Thou Shell of Death (6 page)

Georgia Cavendish rushed into the house, and practically flung herself into the arms of O’Brien, her dark, monkey-like face chattering with excitement. She certainly does live up to her reputation, thought Nigel, looking on and grinning involuntarily himself.

Christmas Day. Seven-thirty p.m. For two days Nigel had been watching, with the whole concentrated force of his attention. The superb Lucilla, the colourful Georgia Cavendish, and her pompous, decent, elderly brother; Knott-Sloman, with his professional bonhomie; Philip Starling and Fergus O’Brien—all had passed and repassed under his trained scrutiny: and precious little he had to show for it. His mood alternated between incredulity and an apprehension that was increasing as the Feast of Stephen drew nearer. There were personal undercurrents of feeling among the guests: that was obvious. But the one sign that Nigel was looking for he could not find: it was almost impossible, he believed, to have planned murder against a person and to behave normally towards him in the interim. Yet, as far as he could observe, not one of the guests was less his normal self in O’Brien’s presence than out of it. Either someone had the most remarkable emotional control, or the
threat
came from outside this circle—or the whole thing was a hoax.

Lord and Lady Marlinworth had accepted an invitation to dine at the Dower House this night, and Nigel came downstairs early to be ready for them. As he reached the drawing-room door, he heard a low-toned conversation within. There was no mistaking that resonant voice, its tones indifferent, humouring, a little impatient.

‘… No, not tonight.’

‘But, Fergus, darling, I want you so. It’s quite safe. Why can’t 1—?’

‘You can’t because I say you can’t. Now be a good girl and do what I tell ye; and don’t ask questions, because you’re wasting your breath.’

‘Oh, you’re cruel, cruel—’ the voice of Lucilla, almost unrecognisably altered from her usual cool drawl, broke; and Nigel had time only to retreat half a dozen paces from the door before she swept out and past him, quite oblivious of his presence. Well, for once you’re getting as good as you give, thought Nigel: no wonder O’Brien doesn’t want you coming to his bedroom when he means to be out in the hut …

The Christmas dinner was half over. At the head of the table O’Brien, his black beard jutting out from his dead-pale face, looked like an Assyrian king; he was at the top of his form, blarneying away at Lady Marlinworth till the old lady was in a positive twitter of delight.

‘Fie, Mr. O’Brien, I declare you are the most outrageous flatterer.’

‘Not a bit of it. Lady Marlinworth looks as if she were at her first ball, doesn’t she now, Georgia?’

Georgia Cavendish, in emerald-green velvet, her cockatoo perched on her shoulder, wrinkled up her monkey-face at him and grinned elfishly. At the other end of the table Lord Marlinworth was plying Lucilla Thrale with Edwardian attentions. The girl showed no outward sign of the emotional storm Nigel had overheard. Magnificent in her low-cut white dress, she replied to Lord Marlinworth’s sallies with cool provocativeness: but Nigel could see her gaze wandering away to O’Brien and hardening for an instant when it rested on Georgia Cavendish. Georgia’s brother was talking high finance with Philip Starling: it was the first time Nigel had heard him on what was presumably his own subject, and there was no doubt he had an acute and able mind. Nigel noticed that, while Philip was talking, Edward Cavendish’s eyes kept straying towards Lucilla; considering her nonpareil appearance tonight, there was nothing odd in that: but his expression was revealing by its very guardedness—he looked at her with the deliberate reticence of a poker player inspecting his hand. Nigel noticed, too, that Lucilla was aware of these glances and studiously avoided returning them. Knott-Sloman was vying with Lord Marlinworth for her attentions. His pale blue, restless, rather stupid eyes kept returning to her mouth and shoulders with a
boorish
sort of aggressiveness. He held her attention by brute force, as it were, raising his voice to subdue Lord Marlinworth’s thin tenor, and piling anecdote on anecdote. He had a coarse charm of his own, undoubtedly, as well as the crude ‘personality’ of the egotist.

All round Nigel the conversation played, rising and falling and blowing to this side and that like fountains on a gusty day. But gradually, in the centre of it all, Nigel grew conscious of a deep nervous excitement. He had the fancy that it was not the cumulative excitement of a successful party, but radiated from one person. He shook his head irritably: what could it be but his own apprehension of O’Brien’s approaching zero hour? O’Brien himself looked almost fey. He rose suddenly, glass in hand, shot an incalculable glance at Nigel, and cried:

‘A toast! To absent friends—and to present enemies!’

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Georgia Cavendish bit her lip: her brother looked vaguely worried: Lord Marlinworth tapped on the table: Lucilla and Knott-Sloman glanced at each other: Philip Starling was smirking with amusement at the general embarrassment. Lady Marlinworth broke the spell. ‘What a droll toast, Mr. O’Brien! An old Irish one, I suppose. Such a whimsical people!’ The old lady tittered and sipped at her wine; the rest followed suit. Just as they were laying down their glasses, the lights went out. Nigel’s heart dropped like
a
stone. Now it was coming. It was here at last. The next moment he was cursing himself for a hysterical old woman. Arthur Bellamy entered with a flaming Christmas pudding. He set it down before O’Brien, remarking in a perfectly audible whisper, ‘Took a box of matches to light the blasted stuff, colonel. That there Mrs Grant been swigging it on the Q.T. you betcha life, and filling up the bottle with water.’ He retired and switched on the lights. O’Brien looked at Lady Marlinworth apologetically, but she was far beyond being shocked.

‘What a delightfully outspoken man your butler is! Quite a character! No, not a drop more. I vow you will have me tipsy. Well, just half a glass, then,’ she giggled. ‘You know,’ she proceeded, staring fixedly at him, and tapping his arm archly with her fan, ‘your face reminds me of someone—someone I met a long time ago. Herbert!’ she rapped out, ‘who does Mr O’Brien remind me of?’

Herbert Marlinworth started, and fingered his silky gray moustache. ‘I’m sure I don’t know, my dear. Possibly one of your—ah—unlucky suitors. I don’t think we have had the pleasure of meeting any of the Irish O’Briens. What part of the country do you—?’

‘Our seat,’ replied O’Brien with the utmost gravity, ‘reposes on the site of the palace of the great king, Brian Boru.’

Knott-Sloman began to guffaw but, receiving an icy look from O’Brien, turned it into a cough. Georgia
Cavendish
, her stubby nose wrinkled up in distaste, said to O’Brien:

‘I suppose your family has a banshee as well as a castle. You’ve never told me about it.’

‘Banshee? That’s a kind of fairy or something, isn’t it? Can’t see a fairy getting much change out of old Slip-Slop,’ said Knott-Sloman. A curious nickname for O’Brien, Nigel thought, and judging by their puzzled expressions, none of the others knew it. O’Brien cut in quickly:

‘A banshee is a spirit that howls about the place when one of the family is going to die. So if anny of yez hears an ululation tonight ye’ll know I’m for ut.’

‘And we’ll all come rushing down the stairs and find it’s only Ajax having a nightmare,’ exclaimed Georgia with the barest perceptible tremor in her voice. Lucilla Thrale shivered delicately.

‘Brr,’ she said, ‘this is getting a morbid party. Death is too fearfully middle-class and Victorian, don’t you think? I call it a poor do altogether.’

‘Dear lady,’ said Lord Marlinworth, leaping in with Edwardian gallantry, ‘you need have no fear. Death has only to look at your face once and he will be like the rest of us—a captive at your feet.’ He sketched a courtly gesture, and continued to the company at large. ‘The death-warning is not confined to the Emerald Isle. I well recollect a similar phenomenon attaching to the family of my old friend, Viscount Hawsewater. The bell of a ruined chantry on the estate was reputed to toll at night when the death of
the
head of the family was at hand. One night poor Hawsewater, who was enjoying perfect health at the time, heard it: unfortunately he was tone-deaf and mistook it for the fire-bell: he rushed out of the house, omitting to put on any—if the ladies will pardon me—nether garments. It was bitterly cold that night. He caught a chill, contracted pneumonia, and was dead in two days. Poor fellow. A melancholy end. But it shows one must not dismiss too lightly these supernatural warnings. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, I think. I think so.’

At this point Lady Marlinworth thought it best to beckon the ladies into the drawing room. The men gathered nearer to their host.

‘Coffee for you, Lord Marlinworth? Coffee, Nigel?’ he said, passing the cups along. ‘Pass the port round. Just reach out if you want nuts—afraid I haven’t got any of your speciality, Knott-Sloman: Farquhar’s are late with their consignment. You must show us your parlour trick. I bet you’re the only person here who can crack a walnut with his teeth.’ Knott-Sloman duly showed off, and the rest ignominiously failed. O’Brien went on: ‘I see you are a student of Shakespeare, Lord Marlinworth. Did you ever read any of the post-Elizabethan dramatists? Grand stuff. Shakespeare slew his thousands, but Webster slew his tens of thousands. I must say I like the stage littered with corpses at the final curtain. And what poetry! “Doth the silkworm expend her yellow labors”.’ O’Brien began to recite the passage, his eyes looking away into illimitable
distance
, his voice soft and thrilling. Before he had finished he broke off suddenly, as though ashamed at being betrayed into such emotion by mere words. Lord Marlinworth tapped the table deprecatingly.

‘Very striking, no doubt. But not Shakespeare, not Shakespeare. I may be old-fashioned, but I fancy the Bard stands alone.’

Before long they joined the ladies. Nigel afterwards retained the vaguest memory of the absurd paper games they played, the blood-curdling ghost stories that were told, the general horseplay, for he felt sleepier and sleepier—as well he might after such a dinner. One thing he remembered clearly—the resonant voice and infectious laughter of Fergus O’Brien, contrasting so strangely with the fey look in his eyes, the look of one seeing things beyond the world’s edge. When Lord and Lady Marlinworth took their leave at 11 p.m. and some of the men adjourned to the billiard room, Nigel went up to bed. He wanted to rest. Hoax or no hoax, he meant to be near the hut tonight. O’Brien might be able to look after himself, but four hands were better than two. The hut … zero hour … ‘Look after him, won’t you?’ … four hands better than … zero hour …

IV

A DEAD MAN’S TALE

NIGEL, COMING AWAKE
by slow degrees, was conscious first of light and then of silence. The light seemed to be striking down at him from the ceiling, which was surely odd on a winter’s morning. The silence was not, now that he listened to it more attentively, exactly silence; but a damping-down of all the country sounds, of dog-bark, harness-jingle, wagon-rumble, cockcrow, and footfall, as though some gigantic soft pedal had been pressed down over the countryside. Nigel wondered vaguely if these phenomena were the after-effect of drugs. Then he pointed out to himself, rather laboriously, that he did not take drugs. Then his mind started working properly, and he exclaimed, ‘Snow!’ He went to look out of the window. Yes, there had been a fall in the night: not enough to overload roofs and branches, but blanketing earth and all its sounds. Nigel’s heart contracted suddenly. O’Brien! The hut! He ran along to the room in which O’Brien had pretended to be sleeping, and looked out towards the hut. A single trail of footsteps, half obliterated by the snow, led to it from the veranda. There was a thin
layer
of smooth snow on the veranda roof. ‘Thank God, that’s all right,’ Nigel muttered. ‘No one but O’Brien has been out there. Nothing has happened after all.’ Returning to his room, he looked at his wrist watch. Eight-forty. He had slept late. So had O’Brien, it seemed: he was usually out feeding the birds by this time. Well, after a dinner like that, what could you expect? But a little flaw of apprehension crawled over Nigel’s heart again. He would have been told if—Arthur Bellamy would have told him. But Arthur had not been out to the hut; or, if he had been out, he had not come back. And why hadn’t he called Nigel?

Nigel hurried on his clothes. A nightmare sensation was gnawing at him—the sensation he had felt as a boy, dreaming that he was late for school. He ran downstairs. Edward Cavendish was stamping up and down the front veranda in an overcoat.

‘Getting up an appetite for breakfast,’ he said. ‘Everyone seems very sleepy this morning. I wasn’t called at all—though I suppose one couldn’t expect that in this house.’ His tones were a little pettish.

‘I’m just going out to the hut to see if our host is awake,’ said Nigel. ‘Coming?’

Nigel’s uneasiness must have communicated itself to Cavendish, for the latter preceded him with alacrity round the corner of the house. The trail of footsteps stretched out before them from opposite the french windows to the hut door, a distance of about fifty yards. Nigel hurried out, unconsciously keeping well
away
from this trail, Cavendish a little ahead of him. He knocked on the door of the hut. There was no answer. Nigel looked in at the window, and what he saw made him leap for the door, thrust it open and stumble inside. The enormous kitchen table was still there, strewn with books and papers; the oil stove and the easy chairs were as he had seen them last. One of the carpet slippers was there on the floor, too; but the other was on the foot of O‘Brien, who lay in a heap beside the desk.

Nigel knelt down and touched one of his hands. It was dead cold. It did not need the dried trickle of blood from his heart, the scorching of black lapel and white shirt-front to tell Nigel that Fergus O’Brien was dead. A revolver lay beside the stiffened fingers of his right hand. His eyes were blank, but his black beard jutted out indomitably even in this hour of defeat, and some whimsy of death had set his lips into a smile—the half-impish, half-sardonic smile with which he had looked down the dinner-table only twelve hours before. Nigel never forgot that look. It seemed to forgive him for his own failure, to invite him to be amused at the way death had outwitted them both. But Nigel was very far from being amused. In a few days he had come to feel for O’Brien an affection and deep respect he had never felt for anyone but his uncle before. He had failed; and the completeness of that failure was the measure of his determination to win through to the truth in the end.