Chapter 3
What was that place Roman Catholics went to after death if they weren’t bad enough for Hell nor good enough to go straight to Heaven?
Pur-something, Phillip thought dizzily. By Jove, they were right.
He was damp and chilly, his head and his shoulders ached, his hands managed to be both sore and numb at the same time, altogether deucedly uncomfortable.
Definitely not Paradise, but not the burning, fiery furnace, either.
Somewhere a cuckoo called. The air smelled of wild roses, like a promise of Paradise to come.
Something warm and wet slithered across his face. Startled, Phillip opened his eyes, and looked up into the grinning muzzle of a liver-spotted spaniel.
“Pepper, heel!”
The dog gave a short, sharp, self-satisfied bark and bent its head to lick Phillip’s cheek again.
Ye gods, was he alive?
He lay in long, dew-soaked grass under a hawthorn hedge wreathed with pink roses.
Above his head, a spider’s web spangled with dewdrops sparkled in the slanting rays of the early morning sun.
An insect crawled invisibly up his neck, a maddening tickle.
He couldn’t brush it off. His hands were still tied.
He was alive!
“Pepper? What have you found there?” called the fussy, schoolmasterish voice.
“Help!” croaked Phillip.
The dog wagged its stumpy tail approvingly and uttered another bark.
Boots swished through the grass. A stocky man in his midforties, wearing tweed knickbockers, a deerstalker, and pince-nez, stood over Phillip. He looked vaguely familiar.
“A tramp,” he said, displeased, tapping his cane on his hand in a thoroughly schoolmasterly fashion.
“Help,” Phillip croaked again.
“My good man, if you’re hungry you may go up to the kitchen and tell them I said to give you bread and cheese. Then be on your way. Our local magistrates are hard on vagrants.”
By the time he finished, Phillip had both cleared his throat and recognized him. “I say, Lord Dalrymple,” he said, “I must look like the most frightful vagabond, but I’m Phillip Petrie. I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a spot.”
Daisy’s cousin—second or third, and once or twice removed—hitched the pince-nez lower on his nose and stared down at Phillip over the top.
“’Pon my soul! Petrie? So you are. My dear fellow, give me your hand and let me help you up.
No, wait a moment.” Leaning down, he pushed his eye-glasses back up and peered through them.
“That is, if I am not mistaken, the larva of Calothysanis amata on your neck. The Blood Vein moth’s caterpillar, you know. ”
“Would you mind removing it?” Phillip asked with what patience he could muster. “I’ve lost enough blood lately, as a matter of fact.”
“Dear me no, it feeds on dock leaves, not blood. None of our native moths and butterflies is a blood-sucker—though some do, admittedly, feed on the juices of decaying meat—and I rather doubt whether even any tropical…”
“Please,” begged Phillip, who felt not unlike a piece of decaying meat himself. He was also suddenly aware of his own juices, long pent up, suddenly demanding egress.
“Yes, yes, let me rid you of it. There. Not a rare species, alas. But you don’t want a lecture on the Lepidoptera. Your hand, my dear fellow.”
“I can’t. My hands are tied behind my back.”
“Good gracious! Well, happily I always carry a pocket-knife, to collect the leaves fed upon by any larva I wish to try to hatch. If you will roll over, I shall see what I can do.”
Clucking in horror over the dried blood on Phillip’s head and hands, Lord Dalrymple efficiently severed the cords.
Phillip’s hands stung like blazes as the circulation was restored, but his bladder insisted on more immediate attention.
He clambered shakily to his feet and, with a word of apology, pissed long and satisfyingly into the hedge.
During this exercise, Lord Dalrymple politely turned his back, moved away a few paces, and hummed a verse of the Eton Boating Song.
Phillip, amused, recalled Daisy telling him her cousin had taught at a very minor prep school before unexpectedly inheriting Fairacres and the viscountcy from her father.
Fairacres, presumably, was where Phillip now found himself. He had been dumped not ten miles from the site of the kidnapping, considerably less from his own home, and alive. At least half alive, he amended, as he struggled with smarting, tingling fingertips to button his fly.
He took a few steps towards Dalrymple and found himself staggering. The bright morning blurred before his eyes, poppies, ox-eye daisies, and purple knapweed swirling in a vast kaleidoscope with the blue sky and green hedges. He sat down and buried his head between his knees.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he gasped, “but I seem to be a bit wonky. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
“You have been in the wars.” A comforting hand patted Phillip’s shoulder. “You just sit here, old chap. I’ll pop down to my gamekeeper’s cottage and between the two of us we’ll carry you up to the house.”
“Gad no,” said Phillip, revolted, “I’ll be able to walk in a minute.” He raised his head. The blood red poppies, as always, reminded him of Flanders, but at least they kept still now.
“Sure? Then I shall send him along to lend you a hand while I go ahead to warn Geraldine to expect a guest.”
“I don’t want to impose on Lady Dalrymple.”
“Nonsense! Fate has put me in Gervaise’s place, and the least I can do is welcome his friends as if he were still with us. Carlin will be with you in a trice. I’ll leave Pepper to keep you company.”
The spaniel, having drawn his master’s notice to his find, had gone off after rabbits, but he rushed back when called. Told to stay, he sighed and lay down with his head on Phillip’s ankle.
Phillip watched Dalrymple tramp off, noting that what he had taken for a cane was actually a butterfly net. He blessed the man’s apparent lack of curiosity. Before he told anyone at all about the kidnapping, he had to try to get in touch with Gloria’s father. The poor fellow must be quite frantic.
How Gloria was feeling, Phillip didn’t want to think.
The few minutes before Carlin arrived did much to restore his strength.
As the stalwart, grizzled gamekeeper approached, Phillip stood up with only a touch of giddiness.
With a growl, his stomach reminded him he had not eaten since lunch yesterday, and then no more than a slice of cold pork pie in a pub on the drive down from London.
He had been saving every shilling to buy Gloria chocolates and take her dancing. The hollow in his stomach was nothing to the hollow in his heart.
“Well now, Master Phillip,” Carlin greeted him, “what have ’e bin up to now?”
He spoke in just the tone of patient reproach he had used when Phillip and Gervaise got stuck up trees, or fell out of them or into streams, in early youth.
Later he had taught the boys to shoot—and dug the shot out of Phillip’s retriever pup when she rushed ahead and Gervaise accidentally peppered her.
“Does Lord Dalrymple shoot?” Phillip asked with curiosity as they set off.
“Nay, sir, not he. Nor hunt, leastways nowt but butterflies. He don’t properly understand country life, if ’e’ll excuse my boldness. He don’t have much need for the likes of I, but he knows better than to turn off them as’ve served the Dalrymples time out o’ mind.”
“I’m glad you’re still here.” If Phillip had to be ignominiously helped up to the house, he’d as soon it was by Carlin as anyone.
All the same, he was pleased to find he needed little help.
The combined effects of the blow to the head and the chloroform were wearing off, and his hunger would soon be satisfied, he trusted.
Climbing a stile was an effort; he accepted Carlin’s hand to steady him.
Otherwise he walked slowly but under his own steam, across a hayfield, already cut, through a plum orchard (scene of many a raid in the old days), and into the park.
The rear facade of the house rose above gardens and a balustraded terrace.
Fairacres, though too large to be called a manor, was no vast ducal mansion.
The formality of its classical symmetry was offset by the patchwork appearance found in many local buildings.
Pinkish sandstone, amber Cotswold limestone, pale grey stone from who knew where, placed at random blended into an attractive whole.
It was once Phillip’s home from home. The War had kept him away for four years.
Since the death of Daisy and Gervaise’s father four years ago, in the great ’flu epidemic of ’19, he had called only two or three times, for politeness’ sake.
He still thought of Edgar Dalrymple, ex-schoolmaster, and his wife Geraldine as intruders.
He could not blame Daisy or her mother for not accepting their offer of a home.
Dash it all, he had promised Daisy to drop in and see the Dowager Lady Dalrymple at the Dower House. Not a chance, not for the foreseeable future, not while Gloria suffered in the hands of those vile brutes.
The swine had added insult to injury by pinching his wallet and all his change, as he discovered when he felt for a shilling for Carlin. Thank heaven they had not dumped him in the middle of nowhere!
“I must make a telephone call,” he said to the butler, new since Daisy’s time, who met him in the marble-floored front hall with its twin semi-circular staircases. “At once.”
“Certainly, sir.” The butler, no doubt forewarned by Lord Dalrymple, was not visibly perturbed by the arrival of a guest in his shirtsleeves, filthy and encrusted with dried blood. “If you will be so good as to…”
But Lady Dalrymple came hurrying down the stairs, followed by her husband.
An angular woman, an inch or two taller than his lordship, she looked Phillip up and down po-faced, but she said civilly enough, “Mr. Petrie, I am so sorry to hear you have had an accident. Edgar was not certain whether we ought to send for the doctor?”
“No, thank you, Lady Dalrymple. I’m much better already.”