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‘But I have no money,' Paddy pointed out.

'That was another thing,' he said, still smoothly, ‘that I took the precaution of ascertaining.’

‘My
lack
of
money?’

’Yes.’

‘You’ve been very painstaking,' she said coldly.

‘I always am.’

‘I—I can’t follow you. I can’t credit what you’re saying. Why do you dislike me so much?’

‘Have I said so?’

‘You’ve acted so.’

‘By choosing you out of a score of applicants for the job? Is that dislike?’

‘In this case, yes. How did you do it?’

‘Find you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was both simple yet time-consuming. The pertinent Personal and Missing Friends ad, I’d noted... incidentally Jeremy died only recently, hence this year’s insertion ... quoted “Remember September.” I checked back. There was only one September Jeremy had not been at home. That was the September following his three months in bed, when the doctor suggested a little toughening up by himself down at the beach. Last year, to be more precise.’

‘Three months in bed?’ Paddy gasped.

He nodded. ‘Jeremy spent a lot of time in bed. He only went to school briefly.’

...
‘I’ve never had a friend. I didn’t have enough time at school to collect one. I was considered delicate, ho-ho, so 1 had lessons at home.’
Jerry’s dear boyish voice.

‘So I remembered Jeremy going down to the beach,' Magnus David continued.

‘Your beach, I think.’ It was all coming back now— the caretaker, the deference he always had given to Jerry.

‘Yes.’

‘So you checked?’ Paddy prompted. ‘Had you always checked on Jerry like that?’

‘The answer is Yes.’ A pause. ‘You do with Jeremys.’

‘What do you mean?’

'You must know.’

‘I don’t,’ she insisted.

‘Prognosis nil. That’s a medical term, Miss Travis, for no future. For a short thread in the tapestry of life. But of course you must have known that.’

‘How? Why? What are you saying?’

For answer he gave a brief laugh.

‘Jeremy had no time left,’ he went on, ‘he never had had time. It was a miracle he reached the years that he did.’

‘Please go on,’ she said quietly.

‘So I checked which September, and the rest was easy. Jeremy might not have bothered to find out your name, but Walsh knew.’

‘The caretaker?’

‘Yes.’

‘Letters,’ Paddy nodded. She said it dully.

‘Letters,’ Magnus David agreed.

‘But I still don’t understand. What did it matter? Was Jerry asking for me?’

‘Oh, no, nothing like that. Don’t go all sentimental too late. Also don’t go too fast. That will come later.’

‘Then?’

‘I found out your name ... something which Jeremy hadn’t, and it would have made it awkward in law had the thing gone through.’

‘The—thing?’

His lips tightened. ‘I found out your name,’ he resumed, ‘after which running you to earth was compara
tively
simple. I found out where you worked. Are you catching on now?’

‘No.’

‘Not very alert today, are you, Maryrose?’ He smiled without amusement.

‘What—what else?’

‘What you already know.’ A shrug. ‘I decided on your line of business, the business of orphans.’

‘Destitutes, too,’ Paddy came in woodenly, and he nodded.

‘It seemed as good a charity as any to me, especially with a house too large for one. So ’

‘So?’

‘I contacted your Mr Aston ... it is Aston?’

‘Yes, Aston. Then?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘No, Mr David, I can’t guess,’ she snapped. ‘And don’t try to concoct a significant interlude between Jerry and me, because there wasn’t any.’

‘No? But there must have been something.’

Paddy looked at the man through the darkness, for night definitely had fallen now.

‘What?’ she challenged.

‘You tell me and I’ll tell you.’ He laughed scornfully. ‘But to prompt you I’ll tell you part of it.’

‘Part?’

'There are two parts, happily, then unhappily, for you.’

‘Yes?’

‘Part One: Poor Jeremy left you everything he possessed, Miss Travis. That’s your happy part.’

‘I’m touched, but they would be nothing—not, as you tell me, at the age of eighteen.’

‘He was only seventeen then. You see, he wrote the thing at once.
Seventeen,
not even the lower legal age that is now currently accepted. Well, are you starting to catch on now?’

‘Catch on?’ she asked.

‘He left a will at seventeen, a very emotional and affectionate piece of prose, but’ ... a pause ... ‘he was seventeen nonetheless, and that’s your Part Two, the unhappy part.’

‘Did—did Jerry know his future?’

‘His lack of it, you mean? Yes.’

‘I said once he looked young and he didn’t like it.’ Paddy caught her lip with her teeth and held back a sob.

‘Oh, he was intelligent,’ Magnus shrugged. ‘Don’t think because he made a will as a minor he was unaware of things. Not Jeremy. No, he would be depending on me.’

‘On you?’

'To see it through.’

‘Which you won’t.’

‘Which I won’t.—Tell me, Miss Travis, as a matter of interest, what did you do to mesmerise him?’

‘Mesmerise?’ she queried.

‘I said that.’

‘I did nothing,’ Paddy insisted.

‘Which is what you will be receiving.’

‘And would have, anyway, for Jerry had nothing.’

‘Oh, no, my dear, you’re wrong.’

‘But I tell you, he was as hard-up as I was.’

...
Race you to the buoy. Last out of the water buys the lunch
...

‘He had nothing
then.’
Magnus must have read her thoughts. He negotiated a sharp bend. ‘But a year has passed. An estate has been wound up. Are you catching on at last?’

‘No.’

Then Mr Aston was wrong when he said you had high intelligence. I’d label you dumb.’

‘Please tell me—and you can leave out Mr Aston.’

He shrugged. ‘Very well then. You’ve been bequeathed ... or would have been under different circumstances ... a very comfortable sum. In short—a fortune.’

‘From Jerry?’

‘From Jeremy. But’ ... and the man beside Paddy paused significantly ... ‘only, at that irresponsible age, if
I
say so. Ordinarily I would say so, and readily. I have more than enough money of my own. But I’m not satisfied, Miss Travis, and that’s why I’ve brought you up here. I want to know why Jeremy did it, also how I’m to react.’

‘You?’ she queried.

‘I was his mentor, teacher, authoritarian, guardian, adviser. You have to be to an afterthought brother who arrives when you yourself are almost a man. Because Jeremy was immature, and because I was responsible for him, I am now in the position of judge. Well, have we got that straight in the end?’

‘You might have,’ said Paddy coldly. ‘I haven’t.’

‘No?’

‘No. Also I don’t intend to try. So just turn back to the station, Mr David.’

‘You mean the conditional stop? Turnabout Creek? But there’s no train either way before tomorrow morning, and even then only if you ring the nearest station for them to alert the guard, and there’s no phone until we reach the house.’

‘I’m resigning,' she snapped.

‘Before you even start?’

‘Yes. I couldn’t work for a man like you.'

‘I gathered in a calling like this that you worked for the ideal, not the employer.'

‘Sometimes the employer makes that impossible. You would.’

‘All very well, but aren't you forgetting the agreement you signed?’

‘No, I’m not forgetting, but what else, apart from my having to borrow from someone to repay you for my ticket and anything else you have put out, could my resignation mean to me?’

‘It could cancel any future assignments through the C.F.A.’

She had not thought of that, had not thought that anyone would be so mean as to think of it either, but a glance at the man beside her told her that he would ... and had.

‘Then I’ll scrub floors. Or wash dishes. Or ’

‘Or marry ? That’s another idea for you now that your previous one has gone sour. Tell me’ ... before she could break in ... ‘how did you find out Jeremy’s potential?’

‘Potential?’ she queried.

‘What he could one day mean in the almighty dollar?’

‘I hate you! You’re the worst man I could even dream up in a ghastly nightmare.—But tell
me
something for a change. Why do you despise me this much?’

‘Because,' said Magnus David, reaching the top of the mountain at last and turning into a drive that seemed suddenly to have opened up from nowhere, ‘I loved him.’

‘Loved him?’

‘Loved my brother Jeremy.’ He halted the big black car at a big white edifice. ‘I loved him very much.’

He leaned across her and opened her door. ‘Madam, we’ve arrived.’

It
was not a house, it was a castle—that was Paddy’s first impression. Almost she turned to the man now obviously awaiting her reaction to fling at him:

‘It’s a castle, and you are its king.’

She might as well have said it. Just as he had read her before, Magnus David read her again.

‘No, not the king, merely the owner. There are a number of such castles dotted around the north coast, built either by exiled remittance lords or ambitious onetime stablehands who made good in their new country and proved it in the best manner they could think. A fine house.’

‘Castle,’ she corrected. .

‘Castle,
castelo
, palace,
palacio
, call it what you will so long as it’s home. But I forgot, it’s not to be that to you.’

‘You mean I can go after all?’ she asked eagerly.

‘No, I meant you would never allow it to be your home.’

‘With you in it? No,’ she agreed definitely. After a pause she asked: ‘And what were your forefathers, lords or stablehands?’

‘This forefather was a fore-uncle. I—
we’
... he looked at her cruelly, remindingly .
.
. ‘inherited from him. He was a ’

‘A banana baron?’ Paddy broke in before he could finish. She had heard of the banana barons of the north coast. She added with deliberate impertinence: ‘Do I bow?’

He let that pass. He helped her out of the car, then led the way up the steep, imposing flight of curved stairs to a wide patio. On every rise there was a tub of oleander. There was an immense front door ... portal, Paddy found herself thinking of it... and it was flung open to display a long, red-carpeted hall.

‘Not
put down for you,’ Magnus David assured her, ‘so please don’t feel embarrassed. No, it’s been in use for years. As long, possibly, as the house, which is so old by colonial standards, and so significant of its period, that there’s been an approach from the National Trust.’

‘I wasn’t feeling embarrassed,’ Paddy replied, ‘I was feeling a little dubious about such a beautiful carpet and four wards.’

‘Oh, they don’t live this side.’

‘Yet I do?’ Paddy turned to him in righteous protest.

He smiled almost pityingly back at her. ‘The last thing I would want to do ... with you ... is flaunt convention. Oh, no, I’m just being polite and having you here first.’

‘To show me around?’

‘And give you a general idea of the place, of the kind of job it is.’

‘Oh, I know
that.
I’m
trained,
Mr David.’

‘But not experienced, I hear. I’ve no doubt that lacking an aircraft to practice on a man could still be taught to fly on paper, but I can tell you I wouldn’t be a passenger when he did reach the controls.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning how will you manage four actually in your hands instead of at the end of a pen?’

‘Well, you won’t be one of my “passengers”, will you?’ she answered smartly. ‘I anticipate little trouble. Unlike you, Mr David, they will be the needing ones, the unfortunate, the unbelonging ones—something you never were.’

‘You were yourself?’

‘No, but I’ve been trained ’

‘Trained! ’ The laugh was more a sneer. ‘All the same, you’re quite wrong. I ... and my brother ... were orphans.’

‘But privileged ones.’

‘Can an orphan be privileged?’ he came back.

He let a moment go by, then said: ‘My father died when I was sixteen. It was a big blow. We were very close. But the blow was minimized with the amazing news of my mother’s pregnancy. She had been married at a very young age, had had me, then that was that.’ He shrugged and extended his hands. They were big, working hands, Paddy noted, not delicate like Jerry’s had been. Yet there was something else about them ... a kind of gentleness for all their firmness, as though he sometimes dealt with gentle situations.—But gentleness in this man ?

‘Jeremy was a complete surprise,’ he was saying, ‘and a lovely surprise ... at least it would have been if she had lived.’

‘Your mother died, too?’

‘One year after my father and following Jeremy’s birth. I hated Jeremy for a while for that. Then I came to my senses and I—well, I loved him instead. Loved him much more, I think.’

It was all making sense now. This man had gone from one extreme to the other, from resentment to devotion. Paddy could see how he had disliked her so much ..
.
and yet, she thought, if he had loved Jerry,
really
loved him, shouldn’t he have been pleased that for a while, anyway, his brother had been glad? ‘Maryrose: Remember September? Magnus.’ Shouldn’t he have smiled, not scowled over that?

‘My aunt Mirabel brought Jeremy up while I finished my education,’ Magnus David went on.

‘Jerry grew up here?’

‘I did, too, once away from school. Aunt and Uncle had no children and it was a well-known fact that the property would be ours one day.’ There was the slightest emphasis on ‘well-known’, and Paddy flinched.