Jenny nodded.
"That's it exactly. Grandmother has one, and it still works. But it's never used except on very special occasions. I asked Grandmother what it meant, but she only smiled that peculiar smile and said I should understand in good time. What's more, she told Dawson she would drive herself, because she wanted me as a witness.
"It was broad daylight, not more than half-past eight. Along we went in the electric—'brougham’ Grandmother calls it— with Grandmother sitting bolt upright and never looking more grand, and me sitting bolt upright, eyes ahead, and feeling awful. We got as far as Fleet House, and then turned round in a graceful curve to the main bar of the Dragon's Rest."
Martin Drake was beginning to taste ecstasy.
"Is that the one she usually patronizes?"
"Martin!" said Jenny. Her eyes belied her seraphic countenance.
"I beg your pardon. Go on."
"Of course Grandmother wouldn't let me go in. She stationed me just outside the door. It was Saturday night, and they were pretty noisy. They're not supposed to sing, but the constable doesn't interfere much. A group in one corner were harmonizing on a pirate chantey with a refrain like, 'Skull and bones, skull and bones; ho, the Jolly Roger.' "When Grandmother walked in, every man of them looked up as though he'd seen the hangman. But Grandmother loves—" Jenny's voice poured with bitterness—"how Grandmother loves being the lady of the manor. She raised her hand and said, ‘Please, my good men, be at ease.' Then she beckoned to poor Mr. Puckston.
"I couldn't hear much of what they were saying. Mr. Puckston seemed to be telling her the first bar-parlour was used as a private sitting-room by Sir Henry Merrivale, and H.M. was out, and the door was locked. Of course you can guess how Grandmother dealt with that Mr. Puckston unlocked the door, Grandmother went in; and in a minute Mr. Puckston followed her with a pair of wire-cutters.
"Then the door opened again. Out marched Grandmother, with the skeleton slung over her shoulder. The head was hanging down her back, and she had the legs in her hand.
"One poor old man, who must have been eighty, spilled a pint beer-glass straight into Miss Partridge's lap. Grandmother never stopped or looked round. She marched straight out to the brougham, sat the skeleton up in the seat like a passenger, and told me to get in.
"That's where the fireworks really started. As I was getting in, I looked round. In the middle of the road, about thirty feet behind us — well, there was Sir Henry.
"His eyes were bulging out behind his spectacles, and his whole corporation was shivering like a mountain. I can't reproduce the tone, and, anyway, nobody could reproduce the volume, of what he said.
"He said: 'You stole my skeleton.' Then he turned round to the people in the door, who'd crowded out with their glasses in their hands, and said: 'Boys, that goddam hobgoblin stole my skeleton.' By this time we were off to a flying start
"There wasn't any motor-car outside the Dragon at all. Only a lot of bicycles, and a farm-cart with Will Harnaby's horse. H.M. was so mad he really and literally couldn't see straight and he fell all over the farm-cart when he tried to get up. But he did get there, and he did grab the reins and whip, and off we all went
"Grandmother was bending tensely over the steering-lever, putting on every ounce of speed; and Sir Henry was standing up and whirling the whip round his head like a charioteer in Ben-Hur. Only, you see, that electric car couldn't possibly do twenty miles an hour. And Will Harnaby's horse couldn't do fifteen.
That's where—" Jenny faltered a little—"Grandmother gave me the instructions. She said, with that smile of hers, I was to stick the skeleton's head out of the side-window so it faced H.M. And I was to move the lower jaw up and down as if the skeleton gibbered at him.
"Well, I did. I made the skeleton stick its head out and gibber about every twenty yards. And, every time the skeleton gibbered at him, his face got more purple, and his language was awful. Truly awful. I never heard anything, even in the Navy, that could…"
Jenny stopped. "Martin!" she said, in an attempt at reproachfulness which broke down completely.
He couldn't help it. He knew it wasn't really funny; it was funny only because you could visualize the expressions of the persons concerned. He had collapsed against a tree, beating his hands on the bark. Jenny collapsed as well.
"But, Martin!" she insisted presently. "You've got to see the serious side as well!"
"If you can see the serious side of that, my sweet, you'd appeal greatly to Sir Stafford Cripps. Besides, you haven't told me the ending."
The ending is the serious side."
"Oh? Who won the race?'
"We did. By yards and yards and yards." Jenny reflected. "I'm perfectly certain Grandmother told Dawson to be ready. He was there at the lodge gates, where there's no lodge-keeper now. But the wall is fifteen feet high, and there are big iron-barred gates."
Prisons, it suddenly occurred to Martin: striking the amusement from his heart. Pentecost, Fleet House, Brayle Manor, all were prisons; though for the life of him he could not think how this applied to Fleet House, where the impression had-come only, from feeling.
He and Jenny were walking again through the mist A white tide of mist-under-mist washed across the grass, then revealed it ever moving. Its damp could be felt and breathed.
"Go on," he prompted. "What happened after your electric flyer got through the gates?"
"Dawson closed and locked them. Grandmother drove the car a fairly long way up the drive. After that she walked to the gates again. By that time she and H.M. too must have done a little thinking, because.. well, because it was different H.M. was sitting outside the gates on the seat of the farm-cart, with the whip across his knees and no expression on his face at all.
"Grandmother put her own face almost against the bars, and (don't think I've forgotten a word!) she said: 'It may be conceded that you won the first round, Henry; but can there be any doubt about who won the second?'" Martin whistled.
"Jenny," he declared, "something tells me there is going to be a third round. And that the third round will be a beauty."
"But that's just what mustn't happen!" Jenny, peering at him past the side of her yellow hair, was again the eager and the breathless. "Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter if it's something silly, like making skeletons gibber. Though even there I doubt whether your H.M. is as clever as Grandmother."
"You think that, eh?"
"Yes. I do."
"Wait," advised Martin.
"But the skeleton-in-the-clock," Jenny told him, her thin and arched eyebrows drawn together, "is a different thing. It's serious, and — it may be deadly. Do you realize, from what H.M. said at Willaby's and from every bit of gossip floating about, that H.M. thinks this skeleton is a vital piece of evidence?"
"But evidence of what?"
"I wish I knew. And he told us straight out what he thought about Sir George Fleet's… death."
"You're sure it was murder too. Aren't you, Jenny?"
She stopped short and turned round, her lips apart "Martin! What makes you ask that?"
"Because every single time you've mentioned it you hesitate before you say 'death.' Besides, for some reason yesterday you started to be passionately interested all of a sudden, and wanted to learn all about it Why, Jenny?"
Instead of lessening as they walked, the mist was becoming thicker. Already, some distance back, a hedgerow had loomed unexpectedly in their faces; they groped for the stile. Now a fence emerged with almost equal materialization from the white twilight They reached the fence, and Jenny put a hand on it