said. And to lay a new scent: "You seem to have done well for yourself since."
"Not badly," Simon said, his attention going back to his shirt drawer. "But I'm going to do a lot better. Ballsbridge and all stops to Olympia." It was said absentmindedly, but with confidence; as if the money to buy good horseflesh would automatically be available. Brat wondered a little, but felt that this was no moment for discussing the financial future.
"Do you remember the object that used to hang at the end of your bed?" Simon asked casually, pushing the shirt drawer shut.
"The little horse?" Brat said. "Yes, of course. Travesty," he added, giving its name and mock breeding. "By Irish Peasant out of Bog Oak."
He turned from the exhibits on the mantelpiece, meaning to collect the clothes that Ashby had looked out for him; but as he turned he saw Ashby's face in the mirror, and the naked shock on that face stopped him in his tracks. Simon had been in the act of pushing the drawer shut, but the action was arrested half-way. It was, thought Brat, exactly the reaction of someone who has heard a telephone ring; the involuntary pause and then the resumed movement.
Simon turned to face him, slowly, the shirt hanging over his left forearm. "I think you'll find that all right," he said, taking the shirt in his right hand and holding it out to Brat but keeping his eyes on Brat's face. His expression was no longer shocked; he merely looked blank, as if his mind were elsewhere. As if, Brat thought, he were doing sums in his head.
Brat took the shirt, collected the rest of the clothes, expressed his thanks, and made for the door.
"Come down when you're ready," Simon said, still staring at him in that blank way. "We'll be waiting for you."
And Brat, making his way round the landing to his own room in the opposite wing, was shocked in his turn. Ashby hadn't expected him to know that. Ashby had been so certain, indeed, that he would not know about the toy horse that he had been rocked back on his heels when it was clear that he did know about it.
And that meant?
It could mean only one thing.
It meant that young Ashby had not believed for a moment that he was Patrick.
Brat shut the door of the peaceful old night nursery behind him and stood leaning against it, the clothes cascading slowly to the ground from his slackened arm.
Simon had not been fooled. That touching little scene over the sherry glasses had been only an act.
It was a staggering thought.
Why had Simon bothered to pretend?
Why had he not said at once, "You are not Patrick and nothing will make me believe that you are!"?
That had been his original line, if Lana's report and the family atmosphere meant anything. Up to the last moment they had been unsure of his reaction to Brat's arrival; and he had gratified them all by a frank and charming capitulation.
Why the gratuitous capitulation?
Was it-was it a trap of some sort? Were the welcome and the charm merely the grass and green leaves laid over a pit he had prepared?
But he could not have known until the actual face-to-face meeting that he, Brat, was not Patrick. And he had apparently known instantly that the person he was facing was not his brother. Why then should he….
Brat stooped to pick up the clothes from the floor and straightened himself abruptly. He had remembered something. He had remembered that odd relaxing on Simon's part the moment he had had a good look at himself. That suggestion of relief. Of being "let off."
So that was it!
Simon had been afraid that it was Patrick.
When he found that he was faced with a mere impostor he must have had difficulty in refraining from embracing him.
But that still did not explain the capitulation.
Perhaps it was a mere postponement; a setting to partners. It might be that he planned a more dramatic denouement; a more public discrediting.