The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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his face clearly for the first time. In other ranked soldiers I had met, even when dressed in ordinary clothes, their profession had always been distinguishable by the peculiar suppleness around their mouths when they spoke; something like an exaggeration of the movement of the jaw that belonged to men who spent a lot of time in the officer’s mess and got a lot of practice at guffawing. I couldn’t imagine this old soldier had ever guffawed in his life.
His son didn’t look like he belonged to that class either. He certainly wasn’t smiling when his father queried coldly, ‘You saw this man?’
Because I was stupid, I asked blankly, ‘Which man?’
‘Father, this is the young woman who made me run for the train. Miss Sutton.’ Just beyond my right shoulder the Captain’s voice was low and mildly persuasive, as though his father was in danger of bullying me like he did Danny Hannis. For a moment I thought the son was saving me, but when I turned my head I found that although his eyes were a considerably less dramatic shade of hazel compared to his father’s grey, at that moment they shared rather too much of the family intensity for my comfort. There was something odd there; a kind of dismissive impatience when he added, ‘I think, Emily, you said you were about to prepare my father’s lunch?’
Flushing, I said lamely, ‘Why yes, I—’
‘This man who nearly ran you down.’ The Colonel’s interruption was decisive. ‘He was here? At this house? Was it the same fellow who …?’
He meant to ask, of course, if this were the same fellow I had encountered on Mr Winstone’s garden path. Standing by the table with the lamp on it, the old man’s gaze was unwavering. I couldn’t help answering now. I risked a glance at the Captain as I said awkwardly, ‘He wasn’t the same man.’
I caught the moment the son raised his eyes to heaven.
The Colonel was waiting. I could see that he was used to having his orders obeyed. I could also see that his hand was trembling a little where it hung by the polished lip of the table. I said unwillingly, ‘He looked like a city man who had taken a wrong turn off the main road.’ I couldn’t help the stray of my eyes towards the Captain’s own city attire. There was a twitch of enquiry in response to the unintended insult. I added hastily, ‘I mean his suit was grey and he wasn’t terribly tall and he was balding.’
‘Age?’ This was from Danny.
‘About fifty, I think. He had a pappy complexion.’
‘Pappy?’ The Colonel frowned at the term.
‘You know, fleshy but soft, like a shrivelled potato.’
‘You have excellent powers of observation.’ I believe the Captain was mocking me. Little did he know how much I had been privately congratulating myself for learning the lessons of yesterday and managing to commit this man’s features to memory. The Captain asked, ‘And what did he take, do you know?’
He’d asked me this once before. He knew what I would say. ‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said, ‘except my case, of course. He took my suitcase.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Captain agreed impatiently, ‘and with it, all your clothes. So that when we next see you, I presume you’ll be clad in your aged aunt’s wardrobe, which last saw the light of day in the era of bustles or something like that. Have pity for me while you do it. I wasn’t planning a trip to the country when I dropped Father at the station yesterday and my change of mind came up on me, shall we say, rather abruptly and without leaving time to pack.’
‘You needn’t have come at all,’ remarked the old man tersely while revealing for the first time the first glimmer of the parent beneath. He was fond of his son. That weakness in his hand wasn’t fading though. It suddenly struck me that it was perhaps deliberate that the Captain was keeping us loitering in the lee of the staircase. A few steps more would confront the old man with the open door into the younger son’s study and I thought I knew by now what effect it had. To lay it before the old man like this just as soon as he’d arrived would be an awful welcome.
‘Hold on a minute, Emily.’ I must have moved impulsively to shut it because the Captain put his hand out. I think he thought I was running away. His gesture held me there while he said to his father, ‘Do you want your cane? I’ve taken it upstairs already. Emily? Perhaps you might …?’
Perhaps he’d understood me after all. And perhaps he knew his father well enough to know that it wouldn’t help to let the old man know why we were, in effect, managing his entrance to his own home. I nodded my agreement and turned to slide through the gap between the Captain and the painted triangle that screened the space under the rising stairs. Then the Colonel’s voice addressed me so that I turned again and found myself briefly faced with the panel of glass beneath the stairs that proved to be a historic gun cabinet. Sporting guns from the ages were locked inside, gleaming with oil, and an awful lot of rotten old shooting sticks with deer’s feet for handles.
I was turning again to face the Colonel as he asked, ‘Do I understand correctly that you saw both these men? This fellow today and the man who struck Bertie? Has your stepfather remembered anything useful, by the way?’ This last question was barked at Danny.
Danny shifted the weight of the little dog in his arms – who was now hanging like a deadweight in protest – and said blandly, ‘Not really. To be honest, now the excitement’s worn off and people have stopped fussing over him, the only thing Pop can really remember with any clarity is the sight of Miss Sutton’s face looming over him on the path.’
‘Poor man,’ I sympathised automatically, before I’d thought. But really I was wondering why Danny had said it like that. Why he’d felt compelled to add this little mention of my part in Mr Winstone’s collapse in the manner of an amusing aside and yet I could tell in an instant that it meant something to the Captain. I couldn’t read Danny’s face because his eyes were downcast as he ran his free hand over the dog’s head in an easy caress, but I could read the Captain’s. He was staring at me as though he’d just discovered a lie while he said clearly, for his father’s sake, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem anything important was taken today. Do you want to step outside with Hannis, Father, and give your orders about where to take your many bags?’
And then the impasse was broken by a flurry of movement which bore the old man to the door and outside and the Captain to the study door. He shut it decisively. A hand gripped the handle firmly while his eyes followed the departure of his father and then as soon as he was sure the Colonel was out of earshot, his attention rounded onto me. I was hoping for an easing of tension; a recognition at the very least of our mutual charade. I wasn’t prepared to meet suspicion. And I wasn’t remotely happy to perceive the tone in his voice when he said, ‘What are you doing here, truly? I mean who are you? What is your profession?’
I gaped. The lie he thought he’d discovered was very specifically mine. It made me bluster, ‘I beg your pardon? What have I been doing? I’ve been here talking to you on the telephone, I should think, and running errands, that’s what.’ His head tilted. He expected an answer to each of his questions. I added a shade tartly, ‘I haven’t got a profession. Formerly I was a chemist’s assistant. In Knightsbridge.’
‘And your father? What does he do?’
The rapidity of his hard questions was strangely shocking. It was the unfriendliness of them. I understood that he didn’t know me and might wish to understand better who had been letting herself into his father’s home, but I didn’t know what this particular course of his suspicion meant. I told him, ‘He’s a supplier of antiques to the nobility. Or, at least, he was. He’s trying to retire.’
‘So he’s also a person with a former profession. I see. And this cousin of yours?’
‘Cartographer.’ Surprisingly, this was given by Danny Hannis. We’d both thought – the Captain and I – that Danny was already outside, but there he was, bending on one knee before the front door, dragging a string from his pocket to act as an improvised lead for the dog. Without lifting his head he added, ‘At least, that’s what she is when she’s