The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (5 page)

Once more he departed, this time finally, and left Mr. Brett in the impossible situation of having agreed to act as second to both parties because he'd been too cowardly to utter a word in objection.

Indeed, the only soul he'd spoken to with any passion had been the unlucky Tizzy, who still wandered, gently sobbing, along the maze of passages and up and down the lurking stairs.

Mercifully, the intricate architecture of the academy's upper part continued to hide her grief from the other wanderers in the night, each of whom pursued his separate winding way like a nightgowned thought in the coils of some dark, gigantic brain.

Suddenly she stopped. Somewhere a door had opened and shut. A breathless silence seemed to fall
on all the house. The creakings and gruntings of boards were stilled. Then slow but dreadfully sure came the sound of stealthy steps . . .

Ralph Bunnion, half frightened, half excited by the prospect of the duel, had not gone out that night. Instead, he'd remained in his room, brooding on blood, weapons and cold death upon some gray dawn. Still in his fatal waistcoat, he'd saluted his reflection in the mirror and raised imaginary pistols and swords.

He had almost decided on pistols, as one of his friends owned a very fine pair, but still he hesitated. He was not a coward, but if by ill luck he should fall, a sword thrust was likely to prove less injurious than a pistol shot—which might well be fatal.

He opened a bottle of claret to oil his thoughts. He was very used to claret. At the Old Ship Inn a bottle did no more for him than impart an ease and lightness to his gait. So he drank quite freely and without any sense of care or constraint. The fact that he'd had no supper to lay the claret's foundation, so to speak, had quite slipped his mind. By the time he'd finished half the bottle the ease and lightness that should have tempered his limbs had reached his unsuspecting head.

Matters of life and death slipped effortlessly away and various extraordinary notions, robed in crimson fumes, filled his brain. Lust, anger and the memory of his downland fall inflamed him. In his mind's bleary eye he saw again the tempting, insolent back of Tizzy Alexander whirling away from his
outstretched grasp. He clenched his fists and brought them down fiercely on his writing table. Then he drank some more claret to clear his head.

He stood up and stared at himself again in the mirror. For a moment, he was shocked at the sight of his injuries. His chiseled features contorted in fury and humiliation. In vain he called up images of his many conquests—saw them fall like painted leaves before the wind of his passion. But always Tizzy interposed with her look of weary disappointment, and again he lived through his frightful fall.

He drank the last of the claret to wash her memory away. But the dangerous fumes within only boiled the more fiercely and his lust and hatred knew no bounds. He snarled and moved vaguely toward the door. If only he could find it, he would move along the corridors like a ghost—like a wolf . . . He would take her in her arrogant bed . . . he would stifle her screams and—

At last he found the door which had unaccountably eluded him. He opened it. Like a wolf toward his wild design, he began to move. Slow, slow, but dreadfully sure, his stealthy feet moved on . . .

THE MOON, THE
same inquisitive moon that had laid its silver finger on the troubled bed of Mr. Brett, gazed down on the other distracted household in the town—the home of Dr. Harris—as if coldly noting the connection.

Between the two houses lay the silvered windows and phantom streets from which thieves, murderers and lovers alike all shrank into the concealment of the shadows. But their thoughts and schemes ever ventured abroad, crossing, linking, tangling, till the whole world seemed covered with a web of obscure motives in which even angels might be caught.

The old nurse who had looked after all the Harrises had been the first to scream. She'd gone to wake little Adelaide for her ten o'clock feed.

“Come, little one,” she'd crooned. “Come to—”

A beetle-browed infant with hair as black as sin opened its eyes and glared at her. She screamed, she shrieked, she ran distracted out of the room pursued by alien cries from the usurped crib.

Then terror, confusion and frantic grief seized the house till the very cobbles of its walls seemed turned to bulging eyes, all stony with amazement. Every window blazed with light as the Harrises rushed from room to room as if hoping to come upon Adelaide in some unexpected part of the house. Then they went out into the garden and called and rummaged among the bushes. Then Dr. Harris ran up and down the street.

Not that anyone had any clear idea of what should be done, but everyone felt they should be doing something, even though, in their heart of hearts, they knew it to be in vain. Several times Dr. Harris went back into the nursery and stared, bewildered, at the crumpled, shrieking infant that lay in his daughter's place. The loss of Adelaide by itself would have been a terrible thing, but this substitution—this
change
—was weird and uncanny. It was beyond all normal experience and reasonable explanation. Wretchedly, Dr. Harris shook his head. He was a good, learned, persevering sort of man; a man of sense, not given to idle fancy.

“For pity's sake,
do
something!” wept his wife. “Look again before it's too late!”

“Too late for what?”

“I don't know—I don't know!”

So once again Dr. Harris joined in the despairing search. And of all that troubled household, the most eager, the most urgent and the most anxious to look and look again was the only son, young Harris himself. It was he who was ever in the forefront, full of hopes, ideas and sudden sights that, alas, came to nought. It was he who thought he saw Adelaide at the bottom of the garden. It was he who thought he saw her in the attic.

Deep and subtle consideration had suggested this course to Harris as being the most brilliant way to avoid suspicion. His absence from the scene, or even his lagging behind, would surely have seemed unusual and so might have led to the horror of discovery. So he threw himself into the search with extraordinary vigor and invention. But all the while, under this dazzling counterfeit, his brain was steadily at work.

At last it became tragically plain to the Harrises that Adelaide was not going to be found, and in spite of the younger Harris's urgent entreaties that they should look just once more, they gathered wearily in the front parlor to decide on what next should be done.

“Bostock,” said Dr. Harris gravely. “I'll have to call Bostock.”

At this, the son of the house started in horrible alarm, till he understood that his father had meant Bostock the sea captain—his friend's parent—who was a Justice of the Peace. So Captain Bostock was fetched from his bed and informed of the unnatural disaster that had struck at the home of Dr. Harris.

He listened, yawning and frowning the while and fixing his piercing blue eyes upon one member of the family after another as they broke in with uncontrollable agitation. This gaze of his which, in its day, had subdued mutinous sailors and almost the sea itself, had the effect of calming the parlor. Everyone dropped their eyes. But not the younger Harris, whose mounting dread of discovery would have given him strength to outstare St. Peter himself. He sat and glared with terrible fixity at Captain Bostock, being entirely convinced that one turn of his head would reveal its guilty contents. Then, little by little, as the sea captain talked, his dread diminished and his brain resumed its underground activity.

Though Captain Bostock was, as he himself freely admitted, a sturdy, straightforward and even blunt fellow, many years on the bench had taught him a great deal. He was, he owned with a sigh, no stranger to the webs of deceit in which men raveled themselves. In his time he had come upon many affairs as curious as the disappearance of Adelaide. He did not say this with any idea of belittling the Harris family's grief, but merely to establish an authority over it.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris looked plainly resentful at what she took to be Captain Bostock's insinuation that that they were all making a great fuss over nothing. The sea captain, anxious to correct the false impression, hastily admitted that there were certain aspects of the Adelaide affair that distinguished it from the commonplace.

In his opinion—for what it was worth—it was not so much the disappearance of Adelaide that was extraordinary, but the
appearance
of the unknown infant in her place. He took it for granted, he said, in view of his long friendship with Dr. Harris, that the family were not mistaken and the infant was not their own. Here Mrs. Harris could not be restrained from telling the sea captain that his long friendship with Dr. Harris might go to the devil, a mother knew what was her own child and what was not, and that the newcomer was male which, somehow or another, seemed to her the worst thing of all. Then she began to sob and Captain Bostock said, “Madam, madam,” several times in an effort to atone for his unlucky remark. At last Mrs. Harris was brought to a temporary calm and Captain Bostock admitted cautiously the situation was one that called for an inquiry of
peculiar
delicacy . . .

The younger Harris's heart leaped and thundered. The very word “inquiry” tolled like the bell of doom inside his breast. Nor was what followed any less alarming. He sat, cold and deathly, as the consequences of his and Bostock's experiment in Natural History grew and grew till it was like a monster whose tentacles reached into every corner of the living world.

Naturally, Captain Bostock would institute inquiries (that terrible word again!)—and here he tapped the side of his weathered nose down which ran a neat, straight scar—but he would advise Dr. Harris to take certain steps himself.

At the Old Ship Inn there happened to be staying a certain Mr. Raven—Mr. Selwyn Raven. Had Dr. Harris heard of him? Well, well, perhaps not. Unless one had cause, one did not hear of such as Mr. Raven. Such persons are rather more discreet than most. The nature of their trade is against advertisement. Nonetheless, in his, Captain Bostock's opinion, for what it was worth, the Harrises could do no better than consult Mr. Raven whose reputation, among those who had cause to know it, stood very high indeed for pursuing inquiries of
peculiar
delicacy. There could be little doubt that Mr. Raven, once in possession of the facts, would quickly arrive at the truth.

At the word “truth” the younger Harris's blood all but congealed. He felt like some rare and lovely creature caught in a forest of implacable hunters seeking to destroy him. He twisted, he turned, he darted this way and that in the secret places of his mind to escape. But outwardly, by reason of his almost superhuman strength of will, he appeared quite still, and with an air of utter calm. There was a small, remote part of Harris that was able to observe this, and even to admire it.

At last Captain Bostock rose to go, and Harris, still brilliantly counterfeiting an inward peace, courteously offered to attend him. He had reached a conclusion and determined on a course of action.

For a moment Captain Bostock fixed him with his piercing eyes which seemed to go right inside
Harris's head, but apparently he saw nothing there, for he patted the lad's arm and suffered him to lead the way to the neighboring street.

Harris waited for the sea captain to shut his front door, then with easy stealth he floated around to the back of the house and summoned his friend by means of a stone at his window. Bostock appeared, disappeared, then appeared again and came looping down through an ancient apple tree that grew against the house, pausing only to embrace Jupiter, his brutish ginger cat, who waited on a bough for some necessary bird.

The friends shook hands, then Harris told Bostock about the consternation in the Harris household and the mention of the man who was staying at the Old Ship—the inquiry agent, Mr. Selwyn Raven. Bostock looked at Harris in terror. He could see Harris was alarmed, and to him Harris's alarm was as the cracking of a temple or the shaking of a star in the sky.

“But I've thought of something, old friend,” whispered Harris reassuringly. In a curious way, Bostock's simplicity seemed to reassure both of them. Bostock's great faith gave Harris confidence, and the more confidence Harris displayed, the greater grew Bostock's faith. There was really no limit to it all. “I think I know where she is.”

“Who?”

“Adelaide. I've put two and two together, Bosty, and there's only one answer.”

“What's that, Harris?” breathed Bostock, who was not strong on arithmetic.

“She's back in the school.”

“How do you know?”

“Human nature, Bosty.”

Bostock frowned; he did not like to question Harris, particularly about human nature.

“Mark my words, Bosty, at this very minute my sister's asleep at the school, snug in Miss Alexander's bed.”

“Then—then Ralph took her all the way back again?”

Harris tapped the side of his nose. “Human nature, old friend. He fancied Miss Alexander, Miss Alexander fancied Adelaide. Two and two, Bosty.”

“Human nature,” nodded Bostock, but with a note of uncertainty in his voice. Then Harris smiled and Bostock was reassured.

“Let's go, Bosty.”

“Where, Harris?”

“To the school. We've got to get her back, you know. It wouldn't be natural to leave her.”

“Right now, Harris?”

“Right now, old friend. Safest and best. They'll all be asleep at the school. After all, what can have happened to keep
them
awake?”

The moon stood in the sky above the two distracted households like a scimitar. It illumined a thread between them like a silver worm winding through a world of black. Along this thread, which here and there vanished under interrupting shadows, moved the double shape of Bostock and Harris,
and a little way behind, a smaller, quicker shape that stopped and started, then went arrow straight.