The Knocker On Death's Door Part 1

The Knocker On Death's Door.

by Ellis Peters.

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OTHER INSPECTOR FELSE MYSTERIES PUBLISHED BY THE MYSTERIOUS PRESSFlight Of A WitchA Nice Derangement Of EpitaphsBlack Is The Color Of My True Love's HeartRainbows End

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CHAPTER 1.

THE door was of oak, roughly five feet wide by more than seven feet high, with a top in the form of a flattened late-Gothic arch. The timbers from which it had been made, with loving care, some five hundred or more years ago, were nearly six inches thick, and carved on the outer side into crude vertical folds, and with the wear and tear of centuries, and the rigours of recent cleaning to remove the gloss of dirt from acc.u.mulated time and the touch of many hands, the colour of the wood had clarified into an exquisite matt brown fading away into pure grey, the colour of subdued light at the onset of evening after a clear day, and the grain to a veining of liquid silver, so that the carved folds were no longer related in any way to anything so solid as linen, but appeared rather as shot silk of a cobweb fineness. In certain lights the door seemed almost translucent, so that you might have tried to walk through it in the belief that it was mere mirage, and no more palpable than mist. Actually it weighed an unconscionable amount, and had elicited fervent curses from the modern workmen who had had the job of moving it. They were accustomed to the gimcrack soft-woods of today, and only one of them had so far forgotten himself as to stroke the silken meshes with a loving and wondering hand, and feel for a moment deprived and born out of time. He was an old man, of course, reared in the trade. The others thought it was simply a quarter of a ton of over-valued junk.

The crowning arch of the door had a carved border of leaves, undercut so deeply that they could almost have been plucked at will, though only by t.i.tans. Beneath this canopy two elongated angels, hieratic and crude and modern now as Modigliani, though certainly years out of date when they were carved, spread large hands and rigid wings over the entering wors.h.i.+pper. Or, of course, butler, depending on the period in question, but reverence was always equally implied.

For the door had hung for centuries on the ma.s.sive hinges of the wine-cellar in the house known as the Abbey, in the village of Mottisham, in West Mids.h.i.+re. It was now being restored to its ancient place (hypothetically, at least, for the actual evidence was slim and ambiguous) in the south porch of the church of Saint Eata in the above-named village. A very rare dedication indeed, and territorially limited, and if there was a person in the parish who had any very clear idea of who St. Eata was, it certainly was not the vicar, the Reverend Andrew Bright, who was thirty-one, and devoted to Rugby, G.o.d (or his extremely simple idea of G.o.d), rock-climbing, youth-clubs and his own advancement, in that order. He was himself, however, solid, worthy and real, and knew a real, solid, worthy work of art when he saw one. He had jumped at the offer of the door, and ruthlessly adapted the nineteenth-century south porch, the latest of many renovations to St. Eata's long-suffering fabric, to accommodate it. With the effect achieved he was more than content. It was a very beautiful, thought-provoking and virtually permanent door. That it had other and more disquieting properties was not yet apparent.

As for the knocker, it was of antique iron, rust-proof practically for ever, of a lovely, crude texture that gave acute tactile pleasure to anyone handling it. The surface was not quite smooth, being very slightly pitted all over, so that it clung to the hand with a live, bracing contact. It was made in the form of a beast's head, wreathed in leaves that never grew on any tree, as the beast had never roamed in any jungle but that of Apocalypse; and in the wide, generous, patently amiable jaws was proffered, rather than gripped, a large, twisted ring of iron, thick enough to fill the palm.

Through this door the bishop emerged, radiant and serene, beautifully robed and crozier in hand, at the conclusion of the service, with the Reverend Andrew and the living representatives of the Macsen-Martel family at his heels, on his way to the vicarage for tea with m.u.f.fins, scones and fruit cake, suitable to an English Sunday. Traffic on the B road through the village was halted to allow his procession to make its way across the green with becoming dignity and deliberation, which took some time. The village itself looked on from a discreet distance, tolerantly unsmiling and unfrowning, missing not a trick. Comparatively few of the inhabitants had been among the congregation inside St. Eata's. Mottisham was a rea.s.suringly normal English village.

Motorists, impatient but resigned, sat back and waited for the magnificently aesthetic old man, less ingenuous than he appeared, to withdraw his train inside the confines of the vicarage grounds, a manoeuvre over which he took his time. Who knows when the arrested mind will open and the light dawn?

Detective Chief Inspector George Felse and his wife Bunty were on their way back from a week-end by the Welsh coast; probably the last of the year, for it was mid-October and the best of the weather was already gone. They had left immediately after lunch, to avoid the normal concerted rush back to the Midlands, only to find that even more people than usual had been visited by the same idea. The trouble with mid-Wales is that the mountains render whole tracts of it impossible for major, or indeed any, roads, and confine the motorist to the few main arteries. The inevitable boring, irritating, nose-to-tail procession home was something George detested, but for many miles could not escape. But towards the Mids.h.i.+re border he swung thankfully off to the right, and took the minor road that threaded the long cleft of Middlehope, between the hills. It was longer, and probably a few of the regular commuters to the Welsh coast had discovered its advantages by now, but even so it was a relief after the main road.

Through the few stark villages, with their half-Welsh, half-English names, they made better time, and had something better to look at than the b.u.t.t-end of the car in front. Road and river wound inextricably along the valley, crossing and re-crossing in an antique dance of their own. In some of those bridges there was Roman masonry. There was even a short stretch of Roman causeway still exposed at the approach to one of them, perhaps twelve yards of huge stones laid like crazy paving, none too smooth even now, after centuries of weathering. Those who knew the road slowed to a crawl and shambled over them with respect; the unwary from the cities. .h.i.t them at speed, and banged their heads on their car roofs at the first bound. Strangers, hearing they were Roman, a.s.sumed they had been carefully preserved for archeological purposes. The truth was that in Middlehope things survived; no one preserved them. They had always been there, and were still serviceable, why move them?

Outside the narrow ribbon of level fields that fringed the road, this was sheep country, and the pastures rose steeply into rough slopes of gra.s.s and heather, broken at the crests by a few outcrops of rock. Gradually the red and white brick chapels of Wales gave place to the small, squat-towered stone churches of England. The bracken along the hills was already russet, the heather a brownish purple so dark as to match the occasional patch of bare, peaty soil. Sheep minced along the contours with slow, delicate movements, heads down, as deliberately as though they possessed the whole of time, the elders still showing the shapeliness of their summer clipping, the yearlings fat rolls of wool. Life did not change much in Middlehope. Why should it? The basic way of living here, in a hard but beautiful solitude, had been evolved long ago, and only minor adaptations had been made to them since.

Until they drew near to the village of Mottisham, that is. Along with several other similarly attractive places scattered round the rim of a ten-mile circle surrounding the county town of Comerbourne, Mottisham was just beginning to feel the effect of the progressive withdrawal of the wealthier townspeople from their town. The latest ripple of the expanding ring had only just reached them; but there in the opening bowl were the first two new estates, one of council houses but the other, more significantly, of that curious modern phenomenon, the "executive-type" dwelling. A few of the older houses at the edge of the village had also been taken over and done up by new and obviously well-to-do owners. And in the thin copse behind the churchyard half a dozen artfully deployed "desirable residences"-one step higher up the social scale-were just being built, so carefully arranged that no one should look into anyone else's windows, or, indeed, see anyone else's roof, and most of the trees should be retained in what would certainly be advertised as "picturesque wooded grounds."

The road made a great loop all round the churchyard, shrinking between old buildings; and there, stationed at the curve by "The Sitting Duck," was a white-gloved police sergeant, waving all traffic to a standstill with a palm the size of a spade. George pulled in obediently to the side and stopped. Within seconds there were three more cars drawn up behind him.

"Now what's going on?" he wondered aloud, and wound down the window to peer ahead. The sergeant, having secured the desired effect, rolled ponderously alongside and stooped to the obvious inquiry. The car was new, along with George's recent promotion, and country members of the constabulary had as yet no reason to a.s.sociate a pale grey VW 1500 with the deputy head of the County C.I.D.

"Shan't be keeping you more than a few minutes, sir..."

He did a double take with admirable equanimity, and continued in the same tone and the same tempo: "Well, well, I see I caught a big one. How are you, George? And Mrs. Felse, ma'am... we haven't seen you up this way for quite some time. How's the boy?" Sergeant Moon was a very old acquaintance, and but for the remoteness of his chosen solitude, now apparently becoming rapidly less remote, he would have ranked as a close friend.

"Fine, thanks, Jack!" Dominic was away in France with his fiancee, as it happened, recovering, he said, from post-examination exhaustion and pre-life cold feet, and considering for the first time entirely seriously and for the first time with trepidation, what he was to do with himself and his career. "How about your own family? Well, I hope?"

Sergeant Moon acknowledged the inquiry gravely; his wife and daughter were well. "You don't find us much to do up here, or you'd see more of us," George said. At the time this was a strictly truthful statement, but somebody somewhere was certainly listening, and took malicious note.

"Ah, that's right," acknowledged Sergeant Moon, leaning a sharp blue elbow on the VW's roof. "Crime, by and large, we don't go in for. A bit of riotous behaviour now and again, that's about it. Sin, now, sin's more in our line." The distinction was clear, thoughtful and comforting. The sins of Middlehope were time-honoured, the contrivances of an enclosed community still governed by pre-feudal sanctions, and generally speaking the sinners were disciplined by their own society and did not totally s.h.i.+rk responsibility for their acts. The sergeant knew where the law ought to restrain its hand and leave older laws to function, with profounder humanity and sounder common sense. "Today," he said, "we should be whiter than snow. We've got company."

"So I see," said George. "What exactly is going on?"

"You haven't been reading the ecclesiastical news and notes, have you? We've got the bishop, no less. Look out, here he comes!"

And here he came. The church, a square-towered conglomeration of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century renovations on the poor remnants of a very ancient foundation, lay on the left of the road, half-screened by old trees and ringed by its crowded graves. To the right, on the other side of the road, was the nineteenth-century vicarage, three-coloured brick with dozens of gables and mock-Gothic windows, a pretentious and unmanageable mess. It had, however, a generous and well-stocked garden with plenty of fruit trees. Towards this green shade the bishop took his unhurried way. He was undoubtedly impressive. All the women watching from windows, doorways and pavement touched their hair and smoothed their dresses at the sight of him. The word that entered George's head was "bridled." The word that entered Bunty's was "blossomed." Six feet tall and something over, fragile and ascetic as a primitive saint (and every bit as durable), with a fleshless face honed into an incredible refinement of benevolence and beauty, and longish silvery hair framing it, the bishop paced slowly along the flagged path, his frilled sleeves falling back from emaciated hands, posed exquisitely in the frame of the lych-gate for half a dozen photographers who materialised surprisingly out of nowhere in particular, and flowed majestically across the road towards his promised vicarage tea.

"If you're going to do a thing," observed Sergeant Moon approvingly, "I like to see it done well. These hearty modern clerics don't know they're born."

"But what's he been up to?" George wanted to know.

"Re-dedicating our south door. Hadn't you heard? It's been hung somewhere in the cellars of the Abbey ever since the dissolution of the monasteries, and now they've been clearing up the old place in the hope that the National Trust will take it over, they wanted to put back the things that were pinched, and get everything in order. Done a very nice restoration job on that door, so they tell me."

The vicar, walking behind his bishop, was half a head shorter and about three times as wide, a burly young man with a round, ingenuous face and muscles befitting a wing three-quarter. A late shaft of sun bounced from his red hair like singed fingers recoiling from a burning bush.

"You've got the press on the run," said George. "I never thought a door could bring in so many cameras!"

"It's said to be something special, all right. The experts got the word, apparently. The thing's never been on view before, you see. n.o.body writes up the Abbey, not these days."

"Nor the family?" said George curiously. "I take it that's the squire following on?"

"Don't mention that word here, George, we're allergic to it. Even if they used it at all, it would be about old Thwaites who bought up the Court fifty years ago-and if they used it about him him it would have inverted commas round it, and nasty implications. We're tribal, not feudal. And even the old princes of Powis didn't venture to show their faces here unless they were invited." it would have inverted commas round it, and nasty implications. We're tribal, not feudal. And even the old princes of Powis didn't venture to show their faces here unless they were invited."

"The lords of shop and bank are coming, by the look of your housing plans," said Bunty.

"Let 'em come, they'll learn. But, yes," he said, returning to the little procession which had just reached the vicarage gate, "that's Robert Macsen-Martel and his mother. Don't see her often these days. He works for Poole, Reed and Poole, in the estate office-talking of historical ironies, though I know we weren't. Sells expensive little gimcrack houses all round what's left of his own-and after all, they've been there best part of nine centuries. G.o.d knows how they stuck it out, they never were wealthy. Probably the best they ever did was out of that dissolution business, when the monks got kicked out. Count for nothing now. Never will again. Never did did, for all that much."

It was an epitaph; and there was something about the two figures now vanis.h.i.+ng into the vicarage garden that suggested that even the epitaph was an afterthought, long after the event of dissolution.

The old woman was exceedingly tall and ramrod erect, a residue of desiccated flesh shrunk tightly to attenuated bones, and draped with old-fas.h.i.+oned and shapeless tweeds of no particular colour. Under an ancient felt hat, worn dead straight on lank grey hair drawn into a bun on her neck, the long, narrow, aristocratic face looked out with chill disapproval at the world, as though she had ceased to expect anything good from present or future.

"She looks," said Bunty thoughtfully, "like that bronze bishop at Augsburg-the one with the bad smell under his nose."

"Bishop Wolfhart Roth," said Sergeant Moon understandingly. "Now you come to mention it, so she does." And it was entirely typical of him that he should be able to haul out of his capacious memory not only the face but even the name of a German bishop some unknown artist had caricatured in bronze in the fourteenth century.

Her son was like her, but not yet mummified. Tall, thin, with long, narrow bones and a long, narrow face, withdrawn, distrustful, austere. An uncomfortable family, Bunty thought, watching them disappear under the vicar's trees, but too faded now to discomfort the populace of Mottisham overmuch.

They were gone, it was over. The sergeant flapped a huge white hand in a final salute, and withdrew to his duty, waving the VW on towards home. Bunty turned to stare into the porch as they pa.s.sed by, and try to catch a glimpse of the door that had brought press photographers and scholars into the wild territory of Middlehope. Old trees crowded close, darkening the cavity of the porch. She caught a faint flash of pale, pure colour, old wood restored to the light from under the patina of centuries of dirt and neglect; but that was all.

"Sorry!" said George. "Did you want to stop and have a look at it? I couldn't hold up the procession, but we can pull round into the pub yard if you like, and walk back."

"No, never mind." Bunty settled back in her seat, her thoughts returning pleasurably to the prospect of getting home and getting the Aga lit and the house warmed. "I don't suppose there's anything so remarkable about it. Nothing to fetch us back for another look."

Whatever minor fate had been jolted by George's a.s.sessment of the Middlehope crime potential, and Moon's acceptance of it, must also have recorded, and with the same malice, this complacent comment-probably under the category of famous last words!

There were still three reporters and one press photographer left over from the jamboree when Hugh Macsen-Martel and Dinah and Dave Cressett entered the public bar of "The Sitting Duck" that evening. Saul Trimble, trading on his antediluvian appearance as usual, had already lured two of the visitors into his corner, one on either side, and was furnis.h.i.+ng them with a few impromptu fragments of folk-history in return for the pints with which, alternately, they furnished him. He had left out his false teeth for the occasion, which added twenty years to his appearance, and put on his old leather-elbowed jacket and a m.u.f.fler instead of his usual smart Sunday rig. By good luck the bar itself still looked every inch the antiquated country pub for which it was cast, since Sam Crouch, who owned it, was too mean to spend money on modernising it, and had no need to worry about compet.i.tion. There were two other pubs within reach, but both were tied, while "The Sitting Duck" was not merely a free house, but a home-brewed house into the bargain, one of only three left in the entire county. So the public bar was still all quarries and high-backed settles, furnished with bright red pew cus.h.i.+ons, and every evening the place was full. This Sunday evening it was perhaps even a little fuller than usual. The newsmen, strangers from the town, were fair game, and there was the afternoon's show to talk about.

Saul was in full cry when Hugh's party entered. He was using his folk-lore voice, half singing Welsh, half quavering, superst.i.tious old age, and all the regulars were there to egg him on. William Swayne, alias Willie the Twig, the forestry officer from the plantations beyond the Hallowmount, had driven down in the Land-Rover, Eli Platt had closed his by-pa.s.s fruit and flower stands early, and come in from the market-garden on the fringe of Comerbourne, Joe Lyon, smelling warmly of his own sheep, steamed gently by the fire with a pint of home-brewed in one hand. It may even have been the beer, rather than the company, that had caused the strangers to prolong their visit into licensing hours.

"Normans?" Saul was saying with tremulous disdain. "Normans, is it? The Normans were mere incomers here, and never got a toehold, not in Middlehope, not for hundreds of years. The few that got in by marrying here, them we tolerated if they minded their step, the rest-out! Normans, indeed!"

"I was going by the name," said the oldest reporter reasonably.

"Martel? Oh, ah, that's Norman, that is. The Martel got in with one o' these marriages I was telling you about. In Henry One, that was, there was no sons to the family, and the heiress, she took up with this Martel, who was an earl's man from Comerbourne, but had fallen out with his master. Let him alone, they did, when he had the clans of Middlehope behind him, they wanted no extra trouble up on this border. Been Macsen-Martels ever since, they have, right enough, but they'd been here many a hundred years before that-ah, right back to King Arthur and the Romans afore him..."

"This," said Hugh in Dinah's ear, as he found her a chair in the bow window, "is going to be good." He caught Saul's impervious blue eye, bright beneath a deliberately ruffled eyebrow, and winked. Saul looked through him stonily into the far distances of inspiration.

"I'll get them," volunteered Dave, and went off through the crowd to the bar, where Ellie Crouch and her nineteen-year-old daughter, christened Zen.o.bia but n.o.bbie to her friends, dispensed home-brewed and presided over the scene like a couple of knowing blonde cherubs, deceptively guileless of eye.

"If you'm going by names," pursued Saul, warming almost into song, "it's the Macsen you want to think about, my lads. You know who Macsen was? He was the same person as Maximus, King of the Britons, back in the fifth century. And if you don't believe me, go and look for yourselves at the inscription on the Pillar of Eliseg, up north there by Valle Crucis, and there you'll see it in Latin..."

"Are you telling us you can read Latin?" demanded the youngest reporter dubiously.

"Course I can't, nor never needed to, and if I could, I couldn't make out the letters on that stone, but there's those who have, and turned it into English for you and me both. Look it up in the libraries! 'Maximus the King,' it says, 'who slew the King of the Romans... ' Macsen Wledig, the Welsh called him. And do you know who the King of the Romans was, the one he slew? He was the Emperor Constans, that's who, and uncle to King Arthur himself. And ever since Macsen Wledig was Prince of Powis there've been Macsens in Middlehope."

"How do you know?" objected the young reporter boldly. "Are there still records of all this? After all that length of time?"

"There's better than written records. There's the records that have come down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Why, my old granny could have recited you the pedigree of every family in this village nearly back to Adam, just like in the Bible. The women... the women were the keepers of the traditions ever, since time started. Now that's all gone. Progress we've got, and it's cost us everything else we had, whether we wanted it or not..."

"He's beginning to ramble," Dinah said softly. "Hadn't you better give him a shove back on to the rails?"

Someone else, however, did that in Hugh's place, and very effectively. The last of the photographers sat on a high stool at the end of the bar, a big, hearty man just running slightly to flesh, with a shock of untidy straw-coloured hair and inquisitive eyes. He hadn't been priming Saul, he hadn't been doing much talking, but it was plain that he had missed nothing.

"What about this door?" he said. "If it was originally one door of the church, how did it get into their house in the first place?"

Saul trimmed his sails nimbly, got halfway through an unplanned sentence, decided to revise it, and created a mild diversion by peering meaningfully into his empty pint-pot. One of his two interlocutors took the hint and filled it again.

"It got there because they took it, along with a few other things, when the monastery here was closed down under Henry Eight, that's how. A very nice bit of carving it is, you can see that, and made locally, so the experts say, and there's bits inside the old part o' the church by the same hand. Closed down, the monastery was, and the brothers turned out on to the road. The abbey church was looted and abandoned for a while, and then it was took over for the parish church and repaired again. And the Macsen-Martels sided with the commission, they did, and they got the abbot's lodging to live in, and that's how the door came to be there."

"And what," the photographer wanted to know, "put it into their heads to give it back now? n.o.body knew about it. n.o.body was asking for it. n.o.body was in any position to ask for it. Are you telling me they suddenly went to the trouble and expense of having the thing cleaned and restored, after all this time, just in a fit of belated honesty? It doesn't make sense."

They all turned to look at him more carefully, for the tone of his questioning was curiously more purposeful than that of his colleagues. Dave came back with the drinks, and put Dinah's half-pint into her hand. Hugh levelled black eyes above the rim of his pint-pot. "Who is he?" he asked softly. "Not a Comerbourne man, I know them all."

"Brummagem, I think. Some freelance." Dave was uninterested; he didn't question other people's declared motives for what they did.

"Don't," warned Saul unexpectedly, his voice receding hollowly into a cavern of senile solemnity, "don't ask me about that! There's reasons for wanting to have things-like a good cellar door when you're setting up house and there's one standing handy-and reasons for wanting not to have things any longer when they begin to turn malignant towards them that took them out of their right place. Don't forget 'tis a church church door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I'm not saying it door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I'm not saying it is is so, I've only said it so, I've only said it might might be so. I haven't even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there's no harm in trying." And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. "Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?" he asked mildly. "There were only four o' the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn't say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish." be so. I haven't even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there's no harm in trying." And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. "Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?" he asked mildly. "There were only four o' the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn't say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish."

"Are you saying," demanded the photographer bluntly, "that there's something uncanny about that door?"

"I'm saying nothing, except that it's better to be safe than sorry," mumbled Saul darkly, "and back in the church is the best place for a door the like of that one. Don't you get too inquisitive, my lad, about things that's best let alone."

"But what what went on in the church?" the youngest reporter pressed avidly. "Do you mean black ma.s.ses, and things like that?" went on in the church?" the youngest reporter pressed avidly. "Do you mean black ma.s.ses, and things like that?"

"Tisn't for me to say. There were tales... there were tales..." The veiled eye and withdrawn manner implied that he had heard them all at firsthand, but didn't propose to share them.

"Oh, go on!" urged Willie the Twig, fixing Hugh across the smoky room with an innocent grey stare. "Tell 'em about the family curse. Tell 'em what happens in every third generation, ever since the Dissolution..."

"Young man," said Saul weightily, playing for time while he readjusted to this uninvited a.s.sistance, "there's some things better not spoke of..."

"Why?" asked Hugh with interest. "It won't just go away, whether you speak about it or not, everybody knows it happens."

"Every third generation," prompted Willie the Twig gently.

"Ever since the last abbot was thrown out to beg, and put a curse on the usurpers for all time..." confirmed Hugh. Dinah dug her elbow sharply into his ribs, but he only smothered a small convulsion of laughter in what was left of his beer, and looked round to claim Dave's empty pint-pot. "You, Dinah? No? Here you are, n.o.bbie, love, same again!"

Saul's stony eye fixed him balefully. Hugh suppressed his charming smile and gazed back in monumental and brazen innocence.

"But what does does happen every third generation?" the youngest reporter insisted. happen every third generation?" the youngest reporter insisted.

"Every third generation," Saul said with vengeful deliberation, and his voice sank into the cellar like the demon king disappearing down a stage trap, "the second son is born a witless idiot."

"Or a degenerate monster," Hugh added helpfully.

"Go on, you're having us on!" protested the reporter.

"You think so? You didn't see the second son at the service this afternoon, did you You didn't see the second son at the service this afternoon, did you?"

"You devil devil!" whispered Dinah.

Hugh didn't even trouble to warn her to silence; he knew she disapproved, or at the very best withheld her approval, but he also knew she wouldn't do anything to spoil the game, if it amused him.