‘He hasn’t been called up?’
‘Oh, no – he must be nearly fifty. He was all through the last war, you know. I used to wonder how old Bush felt about it, because though of course the children were born over here, he and his wife were both Germans, and they never thought about being naturalised – people in their position didn’t – but they started spelling their name the English way almost at once.’
Something like a mild electric shock set the palms of his hands tingling.
‘I’d forgotten,’ he said.
‘I do not suppose you ever knew my dear. But the name was Busch, with an sch – Adolf Busch. And of course Adolf sounds terrible now, but there wasn’t anything worse about it than any other German name then. Still, your grandfather advised his writing it Adolphous in the English way, and he christened all the children himself with proper English names. The two elder boys were killed in the last war. Frederick was the third, and when he was seventeen he was second footman to Sir James Talbot at Wrestinglea. Well, a very curious thing happened not very long before the war broke out – he was approached by German agents. You know, all sorts of people used to come down to Wrestinglea – soldiers, politicians, newspapermen. And they wanted him to listen to what was said whilst he was waiting at table and write it down for them. They offered him quite a lot of money, but of course he said no. He came and told your grandfather all about it, and your grandfather told me. I remember what impressed him so much was the fact that the German Foreign Office should have kept track of a humble family like this. They must have been in England for quite twenty-five years, but the Wilhelmstrasse knew where to find them, and knew that Frederick was in service in a house where he could pick up just the kind of news they wanted. I remember your grandfather walking up and down the room and saying that it disclosed a very alarming state of affairs.’
‘He wasn’t far wrong, was he? Well, well – and Frederick is sexton. I must look him up. Let me see – he married one of the Pincott girls, didn’t he?’
Miss Sophy began at once to tell him all about the Pincotts. As there were a round dozen of them, it took some time.
At ten o’clock they went to bed, Miss Brown informing him that he could have a bath, but that he must be careful not to take more than five inches of water. Again that absurd resentment flared. But he had the bath, and getting into bed, fell immediately and rather unexpectedly into a dreamless sleep.
He awoke some time later with a start. The moon was up. The two windows, which had been empty and dark when he had drawn the curtains back before getting into bed, now framed a silvered landscape. The night air was so warm as to give the impression that it was the light that was warming it. He got up and stood at the nearer window, looking out. There was nothing that could be called a breeze – only that warm air just moving against his cheek. Below him the lawn and Miss Sophy’s border lay under the moon. To the right the churchyard wall rose grey behind the flowers until it melted into the shadow of great trees – copper beech, green beech, and chestnut. The shadow deepened away to the left. More trees, with the moon throwing a black image of each on the blanched grass. Lilacs, a tall red thorn, a cedar nearly as old as the church, a single heavy elm – he could still name every tree, though with the light behind them they showed only in silhouette, all detail lost.
He had stood there for perhaps ten minutes, when he saw that something was moving in the shadows – something, or someone. It moved where the shade was deepest. Only the fact that it moved made it visible. But there was no point at which the shadow extended to the house. The moment was bound to come when there would be an alternative of retreat or emergence. Garth watched with a good deal of interest to see which it would be.
The moment arrived, and he saw Miss Medora Brown cross the barrier and stand quite plainly revealed. She wore the long black dress she had worn at dinner, covering her to the feet, to the wrists. Over her head she had tied a black lace scarf, the ends brought round to cover her to the chin. Only her hands showed white in the drowning light – her hands, and her lifted face.
Instinctively Garth drew back, and then stood wondering whether his own movement might not have given him away as hers had done.
She stood for a moment, and then walked quickly and noiselessly forward until she was lost from view. He had by now no need to watch her. He knew very well that she would come in, as he had so often done himself, by the glass door of his grandfather’s study. Only there was a trick with that door. If your hand wasn’t perfectly steady, if there was the least interruption in the slow, smooth pressure which opened it, it creaked on you. He knew now that Miss Brown’s hand had not been steady, and that it was this creak which had waked him. He listened for it, and heard it again. Wherever she had been, she had been quick about it. She couldn’t have been out of the house for more than a quarter of an hour. Well, the show was over and she was back.
He got into bed and lay down. Just as his head touched the pillow, there zigzagged into his mind the recollection of where he had come across the name of Medora.
In a poem – in the title of a poem. One of those long-winded tales in verse which had been the fashion when the nineteenth century was young. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it was about, or who it was by, but he could see the title as plainly as he had ever seen anything in his life:
Conrad and Medora
He jerked up on an elbow and whistled softly. Whether Medora was English or not, there was no doubt at all about Conrad. Conrad was German.
CHAPTER SIX
AT HALF-PAST SIX next morning Garth yawned, stretched, and jumped out of bed. There seemed to have been no interval at all. He had remembered about Conrad and Medora, he had looked at his watch and found the time to be half an hour after midnight, and then he had gone to sleep and slept without a break and without a dream. Funny, because sometimes he dreamed like mad.
Well, now he thought he would get up. The maids had no vice of early rising. Mabel had been house-parlourmaid in Aunt Sophy’s mother’s time, and goodness knew how long ago that was. Florence had cooked the Rectory meals for thirty years. Miss Sophy would get her early morning tea at eight, but very little else would be done before breakfast. He thought he would rather like to walk out into the garden before anyone was up. He felt some curiosity about Miss Brown’s nocturnal excursion, and some inclination to prospect.
He emerged from his room upon a well blacked-out passage and switched on the light at the head of the stairs. He had no mind to rouse the household and provide Bourne with another inquest by taking a header into the stone-flagged hall. The light came on, imparting a raffish air to its respectable surroundings. After the early morning sunlight this synthetic product was all wrong, all out of key. It gave the sedate Rectory stair a horrid up-all-night appearance.
He was nearly at the bottom, when something sparkled at him from the heavily patterned carpet. He bent, and pricked his finger on a sliver of glass. As he dropped it into the wastepaper basket in the study he wondered vaguely who had been breaking what. Then he let himself out by the glass door, and was pleased to observe that his hand had lost neither its cunning nor its steadiness. There was no creak of the hinge for him. He stepped on to the dew-drenched lawn and looked down the garden, as he had looked from his bedroom window in the night. It was the same scene, but whereas then everything had been dreaming under the moon, now it was all enchantingly awake, the border jewel bright, the old wall behind it warm and mossy in the early sunshine. Away to the left the shadows lay across the grass, but now it was the sun that laid them there, and the trees themselves were full of colour and light – the cedar with its cones like a flock of little owls sitting all in rows on the great layered branches, the thorn almost as red with berries as in its blooming time. That was where he had first caught sight of Miss Brown last night – not as Miss Brown, but as something that moved in the shadow of the thorn.