Death and the Dancing Footman. Ngaio Marsh

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ room.

      ‘By all means,’ said Nicholas. ‘Here’s old Bill as silent as the grave, Jonathan, longing for his love. And Dr Hart not much better, though whether it’s from the same cause or not we mustn’t ask.’

      ‘You are right,’ said Dr Hart thickly. ‘It would not be amusing to ask such a question.’

      ‘Come along, come along,’ said Jonathan quickly, and opened the door. Mandrake hurriedly joined him, and William followed. At the door Mandrake turned and looked back. Nicholas was still in his chair. His hands rested on the table, he leant back and smiled at Dr Hart, who had risen and was leaning heavily forward. Mandrake was irresistibly reminded of an Edwardian problem picture. It was a subject for the Hon. John Collier. There was the array of glasses, each with its highlight and reflection, there was the gloss of mahogany, of boiled shirt-fronts, of brass buttons. There was Dr Hart’s face, so violently expressive of some conjectural emotion, and Nicholas’s, flushed, and wearing a sneer that dated perfectly with the Hon. John’s period: all this unctuously lit by the candles on Jonathan’s table. ‘The title,’ thought Mandrake, ‘would be “The Insult.”’

      ‘Come along, Nick,’ said Jonathan, and when it appeared that Nicholas had not heard him, he murmured in an undertone: ‘You and William go on, Aubrey. We’ll follow.’

      So Mandrake and William did not hear what Nicholas and Dr Hart had to say to each other.

      IV

      Mandrake had suspected that if Jonathan failed it would be from too passionate attention to detail. He feared that Jonathan’s party would die of over-planning. Having an intense dislike of parlour-games, he thought gloomily of sharpened pencils and pads of paper neatly set out by the new footman. In this he misjudged his host. Jonathan introduced his game with a tolerable air of spontaneity. He related an anecdote of another party at which the game of Charter had been played. Jonathan had found himself with a collection of six letters and one blank. When the next letter was called it chimed perfectly with his six, but the resulting word was one of such gross impropriety that even Jonathan hesitated to use it. A duchess of formidable rigidity had been present. ‘I encountered her eye. The glare of a basilisk, I assure you. I could not venture. But the amusing point of the story,’ said Jonathan, ‘is that I am persuaded her own letters had fallen in the same order. We played for threepenny points, and she loathes losing her money. I hinted at my own dilemma, and saw an answering glint. She was in an agony.’

      ‘But what is the game?’ asked Mandrake, knowing that somebody was meant to ask this question.

      ‘My dear Aubrey, have you never played Charter? It is entirely vieux jeu nowadays, but I still confess to a passion for it.’

      ‘It’s simply a crossword game,’ said Hersey. ‘You are each given the empty crossword form and the letters are called one by one from a pack of cards. The players put each letter, as it is read out, into a square of the diagram. This goes on until the form is full. The longest list of complete words wins.’

      ‘You score by the length of the words,’ said Chloris. ‘Seven-letter words get fifteen points, three-letter words two points, and so on. You may not make any alterations, of course.’

      ‘It sounds entertaining,’ said Mandrake with a sinking heart.

      ‘Shall we?’ asked Jonathan, peering at his guests. ‘What does everybody think? Shall we?’

      His guests, prompted by champagne and brandy to desire, vaguely, success rather than disaster, cried out that they were all for the game, and the party moved to the smoking room. Here, Jonathan, with a convincing display of uncertainty, hunted in a drawer where Mandrake had seen him secrete the printed block of diagrams and the requisite number of pencils. Soon they were sitting in a semicircle round the fire with their pencils poised and with expressions of indignant bewilderment on their faces. Jonathan turned up the first card:

      ‘X,’ he said, ‘X for Xerxes.’

      ‘Oh, can’t we have another,’ cried Madame Lisse, ‘there aren’t any – Oh, no, wait a moment. I see.’

      ‘K for King.’

      Mandrake, finding himself rather apt at the game, began to enjoy it. With the last letter he completed his long word, ‘extract,’ and with an air of false modesty handed his Charter to Chloris Wynne, his next-door neighbour, to mark. He himself took William’s Charter, and was embarrassed to find it in a state of the strangest confusion. William had either failed to understand the game, or else had got left so far behind that he could not catch up with the letters. Many of the spaces were blank, and in the left-hand corner William had made a singular little drawing of a strutting rooster, with a face that certainly bore a strong resemblance to his brother Nicholas.

      ‘Anyway,’ said William, looking complacently at Mandrake, ‘the drawing is quite nice. Don’t you think so?’

      Mandrake was saved from making a reply by Nicholas, who at that moment uttered a sharp ejaculation.

      ‘What’s up, Nick?’ asked Jonathan.

      Nicholas had turned quite pale. In his left hand he held two of the Charter forms. He separated them and crushed one into a wad in his right hand.

      ‘Have I made a mistake?’ asked Dr Hart softly.

      ‘You’ve given me two forms,’ said Nicholas.

      ‘Stupid of me. I must have torn them off the block at the same time.’

      ‘They have both been used.’

      ‘No doubt I forgot to remove an old form, and tore them off together.’

      Nicholas looked at him. ‘No doubt,’ he said.

      ‘You can see which is the correct form by my long word. It is “threats.”’

      ‘I have not missed it,’ said Nicholas, and turned to speak to Madame Lisse.

      V

      Mandrake went to his room at midnight. Before switching on his light he pulled aside the curtains and partly opened the window. He saw that at last the snow had come. Fleets of small ghosts drove steeply forward from darkness into the region beyond the windowpanes, where they became visible in the firelight. Some of them, meeting the panes, slid down their surface and lost their strangeness in the cessation of their flight. Though the room was perfectly silent, this swift enlargement of oncoming snowflakes beyond the windows suggested to Mandrake a vast nocturnal whispering. He suddenly remembered the blackout and closed the window. He let fall the curtain, switched on the light, and turned to stir his fire. He was accustomed to later hours and felt disinclined for sleep. His thoughts were busy with memories of the evening. He was filled with a nagging curiosity about the second Charter form, which had caused Nicholas Compline to turn pale and to look so strangely at Dr Hart. He could see Nicholas’s hand thrusting the crumpled form down between the seat and the arm of his chair. ‘Perhaps it is still there,’ Mandrake thought. ‘Without a doubt it is still there. Why should it have upset him so much? I shall never go to sleep. It is useless to undress and get into bed.’ And the prospect of the books Jonathan had chosen so carefully for his bedside filled him with dismay. At last he changed into pyjamas and dressing-gown, visited the adjoining bathroom, and noticed that there was no light under the door from the bathroom into СКАЧАТЬ