Miss Silver inclined her head.
“The survivors of an old family are often averse to parting with the last vestiges of former greatness.”
Miss Bowden made the sound which is usually written, “Humph!”
“That’s as may be! I just want to make sure that she hasn’t got some kink in her conscience. Geoffrey Trent would be welcome to buy up all the insanitary ruins in England he’d a mind to if he hadn’t married my god-daughter. But he has, and that brings me in neck and crop. The person I am concerned about is Allegra, and I don’t want her saddled with a mouldy old manor built over a cesspool-if they even had cesspools at the time it was built-or one of these places that has got a curse on it, or some particularly horrid kind of ghost!” She banged her knee even more decidedly than before. “And we all know that ghosts and curses are just a lot of superstitious nonsense! But I’m not having Allegra subjected to them! There is such a thing as suggestion, and she’s not in a state to have unpleasant things suggested to her!”
Miss Silver coughed.
“Without admitting any reality in these phenomena or pronouncing an opinion as to whether they have their origin in trickery or in the vagaries of the human mind, they can at times be extremely unpleasant.”
Miss Bowden nodded vigorously.
“I consider myself a strong-minded woman, and so, I suppose, do you. At this moment, at twenty minutes past eleven in the morning, sitting here in your nice bright room, I have a perfectly healthy and civilized disbelief in ghosts, spectres, apparitions, ghouls, vampires, and curses. But put me in a haunted room at midnight, with doors opening by themselves and the candle guttering and going out, and I don’t pretend for a moment that I shouldn’t probably scream the house down. It’s all atmosphere, and whether the thing can get you to believe in it or not. I’ve seen a man die of a curse in Africa. He believed in it like mad, and he just lay down and died, like an animal will if it’s been too badly frightened. And that brings me back to Allegra. I want to know whether anything is frightening her. She is the kind that would be easy enough to scare. Gentle, timid kind of creature with a soft voice and pretty ways. Not half the pluck and go and spirit of her sister Ione.”
“There is a sister?”
“Yes-unmarried-Ione Muir. I hear she’s on a visit to Allegra now. First time for two years, but she’s been out in the States. Made rather a hit there with monologues, sketches-you know the sort of thing. I’m told they went quite wild about her. Well, she’s been back some time now, but until a few days ago she hadn’t so much as laid eyes on Allegra. That’s one of the things that’s been worrying me. She’s been going down there half a dozen times, and they’ve always put her off. And Allegra’s been coming up to meet her in London, but there’s always been a telegram or a last minute call to say she couldn’t come. I ran into Ione on Bond Street and dragged it all out of her. I just said to her, ‘Look here, you can make this hard work for me and very irritating for yourself, but I intend to know what is going on about Allegra, and you can’t put me off. I shall just go on until I find out, so it will be a whole lot easier if you come across and tell me what you know.’ ”
Miss Silver picked up her knitting again.
“And then she told you?”
Josepha Bowden nodded.
“Told me I was a human battering-ram and I ought to be ashamed of myself! So then we went in and had some coffee, and she told me all about it. Not that there was really anything to tell-only about being put off, and Allegra never turning up when she’d made an appointment. Once we got the ice broken, I think she was glad enough to talk-I could see she was just as worried as I was. So it was a considerable relief to me to hear that her visit to Allegra had actually come off at last.”
Miss Silver looked thoughtfully across her rapidly moving needles.
“Since Miss Muir is now staying at the Ladies’ House and will be able to give you a much fuller account of the situation there than I can possibly hope to do, are you sure that you really wish to engage my services?”
She got one of those hearty laughs.
“I shouldn’t have come if I didn’t! I want the village talk, the village gossip. I want the Falconer angle. Elizabeth Moore says you’re a wonder at getting people to talk. Well, that’s what I want. Villages can be as tight as clams. I sent a man down to snoop around, didn’t get a thing, and he wouldn’t if he’d stayed there a year instead of a day. But one of Miss Falconer’s p.g.’s pottering round with her, buying oddments, and going to church on Sundays-well, that’s different. Especially if you could carry on a spot of knitting.”
Miss Silver, inured by now to Miss Bowden’s informal mode of conversation, smiled indulgently and remarked that she never went anywhere without her knitting.
“And your fees?”
Miss Silver named a sum which only a few years before she would have considered alarming. It was accepted with a careless,
“That’s all right. I’ve got plenty of money-a lot more than I shall ever use. When you spend most of your time with all your worldly goods in a couple of saddlebags you don’t get cluttered up with possessions like the stay-at-homes do. I shall probably settle down, if I ever do, in a tent on a bit of ground that I overlooked when I was selling the rest of the land my forebears managed to hang round my neck. It’s got a nice spring on it, and if I find a tent too cold I can always make it a caravan.” She got up out of her chair and held out a strong brown hand. “I think you’ll do the job all right, and I’d like you to go down as soon as you can. Miss Falconer is on the telephone, and I suggest you ring her up and say something on the lines of a friend of yours had met someone who had stayed with her in the summer, and would she by any chance be prepared to take you in? You had better mention references, because she won’t take anyone without them.”
Miss Silver smiled. She would be able to offer some quite unexceptionable references which could be verified on the telephone. Having taken down a few more particulars, she suffered a very hearty handshake from Miss Bowden, who thereupon departed with every appearance of being very well satisfied with her morning’s work.
As soon as the front door had closed upon her Miss Silver drew the table-telephone towards her and dialled Trunks.
CHAPTER 13
The dining-room of the George Hotel at Wraydon is very strictly in the tradition of its many Georgian and Victorian counterparts. It has a row of tall windows curtained in olive green and rather heavily screened by yellowing net. The tables-it does have separate tables-are solidly constructed, and shrouded to within an inch or two of the floor.
The table-cloths have seen better days. Sometimes there is a vase containing a couple of paper flowers and a sprig of evergreen. In summer the flowers may even be real if rather shabby-genteel, but always, and where you cannot possibly help seeing it, there is a massive ash-tray which advertises some well known brand of table-water. From the walls engravings representing the royalties and politicians of a bygone day gaze benignly or severely upon the scene. Queen Victoria as a smiling young woman with pretty little ears just peeping out from demurely banded hair. Albert, the Prince Consort, in the days when he was one of the handsomest young men in Europe. The great Gladstone, hatchet-faced and gloomy. The Marquess of Salisbury in a bushy beard. There is something reposeful about the distance between these fading portraits and the really fiery passions which once raged around the men who posed for them.
Ione sat with her back to a window and laughed at Jim Severn’s apologies for not having been able to find a better place for lunch.
“We ought to have gone out into the country.”
“Well, it’s a very good thing we didn’t, isn’t it? I’m not really bigoted about the country when it’s pouring with rain. Cousin Eleanor lives in a village, you know, so I’ve always had plenty of it, and frankly, when it comes to a wet Sunday I’d just as soon be somewhere else. Now here we can go back into the great Victorian age and be as leisurely as we like. We haven’t any trains to catch, and I’ve got a lot of things I want to talk to you about.”