In less than two minutes, at rustling quick-step through what was now only a dreary storage-building, he reached the main gate. All phantasmagoria, like that skeleton in the clock. Briefly he wondered what Sir Henry Merrivale might have been doing with the skeleton in the clock.
Through the arched frame of bars like a portcullis, he saw that the tall iron gates stood wide open. Beyond lay thick white.mist, drifting and with rifts in it; the mist would presently vanish before heat and sun, but meantime it muffled the world in eeriness.
As he passed the opening in the portcullis, switching off the lamp and putting it in his pocket, Martin laughed aloud at this so-called eeriness." He could have danced or hit the air a right-hander. Then, just outside the prison gates as a rift in the mist floated past, he saw Jenny herself. She was obviously waiting.
For a moment he stood still, with a notion that this might be part of the fantasy.
By coincidence, Jenny also wore slacks and a sweater coloured brown, with a light coat thrown over her shoulders. As soon as he saw her, other considerations of feminine appeal were forgotten. Her yellow hair curled to her shoulders. She was smoking a cigarette, which she instantly threw away. They ran towards each other.
"How the devil did you get back here?"
‘I was never away," Jenny confessed. "I thought I could take that train. But I couldn't face it I told the taxi-driver to come back. Because—" She stopped. "So you'd have paid five hundred pounds just to learn where I'd gone?"
"If that butler has blabbed, the old lady will sack him."
"Dawson," said Jenny, "isn't a butler. I suppose he is, in a way, and Grandmother insists on calling him that He's butler and handyman too; we don't employ much of a staff of servants. Anyway, I caught him when he was going to take your money. I was afraid you could hear me whispering in the background."
Realization bumped him. "Come to think of it I heard something."
"Of course I rang up Mr. Anthony after you did, and said it was all a joke and he wasn't to send any cheque. Dawson nearly wept Then I made him ring you and give the address, or you might have come to the Manor. But—"
Here, raising her blue eyes, Jenny began such a bitter denunciation of her own character, such a writhing of self-loathing, that it would have been considered strong even by her worst enemy.
"Martin, I knew you had to go through with that "bet' I wouldn't have you back out That's what makes me so vile. There's one excuse," her eyes looked at him oddly, "that perhaps helps, and I've got to tell you soon. But Ruth had got me absolutely furious. Then, when I saw you running across the road after her…"
He ended her rush of speech in the appropriate way, which was an effective way. At the back of his mind it occurred to him that he wouldn't just yet tell Jenny about that small brush with Ruth last night Presently, of course! But not just yet
Presently Jenny spoke.
"So I had to sneak out this morning and meet you. Otherwise," she said happily, "you'd have been ripping away or chartering a special plane or heaven knows what Where do you want to go now?"
"Anywhere you like. We might go and throw a bucket of water over your grandmother?"
"Martin! You mustn't…"
Jenny stopped. Suddenly she began to laugh, with such full infectiousness and delight that Martin joined in without knowing why..It warmed his heart to see this girl growing healthier and more exuberant at every minute, as though she had been let out of prison.
"If you think the idea is as funny as all that Jenny, it would be still better to use a fire-hose."
"Wait!" cried Jenny, shaking all over and wiping the tears of joy from her eyes. "Do you mean to say you haven't heard about the perfectly awful thing that happened last night? In the public road between the Dragon's Rest and the Manor?"
"No."
"Well, Grandmother and Sir Henry Merrivale…" "Godalive, don't tell me those two had another knock-down row?" "Yes."
"He threw a bucket of water over her, I suppose?"
"No, no, it wasn't anything like that." Jenny, the wings of her yellow hair falling forward, pressed a hand over her mouth and began to shake again. He straightened up her shoulders. "Darling," she assured him, "I shall be a perfect model of prim correctness. I've been trained to that You're at the Dragon, aren't you?"
"No; at Fleet House."
"If you don't mind wading in wet grass, there's a wonderful short-cut over the fields."
"We will roll and revel in the wet grass. Lead on."
About them the white mist so muffled sight that even the prison was hardly visible twenty feet away. Sometimes the mist would drift past Jenny, obscuring her until the smiling face emerged. Their footsteps crunched in weedy gravel; once, on the edge of the gravel approach, Jenny hesitated.
"Good heavens, what about Mr. Stannard? What about everything?"
"Stannard," he replied, "is A-l. He'll be out in a minute, so let's go ahead. I saw no ghosts. In fact," concluded Martin, telling one of the more remarkable lies of his life, "there was practically no excitement. Let's hear about this row."
The wet grass swished and soaked to their knees as they went down across an almost invisible field in the mist The shape of a tree swam dimly past, to be blotted out as though by magic. They walked happily, arm and hand linked; but Jenny was now frowning.
"You see," she explained, "Grandmother's now got the skeleton."
"She's got… you mean the skeleton-clock?"
"Not the clock. Just the skeleton. Heaven alone knows why she wants it" Jenny bit her lip, "or why anybody wants it. It all started very seriously. Grandmother had gone to visit Aunt Cicely, and got back home about a quarter to eight"
"Yes. I remember."
"I was a bit uneasy when she got home. I shouldn't have been, and I won't be again. But I wondered what she'd say when she found I hadn't gone to visit Mr. and Mrs. Ives after all. She just looked at me in the oddest way—" Jenny hesitated—"as though it didn't matter. She said: 'Jennifer dear, I must think hard for five minutes.'
"Whenever she says that I know it means she's thinking about legal proceedings. Grandmother's got a passion for law suits. She's always trying to prove something from old documents of 1662, or things like that. I imagined she was thinking about the fair (you'll hear about it) that opens on Monday.
"Anyway, she came back in fifteen minutes looking grim and sort of triumphant. She made me sit down in a chair. She said: 'Jennifer, mark my words! The unspeakable Merrivale!’
(Martin could hear Lady Brayle saying it.) '—the unspeakable Merrivale,' Grandmother said, "in the presence of no less than four witnesses, distinctly promised to give me the clock if I answered "a few" questions. These questions I did answer, as the witnesses can testify.'"
To Martin's memory returned a view of the library at Fleet House, with H.M. and Lady Brayle standing on either side of the desk like offenders in a magistrate's court He saw Ruth Stannard, Ricky and himself with their backs to the white marble mantelpiece.
"Jenny,’' he said, "that's true. He did say so!"
"Anyway, I'm afraid I couldn't follow the legal lecture she gave me. Something about possession of the clock including possession of its contents: as, par example, and to wit, when it is sold at Willaby's with a skeleton inside. Then she called for Dawson to get out the electric car. Do you know what an electric car is?"
Martin reflected.
"I dimly remember having seen, or at least heard of one. It looked like a two-seater carriage with a dashboard, but no horses; nothing in front except the dashboard and a glass windscreen. You steered with a handle instead of a steering-wheel Yes! And it was used by stately ladies who didn't want to travel fast"