The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray

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      This was said more coolly. It drew my gaze at last. His expression was bold, clear. It wasn’t an accusation but he meant me to answer the question that hung over my behaviour. He proved it when he remarked, ‘You stepped in when the policeman asked that last awkward question.’ A deeper intensity of interest that carried the faintest of concessions towards real gratitude. ‘Why did you do that?’

      I replied rather coldly, ‘It strikes me that I ought to be asking you to explain what was taken, since I’ve obviously saved you from having to lie to a policeman. Only I don’t want to know. I can state quite firmly that I really don’t. If it is the sort of thing you couldn’t tell the policeman I don’t think I should know either.’

      For a moment the Captain was actually disconcerted. It clearly grated to have his integrity questioned. ‘Don’t say it like that. Please. My idea of the seriousness of what I stepped into an hour ago escalated the moment that fellow turned up at your garden gate and I don’t know why I didn’t tell PC Rathbone. It’s in part this damned sense this place gives that one careless word will cause my father a whole deal of fuss. But,’ he added, ‘at least this particular oversight is easily remedied. Thanks to you I will be able to tell the man later.’

      I believed him, I didn’t know why. The Captain had been urging concealment from the start but all the same I believed him when he said this place was the sort to fix shackles upon a person. Only in my mind the ties of his sense of duty and the history of this place had more the appearance of a snare. There was still the impulse to shed the lot and be rude by ushering him away to his car.

      I felt beneath my fingertips the rough pitting of a scrape in the old oak of the front door. In a voice that was certainly softer if not yet ready to move beyond that to true warmth, I asked, ‘Why did you come to see me? You didn’t know I was set for an interview with the police, did you, so it can’t have been because you wanted to act as a censor upon what I said in my statement? And you can’t have known the burglar was about to knock on my door.’

      He told me plainly, ‘It was the fact you took the trouble to make up a plate of bread and salad stuff for me on your way out. Is that a terrible thing to say?’

      My expression made him laugh. ‘Obviously it is,’ he remarked, still smiling a little. ‘Well, the long and the short of it is, I’d had a terrible night followed by an even stranger morning and in the midst of it all, the young woman who seemed to be the principal cause of my unplanned arrival here took the time to leave some lunch for me. It was,’ he added more seriously, ‘a reminder of a simple bit of humanity and, I might say, a sobering experience.’

      As olive branches went, it was a good one. It was utterly disarming. It made me willing to smile at last myself. It shook away the expectation I’d had that he was only here to assure himself that I was keeping my promise of silence. It proved that he hadn’t come to bully me a little more. Unfortunately, his apology also had the effect of removing my control over this scene once and for all.

      It gave me room to fully experience that other, less willingly acknowledged fear that resided beside the one that belonged to the visitation of that other man in the black Ford.

      That car had carried the usual dread that I was going to be made to confront some of the darker aspects of this world. This other fear belonged solely to this Captain. It began with the realisation that I’d bristled right up to the moment that I’d shown that I cared to help him manage the toll this burglary would take on his father, and at that moment I’d let him glimpse what nervousness really lay beneath. There was a very faint trace of that protectiveness in his manner still and this time it was directed at me rather than his father. It was disconcertingly unexpected. It was made all the more confusing because I thought it was an instinctive part of his nature rather than a conscious decision to be kind. It was like being wrapped in a tender touch. Except that this was again an encounter with the decisive habits of a soldier. He knew I had been frightened and now I had to deal with the familiar expectation that I was set to receive soothing platitudes and the supposedly reassuring news that he hadn’t come here to force me to hear what he wanted me to do for him next. Because, to a man like this, I had never been judged capable of doing anything of any use at all.

      Very deliberately I focused on the simple social nicety that was probably all he really wanted from me anyway. ‘Tea?’ I asked, and walked ahead of him into the kitchen.

      We took our tea outside. I’d mistakenly directed him out there with the idea that there were some folding chairs beneath the window, but there weren’t. Luckily he didn’t seem to object to me sitting on the warm stone of the front step while he leaned against the doorframe and we both turned our faces to the sun and sipped our tea.

      After a while, memory suddenly prodded me into asking, ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to find somewhere to sit inside? On account of your sprained ankle, I mean.’

      I glanced up at him to catch the brief shake of his head. He told me, ‘I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind.’

      I didn’t mind. I was sitting with legs stretched out and idly crossed at the feet and revelling in the blazing scents of an English vegetable garden at the height of its summer glory. This was what the Manor lacked.

      ‘I lied to you earlier.’ He waited until I lifted my gaze to him again. ‘When I said it was a sprain. The truth is, I was a little taken aback that you’d noticed. It’s the usual sorry story of an old injury that flares up if it takes a sudden knock. Unfortunately, in my case, an old injury that won’t quite resolve itself is the sort of thing that ends a career and I’m working very hard to keep mine. So please don’t let on that you know.’

      ‘Why are you telling me at all?’

      ‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry. For being rude to you again.’

      I returned my gaze to the gravel by my step. I had been rolling it and ordering each grain in that abstract way people have when they are really thinking deeply about something else. Such as how confidently he wore his citified clothes – not with the sort of confidence that makes a person swagger, but the sort where they firmly believe they are fit to meet anything, wherever they are. Whereas I was pretty sure I was looking very much out of my element, and wearing my only remaining frock in the whole wide world, and a tired one at that.

      I deliberately made my hand mess up the little lines of stones and told him easily, ‘You don’t need to apologise to me. You weren’t to know I wasn’t … well, whatever it is you suspect me of.’

      ‘Suspected, Emily. I wondered if you were from a newspaper. Or at least tied to one – hence all the questions about your family.’

      The insinuation was so unexpected that it made me laugh. I thought he was almost smiling himself as he added, ‘The thought had crossed my mind that your sudden arrival and interest in prowling about the attics of my father’s house might well have been because you were a woman with a nose for a good story. I’ve even wondered if you were the sort who would be prepared to create a bigger one if the connection forged by Bertie’s assault between my father and Matthew Croft proved too tenuous.’

      There was something mildly flattering about the idea he had been accusing me – idly at the very least – of actually orchestrating something on the grand scale of a scheme like that. My voice was suddenly itself again. Friendly and cheerful. ‘Good heavens. Has that happened before?’

      ‘Not directly like that, no. But if you discount the part of the unknown female, not dissimilar. And the consequences were, shall we say, dangerous for the health of all concerned.’

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