‘Would that be Sir Jasper Luttrell, sir?’
‘Yes, indeed, we are going on a visit to him.’
The landlord was plainly shaken. Sir Jasper was apparently well-known to him; on the other hand Sir Richard was not. He cast him a doubtful, sidelong look, and slowly shook his head.
‘Well, if you won’t let out your gig on hire, I suppose I shall have to buy it,’ said Sir Richard.
‘Buy my gig, sir?’ gasped the landlord, staggered.
‘And the horse too, of course,’ added Sir Richard, pulling out his purse.
The landlord blinked at him. ‘Well, I’m sure, sir! If that’s the way it is, I don’t know but what I could let you drive the gig over yourself – seeing as how you’re a friend of Sir Jasper. Come to think of it, I won’t be needing it for a couple of days. Only you’ll have to rest the old horse afore you send him back, mind!’
Sir Richard raised no objection to this, and after coming to terms with an ease which led to the landlord’s expressing the wish that there were more gentlemen like Sir Richard to be met with, the travellers had only to wait until the cob had been harnessed to the gig, and led round to the front of the inn.
The gig was neither smart nor well-sprung, and the cob’s gait was more sure than swift, but Pen was delighted with the whole equipage. She sat perched up beside Sir Richard, enjoying the hot sunshine, and pointing out to him the manifold superiorities of the Somerset countryside over any other county.
They did not reach Queen Charlton until dusk, since the way to it was circuitous, and often very rough. When they came within sight of the village, Sir Richard said: ‘Well, brat, what now? Am I to drive you to Sir Jasper Luttrell’s house?’
Pen, who had become rather silent during the last five miles of their drive, said with a little gasp: ‘I have been thinking that perhaps it would be better if I sent a message in the morning! It is not Piers, you know, but, though I did not think of her at the time, it – it has occurred to me that perhaps Lady Luttrell may not perfectly understand…’
Her voice died away unhappily. She was revived by Sir Richard’s saying in matter-of-fact tones: ‘A very good notion. We will drive to an inn.’
‘The George was always accounted the best,’ offered Pen. ‘I have never actually been inside it, but my father was used to say its cellars were excellent.’
The George was discovered to be an ancient half-timbered hostelry with beamed ceilings, and wainscoted parlours. It was a rambling house, with a large yard, and many chintz-hung bedrooms. There was no difficulty in procuring a private parlour, and by the time Pen had washed the dust of the roads from her face, and unpacked the cloak-bag, her spirits, which had sunk unaccountably, had begun to lift again. Dinner was served in the parlour, and neither the landlord nor his wife seemed to recognize in the golden-haired stripling the late Mr Creed’s tomboyish little girl.
‘If only my aunt does not discover me before I have found Piers!’ Pen said, helping herself to some more raspberries.
‘We will circumvent her. But touching this question of Piers, do you – er – suppose that he will be able to extricate you from your present difficulties?’
‘Well, he will have to, if I marry him, won’t he?’
‘Undoubtedly. But – you must not think me an incorrigible wet blanket – it is not precisely easy to be married at a moment’s notice.’
‘Isn’t it? I didn’t know,’ said Pen innocently. ‘Oh well, I dare say we shall fly to Gretna Green then! We used to think that would be a splendid adventure.’
‘Gretna Green in those clothes?’ enquired Sir Richard, levelling his quizzing-glass at her.
‘Well, no, I suppose not. But when Piers has explained it all to Lady Luttrell, I expect she will be able to get some proper clothes for me.’
‘You do not entertain any doubts of Lady Luttrell’s – er – receiving you as her prospective daughter-in-law?’
‘Oh no! She was always most kind to me! Only I did think that perhaps it would be better if I saw Piers first.’
Sir Richard, who had so far allowed himself to be borne along resistless on the tide of this adventure, began to perceive that it would shortly be his duty to wait upon Lady Luttrell, and to give her an account of his dealings with Miss Creed. He glanced at that young lady, serenely finishing the last of the raspberries, and reflected, with a wry smile, that the task was not going to be an easy one.
A servant came in to clear away the dishes presently. Pen at once engaged him in conversation and elicited the news that Sir Jasper Luttrell was away from home.
‘Oh! But not Mr Piers Luttrell?’
‘No, sir, I saw Mr Piers yesterday. Going to Keynsham, he was. I do hear as he has a young gentleman staying with him – a Lunnon gentleman, by all accounts.’
‘Oh!’ Pen’s voice sounded rather blank. As soon as the man had gone away, she said: ‘Did you hear that, sir? It makes it just a little awkward, doesn’t it?’
‘Very awkward,’ agreed Sir Richard. ‘It seems as though we have now to eliminate the gentleman from London.’
‘I wish we could. For I am sure my aunt will guess that I have come home, and if she finds me before I have found Piers, I am utterly undone.’
‘But she will not find you. She will only find me.’
‘Do you think you will be able to fob her off ?’
‘Oh, I think so!’ Sir Richard said negligently. ‘After all, she would scarcely expect you to be travelling in my company, would she? I hardly think she will demand to see my nephew.’
‘No, but what if she does?’ asked Pen, having no such dependence on her aunt’s forbearing.
Sir Richard smiled rather sardonically. ‘I am not, perhaps, the best person in the world of whom to make – ah – impertinent demands.’
Pen’s eyes lit with sudden laughter. ‘Oh, I do hope you will talk to her like that, and look at her just so ! And if she brings Fred with her, he will be quite overcome, I dare say, to meet you face to face. For you must know that he admires you excessively. He tries to tie his cravat in a Wyndham Fall, even!’
‘That, in itself, I find an impertinence,’ said Sir Richard.
She nodded, and lifted a hand to her own cravat. ‘What do you think of mine, sir?’
‘I have carefully refrained from thinking about it at all. Do you really wish to know?’
‘But I have arranged it just as you did!’
‘Good God!’ said Sir Richard faintly. ‘My poor deluded child!’
‘You are teasing me! At least it was not ill enough tied to make you rip it off my neck as you did when you first met me!’
‘You will recall that we left the inn in haste this morning,’ he explained.
‘I am persuaded that would not have weighed with you. But you put me in mind of a very important matter. You paid my reckoning there.’
‘Don’t let that worry you, I beg.’
‘I am determined to pay for everything myself,’ Pen said firmly. ‘It would be a shocking piece of impropriety if I were to be beholden for money to a stranger.’
‘True. I had not thought of that.’
She looked up with her sudden bright look of enquiry. ‘You are laughing at me again!’
He showed her a perfectly grave countenance. ‘Laughing? I?’
‘I know very well you are. You may make your mouth prim, but I have noticed several times that you laugh with your eyes.’
‘Do I? I beg your pardon!’
‘Well, you need not, for I like it. I would not have come all this way with you if you had not had such smiling eyes. Isn’t it odd how one knows if one can trust a person, even if he is drunk?’
‘Very odd,’ he said.
She was hunting fruitlessly through her pockets. ‘Where can I have put my purse? Oh, I think I must have
put it in my overcoat!’
She had flung this garment down on a chair, upon first entering the parlour, and stepped across the room to feel in the capacious pockets.
‘Are you seriously proposing to count a few miserable shillings into my hand?’
‘Yes, indeed I am. Oh, here it is!’ She pulled out a leather purse with a ring round its neck, from one pocket, stared at it, and exclaimed: ‘This is not my purse!’
Sir Richard looked at it through his glass. ‘Isn’t it? It is certainly not mine, I assure you.’
‘It is very heavy. I wonder how it can have come into my pocket? Shall I open it?’
‘By all means. Are you quite sure it is not your own?’
‘Oh yes, quite!’ She moved to the table, tugging at the ring. It was a little hard to pull off, but she managed it after one or two tugs, and shook out into the palm of her hand a diamond necklace that winked and glittered in the light of the candles.
‘Richard! ’ gasped Miss Creed, startled into forgetting the proprieties again. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon! But look!’
‘I am looking, and you have no need to beg my pardon. I have been calling you Pen these two days.’
‘Oh, that is another matter, because you are so much older!’
He looked at her somewhat enigmatically. ‘Am I? Well, never mind. Do I understand that this gaud does not belong to you?’
‘Good gracious, no! I never saw it before in my life!’
‘Oh!’ said Sir Richard. ‘Well, it is always agreeable to have problems solved. Now we know why your friend Mr Yarde had no fear of the Bow Street Runner.’
Six
Pen let the necklace slip through her fingers on to the table. ‘You mean that he stole it, and then – and then put it in my pocket? But, sir, this is terrible! Why – why, that Runner will next come after us!’
‘I think it more likely that Mr Yarde will come after us.’
‘Good God!’ Pen said, quite pale with dismay. ‘What are we to do?’
He smiled rather maliciously. ‘Didn’t you desire to meet with a real adventure?’
‘Yes, but – Oh, do not be absurd and teasing, I beg of you! What shall we do with the necklace? Couldn’t we throw it away somewhere, or hide it in a ditch?’
‘We could, of course, but it would surely be a trifle unfair to the owner?’
‘I don’t care about that,’ confessed Pen. ‘It would be dreadful to be arrested for thieving, and I know we shall be!’
‘Oh, I trust not!’ Sir Richard said. He straightened the necklace, where it lay on the table, and looked down at it with a slight frown creasing his brow. ‘Yes,’ he said meditatively. ‘I have seen you before. Now, where have I seen you before?’
‘Do please put it away!’ begged Pen. ‘Only think if a servant were to come into the room!’
He picked it up. ‘My lamentable memory! Alas, my lamentable memory! Where, oh, where have I seen you?’
‘Dear sir, if Jimmy Yarde finds us, he will very likely cut our throats to get the necklace back!’
‘On the contrary, I have his word for it that he is opposed to all forms of violence.’
‘But when he does not discover it in my pocket, where he placed it – and now I come to think of it, he actually had my coat in his hands – he must guess that we have discovered it!’
‘Very likely he will, but I cannot see what profit there would be in his cutting our throats.’ Sir Richard restored the necklace to its leather purse, and dropped it into his pocket. ‘We have now nothing to do but to await the arrival of Jimmy Yarde. Perhaps – who knows? – we may induce him to divulge the ownership of the necklace. Meanwhile, this parlour is very stuffy, and the night remarkably fine. Do you care to stroll out with me to admire the stars, brat?’
‘I suppose,’ said Pen defiantly, ‘that you think I am very poor-spirited!’
‘Very,’ agreed Sir Richard, his eyes glinting under their heavy lids.
‘I am not afraid of anything,’ Pen announced. ‘Merely, I am shocked !’
‘A waste of time, believe me. Are you coming?’
‘Yes, but it seems to me as though you have put a live coal in your pocket! What if some dishonest person were to steal it from you?’
‘Then we shall be freed from all responsibility. Come along!’
She followed him out into the warm night. He appeared to have banished all thought of the necklace from his mind. He pointed various constellations out to her, and, drawing her hand through his arm, strolled with her down the street, past the last straggling cottages, into a lane redolent of meadowsweet.
‘I suppose I was poor-spirited,’ Pen confided presently. ‘Shall you feel obliged to denounce poor Jimmy Yarde to the Runner?’
‘I hope,’ said Sir Richard dryly, ‘that Mr Piers Luttrell is a gentleman of resolute character.’
‘Why?’
‘That he may be able to curb your somewhat reckless friendliness.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen him for five years, but it was always I who thought of things to do.’
‘That is what I feared. Where does he live?’
‘Oh, about two miles farther down this road! My home is on the other side of the village. Should you like to see it?’
‘Immensely, but not at the moment. We will now retrace our steps, for it is time that you were in bed.’
‘I shan’t sleep a wink.’
‘I trust that you are mistaken, my good child – in fact, I am reasonably certain that you are.’
‘And to add to everything,’ said Pen, unheeding, ‘Piers has got a horrid man staying with him! I don’t know what is to be done.’
‘In the morning,’ said Sir Richard soothingly, ‘we will attend to all these difficulties.’
‘In the morning, very likely, Aunt Almeria will have discovered me.’
On this gloomy reflection, they retraced their steps to the inn. Its shuttered windows cast golden gleams out into the quiet street, several of them standing open to let in the cool night air. Just as they were about to pass one of them on their way to the inn door, a voice spoke inside the room, and to her astonishment, Sir Richard suddenly gripped Pen’s arm, and brought her to a dead halt. She started to enquire the reason for this sudden stop, but his hand across her mouth choked back the words.
The voice from within the house said with a slight stammer: ‘You c-can’t come up to C-Crome Hall, I tell you! It’s b-bad enough as it is. G-Good God, man, if anyone were to see me sneaking off to meet you here they’d p-precious soon smell a rat!’
A more robust voice answered: ‘Maybe I’ve been smelling rats myself, my young buck. Who was it foisted a partner on to me, eh? Were the pair of ye meaning to cheat Horace Trimble? Were ye, my bonny boy?’
‘You fool, you let yourself be b-bubbled!’ The stammerer said furiously. ‘Then you c-come here – enough to ruin everything! I tell you I d-daren’t say! And don’t come up to C-Crome Hall again, damn you! I’ll m-meet you tomorrow, in the spinney down the road. ’Sblood, he can’t have g-gone far! Why don’t you go to B-Bristol if he didn’t b-break back to London? Instead of c-coming here to insult me!’
‘I insult you! By the powers, that’s rich!’ A full-throated laugh followed the words, and the sound of a chair being dashed back on a wooden floor.
‘Damn your impudence! You’ve b-bungled everything, and now you c-come blustering to me! You were to arrange everything! I was to I-leave all to you! Finely you’ve arranged it! And n-now you expect m-me to set all to rights!’
‘Softly, my buck! softly! You’re crowing mighty loud, but I did my part of the business all right and tight. It was the man you were so set on that bubbled me, and that makes me think, d’ye hear? It makes me think mighty hard. Maybe you’d better think too – and if you’ve a notion in your head
that Horace Trimble’s a green ’un, get rid of it! See?’
‘Hush, for G-God’s sake! You d-don’t know who may be listening! I’ll m-meet you to-morrow, at eleven, if I c-can shake off y-young Luttrell. We must think what’s to be done!’
A door opened and was hastily shut again. Sir Richard pulled Pen back into the shadows beyond the window, and, a moment later, a slight, cloaked figure came out of the inn, and strode swiftly away into the darkness.
The warning pressure on Pen’s arm held her silent, although she was by this time agog with excitement. Sir Richard waited until the dwindling sound of footsteps had died in the distance, and then strolled on with Pen’s hand still tucked in his arm, past the open window to the inn-door. Not until they stood in their own parlour again did Pen allow herself to speak, but as soon as the door was shut behind them, she exclaimed: ‘What did it mean? He spoke of “Young Luttrell” – did you hear him? It must be the man who is staying with him! But who was the other man, and what were they talking about?’
Sir Richard did not appear to be attending very closely. He was standing by the table, a frown between his eyes, and his mouth rather grim. Suddenly his gaze shifted to Pen’s face, but what he said seemed to her incomprehensible. ‘Of course!’ he muttered softly. ‘So that was it!’
‘Oh, do tell me!’ begged Pen. ‘What was it, and why did you stop when you heard the stammering-man speak? Do you – is it possible that you know him?’
‘Very well indeed,’ replied Sir Richard.
‘Good heavens! And it is he who is visiting Piers! Dear sir, does it seem to you that everything is becoming a trifle awkward?’
‘Extremely so,’ said Sir Richard.
‘Well, that is what I thought,’ said Pen. ‘First we are saddled with a stolen necklace, and now we discover that a friend of yours is staying with Piers!’
‘Oh no, we do not!’ said Sir Richard. ‘That young gentleman is no friend of mine! Nor, I fancy, is his presence in this neighbourhood unconnected with that necklace. If I do not mistake, Pen, we have become enmeshed in a plot from which it will take all my ingenuity to extricate us.’